Pretty Heady Stuff

Gina Dent is an associate professor of feminist studies, history of consciousness, and legal studies at UC Santa Cruz in California. Erica R. Meiners is professor of education and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern Illinois University. Dent and Meiners are two of the four creators of a pivotal new book from Haymarket entitled Abolition. Feminism. Now. (https://www.haymarketbooks...

Ardath Whynacht is an activist and writer who works for and with survivors of state and family violence. She’s also a professor of sociology at Mount Allison University and the author of a new book called Insurgent Love: Abolition and Domestic Homicide (https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/insurgent-love). The radical, utopian and absolutely necessary prospect of abolition is on people’s minds. As A...

Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald have spent decades developing ways of offering care and protection to women who desperately need it. As the description for their new book Women Unsilenced points out, they’ve made it their goal to break the silence, the tyranny of silence by which gender-based violence persists. They explain in this conversation that they developed a network of care for women in...

You might know Nora Loreto from her podcast Sandy and Nora Talk Politics. If you don’t, you should. Her conversations with Sandy Hudson aren’t just hilarious and relatable, they’re full of appropriately directed anger, and in many ways model a kind of solidarity that is necessary right now. You should also know her from her two books: Take Back the Fight, which I discussed with her last year, and...

Melanie Yazzie is a political organizer, a vocally anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist thinker, and an Indigenous revolutionary. She currently works as an assistant professor in the Departments of Native American Studies and American Studies at the University of New Mexico (https://nas.unm.edu/people/faculty/me...) and also organizes with The Red Nation, an indigenous-led leftist organization com...

Dr. Rupa Marya and Raj Patel are the authors of a brilliant new book entitled Inflamed: Deep Medicine and The Anatomy of Injustice (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374602529/inflamed). Dr. Rupa Marya is a specialist in internal medicine. Her research looks at the ways that social structures predispose certain groups to health or illness. And while Rupa is central to a number of revolutionary he...

Imre Szeman is University Research Chair of Environmental Communication and Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo. He’s also co-founder of the Petrocultures Research Group, a member of the International Panel on Behavior Change, and a fellow of the Canadian International Council. Over the years, his writing has made an enormous impact on my thinking, so I was thrilled to he...

Jeff Diamanti is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities (Cultural Analysis & Philosophy) at the University of Amsterdam. At the beginning of this podcast’s run, I recorded an interview with him where I asked some very broad questions about the relationship between humanity and our natural environment. Here, I had the chance to sit down with his new book Climate and Capital in the Age o...

Matt Bors (https://thenib.com/author/matt-bors/) started drawing editorial cartoons for his student newspaper while attending the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. His work has since appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Village Voice, and The Daily Beast, among others. His first graphic novel War Is Boring was a collaboration with journalist David Axe. It came out in 2010 from New America...

Neil Cohn is an American cognitive scientist and comics theorist (http://www.visuallanguagelab.com/) who works at Tilburg University (https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/staff/n-cohn). In this interview, he works through how his research on the acquisition of visual languages in comics literacy relates to the broader acquisition of all the cognitive structures that allow us to make sense of the worl...

Carlyn Zwarenstein (https://carlynzwarenstein.com/) is a writer and journalist based in Toronto. Her second book On Opium was just published by Goose Lane Editions (https://gooselane.com/products/on-opium). I speak with her about her push within that work to question narratives around whose lives are “enabled” and “destroyed” by opioids, and about how, for her, drug use became a tool for writing,...

Francesca Ekwuyasi (https://www.ekwuyasi.com/) is a writer you read with the windows open. Her work embodies what it means to be attentive to life, in spite of the fact that, as she admits in this interview, “paying attention is overwhelming.” Francesca’s novel Butter Honey Pig Bread was one of the most critically acclaimed works of fiction in 2020. It’s a book that shows the deep love that motiva...

Henry Adam Svec is an author, musician and an assistant professor of communication arts at the University of Waterloo. He’s produced two extraordinary albums (http://www.folksingularity.com/download.html). His album The CFL Sessions (http://www.thecflsessions.ca/songs.html) is perhaps most relevant to this conversation. This album, along with a series of live shows that Svec did to support it, for...

Judith Butler is an internationally recognized feminist philosopher whose work is incredibly difficult to summarize. The author of more than twenty books of groundbreaking critical theory, she has indelibly shaped our ability to understand the body politic, the politics of the body, and the unbelievable complexity of our relationships to one another. Because it's so challenging to adequately captu...

Andreas Malm works in The Department of Human Geography at Lund University. He’s a scholar of human ecology and environmental history and the author of The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, How to Blow Up A Pipeline (www.versobooks.com/books/3665-how-…w-up-a-pipeline) and most recently White Skin,...

Nora Loreto is an author and political organizer, and a vital voice in podcasting within Canadian politics especially. Sandy and Nora Talk Politics (https://sandyandnora.com/) features conversations with co-host Sandy Hudson on a broad cross-section of contemporary issues. She tells me, in this interview, that the podcast started by recording her conversations with Sandy -- as a consequence of the...

Natasha Lennard is a columnist for The Intercept. She has also written for The Nation, The Guardian, Bookforum and the New York Times, among other venues. She currently teaches critical journalism at the New School for Social Research in New York. Her books include Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life (https://www.versobooks.com/books/2949-being-numerous), and a co-written anthology of inter...

Daniel Lombroso is a director and journalist (http://www.daniellombroso.com/). His debut feature film, White Noise (https://www.theatlantic.com/white-noise-movie/), based on his four years of reporting inside the alt-right, premiered last year and was met with high praise from film critics. The film has also garnered a large academic audience: scholars of communication, sociology and political sci...

Caroline Monnet is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist whose work experiments with many languages, art forms and genres to search out and dwell with the dualities, grey areas, and forms of hybridity that resonate with her own personal experience of inhabiting a self that exists across multiple languages and competing and conflicting cultural histories. Currently based in Montreal, she has exhib...

Anna Tsing is a professor of Anthropology at the University of California: Santa Cruz and the author of books that show us how a multitude of different forms of life are bound together in a web of complex and fragile interdependence. Her books include Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, The Mushroom at the End of the World and Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of t...

Holly Jean Buck has released two books on the subject of geoengineering. After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration(https://www.versobooks.com/books/3091-after-geoengineering) focuses on the overwhelming questions that humanity now has to face as we begin, finally, to confront the reality of the climate crisis. Has It Come to This?, co-edited with J.P. Sapinski and Andreas Malm...

Kathi Weeks is an Associate Professor in the Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Program at Duke University. Her book Constituting Feminist Subjects was reissued by Verso in 2018 (https://www.versobooks.com/books/2696-constituting-feminist-subjects); it looks again at feminist standpoint theory and tries to remove some of the imaginary blockages that have stymied the development of a socialist...

Cara Daggett is an assistant professor of political science at Virginia Tech and the author of The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-birth-of-energy), a book that explores the histories of energy from the perspective of feminist political ecology. In this conversation, Daggett makes it clear that the system of global capitalism...

Derf Backderf is the creator of several acclaimed graphic novels: Punk Rock & Trailer Parks, My Friend Dahmer, Trashed, and most recently Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio. We discuss his distinctive art style, the joys and challenges of accepting the adaptation of one’s work into film, comics as both an established and emergent art form, and the ethics of representing violence. Backderf's work is bes...

Alexis Shotwell, is a social theorist and professor of sociology and anthropology at Carleton University who has a rare gift for addressing and expressing the unbelievable complexity of our current system. Her book Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (2016) was released at a moment where it had become impossible to ignore the overlapping emergencies that we now face. How do we ex...