Pretty Heady Stuff

Ava Val is a comedian, actor, writer and musician based in Toronto. She’s made multiple appearances at Just For Laughs and The Halifax Comedy Festival, and recorded stand-up sets for CBC Gem, Crave TV, and CTV. She has a weekly podcast of her own called PodGis, which is a great place to get a taste of her high energy, clever comedy. Val released her debut special, So Brave, earlier in the year. Th...

Andreas Malm works in The Department of Human Geography at Lund University. He’s a scholar of human ecology and environmental history and has written several books, including The Progress of this Storm, Fossil Capital, How to Blow Up A Pipeline and White Skin, Black Fuel. Wim Carton works in the same department as a human geographer. The main focus of his research is the relationship between socie...

Jennifer Wickham is a filmmaker and a member of the Gidimt’en Clan of the Wet’suwet’en people. In 2012, she moved home to defend her clan’s territory against multiple pipeline projects, and especially the aggression of Coastal GasLink. Her work on the documentary film Yintah is the main focus of our conversation. Yintah is about the Wet’suwet’en fight for sovereignty, and like some other documenta...

Alder Keleman Saxena is an environmental anthropologist whose research looks at the links between agricultural biodiversity and food culture, especially in relation to nutritional health in the Bolivian Andes. Her collaboration with Anna Tsing, Feifei Zhou and Jennifer Deger for the online Feral Atlas project is an absolute gift to anyone concerned with ecology, but specifically from the perspecti...

Robert Neubauer studies the media strategies of Canadian environmental and pro-resource extraction social movements, with a focus on populist discourse and public mobilization around proposed energy infrastructure. He is currently a Post-doctoral Researcher and Limited Term Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Victoria, where he teaches on contemporary media stud...

Alice Mah is Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies at the University of Glasgow. Prior to this, she was the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council-funded project “Toxic Expertise: Environmental Justice and the Global Petrochemical Industry.” Her work focuses on toxic pollution and environmental justice. She writes about social and ecological transformations and is always tr...

Allie Rougeot is a climate justice activist and program manager at Environmental Defence Canada where she advocates for a just energy transition. As a speaker and facilitator, Allie talks to people about the escalating climate crisis and the solutions we can use to fight the emergency. In this conversation, we discuss the path she took to doing this work. Allie says it really started with working...

Dr. Ingrid Waldron should not need an introduction. The leading voice on environmental racism in Canada and author of There’s Something in the Water, Waldron has built a reputation for being unusually skilled at working with and within community and at reading the social landscape for fluctuations in the way that power works. She is the HOPE Chair in Peace and Health in the Global Peace and Social...

Catherine Abreu is a world-renowned climate campaigner whose work focuses on creating coalitions to take real action on climate change. She is the founder and executive director of Destination Zero, which—to quote their website—”partners with networks and other non-profits seeking to expand their work on climate justice, with a particular focus on accelerating the global transition away from fossi...

Darin Barney is a professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He has written some really impactful work in communication studies, and received several awards for his academic work. He is a member of the Petrocultures Research Group, the After Oil collective and Future Energy Systems at the University of Alberta, among other groups. Jesse Goldstein is...

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...