Be part of the live audience for the taping of this nationally distributed radio show! Come to the AS220 performance space on Wednesday nights at 5:30 pm from October 3rd through November 21st to watch host Marc Levitt facilitate a panel discussion.

For 17 years, Action Speaks! has been committed to enhancing Providence’s cultural life by providing high-quality discourse. The programs looks at contemporary issues through the lens of history by using underappreciated moments of the twentieth-century, providing a venue for discussions about history, culture, and current events.

This fall, with an expanded eight-week season and a prestigious grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the program will look at moments when individual rights have clashed with public needs or beliefs. All panels are recorded, edited, and rebroadcast on presenting station WGBH 89.7 Boston, and other radio stations around the country. A corresponding topical documentary series is also broadcast on Rhode Island PBS on Mondays before each public forum.

The 2012 schedule includes:

• October 3: 1980 Diamond v. Chakrabarty. The Supreme Court case that helped put a ‘for sale’ sign on our genes.
• October 10: 1992 First Critical Mass Ride. Bicyclists take to the streets en mass in a fight over the ‘right to the city’.
• October 17: 1936 Chaplin’s ‘Modern Times’ Debuts. Factories closed; Unions ignored; The Tramp asks, ‘What’s Next’?
• October 24: 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut. Contraception as a right of privacy? The Supreme Court says, ‘Yes’!
• October 31: 1992 The Invasion of the Body Scanner. Surveillance in America—needed or nightmare?
• November 7: 1908 Photographer Lewis Hine Hired to Document Child Labor. The camera, exposing social problems or becoming one?
• November 14: 1944 FDR’s 2nd Bill of Rights Speech. Can and should the government guarantee economic security?
• November 21: 1971 Powell Memo. A call to arms to protect business from the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the 1960’s.

Download a press release, or visit actionspeaksradio.org for more details.