The Andrea Mitchell Center Podcast

Interviewer: KIM FERNANDES . Our perspective on emerging technology such as A.I. is often future-oriented and technocratic, focused on how its design features might someday transform the world – and, above all, the advanced economies of the world – in ways wanted and unwanted. In their work at the Data & Society Institute, RIGOBERTO LARA GUZMÁN and RANJIT SINGH have focused instead on the current...

Interviewer: MATTHEW BERKMAN . In a repeat of the debt-ceiling crisis of the Obama years, House Republicans are threatening to maintain the current $31-trillion limit on borrowing by the federal government, thus raising the specter of imminent default. Wharton Professor ERIC ORTS , in a return to the podcast, worries that this time Republican brinksmanship might signal an actual willingness to go...

Interviewer: RAFAEL KHACHATURIAN . Social justice movements are often defined by high-visibility moments that succeed in crystallizing new attitudes and enlarging the scope of national debate. What often follows, as media scholar and activist RACHEL KUO explores in her work, is a slow death by a thousand cuts: co-optation, backlash, internal discord and lack of resources, and the sheer capacity of...

Interviewer: ZACHARY LOEB . When high-profile data breaches or cyber attacks reveal the nation's vulnerability to hacking, there are often loud calls for tighter cybersecurity. As scholar of science and technology REBECCA SLAYTON points out, however, in a world of limited resources and competing priorities, the degree to which we can secure our infrastructure is not absolute. In her conversation w...

Interviewer: ZACHARY LOEB . In the period following World War II and during the Cold War, the United States was the indisputable world leader in technological development, putting the U.S. government in a privileged position to shape technologies for its own economic and security ends. National security expert MELISSA FLAGG argues that since 2000 these circumstances have changed drastically: there...

Interviewer: MATTHEW BERKMAN . In the U.S., the institutionalization of the labor movement, with established unions following procedures set out by the NLRB through professional staffs and legal teams, has gone hand-in-hand with its decline. In the face of laws stacked against it, the movement's growth often comes from upstarts that find new ways to harness the collective power of workers. In rece...

Interviewer: ZACHARY LOEB . The concept of "smart cities" promises better living through data and the software that can use it in real time to control urban systems. Law and Public Policy professor SHEILA FOSTER argues that, among the diverse populations that live in cities, which lives are actually improved by this technology – and which are arguably made worse – very much depends on who gets to...

Interviewer: RAFAEL KHACHATURIAN . As with all aspects of American life, Black people were part of the digital revolution from the beginning. CHARLTON MCILWAIN 's work explores multiple strands of this history, in which African Americans appear as both creative subjects and objects of social control. In his discussion with political theorist Rafael Khachaturian, he tells of early pioneers who deve...

Interviewer: ZACHARY LOEB . In the original formulation of urban theorist Jane Jacobs, "eyes on the street" linked public safety to the inadvertent effect of people going about their business and, in the process, monitoring their shared surroundings. In her recent work, media studies professor SHANNON MATTERN has explored how certain technologies, under the umbrella of "smart cities" or "urban tec...

Interviewer: MATTHEW BERKMAN . In the tradition of C. Wright Mill's The Power Elite , author AARON GOOD argues that political science needs to bring power back in and seriously consider the links between social elites and the continuity of U.S. policy from one administration to the next. In his discussion with political scientist Matthew Berkman, Good proposes a tri-partite model of the state that...

Interviewer: MELISSA TEIXEIRA . Author, journalist, and 2022-23 Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies MARILENE FILENTO reflects on the recent national election in Brazil that brought former president Lula da Silva back into power. In her discussion with Penn Assistant Professor of History Melissa Teixeira, she describes the r...

Interviewer: MATTHEW BERKMAN . Professor IAN LUSTICK returns to the podcast (see episode 1.15) to discuss the recent Israeli election, its implications, and the one-state reality that now tacitly guides political actors, Israeli, Palestinian and American alike. In his discussion with political scientist Matthew Berkman, he describes how both Jewish settlers and Palestinian leaders in the Occupied...

Interviewer: MATTHEW BERKMAN . While its place in the mythology of the nation's founding suggests to many that Virginia must itself be a democracy, political activist JOSH STANFIELD points out that in practice it has fallen far short of that ideal. Governed at first by an oligarchy of white planters, and then during the twentieth century by the corporate-friendly Byrd Machine, it has known only br...

Series: Democracy and Emergent Technology . Interviewer: ZACHARY LOEB . Even as awareness has risen of disinformation deliberately spread by authoritarian regimes, the forms it takes have become more subtle and insidious, warns digital and foreign policy specialist JESSICA BRANDT . The Russian government, for instance, has shifted away from troll farms and toward amplifying conspiracy theories ori...

Note: This interview was conducted in Portuguese. A transcript with an English translation is available here . Interviewer: DANIELA ALARCON . Amid advancing agricultural frontiers, deforestation, tourism, and the advent of infrastructural megaprojects such as hydroelectric dams, Indigenous peoples in Brazil have struggled to defend their territories, lifeways, and collective aspirations. As a memb...

Interviewer: MATTHEW BERKMAN . As director of the film Enemies of the State , now available on Hulu and for rent on other platforms, SONIA KENNEBECK found herself in a narrative maze that begins with an all-American couple who built careers in U.S. intelligence, whose adult son, Matt DeHart, happened to be part of the hacker group Anonymous. In 2009, he was arrested for possessing child pornograph...

Interviewer: RAFAEL KHACHATURIAN . The transition away from Apartheid in South Africa during the 1990s has been hailed as a double miracle of nation-building and the establishment of democracy, so much so that at the time it seemed to validate Francis Fukuyama's declaration of the end of history. Political scientist CAROLYN E. HOLMES , in her political ethnography of contemporary South Africa, hig...

Interviewer: MATTHEW BERKMAN. Of all of the emotions that spur political engagement, whether in the form of electoral participation or disruptive violence, none currently seem as potent as a sense of humiliation. Political theorist ROXANNE EUBEN 's current book project explores how political rhetoric the world over responds to the experience of humiliation. In her discussion with political scienti...

Interviewer: RAFAEL KHACHATURIAN . At a moment when its actions truly demand international scrutiny, Russia's place at the center of Western attention seems only natural. That said, historian and SRB Podcast ( https://srbpodcast.org/ ) host SEAN GUILLORY is engaged in multiple projects examining why Russia has loomed so large for so long in the imaginations of America and Western Europe. He argues...

Interviewer: RAFAEL KHACHATURIAN . As our economy, political system, and society in general weather a number of immediate crises, from pandemics to inflation, economist RICHARD WOLFF argues that the real cause of our inability to grapple with them is being ignored. In his discussion with political theorist Rafael Khachaturian, Wolff contends that the power of capitalism as a governing ideology, an...

Interviewer: MATTHEW BERKMAN. Especially since the national reckoning with race following the death of George Floyd, there has been a focus, in both academic and popular discourse, on the continuity of anti-Black racism in U.S. history. Distinguished political scientist ADOLPH REED contests the idea, however, that racism as an immutable force exerting a uniform influence from the era of slavery to...

Interviewer: RAFAEL KHACHATURIAN . Over the course of decades, Neoliberalism has shifted from being an overt ideological position, explicitly arguing for the primacy of the market as a way to organize society, into a set of embedded assumptions and practices that govern much of our economy and politics. Political theorist WENDY BROWN has charted this process and the destruction left in its wake, a...

Interviewer: RAFAEL KHACHATURIAN . As he sparks an international crisis over a possible invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has seemingly consolidated his control in an increasingly autocratic regime. Scholar of international relations and Russian political economy ILYA MATVEEV argues, however, that Putin's turn to greater repression is a sign that his base of power is narrowing. In his discussion...

Interviewer: MATTHEW BERKMAN . Many accounts of the Arab Spring of 2010-11 view it primarily through a political lens: whatever the underlying grievances, its goals centered around removing autocrats from power and replacing them with more responsive governments. Historian JOEL BEININ argues that in fact the Arab Spring protests, particularly in Egypt and Tunisia, were rooted in a worker's movemen...

Interviewer: MATTHEW BERKMAN. The story of Palestine, as much as its territory, has been subsumed by Israel, its recent history typically told as a chronicle of the Jewish state's establishment, development, and defense. In his new book, The Hundred Years' War: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017, acclaimed historian RASHID KHALIDI refocuses the narrative on the Palestinian...