Pretty Heady Stuff

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-Winters is a former Professor of Education at Illinois State University in the College of Education with faculty affiliation in Women & Gender Studies, African American Studies, and Ethnic Studies. She is also the Founder of Planet Venus and creator of the Write Like A Scholar program, and has worked with the African American Policy Forum and the SayHerName project, led by Kimberlé Crenshaw. Venus has a vast research purview, focusing on the social and cultural foundations of education, Black feminist thought, critical race theory, educational policy, and qualitative inquiry. Her books include (Re)Teaching Trayvon: Education for Racial Justice and Human Freedom and Black Feminism in Education: Black Women Speak Back, Up, and Out. Their book is a completely unique intervention on the purpose and practice of intersectional qualitative research. The book, they explain, isn’t only pedagogical, “it’s a political act of resistance.” They are trying to create the conditions for a radical rewriting of the very rules of the game of academia. From their perspective, intersectional qualitative research is an “intentional disruption” of the persistent “deficit narrative” that “keeps white supremacy alive” by presupposing that there is something wrong that must be fixed within BIPOC communities. In Venus’ terms, what would it mean to “embolden those who want to use intellectual activism as a weapon” against harm? We’ve largely been “hoodwinked" by a linear narrative that counts only certain texts and voices and styles as valid in academic study. “What happens,” Venus asks, “when we focus on joy?” On “movement struggles?” On “meaning-making?” We also zoom in on the question of how thinkers collaborate and write effectively together. It takes, they say, a certain capacity for “emotional labour” and for a more meaningful and relational kind of accountability. Learning to write together means sharing our “rituals” and sharing what we think it means to be “a contemplative researcher, an ethical researcher, a mindful researcher, a Black feminist thinker and researcher.” Questioning this insidious assumption that there is, as Jennifer puts it, “only one way of writing” or “thinking critically.” Against this, she says that she feels an intense responsibility to “help [students] rediscover their authentic authorial voice.” That responsibility to students is a central theme of this discussion. They really emphasize this idea that, under this system of neoliberalism that demands the commodification of knowledge and that teaches us there are certain knowledges that are just “worth more on the free market,” they feel like they have to be “up front” with students. What they frequently find, though, is that students already know or sense that there are certain ways of knowing that are more readily rewarded, and yet they still choose to pursue and produce knowledge that helps their communities. Dr. Esposito and Dr. Evans-Winters explain how they’ve charted a course from being young scholar-activists to the present day, where Venus has, in her words, “broken up with her oppressor,” and Jennifer feels her calling is to stay in the academy and “push against the boundaries and the borders,” to “chip away” while mentoring other folks that will help her chip away at the steep edifice of higher education, in the interest of advancing these core values of authenticity, integrity and accountability.

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 the next twenty years. And this is just one of the striking observations that he makes. There’s a deep analysis here that centres around a serious gap between the world that he wants and the world that he sees, and much of our conversation actually comes back to that gap between the moral aspirations that we might have as empathetic citizens of the world, the rights-based order we wish existed, and the “inherently conflictual” character of the world as it is. He actually expands on the ways that a tradition of political philosophy engages with the extent to which nations and polities are locked into efforts to constrain each other through force and dominance, and suggests that refusing to grasp that means that “we miss a lot” about the structure of societies. Again, he makes it clear that the world he reports on and tries to understand is not the one that he wants to exist, but I think it’s for that reason that he reports on global affairs in the honest, shrewd way that he does. I mean, in this conversation he is talking in no uncertain terms about how Ukraine’s decision to denuclearize, to not retain their nuclear weapons, meant that they had to abandon “the ultimate guarantor” of national sovereignty. Given up under global pressure and incentives—assurances that were not met—the loss of a nuclear arsenal, he feels, in part led to the situation it is currently in, where the international community has determined that the cost of deterring Russia is too high and the country cannot fully defend itself against Russian aggression. What does it mean that this terrifying power is an “insurance policy” in the contemporary world? Ignoring the reality doesn’t change it. And yet, as he points out, there are realities that can be ignored. While there’s little evidence that sanctions, for example, succeed in changing the behaviour of governments, sanctions are still imposed without any real consideration for the social impact or political effectiveness they will have. As Hussain says, they are “done without even thinking” because “no one is holding you to account” and the deaths that they produced are “indirect.” So, in terms of the United States positing itself as a “benevolent actor” by imposing sanctions or even arming Ukraine, it’s unclear whether anyone in the global community actually feels that it wipes the imperialist record of the US clean just because it currently seems to be on the right side of a military conflict. What I found so profound, too, in what Murtaza was talking about here is that he, over and over, comes back to this question of establishing a “moral baseline” in a world torn apart. He says that there is clearly a “grievous disparity between what lives are considered grievable or not,” and that what this means is that, outside of the political and epistemological boundaries of the nation-state, we need to really think seriously about what our principles are, beyond the vast imperialist power blocs. The alternative is a world where there is, to again quote him here, there is a “collective conspiracy of silence about human rights abuses… because we’re all doing it.”

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 radical ideas. He talks about his high tolerance for pessimism, which he realizes not everyone shares, and reflects on how that specific threshold for the negative might allow him to consider the nightmarish history of palm oil. It’s a history that is, in many ways, written in blood and fire, and one that opens up epistemic rifts. That idea of “epistemic rifts,” however, is more rooted to the moment where you, as he says, encounter an other and realize that your traditions are particular rather than universal. This is something that looking at the history of palm oil yields. And so, the history he offers is the history of something so sublimely complex that, in a sense, no imagination can quite grasp all of the entanglements the substance represents. He wants us to attempt to dwell with that immense complexity, and also the fact that it is a complex and yet not intractable problem. Ultimately his point is that there are solutions to the problem of exploitation, alienation and ecocide that the palm oil industry produces, but that those solutions have to come from the grassroots. To quote him here: the job of experts is to listen to the people who live in relation with each other and the land. To listen to these people and lend a hand if necessary. Self-determination is at the core of his argument here, but it is a self-determination that realizes the depth of entanglement; the fact that accepting local self-determination will likely drive up the price of commodities and potentially mean we have to forgo particular commodities in order to mitigate against social and environmental harm. He says it's imperative that we learn to defetishize commodities and perhaps fetishize instead the density of our entanglement. What would that mean? It might mean moving past confining logics that confuse the issue—the notion of inflation within economics, for example. He says the debate over the inflation crisis we are currently undergoing misses that the problem is, in fact, not rising prices but extreme levels of global inequality whereby certain people are deprived of the economic power and social agency to meet their own needs. Scarcity is something that we must politicize. So too is sacrifice. Who's sacrifice? This is the key question in Palm Oil. Human sacrifice, despite the undecided nature of its history, is consistently something practiced by elites for expedient reasons. What are those reasons? And why are they considered reasonable? If it is acceptable to sacrifice some for the good of the many, who gets to make that determination. And how does the logic of sacrifice get naturalized?

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 reality of sex work. Meredith speaks to her profound sense that a “pleasure gap” still exists, where the disparate and binaristic socializations of men and women position people very differently in terms of access to pleasure. I ask her about the place of biology in sex, and whether culture and context, and power, are always complexly at play in determining even our sense of the biology of sex. Ralston’s research work has largely focused on sex work and sex tourism globally, she’s also looked at unhoused women and sex work in Canada. She is also an award-winning filmmaker, and her film, Hope in Heaven received a very positive reception when it was broadcast on CBC. She also wrote and directed two documentaries with the National Film Board of Canada on women in politics. Here, though, we talk about her shifting relationship to the documentary work that she’s produced. This is where the critical self-reflection comes in, as Ralston is extremely aware of her own tendency to adopt certain conservative relationships to sex and sex work. It’s a complex topic that warrants an engaged conversation that doesn’t conveniently skip over the impasses. I would definitely recommend her new book. It thinks through the ripple effects of the #MeToo movement, which is differently relevant in the face of the misogynistic vilification of Amber Heard we’re seeing right now; it talks about the discourse of rape culture, and, most intensely, it advocates for sexual equality and justice, and an end to the sexual double standard that continues to contribute to the vulnerability and widespread dehumanization of trans women, women of colour and women in general who are open about sexual desire. We end by talking about a broader end to the policing of sex, which cannot arrive soon enough.

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 specific institutions in the United States. Her most recent book, The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging, is a remarkable study of the many ways that Black cartoonists have used racialized caricatures to contest and rework constructions of ideal citizenship. Wanzo recalls being told that her subject in The Content of Our Caricature had basically been exhausted. Imagine being questioned about whether there was enough content for a scholarly book within the history of Black comics—it speaks to the ways that, as she points out, comics are still seen as somewhat juvenile, and also the ways in which Black comics, in particular, are not understood as having their own vital, varied history. It’s interesting to think that Wanzo struggled to get the cover image for the book approved by the publisher. This striking image from Jeremy Love’s Bayou perfectly captures the concerns of her text. As she puts it, one of the questions she’s asking, again and again, in this book is: “What is this Black creator trying to do” with this representation of a figure—in the case of Bayou, the figure of the gollywog—that has “a specific racist… representational history”? In the coda for The Content of Our Caricature, Wanzo talks about the Marvel film Black Panther and its foundations in the foundational story arc surrounding Killmonger from the comics. She explains how the “transformation” and “rehabilitation” of Black Panther shows us how the history of representation and appropriation really is complex, and stresses that there is never “a homogenous black audience response. Things are not transparently always good and always bad." She argues that we really need to slow the process of interpretation and critical conversation down, and resist the tendency toward immediate condemnation. “Cancel culture,” as we’ve now titled it, is, in her words, “subsuming” so many different things that it’s become a “useless analytic tool.” It’s also a dizzyingly ironic title, given that those that frequently decry so-called cancel culture—namely those on the Right—are at the vanguard of canceling huge parts of culture that they deem threatening. Wanzo explains that, in the contemporary context, what we are seeing is the Right, in the US especially, attacking not only critical race theory, but all of “history” and “any discussion of discrimination.” The dominant form that cancellation is taking today vilifies any media that, from Wanzo’s perspective, “might make white heterosexual children from heteronormative families uncomfortable.” She makes it clear that this push exposes the fact that these groups fundamentally “don’t care about people who are not this ideal child that they’ve decided is American.” We talk about the ways that the mere presence of people who are not cisgendered and white in superhero stories still provokes strong reactions. Wanzo says that this spontaneous reaction to difference is deeply troubling, but it also shows the degree to which “the space of representation is a big battleground, and it matters,” and reveals “all kinds of conflicts that we have culturally and it’s a space under which various politics around inclusion and the nation and political belonging play out.”

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 Intentions: Canada's Development NGOs from Idealism to Imperialism. There’s no getting around it, though: the state of the journalistic profession is looking bleak. Dru talks about how social media has meant a “shifting of roles” for journalists and widespread “disempowerment in the sector” that runs alongside the public’s lack of confidence in journalism during the neoliberal period. More particularly, he says that social media and what he calls “algorithmic curation” is a kind “race” where “society is coming apart,” and in which a multitude of competing organizations are trying to establish the dominant “pattern of thinking.” What’s necessary, in this context, is for those on the Left to commit to radically deepening democracy, even as we labour under the force of “mega corporations” that constrain the flow of information. There are multiple demobilizing forces converging in the current moment. Jay talks about his research into the effects of NGOs, how they have tended historically, despite their good intentions, to deradicalize movements. In fact, he claims that we are currently seeing “systematic and cynical work to derail” the climate movement through the professionalization of activism in NGOs. What he laments is the loss of “direct accountability” and the constitutive links that movements have with their members as groups become incrementally more accountable to funders over time. A major theme here is the problem of how particular “patterns of thinking” are created, and then become very difficult to dislodge. We discuss the ways that geopolitical patterns of thinking have historically undermined any notion of a rules-based international order. He offers some nuanced analysis of the role of NATO in creating the conditions for the crisis in Ukraine, while necessarily dwelling with the impossible contradictions of that military conflict and the terrifying possibility that it could mean nuclear war, given the brazen ways that major powers are dealing with, and have dealt with, the prospect of nuclear annihilation in the past and present. It’s clear that, for Jay, we also need to unpack and come to terms with the “collective trauma” of settler colonialism and how it lives on in “scars” and “patterns of thought” we inherit. He underscores the ongoing violence of colonial oppression, and how, today, Indigenous peoples are “handcuffed to an objective measure” of climate collapse in ways that reinforce the ties between racism and capitalism. We talk in bluntly critical ways about how, as he puts it, capitalism is always “looking over your shoulder”—creating, commodifying and exploiting our relationships in its image. For this reason, perhaps, he stresses the importance of class as a site of social transformation, especially in relation to established and emerging environmental movements, where we are starting to realize that we share a grim fate under “the brutality of petro-states.” Wars are spreading globally and the climate emergency is accelerating. What are we going to do? Jay makes it clear that the crises we face are going to require mass mobilization to upend them, and that part of the battle involves confronting the class privilege and extreme wealth that makes it too easy for some to just basically refuse to perceive reality as it is.

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 of sovereignty that seek to overturn that form of domination by assuming radical responsibility for balancing relationships with ‘āina, or the land that feeds. In our conversation he talks about the meanings of Mauna Kea, which is not only the tallest mountain in the world, but also, more importantly, a place of worship and deep relationality for Kānaka Maoli that has been under threat for generations as a result of numerous telescope projects and the pursuit of profit through tourism. The struggle for Mauna Kea is a focal point of this interview for a number of reasons. Maile says that the state has shown it privileges the veneration of astronomy over the legally protected sacredness of Indigenous Hawaiians’ relationship to the place, and this is unequivocally because government funding, tourism and settler colonial capital determine what counts as valuable. Maile asks bluntly: why can’t we accept that leveling peaks of mountains is inherently a violent act of “desecration”? This is difficult, when one aspect of the struggle is the fact that the pop cultural trope of Hawai’i as a popular refuge continues to draw people in, even during a pandemic. On this point, he describes how lockdown, for a brief moment, allowed Indigenous Hawai’ians to see what places like Honolulu Harbor, Waikiki and others would look like as they began to “heal” from the “degradation” caused by this influx of tourists. Another theme here is the idea that we should take pop cultural representations seriously, but perhaps not too seriously. We talk about South Park’s reductive depiction of Indigeneity in Hawai’i and what it means to engage with the satirical representation of cultural appropriation itself. Maile insists that “Satire is not a metaphor” and “cannot be used metaphorically for decolonization.” Ultimately, the conversation zooms out to think through the ways that state governments look to bureaucratize control of the land to further occupy and control Indigenous sovereignty. In particular, the presence of the US military in Hawai’i is, for Maile, undoubtedly part of a broader process of territorial command by the settler colonial nation. He says that we need to start engaging with this in relation to the general need to slow down the pace of development in order to stave off climate change, and recognize the ways in which Kānaka Maoli and other Indigenous communities demonstrate an unwavering commitment to this reality. There are many moments, he says, where he’s called upon to teach settlers, using his particular expertise, but he still doesn’t believe that there is reciprocity in these relationships a lot of the time. While he trusts the intelligence of scientists, for example, he doesn’t feel that trust returned. And when his hospitality is met with hostility, it is hard to avoid taking a position of refusal. Refusal is maybe the overarching concept in this conversation. “No,” he says, is frequently the means through which Indigenous peoples affirm a right to the land. He doesn’t believe, for example, that existing in relation to the sacredness of the land, or “mastering what the sacred means” can or even should be taught in the university. He sees this when he’s asked to speak on behalf of other Indigenous nations in Canada. Not only is this not an ethical practice, he points out that it ignores the extent to which Indigenous politics is particular, not abstract–a fact that remains woefully misunderstood within settler colonial culture.

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 change or adaptation to climate change without “putting equity first.” This means devising material solutions with and for the disadvantaged communities in our city: racialized and underserved communities, the poor, the uniquely vulnerable. She wants us, on this Earth Day 2022, to recognize the unprecedented momentum the climate justice movement now has, in a context where we no longer talk about just “climate change” or a “climate crisis,” but a “climate emergency” and even a coming “climate catastrophe.” What we need are plans like the one that Regional Council just adopted in HRM: HalifACT (https://www.halifax.ca/about-halifax/energy-environment/halifact-2050-acting-climate-together) acts on the knowledge that the climate emergency is going to take everyone, it’s going to require an “army” of people capable of “deepening” and “increasing” engagement across the board. Shannon talks about the risk that was inherent in even bringing their plan and projections to Council originally. The choice was made to initiate the plan, despite the knowledge that, as she acknowledges, the COVID-19 pandemic had and has municipalities very worried about their “financial future.” But the future is, of course, what’s at stake in climate change, both immediate and long-term. So they moved forward, pushing seven core areas of actionable, conceivable counter-action, mitigation and adaptation. And the goal is to inspire confidence that there are so many things that can be done: against a dangerous attachment to business as usual and a deadly conviction that it is already too late. One of the big themes of our conversation is this idea that–in spite of the globe-spanning scale of the climate emergency, and the desperate need for a still-unrealized form of “multi-level climate governance”--cities are a crucial space where mobilization can materially happen. Especially in Canada. Cities need to be consulted, Shannon tells us, because large-scale plans to act against climate catastrophe which don’t attend to cities will not have “policies and funding programs” that actually meet the needs of people in cities. Cities are important, as well, because places like Halifax, with a high GDP and a lamentably very “dirty grid,” where the majority of our power comes from coal, can and should do more to decarbonize. Another major theme is this unresolved problem of communication: how do we craft messages and create engagement that causes people to care and feel capable of action, rather than encouraging them to turn away or tune out because it’s too late or because they’re too wracked with doubt? What does it mean to inspire stakeholders at every level to not just understand, but commit to the preservation of the local environment, out of love for the land and a knowledge that we can’t go on the way we’re going?

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 of articles on these subjects, but a main focal point of our dialogue was this new issue of the European Journal of Cultural Studies that he co-edited with Dick Zjip, which contains some new approaches to the politics of comedy. The reason this issue is so exciting is that it comes at a time when, as Nieuwenhuis explains, the “post-political” worldview that characterized the zenith of liberalism has been supplanted by a sort of “hyper-politics,” the point-of-no-return moment we now occupy where everything is inescapably political and a more diverse panoply of funny voices can be heard in comedy. And one of the things Nieuwenhuis points out in this conversation is that while “there has always been humour,” it is “very difficult today” to be “humorless.” In today’s system of compulsive entrepreneurialism where cultural capital is a question of social survival, the “saturation of every aspect of life with comedy” has reached a unique stage. If comedy is everywhere and if humour is an obligation, can we still be critical about it? When we’re surrounded by forms of funny communication that are predicated on boundary-pushing and offensiveness, do we have to look at it as “brave” or “challenging,” or can we speak up and shut it down? This obviously opens onto this thorny situation that’s been crudely dubbed “cancel culture,” which we note is not just about cancellation of certain kinds of humour, but as often about the emergence of new comedic styles that do consciously criticize conventions in comedy. Fundamentally, Ivo says, comedy is still about power, but not in the assumed way that it’s typically been thought about: yes, comedy can challenge dominant power structures, but it can also, and often does, reinforce them… in fact, Ivo suggests that both things can often happen in the same comedy special! Because, as he points out, the “form [itself] is very persuasive,” we need to, as audiences and avowed appreciators of comedy, be critical about the “aggressive side” of humour, and the co-optation of its truth-telling function for pernicious purposes. Ivo is sort of an expert in the history of humour scandals. In this interview we talk about these moments as “flashpoints” – controversies that emerge as a way of allowing us to assess changing cultural norms. Politicizing mockery which claims that derisive stereotypes are somehow a form of inclusion, we look at the controversy surrounding Dave Chappelle’s horribly transphobic and unfunny Netflix special The Closer, we talk briefly about the flashpoint of Joe Rogan being officially sponsored by Spotify, among other key sites of struggle over what’s acceptable in comedy and what constitutes overt hate speech. And, beyond that, how the debate itself has been both accelerated by and attenuated by algorithmic media and platform capitalism, where corporations like Netflix and Spotify, ByteDance and Google, and an increasing number of other Silicon Valley behemoths, “make money from our debates.” It’s tough to know how to proceed in this context, when we feel compelled to identify and confront the defensiveness of the old guard, knowing that our discourse has been captured by a “binary model” that encourages individuated clashes for cash. The point, in part, is just to be conscious of how we’re ensnared, and go from there.

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, affiliated with the Department of Anthropology, the Global Health Program, the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, the Climate Action Lab, and the Indigenous Futures Lab, while Stewart-Ambo is an Assistant Professor in the Education Studies program at UC San Diego. Despite these distinct research focuses, they co-direct the Indigenous Futures Institute with a visionary sense of collective purpose: for the Institute to signify beyond the individual demands of each member's disciplines. IFI is exceptional for the projects that are being worked on there, but it is also important because it is Indigenous-run at the highest level. This is not something that we encounter very much, and certainly not enough. The Institute is about imagining Indigenous design hubs outside of the constraints of, as Yang explains, the nation state, because that social formation, and its obsession with borders, cannot grasp the vital nature of living and interconnected bioregions. When I asked Yang, in this conversation, about what demilitarization could mean from an Indigenous perspective, he didn’t talk about any one conflict, but instead focused on the land and the context of a total war on nature, and how this language of interconnected bioregions allows us to think in radical ways about demilitarization beyond the “removal of troops.” While there is a discursive shift, among critical people, toward decolonization in the form of land acknowledgments, Stewart-Ambo talks about how universities are still clearly not structured with Indigenous prosperity in mind. She argues that so much of the language around equity, diversity and inclusion is about diversion, and either overlooks Indigenous peoples or actively plays into stereotypes. She demands “respectful engagement” at the highest levels and wants land acknowledgment statements to materialize relationships, with institutions actually stepping up and doing their part. No more superficial land acknowledgments, Fox says, because they so obviously function as a form of misdirection, a way of distracting the public from the persistence of privatization, extraction and harm done to Indigenous communities. What is so different, then, about the Indigenous Futures Institute, from their perspective, and I'm starting to see, as an outsider, how stark this difference is from the ways in which people are taught in the traditional Eurocentric university, what's so different is perhaps embodied by this idea of dream tanks: in direct opposition to the notion of think tanks, where, as Yang puts it, we are told how to think, rather than given time and space to explore what may be thought. Fox talks about the idea of a futurist fluency, against the nightmare scenarios that we face under settler colonial capitalism, and gives us this incredible vision for a moment where, in the “husk of colonialism,” communities can make something “beautiful,” innovating out of the remnants of militarism and industrialization.