Unsettling

Today we’re joined by Brennain Lloyd from Northwatch to discuss the prospective construction of a nuclear waste repository near Ignace in northwestern Ontario. What are some of the risks of burying nuclear waste? How is Canada’s industrial sector presenting nuclear waste and nuclear waste management to the public and does this image hold? What is the historical context of nuclear energy production...

Join us for a discussion with Philippe Blouin, compiler and editor of the recent book The Mohawk Warrior Society: A Handbook on Sovereignty and Survival. Our wide ranging discussion offers an overview of Haudenosaunee political thinking, Indigenous-settler alliance building and solidarity practices, and the intersections between contemporary European philosophy and the Mohawk Warrior Society.    T...

AND WE ARE BACK! Back with a new name and back with a new episode, back-to-back, and today’s all about settlers and Land Back. In this episode, Kiegan Irish and Alex Boos explore a variety of questions about the nature of settler subjectivity, its transformability, and ways to theorize settler solidarity politics with Indigenous Land Back struggles. From the Red Paper to Wasáse, from the Yintah to...

In this episode, Kiegan Irish and Alex Boos are joined by Benjamin Pillet, a PhD grad from Université de Québec à Montréal who now lives on a sustainable farm with his family in Paspébiac, to discuss his journey from France to Turtle Island, the concept of Anarcho-Indigenism, settler solidarity publishing, activism, decolonization, anarchism, postcolonialism, theories of the state and more.  Speci...

In this episode, Kiegan Irish and Alex Boos are joined by Montreal-based poet William Vallières for an enriching discussion on the nature and history of fascism and what the legacy of studies on fascism can offer us when interpreting politics in the world today. Special thanks goes out to Will for generously sharing his time and thoughts with us. You can find his most recent book of poetry Versus...

Feeling lonely? As the first round of vaccines rolls into Canada, a yearning for the revitalization of social relations long severed and strangulated by the social distancing and confinement required to fight COVID-19 grows stronger. But what kinds of social relations are we going to build now and commit to the future? What can we build together in the face of crisis at home or abroad? In this epi...

Seven months into the global pandemic, Kiegan Irish and Alex Boos revisit one of Mark Fisher’s papers called “Post-Capitalist Desire.” At a time when societal collapse, economic recession, world-historical crises, homelessness, unemployment and fascist tendencies are on the rise, we believe it is crucial to think about the situation of the political left in public discourse and how it is taking sh...

In this episode, Kiegan Irish and Alex Boos are joined by Mike Fong to discuss Erin O'Toole's recent conservative party leadership election, the legacy of Canadian conservative politics and Canadian political economy. What shape is Canada's right-wing discourse taking? How do today's conservative party politics tie in with right-wing radicalization practices and what are some of the stakes at play...

In this episode, Kiegan Irish and Alex Boos discuss some of the events transpiring at 1492 Land Back Lane, where Haudenosaunee land defenders and allies have been actively holding Haudenosaunee territory since July 19, 2020, before diving into a film analysis of Winnipeg film director Matthew Rankin’s The Twentieth Century. Join us as we revisit the plot, themes, historical resonances and symbolis...

In this episode, Kiegan Irish and Alex Boos revisit and contemplate historical moments and trajectories that trace out certain facets of the encounter between Europeans and Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island. Taking a dual historical approach that blends Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s decolonial methodology of Indigenizing discourse with a historical materialist analysis borrowed from Marxism, we consider...

In this episode, Kiegan Irish, Alex Boos, and Alex Edwards are joined by guest Anna Bishop, who recently completed a master’s in biogeochemistry from the University of Alberta, to elucidate the world of climate science and its methods of understanding climate change. Join us as Anna demystifies climate science with language that balances the rigour of science with clarity and accessibility.

Now, something a little different for The Poplar Tapes. This time around, Kiegan Irish joined a roundtable with other creators to discuss left media, free speech, contemporary American politics, the differences between socialism and liberalism, and more! A big thank you goes out to Toby Buckle from the Political Philosophy Podcast for organizing the roundtable and to everyone else who took part! C...

In this episode Alex Edwards and Kiegan Irish discuss the Bernie Sanders primary campaign. Bernie had a huge amount of momentum and grassroots support, yet a ripple of electoral losses led to a struggling campaign. We discuss in detail what went wrong at the level of strategy and rhetoric. We look at the campaign through the lens of populism and enumerate our diagnoses as well as offering prescrip...

In this episode, Kiegan Irish and Alex Boos discuss the novel coronavirus, a.k.a COVID-19. We investigate its origins and draw out the connections between industrial agricultural practices, globalization, climate change, and the spread of the virus. We then do a deep dive into the relationship to nature embodied in the global economic order and how our lasting social, political, and economic probl...

In this episode, Kiegan Irish and Alex Boos discuss an essay entitled “Racialized Accumulation by Dispossession in the Age of Finance Capitalism: Notes on the Debt Economy” from Jackie Wang’s book Carceral Capitalism. Distilling Wang's critical reworkings of Rosa Luxemberg’s concept of hybrid capitalism and her reflections on systems of expropriation and indebtedness specific to the age of finance...

In this episode, Kiegan Irish and Alex Boos discuss the history of the figure of the clown from the Feast of Fools to Ronald McDonald, and its eventual development into the 'evil' clown, which plays a recurring role in particular as a signifier in the popular culture of today. Taking the horror genre as a pivotal point of departure, we then consider the political anxieties the evil clown embodies...

In this episode, Kiegan Irish, Mike Fong, and Alex Boos discuss Canada's upcoming federal election with a conversational approach, covering a broad range of topics. We talk through how to orient ourselves towards the different political parties and the political system in Canada as a whole. We talk about voting, not voting, democracy, the concepts of "voter apathy" and "strategic voting," Canadian...

In this episode, Kiegan Irish, Alex Boos and Alex Edwards discuss reporting from 2017 and 2018 on corruption in Canadian banking culture and embed these reports in the wider context of our capitalist economy with a reading of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism. We look at the banking practices of Canada’s banks and the federal government’s response to these banking practices and draw from Fisher’s c...

In this episode Alex Edwards, Kiegan Irish, and Alex Boos discuss false dichotomies in our political discourse. We look at how these dichotomies are set up intentionally by those in positions of political power to divide an electorate and achieve their goals.  We look at three examples of these false dichotomies. First, the 2016 American election of Hillary vs. Trump, second the Green New Deal vs....

The third and final instalment in our series on algorithms and the digital condition. In this episode Kiegan Irish and Alex Boos discuss what kinds of people we are becoming in a world dominated by communication media and surveillance. We talk about some of the implications of data collection for our daily lives and the way that companies and governments use data to incentivize certain kinds of be...

In the second of our three-part series on algorithms and the digital condition, Kiegan Irish and Alex Boos discuss the relationship between algorithms and the market. We live in an age of social media and to understand what that means for ourselves and for our society it's important to learn about the market forces that motivate and organize the networks we use everyday. How do new digital technol...

In Part One of our three part series on algorithms and the digital condition, Kiegan Irish and Alex Boos discuss what an algorithm is, the history of algorithms, and the way that algorithms function to polarize our political culture in a digital environment.

Kiegan Irish and Pat Case discuss a chapter from Chris Hedges latest book and decide if his criticisms of antifa are warranted. 

In this episode Kiegan Irish, Alex Boos and Alex Edwards discuss the movement in support of building pipelines in Canada and the constitutive environmental racism that comes along with it.