Pretty Heady Stuff

Marcus Boon is Professor of English at York University, Toronto. He is the author of The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs, In Praise of Copying and The Politics of Vibration: Music as a Cosmopolitical Practice, which was just recently released from Duke University Press. I was really excited to speak with him about The Politics of Vibration because it’s a terrific, dense, complex book...

Ben Tarnoff is the author of A Counterfeiter’s Paradise and The Bohemians. He’s the co-founder of Logic magazine. His writing has appeared in a lot of different places, mostly left publications like The Guardian and Jacobin. His most recent piece of writing, and the focus of this conversation, is a book called Internet for the People. It’s an incredibly engaging study of how the modern internet ca...

Ajay Parasram has roots in South Asia, the Caribbean and the settler cities of Halifax, Ottawa and Vancouver. He is an associate professor in the Departments of International Development Studies, History and Political Science at Dalhousie University in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), on unceded and unsurrendered Mi’kmaw territory. His research interests focus on the politics of colonialism and structural for...

Monty Scott is a brilliant stand-up comedian from Scarborough, Ontario. His album The Abyss Stares Back was nominated for a Juno Award in 2019. And while it didn’t win Comedy Album of the Year, it still represents a real victory: Scott recorded it in part as a response to a near-death experience. We talk in this conversation about bouncing back, the lives and livelihoods of comedians in Canada, sp...

Sandra Battaglini is an actor, stand-up comedian and writer. She is also the founder of the Canadian Association of Stand-Up Comedians, an organization that represents comics in Canada and lobbies for them to be recognized as the brilliant, culturally significant artists that they are. I just wrote an article for The Breach that features Sandra, among other comedians, and looks at some of her effo...

Armond R. Towns is Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. His research and teaching focuses on the relationship between media, communication, race, blackness, and history. He’s just released an amazing book called On Black Media Philosophy with University of California Press. And he’s also the cofounder and editor of the brand new journal Communica...

Janelle Niles is a stand-up comedian from Truro, Nova Scotia and the producer of Got Land?, an all-Indigenous comedy tour. The Got Land? show is an example of what greater solidarity could mean for the culture of comedy in Canada. The stated goal of the show is to “express solidarity with humour” as a way of gaining grassroots control over the sites of cultural production: the venues, shows, insti...

Tey Meadow is an assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University. While her research covers a lot of topics, the work she’s created that has had the biggest impact on me is her writing on the emergence of the transgender child as a social category, and the creation and maintaining of gender classifications in law and medicine. The book that we focus on here is the one she put out through U...

Al Val is a comedian, actor, writer and musician who has appeared on programs for CBC, MTV, and YTV. She’s also headlined standup comedy shows all over North America. A graduate of Second City’s Conservatory Program, Val also performed with improv troupe “Starwipe” for 8 years. Val is set to co-headline Just for Laughs Toronto with Allie Pearse in the Fall, has just finished filming a reality show...

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 several books, including: Geoengineering: the Gamble, But will the planet notice?, Climate Shock, which he co-authored with Martin Weitzman, and City, Country, Climate published in Germa...

Clayton Thomas-Müller is an organizer, public speaker and author focused on fighting for environmental and economic justice. He’s worked for more than two decades in support of grassroots movements and Indigenous peoples. He is a campaigner for 350.org, and has worked with the Indigenous Environmental Network, Black Mesa Water Coalition, Global Justice Ecology Project, and Bioneers. I had the oppo...

Chanelle Gallant has participated in grassroots movements for sex workers rights and racial justice for 20 years as an organizer, writer, strategist, fundraiser and speaker. She is on the leadership team for Showing Up For Racial Justice in the US, she co-founded the Migrant Sex Workers Project and has worked with sex work organizations locally and nationally including Butterfly, Maggie’s, Desiree...

Jennifer Esposito is Chair of the Department of Educational Policy Studies and is a Professor of research, measurement and statistics. Her research focuses on how race, class, gender and sexuality impact experiences of education and how marginalized groups are represented in popular culture. In this conversation we mainly focus on her recent co-authored book Introduction to Intersectional Qualitat...

Murtaza Hussain is a reporter at The Intercept who focuses on national security and foreign policy (https://theintercept.com/staff/murtaza-hussain/). He has appeared on CNN, BBC, MSNBC, and other news outlets. We had a sobering conversation about the political structure of the globalized world. One of the many frank projections that Murtaza shares in this conversation is his sense that it’s fairly...

Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination (https://maxhaiven.com/). In this interview I talk to him about his most recent book Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire, a new entry in the Vagabond series of books that Max edits for Pluto Press (https://www.plutobooks.com/pluto-series/vagabonds/). It's a series that tries to create a venue for, as he says, writin...

Meredith Ralston is Professor in the Departments of Women’s Studies and Political Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her most recent book, Slut-Shaming, Whorephobia and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution is a remarkably self-reflexive and rigorous study of contemporary sexual politics in a supposedly permissive era. We talk about the limits of white feminism and carce...

Rebecca Wanzo (https://www.rebeccawanzo.com/) is a Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and an Affiliate Professor of American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She’s the author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling, a book that thinks through the kinds of storytelling conventions that African America...

Dru Oja Jay is a writer, organizer and web developer. He’s currently hosting a podcast called Half Past Capitalism, and serving as both the Executive Director of CUTV, Canada's oldest campus-based TV station, and as publisher of The Breach, an independent media outlet producing critical journalism at a time when it is urgently needed. He’s written a number of stirring articles for The Breach, and...

Uahikea Maile is a Kānaka Maoli scholar and activist from Maunawili, Oʻahu. He works as an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Politics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Maile’s research looks at the legal constraints and decolonial activism that marks the history of Hawaiian sovereignty. His upcoming book focuses on settler colonial capitalism and Indigenous sover...

Shannon Miedema is Director of the Environment and Climate Change team with the Halifax Regional Municipality and one of the chief architects of the city’s climate plan, the subtitle of which is “Acting on Climate Together.” In this conversation she defines what that means in terms of what is increasingly referred to as a “just transition,” or a transition that, as she says, isn’t interested in “l...

Ivo Nieuwenhuis works as a Professor of Dutch literature at Radboud University in The Netherlands. He’s also a comedy critic for the national Dutch newspaper Trouw. He’s currently writing about the politics of humour, with a specific focus on humour’s political implications in terms of gender, race, and class relations. We talked about these implications, and the unresolved question of whether hum...

Theresa Stewart-Ambo and Keolu Fox are the co-directors of the Indigenous Futures Institute at the University of California San Diego. K. Wayne Yang is a critical theorist and social critic who writes about popular culture, social movements, urban education, critical pedagogy, decolonization, and many other subjects. Stewart-Ambo and Fox are two authors with wildly divergent research interests. Fo...

Yuliya Yurchenko is a senior lecturer and researcher in political economy at University of Greenwich. She is currently in Ukraine on an extraordinary leave. And while she writes that she is, for the moment, in relative safety, that could change any moment. Being a Ukrainian, an activist and an academic, Yuliya traveled to Ukraine on Feb 19, 2022 as part of a fact-finding and solidarity mission wit...

Joshua Cotter’s debut book Skyscrapers of the Midwest was nominated for an Ignatz Award. His book Driven By Lemons is a challenging and deeply personal exploration of unstable psychological states. We talk about how creating Driven By Lemons informed his breakout book Nod Away, which was on many top ten lists in 2016. And how reading a random article about the transference of consciousness into an...

Tari Ajadi is an Assistant Professor in Black Politics at McGill University. El Jones is an Assistant Professor of Political and Canadian Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University, and Julia Rodgers is a PhD Candidate studying patient-oriented healthcare and public engagement in the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie. They are three of the four lead authors of the high profile and politi...