All Episodes
The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities
In the 2010s cities and counties across the US witnessed long-overdue change as they engaged more with questions of social, economic, and racial justice. After decades...
The Lichen Museum with A. Laurie Palmer (Art after Nature 4)
Lichens are composite organisms made of a fungus and an alga or cyanobacteria thriving in a mutually beneficial relationship. The Lichen Museum looks to these complex ...
Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson
The first biography of Robert Smithson, Inside the Spiral deepens understanding of his art by addressing the potent forces in his life that were shrouded by his succes...
Making breathable worlds through citizen engagement
Modern environments are awash with pollutants. The book Citizens of Worlds is the first thorough study of the increasingly widespread use of digital technologies to mo...
Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: On filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang
A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema, Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. A new book by Nicholas de Villiers, CRUISY,...
Hear, hear! Talking English idioms that really take the cake with Anatoly Liberman.
Are you feeling merry as a grig? Or merry as a pismire? Pert as a pearmonger? Fit as a fiddle? Where do these idioms come from? Do they make life more fun? If you’ve e...
Queer Silence with J. Logan Smilges, Travis Chi Wing Lau, and Margaret Price
In queer culture, silence has been equated with voicelessness, complicity, and even death. Queer Silence insists, however, that silence can be a generative and empower...
Arte Programmata: An important antecedent to the digital age.
In postwar Italy, a group of visionary artists used emergent computer technologies to experiment with art and technology and subvert conceptions of freedom and control...
Pooches. Planes. Pandemic. Margret Grebowicz and Christopher Schaberg on mass phenomena transformed by Covid.
A lot of societal structures have been permanently upended by the Covid-19 pandemic. We’re here to talk about two: air travel and dog ownership. Margret Grebowicz, aut...
How feelings about race are normalized by media culture
Amid fervent conversations about antiracism and police violence, Media and the Affective Life of Slavery delivers vital new ideas, analyzing how media culture instruct...
Allotment Stories: Sarah Biscarra Dilley and Joseph M. Pierce
“White people passed laws specifically in order to take away this land from our people. And then we did these other things in order to try to survive.” ALLOTMENT STORI...
Dorion Sagan and Joshua DiCaglio on the cosmic challenge of scale.
How is it possible that you are—simultaneously—cells, atoms, a body, quarks, a component in an ecological network, a moment in the thermodynamic dispersal of the sun, ...
Christopher Isherwood’s California lectures: with James J. Berg, Chris Freeman, and Claude Summers
In the 1960s, Christopher Isherwood gave an unprecedented series of lectures at California universities about his life and work. During this time, Isherwood spoke open...
What would an education beyond learning look like?
In a time when online classrooms and meetings have become both indispensable and mundane features of the university, STUDIOUS DRIFT asks: What kind of university becom...
Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature
The new book ‘Cacaphonies’ takes fecal matter and its place in literature seriously. In a stark challenge to the tendency to view 20th- and 21st-century French literat...
Sylvain Tesson's wandering journey of solitude through the countryside of France
ON THE WANDERING PATHS is Sylvain Tesson’s literary adventure and philosophical reflection during a three-month journey of solitude and personal contemplation while wa...
Architecture and Objects with Graham Harman (Art after Nature 3)
Exploring new concepts of the relationship between form and function while thinking through object-oriented ontology (OOO), Graham Harman (ARCHITECTURE AND OBJECTS) de...
Algorithms of Education: Data and its role in education policy
How do educational policy studies need to shift to remain adequate to the emergence of powerful forms of technology? In ALGORITHMS OF EDUCATION, Kalervo N. Gulson, Sam...
A field guide to a nonfascist life at the end of the world as we know it
“Capitalism defeated traditional societies because it was more exciting than they were. But now there is something more exciting than capitalism: its destruction.” In ...
Side Affects: Being trans and feeling bad with Hil Malatino and Zena Sharman
In SIDE AFFECTS, Hil Malatino opens a conversation about trans experience that acknowledges the reality of feeling fatigue, envy, burnout, numbness, and rate amid the ...
Activist archiving in the age of AIDS.
What are we leaving behind, forgetting, and obscuring as we remember AIDS activist pasts? VIRAL CULTURES is the first book to critically examine the archives that have...
Allotment Stories: Daniel Heath Justice and Jean M. O'Brien
Land privatization has been a longstanding and ongoing settler colonial process separating Indigenous peoples from their traditional homelands, with devastating conseq...
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...