Today I speak with Nasser Abourahme about his new book, The Time Beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony. Drawing on a wealth of diverse materials including, but not limited to, state documents, political philosophy, literature, and historical archives, The Time Beneath the Concrete focuses on the “struggle over historical time itself.” This is a struggle that is predicated on a constitutional inertia or “stuckness” of the colonial project.  We end by talking about the notion of “inhabitation,” which Abourahme describes as “the life-making practice of the dispossessed everywhere.”  He suggests this as a way to imagine a life that can be lived in a different set of temporal coordinates that recognize a different set of human possibilities.Nasser Abourahme is a writer and teacher, and is currently Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at Bowdoin College. He’s the author of The Time beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony (Duke University Press, 2025). 

Today I have the great honor of speaking with activist and educator Jesse Hagopian about his new book, Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education. We talk about the assault on public education that takes the form of criminalizing the truth itself. We note both the powerful corporate forces behind this movement and what they are afraid of, and also discuss the many instances of people fighting back to name, amplify, and mobilize the truth together.Jesse Hagopian’s African ancestors survived the middle passage and enslavement on plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana. Jesse is a Seattle educator and author of the new book, Teach Truth: The Attack on Critical Race Theory and the Struggle for Antiracist Education. He is editor for Rethinking Schools magazine, a founding steering committee member of Black Lives Matter at School, and is the Director the Teaching for Black Lives Campaign of the Zinn Education Project. Jesse is the editor of of the book, More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High Stakes Testing, and the co-editor of the books, Teaching Palestine, Teaching for Black Lives, Black Lives Matter at School, and Teachers Unions and Social Justice.Jesse’s writing has appeared in The Seattle Times, The Nation, The Progressive, Truthout, and The Washington Post. You can connect with Jesse on IG  (@jessehagopian), Bluesky (@jessehagopian.bsky.social) or his website, www.IAmAnEductor.com.

In today’s show, I speak with Evyn Le Espiritu Gandhi about two pathbreaking studies which create new ways of thinking about populations bound by complex and contradictory notions of loyalty and psychological investment. Based on meticulous archival research and oral histories amongst disparate populations in South Vietnam, Guam, and Israel-Palestine, in Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine Gandhi is able to probe deeply into fascinating personal stories of refugees that have moved between these spaces, disclosing complex and often contradictory notions of belonging and loyalty. We also talk about her current book project, which tackles the idea of southern regions such as South Korea, South Vietnam, and the American South, as each mourning lost images of the nation.Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is an associate professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA (Tovaangar). She is the author of Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine (University of California Press, 2022) and co-editor with Vinh Nguyen of The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives (Routledge, 2023). She is the lead curator of a public history exhibit, “Remembering Saigon: Journeys through and from Guam,” which opened this month at UC Irvine’s Southeast Asian Archive. She is currently working on a second book project which revisits Gramsci’s “southern question” by constellating the southern spaces of South Korea, South Vietnam, and the US South.

Today on Speaking Out of Place I talk with Sarah T Roberts about the hidden humans behind Artificial Intelligence, which is reliant on executives and business managers to direct AI to promote their brand and low-level, out-sourced, and poorly paid content managers to slog through masses of images, words, and data before they get fed into the machine. We talk about the cultural, sociological, financial, and political aspects of AI. We end by taking on Elon Musk and the DOGE project, as an emblem of how Silicon Valley executives have embraced a brand of tech rapture that disdains and destroys democracy and attacks the idea that people can take care of each other, independent of sociopathic libertarianism.Sarah T. Roberts, Ph.D. is a full professor at UCLA (Gender Studies, Information Studies, Labor Studies), specializing in Internet and social media policy, infrastructure, politics and culture, and the intersection of media, technology and society. She is the faculty director and co-founder of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2), co-director of the Minderoo Initiative on Technology & Power, and a research associate of the Oxford Internet Institute. Informed by feminist Science and Technology Studies perspectives, Roberts is keenly interested in the way power, geopolitics and economics play out on and via the internet, reproducing, reifying and exacerbating global inequities and social injustice.

Today on Speaking Out of Place I talk with award-winning novelist Laila Lalami about her new novel, The Dream Hotel. What happens when the state, with the pretext of protecting public safety, can detain indefinitely certain individuals whose dreams seem to indicate they may be capable of committing a crime?  Set in a precarious world where sleep-enhancing devices and algorithms provide the tools and formulae for making one’s unconscious a witness to one’s possible waking life, this novel touches on a myriad of political, philosophical, and moral concerns as they particularly connect to issues of gender, race, ethnicity, privacy, and  the security state.Laila Lalami is the author of five books, including The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award. It was on the longlist for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a national bestseller, won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. Her books have been translated into twenty languages. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s, the Guardian, and the New York Times.  She has been awarded fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University.  She lives in Los Angeles.  

Today I have the pleasure of talking with Professor Adrian Daub about the recent elections in Germany, where we saw a surge in votes for the Far Right AfD party, which is now the second-most powerful party in the country.  We discuss the significance of this rise in popularity,  and the ways the elections reveal a number of shifts in German politics, as the various parties stake out positions which align with not just a center-right orientation, but, more dangerously, a far right one. We speak of the parallels to the recent election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, and what it says about the entrenchment of both neoliberalism and a faux populism based on xenophobia, and not serving the actual material interests of everyday people.Adrian Daub teaches German and Comparative Literature at Stanford, where he directs the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. He is the author most recently of The Cancel Culture Panic (2024), and co-hosts the podcast In Bed With the Right.”

Today on Speaking Out of Place I talk with Omar El Akkad about his new book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. The title of the book comes from a tweet he posted three weeks after the bombardment of Gaza began. Since then, the tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times. Horrified at what has transpired since that moment, Omar El Akkad wrote this full-throated indictment of the “principal concern” of the modern American liberal. It is “not what one does or believes or supports or opposes, but what one is seen to be.” Moving from the scale of the individual to that of entire industries and political parties, we talk about the terrible consequences of this attitude with regard to Palestine, and beyond.OMAR EL AKKAD is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager, and now lives in the United States. He is a two-time winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and the Oregon Book Award for fiction. His books have been translated into thirteen languages. His debut novel, American War, was named by the BBC as one of one hundred novels that shaped our world.

Maha Nasser, an associate professor focused on Palestine's cultural history and author of "Brothers Apart," joins Karam Dana, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies and author of "To Stand with Palestine." They dive into the formation of transnational Palestinian identities and the critical role of language and art in activism. Highlights include resilience amid settler colonialism, the historical shaping of Palestinian identity, and the importance of solidarity in resistance movements. They also share insights on confronting academic repression and amplifying Palestinian voices in broader social struggles.

Today I talk with Tao Leigh Goffe about her new, magisterial Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis.  Spanning many fields and disciplines in the natural sciences, social sciences, the humanities and the arts, Professor Goffe weaves together an historically rich and geographically complex picture of how capitalism and racism undergird the climate crisis in ways made invisible or benign via the work of the west’s “dark laboratory.”  Writing back through accounts of indigenous bird watching and Black provisional grounds, we talk about things as seemingly different as the massive guano industry built on Chinese and Indian labor in the 19th century to Malcolm-X’s boyhood vegetable garden in Michigan.  We talk in particular about one of the key passages of Dark Laboratory, where Tao writes:“Still, we manage to create a poetics out of that which wishes to destroy us and the planet.  How else will we be able to live in ‘the after’? We must reassess what a problem is.  Living is not a problem, as Audrey Lorde reminds us. I would add that dying is not a problem either. Decomposing is essential to the natural order and cycle of life. Living at the expense of others is a problem.”Tao Leigh Goffe is a writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist who grew up between the UK and New York City. For the past fifteen years she has specialized in colonial histories of race, geology, climate, and media technologies. Dr. Goffe lives and works in Manhattan where she is an Associate Professor at CUNY in Black Studies. She teaches classes on literary theory and cultural history. Dr. Goffe’s book on how the climate crisis is a racial crisis is called DARK LABORATORY (Doubleday and Hamish Hamilton (Penguin UK, 2025)). Her second book BLACK CAPITAL, CHINESE DEBT, under contract with Duke University Press, presents a long history of racialization, modern finance, and indebtedness. It brings together subjects of the Atlantic and Pacific markets from 1806 to the present under European colonialism. Dr. Goffe is a fellow at the Harvard University Kennedy School in racial justice. Her research explores Black diasporic intellectual histories, political, and ecological life. She studied English literature at Princeton University before earning her PhD at Yale University. Dr. Goffe’s research and curatorial work is rooted in literatures and theories of labor that center Black feminist engagements with Indigeneity and Asian diasporic racial formations. Committed to building intellectual communities beyond institutions, she is the founder of the Dark Laboratory, an engine for the study of race, technology, and ecology through digital storytelling. Dr. Goffe is also the Executive Director of the Afro-Asia Group, an organization that centers the intersections of African and Asian diasporas, futurity, and radical coalition towards sovereignty.   

In a thought-provoking discussion, Maya Schenwar, a seasoned writer and editor, and Kim Wilson, an inspiring artist and educator, explore the intertwining of parenting and abolition. They address the challenges of merging activism with caregiving and advocate for the vital role of care work in justice movements. The guests emphasize creating nurturing environments for children, community support, and the importance of interdependence. Their insights highlight the transformative power of radical parenting and nurturing relationships in fostering societal change.