Speaking Out of Place

In this episode of Speaking Out of Place we talk with Ashley Dawson about his new co-edited book, Decolonize Conservation: Global Voices for Indigenous Self-Determination, Land, and a World in Common, an anthology of essays by Indigenous activists from the Global South arguing against “fortress conservation” and “protected areas” whose existence is predicated on displacing indigenous peoples, and...

On today's episode of Speaking Out of Place , we speak with Naomi Oreskes, who is Henry Charles Lea professor of the History of Science and affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. She is a world-renown earth scientist, historian, and public speaker. Oreskes is a leading voice in the role of science in society, the reality of anthropogenic climate change, an...

On today’s episode of Speaking Out of Place , we talk with Professor J. Kēhaulani Kauanui and Professor Sunaina Maira, two people involved in the 2013 effort to get the American Studies Association in support for the academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions, called for by Palestinian civil society groups in 2004. Both Kauanui and Maira were named defendants in a lawsuit brought by pro-Isr...

Today we talk with Françoise Vergès and Jamille Pinheiro Dias about the difficulty of "decolonizing" the museum, and engaging passionately with another project--creating a "post-museum" dedicated to a poetics of a common world. Leaving behind the pretensions of a "universal museum," filled with dead objects, Vergès and Dias work toward a living, mobile, and heterogeno...

Today on Speaking Out of Place I talk with the intellectual, writer, and activist Hilton Obenzinger about his remarkable life as all those things. He starts by talking about his earliest exposure to art and politics, as both a witness to and participant in such moments as the takeover of the Office of the President at Columbia University in 1968, the Farm Worker’s strike in California, the fight f...

In this episode of Speaking Out of Place, we talk with Malcolm Harris, author of a new book entitled, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World .  Working our way back from the recent meltdown of the Silicon Valley Bank and the massive, toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, to the founding of the city of Palo Alto by Leland Stanford as a haven from labor unrest in San...

Recently the US State Department withdrew its nomination of eminent international human rights scholar Jim Cavallaro, solely on the basis of some tweets in which he called out Israeli apartheid and the undue influence of AIPAC (America-Israel Public Affairs Committee--a pro-Israel lobbying group). In 2019, Israel deported Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch, for is...

On today’s show, a conversation with Dr Rabab Abdulhadi, who has recently won a major national award from the Middle East Studies Association for her lifetime of work. Dr. Abdulhadi is an organic intellectual and a renowned scholar-activist. She is the founding director and Senior Scholar of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies (AMED) at the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco...

How does the automobile—the All American symbol of freedom--become part of a “cascading” process of unfreedom for recently incarcerated people?  Livingston and Ross, members of the NYU Prison Education Research Lab, talk about how cars, a necessity for securing work for so many and a symbol of independence and mobility, are enmeshed within interlinked systems that create and perpetuate debt, preca...

Today Professor Jennifer Freyd speaks out against institutional betrayal, specifically about issues of sexual harassment and violence. We talk about what happens when institutions of higher education, which are supposed to be nurturing young people, teaching them to be better citizens and contributors to society, end up betraying them when they are mistreated.  We talk in particular about the effe...

On this episode of “Speaking Out of Place” we talk with eminent Middle East historian Joel Beinin on a range of topics that center on the fact that for some scholars, activism and scholarship are not only compatible—they are inextricably linked. Joel will talk about his time as a union organizer in Detriot, working in the automobile industry, and how his learning Arabic was facilitated by talking...

In today's show I speak with Richard Falk about his recent autobiography— Public Intellectual:  The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim . Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University (1961-2001) and Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, Queen Mary University London. Since 2002 has been a Research Fellow at the Orfalea Center of Global and International Studie...

Liza is a columnist at Jacobin and The New Republic , as well as a contributing writer at The Nation . In this podcast, Featherstone explains the structural challenges Democrats must overcome in order to meet the needs of ordinary people who are hurting—we discuss issues of crime, homelessness, childcare, and labor, taking Biden to task for folding on sick pay for rail workers, and seeing what pos...

Interviews with organizers, strikers, and faculty participating in the University of California strike, and their counterparts at the University and  College Union strike in the UK give us critical background information on both, talk with us from the front lines, and urge for global strikes for decent wages, strong pensions, and an education that teaches us how to work for a better world.  As you...

An in-depth interview with scholar, activist, and poet Dr. Persis Karim, director of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University. Karim provides indispensable background information reaching back to 1979, explains the long history of gender apartheid in Iran and why today there has been an explosion of mass protests led by young women joined by tens of thousands of ot...

A dialogue between David Kyuman Kim and David Palumbo-Liu at Stanford, on the possibilities, or the impossibility, of doing radical work on race at universities. Is it best to work within the institution, or outside it--and how can we best keep hope alive? The inaugural episode of "Speaking Out of Place," announcing future episodes on Iran, Palestine, fighting domestic violence, and surv...