All Episodes
Saving Animals: On sanctuary, care, ethics
Elan Abrell is author of SAVING ANIMALS: the first major ethnography to focus on the ethical issues animating the establishment of animal sanctuaries and animal rescue...
Making creative laborers for a precarious economy.
Josef Nguyen’s THE DIGITAL IS KID STUFF narrates the developmental arc of a future creative laborer: from playing Minecraft, to DIY innovation with Make magazine, to s...
Eco Soma with Petra Kuppers (Art after Nature 2)
Eco Soma proposes an art/life method of sensory tuning to the inside and the outside simultaneously. Petra Kuppers asks readers to be alert to their own embodied respo...
Art and Posthumanism with Cary Wolfe (Art after Nature Part 1)
How do contemporary art and theory contemplate the “bio” of biopolitics and bioart? One of the foremost theorists of posthumanism, Cary Wolfe argues for the reconceptu...
Life in Plastic: Plastic's Capitalism (Part 2)
Plastics have been a defining feature of contemporary life since at least the 1960s. Yet our proliferating use of plastics has also triggered catastrophic environmenta...
Life in Plastic: Petrochemical Fantasies and Synthetic Sensibilities (Part 1)
Plastics have been a defining feature of contemporary life since at least the 1960s. Yet our proliferating use of plastics has also triggered catastrophic environmenta...
LIVE: We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World
In inspired and incisive writing the contributors to WE ARE MEANT TO RISE speak unvarnished truths not only to the original and pernicious racism threaded through the ...
What society gets wrong about transracial adoption: Sun Yung Shin, Shannon Gibney, and JaeRan Kim.
Outsiders Within is a volume of essays, fiction, poetry, and art by transracially adopted writers from around the world who tackle difficult questions about how to sur...
How institutionalized racism shapes health in the 21st century: Anne Pollock with Ruha Benjamin
SICKENING is a book that examines the unconscionable disparity in health outcomes between Black and white Americans. Author Anne Pollock of King’s College London takes...
Balzac in translation: Portraits of a turbulent 19th-century France with remarkable contemporary resonances
”Adapting Balzac is no small feat for any filmmaker” (Variety)—or any translator. LOST ILLUSIONS and LOST SOULS are two newly translated volumes in Honoré de Balzac’s ...
How the ordinary postwar home constructed race in America
Dianne Harris offers a rare exploration of the racial and class politics of architecture in her book LITTLE WHITE HOUSES, which examines how postwar media representati...
Race and the Politics of Precarity in the United States
Race plays a fundamental role in naturalizing social, political, and economic inequalities in the United States. Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph Lowndes are here wit...
Korean and Vietnamese adoptees on the intimate racialized politics of transracial adoption
The dynamics of adoptee communities have shifted in the decades since the first edition of OUTSIDERS WITHIN was published in 2006, yet the volume continues to provide ...
Attending to body and earth in distress.
What if we attended to an ailing ecosystem just as we would a body in the throes of a chronic medical condition? Ranae Lenor Hanson’s memoir WATERSHED encourages us to...
The Migrant's Paradox, with Suzanne M. Hall, Tariq Jazeel, Huda Tayob, and Les Back
The Migrant’s Paradox connects global migration with urban marginalization, exploring how “race” maps onto place across the globe, state, and street. Suzanne Hall exam...
The Filing Cabinet: How information became a "thing"
Craig Robertson’s THE FILING CABINET explores how this now-neglected artifact profoundly shaped the way that information and data have been sorted, stored, retrieved, ...
Planetary probiotics and Gaia’s variants.
Jamie Lorimer’s THE PROBIOTIC PLANET calls for a rethinking of artificial barriers between science and policy and a sweeping overview of diverse probiotic approaches. ...
Capture: The nineteenth-century landscape and wildlife in modernity.
CAPTURE is a book that reveals how the drive to contain and record disappearing animals was a central feature and organizing pursuit of the nineteenth-century US cultu...
Who is welcome? Hospitality and contemporary art.
Amid xenophobic challenges to America’s core value of welcoming the tired and the poor, Irina Aristarkhova calls for new forms of hospitality in her engagement with th...
Outsiders Within: Korean adoptees Jane Jeong Trenka and Ami Nafzger share their stories.
“I may not be able to find my family but it always made me feel a step closer to help others.” OUTSIDERS WITHIN is a landmark publication that explores transracial ado...
Why art? On performance, theater, deep time, and the environment.
The urgency of climate change means it is not sufficient for environmental scholarship to describe our complex relationship to the natural world. It must also compel a...
The crime of black repair in Jamaica.
Scammer’s Yard is an ethnography that focuses on the stories of three young Black Jamaicans who strive to make a living in Montego Bay, where call centers and tourism ...
"The way you show up is everything": History-making expeditions and the women behind them.
If you’ve ever wondered what to do with your summer and considered (1) making history, (2) spending the whole thing on a wild 2,000-mile canoe trip, and (3) putting yo...
Time and the interplay between human history and planetary history
TIMESCALES is a book that explores how time has seemed to shift in the Anthropocene and examines the human inability to see and to witness time as an element of enviro...
On reading, solitude, Edith Wharton, and what a library means to a woman.
“Historically, women have had to frame their own intellectual advancement in alternative terms.” When writer Edith Wharton died in 1937, her library of more than five ...
Scientists and humanists talk timescales and climate change.
When talking about climate change, what do an oceanographer and a literary scholar have in common? How might these distant disciplines begin to speak to each other? TI...
"Not just surviving, but thriving": On recovery. (Mental Health Series, Part 3)
On this podcast, Mindy Greiling, a mental health advocate and former state representative, has hosted a series of conversations around mental health care in Minnesota:...
Waste More, Want More: The case for taking objects seriously.
Consumption is on pause for a lot of people during the novel coronavirus pandemic. Whether that's given you cause to clean out your stuff or become closer with your st...