Pretty Heady Stuff

Timothy Leduc is faculty in Land-based and Indigenous Social Work at Wilfrid Laurier University in Brantford, Ontario. He is author of A Canadian Climate of Mind (2016) that looks at climate change as a spiritual initiation into healing the pain at the root of modern culture. In this conversation, we talk about being stuck within a system that extracts and destroys the Earth, not knowing how to ho...

James Adomian is a brilliant stand-up comedian, voice actor, writer and impressionist known for his work on Comedy Bang! Bang!, Last Comic Standing, and his many hilarious podcast appearances. He's also one of the funniest people in the world. Renowned for his impressions of figures like Bernie Sanders, David Attenborough, Elon Musk and Mike Lindell, Adomian's recent comedy special Path of...

Harsha Walia is a South Asian activist and writer based in Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish Territories. Author of the essential Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Walia has been involved in community-based grassroots migrant justice, feminist, anti-racist, Indigenous solidarity, anti-capitalist, Palestinian liberation, and anti-imperialist movements,...

In this episode of Pretty Heady Stuff, Halifax's Poet Laureate Anna Quon talks about the places and people that her poetry comes from, why she is committed to using art as a means of documenting the suffering and joy that we experience, and how to advocate for more inclusive forms of care. Quon is a writer and writing workshop facilitator. Her first novel, Migration Songs, was released by Invi...

In the wake of October 7, two political modalities have emerged: one is an imperialist one that seeks to forcefully normalize the retaliatory genocidal violence Israel has inflicted on Palestine, the other is an anticolonial one that refuses the racial domination of people rendered disposable by the imperial machine. A primary effect of the so-called "Palestine exception" -- where one ca...

Kai Bosworth is a human geographer and political ecologist, and an Associate Professor at the School of World Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University. He is currently working on a book project provisionally entitled ​Protectors of the Subsurface: Militant Investigation and Critical Imagination in Anti-Oil Activism. In this discussion, we look at his terrific book Pipeline Populism at a moment of...

Many academic workers are striking for better labour protections, including CUPE 3916 in Nova Scotia, but where are the connections forming between different labour movements? Can we forge deeper solidarity in this moment of crisis? Do we blow up the system or try to repair it? Nora Loreto, host of the podcast Sandy and Nora Talk Politics and author of many books on politics, and Alex Khasnabish,...

Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She’s the editor of a number of academic journals, including the Journal of Palestine Studies. She’s also a policy member of Al-Shabaka and the Palestinian Policy Network. Seikaly and I talk about the question of Palestine and the ongoing catastrophe. When we spoke, the central focus was famine, which...

Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano (https://www.sarahsteinlubrano.com/) got her PhD from Oxford and Masters degree from the University of Cambridge. She works with the Sense and Solidarity Initiative and the Future Narratives Lab. She's also served as the head of content at The School of Life. Her new book, Don't Talk About Politics, has me reeling. (https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/dont-talk-about-poli...

Ingrid Waldron is the founder and director of The ENRICH Project, the co-founder and co-director of the Canadian Coalition for Environmental and Climate Justice (CCECJ), and currently a consultant for Canada's Environmental Justice Strategy. Ingrid Waldron partners with equity demanding groups because their health depends on this thing called structural competency. There is a massive body of r...

This episode comes out at a time when the movement for Palestinian liberation is relentlessly holding groups accountable for supporting and whitewashing the state of Israel's annihilationist violence against Gaza's people. The shaming of companies, states and cities for their complicity and quietism on Gaza has reached a fever pitch. Here in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Tennis Canada was set to p...

Dominic Boyer is an anthropologist, content producer and environmental researcher who teaches at Rice University, where he served as founding director of Rice’s Center for Environmental Studies. Some of his recent books are Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene and Hyposubjects: On Becoming Human. The book we’re talking about here, though, No More Fossils, is a short, stunning analysi...

Dr. Rupa Marya is a physician and activist. She's been a major part of revolutionary health initiatives like the Justice Study, which looks at the links between police violence and health in Black, brown and Indigenous communities, and Seeding Sovereignty, a group that promotes Indigenous autonomy in climate action. She's also the co-author, with Raj Patel, of Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anato...

Kilian Jörg is an artist and philosopher who is interested in understanding how art can intervene to disrupt the ecological catastrophe we’re currently witnessing. His current research focuses on the car as a metaphor for the toxic behaviors of modernity, the psychological effects of living in a time of ecocide and what sorts of activist strategies for reclaiming land might be effective at shaking...

Alexander Gallant is a folk singer-songwriter from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. His songs are simple and direct but also singular and sardonic. He takes a lot of inspiration from the folk revival of the 1960’s, but uses a specific blend of open tuning style fingerpicking and percussive strumming, paired with funny, personal poetry. He released his debut record, Waiting Tables Blues with Tibet Street Re...

Caleb Wellum is a professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He’s also the editor of Energy Humanities and a member of both the Petrocultures Research Group and the After Oil Collective. As an historian who studies the intersection of energy, culture and political economy in the twentieth century, he’s invested in understanding how natural resource...

James Rowe is a professor of Political Ecology and Cultural, Social, and Political Thought at the University of Victoria and the author of a great book called Radical Mindfulness: Why Transforming Fear of Death is Politically Vital. Radical Mindfulness examines the root causes of injustice and how the fear of death works as a major cause of injustice globally. One of my main takeaways, so to speak...

Imre Szeman is the inaugural Director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation and Sustainability and Professor of Human Geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough. His recent book, Futures of the Sun: The Struggle Over Renewable Life, examines corporate and state control of the transition to renewables. We talk here about how Futures of the Sun explores the competing eco-stories bei...

Max Haiven is the author of many books on finance capitalism, social movement organizing, anti-fascist revolt and the politics of revenge. His latest project focuses on games as a major feature of everyday life under advanced capitalism. His writing on games has really grown my understanding of what’s going on when people take on the sort of abstract agency they can experience in an imagined envir...

Mark Bourrie is an Ottawa-based author, lawyer, and journalist. He holds a master’s in journalism from Carleton University and a PhD in history from the University of Ottawa. In 2017, he was awarded a Juris Doctor degree and was called to the bar in 2018. He has won numerous awards for his journalism, including a National Magazine Award, and received the RBC Charles Taylor Prize in 2020 for his bo...

Judy Haiven is the co-founder of Equity Watch and part of the national steering committee for Independent Jewish Voices Canada. She worked for nearly 20 years as a professor of industrial relations at Saint Mary's University in Halifax. Now, her main focus is left wing activism and political writing. As a Jewish person who supports Palestinian human rights, her voice is a powerful source of mo...

Deborah Britzman is a practicing psychoanalyst and philosopher of education. Her research connects psychoanalysis with pedagogy, teacher education, and the idea of vulnerability as a "constitutive inequality." We discuss her recent book When History Returns, which brings together theories of learning with the paradoxes of social strife. It argues that history "returns" through...

Abdaljawad Omar is a Lecturer in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at Birzeit University. He has written some indispensable articles on the assumptions people have about Palestine and Palestinian resistance, on the internal tensions in the Palestinian diaspora, the complicity of the United States with Israel’s genocide, and the ongoing exterminationist attitudes that Western elites...

Mark Stoll teaches American environmental history and American religious history at Texas Tech, where he also serves as director of Environmental Studies. Stoll’s latest book is an environmental history of capitalism, Profit: An Environmental History (2022). From the publisher: "Profit — getting more out of something than you put into it — is the original genius of homo sapiens, who learned how to...

Sarah Marie Wiebe is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria whose research and solidarity work focuses on community development and environmental justice. When we last spoke on the pod, we looked at her writing broadly, but this time around we’re marking the release of her fantastic new book Hot Mess: Mothering Through a Code Red Climate Emergen...