Speaking Out of Place

Today we talk with members of the organizing collective of the Coalition for Action in Higher Education, or CAHE, about their second National Day of Action, taking place on Thursday, April 17. The Day of Action is a call for free higher education in every meaning of that term. CAHE calls for “the elimination of all existing student debt, making all public colleges and universities tuition-free, an...

Today I speak with Nasser Abourahme about his new book, The Time Beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony . Drawing on a wealth of diverse materials including, but not limited to, state documents, political philosophy, literature, and historical archives, The Time Beneath the Concrete focuses on the “struggle over historical time itself.” This is a struggle that is predicated on a c...

Today I have the great honor of speaking with activist and educator Jesse Hagopian about his new book, Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education . We talk about the assault on public education that takes the form of criminalizing the truth itself. We note both the powerful corporate forces behind this movement and what they are afraid of, and also discuss the many instances of people figh...

In today’s show, I speak with Evyn Le Espiritu Gandhi about two pathbreaking studies which create new ways of thinking about populations bound by complex and contradictory notions of loyalty and psychological investment. Based on meticulous archival research and oral histories amongst disparate populations in South Vietnam, Guam, and Israel-Palestine, in Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Ref...

Today on Speaking Out of Place I talk with Sarah T Roberts about the hidden humans behind Artificial Intelligence, which is reliant on executives and business managers to direct AI to promote their brand and low-level, out-sourced, and poorly paid content managers to slog through masses of images, words, and data before they get fed into the machine. We talk about the cultural, sociological, finan...

Today on Speaking Out of Place I talk with award-winning novelist Laila Lalami about her new novel, The Dream Hotel . What happens when the state, with the pretext of protecting public safety, can detain indefinitely certain individuals whose dreams seem to indicate they may be capable of committing a crime?  Set in a precarious world where sleep-enhancing devices and algorithms provide the tools...

Today I have the pleasure of talking with Professor Adrian Daub about the recent elections in Germany, where we saw a surge in votes for the Far Right AfD party, which is now the second-most powerful party in the country.  We discuss the significance of this rise in popularity,  and the ways the elections reveal a number of shifts in German politics, as the various parties stake out positions whic...

Today on Speaking Out of Place I talk with Omar El Akkad about his new book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This . The title of the book comes from a tweet he posted three weeks after the bombardment of Gaza began. Since then, the tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times. Horrified at what has transpired since that moment, Omar El Akkad wrote this full-throated indictment...

Today on Speaking Out of Place I am delighted to have Professors Maha Nasser and Karam Dana in conversation.  Dr. Nasser is author of Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World ; Professor Dana’s new book is entitled, To Stand with Palestine: Transnational Resistance and Political Evolution in the United States . Together, these two studies offer a fascinating account of the...

Today I talk with Tao Leigh Goffe about her new, magisterial Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis .   Spanning many fields and disciplines in the natural sciences, social sciences, the humanities and the arts, Professor Goffe weaves together an historically rich and geographically complex picture of how capitalism and racism undergird the climate crisi...

Today I am delighted to have Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson on Speaking Out of Place to discuss their new book, We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition . We talk about what inspired them to commission a wide range of amazing activists, artists, scholars and organizers to write whatever came to their minds about the topic of parenting and abolition. The result is a rich mosaic of uniqu...

Today on Speaking Out of Place we sit down with Peter Beinart to discuss his new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza . We ask what led him to write this intense, and intensely provocative book, which declares that Jews “need a new story” other than the current one, in which, Beinart argues, Jews see themselves as innocent with regard to the genocide in Gaza.  I ask Peter to fully unpa...

Today on Speaking Out of Place I am delighted to be in conversation with Azucena Castro and Malcom Ferdinand.  We start with a discussion of what Ferdinand calls the “double fracture”—the environmental division of humans from their connection to the biosphere, and the colonial division instantiated by white supremacism and patriarchy. He insists that we not see these two phenomena as separate, rat...

Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with Professor Persis Karim, co-producer and co-director of a new documentary film, The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life . She is joined by Roya Ahmadi, a student at Stanford who interned at the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University and was part of the production team for the film. The film captures the lives o...

Today on Speaking Out of Place I have the honor of talking with Professor Christen A Smith on a new book she has co-edited entitled, The Dialectic is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento . Smith explains that “Beatriz Nascimento was a critical figure in Brazil’s Black Movement until her untimely death in 1995. Although she published only a handful of articles before she died...

Today on Speaking Out of Place I talk with Lindsay Weinberg and Robert Ovetz about the use of Artificial Intelligence in higher education. Under the guise of “personalizing” education and increasing efficiency, universities are increasingly sold on AI as a cure to their financial ills as public funds dry up and college applications drop.  Rather than maintain  that education is an essential public...

Today on Speaking Out of Place I am honored to welcome Huda Fakhreddine and Anthony Alessandrini to talk about the unique manners in which literature can disclose the human significance of the historical and ongoing genocide in Palestine. Such revelation has to fight at least two things—the sheer brutality and inhumanity of this violence, and the active silencing of Palestinian voices by instituti...

On today’s show we talk with journalists, activists, and political commentators, Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood about the recent Presidential elections. We try to make sense of the fact that a convicted felon, proud misogynist, outright racist, authoritarian figure, and known liar whose first term put nearly all those characteristics on display for four years, will be the most powerful person...

Today on Speaking Out of Place we are joined by Shourideh Molavi, who talks about the ways in which Israel has waged a protracted war on both the people and environment of Gaza. Linking this war to its colonial precedents, Molavi explains who she, as a researcher for the Forensic Architecture project, combines technologies like satellite imaging with on-the-ground stories from Palestinian farmers...

Today we are joined by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins and Jess Ghannam, who comment on a devastating new report authored by Stamatopoulou-Robbins. This report, “Costs of War,” reviews data gathered in Palestine since October 7, 2023. In that year alone, the report finds that the US has spent at least $22.76 billion on military aid to Israel and related US operations in the region. The number of dire...

Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with scholar-activists Naomi Paik and Ashley Dawson about the close connection between abolition and environmental activism from below. How are the twin projects raising profound questions about borders, carcerality, enclosures, and the separation of humans from each other and all other forms of life, including supposedly “inanimate” objects?  How can we crea...

Today on Speaking Out of Place we are honored to speak with three international volunteers from the International Solidarity Movement. They are all involved in the effort to save the Masafer Yatta region in the Occupied West Bank. While it has been a common practice of psychological warfare for the IOF to place military firing ranges near villages, neighborhoods, outside Palestinian hospitals, and...

Today, Sunday morning, October 20, former general Prabowo Subianto is being sworn in as Indonesia’s new president. We release a conversation we had earlier this month with Intan Paramaditha and Michael Vann about the road leading up to this inauguration, beginning in the 1960s with the Suharto regime.  Prabowo is a strong-arm authoritarian figure with a bloody record of human rights violations, ye...

Today on Speaking Out of Place we are joined by three members of the University of California faculty who are part of groups that have filed a landmark compliant against the UC system. This September, faculty associations from seven University of California campuses along with the systemwide Council of UC Faculty Associations filed an unfair labor practice, or ULP charge against their employer, th...

Today, on Speaking Out of Place, we are honored to talk with Munira Khayyat, a Lebanese anthropologist whose book, A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon examines what she calls “resistant ecologies in a world of perennial warfare.”  Drawing on long-term fieldwork in frontline villages along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel, she examines war not only as a pl...