Tanner Mirrlees (https://twitter.com/tmirrlees_) is the Director of the Communication and Digital Media Studies program at Ontario Tech University. His current research focuses on topics in the political economy of communications such as war and media, work and labour in the creative and digital industries, and the links between far-right hate groups and social media platforms. He’s the author of Hearts and Mines: The US Empire's Cultural Industry, Global Entertainment Media: Between Cultural Im...
Jan 13, 2023•1 hr 7 min
El Jones is a poet, journalist, professor and activist living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She teaches in the department of Political and Canadian Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University. She’s the author of Live from the Afrikan Resistance!, a collection of poems about resisting white colonialism. Her work focuses on feminism, prison abolition, anti-racism and decolonization. In Rehearsals for Living, Robyn Maynard describes El as a “Black liberation visionary and long-time prison abolitionist [w...
Dec 16, 2022•1 hr 9 min
Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay is clinical faculty at the McGill Department of Family Medicine, focusing on supporting rural and low-resource practice. Mukhopadhyay organises around issues related to extractivism, migrant rights, policing, public services and decolonizing global health within local and international networks and collectives. Alexis Shotwell is a Professor in Carleton University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Her academic work addresses impurity, environmental justice, raci...
Dec 05, 2022•1 hr 10 min
Fab Filippo is an actor, screenwriter, and playwright. Most recently, he co-created, wrote, and directed the critically acclaimed comedy-drama “Sort Of,” for CBC and HBO Max. A winner of a slew of awards, Sort Of (https://gem.cbc.ca/media/sort-of/) is the main focus here, but Fab has also worked on a huge array of shows and films over the years, from his work writing and directing Save Me, to co-writing the true crime indie film Perfect Sisters. Gray Powell has worked all over Canada with variou...
Nov 14, 2022•1 hr 1 min
Marcus Boon is Professor of English at York University, Toronto. He is the author of The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs, In Praise of Copying and The Politics of Vibration: Music as a Cosmopolitical Practice, which was just recently released from Duke University Press. I was really excited to speak with him about The Politics of Vibration because it’s a terrific, dense, complex book. There are so many ways to approach thinking about the beauty, power and moving qualities of music ...
Nov 04, 2022•1 hr 9 min
Ben Tarnoff is the author of A Counterfeiter’s Paradise and The Bohemians. He’s the co-founder of Logic magazine. His writing has appeared in a lot of different places, mostly left publications like The Guardian and Jacobin. His most recent piece of writing, and the focus of this conversation, is a book called Internet for the People. It’s an incredibly engaging study of how the modern internet came to be, why it's fundamentally broken, and what steps we can take to make it less broken. I asked ...
Oct 14, 2022•1 hr 1 min
Ajay Parasram has roots in South Asia, the Caribbean and the settler cities of Halifax, Ottawa and Vancouver. He is an associate professor in the Departments of International Development Studies, History and Political Science at Dalhousie University in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), on unceded and unsurrendered Mi’kmaw territory. His research interests focus on the politics of colonialism and structural forms of violence founded and exacerbated by and through imperialism. Alex Khasnabish is a writer, rese...
Sep 29, 2022•1 hr 32 min
Monty Scott is a brilliant stand-up comedian from Scarborough, Ontario. His album The Abyss Stares Back was nominated for a Juno Award in 2019. And while it didn’t win Comedy Album of the Year, it still represents a real victory: Scott recorded it in part as a response to a near-death experience. We talk in this conversation about bouncing back, the lives and livelihoods of comedians in Canada, speak to the politics of comedy today, and try to imagine ways of thinking about comedy as an art. The...
Sep 09, 2022•58 min
Sandra Battaglini is an actor, stand-up comedian and writer. She is also the founder of the Canadian Association of Stand-Up Comedians, an organization that represents comics in Canada and lobbies for them to be recognized as the brilliant, culturally significant artists that they are. I just wrote an article for The Breach that features Sandra, among other comedians, and looks at some of her efforts to push for fair pay, government recognition from the Canada Council, and organized resistance a...
Aug 25, 2022•45 min
Armond R. Towns is Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. His research and teaching focuses on the relationship between media, communication, race, blackness, and history. He’s just released an amazing book called On Black Media Philosophy with University of California Press. And he’s also the cofounder and editor of the brand new journal Communication and Race, which will start publishing issues in 2024. In this conversation, we dwell with the s...
Aug 12, 2022•1 hr 23 min
Janelle Niles is a stand-up comedian from Truro, Nova Scotia and the producer of Got Land?, an all-Indigenous comedy tour. The Got Land? show is an example of what greater solidarity could mean for the culture of comedy in Canada. The stated goal of the show is to “express solidarity with humour” as a way of gaining grassroots control over the sites of cultural production: the venues, shows, institutions and platforms that determine who makes it and who gets missed in comedy. We discuss Janelle’...
Aug 05, 2022•59 min
Tey Meadow is an assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University. While her research covers a lot of topics, the work she’s created that has had the biggest impact on me is her writing on the emergence of the transgender child as a social category, and the creation and maintaining of gender classifications in law and medicine. The book that we focus on here is the one she put out through University of California Press in 2018: Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century (https...
Jul 26, 2022•1 hr 36 min
Al Val is a comedian, actor, writer and musician who has appeared on programs for CBC, MTV, and YTV. She’s also headlined standup comedy shows all over North America. A graduate of Second City’s Conservatory Program, Val also performed with improv troupe “Starwipe” for 8 years. Val is set to co-headline Just for Laughs Toronto with Allie Pearse in the Fall, has just finished filming a reality show for OutTV, and has been performing non-stop during Pride. Val combined coming out as transgender du...
Jul 22, 2022•1 hr 8 min
Gernot Wagner is a climate economist at Columbia Business School. His research, writing, and teaching focus on climate risks and climate policy. Gernot writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate and has written several books, including: Geoengineering: the Gamble, But will the planet notice?, Climate Shock, which he co-authored with Martin Weitzman, and City, Country, Climate published in German. Since he’s well-versed in environmental science, public policy, and economics, I wanted to ask hi...
Jul 12, 2022•49 min
Clayton Thomas-Müller is an organizer, public speaker and author focused on fighting for environmental and economic justice. He’s worked for more than two decades in support of grassroots movements and Indigenous peoples. He is a campaigner for 350.org, and has worked with the Indigenous Environmental Network, Black Mesa Water Coalition, Global Justice Ecology Project, and Bioneers. I had the opportunity to talk to him about his memoir Life in the City of Dirty Water, which you might have heard ...
Jul 08, 2022•1 hr 8 min
Chanelle Gallant has participated in grassroots movements for sex workers rights and racial justice for 20 years as an organizer, writer, strategist, fundraiser and speaker. She is on the leadership team for Showing Up For Racial Justice in the US, she co-founded the Migrant Sex Workers Project and has worked with sex work organizations locally and nationally including Butterfly, Maggie’s, Desiree Alliance, and Red Canary Song. Her writing about sexuality, social justice and sex work has appeare...
Jun 24, 2022•1 hr 28 min
Jennifer Esposito is Chair of the Department of Educational Policy Studies and is a Professor of research, measurement and statistics. Her research focuses on how race, class, gender and sexuality impact experiences of education and how marginalized groups are represented in popular culture. In this conversation we mainly focus on her recent co-authored book Introduction to Intersectional Qualitative Research. She wrote the book with her frequent collaborator Venus Evans-Winters. Dr. Evans-Winte...
Jun 15, 2022•1 hr 21 min
Murtaza Hussain is a reporter at The Intercept who focuses on national security and foreign policy (https://theintercept.com/staff/murtaza-hussain/). He has appeared on CNN, BBC, MSNBC, and other news outlets. We had a sobering conversation about the political structure of the globalized world. One of the many frank projections that Murtaza shares in this conversation is his sense that it’s fairly likely that the United States and China will be engaged in some form of military conflict within th...
Jun 02, 2022•53 min
Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination (https://maxhaiven.com/). In this interview I talk to him about his most recent book Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire, a new entry in the Vagabond series of books that Max edits for Pluto Press (https://www.plutobooks.com/pluto-series/vagabonds/). It's a series that tries to create a venue for, as he says, writing that engages with contemporary struggles and that tries to invent new ways of offering the public ...
May 26, 2022•1 hr 32 min
Meredith Ralston is Professor in the Departments of Women’s Studies and Political Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her most recent book, Slut-Shaming, Whorephobia and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution is a remarkably self-reflexive and rigorous study of contemporary sexual politics in a supposedly permissive era. We talk about the limits of white feminism and carceral thinking when it comes to the prevalent approaches to thinking about and reckoning with the real...
May 20, 2022•57 min
Rebecca Wanzo (https://www.rebeccawanzo.com/) is a Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and an Affiliate Professor of American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She’s the author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling, a book that thinks through the kinds of storytelling conventions that African American women, and social beings in general, are compelled to use to make their suffering legible to speci...
May 12, 2022•1 hr 2 min
Dru Oja Jay is a writer, organizer and web developer. He’s currently hosting a podcast called Half Past Capitalism, and serving as both the Executive Director of CUTV, Canada's oldest campus-based TV station, and as publisher of The Breach, an independent media outlet producing critical journalism at a time when it is urgently needed. He’s written a number of stirring articles for The Breach, and he’s also the co-author, with Nikolas Barry-Shaw, of an invaluable book called Paved with Good Inten...
May 04, 2022•1 hr 28 min
Uahikea Maile is a Kānaka Maoli scholar and activist from Maunawili, Oʻahu. He works as an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Politics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Maile’s research looks at the legal constraints and decolonial activism that marks the history of Hawaiian sovereignty. His upcoming book focuses on settler colonial capitalism and Indigenous sovereignty in Hawaiʻi, and investigates the formation of settler colonial capitalism alongside the gifts...
Apr 26, 2022•1 hr 24 min
Shannon Miedema is Director of the Environment and Climate Change team with the Halifax Regional Municipality and one of the chief architects of the city’s climate plan, the subtitle of which is “Acting on Climate Together.” In this conversation she defines what that means in terms of what is increasingly referred to as a “just transition,” or a transition that, as she says, isn’t interested in “leaving anyone behind,” one that rejects the idea that we can simply embrace mitigation of climate ch...
Apr 22, 2022•59 min
Ivo Nieuwenhuis works as a Professor of Dutch literature at Radboud University in The Netherlands. He’s also a comedy critic for the national Dutch newspaper Trouw. He’s currently writing about the politics of humour, with a specific focus on humour’s political implications in terms of gender, race, and class relations. We talked about these implications, and the unresolved question of whether humour is inherently subversive, or just as often conservative and regressive. He’s published a bunch o...
Apr 13, 2022•1 hr 24 min
Theresa Stewart-Ambo and Keolu Fox are the co-directors of the Indigenous Futures Institute at the University of California San Diego. K. Wayne Yang is a critical theorist and social critic who writes about popular culture, social movements, urban education, critical pedagogy, decolonization, and many other subjects. Stewart-Ambo and Fox are two authors with wildly divergent research interests. Fox does work in genomic research and is an assistant professor at University of California, San Diego...
Mar 28, 2022•1 hr 14 min
Yuliya Yurchenko is a senior lecturer and researcher in political economy at University of Greenwich. She is currently in Ukraine on an extraordinary leave. And while she writes that she is, for the moment, in relative safety, that could change any moment. Being a Ukrainian, an activist and an academic, Yuliya traveled to Ukraine on Feb 19, 2022 as part of a fact-finding and solidarity mission with a number of MPs, trade unionists and journalists. The goal, she says, of this mission is to connec...
Mar 16, 2022•1 hr 28 min
Joshua Cotter’s debut book Skyscrapers of the Midwest was nominated for an Ignatz Award. His book Driven By Lemons is a challenging and deeply personal exploration of unstable psychological states. We talk about how creating Driven By Lemons informed his breakout book Nod Away, which was on many top ten lists in 2016. And how reading a random article about the transference of consciousness into an electronic medium provided the “spark” for the Nod Away series (https://www.fantagraphics.com/produ...
Feb 28, 2022•48 min
Tari Ajadi is an Assistant Professor in Black Politics at McGill University. El Jones is an Assistant Professor of Political and Canadian Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University, and Julia Rodgers is a PhD Candidate studying patient-oriented healthcare and public engagement in the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie. They are three of the four lead authors of the high profile and politically impactful report Defunding the Police: Defining the Way Forward for HRM. (https://www.halifax....
Feb 22, 2022•1 hr 13 min
Gina Dent is an associate professor of feminist studies, history of consciousness, and legal studies at UC Santa Cruz in California. Erica R. Meiners is professor of education and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern Illinois University. Dent and Meiners are two of the four creators of a pivotal new book from Haymarket entitled Abolition. Feminism. Now. (https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1546-abolition-feminism-now) It’s an essential text that was also co-written by Angela Da...
Feb 15, 2022•1 hr 8 min
