“I may not be able to find my family but it always made me feel a step closer to help others.” OUTSIDERS WITHIN is a landmark publication that explores transracial adoption and the heavy emotional and cultural toll on those who directly experience it. The volume has many contributors who explore transracial adoption through essays, fiction, poetry, and art. OUTSIDERS WITHIN is coedited by Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and Sun Yung Shin. This episode features Trenka in conversation with Ami Nafzger.

Jane Jeong Trenka was adopted from South Korea to Minnesota. She holds a master of public administration from Seoul National University and was instrumental in revising Korea’s adoption law in 2011. She is author of THE LANGUAGE OF BLOOD and FUGITIVE VISIONS and coauthor of CHILD-SELLING COUNTRY (in Korean) with Kihye Jeon Hong and Kyung-eun Lee. She lives in Korea.

Ami Inja Nafzger (aka Jin Inja) was adopted from Cheonju, South Korea, at the age of four and grew up in Wisconsin. She attended Augsburg College in Minnesota, graduating in social work, sociology, and Native American Indian studies. She founded Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link (GOA’L) in 1997. Nafzger is founder, president, and CEO of Adoptee Hub and works for the Department of Human Services (DHS) State of Minnesota as a Planning Director in the Business Integration Division for Children and Family Services.

LINKS:
Outsiders Within: z.umn.edu/outsiderswithin
Adoptee Hub: https://www.adopteehub.org/
G.O.A’.L.: Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link: https://goal.or.kr/

Outsiders Within: Korean adoptees Jane Jeong Trenka and Ami Nafzger share their stories.

Amid xenophobic challenges to America’s core value of welcoming the tired and the poor, Irina Aristarkhova calls for new forms of hospitality in her engagement with the works of eight international artists. In ARRESTED WELCOME, the first monograph on hospitality in contemporary art, she employs a feminist perspective and asks who, how, and what determines who is worthy of welcome. With a focus on lessons that contemporary artists teach about the potential of hospitality, Aristarkhova looks at Linda Hattendorf’s documentary The Cats of Mirikitani; the Serbian-born installation and performance artist Ana Prvački’s project The Greeting Committee Reports . . . ; American artist Faith Wilding’s performance Waiting; Taiwanese American artist Lee Mingwei’s aesthetics of hospitality; American bioartist Kathy High’s project Embracing Animal; Mithu Sen’s artworks that explore questions of radical hospitality and crossing borders; Pippa Bacca and Silvia Moro’s art project Brides on Tour; and Ken Aptekar’s exhibition Neighbours in Lübeck, Germany. 

Aristarkhova is professor at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is author of Arrested Welcome: Hospitality in Contemporary Art and Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture. 

She is joined today by Jorge Lucero, an artist born, raised and educated in Chicago. He is chair and associate professor of art education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Lucero's books include Mere and Easy: Collage as a Critical Practice in Pedagogy, Teacher as Artist-in-Residence: The Most Radical Form of Expression to Ever Exist, and the forthcoming What Happens at the Intersection of Conceptual Art and Teaching?. Lucero is coeditor of the international journal Visual Arts Research and sits on the editorial boards for the Journal of Social Theory and Art Education, the Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education, and the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy.

This conversation was recorded in February 2021.

More about ARRESTED WELCOME: z.umn.edu/arrestedwelcome
Irina Aristarkhova: https://stamps.umich.edu/people/detail/irina_aristarkhova
Jorge Lucero: www.jorgelucero.com

An open-access edition of ARRESTED WELCOME is available at https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/arrested-welcome.

Who is welcome? Hospitality and contemporary art.

Jamie Lorimer’s THE PROBIOTIC PLANET calls for a rethinking of artificial barriers between science and policy and a sweeping overview of diverse probiotic approaches. Bruce Clarke’s GAIAN SYSTEMS is a pioneering exploration of the complex evolution of Gaia’s many variants. In a conversation that ranges from Lynn Margulis to science fiction, neocybernetics to COVID-19, Lorimer and Clarke ultimately seek insight into solving an environmental crisis of humanity’s own making. This conversation was recorded in November 2020.


BOOKS:
The Probiotic Planet: z.umn.edu/theprobioticplanet
Gaian Systems: z.umn.edu/gaiansystems


REFERENCES:
Helminth, a species of parasitic worm
Heather Paxson on raw milk cheese
Bruno Latour
Isabelle Stengers
Donna Haraway
James Lovelock
Lynn Margulis
Lyndisfarne Conferences
Stewart Brand
O’Neill cylinder
William Gibson’s Neuromancer
Stanisław Lem
Frank Herbert’s Dune

Planetary probiotics and Gaia’s variants.

The dynamics of adoptee communities have shifted in the decades since the first edition of OUTSIDERS WITHIN was published in 2006, yet the volume continues to provide critical perspectives that have gained renewed relevance during contemporary crises. Here, three writers and artists, Korean and Vietnamese adoptees who were adopted across geographic borders in the 1970s, talk isolation, racism, identity struggle, adoption policy, and how the Internet has changed the ways connection can be found. This conversation was recorded in May 2021.

Jane Jeong Trenka is an activist and award-winning writer who was adopted from South Korea to Minnesota in 1972. She has a master of public administration from Seoul National University and was instrumental in revising Korea’s adoption law in 2011. She is author of the memoir ‘The Language of Blood’ and co-editor of ‘Outsiders Within,’ published in a new edition by University of Minnesota Press.

Dr. Indigo Willing is a sociologist, lecturer, and creator of the Adopted Vietnamese International (AVI) network for adoptees from the Vietnamese community and war refugee generation. She lives in Australia.

kimura byol-nathalie lemoine is an artist, activist, and archivist, and a Korean-born adoptee who grew up in Belgium and currently resides in Montreal. kimura*lemoine is co-founder of Euro-Korean League and an active member and archivist for the interracial adoptee community.

Outsiders Within: z.umn.edu/outsiderswithin

Korean and Vietnamese adoptees on the intimate racialized politics of transracial adoption

”Adapting Balzac is no small feat for any filmmaker” (Variety)—or any translator. LOST ILLUSIONS and LOST SOULS are two newly translated volumes in Honoré de Balzac’s vast HUMAN COMEDY, a sprawling and interconnected fictional portrait of early nineteenth-century France. Keenly attuned to the acerbic charm and subtleties of Balzac’s prose, these editions are invaluable resources for today’s readers as they navigate the author’s copious allusions to classical and contemporaneous politics and literature. In this episode, Raymond N. MacKenzie is interviewed by University of Minnesota Press director Doug Armato about Balzac’s incomparable style and the intricacies of translation. (Spoiler alert: Key plot points from Lost Illusions and Lost Souls are discussed.)

Other University of Minnesota Press translations by MacKenzie include:
Red and Black (Stendhal), forthcoming in summer 2022
Italian Chronicles (Stendhal)
Diaboliques (Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly)
Graziella (Alphonse de Lamartine)
Brouhaha (Lionel Ruffel)

Balzac in translation: Portraits of a turbulent 19th-century France

Outsiders Within is a volume of essays, fiction, poetry, and art by transracially adopted writers from around the world who tackle difficult questions about how to survive the racist and ethnocentric worlds they inhabit. The volume was first published in 2006 and released in a new edition in 2021: a year in which reproduction and adoption politics have been spotlighted anew.

In this episode, three transracial adoptees talk about what society often gets wrong about adoption.

Sun Yung Shin was born in Seoul, Korea, and raised in the Chicago area. She is an award-winning poet, writer, and cultural worker, whose books include Unbearable Splendor and What We Hunger For. She lives in Minneapolis.

Shannon Gibney is a writer, educator, activist, and award-winning author. She was adopted by white parents in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1975. Gibney is a professor of English at Minneapolis College. Her forthcoming novel Botched explores themes of transracial adoption through speculative memoir.

JaeRan Kim was born in South Korea and adopted to the United States in 1971. She is associate professor at the University of Washington, Tacoma, in the social work program. She is a contributor to the volume The Complexities of Race (NYU Press), and her blog, Harlow’s Monkey, is one of the longest-running transracial adoption blogs in the US.

What society gets wrong about transracial adoption: Sun Yung Shin, Shannon Gibney, and JaeRan Kim.

Land privatization has been a longstanding and ongoing settler colonial process separating Indigenous peoples from their traditional homelands, with devastating consequences. ALLOTMENT STORIES is an edited collection that dives into this conflict, creating a complex conversation out of narratives of Indigenous communities resisting allotment and other dispossessive land schemes. The volume’s editors, Daniel Heath Justice and Jean M. O’Brien, are here to talk about the urgency of these conversations on dispossession and repossession, which are not always stories of easy heroes and easy villains; and also discuss considerations that go into publishing an edited collection.


Raised in traditional Ute territory in Colorado and now living in shíshálh territory in British Columbia, Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation) is professor of Critical Indigenous Studies and English at the University of British Columbia, xwməθkwəy̓əm territory. He is author of Why Indigenous Literatures Matter and Our Fire Survives the Storm (Minnesota, 2005).

Jean M. O’Brien (White Earth Ojibwe) is Distinguished McKnight and Northrop Professor in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota within Dakota homelands. Her books include Dispossession by Degrees and Firsting and Lasting (Minnesota, 2010).


Episode note: Brief references are made to the book’s cover designer and acquisitions editor; they are, respectively, Catherine Casalino and Jason Weidemann.


References:
-General (Dawes) Allotment Act of 1887 in the United States, which allowed the federal government to break up tribal lands.
-McGirt v. Oklahoma, in which the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s reservation boundaries in current-day Oklahoma had not been extinguished by nineteenth-century allotment legislation.
-Cobell v. Salazar settlement’s Land Buy-Back Program for Tribal Nations.


ALLOTMENT STORIES is a volume that features contributions from Jennifer Adese, Megan Baker, William Bauer Jr., Christine Taitano DeLisle, Vicente M. Diaz, Sarah Biscarra Dilley, Marilyn Dumont, Munir Fakher Eldin, Nick Estes, Pauliina Feodoroff, Susan E. Gray, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Rauna Kuokkanen, Sheryl R. Lightfoot, Kelly McDonough, Ruby Hansen Murray, Tero Mustonen, Darren O’Toole, Shiri Pasternak, Dione Payne, Joseph M. Pierce, Khal Schneider, Argelia Segovia Liga, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Jameson R. Sweet, Michael P. Taylor, Candessa Tehee, and Benjamin Hugh Velaise.

Allotment Stories: Daniel Heath Justice and Jean M. O'Brien

“Capitalism defeated traditional societies because it was more exciting than they were. But now there is something more exciting than capitalism: its destruction.” In the face of things with true power (capitalism, the law, public opinion, etc.), philosophy is not provisioned to battle them head-on. But it can wage “a guerrilla campaign against them,” writes Andrew Culp (referencing Deleuze) in his new book A GUERRILLA GUIDE TO REFUSAL. Harnessing critical theory, this book takes us on a journey through a subterranean network of communiques, military documents, contemporary art, political slogans, adversarial blogs, and captive media. This conversation among scholars traces a nonfascist life at the end of the world as we know it.



Andrew Culp is professor of media history and theory in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. He is author of A Guerrilla Guide to Refusal (2022) and Dark Deleuze (2016).

Will Conway is a PhD candidate whose research centers around disability, biopolitics, and theories of resistance.

Jose Rosales is an independent researcher. With Claire Fontaine and Iman Ganji, they are co-author of Foreigners Everywhere and the author of 'Communism as the Riddle Posed to History' in The Double Binds of Neoliberalism (Rowan & Littlefield, 2022), as well as various other texts that can be found online. Currently, they are co-editor (alongside Andreas Petrossiants) of the multi-volume series, Diversity of Aesthetics. 

Violet is a queer independent researcher based in India working on theories of resistance, biopolitics, and destituent communism.



References:
Gilles Deleuze
Michel Foucault
Arlette Farge
May 68
Jean Genet
Guy Hocquenghem
Johann Most
Lucy Parsons
Friedrich Engels
Paul B. Preciado (and “Marcos”)
Christopher Chitty (Sexual Hegemony)
Karl Marx
Jacques Derrida
Roberto Esposito
Antonio Negri
Félix Guattari
Bernadette Corporation’s Get Rid of Yourself (film)
Edward Said
Eqbal Ahmad (Confronting Empire)
Frantz Fanon
Robin D. G. Kelley (Race Rebels)
Homi Bhabha
Fred Moten
Nahum Dimitri Chandler (paraontology)
Claire Fontaine
Tiqqun
Saidiya Hartman
Kwame Ture
Nanni Balestrini (The Unseen)

     

Keywords: archive, power, surveillance, cybernetics, refusal, political, political control, philosophy, anarchy, class, class war, transformation



Several references are made to specific current events, and as such we want to mention the date of this recording: March 31, 2022.

A field guide to a nonfascist life at the end of the world as we know it

Exploring new concepts of the relationship between form and function while thinking through object-oriented ontology (OOO), Graham Harman (ARCHITECTURE AND OBJECTS) deepens the exchange between architecture and philosophy, providing a new roadmap to OOO’s influence on the language and practice of contemporary architecture.

Art after Nature is a series from University of Minnesota Press that engages with the politics and contradictions of the Anthropocene. Each volume aims to provide the opportunity to creatively engage with new and alternative discourses at the intersection of art, science, and philosophy. More: z.umn.edu/artafternature.



Graham Harman is distinguished professor of philosophy at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Los Angeles, and author of many books, including Architecture and Objects; Speculative Realism; and Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything.

Dr. Giovanni Aloi is an author, educator, and curator specializing in the representation of nature and the environment in art. Aloi is editor-in-chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture.

Caroline Picard is a writer, cartoonist, curator, and executive director of Green Lantern Press.



Episode references:
Object-oriented ontology (OOO)
Bruno Latour
Martin Heidegger
Jacques Derrida
Gilles Deleuze
David Ruy
Aristotle
Immanuel Kant
Clement Greenberg
Joanna Malinowska (exhibit, Time of Guerrilla Metaphysics)
Edmund Husserl
Michael Fried
Aldo Rossi
Jeffrey Kipnis
Michael Young (Young & Ayata)
Mark Foster Gage 
Tom Wiscombe
Marcel Duchamp

Architecture and Objects with Graham Harman (Art after Nature 3)

How is it possible that you are—simultaneously—cells, atoms, a body, quarks, a component in an ecological network, a moment in the thermodynamic dispersal of the sun, and an element in the gravitational whirl of galaxies? Joshua DiCaglio’s SCALE THEORY provides a foundational theory of scale that explains how scale works, the parameters of scalar thinking, and how scale reconfigures objects, subjects, relationships—while teaching us to think in terms of scale, no matter where our interests may lie. DiCaglio is joined here by author Dorion Sagan in a dazzling conversation about how a theory of scale might challenge perspectives on space and time, philosophy, innerness, psychedelics—with careful attention to scientific thinking as well as fascination and mysticism, much attuned to the way scale transforms both reality and ourselves.



Joshua DiCaglio is assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University.

Dorion Sagan is an award-winning science writer, editor, and theorist. He is the son of the astronomer Carl Sagan and the biologist Lynn Margulis.



References and citations:
-Scale Theory (Joshua DiCaglio)
-Cosmic Apprentice (Dorion Sagan)
-Dazzle Gradually (Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan)
-Cosmos (Carl Sagan)
-Powers of Ten video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0)
-Inner Life of a Cell video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKW4F0Nu-UY)
-Jakob von Uexküll
-Microcosmos (Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan)
-Symbiotic Planet (Lynn Margulis)
-Simon Levin
-Samuel Butler
-Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, editors); Sagan has a contribution in this volume.
-The Philosophy of Science Fiction: Henri Bergson and the Fabulations of Philip K. Dick (James Edward Burton)
-Darwin’s Pharmacy (Richard Doyle)
-Friedrich Nietzsche
-Luigi Fantappiè
-Molecular Capture (Adam Nocek)

Dorion Sagan and Joshua DiCaglio on the cosmic challenge of scale.

“White people passed laws specifically in order to take away this land from our people. And then we did these other things in order to try to survive.” ALLOTMENT STORIES is a volume that collects more than two dozen chronicles of white imperialism and Indigenous resistance, highlighting how Indigenous peoples have consistently engaged creativity to sustain collective ties, kinship relations, and cultural commitments in the face of land privatization. Two contributors to this volume, Sarah Biscarra Dilley and Joseph M. Pierce, are here today to share their pieces of this history.


Sarah Biscarra Dilley (yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini) is an artist, educator, and PhD candidate
in Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis, nitspu tititʸu
tsʔitɨnɨ patwin, in the unceded homeland of the Patwin-speaking
people (unratified Treaty “J” region).

Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation) is associate professor in the Department of
Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. He is the author of
Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890–1910
and, with S.J Norman (Koori, Wiradjuri descent), cocurator of the Indigenous-led
performance series Knowledge of Wounds.



ALLOTMENT STORIES: Indigenous Land Relations under Settler Siege is a collection edited by Daniel Heath Justice and Jeani O’Brien. More info: z.umn.edu/allotmentstories.

Allotment Stories: Sarah Biscarra Dilley and Joseph M. Pierce

Lichens are composite organisms made of a fungus and an alga or cyanobacteria thriving in a mutually beneficial relationship. The Lichen Museum looks to these complex organisms, remarkable for their symbiosis, diversity, longevity, and adaptability, as models for relations rooted in collaboration and nonhierarchical structures. Author A. Laurie Palmer channels the personal, the scientific, the philosophical, and the poetic to imagine a radical new approach to human interconnection. Palmer is joined in conversation with Art after Nature series editors Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard.


A. Laurie Palmer is an artist and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.


Dr. Giovanni Aloi is an author, educator, and curator specializing in the representation of nature and the environment in art. Aloi is editor-in-chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture.


Caroline Picard is a writer, cartoonist, curator, and executive director of Green Lantern Press.


Praise for The Lichen Museum:
"A deeply engaging, provocative, humorous, and moving account of why we should pay more attention to lichens. As lichens can be found anywhere, the entire surface of the earth becomes the lichen museum." —Heather Davis, author of Plastic Matter


"Meditative and inquisitive." —Foreword


"Reading this work feels like taking a series of walks with a particularly curious and sensitive companion, consistently attentive to otherwise neglected facets of the actual environment." —e-flux


Learn more about The Lichen Museum at the University of Minnesota Press website. upress.umn.edu

The Lichen Museum with A. Laurie Palmer (Art after Nature 4)

Focusing on Friedrich Nietzsche’s reception of the life sciences of his day (including concerns with insects and the emergent social properties they exhibit) and his reflections on technology—research areas as central to Nietzsche’s work as they are to posthumanism—Edgar Landgraf provides fresh readings of Nietzsche and a critique of posthumanist and transhumanist philosophies in his new book, Nietzsche’s Posthumanism. Here, Landgraf is joined in conversation with Christian Emden and Stefan Herbrechter.



Edgar Landgraf is distinguished research professor of German at Bowling Green State University. He is author of Nietzsche’s Posthumanism and Improvisation as Art, and coeditor of Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism and Play in the Age of Goethe.

Christian Emden is Frances Moody Newman Professor at Rice University where he teaches German intellectual history and political thought. He is author of several books on Nietzsche, including Nietzsche’s Naturalism and Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body.

Stefan Herbrechter is former Reader in Cultural Theory at Coventry University and former professor of English and cultural studies at Heidelberg University in Germany. He is an independent scholar of critical posthumanism and author of several books including Before Humanity and Posthumanism.



Episode references:
Friedrich Nietzsche
Cary Wolfe
Baruch Spinoza
Jane Bennett
Alfred Espinas
Bernard Stiegler
Ernst Kapp
Charles Darwin
Rosi Braidotti
Francesca Ferrando
Patricia MacCormack
Tamar Sharon 


Reading list:
Vibrant Matter / Jane Bennett
On Animal Societies / Alfred Espinas
Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy / Vanessa Lemm
Meeting the Universe Halfway / Karen Barad
Nietzsche’s Naturalism / Christian J. Emden
Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body / Christian J. Emden
How We Became Posthuman / N. Katherine Hayles
Staying with the Trouble / Donna Haraway
Posthumanism / Stefan Herbrechter
The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism / Arthur Kroker
Insect Media / Jussi Parikka
Before the Law / Cary Wolfe


Keywords: Nietzsche, posthumanism, transhumanism, critical posthumanism, swarm theory, insects, history of technology, human agency, posthumanist ethics, posthumanist politics

On Nietzsche and posthumanist philosophy

In Gramsci at Sea, author Sharad Chari asks how the environmental crisis of the oceans is linked to legacies of capitalism and imperialism across and within the oceans. Chari reads Antonio Gramsci as a thinker of the oceanic crisis, drawing on the philosopher’s prison notes and questions concerning waves of imperial power in the inter-war oceans of his time. Here, Chari is joined in conversation with Charne Lavery, Melissa Marschke, and Philippe Le Billon.


Sharad Chari is associate professor of geography and critical theory at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of Gramsci at Sea and Fraternal Capital.

Charne Lavery is senior lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. She is author of Writing Ocean Worlds.

Melissa Marschke is professor at the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa. She is author of Life, Fish and Mangroves.

Philippe Le Billon is professor in the Department of Geography and the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. He is author of Wars of Plunder.




Persons and works referenced:
-Fernando Coronil
-The Many-Headed Hydra by Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh
-Meg Samuelson, “Thinking with Sharks,” Australian Humanities Review
-Matthew Shutzer
-Gavin Capps
-Damien Hirst’s shark tanks
-Moby Dick by Herman Melville (character of Pip)
-Ellen Gallagher
-Katherine McKittrick
-Drexciya
-John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea
-Kamau Brathwaite’s “tidalectics”


More about the book:
Gramsci at Sea is available from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition may be read for free online at manifold.umn.edu.

Gramsci at Sea

“There is always some moment when other-than-human life bursts into presence amid the clamor of urban routine.” —Maan Barua, Lively Cities

One of the fundamental dimensions of urbanization is its radical transformation of nature. The book Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology departs from conventions of urban studies to argue that cities are lived achievements forged by a multitude of entities, drawing attention to a suite of beings, human and nonhuman, that make up the material politics of city making. From macaques and cattle in Delhi to invasive parakeet colonies in London, author Maan Barua examines the rhythms, paths, and agency of nonhumans across the city. Barua is joined here in conversation with Sandra Jasper.


Maan Barua is a university lecturer in human geography at the University of Cambridge.

Sandra Jasper, a geographer and urbanist, is assistant professor of geography and gender at Humboldt University of Berlin.

References:
Matthew Gandy
Tom Fry
Garry Marvin
Vinciane Despret
Anindya Sinha
ARCH+ exhibit Cohabitation: A Manifesto for the Solidarity of Non-Humans and Humans in Urban Space (https://archplus.net/de/cohabitation-EN/)
Yi-Fu Tuan
Deleuze
Charles Elton
Marx
Laura Fortunato
Sylvia Federici



Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Imagining a new—human and nonhuman—grammar of urban life.

Benjamin Meiches explores the role of animals laboring alongside humans (mine-clearance dogs, milk-producing cows and goats, disease-identifying rats) in humanitarian operations, generating new ethical possibilities of care in humanitarian practice—and opening up new ethical ways to think about being human in terms of how we interact with nonhuman animals. Meiches, author of Nonhuman Humanitarians, is joined here in conversation with Stefanie Fishel.


Benjamin Meiches is associate professor of politics at the Univeristy of Washington-Tacoma. He is author of Nonhuman Humanitarians: Animal Interventions in Global Politics and The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide. 

Stefanie Fishel is lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. Fishel is author of The Microbial State: Global Thriving and the Body Politic and contributor to the edited volume The Long 2020.



EPISODE REFERENCES:
-Emmanuel Levinas, “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,” in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (trans. Sean Hand)
-Heifer International (organization)
-J. M. Coetzee / The Lives of Animals
-Brian Massumi / What Animals Teach Us about Politics
-Liisa Malkki / The Need to Help
-Timothy Morton / Dark Ecology
-Timothy Morton / Ecology without Nature
-David Shannon / Duck on a Bike
-Jack Halberstam / Wild Things
-Eugene Thacker / In the Dust of This Planet

Care is more than human—it's creaturely.

In Visible Archives is a book that explores a number of feminist and cultural touchstones of the 1980s and examines how visual culture interacts with these pivotal moments. Author Margaret Galvan goes deep into the archives to bring together a decade’s worth of research that includes comics, collages, photographs, drawings, and other media produced by women including Nan Goldin, Alison Bechdel, Lee Marrs, and Gloria Anzaldúa. Galvan demonstrates how women represented their bodies and sexualities on their own terms and created visibility for new, diverse identities. Galvan is joined here in conversation with Anna Peppard and Ramzi Fawaz.


Margaret Galvan is assistant professor of English at the University of Florida and author of In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s.

Anna Peppard is a writer, researcher, podcaster, and educator. Peppard is an adjunct lecturer in the department of Communication, Popular Culture, and Film at Brock University and editor of Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero.

Ramzi Fawaz is an award-winning queer cultural critic, public speaker, and educator. Fawaz is a Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and author of Queer Forms and The New Mutants.



Episode references:
Trina Robbins
Hillary Chute / Graphic Women
Gloria Anzaldúa / Borderlands and This Bridge Called My Back
Alison Bechdel
Nan Goldin
Diary (1982) from the Barnard Sex Conference (Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, Marybeth Nelson)
Kristen Hogan / The Feminist Bookstore Movement
Lee Marrs / The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp
Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing (exhibit)
Roberta Gregory
Maria Cotera / Chicana por mi Raza (digital project)
Chicana Movidas / edited by Dionne Espinoza, María Eugenia Cotera, and Maylei Blackwell



In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s is available from University of Minnesota Press. 
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/in-visible-archives
This book has an open-access Manifold edition that is free to read online.
https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/in-visible-archives


"Margaret Galvan asks all the right questions about queer and feminist visual storytelling from the 1980s: Where were these works situated? How did communities use them? How have they been archived? Both commentary upon as well as an integral part of the activist project begun by the creators themselves, In Visible Archives helps keep these remarkable works visible for us all."
—Justin Hall, California College of the Arts, editor of No Straight Lines

"This wonderful book demonstrates the critical importance of community-based archives. Utilizing primary source materials, Margaret Galvan has produced an original and consequential contribution to the history of the feminist sex wars, and her attention to the visual aspects of those documents provides long overdue recognition to the period’s artists, designers, and activists."
—Gayle Rubin, University of Michigan

Comics, visual culture, and feminism in the 1980s

What is fossil civilization? In the book No More Fossils, Dominic Boyer tells the story of how we came to rationalize fossil fuel use through successive phases of sucropolitics (plantation sugar), carbopolitics (industrial coal), and petropolitics (oil and plastics), showing what tethers us to petroculture today and what it will take to overcome the forces that mire us in place. What can we do to make electroculture a more just and sustainable alternative? In this episode, Boyer is joined in conversation about modern energy politics with Cara Daggett.



Dominic Boyer is an anthropologist, media maker, and environmental researcher who teaches at Rice University. His books include No More Fossils, Energopolitics, and Hyposubjects.

Cara Daggett is associate professor of political science at Virginia Tech and author of The Birth of Energy.



References:
The Birth of Energy / Cara Daggett
Anna Tsing
Carbon Democracy / Timothy Mitchell
Michel Foucault on biopower
Sweetness and Power / Sidney Mintz
Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History / Susan Buck-Morss
Fossil Capital / Andreas Malm
15-Minute City
John Locke
Alexander Dunlap on Fossil Fuel+
Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More / Alexei Yurchak
Staying with the Trouble / Donna Haraway
Ariella Azoulay
Kyle Powys Whyte
Geontologies / Elizabeth Povinelli
Low Carbon Pleasure / a collaborative experimental art and performance project by Dominic Boyer, Cymene Howe, and others
Stacy Alaimo / ecophilia



No More Fossils is available from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu.

Sugar, coal, oil: No more fossils.

More than twenty years ago, a bizarre confluence of meteorological events resulted in the most damaging blowdown in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness’s history. It traveled 1,300 miles and lasted 22 hours, flattening nearly 500,000 acres of the Superior National Forest. Hundreds of campers and paddlers were stranded and dozens injured; amazingly, no one died. The historic storm ultimately reshaped the region’s forests in ways we have yet to fully understand. Here, author Cary J. Griffith is joined in conversation with scientist Lee Frelich and Peter Leschak, who was involved in the response and rescue effort.



Cary Griffith is author of several novels and four books of nonfiction, including Gunflint Falling: Blowdown in the Boundary Waters and Gunflint Burning: Fire in the Boundary Waters. He is recipient of a Minnesota Book Award and a Midwest Book Award.

Peter Leschak was chief of the French Township fire department in Side Lake, Minnesota, for thirty years. He has written ten books and has worked in a variety of wildfire-related capacities and held positions of leadership in the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Forest Service.

Lee Frelich is director of the Center for Forest Ecology at the University of Minnesota. He is listed among the top 1% of scientists in the Web of Science, Ecology, and Environment and has authored more than 200 publications, and has been featured in the New York Times, Newsweek, and the Washington Post.



Gunflint Falling: Blowdown in the Boundary Waters is available from University of Minnesota Press.

"In the tradition of The Perfect Storm, Cary J. Griffith brings readers into the Boundary Waters moment by moment as an epic gale sweeps through. Ample maps and in-depth interviews with witnesses both immerse us in one terrifying day and offer a glimpse of the past and future of Minnesota’s boreal forest."
—Kim Todd, author of Sensational: The Hidden History of America’s “Girl Stunt Reporters”

"In Gunflint Falling, Cary J. Griffith provides an accurate, comprehensive narrative of those impacted by one of the region’s most devastating storms. The damage and pain brought by the derecho storm was more severe than anything previously experienced in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The reader is taken into the personal experiences of the injured and those searching for them for fourteen days in the million-acre wilderness, and Griffith’s narrative of these experiences demonstrates how, when faced with an emergency, we come together to help one another."
—Jim Sanders, retired forest supervisor, Superior National Forest (1996-2011), USDA Forest Service

Blowdown in the Boundary Waters

John Arena examines the more than two-decade struggle to privatize public schools in Newark, New Jersey—a conflict that is raging in cities across the country. Arena’s book Expelling Public Schools reveals the political rise of Cory Booker and Ras Baraka and what this particular case study illuminates about contemporary post-civil rights Black politics. Here, Arena is joined in conversation with David Forrest.


John (Jay) Arena is associate professor of sociology at CUNY’s College of Staten Island. Arena is author of Expelling Public Schools: How Antiracist Politics Enable School Privatization in Newark and Driven from New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization.

David Forrest is associate professor of politics at Oberlin College. He is author of A Voice but No Power: Organizing for Social Justice in Minneapolis.


Works and scholars referenced:
Adolph Reed Jr. (Stirrings in the Jug)
David M. Kotz (The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism)
Cedric Johnson
Frances Fox Piven (Challenging Authority)
Jane McAlevey (No Shortcuts)
Preston H. Smith II (Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis)
Sharon Kurtz (Workplace Justice)
Marc Doussard and Greg Schrock (Justice at Work)
Kristen Buras (Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space)
Touré Reed (Toward Freedom)
Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Laurence Cox (We Make Our Own History)
Colin Barker, Laurence Cox, John Krinsky, and Alf Gunvald Nilsen, editors (Marxism and Social Movements)
Rosa Luxemburg (Rosa Luxemburg Speaks)
Chris Maisano (“What Does Revolution Mean in the 21st Century?”, Jacobin)
Mark R. Beissinger (The Revolutionary City)


People and organizations referenced:
Cory Booker
Chris Christie
Ras Baraka
Newark’s downtown Teachers Village complex
Sharpe James
Cami Anderson
Christopher Cerf
Randi Weingarten
Albert Shanker
Karen Lewis
Al Moussab
Newark Education Workers



This episode was recorded in September 2023.


Expelling Public Schools: How Antiracist Politics Enable School Privatization in Newark is available from University of Minnesota Press.

"Expelling Public Schools offers a fascinating look into the racial politics of corporate school reform in Newark Public Schools. John Arena takes a long view—just over two decades—and examines the reform movements and countermovements in the district from the top down and the bottom up. In assessing corporate school reform efforts under mayors Cory Booker and Ras Baraka, this deeply researched book illuminates the mechanisms that maintain educational inequality."
—Rand Quinn, author of Class Action: Desegregation and Diversity in San Francisco Schools


"It is rare to encounter a work that treats actually existing Black life, an approach best articulated by Cedric Johnson, to critically address contemporary Black urban regimes. Thoughtful, careful, and incisive, Expelling Public Schools does just that. In this moment when antiracism (and surface critiques of antiracism) is rife, John Arena’s work provides a wonderful tonic."
—Lester Spence, author of Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip-hop and Black Politics

Expelling public schools: Antiracist politics and school privatization.

During the past decade, new oil plays have unsettled energy landscapes and imaginaries in the US. Settling the Boom, a volume of essays, studies how the disruptive forces of an oil boom in the northern Great Plains of Williston, North Dakota, are contained through the extension of settler temporalities, reassertions of heteropatriarchy, and the tethering of life to the volatility of oil and its cruel optimisms. Here, the book’s coeditors Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun are joined in conversation.


Mary E. Thomas is associate professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at The Ohio State University. She is coeditor of Settling the Boom, coauthor of Urban Geography, and author of Multicultural Girlhood.

Bruce Braun is professor of geography at the University of Minnesota. He is coeditor of Settling the Boom and Political Matter, and author of The Intemperate Rainforest.




Episode references:
Cruel Optimism / Lauren Berlant
Pollution Is Colonialism / Max Liboiron
White Earth (film)
Jessica Christy, Through the Window exhibition

Location of focus:
Western North Dakota, including Willison (Williston Basin) and Dickinson, within the Bakken Formation.




Settling the Boom: The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil, is available from University of Minnesota Press. This edited collection includes contributions from Morgan Adamson, Kai Bosworth, Thomas S. Davis, and Jessica Lehman.

The disruptive forces of an oil boom.

Masculinity in Transition is a book that moves the study of masculinity away from an overriding preoccupation with cisnormativity, whiteness, and heteronormativity, and toward a wider and more generative range of embodiments, identifications, and ideologies. Author K. Allison Hammer’s bold rethinking of masculinity and its potentially toxic effects lays bare the underlying fragility of normative masculinity. Here, Hammer is joined in conversation with Kale Bantigue Fajardo. This episode was recorded in late fall of 2023.



K. Allison Hammer (they/them) is assistant professor and coordinator of women, gender, and sexuality studies at Southern Illinois University. Hammer is author of Masculinity in Transition.

Kale Bantigue Fajardo (he/him) is associate professor of American studies and Asian American studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Fajardo is author of Filipino Crosscurrents: Oceanographies of Seafaring, Masculinities, and Globalization.



REFERENCES:
The Politics of Friendship / Jacques Derrida
The Feeling of Kinship / David Eng
Men in Place / Miriam J. Abelson
True Sex / Emily Skidmore
Masculinities in Theory / Todd Reeser
Gertrude Stein
Female Masculinity / Jack Halberstam
Sons of the Movement / Bobby Noble
The Future of Whiteness / Linda Martín Alcoff
Disturbing Attachments / Kadji Amin
Emily Dickinson
Willa Cather
Stone Butch Blues / Leslie Feinberg
Minnie Bruce Pratt
Andrea Gibson
Reinaldo Arenas
Marlon Riggs
Presidential masculinity (Reagan, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden)
The Color Pynk / Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley
Nao Bustamante
Judith Butler
The Crying Game (film, 1992)
Disclosure (film, 2020)
Buddhism
Care Work / Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Trans Care / Hil Malatino
Normal Life / Dean Spade
Mutual Aid / Dean Spade
Workers in Industrial America / David Brody



Masculinity in Transition and Filipino Crosscurrents are available from University of Minnesota Press.

MORE: Listen to more talks with K. Allison Hammer on the University of Minnesota Press YouTube page (with Greta Olson and Christopher Breu), the Gender Stories podcast, and on In Conversation with Frank Schaeffer.


"A major intervention into masculinities studies, Masculinity in Transition brilliantly and consistently pushes the field toward a critical understanding of masculinity as a complex gender formation."
—Christopher Breu, author of Hard-Boiled Masculinities


"How might we understand masculinity if we turn toward culture rather than biology? K. Allison Hammer uncover(s) remakings of masculinity that center care, porosity, and unruly alliances—uplifting models for the precarious now."
—Amber Jamilla Musser, author of Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance

Tracing the roots of toxic masculinity.

Estado Vegetal is Manuela Infante’s riveting piece of experimental performance art through which plants are charged with an agency capable of uprooting culturally grounded conceptions of the world. The book Estado Vegetal: Performance and Plant-Thinking, edited by Giovanni Aloi, is the first book dedicated to this performance and features essays from scholars and artists, including a fictional continuation of Infante’s work by Mandy-Suzanne Wong. Here, Infante and Wong join Art after Nature series editors Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard in conversation.


Manuela Infante is a Chilean playwright, director, screenwriter, and musician who creates her own performances and tours in America, Europe, and Asia. Her works include Estado Vegetal and Metamorphosis. 

Mandy-Suzanne Wong is a Bermudian writer of fiction and essays. She is an award-winning author whose books include The Box and Drafts of a Suicide Note.

Giovanni Aloi teaches art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is author or editor of many books on the nonhuman and art.

Caroline Picard is a writer, cartoonist, curator, and founder of the Green Lantern Press.


A performance of Manuela Infante’s Estado Vegetal (Vegetative State), performed by Marcela Salinas, is available to watch on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_9tGnvu3w8&t=8s


Art after Nature is a series edited by Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard that explores epistemological questions that emerge from the expanding, environmental consciousness of the humanities. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/series/art_after_nature



Estado Vegetal: Performance and Plant-Thinking is available from University of Minnesota Press. The volume includes pieces by Maaike Bleeker, Lucy Cotter, Prudence Gibson, Michael Marder, Dawn Sanders, Catriona Sandilands, Sibila Sotomayor Van Rysseghem, and Mandy-Suzanne Wong. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/estado-vegetal



Episode references:
The Conquest of America / Tzvetan Todorov
Capitalist Realism / Mark Fisher
Horizon / Manuela Infante

Art, time, nonlinearity with Manuela Infante and Mandy-Suzanne Wong (Art after Nature 5)

Educators who underestimate children’s knowledge about citizenship and immigration status can marginalize or misunderstand these students and their families. In Knowing Silence: How Children Talk about Immigration Status in School, author Ariana Mangual Figueroa models new ways scholars might collaborate with educators, children, and families—and makes audible the experiences of immigrant-origin students in their own terms, ultimately offering teachers and researchers a crucial framework for understanding citizenship in the contemporary classroom. Here, the author is joined in conversation with collaborators Dra. Aurora Chang, Claudia Rolando, and Lumari Sosa Garzón.


Ariana Mangual Figueroa is author of Knowing Silence and associate professor of urban education and Latin American, Iberian, and Latino cultures at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). She is a co-principal investigator at the CUNY Initiative on Immigration and Education (CUNY IIE).

Dra. Aurora Chang is associate professor of higher education at Loyola University and incoming Director of Faculty Development and Career Advancement at George Mason University. Chang is founder of Academic Life Simplified.

Claudia Rolando is a graduate of Brooklyn College and an educator in New York.

Lumari Sosa Garzón is a Mexican student in the Macaulay Honors program with a TheDream.US scholarship at Brooklyn College, majoring in psychology and minoring in anthropology. Lumari is a co-author of the Afterword appearing in Knowing Silence.


Episode references:
-Published research of Michael Fix and Wendy Zimmerman (“All under One Roof: Mixed-Status Families in an Era of Reform,” International Migration Review)
-The Struggles of Identity, Education, and Agency in the Lives of Undocumented Students (Aurora Chang)
-The Undocumented Americans (Karla Cornejo Villavicencio)
-The New York State Youth Leadership Council
-Lives in Limbo (Roberto G. Gonzales)
-concept of Community Cultural Wealth / Dr. Tara Yosso
-Plyler v. Doe, Supreme Court decision, 1982
-The New School’s Parsons Scholars Program

Recommended reference:
-Areli is a Dreamer / Areli Morales


Knowing Silence: How Children Talk about Immigration Status in School is available from University of Minnesota Press.

"No words can express all that I think and feel about this beautiful, brilliant book. Narrated innovatively and with the utmost of care, with rich analyses of language data and thought-provoking insights drawn from a longitudinal and intimate ethnographic research relationship, Knowing Silence will surely make you think, wonder, laugh, cry—and see and hear young people who are growing up in contexts of immigration in new ways."
—Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, UCLA

"Using child-centered methodologies, Ariana Mangual Figueroa unveils the critical yet often invisible aspects of students' lives and highlights unintended chilling effects of school practices. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, this is an important and compelling contribution to the field."
—Carola Suárez-Orozco, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Knowing Silence: How children understand and negotiate immigration status.

EL Putnam’s new book Livestreaming: An Aesthetics and Ethics of Technical Encounter considers how livestreaming constitutes new patterns of being together that are complex, ambivalent, and transformative. Digging into how humans and technology co-evolve, Putnam and Noel Fitzpatrick engage in conversation about relation and hyper-individualism, glitch and switchtasking, activism and hidden labor and performance and more.


EL Putnam is an artist-philosopher and assistant professor of digital media at Maynooth University, Ireland. Putnam is author of Livestreaming: An Aesthetics and Ethics of Technical Encounter in the University of Minnesota Press Forerunners series and The Maternal, Digital Subjectivity, and the Aesthetics of Interruption.

Noel Fitzpatrick is Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics and the Academic Lead of the European Culture and Technology Laboratory at the Technological University Dublin..


Episode references:

Gilbert Simondon
Bernard Stiegler
Yuk Hui 
Hegel
Kant
Jackson Pollock
Heidegger
Paul Ricoeur
Ayana Evans
Ana Voog
N. Katherine Hayles
Miriam Wolf
Diamond Reynolds and the livestream of Philando Castile’s murder
Safiya Umoja Noble
Christina Sharpe
Saidiya Hartman
Tonia Sutherland
Jacques Rancière
Simone Browne
Èdouard Glissant
Susan Sontag
Sara Ahmed
H. P. Grice


Related works:
On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects / Simondon
On the Existence of Digital Objects / Hui
Art and Cosmotechnics / Hui
Oneself as Another / Ricoeur
Memory, History, Forgetting / Ricoeur
Resurrecting the Black Body / Sutherland
Dark Matters / Browne
Regarding the Pain of Others / Sontag




Livestreaming: An Aesthetics and Ethics of Technical Encounter is available from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu.

Meaning and livestreaming: On technical encounter’s aesthetics and ethics.

Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna is a book that asks why so many big bluefin tuna have vanished from the Atlantic Ocean. Author Jen Telesca notes that the term “red gold” has emerged out of the exorbitant price her ruby-colored flesh commands on the global market; for reference, in January 2019, a 613-pound Pacific bluefin tuna sold at market in Tokyo for an astounding record of $3.1 million US dollars. To research this book, Telesca gained unparalleled access to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (also known as ICCAT) to show that the institution has faithfully executed the task assigned to it by international law: to fish as hard as possible to grow national economies. This interview between Telesca and editor Jason Weidemann was recorded in May 2020.

More about the book: http://z.umn.edu/redgold

A transcription of this conversation is available: z.umn.edu/t-redgold

Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna

Isherwood in Transit is a collection of essays that considers Christopher Isherwood as a transnational writer whose identity, politics, and beliefs were constantly transformed by global connections arising from journeys to Germany, Japan, China, and Argentina; his migration to the United States; and his conversion to Vedanta Hinduism in the 1940s. We are here today to talk about Isherwood’s reception and history of publication in the US, as well as what we mean by the title ‘Isherwood in Transit’, which is open to interpretation and refers to the writer’s movement on a personal and spiritual level as much as geographic. Here we have book editors Jim Berg and Chris Freeman, who have coedited several volumes on Isherwood including The Isherwood Century and The American Isherwood. Berg is associate dean of faculty at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York City. Freeman is professor of English and gender studies at the University of Southern California. They are joined by University of Minnesota Press director Doug Armato. This conversation was recorded in June 2020. 

More about the book: z.umn.edu/intransit.

A transcript of this conversation is available: z.umn.edu/t-intransit

Christopher Isherwood in Transit: A 21st-Century Perspective

The Anthropocenic condition gives us “a sense of the proximity we have to things we might otherwise have thought very distant from us.” David Farrier, author of Anthropocene Poetics, discusses deep time, extinction, and intimacy, asking how poetry can help us think about and live in the Anthropocene by reframing our intimate relationship with geological time. David is professor of literature and the environment at the University of Edinburgh, and he is joined here in conversation by Adam Dickinson, who is the author of four books of poetry including Anatomic. Adam is a professor in the English department at Brock University in Ontario. This edited conversation was recorded in July 2020. 

For more information, please visit z.umn.edu/poetics.

Topics discussed include diffraction-based poetics; Donna Haraway's reminder that we are kin-making beings; the concept of the Clinamen; Evelyn Reilly; Elizabeth Bishop; Seamus Heaney; Deborah Bird Rose; Karen Barad; Alfred Jarry. Additionally, David and Adam recommend poets whose work addresses the Anthropocene:
Brenda Hillman
Angela Rawlings
Harryette Mullen
Juliana Spahr
Jen Bervin
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Liz Howard
Dea Antonsen and Ida Bencke
Morten Søndergaard
Karin Bolender
Amanda Ackerman
Craig Santos Perez
Sean Hewitt

Anthropocene Poetics: David Farrier with Adam Dickinson

In his early twenties, Mindy Greiling’s son, Jim, was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. At the time, and for more than a decade after, Greiling was a Minnesota state legislator who struggled, along with her husband, to navigate and improve the state’s inadequate mental health system. Her book FIX WHAT YOU CAN is an illuminating and frank account of caring for a person with a mental illness, told by a parent and advocate. Greiling is joined here today by Minnesota Public Radio’s mental health reporter Alisa Roth, author of INSANE: AMERICA’S CRIMINAL TREATMENT OF MENTAL ILLNESS. This edited conversation was recorded in August 2020.

For more information, please visit z.umn.edu/fixwhatyoucan.

Mental health care and criminal justice reform. (Mental Health Series, Part 1)

In the era of climate change, how can we imagine better futures? AN ECOTOPIAN LEXICON is a collaborative volume of short, engaging essays that offer ecologically productive terms—drawn from other languages, science fiction, and subcultures of resistance—to envision what could be. The book connects thirty authors and fourteen artists from a range of backgrounds and locations, and three of them are here in discussion today: anthropologist and herbalist Charis Boke, visual artist Michelle Kuen Suet Fung, and Sam Solnick of the University of Liverpool. This conversation was recorded in August 2020.

For more information, visit ecotopianlexicon.com.

Works and writers referenced in this episode in order of appearance:
David Attenborough’s The Private Life of Plants
Carolyn Fornoff
The Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, edited by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt
bell hooks
Evelyn Reilly
Karen Barad
Donna Haraway
Climate Changed by Philippe Squarzoni

Thanks to the conversants:
Charis Boke, charisboke.com
Michelle Kuen Suet Fung, michelleksfung.com
Sam Solnick, @LitSciHub on Twitter

Hope and Art when the World is Falling Apart.

When talking about climate change, what do an oceanographer and a literary scholar have in common? How might these distant disciplines begin to speak to each other? TIMESCALES: THINKING ACROSS ECOLOGICAL TEMPORALITIES is a volume that includes frictive chit-chats from scholars from far-flung disciplines and explores what they have to teach each other about the timescales of environmental change. Bethany Wiggin is one of three co-editors of this volume, along with Carolyn Fornoff and Patricia Kim. Wiggin is director of the first established academic program in environmental humanities at a major research university: the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. She is joined here by oceanographer Frankie Pavia, law student Jason Bell, and geophysicist Jane Dmochowski. This conversation was recorded in November 2020.

More information: z.umn.edu/timescales.

MORE TIMESCALES PODCAST EPISODES:

-Ep. 17: Why art? On performance, theater, deep time, and the environment. With Patricia Eunji Kim, Kate Farquhar, and Marcia Ferguson: https://soundcloud.com/user-760891605/episode-17

-Ep. 14: Time and the interplay between human history and planetary history. With Carolyn Fornoff, Jen Telesca, Wai Chee Dimock, and Charles Tung: https://soundcloud.com/user-760891605/episode-14

Scientists and humanists talk timescales and climate change.

“Historically, women have had to frame their own intellectual advancement in alternative terms.” When writer Edith Wharton died in 1937, her library of more than five thousand volumes was divided and subsequently sold. Decades later, it was reassembled and returned to The Mount, her historic Massachusetts estate. WHAT A LIBRARY MEANS TO A WOMAN is a book by Sheila Liming that examines personal libraries as technologies of self-creation in modern America. For Wharton, a library meant a home, a school, a sense of independence, a place of solitude but not loneliness, and a place where she set rules for herself as a writer and as a reader. Liming is joined here by Nynke Dorhout and Anne Schuyler of The Mount in Lenox, MA, and by Wharton scholar Donna Campbell. This conversation was recorded in December 2020.

For more information:
z.umn.edu/whatalibrarymeans
edithwhartonslibrary.org
edithwharton.org
whartoncompleteworks.org

On reading, solitude, Edith Wharton, and what a library means to a woman.

TIMESCALES is a book that explores how time has seemed to shift in the Anthropocene and examines the human inability to see and to witness time as an element of environmental catastrophe. The volume brings together humanities scholars, scientists, and artists to develop new ways of thinking about the world with its human and nonhuman entanglements and diverse systems of knowledge. Carolyn Fornoff is assistant professor of Latin American culture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is co-editor, along with Bethany Wiggin and Patricia Kim, of Timescales. Fornoff is joined here by three volume contributors: Jen Telesca, assistant professor of environmental justice in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute; Wai Chee Dimock, editor of PMLA, who teaches at Yale University; and Charles Tung, professor of English at Seattle University. This conversation was recorded in December 2020.

REFERENCES:
-Timescales: Thinking across Ecological Temporalities. z.umn.edu/timescales
-Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna (Jen Telesca)
-Modernism and Time Machines (Charles Tung)
-Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival (Wai Chee Dimock)
-’Salmon’ by Jack Scoltock: https://www.firstpeople.us/native-american-poems/salmon.html
-Black ‘47: Native American Poetry (Jack Scoltock)
-”Irish support for Native American Covid-19 relief highlights historic bond”: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/09/irish-native-american-coronavirus-historic-bond
-Salmon in the Trees (Amy Gulick)
-Beyond Settler Time (Mark Rifkin)
-“How the Covid-19 pandemic has been curtailed in Cherokee Nation”: https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/17/how-covid19-has-been-curtailed-in-cherokee-nation/
-”The Amazon Is on Fire—Indigenous Rights Can Help Put It Out,” by Naomi Klein: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/08/26/amazon-fire-indigenous-rights-can-help-put-it-out
-“Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene” by Kyle Whyte. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2514848618777621
-The Human Planet (Mark Maslin and Simon Lewis)


MORE TIMESCALES PODCAST EPISODES:

-Ep. 17: Why art? On performance, theater, deep time, and the environment. With Patricia Eunji Kim, Kate Farquhar, and Marcia Ferguson: https://soundcloud.com/user-760891605/episode-17

-Ep. 12: Scientists and humanists talk timescales and climate change. With Bethany Wiggin, Frankie Pavia, Jason Bell, and Jane Dmochowski: https://soundcloud.com/user-760891605/episode-12

Time and the interplay between human history and planetary history

Scammer’s Yard is an ethnography that focuses on the stories of three young Black Jamaicans who strive to make a living in Montego Bay, where call centers and tourism are the two main industries in the struggling economy. Author Jovan Scott Lewis raises unsettling questions about the fairness of a world economy that relegates Caribbean populations to durative sufferation. This groundbreaking book asks whether true reparation for the legacy of colonialism is to be found only through radical—even criminal—means. Lewis, an assistant professor of geography and African American Studies at UC Berkeley, is joined here by Peter James Hudson, associate professor of African American Studies and History at UCLA. This conversation was recorded in November 2020.

More about the book: z.umn.edu/scammersyard

REFERENCES:
Caricom Reparations Commission
Walter Rodney
Sylvia Wynter
Stuart Hall
C. L. R. James
George Padmore
Frantz Fanon
Lloyd Best
Faye Harrison
Beverley Mullings
Barry Chevannes
Walter Rodney

The crime of black repair in Jamaica.

The urgency of climate change means it is not sufficient for environmental scholarship to describe our complex relationship to the natural world. It must also compel a response. TIMESCALES: THINKING ACROSS ECOLOGICAL TEMPORALITIES gathers scholars from different fields, placing traditional academic essays alongside experimental sections, to promote innovation and collaboration. 

This episode asks: Why art? Why art … at all? With climate change and environmental catastrophe looming large, what purpose does art serve in pressing conversations about environmental futures?

Three TIMESCALES contributors are here to answer that question:

-Patricia Eunji Kim, assistant professor/faculty fellow at the Gallatin School of Individualized Studies and a provost’s postdoctoral fellow at New York University. She serves as an assistant curator at Monument Lab, a public art and history studio. Kim researches and teaches Greco-Roman art and archaeology, with a focus on issues of gender, cultural identity, and empire. Her in-progress monograph examines the art and archaeology of royal women from the Hellenistic world (4th–1st century BCE).

-Kate Farquhar is a Philadelphia-based landscape designer at Olin and has worked at the intersection of ecology, infrastructure, and art for fifteen years. Her TIMESCALES chapter focuses on WetLand, an experimental floating lab created from a 45-foot-long salvaged houseboat in 2014 by artist Mary Mattingly. From 2015 to 2016, Farquhar served as program coordinator for events that accompanied its residency with the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH) on the Lower Schuylkill River.

-Dr. Marcia Ferguson, a professional actor, director, and educator, has worked as a theatre artist in Philadelphia regional theatre and arts organizations including the Wilma Theatre, Painted Bride Art Center, Act II Playhouse, Irish Heritage, Paper Dolls, the Mediums, Juniper productions, the Daedalus String Quartet, and the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. She has collaborated on seven original productions for Edinburgh and Philadelphia Fringe festivals, and has done theatre and film work in Los Angeles, New York, Rome, and Tokyo. She is senior lecturer in theatre arts at the University of Pennsylvania and has published two books and several articles on theatre. Her TIMESCALES chapter focuses on Pig Iron’s work in progress “A Period of Animate Existence,” the subject of a discussion Ferguson moderated at the 2016 PPEH conference. Director Dan Rothenberg, composer Troy Herion, and set designer Mimi Lien were the 2016-17 artists in residence at PPEH.

This conversation was recorded in November 2020. This is the third and final podcast episode in a series that has featured the book’s three coeditors: Kim; Bethany Wiggin, director of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities; and Carolyn Fornoff, assistant professor of Latin American culture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

REFERENCES:
Timescales: z.umn.edu/timescales
WetLand: https://ppeh.sas.upenn.edu/experiments/wetland
A Period of Animate Existence: https://www.pigiron.org/productions/period-animate-existence

MORE TIMESCALES PODCAST EPISODES:

-Ep. 14: Time and the interplay between human history and planetary history. With Carolyn Fornoff, Jen Telesca, Wai Chee Dimock, and Charles Tung: https://soundcloud.com/user-760891605/episode-14

-Ep. 12: Scientists and humanists talk timescales and climate change. With Bethany Wiggin, Frankie Pavia, Jason Bell, and Jane Dmochowski: https://soundcloud.com/user-760891605/episode-12

Popular tracks by University of Minnesota Press