Everything is Ideology: a Cultural Studies Podcast

Show notes : Universities often present themselves as neutral institutions devoted to the pursuit of knowledge. But what counts as knowledge? Who decides which ways of learning are legitimate? And why have certain forms of education—particularly those rooted in community, oral tradition, and collective practice—so often been excluded from the academy in favor of European models of expertise? Today...

Show notes: In this episode, I'm joined by David Ventura, Associate Res earcher at Newcastle University, whose work engages the Black Radical Tradition, colonial temporality, and practices of refusal. We discuss his recent article,  "History and Histories: Fanon and Glissant on Breaking with the Colonial Past,"  which revisits an enduring question within decolonial thought: What relationship shoul...

Patreon.com/everythingisideology Buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology Show Notes: In this episode of  I sit down with philosopher Zeyad el Nabolsy to discuss his article,  "The Concept of Western Civilization in Black Marxism: Cedric Robinson as an Ethnophilosopher."  Together, we explore one of the most influential and debated texts in Black Studies and political theory: Cedric Robinson's  Black...

patreon.com/everythingisideology buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology. Show notes: In this episode, I sit down with Emily Contois to discuss her recently published article,  “Fueling Masculinity: How Ads for Plant-Based Burgers and Electric Trucks Reinforce Gender Norms and Resist Sustainable Imaginaries.”  We explore the politics of food, masculinity, consumer culture, and advertising. Drawing o...

Show Notes: When we think about colonialism, countries like Britain, France, and Spain often come immediately to mind. Italy, by contrast, is frequently imagined through a different set of narratives—art, culture, food, and, perhaps most significantly, a national mythology that has long obscured the realities of its colonial past. In this episode, we're joined by scholar Noreen Kane to discuss her...

Show notes: I’m joined by Max Blansjaar and Jacob Kingsbury Downs for a wide-ranging conversation on their article, “On Taylor Swift and Broken Glass: Confessional Pop, Psychological Intimacy, and Two-Way Authentication,” we explore why honesty has become such a central aesthetic category in popular music and what it means when listeners begin to understand themselves through artists they consume....

Show notes: In this episode speak with Colin Sterling about his article,  “Reparative Museology and Its Limits.” We discuss the broader political, philosophical, and cultural questions surrounding museums, memory, and institutional critique. Drawing from critical heritage studies, museum studies, psychoanalysis, and environmental humanities, we discuss the growing “reparative turn” within museums...

Buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology Patreon.com/everythingisideology Show notes: We are joined once again by historian and writer Sarah Balakrishnan to discuss her article “Prison of the Womb: Gender, Incarceration, and Capitalism on the Gold Coast of West Africa, c. 1500–1957” the conversation explores a largely erased history of indigenous prison systems in the Gold Coast and the central role...

Patreon.com/everythingisideology Buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology Show Notes: In this episode, we’re diving into a history that feels uncannily familiar—one where media, persuasion, and strategic communication shape public opinion in ways that still resonate today. I’m joined by Stuart Anderson Davis, a doctoral researcher at Columbia University studying the history of deception and disinform...

buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology Shownotes: In today’s episode, we’re in conversation with Dr. Bright Gyamfi about a fascinating and necessary rethinking of decolonization, memory, and historical narrative. But rather than retelling familiar stories centered on nation-states or political elites, this conversation turns toward what has been overlooked—and often structurally erased. At the hear...

Patreon.com/everythingisideology Buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology Instagram.com/everythingisideology Music: "Building Nests in the Ruins" By nihilore creative commons music project Shownotes: Welcome back to  Everything is Ideology , I’m your host Dr. Lee Caplan. Today were joined by Ehsan Hanif a PhD candidate at Cornell University whose work explores the intersections of architecture, oil,...

If you like what we do please subscribe to the show at Patreon.com/everythingisideology or give a one time donation at buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology Show notes : Welcome back to  Everything is Ideology . I’m your host Dr. Lee Caplan. I’m joined by Dr. Laura Sykes, and we will be discussing her recently published essay “Rolling Stone Magazine: Co-opting the Counterculture.” Today’s episode...

Show Notes: In today’s episode we dive into his recent work, “Writing with Emo Nostalgia Toward Musical Mattering” where we explore how nostalgia functions not just as a backward glance, but as a way of imagining alternative futures. We’ll talk about emo beyond its stereotypes—less as individual angst and more as a site of community, affect, and critical engagement. We’ll also unpack concepts like...

Biography: Dr. Rachmi Diyah Larasati of the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies Is a passionate dance practitioner, innovative choreographer, and author of works such as The Dance that Makes You Vanish, she has explored aesthetics and narrative through numerous writings. As Professor of Transnationalism and Aesthetics at the University of Minnesota, she is also affiliated with Amer...

Biography: Sarah Balakrishnan is a Canadian-Indian writer and scholar based in the Department of History at Duke University. Balakrishnan is the 2022 Narrative Prize winner, the winner of Narrative Magazine’ s Best Under 30 writing contest, and a finalist for the Cecilia Joyce Johnson Award for Short Fiction from the Key West Literary Seminar. Since 2020, BalaKRISH NIN has served as a fiction edit...

Biography: Max Blansjaar is a musician and writer from Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He holds a BA in Music from St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford, where he was awarded the Gibbs Prize by the Faculty of Music in 2024. His work centres around cultural politics in popular music and the negotiation of social identities and relations through music and sound, with recent essays published in S...

Biography : Dr. Jamil Khader is a Palestinian-American scholar of English literature, literary theory, and cultural politics whose work explores how stories shape our understanding of power, identity, and justice. Across a career spanning institutions in the Middle East and the United States, he has cultivated a distinctive intellectual voice—bringing together Marxist critique, Lacanian psychoanal...

Biography: Sydney Beckmann earned her PhD in American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, where she was a Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bolinski Fellow. Her research is interdisciplinary and intersects the areas of religion, race, and colonialism. She focuses on the legacy of colonial discourse and its effect on urban indigeneity particularly how government policies and rhe...

Biography: Dr. Alex Moulton earned his PhD in Geography from Clark University, with a MS in Geography from East Carolina University and a BSc in Geography and Geology from the University of the West Indies, Mona. His research examines Black geographical epistemologies and history, ecological justice, community resource governance, landscape legacies of colonization, and political ecology of enviro...