Speaking Out of Place: Recent Episodes
David Palumbo-Liu
In 2018, hundreds of thousands of people in France showed up day after day, month after month, to protest the French government’s attacks on labor, on social benefits, and on the environment, among other things, including police violence. Anthropologist Ida Susser took part in these communal actions, interviewing a vast array of participants, who came from all walks of life, from political positions across the spectrum, and from many different regions and class identities. We learn how people formed common cause, organized unique social worlds, and how their struggles, defeats, and successes, can teach us critical lessons in making the a new, more just, world.
In the spirit of communing, Ida Susser has made Yellow Vests a free download here.
Ida Susser, PHD, is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center and Hunter College, CUNY. Her recent book The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy: taking to the streets of Paris in the 21st Century (Routledge 2026) focuses on commoning movements and new visions. Her previous books include: Norman Street (Oxford, 2012) a study of working class opposition to cutbacks during the New York City fiscal crisis and the transition of Greenpoint-Williamsburg from a working class neighborhood to a gentrified enclave, andAIDS, Sex and Culture: Global Politics and Survival in Southern Africa (Wiley-Blackwell 2009), a history of the power of social movements to transform health.
Today I am honored to speak with Elizabeth Hinton and Elsa Julien Lora about their new book, Harm and Punishment: Incarcerated Writers on Violence and the US Prison. Along with two research assistants, Lora and Hinton pored over hundreds of essays by prisoners, found in the American Prison Writing Archive. They then selected and organized the essays found in this volume, offering illuminating introductions to each section.
Our discussion moves through many topics—the brutal, dehumanizing, and punitive nature of the prison system, the damage it does to lives both inside and outside prison, and the ways prisoners find to survive and offer each other support, despite being pitted against each other. At base, we consider how we, as a society, are “addicted to violence,” and why and how it is crucial to understand that violence can only produce more violence. These essays organically blend personal observations and stories with a deep understanding of the broad, systemic nature of violence.
Elizabeth Hinton is one of the nation’s leading experts on the roots of mass incarceration and enduring inequality in the United States. The Class of 1954 Professor of History, Black Studies, and Law at Yale University, Hinton serves as the founding director of the Justice for Everybody Movement J4EM, a university-based center focused on promoting public safety through education, research, and coalition-building. At Harvard, she is the founding co-director (with Brandon M. Terry) of the Hutchins Center’s Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety.
Hinton’s groundbreaking books—From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime and America on Fire—were each named New York Times Notable Books and have become essential texts in policy and social justice circles. A sought-after public intellectual, Hinton’s commentary appears in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The Los Angeles Times and beyond. Her research has been supported by the Carnegie Corporation and the Guggenheim, Mellon, and Ford Foundations. Hinton served on the National Academies of Sciences Committee on Reducing Racial Inequalities in the Criminal Justice System and in 2022 was elected to the American Philosophical Society as one of the youngest members in its history. At J4EM, Hinton is building the infrastructure for a more just and robust democracy—where education is not a privilege, but a cornerstone of public safety.
Elsa Julien Lora is a U.S. historian and interdisciplinary scholar whose research focuses on the history of American prisons and the texture and intimacy of family life. A Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Columbia University Society of Fellows, Elsa is at work on her book, Life in Prison: An Intimate History of American Punishment. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the American Society for Legal History. Elsa’s writing about race, justice, and family has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Aperture, and Public Books, and she is currently producing a documentary about her grandmother, boundary-breaking modern dancer Mary Hinkson. She holds a PhD in African and African American Studies from Harvard University and a JD from Yale Law School.
Today I am honored to welcome activists and organizers from #StopCopCity, a series of actions in Atlanta that drew international attention, and state and federal prosecutions of people involved in protecting the environment and fighting the construction of a massive training facility designed for urban warfare. Ordinary people were labelled antifa terrorists for acts of civil disobedience and for occupying the land as defender. We get an update on the various legal battles that have continued to this day, and talk about what we can learn from organized collective legal resistance. We talk about all this in the context of recent cases such as the Cobb County 3, Broadview, and Prairieland prosecutions, and focus on the struggle for the future in solidarity with others.
Jess Fuller is a dedicated, anti-authoritarian legal worker and organizer. Over the last decade, Jess has coordinated on the ground legal support to struggles including Standing Rock, the U.S./Mexico border, work-place union organizing, the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta and more. Jess is a frontline legal worker experienced in building effective jail support teams and defendant-centered strategies to combat state repression. She knows that solidarity, building power and creative legal strategies are the best defense to the criminalization of resistance.
Dr. Hannah Kass is a scholar-activist and former defendant in the ongoing prosecution of Stop Cop City activists. Her work focuses on struggles for land, food, and abolition, and state strategies of authoritarian repression in the US. She earned her joint PhD in Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2026.
Both are part of the ATL 61+ Defense Committee
In today’s discussion with veteran media historian and critic Robin Andersen, we discuss in depth the ways that the New York Times, CNN, and other legacy media outlets became little more than Israeli propaganda organs, uncritically feeding IDF narratives, images, and self-declared expertise while not only discrediting Palestinian voices, but also becoming complicit with Israel’s policy of censorship by murder. We talk about the distortions and lies surrounding the destruction of hospitals, patients and medical staff, the purposeful killings of journalists and the cover-ups that followed, and the media attacks on the student encampments that turned peaceful demonstrations into scenes of violence. We come away with a profound respect and admiration for courageous and dedicated Palestinian journalists, the global social media that bore witness, and independent and alternative media that stood steady in their commitment to speak the truth.
Robin Andersen, professor emerita of media studies at Fordham University, author of a dozen books, and writer and member of the Board of Directors for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). She serves as a judge and contributing writer for Project Censored, and her work can be found at a number of online publications. Her latest book is The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel's Genocide in Gaza.
It’s always a pleasure to talk with Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood, two seasoned political observers, and activists, based in New York City. Today we discuss the results of the recent primaries in NYC, which saw a wave of impressive victories by DSA candidates and other progressives, defeating incumbent after incumbent. We discuss some of the causes of these successes, and look to other signs of a surge of interest in socialist candidates in other states. We put all this in the broader context of MAGA, populism, affordability, data centers and AI, and the devastating and welcomed unpopularity of Zionism and the state of Israel in eyes of the American public.
Liza Featherstone is the author of Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation, published by O/R Books in 2018, as well as Selling Women Short: the Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Walmart (Basic Books, 2004). She co-authored Students Against Sweatshops (Verso, 2002) and is editor of False Choices: the Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Verso, 2016). She's currently editing a collection of Alexandra Kollontai 's work for O/R Books and International Publishers and writing the introduction to that volume.
Featherstone's work has been published in Lux, TV Guide, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Ms., the American Prospect, Columbia Journalism Review, Glamour, Teen Vogue, Dissent, the Guardian, In These Times, and many other publications.
Liza teachers at NYU 's Literary Reportage Program as well as at Columbia University School for International and Public Affairs. She is proud to be an active member of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America and of UAW local 7902.
Doug Henwood is a Brooklyn-based journalist and broadcaster specializing in economics and politics. He edited Left Business Observer, a newsletter, from 1986–2013, and has been host of Behind the News, a weekly radio show/podcast that originates on KPFA, Berkeley, since 1995. He is the author of Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom (Verso, 1997), After the New Economy (New Press, 2004), and My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency (OR Books, 2016). He’s written for numerous periodicals including Harper’s, The New Republic, The Nation, The Baffler, and Jacobin. He’s been working on a book about the rot of the US ruling class for way too long and needs to acquire the self-discipline to finish it.
Today it is my great pleasure to talk with Dr Lara Sheehi about her new book, From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures. We talk about the ways that those fighting for Palestinian liberation are constantly confronting what Sheehi calls “psychic intrusions,” which seek to interrupt and divert our energies. These intrusions take a number of forms, from direct attacks to insinuations of impropriety. Sheehi argues that these are forms of psychological warfare—backing up these claims by documenting the original tactics and strategies governments and other organizations used to discredit and disarm radical activists in the past, and seeing similar tactics today. Against these psychic intrusions Lara mounts a forceful argument for us to develop and hold true to what she calls “psychic militancy.” She gives us many examples of both psychic intrusions and psychic militancy, thereby providing us with essential and powerful tools to recognize and resist the mundane and all too common efforts of Zionists and others to distract us from our work. This is a deeply therapeutic and empowering book, and useful to all radical activists.
Lara Sheehi is a Research Fellow at the University of South Africa's Institute for Social and Health Sciences, a licensed clinical psychologist, and the host of the Psychic Militancy podcast. Lara’s work focuses on psychoanalysis, the psychic refusals central to liberation struggles and life-making in the Global South, the psychic dimensions of resistance and revolution, and critical Zionism studies. She is the author of From Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures (Pluto, 2026) and co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022). Lara is a member of the founding collective for the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and is on the advisory board for Forensic Architecture.
Today it is my immense pleasure and honor to welcome Amitav Ghosh to Speaking Out of Place to talk about his new novel, Ghost Eye. The novel is about reincarnation, but also a lot more. In our conversation we talk about the need to address the terrible set of environmental and other crises we face, and the seeming foreclosure of the imagination by the obsession with technology and the future it offers to us. Instead, we look to how we can fashion beginnings out of endings, aided by a renewed sense of wonder, curiosity, and awe. We turn to the body, to the haptic, and perhaps most important, to food as more than simply nourishment. In all this, story-telling, the revival of connections between living beings, and a deep sense of other times and places are central.
AMITAV GHOSH grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and has a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford. He is the author of four books of non-fiction, two collections of essays and nine novels. His books have won many prizes and he has received eight honorary degrees, six lifetime achievement awards and four honorary fellowships. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages and he has served on the Jury of the Locarno and Venice film festivals. In 2018 he became the first English-language writer to receive India’s highest literary honor, the Jnanpith Award. In 2019, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade. In 2024 he was awarded the Erasmus Prize and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2025 he was awarded the Pak Kyongni Prize by South Korea’s Toji Foundation, and in 2026 he was given a Fellowship by the Guggenheim Foundation. He is married to the writer Deborah Baker and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
On today’s show we take a deep look into universities, and education more broadly with Tristan Ahtone, Andrew Herscher, and Robert Warrior. We focus on a critique of land grant universities, which were built on land granted by the federal government. What we learn is that lands were stolen from Indigenous peoples through violence-based treaties and seizures. These 57 universities have used wealth derived from those initial acts of theft to buy more property, expand holdings, and enrich themselves. In contrast, we see the continued harm these universities do to Native peoples. This harm comes what Herscher calls “non-memory,” which creates knowledge that distorts and omits historical truths and impedes upon Indigenous futures. We talk about the deep damage non-memory does to education for all, and the ways people have fought back to retrieve, restore, and grow knowledge through scholar-journalist activism like the Land Grab University project.
Tristan Ahtone (Kiowa) is Editor at Large at Grist and one of the foremost journalists covering Indigenous affairs in America. He previously served as Editor in Chief of the Texas Observer and Indigenous Affairs editor at High Country News. His investigations have been honored with a George Polk Award, an IRE Award, a Sigma Award, a National Magazine Award nomination, and investigative awards from the Gannett Foundation. A multiple Richard LaCourse Award winner, Ahtone was also named Journalist of the Year by Covering Climate Now in 2024. A past president of the Indigenous Journalists Association and a 2017 Nieman Fellow, he is a co-founder of the Indigenous News Alliance.
Andrew Herscher’s work endeavors to bring the study of architecture and cities to bear on struggles for justice, democracy, and self-determination across a range of global sites. He is the co-founder of a series of militant research collectives, including Detroit Resists, Settler Colonial City Project, and the We the People of Detroit Community Research Collective. His scholarly work include Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict (Stanford University Press, 2010); The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2012); Displacements: Architecture and Refugee (Sternberg Press, 2017); The Global Shelter Imaginary: IKEA Humanitarianism and Rightless Relief (co-authored with Daniel Bertrand Monk, University of Minnesota Press, 2022); and Under the Campus, the Land: Anishinaabe Futuring, Colonial Non-Memory, and the Origin of the University of Michigan (University of Michigan Press, 2025). He is teaches at the University of Michigan in architecture, Native American and Indigenous studies, and the history of art.
Robert Warrior is Hall Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Kansas and a member/citizen of the Osage Nation. He is the author of Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (University of Minnesota Press, 1995) and The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), and coauthor of Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New Press, 1996), American Indian Literary Nationalism (University of New Mexico Press, 2008), and Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective (University of Oklahoma Press, 2009). He is past president of the American Studies Association and was the founding president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (2009-10). He was the founding co-editor of Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAISA’s journal) and edits the Indigenous Americas series at the University of Minnesota Press). Before moving to the University of Kansas, he taught at Stanford, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Illinois. In 2018, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Today I am delighted to talk with Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff about their new book, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. This is much more than a biography or popular account of Elon Musk, it is a radical analysis of a deeply disturbing, computational way of seeing the world. We see a mind that is profoundly troubled by any contagion spreading into seemingly closed systems—it can take the form of racial others, transpeople, “woke” populations, or most generally and dismissively, “Non-Playing-Characters.” We talk about the dangers this mindset and its manifestations have on democracy and the public sphere, and argue that what we should do is to “embrace the woke-mind virus as a counter-revolutionary act.”
Quinn Slobodian is professor of international history at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His books, which have been translated into ten languages, include Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy, and Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right . His most recent book, co-authored with Ban Tarnoff, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. Slobodian is a Guggenheim Fellow for 2025-6; he has been an associate fellow at Chatham House and held residential fellowships at Harvard University and Free University Berlin. Project Syndicate put him on a list of 30 Forward Thinkers and Prospect UK named him one of the World’s 25 Top Thinkers.
Ben Tarnoff is a writer from Massachusetts. He is the co-author, with Quinn Slobodian, of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.
Today I am excited to talk with three members of Youth United for Community Action, an organization based in East Palo Alto that has been fighting for community empowerment since 1994, when a small group of young people of color active in their communities came together to form YUCA—“a grassroots community organization created, led, and run by young people of color, the majority from low-income communities. It “provides a safe space for young people to empower[themselves] and work on environmental and social justice issues to establish positive systemic change through grassroots community organizing.”
We talk about how YUCA chooses its causes, the way it interacts with the community, and the most pressing issues it is addressing today. We hear inspiring stories about how YUCA workers interact with people in the community in big and small ways, and how this work is giving them the political education needed for meaningful change.
Larissa Perez is a junior in high school. She has lived in East Palo Alto for the majority of her life and is passionate about being able to help others and give back to her community. Through her involvement with YUCA, she has deepened her understanding of East Palo Alto’s rich history while also developing the skills to become a strong leader and advocate for justice.
Estefani Ruiz first joined Youth United for Community Action in August of 2022 and has climbed the pipeline ever since. She first started off as a core member and now finds herself in a Youth Organizer role. Estefani is extremely passionate about giving back to her community and learning new things. This is where her interest in housing and social justice issues first started. She has participated in outreach, community events, and city meetings. She hopes to continue this work as she moves into the next stage of her life by making connections of her prior knowledge to the new area she will find herself in this upcoming academic year.
Filiberto “Fili” Zaragoza is one of the campaign organizers and Co-program director at Youth United for Community Action (YUCA) in East Palo Alto, where he grew up. Since joining YUCA in 2019 as a sophomore in high school and moving into a staff position in 2023, he’s developed organizing skills while fighting for his community. Fili draws his passion for advocacy from witnessing social injustices in East Palo Alto and across the Bay Area. He plans to continue his education while building his career in community organizing.
In 2021, the City of Atlanta announced that it was entering into a partnership with the Atlanta Police Foundation to destroy the South River Forest and build what became known as “Cop City,” a large facility for the training of police officers. This met with massive public outcry from those outraged by the destruction of the environment and an important historical site (a former prison farm), and the purpose to which the land was to be put—to train police in urban warfare techniques and by extension feed the prison-industrial complex. Activists also pointed to its connection to the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange, which partners with Israel. Protesters occupied the land and carried out a number of direct actions.
In August 2023 the Georgia Attorney General incited 61 people on a sweeping RICO charge, as well as charges of domestic terrorism, and others. In January, a judge threw out all the RICO charges; the state is appealing.
Today I am honored to speak with two #StopCopCity activists—both participated in the #Imaginary Crimes Tour, which visited more than 40 cities in the US to publicize the case; one is named in the indictment. We hear their stories of how and why they became involved in #StopCopCity, what transpired during those events and during the trial, and how it has deepened their commitment to activism. We hear especially about how ordinary people find themselves transformed into activists of conscience, and how they are working in solidarity with many other groups.
To keep up to date, please check out this Linktree and join the Signal chat below:
https://linktr.ee/sccimaginarycrimestour
https://signal.group/#CjQKIFw7xqV1kNadZE8NplWCOD7cpYfB_RtiQ0IScBxjOVgPEhDxoZaYLrElXwyk2kqyynmP
Today I have the immense pleasure of speaking with author Anna Badkhen about her new collection of essays, To See Beyond. Badkhen talks about how her experiences as a veteran war correspondent exposed her to War’s multiple forms of violence, destruction, and carnage, and how that compelled her to write these essays about survival, and hope. Speaking from many global locations and from a wide range of historical and cultural perspectives, from antiquity to the present, Badkhen’s essays draw together amazingly imaginative connections across peoples, and ways of seeing. Ultimately, we are shown how to both recognize violence, and hope as well. Anna favors us by reading select passages from this marvelous, and necessary, book.
Anna Badkhen’s new essay collection, To See Beyond, is out from Bellevue Literary Press in April 2026. She is the author of seven other published books, most recently Bright Unbearable Reality, which was a finalist for the 2026 Tiziano Terzani International Literary Prize and waslonglisted for the 2022 National Book Award and for the 2023 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature.
Badkhen’s awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community Fellowship, and the Joel R. Seldin Award from Psychologists for Social Responsibility for writing about civilians in war zones.
A former war correspondent, Badkhen grew up in the Soviet Union and is a US citizen. She is an Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.
Today I have the immense pleasure of talking with Carissa Véliz, an associate professor at the University of Oxford, about her new book, Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future—from Ancient Oracles to AI. Linking this work to her previous book, Privacy is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data, Véliz writes: “ surveillance and prediction are digital technology’s original sins.”
In our wide-ranging discussion, we talk about how both massive and intrusive invasions of privacy at all levels of society and false claims to be able to predict the future erode democracy, are corrosive to ethics, and undermine people’s ability to think for themselves. Instead, we are conditioned to trust an unregulated band of “effective altruists” who claim to know better than we what kinds of lives we should prefer and the choices we should make. Véliz argues instead that we should embrace the uncertain to build resilience, to prepare for contingency but not be determined by what we cannot see, and to foster curiosity and imagination.
Carissa Véliz is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI, and a Fellow at Hertford College at the University of Oxford. She is the recipient of the 2021 Herbert A. Simon Award for Outstanding Research in Computing and Philosophy. She is a member of UNESCO’s Women 4 Ethical AI. She advises companies and policymakers around the world on privacy and the ethics of AI. She is a board member of the Proton Foundation, along with Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Proton’s CEO Andy Yen. She is the author of the highly-acclaimed Privacy Is Power (an Economist book of the year, 2020) and the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics. Her new book Prophecy was described as “The most important book you will read for years” by Roger McNamee, the tech investor and best selling author.
Today I am deeply honored to welcome back Iranian journalists Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy. Before, they talked about their book, For the Sun After Long Nights: the Story of Iran’s Women-led Uprising, today they tell us of conditions in Iran, which since January has suffered the government’s massacre of tens of thousands of protesters and the onslaught of the US/Israel war on Iran. Instead of concentrating on how the war is going and its effects on the global economy, as most media sources do, we focus entirely on the Iranian people, and talk about the effects of the bombing on daily life, the attacks on infrastructure, and the shutting down of the Internet. We look at the impact of these many forms of violence on civil society, and talk about the differentials of class, ethnicity, and gender. We end by having Fatemeh and Nilo talk about how covering Iran now is affecting their lives as journalists, and as Iranians.
Fatemeh Jamalpour is a feminist journalist banned from working in Iran by the Ministry of Intelligence. Jamalpour has worked as a freelance reporter for outlets such as The Sunday Times, The Paris Review and the Los Angeles Times, and has also held positions at BBC World News in London and Shargh newspaper in Tehran. She has two master's degrees in journalism and communication from Northwestern University and Allameh Tabatabaei University in Tehran and was a 2024-25 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan.
Nilo Tabrizy is an investigative reporter at The Washington Post. She works for the Visual Forensics team, where she covers Iran using open-source methods. Previously, she was a video journalist at the New York Times, covering Iran, race and policing, abortion access, and more. She is an Emmy nominee and the 2022 winner of the Front Page Award for Online Investigative Reporting. Nilo received her MS in Journalism from Columbia University and her BA in Political Science and French from the University of British Columbia.
Today I am excited to talk with journalist and media critic Adam Johnson about his new book, How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza. Many of us gained an intuitive sense of just how bad the media coverage of the genocide in Gaza and beyond was—not just in the right wing media, but also in the center-left media. Adam Johnson scoured thousands of stories, articles, news programs, cable shows, and social media posts to not only confirm our worst suspicions, but also, and critically, to fit them into a analytic framework to show the myriad tactics, rhetorical strategies, and instances of journalistic malpractice that not only sold a genocide, but also facilitated it. We talk about how the media whitewashed Israeli lies, erased Palestinian voices, and contrived a way to make a political settlement seem impossible, and war crimes not only acceptable, but also inevitable. We end by showing how these practices created a template that we see applied today in the coverage of the US/Israeli war on Iran. This is must-listening for those who want to fight genocide and crimes against humanity.
Adam Johnson is a media analyst and co-host of the podcast Citations Needed. His writing has been featured in The Nation, In These Times, The Intercept, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle.
Today I am honored to speak with veteran journalist Victoria Law. She is the author of such books as Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, Prison By Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms (co-authored with Maya Schenwar), and “Prisons Make Us Safer” and 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration. Today we talk about her new book, Corridors of Contagion: How the Pandemic Exposed the Cruelties of Incarceration.
In this devastating study, Law shows how instead of focusing on care during the outbreak of COVID, prisons took the pandemic as an opportunity to amplify their inhumanity: we learn how things like solitary confinement and strip searches only intensified their worse aspects, and how extractive communications systems preyed on those hungry for news from loved ones. Law also tells of the personal stories she was able to track that give a human dimension to the statistics of the pandemic, and also remarkable stories of self-sacrifice and solidarity, as prisoners gave each other the care and support so badly needed. We end by learning about organizations that are at the forefront of fighting for decarceration and restructuring of parole boards, and other actions to fight against the inhumane and cruel practices of the prison industrial complex.
Victoria Law is a freelance journalist and author who has written about incarceration, particularly women's incarceration, for nearly two decades. Her books include Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, Prison By Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms (co-authored with Maya Schenwar), and “Prisons Make Us Safer” and 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration. Her latest book, Corridors of Contagion: How the Pandemic Exposed the Cruelties of Incarceration, is sadly still relevant. You can find her work at victorialaw.net
Organizations mentioned in our conversation:
Release Aging People in Prison: https://rappcampaign.com/
California Coalition for Women Prisoners: https://womenprisoners.org/
Californians United for a Responsible Budget:
https://curbprisonspending.org/
Participatory Defense:
https://www.participatorydefense.org/hubs
Article on Participatory Defense NOLA:
https://progressive.org/magazine/whose-justice-system-is-it-anyway-law/
Survived & Punished, a national network which works with criminalized abuse survivors:
https://survivedandpunished.org/
Today it’s a special honor to welcome Serhat Tutkal and Hevin Karakurt to Speaking Out of Place. These two scholars engage in a broad discussion of Kurdish history, culture, politics, literature and language, with particular attention to issues of statelessness, identity, and violence. We talk about the current moment with regard to Turkey, Syria, Palestine, and the US-Israel war on Iran and beyond. We use as a starting poet Serhat’s remarkable essay, “Note from Non-People,” and then move to a discussion of his work on dehumanization. We end with imagining paths out of cycles of violence and dehumanization, and consider specifically the way we might imagine new sorts of utopias and vistas of life-affirmation.
Hevin Karakurt is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Stanford University, where she studies Kurdish literature across languages and territories. In this way, she works on the question of how a literature of a collective that shares neither one nation nor any one language might function. Before coming to Stanford, she worked as a researcher in the Swiss National Science Foundation funded research project “Half-Truths. Truth, Fiction, and Conspiracy in the ‘Post-Factual’ Age”, at the University of Basel.
Serhat Tutkal is a Kurdish academic. He is a postdoctoral researcher funded by the Secretariat of Science, Humanities, Technology and Innovation (Secihti) in Mexico. He has a PhD from Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Bogotá) with a dissertation on the legitimation and delegitimation of Colombian state violence. He mainly works on violence, racism, and dehumanization in West Asia and Latin America
Today it gives me special pleasure to speak with Fernando Racimo, a leading scientist-activist, about his new book, Science in Resistance. This book gives a riveting account of the founding and growth of the international group Scientist Rebellion, in which now thousands of scientists from around the world have organized direct actions to draw attention to the climate crisis. Breaking through the censorship and silencing carried on by big fossil fuel companies, and also scientific groups in and out of academia, which often collude with each other, members of SR have put their careers, and their bodies on the line to raise public consciousness and to spur action. We talk about the connection between power and knowledge, between ecocide and genocide, and the need to democratize education and research if we are going to have the kind of world we want to both live in, and to pass on to other generations.
Fernando Racimo is a scientist-activist and the author of the new book Science in Resistance. He co-founded the Danish chapters of Scientist Rebellion and Academics for Palestine, and works at the intersection of academia and social movement organizing. He earned his bachelor from Harvard University and his PhD from the University of California Berkeley, and is now an associate professor in ecology and evolution at the Globe Institute in the University of Copenhagen. He has written articles and OpEds on the urgent need for scientists to join and support social movements fighting structures of oppression, as well as on strategies for transforming and democratizing academic institutions to serve positive socio-ecological needs. At the University of Copenhagen, he teaches on various topics including ecology and evolution, degrowth and socio-ecological justice, decolonizing global health and social movement theory and practice. He currently co-runs a study circle on Degrowth and Exnovation as part of the Nordic Summer University, to explore creative and democratically engaging ways to undo, dismantle and decommission unsustainable institutions, structures and technologies.
Today I am excited and honored to be talking with Dr. Shamell Bell and Sherena Razek, two activist scholars who join us to talk about their work on the Coalition for Action in Higher Education, which will be convening its Third Annual National Day of Action on April 17th. We talk about the unique and central position CAHE occupies on the activist landscape. The Coalition brings together labor, anti-fascist and anti-racist activists, and those working for Palestinian freedom. CAHE energizes the educational sphere by refusing to shy away from taking radical positions, by embracing boundary-crossing and close affiliations with diverse communities, by defending the most vulnerable, and insisting on free education in every sense of the word. CAHE aims to both hold university administrators and trustees accountable, but also to recognize and grow our own strength with imagination, creativity, and mutual care.
Dr. Shamell Bell is a global movement artist, scholar, and visionary cultural strategist whose work lives at the intersection of radical imagination, embodied activism, and unconditional love. She earned her Ph.D. in Culture and Performance from UCLA and recently completed a teaching appointment in Theater, Dance & Media at Harvard University. As an interdisciplinary scholar and documentary filmmaker, Dr. Bell explores the power of embodiment, collective freedom dreaming, and multimedia storytelling to disrupt oppressive systems and ignite transformation. Her social impact work in the entertainment industry includes collaborations with artists such as Common, Dominique Fishback, Lalah Hathaway, and Esperanza Spalding. She also served as Supervising Producer on the Emmy-nominated series Lessons in Chemistry. Dr. Bell is co-social impact director—alongside Ms. Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner—for Ritual of Breath is the Rite to Resist, a performance project responding to state-sanctioned violence. She organizes for economic justice with the Debt Collective as its Visionary Escalator, advocating for student debt abolition and debt-free college for all. She also serves on the steering committee for the Coalition for Action in Higher Education and co-chairs their Antifascism caucus.
Sherena Razek is a diasporic Palestinian feminist educator, scholar, activist, and labor organizer. Currently, she is a President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Gender Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. She holds a PhD from the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University where she was the President of the Graduate Labor Organization and co-founder of the Palestine Solidarity Caucus. Her research focuses on Palestinian visual culture, anti-imperialist struggle, and decolonial feminist ecologies.
Today, on Speaking Out of Place, I have the pleasure of talking with Say Burgin about her book, Organizing on Your Own: The White Fight for Black Power in Detroit. Tracing the changing terrain of anti-racist organizing and activism in the 1960s and 1970s, Burgin’s book focusses on what became known as “parallel organizing” amongst Blacks and whites. Delving into fascinating archival materials from many activist organizations at that time, Say finds that groups like the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee both maintained active relations with white activists and also encouraged them to organize within their own communities. These groups, such as People Against Racism, formed working relations with clergy, labor, and even some in management, and centered their energy in not only job creation, but also the political education of whites as to the structures of racism they inhabited. Another key focal point was police violence. Risking their lives at this moment intense repression and violence, including that against whites who were working for Black liberation, white groups were ahead of their counterparts in today’s moment, photographing police violence and establishing radical educational projects. Indeed, Say and I end our conversation with a comparison between then, and now, from the moment of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the uprising of the George Floyd killing.
Say Burgin is a professor of history who focuses on 20th century US social movement and African American history. Her book, Organizing Your Own: The White Fight for Black Power in Detroit, was published by New York University Press in 2024. It provides a new way of understanding the Black Power movement’s relationship to white America. She has been active in movements to abolish prisons and build solidarity with Palestine, and she spends a lot of her time helping to run a community bail fund. Follow her on Bluesky @sayburgin.bsky.social.
Today it gives me special pleasure to speak with Helen Whybrow about her book, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life. Besides being a detailed account of the day to day, season by season life on her farm, where she and her family raise sheep, build a broad community, and maintain Knoll Farm, a center for activists, writers, artists and others to share ideas on how to promote healthier and more just ways of living together and in the environment, The Salt Stones is at base about the ways we are losing a sense of belonging, not only with others and with other forms of life on this planet, but also with the cycles of existence, of life and of death. Whybrow shows time and again that it is mostly a matter of developing ways of seeing and noticing what is all around us, and learning about and respecting the ways that generations of people and non-human animals have existed together in sustainable and mutually-dependent ways.
Helen Whybrow is a writer, editor and organic farmer whose book about shepherding, land and belonging, The Salt Stones, was longlisted for the National Book Award and chosen as a New Yorker Best Book of 2025. Her other titles include Dead Reckoning (W. W. Norton, 2001) and A Man Apart (Chelsea Green, 2015). She has a master’s in journalism and has taught writing at Middlebury College and the Breadloaf Environmental Writer’s Conference. She and her family farm and steward a refuge for land justice at Knoll Farm in Fayston, Vermont.
Today I am both excited and frightened to talk with Tamara Kneese and Xiaowei Wang, two individuals whose research, writing, and activism has for years insisted on the materiality of the technologies that have brought us things like artificial intelligence, the Cloud, data centers, and digital agriculture. They explain why and how these technologies clothe themselves in ethereal garb and notions of a frictionless, beneficent capitalism while diverting attention from the vast natural and human resources they plunder to make a profit, and colonize more and more land, water, and minerals. We move from corrective histories and analyses to case histories that show how these technologies materialize in settler colonial practices, and end decisively on stories of how people are fighting back, and creating alternate software, hardware, and cultural and social practices that offer a window onto a much less violent and dismal world than the one technofascism wants us to be hypnotized by. Here, we set to break that spell.
Tamara Kneese directs Data & Society Research Institute's Climate, Justice, and Technology program and previously led the Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab. Before joining D&S, she was director of developer engagement on the Green Software team at Intel and assistant professor of Media Studies and director of Gender and Sexualities Studies at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond (Yale University Press, 2023), co-author of Notes Toward a Digital Workers' Inquiry (Common Notions Press, 2025), and the co-editor of The New Death: Mortality and Death Care in the Twenty-First Century (School for Advanced Research/University of New Mexico Press, 2022). Her work has been published in academic journals including Social Text, Social Media + Society, and the International Journal of Communication and in popular outlets such as Wired, The Verge, and The Baffler. Her research has been supported by the Internet Society Foundation, National Science Foundation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Xiaowei R. Wang is an artist, writer, organizer and coder. They are the author of the book Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech In China's Countryside, a 2023 National Book Foundation Science and Literature Award winner. Their multidisciplinary work over the past 15 years sits at the intersection of tech, digital media, art, and environmental justice. Currently, they are a Mancosh Fellow at Northwestern University and one of the stewards of Collective Action School (formerly known as Logic School), an organizing community for tech workers. In 2024 they were a Eyebeam Democracy Machine Fellow, which supported their work with forms of soft data storage and transmission using textiles.
Today I talk with Omar Zahzah about his new book, Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital/Settler Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle. This is an immensely informative study, which details the convergence of Zionism, Silicon Valley Big Tech, and the US political and governmental elites in what Zahzah calls the hegemonic form of Zionism. He shows how capitalist profit motives and Zionist settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing go hand in hand with attempts to censor, silence, and erase Palestinian voices and the voices of those who act in solidarity with Palestine. Nevertheless, and crucially, Omar fills his book with accounts of how Palestinians have found ways to appropriate, repurpose, and deploy technology in ingenious, creative, and subversive ways that keep the movement alive and growing globally.
Omar Zahzah is a poet, writer, independent journalist, and Assistant Professor of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies at San Francisco State University.
Today I talk with Omar Zahzah about his new book, Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital/Settler Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle. This is an immensely informative study, which details the convergence of Zionism, Silicon Valley Big Tech, and the US political and governmental elites in what Zahzah calls the hegemonic form of Zionism. He shows how capitalist profit motives and Zionist settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing go hand in hand with attempts to censor, silence, and erase Palestinian voices and the voices of those who act in solidarity with Palestine. Nevertheless, and crucially, Omar fills his book with accounts of how Palestinians have found ways to appropriate, repurpose, and deploy technology in ingenious, creative, and subversive ways that keep the movement alive and growing globally.
Omar Zahzah is a poet, writer, independent journalist, and Assistant Professor of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies at San Francisco State University.
Today I have the immense honor and privilege to speak with Ellen Schrecker, who has been referred to as “the dean of the anti-anti-Communist historians.” Well known for her classic studies of McCarthyism, today Schrecker explains how much worse Trump’s regime is than what we saw in the 1950s and 60s. A fierce defender of democracy, Ellen explains the central role education plays in creating a public culture and in maintaining democracy. Our conversation takes many paths, including an indictment of Capitalism, of the dominance of economistic thinking and values, of the ways university leaders are bending a knee to Trump. We talk about the value of the humanities, the importance of autonomous forms of education and mutual support such as we saw in the pro-Palestinian encampments, and one of the most remarkable differences between the days of McCarthyism—the phenomenon of mass protests like #NoKingsDay. I know you will treasure this conversation as much as I do.
Ellen Schrecker is an American historian known for her research on McCarthyism, political repression, and American higher education. Among her books are The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing War on Academic Freedom (2024) edited with Valerie C. Johnson and Jennifer Ruth, (2024) winner 2025 Frederick Ness Book Award. American Association of Colleges and Universities; The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s (2021); Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1998); and No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (1986). A retired history professor from Yeshiva University, she is active in the American Association of University Professors and now serves on its Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure.
Today I am delighted to talk with Eunsong Kim about her stunning book, The Politics of Collecting: Race & the Aestheticization of Property. It is remarkable in its theoretical conceptualization, argument, and archival work. Kim argues that the beginnings of elite art collection in the United States coincided with the rise of the robber barons and the suppression of the labor movement. She connects this to Taylorism and the idea of scientific management, that further extenuated the rift between the mind and the body, between intellectual activity and labor. Not coincidentally, this distribution of kinds of work created a new distribution of value. In each case, Kim argues, race played a fundamental role. Ranging from the “found” art of Duchamp to the pseudo-Marxist conceptual art of Sierra, Kim eviscerates both pretention and cruelty, and restores the laboring body and what it produces to prominence, along with a truly re-invigorated and capacious sense of the Imagination outside of the constraints of neoliberal aesthetics.
Eunsong Kim is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Northeastern University. She is the author of gospel of regicide (2017), and with Sung Gi Kim she translated Kim Eon Hee’s poetic text Have You Been Feeling Blue These Days? published in 2019. Her monograph, The Politics of Collecting: Race & the Aestheticization of Property (Duke 2024) materializes the histories of immaterialism by examining the rise of US museums, avant-garde forms, digitization, and neoliberal aesthetics, to consider how race and property become foundational to modern artistic institutions. In 2021 she co-founded offshoot, an arts space for transnational activist conversations.
Today I am deeply honored to spend time with poet, activist, and scholar Jamaica Osorio. Shortly after October 7, 2023, she began to write a series of astonishing poems about the war in Gaza and the genocide. Osorio graces us with readings of some of those poems, and engages in a rich, complex, and deeply moving discussion of what went into their composition. Throughout, we talk about the power of poetry to suspend time and allow us the space to contemplate the impossible. We talk about the nature of not knowing, of the inexpressible, and the ways certain poems can give us the strength, energy, and commitment to persist in working for the liberation of all peoples, even when dwelling in grief.
Dr. Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio is a Kanaka Maoli wahine artist / activist / scholar / storyteller born and raised in Pālolo Valley to parents Jonathan and Mary Osorio. Jamaica earned her PhD in English (Hawaiian literature) in 2018 from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Currently, Jamaica is an Associate Professor of Indigenous and Native Hawaiian Politics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. In 2020 her poetry and activism were the subject of an award-winning film, This is the Way we Rise which premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2021. In 2022 she was a lead artist and Co-writer of the revolutionary VR Documentary, On the Morning You Wake (To the end of the world), that premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2022 and won the XR experience Jury award at SXSW 2022. She is a proud past Kaiāpuni student, Ford Dissertation (2017) and Post Doctoral (2022) Fellow, and a graduate of Kamehameha, Stanford University (BA) and New York University (MA). She is the author of the award winning book Remembering our Intimacies: Moʻolelo, Aloha ʻĀina, and Ea which was published in 2021 by The University of Minnesota Press. She believes in the power of aloha ʻāina and collective action to pursue liberatory, decolonial, and abolitionist futures of abundance.
In February, a New York assemblyman little known outside New York City was polling at 1% in his bid for mayor of NYC. This Tuesday, he became mayor-elect, after running a remarkable and inspiring campaign that drew 100,000 volunteers to knock on two million doors. Largely centering on making NYC affordable for everyone, Zohran Mamdani toppled a political dynasty by weaving together a broad constituency with his charisma, intelligence, compassion and energy. We talk to Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood, who have covered Mamdani from the start. They talk about what went into the campaign, what he needs to do once in office to start to make good on his promises, and the national significance of his victory.
Liza Featherstone is the author of Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation, published by O/R Books in 2018, as well as Selling Women Short: the Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Walmart (Basic Books, 2004). She co-authored Students Against Sweatshops (Verso, 2002) and is editor of False Choices: the Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Verso, 2016). She's currently editing a collection of Alexandra Kollontai 's work for O/R Books and International Publishers and writing the introduction to that volume.
Featherstone's work has been published in Lux, TV Guide, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Ms., the American Prospect, Columbia Journalism Review, Glamour, Teen Vogue, Dissent, the Guardian, In These Times, and many other publications.
Liza teachers at NYU 's Literary Reportage Program as well as at Columbia University School for International and Public Affairs. She is proud to be an active member of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America and of UAW local 7902.
Doug Henwood is a Brooklyn-based journalist and broadcaster specializing in economics and politics. He edited Left Business Observer, a newsletter, from 1986–2013, and has been host of Behind the News, a weekly radio show/podcast that originates on KPFA, Berkeley, since 1995. He is the author of Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom (Verso, 1997), After the New Economy (New Press, 2004), and My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency (OR Books, 2016). He’s written for numerous periodicals including Harper’s, The New Republic, The Nation, The Baffler, and Jacobin. He’s been working on a book about the rot of the US ruling class for way too long and needs to acquire the self-discipline to finish it.
Today I have the pleasure of talking with Dean Spade about his new book, Love in a Fucked-up World: how to build relationships, hook up, and raise hell together. This book builds on all of Dean’s previous books, and shares their commitment to finding ways to build better movements for better worlds. Like all of his work, Love in a Fucked Up World homes in on the obstacles we face not only from repressive states and destructive ideologies, but also from our own very human weaknesses and blindspots. This new book focuses on what Spade calls the “romance myth,” which shares so many features with, among other things, capitalism—ideas like a property, scarcity, ownership, status, power. While showing how when romance is brought into activist spaces it can cause great harm, Dean Spade also shows that, if converted into a form which includes patience, kindness, and generosity, romance can complement and strengthen our activism at a time when it is needed the most.
Dean Spade has been working in movements for queer and trans liberation, anti-militarism, and police and prison abolition for the past 25 years. He’s the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, and Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) the director of the documentary “Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!.” His new book is Love in a Fucked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up and Raise Hell Together, and he is the host of a new podcast with the same name.
In 2017, activist-scholar Robyn Maynard published her groundbreaking study, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present. Today, I have the privilege of talking with her about the second edition of this study, which has just been published by Duke University Press. Robyn tells us what has happened since 2017 that compelled her to revise the book and add important new materials to address the challenges of the present. At the core of this new edition is a powerful argument against reform and for abolition—Maynard details the numerous failures of police reform, and explains why precious time, resources, and lives have been spent trying to bring about authentic change via reform. Her vision for abolition is bold, and expansive, reaching beyond Canada to examine both transnational apparatuses of surveillance, policing, and punishment, and vital global forms of resistance and solidarity.
Robyn Maynard is an author and an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. Her writing on borders, policing, abolition and Black feminism is taught widely in universities across Canada, the United States and Europe.
The first edition of Policing Black Lives: State violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present, published in 2017, is a national bestseller, designated as one of the “best 100 books of 2017” by the Hill Times, listed in The Walrus‘s “best books of 2018,” shortlisted for an Atlantic Book Award, the Concordia University First Book Prize and the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction, and the winner of the 2017 Errol Sharpe Book Prize. In 2018 the book was published in French, titled NoirEs sous surveillance. Esclavage, répression et violence d’État au Canada, and won the 2019 Prix de libraires. Her second book, Rehearsals for Living, co-authored with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, is a Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, and CBC national bestseller and was shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award for literary non-fiction, a Toronto Heritage Award, and designated one of CBC’s “best Canadian non-fiction books of 2022” and the “best 100 books of 2022” by the Hill Times. Other awards include “2018 Author of the Year” from Montreal’s Black History Month and the Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQI* Emerging Writers. Her public scholarship is available at www.robynmaynard.com
Today I talk with Professor Nisrin Elamin about the situation in Sudan, where we find both a war between rival factions and these same factions continuing counter-revolutionary campaign against pro-democracy forces. We discuss how regional actors such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have contributed to the repression of democracy, and not only the ineffectiveness of NGOs and the United Nations in quelling the violence, but their roles in exacerbating it. In the midst of forced famine and war, we find the remarkable and heroic efforts of mutual aid groups and resistance organizations in civil society that have made life possible. Elamin explains how this ethos of obligation reaches far back in Sudanese history and culture. We end by talking about the Sudanese Solidarity Collective, a group that Nisrin helped found, which provides a vital conduit of aid to Sudan from its diasporic communities and others.
Nisrin Elamin is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Toronto. She is currently writing a book tentatively titled: Stratified Enclosures: Land, Capital and Empire-making in Central Sudan which focuses on Saudi and Emirati investments in land and community resistance to land dispossession in the agricultural Gezira region. In addition to scholarly articles, Nisrin has published and co-written several op-eds for Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, Okay Africa, Hammer and Hope and The Egypt Independent. Before pursuing her Ph.D., Nisrin spent over a decade working as an educator, organizer and researcher in the US and Tanzania. She is also a co-founding member of the Sudan Solidarity Collective which formed in the aftermath of the current war to support local emergency response rooms (ERRs) and other mutual aid networks and unions leading relief efforts in the face of a largely absent international aid community and civilian state.
How have young people in rural areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo invented new forms of radicalism in response to the impact of new flows of foreign investment and the inability of normal national and international politics to serve their needs and interests? Zachariah Mampilly explains how rural and urban spaces have seen a complex transit of peoples and funds that complicate politics, and emergent forms of radical activism have taken root and spread in many African countries. These forms display important re-imaginings of power sharing and revolutionary praxis.
Zachariah Mampilly is the Marxe Endowed Chair of International Affairs at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, CUNY and a member of the doctoral faculty in the Department of Political Science at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the Co-Founder of the Program on African Social Research. Previously, he was Professor of Political Science and Director of the Africana Studies Program at Vassar College. In 2012/2013, he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He is the author of Rebel Rulers: Insurgent Governance and Civilian Life during War (Cornell U. Press 2011) and with Adam Branch, Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change (African Arguments, Zed Press 2015). He is the co-editor of Rebel Governance in Civil Wars (Cambridge U. Press 2015) with Ana Arjona and Nelson Kasfir; and Peacemaking: From Practice to Theory (Praeger 2011) with Andrea Bartoli and Susan Allen Nan. His writing has also appeared in Foreign Affairs, Jacobin, The Hindu, Africa's a Country, N+1, Dissent, Al Jazeera, Noema, The Washington Post and elsewhere.
Today I have the pleasure of talking with Supriya Khandelwal and Koa Tran, two members of the South Bay Youth Changemakers, and one of its co-directors, Amulya Mandava. This Asian American organization, located at the heart of Silicon Valley, seeks to both challenge and expand the label, Asian American. The SBYC directs its energy into projects that go far beyond the stereotypes of wealth, acquisition, and status associated with its location, and focuses on empowerment and social justice. Crucially, the organization recognizes the multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and multi-class components of its community. We hear about the kinds of events and activities that characterize this important and vital organization.
Koa is a former youth member and summer fellow of South Bay Youth Changemakers. They are currently an undergraduate student in their senior year at UCSD. A special interest of theirs is disability justice and intersectional health.
Supriya is a former youth member of South Bay Youth Changemakers. She is a freshman in college majoring in Psychology. They’re a fan of internet art culture, and are interested in fair accommodations at school and work, and in labor justice—she believes people shouldn’t have to work their lives away.
Amulya is co-Director of South Bay Youth Changemakers. Her background is in labor organizing with the UAW, and in organizing against gender-based violence in higher ed.
Today I have the honor and the pleasure of speaking with legal scholar Mary Anne Franks, about her book, Fearless Speech: Breaking Free from the First Amendment. As the title of the book indicates, this is a fearless and iconoclastic critique of the ways that the First Amendment has been interpreted and mobilized in ways that protect and extend racism, misogyny, religious fundamentalism, and corporate self-interest. Among other topics, we talk about Amber Heard case and the limitations of groups like the ACLU and the misleading ways “cancel culture” is portrayed, along with the efforts to stifle speech that documents the promotion of misinformation, and the federal government’s extortion of media conglomerates to censor and remove satirists like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel. This promulgation of what Franks calls “reckless speech” does not have to persist. Franks calls on us to foster and practice “fearless speech” and to multiply counter-publics that take inspiration from the historical cases she presents. This is an especially timely and important episode of Speaking Out of Place.
Dr. Mary Anne Franks is the Eugene L. and Barbara A. Bernard Professor in Intellectual Property, Technology, and Civil Rights Law at George Washington Law School. An internationally recognized expert on the intersection of civil rights, free speech, and technology, Dr. Franks also serves as the President and Legislative & Tech Policy Director of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, the leading U.S.-based nonprofit organization focused on image-based sexual abuse. Her model legislation on the nonconsensual distribution of intimate images (NDII, sometimes referred to as “revenge porn”) has served as the template for multiple state and federal laws, and she regularly advises lawmakers and tech companies on privacy, free expression, and safety issues. She is the author of two books: Fearless Speech (Bold Type Books, 2024) and The Cult of the Constitution (Stanford Press, 2019). She holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School as well as a doctorate and a master’s degree from Oxford University, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. She is an Affiliate Fellow of the Yale Law School Information Society Project and is admitted to practice in the U.S. Supreme Court and the District of Columbia.
Today I am delighted to speak with primatologist Christine Webb about her new book, The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why it Matters. The title of the book itself is a concise and precise description of its two constituent halves. First, Webb tells us how science itself, from premodern times onward, has operated with an assumption it keeps reconfirming constantly--that humans are not only exceptional, but also superior to other forms of life. Webb convincingly debunks this science over and over again. And most importantly, she explains how this myth has devastating political, cultural, and environmental consequences. Combining scientific and humanistic studies, we go into some detail about what this arrogance produces, and why we desperately need a much more humble sense of ourselves.
Christine Webb is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at New York University, where she is part of the Animal Studies program. Her research is driven by growing awareness that the ecological crisis demands a profound shift in how we understand other animals and our place among them, leading to two intersecting lines of inquiry. First, her work seeks to elucidate the complex dynamics of animal social life, and to apply this knowledge to foundational questions in animal ethics and conservation. Second, she is interested in how prevailing societal norms, values, and institutions shape contemporary scientific knowledge of other animals and the environment, with a critical emphasis on human exceptionalism. Her debut book, The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why it Matters, was recently published with Avery (Penguin Random House) and is being translated into 17 languages.
Today I have the honor of speaking with longtime activist Silky Shah, Executive Director of the Detention Watch Network, about her new, and extremely important book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition. Shah provides a critical discussion about the intersection between detention, the prison industrial complex, and anti-immigrant racism. She explains how this relationship is hardly new, but stretches back at least to the Reagan presidency and through Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden. Given the durability of this connection, Shah makes an altogether convincing case that reform does not work, and that abolition is called for. Her book and her activism give us inspirating examples of such work in the past and present, and for the future.
Silky Shah is the Executive Director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigration detention in the United States. She has worked as an organizer on issues related to immigration detention, the prison industrial complex, and racial and migrant justice for nearly 20 years.
Today I have the real pleasure of speaking with Maytha Alhassen and Halah Ahmad, two prominent feminist activists, writers, and scholars deeply committed to exploring the connections between the Arabic language, storytelling, and political agency, from the historical past to the present. We talk about the continuity of storytelling forms and techniques that bridge generations and support and convey a durable set of values and beliefs that resist western appropriation and distortion. These phenomena have everything to do with continuing and advancing the struggle for Palestinian rights and the celebration of Palestinian life.
Halah Ahmad is a Harvard and Cambridge-trained writer, researcher, and political strategist whose work has appeared in multiple outlets from The Hill to Vox and the New York Times. She writes for Al-Shabaka, The Palestinian Policy Network and provides research and communications services to Palestinian and economic rights organizations across the country. Much of her work focuses on narrative change through storytelling in organizing and media. At a recent Stanford event, Halah discussed the historic forms of Palestinian storytelling, the Hakawati tradition, and the ways it has evolved and continued to be relevant amid the ongoing genocide. As a practitioner in the world of policy and politics, she grapples with the limitations of present avenues for Palestinian storytelling.
Maytha Alhassen is a journalist, poet, community organizer, and scholar whose work bridges media, justice advocacy, research, and artistic expression. She’s a Co-Executive Producer on Hulu’s award-winning Ramy, Executive Producer of the award-nominated PBS docu-series American Muslims: A History Revealed, a Pop Culture Collaborative Pluralist Visionaries Fellow, TED Resident, and Harvard Religion and Public Life Art and Pop Culture Fellow (2021–2024), lectures at Stanford University’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and is currenlty a Research Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Storytellers at UCLA. As a journalist, she has hosted on Al Jazeera English, reported for CNN, Huffington Post, Mic, and The Baffler, and written for Boston Review and LA Review of Books. Her work explores how storytelling shapes cultural and political belonging, with a focus on Muslim representation and equity in popular culture. She co-edited Demanding Dignity: Young Voices from the Front Lines of the Arab Revolutions, authored Haqq and Hollywood: Illuminating 100 Years of Muslim Tropes and Traps and How to Transform Them, and has published widely in academic journals. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies & Ethnicity from USC, an M.A. in Anthropology from Columbia, and a B.A. in Political Science and Arabic & Islamic Studies from UCLA.
Today I talk with poet Maya Salameh about her poetry collection, How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave, which won the prestigious Etal Adnan Poetry Prize in 2022. The judges remarked, “Maya Salameh’s poetry stood out for its inventiveness in cracking the code of life ‘between system and culture'…The turns and swerves the poems make are astonishing; the expectations they upend are remarkable… It’s a testament to the aesthetic boundaries and intellectual revolt poets of Arab heritage are pushing, breaking, and reinventing.” We talk about what led her to both technology and poetry, language and story-telling, and the challenges and joys of representing life in the diaspora. In a time of war and genocide, Salameh’s poetry shows how patterns of life and reproduction and desire persist. In her readings and discussions of three poems, we find a new lexicon and a new grammar.
Maya Salameh is the author of Mermaid Theory (Haymarket Books, 2026), How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave (University of Arkansas Press, 2022), winner of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, and the chapbook rooh (Paper Nautilus Press, 2020). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, and the President’s Committee for the Arts and Humanities, and served as a National Student Poet, America’s highest honor for youth poets. Her work has appeared in The Offing, Poetry, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, AGNI, Mizna, and the LA Times, among others. She can be found @mayaslmh or mayasalameh.com.
Today I am extremely grateful to Ardi Imseis and Chris Gunness for joining me for an urgent discussion of Israel’s accelerated genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank. These eminent international human rights scholars discuss Israel’s longstanding violations of international law and the complicity of the US. We also discuss at length the responsibility of states to immediately halt their direct and indirect support for the genocide. Our conversation includes an in-depth discussion of the UN, and both the usefulness and shortcomings of international law. We end with a call to international civil society to use the information, rules, and judgments of law to do what too many states fail to do—protect the rights and lives of Palestinians and bring forth justice.
Dr. Ardi Imseis is Associate Professor of Law, Faculty of Law, Queen’s University. He is author of The United Nations and the Question of Palestine: Rule by Law and the Structure of International Legal Subalternity (Cambridge University Press 2023). In 2019 he was named by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to serve as a Member of the UN commission of inquiry into the civil war in Yemen. He has served as legal counsel before the International Court of Justice, including the Court’s groundbreaking 2024 opinion on Legal Consequences arising from the policies and practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem. Between 2002 and 2014, he served in senior legal and policy capacities in the Middle East with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). He has provided expert testimony in his personal capacity before various high-level bodies, including the UN Security Council, the UN Human Rights Council, and the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Professor Imseis’s scholarship has appeared in a wide array of international journals, and he is former Editor-in-Chief of the Palestine Yearbook of International Law (Brill; 2008-2019) and Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and Human Rights Fellow, Columbia Law School. Professor Imseis holds a Ph.D. (Cambridge), an LL.M. (Columbia), LL.B. (Dalhousie), and B.A. (Hons.) (Toronto). He appears today in his personal capacity.
Chris Gunness covered the 1988 democracy uprising for the BBC in what was then Burma. After a 23-year career at the BBC, he joined the United Nations as Director of Strategic Communications and Advocacy in the Middle East. In 2019 he left the UN and returned to London. He founded the Myanmar Accountability Project (MAP) in 2021.
Today I have the pleasure of speaking with cultural anthropologist Greta YOU-LING about her new book, Decolonizing Ukraine: The Indigenous People of Crimea and Pathways to Freedom, a fascinating story about an indigenous group in Crimea fighting for its rights. Uehling tells us of the complex history of the Crimean Tatars, a Sunni Muslim group who were driven off their land in 1944 by the Soviet Union. This group now finds itself caught in the Russia-Ukraine war. It has rebuffed attempts by Putin and yet also has insisted on maintaining and defending its indigenous identity and rights with regard to Ukraine. We talk about the importance of both cultural memory and political struggle in the present, and hear of Greta’s time at the barricade which Tatars set up to stem the flow of materials across their land.
Greta Uehling is a cultural anthropologist who works at the intersection of Indigenous and Eastern European Studies. She is a Teaching Professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she is in the Program in International and Comparative Studies and is Associate Faculty of the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. Uehling is the author of three books: Beyond Memory: The Deportation and Return of the Crimean Tatars (Palgrave 2004), Everyday War: The Conflict over Donbas, Ukraine (Cornell University Press 2023), and Decolonizing Ukraine: The Indigenous People of Crimea and Pathways to Freedom (Rowman & Littlefield 2025). Throughout her career, Uehling has served as a consultant to organizations working in the fields of international migration, human rights, and human trafficking, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
In this episode of Speaking Out of Place, investigative journalist Karen Hao explains that OpenAI is anything but “open”—very early on, it left behind that marketing tag to become increasingly closed and elitist. Her massive study, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI had a rather different subtitle in its UK edition: “Inside the reckless race of total domination.” In our conversation we flesh out the overlap between these two points of emphasis. Hao argues that in general the AI mission “centralizes talent around a grand ambition” and “centralizes capital and other resources while eliminating roadblocks, regulation, and dissent.” All the while “the mission remains so vague that it can be interpreted and reinterpreted to direct the centralization of talent, capital, resources however the centralizer wants.” Karen explains that she chose the word “empire” precisely to indicate the colonial nature of AI’s domination: the tremendous damage this enterprise does to the poor, to racial and ethnic minorities, and to the Global South in general in terms of minds, bodies, the environment, natural resources, and any notion of democracy. This is a discussion everyone should be part of.
Karen Hao is a bestselling author and award-winning reporter covering the impacts of artificial intelligence on society. She was the first journalist to profile OpenAI and wrote a book, EMPIRE OF AI, about the company and its global implications, which became an instant New York Times bestseller. She writes for publications including The Atlantic and leads the Pulitzer Center's AI Spotlight Series, a program training thousands of journalists around the world on how to cover AI. She was formerly a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, covering American and Chinese tech companies, and a senior editor for AI at MIT Technology Review. Her work is regularly taught in universities and cited by governments. She has received numerous accolades for her coverage, including an American Humanist Media Award, an American National Magazine Award for Journalists Under 30, and the TIME100 AI. She received her Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from MIT.
Today I talk with Huda Fakhreddine, writer, translator, and scholar of Arabic literature. Among the many topics we touch upon are the challenges of teaching Arabic literature, especially Palestinian literature, in a time of genocide, when universities, professional organizations, and political groups militate against any honest discussion of these topics, and punish those who do. We talk about the notion of belonging, and the importance of being able to choose what to belong to, and what not to. Huda speaks of the freedom found in living in Arabic, and explains what that means to her. She also reads in Arabic and English Nima Hasan’s stunning and wrenchingly beautiful poem, “Old Song.”
Huda J. Fakhreddine is a writer, translator, and Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (Routledge, 2023). Among her translations are The Sky That Denied Me: Selections from Jawdat Fakhreddine (University of Texas Press, 2020), The Universe, All at Once: Selections from Salim Barakat (Seagull Books, 2024), and Palestinian: Four Poems by Ibrahim Nasrallah (World Poetry Books, 2024). Her creative work includes a book of creative non-fiction titled Zaman saghīr taḥt shams thāniya (A Brief Time under a Different Sun), Dar al-Nahda, Beirut, 2019 and the forthcoming Wa min thamma al-ālam (And then the World), Manshūrāt Marfa’, Beirut, 2025. Her translations of Arabic poems have appeared in Protean, Lithub, Words Without Borders, Nimrod, ArabLit Quarterly, Asymptote, and Middle Eastern Literatures among many others. She is co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures and section editor of the Encyclopedia of Islam.
Today it’s my honor to speak with Danica Savonick about her marvelous book entitled Open Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College. This is a riveting and deeply inspiring story of how each of these luminaries in the fields of literature and feminism found their way into the City University of New York in the 1960s, when community activists had forced open what was called the Harvard for the proletariat to admit new classes of Black, brown, and other people of color. Savonick shows through copious archival research how Bambara, Jordan, Lorde and Rich each came to find radical teaching methods in collaboration with these new students, and how their experiences with this new pedagogy affected their creative and other writing in profound and lasting manners. This is a critical history we can and must learn from today, when federal and state governments have added to the damage and violence done by the neoliberal university. We find exactly the tools and models we need to create spaces for education for liberation both within, but also outside, the Academy.
Check out our blog, featuring these writers' teaching materials!
Danica Savonick is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY Cortland and the author of Open Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College (Duke University Press, 2024). Her current project focuses on the radical writers and artists who taught at the experimental Livingston College (part of Rutgers University) in the 1970s. Her research has appeared in MELUS, American Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Radical Teacher, Keywords for Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, Public Books, and The Chronicle of Higher Ed.
Today I'm delighted to talk with Quinn Slobodian about his new book, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. We take a deep dive into the genesis of a weird and powerful merging of two seemingly different groups the Far Right and neoliberals. Slobodian writes, “as repellent as their politics may be these radical thinkers are not barbarians the gates of neoliberalism but the bastard offspring of that line of thought itself.” We talk about how this meshing is driven by a primitive desire to ward off egalitarianism, difference, democracy, and government that services the common good. Our wide-ranging talk ends with addressing DOGE, Trump's tariffs, and yes, the Jeffrey Epstein case.
Quinn Slobodian is professor of international history at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His books, which have been translated into ten languages, include Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy, and Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right . A Guggenheim Fellow for 2025-6, he has been an associate fellow at Chatham House and held residential fellowships at Harvard University and Free University Berlin. Project Syndicate put him on a list of 30 Forward Thinkers and Prospect UK named him one of the World’s 25 Top Thinkers.
Today we are deeply honored and privileged to speak with journalist-activist Yousef Aljamal, one of the editors of a remarkable, gripping, and altogether inspiring collection, Displaced in Gaza: Stories from the Gaza Genocide, 27 stories written by Palestinians in Gaza. We talk about the conception behind the book, and concentrate on certain keywords like obligation, pride, inventiveness, and resilience. Aljamal talks about how Palestinians are relying on a long history of survival and persistence—educating, caring for, and continuing life under the most oppressive circumstances imaginable. We end by echoing the voices in this collection, which call on the international community to continue to fill the streets, pressure politicians and to fight for Palestinian freedom.
Yousef Aljamal, born in a refugee camp in Gaza, works as the Gaza coordinator at the Palestine Activism Program at the American Friends Service Committee and recently received his PhD at Sakarya University in Turkey. He is the editor of If I Must Die Poetry and Prose by Refaat Alareer. He is the co-editor of Displaced in Gaza: Stories from the Gaza Genocide.
Recently, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio imposed sanctions on the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, saying, “The United States has repeatedly condemned and objected to biased and malicious activities of Albanese that have long made her unfit for service as a Special Rapporteur.” Today we are joined by three of Albanese’s predecessors—John Dugard, Richard Falk, and Michael Lynk, who talk about what these sanctions mean. They trace the United States’ and Israel’s longstanding attacks on not only Special Rapporteurs on Palestine, but the very claims to Palestinian rights. This latest instance is a particularly egregious attack on the UN and international law. We end with a plea to the international community to come to the aid of the Palestinian people, who are suffering famine, disease, and warfare of immense proportions.
John Dugard SC, Emeritus Professor of Law, Universities of the Witwatersrand and Leiden; Member of Institut de Droit International; ; Director of Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, Cambridge (1995-1997); Judge ad hoc International Court of Justice (2000-2018); Member of UN International Law Commission (1997 -2011); UN Special Rapporteur on Situation of Human Rights in Occupied Palestinian Territory (2001-2008); Legal Counsel, South Africa v Israel (Genocide Convention).
Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University (1961-2001) and Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, Queen Mary University London. Since 2002 has been a Research Fellow at the Orfalea Center of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Between 2008 and 2014 he served as UN Special Rapporteur on Israeli Violations of Human Rights in Occupied Palestine.
Falk has advocated and written widely about ‘nations’ that are captive within existing states, including Palestine, Kashmir, Western Sahara, Catalonia, Dombas.
Falk has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times since 2008.
Michael Lynk was a member of the Faculty of Law, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada between 1999 and his retirement in 2022. He taught courses in labour, human rights, disability, constitutional and administrative law. He served as Associate Dean of the Faculty between 2008-11. He became Professor Emeritus in 2023.
In March 2016, the United Nations Human Rights Council unanimously selected Professor Lynk for a six-year term as the 7th Special Rapporteur for the human rights situation in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967. He completed his term in April 2022.
He has written about his UN experiences in a 2022 book co-authored with Richard Falk and John Dugard, two of his predecessors as UN special rapporteurs: Protecting Human Rights in Occupied Palestine: Working Through the United Nations (Clarity Press).
Professor Lynk’s academic scholarship and his United Nations reports have been cited by the Supreme Court of Canada, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court and the United Nations General Assembly.
How do not only monuments, but also the very idea of monumentality, serve to mystify and perpetuate beliefs that maintain social orders that deserve to be strenuously re-evaluated? Archaeologist and anthropologist Dan Hicks traces the development of a particularly virulent strain of monument-worship, that which emerges out of what he calls “militarist realism,” which harnesses technologies of war, particularly colonial, white supremacist war, to build institutions, disciplines, museums in its image in order to permanently maintain a border between those deemed human subjects and the object-worlds of the non-human—which includes racial others. Rather than grant the past immunity, Hicks argues that we need to decide for ourselves what we chose to remember, and what deserves to be forgotten.
Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at Oxford University, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College. He has written widely on art, heritage, museums, colonialism, and the material culture of the recent past and the near-present. Dan's books include The Brutish Museums: the Benin Bronzes, colonial violence and cultural restitution (Pluto 2020) and Every Monument Will Fall: a story of remembering and forgetting (Hutchinson Heinemann 2025). Bluesky/Insta: @ProfDanHicks
Today we speak with Daniela Navin and Jeanette de La Riva, two members of Grupo Auto Defensa, a community organization based in Pasadena CA which has come about in response to attacks by ICE which have violently disrupted everyday life and led people to form new relations of mutual support and care. We hear their stories of how Trump lieutenant Stephen Miller's demand that ICE arrest 3,000 people every day has put unbelievable constraints on hard-working people's lives. Nevertheless, we also hear how they have invented tactics to challenge these repressive measures. We are joined by journalist-activist Maxmillian Alvarez of The Real News Network who grew up in Los Angeles and comments on the broad networks of resistance cropping up organically to fight fascism.
Maximillian Alvarez is an award-winning journalist and the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Executive Director of The Real News Network (TRNN) in Baltimore. He is the founder and host of Working People, "a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today," and the author of "The Work of Living," a collection of interviews with US workers recorded during Year One of the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to joining TRNN, he was an Associate Editor at the Chronicle Review. His writing has been featured in outlets like The Nation, In These Times, Poynter, Boston Review, The Baffler, Current Affairs, and The Chronicle of Higher Education; as an analyst and commentator, he has appeared on programs like PBS NewsHour, Breaking Points, Democracy Now!, The New Republic, NPR’s 1A, The Hill’s Rising, and more.
Today I talk with Rahim Kurwa about a powerful study of housing rights and police repression in Southern California. Tapping into a vast historical archive as well as oral histories with residents of Antelope Valley, California, Rahim traces the complex relationship between this region and the City of Los Angeles. Using David Harvey’s famous notion of a “spatial fix,” Kurwa argues that for decades Antelope Valley acted both as a safety value for LA’s over-accumulation of capital, and Black labor. Anti-black racism took the form of powerful collaborations between local police departments, politicians, the courts, the media, and citizens groups that acted as vigilantes. Yet Rahim Kurwa also speaks about organized resistance to these attacks that resulted in significant victories, and of the history of Sun Village, that started on land from a socialist community, and grew into an all-Black town. Given today’s brutal ICE assaults on migrants and others in Los Angeles and the policing of public and private space, this episode is of special importance.
Rahim Kurwa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). His work is broadly focused on the policing of housing, and he has published work on this topic in Du Bois Review, Housing Policy Debate, City and Community, and Feminist Formations. His book, Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing, traces the past century of Black history in Los Angeles' northernmost outpost, known as the Antelope Valley, showing how pre-1968 methods of racial segregation have been replaced today by policing. At UIC, he is currently studying the eviction crisis in the Chicago Housing Authority while teaching courses on race, class, gender, and the law. He received his PhD from UCLA in 2018.
On May 15, international legal experts Lara Elborno, Richard Falk, and Penny Green joined me to discuss the work of the Gaza Tribunal, a group devoted to creating an archive of facts and a set of documents and arguments to help international civil society fight against the genocide in Gaza and the Zionist regime that, along with the United States, has perpetrated this atrocity. Today they all return to update us. They present a grim picture of what they call the final phase of genocide and note both the overwhelming global support for Palestine and the concurrent repression against advocacy and protest. This is a critical episode to listen to and share.
Lara Elborno is a Palestinian-American lawyer specialized in international disputes. She has worked for over 10 years as counsel acting for individuals, private entities, and States in international commercial and investment arbitrations. She dedicates a large part of her legal practice to pro-bono work including the representation of asylum seekers in France and advising clients on matters related to IHRL and the business and human rights framework. She previously taught US and UK constitutional law at the Université de Paris II - Panthéon Assas. She currently serves as a board member of ARDD-Europe and sits on the Steering Committee of the Gaza Tribunal. She has moreover appeared as a commentator on Al Jazeera, TRTWorld, DoubleDown News, and George Galloway's MOAT speaking about the Palestinian liberation struggle, offering analysis and critiques of international law."\
Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University (1961-2001) and Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, Queen Mary University London. Since 2002 has been a Research Fellow at the Orfalea Center of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Between 2008 and 2014 he served as UN Special Rapporteur on Israeli Violations of Human Rights in Occupied Palestine.
He is Senior Vice President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, having served for seven years as Chair of its Board. He is Chair of the Board of Trustees of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. He is co-director of the Centre of Climate Crime, QMUL.
Falk has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times since 2008.
His recent books include (Re)Imagining Humane Global Governance (2014), Power Shift: The New Global Order (2016), Palestine Horizon: Toward a Just Peace (2017), Revisiting the Vietnam War (ed. Stefan Andersson, 2017), On Nuclear Weapons: Denuclearization, Demilitarization and Disarmament (ed. Stefan Andersson & Curt Dahlgren, 2019.
Penny Green is Professor of Law and Globalisation at QMUL and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. She has published extensively on state crime theory, resistance to state violence and the Rohingya genocide, (including with Tony Ward, State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption, 2004 and State Crime and Civil Activism 2019). She has a long track record of researching in hostile environments and has conducted fieldwork in the UK, Turkey, Kurdistan, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Israel, Tunisia, Myanmar and Bangladesh. In 2015 she and her colleagues published ‘Countdown to Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar’ and in March 2018 ‘The Genocide is Over: the genocide continues’. Professor Green is Founder and co-Director of the award winning International State Crime Initiative (ISCI); co-editor in Chief of the international journal, State Crime; Executive member of the Gaza Tribunal and Palestine Book Awards judge. Her new book with Thomas MacManus Chronicle of a Genocide Foretold: Myanmar and the Rohingya will be published by Rutgers university Press in 2025
Today we welcome Malcolm Harris back to the show. Previously he talked with us about his mammoth study, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. This time we are looking not at a history of Capitalism and the World, but our possible futures under the threat of catastrophic climate change. We talk about not only failed policies, but failed perspectives on society, politics, and culture, and focus on a deadly form of Value that has led us to the abyss precisely because it has emanated from a basic rift between humans and the world. It is a rift that Capital has always both fed and exploited, but will end up exhausting a finite resource—the Planet. We talk about what is needed to heal this, and what we are up against.
Malcolm Harris is a freelance writer and the author of Kids These Days, Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit, and Palo Alto. His newest book is What's Left?: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis.
Ever since its publication, Abolish Silicon Valley—How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism has proven to be more urgent and insightful. Today I talk with author Wendy Liu about how developments like AI and LLM, further erosions of intellectual property, and increased invasions of privacy make the case for abolishing Silicon Valley even more important. We talk about how abolition is critical at a time when more and more the private sector has come to eviscerate the public good. Turning to the genocide in Gaza, we discuss the ways Capital has enlisted technology in deadly and horrific manners. We end with a meditation on the commons and how one can live with fewer commodities and find value in common projects to make life more valuable and worthwhile outside of the logic of the market.
Wendy Liu is the author of Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism, a memoir/manifesto about the tech industry from the perspective of a former believer. She lives in San Francisco and is working on a novel.
Today we talk with Samar Al-Bulushi about her rich and complex work on Kenya, which, across multiple scales of time and place, discovers how the War on Terror both tapped into colonial ideologies of the past and present-day political calculations at the intersection of the local and global. We find out how the War has taken many different forms that often escape the eye—embedded as they are in structures of feelings and new practices that were instilled as Kenya maneuvers its different roles as war-maker and pacifier, independent state and partner with the US. We end with an important update on Kenya since the book’s publication, which has seen a popular uprising and state repression. We speak about the roles of civil society and international organizations in this new historical moment.
Samar Al-Bulushi is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Irvine. Her book, War-Making as Worldmaking: Kenya, the United States, and the War on Terror, was published by Stanford University Press in November 2024. She is a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and previously served as contributing editor for Africa is a Country. She has published in a variety of public outlets on topics ranging from the International Criminal Court to the militarization of U.S. policy in Africa.
Last week, over 100 agents from nine federal agencies stormed a bucolic public park in Los Angeles, claiming it was a hotbed of terrorism and lawlessness. In fact, heavily armed soldiers in camouflage found a group of young children attending a summer camp. This was a show of force meant to intimidate, shock, and awe, but just like Trump’s military parade in Washington, DC, it ended up pathetic and farcical. Today we are fortunate to speak with journalist Mel Buer, who was at MacArthur Park and witnessed this sad spectacle. We talk about what she saw and how is simply part of a recent history of attacks on mostly brown people. We get Mel’s thoughts on both the broader national context, and how local people and longstanding immigrant’s rights groups are resisting and fighting back.
Mel Buer is an LA-based independent journalist covering labor, social movements, and community organizing.
Today on Speaking Out of Place we have a special episode on Israeli attacks on Iran that resulted in 12 days of bombings and culminated with the US dropping bunker bombs on Iran's nuclear facilities. Scholars and activists Persis Karim and Manijeh Moradian discuss both the Iranian national issues involved as well as the regional context, connecting this war with the genocide in Gaza and Israel’s extensive wars elsewhere. At stake is both Iranian sovereignty and the calls for so-called “regime change.” We question the use of that term, delve into how the struggle for liberation in Iran rejects both the repressive Islamic state and the US/Israeli war machine. Our discussion draws the frightening parallels between Iran’s stifling of dissent and imprisonment of political enemies and others with our own government’s. Finally, we recall the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and build hope for international solidarity with groups working for liberation in Iran, Palestine, and elsewhere, and insist liberation will never be achieved by dropping bombs.
Persis Karim is the director emeritus of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies and a professor in the Department of Humanities and Comparative and World Literature at San Francisco State University. Since 1999, she has been actively working to expand the field of Iranian Diaspora Studies, beginning with the first anthology of Iranian writing she co-edited, A World Between: Poems, Short Stories and Essays by Iranian-Americans. She is the editor of two other anthologies of Iranian diaspora literature: Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora, and Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian-American Writers. Before coming to San Francisco State, she was a professor of English & Comparative Literature at San Jose State where she was the founder and director of the Persian Studies program, and coordinator of the Middle East Studies Minor. She has published numerous articles about Iranian diaspora literature and culture for academic publications including Iranian Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asian, African and Middle East Studies (CSSAMES), and MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States. “The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life,” is her first film project (co-directed and co-produced with Soumyaa Behrens). She received her Master’s in Middle East Studies and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UT Austin. She is also a poet.
Manijeh Moradian is assistant professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States, was published by Duke University Press in December 2022. She has published widely including in American Quarterly, Journal of Asian American Studies, Scholar & Feminist online, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She is a founding member of the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective and a member of the Feminists for Jina transnational network.
On today’s episode I talk with geographer, artist, photographer, and activist Linda Quiquivix about her new book: Palestine 1492: A Report Back. Combining her work learning and working alongside the Zapatistas and Palestinians, and incorporating anti-fascist politics from the Black Panthers, Quiquivix reaches back to the 15th century to see the beginnings of the Western project to carve the surface of the planet into spaces to be both shared and wrestled over by those Above. Instead, Linda asks us to walk side by side with those Below. She writes, “what might it look like what might it feel like, to walk with the Below? To place yourself under fire with the Below, so that the need to shake off fascism becomes a shared necessity for you, too? I do not know, but I hope we will find out together because there's no blueprint. From the Zapatistas I learn to ask questions as we walk. From Aida Camp I learn sometimes we must ask questions as we jump. May we learn the answers together.”
Dr. Linda Quiquivix is a geographer, illustrator, and popular educator of Maya-Mam roots, raised by Palestinians, Zapatistas, Panthers, and jaguars. Her work centers on decolonial land struggles that challenge us to share the world with all our difference, a world “where all worlds fit.” She is author of Palestine 1492: A Report Back (Wild Ox Books, 2024), a visual and literary exploration that weaves Palestine into global struggles across 500 years. Quiquivix is also a co-editor of “The Fourth World War: Zapatista Writings on Global Capital 1997-2023” (Paliacate Press, 2024). Learn more about her work at quiqui.org
In today’s episode we speak with Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood about Zohran Mamdani’s upset victory in the recent primary for in New York mayor’s race. We first learn more about this 33-year-old socialist, and remarkable campaign he and his team put together to defeat ultimate political insider and ex-governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo. We probe behind the headlines to see the ways Mamdani’s platform was responding to a set of crises that the Democratic establishment chose to ignore. We both address the onslaught of Islamophobic attacks on Mamdani, and also see what they mask—why is Zohran Mamdani both so reviled by some, and loved and championed by others? And is this race about the future of the Democratic party, and why should we care?
Liza Featherstone is the author of Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation, published by O/R Books in 2018, as well as Selling Women Short: the Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Walmart (Basic Books, 2004). She co-authored Students Against Sweatshops (Verso, 2002) and is editor of False Choices: the Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Verso, 2016). She's currently editing a collection of Alexandra Kollontai 's work for O/R Books and International Publishers and writing the introduction to that volume.
Featherstone's work has been published in Lux, TV Guide, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Ms., the American Prospect, Columbia Journalism Review, Glamour, Teen Vogue, Dissent, the Guardian, In These Times, and many other publications.
Liza teachers at NYU 's Literary Reportage Program as well as at Columbia University School for International and Public Affairs. She is proud to be an active member of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America and of UAW local 7902.
Doug Henwood is a Brooklyn-based journalist and broadcaster specializing in economics and politics. He edited Left Business Observer, a newsletter, from 1986–2013, and has been host of Behind the News, a weekly radio show/podcast that originates on KPFA, Berkeley, since 1995. He is the author of Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom (Verso, 1997), After the New Economy (New Press, 2004), and My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency (OR Books, 2016). He’s written for numerous periodicals including Harper’s, The New Republic, The Nation, The Baffler, and Jacobin. He’s been working on a book about the rot of the US ruling class for way too long and needs to acquire the self-discipline to finish it.
Today I speak with Gabrielle Apollon and Pooja Bhatia about the histories behind the persecution of Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and beyond. Targeted as exemplary “bad people” by demagogue Donald Trump, the stories of both the town and the people of Springfield are brought forward by Pooja Bhatia, who lived both in Haiti and as a journalist lived with the people in Springfield. Complementing Bhatia’s local stories of migrants, we have Gabrielle Apollon of the Global Justice Clinic, who tells of the complex “push” factors that drive Haitians from their homeland. We end on a hopeful note—showing how instances of transnational solidarity have succeeded where governments and international governmental bodies have failed.
For more information on this topic, please check out our blog.
Gabrielle Apollon is the Director of the Haitian Immigrant Rights project at NYU Law's Global Justice Clinic. She also coordinates the Hemispheric Network for Haitian Migrants' Rights, a coalition of Haitian activists, lawyers, and leaders, collaborating to combat the anti-Black racism, exclusion and cyclical displacement Haitians have faced as they’ve migrated throughout the Western Hemisphere. Gabrielle previously served as Managing Attorney at The Door: A Center for Alternatives, where she represented young people in immigration and family law matters. She holds a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University, as well as a law degree from NYU School of Law.
Pooja Bhatia is an U.S. writer, editor and teacher who has reported on Haiti and Haitian immigrants for more than 15 years. She lived in Haiti from 2007 to 2011 and speaks Kreyòl. Her work has been published in a variety of outlets, including The London Review of Books, The Baffler, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times and The Economist, where she was Haiti correspondent from 2010-2013. A former human rights lawyer, Pooja teaches with the University Network for Human Rights, and is working on a novel.
Today on Speaking Out of Place I am joined by two of my favorite guests—Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood. As always, this is a free-wheeling, unscripted conversation amongst friends and political allies. This time we talk about the New York City mayor’s race, Elon Musk and DOGE, the unbridled wave of greed we see on display amongst the oligarchy, and the need to think beyond Trump and single issues to arrive at a diagnosis of the systematic attacks on social life and mutual care.
Liza Featherstone is the author of Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation, published by O/R Books in 2018, as well as Selling Women Short: the Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Walmart (Basic Books, 2004). She co-authored Students Against Sweatshops (Verso, 2002) and is editor of False Choices: the Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Verso, 2016). She's currently editing a collection of Alexandra Kollontai 's work for O/R Books and International Publishers and writing the introduction to that volume.
Featherstone's work has been published in Lux, TV Guide, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Ms., the American Prospect, Columbia Journalism Review, Glamour, Teen Vogue, Dissent, the Guardian, In These Times, and many other publications.
Liza teachers at NYU 's Literary Reportage Program as well as at Columbia University School for International and Public Affairs. She is proud to be an active member of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America and of UAW local 7902.
Doug Henwood is a Brooklyn-based journalist and broadcaster specializing in economics and politics. He edited Left Business Observer, a newsletter, from 1986–2013, and has been host of Behind the News, a weekly radio show/podcast that originates on KPFA, Berkeley, since 1995. He is the author of Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom (Verso, 1997), After the New Economy (New Press, 2004), and My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency (OR Books, 2016). He’s written for numerous periodicals including Harper’s, The New Republic, The Nation, The Baffler, and Jacobin. He’s been working on a book about the rot of the US ruling class for way too long and needs to acquire the self-discipline to finish it.
The academic year has just ended, but student activists for Palestinian liberation are already making plans for next year. On today’s show I talk with organizers from the University of Oregon (Cole Herman), from CUNY Graduate Center (Flora deTournay), and from Stanford (Iman Deriche) about this past year’s hunger strike campaigns—we learn of concerted efforts to change the narrative and raise support for those resisting Israel’s genocide. We speak of the need to engage the diverse but broad base of support for Palestine, to build strength, and to creatively bypass administrative indifference and repression. Full of useful information that inspires, this episode is important listening for the summer. Please also check for our upcoming blog on this episode, where we will share resources and ideas.
Today on Speaking Out of Place I talk with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson about her new book, Theory of Water. Theory of Water is a rich, complex, and deeply personal reflection on world-making and life-giving processes best captured in the fluidity of water as it circulates through all our bodies and the planet. It is a largely collective project that enlists our listening and love, and helps us face the violence of all forms of dominance, enclosure, and containment. We are especially gifted to have the chance to listen to one of the songs from Leanne’s album, Theory of Ice, and have her comment on it and the relation of her music to her writing. This is a particularly special episode of Speaking Out of Place.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and musician. She is the author of eight previous books, including the novel Noopiming: A Cure for White Ladies, which was short listed for the Dublin Literary prize and the Governor General’s award for fiction. Leanne’s album, Theory of Ice, released by You’ve Changed Records in 2021 and short-listed for the Polaris Prize and she was the 2021 winner of the Prism Prize’s Willie Dunn Award. Her latest project Theory of Water was published by Knopf Canada/Haymarket books in the spring of 2025. Leanne is a member of Alderville First Nation.
Today I talk with M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi about their dazzling and challenging book, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052 to 2072. They imagine a world haunted by genocide, ecocide, disease, fascism, and viral capitalism, but rather than writing a dystopian novel, O’Brien and Abdelhadi create a complex mosaic of oral histories, in which they each play the part of interviewer. The result is a story that far exceeds New York, and the twenty years noted in the title. The histories cover generations across the globe, and reach into the deep sources of trauma, and the kinds of mutual care we will need to not only survive, but also to thrive in these frightening times.
Eman Abdelhadi is an academic, organizer and writer based in Chicago. She is co-author of "Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072," a revolutionary sci-fi novel published in 2022 with Common Notions Press. She is an assistant professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago, where she researches American Muslim communities, and she is a columnist at In These Times magazine where she writes on the Palestine Liberation movement and American politics. Eman organizes with the Salon Kawakib collective, Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine at the University of Chicago, Scholars for Social Justice and other formations.
M. E. O’Brien writes and speaks on gender freedom and capitalism. She has written two books: Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (Pluto Press, 2023) and a co-authored speculative novel, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (Common Notions, 2022). She is a member of the editorial collective of Pinko, a magazine of gay communism. Her work on family abolition has been translated into Chinese, German, Greek, French, Spanish, Catalan, and Turkish.
Previously, she coordinated the New York City Trans Oral History Project, and worked in HIV and AIDS activism and services. She completed a PhD at NYU, where she wrote on how capitalism shaped New York City LGBTQ social movements.
She currently works a psychotherapist in private practice and is a psychoanalyst in formation.
Worries about the so-called “pussification of Silicon Valley” are not at all new. Becca Lewis’ work reaches far back in American history to trace the nexus of gender, technology, and entrepreneurship, such that what we find today seems a foregone conclusion. In today’s wide-ranging discussion we talk about the central figure in this history—George Gilder, whose first book, Sexual Suicide, and subsequent forays into technology, conservative politics, and capitalism included much of what we see today in things like the echo chambers of misinformation of Fox News and the alienated “freedom” of Elon Musk’s SpaceX City. Who are these men, who Becca says, “leave behind the messy physical flows of women’s bodies in favor of the streamlined capitalism of male genius”?
Becca Lewis is a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford University Department of Communication and an incoming assistant professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Her work examines the rise of reactionary politics in Silicon Valley and online. In September 2024, she received her PhD in Communication from Stanford University. She previously worked as a researcher at the Data & Society Research Institute, where she published flagship reports on far-right online broadcasting, media manipulation, and disinformation. Her work has been published in academic journals including New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, and American Behavioral Scientist, and in news outlets such as The Guardian and Business Insider. In 2022, she served as an expert witness in the defamation lawsuit brought against Alex Jones by the parents of a Sandy Hook shooting victim.
This episode of Speaking Out of Place is being recorded on May 15, 2025, the 77th anniversary of the 1948 Nakba, which began the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land. We talk with Lara Elborno, Richard Falk, and Penny Green, three members of the Gaza Tribunal, which is set to convene in Saravejo in a few days. This will set in motion the process of creating an archive of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people with an aim to give global civil society the tools and inspiration it needs to further delegitimize Israel, end its genocidal acts, help bring about liberation for the Palestinian people.
Lara Elborno is a Palestinian-American lawyer specialized in international disputes, qualified to practice in the US and France. She has worked for over 10 years as counsel acting for individuals, private entities, and States in international commercial and investment arbitrations. She dedicates a large part of her legal practice to pro-bono work including the representation of asylum seekers in France and advising clients on matters related to IHRL and the business and human rights framework. She previously taught US and UK constitutional law at the Université de Paris II - Panthéon Assas. She currently serves as a board member of ARDD-Europe and sits on the Steering Committee of the Gaza Tribunal. She has moreover appeared as a commentator on Al Jazeera, TRTWorld, DoubleDown News, and George Galloway's MOAT speaking about the Palestinian liberation struggle, offering analysis and critiques of international law.
Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University (1961-2001) and Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, Queen Mary University London. Since 2002 has been a Research Fellow at the Orfalea Center of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Between 2008 and 2014 he served as UN Special Rapporteur on Israeli Violations of Human Rights in Occupied Palestine.
Falk has advocated and written widely about ‘nations’ that are captive within existing states, including Palestine, Kashmir, Western Sahara, Catalonia, Dombas.
He is Senior Vice President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, having served for seven years as Chair of its Board. He is Chair of the Board of Trustees of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. He is co-director of the Centre of Climate Crime, QMUL.
Falk has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times since 2008.
His recent books include (Re)Imagining Humane Global Governance (2014), Power Shift: The New Global Order (2016), Palestine Horizon: Toward a Just Peace (2017), Revisiting the Vietnam War (ed. Stefan Andersson, 2017), On Nuclear Weapons: Denuclearization, Demilitarization and Disarmament (ed. Stefan Andersson & Curt Dahlgren, 2019.
Penny Green is Professor of Law and Globalisation at QMUL and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. She has published extensively on state crime theory, resistance to state violence and the Rohingya genocide, (including with Tony Ward, State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption, 2004 and State Crime and Civil Activism 2019). She has a long track record of researching in hostile environments and has conducted fieldwork in the UK, Turkey, Kurdistan, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Israel, Tunisia, Myanmar and Bangladesh. In 2015 she and her colleagues published ‘Countdown to Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar’ and in March 2018
In one of the most timely and urgent shows we have ever done, today I speak with law scholar Aziz Rana about his brilliant and bracing article recently published in New Left Review, “Constitutional Collapse.” We talk about how the Trump administration and its enablers are shredding a liberal “compact” which was established in in the 1930s through the Sixties and extending an imperial presidency abroad to an authoritarian one domestically. We talk about the current constitutional crisis, but also about the need for, and manifestations of, a politics which is at once a genuine membership organization and social community. As Aziz Rana powerfully argues, “its aim should be to transform the world people organically experience.” This is exactly the analysis and message so many of us need in these dark times.
Aziz Rana is a professor of law at Boston College Law School, where his research and teaching center on American constitutional law and political development. In particular, his work focuses on how shifting notions of race, citizenship, and empire have shaped legal and political identity since the founding.
Rana’s first book, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Harvard University Press) situates the American experience within the global history of colonialism, examining the intertwined relationship in American constitutional practice between internal accounts of freedom and external projects of power and expansion. His new book, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them (University of Chicago Press, 2024), explores the modern emergence of constitutional veneration in the twentieth century -- especially against the backdrop of growing American global authority -- and how veneration has influenced the boundaries of popular politics.
Aziz Rana has written essays and op-eds for such venues as n+1, The Boston Review, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Dissent, New Labor Forum, Jacobin, The Guardian, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, Jadaliyya, Salon, and The Law and Political Economy Project. He has articles and chapter contributions published or forthcoming with Yale and Oxford University Presses, The University of Chicago Law Review, California Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Texas Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal Forum, among others.
Today I have the honor and the pleasure to speak once again with celebrated poet and physician, Fady Joudah. The last time Fady was on the podcast was in November, 2023, shortly after the outbreak of war in Gaza. At that point we spoke about the impossibility of, even then, quantifying the genocide. Today we focus on the politics of language—in particular, the distinction Fady Joudah makes between Palestine in English, and Palestine in Arabic. We speak too of the need for and limitations of solidarity, and finish with a reading and discussion of one of Fady Joudah’s most remarkable and stunning poems, “Truth is Never Finished.”
Fady Joudah is the author of […].Hehas also published six collections of poems: The Earth in the Attic; Alight; Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received the Jackson Poetry Prize, a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.
Today we talk with members of the organizing collective of the Coalition for Action in Higher Education, or CAHE, about their second National Day of Action, taking place on Thursday, April 17. The Day of Action is a call for free higher education in every meaning of that term. CAHE calls for “the elimination of all existing student debt, making all public colleges and universities tuition-free, and ensuring that our colleges and universities remain sites of robust free thinking about the world we live in and the world we want.”
We talk about the genesis of this group, and the gap it seeks to fill at the intersection of all of these interests, with Palestine squarely at the center. CAHE is thus a critical hub for activism that addresses each of the major points of attack on education coming from the Trump administration.
Karim Mattar is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. A descendant of survivors of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, he works at the intersection of Palestine studies, the humanities, and higher education. He is currently at work on two book projects. The Ethics of Affiliation seeks to develop a curriculum and a public pedagogy of truth and reconciliation in historic Palestine, focusing on the areas of education, culture, public institutions, civil society, and law. Reflections on Palestine: Exile, Privilege, Responsibility interweaves personal experience, family history, cultural critique, and political analysis to tell a multigenerational, transcontinental story of responsibility to the oppressed. Also a dedicated community organizer, Karim works at the local, state, and national levels to enhance public awareness and understanding of Palestinian literature, history, and politics and to advocate for Palestinian liberation. Karim received his D.Phil. in English at the University of Oxford in 2013, and writes and teaches more broadly on comparative Middle Eastern literatures and cultures, the history of the novel, media and technology, and critical theory.
Bill V. Mullen is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Purdue. He is the author of several books including most recently We Charge Genocide! American Fascism and the Rule of Law (Fordham University Press) and (with Jeanelle Hope) The Black Antifascist Tradition Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition (Haymarket Books). He is a member of Purdue AAUP and the organizing collective for the Coalition for Action in Higher Education. He is also a member of Writers Against the War on Gaza.
Jennifer Ruth is a professor of film studies at Portland State University. Her most recent work is a volume co-edited with Ellen Schrecker and Valerie Johnson called The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom(Beacon Press, 2024). She is the director, with Jan Haaken, of The Palestine Exception: What's at Stake in the Campus Protests?
Today I speak with Nasser Abourahme about his new book, The Time Beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony. Drawing on a wealth of diverse materials including, but not limited to, state documents, political philosophy, literature, and historical archives, The Time Beneath the Concrete focuses on the “struggle over historical time itself.” This is a struggle that is predicated on a constitutional inertia or “stuckness” of the colonial project. We end by talking about the notion of “inhabitation,” which Abourahme describes as “the life-making practice of the dispossessed everywhere.” He suggests this as a way to imagine a life that can be lived in a different set of temporal coordinates that recognize a different set of human possibilities.
Nasser Abourahme is a writer and teacher, and is currently Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at Bowdoin College. He’s the author of The Time beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony (Duke University Press, 2025).
Today I have the great honor of speaking with activist and educator Jesse Hagopian about his new book, Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education. We talk about the assault on public education that takes the form of criminalizing the truth itself. We note both the powerful corporate forces behind this movement and what they are afraid of, and also discuss the many instances of people fighting back to name, amplify, and mobilize the truth together.
Jesse Hagopian’s African ancestors survived the middle passage and enslavement on plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana. Jesse is a Seattle educator and author of the new book, Teach Truth: The Attack on Critical Race Theory and the Struggle for Antiracist Education. He is editor for Rethinking Schools magazine, a founding steering committee member of Black Lives Matter at School, and is the Director the Teaching for Black Lives Campaign of the Zinn Education Project. Jesse is the editor of of the book, More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High Stakes Testing, and the co-editor of the books, Teaching Palestine, Teaching for Black Lives, Black Lives Matter at School, and Teachers Unions and Social Justice.
Jesse’s writing has appeared in The Seattle Times, The Nation, The Progressive, Truthout, and The Washington Post. You can connect with Jesse on IG (@jessehagopian), Bluesky (@jessehagopian.bsky.social) or his website, www.IAmAnEductor.com.
In today’s show, I speak with Evyn Le Espiritu Gandhi about two pathbreaking studies which create new ways of thinking about populations bound by complex and contradictory notions of loyalty and psychological investment. Based on meticulous archival research and oral histories amongst disparate populations in South Vietnam, Guam, and Israel-Palestine, in Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine Gandhi is able to probe deeply into fascinating personal stories of refugees that have moved between these spaces, disclosing complex and often contradictory notions of belonging and loyalty. We also talk about her current book project, which tackles the idea of southern regions such as South Korea, South Vietnam, and the American South, as each mourning lost images of the nation.
Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is an associate professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA (Tovaangar). She is the author of Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine (University of California Press, 2022) and co-editor with Vinh Nguyen of The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives (Routledge, 2023). She is the lead curator of a public history exhibit, “Remembering Saigon: Journeys through and from Guam,” which opened this month at UC Irvine’s Southeast Asian Archive. She is currently working on a second book project which revisits Gramsci’s “southern question” by constellating the southern spaces of South Korea, South Vietnam, and the US South.
Today on Speaking Out of Place I talk with Sarah T Roberts about the hidden humans behind Artificial Intelligence, which is reliant on executives and business managers to direct AI to promote their brand and low-level, out-sourced, and poorly paid content managers to slog through masses of images, words, and data before they get fed into the machine. We talk about the cultural, sociological, financial, and political aspects of AI. We end by taking on Elon Musk and the DOGE project, as an emblem of how Silicon Valley executives have embraced a brand of tech rapture that disdains and destroys democracy and attacks the idea that people can take care of each other, independent of sociopathic libertarianism.
Sarah T. Roberts, Ph.D. is a full professor at UCLA (Gender Studies, Information Studies, Labor Studies), specializing in Internet and social media policy, infrastructure, politics and culture, and the intersection of media, technology and society. She is the faculty director and co-founder of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2), co-director of the Minderoo Initiative on Technology & Power, and a research associate of the Oxford Internet Institute. Informed by feminist Science and Technology Studies perspectives, Roberts is keenly interested in the way power, geopolitics and economics play out on and via the internet, reproducing, reifying and exacerbating global inequities and social injustice.
Today on Speaking Out of Place I talk with award-winning novelist Laila Lalami about her new novel, The Dream Hotel. What happens when the state, with the pretext of protecting public safety, can detain indefinitely certain individuals whose dreams seem to indicate they may be capable of committing a crime? Set in a precarious world where sleep-enhancing devices and algorithms provide the tools and formulae for making one’s unconscious a witness to one’s possible waking life, this novel touches on a myriad of political, philosophical, and moral concerns as they particularly connect to issues of gender, race, ethnicity, privacy, and the security state.
Laila Lalami is the author of five books, including The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award. It was on the longlist for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a national bestseller, won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. Her books have been translated into twenty languages. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s, the Guardian, and the New York Times. She has been awarded fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. She lives in Los Angeles.
Today I have the pleasure of talking with Professor Adrian Daub about the recent elections in Germany, where we saw a surge in votes for the Far Right AfD party, which is now the second-most powerful party in the country. We discuss the significance of this rise in popularity, and the ways the elections reveal a number of shifts in German politics, as the various parties stake out positions which align with not just a center-right orientation, but, more dangerously, a far right one. We speak of the parallels to the recent election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, and what it says about the entrenchment of both neoliberalism and a faux populism based on xenophobia, and not serving the actual material interests of everyday people.
Adrian Daub teaches German and Comparative Literature at Stanford, where he directs the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. He is the author most recently of The Cancel Culture Panic (2024), and co-hosts the podcast In Bed With the Right.”
Today on Speaking Out of Place I talk with Omar El Akkad about his new book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. The title of the book comes from a tweet he posted three weeks after the bombardment of Gaza began. Since then, the tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times. Horrified at what has transpired since that moment, Omar El Akkad wrote this full-throated indictment of the “principal concern” of the modern American liberal. It is “not what one does or believes or supports or opposes, but what one is seen to be.” Moving from the scale of the individual to that of entire industries and political parties, we talk about the terrible consequences of this attitude with regard to Palestine, and beyond.
OMAR EL AKKAD is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager, and now lives in the United States. He is a two-time winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and the Oregon Book Award for fiction. His books have been translated into thirteen languages. His debut novel, American War, was named by the BBC as one of one hundred novels that shaped our world.
Today on Speaking Out of Place I am delighted to have Professors Maha Nasser and Karam Dana in conversation. Dr. Nasser is author of Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World; Professor Dana’s new book is entitled, To Stand with Palestine: Transnational Resistance and Political Evolution in the United States. Together, these two studies offer a fascinating account of the historical and present-day formation of transnational Palestinian identities, and the way that these complex histories inform today’s struggles for Palestinian liberation and rights, by both Palestinians and non-Palestinians. We talk about the importance of language, the arts, and especially poetry, as well as contemporary cultural forms. We take on the violence of settler colonialism, neoliberalism, and capitalism, and the importance of finding paths of solidarity while never losing sight of what is distinct about Palestine and Palestinians.
Dr Karam Dana is a Palestinian American Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Washington Bothell. He is the Alyson McGregor Distinguished Professor of Excellence and Transformative Research and the founding director of the American Muslim Research Institute. His research examines the evolution of transnational political identities and their impact on civic engagement and political participation, with a focus on Palestinians and American Muslims. As an interdisciplinary scholar, Dr Dana explores the intersections of religion, identity, and politics, addressing persistent theoretical and policy issues affecting marginalized communities. His work is centered on understanding how ethno-political, socio-cultural, and religious identities are formed, evolve, and adapt under shifting socio-economic and political conditions. He recently published book is titled To Stand With Palestine: Transnational Resistance and Political Evolution in the United States, which examines the evolution of discourse on Palestine and Israel in the United States in recent years. Dr Dana is the recipient of the 2018 Distinguished Teaching Award at the University of Washington and the 2023 Distinguished Scholarship, Research, and Creative Activities Award. In 2024, the Arab American Community of the Pacific Northwest presented him with the Leadership and Outstanding Service Award.
Dr. Maha Nassar is an associate professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona, where she specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of Palestine and the 20th-century Arab world. Her award-winning book, Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (Stanford University Press, 2017), examines how Palestinian intellectuals inside the Green Line connected to global decolonization movements through literary and journalistic writings. Her scholarly articles have appeared in the Journal of Palestine Studies, Arab Studies Journal, and elsewhere. A 2018 Public Voices Fellow with the OpEd Project, Dr. Nassar’s analysis pieces have appeared widely, including in The Washington Post, The Conversation, +972 Magazine.As a 2022 non-resident fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace, she joined FMEP in developing public programming for their Occupied Thoughts podcast. Dr. Nassar’s current book project examines the global history of Palestine’s people.
Today I talk with Tao Leigh Goffe about her new, magisterial Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis. Spanning many fields and disciplines in the natural sciences, social sciences, the humanities and the arts, Professor Goffe weaves together an historically rich and geographically complex picture of how capitalism and racism undergird the climate crisis in ways made invisible or benign via the work of the west’s “dark laboratory.” Writing back through accounts of indigenous bird watching and Black provisional grounds, we talk about things as seemingly different as the massive guano industry built on Chinese and Indian labor in the 19th century to Malcolm-X’s boyhood vegetable garden in Michigan. We talk in particular about one of the key passages of Dark Laboratory, where Tao writes:
“Still, we manage to create a poetics out of that which wishes to destroy us and the planet. How else will we be able to live in ‘the after’? We must reassess what a problem is. Living is not a problem, as Audrey Lorde reminds us. I would add that dying is not a problem either. Decomposing is essential to the natural order and cycle of life. Living at the expense of others is a problem.”
Tao Leigh Goffe is a writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist who grew up between the UK and New York City. For the past fifteen years she has specialized in colonial histories of race, geology, climate, and media technologies. Dr. Goffe lives and works in Manhattan where she is an Associate Professor at CUNY in Black Studies. She teaches classes on literary theory and cultural history. Dr. Goffe’s book on how the climate crisis is a racial crisis is called DARK LABORATORY (Doubleday and Hamish Hamilton (Penguin UK, 2025)). Her second book BLACK CAPITAL, CHINESE DEBT, under contract with Duke University Press, presents a long history of racialization, modern finance, and indebtedness. It brings together subjects of the Atlantic and Pacific markets from 1806 to the present under European colonialism. Dr. Goffe is a fellow at the Harvard University Kennedy School in racial justice. Her research explores Black diasporic intellectual histories, political, and ecological life. She studied English literature at Princeton University before earning her PhD at Yale University.
Dr. Goffe’s research and curatorial work is rooted in literatures and theories of labor that center Black feminist engagements with Indigeneity and Asian diasporic racial formations. Committed to building intellectual communities beyond institutions, she is the founder of the Dark Laboratory, an engine for the study of race, technology, and ecology through digital storytelling. Dr. Goffe is also the Executive Director of the Afro-Asia Group, an organization that centers the intersections of African and Asian diasporas, futurity, and radical coalition towards sovereignty.
Today I am delighted to have Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson on Speaking Out of Place to discuss their new book, We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition. We talk about what inspired them to commission a wide range of amazing activists, artists, scholars and organizers to write whatever came to their minds about the topic of parenting and abolition. The result is a rich mosaic of unique insights expressed in diverse forms, but each one touching deeply on the interdependency of living beings and the importance of caregiving in all its forms. It is this commitment that leads us always to imagine an abolitionist future for ourselves, and all children.
Maya Schenwar is a writer, editor, and organizer who serves as director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism. She is also Truthout's board president and editor at large. Maya is the co-editor of We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolitionand co-author of Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms, among other books. In addition to Truthout, Maya's work has appeared in many publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, NBC News and The Nation, and she has appeared on Democracy Now!, MSNBC, C-SPAN, NPR, and other television and radio programs. Maya is a cofounder of the Movement Media Alliance, as well as Media Against Apartheid and Displacement. She lives in Chicago.
Kim Wilson is an artist, educator, writer, and organizer. She is the cofounder, cohost, and producer of Beyond Prisons, a podcast on incarceration and prison abolition. A social scientist by training, Dr. Wilson has a PhD in Urban Affairs and Public Policy, and her work focuses on examining the interconnected functioning of systems, including poverty, racism, ableism, and heteropatriarchy, within a carceral structure. Her work delves into the extension and expansion of these systems beyond their physical manifestations of cages and fences, to reveal how carcerality is imbued in policy and practice. She explores how these systems synergize to exacerbate the challenges faced by under-resourced communities, revealing a deliberate intention to undermine and further marginalize vulnerable populations.
Today on Speaking Out of Place we sit down with Peter Beinart to discuss his new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. We ask what led him to write this intense, and intensely provocative book, which declares that Jews “need a new story” other than the current one, in which, Beinart argues, Jews see themselves as innocent with regard to the genocide in Gaza. I ask Peter to fully unpack this claim, among others:
“Many Jews treat a Jewish state the way the Bible feared Jewish monarchs would treat themselves: as a higher power, beholden to no external standard. Again and again, we are ordered to accept a Jewish state’s ‘right to exist.’ But the language is perverse. In Jewish tradition, states have no inherent value. States are not created in the image of God; human beings are. States are mere instruments… The legitimacy of a Jewish state—like the holiness of the Jewish people—is conditional on how it behaves. It is subject to law, not a law in and of itself.”
PETER BEINART is professor of journalism and political science at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He is also editor at large of Jewish Currents, a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times, an MSNBC political commentator, and a nonresident fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace. He is the author of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, and writes the Beinart Notebook newsletter on Substack.com. He lives in New York with his family.
Today on Speaking Out of Place I am delighted to be in conversation with Azucena Castro and Malcom Ferdinand. We start with a discussion of what Ferdinand calls the “double fracture”—the environmental division of humans from their connection to the biosphere, and the colonial division instantiated by white supremacism and patriarchy. He insists that we not see these two phenomena as separate, rather as intimately connected. This double fracture makes any attempts to solve either environmental violence or colonial violence ineffective. In her foreword to Ferdinand’s Decolonial Ecologies, Angela Y. Davis writes that as she read the book, she “recognized how perfectly his conceptualizations illuminate the frameworks we need for both philosophical and popular understandings of our planetary conditions today.” In our conversation we spend some time talking about how art, film, and poetry can manifest some of those frameworks, and we are delighted have Azucena take us into a deep discussion of this, and also to read two poems in Spanish and then in English translation and have Malcom gloss them for us.
Azucena Castro is assistant professor at Rice University in Houston. Currently, she is a Swedish Research Council Postdoctoral Researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Center, Faculty of Science, Stockholm University. She held positions as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Latin American and Caribbean cultures at Stanford University and cultural geography at the Institute of Geography, University of Buenos Aires. Her scholarly work focuses on 20th and 21st-century Latin American cultural products through the lens of climate and energy justice, multispecies resistance, and anti-extractivist critique in the artivist scenes of South America, particularly, Southern Cone and Brazil. Azucena is the author of the book Poetic Postnatures. Ecological Thinking and Politics of Strangeness in Contemporary Latin American Poetry, Series SubAtlantic at De Gruyter (2025). She has edited the volume Futuros multiespecie. Prácticas vinculantes para un planeta en emergencia (Bartlebooth. Critical Spaces, 2023), and co-edited the Essay Cluster “GeoSemantics: Earthly Memories and Inhuman Becomings in the Global South” at ASAP/Journal. As part of her engagement with community-based research and collaborative filmmaking, she has co-developed the energy justice project “No aire, no te vendas” (Penn Environmental Humanities, University of Pennsylvania) focusing on winds in ancient cosmologies and human communities in the Afro-Wayúu territories of La Guajira, Colombia in the intersection of old and green extractivism.
Malcom Ferdinand is an environmental engineer from University College London and doctor in political philosophy from Université Paris Diderot. He is now a researcher at the CNRS (IRISSO/University Paris Dauphine). At the crossroad of political philosophy, postcolonial theory and political ecology, his research focuses on the Black Atlantic and particularly the Caribbean. He explores the relations between current ecological crises and the colonial history of modernity. He published a book based on his PhD dissertation entitled Decolonial Ecology: Thinking of Ecology from the Caribbean World.( Polity 2021) that challenges classical environmental thoughts. He recently published an in-depth study of the pesticide contamination of martinique and Guadeloupe entitled S'aimer la Terre: défaire l'habiter colonial ( Seuil 2024).
Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with Professor Persis Karim, co-producer and co-director of a new documentary film, The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life. She is joined by Roya Ahmadi, a student at Stanford who interned at the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University and was part of the production team for the film. The film captures the lives of young Iranian-Americans who come to the San Francisco Bay Area around the time of the Iranian Revolution, and find themselves involved with, and helping to shape, a vibrant, international culture of politics and art. We talk about both the similarities and differences between those days and today—especially with regard to diasporic identity formation in different historical times, and the persistent need to resist racism and bigotry and act in solidarity with others.
Persis Karim is the director of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University, where she also teaches in the Department of Humanities and Comparative and World Literature. Since 1999, she has been actively working to expand the field of Iranian Diaspora Studies, beginning with the first anthology of Iranian writing she co-edited, A World Between: Poems, Short Stories and Essays by Iranian-Americans. She is the editor of two other anthologies of Iranian diaspora literature: Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora, and Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian-American Writers. Before coming to San Francisco State, she was a professor of English & Comparative Literature at San Jose State where she was the founder and director of the Persian Studies program, and coordinator of the Middle East Studies Minor. She has published numerous articles about Iranian diaspora literature and culture for academic publications including Iranian Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asian, African and Middle East Studies (CSSAMES), and MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States. “The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life,” is her first film project (co-directed and co-produced with Soumyaa Behrens). She received her Master’s in Middle East Studies and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UT Austin. She is also a poet.
Roya Ahmadi is a senior at Stanford University studying Human Biology with a self-designed concentration in Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) Women's Health and a minor in Interdisciplinary Arts. She is interested in Muslim and SWANA women's sexual and reproductive health and culturally/religiously sensitive pregnancy care. Roya is a co-chair for the Stanford Institute for Diversity in the Arts Undergraduate Fellowship and a video and sound installation artist who has presented work in group shows across the US. Roya interned for the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at SFSU for two summers when she was in high school; the Center has had a deep impact on her artwork and her identity as an Iranian-American.
Trailer:
https://vimeo.com/1002914645
Today on Speaking Out of Place I have the honor of talking with Professor Christen A Smith on a new book she has co-edited entitled, The Dialectic is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento. Smith explains that “Beatriz Nascimento was a critical figure in Brazil’s Black Movement until her untimely death in 1995. Although she published only a handful of articles before she died and left only a few other recorded thoughts, her ideas about the symbolic relationship between quilombos (Afro-Brazilian maroon societies) and black subjectivity encourage us to re-imagine the meaning of Black liberation from a transnational, Black feminist perspective.” Our conversation delves into Nascimento’s rich and complex cultural and intellectual productions, and talk about everything from her films and essays to her student papers, which Smith and her co-editors include in their volume. Nascimento was also a poet, and we are grateful that Christen graces us with reading two poems in Portuguese and then in English translation.
Christen A. Smithis Associate Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at Yale University. She is the author of the book, Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence and Performance in Brazil (University of Illinois Press, 2016), co-author of the book The Dialectic is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento (Princeton University Press, 2023) and co-editor of Black Feminist Constellations: Black Women in Dialogue and Translation (University of Texas Press, 2023). In 2017, she started Cite Black Women—a transnational initiative that she began in 2017 that draws attention to Black women’s intellectual contributions as well as the race and gender inequalities of citational politics.
Today on Speaking Out of Place I talk with Lindsay Weinberg and Robert Ovetz about the use of Artificial Intelligence in higher education. Under the guise of “personalizing” education and increasing efficiency, universities are increasingly sold on AI as a cure to their financial ills as public funds dry up and college applications drop. Rather than maintain that education is an essential public good that needs broad support, universities are looking to technology in ways that are changing the nature of education in dangerous and destructive ways. As Lindsay writes in the book, Smart University,
“Higher education is becoming increasingly synonymous with digital surveillance in the United States. Advanced network infrastructure, internet- connected devices and sensors, radio frequency identification (RFID), data analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) are being celebrated as a means of ushering in the age of “smart universities,” one where institutions can run their services more efficiently and strengthen the quality of higher education using digital tools. However, as this book demonstrates, these tools have a darker side. They allow public universities to respond to and perpetuate corporate logics of austerity, use student data to reduce risk of financial investment in the face of dwindling public resources, and track student behavior to encourage compliance with institutional metrics of success. Surveillance of student behavior forms the foundation ofthe smart university, often in ways that prove harmful to students— particularly those who are already marginalized within the academy."
We talk about these issues, and attach them to critical issues of labor—everything from the outsourcing of the most dangerous work to laborers in the Global South, to the way university workers at all levels are subordinated to the logic that drives AI. We end with a discussion of what we can and should do about it.
Dr. Lindsay Weinberg is a clinical associate professor in the Honors College at Purdue University, and the Director of the Tech Justice Lab. Her research and teaching are at the intersection of science and technology studies, media studies, and feminist studies, with an emphasis on the social and ethical impacts of digital technology. She is interested in the constitutive role that history and unequal power relations play in shaping the design, application, and reception of technological innovations.
Her work has appeared in Lateral, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, Impost: A Journal of Critical and Creative Work, the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, and Frontiers: International Journal of Study Abroad. Her book, Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age (John Hopkins UP, 2024) examines the proliferation of digital tools for higher education governance, and their impacts on marginalized people within and beyond the university’s walls. She has been the recipient of internal and external grants to support research, seminars, and workshops concerning the justice-related implications of digital technology, including from the National Science Foundation, the Indiana Humanities, and the Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence.
Robert Ovetz, Ph.D. is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science and teaches non-profit management and labor relations in the Master of Public Administration program at San José State University. He is the author and editor of four books, including We the Elites (Pluto, 2022), and the forthcoming Rebels for the System: NGOs and Capitalism to be published in 2025 by Haymarket Press. Robert writes regularly for Dollars & Sense magazine.
Today on Speaking Out of Place I am honored to welcome Huda Fakhreddine and Anthony Alessandrini to talk about the unique manners in which literature can disclose the human significance of the historical and ongoing genocide in Palestine. Such revelation has to fight at least two things—the sheer brutality and inhumanity of this violence, and the active silencing of Palestinian voices by institutions that, ironically, profess to champion the humanities. Here, once again, we find a pernicious instantiation of the Palestine Exception. Despite these efforts to censor and silence, Huda and Tony delve deeply into the power of Palestinian poetry, through translations and readings of some of the most remarkable literature in the world.
Anthony Alessandrini teaches English at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn and Middle Eastern Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he is also a member of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change. He is the author of Decolonize Multiculturalism and of Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics; the editor of Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives; and the co-editor of “Resistance Everywhere”: The Gezi Protests and Dissident Visions of Turkey. He has also published a poetry chapbook, Children Imitating Cormorants. He is a Co-Editor of Jadaliyya, is on the Board of Directors of the Middle East Studies Association, is on the faculty of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, is a co-convener of the International Solidarity Action Research Network, serves as chair of his union’s Academic Freedom Committee, and is a proud member of CUNY Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.
Huda J. Fakhreddine is a writer, translator, and Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), as well as the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (Routledge, 2023). Her creative writings include a work of creative nonfiction, Zaman Ṣaghīr Taḥt Shams Thāniya (A Brief Time Under a Different Sun), published by Dar al-Nahda, Beirut, in 2019, and a forthcoming collection Wa Min Thammata al-‘Ālam… (And Then, the World…), to be published by Manshurat Marfa’, Beirut, in 2025. She serves as co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures and as an editor for the Library of Arabic Literature.
On today’s show we talk with journalists, activists, and political commentators, Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood about the recent Presidential elections. We try to make sense of the fact that a convicted felon, proud misogynist, outright racist, authoritarian figure, and known liar whose first term put nearly all those characteristics on display for four years, will be the most powerful person in the world again. Much of our discussion takes the Democratic party, and Kamala Harris in particular, to task, for proving once again that it is entirely beholden to the donor class, and incapable of recognizing the immense suffering, alienation, and cynicism of much of the United States. We pay particular attention to exactly those things Harris chose not to emphasize—the economy, Gaza, and climate change. We end by trying to see what kinds of progressive possibilities might be nurtured, and how we can lean on each other in the next several years.
Liza Featherstone is the author of Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation, published by O/R Books in 2018, as well as Selling Women Short: the Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Walmart (Basic Books, 2004). She co-authored Students Against Sweatshops (Verso, 2002) and is editor of False Choices: the Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Verso, 2016). She's currently editing a collection of Alexandra Kollontai 's work for O/R Books and International Publishers and writing the introduction to that volume.
Featherstone's work has been published in Lux, TV Guide, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Ms., the American Prospect, Columbia Journalism Review, Glamour, Teen Vogue, Dissent, the Guardian, In These Times, and many other publications. Liza teachers at NYU 's Literary Reportage Program as well as at Columbia University School for International and Public Affairs. She is proud to be an active member of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America and of UAW local 7902.
Doug Henwood is a Brooklyn-based journalist and broadcaster specializing in economics and politics. He edited Left Business Observer, a newsletter, from 1986–2013, and has been host of Behind the News, a weekly radio show/podcast that originates on KPFA, Berkeley, since 1995. He is the author of Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom (Verso, 1997), After the New Economy (New Press, 2004), and My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency (OR Books, 2016). He’s written for numerous periodicals including Harper’s, The New Republic, The Nation, The Baffler, and Jacobin. He’s been working on a book about the rot of the US ruling class for way too long and needs to acquire the self-discipline to finish it.
Today on Speaking Out of Place we are joined by Shourideh Molavi, who talks about the ways in which Israel has waged a protracted war on both the people and environment of Gaza. Linking this war to its colonial precedents, Molavi explains who she, as a researcher for the Forensic Architecture project, combines technologies like satellite imaging with on-the-ground stories from Palestinian farmers to produce a powerful form witnessing, and testimony to Israel’s war. She connects the trauma felt by the environment and the trauma felt by the people. She also tells of the new and powerful forms of resistance and resilience that take place at the nexus of nature, landscape, and the Palestinian people.
Shourideh Molavi is the lead Israel/Palestine researcher for Forensic Architecture, linking their investigations to the work and research of civil society, grassroots groups and human rights defenders in the country. She is a scholar in political science and human rights and trained with a background in International Humanitarian Law. She is also Senior Lecturer in the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University in NYC.
Today we are joined by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins and Jess Ghannam, who comment on a devastating new report authored by Stamatopoulou-Robbins. This report, “Costs of War,” reviews data gathered in Palestine since October 7, 2023. In that year alone, the report finds that the US has spent at least $22.76 billion on military aid to Israel and related US operations in the region. The number of direct deaths, but also so-called “indirect deaths” (and such a term forces us to project such deaths well into the future due to Israel’s massive destruction of the infrastructure and environment necessary to sustain even the barest forms of life), leads this report to claim that “the scale and rapidity of Gaza’s destruction … is unprecedented, not only in Palestinian history, but in recent global history.” Today we review but a small portion of the information that supports this terrible claim.
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins is an anthropologist and film-maker with research interests in infrastructure, waste, the environment, platform capitalism, the home, food, disability, and neurodivergence. Her first book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), won five major book awards and explores what happens when, as Palestinians are increasingly forced into proximity with their own wastes and with those of their occupiers, waste is transformed from “matter out of place,” per prevailing anthropological wisdom, into matter with no place to go--or its own ecology. Her second book, which explores the impacts of Airbnb on property ownership in Athens, Greece, is under contract with Duke University Press. And she is currently beginning work on a next project on the rise of "demand avoidance" as diagnosis and lived experience for autistic people. She serves on the editorial teams of Cultural Anthropology and Critical AI. More on her scholarship and film-making can be found here: https://sophiastamatopoulourobbins.com/.
Dr. Jess Ghannam is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Global Health Sciences in the School of Medicine at UCSF. His research areas include evaluating the long-term health consequences of war on displaced communities and the psychological and psychiatric effects of armed conflict on children. Dr. Ghannam has developed community health clinics in the Middle East that focus on developing community-based treatment programs for families in crisis. He is also a consultant with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Reprieve and other international NGO's that work with torture survivors. Locally he works to promote and enhance the health and wellness of refugee, displaced, and immigrant populations from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia and has established a community-based Mental Health Treatment Programs to support these communities.
Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with scholar-activists Naomi Paik and Ashley Dawson about the close connection between abolition and environmental activism from below. How are the twin projects raising profound questions about borders, carcerality, enclosures, and the separation of humans from each other and all other forms of life, including supposedly “inanimate” objects? How can we create “sanctuary for all” in a radical rethinking of notions like “the commons”?
Ashley Dawson is Professor of English at the Graduate Center / City University of New York and the College of Staten Island. Recently published books of his focus on key topics in the Environmental Humanities, and include People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons(O/R, 2020), Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (Verso, 2017), and Extinction: A Radical History(O/R, 2016). Dawson is the author of a forthcoming book entitled Environmentalism from Below (Haymarket) and the co-editor of Decolonize Conservation! (Common Notions, 2023). For the past 20 years Ashley has been engaged in public higher education as our nation's largest urban university CUNY helps transform the lives of huge numbers of students from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds. Ashley believes deeply in the mission of public institutions such as CUNY to provide a quality education to such students and his teaching and pedagogy philosophy has been shaped by this commitment
Naomi Paik is the author of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the 21st Century (2020, University of California Press) and Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (2016, UNC Press; winner, Best Book in History, AAAS 2018; runner-up, John Hope Franklin prize for best book in American Studies, ASA, 2017), as well as articles, opinion pieces, and interviews in a range of academic and public-facing venues. Her next book-length project, "Sanctuary for All," calls for the most capacious conception of sanctuary that brings together migrant and environmental justice. A member of the Radical History Review editorial collective, she has co-edited four special issues of the journal—“Militarism and Capitalism (Winter 2019), “Radical Histories of Sanctuary” (Fall 2019), “Policing, Justice, and the Radical Imagination” (Spring 2020), and “Alternatives to the Anthropocene” with Ashley Dawson (Winter 2023). She coedits the “Borderlands” section of Public Books alongside Cat Ramirez, as well as “The Politics of Sanctuary” blog of the Smithsonian Institution withSam Vong. She is an associate professor of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, and a member of the Migration Scholars Collaborative and Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, UIC. Her research and teaching interests include comparative ethnic studies; U.S. imperialism; U.S. militarism; social and cultural approaches to legal studies; transnational and women of color feminisms; carceral spaces; and labor, race, and migration.
Today on Speaking Out of Place we are honored to speak with three international volunteers from the International Solidarity Movement. They are all involved in the effort to save the Masafer Yatta region in the Occupied West Bank.
While it has been a common practice of psychological warfare for the IOF to place military firing ranges near villages, neighborhoods, outside Palestinian hospitals, and prisons as a persistent reminder of its power and the possibility of lethal force in every space, the case of Masafer Yatta is exceptional--people’s actual homes are bulldozed, land confiscated, livestock stolen, and people often driven to live in caves. Palestinians face physical attacks, including indiscriminate shootings, from Israeli settlers, military police, and the Israeli Occupation Force, who each act in collusion with each other, and enjoy near immunity.
ISM volunteers work under Palestinians to do what is required of them, and have suffered increasing violence, and even murder during peaceful demonstrations. Our guests explain what has led them to leave their home countries and live and stand in solidarity in Palestine. Their eye-witness accounts of various aspects of Palestinian life under Occupation are both devastating and inspiring.
Please check out the blog for this episode, which contains important resources.
Today, Sunday morning, October 20, former general Prabowo Subianto is being sworn in as Indonesia’s new president. We release a conversation we had earlier this month with Intan Paramaditha and Michael Vann about the road leading up to this inauguration, beginning in the 1960s with the Suharto regime. Prabowo is a strong-arm authoritarian figure with a bloody record of human rights violations, yet he has remade his image as a cuddly, elder populist figure. We spend some time talking about how his regime is likely to continue, if not accelerate, aggressive and brutal economic development policies that have wrecked the environment and displaced Indigenous peoples. We talk a lot about how both the Indonesian media and some of its art world has been enlisted to promote this regime, and how decolonial feminists and others have taken on the task to both resist and present, and embody, other ways of being through listening to and engaging with voices from outside Jakarta and the liberal elites.
Intan Paramaditha is an Indonesian writer and an academic based in Sydney. She received her Ph.D from New York University and is now a Senior Lecturer in Media and Film Studies at Macquarie University. Her fiction, academic, and activist works focus on decolonial feminism and the politics of travel and mobility. She is the author of Apple and Knife and The Wandering (Harvill Secker/ Penguin Random House UK, translated by Stephen J. Epstein).Her fiction has been translated into English, Polish, Turkish, German, and Thai. Intan’s latest books are the novel Malam Seribu Jahanam (GPU 2023) and the co-edited volume The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas (Routledge 2024). She is the co-founder of the feminist collective Sekolah Pemikiran Perempuan (SPP/ The School of Women’s Thought).
Michael Vann has a Ph.D. from UC Santa Cruz and is a professor of world history at Sacramento State Univesity who specializes in the history of imperialism and the Cold War, with special attention to Southeast Asia. Mike’s hometown is Honolulu, Hawai’i, and he has taught at universities in Indonesia, Cambodia, and the People's Republic of China. Among his publications are The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam and articles on race, film, empire, genocide, pandemics, the politics of Korean zombies, and the political economy of surfing in publications ranging from the Journal of World History and Historical Reflections to Jacobin and The Diplomat. He is currently writing an analysis of depictions of Cold War era mass violence in Indonesia, Vietnamese, and Cambodian museums. Since 1990 Mike has been trying to spend as much time as he can in Indonesia.
Please check out the Blog for this episode.
Today on Speaking Out of Place we are joined by three members of the University of California faculty who are part of groups that have filed a landmark compliant against the UC system.
This September, faculty associations from seven University of California campuses along with the systemwide Council of UC Faculty Associations filed an unfair labor practice, or ULP charge against their employer, the University of California. A nearly 600-page complaint was presented to the California Public Employment Relations Board.
What is especially noteworthy about this complaint is that it claims UC’s repression of faculty and student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza cuts to the heart of the educational process, and denies faculty, staff, and students the ability to carry on their work of learning and teaching about critical issues in the world today.
Most notably, perhaps, is the fact that the faculty groups say that the university system’s restrictions on activism for Palestine amount to violations of the Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act (HEEERA), which protects employees from retaliation around advocating for changes in the workplace. This raises the issue of just how far universities can go, and the methods they employ, to maintain their complicity with genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Anna Markowitz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Education at UCLA. Her work is at the intersection of child development and policy for children and families. She is a member of the UCLA Faculty Association Executive Committee.
Wendy Matsumura is Associate Professor in the Dept of History at UCSD. Her work is on the history of Japanese empire and Okinawan anti-colonialism. She is part of the UCSD Faculty Association Executive Committee. She is also part of the Workshops4Gaza (https://www.workshops4gaza.com) collective.
Annie McClanahan is an Associate Professor of English at UCI. She works on American culture and economic history and theory. She is the chair of the Irvine Faculty Association board.
Please see the Blog linked to this Episode for news and resources about this issue.
Today, on Speaking Out of Place, we are honored to talk with Munira Khayyat, a Lebanese anthropologist whose book, A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon examines what she calls “resistant ecologies in a world of perennial warfare.” Drawing on long-term fieldwork in frontline villages along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel, she examines war not only as a place of death and destruction, but also necessarily, as an environment of living.
We appreciate greatly that she was able to join us now, during the massive and deadly new war Israel is waging on Lebanon. Munira shows how this devastation is a continuation of wars Israel has waged against Lebanon for decades, but also how both the Lebanese people and the Lebanese landscape are resisting death and persisting in life. This episode is especially useful to those wanting to know more about Lebanon, as Professor Khayyat gives us an informative account of the intertwined histories of Lebanon, Palestine, and the State of Israel.
Munira Khayyat is an anthropologist whose research revolves around life in war, intimate genealogies of empire, and theory from the South. Her first book, A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon (University of California Press 2022) examines resistant ecologies in a world of perennial warfare. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in frontline villages along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel, she examines war not only as a place of death and destruction, but also necessarily, as an environment of living.
Khayyat is currently working on a second book that fleshes out the complex heart of empire in Saudi Arabia. Heart of Black Gold draws on a personal archive meticulously created by her maternal grandfather, who was among the first Arabian employees of ARAMCO, the Arab American Oil Company. How has oil — its extractive, shiny infrastructures, camps, big men, politics and corporations, its global ecologies — shaped lived environments? Insisting on a feminist and multidisciplinary rearranging of the archive, the book inhabits history-in-the-making as it unfolds in domestic scenes, lived quarters, the affective terrains of oil.
Khayyat’s research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Arab Council for the Social Sciences, the Rachel Carson Center. Her writing has appeared in American Ethnologist, Public Culture, JMEWS, Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology News, HAU, and a number of edited volumes. Khayyat was a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2018-2019). Before joining NYUAD, she taught at the American University in Cairo (2013-2023) and the American University of Beirut (2011-2013). She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University (2013), an MPhil in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University (1998) and a BA in history (1997) from the American University of Beirut.
Today on Speaking Out of Place, we talk with Maya Wind about her book, Towers of Ivory and Steel, How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, published by Verso. Through meticulous research into the archives of Israeli universities and hundreds of other documents, Wind furnishes proof of just how deeply and completely Israeli universities are essential actors in Israel’s efforts to suppress Palestinian freedom.
We originally taped this show in June 2023, as Maya came off a long book tour in Europe. We decided to wait into the beginning of this new academic year to release this episode. Since then, of course, we have seen that US universities have spent the summer creating new draconian measures to curtail and make illegal protests against Israel’s war on Palestine, which has now increased in violence and volume not only in the West Bank, but now also spread into Lebanon, killing civilians with impunity. Whereas the United Nations General Assembly has voted overwhelmingly to censure Israel, the US remains committed to feeding the Israeli war machine no matter what. This makes today’s show even more urgent.
Shining a bright light on Israeli universities complicity in Israel's ethnic cleansing of its Palestinian population, the book is an indispensable resource in the fight to boycott Israeli universities and divest from firms doing business with Israel.
Today we speak with two scholar-activists who are using satellite technologies and other tools to work for environmental justice, with specific attention to prisons and prison populations. They monitor air quality, water quality, extreme weather and other quantities relevant to EJ. Ufuoma Ovienmhada and Nick Shapiro show how people of color and other socio-economically marginalized groups in the United States experience a disproportionate burden of environmental challenges such as exposure to air pollution, contaminated water, habitat loss, and disrupted livelihood due to natural hazards and climate change. They challenge the idea of scientific neutrality and objectivity, uncover multiple ways that power works to dominate these populations in many guises, and they speak compellingly about listening to and working with communities on projects for liberation and abolition.
Ufuoma Ovienmhada is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Arizona, School of Geography, Development, and Environment where she researches satellite data and machine learning applications for measuring flood exposure inequity. Prior to beginning this position, Ufuoma completed a PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department. In her dissertation, she employed a multi-method approach to research the distribution of environmental hazards in carceral landscapes, co-design Earth Observation technologies to support environmental justice advocacy, and make recommendations for how the Earth Observation ecosystem at large can better serve environmental justice goals.
Dr. Nicholas Shapiro, Assistant Professor at UCLA’s Institute for Society & Genetics, is a multidisciplinary environmental researcher that studies, and designs interventions into, issues of chemical contamination and climate change. He is the director of Carceral Ecologies, a lab focused on the environmental health conditions of carceral institutions. His first book, Homesick, about how housing became a seat of toxicity and what we can do about it is forthcoming with Duke University Press. Today we speak with two scholar-activists who are using satellite technologies and other tools to work for environmental justice, with specific attention to prisons and prison populations. They monitor air quality, water quality, extreme weather and other quantities relevant to EJ. Ufuoma Ovienmhada and Nick Shapiro show how people of color and other socio-economically marginalized groups in the United States experience a disproportionate burden of environmental challenges such as exposure to air pollution, contaminated water, habitat loss, and disrupted livelihood due to natural hazards and climate change. They challenge the idea of scientific neutrality and objectivity, uncover multiple ways that power works to dominate these populations in many guises, and they speak compellingly about listening to and working with communities on projects for liberation and abolition.
Today we speak with Rebecca Vilkomerson and Rabbi Alissa Wise about their foundational work in starting and growing Jewish Voice for Peace. It’s a story captured in their new book, Solidarity Is the Political Version of Love: Lessons from Jewish Anti-Zionist Organizing. We learn about the different phases in the organization’s life—its growing pains, its key transitions and expansions, and the lessons it has learned on the way about organizing and activism for Palestine. As the title indicates, the book is fundamentally about discovering and growing an expansive notion of solidarity, and the love necessary to sustain a movement.
Rebecca Vilkomerson was the Executive Director of Jewish Voice for Peace from 2009-2019. She is now Co-Director of Funding Freedom, organizing within philanthropy.
Rabbi Alissa Wise is a community organizer, educator, organizational consultant, and ritual leader with over two decades of movement-building experience. Rabbi Wise co-founded the JVP Rabbinical Council in 2010, and was a staff leader at JVP from 2011-2021. She is currently the Lead Organizer of Rabbis for Ceasefire, which she founded in October 2023.
Recently, twenty-three lecturers in the highly successful Creative Writing program at Stanford were summoned to a Zoom meeting where they were first praised, and then summarily fired. One of the most surprising aspects of this purge is the fact that it was carried out not by top-tier university administrators, but by tenure-track faculty in the program. It was they who decided to brutally terminate their colleagues. On today’s show we speak with two of the lecturers who have been told they will leave Stanford in nine months, and one of their students, a published novelist. They explain the devastating nature of this act and share statistics and histories that show this was not at all necessary. Expediency for senior faculty trumped the survival of a carefully developed and nurtured community of creative writers.
Here is the link to a petition we urge our listeners to sign and share as widely as possible to support this program, and these talented and devoted teachers.
Sarah Frisch is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and current Lecturer in Stanford's Creative Writing Program. Her work has been published in The Paris Review, the VQR, and The New England Review. She’s won a Pushcart Prize and an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant for fiction and has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Washington University in St. Louis.
Malavika Kannan is an advocate for South Asian queer women, online and IRL. They studied Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity and creative writing at Stanford University.
Their YA novel All The Yellow Suns, a queer coming-of-age story about activism and identity, was published by Little & Brown in 2023. Malavika writes about Gen Z & culture for publications including Washington Post, Teen Vogue, Refinery29, and San Francisco Chronicle. Their writing has been awarded nationally by YoungArts and the Library of Congress. Malavika Kannanbeen featured on the cover of Seventeen Magazine, as well as by Good Morning America, Vice, Ms. Magazine, Dazed, and Instagram.
Nina Schloesser Tárano was born and grew up in Guatemala City. She received her MFA from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Fence and The New Inquiry Magazine. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction 2010-2012, and has been a lecturer in the Stanford Creative Writing Program since 2012
The Palestine Exceptionopens as campus encampments increase across the US in protest against Israel’s war in Gaza. In the largest anti-war movement since the 1970s, students, faculty and staff make demands on their institutions to divest from companies that do business with Israel. The film unfolds as a character-driven story featuring academics whose lives and scholarship bring into sharp relief historical dynamics behind the censoring of criticisms of Israel and Zionism.
To support this critically important project, please use this link.
Jan Haaken is professor emeritus of psychology at Portland State University, a clinical psychologist, and documentary filmmaker. From refugee camps, war zones, abortion clinics, mental hospitals and jury trials to drag bars, dairy farms and hip-hop clubs, her documentary films focus on stressful work carried out on the social margins and in liminal spaces. Haaken has directed nine feature films, including Our Bodies Our Doctors (2018), the two-part Necessity series (2022), Atomic Bamboozle (2023) and The Palestine Exception (currently in production).. Her books include Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory and the Perils of Looking Back (1998), Hard Knocks: Domestic Violence and the Psychology of Storytelling (2011), and Psychiatry, Politics and PTSD (2021). Haaken also is a programmer on KBOO Community Radio in Portland, OR where she produces interviews and reviews for the Old Mole Variety Hour.
Jennifer Ruth is a professor of film studies at Portland State University. She writes extensively about academic freedom and higher education in outlets such as The New Republic, Truthout, Academe, Academe blog, Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, LA Review of Books and Ms. She is the author of one book and the co-author, with Michael Bérubé, of two – The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments and It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom. She is the co-editor, with Valerie Johnson and Ellen Schrecker, of The Right to Learn; Resisting the Right-Wing War on Academic Freedom, forthcoming from Beacon Press.
Today we speak with journalists and political commentators Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood about the state of the US Presidential elections. Recorded just after the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, we muse about Kamala Harris’s ascension, her choice of running mate, the strangely abiding popularity of Donald Trump, and the Democratic political calculation to downplay and even ignore our country’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal attacks on Palestine, and to likewise table any serious discussion of our environmental crisis.
Liza Featherstone is the author of Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation, published by O/R Books in 2018, as well as Selling Women Short: the Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Walmart (Basic Books, 2004). She co-authored Students Against Sweatshops (Verso, 2002) and is editor of False Choices: the Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Verso, 2016). She's currently editing a collection of Alexandra Kollontai 's work for O/R Books and International Publishers and writing the introduction to that volume.
Featherstone's work has been published in Lux, TV Guide, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Ms., the American Prospect, Columbia Journalism Review, Glamour, Teen Vogue, Dissent, the Guardian, In These Times, and many other publications. Liza teachers at NYU 's Literary Reportage Program as well as at Columbia University School for International and Public Affairs. She is proud to be an active member of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America and of UAW local 7902.
Doug Henwood is a Brooklyn-based journalist and broadcaster specializing in economics and politics. He edited Left Business Observer, a newsletter, from 1986–2013, and has been host of Behind the News, a weekly radio show/podcast that originates on KPFA, Berkeley, since 1995. He is the author of Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom (Verso, 1997), After the New Economy (New Press, 2004), and My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency (OR Books, 2016). He’s written for numerous periodicals including Harper’s, The New Republic, The Nation, The Baffler, and Jacobin. He’s been working on a book about the rot of the US ruling class for way too long and needs to acquire the self-discipline to finish it.
Naomi Paik is the author of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the 21st Century (2020, University of California Press) and Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (2016, UNC Press; winner, Best Book in History, AAAS 2018; runner-up, John Hope Franklin prize for best book in American Studies, ASA, 2017), as well as articles, opinion pieces, and interviews in a range of academic and public-facing venues. Her next book-length project, "Sanctuary for All," calls for the most capacious conception of sanctuary that brings together migrant and environmental justice. A member of the Radical History Review editorial collective, she has co-edited four special issues of the journal—“Militarism and Capitalism (Winter 2019), “Radical Histories of Sanctuary” (Fall 2019), “Policing, Justice, and the Radical Imagination” (Spring 2020), and “Alternatives to the Anthropocene” with Ashley Dawson (Winter 2023). She coedits the “Borderlands” section of Public Books alongside Cat Ramirez, as well as “The Politics of Sanctuary” blog of the Smithsonian Institution with Sam Vong. She is an associate professor of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, and a member of the Migration Scholars Collaborative and Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, UIC. Her research and teaching interests include comparative ethnic studies; U.S. imperialism; U.S. militarism; social and cultural approaches to legal studies; transnational and women of color feminisms; carceral spaces; and labor, race, and migration.
Arianna Salgado is a queer immigrant who was born in Morelos, Mexico and arrived in the United States at the age of 6. She began organizing in high school with the West Suburban Action Project, Nuestra Voz, and the Immigrant Youth Justice League; undocumented-led organizations that sought to create safe spaces for undocumented people and resources for higher education. Arianna is a founding member of Organized Communities Against Deportations, a grassroots organization that fights against the criminalization, detention, and deportation of undocumented people. She currently lives in Chicago in the South Lawndale neighborhood with her two pups and is the executive director at Prison/ Neighborhood Arts and Education Project.
Today we speak with legal scholar and historian Aziz Rana about his deep study into the ways the Constitution has been critiqued, reimagined, and adapted from liberal, conservative, radical, progressive, decolonial, and other groups since its inception. What emerges from his book is a demystification of a document that is both durable and malleable, conservative at its core but open to both radical challenges and appropriation—a true site of contestation.
Aziz Rana is a professor of law at Boston College Law School, where his research and teaching center on American constitutional law and political development. In particular, his work focuses on how shifting notions of race, citizenship, and empire have shaped legal and political identity since the founding.
Rana’s first book, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Harvard University Press) situates the American experience within the global history of colonialism, examining the intertwined relationship in American constitutional practice between internal accounts of freedom and external projects of power and expansion. His new book, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them (University of Chicago Press, 2024), explores the modern emergence of constitutional veneration in the twentieth century -- especially against the backdrop of growing American global authority -- and how veneration has influenced the boundaries of popular politics.
Aziz Rana has written essays and op-eds for such venues as n+1, The Boston Review, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Dissent, New Labor Forum, Jacobin, The Guardian, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, Jadaliyya, Salon, and The Law and Political Economy Project. He has articles and chapter contributions published or forthcoming with Yale and Oxford University Presses, The University of Chicago Law Review, California Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Texas Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal Forum, among others.
For our snap episode on the snap elections in the UK and France, we're joined by eminent decolonial scholar activists, Françoise Vergès in France and Priyamvada Gopal in the UK. Following the defeat of right wing parties in both countries in the polls, we discuss what's changed with the elections, what hasn't changed, and what should movements, activists, and organizers be focusing on.
Priyamvada Gopal is Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge and Professorial Fellow, Churchill College. Her present interests are in the literatures, politics, and cultures of empire, colonialism and decolonisation. She has related interests in the novel, South Asian literature, and postcolonial cultures. Her published work includes Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence (Routledge, 2005), After Iraq: Reframing Postcolonial Studies (Special issue of New Formations co-edited with Neil Lazarus), The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration (Oxford University Press, 2009) and, most recently, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (Verso, 2019) which was shortlisted for the British Academy Prize for Global Cultural Understanding and the Bread and Roses Prize. Her writing has also appeared in The Hindu, Outlook India, India Today, The Independent, Prospect Magazine, The New Statesman, The Guardian, Al-Jazeera English (AJE) and The Nation (USA). She is working on a new project called Decolonization: the Life and Times of an Idea which examines a range of thinkers, contexts and struggles across the Global South.
Françoise Vergès is a writer and decolonial antiracist feminist activist. A Reunionnese, she received an education that ran counter to the French hegemonic school from her anticolonial communist and feminist parents and the members of their organisations. She received her Ph.D in Political Theory from Berkeley University in 1995. She remained an activist during these years, collaborated on Isaac Julien’s film "Black Skin, White Masks » and published in feminist and theory journals. She has taught at Sussex University and Goldsmiths College and has been a visiting professor at different universities. She has never held a teaching position in France but created the Chair Global South(s) at Collège d’études mondiales where she held workshops on different topics (2014-2018). She was president of the National Committee for the History and Remembrance of Slavery (2009-2012), was a co-founder of Decolonize the Arts (2015-2020), the director of the scientific and cultural programme for a museum project in Reunion Island (2004-2010, a project killed by the State and the local conservatives). She is the convener and curator of L’Atelier a collective and collaborative seminar/public performance with activist and artists of color. Recent publications include: Programme de désordre absolu. Décoloniser le musée (2023), A Feminist Theory of Violence (2021), De la violence coloniale dans l’espace public (2021), The Wombs of Women. Capital, Race, Feminism (2021), A Decolonial Feminism (2020).
Charged by the United Nations General Assembly to ascertain the legality of the continued presence of Israel, as an occupying Power, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, on July 19th, 2024, the International Court of the Justice, the highest court in the world on matters of international law, determined that “The Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the regime associated with them have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law.” It called for the end of the Occupation, the dismantling of the apartheid structure that supports and maintains it, and the removal of Israeli settlers and settlements. All member states of the United Nations are obligated to support each of these actions. Israel’s response to this comprehensive and devastating report has been to dismiss it and hold itself above international law. In so doing it has sealed its reputation as a pariah state in the global community of nations.
In today’s special episode of Speaking Out of Place, we are honored to have eminent legal scholars Diana Buttu and Richard Falk join us to explain the significance of this historic document.
Diana Buttu Haifa-based analyst, former legal advisor to Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestinian negotiators, and Policy Advisor to Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. She was also recently a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
After earning a law degree from Queen's University in Canada and a Masters of Law from Stanford University, Buttu moved to Palestine in 2000. Shortly after her arrival, the second Intifada began and she took a position with the Negotiations Support Unit of the PLO.
Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University (1961-2001) and Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, Queen Mary University London. Since 2002 has been a Research Fellow at the Orfalea Center of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Between 2008 and 2014 he served as UN Special Rapporteur on Israeli Violations of Human Rights in Occupied Palestine.
Falk has advocated and written widely about ‘nations’ that are captive within existing states, including Palestine, Kashmir, Western Sahara, Catalonia, Dombas.
He is Senior Vice President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, having served for seven years as Chair of its Board. He is Chair of the Board of Trustees of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. He is co-director of the Centre of Climate Crime, QMUL.
Falk has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times since 2008.
His recent books include (Re)Imagining Humane Global Governance (2014), Power Shift: The New Global Order (2016), Palestine Horizon: Toward a Just Peace (2017), Revisiting the Vietnam War (ed. Stefan Andersson, 2017), On Nuclear Weapons: Denuclearization, Demilitarization and Disarmament (ed. Stefan Andersson & Curt Dahlgren, 2019.
Far too few people know about the terrible war and the massive famine taking place in Sudan. Today learn about the long history behind these events, the people and groups involved, and the roles that foreign governments and international organizations like the IMF have played. Importantly, we learn how civil society groups are bringing a form of mutual aid and support to the people of Sudan where the national government, warring factions, and international humanitarian organizations have utterly failed.
Dr. Osman Hamdan is a graduate of the University of Khartoum, Sudan, and holds a PhD in forestry economics from the Dresden University of Technology. He is a longtime pro-democracy fighter and activist.
Umniya Najaer is a doctoral candidate in the Program in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University where she studies Black Feminist Thought and the Black Radical Tradition. Her poetry chapbook Armeika (2018, Akashic Press) explores experiences of the Sudanese-American diaspora and the unofficial government torture sites known as Biyout al-Ashbah, or ghost houses.
For decades, the works of scholar Angana Chatterji and author and journalist Siddhartha Deb have exposed the violence and fascism lying behind the mythology of India as the world's largest democracy. In the wake of India's most recent elections, in which the far right Hindutva BJP was surprisingly reduced from its former majority to a ruling minority government.
Siddhartha and Angana join us to discuss the election results, the deep roots of fascism, the enduring structures of colonialism, and possible futures of resistance.
Angana P. Chatterji is Founding Chair, Initiative on Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights at the Center for Race and Gender, University of California, Berkeley. A cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scholar of South Asia, Dr. Chatterji’s work since 1989 has been rooted in local knowledge, witness to post/colonial, decolonial conditions of grief, dispossession, agency, and affective solidarity. Her investigations with colleagues in Indian-administered Kashmir includes inquiry into unknown, unmarked and mass graves. Chatterji’s recent scholarship focuses on political conflict and coloniality in Kashmir; prejudicial citizenship in India; and violence (as a category of analysis) as agentized by Hindu nationalism, addressing religion in the public sphere, Islamomisia, state power, gender, caste, and racialization, and accountability. Her research also engages questions of memory, belonging, and legacies of conflict across South Asia. Chatterji has served on human rights commissions and offered expert testimony at the United Nations, European Parliament, United Kingdom Parliament, and United States Congress, and has been variously awarded for her work. Her sole and co-authored publications include: Breaking Worlds: Religion, Law, and Nationalism in Majoritarian India; Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India; Conflicted Democracies and Gendered Violence: The Right to Heal; Contesting Nation: Gendered Violence in South Asia; Notes on the Postcolonial Present; Kashmir: The Case for Freedom; Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present; Narratives from Orissa; and reports: Access to Justice for Women: India’s Response to Sexual Violence in Conflict and Social Upheaval; BURIED EVIDENCE: Unknown, Unmarked and Mass Graves in Kashmir.
Born in Shillong, north-eastern India, Siddhartha Deb lives in New York. His fiction and nonfiction have been longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, and been awarded the Pen Open prize and the 2024 Anthony Veasna So Fiction prize. His journalism and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, Dissent, The Baffler, N+1, and Caravan. His latest books include the novel, The Light at the End of the World (Soho Press 2023) and Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Fall of India (Haymarket Books, 2024).
Today we speak with acclaimed author and activist, and San Francisco legend, Chris Carlsson about his new novel, When Shells Crumble. It begins in December 2024, when the US Supreme Court nullifies the popular vote in the Presidential election and awards the presidency to an authoritarian Republican, who proceeds to demolish democracy and install a fascistic state that hastens ecological havoc. The novel is much more than your usual dystopian tale—it focuses on how to resist political cynicism and defeatism, and rebuild on planetary wreckage. It is a world-building project filled with wisdom, sadness, and joy. We put this fictional text in conservation with Chris' brilliant non-fiction work, Nowtopia, which offers a radical redefinition of “work” that restores dignity and value to their proper places.
Chris Carlsson, co-director of the “history from below” project Shaping San Francisco, is a writer, publisher, editor, photographer, public speaker, and occasional professor. He was one of the founders in 1981 of the seminal and infamous underground San Francisco magazine Processed World. In 1992 Carlsson co-founded Critical Mass in San Francisco, which both led to a local bicycling boom and helped to incubate transformative urban movements in hundreds of cities, large and small, worldwide. In 1995 work began on “Shaping San Francisco;” since then the project has morphed into an incomparable archive of San Francisco history at Foundsf.org, award-winning bicycle and walking tours, and almost two decades of Public Talks covering history, politics, ecology, art, and more (see shapingsf.org). Beginning in Spring 2020, Carlsson has hosted Bay Cruises along the San Francisco shoreline.
His latest novel, When Shells Crumble was published by Spuyten Duyvil in Brooklyn, NY at the end of 2023. At the dawn of the pandemic, he published a detailed historical guidebook of the city, Hidden San Francisco: A Guide to Lost Landscapes, Unsung Heroes, and Radical Histories (Pluto Press: 2020). His full-length nonfiction work Nowtopia (AK Press: 2008), offers a groundbreaking look at class and work while uniquely examining how hard and pleasantly we work when we’re not at our official jobs. He published his first novel, After The Deluge, in 2004, a story of post-economic utopian San Francisco in the year 2157. He has edited six books, including three “Reclaiming San Francisco” collections with the venerable City Lights Books. He redesigned and co-authored an expanded Vanished Waters: A History of San Francisco’s Mission Bay after which he joined the board of the Mission Creek Conservancy. He has given hundreds of public presentations based on Shaping San Francisco, Critical Mass, Nowtopia, Vanished Waters, and his “Reclaiming San Francisco” history anthologies since the late 1990s, and has appeared dozens of times in radio, television and on the internet.
Today we speak with co-authors Sami Hermez and Sireen Sawalha about their book, My Brother, My Land: A Story from Palestine. The eminent Palestinian author Hala Alyan calls it “A breathtaking display of literary prowess that tells the story of an entire homeland through the frame of one woman’s life.”
In our conversation Hermez and Sawalha explain the intricate back and forth that took place as the two collaborated to weave together Sireen’s many stories about her extended family on Palestine through many generations. At the heart of the book is the story of her brother Iyad. Through his life, and those he interacts with we hear a story of colonial violence, Palestinian resistance, and the never-ending struggle for liberation across generations of Palestinians.
Sami Hermez, PhD, is the director of the Liberal Arts Program and associate professor of anthropology at Northwestern University in Qatar. He obtained his doctorate degree from the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. He is the author of War is Coming: Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon (UPenn 2017), which focuses on the everyday life of political violence in Lebanon and how people recollect and anticipate this violence, and My Brother, My Land: A Story from Palestine (Stanford 2024), that tells the story of a Palestinian family resisting ongoing Israeli settler colonialism. His broader research concerns include the study of social movements, the state, the future, memory, violence, and critical security in the Arab World.
Sireen Sawalha, born in the small village of Kufr Rai in Jenin, Palestine, comes from a family deeply connected to the region's rich history. She moved to the US in 1990 and completed her Bachelor's and Master's degrees at Rider University. Recognized by Cornell University for her outstanding contributions to education in 2022, Sireen serves as a social studies teacher in New Jersey. Beyond academia, she is a passionate chef and compelling storyteller, sharing her family's experiences under occupation. My Brother, My Land is the story of her family.
Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with Jeanelle Hope and Bill Mullen about their new book, The Black Antifascist Tradition, which uses a vast set of archival materials to show how Black intellectuals and activists regarded anti-Black racism as inseparable from fascism. This is brought out vividly in the ways the law was constructed, labor was extracted, culture oppressed, and lives curtailed.
Struggles for Black liberation are therefore connected across national boundaries, just as fascist and racist laws and practices are shared by oppressive regimes globally. Hope and Mullen show how these cross currents work in examples like the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that fought against fascism during the Spanish Civil War, and the momentous 1951 document, “We Charge Genocide,” that linked fascism in the US to violations of international humanitarian law. Ultimately, we talk about how peoples’ movements must always acknowledge how racism and fascism are baked into the law, and unite in world-making projects that lead to liberation for all peoples.
Dr. Jeanelle K. Hope is the Director and Associate Professor of African American Studies at Prairie View A&M University. She is a native of Oakland, California and a scholar of Black political thought, culture, and social movements. Dr. Hope is the co-author of The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition. Her research has been published in several academic journals including The American Studies Journal, Amerasia, View, and Black Camera, and her public scholarship has been featured in Voices of River City, Essence, and the African American Policy Forum.
Bill V. Mullen is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Purdue. He is co-author with Jeanelle Hope of The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-lynching to Abolition. He is also author of James Baldwin: Living in Fire (Pluto Press) and We Charge Genocide!: American Fascism and the Rule of Law (forthcoming September Fordham University Press). He is a member of the organizing collective for USACBI (United States Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel).
As the long burning genocide against the Rohingya continues to unfold with recent conflagrations of violence in Rakhine State, we are joined on Speaking Out of Place today with prominent Rohingya advocate and writer Nay San Lwin and veteran journalist Chris Gunness, now with the Myanmar Accountability Project.
They take us through recent disturbing developments in the area and the present perils facing the Rohingya. They discuss the pervasive failings of international institutions and the relationship between the Gaza and Rohingya genocides, and also, together, envision what a just future might look like and require.
Chris Gunness covered the 1988 democracy uprising for the BBC in what was then Burma. After a 23-year career at the BBC, he joined the United Nations as Director of Strategic Communications and Advocacy in the Middle East. In 2019 he left the UN and returned to London. He founded the Myanmar Accountability Project (MAP) in 2021.
Nay San Lwin is a Rohingya activist and blogger. For the past 18 years, since his departure from Myanmar, he has been documenting human rights violations and the military campaigns of the Tatmadaw in Arakan State of Myanmar. He is a prolific commentator on Rohingya issues on radio, television channels and other mainstream media outlets. He is a co-founder of the Free Rohingya Coalition.
Today, on Speaking Out of Place, we are joined by eminent political theorists Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra to talk about their thesis of a global war regime and its relationship with capitalist governments, a significant challenge to dominant conceptualizations of war, and its relationship with the international order.
We discuss colonial continuities, historical transformations, and global Palestine movements against the Gaza genocide as an inspiration for non-nationalist, internationalist resistance futures.
Michael Hardt teaches political theory in the Literature Program at Duke University. He is co-author of several books with Antonio Negri, including Empire. His most recent books are The Subversive Seventies and (with Sandro Mezzadra) Bolivia Beyond the Impasse. Together Sandro and Michael host The Social Movements Lab.
Sandro Mezzadra teaches Political theory at the University of Bologna (Department of Arts). His work centers on borders, migration, global processes, and contemporary capitalism. For many years now, he has been part of autonomist movements as an activist and he participates in the further development of Italian autonomist Marxism. Among his books in English, In the Marxian Workshops. Producing Subjects, London, Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. With Brett Neilson he is the author of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Duke University Press, 2013), The Politics of Operations. Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2019), and The Rest and the West. Capital and Power in a Multipolar World (forthcoming from Verso, 2024).
As protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing on the West Bank, and apartheid repression within ’48 harden into a proliferation of encampments on US university campuses, still more have popped up across the globe—in Asia, Europe, Mexico, and elsewhere.
These encampments have been met with brutal repression as many universities have called in riot police and even the military. Today we are joined by activists from the US, the UK, and Northern Ireland to discuss this historic formation. On the program is a faculty member from Columbia University; a lecturer, organizer, and PhD student from the London School of Economics, plus a masters’ student and undergraduate; and two undergraduates from Queen’s University, Belfast, who helped push through a divestment agreement.
Even as some universities have started graduation ceremonies, these rituals have also been stages for protest and resistance, and these protests show no sign of lessening over the summer—it’s rather the opposite. The next academic year will certainly see an acceleration and expansion of what has started this Spring.
As protests against Israel’s geocidal attack on Gaza and increased dispossession and violence on the West Bank grow into encampments that have sprung up across the globe, they have been suppressed by college administrators and national political leaders alike as being anti-Semitic and harmful to Jewish students. The US House of Congress has just passed a bill endorsing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism as including criticism of the State of Israel.
In this context, there could be no better time to discuss a new book by Professor Geoffrey Levin, Our Palestine Problem. In this fascinating and revealing study, Levin documents longstanding criticisms of the State of Israel, and of Zionism, by both Jewish American individuals and organizations, dating back to the early 20th century. In varying degrees, since the founding of the State of Israel, American Jews have argued for Palestinian rights, for their enfranchisement, for their repatriation, and some for a Palestinian state. In this episode of Speaking Out of Place we discuss the debates and controversies over the decades.
We are grateful that Professor Joel Beinin, an eminent historian and participant in many of these debates, is here with us, as well as prominent Jewish American activist Simone Zimmerman, who is co-founder of If Not Now and who appears in the documentary film, “Israelism.”
Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History, Emeritus at Stanford University. His research and teaching have been focused on the history and political economy of modern Egypt, Palestine, and Israel, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He has written or edited twelve books. In 2001-02 he served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America.
For many years Joel Beinin was a member of the editorial committee of the Middle East Research and Information Project, which provides critical reporting and analysis of state power, political economy, social hierarchies, and popular struggles in the Middle East and US policy in the region. More recently, he is a non-resident fellow of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), an American non-profit organization that advocates for democracy and human rights in the Arab world.
Geoffrey Levin is assistant professor of Middle Eastern and Jewish Studies at Emory University in Atlanta. His research interests lie at the intersection of Jewish, Arab, and modern US. histories.
Prior to joining Emory's faculty, Levin was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Center for Jewish Studies. He holds a PhD in Jewish history from New York University. Our Palestine Question, published by Yale University Press last November, is his first book. The book has been discussed media outlets including The Washington Post, The Guardian,+972 Magazine, and Jewish Currents, and it is now available as an audiobook.
Simone Zimmerman is an organizer and strategist based in Brooklyn, New York, and the co-founder of the Jewish anti-apartheid organization IfNotNow. Her personal journey is currently featured in the film Israelism, about a younger generation of American Jews who have been transformed by witnessing the reality in the West Bank and connecting with Palestinians.
Recent weeks have seen a series of strikes between Israel and Iran. Israel's attack on an Iranian embassy building in Damascus, killing seven, followed by Iranian barrage of missile and drone strikes on Israel, killing no one, and then followed by Israeli strikes on Iran in Isfahan all of this occurring, of course, with the continuing unfolding genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and intensifying violence in the West Bank. As these strikes between Israel and Iran ignited fears of a regional conflagration, we are joined on the show by prominent Iran scholar and anthropologist Narges Bajoghli, whose most recent co-authored book is an in-depth study of the impact and perverse effects of sanctions on Iran, as well as by eminent scholar of international law John Quigley.
We discuss recent events from the perspective of international law and dissect dangerously pervasive myths, assumptions and racist tropes informing policy with respect to Iran.
Narges Bajoghli is Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies. She is an award-winning anthropologist, writer, and professor. Trained as a political anthropologist, media anthropologist, and documentary filmmaker, Narges' research is at the intersections of media, power, and resistance. She is the author of several books, including the award-winning book Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic(Stanford University Press 2019; winner 2020 Margaret Mead Award; 2020 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title; 2021 Silver Medal in Independent Publisher Book Awards for Current Events); How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare (with Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Esfahani, and Ali Vaez, Stanford University Press 2024); and a graphic novella, Sanctioned Lives (2024).
Before joining the Ohio State faculty in 1969, Professor John B. Quigley was a research scholar at Moscow State University, and a research associate in comparative law at Harvard Law School. Professor Quigley teaches International Law and Comparative Law. In 1982-83 he was a visiting professor at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Professor Quigley is active in international human rights work. His numerous publications include books and articles on human rights, the United Nations, war and peace, east European law, African law, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. In 1995 he was recipient of The Ohio State University Distinguished Scholar Award. He formerly held the title of President’s Club Professor of Law.
In the wake of Congressional investigations into a wave of so-called “anti-Semitism” on university campuses, college administrators are bending over backwards to appease Right Wing politicians and wealthy donors at the expense of civil liberties, and free speech and academic freedom protections. They particularly operationalize notions of public safety and feelings of safety to mute protests over the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people, a genocide enabled by these same universities and the United States as a whole. Thus we see a warped set of values and priorities wherein the most principled people are being disciplined, suspended, and expelled from campus. Hamza El Boudali, a student activist, Nicole Morse, a professor long involved in the movements for Palestinian rights and LGBTQ justice, and Natasha Lennard, a journalist from The Intercept who has been covering these cases join us for a conversation that ranges from the immediate case at Columbia to a broad discussion of attacks on education by the right wing. We end with arguments for the future.
Hamza El Boudali is a master's student at Stanford University studying Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. Born in Morocco and raised in New Hampshire, he is a practicing Muslim interested in Muslim and Islamic causes worldwide. He is a former co-President of the Muslim Student Union at Stanford and he is passionate about advocacy for Palestine as well as other oppressed Muslim groups around the world such as the Uyghurs, Rohingya, Kashmiris, etc. After graduation, he plans to study the traditional Islamic sciences and combine his interest in AI with Islamic studies, philosophy, and intellectual activism.
Natasha Lennard is a columnist for The Intercept, and her work has appeared in The Nation, Bookforum, Dissent, and the New York Times, among others. She is the associate director of the Creative Publishing & Critical Journalism graduate program at the New School for Social Research in New York. She is the author of Violence: Humans in Dark Times (with Brad Evans, CityLights, 2018), and Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life (Verso, 2019). She is working on her next book, on conceptualizing uncertainty, for Verso Books.
Nicole Erin Morse is an Associate Professor of Media Studies and Director of the Center for Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Florida Atlantic University. Their research has been published in Feminist Media Studies, Porn Studies, Jump Cut, Discourse, and elsewhere, and their book Selfie Aesthetics: Seeing Trans Feminist Futures in Self-Representational Art was published by Duke University in 2022. They are a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, which has landed them on Turning Point USA’s Professor Watchlist.
Today on Speaking Out of Place, we have a special extended conversation on the suppression of Palestine solidarity at universities from the U. S. to the U. K. to within Israel itself. We are grateful to be joined by Adi Mansour, a lawyer with Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, Neve Gordon, Professor of Human Rights Law at Queen Mary University of London and Vice President of the British Society for Middle East Studies, and Laurie Brandt, former president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and current chair of its Committee on Freedom of Expression. In our conversation we compare and contrast the ways universities in each country have disciplined dissenting speech both within the university and beyond, breaching civil liberties and exacting punishment in forms including harassment and dismissal. In sum, it becomes a question of what is allowed and what is prohibited, and who belongs.
Laurie A. Brand is Professor Emerita of Political Science & International Relations and Middle East Studies at the University of Southern California (USC). A four-time Fulbright grantee, and the recipient of Carnegie, Rockefeller, and numerous other fellowships, she is author of Palestinians in the Arab World (Columbia, 1988), Jordan’s Inter-Arab Relations (Columbia, 1994), Women, the State and Political Transitions (Columbia, 1998), Citizens Abroad (Cambridge, 2006), and Official Stories (Stanford, 2014). A former president of the Middle East Studies Association (2004), she has chaired its Committee on Academic Freedom since 2007.
After teaching for seventeen years at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, Neve Gordon joined the School of Law at Queen Mary University of London. His research focuses on international humanitarian law, human rights, the ethics of violence, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is the author of Israel’s Occupation (University of California Press 2008) and co-author of The Human Right to Dominate (Oxford University Press, 2015), Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire (University of California Press, 2020). Gordon is currently the Vice President of the British Society of Middle Eastern Studies and the Chair of its Committee on Academic Freedom.
Adi Mansour works in Adalah’s civil and political rights unit. He holds an LLB in Law and BA in political science from Tel Aviv University. He is also a founding member and activist of the Haifa Youth Movement, and he served as the head of “Almuntada” – the Arab Law Students Forum, Tel Aviv University. Upon completing his studies, Adi clerked in the national public defender's office in the field of criminal and administrative law. He joined Adalah as a staff attorney in 2021.
Today on Speaking Out of Place we are joined by Noura Erakat and Jeffrey Sachs in a discussion of possible futures for Palestine. Our conversation includes different stances toward a two-state solution, a discussion of international humanitarian law and the laws of warfare, and a deliberation on the practical steps necessary to stop Israel’s devastating genocide of the Palestinian people and the complicity of the United States . We end with a discussion about the need to go beyond state-centric notions of justice and the recommendation that a people’s parliament might be a better way to approach the crises we see on a planetary scale.
Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and an Associate Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is a Co-Editor of Jadaliyya.
Her book,Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019) narrates the Palestinian struggle for freedom as told through the relationship between international law and politics during five critical junctures between 1917-2017 to better understand the emancipatory potential of law and to consider possible horizons for the future. Erakat’s research interests include human rights law, humanitarian law, refugee law, national security law, social justice, critical race theory, and the Palestinian-Israel conflict.
Jeffrey Sachs serves as the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he holds the rank of University Professor. From 2001-18, Sachs served as Special Advisor to UN Secretaries-General Kofi Annan (2001-7), Ban Ki-moon (2008-16), and António Guterres (2017-18). Sachs has authored and edited numerous books, including The End of Poverty (2005), Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (2008), and The Price of Civilization (2011). Sachs has received 42 honorary doctorates, and his recent awards include the 2022 Tang Prize in Sustainable Development, the Legion of Honor by decree of the President of the Republic of France, and the Order of the Cross from the President of Estonia. Prior to joining Columbia, Sachs spent over twenty years as a professor at Harvard University, most recently as the Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade.
Today we speak with Harvard professor Robin Bernstein about her new book, Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit. While researching a book to develop her earlier interests in race and childhood, Bernstein came across the case of Afro-Indigenous teenager William Freeman, who in the late 19th century was convicted of stealing a horse and sentenced to five years in the federal prison in his home town, Auburn, New York. Forced to work for only nominal pay, beaten so much he lost the hearing in one ear, when released Freeman had the audacity to sue to recover lost wages. He stated repeatedly, “I am not going to work for nothing,” meaning both that he had not committed the crime he was convicted of, and that as a free man, he was not going to work for nothing. Bernstein’s book quickly became about the intimately connected stories of Freeman and Auburn prison, about the ways the prison insinuated itself into the town’s economy. So much so that any one who might testify against Freeman would likely be compromised by the way they benefitted financially from the prison. This remarkable study has everything to do with today’s abolitionist movement, and Bernstein tells how, in the course of writing this book, she herself became an abolitionist.
Robin Bernstein is the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Her previous books include Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, which won five awards. Her new book, Freeman's Challenge: The Murder that Shook America's Original Prison for Profit, was written with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She has published in the New York Times, African American Review, Social Text, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and many other venues. She recently published the forgotten 1897 slave narrative of Jane Clark, who liberated herself from slavery in Maryland by undergoing an arduous three-year journey that ended in Auburn, New York in 1859. The full text of the narrative, along with annotations and an introduction, was published in Commonplace.
Today we talk with Camilla Hawthorne about her recent edited collection, The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity, and its relation to her prior monograph, Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean. She explains and elaborates on how Blackness is not singular, but involved in “taking place” in imaginative, resistant, and across many different political terrains, whether it be citizenship, the right to the city, the imagining of futures after environmental collapse, and diverse linguistic, cultural, and musical affiliations across diasporic communities.
Camilla Hawthorne is Associate Professor of Sociology and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and also serves as program director and faculty member for the Black Europe Summer School in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her work addresses the racial politics of migration and citizenship and the insurgent geographies of the Black Mediterranean. Camilla is co-editor of the The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (Duke University Press, 2023), and is author of Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022). In 2020, she was named as one of the national Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera‘s 110 "Women of the Year" for her work on the Black diaspora in Italy. Camilla received her PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018.
Today on Speaking Out of Place, we have a conversation with critical political theorists Adom Getachew and Ayça Çubukçu on the colonial construction of the international system and its organization around the institution of the nation state. Our conversation covers and uncovers so many aspects of the hidden colonial history behind the constitution of this system, but also the resistance and creative appropriations by Black, Indigenous, and colonized peoples, allowing us to imagine possible liberatory futures beyond the forms and strictures of the colonial present.
Ayça Çubukçu is associate professor in human rights at the London School of Economics and Political Science and codirector of LSE Human Rights. She is the author of For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq (2018). Her work has appeared in Law and Critique; Polity; London Review of International Law; Thesis 11; Contemporary Political Theory; parallax; Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies; boundary 2; Law, Culture and the Humanities; Journal of Human Rights;and the Los Angeles Review of Books; the Guardian; Al Jazeera; Truthout; Africa Is a Country; Jadaliyya,and Red Pepper magazine, among other publications. She coedits the journal Humanity and the LSE International Studies Series at Cambridge University Press.
Adom Getachew is Professor of Political Science and Race, Diaspora & Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019) and co-editor, with Jennifer Pitts, of W. E. B. Du Bois: International Thought (2022). She is currently working on a second book on the intellectual origins and political practices of Garveyism—the black nationalist/pan-African movement, which had its height in the 1920s. Her public writing has appeared in Dissent, Foreign Affairs, the London Review of Books, the Nation, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times.
Since October the 7th we have seen an eruption of support for Palestinian liberation. On university campuses we find both the tremendous growth of activism for Palestine, and repressive and punitive measures that seek to discourage and curtail these activities. One of the most important tasks for activists is to organize broad networks of support. Today we speak with two people who have helped organize a network called National Faculty for Justice in Palestine, which now has close to 100 chapters in the US. Our conversation ranges from the genesis of this group and its goals, to an appreciation of how activism is now crossing boundaries that had formerly separated people in terms of status, rank, and discipline, and created new kinds of communities and energies that are broadly life-affirming and for the liberation of all.
Andrew Ross is a social activist and Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. A contributor to the Guardian, the New York Times, The Nation, Artforum, Jacobin, the London Review of Books, and Al Jazeera, he is the author or editor of 25 books and more than 250 articles on a wide variety of topics including labor and work, urbanism, politics, technology, environmental justice, alternative economics, music, film, TV, art, architecture, and poetry. Politically active in many movement fields, he's the co-founder of several groups: Gulf Labor Artist Coalition, Global Ultra Luxury Faction, Coalition for Fair Labor, Occupy Student Debt Campaign, and is an organizer with others, including the American Association of University Professors and the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. His books include Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, Incarceration; Sunbelt Blues: the Failure of American Housing; Stone Men: the Palestinians who Built Israel, and others.
Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a historian of capitalism, consumption, and development in the modern Middle East. Her book, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016) examines British-ruled Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s through a focus on economy. In a departure from the expected histories of Palestine, this book illuminates dynamic class constructions that aimed to shape a pan-Arab utopia in terms of free trade, profit accumulation, and private property. And in so doing, it positions Palestine and Palestinians in the larger world of Arab thought and social life, moving attention away from the limiting debates of Zionist–Palestinian conflict. Her current book project follows the trajectory of a peripatetic medical doctor, her great grandfather, to place Palestine in a global history of race, capital, slavery, and dispossession. Sherene Seiklay is an editorial board member of the American Historical Review, co-editor of the Stanford Studies Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures Series, co-editor of Journal of Palestine Studies, and co-editor of Jadaliyya.
Today we speak with Professor Amahl Bishara about her book, Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression. She is joined by Professor Nayrouz Abu Hatoum to discuss the ways that notions of national identity, cultural commitments, and political expression are all complicated when juxtaposing two groups of Palestinians—those living under occupation, and those who are citizens of Israel. How does the boundary line fragment Palestinians into unequal camps, and yet how do Palestinians invent new forms of unity through art, media, public demonstrations, photography, and other means? Our conversation ranges from microscopic attention to details of everyday life, to broad explorations of how Palestinian fragmentation and unity can teach us so much about other worlds and struggles.
Amahl Bishara is Associate Professor of the Anthropology Department at Tufts University. She is the author of Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, & Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression (Stanford 2022), about different conditions of expression for Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank. Her first book, Back Stories: U.S. News and Palestinian Politics(Stanford University Press 2013), is an ethnography of the production of U.S. news during the second Palestinian Intifada. She has co-produced documentaries about incarceration and expression under occupation and collaboratively produced bilingual children’s books with Lajee Center in Aida Refugee Camp, Bethlehem.
Nayrouz Abu Hatoum is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Concordia University, Montreal. She was the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University for 2018/2019, and is a co-founding member of Insaniyyat: Society of Palestinian Anthropologists. Her research explores visual politics in Palestine and focuses on alternative imaginations, peoples' place-making and dwelling practices in contexts of settler-colonialism. Currently, she is working on her ethnographic project that examines the politics of visual arts production and its role in expanding Palestinians' imagination.
In January, the University of Michigan Faculty Senate passed a resolution calling for “the University’s leadership, including the Board of Regents, to divest from its financial holdings in companies that invest in Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza.” The statement highlighted the unprecedented rate of civilian deaths in Gaza, and that American financial sources are central to Israel’s ongoing genocide. Working with Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), the TAHRIR Coalition, and Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, and others, the resolution drew on the tradition of activism against South Africa’s apartheid regime, and ongoing anti-racist work.
Today we speak with members of the UM faculty, who tell us about the background of the resolution, the work they did to pass it, and the campaigns on campus that are building off its success. Our conversation offers a range of insights that will be useful to campus activists elsewhere.
Charlotte Karem Albrecht is an Associate Professor of American Culture and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, where she is also core faculty in the Arab and Muslim American Studies program and affiliated faculty for the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies and the Race, Law, and History Program. Her research interests include Arab American history, histories of gender and sexuality, women of color feminist theory, queer of color critique, and interdisciplinary historicist methods. Her first book, Possible Histories: Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling, was published open access with University of California Press. Karem Albrecht holds a Ph.D. in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota. Her work has also been published in Arab Studies Quarterly, Gender & History, the Journal of American Ethnic History, and multiple edited collections.
Leila Kawar is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor where she holds appointments in the Department of American Culture and in the Social Theory and Practice Program. Kawar’s research examines the cultural dimensions of legal practice, focusing on how legal advocacy intersects with the politics of migration, citizenship, and labor. Her first book, Contesting Immigration Policy in Court: Legal Activism and Its Radiating Effects in the United States and France (Cambridge University Press 2015) asks what difference law has made in immigration policymaking in the U.S. and France since the 1970s. Challenging the conventional wisdom that “cause litigation” has little long-term impact unless it produces broad rights-protective principles, the book shows that legal contestation can have important radiating effects by reshaping how political actors approach immigration issues. Her current book project, Conditioning Human Mobility: Rights, Regulation, and the Transnational Construction of the Migrant Worker, is an empirically-grounded study that critically examines international law’s historical and contemporary entanglements with migrant labor recruitment. Kawar is a regular contributor to the Detroit-based socialist journal Against the Current.
Derek R. Peterson is Ali Mazrui Professor of History and African Studies at the University of Michigan, and an elected member of the Faculty Senate Assembly.
Today we speak with publisher Judith Gurewich and translator Luke Leafgren about a remarkable first-person narrative by Nasser Abu Srour, a Palestinian political prisoner who in 1993 was given a life sentence. His memoir, The Tale of a Wall, tells of the author’s decades-long life in multiple prisons, moving through many historical periods and shifting personal and political lives. The one thing that is always present is the figure of the wall, that becomes his one constant companion. Gurewich and Leafgren tell how they came to acquire the text, and how they came to know this remarkable man through it. The tale itself is a stunning and moving contribution to our understanding of the Palestinian struggle for liberation.
Nasser Abu Srour was arrested in 1993, accused of being an accomplice to the murder of an Israeli intelligence officer, and sentenced to life in prison. While incarcerated, Abu Srour completed the final semester of a bachelor’s degree in English from Bethlehem University, and obtained a master’s degree in political science from Al-Quds University. The Tale of a Wall is his first book to appear in English. It will be published in the United Kingdom by Allen Lane, and translations are forthcoming from Gallimard, Feltrinelli, and Galaxia Gutenberg, among others.
Judith Gurewich is the publisher of Other Press, a position she has held since 2002. Under her leadership, Other Press has become a highly respected and award-winning publisher of literary fiction and non-fiction, including titles such as Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, and Raja Shehadeh’s We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I, a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award. Born in Canada and raised in Belgium, she holds a law degree from Brussels University as well as a master’s of law from Columbia University and a PhD in sociology from Brandeis University. She now resides in Cambridge, MA. Judith is also a Lacanian trained psychoanalyst, practicing part-time.
Luke Leafgren is an Assistant Dean of Harvard College, where he is also a lecturer in Comparative Literature and teaches courses on translation. He has published seven translations of contemporary Arabic novels and received the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation in 2018 and 2023.
Ever since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza, global protests have grown exponentially. This is most evident on the streets, and also, very importantly, on college campuses, where activism for Palestinian liberation have often been met with brutal repression. Chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace have been shut down, students placed under surveillance and disciplined, and protesters physically attacked.
Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with student activists from two campuses who have achieved remarkable victories—student activists at the University of California, Davis, passed a measure that prevents any of the Associated Students, University of California, Davis (ASUDC)'s $20m budget from being used on companies named in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. And students at Stanford staged the longest sit-in protest in Stanford’s history. The Sit In to Stop genocide occupied tents and staffed tables 24/7 for an unprecedented 120 nights and days, and at one point drew 500 people in the space of 4 hours to defend the encampment well until the early morning hours.
We learn about these campaigns, the motivations behind them, and how activists will press forward.
After the International Court of Justice's finding that Israel's war on Gaza was a "plausible case of genocide," Israel smeared the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, claiming that four or five UNRWA employees were affiliated with Hamas. These employees were fired without any proof of wrongdoing, and several countries stopping funding UNRWA, also without seeing any concrete evidence. Many of these countries are signatories of the Genocide Convention, which means they should be doing everything possible to stop Israel's acts of genocide. Instead, they are aiding and abetting genocide by cutting off desperately needed humanitarian aid.
In this episode of Speaking Out of Place we collect statements from 27 leading activists and organizations from Kashmir, Indonesia, Ireland, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, including Ardi Imeis, a former legal counsel for UNRWA, former UN Special Rapporteurs on Palestine Richard Falk and Michael Lynk, Palestinian writers and activists Susan Albuhawa, Sherene Seikaly, Randa Abdel-Fattah, Lina Abojaradeh, Nasser Mashni and others, and legendary activist Angela Davis.
In our Blog we list all the speakers and the time of their statement. We are also uploading the video on our YouTube channel
Today we speak with scholar Julie Norman about her book, The Palestinian Prisoners Movement: Resistance and Disobedience. She is joined in conversation by her colleague and collaborator Amahl Bishara. Based on extensive interviews with Palestinian prisoners, Norman’s study delineates in detail and depth the centrality of the movement in the broader Palestinian national struggle. Palestinian prisoners took back the prison space for organizing and resistance, developing an internal "counterorder" to challenge authorities. We talk about how the Palestinian prisoners movement was both intertwined with the Palestinian national movement, and yet also prefigured modes of liberation beyond it.
Dr Julie Norman is an Associate Professor in Politics & International Relations at University College London (UCL), and a researcher/consultant on conflict, development, and political violence. She is also the Deputy Director of the UCL Centre on US Politics (CUSP), and a Senior Associate Fellow of International Security at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).
She is the author of five books and multiple articles on unarmed resistance, and she has published widely on conflict, activism, political prisoners, and political violence. She has worked as a practitioner with numerous NGOs in the Middle East and Africa, and she is a frequent commentator on the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, and other media outlets.
Amahl Bishara is an associate professor of Anthropology, and of Studies of Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University. Bishara’s research revolves around expression, space, media, and settler colonialism.
Her first book, Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics (Stanford University Press 2013) is an ethnography of production of US news during the second Palestinian Intifada. It asks what we can learn about journalism and popular political action when we place Palestinian journalists at the center of an inquiry about U.S. journalism.
She is currently working on two book projects. One, addresses the relationship between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank, two groups that are positioned slightly differently in relation to Israeli settler-colonialism. Her second project examines Palestinian popular politics in a West Bank refugee camp.
Bishara regularly writes for such outlets as Jadaliyya, Middle East Report. She also produced the documentary "Degrees of Incarceration" (2010), an hour-long documentary that explores how, with creativity and love, a Palestinian community responds to the crisis of political imprisonment.
Today, on Speaking Out of Place, we discuss the recent International Court of Justice ruling on the Gaza genocide case, which found that Israel is plausibly engaging in genocide in Gaza.
We discuss the case and its implications, as well as the colonial backdrop of the international law behind it, with former UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine Michael Link, Palestinian human rights attorney, scholar, activist, and teacher Noura Erakat, and Burmese scholar and dissident in exile, Maung Zarni.
We also address the recent decision of a number of countries to defund the UN Relief Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, which was established by the United Nations in 1949. Finally, we talk about what global civil society can and must do to effect change where international law cannot.
Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and an Associate Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is a Co-Editor of Jadaliyya.
Her book,Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019) narrates the Palestinian struggle for freedom as told through the relationship between international law and politics during five critical junctures between 1917-2017 to better understand the emancipatory potential of law and to consider possible horizons for the future.
Erakat’s research interests include human rights law, humanitarian law, refugee law, national security law, social justice, critical race theory, and the Palestinian-Israel conflict.
Until his retirement in December 2022, Michael Lynk taught labor law, constitutional law and international and Canadian human rights law at the Faculty of Law, Western University in London, Ontario for more than 20 years.
From 2016 to 2022, he served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967. He has authored and edited several books, including most recently Protecting Human Rights in Occupied Palestine: Working Through the United Nations (Clarity Press, 2022), co-authored with Richard Falk and John Dugard, and International Law and the Middle East Conflict (Routledge, 2011), co-edited with Susan Akram, Michael Dumper and Iain Scobbie.
Maung Zarni is a research fellow at the (Genocide) Documentation Center - Cambodia, co-founder of FORSEA.com, a progressive activist and intellectual platform for Southeast Asian activists, and Burmese coordinator of the Free Rohingya Coalition. He has 30-years of engagement in activism, scholarship, politics, and media. An adviser to the Genocide Watch, Zarni served as a member of the Panel of Judges in the Permanent Peoples Tribunal on Sri Lanka ('s) genocidal crimes against Eelam Tamil (2013) and was the initiator of the Permanent Peoples Tribunal on Myanmar (2017).
His most recent monographs are “The Enemy of the State” speaks: Irreverent Essays and Interviews” (2019) and “Essays on Myanmar's Genocide of Rohingyas” (2018). With Uzbek-British filmmaker and war-correspondent Shahida Tulaganov, Zarni co-produced the 50-minutes educational film "Auschwitz: Lessons Never Learned" (2020) ( https://vimeo.com/469954700 ) and served as a leading expert in "EXILED: A film by Shahida Tulaganov (2017)", a historical documentary about the Rohingya genocide (https://exiledthefilm.com/)
For his scholarship and activism, Zarni was recognized with the Cultivation of Harmony Award by the Parliament of the World’s Religions in 2015 and shortlisted for Sweden’s Right Livelihood Award in 2018.
Plants show signs of communication and of learning. They produce and respond to many of the same neurochemicals as humans, including anesthetics. They share resources with one another, and when under threat, emit signals of warning and of pain. Today on Speaking Out of Place, we are joined in conversation with eminent Anishinaabe legal theorist John Borrows and philosopher Paco Calvo to discuss how we might learn about, learn with, and learn from our plant companions on this earth.
While Borrows and Calvo both urge us to listen to the Earth, during our conversation we discover that these two thinkers are often listening for different things. The discussion reveals fascinating points of difference and commonality. And in terms of the latter, the point both John and Paco insist upon is that we maintain our separation from other beings at our peril and at a loss.
Bios
Dr. John Borrows, BA, MA, JD, LLM, PhD, LLD, FRSC, is Canada's pre-eminent legal scholar and a global leader in the field of Indigenous legal traditions and Aboriginal rights. John holds the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Law at the University of Victoria as well as the Law Foundation Chair in Aboriginal Justice and Governance.
John teaches in the area of constitutional law, Indigenous law and environmental law. His research focuses on advancing the understanding of Indigenous laws and customs. John’s work influenced the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and the Supreme Court of Canada has cited his research. John is Anishinabe/Ojibway and a member of the Chippewas of the Nawash First Nation in Ontario.
In May 2017, the Right Honourable David Johnston, Governor-General of Canada, presented John with the prestigious 2017 Killam Prize in the Social Sciences for his “contributions as a global leader in Indigenous law, and substantial and distinguished scholarship and commitment to furthering our knowledge about Indigenous legal tradition.”
John is the recipient of a National Aboriginal Achievement Award in Law and Justice, a fellow of the Trudeau Foundation, a fellow of the Canadian Society of Arts, Humanities and Sciences and the Royal Society of Canada, Canada’s highest academic honour.
In 2012, he was declared an Indigenous Peoples Counsel by the Indigenous Bar Association, for his honour and integrity in the service to Indigenous communities.
Paco Calvo is a renowned cognitive scientist and philosopher of biology, known for his groundbreaking research in the field of plant cognition and intelligence. He is a professor at the University of Murcia in Spain, where he leads the Minimal Intelligence Lab (MINT Lab), focusing on the study of minimal cognition in plants. Calvo’s interdisciplinary work combines insights from biology, philosophy, and cognitive science to explore the fascinating world of plant behavior, decision-making, and problem-solving. By investigating the complex interactions and adaptive responses exhibited by plants, Paco Calvo has significantly contributed to our understanding of cognition beyond the animal kingdom, challenging conventional perspectives on intelligence and mental capacities.
Today I speak with noted researcher and scholar Ben Franta about two new articles he has written that add to his growing archive of seminal work on climate change. Ben tells us now the fossil fuel industry paid economists to join scientists in denying the true nature of the fossil fuel industry’s destruction of the environment. Economists argued that even if some science were correct, implementing change would be too costly. This became a powerful tool to stall and kill climate change legislation. Franta also talks about how communities have tried to sue fossil fuel companies for damages incurred by such misinformation and disinformation. In sum, we learn about what the industry has done, and how ordinary people and municipalities can fight back.
Benjamin Franta is the founding head of the Climate Litigation Lab and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford Sustainable Law Programme. The Climate Litigation Lab is a multidisciplinary research initiative to inform, enable, and accelerate climate change litigation globally. Ben is also an Associate at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School and an Associate Member of Nuffield College, Oxford.
Ben holds a JD from Stanford Law School and is a licensed attorney with the California State Bar, a PhD in History of Science from Stanford University, a separate PhD in Applied Physics from Harvard University, an MSc in Archaeological Science from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Physics and Mathematics from Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He is also a former research fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
He is the recipient of numerous academic and research fellowships including the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the U.S. National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship, the USAID Research and Innovation Fellowship, the University of Oxford Clarendon Scholarship, and the Coe College Williston Jones Scholarship.
His research and writing have appeared in 10 languages, been featured in the Paramount+ documentary Black Gold, been cited in the U.S. Congressional Record, and been published in numerous scholarly and popular venues including Nature Climate Change, Global Environmental Change, The Guardian, Project Syndicate, and more.
Today on Speaking Out of Place, we talk with artists and activists Isabelle Frémaux and Jay Jordan about their book, We are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones Vagabonds/Pluto/Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, 2021. They tell the story of a 40-year struggle to preserve 4,000 acres of wetlands from being destroyed to make way for an airport, but the book is also a profound and beautiful meditation on what it means to live together and struggle together outside the logic of capitalist extraction and violence.
Jay (formerly John) Jordan (they/them) is labelled a "Domestic Extremist" by the police, and “a magician of rebellion” by the press. Part-time author, sex worker and full time trouble maker, Jay is a lover of edges, especially between art and activism. They co-founded Reclaim the streets and the clown army.
Isabelle Fremeaux (she/her) is apopular educator, facilitator, action researcher and deserter of the neoliberal academy where for a decade she was Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck College London. Co-author (with Jay) of the film/book Les Sentiers de L’utopie (2011, La Découverte), together they coordinate The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, bringing artists and activists together to co-design and deploy tools of disobedience. They live on the zad of Notre-dame-des-landes, a territory “lost to the Republic,” according to the French government.
Today we speak with Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito, whose book, Marx in the Anthropocene , sold over half a million copies. In it, Saito shows how late in life Marx came to a richer sense of production when he realized that there was a law above the economic as he had conceived it—it was the law of Nature. Marx saw how disturbing Nature’s metabolism could bring about a “rift” that sent destructive ripples across human life. Today we make the connection between that scholarly book and Kohei’s new book, Slow Down!!, which has just come out in English translation. Here he offers a sharp critique of liberal and socialist attempts to “sustain”—like the Green New Deal, and argues for a radical form of degrowth communism that de-celerates our compulsion to add more stuff into the world, in whatever form, and derails our compulsion to sustain, rather than revolutionize. Saito argues that we can lead much happier, and more healthy lives, if we emphasize use value, and revitalize democracy so we all have a hand in deciding what is valuable.
Bio
Kohei Saito is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tokyo. He completed his doctorate at the Humboldt University in Berlin. In 2018 he won the prestigious Deutscher Memorial Prize for Marxist research—becoming the first Japanese, and the youngest person, ever to win that prize. His books include: Slow Down! How Degrowth Communism Can Save the World (2023); Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (2022), Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (2017).
For weeks, hundreds of international law and genocide experts have been warning that the situation in Gaza is approaching or has become an active genocide, a conclusion very vociferously rejected by Israel and its allies. Today on Speaking Out of Place, we are joined by state crime expert Penny Green and Holocaust historian Omar Bartov to discuss the applicability of the term genocide, the history of its framing, and ways of moving beyond genocidal dynamics.
We also talk about how the term has circulated far beyond legal circles and taken on a particular affective power in the popular imagination. We consider how this language circulates in such a way to form a basis for acts of solidarity at the level of civil society to describe the horrors that people see before them. We consider how this massive protest at the level of civil society might be a more powerful means to move leaders than the implementation of law.
Omer Bartov is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. Born in Israel and educated at Tel Aviv University and St. Antony's College, Oxford, his early research concerned war crimes in World War II and the links between war and genocide. He has also written on representations of antisemitism in twentieth-century cinema. More recently he has focused on interethnic relations, violence, and population displacement in Europe and Palestine. His latest books include Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018), Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past (2022), and Genocide, The Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis (2023). He is currently writing a book tentatively titled “The Broken Promise: A Personal-Political History of Israel and Palestine,” which is dedicated to investigating the first generation of Jews and Palestinians in Israel, a generation to which he also belongs. His novel, The Butterfly and the Axe, was published in 2023 in the United States and Israel.
Penny Green was born in Tasmania and educated at the Australian National University and Cambridge. She is Professor of Law and Globalisation and former Head of the Law School at Queen Mary University of London and an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. She has written extensively on state crime theory (including her monographs with Tony Ward, State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption 2004 and State crime and Civil Activism: on the dialectics of repression and resistance 2019), state violence, Turkish criminal justice and politics, ‘natural’ disasters, forced evictions and resistance to state violence. She has a long record of researching in hostile environments and her most recent projects include a comparative study of civil society resistance to state crime in Turkey, Tunisia, Colombia, PNG, Kenya and Myanmar; forced evictions in Palestine/Israel and Myanmar’s genocide against the Rohingya. In 2015 she and her colleagues Thomas MacManus and Alicia de la Cour Venning published the seminal ‘Countdown to Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar’ and in March 2018‘The Genocide is Over: the genocide continues’. She is completing a book on the Rohingya genocide. Professor Green is Founder and Director of the award winning International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) and co-editor in Chief of the international journal State Crime. She is an Adjunct Professor at Birzeit University, Ramallah and is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of NSW and Ulster University.
Today on Speaking Out of Place, we are joined by Frédéric Mégret, Neve Gordon, and Nicola Perugini. As the devastation of Gaza is permitted to continue to unfold, and colonial violence also intensifies in the West Bank, we discuss the role and responsibility of international law in enabling and structuring mass violence, the enduring importance of colonial histories in shaping the colonial present of international law.
In the face of the refusal or failure of domestic state law regimes and governments to confront even extreme instances of violence we often turn to international law as a panacea or at least a site of salvation and hope. And yet we know that international law not only prohibits certain forms of violence, but actually enables others, including shaped in part by its own colonial histories, perhaps no longer articulated explicitly in terms of standards of civilization, the language of savages and barbarians, but encoding a colonial and racial line in maybe more subtle, and less obvious ways.
Frédéric Mégret is a Professor of Law and the holder of the Hans & Tamar Oppenheimer Chair in Public International Law. Previously he was a William Dawson Scholar from 2015 to 2023, and the holder of the Canada Research Chair on the Law of Human Rights and Legal Pluralism from 2006 to 2015.
Neve Gordon is a professor of human rights law at Queen Mary University of London and the Vice President of the British Society for Middle East Studies. His first book, Israel’s Occupation , provided a structural history of Israel’s mechanisms of control in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. His second book, The Human Right to Dominate was written with Nicola Perugini and examines how human rights, which are generally conceived as tools for advancing emancipation, can also be used to enhance subjugation and dispossession. Most recently, he wrote with Perugini the first book on the legal and political history of human shielding. Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Firefollows the marginal and controversial figure of the human shield over a period of 150 years in order to interrogate the laws of war and how the ethics of humane violence is produced. Gordon writes regularly for the popular press and his articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Los Angles Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Al Jazeera, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The London Review of Books.
Nicola Perugini's research focuses mainly on the politics of international law, human rights, and violence. He is the co-author of The Human Right to Dominate (Oxford University Press 2015), Morbid Symptoms (Sharjah Biennial 13, 2017), and Human Shields. A History of People in the Line of Fire(University of California Press 2020). Nicola has published articles on war and the ethics of violence; the politics of human rights, humanitarianism, and international law; humanitarianism's visual cultures; war and embedded anthropology; refugees and asylum seekers; law, space and colonialism; settler-colonialism.
Today’s conversation is perhaps one of the most unusually important ones we have had on the podcast. Len and Hwei-ru Tsou are two Taiwanese activists whose main commitment, over a period of decades, has been to discover and disclose the involvement of Asian and South Asian anti-fascists in the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. Not only do we discover their longstanding friendship with one of their first interviewees--Kenneth Graeber, father of celebrated anarchist David Graeber--but we also hear them linking their anti-fascist work to their pro-Palestine activism, which included their courageous participation in the flotillas protesting Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza. We hear Len and Hwei-ru draw the links between the anti-fascist struggle in Spain and the international movement for Palestinian rights. The conversation inspires and gives one hope about international solidarity in the past, and the present.
Bios of Len Tsou and Hwei-Ru Tsou
We are the authors of a book on the Chinese volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, in Chinese as well as in Spanish edition.
Growing up in Taiwan, we came to the U.S. to pursue our graduate studies in natural sciences. The new land provided us with space and resources for our curiosity in modern Chinese history and the cold war. In 1973 a military coup overthrew the Chilean President Salvador Allende, a democratically elected Socialist. It led us to pay attention to the America’s Dirty Wars.
After obtaining our PhDs in Chemistry, Len worked in semiconductor field and Hwei-Ru in pharmaceutical industry. We each published numerous scientific papers and patents in our respective fields. To serve as a bridge, we founded Cultural International in 1989 to introduce to Taiwan the experiences of American people’s struggles in environment, labor and human rights.
In 2002, we organized weekly peace vigil in Rockland County, NY, hoping to prevent the imminent war on Iraq from happening. The peace vigil continued for nine years. In 2011 Len joined the US Boat to Gaza challenging Israel’s blockade on Gaza. After moving to California, we join the San Jose weekly peace vigil to continue protesting the endless wars.
In 2001 our research result was published in Taiwan as a book 《橄欖桂冠的召喚：參加西班牙內戰的中國人(1936-1939)》. A Spanish edition “Los Brigadistas Chinos en la Guerra Civil: La LLamada de España (1936-1939)” was published in Madrid in 2013. The revised editions were published in Chinese as 《当世界年轻的时候：参加西班牙内战的中国人(1936-1939)》 in 2013 and 2015.
Our writings can be found in The Volunteers, Science & Society, South China Morning Post Magazine (南华早报), Southern Weekend (南方周末), China Times (中國時報), and others.
Our collection of photos and documents of the Chinese volunteers resulted in the travelling photo exhibitions in Spain since 2019. Based on our book, the Phoenix Satellite TV produced a documentary 《当世界年轻的时候——国际纵队里的中国人》in 2020.
Today I talk with Marthie Momberg, whose book 21 Voices from Israel and South Africa: Why the Palestine Struggle Matters, compiles interviews Momberg conducted over many years. Her interviewees are Israelis and South Africans who have followed different paths to become activists for Palestine. The 21 voices speak about this connection, but about many other things as well, including gender, generational difference, race, human rights, and Zionism. Taped in December during Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza, which have brought millions onto the streets in protest across the globe, Marthie’s book serves as a vibrant reminder of the spirit of solidarity.
Marthie Momberg (PhD) is a South African activist scholar with postgraduate qualifications in theology, literature and education. In 2020 her postdoctoral research was awarded for exceptional achievement by Stellenbosch University (SU). As a researcher at SU and at Nelson Mandela University she has published many peer-reviewed publications and regularly addresses international conferences, the media and other forums including the South African Parliament. Marthie serves on the Theology Committee of Global Kairos for Justice and in 2011 monitored human rights violations in Israel and Palestine on behalf of the World Council of Churches. During her earlier career in corporate communications her work received several local and international awards, including a Gold Quill for Excellence from the International Association for Business Communicators for the best entry worldwide in the category Human Resources & Benefits Communication. Marthie is an Honorary Member and Fellow of the Frederik van Zyl Institute for Student Leadership Development.
Today we speak with legendary climate activist Bill McKibben and scholar Caroline Levine. McKibben relates his long struggle to get companies to divest from fossil fuels and for the world in general to act immediately to seriously and substantially address this existential crisis. Levine tells of her efforts to get the giant pension fund, TIAA-CREF, to divest. She also talks about her new book, The Activist Humanist, and its relation to both her teaching and her activism.
Caroline Levine has spent her career asking how and why the humanities and the arts matter, especially in democratic societies. She argues for an understanding of forms and structures as essential both to understanding links between art and society and to the challenge of taking meaningful political action. She is the author of four books. The most recent, The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (Princeton University Press 2023), grows out of the theoretical work of Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015, winner of the James Russell Lowell Prize from the MLA, and named one of Flavorwire’s “10 Must-Read Academic Books of 2015”). Levine has also published The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003, winner of the Perkins Prize for the best book in narrative studies) and Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007).
Bill McKibben is founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate and justice. His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages. He’s gone on to write 20 books, and his work appears regularly in periodicals from the New Yorker to Rolling Stone. He serves as the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has won the Gandhi Peace Prize as well as honorary degrees from 20 colleges and universities. He was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the alternative Nobel, in the Swedish Parliament. Foreign Policy named him to its inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers.
McKibben helped found 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign, which has organized protests on every continent, including Antarctica, for climate action. He played a leading role in launching the opposition to big oil pipeline projects like Keystone XL, and the fossil fuel divestment campaign, which has become the biggest anti-corporate campaign in history, with endowments worth more than $40 trillion stepping back from oil, gas and coal. He stepped down as board chair of 350 in 2015, and left the board and stepped down from his volunteer role as senior adviser in 2020, accepting emeritus status. He lives in the mountains above Lake Champlain with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, where he spends as much time as possible outdoors. In 2014, biologists credited his career by naming a new species of woodland gnat—Megophthalmidia mckibbeni–in his honor.
We recorded this episode of Speaking Out of Place on Saturday the 18th of November, 2023, as Israel’s massive attack on Gaza passed the 40-day mark. Almost immediately after the deadly October 7 Hamas attack, the image of the child, both Israeli and Palestinian, began to dominate the media’s coverage, and appeals to international humanitarian law were made to “save the children.” Azeezah Kanji and I decided to create this podcast to coincide with November 20, International Children’s Day, in order to take a deeper look at why such appeals to the law must be contextualized both historically and politically.
Hedi Viterbo is an associate professor of law at Queen Mary University of London in the UK. His research examines legal issues concerning childhood, state violence, and sexuality from an interdisciplinary and global perspective. His latest book is Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood in Israel/Palestine (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Dr. Jess Ghannam is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Global Health Sciences in the School of Medicine at UCSF. His research areas include evaluating the long-term health consequences of war on displaced communities and the psychological and psychiatric effects of armed conflict on children. Dr. Ghannam has developed community health clinics in the Middle East that focus on developing community-based treatment programs for families in crisis.
He is also a consultant with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Reprieve and other international NGO's that work with torture survivors. Locally he works to promote and enhance the health and wellness of refugee, displaced, and immigrant populations from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia and has established a community-based Mental Health Treatment Programs to support these communities.
This is a special project of Speaking Out of Place, meant to collect and amplify the voices of artists, musicians, and publishers from around the world raising their voices in solidarity with the people of Palestine. We will add to this episode as statements come in. Here you will hear James Schamus, Ben Ehrenreich, Judith Gurevich, Raja Shehadeh, Ariel Dorfman, Bora Chung, Intan Paramaditha, Nancy Kricorian, Hala Alyan, Anton Shammas, Suzanne Gardinier, and others (please see the blog entry on the Speaking Out of Place website for full list--we update as often as possible).
On Saturday 4th November, 2023, leading scholar activists, anti-genocide campaigners, human rights defenders, and musicians from 20 countries, as well as Rohingya refugees joined Palestinians from the West Bank as a global online show of support for the 2.3 million residents of Gaza, who are currently under Israel’s genocidal onslaught perpetrated with the unconditional backing of the United States and historically colonizing, genocidal Europe, including Germany, France and United Kingdom. This mini-podcast segment features the statements of Speaking Out of Place co-host David Palumbo-Liu, Neferti Tadiar, and Chloe DS.
Neferti X. M. Tadiar is a feminist scholar of cultural practice, social imagination, and global political economy, and Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her most recent book is Remaindered Life (Duke, 2022). She is founding Director of the Alfredo F. Tadiar Library, an independent community library, cultural space, and publisher in San Fernando, La Union, Philippines.
Chloe DS represented Socialist Alliance, Australia. She is a refugee activist, and a Green Left journalist.
On Wednesday, 1 November, the Palestine Festival of Literature held an event in New York titled, "But We Must Speak: On Palestine and the Mandates of Conscience." On that occasion, Noura Erakat delivered a powerful and stunning speech entitled “In This Moment,” in which she spoke on the genocide in Gaza from her perspective as a teacher, a legal expert, a Palestinian, as a mother, and as an activist. We are grateful to Noura Erakat, to PalFest, and to Jadaliyya for permission to feature this speech on Speaking Out of Place.
Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and an Associate Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Noura is a Co-Editor of Jadaliyya.
Her book,Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019) narrates the Palestinian struggle for freedom as told through the relationship between international law and politics during five critical junctures between 1917-2017 to better understand the emancipatory potential of law and to consider possible horizons for the future.
Her research interests include human rights law, humanitarian law, refugee law, national security law, social justice, critical race theory, and the Palestinian-Israel conflict.
Today we speak with Palestinian American poet and physician Fady Joudah. We are recording this interview on Thursday, November 2, 2023, as the State of Israel expands its brutal and illegal collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza—an act of genocidal ethnic cleansing. Health authorities in Gaza report more than nine thousand deaths in a population where 60 percent are under the age of 18. The United Nations General Assembly has just overwhelmingly passed a resolution demanding the “protection of civilians and [the] upholding [of] legal and humanitarian obligations.” The Assembly, also demanded that all parties “immediately and fully comply” with obligations under international humanitarian and human rights laws, “particularly in regard to the protection of civilians and civilian objects.”
Fady Joudah’s poetry has always addressed the situation of the Palestinians in Israel, in the Occupied Territories, and in diaspora, managing somehow to capture both the political and the personal, and above all the courage and humanity of the Palestinian people. We speak in particular about his recent LitHub piece, “A Palestinian Meditation in a Time of Annihilation: Thirteen Maqams for an Afterlife.” We are honored that he made time in this period of crisis to speak with us.
Fady Joudah is a Palestinian American physician, poet, and translator. He was born in Austin, Texas, and grew up in Libya and Saudi Arabia. He was educated at the University of Georgia, the Medical College of Georgia, and the University of Texas Health Sciences in Houston. In 2002 and 2005 he worked with Doctors Without Borders in Zambia and Sudan, respectively.
Joudah’s debut collection of poetry, The Earth in the Attic (2008), won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, chosen by Louise Glück. Joudah followed his second book of poetry, Alight (2013) with Textu (2014), a collection of poems written on a cell phone wherein each piece is exactly 160 characters long. His fourth collection is Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance (2018). In 2014, Joudah was a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry.
As critic Charles Bainbridge observed in a 2008 Guardian review of The Earth in the Attic, “Joudah’s poetry thrives on dramatic shifts in perspective, on continually challenging received notions.”
Joudah translated several collections of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s work in The Butterfly’s Burden (2006), which won the Banipal prize from the UK and was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation; and in If I Were Another, which won a PEN USA award in 2010. His translation of Ghassan Zaqtan's Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me (2012) won the Griffin International Poetry Prize in 2013. His other translations include Amjad Nasser's Petra: The Concealed Rose and A Map of Signs and Scents.
Joudah lives with his family in Houston, where he works as a physician of internal medicine.
Today we talk with the prolific and wide-ranging scholar Charisse Burden-Stelly about her new book, Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States, just out from the University of Chicago Press. The book shows the emergence and conjuncture of two strands of discourse and practice that were used to suppress Blacks in the United States, beginning in the early twentieth century and still present today. The Black Scare created and nurtured a phobic psychic disposition towards Blacks on the basis of race, the Red Scare was based on anti-Bolshevik and anti-Communist fears rampant at the time. The Black Scare was used to maintain White Supremacy, the Red Scare to prop up Capitalism. Charisse Burden-Stelly talks with us about these phenomena on both the national and international stages, and attends to the specific dynamics of gender, race, and class through a series of case studies.
Charisse Burden-Stelly is a critical Black Studies scholar of political theory, political economy, and intellectual history. Their research pursues two complementary lines of inquiry. The first interrogates the transnational entanglements of U.S. capitalist racism, anticommunism, and antiblack racial oppression; the second area of focus examines twentieth-century Black anticapitalist intellectual thought, theory, and praxis.
Burden-Stelly is the co-author, with Dr. Gerald Horne, of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History, and my single-authored book titled Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States is forthcoming in November 2023. They are also the co-editor, with Dr. Jodi Dean, of Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writings (Verso, 2022)and the co-editor, with Dr. Aaron Kamugisha and Dr. Percy Hintzen, of the latter’s writings titled Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean and the Postcolonial State.
They also edited the “Claudia Jones: Foremother of World Revolution” special issue of The Journal of Intersectionality.
Charisse Burden-Stelly’s published work appears in journals including Small Axe, Monthly Review, Souls, Du Bois Review, Socialism & Democracy, International Journal of Africana Studies, CLR James Journal, and American Communist History and in popular venues including Monthly Review, Boston Review, Essence magazine, and Black Agenda Report.
How have companies like Uber and Lyft, Instacart and DoorDash and others, changed the nature of work from bad to horrific? Veena Dubal joins me to explain how such companies have exported globally a technique of algorithmic wage discrimination that pays workers based on data to which they have no access. Owners dangle bonuses before workers but take away work from them as they draw close to achieving their targets; they use psychological tricks derived from video games to create a casino-like environment where the house always wins. Dubal urges us not to fall into the trap of competing against the house, but back to “good old-fashioned organizing.” This is one of the most powerful and significant episodes of Speaking Out of Place.
Professor Veena Dubal’s research focuses broadly on law, technology, and precarious workers, combining legal and empirical analysis to explore issues of labor and inequality. Her work encompasses a range of topics, including the impact of digital technologies and emerging legal frameworks on workers' lives, the interplay between law, work, and identity, and the role of law and lawyers in solidarity movements.
Dubal has written numerous articles in top law and social science journals and publishes essays in the popular press. Her research has been cited internationally in legal decisions, including by the California Supreme Court, and her research and commentary are regularly featured in media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, CNN, etc. TechCrunch has called Prof. Dubal an “unlikely star in the tech world,” and her expertise is frequently sought by regulatory bodies, legislators, judges, workers, and unions in the U.S. and Europe. Professor Dubal is completing a book manuscript that presents a theoretical reappraisal of how low-income immigrant and racial minority workers experience and respond to shifting technologies and regulatory regimes. The manuscript draws upon a decade of interdisciplinary ethnographic research on taxi and ride-hail regulations and worker organizing and advocacy in San Francisco.
Prof. Dubal received a B.A. from Stanford University and holds J.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, where she conducted an ethnography of the San Francisco taxi industry. The subject of her doctoral research arose from her work as a public interest attorney and Berkeley Law Foundation Fellow at the Asian Law Caucus where she founded a taxi worker project and represented Muslim Americans in civil rights cases. Prof. Dubal completed a post-doctoral fellowship at her alma mater, Stanford University. She returned to Stanford again in 2022 as a Residential Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Prof. Dubal is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Fulbright, for her scholarship and previous work as a public interest lawyer.
In response to the attacks launched against the Palestinian people in Gaza by the State of Israel, on Oct 12 Speaking Out of Place created a special episode on Gaza with legal experts Diana Buttu and Richard Falk. We did so with the aim to address and correct the proliferation of misinformation that the mainstream press was spewing out.
We also solicited and received many statements of solidarity with the Palestinian people. So many have come in, and continue to come in, that we decided to create a separate podcast episode consisting entirely of these statements. We will update this episode continually.
Listen to these voices, and please help amplify them my sharing this episode as widely as possible. May there be a just peace for the Palestinian people, may they have the land and freedom that is rightfully theirs. Free Palestine.
A full list of contributors is on our Blog, and will be updated.
Today we talk with Joseph Pierce and Liza Black about the vast number of questions that are opened up when people pretend to be Native when they in fact are not. These cases take on a specific significance when such false identifications allow these people access to privilege and positions of authority. When these falsehoods are found out, they place scholars and activists who have allied themselves with these people in extremely difficult positions, and unfortunately make institutions like colleges and universities the final arbiters of how “justice” is to be served. Finally, these cases put even more pressure on Native peoples to imagine and practice inventing identities that are both rooted and at the same time open to a broader set of possibilities.
Liza Black is a citizen of Cherokee Nation. Recently on fellowship at UCLA, Black is currently completing her book manuscript: How to Get Away with Murder: A Transnational History of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, contracted with Johns Hopkins University Press for an anticipated publication date of 2026. How to Get Away with Murder provides six case studies of women, girls, and two spirits disappeared or murdered over the course of the 20th century. Black is an Associate Professor of History and Native American and Indigenous Studies. In 2020, Black published Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, a deeply archival book making the argument that mid-century Native people navigated the complexities of inhabiting filmic representations of themselves as a means of survivance. Black has received several research grants including the Ford pre-, doc and post-doc fellowships; the Institute of American Cultures at UCLA fellowship; and the Cherokee Nation Higher Education Grant.
Joseph M. Pierce is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the intersections of kinship, gender, sexuality, and race in Latin America, 19th century literature and culture, queer studies, Indigenous studies, and hemispheric approaches to citizenship and belonging. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019) and co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) as well as the 2021 special issue of GLQ, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” His work has been published recently in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Critical Ethnic Studies, Latin American Research Review, and has also been featured in Indian Country Today. Along with S.J. Norman (Koori of Wiradjuri descent) he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds. He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.
The volatile situation in Gaza has been grossly distorted in the mainstream western press. By omission, selective editorializing, and misstatement of so-called “facts,” a particular caricature has emerged that has invisibilized the Palestinian people, the history and the nature of the Occupation, and the actual conditions of life in what many have called the world’s largest open air prison. To get a better sense of all of these, we speak with two seasoned experts on Palestine.
After our conversation with Diana Buttu and Richard Falk, we conclude this episode with statements of solidarity with the Palestinian people from activists, scholars, and cultural workers from around the world: the Birzeit University Union of Professors and Employees Occupied Palestine; activist and scholar Cynthia Franklin, a long-time champion for Palestinian and other Indigenous peoples’ rights; renown Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, who has been widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation; celebrated feminist scholar, philosopher, and public intellectual Sara Ahmed; Michael Hardt, eminent political philosopher and writer; award-winning poet, scholar and long-time civil rights and anti-Zionist Hilton Obenzinger; legendary abolitionist feminist activist, writer, and scholar Angela Y. Davis. Following Angela Davis we have a statement from the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective read by scholar Manijeh Moradian, and then a statement from the Palestine Writes Literary Festival, read by executive director and celebrated novelist, Susan Albuhawa.
We then solicited statements from others, and received several immediately, with more coming in daily. We will update this podcast and add contributions as they arrive and as we can process them. We invite you to listen to them as you can, and to join in our commitment to Palestinian life, freedom, and land.
Diana Buttu is a Haifa-based analyst, former legal advisor to Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestinian negotiators, and Policy Advisor to Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. She was also recently a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
After earning a law degree from Queen's University in Canada and a Masters of Law from Stanford University, Buttu moved to Palestine in 2000. Shortly after her arrival, the second Intifada began and she took a position with the Negotiations Support Unit of the PLO.
Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University (1961-2001) and Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, Queen Mary University London. Since 2002 has been a Research Fellow at the Orfalea Center of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Between 2008 and 2014 he served as UN Special Rapporteur on Israeli Violations of Human Rights in Occupied Palestine.
Falk has advocated and written widely about ‘nations’ that are captive within existing states, including Palestine, Kashmir, Western Sahara, Catalonia, Dombas.
He is Senior Vice President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, having served for seven years as Chair of its Board. He is Chair of the Board of Trustees of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. He is co-director of the Centre of Climate Crime, QMUL.
Falk has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times since 2008.
His recent books include (Re)Imagining Humane Global Governance (2014), Power Shift: The New Global Order (2016), Palestine Horizon: Toward a Just Peace (2017), Revisiting the Vietnam War (ed. Stefan Andersson, 2017), On Nuclear Weapons: Denuclearization, Demilitarization and Disarmament (ed. Stefan Andersson & Curt Dahlgren, 2019.
On today’s episode we speak with two of the founders of the Polis Project—Suchitra Vijayan and Francesca Recchia—about their new book, How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners. We are also deeply honored that the eminent Dalit intellectual, and former political prisoner Dr. Anand Teltumbde is with us as well to lend his unique insight into the political situation in India and the realities of being a political prisoner there.
The Polis Project, Inc. is a New York-based hybrid research and journalism organization that works with communities in resistance. Through its Research, Reportage and Resistanceapproach, they publish and disseminate critical ideas that are excluded from mainstream media. Their work sheds light on the rise of authoritarianism especially in democracies and focuses on issues of racial, class and caste injustice, Islamophobia and State oppression around the world. In September 2019, the United States Library of Congress selected The Polis Project, Inc.’s website for inclusion in its web archives.
Francesca Recchia is an independent researcher, educator and writer whose work is grounded in the values and principles of decolonial philosophy and radical pedagogy. She is interested in the geopolitical dimension of heritage and cultural processes in countries in conflict and she focuses on creative practices of collective resistance in contexts of unequal structures of power. Over the last two decades, Francesca has worked in different capacities in Palestine, Pakistan, India, Kashmir, Iraq and Afghanistan. Her latest assignment in Kabul was as Acting Director of the Afghan Institute for Arts and Architecture.
She was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College of London, has a PhD in Cultural Studies at the Oriental Institute in Naples and a Master in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Besides being a scholar and practitioner in his formal disciplines of Technology and Management, with a corporate career spanning four decades at top management positions, and a decade as an academic, Dr Anand Teltumbde has maintained his parallel career as a civil rights activist, writer, columnist and public intellectual right since his student days.
He contributed to the civil rights movement in India as one of its founding pillars and contributed theoretical insights through his voluminous writings into most issues. He participated and led many fact finding missions and peoples’ struggle. He has published more than 30 books on contemporary issues and wrote a column Margin Speak for a decade in Economic & Political Weekly before being arrested in the infamous Bhima-Koregaon case.
Suchitra Vijayan is an essayist, lawyer, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. She is the award winning author of the critically acclaimed book Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India (Melville House, New York) and How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners (Pluto Press). Her essays, photographs, and interviews have appeared in The Washington Post, Time Magazine GQ, The Nation, The Boston Review, Foreign Policy, Lit Hub, Rumpus, Electric Literature, NPR, NBC, and BBC. As an attorney, she worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before co-founding the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, giving Iraqi refugees legal aid. She is an award-winning photographer and the founder and executive director of the Polis Project. She teaches at NYU Gallatin and Columbia University’s Oral History Program.
A transcript of Dr Tetumbde's remarks can be found on SpeakingOutofPlace.com
Amidst great fanfare, Stanford University created the Doerr School for Sustainability, which immediately said that it would accept funding from the fossil fuel industry. A group of students has pushed back, and built an impressive movement to dissociate from such funds. In this episode, we talk to some of the people leading the movement about what drives them and sustains them in building a True School of Sustainability.
June Choi is a PhD candidate in Earth System Science at the Doerr School of Sustainability. Her research focuses on quantifying the impacts of climate change to inform adaptation strategies. Her previous work involved tracking global climate finance flows, setting standards for green bonds and sustainable finance integrity. She holds an MA in International Relations from John Hopkins University and BA in Sociology from Amherst College.
Yannai Kashtan is a PhD candidate in Earth System Science at the Doerr School of Sustainability, where he studies health-related hazards of residential fossil-fueled appliances. His most recent project quantified benzene emissions from gas and propane stoves. He earned a BA from Pomona College, where he majored in physics and chemistry and studied organic semiconductors.
Belinda Ramírez (they/them) teaches introductory liberal education courses at Stanford as a COLLEGE Fellow, including courses on environmental sustainability, food and culture, and climate/environmental/food justice. They also organize with Stanford’s Environmental Justice Working Group and the Coalition for a True School of Sustainability. Trained in cultural anthropology, their research deals with the social, racial/ethnic, political, and economic dimensions of urban agriculture and other food movements situated within the modern industrialized and corporatized global food system. In researching these topics, Belinda has come to recognize the fulfillment found in experiential learning and working firsthand to change their local food system, receiving agricultural training through local farms and community gardens in southern San Diego. They have also engaged in statewide political advocacy for young farmers through the National Young Farmers Coalition, served as both Board and Food Justice Co-Chair for Slow Food Urban San Diego, and worked as a Soil Farmer for Food2Soil. They consider themselves a farmer-scholar, bridging the worlds between praxis and theory, academia and tangible, on-the-ground work.
Attacks on those protesting the Israeli state policies and practices which have maintained the violent dispossession of Palestinians have commonly misrepresented, distorted, and even manufactured disinformation. This has done great damage to the lives and careers of many. As public opinion shifts against the Israeli state, attacks by extreme Zionists have increased. On today’s show we speak with two individuals about this phenomenon. Nader Hashemi and Omar Shakir help us understand it from many different angles--legal, historical, and personal.
Nader Hashemi is the Director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and an Associate Professor of Middle East and Islamic Politics at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He obtained his doctorate from the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto and previously was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the UCLA Global Institute. Dr. Hashemi was previously the founding Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. His intellectual and research interests lie at the intersection of comparative politics and political theory, in particular debates on the global rise of authoritarianism, religion and democracy, secularism and its discontents, Middle East and Islamic politics, democratic and human rights struggles in non-Western societies and Islam-West relations. He is the author of Islam, Secularism and Liberal Democracy: Toward a Democratic Theory for Muslim Societies (Oxford University Press, 2009) and co-editor of The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future (Melville House, 2011), The Syria Dilemma (MIT Press, 2013), Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2017) and a four-volume study on Islam and Human Rights: Critical Concepts in Islamic Studies (Routledge, 2023). He is frequently interviewed by PBS, NPR, CNN, Al Jazeera, Pacifica Radio, Alternative Radio and the BBC and his writings have appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, The Nation, Al Jazeera Online, CNN.com among other media outlets.
Omar Shakir serves as the Israel and Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch, where he investigates human rights abuses in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza and has authored several major reports, including a 2021 report comprehensively documenting how Israeli authorities are committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution against millions of Palestinians. As a result of his advocacy, the Israeli government deported Omar in November 2019. Prior to his current role, he was a Bertha Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where he focused on US counterterrorism policies, including legal representation of Guantanamo detainees. As the 2013-14 Arthur R. and Barbara D. Finberg Fellow at Human Rights Watch, he investigated human rights violations in Egypt, including the Rab’a massacre, one of the largest killings of protesters in a single day. A former Fulbright Scholar in Syria, Omar holds a JD from Stanford Law School, where he co-authored a report on the civilian consequences of US drone strikes in Pakistan as a part of the International Human Rights & Conflict Resolution Clinic, an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Affairs, and a BA in International Relations from Stanford.
Today we talk with Liza Featherstone about this huge victory for ecosocialists, and for everybody actually, in New York, that came with the passage of a bold piece of legislation, the Build Public Renewables Act, or BPRA. Featherstone explains the genesis of the bill, and the specific wrk that activists put into its passage. What obstacles did they confront, how did they work together to overcome those obstacles, and what can other environmental activists learn from this historic moment?
Liza Featherstone is the author of Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation, published by O/R Books in 2018, as well as Selling Women Short: the Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Walmart (Basic Books, 2004). She co-authored Students Against Sweatshops (Verso, 2002) and is editor of False Choices: the Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Verso, 2016). She's currently editing a collection of Alexandra Kollontai 's work for O/R Books and International Publishers and writing the introduction to that volume.
Featherstone's work has been published in Lux, TV Guide, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Ms., the American Prospect, Columbia Journalism Review, Glamour, Teen Vogue, Dissent, the Guardian, In These Times, and many other publications.
Liza teaches at NYU's Literary Reportage Program as well as at Columbia University School for International and Public Affairs. She is proud to be an active member of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America and of UAW local 7902.
Today we talk with Sara Ahmed about her new book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. How and why is it that complaining about sexism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of bigotry, is considered impolite? How is civility uncivil, and the mandate to be “happy” a tool for silencing grievances? Sara Ahmed tackles all those questions, and gives us strength and courage to keep on killingjoy and speaking truth.
Sara Ahmed is an independent queer feminist scholar of colour. Her work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. Her first trade book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook is coming out with Seal Press next month. Previous books (all published by Duke University Press) include Complaint! (2021), What's The Use? On the Uses of Use (2019), Living a Feminist Life (2017), Willful Subjects (2014), On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012), The Promise of Happiness (2010) and Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others (2006). She is currently writing A Complainer’s Handbook: A Guide to Building Less Hostile Institutions and has begun a new project on common sense. She blogs at feministkilljoy.com
Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with Michael Hardt about his new book, The Subversive Seventies. This expansive study of a broad range of subversive movements across the globe shows us how the 70s were actually ahead of us in terms of confronting key issues and contradictions that remain with us today and shows what we can learn from them.
Michael Hardt teaches political theory in the Literature Program at Duke University. He is co-author of several books with Antonio Negri, including Empire. His most recent books are The Subversive Seventies and (with Sandro Mezzadra) Bolivia Beyond the Impasse. Together Sandro and Michael host The Social Movements Lab.
Today we talk with Manijeh Moradian about her book, This Flame within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States, which documents the formation of Iranian student activists in the US in the 1970s, and their impact on the Iranian revolution.
This Flame Within is not only a book about history, but also a book about memory and the importance of retrieving these memories of anti-imperialist pasts against the backdrop of a thoroughly imperial present for the possibilities of building anti-imperial futures.
Among many of the things we discuss is the cross-pollination between these groups and groups based in the US working toward Third World Liberation, supporting Palestinian rights, and protesting the Vietnam war. We also connect all these topics to today’s situation in Iran, and the Iranian diaspora.
Manijeh Moradian is assistant professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States, was published by Duke University Press in December 2022. She has published widely including in American Quarterly, Journal of Asian American Studies, Scholar & Feminist online, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She is a founding member of the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective and on the editorial board of the Jadaliyya.com Iran Page.
Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with Dr. Tim Hewlett, co-founder of the international protest organization Scientist Rebellion. With more than a thousand members in more than 25 countries, Scientist Rebellion stages non-violent protests, organizes events and talks, and lobbies other scientists and national leaders to draw attention to the need for immediate and meaningful action with regard to the climate crisis.
In today’s show Tim talks about the genesis of Scientist Rebellion, its tactics and strategies, and the blowback the organization is facing from governments seemingly more concerned about protest than the crisis itself.
Tim Hewlett obtained his PhD in astrophysics in 2018 from the University of St Andrews, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, researching cosmological relations between galaxies and supermassive black holes. In 2020 he returned to the UK and co-founded Scientist Rebellion, an international climate activist collective which focuses on organising academics in civil disobedience, arguing that if those who study the crisis do not act like they are in a struggle for survival the wider public cannot be expected to do so.
Today in Speaking Out of Place, we are joined by Anthony Arnove and Haley Pessin, who are the co-editors of a marvelous new volume entitled Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century: Documents of Hope and Resistance.
This book is not only a beautiful archive of people's struggles in the 21st century, but also a powerful tribute to and continuation of the work of professor and radical historian Howard Zinn. We speak with Anthony and Haley about the histories of struggles and the possibilities for building a more beautiful future.
Anthony Arnove is the editor of several books, including, with Howard Zinn, Voices of a People’s History of the United States and Terrorism and War. He wrote the introduction for the thirty-fifth anniversary edition of Zinn’s classic book, A People’s History of the United States. Arnove cofounded the nonprofit education and arts organization Voices of a People’s History of the United States, wrote, directed, and produced the documentary The People Speak, and has directed stage and television versions of The People Speak in Dublin with Stephen Rea, in London with Colin Firth, and across the United States with various groups including Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Sundance Film Festival. He produced the Academy Award-nominated documentary Dirty Wars. Arnove is on the editorial boards of Haymarket Books and Tempestmag.org and is the director of Roam Agency, where he represents authors including Arundhati Roy and Noam Chomsky. He lives in Hopewell, New Jersey.
Haley Pessin is a socialist activist living in Queens, New York. They have participated in struggles against police brutality and mass incarceration, in solidarity with Palestine, in defense of abortion rights and reproductive justice, and as a legal service worker and union delegate for 119SEIU (Service Employees International Union). Pessin has spoken at conferences in Switzerland, Australia, Ireland, Quebec, and throughout the United States on the struggle for Black liberation. Their writing has appeared in New Politics and at Tempestmag.org, where they currently serve on the editorial board.
Today we are speak with renown scholar, activist, and writer Silvia Federici about her powerful and inspiring collection of essays, Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. These essays, written over the span of several decades, display her abilities to diagnose and indeed predict the most important issues facing us today, demanding a collective struggle for a new social world.
Silvia Federici is a scholar, teacher, and feminist activist based in New York. She is a professor emerita and teaching fellow at Hofstra University in New York State, where she was a social science professor.[2] She also taught at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria.[when?] In 1972, she co-founded the International Feminist Collective. In 1995, in the course of the campaign to demand the liberation of Mumia Abu-Jamal, she cofounded the Radical Philosophy Association (RPA) anti-death penalty project, an organization intended to help educators become a driving force towards its abolition.
For several decades, Federici has been working in a variety of projects with feminist organizations across the world like Women in Nigeria (WIN), Ni Una Menos, the Argentinian feminist organization; she also has been organizing a project with feminist collectives in Spain to reconstruct the history of the women who were persecuted as witches in early modern Europe, and raise consciousness about the contemporary witch-hunts that are taking place across the world.
Federici is considered one of the leading feminist theoreticians in Marxist feminist theory, women’s history, political philosophy, and the history and theory of the commons. Her most famous book, Caliban and the Witch, has been translated in more than 20 foreign languages, and adopted in courses across the U.S. and many other countries. Often described as a counterpoint to Marx’s and Foucault’s account of “primitive accumulation,” Caliban reconstructs the history of capitalism, highlighting the continuity between the capitalist subjugation of women, the slave trade, and the colonization of the Americas. It has been described as the first history of capitalism with women at the center.
Today we speak with Emmaia Gelman and Christine Hong, two of the founders of the new Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. They tell us what motivated them and others to take up this project to create a space where the critical study of Zionism could take place in conversation with many other fields. We hear why the organizers wish to separate critical Zionist studies from conventional Jewish Studies as practiced in the academy, and locate it in the context of radical ethnic studies.
Emmaia Gelman is guest faculty in Social Sciences at Sarah Lawrence College and the founding Director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, which examines the political and ideological work of Zionist institutions beyond their direct advocacy for Israel. Her research and writing investigate the history of ideas about race, queerness, safety, and rights, and their production as political levers in the realm of hate crimes policy, surveillance, anti-terror measures, and war. She is at work on a critical history of the Anti-Defamation League (1913-1990) as a Cold War neoconservative institution, as well as an edited volume of social justice movement writings and academic research on resistance to the ADL. She is the co-chair of the American Studies Association Caucus on Academic and Community Activism, and a longtime activist in New York City on Palestine, policing, antiracism, and queer issues.
Christine Hong is Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) and Literature. She directs the Center for Racial Justice at UC Santa Cruz, serves on the board of directors of the Korea Policy Institute, an independent research and educational institute, co-chairs the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council, and co-edits the Critical Ethnic Studies journal. She is also a core member of the Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective. Her book, A Violent Peace: Race, Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific, was published byStanford University Press in 2020. Along with Deann Borshay Liem, she co-directed the Legacies of the Korean War oral history project. She also guest edited a two-volume thematic issue of Critical Asian Studies on Reframing North Korean Human Rights (2013-14); a special issue of positions: asia critique on The Unending Korean War (2015); and a forum of The Abusable Past on “White Terror, ‘Red’ Island: A People’s Archive of the Jeju 4.3 Uprising and Massacre.”
Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with award-winning novelist and activist Susan Albuhawa about a major literary festival she is organizing entitled “Palestine Writes,” which will take place in Philadelphia from Sept 22 to Sept 24.
“Palestine Writes” is the only North American literature festival dedicated to celebrating and promoting cultural productions of Palestinian writers and artists. Born from the pervasive marginalization of Palestinian voices in mainstream literary institutions, the festival brings Palestinian cultural workers from all parts of historic Palestine and in exiled diaspora together with peers from other marginalized groups in the United States. Crossing multiple borders dash geographic linguistic and cultural boundaries--writers, artists, publishers, booksellers, scholars, musicians, and thinkers hold conversations about art, literature, and the intersections between culture and power, struggle, politics, climate change, sexuality, human rights, animal rights, food sovereignty, and more.
Albuhawa gives us an inside look at the genesis of the festival, and its motivating ethos and political and artistic message.
Susan Albuhawa is a novelist, poet, essayist, scientist, mother, and activist. Her debut novel Mornings in Jenin, translated into 30 languages, was an international bestseller and is considered a classic in Palestinian literature. Its reach and sales has made Albuhawa the most widely-read Palestinian author. Her second novel, The Blue between Sky and Water, was likewise an international bestseller. Against the Loveless World was published in August 2020 by Simon and Schuster to much acclaim. Albuhawa is the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, a children's organization dedicated to uplifting Palestinian children.
In 1980, the synagogue in Paris was bombed, killing four in entering 40 others over four decades later. Canadian academic Dr. Hassan Diab was convicted in absentia for this unsolved crime. Former Secretary General of Amnesty International Canada, Alex Neva, described the prosecution of Hassan Diab as, “surreal and disgraceful.”
Diab was sentenced to life by a French court for a 1980 synagogue bombing, despite all of the evidence indicating that he could not possibly have committed it. He is currently facing re- extradition from Canada to France.
Today we have with us Dr. Hassan Diab, as well as Michelle Weinroth, a long-term member of the Hassan Diab Support Committee, and Bernie Farber, former head of Canadian Jewish Congress who previously advocated for the extradition of Dr. Diab, but now has become one of his supporters.
Dr. Hassan Diab is a Canadian citizen and sociology professor who lives in Ottawa. Up until October, 2007, Hassan enjoyed an engaged and productive public life, including teaching, publishing research, and traveling internationally.
Bernie Farber is the Founding Chair of the Canadian AntiHate Network. His career spans more than three decades focusing on human rights, diversity, countering antisemitism and extremism. His expertise has been recognized by Canadian Courts, media and law enforcement. His efforts have been documented in numerous Canadian human rights publications, books, films, newspapers and magazines. He is widely respected as a CEO in the not-for-profit world best known internationally as the former CEO of Canadian Jewish Congress. He is a published author and a newspaper columnist. He is a a recipient of numerous medals and awards for his human rights work. In his retirement he is a consultant on antisemitism and extremism to Canadian School Boards and police services, he sits as an advisor to Human Rights Watch Canada and the Mosaic Institute and Chairs the Rights and Ethics Committee of Community Living Toronto.
Michelle Weinroth is a writer and teacher living in Ottawa. She taught English literature at the University of Ottawa and at Carleton University for a decade. Her area of specialization is the workings of propaganda in 19th- and 20th-century fiction and non-fiction. Over the past seven years, she has taken a special interest in the Hassan Diab Affair.
This August, the Asian American Literary Festival was to take place in Washington, DC.. The event had already garnered substantial investments and expectations from both national and international groups and states. Thus there was considerable shock and outrage when Acting Director Yao-Fen You abruptly cancelled the entire festival, without a word of explanation.
The Washington Post and other sources have hinted that it might be because of potentially controversial content. The Post wrote: "According to emails shared with The Post, You notified Lawrence-Minh Bui Davis, the festival’s director since its founding in 2017 and a curator at the Smithsonian that “due to the current political climate,” Smithsonian leadership had requested that all upcoming exhibitions and multiday programs be reviewed under a policy known as Smithsonian Directive 603, which is meant to help identify any potentially sensitive or controversial content and prepare for potential responses from the public."
On today’s show we speak with Ching-In Chen, a poet who was curating a festival event featuring books by trans and nonbinary writers, and Kate Hao, a program coordinator on contract with the Smithsonian for the festival, about the controversy, and about the issues it raises about art for the community vs. art that must conform to state institutional preferences and politics. We discuss why this festival is absolutely essential for the present day, where we have Asian Americans being used to help dismantle affirmative action, and where we see persistent and deadly acts of anti-Asian violence.
We also hear about possible plans to go forward without the Smithsonian, and ways we can help support the artists and organizers.
Acting Director You declined to comment for this show.
Descended from ocean dwellers, Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2009) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing (speCt! Books) and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press, 1st edition; AK Press, 2nd edition) and currently a core member of the Massage Parlor Outreach Project as well as a Kelsey Street Press collective member. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center and the Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They are currently collaborating with Cassie Mira and others on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation, health and environmental justice. They teach in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at University of Washington Bothell and serve as Writer in Residence at Hugo House. www.chinginchen.com
Kate Hao is a poet and fiction writer, a cultural worker, a shy Leo, an ex-pianist, a soup enthusiast, an aspiring morning person. She grew up in the suburbs of northern Virginia and currently calls Providence, Rhode Island home.
Today we talk with Cynthia Franklin about her new book, Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea. Taking on pivotal historical moments like the murder of George Floyd and the emergence of #BlackLivesMatter, the on-going struggle of the Palestinian people against the ethno-nationalist Zionist state, and the fight for Indigenous rights in Hawai’i, Franklin asks the question, what requirements to people have to meet in order to fit into the human narrative? And what are the possibilities of creating alternate stories of the human that can accommodate individuals who identify more as members of political collectives, and also narratives that exceed the normative category of the human? This powerful book asks fundamental questions about the relationship between art and activism.
Cynthia G. Franklin is Professor of English at the University of Hawai'i, and coeditor of the journal Biography. She is the author of Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea (2023), Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory and the University Today and Writing Women’s Communities: The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary Multi-Genre Anthologies. She has coedited special issues of Biography including “Life in Occupied Palestine” and “Personal Effects: The Testimonial Uses of Life Writing.” For the past ten years, Cynthia has been on the Organizing Collective of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) and she is a founding member and faculty advisor of Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UH (SFJP@UH). She serves on the Editorial Collective for the newly established initiative EtCH (Essays in the Critical Humanities).
In today’s episode of Speaking Out of Place we speak with Dr Jennifer Gomez about her new book, The Cultural Betrayal of Black Women and Girls: A Black Feminist Approach to Healing from Sexual Abuse, which takes on the particular difficulty of centering the voices and experiences of Black women and girls when confronting sexual violence in the Black community.
In her foreword the book, Thema Bryant, President of the American Psychological Association writes, This important work … is a love song to the survival of black sis and trans women and girls. For love to be liberating it must see and affirm survivors holistically. Gomez calls psychologists and other mental health providers to adopt courageous compassion, which means sharing concern and outrage at the realities of sexual violence as well as concern and outrage for the injustices that contextualize the trauma and recovery process for black women and girls.
In our conversation Dr. Gomez explains how she fought to reconcile the need for solidarity in the Black community with the demand that the abuse of Black women and girls be confronted and healed. Alongside this struggle was her effort to change the ways psychologists and others silence these traumas.
Jennifer M. Gómez is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work and a Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Innovation in Social Work & Health at Boston University, and a Board Member and Chair of the Research Advisory Committee at the Center for Institutional Courage. Her primary research focus is cultural betrayal trauma theory (CBTT), which she created as a framework for understanding the mental, behavioral, cultural, and physical health impact of violence on Black and other marginalized youth, young adults, and elders within the context of inequality.
Written while she was a 2021-22 Fellow at the Stanford University Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), her book, “The Cultural Betrayal of Black Women & Girls: A Black Feminist Approach to Healing from Sexual Abuse” (American Psychological Association; 2023), provides individual, interpersonal, and structural strategies for healing. Website: https://jmgomez.org ; Book Website: https://www.apa.org/pubs/books/cultural-betrayal/; Twitter: @JenniferMGmez1
On today’s episode of Speaking Out of Place we talk with Olivia Harrison, author of a new book entitled, Natives Against Nativism: Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France, which takes on the appropriation of the figure of the “native” to serve progressive and indeed revolutionary causes, but also its appropriation by the alt-right both in France and internationally to drive a reactionary program against so-called anti-white racism.
Our conversation covers a lot of ground, from a discussion of the basic premises of the French Republic, to unpacking the long history of anti-racist struggles in France, to the period of the late 1960s and 1970s, where we see in particular the figure of the Palestinian, and of the American Indian, play enormous roles in the radical imaginary.
We then turn to the ways things like the “Great Replacement Theory” signal a convergence of US and French anti-right “nativism,” and use photographs, films, and poetry to show the complexity of this terrain, perhaps best illustrated by the collaboration between French avant-garde film maker Jean-Luc Godard and the pre-eminent Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish.
Olivia C. Harrison is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on postcolonial North African, Middle Eastern, and French literature and film, with a particular emphasis on transcolonial affiliations between writers and intellectuals from the Global South. Her publications include Natives against Nativism: Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), Transcolonial Maghreb: Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2016), and essays on Maghrebi literature, Beur and banlieue cultural production, and postcolonial theory. With Teresa Villa-Ignacio, she is the editor of Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics (Stanford University Press, 2016) and translator of Hocine Tandjaoui’s proem, Clamor/Clameur (Litmus Press, 2021).
In today’s episode of “Speaking Out of Place” we speak with Dr. Haley Duschinski and Mr. Imraan Mir, who people active in trying to grow global awareness of Kashmir and in working to secure human rights for the people of Kashmir. They give us important historical background on Kashmir, which is normally reduced to simply a place of struggle between India and Pakistan. To counter that image, Duschinski and Mir characterize Kashmir as a region with a deep and rich culture and history that is suffering under a brutal and anti-democratic occupation imposed and maintained by the state of India.
We talk about the evasive moves Modi’s India has made to create a state of permanent emergency which is hidden by “performative democracy,” greenwashing, and deceptive and false labeling of pro-rights activists as “terrorists.” And we learn how the global community can help.
Dr. Haley Duschinski is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Ohio University (Ph.D. Anthropology, Harvard University, 2004). A legal and political anthropologist, she has co-edited Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (2018), The Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies (2022), and The Palgrave Handbook of New Directions in Kashmir Studies (2023). Duschinski is a founding member of the Critical Kashmir Studies collective and an active member of the Kashmir Scholars Consultative and Advocacy Network (KSCAN).
Imraan Mir is a lawyer, entrepreneur and author. His Kashmir-related work involves research, writing and advocacy to increase understanding of historic and contemporary realities and to facilitate accountability for rights violations. He has done human rights-related work on Kashmir since the late 1990s independently and through collaborations with various organizations, including the Kashmir Law and Justice Project. He holds a J.D. from Harvard Law.
In November 20, 2015, a resolution presented to the members of the American Anthropological Association for a boycott of Israeli institutions narrowly missed adoption (2,384 in favor and 2,423 opposed; 49.6% - 50.4%). Responding to the new petition members submitted on March 3, the American Anthropological Association has scheduled a vote on the boycott of Israeli academic institutions from June 15-July 14.
In this episode of Speaking Out of Place we talk with two of the main scholar-activists involved in the campaign, who tell us why the American Anthropological Association must follow other academic organizations such as the American Studies Association in answering the call from Palestinian civil society for a boycott of Israeli institutions.
Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies, and Chair of the Governing Board of the Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. She also serves as Vice President and Vice Chair of the Board at The Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington DC. The recipient of numerous awards, including from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Harvard Academy for Area and International Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, she is the author of numerous journal articles published on topics ranging from the history of archaeology in Palestine to the question of race and genomics today.
Sami Hermez is director of the Liberal Arts Program and Associate Professor in residence of anthropology at Northwestern University in Qatar. His forthcoming book will be released in February 2024 with Stanford University Press titled, My Brother, My Land: A Story From Palestine, which is a creative nonfiction that chronicles the life of a Palestinian family living through ongoing Israeli occupation and dispossession. His first book published with Penn Press, War is Coming: Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon (2017), focused on the everyday life of political violence in Lebanon and how people recollect and anticipate this violence. He obtained his doctorate degree from the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University.
In today’s episode of “Speaking Out of Place” we talk with Professor Adam Aron, author of the book, “The Climate Crisis: Science, Impacts, Policy, Psychology, Justice, Social Movements.”
As the title of the book indicates, it is a systematic and thorough discussion of not simply the Climate Crisis, but also, and very importantly, all the key elements we need to know about to do effective activism to save our planet.
I speak with Adam first about the fact that science has shown that we are at a tipping point in the climate crisis—a point of no return. After that, we explore the psychological responses to that science, and how we might work toward changing our individual, collective, national, and international behaviors and actions to address the accelerating climate crisis.
Adam is a Professor in the Psychology Dept at UC San Diego. His research and teaching focus on the social science of collective action on the climate crisis. His climate activism has been through the Green New Deal at UC San Diego where he has worked on several campaigns such as fossil fuel divestment and also campus decarbonization via ElectrifyUC and he has also produced the documentary Coming Clean. Before switching to the climate crisis, Adam had a successful career in cognitive neuroscience. He earned his PhD from the University of Cambridge, and was a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA.
In this episode of Speaking Out of Place we talk with Ashley Dawson about his new co-edited book, Decolonize Conservation: Global Voices for Indigenous Self-Determination, Land, and a World in Common, an anthology of essays by Indigenous activists from the Global South arguing against “fortress conservation” and “protected areas” whose existence is predicated on displacing indigenous peoples, and false claims about the expected benefits of such violence. They argue: It’s not all humans who are destroying “nature”; it’s one particular way of life and ideology. In reality, we are part of nature and must stop pretending weare separate. This is a human crisis and not only a climate or environmental one.Protecting nature must come to be seen as a vital aspect of this wider issue—how to live and create a world in which a healthy and decent life.”
This episode is part of a new collaboration between Speaking Out of Place and The Creative Process, a Paris-based project that brings issues of art, culture, and politics to a world audience. We are excited by this partnership, and grateful to The Creative Process for producing this episode and sharing it through its global channels.
Ashley Dawson is Professor of English at the Graduate Center / City University of New York and the College of Staten Island. Recently published books of his focus on key topics in the Environmental Humanities, and include People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons(O/R, 2020), Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (Verso, 2017), and Extinction: A Radical History(O/R, 2016). Dawson is the author of a forthcoming book entitled Environmentalism from Below (Haymarket) and the co-editor of Decolonize Conservation! (Common Notions, 2023).
On today's episode of Speaking Out of Place, we speak with Naomi Oreskes, who is Henry Charles Lea professor of the History of Science and affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. She is a world-renown earth scientist, historian, and public speaker. Oreskes is a leading voice in the role of science in society, the reality of anthropogenic climate change, and the role of disinformation in blocking climate action.
In 2010, she and her co-author Eric Conway, published Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change, where they identified something called the “tobacco strategy” that became paradigmatic in terms of corporate efforts to debunk science.
This discovery led them to explore more deeply and more broadly the attack on science. They found that as science was demoted, the idea of market fundamentalism or the "magic of the market" became a mantra that covered up corporate malfeasance and killed progressive governmental policies that constrained capitalism and benefitted people and the environment.
In today's program we discuss Oreskes’ and Conway's new book, the Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe the Government and Love the Free Market.
On today’s episode of Speaking Out of Place, we talk with Professor J. Kēhaulani Kauanui and Professor Sunaina Maira, two people involved in the 2013 effort to get the American Studies Association to pass a resolution supporting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement for Palestinian rights, created by Palestinian civil society groups in 2005. Both Kauanui and Maira were named as two of several defendants in a lawsuit brought by disgruntled members of the ASA. Recently, the court dismissed the lawsuit. We hear about the legal case and the successful effort to pass the boycott resolution. We spend a great deal of the program talking about the significance of the struggle, and the victory.
J. Kēhaulani Kauanui is Professor of American Studies and affiliate faculty in Anthropology at Wesleyan University, where she teaches courses in critical Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, critical race studies, and anarchist studies. She is the author of Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Duke University Press 2008); Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism (Duke University Press 2018); and editor of Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders (University of Minnesota Press 2018). Kauanui is one of the six co-founders of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. And she is the recipient of the Western History Association’s 2022 American Indian History Lifetime Achievement Award.
Sunaina Maira is Professor of Asian American Studies at UC Davis and a founding organizer of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI). She does research in Arab and South Asian American studies and is the author of several books related to the Palestine justice movement such as The 9/11 Generation: Youth, Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror and Boycott!: The Academy and Justice for Palestine. Her book based on ethnographic research in Palestine is Jil [Generation] Oslo: Palestinian Hip Hop, Youth Culture, and the Youth Movement. Maira launched a section on West Asian American Studies in the Association for Asian American Studies has been faculty advisor of SJP and organizer with Faculty for Justice in Palestine.
Today we talk with Françoise Vergès and Jamille Pinheiro Dias about the difficulty of "decolonizing" the museum, and engaging passionately with another project--creating a "post-museum" dedicated to a poetics of a common world. Leaving behind the pretensions of a "universal museum," filled with dead objects, Vergès and Dias work toward a living, mobile, and heterogenous space of art production in unlikely places.
Françoise Vergès is a writer and decolonial antiracist feminist activist. A Reunionnese, she received an education that ran counter to the French hegemonic school from her anticolonial communist and feminist parents and the members of their organisations. She left Reunion for Algeria to obtain her high school diploma and then stayed. She moved to Paris, France, and was an activist in antiracist, anti imperialist and feminist movements. She became a professional journalist for a feminist magazine and traveled for the publishing house des femmes to collect testimonies of women fighting in the Global South. She received her Ph.D in Political Theory from Berkeley University in 1995. She has never held a teaching position in France but created the Chair Global South(s) at Collège d’études mondiales where she held workshops on different topics (2014-2018). She is the convener and curator of L’Atelier a collective and collaborative seminar/public performance with activist and artists of color. Recent publications include: Programme de désordre absolu. Décoloniser le musée (2023), A Feminist Theory of Violence (2021), De la violence coloniale dans l’espace public (2021), The Wombs of Women. Capital, Race, Feminism (2021), A Decolonial Feminism (2020).
Jamille Pinheiro Dias is currently the director of the Centre of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at University of London’s School of Advanced Study, where she also works as a Lecturer. In addition, she is a von der Heyden Fellow at the Franklin Humanities Institute's Amazon Lab at Duke University. Prior to joining the University of London, she worked as a Research Associate at the University of Manchester as part of the project Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America, funded by the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. Her studies involve environmental issues, Amazonian cultural production, Indigenous arts, and translation studies in Latin America, with a focus on Brazil. Prior to working in the UK, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Modern Languages at the University of São Paulo, where she also received a Ph.D. in Modern Languages. In addition, she was a visiting researcher in Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University, and a teaching assistant at the Institute of Brazilian Studies at the University of São Paulo.
Today on Speaking Out of Place I talk with the intellectual, writer, and activist Hilton Obenzinger about his remarkable life as all those things. He starts by talking about his earliest exposure to art and politics, as both a witness to and participant in such moments as the takeover of the Office of the President at Columbia University in 1968, the Farm Worker’s strike in California, the fight for the I-Hotel in Manilatown, activism around Indigenous rights in the 70s, to his work in the anti-apartheid movement and the anti-Zionist struggle for Palestinian rights, and finally to his recent work on Stanford’s Chinese Railroad Workers History project and his poetry on living through the pandemic, environmental crises, and the fascism of the Trump era. Winner of an American Book Award, and a published scholar, Hilton Obenzinger has been the embodiment of an engaged writer through some of the most important moments in US and world history.
Hilton Obenzinger writes poetry, fiction, criticism, and history. His books include Witness: 2017-2020, Treyf Pesach [Un-Kosher Passover], an autobiographical novel Busy Dying, How We Write: The Varieties of Writing Experience at Stanford University, Cannibal Eliot and the Lost Histories of San Francisco, American Palestine: Melville, Twain and the Holy Land Mania, New York on Fire [selected by The Village Voice as one of the best books of the year], and This Passover Or The Next I Will Never Be in Jerusalem, which received the American Book Award. Born in Brooklyn, he participated in the Columbia University rebellion of 1968, graduated in 1969, helped to operate a community printing press in San Francisco’s Mission District, and was active in the anti-imperialist, Native American, and Palestine solidarity movements. He taught writing, literature and American studies at Stanford University, and is Associate Director Emeritus of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America project.
In this episode of Speaking Out of Place, we talk with Malcolm Harris, author of a new book entitled, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. Working our way back from the recent meltdown of the Silicon Valley Bank and the massive, toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, to the founding of the city of Palo Alto by Leland Stanford as a haven from labor unrest in San Francisco and his first endeavor there, the world’s largest stock farm, to the founding of the university that bears his son’s name, we discover the ghostly presence of Capital.
From there we move to an in-depth study of Herbert Hoover and the Hoover Institution, and the formation of Silicon Valley itself.
Throughout, we find a common thread that links all. This thread is a continuous, if evolving, effort to sort out people into two groups--those that Nature has deemed superior, from those who are meant to serve. This is the “Palo Alto System.”
Inspired in part by the rash of suicides at Harris’s alma mater, Palo Alto High School, the author notes that the railroad tracks upon which these young people perished were laid by Leland Stanford, and that the Valley is haunted by the ghosts of people whose lives were destroyed by the “Palo Alto System.
We end by discussing his audacious proposal—to give the land back to the Muwekma Ohlone, the first of the dispossessed peoples.
Malcolm Harris is a freelance writer and the author of Kids These Days, Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit, and Palo Alto.
Recently the US State Department withdrew its nomination of eminent international human rights scholar Jim Cavallaro, solely on the basis of some tweets in which he called out Israeli apartheid and the undue influence of AIPAC (America-Israel Public Affairs Committee--a pro-Israel lobbying group). In 2019, Israel deported Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch, for issuing reports calling out similar human rights violations. In this episode, we talk to both of them about their individual cases, and then do a deep dive into the difficulties of exposing Israel's violations of human rights, and talk about ways the message is getting out, nonetheless.
James (Jim) Cavallaro is a visiting professor at Columbia, UCLA and Yale and a professor of the practice at Wesleyan University. He is also the Executive Director of the University Network for Human Rights. He has taught human rights law and practice for nearly a quarter century, most recently at Yale Law School (Spring 2020), Stanford Law School (2011-2019), and Harvard Law School (2002-2011). In June 2013, Cavallaro was elected to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. He served as President of that body from 2016-2017.
Professor Cavallaro has worked in human rights for more than three decades. He received his BA from Harvard University and his JD from Berkeley Law School. He also holds a doctorate in human rights and development (Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Seville, Spain). In 1994, he opened a joint office for Human Rights Watch and the Center for Justice and International Law in Rio de Janeiro and served as director, overseeing research, reporting, and litigation before the Inter-American system’s human rights bodies. In 1999, he founded the Global Justice Center, a leading Brazilian human rights NGO. Cavallaro has authored or co-authored dozens of books, reports, and articles on human rights issues, a list of which is available below. He is fluent in English, Spanish, and Portuguese and also speaks Italian and French.
Omar Shakir serves as the Israel and Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch, where he investigates human rights abuses in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza and has authored several major reports, including a 2021 report comprehensively documenting how Israeli authorities are committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution against millions of Palestinians. As a result of his advocacy, the Israeli government deported Omar in November 2019. Prior to his current role, he was a Bertha Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where he focused on US counterterrorism policies, including legal representation of Guantanamo detainees.
As the 2013-14 Arthur R. and Barbara D. Finberg Fellow at Human Rights Watch, he investigated human rights violations in Egypt, including the Rab’a massacre, one of the largest killings of protesters in a single day. A former Fulbright Scholar in Syria, Omar holds a JD from Stanford Law School, where he co-authored a report on the civilian consequences of US drone strikes in Pakistan as a part of the International Human Rights & Conflict Resolution Clinic, an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Affairs, and a BA in International Relations from Stanford.
On today’s show, a conversation with Dr Rabab Abdulhadi, who has recently won a major national award from the Middle East Studies Association for her lifetime of work.
Dr. Abdulhadi is an organic intellectual and a renowned scholar-activist. She is the founding director and Senior Scholar of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies (AMED) at the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University (SFSU).
Her publications include the influential and much-cited articles, “The Palestinian Women’s Autonomous Movement: Emergence, Dynamics & Challenges” (1998) and “Tread Lightly: Teaching Gender and Sexuality in Time of War” (2005); as well as the more recent, “Framing Resistance Call & Response: Reading Assata Shakur’s Black Revolutionary Radicalism in Palestine” (2018), and Israeli Settler Colonialism in Context: Celebrating (Palestinian) Death and Normalizing Gender and Sexual Violence (2019).
In 2017, Dr. Abdulhadi, along with Suzanne Adely (President of the National Lawyers Guild), Angela Davis, and Selma James (feminist activist and partner of the Black radical thinker C.L.R. James), co-authored an article in Mondoweiss titled, “Confronting apartheid has everything to do with feminism."
As a community organizer, she co-founded the Palestine Solidarity Committee and the Union of Palestinian Women’s Associations in North America; and served as a founding member of the recently launched Palestinian Feminist Collective.
In our conversation we talk about the institutional pressures she has worked under, and the slew of harassing frivolous lawsuits that have been leveled at her, and others who teach about Palestine, and the connections between Palestine work and all struggles for justice. We end by talking about the ways we can take on the burden of activism and lean on and learn from each other in struggle.
How does the automobile—the All American symbol of freedom--become part of a “cascading” process of unfreedom for recently incarcerated people? Livingston and Ross, members of the NYU Prison Education Research Lab, talk about how cars, a necessity for securing work for so many and a symbol of independence and mobility, are enmeshed within interlinked systems that create and perpetuate debt, precarity, and sometimes death. Through predatory lending, unscrupulous auto dealers, revenue-seeking and gratuitously harassing traffic stops and citations, and data systems built into the hardware and software of vehicles that feed into a number of dangerous data bases, the “open road” can become dangerous and deadly, especially for Black and Brown peoples, who often succumb to what Livingston calls the “power of capture.”
Against that bleak picture, Ross and Livingston tell stories of support networks and offer us important ways to bring about what they call “Mobility Justice.”
“As cornerstones of life under racial capitalism, the automobile and prison exemplify the ease with which the quotidian can become deadly. Livingston and Ross, with the support of formerly incarcerated peer researchers, have produced an extraordinary example of how critical carceral studies can enlighten, complicate and inspire.” Angela Y. Davis.
Andrew Ross is a social activist and professor at NYU, where he teaches in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Prison Education Program. A contributor to the Guardian, the New York Times, The Nation, and Al Jazeera, he is the author or editor of twenty-five books, including, most recently, Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing.
Julie Livingston is Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University. Her previous books include Self-devouring Growth: a Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa; Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic; and Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana. The recipient of numerous awards and prizes, in 2013 Livingston was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.
Today Professor Jennifer Freyd speaks out against institutional betrayal, specifically about issues of sexual harassment and violence. We talk about what happens when institutions of higher education, which are supposed to be nurturing young people, teaching them to be better citizens and contributors to society, end up betraying them when they are mistreated. We talk in particular about the effects this has on students who enter universities hoping to become professors themselves, only to be betrayed by their own departments. Jennifer helps us understand why both individuals and departments deny betrayal, and she makes a forceful argument for changing that state of things. She ends by talking about hope and the future, and the work of her non-profit Institute for Institutional Courage.
Jennifer J. Freyd, PhD, is a researcher, author, educator, and speaker. Freyd is the Founder and President of the Center for Institutional Courage, Professor Emerit of Psychology at the University of Oregon, and Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in the School of Medicine, Affiliated Faculty at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and Affiliated Faculty, Women's Leadership Lab, Stanford University. She is also a Member of the Advisory Committee, 2019-2023, for the Action Collaborative on Preventing Sexual Harassment in Higher Education, National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. Freyd was in 1989-90 and again in 2018-19 a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Freyd currently serves as the Editor of The Journal of Trauma & Dissociation.
Freyd is a widely published and renowned scholar known for her theories of betrayal trauma, institutional betrayal, institutional courage, and DARVO. She received her PhD in Psychology from Stanford University. The author or coauthor of over 200 articles and op-eds, Freyd is also the author of the Harvard Press award-winning book Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Her most recent book Blind to Betrayal, co-authored with Pamela J. Birrell, was published by John Wiley, with seven additional translations. In 2014, Freyd was invited two times to the U.S. White House due to her research on sexual assault and institutional betrayal. In 2021 Freyd and the University of Oregon settled Freyd’s precedent-setting equal pay lawsuit.
Freyd has received numerous awards including being named a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, an Erskine Fellow at The University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In April 2016, Freyd was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Trauma & Dissociation. Freyd was selected for the 2021 Christine Blasey Ford Woman of Courage Award by the Association for Women in Psychology.
On this episode of “Speaking Out of Place” we talk with eminent Middle East historian Joel Beinin on a range of topics that center on the fact that for some scholars, activism and scholarship are not only compatible—they are inextricably linked.
Joel will talk about his time as a union organizer in Detriot, working in the automobile industry, and how his learning Arabic was facilitated by talking with Arab autoworkers. He then talks about his first book on labor movements in Egypt. We spend some time talking about the particular challenges of teaching about the Middle East at a place like Stanford, and the effects of its historical conservatism, and current neoliberal trajectory. We end by talking about advice we would give undergraduate and graduate students today.
Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History, Emeritus at Stanford University. His research and writing focus on the social and cultural history and political economy of modern Egypt, Palestine, and Israel, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
He received his A.B. from Princeton University in 1970, A.M. from Harvard University in 1974, and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1982. He taught at Stanford from 1983 to 2019 with a hiatus as Director of Middle East Studies and Professor of History at the American University in Cairo in 2006-08. In 2002 he served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America.
Beinin has written or edited twelve books, among them: A Critical Political Economy of the Modern Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2021); co-edited with Bassam Haddad and Sherene Seikaly;Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt(Stanford University Press, 2016);Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa, (Stanford University Press, 1st ed. 2011, 2nd ed. 2013); co-edited with Frédéric Vairel; Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882-1954 (Princeton University Press, 1987), co-authored with Zachary Lockman; and Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli Occupation (South End Press, 1989) co-edited with Zachary Lockman.
His articles have been published in leading scholarly journals as well as Jacobin, Democracy in Exile, Jewish Currents, +972 webzine, Carnegie Papers, The Nation, Le Monde Diplomatique, Middle East Report, Jadaliyya, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Jose Mercury News, and several blogs.
Joel has been interviewed on Al-Jazeera TV, BBC radio, (US) National Public Radio, and many other TV and radio programs throughout the world as well by the global print media.
His work has been translated into Arabic, Hebrew, French, and Turkish.
In today's show I speak with Richard Falk about his recent autobiography—Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim. Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University (1961-2001) and Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, Queen Mary University London. Since 2002 has been a Research Fellow at the Orfalea Center of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Between 2008 and 2014 he served as UN Special Rapporteur on Israeli Violations of Human Rights in Occupied Palestine.
Falk has advocated and written widely about ‘nations’ that are captive within existing states, including Palestine, Kashmir, Western Sahara, Catalonia, Dombas.
He is Senior Vice President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, having served for seven years as Chair of its Board. He is Chair of the Board of Trustees of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. He is co-director of the Centre of Climate Crime, QMUL.
Falk has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times since 2008.
His recent books include (Re)Imagining Humane Global Governance (2014), Power Shift: The New Global Order (2016), Palestine Horizon: Toward a Just Peace (2017), Revisiting the Vietnam War (ed. Stefan Andersson, 2017), On Nuclear Weapons: Denuclearization, Demilitarization and Disarmament (ed. Stefan Andersson & Curt Dahlgren, 2019.
Praise for his autobiography include:
“This intimate and penetrating account of a remarkable life is rich in insights about topping ranging from the academic world to global affairs to prospects for livable society. A gripping story, with many lessons for a troubled world.”--Noam Chomsky
“Richard Falk is one of the few great public intellectuals and citizen pilgrims who has preserved his integrity and consistency in our dark and deep content times period this wise and powerful memoir is a gift that bestows us with a tear-soaked truth and blood-stained hope.” --Cornel West
“Richard Falk recounts a life well spent trying to bend the arc of international law toward global justice. A Don Quixote tilting nobly at real dragons. His culminating vision of a better and even livable future--a necessary utopia--evokes with urgent the slogan of Paris May 1968: ‘Be realistic: Demand the impossible’”--Daniel Ellsberg
While a visiting scholar at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Falk wrote his prescient 1972 book, This Endangered Planet: Prospects and Proposals for Human Survival.
Liza is a columnist at Jacobin and The New Republic, as well as a contributing writer at The Nation. In this podcast, Featherstone explains the structural challenges Democrats must overcome in order to meet the needs of ordinary people who are hurting—we discuss issues of crime, homelessness, childcare, and labor, taking Biden to task for folding on sick pay for rail workers, and seeing what positives can be derived from things like the Inflation Reduction Act and the surge in progressive young voters.
Liza Featherstone is the author of Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation, published by O/R Books in 2018, as well as Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart (Basic Books, 2004).
She co-authored Students Against Sweatshops (Verso, 2002) and editor of False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Verso, 2016). She’s currently editing a collection of Alexandra Kollontai’s work for OR Books and International Publishers, and writing the introduction to that volume.
Featherstone’s work has been published in Lux, TV Guide, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Ms., The American Prospect, Columbia Journalism Review, Glamour, Teen Vogue, Dissent, The Guardian, In These Times and many other publications.
Liza teaches in NYU’s Literary Reportage program as well as at Columbia University’s School for International and Public Affairs.
She is proud to be an active member of New York City Democratic Socialists of America and of UAW Local 7902.
Interviews with organizers, strikers, and faculty participating in the University of California strike, and their counterparts at the University and College Union strike in the UK give us critical background information on both, talk with us from the front lines, and urge for global strikes for decent wages, strong pensions, and an education that teaches us how to work for a better world. As you listen to these extended conversations, you will be learn how both strikes respond to precarious labor, casualization, wage discrimination against people of color, women, and people with disabilities, and the ballooning salaries of the administrative class, and how both university systems siphon money meant for education into real estate assets and other "fixes" for capital investment. You will the outraged, but also inspired. To contribute to the UC strikers, use PayPal: feeducrgradstrikers@gmail.com
An in-depth interview with scholar, activist, and poet Dr. Persis Karim, director of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University. Karim provides indispensable background information reaching back to 1979, explains the long history of gender apartheid in Iran and why today there has been an explosion of mass protests led by young women joined by tens of thousands of others, including rappers, educators, human rights workers, ethnic minorities, artists, children, and others. She also explains the tremendous gaps in Western media coverage and fills in missing information. She ends with a reading from her own poetry, and a plea to link these protests to all protests against authoritarian regimes.
Karim’s pioneering work in the emerging field of Iranian Diaspora Studies, primarily in literature, has helped to galvanize a wider engagement with transnational and interdisciplinary approaches, as well as to foster the work of younger scholars. She is the editor/co-editor of three anthologies of Iranian diaspora literature: A World Between: Poems, Short Stories and Essays by Iranian-Americans (1999); Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora (2006); and, Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian-American Writers (2013). She is currently completing a documentary film project: "The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life," which will be released in spring 2023. Her poetry has appeared in a number of national publications including Calalloo, Reed Magazine,The New York Times, the Raven's Perch, and Green Linden Press.
A dialogue between David Kyuman Kim and David Palumbo-Liu at Stanford, on the possibilities, or the impossibility, of doing radical work on race at universities. Is it best to work within the institution, or outside it--and how can we best keep hope alive? The inaugural episode of "Speaking Out of Place," announcing future episodes on Iran, Palestine, fighting domestic violence, and surviving institutional betrayal. Ideas for other topics? Contact @palumboliu@climatejustice.social