All Episodes
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...
On the intersection of mental illness and substance abuse. (Mental Health Series, Part 2)
Mindy Greiling was a member of the Minnesota House of Representatives for twenty years. She has served on state and national boards of the National Alliance on Mental ...
Hope and Art when the World is Falling Apart.
In the era of climate change, how can we imagine better futures? AN ECOTOPIAN LEXICON is a collaborative volume of short, engaging essays that offer ecologically produ...
Mental health care and criminal justice reform. (Mental Health Series, Part 1)
In his early twenties, Mindy Greiling’s son, Jim, was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. At the time, and for more than a decade after, Greiling was a Minnesota ...
Anthropocene Poetics: David Farrier with Adam Dickinson
The Anthropocenic condition gives us “a sense of the proximity we have to things we might otherwise have thought very distant from us.” David Farrier, author of Anthro...
"There's a life that the page gives": Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss
Miscarriage and infant loss are experiences that disproportionately affect Indigenous women and women of color. WHAT GOD IS HONORED HERE? is the first book of its kind...
Tell Me Your Names and I Will Testify: Carolyn Holbrook with Sherrie Fernandez-Williams
Once a pregnant sixteen-year-old incarcerated in the Minnesota juvenile justice system, now a celebrated writer, arts activist, and teacher who helps others unlock the...
Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age
Digitize and Punish is a comprehensive study of the use of digital technology in American criminal justice. Brian Jefferson shows how the technology has expanded the w...