Pretty Heady Stuff

Alexis Shotwell, is a social theorist and professor of sociology and anthropology at Carleton University who has a rare gift for addressing and expressing the unbelievable complexity of our current system. Her book Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (2016) was released at a moment where it had become impossible to ignore the overlapping emergencies that we now face. How do we explain why the political reaction to these disastrous effects doesn’t translate into more mass dissent and a greater sense of shared vulnerability? Shotwell says that a doctrine of “purism” or “purity politics” turns us against each other: cultivating and asserting one’s own individual purity against these unsettling feelings of contamination. If we aren’t sure of how to implicate the system effectively, it is because available practices of self-purification, clean eating and detoxing only give us the comfortable feeling of being innocent, ourselves.

Max Taylor is a young communicator and mayoral candidate here in Halifax. His campaign is not built to win; instead, it's designed to produce a scarce resource in political communication locally and globally: engagement. In this conversation I talk to him about the kind of courage he’s needed to run for mayor, why people who see it as a transparent attempt to gain followers don’t get it, and why he cares about setting a precedent for more direct participation in politics, especially among young people. Check out Max's TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@maxemersontaylor?lang=en (You'll find a link to his campaign site through the page.)

Jesse David Fox, senior editor at Vulture and host of the fascinating Good One podcast, discusses his divisive theory of “post-comedy” (or forms of humour that don't fit the traditional rubric of "laughs-per-minute"), how the rhythm of comedy has changed in the context of our coronavirus-induced isolation, and how the notion of booms and busts in comedy doesn’t really match up with the historical fact that, as he puts it, “comedy is a renewable resource.”

Andy Brown is a publisher and writer who runs Conundrum Press in Wolfville, Nova Scotia (https://www.conundrumpress.com/). The books Conundrum puts out are immensely immersive and artful, so it was really exciting to discuss the challenges of operating in a niche market with Andy. We discuss Conundrum's beginnings in Montreal in the 90s, and the moment when Andy decided to change Conundrum’s mandate to focus exclusively on publishing literary graphic novels. The literary graphic novel is a relatively new term, so one of the things we talk about is what exactly that term means. What do books in this genre look like? What do they do? How do you edit them, and how is it distinct from editing just prose? And what kind of work does the term itself, graphic novel, do to invest the comic form with credibility?

Summer Pierre is an extremely inventive illustrator whose debut graphic novel All the Sad Songs (https://retrofit.storenvy.com/products/24567828-all-the-sad-songs-by-summer-pierre) is a text that pushes you to explore connections to the past and to think about how specific objects and pieces of art stand out and score the process of self-realization. How can an artist convey how it feels when music affects you in your body? How might the grid structure of comics serve as a kind of "safety net" for analyzing the deepest stories we tell about ourselves?

Veronica Post is a graphic novelist whose sharply drawn debut book Langosh and Peppi: Fugitive Days has just been published by Conundrum Press (https://www.conundrumpress.com/new-titles/langosh-and-peppi-fugitive-days/). In this conversation, she talks about her direct experience of the European migrant crisis, and how it shaped the narrative of this immersive and incredibly thoughtful graphic text. Langosh and Peppi is a book that blends exuberant adventure with serious reflections on the repressed relationship to history we find in nations that have borne witness to trauma. It combines roaming explorations of Central Europe with a critical perspective on injustice and the basic brutality of borders. By making these connections between racial nationalism, what she calls “emotional repression” and the continuing global refugee crisis, Veronica gives us an opportunity to consider the importance of narrative in contesting the long history of moral indifference to the other’s suffering.

Rebecca Roher is a cartoonist and educator whose captivating work of graphic memoir Bird in a Cage won the Doug Wright Award in 2017. We discuss her current project, 100 Year Old Wisdom, and its interest in making us more open to the lived realities of aging and the aged. We also talk about her forthcoming graphic biography of civil rights activist Viola Desmond, which will be out in October as part of the Nova Graphica anthology from Conundrum Press (https://www.conundrumpress.com/forthcoming/nova-graphica/). She explains how representing Desmond’s story required extensive research and intense self-reflection on what it means to be an anti-racist ally. Head to http://rebeccaroher.com/index.html to see more of her singular style of graphic storytelling.

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 oppression. We discuss her book and some of the claims it makes around how we can mobilize for that future. She explains how we have been taught forms of care that are individualizing and, in many ways, contrary to real care. Her message is essential because it envisions a means of lifting the curse of a deep isolation so that we can let the floodgates of peer-to-peer care open.

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.