Countersign

Discussion with Prof Tshepo Madlingozi, South African Human Rights Commissioner, on the legacy of colonialism and Apartheid as we approach the 30th anniversary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the adoption of the Constitution of South Africa, signed by President Mandela in 1996. Madlingozi speaks of his childhood lived in the midst of environmental racism and racist capitalism as hi...

How does art take us closer to the nature of the ongoing catastrophe in Fukushima? I visited the Fukushima nuclear reactor exclusion zone with art curator Jason Waite. The collective art project, 'Don't Follow the Wind', interrogates the nature of nuclear catastrophe with practices that mirror the duration of irradiation. We explore the history of extraction and colonisation of the Fuk...

Discussing Bernard Keenan's book ' Interception: State Surveillance from Postal Systems to Global Networks ' (MIT, 2025). We discuss the history of state surveillance from the 17th century to the present. Surveillance is tied to the medium of communication; and through this we consider the reflexivity of state power and authority as they shift in response to new technologies.

Discussing student protests, killing of protesters, and deployment of the National Guard - Naeem Mohaiemen and I discuss his latest film, 'Through a Mirror, Darkly'. The archival footage concerns the killing of students in May 1970 at Kent State, and Jackson Mississippi, while the U.S pursues the Vietnam War whose dead are barely memorialised in the West. We consider resonances of this vio...

What are the origins and implications of hyper-transactional thinking coming out of Trump 2.0? I discuss this and other issues with the eminent critical race theorist and legal scholar Patricia J. Williams whose latest book,  The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law (2024) examines the tension between rights in contract and constitutions. At a time when...

Discussion with international lawyers, Alofipo So'oalo Fleur Ramsay and Watna Mori, on the impacts of climate destruction on the Village of Veraibari, Kikori Delta, Papua New Guinea. Veraibari is emblematic of wider devastation impacting small island communities and States in the Pacific and elsewhere as a result of climate change and biodiversity destruction. The International Court of Justic...

Discussing Marlen Haushofer's novel The Wall (1963) with Anna Richards (Birkbeck). What does it mean to survive a catastrophic event? How can we navigate the barrier between human and non-human animals?

Discussing two books by Dinesh Wadiwel on animals as food: The War Against Animals (Brill, 2015); and Animals and Capital (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). Wadiwel examines animal agriculture as sovereign violence; and the structural place of animal labour in capitalist modes of value generation and reproduction. What are the political and ecological implications of treating animals as food? Wha...

Discussing Alison Stone's book ‘Frances Power Cobbe’ regarding the 19th C philosopher and feminist who developed a moral theory on the status and treatment of animals; founded anti-vivisection societies; and reconciled her Victorian Christian ideas with Darwin's theory of evolution. How is the relative status and value of animals to humans to be judged? What do emotions have to do with morality? W...

Discussing the concept of genocide with international human rights lawyer and social theorist, Vasuki Nesiah (NYU Gallatin). Is genocide event or process? How do we move from idea of genocide as apex crime in international criminal law to appreciating its role in the structural process of world-making? We discuss the implications of her analysis for thinking through the war in Gaza. For more detai...

Discussing Richard A. Lee's The Thought of Matter: Materialism, Conceptuality and the Transcendence of Immanence (2016). Thought and matter are distinct, separate. The explosion of new materialisms emphasise the agency of things without a critical philosophy that can sustain ethical and normative commitments. How does philosophical materialism allow the otherness of thought to emerge?

Discussing William E. Connolly's recent books on climate catastrophes; examining geological volatilities; considering pagan thinkers

Discussing human & planetary time with Prof Dipesh Chakrabarty (Uni of Chicago)

Discussion with Joel Bakan of book and film, The New Corporation (2020), which reveals a world now fully remade in the corporation's image, perilously close to losing democracy.

Discussing norms derived from nature with Margaret Davies, author of EcoLaw: Legality, Life, and the Normativity of Nature (2022).  Nomos and nature are usually viewed in opposition. Here we ask, what are the norms to be derived from nature? How do they emerge and coexist?

Discussing Daniel Matthews's book Earthbound: The Aesthetics of Sovereignty in the Anthropocene (2021). How does obligation signal a new ethics and politics for our time?

Discussing the Australian High Court's landmark ruling in Mabo v Queensland (No 2) (1992), the failure of decolonisation; and how the case enabled the growth of extractive industries and mining.

Behrouz Boochani discusses his book No Friend but the Mountains and Australia's border mentality.

Discussing Marc Nichanian's 'Historiographic Perversion' on the denial of the extermination of Armenians in 1915. How are historians and archives complicit? What are the limits of representing genocide through memory, testimony, or art?

Discussing Tanya Serisier's 'Speaking Out: Feminism, Rape, and Narrative Politics' which considers the political value and outcome of 'breaking the silence' on rape and sexual violence. What are the conditions in which such speech is heard?

Discussing Gerry Simpson's The Sentimental Life of International Law - we explore how indirection, hesitancy, and gardening offer a 'style' of engagement that moves people to hope and action.

Discussing Renisa Mawani’s book Across Oceans of Law - concerning issues of migration, Empire, and indigenous peoples as encapsulated in the story of the 1914 voyage of the ship, Komagata Maru .

Discussion with Lisa Baraitser on her book ' Enduring Time', addressing the suspended time of mothering, care, grief, solitary confinement, and anachronistic political ideas.

Discussion with Nanna Bonde Thylstrup on mass digitization and attempts at ‘total archives’ - revealing the corporate and cultural domination of Google Books, Europeana, and the ‘shadow’ libraries that subvert these.

Discussing Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s Geontologies: A Requiem To Late Liberalism - challenging the distinction between life and non-life. Drawing on knowledge from Indigenous people from the Northern Territory, Australia, hear how humans and apparently inert things like rocks and fog are intertwined and co-constituted.