Pretty Heady Stuff

Abboud Hamayel is a Lecturer in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at Birzeit University. In this conversation we talk about a number of his recent articles, and think through the implications of the October 7th Al-Aqsa Flood, or the attacks led by Hamas within the so-called Gaza Envelope. Abboud has written some invaluable pieces breaking down the assumptions people project onto Pal...

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. As a historian of capitalism, consumption, and development in the modern Middle East, she has an overriding concern with how indiv...

Nadia Yaqub is Professor of Arabic Language and Culture and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research has examined Arab medieval literature and contemporary oral poetry, as well as modern prose fiction and visual culture. I spoke to her about three of her books: Bad Girls of the Arab World, which is about women and transgression in the Arab world, Palestinian Cinema in the D...

Jeff Karabanow is Professor and Associate Director in the School of Social Work at Dalhousie University. He has worked with homeless populations in Toronto, Montreal, Halifax and Guatemala. His research focuses primarily upon housing stability, service delivery systems, trauma, and homeless youth culture. I want to say, first, that right now we don’t even really know how many people are currently...

Veronica Post is a furniture maker, teacher and an award-winning graphic novelist based in Nova Scotia. She’s written two graphic novels so far, published by Conundrum Press; the books are part of a planned trilogy focused on the trials and tribulations of their title character Langosh and his trusty dog Peppi. The first two titles, Fugitive Days and Hot to Trot, are journalistic explorations of V...

Gideon Levy is an Israeli journalist and author. Levy writes opinion pieces and a weekly column for the newspaper Haaretz that often focuses on the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. He’s won numerous awards for his writing on human rights abuses in the occupied territories. Levy is known for insisting that being an Israeli patriot requires one to be critical of the occupation. Whe...

Licypriya Kangujam is an environmental activist from Manipur, India. On December 11th of last year, she marched onto the plenary stage as COP28 came to a close in the UAE and demanded that leaders acknowledge the state of emergency we are in, and the fact that there is no time to waste, as millions of people are already being directly impacted by the climate crisis and the situation is sure to get...

Hadil Kamal works as a surgeon at Al Quds University in Ramallah. For years, Hadil has been lecturing and practicing in Palestine. In this conversation, she offers a brilliant account of why she feels an intense moral obligation to oppose the oppression of Palestinian people. Ramallah is at a unique vantage point when it comes to understanding and resisting Israel's occupation of Palestine. As the...

Michael Hardt teaches political theory in the Literature Program at Duke University. He is co-author, with Antonio Negri, of the Empire trilogy and, most recently, Assembly. He is also the co-director of The Social Movements Lab. Toni Negri sadly died just recently, on December 16th, at the age of 90. He was a towering intellectual and political figure in modern Marxism and will be missed deeply f...

Mark Paul is an assistant professor and a member of the Climate Institute at Rutgers University. His research looks at the causes and effects of inequality, and tries to work through some of the material remedies for inequality in the context of neoliberal capitalism. He’s written a great deal on the climate crisis, focusing on economic pathways to crash decarbonization that also take into account...

Seth Klein is a public policy researcher and writer based in Vancouver, BC. He’s the Director of Strategy with the Climate Emergency Unit and the author of A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency, which is the basis of a lot of the questions that I ask in this interview. He talks about how the focus of the book was not always the sorts of lessons we can take from the Second World W...

Margaret Galvan is Assistant Professor of visual rhetoric in the Department of English at the University of Florida. Her research examines how visual culture operates within the print media of feminist and queer social movements in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Her first book, In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s explores how publishing practices and archives have shaped und...

Macarena Gómez-Barris is a writer and scholar with a focus on queer ecologies and decolonial theory and praxis. She is author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (2017) and Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (2018), among several other texts. She is working on a new book, At the Sea’s Edge that reflects on the space between land a...

Matt Wolf is a filmmaker from New York whose critically acclaimed documentary films have been shown across the globe. (https://www.criterionchannel.com/directed-by-matt-wolf) Wild Combination does a deep dive into the life and music of Arthur Russell, Teenage is a study of early youth culture and the birth of the very idea of teenagers, Recorder is an invaluable portrait of the activist and archiv...

I sort of feel like this guest needs no introduction, but that may be because, for me, she’s such a powerful influence on thinking around affect, obviously, but also feminist politics, anticolonial resistance, the consequences of representation and misrepresentation. For people that don’t know who she is, Sara Ahmed is the author of many widely read texts, from Queer Phenomenology, to Living a Fem...

Kyla Tienhaara is an Assistant Professor in the School of Environmental Studies and the Department of Global Development Studies at Queen’s University, Canada and a Visiting Fellow at the School of Regulation and Global Governance, Australian National University. She’s the author of Green Keynesianism and the Global Financial Crisis and the co-editor of the Routledge Handbook on the Green New Deal...

Gernot Wagner is a climate economist at Columbia Business School. His research, writing, and teaching focus on climate risks and climate policy. Gernot writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate and has written four books, including Geoengineering: the Gamble and Climate Shock. Before joining Columbia and serving as faculty director of the Climate Knowledge Initiative, Gernot taught at NYU and...

Casey Williams is a Lecturer in the Center for Environmental Studies at Rice University. His research examines the social and cultural dimensions of climate change and energy transition, especially the problem of “climate impasse” and the concept and possibility of a “just transition.” His writing on climate, energy and labor has appeared in The New York Times, The LA Review of Books, Radical Phil...

Amanda Boetzkes is a professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Guelph. Her research focuses on the intersection of ethics and art as these relate to ecology. I reached out to her because I’ve been trying to understand the problem of plastics for a long time. If you remember, I spoke to Heather Davis, Mark Simpson and Sarah King back in February about this intimidatingly...

Sarah Marie Wiebe is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Hawai'i, Mānoa with a focus on community development and environmental sustainability. She is a Co-Founder of the Feminist Environmental Research Network and a prolific writer. Her books include Everyday Exposure: Indigenous Mobilization and...

Raja Swamy is a social anthropologist with an interest in the political economy and political ecology of natural disasters. In this conversation we unpack the ideas in his recent book Building Back Better in India: Development, NGOs, and Artisanal Fishers after the 2004 Tsunami. This is a disaster that killed nearly 230,000 people. It’s trauamtic, but Raja takes us into that trauma in order to tal...

Brenna Walsh is the Energy Coordinator at the Ecology Action Center. She’s made a career out of bringing different communities together to strengthen and accelerate climate policy and action. Walsh is focused squarely on understanding what has worked and not worked in the past and on exploring new initiatives to build climate resistant communities. In this interview I aimed to get a deeper sense o...

Paris Marx is a technology writer. They’ve written for TIME magazine, WIRED, CBC News, Jacobin, and OneZero. They speak internationally on the future of transportation. They also host the award-winning podcast 'Tech Won't Save Us,' which offers a much-needed critical perspective on the history and future implications of Big Tech. Their book, Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about th...

Thomas Beller is Associate Professor of English at Tulane University, a regular contributor to the New Yorker, and the author of J. D. Salinger: The Escape Artist, How to Be a Man, and Seduction Theory, among other books. He’s noted that his writing differs in form and genre but tends to share a lot of the same preoccupations: “the dynamics of relationships, a sense of place, and a preoccupation w...

Amy Cardinal Christianson is a Fire Research Scientist with the Canadian Forest Service. Her research on Indigenous fire stewardship, Indigenous wildland firefighters, and wildfire evacuations is important to any sort of comprehensive view of the shockingly intense wildfires that have burned 4 million hectares so far this year in Canada, and that produced almost 60 million tonnes of CO2 in May. Sh...