All Episodes
Abolitionist thinking, practical realities, and radical change
Far from being unrealistic, abolition is an indispensable part of a realist politics. In the book Prison Abolition for Realists, Anna Terwiel examines the work of abol...
Helen Hoover's Place in the Woods
During the late 1950s through the early 1970s, Helen Hoover’s stories and essays of life in the wilderness on northern Minnesota’s Gunflint Lake, published in popular ...
On gender and sport
At age 60, Erica Rand decided to take up pairs figure skating. As two white queer adult skaters, Rand and her partner have come into direct contact with the interconne...
Navigating and challenging deep-seated racial injustices in the Midwest.
Movidas are subtle yet strategic actions through which Latina/x artists forge solidarities, mobilize for justice, and reclaim space. In Place-Keepers, Jessica Lopez Ly...
The perilous edge between patriotism and fascism
The work of Maria Janion, one of Eastern Europe’s most profound intellectuals, who witnessed the rise of authoritarian nationalism in Poland, German occupation during ...
Anti-mafia organizing and solidarity movements in Italy
For more than 150 years, Italy has been home to a resilient and evolving resistance against the pervasive influence of mafias. While these criminal organizations are r...
Retirement special: Publishing leaders look back at decades of transformation and tenacity in the industry.
Douglas Armato, the fifth director in the University of Minnesota Press's 100-year history, will soon retire after 27 years of leadership at the Press—following an alm...
Blindness and blind spots.
“Jovencito, it’s going to be lonely being different and yet strong in this world,” James Francisco Bonilla’s grandmother told him when he was ten. Born with congenital...
Medical technology and bodily authority
As medical advancements continue to shape the detection, diagnosis, and treatment of disability and illness, technology is often presented as a path to autonomy. Rebec...
The digitized afterlives of cultural objects.
What is the opposite of “big” data? In a society where households commonly store personal archives of photos, financial records, and other documents, the “little” data...
Indigenous filmmaking and futures
What lives in the spaces between dreams and apocalypse? Two authors discuss their books on Indigenous media: Karrmen Crey, whose Producing Sovereignty: The Rise of Ind...
Surrealism and selfhood
In interwar Paris, the encounter between surrealism and the nascent discipline of ethnology led to an intellectual project now known as “ethnographic surrealism.” Joyc...
“Not everybody has seven mothers.”
In Copenhagen in 1972, during the exhilarating early days of women’s liberation in Scandinavia and dramatic social change around the world, seven women had a child tog...
Nonbinary Jane Austen
Chris Washington reads Jane Austen differently from how she is classically understood; rather than the doyen of the cisheteronormative marriage plot, Washington argues...
Three economies of transcendence
“Lack of political will and corruption of the ruling class are certainly enormous obstacles but do not (fully) explain the widespread inaction against our current mult...
Star Trek and the franchise era.
In his book Late Star Trek, Adam Kotsko analyzes the wealth of content set within Star Trek’s sprawling continuity, beginning with the prequel series Enterprise, highl...
Pseudoscientific phenomena and cultural thought
Some attributes of the paranormal mind are dismissed as nonsense, but what can an exploration of pseudoscientific phenomena tell us about accepted scientific and cultu...
Replacing the state.
Sasha Davis, an activist and scholar of radical environmental advocacy, brings new hope for social justice movements by looking to progressive campaigns that have foun...