The Podcast for Social Research

In this episode, Sophie Lewis, Danya Glabau, and Paige Sweet hold a conversation in honor of Sophie's new book, Femmephilia: Love Letters to Trans Mermaids, Queer Mothers, and Marilyn Monroe. Since at least the 1970s, a dominant strand of Western feminism has regarded femininity with suspicion, if not outright hostility. Given this "feminist machismo," which is an obstacle to liberation, what woul...

In this episode of the Podcast for Social Research Anna Kornbluh and Kate Wagner consider the aesthetics of contemporary American fascism in a conversation moderated by BISR's Audrey Nicolaides. The fascism of the moment merges violent delight in destruction with nouveau riche vulgarity, middle class mediocrity, and internet meme culture. Despite incessant callbacks to the 1930s and continued depl...

The artist and writer Molly Crabapple joins journalist Spencer Ackerman and BISR's Suzy Schneider in coversation about her new book,  Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund , which recreates the revolutionary world of the Bundists, and explores the interwoven histories of the Bund, the Russian Revolution, and the Holocaust. What can we learn, she asks, from this short-live...

In this episode of the Podcast for Social Research, Suzanne Schneider and Soraya Batmanghelichi consider the current crisis in Iran, tracing its roots through the touchpoints of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Iranian history. Their conversation ranges over the origins of modern Iranian political and class structures from the eighteenth century to the present, European interventions in the Mid...

In this shortcast edition of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live as part of BISR's Occasional Evenings event series, BISR's Isi Litke and Rebecca Ariel Porte talk with documentarian Ted Kennedy about his film,  B.F. Skinner Plays Himself , composed of found footage from a never-released educational film about the famed radical behaviorist. The conversation covers the political contexts...

Episode 94 of the Podcast for Social Research is a live recording of an event held at BISR Central to mark the publication of political theorist Roxanne Euben's Driven to Their Knees: Humiliation in Contemporary Politics (Princeton University Press). The text examining visual, verbal, and embodied rhetorics of humiliation across a wide variety of Arabic sources alongside related especially America...

Episode 93 of the Podcast for Social Research is a live recording of an event held at BISR Central to mark the publication of political theorist Alyssa Battistoni's Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Princeton University Press). Battistoni joins BISR's Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Nafis Hasan to discuss how capitalism, as a logic of seemingly relentless commodification, has nevertheles...

In episode 19 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Isi and Ajay are joined by fellow BISR faculty Joseph Earl Thomas to discuss Ghost of Yotei , Sucker Punch Productions' much-anticipated sequel to Ghost of Tsushima . To kick off the episode, Isi and Ajay chat about recent cultural news and highlights, from the Japanese government calling on OpenAI to refrain from using anime and manga as training data, to...

In this shortcast edition of the Podcast for Social Research, BISR's Isi Litke and Jude Webre discuss Fritz Lang's Hangmen Also Die! (1947). Loosely based on the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, and conceived by Lang and Bertolt Brecht mere weeks after his death, the film follows members of the Czech resistance as they attempt to shield Heydrich's killer from Nazi authorities in occupied Prague...

In episode 18 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Isi and Ajay spend some time with a handful of big news items at the intersection of politics and media—from the Skydance-Paramount merger (and other instances of media market concentration) and its implications for American newsmedia (and its potential new gatekeepers); to Charlie Kirk's assassination, its aftermath, its mediations with mass cultural objec...

Episode 92 of the Podcast for Social Research features fusion folk trio Ghost Peppers in concert at BISR Central, playing songs old and new, including selections from their newly released EP Red . After the performance (44:00), the three Ghost Peppers — tabla player Ritam Bhowmil, guitarist Kevin Meehan, and vocalist (and BISR faculty) Amrita Ghosh — sat down with BISR's Hannah Leffingwell and sch...

In this episode of Faculty Spotlight, hosts Mark and Lauren sit down with faculty Alfred Lee and Xafsa Ciise, colleagues whose shared concerns—with race, bias, politics, human consciousness, and the history of science—have cultivated a fascinating and fruitful cross-disciplinary conversation. Xafsa, a social psychologist by training, kicks off the conversation with description of how she found her...

Episode 91 of the Podcast for Social Research is a live recording of an event marking the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with BISR faculty Jude Webre, Suzanne Schneider, Hannah Leffingwell, and Alfred Lee each offering thoughts on the manifold legacies—literary, scientific, political (and geopolitical)—of August 6th and 9th, 1945. How, specifically, did the atom...

Episode 90 of the Podcast for Social Research—TRANSgressions: Rights Wrongs, and Liberal Pieties—was recorded (mostly) live at BISR Central, as we celebrated Pride Month by asking: What happens when trans people in the public eye commit real or perceived wrongs? By what criteria—or liberal pieties or social justice aims—are these so-called wrongs evaluated? And what kind of trans experience even g...

In episode 72 of Practical Criticism, Ajay takes the somber occasion of Brian Wilson's recent death to play, for Rebecca, the Beach Boys's immortal track "God Only Knows"—a song Paul McCartney called the "greatest ever written." Is Sir Paul, for once, correct? Ajay and Rebecca ask after the song's technical perfection, noting its intermix of pop, jazz, and even Bach-esque baroque, while dwelling a...

In episode 17 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay and Isi once again find themselves in the regrettable position of praising the Walt Disney Company. After chatting about recent cultural highlights ( Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 , a 40th anniversary screening of Kurosawa's Ran , and a Criterion retrospective on Johnnie To), they consider the popular and critical success of Andor 's second season, and a...

In episode 89 of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at BISR Central, BISR faculty Danielle Drori, Jude Webre, and Lauren K. Wolfe sat down following a screening of Stanley Kubrick's controversial final film, Eyes Wide Shut , to discuss its long thirty years in the making, its source material in fin-de-siècle Vienna, and its vision of bourgeois marriage and sexual morality in turn-of-th...

In episode 16 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Isi and Ajay discuss the return of Tony Gilroy's  Andor . Before departing for a galaxy far, far away, they stop by the world of gaming to chat about Hazelight Studio's latest co-op title,  Split Fiction , and the impact of Trump's tariffs on the rollout of Nintendo's Switch 2. Turning to the first three episodes of  Andor 's second season, Isi and Ajay dis...

For episode 88 of the Podcast for Social Research, BISR's Rebecca Ariel Porte welcomed special guests—translator Katrina Dodson and songwriter and vocalist Lacy Rose—for an evening of reading, musical performance, and conversation honoring the enduring legacy of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. Occasioned by the release of Rose's concept album Lispector , featuring the Starling Quartet, and Dod...

In episode 87 of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at BISR Central, BISR's Rebecca Ariel Porte and Dilettante Army Editor-in-Chief Sara Clugage sat down with Kyla Wazana Tompkins to discuss her latest book, Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot. The conversation touches on, among other things: food and the early history of the War on Drugs, the racialization of sugar, jelly...

In episode 71 of the Podcast for Social Research's Practical Criticism series, Rebecca Ariel Porte plays Neko Case's "Curse of the I-5 Corridor" (off the 2018 album  Hell-On ) for Ajay Singh Chaudhary. Their conversation ranges from convention to the sound of disillusionment to lyrical density, meta-musical gesture, vocal quality, and how you can tell if and when something is beyond saving. 

In episode 15 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay, Isi, and Joseph explore vampires in media, across genre and time! Welcoming back Joseph after a few episodes away, the episode kicks off with a games roundtable on  Monster Hunter: Wilds  (Capcom, 2025) and  Pentiment  (Obsidian, 2022), among other things. Then the group quickly dives into all things vampire. From  Capital  to  Castelvania , the conve...

In episode 86 of the Podcast for Social Research, live-recorded at BISR Central, BISR's Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Danya Glabau sat down with fellow faculty Nafis Hasan to celebrate the launch of his new book, Metastasis: The Rise of the Cancer-Industrial Complex and the Horizons of Care . Nafis kicks off the discussion with a briefing on the successful cultivation of cancer cures for mice, but not...

In this shortcast edition of the Podcast for Social Research, BISR's Rebecca Ariel Porte, Ajay Singh Chaudhary, and Isi Litke discuss David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001). Conversation ranges over what it means for a thing to be "Lynchian," what it means for a thing to be surreal, why Mulholland Drive isn't easily reducible to pat explanation—and why that's a good thing, and the inextricability,...

In episode no. 70 of Practical Criticism, Ajay surprises Rebecca with Roy Hargrove and the RH Factor's "Out of Town," off the 2003 record Hard Groove . The discussion includes a dive deep into jazz-hip-hop experiments, varieties and suspicions of musical fusion, caesuras and polyharmonies, the dissonant and the antiphonal, "open-eared moonlighting," and hybridity without history. Practical Critici...