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Pretty Heady Stuff

Pretty Heady Stuff•soundcloud.com
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This podcast features interviews with a variety of theorists, artists and activists from across the globe. It's guided by the search for radical solutions to crises that are inherent to colonial capitalism. To this end, I hope to keep facilitating conversations that bring together perspectives on the liberatory and transformative power of care, in particular.
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Episodes

Cassie Thornton imagines how radical collaboration and revolutionary care networks are possible.

Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist, she is also the author of the forthcoming book, The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future (https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745343327/the-hologram/). All of the work that Cassie does is intensely concerned with the pervasive barriers to flourishing that are so entrenched in our late capitalist society--as such, she’s focused on preparing for a future society that generates health outside of the structures that reproduce oppres...

Jul 07, 2020•51 min

Liza Mandelup sheds light on the meaning and making of her documentary Jawline.

Liza Mandelup is a director with an uncanny eye and a deeply perceptive sense of how culture is changing. Her brilliant documentary Jawline (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoVA0-w6VtA) premiered last year at the Sundance Film Festival, where she won the Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker. The film is an invaluable study of content creation today, and it has stunned audiences due to its intimate portrayal of the aspiring and established content creators who make up a new social media ecos...

Jun 25, 2020•49 min

Elaine Power on the politics of food provision and the necessity of a basic income guarantee.

Elaine Power is a professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies and the Head of the Department of Gender Studies at Queen's University. She is also the co-founder of the Kingston Action Group for a Basic Income Guarantee. In this episode we discuss the challenge of making the field of food studies "inherently feminist" by stressing the importance of "power differentials" in determining who has the privilege of indulging in food and who suffers under food insecurity. Dr. Power express...

Jun 18, 2020•45 min

Dave Zirin on anti-racism and nonviolence in contemporary sports and culture.

Dave Zirin is the sports editor for The Nation and has written many path-breaking books on the politics of sports and the legacy of radical, outspoken athletes who have used, and risked, their stature in order to resist racial oppression. Here Zirin talks about how prominent athletes are “breaking out from the corporate shackles” to help mobilize for justice in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, among the many other victims of police brutality. He suggests...

Jun 04, 2020•30 min

Linda MacDonald & Jeanne Sarson on feminism as a means of opposing misogyny and mass violence.

Trigger warning: This episode contains detailed descriptions of assault and abuse that some listeners may find disturbing. Linda MacDonald and Jeanne Sarson are feminist activists and human rights educators who have been pushing for decades to insist that the public confront the related realities of femicide and non-state torture. Their work led them to co-found the organization Persons Against Non-State Torture (www.nonstatetorture.org), a radical advocacy group that demands we recognize the ev...

May 22, 2020•1 hr 16 min

Priscilla Wald on microbial metaphors, outbreak narratives and the politics of pandemic disease.

Priscilla Wald is a Professor of English and Women's Studies at Duke University who has written extensively on the cultural politics of pandemics, past and future. Her books Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form and Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative are essential for understanding the current coronavirus pandemic. Wald offers powerful correctives to the distortions that tend to cloud our thinking about COVID-19 and outbreaks more broadly.

May 03, 2020•1 hr

Joe Duggan on using emotion to communicate the empirical truth of climate change

Researcher and communicator Joe Duggan, a doctoral researcher at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, talks to me about why he created the "Is This How You Feel?" project, which asks climate scientists to compose handwritten letters expressing how the climate crisis makes them feel.

Apr 27, 2020•47 min

Box Brown on the complex frivolity of comic books

Bestselling graphic non-fiction author Box Brown speaks with me about nostalgia and popular culture, wrestling as an analogue for the theatre of politics, and (especially) the graphic medium of comics as a distinct way to look at history. His book Is This Guy for Real? The Unbelievable Life of Andy Kaufman, just won a much-deserved Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work -- Kaufman played in the lines between reality and fiction and Brown talks about the ways that writing about Kaufman's life m...

Mar 08, 2020•20 min

Jeff Diamanti on capturing the climate emergency in a system that resists change

In this episode we discuss the importance of seeing culture, ideas and ideology as central parts of the struggle for climate action and an end to neoliberal extractivism. Jeff identifies a troubling "mood" that dominates conversations about the climate; this mood is part of a larger "haze" that prevents us from fully accepting the extent of the damage or the urgency of the threat.

Mar 08, 2020•48 min

El Jones on the power of critical intervention as a driver of social justice

Following a federal election that exposed some serious issues with Canadian democracy, author and activist El Jones sat down with me to discuss how the rhetoric of emotion is used to simplify political debates around race and how the insularized ways we communicate get in the way of critical dialogue.

Mar 08, 2020•43 min
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