Imagine Otherwise by Ideas on Fire

How are Black feminists challenging tired savior narratives in favor of robust and fully human forms of admiration? How can scholars unlearn some of the academy's lessons to produce truly great public scholarship? What does it actually look like on a daily basis to embody justice as love in public? In episode 87 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach chats with podcaster, Teen Vogu...

How do radical music cultures help us rethink differently copyright and global cultural production? What does it mean to put theory and creative practice in conversation with one another? How can we create socially, politically, and ethically engaged scholarship that is accountable to and supportive of marginalized communities? In episode 86 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach t...

How might we interrogate the sociocultural dimensions of music through queer, class-conscious, and anti-racist frameworks? How can teachers of all subjects use music to tackle challenging topics like race and class politics in the classroom? How can incorporating a creative practice improve scholarly research? In episode 85 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach chats with musician...

How do punitive governance like policing and natural disasters like Hurricane Maria reveal the ongoing colonial relationship between the US and Puerto Rico? What do you do when your research plans are thrown into disarray by unforeseen events? How might we work together to imagine an abolitionist future? In episode 84 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach talks with Latinx studies...

How do the racist and misogynist histories of population control shape current debates over climate change? How is the reproductive justice movement shifting our understandings of environmentalism and public health? How are feminist public health scholars harnessing photography, poetry, and creative writing to bring their research to diverse audiences? In episode 83 of the Imagine Otherwise podcas...

How are women shaking up the global hip hop graffiti scene? What does social justice curation look like? How does feminist graffiti offer vibrant insights into more creative and just worlds? In episode 82 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach interviews performance studies scholar and arts activist Jessica Nydia Pabón-Colón about how women graffiti writers perform feminism on the...

What is the link between global trade policies and the food on our plates? How can scholars of globalization and migration translate their work so as to shape more just and sustainable policies? Why should scholars bring their whole selves to their work and what impact can that have on broader political, economic, and cultural processes? In episode 81 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy H...

How can independent media amplify Indigenous politics? What do the politics of land, gender, and sexuality tell us about the paradox of Hawaiian sovereignty? What might a decolonial Indigenous futurity look like? In episode 80 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach chats with Indigenous studies professor and radio host J. Kēhaulani Kauanui about the histories and futures of the Haw...

What does Indigenous language revitalization look like in our contemporary digital age? How might language learning and capacity building work outside of traditional academic spaces? What would it mean to reframe language revitalization as a process of repairing and reweaving? In episode 79 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach interviews linguistic anthropologist and Indigenous s...

How can a transnational, trans of color aesthetics remake the world? How has transgender studies changed what academic publishing looks like in the digital age? And what might our social justice movements look like if we prioritized small-scale, emergent strategies as much as large-scale, revolutionary ones? In episode 78 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach interviews trans stud...

How might speculative fiction help educators teach gender and ethnic studies to their students? What would it mean to reimagine the Pacific in an anticapitalist, anticolonial, and decolonial way? What kind of world could we have if we thought beyond the normative story? In episode 77 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, Cathy Hannabach talks with professor Aimee Bahng about how speculative fiction an...

How might the world be transformed by honoring Pacific experiences? What can communal storytelling teach us about decolonial ways of knowing? How can poetry be a powerful force for social justice activism? In episode 76 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach talks with Chamoru poet and professor Craig Santos Perez about how creation stories, Spam, and the birth of his daughter insp...

What new pathways emerge when we theorize from the undercurrents? How can art challenge the corrosive logics of racial and extractive capitalism? What kind of world can we build by thinking beyond disciplinary boundaries? In episode 75 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach talks with scholar Macarena Gómez-Barris about how social movements and art practices throughout the Américas...

How do we organize truly intersectional artistic collaboration across time and space? What might running a small business teach us about the creative process? How might a thoughtful creative practice allow us to think deeply about the intersectionalities of struggles? In episode 74 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach interviews artist, designer, and art director Veronica Corzo-D...

What tools does feminism provide for dismantling domination? What might be possible when our work aligns with what nourishes our spirit? How might we build a society where love is at the core of everything that we do? In episode 73 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach interviews professor Imani Perry about the intimate ways gender, colonialism, and race intertwine in the historie...

How do Indigenous forms of governance provide models for organizing beyond the state? How might scholars better work alongside of and in the best interests of the people that they study? How does Indigenous artistic production reimagine the very nature of politics? In episode 72 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach interviews professor Manuela Lavinas Picq about the powerful ways...

How does music enable us to dream up a different world? What does respecting your audience look like as a writer? How can we empower young people access to tell stories that matter to them? In episode 71 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach talks with professor and writer Francesca T. Royster about the queer afterlives of soul music, Francesca's powerful family histories of women...

What politics shape information management and access to knowledge? What are the social and environmental implications of ubiquitous digital preservation? How are librarians and archivists at the forefront of radical social justice projects? In episode 70 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach interviews librarian and archivist Stacie Williams about how knowledge and information ga...

How might a queer lens unearth different conceptions of space and place? How do queer diasporic artists use aesthetics to forge transnational connections? How might radical relationality provide a model for queer ethics and politics? In episode 69 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach talks with queer diaspora studies scholar Gayatri Gopinath about how visual culture allows us to...

Do we really need sex classification in our education system, our public restrooms, or our government IDs? How can we alleviate some of the harm that trans and gender-nonconforming people who don't fit into a binary face? How might gender studies scholars best work with community members on these issues? Episode 68 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast is the final episode in a three-part miniseries th...

How has the concept of Universal Design and its application to architectural practice changed over the years? Who is left out of design practices that are meant for "everyone"? What if the design industry actually employed the people with disabilities who have been designing adaptable and accessible products for decades? Episode 67 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast is the second in a three-part min...

How does speculative fiction provide us models for more queer, just, and creative futures? How are Black women novelists helping us reimagine what (dis)ability and embodiment mean? What is missing from our conversations in popular representation, disability studies, and Black studies? Episode 66 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast is the first in a three part miniseries that was recorded live in Pitt...

How might we create a world where intersectional feminist, sex-positive sex education is the norm? What new avenues of liberation are opened up when we move past a theory vs. practice dichotomy in sexuality education? How can we center accountability and community responsibility in imagining a safer and more pleasurable future? In episode 65 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach i...

What is the negative capacity of art and how does it let us imagine otherwise? What tools does queer of color critique offer for building new worlds? What revolutionary futures become visible when we bring a critical scrutiny to our lives and our work? In episode 64 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach talks with professor Tavia Nyong'o about the ongoing project of Black abolitio...

What does it mean to listen to images? Why do images seem to be haunted by their contexts of production? How are marginalized communities using the intimacy of images to build new ways of relating to each other and the world? In episode 63 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach talks with professor Tina Campt about how listening to images reveals their multisensory and embodied nat...