Pretty Heady Stuff

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 connect with civil society organizations, trade unions, activists and politicians, and “to express direct, cross-border solidarity from the UK working class to the Ukrainian working class.” She not only demands that Ukraine’s foreign debt be canceled, but that the international community also provide reparations for 8 years of inaction on Russian aggression. If we want to understand this war, Yuliya points out, it is going to be necessary to look past the headlines. The simplistic black and white portrayals we’re receiving do not do justice to the complexity of the situation. And although she recognizes that this lack of nuance largely results from a desire to give the public a “coherent frame,” it’s just patently the case that, right now, “conventional frames don’t work” and for that reason, she says, we need to deeply reassess “what constitutes evidence” even, and evolve methods of analyzing disinformation, emotion, belonging, statehood and aggression beyond traditional Western scholarship and standard modes of political science. While we’re still encouraged to think in terms of the rule of law when trying to understand these sorts of conflicts, Yurchenko emphasizes that societies without the rule of law require us to “be more flexible” in our theorizing. Why can’t we incorporate “interdisciplinary and open-minded… frameworks” to understand what’s happening? This is what I kept hearing in my conversation with Yuliya: a tension between wanting to, herself, offer clarity, and knowing that the whole situation is, on some level, hopelessly complicated. So, for that reason, in part, she says she is necessarily hopeful that peace is possible, but has to be pragmatic about the evidence, which suggests that the war is going to drag on. So she continues to communicate publicly for peace. She talks at the beginning of our conversation about the fact that she derives a lot of strength from just fighting for the future through care – that these contributions to collective living-on have become a kind of personal coping mechanism, It speaks to the spirit of Yurchenko’s writing. Her book Ukraine and the Empire of Capital (https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745337371/ukraine-and-the-empire-of-capital/) is not only full of profound analysis, it also, importantly, centres the living labour of workers, people who are focused not on extraction, profit, and domination, but on trying to care for themselves and their families. These people are not, as she puts it here, just “pawns in imperialist games.” They deserve collective ownership of their own future. In the end, she argues that we must stop “competing for the crumbs of Empire,” “we need to imagine a future” of demilitarization, we need to imagine a world in which hate and resentment and competition for those crumbs no longer drives world affairs. In short, as she puts it, “we need to imagine the future before we can build it.”

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/products/nod-away), which is this massive, expansive story that considers the reductio ad absurdum possibilities of that sort of still science fictional, but increasingly more plausible, technology. He says that he wishes he could find the specific article that sparked the idea for Nod Away, but also seems to suggest it’s less important than just being open to the things in the world that are going to “click with you.” Incidentally, I really liked the way he admitted that he can’t exactly explain how his stories develop. He says it’s mostly intuitive, and compares his creative process to a rock tumbler, in the sense that there is a necessary but indeterminate process of refining your ideas. One of the things he notes-–and I think this is relatable for any artist or writer--is that he now feels more confident with his rendering of this epic story, and that he attributes the level of confidence he feels right now to the experience of being in one place, in a fixed space with a reliable routine. That might not work for everyone—others might be more nomadic–but I’d say that I think I function in the same way. The second installment in the Nod Away series (https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/nod-away-vol-2), released in 2021, advances the plot in exhilarating ways. To give you a sense of what the books are about–since I really tried to avoid spoilers in this interview, here is a summary from Multiversity Comics: “Nod Away is set on a near-future version of earth. A deep space transport has been developed to take a small crew to an earth-like, habitable planet in a nearby system in an attempt to begin colonization/repopulation. The internet is now telepathic and referred to as the “innernet.” When the hub is revealed to be a human child, Melody McCabe is hired to develop" a new nexus to replace that human hub. The books are really beautiful. And I ask Josh a number of questions about his specific cartooning style. The wireframe chaos that has become sort of a trademark, for example, is rooted in a dedication to Representing psychological states that can’t be expressed in words. It was amazing to hear that, while these panels seem to be frenetic and out of control, they’re actually conscious, controlled experiments in abstraction. We talk about how those choices are always in service of the story, despite the temptation to lean heavily into the aesthetics of splash panels and spectacle. Overall, he says the goal is to explore the “true costs of technology” without resorting to “didacticism.” I think the books definitely do that–-there are all these suggestive ideas surrounding technology-–the way it can act as both a source of escapism and serve as a site of destruction.

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.ca/sites/default/files/documents/city-hall/boards-committees-commissions/220117bopc1021.pdf) In our discussion we unpack that important document, but we also try to look at some of the historical roots of defunding and divestment as tools for achieving social justice, the complicated challenge of trying to gain public support for policies that strike the public as “too radical” because a prior set of cultural assumptions, ideologies and biases blind many of us to the need to go radically in a different direction from the system that we have: which blindly wastes a fortune in public funds financing a broken status quo. We talk about the ongoing fiasco of the so-called “Freedom Convoy” that has terrorized Canadian cities, and especially Ottawa, for the last several weeks. They make it clear that the public’s disgust with the response from political leaders and law enforcement should not be read as necessarily about a desire for more authoritarian measures to keep the peace–though there is likely a lot of that within Canadian public opinion–it should be seen as, first off, a moment where the police demonstrate they are here to “uphold the social order,” as El puts it, to protect “white conservative movements,” but it should also be interpreted as another example of a “long history of ignoring white nationalism” in Canada, in Julia’s words. In many instances, social movements and counterprotests organized by communities–these forces that “exist outside the system”--were able to accomplish what the police couldn’t. This just confirms, from their perspective, that we need an alternative model of public safety, one that trusts communities enough to work “in concert for the good,” to quote a particularly powerful turn of phrase from Tari that he makes near the end of this discussion. He makes that turn in the context of describing the Defunding the Police report as a “love letter to the city.” And admits that love can be “complex” and “conflictual,” but due to the fact that the evacuation of love from the social in a carceral nation allows “space for domination to exist,” we need to reengage with the public as an act of redemptive love. Things did not have to turn out this way, and they could still change. But achieving that alteration of social reality will necessarily mean, as El teaches us, working to achieve that change at the social level. It’s not going to happen without knowledge translation and civic engagement. As Julie succinctly puts it at one point: “language matters so much” in negotiating the attachment to authority that prevents many people from imagining a more radically democratic means of fostering healthy communities. So often the struggle is less about evidence and data and more about arguments, established doctrines, ideas that have been embedded in institutions for so long they come to count as unreflexive forms of common sense. Moving forward in a transformative way, they stress, might mean looking back in time at misremembered or deliberately forgotten movements, the voice of black women, for example, who Tari tells us “were truth-tellers in their time;” taking up their words and recognizing the prescience of their ideas rather than just “producing the same violence while citing [their] names.”

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 Davis and Beth Ritchie, two central thinkers on the prison industrial complex and its deep connections to racial capitalism. Abolition. Feminism. Now. is an invitation to enter a conversation about how we might respond as a society to the dehumanizing and brutal system of policing and punishment that we’ve more or less come to accept as the only means of ensuring public safety. Rich with examples of strategies for liberation, this book offers an authoritative analysis of not only the forgotten place of the incarcerated in contemporary society, but many other timely social problems that feel, at times, like they have no solution. The trick is, they say, the solutions are hard to imagine because of the way that ideology and a “carceral aesthetics” blind us to the urgent necessity of abolition. In this conversation, I tentatively ask Gina and Erica whether there might be a way for abolition to become more insistent on proactive change, rather than only emerging in response to particular crises. Their response reminded me of how little I really know about the movement for abolition. This is not about some historically new force in global politics; it is not the case that abolition feminism right now represents the reactionary emergence of something that wasn’t there. Abolition feminism has been here for a very long time, it is just that this history has been purposefully and perniciously forgotten. This moment of increased mobilization that we’re seeing today is the product of what Gina calls a “widening [of] the circle” to include people that have been “awakened” by recent events, and who are trying to respond to “multiple temporalities” coexisting at one time. They suggest that striking back against the normalizing of state violence requires the work of pushing the public’s sense of what the prison industrial complex is, past the specific space of unfreedom we imagine, and insisting on “having a longer [and more complex] conversation” about the system of racist mass incarceration we inhabit and are complicit in. That’s a lot to take in, but it’s necessary, they argue, to stay with the complexity, with the trouble. As they write in Abolition. Feminism. Now., it feels like “historical time is accelerating.” Crises are escalating and crashing violently onto the poor and precarious. So we have to try to respond with radical solutions to the emergencies that envelope the vulnerable first, while also remembering that, as they try to explain, we are always going to struggle to “learn in the space of emergency” because of the sometimes suffocating intensity of emergency. This is a problem if the goal and challenge of our times is no less than to fundamentally rework the very way in which society is structured.

Ardath Whynacht is an activist and writer who works for and with survivors of state and family violence. She’s also a professor of sociology at Mount Allison University and the author of a new book called Insurgent Love: Abolition and Domestic Homicide (https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/insurgent-love). The radical, utopian and absolutely necessary prospect of abolition is on people’s minds. As Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth Richie argue in the new book Abolition. Feminism. Now: It would be “Inconceivable to many even ten years ago, [that] jail closure, the elimination of money bond, clemency, and ‘compassionate release’ [would be] debated in mainstream media outlets such as the Washington Post and lauded in progressive public policy forums as examples of necessary change.” But that is what is happening -– a deep quaking of the conceptual foundation upon which our carceral, punishing society has been built. And yet still, at the centre of that tremor in the social fabric is a concern over safety: how do we do the difficult work of imagining a means of keeping especially the very vulnerable in society safe, rather than using the prison and police to ossify the roots of violence? Insurgent Love is an important political statement on the meaning of this broad global shift toward adopting an abolitionist framework, and so much of the book’s critical power comes from thinking in both practical and radical ways about what abolition could mean locally. There’s no question, she says, that it is “tough” to be an “abolitionist scholar on domestic violence research in Canada.” There is not much of an “appetite,” as she puts it, “for… non-carceral” solutions. But an abolitionist answer might be the only one, despite the fact that it is a hard argument to make in a country that still, like so many others, actively “worships” and “reifies” the police and the military as the indispensable sources of our safety. Ardath makes clear that the reason we need abolition feminism now is that the level of analysis Black and Indigenous feminisms can offer right now, and the “level of prediction,” too, as she puts it, means that we don’t need to be condemned to the reactionary politics of punishment. As white settler academics, we talk about what it means to be a “permanent students” of these forms of feminist thought that radically reject the system that was constructed to directly benefit us, and how to do this without passively accepting the underacknowledged and unearned “rewards for being an opportunist.” We can move in a totally different direction if we can begin to conceptualize meaningful multiethnic, multiracial solidarity that builds that different world out of a respect and reinforcement of difference: different cosmologies, different conceptions of justice, of resistance. And if we accept that we need to divorce ourselves from a carceral system that dehumanizes people and perpetuates violence. Davis and the other co-authors of Abolition. Feminism. Now. suggest that one of the things we might need, in this context, are “movement spaces for people to learn, to be wrong and unlearn, and to be accountable and change.” This idea of “reclaiming accountability” from an unaccountable regime of state violence and punishment might be the central tenet of abolition feminism. It’s a challenging idea that I’m still wrestling with, and will be for a very long time. It’s the challenge that I think we should all be confronting, and Insurgent Love gives us a vital engagement with it, in all of its messy, historically rooted reality.

Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald have spent decades developing ways of offering care and protection to women who desperately need it. As the description for their new book Women Unsilenced points out, they’ve made it their goal to break the silence, the tyranny of silence by which gender-based violence persists. They explain in this conversation that they developed a network of care for women in these circumstances because they couldn’t just passively take in the information, they needed to intervene. And while I don’t agree with every single one of the claims that they make in Women Unsilenced, I absolutely respect their fundamental motivation. There is an attachment in their book to the criminal justice system, a sense that we can’t necessarily quickly move away from the system that we have. I feel somewhat differently, and agree with my next guest for the podcast Ardath Whynacht that this violence in some ways comes from living in a carceral society that “relies on binary categories of good and evil to avoid any sustained response to the causes of domestic violence.” But I absolutely agree with Jeanne and Linda's sense that care networks are vital for providing an alternative space of safety outside of a punishing, individualistic society, outside of the coordinates of possibility provided by patriarchy, white supremacy, misogyny, domination. It’s a wide-ranging and difficult conversion, so please do be aware that we’re going to be talking about gender-based violence, we’re going to be talking about subjects that not everyone will be comfortable hearing. We talk about the ways in which victimization dehumanizes people. We talk about what it means to, as Jeanne puts it, “rescue the act of caring” in a society that doesn't just dismiss, but even criminalizes caring in certain ways. They talk about the ways in which their own place in the story is crucial to how they theorize gender-based violence. And I ask them how they cope through the work they do. They make it clear that it’s not a question of coping, but a question of responsibility for them. You can find the book in bookstores in Halifax, NS, and online at Friesen Press (https://books.friesenpress.com/store/title/119734000164461020/Jeanne-Sarson-and-Linda-MacDonald-Women-Unsilenced).

You might know Nora Loreto from her podcast Sandy and Nora Talk Politics. If you don’t, you should. Her conversations with Sandy Hudson aren’t just hilarious and relatable, they’re full of appropriately directed anger, and in many ways model a kind of solidarity that is necessary right now. You should also know her from her two books: Take Back the Fight, which I discussed with her last year, and Spin Doctors: How Media and Politicians Misdiagnosed the Covid-19 Pandemic (https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/spin-doctorshttps://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/spin-doctors). The new book offers political insights on precisely where the system failed, who it failed, and the roots of the political decisions that led to our current calamitous moment. In this interview, I ask about her fundamental motivation in writing the book. What is essential about documenting this dizzying time in detail? Why is it crucial that reporters and social critics document everything and think through what Loreto calls the “moving target” of the pandemic? She insists here that if we don’t, then we know that the virus’ impacts on especially the marginalized, those trapped in a hollowed out, profit-driven system of long-term care, the women who take care of the care labour required to keep society going, all of these underserved communities will be reduced to a footnote as the country pushes hard to return to something resembling “normalcy.” Against that wanton desire for a snapback into the status quo, Loreto forces us to dwell with the nightmarish resurgence of straightforward eugenics in this pandemic. The logic of disposability forced on people in long-term care, the apathy shown toward data that reveals the overwhelming correlation between disability, transmission and premature death. The ignorance of officials who waited for data to confirm the vulnerabilities that organizers and activists already knew existed in a world still deeply stratified by race and class. We end in a somewhat hopeful place, by trying to imagine what a robust left media could do in Canada. She says there’s obviously a pressing need for independent media to grow consequential enough to contest the attrition and monopolization that continues to hamper critical journalism in this country, but she says it can’t really grow in the intersectional, multivocal ways that we need it to if we don’t address and redress the overwhelming whiteness of the journalistic profession in Canada. This crisis made it feel, for a moment, like “anything was possible.” But making change at the root level in this moment required taking stock of the loss of collective power, the weakening of democracy under neoliberalism, and resisting these reassurances that “normal was right around the corner.” None of that happened, despite the fact that we could feel that this appeal to returning to some version of normal was maybe always a false promise. In the first months of the pandemic, fear felt omnipresent. Now something else seems to be intensifying: fatigue. And fatigue can be fatal.

Melanie Yazzie is a political organizer, a vocally anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist thinker, and an Indigenous revolutionary. She currently works as an assistant professor in the Departments of Native American Studies and American Studies at the University of New Mexico (https://nas.unm.edu/people/faculty/me...) and also organizes with The Red Nation, an indigenous-led leftist organization committed to immediate and material decolonization (https://therednation.org/). She is the lead editor of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society and has co-written two incredibly important books, The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth and Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation. We talk about those texts here, and about some of Dr. Yazzie’s forthcoming book projects. Yazzie’s work decrypts and diagnoses the individualism that characterizes liberal politics. And she is, as she explains here, understandably frustrated about the lack of progress that has been made on dealing with the liberal takeover of radical politics, in part via the reassuring language of “reconciliation.” In relation to this problem, Yazzie talks about the palpable “confusion” and “alienation” that exists among white settlers who participate in solidarity protests alongside Indigenous peoples. What she says we tend to overlook, though, is that this alienation is a defining feature of capitalism, and that the desire to be close to and internalize the type of connection and feeling of interdependency that Indigenous peoples feel toward the land, even it comes from a sincere place, is a deeply messy, difficult and unsettling tendency. The rise in “settler extremism” is, in her words, a “direct response to the existential threat that” even a change in the “symbolic order” represents. And so, for this reason, she reflects on how, as an educator, she has seen a “full scale assault on education” and why it might make sense that "the realm of ideas and the realm of intellectual production is” a “battleground… right now politically.”

Dr. Rupa Marya and Raj Patel are the authors of a brilliant new book entitled Inflamed: Deep Medicine and The Anatomy of Injustice (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374602529/inflamed). Dr. Rupa Marya is a specialist in internal medicine. Her research looks at the ways that social structures predispose certain groups to health or illness. And while Rupa is central to a number of revolutionary health initiatives, a few I want to make sure I mention are her work on the Justice Study–a national research effort to examine the links between police violence and health outcomes in black, brown and indigenous communities–and her work on the board of Seeding Sovereignty, an international group that promotes Indigenous autonomy in response to climate change. Raj Patel is an award-winning author and film-maker, and a Research Professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. He has worked for the World Bank and the WTO, and he’s also participated in global protests against both of these institutions. He’s served as a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems and published on an extraordinary array of things in a variety of different fields. He’s written for The Guardian, the Financial Times, the New York Times, Times of India, among many others. His first book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, made a big impact on me when I was a doctoral researcher. His second, The Value of Nothing, was a New York Times and international best-seller. I speak with them about our current moment, as another year begins, as the Omicron variant of COVID-19 rips through beleaguered cities, as climate fires in Colorado destroy almost a thousand homes (despite there still being snow on the ground), and as we somehow still see new year’s resolutions being discussed, as they are every year without fail–even in spite of the pandemic. New year’s, though, as Antonio Gramsci wrote, is less about renewal and more about “turn[ing] life and [the] human spirit into a commercial concern,” a sort of gut-check moment that is imagined to matter as a means of cultivating well-being. But it’s a means of cultivating well-being where we end up thinking, as Gramsci put it, “that between one year and the next there is a break, that a new history is beginning.” But the notion of a new year’s resolution seems nonsensical if we take seriously Marya and Patel’s sense that health, in its truest sense, is an “emergent phenomenon of systems interacting well with other systems.” Inflamed is a book that can help us locate the roots of disease outside of the body, in an economic system that generates obscene levels of toxicity and risk. The body, they point out, is really just doing what it is so incredibly efficient at: achieving equilibrium with its environment – the problem is that the environment has been so thoroughly damaged that the work of equilibrium has become corrosive to our bodies. Marya and Patel describe Inflamed as a “call to advance health” through “vivid and radical experimentation.” Their intervention privileges anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist and anti-white-supremacist perspectives. It acknowledges how important self-care can be in a profoundly exhausting system, but reinforces this idea that self-care is still totally inadequate when the problems we face are so clearly collective. For this reason, their notion of deep medicine is all about decentring the individual, learning ways of being a “plural being,” reengaging with what Rupa describes as “old new ways of being, knowing and learning” that encourage life-preserving networks of care. What would it mean, here, to reimagine water and land protection as acts of “care,” as acts of “love toward future generations” that also, crucially, upend the logic of private property?

Imre Szeman is University Research Chair of Environmental Communication and Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo. He’s also co-founder of the Petrocultures Research Group, a member of the International Panel on Behavior Change, and a fellow of the Canadian International Council. Over the years, his writing has made an enormous impact on my thinking, so I was thrilled to hear that Imre had decided to enter politics in this year’s snap election. He explains in this interview that he made the decision to embrace the challenge of campaigning because he was offered a rare opportunity: to serve as the Green Party of Canada's senior Climate Critic and write radical, innovative climate policy, to test the “translatability” of political and ecological theory in ways that he hadn’t had a chance to before. I ask him about his sense that any radical plan for energy transition has to have a Plan B, a game plan that doesn’t just dismantle, but rebuilds by attending to the needs of communities. This is different from what Szeman calls the “trope of hope,” a tendency that actually, he feels, ignores the “reality on the ground.” And part of that reality, crucially, is the fact of communication itself, and Imre notes that it hasn’t gotten any easier to “communicate about the environment” in a way that “encourages action.” And while he admits he doesn’t have any easy answers, he really stresses that we need to ask questions about “what generates effective communication.” Like, for example, is referencing the colossal, hard-to-cognize problem of the environment a better bet than trying to appeal to small local collectivities? What does technology, or what Szeman calls “technologically-inflected revolutionary politics,” communicate, if anything, about action and the need for “revolutionary social change”? Does technology in any way actually convey the way we move politically into a post-fossil-fuel future? And if it doesn’t, is that a fatal flaw of technologically-inflected revolutionary politics? We spend a lot of time considering the questions, but we also talk about the thought experiments in Kim Stanley Robinson’s sprawling opus of a climate fiction novel The Ministry for the Future. Imre expresses his admiration for how Robinson deals directly with the messiness of the political, rather than moving past the conflicts and contradictions toward a too-convenient conclusion that replaces our chaotic system with a better one. While the mess “can be dispiriting to look at,” Szeman insists that this is what he wants to understand. And he’s not alone: as he notes, there has never been a moment where the impacts of colonialism were “more visible.” The environment is, in a sense, being invoked as a “new political actor,” or an active agent in “revolutionary politics.” This fact of a rising consciousness of a “larger network” or “system” that exceeds capitalism, that totally transcends human desires, means that it has never been clearer that the world is inescapably interconnected.