Pretty Heady Stuff
This podcast features interviews with a variety of theorists, artists and activists from across the globe. It's guided by the search for radical solutions to crises that are inherent to colonial capitalism. To this end, I hope to keep facilitating conversations that bring together perspectives on the liberatory and transformative power of care, in particular.
S4 E1 · Mon, February 24, 2025
Abdaljawad Omar and Ajay Parasram outline postcolonial paths to peace via Palestinian liberation
Abdaljawad Omar is a Lecturer in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at Birzeit University. He has written some indispensable articles on the assumptions people have about Palestine and Palestinian resistance, on the internal tensions in the Palestinian diaspora, the complicity of the United States with Israel’s genocide, and the ongoing exterminationist attitudes that Western elites have toward Palestinian society.Ajay Parasram has roots in South Asia, the Caribbean and the settler cities of Halifax, Ottawa and Vancouver. He is an associate professor in the Departments of International Development Studies, History and Political Science at Dalhousie University. His research interests focus on the politics of colonialism and structural forms of violence founded and exacerbated by and through imperialism.In this conversation, we talk about how the October 7, 2023 attack by a Hamas-led coalition of Palestinian resistance fighters sought to “decompose” or “deform” the reality of oppression that people in Gaza have been living under for a very long time, and especially the state of siege that Palestinians there had been suffering since 2006. This conversation will likely sound one-sided to anyone who believes the self-justifying fictions of the Israeli state, not only because the three of us believe that Israel’s brutal domination of Palestine is unjustifiable, but because the question of Palestine has been strategically simplified into a winner-take-all binary, where we are forced to pick a side—while knowing that Western elites have created a situation in which siding with Israel is the only acceptable position. Instead of capitulating to the unthinking, racist reductionism of this position, we aim to take a step back and see the settler colonization of indigenous Palestinians in historical perspective and grasp the current state of political subjectivity and discourse within Gaza and the West Bank from a place of empathy and solidarity.The only questions, for the three of us, are how do we name and frame the obviously genocidal acts of the Zionist state, how is Palestine grappling with the decision to rupture the relegation of Gaza to slow death, and the West Bank to subjugation, what did that decision to release a flood of resistance expose about the law and sovereignty and the capitulation of certain parts of the left to censorship and quietism, and what will come after the flood, after the rebirth of the movement to liberate Palestine and restore human rights to Palestinians?#gaza #westbank #zionistregime #israelpalestine #gazagenocide #anticolonialism
Mon, January 27, 2025
Mark Stoll charts a path through histories of energy, extraction and profit
Mark Stoll teaches American environmental history and American religious history at Texas Tech, where he also serves as director of Environmental Studies. Stoll’s latest book is an environmental history of capitalism, Profit: An Environmental History (2022). From the publisher: "Profit — getting more out of something than you put into it — is the original genius of homo sapiens, who learned how to unleash the energy stored in wood, exploit the land, and refashion ecosystems. As civilization developed, we found more and more ways of extracting surplus value from the earth, often deploying brutally effective methods to discipline people to do the work needed.Historian Mark Stoll explains how capitalism supercharged this process and traces its many environmental consequences. The financial innovations of medieval Italy created trade networks that, with the European discovery of the Americas, made possible vast profits and sweeping cultural changes, to the detriment of millions of slaves and indigenous Americans; the industrial age united the world in trade and led to an energy revolution that changed lives everywhere. But when efficient production left society awash in goods, a new sort of capitalism, predicated on endless individual consumption, took its place.This story of incredible ingenuity and villainy begins in the Doge’s palace in medieval Venice and ends with Jeff Bezos aboard his own spacecraft. Mark Stoll’s revolutionary account places environmental factors at the heart of capitalism’s progress and reveals the long shadow of its terrible consequences."
Tue, January 07, 2025
Sarah Marie Wiebe cares about care, insisting we fight climate change through love and reconnection
Sarah Marie Wiebe is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria whose research and solidarity work focuses on community development and environmental justice. When we last spoke on the pod, we looked at her writing broadly, but this time around we’re marking the release of her fantastic new book Hot Mess: Mothering Through a Code Red Climate Emergency, from Fernwood Publishing. Hot Mess is a remarkable book, giving readers a nuanced effort to navigate a temporality of disaster, whether the slow disaster of air pollution or the searing trauma of wildfire, while working to manifest the kinds of caring relations that could safeguard the future. It’s not an impersonal text, in the sense that it’s not afraid to let in the emotional avalanche that the lived experience of crisis implies. What happens in and after the moment an emergency is declared? How is the decision made and an emergency response sustained? Sarah’s book isn’t concerned with these questions in the abstract, it offers a detailed account of exactly how and why emergencies are declared, and with what effects. The main crisis, and it is really many crises, that Wiebe takes on in Hot Mess is, of course, the all-encompassing climate crisis. Focusing on the feeling of raising a child in the content of an approaching climate breakdown, Hot Mess lets the reader try to come to terms with the reality that “climate change,” Wiebe tells us, “affects all stages of gestation for mothers.” We talk about her fieldwork for the book, her defiance of certain norms of academic comportment (especially during her difficult pregnancy), and the question of which medium could potentially function the most effectively for communicating the uncanny impressions left by climate impacts.
Fri, December 20, 2024
Ava Val gets bravery, but wonders why comedy can be so cowardly when it comes to trans lives
Ava Val is a comedian, actor, writer and musician based in Toronto. She’s made multiple appearances at Just For Laughs and The Halifax Comedy Festival, and recorded stand-up sets for CBC Gem, Crave TV, and CTV. She has a weekly podcast of her own called PodGis, which is a great place to get a taste of her high energy, clever comedy. Val released her debut special, So Brave, earlier in the year. The special coincided with what Val called her 3-year “hormoniversary,” or the third year she’d been taking hormones as part of an ongoing “mid-life crisis,” in her words: that “crisis” is, of course, the joyful but uncertain journey of trying to align one’s core gender identity with one’s outward gender presentation. In this conversation, we talk about how the trans community, and more specifically trans comedians, can equip themselves to contest and defy the hateful, ignorant transphobia that is surging alongside the rise of right populism. We also talk about why the theme of bravery has some connotations that aren’t particularly flattering, and the level of bravery required to stand on a stage and demand the attention of people who are there to laugh, but who also arrive, presumably, with some openness to the kind of comedic storytelling that challenges the audience as much as it amuses them. Val and I discuss what it means, in that moment of performance, to balance entertaining a crowd with being true to your sense of self and aware of your own vulnerability. I really respect Val’s radical honesty, which I told her the first time we spoke for the podcast. Now, with the special out, we were able to dig into the way she writes and structures the material, the relationship she has with the audience, and with comedy as a profession. I hope the conversation, like Val’s special, offers an access point for people that may not know about how awesome and original contemporary comedy in Canada can be, and especially for people that don’t yet have a sense of the ethics and politics of comedy that is deeply queer.
Fri, November 15, 2024
Wim Carton and Andreas Malm want a radical break to overcome the resignation to overshoot
Andreas Malm works in The Department of Human Geography at Lund University. He’s a scholar of human ecology and environmental history and has written several books, including The Progress of this Storm, Fossil Capital, How to Blow Up A Pipeline and White Skin, Black Fuel. Wim Carton works in the same department as a human geographer. The main focus of his research is the relationship between society and nature and how society-nature relations are informed and changed by ecological crisis. Right now he’s writing about culture, political economy and climate action, with a special emphasis on the promises of carbon removal. In this conversation we talk about their new book Overshoot (https://www.versobooks.com/en-ca/products/3131-overshoot), the first of two books about the state of the climate crisis and the question of whether cutting emissions from fossil fuels is a purely technical or primarily political challenge. The second book will be called The Long Heat, which is a title that gives a name to the era that we are now entering, where powerful state and corporate interests continue to block even meagre climate action, making loss, damage, suffering and, basically, mass sacrifice seem inevitable, even somehow normal. Now, after the election of Donald Trump to a second term as US president, it’s clear that “the days of thinking that the US will ever be a reliable partner on addressing global warming are over,' in the words of New York Times reporter Coral Davenport. It’s hard to maintain hope in this moment, and that question of hope is something that comes up a surprising amount in Overshoot. Malm and Carton are suspicious of the palliative rhetoric of hope in the climate movement and how it tends to inoculate more active feelings of anger, frustration or grief. That said, they are a lot more suspicious of the rhetoric of hopelessness presented by those who are resigned to 1.5, 2, or 3 degrees of global heating. Overshoot is based on the notion that, since there is no reasonable hope of cutting emissions in time, we have to plan, now, to hurtle past our climate targets and pray that technology, adaptation and a little bit of luck will let us, after we’ve blown our carbon budget, bring things back within the realm of safety. The deferral of the burden is clear, but Carton and Malm break it down in a way that explains more fully how overshoot allows fossil capital to endlessly defer stranding its assets, to completely avoid any real disruption. This means that, as Wim puts it, resource radicals and ecosocialists who see a massive transformation as the only way forward have to bet, now, on the possibility of “rupture” as a response to business as usual. As this episode drops, representatives at COP29 will be debating whether or not to pick up their dismal efforts where they left off at COP28, when fossil fuels were finally identified as the root cause of the climate crisis after decades of dicking around. This absurd situation is captured nic
Thu, October 24, 2024
Jennifer Wickham documents the fight of the Wetʼsuwetʼen against pipelines, pollution and plunder
Jennifer Wickham is a filmmaker and a member of the Gidimt’en Clan of the Wet’suwet’en people. In 2012, she moved home to defend her clan’s territory against multiple pipeline projects, and especially the aggression of Coastal GasLink. Her work on the documentary film Yintah is the main focus of our conversation. Yintah is about the Wet’suwet’en fight for sovereignty, and like some other documentaries that depict that fight, there is, in the film, a powerful dream of freedom for Indigenous people and an end to the war against nature. Yintah is now on Netflix (https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/8192...) after striking a deal with the streamer that will see it reach a broader audience. I was thinking about what it means to distribute a film like Yintah, which challenges the legitimacy of the Canadian state and Canadian law, on a platform like Netflix. The goal is strategic, of course: leverage the sites of power that are currently available. But the strategy is maybe more self-reflexive than it seems: in this interview, Jennifer talks about her conviction that people who identify as allies with the Indigenous nations that are resisting neocolonialism aren’t always conscious of what that declaration of solidarity means. From Wickham’s perspective, a more powerful and lasting movement of settler allyship would involve a more authentic commitment to collective survival and a sense of the sacrifices that entails. This film is beyond sobering. It exposes the continuum of tyranny imposed by the RCMP on Indigenous peoples. It demonstrates how corporate greed and the collusion of the state are creating a kind of asymmetrical war over the land itself, and energy, at a time when we understand better than ever that the only way to address the climate emergency is to leave oil and gas in the ground. Don’t develop it. Stop killing the Earth and the people who are most connected to it. I do have to acknowledge my own complicity as a white settler in Canada, and how even wanting to be correct on these issues, the desire to express solidarity in the right or best way, can work against decolonization because it gives us a sense that, at the discursive level anyway, we get it. Actions speak louder than words, and the direct action represented in Yintah is a source of inspiration for anyone that feels the battle against fossil capital is sisyphean.
Thu, October 17, 2024
Alder Keleman Saxena sees how climate impacts & neoliberalism exacerbate each other
Alder Keleman Saxena is an environmental anthropologist whose research looks at the links between agricultural biodiversity and food culture, especially in relation to nutritional health in the Bolivian Andes. Her collaboration with Anna Tsing, Feifei Zhou and Jennifer Deger for the online Feral Atlas project is an absolute gift to anyone concerned with ecology, but specifically from the perspective of reckoning with the impact of human activity on the planet. The book that came out of that digital adventure is called Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature, a riveting book that sets us up with a variety of different ways of approaching the destruction of nature and its disastrous consequences. Alder’s chapter in the Field Guide is focuses on a patch that is very familiar to her: Flagstaff, Arizona, and the erratic ways that market capitalism is changing the demographic make-up of Flagstaff at a moment of increasing climate peril. This conversation about climate migration into Flagstaff takes us into the topic of housing, capitalism and climate impacts, the problem of how to communicate and contextualize climate disasters, and the question of how something like a field guide can encourage us to actually dwell with the idea that human beings are both a “geological force” and a “world-ripping” one.
Fri, September 20, 2024
Robert Neubauer traces how Right-wing populism sells the fiction that fossil fuels are inevitable
Robert Neubauer studies the media strategies of Canadian environmental and pro-resource extraction social movements, with a focus on populist discourse and public mobilization around proposed energy infrastructure. He is currently a Post-doctoral Researcher and Limited Term Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Victoria, where he teaches on contemporary media studies and climate politics. In this episode, Robert and I chat about how an effective communication strategy for rallying the public in support of climate action really needs to validate the public’s concerns about things like affordability and health care, while also emphasizing the urgency of the climate crisis. The way we do that, he says, is to create an effective political “container.” I get the sense that the phrase “a big tent” applies here. I’ve been hearing from a lot of people that expanding the tent, when it comes to transformative changes to infrastructure and to our lifestyles, implies the need to communicate the everyday benefits of climate action, while also being realistic with audiences about the severity of the risks we face. If we fall short in our efforts to convince folks that a radical reset is required – so, if we can’t figure out a way to undermine the cultural importance of the automobile, for example – then we’re in even more serious trouble than the science tells us we are. That’s because a creeping fatalism is forcing a lot of people to court the idea that it’s too late. Neubauer says that nihilism is potentially more dangerous than far right populism. Robert unpacks the idea of petro-populism here, which is still a concept that I struggle with a bit. I find Neubauer’s way of bringing this idea into conversation with the notion of “cultural capital” really helpful. Robert uses this famous idea from Pierre Bourdieu’s work to talk about how petro-populism expresses itself and how it has secured such a prominent place culturally and politically. Neubauer gives us a way of critiquing the propaganda of petro-populists like Ezra Levant, whose ability to manipulate a sense of pride and feelings of national belonging have proven to be remarkably effective. In response to the pull of nostalgia and easy answers, the Left can’t focus on its standard techniques of shaming and allyship. Robert feels like these are now simplistic strategies that go nowhere. Resisting the stunting effects of facile forms of solidarity or public shaming is all about accepting real responsibility for the work of decolonization. The constraints of a carbon-intensive society make it hard to imagine any alternative to the way things are, but things are changing nonetheless. As companies with skin in the carbon game realize they need to aggressively brand fossil fuels as an integral part of our lives to maintain their normalized status, the climate movement is positioning itself to counter with a totally different relationship to energy.
Fri, August 09, 2024
Alice Mah and Cara Daggett talk degrowth, doomerism and the ecological damage of endless growth
Alice Mah is Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies at the University of Glasgow. Prior to this, she was the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council-funded project “Toxic Expertise: Environmental Justice and the Global Petrochemical Industry.” Her work focuses on toxic pollution and environmental justice. She writes about social and ecological transformations and is always trying to develop anti-colonial ecological futures. Cara Daggett is an associate professor of political science in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech. Her research explores the politics of energy and the environment. One of the things she brings to this conversation is her shrewd sense of the overlap between human well-being, science, technology, and the more-than-human world. Cara is known for bringing feminist approaches to power to bear on understanding the ways that global heating emerged, and how it can be combated. Her book The Birth of Energy (https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-birth-of-energy) has become essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the acceleration of everything and an ideal of productivity were normalized: the underlying logics that inform today’s uses of energy. In this conversation, Cara and I ask Alice about her recent book, Petrochemical Planet: Multiscalar Battles of Industrial Transformation (https://www.dukeupress.edu/petrochemical-planet), which is an incomparable study of the petrochemicals industry at a time of planetary collapse. One of the toughest-to-crack aspects of this ultra-toxic industry is the fact that it is basically impossible to simply replace petrochemicals in the global economy. There is basically no way to produce them without fossil fuels and virtually no method of decarbonizing the shadowy production practices involved. And the petrochemicals industry is the #1 industrial consumer of fossil fuels globally. Whether it overcomes that feeling of being overwhelmed or not, Alice and Cara think that the way forward is what they call “multi-scalar” and “multi-temporal” action. If we’re going to save some portion of the Earth we’ve ravaged, it will mean being able to think and feel and act outside of the very short-term timeframes we’re accustomed to in a system that incentivizes and rewards corporate plunder. Can we imagine forms of “multi-temporal resistance” and start “building things” on different timescales? For the Earth to heal from extractivism, we’ll have to. This will require a much deeper sense of duration and what Alice describes as an “extension of empathy” across eons.
Fri, July 05, 2024
Allie Rougeot recounts her route to climate activism and shares her vision of a just transition
Allie Rougeot is a climate justice activist and program manager at Environmental Defence Canada where she advocates for a just energy transition. As a speaker and facilitator, Allie talks to people about the escalating climate crisis and the solutions we can use to fight the emergency. In this conversation, we discuss the path she took to doing this work. Allie says it really started with working in support of refugees and in defense of human rights. The way this influences her approach to climate action is fascinating. It has given her unique insights on the challenge of crafting popular climate policies, ensuring that they’re equitable and fair, and a powerful sense that, because “climate change will create a threat to everything that makes our lives possible,” we are called to resuscitate our struggling democracies in the interest of forcing the system to actually support social life. I resonated most with her feelings of anger as she searches for climate justice. The way Allie puts it is that she is “driven by anger, more even than hope,” and this is because of the “knowing” destruction and suffering being perpetuated by the fossil fuel industry. In her words: “mass suffering was [and is] enabled by… a handful of people that will not bear the consequences.” There’s an emphasis throughout this conversation on how we can incorporate knowledge of the way the project of colonization sought to extract resources and annex Indigenous land. We see the continuation of this plunder today with the environmental obscenity of the Alberta tar sands and the tailings ponds, which represent the largest impoundment of toxic waste on the planet. This sprawling sea of poison is unequivocally an act of environmental racism. Rather than allowing these realities to overwhelm us, though, Allie says that we need to take our feelings of anger and urgency and use them as a turning point. Unfettered energy consumption is creating planet-wrecking carbon bombs and adverse health effects. This needs to be linked, now, with a rejection of extractivism as a worldview.
Mon, June 03, 2024
Ingrid Waldron gives us solutions to the scourge of environmental racism that reimagine space
Dr. Ingrid Waldron should not need an introduction. The leading voice on environmental racism in Canada and author of There’s Something in the Water, Waldron has built a reputation for being unusually skilled at working with and within community and at reading the social landscape for fluctuations in the way that power works. She is the HOPE Chair in Peace and Health in the Global Peace and Social Justice Program at McMaster University and both the founder and director of The ENRICH Project, which has been a crucial source of organizational strength, culminating now in a series of funding announcements and some serious policy changes as Environmental Justice Bill C-226 is debated in Canada’s parliament. Ingrid’s commitment to public engagement and to publicizing the fact of environmental racism has made a huge impact in Nova Scotia, but it’s also been an inspiration to people globally, in part because of the success of a 2019 Netflix adaptation of There’s Something in the Water. Waldron’s radical definition of environmental racism is, as far as I’m concerned, the most precise one: she describes it in terms of the “white supremacist use of space” and explains how the “white supremacist use of space manifests in the disproportionate placement of polluting industries in Indigenous and Black communities.” From that powerful definition, Ingrid develops an argument that leaves a mark by detailing how the fact of environmental racism is rooted in “boundary-making practices that create social hierarchies” and why environmental racism is related to “other structurally induced racial and gendered forms of state violence.” This all has a history, and that history matters because it manifests itself as a combination of ecological destruction and social violence. We talk about how “racial capitalism” influences, and in some cases even determines, the politics of places like Nova Scotia and Flint, Michigan, which have seen intergenerational struggles over how polluting industries get sighted. We also discuss Indigenous sovereignty and the wisdom of Indigenous land and water protectors for thinking more expansively about health, wellness and treatment of the body’s ills. While the language of holistic medicine has been wholly co-opted, Waldron looks to reclaim and recover the concept, reminding us that “This includes all of the medicines the land provides, as well as social relationships with family members and the wider community.”
Fri, April 26, 2024
Catherine Abreu expresses a deep commitment to climate action & explains why the system must change
Catherine Abreu is a world-renowned climate campaigner whose work focuses on creating coalitions to take real action on climate change. She is the founder and executive director of Destination Zero, which—to quote their website—”partners with networks and other non-profits seeking to expand their work on climate justice, with a particular focus on accelerating the global transition away from fossil fuel dependence.” Catherine was appointed as one of the advisors to Canada’s Net-Zero Advisory Body in early 2021. She also serves on the strategic advisory committee for the Global Gas and Oil Network and the steering committee of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. Destination Zero has been foundational to the creation of the important Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, as well. In this conversation we talk about Abreu’s experience of COP28, the health of our democracies and whether they’re up to the task of accomplishing the massive and mandatory shift to clean energy. We look at the culpability of Canada in the climate crisis and the level of responsibility that culpability therefore requires as we move into a future that is likely to be environmentally very unpredictable and dangerous. How can the climate movement gain more traction? How have we kept fighting in spite of so many setbacks and blockades produced by private industry and governments? Part of it, I think, is a sense that the struggle is just and it is urgent. As some of us wait on incremental change to repair -relations to the Earth, others--like Catherine--keep pushing for an ecologically rational disruption of the system that could create a series of chain reactions and ultimately the kind of lasting change we’ve been told is absolutely necessary to protect the world from anthropogenic climate change.
Tue, April 09, 2024
Darin Barney, Jesse Goldstein & Hannah Tollefson narrate anti-capitalist energy futures
Darin Barney is a professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He has written some really impactful work in communication studies, and received several awards for his academic work. He is a member of the Petrocultures Research Group, the After Oil collective and Future Energy Systems at the University of Alberta, among other groups. Jesse Goldstein is an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is a printmaker and has been a member of numerous art collectives, including Space 1026 in Philadelphia and more recently the Occuprint Collective. His current research focuses on the political economy of green technologies. Hannah Tollefson is a media and environmental studies scholar who works on questions of ecology, economy, and infrastructure. She studies how territory is technically mediated; the work of infrastructure in shaping relationships of place and scale; and the politics of energy transition. She is working on a project with Darin about contemporary efforts to develop oil sands bitumen for non-combustion uses and to devise formats for transporting bitumen in solid phase. Her work has appeared in a number of academic journals and anthologies. This conversation is focused on the reality that there is a surprising lack of friction between the fossiil fuel and the cleantech industries. Rather than posing a threat to the domination of everyday life by fossil fuels, we're seeing the ways in which compartmentalization of climate action and the diversification of portfolios is leading to a wholesale corporate capture of the future for energy, or, we should say, for fuels. In the case of Darin and Hannah's writing, their research has taken them into the boardrooms of companies that are vying for a place in the market for solid state bitumen products. With Jesse's work, there is a focus on how greenwashing as we know it has evolved into an ideology of only valuing innovation and imagination within narrow market terms, even when the innovation in question is devoted to cracking the climate crisis. In both instances, there is, in this critique of capitalist enclosure of clean energy or emergent forms of fuel, a sense that actually those that are involved in contemporary entrepreneurialism do want to have a positive social impact. The issue is that, as Jesse argues, the narrowing of innovation under capitalism means that these sorts of entrepreneurs are more or less obligated to concentrate their energy on doing well financially, rather than doing good socially or ecologically.
Sun, March 17, 2024
Abboud Hamayel interrogates the perpetual state of war Israel imposes on Palestinians
Abboud Hamayel is a Lecturer in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at Birzeit University. In this conversation we talk about a number of his recent articles, and think through the implications of the October 7th Al-Aqsa Flood, or the attacks led by Hamas within the so-called Gaza Envelope. Abboud has written some invaluable pieces breaking down the assumptions people project onto Palestine in the West, on the complicity of the United States, in particular, in the ongoing annihilation of Palestinian society. Those essays are absolutely essential for thinking through and acting against the settler colonial violence being perpetrated in Gaza. The conversation here is relatively long, but extremely focused. There’s a concentration on what can be done that should be useful, but Abboud also offers a really rigorous theorizing of the foundations of occupation and settlement. He understands how the occupation affects life and politics in the West Bank, and that reality is something that I think we need to grasp more thoroughly.
Fri, March 01, 2024
Sherene Seikaly yearns for what we can’t see: a world without genocide, ecocide or epistemicide
Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She’s the editor of a number of academic journals, including the Journal of Palestine Studies. She’s also a policy member of Al-Shabaka and the Palestinian Policy Network. As a historian of capitalism, consumption, and development in the modern Middle East, she has an overriding concern with how individuals, groups, and governments use concepts and material practices to shape the body, the self, and the other. We’re at a point now where the death toll in Gaza has climbed to more than 30,000 and yet we still can’t expect an end to the merciless, genocidal attack on Palestinians by the Netenyahu regime in Israel anytime soon. A team of researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Johns Hopkins University just released a report called "Crisis in Gaza: Scenario-Based Health Impact Projections" that says we can still save thousands of lives by establishing a ceasefire that would allow the delivery of humanitarian aid as Gaza is throttled by Israel. It describes the situation by saying that, "In case of a ceasefire now, we would be saving around 75,000 lives." That means that a continuation of the military assault on Rafa will lead to a humanitarian catastrophe at an unimaginable scale. In this terrifying moment, I spoke with Sherene Seikaly about her sense of the roots of this overwhelming, punishing violence in colonial logics of dehumanization. It comes from civilizational hierarchies that have already been established to secure colonial relations and render whole populations disposable. It also comes from silencing and denial. In Sheren’s words, there has been a “repression of people calling for Palestinian liberation” that allows the untold horror to keep happening without the resistance and rage that could end it. For a long time we have been in a situation where “knowledge itself,” she says, “has become a target of war.” This “epistemicide” means there is no relationship between politics and the truth in Israel, there is a tacit encouragement of the genocide by American imperialism and its agenda in the region, which lets the US continue arming Israel with no conditions whatsoever. This obscuring of the reality of genocide, and the jubilation with which settlers are making Gaza unlivable, is forcing Sherene, she says, to question everything that she thought she knew about the world or the notion of a rules-based international order. We talk about her book Men of Capital, which is an untold history of the Arab world through the lens of Palestinian statehood. She says that “Maps are actually violent processes” of colonial and state formation and fundamentally “constructions.” She explains why Palestine contains “an abundance of lessons” about the future we’re heading toward. But we start with the question of the Palestinian child, the eviction of Palestinian people from the category of the human, and the spectre of a violence that aims to era
Fri, February 16, 2024
Nadia Yaqub chronicles the struggles and steadfastness of Palestine through visual culture
Nadia Yaqub is Professor of Arabic Language and Culture and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research has examined Arab medieval literature and contemporary oral poetry, as well as modern prose fiction and visual culture. I spoke to her about three of her books: Bad Girls of the Arab World, which is about women and transgression in the Arab world, Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution, which is an invaluable study of Palestinian resistance through the lens of Third Cinema, and her most recent edited anthology, Gaza on Screen. I learned a lot in this conversation about humility, opacity and the limits of solidarity across distance and across gaps in exposure to vulnerability. Yaqub has a deep understanding of the politics of the so-called “humanitarian image,” which is something she is very conflicted about in her work. She asks whether humanitarian images of Palestinian suffering “are always depoliticizing or victimizing, or whether the depoliticization occurs through the inherently ideological frameworks in which such images circulate.” I ask, as my first question to Nadia, what that idea of the framework means in the current moment, where Palestinians are limited in using artistic practices to demand freedom. I think a lot of us are wondering about the political forces that exist around the overwhelmingly terrifying images we’re receiving of total war being waged on Palestine’s civilian population and infrastructure. Nadia’s insight are really helpful here. There’s this idea in her work that the visual practices of Palestinians make up what she calls an “image archive of steadfastness.” Steadfastness is a core value in Palestinian culture. Yaqub is picking it up in a unique way to say that, especially in terms of art and storytelling, steadfastness is about trying to sustain a sense of community. There’s power in this idea for thinking about the role that communication plays in providing the conditions for political sympathy with Palestinian liberation.
Fri, February 09, 2024
Jeff Karabanow bridges action and fieldwork in the struggle to end homelessness
Jeff Karabanow is Professor and Associate Director in the School of Social Work at Dalhousie University. He has worked with homeless populations in Toronto, Montreal, Halifax and Guatemala. His research focuses primarily upon housing stability, service delivery systems, trauma, and homeless youth culture. I want to say, first, that right now we don’t even really know how many people are currently experiencing homelessness in so-called Canada. The number could be anywhere between 150,000 to 300,000, according to the Homeless Hub, a research centre at York University. That is too wide of a range. What that range says is that our system cannot see unhoused people. The tools we are using—for example, Homeless Hub is using AI now to predict that the number will swell to over half a million people by 2030—the tools we are using to measure and respond to the problem are fundamentally broken. One of the big themes in this conversation is the idea of vulnerability, or rawness. It’s clear to anyone who is paying attention that the people who are living unhoused are vulnerable. They’re vulnerable to extreme weather, to so-called “deaths of despair,” they’re vulnerable to violence, among other forms of harassment and precarity. But the other side of vulnerability has to do with those of us who are housed, and who are buffered from the serious social issues that exist right outside our door. Much of what Jeff does is about breaking down barriers. The visible and invisible barriers to radical social change that keep the solvable problem of homelessness in a state of perpetual disaster. We break down those barriers in this conversation: they include systems of policymaking that exclude first voices, academic research practices that don’t authentically include a community-based aspect, a reticence about cultivating what Jeff calls “caring, authentic spaces” in a world that sometimes punishes us for trying. Engaging with everyone is really what’s required to get answers pushed into place, but that means looking seriously at the hierarchies, the opaque strategies of exhaustion, that privilege some and punish others. It also means taking seriously the effects of our histories of colonialism and racial capitalism that are about extraction and exploitation of the land and people. I know it’s a lot, but that is where the language that Jeff uses for outlining the problem becomes so valuable. At the heart of it is just this idea that, actually, housing is the “foundation of… healthy, dignified living.” As much as he gestures to the importance of being raw and real and letting emotion be an acceptable part of political communication, Jeff is also really emphatic about the fundamental question of dignity and dignified living, which is the crux of recognizing the displacement of people onto the streets by an unfeeling system as a clear and present disaster. People shouldn’t have to show their resilience the way this system makes them. People need homes, they need subsis
Mon, January 29, 2024
Veronica Post zigzags through stories of care, crisis, migration and trauma
Veronica Post is a furniture maker, teacher and an award-winning graphic novelist based in Nova Scotia. She’s written two graphic novels so far, published by Conundrum Press; the books are part of a planned trilogy focused on the trials and tribulations of their title character Langosh and his trusty dog Peppi. The first two titles, Fugitive Days and Hot to Trot, are journalistic explorations of Veronica’s experiences that think through the realities of war, history, migration and trauma. In this conversation we talk about Langosh, Peppi and Yeva: Hot to Trot, an adventurous, ponderous romp that takes the reader across the United States on a tour not only of different spaces and cities, but also the characters’ emotional lives. The book is a thoughtful study of how relationships evolve often through friction. I thought the friction that came out of differences people had about specific social issues was really relatable. People argue about religion, about capitalism, about the crisis of unhoused people that has spread like wildfire since the outbreak of COVID. There are triumphant moments, too, where splash pages take us into heroic moments of women leading with care, people connecting over their shared outrage, and linking up in spite of significant differences to be there for each other. It’s a great book. It’s also beautifully drawn. Veronica has a real eye for landscapes, and because Hot to Trot is taking you on this big adventure, she has an opportunity to capture all kinds of different sunsets, spaces and methods of movement. People don’t stay in one place very long, and the characters in the book have a pretty restless attitude toward time. Especially Langosh. Langosh doesn’t want to think about the future, but the future has him. He can’t avoid it. But this isn’t his fatal flaw. Veronica reveals what that is, from her perspective, in this conversation. If you read the book, though, you’ll pick up on it. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s also really full of sympathy, speculation on how people work (or don’t work) as social beings, and some of the ways that time takes us through a meandering path toward something like realization and connection.
Fri, January 12, 2024
Gideon Levy implores us to thwart Israel’s wanton destruction of Palestinian life
Gideon Levy is an Israeli journalist and author. Levy writes opinion pieces and a weekly column for the newspaper Haaretz that often focuses on the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. He’s won numerous awards for his writing on human rights abuses in the occupied territories. Levy is known for insisting that being an Israeli patriot requires one to be critical of the occupation. When he said recently that he has never been more ashamed of his country, he was defending his country against what he sees as an increasing tendency toward fascism. It must be unbelievably difficult to stay the course and speak from his conscience about the scale of the violence Israel is perpetrating in Palestine. In fact, Levy says it feels “exasperating to write from this perspective and not have the impact he would like. He still maintains that “words are on the front line” of this struggle. How the violence is understood and what can be said has a significant impact on what sort of violence is permitted. So, too, does the form of resistance. Levy maintains that “If the Gazans were sitting quietly, as Israel expects them to do, their case would disappear… from the agenda.” This is a people that are waged war against within an occupied territory enclosed by a wall. Why is there a boycott against the occupied rather than the occupier? His writing is incredibly useful for people that want to understand the strategies of the Israeli leadership, which often uses provocation and assassination, a kind of brinksmanship designed, he suggests, to renew the license for widespread destruction and pacification of the Palestinian people. In this sense, Levy says that Israel “the peace objector.” Israel has imprisoned Gaza for many years, blocked them off from the sea, the air and the land. It regularly uses “violence and force” to subjugate Gaza, rather than coordinating a just withdrawal. Israel should not be “amazed,” Gideon says, “by the violence and hatred that [it has] sowed with [its] own hands.” The response has not been an attempt to understand the root causes or to reflect critically on its complicity. Instead, the IDF is waging a war on the civilian population, showing “contempt for the lives of Palestinian children” in its pursuit of “vengeance.” This collective punishment is forbidden by international law, and at the current moment, and likely for several years, Israel will be on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice. Increasingly, the world is opposed to the Zionist regime in Israel and knows that there can be no military solution. Forcing an understanding of that into Israeli consciousness is extremely difficult, though, Levy says. In his experience, people in Israel are not bothered by the “moral aspects of the war.” This is why he has shifted toward focusing on the security and pragmatic reasons why this genocidal bombardment, this fascist fixation on punishing Gaza, is a failing strategy. He says that October 7th has created a
Fri, January 05, 2024
Licypriya Kangujam staged an intervention for fossil fuel addicts out of concern for the planet
Licypriya Kangujam is an environmental activist from Manipur, India. On December 11th of last year, she marched onto the plenary stage as COP28 came to a close in the UAE and demanded that leaders acknowledge the state of emergency we are in, and the fact that there is no time to waste, as millions of people are already being directly impacted by the climate crisis and the situation is sure to get worse. Although she admits that COP28 was “99% a failure,” as most of these UN summits have been, COP will have a central role in determining our collective future, so it has to be changed from a “fossil fuel summit” into an actual “climate summit” where the right priorities and a sober assessment of the sort of investment that will be required take centre stage. The example she gives is the early agreement at COP28 on a loss and damage fund for the nations in the Global South that are, now and into the future, most impacted by climate change. She says that the loss and damage fund is obviously a “good idea,” but it could still turn out to be an “empty” promise, especially if the amount of investment promised by the wealthy nations who are most responsible for the situation remains so pitifully low. It should be said that Licypriya is among the youngest prominent climate activists in the world, and is, in many ways, a model for what’s possible when it comes to young people getting involved in climate politics at the local and the global level. So, while she has addressed world leaders at multiple COPs, she’s also been campaigning for climate action and climate education in India since 2018. She is a visionary, by the way, in this regard: she’s stated many times that there can be no climate movement without climate education. There’s been a really moving push to make climate education mandatory, in no small part because of the organizing that Licypriya has done. In this conversation we cover a lot of ground, and that includes talking about the climate disasters that drove her to get involved in the movement. We talk about the implications of comparing her to Greta Thunberg, which she rightly sees as reductive. More than anything maybe, we talk about the conspicuous lack of political will at the highest levels of power and their callous disregard for those most affected by the emergency. The disruption she decided to create in Dubai could not have happened, she says, without the love and support of her compatriots in the climate movement. They gave her the courage to push powerful people, committed as they clearly are to dragging their feet and running out the clock, to act now. Licypriya insists that she’s not a member of any particular political party. What’s important to her is the truth, and so she’s focused on changing the dominant mindset. Protesting, for her, is a kind of “last resort.” She has been forced to protest constantly, to learn how to fight in a world on fire, and she’s gotten good at it. But she feels like she’s been robbed of a chi
Fri, December 29, 2023
Hadil Kamal describes the beauty of living in Palestine and the brutality of Israeli occupation
Hadil Kamal works as a surgeon at Al Quds University in Ramallah. For years, Hadil has been lecturing and practicing in Palestine. In this conversation, she offers a brilliant account of why she feels an intense moral obligation to oppose the oppression of Palestinian people. Ramallah is at a unique vantage point when it comes to understanding and resisting Israel's occupation of Palestine. As the central city in the West Bank and the administrative capital of Palestine, it is at a certain distance from direct occupation. Hadil describes the labyrinth of military checkpoints that she has to navigate within Palestine, and what she contemplates during those long, circuitous journey through the countryside. At the core of the conversation is the question of how Palestine can be free and how Hadil experiences everyday life in the context of Israel’s illegal occupation. We also discuss the ways that Israel has codified its callous indifference to Palestinian life in laws that enshrine the expansion of settlements and Islamophobia as core parts of the Zionist nation-building project. October 7th and coordinated attack on Israel by the paramilitary wings of Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, is a globally misunderstood event. This is largely because of the layers of propaganda and political polarization that are screening the reality on the ground from view. That event, with its deplorable acts of violence, should be seen as a response to violent subjugation. As Hadil points out, Gaza is a concentration camp where human beings are denied rights and deemed disposable by an oppressive regime. The right to resist an occupying force is a human right, even if it is controversial to say so. Only 42 countries recognize the right to resist oppression. Since 2004, the African Union has identified the right to resist as a basic human right in the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights. From everything I have learned, read and seen secondhand, those of us who have not experienced the violence of Israeli apartheid directly cannot legitimately condemn the right of Palestinians to resist this violence. Palestinians have, in the words of Andreas Malm, “tried every conceivable form of resistance. They’ve tried peaceful marches, in the Great March of Return in 2018, which only resulted in Israeli snipers killing 223 unarmed demonstrators, they’ve tried strikes and boycotts. They’ve tried writing poetry and posting on social media. They’ve tried throwing stones. They’ve tried diplomacy, including recognizing the state of Israel and giving it all it demands without getting anything back. They tried to go to court. They tried the international community endlessly and, yes, they have tried various forms of armed resistance.” So what are the people supposed to do? When the IDF announced that it was launching a ground invasion of Gaza, it ordered over a million people to evacuate, adding
Fri, December 22, 2023
Michael Hardt subverts ideas about political failure and revisits histories of liberation struggle
Michael Hardt teaches political theory in the Literature Program at Duke University. He is co-author, with Antonio Negri, of the Empire trilogy and, most recently, Assembly. He is also the co-director of The Social Movements Lab. Toni Negri sadly died just recently, on December 16th, at the age of 90. He was a towering intellectual and political figure in modern Marxism and will be missed deeply for his radical philosophy and energy. In this conversation Michael talks about their collaboration on the Empire trilogy, what Toni meant to the process of learning together, and some of the spirited ways that they endeavoured to inform the conversation about the most effective and enduring ways to resist oppression. There’s no questioning the impact of the books Michael wrote with Negri, but for Hardt, it was all about learning. He recalls that Slavoj Zizek once said that this is the thing that most impressed him about each successive text: that the point was not to suggest that they had everything figured out in some airtight way, but to offer an invitation to rethink and rejuvenate democracy, and to wonder about why that term in particular seems to have this enduring power, despite so many efforts to inoculate its meaning and displace its place in politics. What I’ll take away from this discussion, maybe more than anything else, is the stuff I learned about how people learned. Listening again, I was struck by how crucial this part of movements is: the way we learn to be democratic subjects is through that transformative process of learning alongside others. It’s a process that can easily be corrupted and co-opted, but it is extremely important. The Subversive Seventies, Michael’s new book, was published in September by Oxford University Press. It’s the first book he’s written as a solo author in decades. For that reason, he says that he wanted it to be a different sort of exploration. There is much in it that is obviously historical, but it’s not historiographical. It’s about his own desires for insight into contemporary movements. We discuss, then, how the book communicates with the contemporary climate movement, what it might say about the struggle for survival and for freedom in Palestine. And the difference between the struggle for power and the struggle for liberation historically. Ultimately, this is in many ways a book that prioritizes participation over representation: universal participation in political decision-making rather than existing schemes of representation that leave power in the hands of the few. Hardt writes that, in this sense, “Liberation is not just emancipation— that is, releasing people from their chains in order to participate in the existing society. Liberation requires, in addition, a radical transformation of that society, overturning its structures of domination and creating new institutions that foster freedom.”
Fri, December 15, 2023
Mark Paul challenges the economic and environmental injustices of neoliberalism in a climate crisis
Mark Paul is an assistant professor and a member of the Climate Institute at Rutgers University. His research looks at the causes and effects of inequality, and tries to work through some of the material remedies for inequality in the context of neoliberal capitalism. He’s written a great deal on the climate crisis, focusing on economic pathways to crash decarbonization that also take into account the need for economic and environmental justice. His first book, The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America’s Lost Promise of Economic Rights was published in May of this year. This is now a moment when the existential threat of climate change is felt really intensely across the world. The remaining carbon budget for a 50% likelihood to limit global warming to 1.5, 1.7, and 2C has dwindled in the years since the first COP in 1995. Assuming that our 2023 emission levels continue at their current record-setting rate – and the Global Carbon Project has said that total CO2 emissions in 2023 reached a disturbing 40.9 gigatons – we will burn through the budget for keeping global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels by 2030. In 15 years, the carbon budget for 1.7C will be gone too. In planetary terms, that’s a split second. We need crash decarbonization now because, as Paul has pointed out, “climate change is not a problem for future generations—it is a clear and present danger.” So much time has been intentionally wasted, and due to that deadly strategy of delay, Paul says that “we have four times the work to do to decarbonize the planet and dwindling time to do it in.” A lot of the work, within a capitalist economy, is going to take the form of fighting for the appropriate level of investment. It makes all kinds of economic sense to phase-out fossil fuels, and yet because the system has incubated and grown in the toxic stuff, we’re stuck in it. Mark argues that if we wait just one decade more to really make the disruptive changes that are needed to decarbonize the fossil economy, we “will drive up the costs associated with decarbonization by 40-70%, which amounts to well over $3 trillion in additional costs.” One of the questions I had to ask him, though, was why is this still such a hard sell? It often feels Sisyphean to try to communicate projected losses in a system that demands and yet resists change. How to frame it in a resonant sort of way? How do we dislodge the presentist attachment to the status quo? There are some answers in this interview, and obviously some real questions remaining. Some of it centres on the question of growth, which Mark seems to feel is often the wrong question. Shrinking the economy, he suggests, needs to be taken seriously from the perspective of its social costs. I’m sympathetic to that because there is the political problem of ensuring that a mass mobilization for climate action doesn’t leave people behind. So, for that reason, we also spend time talking about the divisive ways that putting a price on carbon has been
Fri, December 08, 2023
Seth Klein galvanizes us to fight a future of climate chaos and guards against historical amnesia
Seth Klein is a public policy researcher and writer based in Vancouver, BC. He’s the Director of Strategy with the Climate Emergency Unit and the author of A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency, which is the basis of a lot of the questions that I ask in this interview. He talks about how the focus of the book was not always the sorts of lessons we can take from the Second World War. He was looking for reminders that we have done this before, mobilized to address a real existential threat. So, as COP28 concludes, we are confronted with a “Global Stocktake” that shows we are not on track to limit catastrophic climate change. Barbara Creecy and Dan Joergensen made this clear recently in their presentation to delegates there. They also emphasized, importantly, that equity is not the opposite of ambition when it comes to the radical action necessary to fight climate change. In fact, they argued that, because we can’t negotiate with nature and the laws of physics, we are going to have to negotiate with and within the laws and policies that determine the scope of climate action. That means we have to negotiate with each other. And there are some reasonable concerns about whether COP is a place where people can meet and actually figure out ways to navigate the planet into a livable future. But was it worth it? Did this clearly very compromised COP28 achieve anything tangible to offset all of these serious issues? One of the biggest risks is that the army of oil and gas lobbyists that have descended on COP28 will succeed in extending their careers and the lifespan of toxic fuels by adjusting the language of any deals, any regulations that are established. Emissions reduction is what we need, and energy producers want, instead, to go in a senselessly destructive direction. All of this distraction and delay is part of what Seth Klein calls the “new climate denialism,” a technique of obstruction that doesn’t care in the least about the health of our environment, about human life, or about what we used to call “sustainability,” but now increasingly should be described as “survivability.” One of the “curses,” Seth explains, about climate action is that we don’t actually feel the emergency for a period that is long enough to warrant the kind of radical action we have witnessed during wars or pandemics. The disaster is diffuse, spread out, and somewhat sporadic, so it doesn’t “galvanize us all at once.” And just as troubling is the fact that our “memories” of these traumatic events “tend to recede fairly quickly,” until they occur again. This speaks to the fact that, as Klein puts it, phase-out of fossil fuels and the post-carbon revolution is “not largely a technical problem,” it is a problem of a lack of political will. In this context, he says that we simply “don’t know the answer” to the question of whether we have people who can collectively rise to the challenge, hold extractive regimes accountable, and lead us out of the path to dis
Fri, December 01, 2023
Margaret Galvan travels between visual archives to sense how memory is preserved & proscribed
Margaret Galvan is Assistant Professor of visual rhetoric in the Department of English at the University of Florida. Her research examines how visual culture operates within the print media of feminist and queer social movements in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Her first book, In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s explores how publishing practices and archives have shaped understandings of the visual within feminist and queer activism. This episode is being released on World AIDS Day. Margaret’s book is partly focused on the tragedy of AIDS for a generation of people that saw the virus disproportionately attack people on the margins. The prejudicial social engineering that created a system of disposability around AIDS meant that those who were suffering had to use every point of leverage at their disposal. Galvan talks about the ways that artists “responded when the emergence of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s fractured their communities. Artists scrambled to preserve their queer worlds—not only through direct action on the street, but also through their own artwork.” We talk, in particular, about Nan Goldin’s enduring work and the way that it “politically activates her community and their losses through image and text,” and how Goldin “refused to allow HIV/AIDS to remain a shameful, private matter.” Galvan’s book is all about archiving as a strategy, so there’s a fair amount of time spent here discussing different approaches to the archive, how archives function politically and why certain archives are seen as relevant while others are not, or certain ways of expressing desire or identity are seen as a threat. Galvan reads across archives to to sense how sense memory is preserved by an archive, or how memory is rendered immobilized through a process of arresting the archive. If texts are hybrid, multiple and meaningful to people, then they can also, Margaret says, be a "guide for future activism.” We’ve all seen the ways in which a text can change the course of someone’s thinking, and how that detour through a different way of being can open up new pathways for political action. What I find really compelling about Galvan’s book, and her way of approaching this paradigm, is that she never abandons a sense of the historical context in favour of analyzing the text’s content. The two things are inextricable, and that means that we get a picture of the ways that texts present the present politically.
Fri, November 24, 2023
Macarena Gómez-Barris refuses to abandon the hope for a future after extractivism
Macarena Gómez-Barris is a writer and scholar with a focus on queer ecologies and decolonial theory and praxis. She is author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (2017) and Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (2018), among several other texts. She is working on a new book, At the Sea’s Edge that reflects on the space between land and sea, as well as other creative writing projects. In this conversation she talks about solidarity. Solidarity in and among the Global South, against empire and extraction, and for a world to come. There’s a great deal of hope in this interview, but it’s the kind of hope that resonates with me because it says that, in Gómez-Barris’ words, “Knowledge production can also be solidarity” if it is “multivocal” and focused on exposing dispossession. Looking for this kind of solidarity, she finds something generative in the “third space of shadow terms between above and below.” For her, this is generative because it moves away from the “binarized language forms we typically use” and returns to things that have been largely submerged by oppressive forces. I think the focus on multiplicity and plurality is potentially helpful for those that are locked in different sorts of colonial spaces where it’s typically seen as sort of unrealistic or unimportant. Gomez-Barris says, instead, it’s actually this sort of experimentation that is going to liberate the globe. We devote time at the end of our conversation to the question of Gaza. Gómez-Barris makes clear that there is a proliferating resistance to that escalating settler colonial violence that demands to be reckoned with. People who are already aware of Gomez-Barris’ writing will know that she is really precise about the world-ending force of extractivism. What she says is that “the extractive zone” ultimately reduces “life to capitalist resource conversion” and trains us to “reduce life to systems.” That is not a thing that is natural, and it’s not a thing we need to accept.
Fri, November 17, 2023
Matt Wolf makes documentaries that spotlight world-builders and risk-takers
Matt Wolf is a filmmaker from New York whose critically acclaimed documentary films have been shown across the globe. (https://www.criterionchannel.com/directed-by-matt-wolf) Wild Combination does a deep dive into the life and music of Arthur Russell, Teenage is a study of early youth culture and the birth of the very idea of teenagers, Recorder is an invaluable portrait of the activist and archivist Marion Stokes, who secretly recorded broadcast television continuously,24 hours a day, for 30 years. Spaceship Earth is a film about Biosphere 2, the experiment from the early 90s where 8 people lived inside a fully contained biome cut off, or seemingly cut off, from the rest of the world. He also recently worked on an incredible film called The Stroll as a producer; that film explores the history of New York’s Meatpacking District from the perspective of the transgender sex workers who lived and worked there. Wolf has a way of effortlessly expanding the parameters of documentary. I say “effortlessly,” but if you listen to this conversation you can tell that there is a great deal of effort put into making sure that viewers of Matt’s films feel an emotional connection to what they’re watching, while also being presented with a set of subtle questions about art, the biosphere, the ways that media manufacture social reality, and many other subjects. More and more, though, he’s looking for ways to work creatively within the conventions of documentary filmmaking, rather than working to “explode” those defining characteristics. All of this comes through on the screen. There are a few threads in this conversation that are worth underlining. Wolf is deeply interested in exploring the lives of people who take enormous risks with what they are attempting to create, risks that might not pay off in the long run or that influence their capacity to relate to the rest of the world. The way he puts it is that his films are concerned with subjects that weren’t entirely able “to translate the full scope of what they were doing to others.” That makes their work difficult and rewarding, and deserving of “reappraisal.” For example, Wolf made his documentary Wild Combination, on the life and work and impact of the cult cellist and disco producer Arthur Russell, at age 25. This is particularly surprising when you actually sit down with the film; you’d assume that this is a director at the top of his game; but, in reality, Matt says that, at the time, he was studying this artist, Arthur Russell, as a way of actually learning how to be an artist himself. I really appreciated how open Matt was in this conversation about his attachment to the specific “texture of the past,” as he put it, and his desire to tell stories in a way that doesn’t intrude on the viewer’s interpretation of the material. He explains how Spaceship Earth, his brilliant study of the Biosphere 2 project, was described by some as being a somewhat uncritical film. That lack of critical scrutiny, though, is
Fri, November 10, 2023
Sara Ahmed extols the feminist killjoy and iterates on her sweeping oeuvre
I sort of feel like this guest needs no introduction, but that may be because, for me, she’s such a powerful influence on thinking around affect, obviously, but also feminist politics, anticolonial resistance, the consequences of representation and misrepresentation. For people that don’t know who she is, Sara Ahmed is the author of many widely read texts, from Queer Phenomenology, to Living a Feminist Life and The Cultural Politics of Emotion, to What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use, to now, most recently, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook: The Radical Potential of Getting in the Way. The new book is an interesting experiment in an author thinking back through her work and theorizing the particular structuring principles that guided it, the core values, concepts and characteristic expressions that give it form. There is a fair bit of conversation in this interview about terms, specifically the term “kill,” for example, in “killjoy”--the extremity of the word and the kind of work that does. I also ask Ahmed about the inclusion of personal reflection in The Feminist Killjoy Handbook and we talk about the false distinction that gets made between the practice of “theory” and the lived experience of the theorist. I appreciated how open Sara was about her foundational sense of the value of killjoy solidarity, even as it is becoming frighteningly clear that this solidarity is required for all the wrong reasons: because rights are being rolled back, because oppression is intensifying and the vindictive forces of sexism and racism are differently emboldened today. There is even a discussion, here, of this seemingly novel, but actually quite old, concept of “cancel culture.” Ahmed explains why she is a “Roxane Gay superfan,” where she thinks the attacks on wokeness are coming from, and how they can be countered. I was most heartened maybe by her expression of killjoy solidarity with the movements for trans lives and for alleviation of the climate crisis. These are seemingly very different struggles, but in both instances there is a normative power to business as usual that is making life very dangerous for people at the margins.
Fri, November 03, 2023
Kyla Tienhaara sheds light on legal barriers to climate action & outlines a path to just transition
Kyla Tienhaara is an Assistant Professor in the School of Environmental Studies and the Department of Global Development Studies at Queen’s University, Canada and a Visiting Fellow at the School of Regulation and Global Governance, Australian National University. She’s the author of Green Keynesianism and the Global Financial Crisis and the co-editor of the Routledge Handbook on the Green New Deal, which is a book that I find absolutely essential for thinking about the potential social benefits of decarbonizing the economy and rethinking growth in our time of climate breakdown. She’s also one of the few researchers looking closely at the function of Investor State Dispute Settlement as an international legal apparatus that largely protects investors from the pushback they might receive from states. There’s no way I could quickly summarize what this work deciphers, in terms of this obscure global legal structure, which not a lot of people I’ve spoken with have any knowledge about. They might understand in the abstract that there is a system of global capitalism that is protected by the codification of laws that largely protect profits and private investment over the safety or autonomy of communities, but this is the actual system that serves that. And Kyla is uniquely insightful about how it works and what it is set up to prevent. I wanted to underscore, at the top here, that we engage, in this conversation, with the concepts of utopianism and pragmatism in climate action. That’s no a disclaimer so much as an invitation to ask yourself where you sit in relation to this idea that abolishing fossil energy is utopian. Or to kind of request that you sit with the question of whether it is too much to ask that the economy be democratized or energy be regarded as a source of social wealth rather than a source of capital. It’s maybe worth thinking, too, about why it is the case that there is legally-binding international law that protects fossil fuel companies from reprisal, but no binding law to protect the planet from the forces that are exacerbating our mounting climate emergency. What history precedes this moment where it is primarily rich countries that benefit from existing laws and international treaties, while poor countries get poorer? And what mechanisms or modes of resistance exist so that we can funnel our collective outrage at these legally sanctioned systems of upholding inequality into something real?
Fri, October 20, 2023
Gernot Wagner pulls apart the paradoxes of economics, expediency and growth in climate action
Gernot Wagner is a climate economist at Columbia Business School. His research, writing, and teaching focus on climate risks and climate policy. Gernot writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate and has written four books, including Geoengineering: the Gamble and Climate Shock. Before joining Columbia and serving as faculty director of the Climate Knowledge Initiative, Gernot taught at NYU and Harvard. In this conversation I kept coming back to this hope that climate action could be, in some ways, uncomplicated. If the primary goal is to stop greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible in order to deal with this as a genuine emergency, it should be simple. But, within the existing system of global capitalism that we have, though, how is that going to happen? Can it happen? I’ve been trying to think about this by having conversations with people like Gernot, people like Kyla Tienhaara, Seth Klein, Mark Paul and others to try to get to the bottom of it. It’s tough, but these interviews, which I’ll release in the coming weeks, have been helpful. We’re at a point where, according to economists like Robert Pollin, at least 1-2 per cent of global GDP will need to be spent pretty much immediately on investments in renewable infrastructure to radically reduce emissions. Global GDP is about $80 trillion. How does that amount of globally coordinated investment happen under capitalism? It’s a huge shift in the nature of the whole economy. One of the reasons I wanted to return to Wagner’s writing is that I’ve been helped a lot by his explanation of the social cost of carbon, and especially by the way he writes about considerations of equity and justice in determining the social cost of carbon. It radically increases the social costs, or damages created, by emissions if we factor in issues of equity. The number skyrockets, validating any and all investments in climate mitigation and adaptation. How could that sort of information become more central to decision-making and policy-making? We definitely get into the weeds here. I’m still processing the discussion we have about “green growth” vs. the “Green New Deal” vs. degrowth. I still can’t say where I land on the question of whether decarbonization needs to happen in a textbook degrowth way. It’s hard to balance expediency and strategy here, and yet, increasingly, the debate about economic transformation to fight climate change hinges on our receptivity to growth or degrowth. What I like is that there is room here for the debate. We need to rapidly phase-out fossil fuels. That much is certain. In fact, we need to fully ban fossil fuels. How that decision gets made and what form action takes—at what speed and with what consequences—is still an open question.
Fri, October 06, 2023
Casey Williams & Rhys Williams amplify the value of friction & rethink the promises of technology
Casey Williams is a Lecturer in the Center for Environmental Studies at Rice University. His research examines the social and cultural dimensions of climate change and energy transition, especially the problem of “climate impasse” and the concept and possibility of a “just transition.” His writing on climate, energy and labor has appeared in The New York Times, The LA Review of Books, Radical Philosophy, Jacobin, Dissent, and elsewhere. Rhys Williams is a Lecturer at University of Glasgow who works on the intersection between fantasy, narrative and energy. His work also looks to get a better grasp on the relationship between ecology and infrastructure. He’s a member of the Petrocultures Research Group and the After Oil Collective. He also organizes the Energy and Ecology Group in Glasgow. Right now a lot of his focus is on energy, infrastructure, food, and water. You can read some of that work in Open Library of Humanities and South Atlantic Quarterly. I think one of the most important takeaways for me in this conversation was this idea that we need to leave more space for real deliberation in our politics, and that this actually means that we need to accept the fact of friction. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but what we call, in this conversation, “frictionful engagements” aren’t really the norm in political communication. What we tend to get is a situation where frictionlessness is tacitly preferred, and so, in Casey’s words, “Capital quietly takes the reins” and we’re left with mechanisms that are meant to do all the heavy lifting in political decision-making. Rhys and Casey see ways that these mechanisms, especially financial mechanisms in the climate debate, really function like a narrative technique – it’s the mechanism that has the agency, not us, and this is the narrative we’ve been largely sold: a kind of politics-without-politics. One of the other big things that I’d underline is Casey’s challenge to those that engage with the climate crisis and who are worried about communicating the risks: he says that there is actually a real political risk involved in treating specific disasters as “metonymic representatives of the climate crisis as a whole.” When we bundle a highly localized disaster into an accumulation of disasters that tell us a story about the agglomeration of impacts and the climate emergency as a whole, Casey says we risk effacing the specificity of the struggles occurring at the local level: struggles not just against the impacts of a transforming climate, but also struggles for social and economic autonomy against global capitalism. I hadn’t thought about it that way before and that sense of being responsible to the specificity of place is something I’ve definitely taken with me from this conversation. There’s a few other things I’d mention: we talk about the “degrowth imaginary” and questions of the scale at which infrastructure ceases to be life-giving. We talk a lot about technology as a thing that gets privilege
Fri, September 22, 2023
Amanda Boetzkes contemplates what it means for waste to be charged with meaning
Amanda Boetzkes is a professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Guelph. Her research focuses on the intersection of ethics and art as these relate to ecology. I reached out to her because I’ve been trying to understand the problem of plastics for a long time. If you remember, I spoke to Heather Davis, Mark Simpson and Sarah King back in February about this intimidatingly large problem. I had been reading Amanda’s book Plastic Capitalism and couldn’t stop thinking about some of the challenges that it makes. We talk a lot about the ideas in that book, but also unpack some of the more recent writing she’s done. Incidentally, I’m excited about the project that she’s currently working on, which focuses on the different ways we can visualize different environments, and especially the environments of the circumpolar North. One of the most important observations Amanda makes in this conversation is that when art reveals something, it’s not necessarily “revealing something that’s hidden.” Often, what art does, she says, is drag us “deeper into the mud.” Instead of illuminating some obscured part of social reality or offering up epiphanies about society and our relationship to wild nature, art that engages with waste communicates that we are awash in waste but don’t know what to do with it; we have tons of plastic but not much plasticity; we’re bent on accumulating energy but don’t really value energy expenditure in any radical way. Most of it is mindless. If we don’t get to the bottom of why this is such a feature of the modern human condition, we aren’t likely to address the climate emergency. We’re more likely to just replace fossil fuels with some other energy input like solar and change nothing about our arrogant attitude towards the fuels we extract for energy. There is a lot in this conversation on the need to be more conscious and critical about energy consumption. After all, it is dangerous to be anything else. But what Boetzkes is asking is whether we are in denial, too, about the “irrevocable” damage we’ve already done to the biosphere. Art, ecology and ethics form a “big knot,” as she puts it, and what is implicated is nothing short of how we choose to live on the Earth. She leaves us with the idea that, while art “must be political,” science is undermined if it’s is too political. And yet, the examples she explores in her work question that assumption, or the opposition between art and science, in ways that help us rethink the distinctions that determine funding and influence our means of knowing the world before, during, and after oil.
Mon, September 11, 2023
Sarah Marie Wiebe searches for strategies to resist disaster and incite joy
Sarah Marie Wiebe is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Hawai'i, Mānoa with a focus on community development and environmental sustainability. She is a Co-Founder of the Feminist Environmental Research Network and a prolific writer. Her books include Everyday Exposure: Indigenous Mobilization and Environmental Justice in Canada's Chemical Valley, Biopolitical Disaster, Creating Spaces of Engagement: Policy Justice and the Practical Craft of Deliberative Democracy, Life Against States of Emergency, and very soon the book Hot Mess: Becoming a Mother during a Code Red Climate Emergency, which is set to come out from Fernwood Press in the near future. I wanted to talk to Sarah about what she calls the “points of connection” between “emotive” or “narrative” forms of communication and the work of “policy transformation.” There’s a point in this conversation where she admits that she’s still searching for examples of this in her work, and is clearly thrilled when she can find it, but it’s difficult to locate because we expect any sort of policymaking or deliberative process to be this cold, calculating thing, a means through which we reach consensus by rationally looking at all the data. But what can we make out of moments where the data of human experience radically exceeds the sorts of colonial logics that make policy? Sarah has a lot of faith in the power of arts-based strategies of policy transformation and affirming life against states of emergency. Part of the point is to convert anxiety into anger, despair into dedication, and the typically transactive parts of treaty into something far more transformative or iterative. What I really appreciate about the way that Sarah thinks through difficult problems is that she’s a settler scholar who doesn’t think it is acceptable for communicators to reduce the lives of Indigenous peoples to crisis. She realizes that there is power and import involved in naming and declaring an emergency, but grasps how focusing exclusively on crisis misrepresents and misunderstands the autonomy and vitality of Indigenous communities. So, the point, in some ways, is to identify and critique all of the colonial constraints–the siloed bureaucracy, the stunting education, the rapacious greed–that limits the flourishing of such communities. She describes this conundrum in terms of the “paradox of emergency,” or the paradox of locating democracy and democratic values in the context of emergency. It’s hard, when a crisis hits, to think about politics, but crises are inherently political, and the forms of expression that are licit or legible at the inception and in the perpetuation of crisis matter because they get to determine our response.
Wed, August 23, 2023
Raja Swamy moves from resilience to resistance in the struggle against exploitative development
Raja Swamy is a social anthropologist with an interest in the political economy and political ecology of natural disasters. In this conversation we unpack the ideas in his recent book Building Back Better in India: Development, NGOs, and Artisanal Fishers after the 2004 Tsunami. This is a disaster that killed nearly 230,000 people. It’s trauamtic, but Raja takes us into that trauma in order to talk about what it meant in the wake of that disaster for states and multinational companies to see it as an opportunity to rebuild in a manner that prioritized profit and alignment with global financial regimes, rather than in a way that put the needs of already existing grassroot networks and forms of collective labour first. Swamy’s generous, generative answers to my questions about his work tell an extraordinary story of globalization and its effects in post-tsunami India. He explores how “gifts” in that context were, in many cases, really a sort of lure or bribe, designed to displace existing worlds through incentivizing the realization of a different, more exploitative one. What he calls the “glib neoliberal rhetoric of reconstruction” really disregarded, and continues to disregard—as we enter a period of intensifying climate impacts—the energy, self-sufficiency, insight and agency of the so-called “developing world” and those whose lives, livelihoods and lifeworlds stand to be most affected by climate change. What would it mean, Raja asks, to look people in these frontline positions as the best guides to the future we want? We’re talking about the use of disaster for the purpose of pushing through opportunistic development, the privatizing of land and the displacement of populations from the world they know. It feels inevitable, this orientation of development toward the dictates of the free market, but it isn’t. Raja poses the question of why it is assumed that, in the interest of gaining autonomy or economic well-being, people should be forced into a position of, really, underdevelopment and neglect under neoliberalism. It’s in this context that he says we should be thinking about how to change the way we talk about things like climate adaptation, this idea of building back better. As he pointedly says: “Better for whom?” As disasters become more frequent and the need to build and rebuild becomes more profound and more pressing, we should be asking what kind of world we want, and who we mean when we say “we.”
Fri, August 04, 2023
Brenna Walsh factors in the social cost of carbon when fighting fossil fuel dependency
Brenna Walsh is the Energy Coordinator at the Ecology Action Center. She’s made a career out of bringing different communities together to strengthen and accelerate climate policy and action. Walsh is focused squarely on understanding what has worked and not worked in the past and on exploring new initiatives to build climate resistant communities. In this interview I aimed to get a deeper sense of the economic reasons behind the policy measure that’s usually referred to as a “carbon tax.” Brenna breaks down how that measure of carbon pricing is just one part of a whole array of emerging measures for addressing the climate crisis. We have Clean Fuel Regulations, a modest removal of some “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies at the federal level, among other policies and incentives. Brenna breaks it all down. I don’t want to spend too much time in this introduction giving an overview of the conversation actually, because the conversation itself is an overview of what we have in terms of tools for limiting carbon and some of the history of those tools. We start by talking about the conceptual and policy tool of the so-called “social cost of carbon,” and how that social cost is calculated in economic terms. The whole goal, though, is to figure out a means of building, really, a different system from the fossil fuel based one that we currently have. Walsh is interested in how to calculate the damages, but she’s more interested in bringing the diverse array of people that feel there is not enough being done into the conversation about crafting and supporting solutions. There are a few invaluable resources that Brenna cites that are included in these show notes. Overall, it’s a matter, though, of using these resources, and conversations like these, as a means of going further faster, of making a complex transition simpler, doable and more seamless for people at the grassroots level. RESOURCES: More Mobility, Less Mining: https://www.climateandcommunity.org/more-mobility-less-mining The State of Carbon Pricing in Canada: https://climateinstitute.ca/reports/the-state-of-carbon-pricing-in-canada/ Ecology Action Centre's Carbon Pricing FAQ: https://ecologyaction.ca/sites/default/files/2023-06/Carbon_tax_FAQ_2023.pdf
Fri, July 21, 2023
Paris Marx targets the gnarled roots of our broken transportation infrastructure
Paris Marx is a technology writer. They’ve written for TIME magazine, WIRED, CBC News, Jacobin, and OneZero. They speak internationally on the future of transportation. They also host the award-winning podcast 'Tech Won't Save Us,' which offers a much-needed critical perspective on the history and future implications of Big Tech. Their book, Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, was published by Verso Books in 2022. Our conversation mainly focuses on Road to Nowhere, why they wrote it in such an accessible way, the politics of communication in the context of a climate emergency, and what it says that we’re largely programmed to assume that technology—even technology that is produced for a profit by private multinational corporations—will save us. Paris’ book has a lot of answers, but doesn’t answer all the questions. I kinda push them to speak to some of the most problematic issues around public engagement and political mobilization. One of the really useful things about their approach is that it’s rooted in a sense that history is helpful if we look critically at the things we’ve been told are true about our car-centric infrastructure, and compare it with what a rigorous look at that history reveals. The history they offer is startling, in the sense that it shows a number of branching paths where our infrastructure could have looked very different if it wasn’t for powerful sites of capitalist production impinging on policy making in profound ways. There have been moments where massive amounts of public money was spent making a world that doesn’t work. We need to move in a radically different direction. There are nearly 1.5 billion vehicles on the planet. According to Marx, replacing them with more vehicles, this time around powered by batteries, is not a viable strategy. I ask them if we need to leverage the desire for disruptive change. What Paris says is really appealing to me: that “people are much more open to change than we give them credit for;” we are “incentivized to want to keep things as they are,” despite the dire ecological consequences, because the economic consequences of change are made so punitive. For this reason, “in the face of the climate crisis,” Paris points out that we have to push ourselves to understand the intertwined nature of “many seemingly separate struggles, over mobility, housing, health, community, and many others.” So, while the rate of vehicle collisions or pedestrian deaths might feel ordinary now, that doesn’t mean it has to be met with passive acceptance. What if we let it radicalize us again? Here in Halifax, we saw that process happen. A local activist named Steve MacKay organized a protest against political inaction and it was successful in getting traffic calming put on Robie Street. The data shows that vehicular deaths disproportionately occur in poor neighborhoods, and not enough is being done. If part of the problem is just acceptance, the answer might
Fri, July 07, 2023
Thomas Beller takes a step back and looks at basketball more critically
Thomas Beller is Associate Professor of English at Tulane University, a regular contributor to the New Yorker, and the author of J. D. Salinger: The Escape Artist, How to Be a Man, and Seduction Theory, among other books. He’s noted that his writing differs in form and genre but tends to share a lot of the same preoccupations: “the dynamics of relationships, a sense of place, and a preoccupation with the nature and effect of time.” We talk in this conversation about his book Lost in the Game: A Book About Basketball, which is definitely concerned with this question of time. I ask him about his sense that pickup basketball especially has “its own time… ruled by the sun, or by the night lights… or by the willingness of those with a ball to keep shooting in the dark.” We even circle around to this experience of shooting in the dark and try to see it as a metaphor for players that have a way of approaching the game with a second sight of sorts—players like Nikola Jokic or Kareem Abdul-Jabber: these all-time great titans of the game. But we also zoom in on the embodied experience of putting up shots and what it means for practice to feel like something that is both meditative and ritualistic, mindful and maniacal. Thomas was kind of astonished that I care as much as I do about basketball. And of course this is a podcast that is often very serious, where I am clearly really dedicated to working through some despairing and deeply scary issues with people. So, in a sense, this episode is almost like an interlude between these more serious concerns; but honestly I take basketball pretty seriously too. In the same way that Marcus Boon spoke to me about his personal relationship with music over the years—how music lets us think about the sort of war for our time that people are constantly engaged in—I wanted to talk to Beller because I think his ideas are also about that pursuit of a more engaging, autonomous relationship to time, beyond just being “productive” for the sake of it. As he puts it in the book: there is joy in “being lost in the game… a joy that doesn’t have to be relinquished.” So Thomas and I talk about what we love about basketball, the things about the sport that fill us with ambivalence, and why we keep coming back to it. We both admit that it’s kind of a mystery. In the end, we get to a point where we sort of say we appreciate both the “anarchic” and “analytic” aspects of the game. The dance and the discipline. Why do we care about a sport that still tends to be dominated by a discourse of intense and androcentric competition? Is that healthy? What kind of a use of public space is playground basketball? What effects has professionalization had on the sport?
Fri, June 23, 2023
Amy Cardinal Christianson on Indigenous fire stewardship as climate action & cultural practice
Amy Cardinal Christianson is a Fire Research Scientist with the Canadian Forest Service. Her research on Indigenous fire stewardship, Indigenous wildland firefighters, and wildfire evacuations is important to any sort of comprehensive view of the shockingly intense wildfires that have burned 4 million hectares so far this year in Canada, and that produced almost 60 million tonnes of CO2 in May. She’s also the co-host of the invaluable Good Fire podcast, which I strongly recommend you listen to. She and Matthew Kristoff talk to luminaries on the contemporary reality of fire’s extreme intensity and destructiveness, and what can be done to restore a balanced relationship with fire. She’s the author of an abundance of work in this field, but I’ll just highlight two co-authored books: First Nations Wildfire Evacuations and Blazing the Trail: Celebrating Indigenous Fire Stewardship. Amy is drawing attention to realities and precarities that are too often ignored in the colonial state of Canada. She makes it clear that the impacts of today’s fire are “generational” where First Nations and Metis communities are “not [going to be] able to participate in their cultural activities on their land base for a long time.” While that is criminal—the uneven impacts of wildfires that have been supercharged by greenhouse gases and global heating—the irony is that future-oriented forms of Indigenous fire stewardship have historically been outlawed in Canada, the US and Australia, in particular. Amy helps us understand the history and motivations behind that policing of cultural fire. Her research is tough for a number of reasons, and not least because, she says, even though she is a Métis woman from Treaty 8 territory, it’s hard to earn the sort of trust necessary to learn fully how Indigenous peoples have preserved their cultural fire practices. In her words: “for Indigenous nations there’s a long history of distrust around fire with outside people” and “outside agencies.” It’s also becoming difficult to talk about the practice of prescribed burning because of the ways that climate change is altering the atmosphere and making conditions more volatile. Nonetheless, the things she has learned are eye-opening and progressive, reaching down to the roots of the problem of conflagration and problematizing things like land use planning and building design from a deeply decolonial perspective.
Wed, June 07, 2023
John Vaillant confronts the climate-induced brutality of modern wildfires
John Vaillant is the award-winning author of bestselling nonfiction books like The Golden Spruce and The Tiger. He’s written articles for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic and The Walrus. His latest book—Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast—is focused on how the conditions that human beings have created through the burning of fossil fuels and the acceleration of capitalist development are producing the sorts of enormous wildfires that we’re seeing right now. So far this year 2.7m hectares have burned across Canada, compared to the roughly 150 thousand that we typically expect. That’s an increase of 18 times over the norm. The fire season has never been this extensive or intense. There are wildfires from coast to coast; including in places that have never seen fires of this magnitude. This is a shocking trend, and it is not a trend that will reverse. Our forests sequester carbon, so when a wildfire occurs it leads to an increase in carbon emissions. It shouldn’t be lost in the fear that we’re feeling, as we view the images and videos of huge swaths of the country going up in flames, that wildfire was the biggest source of carbon emissions in Canada last year. Climate warming is driving an increase in the area burned and Vaillant’s book is absolutely clear about the role of global warming and unsustainable development in fueling these fires. Firefighters are acknowledging that modern fire, especially at the border between forests and urban areas, is unlike anything they’ve ever seen. Fires we can’t fight are emerging as normal under the conditions of a code red climate emergency. How can we respond to this reality without succumbing to panic? How can we let it radicalize and mobilize us? I appreciate the pointed ways that Fire Weather grasps the roots of why we are mired in an incendiary sense of what’s normal because of our attachment to fossil fuels. He says that, in the face of that attachment, we have the “incredible confronting inconvenience of climate change.” These shifts in the earth’s balance confront us, but this means we need to confront the drivers. And the drivers are, he says, “unregulated free market capitalism,” a “growth pattern” that mimics the destructive force of these megafires. In Canada, that means confronting a fossil fuel industry that remains mired in business as usual despite all of the signs that the industry must strand its assets, accept a relinquishing of control, and a transition off of oil and gas. In Alberta, the eye of the storm, there is—Vaillant says—a “provincial identity,” a “structure and infrastructure” and a “history” that is “built around petroleum.” What do we do about that province’s politics and its resistance to the necessary change? One thing Vaillant does in Fire Weather is talk about a trauma which people in Alberta, he says, do not want to talk about: the striking and scarring 2016 wildfires that consumed and destroyed Fort McMurray. Almost 100,000 people, he writes, “were forc
Fri, May 12, 2023
Dru Oja Jay & James Steinhoff guide us through the hype & hysteria around AI
Dru Oja Jay is an author, organizer and web developer who currently serves as Executive Director of CUTV and Publisher of The Breach. He’s also a co-founder of the Media Co-op and Friends of Public Services. He wrote a book with Nikolas Barry-Shaw called Paved with Good Intentions: Canada's Development NGOs from Idealism to Imperialism. James Steinhoff is an Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow in the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin. His research focuses on the political economy of algorithmic technologies, data and digital labour. We talk about his stunning, insightful book Automation and Autonomy: Labour, Capital and Machines in the Artificial Intelligence Industry, which is chock full of information about the history of AI and its relationship to capitalist modes of production. I should note, too, that he co-authored a book called Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism in 2019, which is also a great book on AI. It feels as though every other day we encounter a new angle or emerging fact around machine learning, generative AI, and the incipient market for these sorts of data-driven digital products. Whether it’s the billions of investment dollars that are driving the sudden boom in startups focusing on applications of generative AI, concerns about automation and job loss, concerns about plagiarism with the saturation achieved by ChatGPT, or important discussions about the exploited labour force that makes ChatGPT’s core functions possible (an army of US contractors are being paid about $15 per hour to perform the pivotal work of data labeling that enables the platform), we’re being inundated by information about this supposed technological revolution. And that inundation is firing up the hype cycle, further fueling investment. Here we talk about the goals of the capitalist class in determining the future of AI. What will fragmentation of the labour force look like in the wake of this technological change? Are large language models going to replace human communicators? Does this signal a last shifting in the market for intellectual labour? What about all of the data that is collected to drive the creation of those large language models? Can we imagine ways to produce machine learning out of that massive corporate capture of our data? Whose data is it anyway? There are lots of changes coming, there is no question. But the question too few of us are asking is: who will be in command of that change? In the EU, there is the AI Act, which Steinhoff calls a “watershed moment” in the regulation of private business and its enclosure of AI technology. Jay reminds us that, when it comes to the potential for public and democratic control of data, even though it seems like an unfair fight, we still “have to start building power somewhere.” We also dig into fictional representations of AI. We ponder what movies like Terminator 2: Judgment Day get right in terms of AI generating it
Mon, April 24, 2023
Evan Newman dwells with the quandary of musicians concerned about the climate crisis
Evan Newman is the Managing Director of Outside Music. Outside Music is an independent record label roster that includes a number of award-winning artists. It's one of the leading independent distributers in Canada. Some of the artists Outside Music has worked with include Jill Barber, The Weather Station, Rose Cousins, Aidan Knight, and Justin Rutledge. In 2019, Outside Music launched Next Door Records, a new label designed to provide equitable support and creative freedom to their songwriting community. I spoke with Evan about Next Door's mandate, and what it means for fostering work that engages with the politics of our climate emergency. In a condition of crisis, what can musicians do, beyond what they're doing: writing songs? Can they use what Evan describes as their "stature" to not only move audiences, but also encourage movement at the policy level to respond to carbon-intensive human activities, like how folks get to shows, how they get their music, and whether they're producing all kinds of plastic waste at those shows? Evan runs Outside Music with the passion of a fan. In this conversation he talks about how the rationale for who they work with does come down to who they're inspired by, the music they feel really needs to be heard. Part of this is also built on the faith that, as he says here, "music can enact change." If it's true that--and I agree with him on this point--the overwhelming deluge of information from news and other sources isn't necessarily communicating the urgency of eco-catastrophe, then music might need to not only move people, but move into a place of mobilizing people. The way it does that it through communicating a language of feeling: speaking to peoples' anger, anxiety, their stress and even their solipsism; letting them into the conversation about what climate politics should look like. As an educator in the music business program at the Nova Scotia Community College, he says he's working with young people who are attuned to the reality of the climate crisis, and curious about how to craft a way of working with artists that is environmentally ethical. He clearly derives some hope from knowing that these folks are working to figure out ways of changing an industry that, in his words, is still necessarily "tethered to capitalism." The mere fact that a new generation is entering the conversation about how music and climate change, arts and commerce, the environment and consumerism, means that transformation could become easier to imagine. I'll be discussing these issues with Evan, along with Shannon Miedema, Kim Fry, Joanna Bull, Waye Mason and Braden Lam this Wednesday, April 26th at Halifax's Central Library. The free event is titled "Changing the Tune on Climate," and will feature a number of performances by artists like Akuakultre, T. Thomason, The Gilberts, and Kristen Martell. We hope you'll attend... it will be a celebration of music, and an interesting discussion of environmental justice. Changing the T
Fri, April 21, 2023
Angele Alook & David Gray-Donald breathe new life into the struggle for a habitable planet
Dr. Angele Alook is an Assistant Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University. As a member of Bigstone Cree Nation in Treaty 8 territory, her research has mainly focused on the political economy of oil and gas in Alberta. She specializes in Indigenous feminisms, life course approaches, Indigenous research methodologies, cultural identity, and the sociology of family and work. David Gray-Donald is a settler media worker in tkaronto (Toronto). He worked as a climate campaigner at Environmental Defence from 2022 to March 2023. He’s also worked as the publisher of Briarpatch, a news and analysis magazine with strong anti-poverty, feminist and decolonial politics, and the publicity and promotions Manager at Between the Lines. He’s the current publisher of The Grind magazine in Toronto, and is the co-author of the new book The End of This World: Climate Justice in So-called Canada (https://btlbooks.com/book/the-end-of-this-world). The other authors of the book are Emily Eaton, Joël Laforest, Crystal Lameman and Bronwen Tucker. We focus primarily on The End of This World, an absolutely indispensable text for understanding and acting on our climate crisis paradox. There is far too much in that book for me to even attempt to summarize it, but what I’d like to emphasize is that it is proactive, decolonial, and radical, in the sense of identifying the fundamental roots of our climate emergency in a relationship to land that they and others describe as “extractivist.” That term can be tricky; as Imre Szeman and Jennifer Wenzel have explained, it is a term that designates not just the practice of extraction, but the ideological project of making extraction from the earth for private gain and consumer use seem completely natural, normal, and inevitable. Against that, and in response to the threats inherent to global warming, Angele and David, along with their co-authors, look to imagine alternative futures, futures that aren’t even just limited to decarbonization, but that respond in rigorous ways to the question of what it will mean to decolonize and decarbonize as two aspects of the same mission to save our planet. For Angele, the point is to emphasize the possibility and urgency of imagining ways of “building an economy based on systems of care” to replace what she calls our “death economy.” She and David make it crystal clear that the goal has to be not only respecting Indigenous sovereignty and inherent rights, but supporting everyone. This is a struggle for the future of a habitable planet, after all. And the push for a just transition has to confront that challenge with a sober sense of how to lift up not just workers in the oil and gas industry, but also people in the service industry who work to facilitate that industry, the people who take care of all the care labour, the domestic forms of caring that are usually performed by women and that are always left not only unattended to, but unrewarded. I’m releasing
Thu, April 13, 2023
Moira Weigel listens closely to entrepreneurs working within Amazon’s empire
Moira Weigel is a scholar and founding editor of Logic magazine. Originally trained in modern languages, including German and Mandarin Chinese, she now studies digital media in a global context. You might have heard of her first book, Labor of Love: the Invention of Dating, from 2016, which is about how modern dating co-evolved with consumer capitalism and other forms of gendered work. Her second book, co-edited with Ben Tarnoff, is Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do and How They Do It. It is based in interviews that Weigel and Tarnoff conducted with workers at every level of the Bay Area tech industry, from startup founders to cafeteria workers. Her current research focuses on transnational e-commerce entrepreneurs, and that’s really our main focus here, since Moira recently published an incredible overview of Amazon’s reach and global strength: a lengthy report that she titled “Amazon’s Trickle-Down Monopoly.” (https://datasociety.net/library/amazons-trickle-down-monopoly/) What’s interesting is that she acknowledges the fact that we might not be particularly keen to sit and theorize the impact of the restructuring of the retail business in the 21st century, but it’s actually really important. What, we might ask, does “Amazon’s lack of accountability to the sellers that use it” indicate, in terms of the nature of platform capitalism? Weigel points out that “businesses [like Amazon] are really governed algorithmically in a way that undermines their [sellers’] entrepreneurial autonomy.” And yet, the way that Amazon often justifies its existence is by saying that it is a staunch “ally of small business.” Weigel unpacks this paradox by looking at what her interviewees said about negotiating the Amazon marketplace. The lack of accountability that Amazon enjoys, despite employing hundreds of thousands of people, expresses itself through, in part, these seemingly arbitrary decisions that the company makes—so, things like banning accounts, restricting certain sellers or constraining the flow of certain products. Those decisions are often experienced by sellers as “mistakes,” according to Weigel’s research. But in her analysis they could be part of what she describes as a sort of “regulatory risk shift,” a means of both policing an increasingly complicated marketplace and navigating a complex regulatory environment. Making things circuitous benefits Amazon by keeping things opaque. And understanding the make-up of the company’s power is similarly muddy. It was difficult for Moira to even do this research because of how hard it was to actually locate people to interview. That difficulty itself, she says, revealed something about the way that Amazon’s monopoly is maintained. As she puts it, “recruiting failures [were] an important finding.” Nonetheless, the report she’s put together came about as the result of building trust with sellers and realizing that people, if given the chance, wanted to talk about their experiences in
Fri, March 24, 2023
Wendy Chun rejects the unsustainable assumptions that govern networks & make technology undemocratic
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun holds the Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. She’s also the Director of the Digital Democracies Institute there. The Digital Democracies Institute is a group of scholars and stakeholders from around the world who collaborate across disciplines to generate more democratic technologies and cultures. Wendy herself has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she uses to understand contemporary trends and threats within digital media and emerging technologies. She is the author of books like Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media, and Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition. In this episode, Wendy and I talk about how existing network structures reinforce discrimination. She’s one of a string of theorists who have been critical of what she calls the “segregationist defaults” that exist within these networks that we’re supposed to assume are mechanical, other-than-human, and thus somehow devoid of prejudice. Instead, she says ‘no’: in fact, “Twentieth-century eugenics and twenty-first-century data analytics… both promote or presume segregation.” This gives us a new way to approach the problem of political polarization. Chun argues that the assumption that people typically seek to associate with those that are like them—that look and think and act like alike—this assumption about a seemingly intuitive human tendency to group together in homogeneous ways is an assumption that historically produces itself as a fact. So it is not that homogeneous groups will somehow just naturally clash with other homogeneous groups, it is that an “unsustainable” assumption about homogeneity and homophily as baseline realities has obscured the inherent democratic virtue of difference and a diversity of worldviews. This “erases conflict,” but not in the sense of finding a way to cope with it or resolve it. And so, especially in an algorithm-driven era, polarization proliferates with overwhelming force. We talk about these ideas that challenge the common sense assumptions that folks often have about the nature of contemporary technology, and also tackle things like facial recognition technology, the fact of artificial intelligence being an increasingly normal part of our lives. Wendy’s point is that facial recognition and machine learning are used in insidious, often exploitative, and almost always in discriminatory ways, but that they don’t need to be. AI, she says, doesn’t need to be a “nightmare” that undermines and displaces “human decision-making.” What if these technologies were democratized? What if—and it may seem implausible, given the tech monopolies that silently govern many of our interactions through the diffusion of different technologies—what if there was broader public power and greater particip
Fri, March 17, 2023
Alexander Etkind spotlights the asymmetrical sacrifice & oil curse at the core of the War in Ukraine
Alexander Etkind joined the Department of International Relations at Central European University in 2022. He previously taught at the European University Institute in Florence, and at several other institutions. His research looks at the extreme challenges of global decarbonization and security in Eastern Europe. Much of his past writing is concerned with the question of memory, of European intellectual history, and of empires and decolonization. He’s the author of many books, including Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied, Nature’s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources, and a really interesting new book called Russia Against Modernity which comes out in April. Here we talk about the war in Ukraine, but in the longue durée of various societies’ relationship to the natural resources they use and abuse for the purpose of development. Etkind says that the patterns that we see play out in terms of what is sometimes called the “oil curse” are not totally new. This is a big part of the argument of Nature’s Evil: he sees the “resource curse” unfold at a number of points in human history with other sources of energy, like wood and peat. There are ways that oil is unique, though. The “paradigmatic relationship,” for Etkind is between resource-rich and resource-dependent states, when it comes to oil. And he sees that division in terms of degrees of democracy. In the resource-rich state of Russia, the current regime sees the need to maintain a monopoly on information in order to perpetuate its unequal command of the revenue from the carbon-intensive resources it is founded on. Etkind writes about the dilemma of confronting autocratic petrostates on the problem of climate change, and confronts the seemingly unsolvable problem of how the state—which, he states, is actually the only entity that “stands between the energy barons and the tragedy of drowned cities”—can be made to radically disentangle itself from fossil fuels. He senses that, in Russia, the monopoly on information is weakening. That within the country there is an intergenerational war taking place over the future of the federation, given that a mass exodus of young people fled to what he says are “not very hospitable environments” rather than accept the propaganda and suppression that staying in the country would have meant. While, for him, this is admittedly a “modest grounds for hope,” it is still a source. The persistent problem, though, is that reducing emissions and saving the atmosphere from the death-dealing effects of CO2 will require a sustained period of peace. Once war breaks out, energy transition becomes inconceivable. Forms of feminist organizing and protest, the environmental movement, organized groups who refuse the trauma of war and the tragedy of drowned cities, these are sites of hope for Etkind, but the ongoing “asymmetr
Fri, March 03, 2023
Natasha Lennard lauds the successes of social movements & the vitality of oppositional rage
Natasha Lennard is a Contributing Writer for the Intercept, and her work has appeared regularly in the New York Times, Esquire, Vice, Salon, and the New Inquiry, among others. She teaches in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program at The New School for Social Research and is the author of two books: Violence: Humans in Dark Times, co-edited with Brad Evans, and Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life, from Verso Books. In this interview I ask Natasha about the recent murder, by police, of Tyre Nichols, Keenan Anderson, and the environmental activist known as Tortuguita. She talks about the fact that these are just three of the more prominent deaths this year alone at the hands of police, and explains the relationship of these losses to the inherent violence of policing. What she makes clear is that, despite the fact that cops don’t stop or prevent crime, and actually produce more violence than they stop, it is still the case that, for a number of reasons, the burden is never on those who align with carceral thinking to defend the police. And why is that the case? Because there is a deep ideological attachment to police and policing, to so-called “justice” in a carceral world. And that attachment is fed by a regime of representation that reinforces the heroism of cops in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. As a means of working through this problem, Natasha talks about Antonio Gramsci’s notion of “common sense” as a tool for understanding some of the baseline assumptions that exist to regulate action and reaction. These are some complicated issues. And she admits that it’s tricky. While we can fall into the trap of using what feel like exhausted ideas, the trap of political theatre, Lennard’s analysis has a way of cutting through the contradictions and centring the fact of ongoing oppression. If you do that, then you move out of the theoretical debates about strategy and into the streets. For this reason, she celebrates the small but nimble and durable protests against Cop City in Atlanta. She speaks ardently in support of the need for trans liberation, and articulates that imperative against the array of powerful revanchist far-right forces who stand against it.
Tue, February 21, 2023
Sarah King vies to end the plastic era by closing loopholes and confronting industry
Sarah King is the Head of Greenpeace Canada's Oceans & Plastics campaign. Pushing for a plastics-free future by holding corporations accountable for the growing plastics pollution crisis, Sarah has worked to protect our oceans and ocean-dependent communities for over a decade. She studied in the Environmental Applied Science and Management programme at Toronto Metropolitan University, and has worked at a consulting firm doing environmental impact assessments in order to help determine the scope of negative impacts associated with various development projects. I speak with her about the place of plastics in our everyday lives, the impact that plastics have on the environment, and the many ways that the Trudeau government’s plastics ban is woefully inadequate. I won’t summarize everything that Sarah explains here, but I will quote a particularly pithy summary of her position: she says that, in fact, “the entire category [of single use plastics] is a problem,” because of the overwhelming scale of production and our “lacking and disjointed infrastructure.” She stresses that the government is actually “very scared… to take strong action to hold industry… accountable. The result tends to be policies that benefit industry and do nothing to protect the environment. Loopholes can be found throughout Canada’s environmental regulations, and that means profit over survival. We have a new set of policies that the Liberal government is claiming will give us a “zero plastic waste” future by 2030, but King is very pointed in her assertion that, actually, the government has to know that this is a false promise: in her words, “they have to be looking at that [target] knowing that it’s impossible,” given the state of environmental protections in this country and the incredibly minor push to end plastics production and pollution. Confronting industry and closing loopholes is all about moving radically in a different direction. King says that embracing a “reuse and refill revolution” would legitimately “signal the end of the plastic era” and begin to seriously challenge “our fossil-fuel-dependent system” in which “the wrong things are valued.” Getting to that entirely reasonable, feasible alternative will take a project of accelerated solidarity-building, though, because the lobby for fossil fuels and petrochemicals is very strong. For this reason, King is really looking for more alignment between segments of the environmental movement. We’re starting to see this, and to see a shift both toward the centring of “the people that are most impacted” when it comes to “crafting solutions and a way forward” and toward, as Sarah puts it, “addressing not just our planetary crisis, but also our social justice crises around the world.”
Fri, February 10, 2023
Heather Davis and Mark Simpson deconstruct the toxic and unknown properties of plastics
Heather Davis is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at The New School in New York whose work draws on feminist and queer theory to examine ecology, materiality, and contemporary art in the context of settler colonialism. Her new book, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022), explores the transformation of geology, media, and bodies in light of plastic’s saturation. Davis is a member of the extraordinary Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and expose plastic pollution in the Great Lakes. Mark Simpson is a settler scholar and professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, where he investigates US culture, energy humanities, and mobility studies. He is Principal Investigator for “Transition in Energy, Culture and Society,” a multi-year research project with Future Energy Systems at the U of A. His work has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Radical Philosophy, Postmodern Culture, and English Studies in Canada, among other venues. In this conversation Heather and Mark talk about how we are, in general, “so saturated by” an animated, often willfully hopeful communication style when it comes to environmental threats that it becomes easy to “turn off” and ignore the direness of present and future ecocide. We focus on figuring out what it could mean to adopt different communication strategies that are organized around conveying a sense of “vulnerability,” “embodiedness,” and “kinship.” If plastics are, in Davis’ words, a “much more intimate manifestation of oil,” and represent a major gap between, to quote Simpson, the experience of the “unseen” and the experience of the “invisible,” then it might be necessary to approach the problem using methods that aren’t familiar, but that are actively “defamiliarizing.” Keeping in mind that their focus is on inquiring about what is not known about plastics, Heather points out that the “timeline for plastics is actually incredibly undetermined” and that “we really don’t know what we’re doing,” fundamentally, when it comes to the whole life cycle of plastics, from feedstock extraction to chemical processing to material production and distribution, to dematerialization. The way Heather puts it is that “we’re fumbling around in the dark,” and in “our hubris” think we are in control. Part of Mark’s research focuses on how this hubris cannot be divorced from the unstable sense of mastery bred by petroculture. He’s written on the simulated sense of smoothness that the energy regime of fossil fuels tries to maintain, even as it becomes more and more of a struggle to maintain it, as the obviousness of the truth of climate breakdown becomes apparent. There is a sort of circularity or stuckness that, they say, we’re still, reluctantly, mired in. And plastics are a primary aspect of that: plastic forms a barrier, a “barricade” that lets us preserve a false sense that we are invulnerable, impe
Wed, February 01, 2023
Kim Fry rallies musicians to take a stand on energy transition and the climate crisis
Kim Fry is a co-founder and board member for Music Declares Emergency Canada along with her daughter Brighid Fry from the indie rock band Housewife. Music Declares Emergency is a group of artists, music industry professionals and organisations that are looking to create solidarity in declaring a climate and ecological emergency and demanding an immediate governmental response to preserve life on Earth. Kim has worked on energy efficiency and climate but has also spent a lot of her career as an elementary school teacher, a union activist, a staunch climate justice activist and environmental campaigner. She’s worked for a number of environmental organizations, which is part of the reason she’s found herself devising strategies for Music Declares Emergency, which is moving to get a seat at the policy table by using the specific capacities of music to move people. Our conversation covers a number of different things that we’re both curious about in relation to these capacities. But we also dwell with the material problems associated with the music industry at a time of escalating climate emergencies. How does the music industry contribute to climate change and what should be done to correct some of its impacts? Thinking in these terms helps us move beyond the tempting, but also fairly limiting, logic of condemning particular artists for their hypocrisy, their ostentatious lifestyles, etc., and into a conversation about the kind of music scenes and spaces of meaningful local music participation we’d like to see. What kinds of structural and infrastructural changes might have to be put in place for that to be realized? We’re also concerned here with problems around genre, what kinds of music resonate, which tones seem out of touch with the complexity and urgency of the crisis created by an unaccountable fossil fuel industry and infrastructure… And we can’t help but land on the fact that it’s extremely complicated: there is undeniable power and influence in celebrity, and there is an inarguable concentration of power in a still quite monopolistic music industry. Transforming these things takes time that we do not have. The pace of change we need is more like a metal song, but what we’ve got is plaintive folk. It’s not an easy problem to solve, this stuckness, but Kim encourages us to remember the meaning of the word folk – it’s meant to be the music of the people. Just as pop is meant to be the music that is popular at a given time. This might give us an opening for thinking about the emergence of a new music nomenclature for conveying the climate breakdown that is coming if nothing stands in its way.
Fri, January 13, 2023
Tanner Mirrlees wrestles with American militarism and the cultural projection of imperial power
Tanner Mirrlees (https://twitter.com/tmirrlees_) is the Director of the Communication and Digital Media Studies program at Ontario Tech University. His current research focuses on topics in the political economy of communications such as war and media, work and labour in the creative and digital industries, and the links between far-right hate groups and social media platforms. He’s the author of Hearts and Mines: The US Empire's Cultural Industry, Global Entertainment Media: Between Cultural Imperialism and Cultural Globalization, co-author of EdTech Inc.: Selling, Automating and Globalizing Higher Education in the Digital Age, and the co-editor of Media Imperialism: Continuity and Change and The Television Reader. He’s also heavily involved in efforts to spread the knowledge practices of academia beyond the university. So, he has appeared in documentaries like Theatres of War (https://vimeo.com/ondemand/theatersofwar) and Myths on Screen, and contributed to putting together podcasts like Darts & Letters’ Dangers of Techno-utopianism series. Our conversation is an attempt to wrestle with American militarism, especially but not exclusively as it finds form through popular cultural representation. There is a very long history, Tanner points out, of the US Department of Defence investing in media products that project American military power in precisely the way the DoD wants. While this collusion is now loosely understood, Mirrlees’ insights point us to specific aspects of the ongoing partnership. We talk about the massive popularity of films like Captain Marvel and Top Gun: Maverick—spending a lot of time unpacking the dizzying spectacle of Maverick, one of 2022’s biggest movies: truly a dizzying spectacle, in terms of the gap between dramatized surreality and the actual logistics of military operations. Even though the DoD’s stated policy is that it will support films that give a “realistic” and “authentic” representation of the military, the reality of the representational choices in Maverick expose how tenuous that grip on reality needs to be, and in fact how films benefit financially and technology from the Pentagon when they fudge the facts firmly in their favour. There are long standing fears that drive this sort of forceful fabulation: one is the fear of a decline in the United States’ imperial power, relative to other influential states like China and Russia. Another is the threat of nuclear annihilation. The Pentagon’s particular investment in how Hollywood represents this threat has shifted over time, with Tom Cruise’s last two big action films, Mission Impossible: Fallout and Maverick, centring on this threat as a chief way to threaten the integrity and hegemony of American empire. Mirrlees offers some valuable commentary on how Maverick was written out of a time in the recent past where the threat of Iran enriching uranium was front of mind in US security planning. The United States has waged wars without end for a very long time. Th
Fri, December 16, 2022
El Jones strengthens the bonds of solidarity and fights for the abolition of prisons
El Jones is a poet, journalist, professor and activist living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She teaches in the department of Political and Canadian Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University. She’s the author of Live from the Afrikan Resistance!, a collection of poems about resisting white colonialism. Her work focuses on feminism, prison abolition, anti-racism and decolonization. In Rehearsals for Living, Robyn Maynard describes El as a “Black liberation visionary and long-time prison abolitionist [who] was nourishing abolitionist freedom dreams for years before the public would listen.” Since 2016, El has co-hosted a radio show called Black Power Hour on CKDU-FM. We talk about the important role that show played in producing the sorts of bonds that allowed for more substantial and sustained prison organizing. El explains how the show translated into building relationships, which translated into legal advocacy, a significant prison strike, and the creation of a manifesto demanding justice for those behind bars. The show led to the creation of a “kind of trust where” people like Abdoul Abdi could get to know El, feel connected, and from positions where they are made to feel utterly disconnected from the rest of the world. El’s been on the podcast before, but this is a special occasion, because she’s just put out a book that represents, as she’s put it elsewhere, her “life’s work.” The book, which you should order from Fernwood right now, is called Abolitionist Intimacies. It’s started to appear on a number of lists of the best nonfiction books of 2022, and it is a difficult-to-describe intervention. As El describes it, the different parts of the book, the different approaches to writing in it, are kind of “in conversation with each other;” she says that different images and events “preoccupy” her throughout and tend to show up again and again in this iterative, poetic, meditative way. But the main idea of the book, she states very simply, is “friendship,” it’s about love. What is by no means simple, though, is the book’s preoccupation with the barriers to that friendship and love. Those barriers are not housed in the hearts and minds of the incarcerated, she says, but in the phone system that makes it near impossible to maintain communication with the world, the guards who police contact in the prison, the administrators who ban people from coming in. El is asking: How can anything like intimacy be sustained under those conditions? One way that she has cultivated over time is by thinking a lot about the power and the intimacy of voice. So much of Abolitionist Intimacies is about voice, voices heard over the phone, over the radio. There is so much joy there. And pain, too. Someone’s voice, and the feeling of connection, can change your day. Take you away. There are some indelible moments in El’s book where she documents exactly this sort of witnessing: witnessing the strength of connections across borders and through walls. Against the tyranny of a ca
Mon, December 05, 2022
Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay & Alexis Shotwell diagnose systems & document the timescales of disease
Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay is clinical faculty at the McGill Department of Family Medicine, focusing on supporting rural and low-resource practice. Mukhopadhyay organises around issues related to extractivism, migrant rights, policing, public services and decolonizing global health within local and international networks and collectives. Alexis Shotwell is a Professor in Carleton University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Her academic work addresses impurity, environmental justice, racial formation, disability, unspeakable and unspoken knowledge, sexuality, gender, and political transformation. She is the co-investigator for the AIDS Activist History Project (aidsactivisthistory.ca), and the author of Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding from 2011, and Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times from 2016. We discuss Baj’s new book from Fernwood Publishing, Country of Poxes: Three Germs and the Taking of Territory. In the book, we get an innovative technique for telling the history of colonialism and its effects on past and present capacities for collective survival, threatened as it has always been by microscopic entities that enter our bodies and undermine a misplaced and sinister pretence to mastery. In this conversation we talk about the question of culpability. Baj’s book prompts Alexis to think about agency and how illness is distributed. In her reading, its argument stresses how social actors have made consequential choices in the past, and how, as Baj writes in the book, “reflecting on these experiences in the past” can enable “those of us who believe in a more just, a more healed… future” to “contribute in some way to cobbling together a truer liberation.” You won’t just learn a lot by reading Country of Poxes—a text that focuses on the colonial continua of smallpox, tuberculosis, and syphilis—you’ll also learn, I think, to think differently about the tendency to accept suffering and death. The book historicizes contemporary diagnostic tools, dominant and subordinate ideologies of care in health, as well as the struggle for radical alternatives to the “fragile” health care systems we currently have. Mukhopadhyay’s articles from Briarpatch and Upping the Anti: https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/the-labour-of-care https://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/19-care-as-colonialism Country of Poxes: https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/country-of-poxes
Mon, November 14, 2022
Fab Filippo & Gray Powell describe the humour & humility required to care & create in a messy world
Fab Filippo is an actor, screenwriter, and playwright. Most recently, he co-created, wrote, and directed the critically acclaimed comedy-drama “Sort Of,” for CBC and HBO Max. A winner of a slew of awards, Sort Of (https://gem.cbc.ca/media/sort-of/) is the main focus here, but Fab has also worked on a huge array of shows and films over the years, from his work writing and directing Save Me, to co-writing the true crime indie film Perfect Sisters. Gray Powell has worked all over Canada with various theatre companies, but has spent the most time acting at The Shaw Festival where he is a Festival star. His most recent film and television credits include “Hudson & Rex,” “Designated Survivor,” “Murdoch Mysteries,” and the Netflix film ARQ. My conversation with Fab and Gray grew out of an article that I just wrote for CBC that focuses on this fantastic show Sort Of, a series focused on the character of Sabi, played so captivatingly by Bilal Baig, who is also the show’s co-creator, executive producer and writer. My article talks about my experience as the father of a transgender kid in the 21st century, and about how the show challenges us as caregivers to consider the emotional labour that kids, and especially gender nonconforming kids, often have to do to support their parents. The show has caused me to think about some of my own ideas around identity. It is remarkable for the ways it does this through subtle storytelling, rather than by being didactic or “preachy.” And this is one of the things that we talk about a lot in this conversation: how does a show that’s built, in part, out the parameters of trying to find arts funding in Canada create a tone that is “gentle” and “subtle,” without losing its edge or abandoning its radical commitment to honesty, gender and racial inclusion, intersectionality, and queer love? Fab senses that one defining feature of the new Canadian flourishing of progressive television might be an interest in “cross-sectionality.” At a couple of points here Fab talks about how he’s “thrilled by existence of this interview with Gray” because of the original genesis of Sort Of: to make a show about how each of us is going through transitions, and about how “not all transitions are alike.” The three of us talk about what it means to try to constantly learn and be humble as dads, to negotiate “ego” and be adaptable. Fab’s point is well-taken here: he reminds us that “you cannot engineer your child.” Just like, as an artist, they have to “let go of… perfectionism,” being a parent means relinquishing control of your kids and giving them “room to be new.” The result, with Sort Of, is a show where every character has a distinct voice and three dimensions, the humour feels organic, and yet the overall tone feels cohesive. A rare feat. And one accomplished, they say, but creating a creative environment that respects difference and that seeks difference.
Fri, November 04, 2022
Marcus Boon amplifies the spiritual, mathematical and political aspects of music
Marcus Boon is Professor of English at York University, Toronto. He is the author of The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs, In Praise of Copying and The Politics of Vibration: Music as a Cosmopolitical Practice, which was just recently released from Duke University Press. I was really excited to speak with him about The Politics of Vibration because it’s a terrific, dense, complex book. There are so many ways to approach thinking about the beauty, power and moving qualities of music and vibration. Maybe because glory has connotations of the divine, we’ll start there. Boon doesn’t avoid the spiritual aspects of music in his book. He reinforces this sense of the ineffable in sound and vibration. But what does this mean? He relates it to the way that, when he has conversations about what music is with colleagues and friends, they’ll sometimes claim that he isn’t “playing fair.” Meaning that he catches them off-guard with ontological questions about something that they experience on an emotional level, at the level of uncomplicated pleasure. They’re aware that they don’t exactly have a language for what they’re experiencing, but aren’t ready to concede that this means what they’re experiencing is something spiritual, and maybe—I can only speculate here—because spirituality feels too immaterial to fit in our obsessively material and materialistic age. In the same way, though, that Boon was exploring the conflicts between the material and supernatural or spiritual in psychedelic drug use with The Road of Excess, in The Politics of Vibration he’s invested in working against what he calls a “desacralized music aesthetics” and toward a framework that includes the rather enticing notion that music is made when we make “decisions about how to play with waves,” how to “craft” spaces of feeling through waveforms. If we adopt this sort of expansive framework, Marcus is saying that we move rather quickly into a world where music is actually asking “ontological questions” of us. And he explains how non-European cultures of music have an intuition and a technical expertise in this: that the pursuit of “target states” through music is not a foreign concept in many cultures. The idea of tapping into the “vibration of the land” in many Indigenous musical pathways is a vital practice, for example, in a settler colonial context where finding meaning and belonging in spite of alienation and disconnection is an urgent matter. Beyond that, it’s clear to Boon that many people integrate music in their lives as a tool to resist what he terms the dominant “time regime” of neoliberal global capitalism, in which we’re in many ways compelled to sacrifice the tempo, rhythm and temporality of our lives to a regime that imposes profit-driven structures from outside. So the way Boon approaches the question of music is both philosophical and political, but it’s also very personal. He talks about how music “holds you up,” it allows you to find courage in hard times, ba
Fri, October 14, 2022
Ben Tarnoff untangles the histories and complex architectures of the modern internet
Ben Tarnoff is the author of A Counterfeiter’s Paradise and The Bohemians. He’s the co-founder of Logic magazine. His writing has appeared in a lot of different places, mostly left publications like The Guardian and Jacobin. His most recent piece of writing, and the focus of this conversation, is a book called Internet for the People. It’s an incredibly engaging study of how the modern internet came to be, why it's fundamentally broken, and what steps we can take to make it less broken. I asked Ben about the approach he took to writing Internet for the People because I was really impressed with how he was able to weave metaphors in with accessible language to give folks a much deeper understanding of “the stack,” as it’s called: or the massively complex architecture of the modern internet. One of my favourite lines from the book comes from his description of how the internet is “too sprawling to squeeze into a single frame,” and “too big to see without a metaphor.” That just makes intuitive sense, but it also becomes a sort of method for Tarnoff, as he works to explain the interlocking systems that create the conditions for living life today in a way that is increasingly saturated by internet technologies. His argument in the book is both easy to grasp and hard to pin down: when it comes to internet access, he makes it clear that increasing access by wresting the power away from large telecom companies that pioneered the privatization of the net isn’t just important in terms of protecting consumers from being gouged by ISPs, it is actually—in the era of more and more virtual activity—a basic condition of democratic decision-making and participation. One of the threats that your average internet user might be able to identify, when it comes to the links between online life and a healthy democracy, is the problem of “filter bubbles.” This is another area where Ben’s robust ability to synthesize a lot of research on the subject gets combined with his capacity to break things down: he says that this idea of “filter bubbles” basically brainwashing people is not just unfair, it’s inaccurate. We talk about some of the biggest companies in tech: touching on Zuckerberg’s empire, the power of Amazon and Uber, and how these companies are all sitting on a proprietary accumulation of data that makes them some of the most supremely valued corporations in history. What does it mean, Tarnoff asks, that data itself has become this valuable? The book answers that question in easy-to-parse ways, but the implications are still only now being worked through: I think it’s particularly important to think about his claim that, in fact, companies like Uber are allowed to lose money in part because of the aura around them as a “novel corporate form,” and because of the data they collect and control. At the end of the conversation Ben describes some of the places that he derives hope from, and you can read more about that by looking at his long piece at Logic magazine t
Thu, September 29, 2022
Ajay Parasram & Alex Khasnabish answer pressing questions about racism & anti-racist politics
Ajay Parasram has roots in South Asia, the Caribbean and the settler cities of Halifax, Ottawa and Vancouver. He is an associate professor in the Departments of International Development Studies, History and Political Science at Dalhousie University in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), on unceded and unsurrendered Mi’kmaw territory. His research interests focus on the politics of colonialism and structural forms of violence founded and exacerbated by and through imperialism. Alex Khasnabish is a writer, researcher and teacher committed to collective liberation who also lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax). He’s a professor in sociology and anthropology at Mount Saint Vincent University. His research focuses on the radical imagination, social justice and social movements. In our conversation we look at some of the ideas from their forthcoming book from Fernwood Press, Frequently Asked White Questions. The book comes out of both frustration and inspiration. They were frustrated by the insufficiency of existing efforts at anti-racist education, given especially the current state of affairs in the world, with a resurgent far-right populism winning political ground, but they were also inspired to create space for people to pose questions that, especially in the case of white folks like myself, we might feel somewhat anxious about asking, because there are certain expectations within existing social justice spaces. Their book was the outgrowth of a YouTube show where they saw specific patterns emerge from the questions that were being asked. It's clear that there were specific things on people's minds, and so they wrote the book in order to catalog and constructively engage with those patterns, those questions, those concerns that keep people from being able to even imagine multiracial society, and solidarity within it. Instead of trying to play expert, they want to try to move past “moralistic denunciation” and lecturing and toward a model of “generosity” and “genuineness.” As Ajay puts it, “basic respect” has become more difficult at a time of conflict and polarization. This is, for him, where the Left has collectively sort of “missed the boat;” it has “underestimated right populism and failed to adequately address the political moment.” In the face of these failures, they want to experiment with more “evocative methods” on what needs to be done. The crucial question, from their perspective, is who is going to come up with a narrative that is “savvy and engaging enough to capture public attention” and gain traction in an era of persistent white supremacy and a potent attachment to past and present frameworks for maintaining hierarchy? These are not ideas that are easy to drive home. Arguing for an anti-capitalist politics is not necessarily going to resonate with all people or publics. But they still bring it into the conversation in ways that are convincing, and bring it, more specifically into the conversation about ecological justice movements and anti-racism. On
Fri, September 09, 2022
Monty Scott laughs at the abyss and enlightens us on comedy in Canada
Monty Scott is a brilliant stand-up comedian from Scarborough, Ontario. His album The Abyss Stares Back was nominated for a Juno Award in 2019. And while it didn’t win Comedy Album of the Year, it still represents a real victory: Scott recorded it in part as a response to a near-death experience. We talk in this conversation about bouncing back, the lives and livelihoods of comedians in Canada, speak to the politics of comedy today, and try to imagine ways of thinking about comedy as an art. There are practical reasons for trying to figure out a way to define comedy in these terms. As I discussed in my article for The Breach (https://breachmedia.ca/comedy-and-solidarity-in-canada/), getting comedy recognized this way would open up funding opportunities for a creative community that was hit very hard by the temporary and permanent closure of many venues during the pandemic. But it’s also a theoretical question: there are entrenched assumptions about what art is and what it should do. Changing the definition is slow, difficult work. And yet, Scott suggests, there is a path to comedy getting perceived as a legitimate art. He emphasizes, first of all, that it’s already an obviously relevant art form. It is a live conversation. It’s popular. People need it. He says it may even be “foundational to our existence.” Nonetheless, getting comedy recognized as an art is still a major objective of the Canadian Association of Stand-up Comedians, the organization for which Monty currently acts as president. A shift is already happening on the provincial level, but it remains a struggle. His gut tells him that the important thing is to listen to the people, to take them seriously, and trust that the work comedians can accomplish when they move out of a purely individualistic space and into solidarity with one another can actually achieve something transformative. Another area where he says we gain a lot of clarity from listening to the people is on the question of shifting levels of tolerance, and the politics of comedy. While he admits that his own comedy is, in many ways, grounded in being truly silly, he gets that there is a changing political climate around comedy. Still valuing the power of humour to go to uncomfortable places, while also understanding that there is a fine line between challenging norms and seeking shock for its own sake, is a tricky thing. But I appreciated his point that shock value has little real value, and that there’s an important contradiction between people casually laughing at stereotypes and then getting offended by the willingness to explicitly identify racism. He admits that, in Canadian comedy, being a person of colour means facing a real struggle to avoid being stereotyped. In the fact of that push to simplify one’s perspective and make one’s comedy digestible, he points out that there is a real fusion in Canadian society and that we need a shift in perspective on immigration, on inclusion, and to radically embrace diversity
Thu, August 25, 2022
Sandra Battaglini takes a hard look at the business of comedy in Canada
Sandra Battaglini is an actor, stand-up comedian and writer. She is also the founder of the Canadian Association of Stand-Up Comedians, an organization that represents comics in Canada and lobbies for them to be recognized as the brilliant, culturally significant artists that they are. I just wrote an article for The Breach that features Sandra, among other comedians, and looks at some of her efforts to push for fair pay, government recognition from the Canada Council, and organized resistance against the pull of American media imperialism. Her left political perspectives are in many ways written in CASC’s DNA. She talks here about how CASC was imagined as a kind of “rights movement” focused on stressing the right to be “included” among other communicative arts that we consider culturally more ennobling or important. She insists that we really take a hard “look at the system” and objectively assess the extent to which it is tilted in favour of already economically massive players. She wants us to ask the material question: “How many opportunities are there?” And to what extent are performers being sold certain fictions that make them more vulnerable to being exploited? For example, she says that performing just for exposure is basically “a big lie.” As she puts it: “what are you exposing yourself to?” if not a market in which “there are no standards.” Efforts like the ones that CASC organizes, like the #PayComedians viral campaign, work to establish standards of equitable pay and recognition of structural inequality. These campaigns are showing what is possible: giving comics a bigger piece of the revenue they create, exposing the power of a few players that, Sandra points out, “feel like they can” corral and control comedians, and reckoning with the fear that individual comedians may have, which tends to work against solidarity and take away their power to resist monopolistic control. The main theme here is probably autonomy. Sandra has this sense that building “our own stuff” here means that you’re generating the “spirit… to move forward.” I appreciated all of the detail she gave on the struggle to gain official recognition and government funding. Ultimately, she says that she’s not interested in having a theoretical argument about whether comedy is art; the question, for her, is “should it be supported?” For me, the answer to that question is definitely yes, because I agree with Battaglini that comedy is a more everyday, accessible artform than most. This is such a central part of its power: humour makes people more open to having difficult conversations, it’s “non-elitist,” in Sandra’s words, and so it often allows for a more lively form of connection to occur. I loved the point she makes here about how comedy is also way more immediate than many artforms: happening every night, and expresses in real time what it means to live in a particular place. That immediacy is a huge part of its appeal, its relevance, and a reason it should be better
Fri, August 12, 2022
Armond R. Towns explores the mechanics of revolutionary thought and the media of resistance
Armond R. Towns is Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. His research and teaching focuses on the relationship between media, communication, race, blackness, and history. He’s just released an amazing book called On Black Media Philosophy with University of California Press. And he’s also the cofounder and editor of the brand new journal Communication and Race, which will start publishing issues in 2024. In this conversation, we dwell with the sprawling, exciting claims of his new book On Black Media Philosophy. And one of the central theoretical problems in that book is the question of what is left unsaid in the influential work of Marshall McLuhan, a figure who still has a lingering impact within media studies especially, particularly in Canada. Towns talks about how encountering McLuhan’s thinking was “eye-opening”, and most of all because he was exposed first to media studies in the United States, where the primary focus tends to be on representation itself, the content of the text, rather than the medium. McLuhan’s work offered Towns a really interesting corrective to that tendency, but when he started to dig into McLuhan’s writing, he found some notable gaps, especially around race. So what was unsaid in McLuhan became in some ways more important than what was said—which often gets reduced to the phrases we’re all familiar with: “the medium is the message,” the “global village,” and so on. McLuhan has an impact on Towns’ thinking, but Towns is really trying to act back on McLuhan’s impact by asking why McLuhan is invested in notions of the “tribal” and “de-tribal.” Why is he citing who he is citing? Why is he writing letters to people like J. C. Carothers? So his book, through what he calls a “practice of reading” that is deeply historical, aims to complicate the legacy of people like McLuhan, and others too, like Charles Darwin, for which there is an already established history that may obscure more than it reveals. How do we “break that logic,” as Towns puts it? A logic that frames Africa as a purely “natural” place from which “objects are extracted”? And what are the implications of aiming to break that logic for politics? I was really struck, in reading his work and talking to him, by the way he approaches this through the radical concept of climate reparations, and the destruction of the natural environment. How, as he says, it goes hand in hand with the destruction of particular people. He pushes us, in framing these ideas, to approach reparations as more than just a financial question. Reparations means taking seriously how land, water, and space have been partitioned, poisoned and commodified, and realizing that the question “Where are people going to go?” is going to be central in a future where we see innumerable climate refugees fleeing the sacrifice zones. So much of what he’s writing about really comes from this emphasis on “historical situatedness in all of our thought.” He m
Fri, August 05, 2022
Janelle Niles is creating a legacy in comedy based on camaraderie and care
Janelle Niles is a stand-up comedian from Truro, Nova Scotia and the producer of Got Land?, an all-Indigenous comedy tour. The Got Land? show is an example of what greater solidarity could mean for the culture of comedy in Canada. The stated goal of the show is to “express solidarity with humour” as a way of gaining grassroots control over the sites of cultural production: the venues, shows, institutions and platforms that determine who makes it and who gets missed in comedy. We discuss Janelle’s ability to use humour to cope with some of the most difficult subjects imaginable. Beyond just the joy of making other people laugh, we know that humour can also be a kind of survival strategy. So, COVID-19, we also know, has devastated creative communities, and it has created a level of suffering in communities of colour that should show us, unequivocally, how present and immediate the legacies of systemic oppression are in Canada. Niles talks about her hustle here, which she says is required to fight that system; but the point of solidarity is that the status quo can’t be changed by one person alone. Her ambition is to construct a legacy of comradeship and mutual care, one that is real and formidable enough to fight deeply unfair forms of exclusion. One of the things that Janelle says that I really appreciate here is that “people are not politically aware” in Canada. That’s an important baseline, in a way. It implies having to be sort of pragmatic about communication, and comedy, she says, is an extremely intuitive communicational art. She describes this feeling of having been “born political,” not only because she is Black and Indigenous, but because her experience of racism in Canada has opened her eyes to the scale of racial inequality in this country. A certain kind of racism exists within the culture of comedy in Canada. Niles describes the experience of a Black comedian in Montreal who was told that if there was more than one Black comic on a bill, then the show would be “too ghetto, too ethnic.” As she puts it, this attitude means that, in effect, people of colour are still either the “token” performer on a white-dominated bill, or not included at all. And she wants to “dismantle that.” The watchword here is this notion of “audacity.” Janelle makes connections between how the Idle No More movement, which is ten years old and going strong, provided the grassroots opportunity to “speak the truth” and push to be heard and respected. It reminded First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples in the place currently called Canada that it’s “unfair” to be pushed into a point in the past, to be pressured into invisibility and intimidated out of asserting basic rights. Niles doubles down and says that Got Land? is like “Idle No More with jokes,” it insists on the audacity of BIPOC comedy and the fact of her presence on this land, now. In this context, she talks about trying to be “truthful, transparent and come from a place of love” while working to ensure that
Tue, July 26, 2022
Tey Meadow believes passionately in gender diversity and supporting transgender youth
Tey Meadow is an assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University. While her research covers a lot of topics, the work she’s created that has had the biggest impact on me is her writing on the emergence of the transgender child as a social category, and the creation and maintaining of gender classifications in law and medicine. The book that we focus on here is the one she put out through University of California Press in 2018: Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century (https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520275041/trans-kids). This book is teeming with insights on how we acquire a gendered sense of ourselves, the powerful constraints placed on that process, and how those constraints are both generative and restrictive. We talk about the overarching concerns of Meadow’s work and the curiosities that motivate it, but we also work through the claims of Emily Bazelon’s controversial article in the New York Times from June of this year, “The Battle Over Gender Therapy.” Meadow explains that the way Bazelon gives “equal footing” to those that problematize gender-related care is actually very misleading, because we’ve luckily reached a point, after a history of struggle for legitimacy from groups advocating for transgender rights, where it’s no longer assumed, professionally or politically, that avoiding being trans is somehow “the best outcome.” There is, now, what Meadow describes as a “massive consensus” which says that “affirming and facilitating gender nonconformity in children leads to better psychological, social, educational, physical outcomes for those children.” What also clearly matters is who is speaking, and who isn’t. Because of the power of gender norms, and the compulsion to protect kids from harm, many parent organizations that advocate for trans identities, but are not led by transgender adults, often make it their goal to produce or to promote “the most normative non-normative kids.” The effect, in some ways, is to “create a version of transness without trauma,” and one that doesn’t necessarily learn from what Meadow calls the “incredible wisdom gleaned from decades of navigating cisgender culture.”
Fri, July 22, 2022
Al Val brings joy, truth and trans representation to the comedy scene
Al Val is a comedian, actor, writer and musician who has appeared on programs for CBC, MTV, and YTV. She’s also headlined standup comedy shows all over North America. A graduate of Second City’s Conservatory Program, Val also performed with improv troupe “Starwipe” for 8 years. Val is set to co-headline Just for Laughs Toronto with Allie Pearse in the Fall, has just finished filming a reality show for OutTV, and has been performing non-stop during Pride. Val combined coming out as transgender during the pandemic with her sudden emergence as a force in Canadian comedy. She spoke with me about how, as a comedic performer, one of the first things she is driven to address is the legibility of her gender nonconforming identity. She does this with a terrific sense of timing, and also through her great command of physicality—a thing that not all stand-up comedians have. We also talked about the sense of responsibility she has to bring joy through humour; this is, of course, common among comics, but perhaps not as common as we might think. Her goal is not only to “break the tension,” but to also remind audience that they don’t need to decide what is “morally okay to laugh at,” and that there is no need for “pity” or “coddling”—affective states that are antithetical to a good comedy show and certainly not conducive to recognizing transgender as a legitimate social identity. It was really interesting to get a sense, from Al, of how the industry of comedy works in Canada. It’s a competitive market, and one where comedians don’t really receive much or any support. For this reason, she says she’s had to build a career mostly on her own. Working independently means that, as she puts it, “your attention is being pulled in so many different directions.” There can and should be more support for the art of stand-up comedy in Canada, and so we address the kinds of organizing and lobbying that’s happening around this issue, which has only been exacerbated by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The conversation really zeroes in on the question of how comedy works, and the place of vulnerability and authenticity in it. This is especially relevant to Al Val’s brand of comedy. Comedy is, from her perspective, easier when it's “honest,” and this is in spite of the fact that there’s a degree to which, when you perform, you’re always “submitting yourself to judgment” as an entertainer. That relationship between humour and truth is maybe an especially salient feature of today’s comedy, when you think about the ways that it’s emerged as a confessional, intimate, immediate art form in the last 5 years. The way Al puts it, it’s about “packaging” both “trauma and insight into joke form” to both “disguise” it and inspire people to “think and reflect” on a “thesis” for a while. A central part of her comedy right now is working through the question of “what constitutes gender.” In the words of Tey Meadow, “Gender subjectivity is tender ground. It shifts beneath our feet, eludes e
Tue, July 12, 2022
Gernot Wagner breaks down the economics of climate collapse & the cultural barriers to change
Gernot Wagner is a climate economist at Columbia Business School. His research, writing, and teaching focus on climate risks and climate policy. Gernot writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate and has written several books, including: Geoengineering: the Gamble, But will the planet notice?, Climate Shock, which he co-authored with Martin Weitzman, and City, Country, Climate published in German. Since he’s well-versed in environmental science, public policy, and economics, I wanted to ask him some questions about the nature of the capitalist system we inhabit as a global order, and also some of the ways that system is reinforced, both through government policy and through social norms. While he readily concedes the fact that the system of neoliberal capitalism is fundamentally a flawed one, replete with problems, he makes it clear that he feels the fix for our situation is to work within it. The sense I get is that, from Wagner’s perspective, we have to hope it is possible to reform capitalism in part because the version of it we live in now is completely unregulated, it’s a space where, despite the obviousness of the truth of climate collapse, the average car now “looks like a tank.” It’s an iteration of capitalist overproduction in which “we are just letting things rip and not caring” about the consequences. I like his idea that the current state of affairs means that societies have, to some extent, made “a fetish out of” the market as a sensible source of social organization, when it is clearly not. But, to put it differently, the point is that another capitalism is possible. For this reason, Gernot says he really disagrees with folks like Naomi Klein, who say that right now, our moment of peril and precarity, is our “last best chance” to replace capitalism. He agrees that the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the global instability it has caused really did represent a “window of opportunity” for climate and energy policy, but we talk about how it has mainly led to a shift in defense spending, a widespread militarization which, incidentally, is going to worsen the climate crisis. I got so much out of talking with Gernot. He argues really clearly for attacking the problem of climate change by centring human desires, and more particularly social norms. He stresses that, given the overwhelming mess we are in, we are going to flip the switch not just by making rational arguments, but by combining the work of pushing for policy change with the perhaps more complicated work of rewriting the norms and cultural defaults that make ecocidal behaviour seem acceptable. As an economist, but also as an observer of the built environment, he’s really perceptive about the way that social norms function as a major determinant of climate action, to a greater extent than the level of knowledge we have.
Fri, July 08, 2022
Clayton Thomas-Müller helps protect Mother Earth through art, activism and a little bit of magic
Clayton Thomas-Müller is an organizer, public speaker and author focused on fighting for environmental and economic justice. He’s worked for more than two decades in support of grassroots movements and Indigenous peoples. He is a campaigner for 350.org, and has worked with the Indigenous Environmental Network, Black Mesa Water Coalition, Global Justice Ecology Project, and Bioneers. I had the opportunity to talk to him about his memoir Life in the City of Dirty Water, which you might have heard about as part of this year’s Canada Reads competition, or because it is an absolutely brilliant book. In caring, luminous prose, Clayton writes in the book about his growth into the climate activist and storyteller he’s become. A phrase that comes up a couple of times in the book is this idea of having a “PhD in hustle;” I asked Clayton about that way of phrasing it, and he talked about how the book is partly about showing how he’s seized multiple opportunities to acquire new knowledge, but without thinking of that knowledge as a commodity. Instead, for him, it’s about applying knowledge, not just forming theories. Applying knowledges means actually trying to do the work of building community. The title of his memoir has thrown some people off, he says. People assumed, from the title, that the book is only about what he calls his “day job” as an environmental activist and water protector. So, Thomas-Muller, as a member of the Treaty #6-based Mathias Colomb Cree Nation, also known as Pukatawagan, located in Northern Manitoba, is really making a “very specific reference” to Winnipeg with that title. The Cree and Ojibwe name for Winnipeg translates as "murky water" or "muddy water.” I asked him about some of the resonances, though, of that title—how it can open up conversations about the murky nature of political and environmental communication in our moment of catastrophic climate change. He emphasizes that the goal of his memoir is really to encourage readers’ own interpretations, to “agitate and create” and to just “make people think.” Because, as he puts it, “there is no one answer” to colonial violence and climate collapse. He says, ultimately, that it will likely take “a hybrid mix of Western science, traditional ecological knowledge and straight-up magic” to pull ourselves out of the dire and desperate mire of capitalist accumulation and fossil fueled modernity. The greed we see naturalized today, he feels, is by no means natural. It is a “sickness,” and the product of “disconnection from nature.” The alienation we feel is a thing that derives directly from this uprooting. It breeds “hyper-individualism” and “hyper-consumerism,” in his account. So he looks to unite people “on the jagged intersections of our movement goals and our social movement sectors, “to break down barriers and build up systems of accountability and transparency as we build the largest social movement in the history of humankind.”
Fri, June 24, 2022
Chanelle Gallant, Elene Lam & Shiri Pasternak plant the seeds for abolitionist transformation
Chanelle Gallant has participated in grassroots movements for sex workers rights and racial justice for 20 years as an organizer, writer, strategist, fundraiser and speaker. She is on the leadership team for Showing Up For Racial Justice in the US, she co-founded the Migrant Sex Workers Project and has worked with sex work organizations locally and nationally including Butterfly, Maggie’s, Desiree Alliance, and Red Canary Song. Her writing about sexuality, social justice and sex work has appeared in dozens of publications. Elene Lam is the founder and Executive Director of Butterfly (Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network) and the Migrant Sex Workers Project. She has been involved in the sex work movement and migrant and labour activism for almost 20 years. She has also conducted training for community members, service providers and policymakers on sex work, migration, anti-oppressive practice and human rights in more than 20 countries. Shiri Pasternak is a researcher, writer, and organizer and a professor of Criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto. She is the author of the award-winning book Grounded Authority: the Algonquins of Barriere Lake Against the State, and the co-founder and former Research Director at Yellowhead Institute. Shiri notes that the book that she and two of her collaborators spoke with me about—Disarm, Defund, Dismantle: On Police Abolition in Canada—was, in part, the outcome of a gathering called The Abolition Convergence that was set to take place in Toronto in May 2020, but had to be canceled due to COVID. They had planned, she says, to use the event to build “trust and solidarity and understanding across movements.” But rather than accept the cancellation of the event as an ending, the organizers and contributors decided to reformulate the project and reroute their energies into creating the book. This is reflective of a spirit of relentlessness that characterizes the movement for police abolition here in Canada. While Pasternak suggests that abolition in Canada is regularly thought of as a “copycat movement” that follows and reacts to political trends in the US, it’s important to see the ways in which their local focus grows out of a commitment to communities and peoples who are directly impacted here by the violence of the settler colonial state. So, for people looking for direction and a means of mobilizing, Disarm, Defund, Dismantle is a book that, as Elene Lam explains, is important as a tool for organizing, and not just as a source of academic analysis. She is profoundly insightful on this point, insisting that we tend to assume that these “false binaries between theoretical, intellectual and practical work” exist, when, in fact, it is within social movements that “theory is generated.” Or, in Channelle’s words, the book highlights “frontline community defense against policing” and the “theoretical, political knowledge that comes from that work.” We talk about the manipulative way that the
Wed, June 15, 2022
Jennifer Esposito & Venus Evans-Winters embolden activists & intellectuals to fight harm
Jennifer Esposito is Chair of the Department of Educational Policy Studies and is a Professor of research, measurement and statistics. Her research focuses on how race, class, gender and sexuality impact experiences of education and how marginalized groups are represented in popular culture. In this conversation we mainly focus on her recent co-authored book Introduction to Intersectional Qualitative Research. She wrote the book with her frequent collaborator Venus Evans-Winters. Dr. Evans-Winters is a former Professor of Education at Illinois State University in the College of Education with faculty affiliation in Women & Gender Studies, African American Studies, and Ethnic Studies. She is also the Founder of Planet Venus and creator of the Write Like A Scholar program, and has worked with the African American Policy Forum and the SayHerName project, led by Kimberlé Crenshaw. Venus has a vast research purview, focusing on the social and cultural foundations of education, Black feminist thought, critical race theory, educational policy, and qualitative inquiry. Her books include (Re)Teaching Trayvon: Education for Racial Justice and Human Freedom and Black Feminism in Education: Black Women Speak Back, Up, and Out. Their book is a completely unique intervention on the purpose and practice of intersectional qualitative research. The book, they explain, isn’t only pedagogical, “it’s a political act of resistance.” They are trying to create the conditions for a radical rewriting of the very rules of the game of academia. From their perspective, intersectional qualitative research is an “intentional disruption” of the persistent “deficit narrative” that “keeps white supremacy alive” by presupposing that there is something wrong that must be fixed within BIPOC communities. In Venus’ terms, what would it mean to “embolden those who want to use intellectual activism as a weapon” against harm? We’ve largely been “hoodwinked" by a linear narrative that counts only certain texts and voices and styles as valid in academic study. “What happens,” Venus asks, “when we focus on joy?” On “movement struggles?” On “meaning-making?” We also zoom in on the question of how thinkers collaborate and write effectively together. It takes, they say, a certain capacity for “emotional labour” and for a more meaningful and relational kind of accountability. Learning to write together means sharing our “rituals” and sharing what we think it means to be “a contemplative researcher, an ethical researcher, a mindful researcher, a Black feminist thinker and researcher.” Questioning this insidious assumption that there is, as Jennifer puts it, “only one way of writing” or “thinking critically.” Against this, she says that she feels an intense responsibility to “help [students] rediscover their authentic authorial voice.” That responsibility to students is a central theme of this discussion. They really emphasize this idea that, under this system of neoliberalism that demands the
Thu, June 02, 2022
Murtaza Hussain looks for a moral baseline in a world riven by power and conflict
Murtaza Hussain is a reporter at The Intercept who focuses on national security and foreign policy (https://theintercept.com/staff/murtaza-hussain/). He has appeared on CNN, BBC, MSNBC, and other news outlets. We had a sobering conversation about the political structure of the globalized world. One of the many frank projections that Murtaza shares in this conversation is his sense that it’s fairly likely that the United States and China will be engaged in some form of military conflict within the next twenty years. And this is just one of the striking observations that he makes. There’s a deep analysis here that centres around a serious gap between the world that he wants and the world that he sees, and much of our conversation actually comes back to that gap between the moral aspirations that we might have as empathetic citizens of the world, the rights-based order we wish existed, and the “inherently conflictual” character of the world as it is. He actually expands on the ways that a tradition of political philosophy engages with the extent to which nations and polities are locked into efforts to constrain each other through force and dominance, and suggests that refusing to grasp that means that “we miss a lot” about the structure of societies. Again, he makes it clear that the world he reports on and tries to understand is not the one that he wants to exist, but I think it’s for that reason that he reports on global affairs in the honest, shrewd way that he does. I mean, in this conversation he is talking in no uncertain terms about how Ukraine’s decision to denuclearize, to not retain their nuclear weapons, meant that they had to abandon “the ultimate guarantor” of national sovereignty. Given up under global pressure and incentives—assurances that were not met—the loss of a nuclear arsenal, he feels, in part led to the situation it is currently in, where the international community has determined that the cost of deterring Russia is too high and the country cannot fully defend itself against Russian aggression. What does it mean that this terrifying power is an “insurance policy” in the contemporary world? Ignoring the reality doesn’t change it. And yet, as he points out, there are realities that can be ignored. While there’s little evidence that sanctions, for example, succeed in changing the behaviour of governments, sanctions are still imposed without any real consideration for the social impact or political effectiveness they will have. As Hussain says, they are “done without even thinking” because “no one is holding you to account” and the deaths that they produced are “indirect.” So, in terms of the United States positing itself as a “benevolent actor” by imposing sanctions or even arming Ukraine, it’s unclear whether anyone in the global community actually feels that it wipes the imperialist record of the US clean just because it currently seems to be on the right side of a military conflict. What I found so profound, too, in what Mu
Thu, May 26, 2022
Max Haiven unmasks the global entanglement & human sacrifice that the palm oil industry demands
Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination (https://maxhaiven.com/). In this interview I talk to him about his most recent book Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire, a new entry in the Vagabond series of books that Max edits for Pluto Press (https://www.plutobooks.com/pluto-series/vagabonds/). It's a series that tries to create a venue for, as he says, writing that engages with contemporary struggles and that tries to invent new ways of offering the public radical ideas. He talks about his high tolerance for pessimism, which he realizes not everyone shares, and reflects on how that specific threshold for the negative might allow him to consider the nightmarish history of palm oil. It’s a history that is, in many ways, written in blood and fire, and one that opens up epistemic rifts. That idea of “epistemic rifts,” however, is more rooted to the moment where you, as he says, encounter an other and realize that your traditions are particular rather than universal. This is something that looking at the history of palm oil yields. And so, the history he offers is the history of something so sublimely complex that, in a sense, no imagination can quite grasp all of the entanglements the substance represents. He wants us to attempt to dwell with that immense complexity, and also the fact that it is a complex and yet not intractable problem. Ultimately his point is that there are solutions to the problem of exploitation, alienation and ecocide that the palm oil industry produces, but that those solutions have to come from the grassroots. To quote him here: the job of experts is to listen to the people who live in relation with each other and the land. To listen to these people and lend a hand if necessary. Self-determination is at the core of his argument here, but it is a self-determination that realizes the depth of entanglement; the fact that accepting local self-determination will likely drive up the price of commodities and potentially mean we have to forgo particular commodities in order to mitigate against social and environmental harm. He says it's imperative that we learn to defetishize commodities and perhaps fetishize instead the density of our entanglement. What would that mean? It might mean moving past confining logics that confuse the issue—the notion of inflation within economics, for example. He says the debate over the inflation crisis we are currently undergoing misses that the problem is, in fact, not rising prices but extreme levels of global inequality whereby certain people are deprived of the economic power and social agency to meet their own needs. Scarcity is something that we must politicize. So too is sacrifice. Who's sacrifice? This is the key question in Palm Oil. Human sacrifice, despite the undecided nature of its history, is consistently something practiced by elites for expedient reasons. What are those reasons? And why are they considered reasonable? If it is acceptable to sacri
Fri, May 20, 2022
Meredith Ralston unchains sexual pleasure from carceral thinking & calls for an end to slut-shaming
Meredith Ralston is Professor in the Departments of Women’s Studies and Political Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her most recent book, Slut-Shaming, Whorephobia and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution is a remarkably self-reflexive and rigorous study of contemporary sexual politics in a supposedly permissive era. We talk about the limits of white feminism and carceral thinking when it comes to the prevalent approaches to thinking about and reckoning with the reality of sex work. Meredith speaks to her profound sense that a “pleasure gap” still exists, where the disparate and binaristic socializations of men and women position people very differently in terms of access to pleasure. I ask her about the place of biology in sex, and whether culture and context, and power, are always complexly at play in determining even our sense of the biology of sex. Ralston’s research work has largely focused on sex work and sex tourism globally, she’s also looked at unhoused women and sex work in Canada. She is also an award-winning filmmaker, and her film, Hope in Heaven received a very positive reception when it was broadcast on CBC. She also wrote and directed two documentaries with the National Film Board of Canada on women in politics. Here, though, we talk about her shifting relationship to the documentary work that she’s produced. This is where the critical self-reflection comes in, as Ralston is extremely aware of her own tendency to adopt certain conservative relationships to sex and sex work. It’s a complex topic that warrants an engaged conversation that doesn’t conveniently skip over the impasses. I would definitely recommend her new book. It thinks through the ripple effects of the #MeToo movement, which is differently relevant in the face of the misogynistic vilification of Amber Heard we’re seeing right now; it talks about the discourse of rape culture, and, most intensely, it advocates for sexual equality and justice, and an end to the sexual double standard that continues to contribute to the vulnerability and widespread dehumanization of trans women, women of colour and women in general who are open about sexual desire. We end by talking about a broader end to the policing of sex, which cannot arrive soon enough.
Thu, May 12, 2022
Rebecca Wanzo insists we reassess the way we read and condemn stereotypical representations
Rebecca Wanzo (https://www.rebeccawanzo.com/) is a Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and an Affiliate Professor of American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She’s the author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling, a book that thinks through the kinds of storytelling conventions that African American women, and social beings in general, are compelled to use to make their suffering legible to specific institutions in the United States. Her most recent book, The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging, is a remarkable study of the many ways that Black cartoonists have used racialized caricatures to contest and rework constructions of ideal citizenship. Wanzo recalls being told that her subject in The Content of Our Caricature had basically been exhausted. Imagine being questioned about whether there was enough content for a scholarly book within the history of Black comics—it speaks to the ways that, as she points out, comics are still seen as somewhat juvenile, and also the ways in which Black comics, in particular, are not understood as having their own vital, varied history. It’s interesting to think that Wanzo struggled to get the cover image for the book approved by the publisher. This striking image from Jeremy Love’s Bayou perfectly captures the concerns of her text. As she puts it, one of the questions she’s asking, again and again, in this book is: “What is this Black creator trying to do” with this representation of a figure—in the case of Bayou, the figure of the gollywog—that has “a specific racist… representational history”? In the coda for The Content of Our Caricature, Wanzo talks about the Marvel film Black Panther and its foundations in the foundational story arc surrounding Killmonger from the comics. She explains how the “transformation” and “rehabilitation” of Black Panther shows us how the history of representation and appropriation really is complex, and stresses that there is never “a homogenous black audience response. Things are not transparently always good and always bad." She argues that we really need to slow the process of interpretation and critical conversation down, and resist the tendency toward immediate condemnation. “Cancel culture,” as we’ve now titled it, is, in her words, “subsuming” so many different things that it’s become a “useless analytic tool.” It’s also a dizzyingly ironic title, given that those that frequently decry so-called cancel culture—namely those on the Right—are at the vanguard of canceling huge parts of culture that they deem threatening. Wanzo explains that, in the contemporary context, what we are seeing is the Right, in the US especially, attacking not only critical race theory, but all of “history” and “any discussion of discrimination.” The dominant form that cancellation is taking today vilifies any media that, from Wanzo’s perspective, “might mak
Wed, May 04, 2022
Dru Oja Jay breaks down the manifest necessity and moral hazards of political compromise
Dru Oja Jay is a writer, organizer and web developer. He’s currently hosting a podcast called Half Past Capitalism, and serving as both the Executive Director of CUTV, Canada's oldest campus-based TV station, and as publisher of The Breach, an independent media outlet producing critical journalism at a time when it is urgently needed. He’s written a number of stirring articles for The Breach, and he’s also the co-author, with Nikolas Barry-Shaw, of an invaluable book called Paved with Good Intentions: Canada's Development NGOs from Idealism to Imperialism. There’s no getting around it, though: the state of the journalistic profession is looking bleak. Dru talks about how social media has meant a “shifting of roles” for journalists and widespread “disempowerment in the sector” that runs alongside the public’s lack of confidence in journalism during the neoliberal period. More particularly, he says that social media and what he calls “algorithmic curation” is a kind “race” where “society is coming apart,” and in which a multitude of competing organizations are trying to establish the dominant “pattern of thinking.” What’s necessary, in this context, is for those on the Left to commit to radically deepening democracy, even as we labour under the force of “mega corporations” that constrain the flow of information. There are multiple demobilizing forces converging in the current moment. Jay talks about his research into the effects of NGOs, how they have tended historically, despite their good intentions, to deradicalize movements. In fact, he claims that we are currently seeing “systematic and cynical work to derail” the climate movement through the professionalization of activism in NGOs. What he laments is the loss of “direct accountability” and the constitutive links that movements have with their members as groups become incrementally more accountable to funders over time. A major theme here is the problem of how particular “patterns of thinking” are created, and then become very difficult to dislodge. We discuss the ways that geopolitical patterns of thinking have historically undermined any notion of a rules-based international order. He offers some nuanced analysis of the role of NATO in creating the conditions for the crisis in Ukraine, while necessarily dwelling with the impossible contradictions of that military conflict and the terrifying possibility that it could mean nuclear war, given the brazen ways that major powers are dealing with, and have dealt with, the prospect of nuclear annihilation in the past and present. It’s clear that, for Jay, we also need to unpack and come to terms with the “collective trauma” of settler colonialism and how it lives on in “scars” and “patterns of thought” we inherit. He underscores the ongoing violence of colonial oppression, and how, today, Indigenous peoples are “handcuffed to an objective measure” of climate collapse in ways that reinforce the ties between racism and capitalism. W
Tue, April 26, 2022
Uahikea Maile nurtures radical responsibility & a refusal of settler colonial capitalism
Uahikea Maile is a Kānaka Maoli scholar and activist from Maunawili, Oʻahu. He works as an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Politics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Maile’s research looks at the legal constraints and decolonial activism that marks the history of Hawaiian sovereignty. His upcoming book focuses on settler colonial capitalism and Indigenous sovereignty in Hawaiʻi, and investigates the formation of settler colonial capitalism alongside the gifts of sovereignty that seek to overturn that form of domination by assuming radical responsibility for balancing relationships with ‘āina, or the land that feeds. In our conversation he talks about the meanings of Mauna Kea, which is not only the tallest mountain in the world, but also, more importantly, a place of worship and deep relationality for Kānaka Maoli that has been under threat for generations as a result of numerous telescope projects and the pursuit of profit through tourism. The struggle for Mauna Kea is a focal point of this interview for a number of reasons. Maile says that the state has shown it privileges the veneration of astronomy over the legally protected sacredness of Indigenous Hawaiians’ relationship to the place, and this is unequivocally because government funding, tourism and settler colonial capital determine what counts as valuable. Maile asks bluntly: why can’t we accept that leveling peaks of mountains is inherently a violent act of “desecration”? This is difficult, when one aspect of the struggle is the fact that the pop cultural trope of Hawai’i as a popular refuge continues to draw people in, even during a pandemic. On this point, he describes how lockdown, for a brief moment, allowed Indigenous Hawai’ians to see what places like Honolulu Harbor, Waikiki and others would look like as they began to “heal” from the “degradation” caused by this influx of tourists. Another theme here is the idea that we should take pop cultural representations seriously, but perhaps not too seriously. We talk about South Park’s reductive depiction of Indigeneity in Hawai’i and what it means to engage with the satirical representation of cultural appropriation itself. Maile insists that “Satire is not a metaphor” and “cannot be used metaphorically for decolonization.” Ultimately, the conversation zooms out to think through the ways that state governments look to bureaucratize control of the land to further occupy and control Indigenous sovereignty. In particular, the presence of the US military in Hawai’i is, for Maile, undoubtedly part of a broader process of territorial command by the settler colonial nation. He says that we need to start engaging with this in relation to the general need to slow down the pace of development in order to stave off climate change, and recognize the ways in which Kānaka Maoli and other Indigenous communities demonstrate an unwavering commitment to this reality. There are many moments, he says, where he’s called
Fri, April 22, 2022
Shannon Miedema connects the climate emergency to the need for coordinated political action
Shannon Miedema is Director of the Environment and Climate Change team with the Halifax Regional Municipality and one of the chief architects of the city’s climate plan, the subtitle of which is “Acting on Climate Together.” In this conversation she defines what that means in terms of what is increasingly referred to as a “just transition,” or a transition that, as she says, isn’t interested in “leaving anyone behind,” one that rejects the idea that we can simply embrace mitigation of climate change or adaptation to climate change without “putting equity first.” This means devising material solutions with and for the disadvantaged communities in our city: racialized and underserved communities, the poor, the uniquely vulnerable. She wants us, on this Earth Day 2022, to recognize the unprecedented momentum the climate justice movement now has, in a context where we no longer talk about just “climate change” or a “climate crisis,” but a “climate emergency” and even a coming “climate catastrophe.” What we need are plans like the one that Regional Council just adopted in HRM: HalifACT (https://www.halifax.ca/about-halifax/energy-environment/halifact-2050-acting-climate-together) acts on the knowledge that the climate emergency is going to take everyone, it’s going to require an “army” of people capable of “deepening” and “increasing” engagement across the board. Shannon talks about the risk that was inherent in even bringing their plan and projections to Council originally. The choice was made to initiate the plan, despite the knowledge that, as she acknowledges, the COVID-19 pandemic had and has municipalities very worried about their “financial future.” But the future is, of course, what’s at stake in climate change, both immediate and long-term. So they moved forward, pushing seven core areas of actionable, conceivable counter-action, mitigation and adaptation. And the goal is to inspire confidence that there are so many things that can be done: against a dangerous attachment to business as usual and a deadly conviction that it is already too late. One of the big themes of our conversation is this idea that–in spite of the globe-spanning scale of the climate emergency, and the desperate need for a still-unrealized form of “multi-level climate governance”--cities are a crucial space where mobilization can materially happen. Especially in Canada. Cities need to be consulted, Shannon tells us, because large-scale plans to act against climate catastrophe which don’t attend to cities will not have “policies and funding programs” that actually meet the needs of people in cities. Cities are important, as well, because places like Halifax, with a high GDP and a lamentably very “dirty grid,” where the majority of our power comes from coal, can and should do more to decarbonize. Another major theme is this unresolved problem of communication: how do we craft messages and create engagement that causes people to care and feel capable of action, rather than
Wed, April 13, 2022
Ivo Nieuwenhuis implores us to take comedy seriously and to think deeply about humour scandals
Ivo Nieuwenhuis works as a Professor of Dutch literature at Radboud University in The Netherlands. He’s also a comedy critic for the national Dutch newspaper Trouw. He’s currently writing about the politics of humour, with a specific focus on humour’s political implications in terms of gender, race, and class relations. We talked about these implications, and the unresolved question of whether humour is inherently subversive, or just as often conservative and regressive. He’s published a bunch of articles on these subjects, but a main focal point of our dialogue was this new issue of the European Journal of Cultural Studies that he co-edited with Dick Zjip, which contains some new approaches to the politics of comedy. The reason this issue is so exciting is that it comes at a time when, as Nieuwenhuis explains, the “post-political” worldview that characterized the zenith of liberalism has been supplanted by a sort of “hyper-politics,” the point-of-no-return moment we now occupy where everything is inescapably political and a more diverse panoply of funny voices can be heard in comedy. And one of the things Nieuwenhuis points out in this conversation is that while “there has always been humour,” it is “very difficult today” to be “humorless.” In today’s system of compulsive entrepreneurialism where cultural capital is a question of social survival, the “saturation of every aspect of life with comedy” has reached a unique stage. If comedy is everywhere and if humour is an obligation, can we still be critical about it? When we’re surrounded by forms of funny communication that are predicated on boundary-pushing and offensiveness, do we have to look at it as “brave” or “challenging,” or can we speak up and shut it down? This obviously opens onto this thorny situation that’s been crudely dubbed “cancel culture,” which we note is not just about cancellation of certain kinds of humour, but as often about the emergence of new comedic styles that do consciously criticize conventions in comedy. Fundamentally, Ivo says, comedy is still about power, but not in the assumed way that it’s typically been thought about: yes, comedy can challenge dominant power structures, but it can also, and often does, reinforce them… in fact, Ivo suggests that both things can often happen in the same comedy special! Because, as he points out, the “form [itself] is very persuasive,” we need to, as audiences and avowed appreciators of comedy, be critical about the “aggressive side” of humour, and the co-optation of its truth-telling function for pernicious purposes. Ivo is sort of an expert in the history of humour scandals. In this interview we talk about these moments as “flashpoints” – controversies that emerge as a way of allowing us to assess changing cultural norms. Politicizing mockery which claims that derisive stereotypes are somehow a form of inclusion, we look at the controversy surrounding Dave Chappelle’s horribly transphobic and unfunny Netflix special The Closer,
Mon, March 28, 2022
Keolu Fox, Theresa Stewart-Ambo & K. Wayne Yang dream of flourishing Indigenous futures
Theresa Stewart-Ambo and Keolu Fox are the co-directors of the Indigenous Futures Institute at the University of California San Diego. K. Wayne Yang is a critical theorist and social critic who writes about popular culture, social movements, urban education, critical pedagogy, decolonization, and many other subjects. Stewart-Ambo and Fox are two authors with wildly divergent research interests. Fox does work in genomic research and is an assistant professor at University of California, San Diego, affiliated with the Department of Anthropology, the Global Health Program, the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, the Climate Action Lab, and the Indigenous Futures Lab, while Stewart-Ambo is an Assistant Professor in the Education Studies program at UC San Diego. Despite these distinct research focuses, they co-direct the Indigenous Futures Institute with a visionary sense of collective purpose: for the Institute to signify beyond the individual demands of each member's disciplines. IFI is exceptional for the projects that are being worked on there, but it is also important because it is Indigenous-run at the highest level. This is not something that we encounter very much, and certainly not enough. The Institute is about imagining Indigenous design hubs outside of the constraints of, as Yang explains, the nation state, because that social formation, and its obsession with borders, cannot grasp the vital nature of living and interconnected bioregions. When I asked Yang, in this conversation, about what demilitarization could mean from an Indigenous perspective, he didn’t talk about any one conflict, but instead focused on the land and the context of a total war on nature, and how this language of interconnected bioregions allows us to think in radical ways about demilitarization beyond the “removal of troops.” While there is a discursive shift, among critical people, toward decolonization in the form of land acknowledgments, Stewart-Ambo talks about how universities are still clearly not structured with Indigenous prosperity in mind. She argues that so much of the language around equity, diversity and inclusion is about diversion, and either overlooks Indigenous peoples or actively plays into stereotypes. She demands “respectful engagement” at the highest levels and wants land acknowledgment statements to materialize relationships, with institutions actually stepping up and doing their part. No more superficial land acknowledgments, Fox says, because they so obviously function as a form of misdirection, a way of distracting the public from the persistence of privatization, extraction and harm done to Indigenous communities. What is so different, then, about the Indigenous Futures Institute, from their perspective, and I'm starting to see, as an outsider, how stark this difference is from the ways in which people are taught in the traditional Eurocentric university, what's so different is perhaps embodied by this idea of dream tanks: in direct opposit
Wed, March 16, 2022
Yuliya Yurchenko expands the frame for understanding the Russian invasion of Ukraine
Yuliya Yurchenko is a senior lecturer and researcher in political economy at University of Greenwich. She is currently in Ukraine on an extraordinary leave. And while she writes that she is, for the moment, in relative safety, that could change any moment. Being a Ukrainian, an activist and an academic, Yuliya traveled to Ukraine on Feb 19, 2022 as part of a fact-finding and solidarity mission with a number of MPs, trade unionists and journalists. The goal, she says, of this mission is to connect with civil society organizations, trade unions, activists and politicians, and “to express direct, cross-border solidarity from the UK working class to the Ukrainian working class.” She not only demands that Ukraine’s foreign debt be canceled, but that the international community also provide reparations for 8 years of inaction on Russian aggression. If we want to understand this war, Yuliya points out, it is going to be necessary to look past the headlines. The simplistic black and white portrayals we’re receiving do not do justice to the complexity of the situation. And although she recognizes that this lack of nuance largely results from a desire to give the public a “coherent frame,” it’s just patently the case that, right now, “conventional frames don’t work” and for that reason, she says, we need to deeply reassess “what constitutes evidence” even, and evolve methods of analyzing disinformation, emotion, belonging, statehood and aggression beyond traditional Western scholarship and standard modes of political science. While we’re still encouraged to think in terms of the rule of law when trying to understand these sorts of conflicts, Yurchenko emphasizes that societies without the rule of law require us to “be more flexible” in our theorizing. Why can’t we incorporate “interdisciplinary and open-minded… frameworks” to understand what’s happening? This is what I kept hearing in my conversation with Yuliya: a tension between wanting to, herself, offer clarity, and knowing that the whole situation is, on some level, hopelessly complicated. So, for that reason, in part, she says she is necessarily hopeful that peace is possible, but has to be pragmatic about the evidence, which suggests that the war is going to drag on. So she continues to communicate publicly for peace. She talks at the beginning of our conversation about the fact that she derives a lot of strength from just fighting for the future through care – that these contributions to collective living-on have become a kind of personal coping mechanism, It speaks to the spirit of Yurchenko’s writing. Her book Ukraine and the Empire of Capital (https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745337371/ukraine-and-the-empire-of-capital/) is not only full of profound analysis, it also, importantly, centres the living labour of workers, people who are focused not on extraction, profit, and domination, but on trying to care for themselves and their families. These people are not, as she puts it here, just “pawns in
Mon, February 28, 2022
Joshua Cotter draws the reader in by rendering the indescribable complexity of consciousness
Joshua Cotter’s debut book Skyscrapers of the Midwest was nominated for an Ignatz Award. His book Driven By Lemons is a challenging and deeply personal exploration of unstable psychological states. We talk about how creating Driven By Lemons informed his breakout book Nod Away, which was on many top ten lists in 2016. And how reading a random article about the transference of consciousness into an electronic medium provided the “spark” for the Nod Away series (https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/nod-away), which is this massive, expansive story that considers the reductio ad absurdum possibilities of that sort of still science fictional, but increasingly more plausible, technology. He says that he wishes he could find the specific article that sparked the idea for Nod Away, but also seems to suggest it’s less important than just being open to the things in the world that are going to “click with you.” Incidentally, I really liked the way he admitted that he can’t exactly explain how his stories develop. He says it’s mostly intuitive, and compares his creative process to a rock tumbler, in the sense that there is a necessary but indeterminate process of refining your ideas. One of the things he notes-–and I think this is relatable for any artist or writer--is that he now feels more confident with his rendering of this epic story, and that he attributes the level of confidence he feels right now to the experience of being in one place, in a fixed space with a reliable routine. That might not work for everyone—others might be more nomadic–but I’d say that I think I function in the same way. The second installment in the Nod Away series (https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/nod-away-vol-2), released in 2021, advances the plot in exhilarating ways. To give you a sense of what the books are about–since I really tried to avoid spoilers in this interview, here is a summary from Multiversity Comics: “Nod Away is set on a near-future version of earth. A deep space transport has been developed to take a small crew to an earth-like, habitable planet in a nearby system in an attempt to begin colonization/repopulation. The internet is now telepathic and referred to as the “innernet.” When the hub is revealed to be a human child, Melody McCabe is hired to develop" a new nexus to replace that human hub. The books are really beautiful. And I ask Josh a number of questions about his specific cartooning style. The wireframe chaos that has become sort of a trademark, for example, is rooted in a dedication to Representing psychological states that can’t be expressed in words. It was amazing to hear that, while these panels seem to be frenetic and out of control, they’re actually conscious, controlled experiments in abstraction. We talk about how those choices are always in service of the story, despite the temptation to lean heavily into the aesthetics of splash panels and spectacle. Overall, he says the goal is to explore the “true costs of technology” withou
Tue, February 22, 2022
Tari Ajadi, El Jones & Julia Rodgers define democracy as trusting the public & investing in care
Tari Ajadi is an Assistant Professor in Black Politics at McGill University. El Jones is an Assistant Professor of Political and Canadian Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University, and Julia Rodgers is a PhD Candidate studying patient-oriented healthcare and public engagement in the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie. They are three of the four lead authors of the high profile and politically impactful report Defunding the Police: Defining the Way Forward for HRM. (https://www.halifax.ca/sites/default/files/documents/city-hall/boards-committees-commissions/220117bopc1021.pdf) In our discussion we unpack that important document, but we also try to look at some of the historical roots of defunding and divestment as tools for achieving social justice, the complicated challenge of trying to gain public support for policies that strike the public as “too radical” because a prior set of cultural assumptions, ideologies and biases blind many of us to the need to go radically in a different direction from the system that we have: which blindly wastes a fortune in public funds financing a broken status quo. We talk about the ongoing fiasco of the so-called “Freedom Convoy” that has terrorized Canadian cities, and especially Ottawa, for the last several weeks. They make it clear that the public’s disgust with the response from political leaders and law enforcement should not be read as necessarily about a desire for more authoritarian measures to keep the peace–though there is likely a lot of that within Canadian public opinion–it should be seen as, first off, a moment where the police demonstrate they are here to “uphold the social order,” as El puts it, to protect “white conservative movements,” but it should also be interpreted as another example of a “long history of ignoring white nationalism” in Canada, in Julia’s words. In many instances, social movements and counterprotests organized by communities–these forces that “exist outside the system”--were able to accomplish what the police couldn’t. This just confirms, from their perspective, that we need an alternative model of public safety, one that trusts communities enough to work “in concert for the good,” to quote a particularly powerful turn of phrase from Tari that he makes near the end of this discussion. He makes that turn in the context of describing the Defunding the Police report as a “love letter to the city.” And admits that love can be “complex” and “conflictual,” but due to the fact that the evacuation of love from the social in a carceral nation allows “space for domination to exist,” we need to reengage with the public as an act of redemptive love. Things did not have to turn out this way, and they could still change. But achieving that alteration of social reality will necessarily mean, as El teaches us, working to achieve that change at the social level. It’s not going to happen without knowledge translation and civic engagement. As Julie succinctly puts it at one point:
Tue, February 15, 2022
Gina Dent & Erica Meiners offer abolition feminism as a way to fight the prison-industrial complex
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.org/books/1546-abolition-feminism-now) It’s an essential text that was also co-written by Angela Davis and Beth Ritchie, two central thinkers on the prison industrial complex and its deep connections to racial capitalism. Abolition. Feminism. Now. is an invitation to enter a conversation about how we might respond as a society to the dehumanizing and brutal system of policing and punishment that we’ve more or less come to accept as the only means of ensuring public safety. Rich with examples of strategies for liberation, this book offers an authoritative analysis of not only the forgotten place of the incarcerated in contemporary society, but many other timely social problems that feel, at times, like they have no solution. The trick is, they say, the solutions are hard to imagine because of the way that ideology and a “carceral aesthetics” blind us to the urgent necessity of abolition. In this conversation, I tentatively ask Gina and Erica whether there might be a way for abolition to become more insistent on proactive change, rather than only emerging in response to particular crises. Their response reminded me of how little I really know about the movement for abolition. This is not about some historically new force in global politics; it is not the case that abolition feminism right now represents the reactionary emergence of something that wasn’t there. Abolition feminism has been here for a very long time, it is just that this history has been purposefully and perniciously forgotten. This moment of increased mobilization that we’re seeing today is the product of what Gina calls a “widening [of] the circle” to include people that have been “awakened” by recent events, and who are trying to respond to “multiple temporalities” coexisting at one time. They suggest that striking back against the normalizing of state violence requires the work of pushing the public’s sense of what the prison industrial complex is, past the specific space of unfreedom we imagine, and insisting on “having a longer [and more complex] conversation” about the system of racist mass incarceration we inhabit and are complicit in. That’s a lot to take in, but it’s necessary, they argue, to stay with the complexity, with the trouble. As they write in Abolition. Feminism. Now., it feels like “historical time is accelerating.” Crises are escalating and crashing violently onto the poor and precarious. So we have to try to respond with radical solutions to the emergencies that envelope the vulnerable first, while also remembering that, as they try to explain, we are always going to s
Mon, February 07, 2022
Ardath Whynacht advocates insurgent love & indicts the carceral system that colonialism built
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 Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth Richie argue in the new book Abolition. Feminism. Now: It would be “Inconceivable to many even ten years ago, [that] jail closure, the elimination of money bond, clemency, and ‘compassionate release’ [would be] debated in mainstream media outlets such as the Washington Post and lauded in progressive public policy forums as examples of necessary change.” But that is what is happening -– a deep quaking of the conceptual foundation upon which our carceral, punishing society has been built. And yet still, at the centre of that tremor in the social fabric is a concern over safety: how do we do the difficult work of imagining a means of keeping especially the very vulnerable in society safe, rather than using the prison and police to ossify the roots of violence? Insurgent Love is an important political statement on the meaning of this broad global shift toward adopting an abolitionist framework, and so much of the book’s critical power comes from thinking in both practical and radical ways about what abolition could mean locally. There’s no question, she says, that it is “tough” to be an “abolitionist scholar on domestic violence research in Canada.” There is not much of an “appetite,” as she puts it, “for… non-carceral” solutions. But an abolitionist answer might be the only one, despite the fact that it is a hard argument to make in a country that still, like so many others, actively “worships” and “reifies” the police and the military as the indispensable sources of our safety. Ardath makes clear that the reason we need abolition feminism now is that the level of analysis Black and Indigenous feminisms can offer right now, and the “level of prediction,” too, as she puts it, means that we don’t need to be condemned to the reactionary politics of punishment. As white settler academics, we talk about what it means to be a “permanent students” of these forms of feminist thought that radically reject the system that was constructed to directly benefit us, and how to do this without passively accepting the underacknowledged and unearned “rewards for being an opportunist.” We can move in a totally different direction if we can begin to conceptualize meaningful multiethnic, multiracial solidarity that builds that different world out of a respect and reinforcement of difference: different cosmologies, different conceptions of justice, of resistance. And if we accept that we need to divorce ourselves from a carceral system that dehumanizes people and perpetuates violence. Davis and the other co-authors of Abolition
Thu, February 03, 2022
Jeanne Sarson & Linda MacDonald refuse to abandon victims to a vicious world
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 these circumstances because they couldn’t just passively take in the information, they needed to intervene. And while I don’t agree with every single one of the claims that they make in Women Unsilenced, I absolutely respect their fundamental motivation. There is an attachment in their book to the criminal justice system, a sense that we can’t necessarily quickly move away from the system that we have. I feel somewhat differently, and agree with my next guest for the podcast Ardath Whynacht that this violence in some ways comes from living in a carceral society that “relies on binary categories of good and evil to avoid any sustained response to the causes of domestic violence.” But I absolutely agree with Jeanne and Linda's sense that care networks are vital for providing an alternative space of safety outside of a punishing, individualistic society, outside of the coordinates of possibility provided by patriarchy, white supremacy, misogyny, domination. It’s a wide-ranging and difficult conversion, so please do be aware that we’re going to be talking about gender-based violence, we’re going to be talking about subjects that not everyone will be comfortable hearing. We talk about the ways in which victimization dehumanizes people. We talk about what it means to, as Jeanne puts it, “rescue the act of caring” in a society that doesn't just dismiss, but even criminalizes caring in certain ways. They talk about the ways in which their own place in the story is crucial to how they theorize gender-based violence. And I ask them how they cope through the work they do. They make it clear that it’s not a question of coping, but a question of responsibility for them. You can find the book in bookstores in Halifax, NS, and online at Friesen Press (https://books.friesenpress.com/store/title/119734000164461020/Jeanne-Sarson-and-Linda-MacDonald-Women-Unsilenced).
Mon, January 24, 2022
Nora Loreto signals the need for social change & pushes journalists to dig deeper
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 Spin Doctors: How Media and Politicians Misdiagnosed the Covid-19 Pandemic (https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/spin-doctorshttps://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/spin-doctors). The new book offers political insights on precisely where the system failed, who it failed, and the roots of the political decisions that led to our current calamitous moment. In this interview, I ask about her fundamental motivation in writing the book. What is essential about documenting this dizzying time in detail? Why is it crucial that reporters and social critics document everything and think through what Loreto calls the “moving target” of the pandemic? She insists here that if we don’t, then we know that the virus’ impacts on especially the marginalized, those trapped in a hollowed out, profit-driven system of long-term care, the women who take care of the care labour required to keep society going, all of these underserved communities will be reduced to a footnote as the country pushes hard to return to something resembling “normalcy.” Against that wanton desire for a snapback into the status quo, Loreto forces us to dwell with the nightmarish resurgence of straightforward eugenics in this pandemic. The logic of disposability forced on people in long-term care, the apathy shown toward data that reveals the overwhelming correlation between disability, transmission and premature death. The ignorance of officials who waited for data to confirm the vulnerabilities that organizers and activists already knew existed in a world still deeply stratified by race and class. We end in a somewhat hopeful place, by trying to imagine what a robust left media could do in Canada. She says there’s obviously a pressing need for independent media to grow consequential enough to contest the attrition and monopolization that continues to hamper critical journalism in this country, but she says it can’t really grow in the intersectional, multivocal ways that we need it to if we don’t address and redress the overwhelming whiteness of the journalistic profession in Canada. This crisis made it feel, for a moment, like “anything was possible.” But making change at the root level in this moment required taking stock of the loss of collective power, the weakening of democracy under neoliberalism, and resisting these reassurances that “normal was right around the corner.” None of that happened, despite the fact that we could feel that this appeal to returning to some version of normal was maybe always a false promise. In the first months of the pandemic, fear felt omnipresent. Now something else seems
Fri, January 14, 2022
Melanie Yazzie traffics in radical certainty & fights against the fallout of political atomization
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 committed to immediate and material decolonization (https://therednation.org/). She is the lead editor of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society and has co-written two incredibly important books, The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth and Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation. We talk about those texts here, and about some of Dr. Yazzie’s forthcoming book projects. Yazzie’s work decrypts and diagnoses the individualism that characterizes liberal politics. And she is, as she explains here, understandably frustrated about the lack of progress that has been made on dealing with the liberal takeover of radical politics, in part via the reassuring language of “reconciliation.” In relation to this problem, Yazzie talks about the palpable “confusion” and “alienation” that exists among white settlers who participate in solidarity protests alongside Indigenous peoples. What she says we tend to overlook, though, is that this alienation is a defining feature of capitalism, and that the desire to be close to and internalize the type of connection and feeling of interdependency that Indigenous peoples feel toward the land, even it comes from a sincere place, is a deeply messy, difficult and unsettling tendency. The rise in “settler extremism” is, in her words, a “direct response to the existential threat that” even a change in the “symbolic order” represents. And so, for this reason, she reflects on how, as an educator, she has seen a “full scale assault on education” and why it might make sense that "the realm of ideas and the realm of intellectual production is” a “battleground… right now politically.”
Wed, January 05, 2022
Rupa Marya and Raj Patel radicalize care through deep medicine and an urgent appeal for plurality
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 health initiatives, a few I want to make sure I mention are her work on the Justice Study–a national research effort to examine the links between police violence and health outcomes in black, brown and indigenous communities–and her work on the board of Seeding Sovereignty, an international group that promotes Indigenous autonomy in response to climate change. Raj Patel is an award-winning author and film-maker, and a Research Professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. He has worked for the World Bank and the WTO, and he’s also participated in global protests against both of these institutions. He’s served as a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems and published on an extraordinary array of things in a variety of different fields. He’s written for The Guardian, the Financial Times, the New York Times, Times of India, among many others. His first book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, made a big impact on me when I was a doctoral researcher. His second, The Value of Nothing, was a New York Times and international best-seller. I speak with them about our current moment, as another year begins, as the Omicron variant of COVID-19 rips through beleaguered cities, as climate fires in Colorado destroy almost a thousand homes (despite there still being snow on the ground), and as we somehow still see new year’s resolutions being discussed, as they are every year without fail–even in spite of the pandemic. New year’s, though, as Antonio Gramsci wrote, is less about renewal and more about “turn[ing] life and [the] human spirit into a commercial concern,” a sort of gut-check moment that is imagined to matter as a means of cultivating well-being. But it’s a means of cultivating well-being where we end up thinking, as Gramsci put it, “that between one year and the next there is a break, that a new history is beginning.” But the notion of a new year’s resolution seems nonsensical if we take seriously Marya and Patel’s sense that health, in its truest sense, is an “emergent phenomenon of systems interacting well with other systems.” Inflamed is a book that can help us locate the roots of disease outside of the body, in an economic system that generates obscene levels of toxicity and risk. The body, they point out, is really just doing what it is so incredibly efficient at: achieving equilibrium with its environment – the problem is that the environment has been so thoroughly damaged that the work of equilibrium has become corrosive to our bodies. Marya and P
Thu, December 16, 2021
Imre Szeman campaigns for a revolution in energy use and environmental communication
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 hear that Imre had decided to enter politics in this year’s snap election. He explains in this interview that he made the decision to embrace the challenge of campaigning because he was offered a rare opportunity: to serve as the Green Party of Canada's senior Climate Critic and write radical, innovative climate policy, to test the “translatability” of political and ecological theory in ways that he hadn’t had a chance to before. I ask him about his sense that any radical plan for energy transition has to have a Plan B, a game plan that doesn’t just dismantle, but rebuilds by attending to the needs of communities. This is different from what Szeman calls the “trope of hope,” a tendency that actually, he feels, ignores the “reality on the ground.” And part of that reality, crucially, is the fact of communication itself, and Imre notes that it hasn’t gotten any easier to “communicate about the environment” in a way that “encourages action.” And while he admits he doesn’t have any easy answers, he really stresses that we need to ask questions about “what generates effective communication.” Like, for example, is referencing the colossal, hard-to-cognize problem of the environment a better bet than trying to appeal to small local collectivities? What does technology, or what Szeman calls “technologically-inflected revolutionary politics,” communicate, if anything, about action and the need for “revolutionary social change”? Does technology in any way actually convey the way we move politically into a post-fossil-fuel future? And if it doesn’t, is that a fatal flaw of technologically-inflected revolutionary politics? We spend a lot of time considering the questions, but we also talk about the thought experiments in Kim Stanley Robinson’s sprawling opus of a climate fiction novel The Ministry for the Future. Imre expresses his admiration for how Robinson deals directly with the messiness of the political, rather than moving past the conflicts and contradictions toward a too-convenient conclusion that replaces our chaotic system with a better one. While the mess “can be dispiriting to look at,” Szeman insists that this is what he wants to understand. And he’s not alone: as he notes, there has never been a moment where the impacts of colonialism were “more visible.” The environment is, in a sense, being invoked as a “new political actor,” or an active agent in “revolutionary politics.” This fact of a rising consciousness of a “larger network” or “system” that exceeds capitalism, that totally transcends human desires, means that it has never been clearer that the
Fri, December 03, 2021
Jeff Diamanti zooms in on the terminal & reinforces the elemental otherness of the planet
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 of Petroleum (www.bloomsbury.com/ca/climate-and-…-9781350191839/) and ask more pointed questions about not only the claims of that book, but about the pivotal moment we are currently in, where, as he notes, we are still continually “inundated with stuff drawn from the earth but not encountered as such;” we still, especially in the affluent parts of the world, experience the luxury of that sort of comforting disconnection of commodity from supply chain. But we also now face the mounting pressure of environmental collapse and the knowledge that collapse will be the consequence of this disconnection, where even “postindustrial” or digital capitalism is “coded in a language of intangibility” but still relies wholly upon “dead matter” to drive the system. The pandemic has forced many more of us to attend to the material conditions that allow life to flourish. It matters that, in an instant, what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism” can be “punctured,” in Diamanti’s terms, and the possibility of system-wide change can feel within reach. Yet, at the same time, DIamanti admits that some important methods of engagement don’t automatically translate, for him, into a politics; yet, these modes of thinking and feeling are vital pedagogically for encouraging a connection to what he calls the “elemental alterity of the earth.” Part of this is based on an ethic of being a theorist who is also in and of the world, who makes a deliberate effort to “slow down” and experience the overwhelming forces around you. Who works to ensure that we’re allowing these encounters to inform our concepts, not the other way around. Anna Tsing’s “arts of noticing” are quite a bit different from the language of a “world to win” and are still potentially quite powerful, I think, for environmental communication (a problem I’ll take up in more detail in my conversation next week with Imre Szeman). The hope, nonetheless, is to devise stronger questions and to work beyond the “expected conclusions” provided by readymade frameworks that basically induce a sort of “epistemological illegibiilty” when it comes to energy markets and energy futures, which inevitably leads to the continuation of our current impasse: the paradox of knowing we are cooking the planet for future generations of people are nonhuman beings, but can’t imagine real ways of correcting our course. In this context of profound blockage, Jeff likes to believe an engagement with the elemental alterity of the earth can open things up, these “massive and beautiful forces” can provides a grounds for revolutionary imaginings that don’t
Fri, December 03, 2021
Jeff Diamanti zooms in on the terminal & reminds us of the elemental otherness of dead matter
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 of Petroleum (https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/climate-and-capital-in-the-age-of-petroleum-9781350191839/) and ask more pointed questions about not only the claims of that book, but about the pivotal moment we are currently in, where, as he notes, we are still continually “inundated with stuff drawn from the earth but not encountered as such;” we still, especially in the affluent parts of the world, experience the luxury of that sort of comforting disconnection of commodity from supply chain. But we also now face the mounting pressure of environmental collapse and the knowledge that collapse will be the consequence of this disconnection, where even “postindustrial” or digital capitalism is “coded in a language of intangibility” but still relies wholly upon “dead matter” to drive the system. The pandemic has forced many more of us to attend to the material conditions that allow life to flourish. It matters that, in an instant, what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism” can be “punctured,” in Diamanti’s terms, and the possibility of system-wide change can feel within reach. Yet, at the same time, DIamanti admits that some important methods of engagement don’t automatically translate, for him, into a politics; yet, these modes of thinking and feeling are vital pedagogically for encouraging a connection to what he calls the “elemental alterity of the earth.” Part of this is based on an ethic of being a theorist who is also in and of the world, who makes a deliberate effort to “slow down” and experience the overwhelming forces around you. Who works to ensure that we’re allowing these encounters to inform our concepts, not the other way around. Anna Tsing’s “arts of noticing” are quite a bit different from the language of a “world to win” and are still potentially quite powerful, I think, for environmental communication (a problem I’ll take up in more detail in my conversation next week with Imre Szeman). The hope, nonetheless, is to devise stronger questions and to work beyond the “expected conclusions” provided by readymade frameworks that basically induce a sort of “epistemological illegibiilty” when it comes to energy markets and energy futures, which inevitably leads to the continuation of our current impasse: the paradox of knowing we are cooking the planet for future generations of people are nonhuman beings, but can’t imagine real ways of correcting our course. In this context of profound blockage, Jeff likes to believe an engagement with the elemental alterity of the earth can open things up, these “massive and beautiful forces” can provides a grounds
Fri, November 26, 2021
Matt Bors curates a space for alternative cartooning and traces the roots of the webcomic
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 American Library. More recently, his hysterical and pointed collection of comics entitled We Should Improve Society Somewhat (https://cloverpress.us/products/we-should-improve-society-somewhat) came out in June 2020 from Clover Press. We talk about both books at length here; we also discuss Matt’s current and upcoming projects, his decision to leave editorial cartooning, and why he’s pursuing different artistic goals in the wake of the nightmare of Trump’s authoritarian populism. Incredibly, he is embarking on these projects while doing all of the labour required to keep The Nib (https://thenib.com/) going. The Nib is an online daily comics publication and a crucial space for comic strip interventions on contemporary issues; it features political cartoons, graphic journalism, essays and memoir. We cover a lot of ground in this conversation. Matt expands on what it meant to enter publishing at what he calls the “tail end of print,” only to find that while social media seemed to be a new frontier for publication, it was basically impossible to make a living by “being online.” Now, though, of course, using a hybrid method, The Nib is showing how comics can thrive and find new audiences. Matt, perhaps more than most cartoonists, has had to deal with the volatile nature of contemporary political discourse. He’s also witnessed first-hand the sort of state violence that organized protest can provoke. He describes the horrifying experience of being in Portland in 2020 and witnessing the realization of Trump’s fascist rhetoric in the form of police and federal agents “warring” with protestors, as he puts it. But the interview ends on a positive note--perhaps somewhat unusual for this podcast--Matt feels that, as a public, we have reached a level of “political education” where far more “understand the problems now” and routinely engage with the reality of a “hell world.” The challenge now would seem to be redirecting the “frustration” and “resignation” people feel at not being able to act quickly or collectively into meaningful mass movements.
Thu, November 11, 2021
Neil Cohn rethinks visual literacy and underscores the unexplored dynamics of comic books
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 world. I gravitated to Cohn’s newest book Who Understands Comics? (https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/who-understands-comics-9781350156043/) to some extent because of the acclaim it had received, but mostly because I am a devotee of the medium. (Although, we talk about whether it should even be regarded as a discrete medium.) Who Understands Comics is, in Cohn’s words, his “psychology” book. He explains that the questions he wanted to ask about the ways that we comprehend comics dictated that he use more quantitative methods. That said, his work is still deeply interdisciplinary; and he talks about how working across different fields of thought provides a way to avoid the issue of running into disciplinary constraints in your research that can sometimes shut down conversations, collaborations and critiques before they occur. He also relates how the hybrid approach he was using to understand how comics work, when he was a graduate researcher, meant that “nobody knew what to do with him.” These moments of blockage forced him to find new routes for doing justice to the power of graphic storytelling. To devise a way to conduct experiments that would then inform theory, and theoretical frameworks that could be shaped and revised on the basis of experimentation. While acknowledging the comforts of familiarity, Cohn says he’s committed to creating space for contesting key heuristic assumptions about how readers of graphic texts do the work of supposedly “filling in the gaps” within and between the panels. That particular assumption--that readers are responsible for manufacturing “missing information” that the cartoonist doesn’t provide and that readers just somehow automatically know how to supply--just doesn’t stand up to empirical research, he says. Especially if we do that research across multiple different cultural contexts and traditions. Cohn stresses that there’s just not enough awareness of the importance of cultural differences in comics theory. But these are crucial for thinking through the evolution of distinct systems of visual language. So, we may have a cursory sense of the differences between the libraries of comic storytelling in Japan, France, the U.S. and Canada, but a cursory understanding tends to move us into totalizing about all comics, as though all comic storytellers follow the same patterns when they write, which they don’t.
Tue, October 19, 2021
Carlyn Zwarenstein shatters our misconceptions about opioids and refuses the violence of prohibition
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, and one that forced her to “look outside” herself and engage with the “overlapping issues” that constitute the overdose crisis. She argues that, at a certain point, it becomes necessary to stop worrying about making a convincing case to have one’s cause recognized and just begin acting to insist on that cause. She talks about the role of direct action in producing supervised injection sites, and the Drug User Liberation Front’s rallying cry: “Death is not our destiny,” which she says is a “perfect and beautiful” slogan that acts as an antitoxin against the rhetorical power of this “downward spiral” trope within mainstream discourses on drug use. She points out that framing the issue through the downward spiral metaphor fails to generate the required urgency, reinforcing criminalization and an entrenched fatalism when it comes to the use of opioids. She says, fundamentally, dismantling “prohibition,” getting rid of the violence of the drug trade and the dangerous ways that people obtain drugs, and the dangers that are inherent in illicit drugs, is the only effective policy measure left. If we want to reduce harm and even “see overall drug use lowered,” we must, she stresses, dismantle the system of prohibition and move past policies that do not “prevent death” or “enable life.”
Wed, September 22, 2021
Francesca Ekwuyasi yearns for stories about pleasure and writes searingly about pain
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 motivates Ekwuyasi’s art, life, activism and writing. She expands on why she feels drawn to stories about pleasure, joy and reconciliation, and also why she’s driven to write stories that show us how to “love properly” and heal, even as the world is constantly ending. She talks about the lengthy, improvisational process of putting her staggering book together, how the book became so much more immersive through this process, and how she writes with the hope of understanding, or with the faith that the reader will work to understand. She talks about intimately knowing sisterhoods and wanting to write women’s experiences in the world, using the conventions of fiction to move, as she puts it, toward a ‘merging’ that is also an unraveling...
Thu, July 29, 2021
Henry Adam Svec plays with norms of songwriting & storytelling, urging us to plug in & pick a team
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, forms the basis of his new novel, Life is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs (https://invisiblepublishing.com/product/life-is-like-canadian-football/). The book, in fact, builds out from the stage banter that brought The CFL Sessions to life as a performance. I related most to the ways that Svec’s book can both blithely shrug off and bitterly contest the normative constraints of academia. As it stands, Svec doesn’t feel as though his most recent writing should be required to present a unified theory of authenticity, it’s main object of analysis. It’s enough for the book to simply “offer ideas” about it. In this sense, I think Svec’s work in many ways models how we can inject more joy, satire and self-reflexivity into scholarly writing. (Just a quick note: you might notice that there are some keyboard and mouse noises [clicking and scrolling, not squeaking] throughout the episode. My apologies if this is distracting!)
Tue, June 08, 2021
Judith Butler dismantles the forces that unleash violence
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 capture the extent of Butler’s influence, we focus on her most recent writing, in part because she admits that her thinking has significantly changed over the years. So, while she has been concerned with the question of grieving, and in particular, of the politics of grievability, for almost two decades, her most recent work is differently centered on the problem of how life in the now deeply nihilistic stages of neoliberal capitalism might be safeguarded against increasingly normalized destruction. In our conversation, Butler explores the implications of Arundhati Roy’s plea for the coronavirus pandemic to be seen as a portal. She stresses that the outcomes of the virus, the effects that it will have on society, are not yet decided. The way she puts it is that “the pandemic is a disease of the interconnected world;” but, seen from this perspective, the virus exposes the profound inequalities that characterize and corrupt our interconnection and interdependence. Rather than creating more alienation and apathy, Butler hopes that this might serve as the potential basis for a radically global politics of equality, but explains that this will likely only become possible if we can learn to conceptualize our interconnection in new ways, to actually perceive the relationship between untimely death, inequality and structures of oppression. I was especially struck, in this interview, by Butler’s explanation of the meaning of outrage. For her, outrage means that we refuse the intolerable nature of our circumstances, but it also means that, when we’re faced with unending violence, there is an “unrealism” or utopian power that emerges, making a seemingly impossible politics of nonviolence conceivable. If it is true that, as a form of life, human beings are intrinsically prone to aggression, we are nonetheless not doomed to violence. Violence is a “practice, an action, a way of living,” as Butler puts it. What it manifests, in her view, is not only the destruction of life and of social bonds, but also the authorizing and unleashing of violence, even when the goal of violent action is to end violence. One gets the sense that Butler knows that this is a difficult proposition when we consider a situation like the one faced by Palestinians, who live daily with the specter of death and destruction. But Butler speaks explicitly here to the ways that Israel’s invocation of a “non-reciprocal right” to self-defense “legitimates in advance” any and all of its campaigns of bombardment, its wars on Palestinian life. Self-defense, in this context, constitutes what she calls a “tacti
Tue, May 25, 2021
Andreas Malm thinks through how to break the spell of climate change defeatism & fossil fascism
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, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism (www.versobooks.com/books/3812-whit…skin-black-fuel), which he co-authored with the Zetkin Collective. In our interview, Malm addresses some of his claims about the use of political counterviolence and the ability of social movements to regulate it. Malm is making the case for thinking more deeply about the almost inevitable radicalization of generations of young people that are waking up in a world that has been more or less abandoned to the interests of fossil capital. Given that the globe’s richest 1% bears the greatest responsibility for the climate crisis--because elites invest too much in fossil fuels and burn way too much of them--it makes sense, Malm suggests, to guide anger in the political direction of undoing the extraction and extortion, the violence created through fossil capitalism.
Tue, May 04, 2021
Nora Loreto uses humour and critical debate to confront the neoliberal politics of fauxminism
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 their authentically friendly delivery, the podcast boasts a wildly diverse audience in this sprawling and diffuse country. We discuss the podcast’s unique sense of humour and when that sense of humour comes in handy as a means of dealing with really hard subjects, but also how that approach can sometimes alienate audiences that seem to assume that using the language of humour to express anger, to fight grief, to cope with the anxieties of the contemporary moment, is an inappropriate mode of communication. Nora says that she still plans to defiantly use humour because it’s a source of the joy that enjoins us to keep going. Last October she released a book with Fernwood Publishing called Take Back the Fight: Organizing Feminism for the Digital Age (https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/take-back-the-fight). She talks about the book here as a kind of guide to adopting a productive position of feminist self-scrutiny at a time when, she argues, feminist politics needs to be reimagined as a means of meeting the overwhelming threats to collective flourishing that we, to varying degrees, face in the current moment. Feminism should become, again, more threatening, more of a direct confrontation with the current organization of society, in part by focusing on who materially possesses power and how to undermine it. I value the ways that her book engages with the question of leadership, in particular. She talks about how no single leader can correct what she terms political “atrophy,” that our faith in this privatized notion of leadership is a symptom of an atmosphere in which revolutionary struggles are seen as a thing of the past, a vestige of a less professional or less practical time. Against this, she proposes that we need the spaces, on the left, to practice collective accountability, to learn how to bring people together, how to wield the power of mass communication and how to communicate collective demands to the public in ways that might produce the conditions for practical change. What we do not need, she makes clear, are the virtual platforms we’ve become woefully dependent upon, where we’re connected but apart, where we’re inclined toward competitive individualism and knee-jerk hostility, where learning from the other and discovering the capacity to change one’s mind is a struggle. These private spaces of digital belonging should be contested too, from her perspective, and contested from the position of what we can learn from political struggles of the past.
Fri, April 23, 2021
Natasha Lennard elevates oppositional movements & attacks the conditions for contemporary fascism
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 interviews on the question of violence entitled Violence: Humans in Dark Times (http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100350210). In our interview she addresses how she views the role of journalism and critical writing, stressing that communication is “necessary but deeply insufficient” as a means of creating radical structural change. I appreciate the ways that she interrogates the seductive concept of a “marketplace of ideas” and the seemingly unassailable notion of “Free Speech.” Instead, she’s invested in ideas of accountability and a public sphere in which we are forced to reckon with how speech acts can “call into being” fascist realities. Rather than calling it “censorship,” Lennard sees a culture of accountability as a matter of intervening to insist on “less oppressive spaces” and emphasizes that a just world would “pivot the center” (in Patricia Hill Collins’ words) so that those who are directly affected by hateful material could lead the project of deplatforming fascism. While she acknowledges that Twitter taking away the means of creating what she calls “fascistic lifeworlds” is a progressive step, she also makes it clear that we should not be required to wait for “Silicon Valley Leviathans” to regulate hate, to slowly cave to leftist organizing and resistance. Being Numerous argues for the power of using the term “fascism” to name the authoritarian desires that drive white supremacy; suggesting that it’s useful as a means of capturing the violent nature of the forces we oppose, and for calling into being an anti-fascist response. In general, her work is clear about the tensions between materialist politics and social constructivism, drawing from Donna Haraway’s notion that the world is made, but not made up. She argues that the struggle of our times is to figure out how to create opposition both “all at once” and slowly and reflectively, as challenging as that inherently is. Rather than offering a simplistically hopeful framing, Lennard asks us to actually engage with the impressively fast rebuilding of a robust left-wing politics after decades of “ideological decimation.”
Wed, April 14, 2021
Daniel Lombroso documents a groundswell of racist populism and tracks the sources of violence
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 science especially regard it as a singular first-hand account of the shape and scale of the current networked nature of white nationalism. In this interview we talk about avoiding the simplistic “hot take” so that we can pose more critical questions about how complex our current global society has become, and the challenges we face. Our discussion looks at the ways that White Noise exposes how broken and narcissistic those in the alt-right movement actually are. White Noise is a film that documents the venal desire for influence among many of the movement’s most prominent figures. It also suggests that there is a corruptible drive for community that makes many in the United States and elsewhere vulnerable to narratives of white victimization and displacement. His film studies the ways that white supremacist influencers hack the algorithms that fuel follow culture and seek to, as he puts it, “turbo-charge” their vile racist rhetoric. It also, in subtle ways, unpacks the causal links between racist rhetoric and violence. In light of this fact, we discuss what it would mean, today, to police and regulate online discourse, given the fact that banning Trump and other hateful figures from social media has radically reduced their ability to foment violence. Lombroso's work opens onto an important conversation about how, in the context of a fractured and fractious political moment, we can learn to narrate the possibilities of multiethnic democracy and inject a more ethical radicalism into our political discussions.
Thu, April 01, 2021
Caroline Monnet finds meaning in the border spaces and experiments with strategies for change
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 exhibited across Canada and across the globe. Caroline's short film Mobilize (https://www.nfb.ca/film/mobilize/) takes you on a feverish, exhilarating journey from the Far North to the urban south, and her more recent video installation “Transatlantic” (https://www.schirn.de/en/magazine/context/2021/caroline_monnet/caroline_monnet_transatlantic/) takes us on an immersive and disruptive trip across the colonial route of the Atlantic ocean. She is currently in post-production on her first feature-length narrative film Bootlegger (https://microclimatfilms.com/en/films/bootlegger/) which won best screenplay at Cannes’ Cinefondation in 2017 and has just been picked up by an international distributor. The film is a community-oriented engagement with ideas of self-determination, finding a cohesive sense of self in a world of borders, and the sort of individual and collective resilience required to endure through trauma. In this interview she talks about how the pandemic has influenced the way she thinks about producing art and how returning to her original, more improvisational approach to creating allows her to produce with the greatest amount of self-assurance and freedom.
Thu, February 18, 2021
Anna Tsing mines the meanings of ferality and summons the ghosts of haunted landscapes
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 the Anthropocene. In this episode, we discuss her most recent project--Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene--an online platform that is available at feralatlas.org. The site is intended as an interactive showcase for research into what Tsing and her co-editors Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou call “feral species and feral dynamics,” but it also uses multimedia techniques to tell “stories of environmental injustice, radical diversity and scientific surprise.” Released through the Digital Repository at Stanford University Press, Feral Atlas contains a dizzying array of multidisciplinary engagements with the disturbing realities of the Anthropocene. And despite including more than one hundred essays, analyses, and artworks by leading scientists and artists, it has not yet received the level of attention that it deserves, as a text that maps the enduring social and ecological effects of Invasion, Empire, Capital, and Acceleration. We discuss the risks and pleasures that come with using a digital medium to experiment with modes of storytelling that are capable of inspiring both the hope and the fear necessary to convince people how urgently we need to protect and nurture the last remaining spaces of interspecies flourishing, as we attempt to dismantle, in Tsing’s words, “the most harmful anthropogenic kinds of infrastructural effects.”
Fri, February 05, 2021
Holly Jean Buck takes seriously the innovation and revolutionary change needed to repair the planet.
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, (https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/bucknell/has-it-come-to-this/9781978809352/) looks at the “promise and perils of geoengineering” from a wide array of theoretical perspectives. In this conversation we talk about some of the complex social effects of climate solutions, how to develop a better language for phasing out fossil fuels, how we need to combine emotional methods for moving people with rigorous and ambitious system-wide planning for a future in which we are dedicated, long-term, to drawing down carbon, and what it means to resign ourselves to the scientific certainty that we need to take seriously solutions that seemed, to this point, completely utopian so that we can make space for futures where collective survival is possible.
Thu, December 17, 2020
Kathi Weeks expands on economic power, essential work and the tension between reform and revolution
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 feminism. Her important book The Problem with Work (https://trinity.duke.edu/problem-work-feminism-marxism-antiwork-politics-and-postwork-imaginaries) is a panoramic study of the ways that we tend to think about and value work as a foundation not only for our livelihoods but also our lives. She advocates for a structural shift in the way we think about, commodify and relate to our labour. We talk in this conversation about the pragmatic value of utopian thinking--how it has become, in the years since The Problem With Work was published in 2011, notably less “embarrassing” to be utopian. Her goal is, in many ways, to engage with, as she puts it, the “confining structures” that police us in our homes and on the job, in our relationships to others. It is also her hope that we will be more open to the ways that even seemingly small, incremental changes can create the space necessary to sustain enduring social movements.
Tue, December 15, 2020
Cara Daggett sparks a dialogue on dynamism and works to demystify the human relationship to energy.
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 has not captured all of our relationships and that other models of collective flourishing exist. That, in spite of the many indications that the late Anthropocene is accelerating past a crucial tipping point, we can still model a means of communicating against powerlessness. In pursuit of this, Daggett offers a timely and historical reevaluation of the drive for dynamism since the 19th century, a drive to put the world to work which she exposes as the heart of so much suffering. Her work takes aim at the anthropocentric and often misogynistic roots of violence and outlines some ways that we can demand a healthier future with less work, more pleasure and adequate abundance.
Fri, November 06, 2020
Derf Backderf discusses how comics can nurture dissent, empower readers and offer new perspectives.
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 best understood as a kind of interrogation: he is looking for answers, probing the historical record, and taking artistic risks that pay off in unexpected ways. Check out his work at http://www.derfcity.com/.
Fri, October 23, 2020
Alexis Shotwell outs the lie of individual purity & encourages an entangled sense of responsibility.
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 explain why the political reaction to these disastrous effects doesn’t translate into more mass dissent and a greater sense of shared vulnerability? Shotwell says that a doctrine of “purism” or “purity politics” turns us against each other: cultivating and asserting one’s own individual purity against these unsettling feelings of contamination. If we aren’t sure of how to implicate the system effectively, it is because available practices of self-purification, clean eating and detoxing only give us the comfortable feeling of being innocent, ourselves.
Sat, October 10, 2020
Max Taylor resists public apathy & throws his hat into the ring, powered by the TikTok boom.
Max Taylor is a young communicator and mayoral candidate here in Halifax. His campaign is not built to win; instead, it's designed to produce a scarce resource in political communication locally and globally: engagement. In this conversation I talk to him about the kind of courage he’s needed to run for mayor, why people who see it as a transparent attempt to gain followers don’t get it, and why he cares about setting a precedent for more direct participation in politics, especially among young people. Check out Max's TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@maxemersontaylor?lang=en (You'll find a link to his campaign site through the page.)
Fri, October 02, 2020
Jesse David Fox reckons with the ways that comedy restores, challenges and reorients us.
Jesse David Fox, senior editor at Vulture and host of the fascinating Good One podcast, discusses his divisive theory of “post-comedy” (or forms of humour that don't fit the traditional rubric of "laughs-per-minute"), how the rhythm of comedy has changed in the context of our coronavirus-induced isolation, and how the notion of booms and busts in comedy doesn’t really match up with the historical fact that, as he puts it, “comedy is a renewable resource.”
Fri, August 07, 2020
Andy Brown on the languages of the literary graphic novel & the intuitive art of editing.
Andy Brown is a publisher and writer who runs Conundrum Press in Wolfville, Nova Scotia (https://www.conundrumpress.com/). The books Conundrum puts out are immensely immersive and artful, so it was really exciting to discuss the challenges of operating in a niche market with Andy. We discuss Conundrum's beginnings in Montreal in the 90s, and the moment when Andy decided to change Conundrum’s mandate to focus exclusively on publishing literary graphic novels. The literary graphic novel is a relatively new term, so one of the things we talk about is what exactly that term means. What do books in this genre look like? What do they do? How do you edit them, and how is it distinct from editing just prose? And what kind of work does the term itself, graphic novel, do to invest the comic form with credibility?
Sun, July 26, 2020
Summer Pierre captures the ways that music moves us and images come to matter.
Summer Pierre is an extremely inventive illustrator whose debut graphic novel All the Sad Songs (https://retrofit.storenvy.com/products/24567828-all-the-sad-songs-by-summer-pierre) is a text that pushes you to explore connections to the past and to think about how specific objects and pieces of art stand out and score the process of self-realization. How can an artist convey how it feels when music affects you in your body? How might the grid structure of comics serve as a kind of "safety net" for analyzing the deepest stories we tell about ourselves?
Thu, July 16, 2020
Veronica Post draws links between borders, injustice & the power of stories to provoke thought.
Veronica Post is a graphic novelist whose sharply drawn debut book Langosh and Peppi: Fugitive Days has just been published by Conundrum Press (https://www.conundrumpress.com/new-titles/langosh-and-peppi-fugitive-days/). In this conversation, she talks about her direct experience of the European migrant crisis, and how it shaped the narrative of this immersive and incredibly thoughtful graphic text. Langosh and Peppi is a book that blends exuberant adventure with serious reflections on the repressed relationship to history we find in nations that have borne witness to trauma. It combines roaming explorations of Central Europe with a critical perspective on injustice and the basic brutality of borders. By making these connections between racial nationalism, what she calls “emotional repression” and the continuing global refugee crisis, Veronica gives us an opportunity to consider the importance of narrative in contesting the long history of moral indifference to the other’s suffering.
Sun, July 12, 2020
Rebecca Roher outlines the exhilarating puzzle of making comics that inspire a sense of wonder.
Rebecca Roher is a cartoonist and educator whose captivating work of graphic memoir Bird in a Cage won the Doug Wright Award in 2017. We discuss her current project, 100 Year Old Wisdom, and its interest in making us more open to the lived realities of aging and the aged. We also talk about her forthcoming graphic biography of civil rights activist Viola Desmond, which will be out in October as part of the Nova Graphica anthology from Conundrum Press (https://www.conundrumpress.com/forthcoming/nova-graphica/). She explains how representing Desmond’s story required extensive research and intense self-reflection on what it means to be an anti-racist ally. Head to http://rebeccaroher.com/index.html to see more of her singular style of graphic storytelling.
Tue, July 07, 2020
Cassie Thornton imagines how radical collaboration and revolutionary care networks are possible.
Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist, she is also the author of the forthcoming book, The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future (https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745343327/the-hologram/). All of the work that Cassie does is intensely concerned with the pervasive barriers to flourishing that are so entrenched in our late capitalist society--as such, she’s focused on preparing for a future society that generates health outside of the structures that reproduce oppression. We discuss her book and some of the claims it makes around how we can mobilize for that future. She explains how we have been taught forms of care that are individualizing and, in many ways, contrary to real care. Her message is essential because it envisions a means of lifting the curse of a deep isolation so that we can let the floodgates of peer-to-peer care open.
Thu, June 25, 2020
Liza Mandelup sheds light on the meaning and making of her documentary Jawline.
Liza Mandelup is a director with an uncanny eye and a deeply perceptive sense of how culture is changing. Her brilliant documentary Jawline (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoVA0-w6VtA) premiered last year at the Sundance Film Festival, where she won the Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker. The film is an invaluable study of content creation today, and it has stunned audiences due to its intimate portrayal of the aspiring and established content creators who make up a new social media ecosystem. In this conversation we talk about the intensely collaborative work that went into directing Jawline, her personal and professional commitment to making art, and the ways that gender and identity are shifting in the social media age.
Thu, June 18, 2020
Elaine Power on the politics of food provision and the necessity of a basic income guarantee.
Elaine Power is a professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies and the Head of the Department of Gender Studies at Queen's University. She is also the co-founder of the Kingston Action Group for a Basic Income Guarantee. In this episode we discuss the challenge of making the field of food studies "inherently feminist" by stressing the importance of "power differentials" in determining who has the privilege of indulging in food and who suffers under food insecurity. Dr. Power expresses a measured hope here that the COVID-19 pandemic is creating the conditions for more empathy to emerge in political discourses around food, and points out that this may mean greater solidarity in producing a more equal future of food provision.
Thu, June 04, 2020
Dave Zirin on anti-racism and nonviolence in contemporary sports and culture.
Dave Zirin is the sports editor for The Nation and has written many path-breaking books on the politics of sports and the legacy of radical, outspoken athletes who have used, and risked, their stature in order to resist racial oppression. Here Zirin talks about how prominent athletes are “breaking out from the corporate shackles” to help mobilize for justice in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, among the many other victims of police brutality. He suggests that this is a pivotal moment of collective outrage and reinforces the need for “vigilance” and “consistency” in opposing oppressive forces, for fear that we will see those in positions of power undertake a reactionary consolidation of that power. We also talk about the dangerous and disingenuous celebration of domination in Netflix and ESPN’s documentary series The Last Dance, and the urgent need for real diversity in both the coverage and performance of sports.
Fri, May 22, 2020
Linda MacDonald & Jeanne Sarson on feminism as a means of opposing misogyny and mass violence.
Trigger warning: This episode contains detailed descriptions of assault and abuse that some listeners may find disturbing. Linda MacDonald and Jeanne Sarson are feminist activists and human rights educators who have been pushing for decades to insist that the public confront the related realities of femicide and non-state torture. Their work led them to co-found the organization Persons Against Non-State Torture (www.nonstatetorture.org), a radical advocacy group that demands we recognize the everyday forms of abuse, torture, victimization, and domination in the domestic sphere that go criminally unnoticed. In response to the devastating and unprecedented act of mass murder that occurred here in Nova Scotia on April 18th and 19th, they are devoting their time and energy to a fiercely important media campaign to spread the message that we must, now, adopt what they term a “feminist lens” for understanding the misogynistic roots of the rampage, and a feminist framework for seeing this series of attacks as part of a continuum of male aggression connected to related acts of mass violence that we have witnessed in recent memory.
Sun, May 03, 2020
Priscilla Wald on microbial metaphors, outbreak narratives and the politics of pandemic disease.
Priscilla Wald is a Professor of English and Women's Studies at Duke University who has written extensively on the cultural politics of pandemics, past and future. Her books Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form and Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative are essential for understanding the current coronavirus pandemic. Wald offers powerful correctives to the distortions that tend to cloud our thinking about COVID-19 and outbreaks more broadly.
Mon, April 27, 2020
Joe Duggan on using emotion to communicate the empirical truth of climate change
Researcher and communicator Joe Duggan, a doctoral researcher at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, talks to me about why he created the "Is This How You Feel?" project, which asks climate scientists to compose handwritten letters expressing how the climate crisis makes them feel.
Sun, March 29, 2020
Max Haiven on the desire for vengeance and the demons of capital
Author and activist Max Haiven outlines some radical ways of approaching the challenges that we face globally, in a moment that seems characterized by a series of unprecedented and growing crises.
Sun, March 08, 2020
Jodi Cooper on the promise and challenge of crowdfunded filmmaking.
Artist and communicator Jodi Cooper discusses the complicated and exciting process of making a film that speaks to the fans who are financing it and satisfies the artists who made it. "The Woodsmen" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYB3sl6RJDs
Sun, March 08, 2020
Box Brown on the complex frivolity of comic books
Bestselling graphic non-fiction author Box Brown speaks with me about nostalgia and popular culture, wrestling as an analogue for the theatre of politics, and (especially) the graphic medium of comics as a distinct way to look at history. His book Is This Guy for Real? The Unbelievable Life of Andy Kaufman, just won a much-deserved Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work -- Kaufman played in the lines between reality and fiction and Brown talks about the ways that writing about Kaufman's life meant figuring out relatable ways to represent an artist that defied categorization.
Sun, March 08, 2020
Jeff Diamanti on capturing the climate emergency in a system that resists change
In this episode we discuss the importance of seeing culture, ideas and ideology as central parts of the struggle for climate action and an end to neoliberal extractivism. Jeff identifies a troubling "mood" that dominates conversations about the climate; this mood is part of a larger "haze" that prevents us from fully accepting the extent of the damage or the urgency of the threat.
Sun, March 08, 2020
El Jones on the power of critical intervention as a driver of social justice
Following a federal election that exposed some serious issues with Canadian democracy, author and activist El Jones sat down with me to discuss how the rhetoric of emotion is used to simplify political debates around race and how the insularized ways we communicate get in the way of critical dialogue.
loading...