Pretty Heady Stuff

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 ecosystem. In this conversation we talk about the intensely collaborative work that went into directing Jawline, her personal and professional commitment to making art, and the ways that gender and identity are shifting in the social media age.

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 expresses a measured hope here that the COVID-19 pandemic is creating the conditions for more empathy to emerge in political discourses around food, and points out that this may mean greater solidarity in producing a more equal future of food provision.

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 that this is a pivotal moment of collective outrage and reinforces the need for “vigilance” and “consistency” in opposing oppressive forces, for fear that we will see those in positions of power undertake a reactionary consolidation of that power. We also talk about the dangerous and disingenuous celebration of domination in Netflix and ESPN’s documentary series The Last Dance, and the urgent need for real diversity in both the coverage and performance of sports.

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 everyday forms of abuse, torture, victimization, and domination in the domestic sphere that go criminally unnoticed. In response to the devastating and unprecedented act of mass murder that occurred here in Nova Scotia on April 18th and 19th, they are devoting their time and energy to a fiercely important media campaign to spread the message that we must, now, adopt what they term a “feminist lens” for understanding the misogynistic roots of the rampage, and a feminist framework for seeing this series of attacks as part of a continuum of male aggression connected to related acts of mass violence that we have witnessed in recent memory.

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.

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.

Author and activist Max Haiven outlines some radical ways of approaching the challenges that we face globally, in a moment that seems characterized by a series of unprecedented and growing crises.

Artist and communicator Jodi Cooper discusses the complicated and exciting process of making a film that speaks to the fans who are financing it and satisfies the artists who made it. "The Woodsmen" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYB3sl6RJDs

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 meant figuring out relatable ways to represent an artist that defied categorization.

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.