Pretty Heady Stuff

Trigger warning: This episode contains detailed descriptions of assault and abuse that some listeners may find disturbing. Linda MacDonald and Jeanne Sarson are feminist activists and human rights educators who have been pushing for decades to insist that the public confront the related realities of femicide and non-state torture. Their work led them to co-found the organization Persons Against No...

Priscilla Wald is a Professor of English and Women's Studies at Duke University who has written extensively on the cultural politics of pandemics, past and future. Her books Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form and Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative are essential for understanding the current coronavirus pandemic. Wald offers powerful correctives to t...

Researcher and communicator Joe Duggan, a doctoral researcher at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, talks to me about why he created the "Is This How You Feel?" project, which asks climate scientists to compose handwritten letters expressing how the climate crisis makes them feel.

Author and activist Max Haiven outlines some radical ways of approaching the challenges that we face globally, in a moment that seems characterized by a series of unprecedented and growing crises.

Artist and communicator Jodi Cooper discusses the complicated and exciting process of making a film that speaks to the fans who are financing it and satisfies the artists who made it. "The Woodsmen" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYB3sl6RJDs

Bestselling graphic non-fiction author Box Brown speaks with me about nostalgia and popular culture, wrestling as an analogue for the theatre of politics, and (especially) the graphic medium of comics as a distinct way to look at history. His book Is This Guy for Real? The Unbelievable Life of Andy Kaufman, just won a much-deserved Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work -- Kaufman played in the...

In this episode we discuss the importance of seeing culture, ideas and ideology as central parts of the struggle for climate action and an end to neoliberal extractivism. Jeff identifies a troubling "mood" that dominates conversations about the climate; this mood is part of a larger "haze" that prevents us from fully accepting the extent of the damage or the urgency of the threat.

Following a federal election that exposed some serious issues with Canadian democracy, author and activist El Jones sat down with me to discuss how the rhetoric of emotion is used to simplify political debates around race and how the insularized ways we communicate get in the way of critical dialogue.