Speaking Out of Place

Today I am deeply honored to speak with novelist, essayist, and scholar Yuri Herrera about his new novel, Season of the Swamp, which is a deeply researched and dazzlingly imagined account of Benito Juarez’s time spent in exile in New Orleans.  We talk about what that time and place offered to Juarez’s understanding of a world coming into being—one of créolité and carnival, of mixedness and multiplicity, and what these sometimes hallucinatory moments offered his political vision.  We talk about what kinds of new visions of freedom are discovered in the midst of forms of slavery that horrify Juarez.  Very importantly, we relate all of this to the present day—to the genocide in Gaza, the violent ICE attacks in the United States, and the descent into unbridled, and unmasked fascism. We are especially grateful to Yuri for reading from his novel, and talking in depth about the importance of mixed languages and the new social worlds they reflect.BioYuri Herrera (Actopan, México, 1970). His first three novels have been translated into several languages: Kingdom Cons, Signs Preceding the End of the World, and Transmigration of Bodies. In 2016 he shared with translator Lisa Dillman the Best translated Book Award for the translation of Signs Preceding the End of the World. That same year he received the Anna Seghers Prize at the Academy of Arts of Berlin, for the body of his work. His latest books are A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire, Ten Planets, and Season of the Swamp. He is a professor of creative writing and literature at Tulane University, in New Orleans.

Today I am delighted to speak with Andrew Ross about his new book, The Weather Report: A Journey Through Unsettled Climates. In this study, Ross revisits areas of the world that he has written about before—Palestine, the United Arab Emirates, Phoenix, Arizona, and China. While he found no absolute correlates, he did discover that what he calls a “subterranean current of thought” emerged as he spoke with former interviewees and new ones, and visited old sites that became familiar in a different way. In particular, we follow up Andrew’s claim that in Palestine we find a “grisly future arriving there sooner than elsewhere.”  The book focusses on the idea of population and scarcity, and argues that much of the policies that are based on the presumption of scarce resources are actually predicated on what Ross calls “bogus scarcity,” drawn upon to drive capitalist and genocidal and ecocidal violence. This is a violence that awaits us all unless we can find a better way of living together in the world.Andrew Ross is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, where he is director of the Prison Research Lab. A contributor to The Guardian, the New York Times, The Nation, New York Review of Books, and Al Jazeera, he is the author or editor of about 30 books, including Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel (which won a Palestine Book Prize), and, most recently, The Weather Report: A Journey Through Unsettled Climates. He is the co-founder of several movement groups, and currently is serving on the national steering committee of the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine network.

Today I am happy to speak with Ananya Roy and Veronika Zablotsky about their co-edited volume, Beyond Sanctuary: The Humanism of a World in Motion, which was based on a Sawyer Seminar they convened at UCLA. The essays collected in this book are international in scope and interdisciplinary in nature. What links them is a commitment to show that the idea of sanctuary all too often forgets its radical histories and possibilities, and lapses into a liberal humanism that not only does not solve the problems of refugees, migrants, and exiles, but even form obstacles to real and just solutions. Importantly, the many of the essays put the idea of “humanism” into question.  Most impressively, we find case histories of ordinary people building sanctuary spaces organically well outside, and even in defiance of, liberal sanctuary structures and practices. The book is accompanied by digital materials on the Sanctuary Spaces website which are designed for classroom use and self-study: https://challengeinequality.luskin.ucla.edu/sanctuary-spaces/ Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography and the Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the founding Faculty Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA, which advances research and scholarship concerned with displacement and dispossession in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the world. Working with social movements, the Institute seeks to build power and abolish structures of inequality, within and beyond the university. A scholar of global racial capitalism, Ananya’s research has focused on urban transformations and land grabs, global circuits of financialization, postcolonial development and projects of poverty management, and most recently the problem and promise of sanctuary. In comradeship with unhoused communities, her current research is concerned with racial banishment and counter-geographies of refusal and rebellion in Los Angeles.Veronika Zablotsky is a political theorist with an interest in interconnected histories of migration and empire; feminist and postcolonial studies; transnational social movements; Armenian diaspora studies; and postsocialism in the SWANA region. She teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin and held visiting professorships in politics and gender studies at universities in Germany. Previously she served as Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Sawyer Seminar “Sanctuary Spaces: Reworlding Humanism” at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. She holds a PhD in feminist studies, politics, critical race and ethnic studies, and history of consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Among her co-edited publications are the anthologies Decolonize the City! (Unrast, 2017) and Transforming Solidarities (Adocs, 2025). At the University of Pennsylvania she co-founded the Critical Armenian Studies Collective. She also organizes with the scholar activist collective Abolition Beyond Borders (www.abolitionismus.org).   

I am delighted to talk with scholar, journalist, and activist Thea Riofrancos about her new book, Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism.  She takes us deep into the mining of lithium and the production of lithium batteries, which have been welcomed as a key element in our transition from fossil fuels.  Traveling widely through Latin America to see lithium extraction at work, Thea brings us stories of how this industry has disrupted lives, changed local and national economies, and devastated the environment. On the other hand, she gives us an unflinching glimpse into the alternatives. The book wrestles with these and other issues, tracing the contradictions of things like on-shoring back to the 1970s. While not arriving at an unproblematic “solution” to extraction, Thea nonetheless outlines a critical set of best practices and imaginative alternatives to the bleak offerings of capitalism, green or not.Thea Riofrancos is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College, a Strategic Co-Director of the Climate and Community Institute, and a fellow at the Transnational Institute. Her research focuses on resource extraction, renewable energy, climate change, the global lithium sector, green technologies, social movements, and the Latin American left. She is the author of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism (W.W. Norton, 2025) and Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke University Press, 2020), and the coauthor of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso Books, 2019). Her publications have appeared in scholarly journals such as Global Environmental Politics, World Politics, and Perspectives on Politics, as well as in media outlets including The New York Times, Financial Times, Foreign Policy, n+1, Dissent, and more. 

Today I am delighted to talk with Roderick Ferguson about his provocative and much-needed intervention, “An Interruption in Our Cowardice.”  Initially driven by his deep disappointment in some Black intellectuals’ compliance and even assistance with reactionary forces, this essay opens onto profound issues of institutionalization, professionalization, and the deadening and repressive mental, social, and intellectual habits being “accepted” create. In our conversation we spend some time talking about alternative, and very real counterexamples to cowardice, such as the fearless examples of the encampments of the Student Intifada. We note that such alternative sites have always been there historically, and that it is crucial to turn our eyes to those spaces, if we are going to preserve the promise of liberatory education.Roderick A. Ferguson is the William Robertson Coe Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and American Studies at Yale University. He is also faculty in the Yale Prison Education Initiative as well as the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute/Yale National Initiative. He is the author of One-Dimensional Queer (Polity, 2019), We Demand: The University and Student Protests (University of California, 2017), The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (University of Minnesota, 2012), and Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique(University of Minnesota, 2004). He is the co-editor with Grace Hong of the anthology Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Duke University, 2011). He is also co-editor with Erica Edwards and Jeffrey Ogbar of Keywords of African American Studies (NYU, 2018). He is the 2020 recipient of the Kessler Award from the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS). His book In View of the Tradition: Black Art and Radical Thought will be released Fall 2026. 

Today I have the true honor of speaking with journalist, storyteller, historical researcher, and Native American ceremonial dancer Julian Brave Noisecat about his book, We Survived the Night.  This highly original book blends many voices and registers, from both well-known but also buried and purposefully obscured historical archives, to tribal and family stories.  Foremost are the legends and adaptations of the Coyote figure—which haunts, inspires, deceives, and, yes, teaches lessons that help Indigenous peoples survive the night. We spend some time talking about how Coyote is many things at once, but not all the time, we discuss notions of purity and mixedness, multiplicity and singularity, truth and lies, and come out on the side of generosity, love, and creativity, to make worlds that deserve not only to survive, but also to thrive.Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer, Oscar-nominated filmmaker, champion powwow dancer and student of Salish art and history. His first documentary, Sugarcane, directed alongside Emily Kassie, follows an investigation into abuse and missing children at the Indian residential school NoiseCat’s family was sent to near Williams Lake, British Columbia. Sugarcane premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival where NoiseCat and Kassie won the Directing Award in the U.S. Documentary Competition. The film was recognized with dozens of awards including Best Documentary from the National Board of Review and was nominated for an Academy Award. A proud member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq'escen and descendant of the Lil'Wat Nation of Mount Currie, NoiseCat’s first book, We Survived the Night, was published by Alfred A. Knopf, Penguin Random House Canada, and Profile Books in October 2025 and was an instant national bestseller in Canada with translations forthcoming from Albin Michel in France, Aufbau Verlag in Germany, Iperborea in Italy, and Libros del Asteroide in Spain.NoiseCat’s journalism has appeared in dozens of publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The New Yorker and has been recognized with many awards including the 2022 American Mosaic Journalism Prize, which honors "excellence in long-form, narrative or deep reporting on stories about underrepresented and/or misrepresented groups in the present American landscape." In 2021, NoiseCat was named to the TIME100 Next list of emerging leaders alongside the starting point guard of his fantasy basketball team, Luka Doncic.

Today we speak with Rachel Kuo about her book, Movement Media: In Pursuit of Solidarity, recently published by Oxford University Press. This fascinating study understands political activism through a unique perspective, asking the question, how do the choices activists make about how to present their movements to the public indicate key strategic, tactical, and political decisions?  Kuo shows that as they seek to persuade others to join their causes, activists work out their own questions, values, and commitments. Ranging from ‘zines, newsletters, posters, social media and more, Rachel talks about successes, defeats, and moments of burn-out and regrouping. From “BlackLivesMatter” to “#StopAsianHate” we see both moments of exhilaration, and painful self-reflection as movements take shape, change vectors, and imaging.A teaching and discussion guide for the book is here: https://www.rachelkuo.com/movement-media-bookRachel Kuo writes, teaches, and researches on race, social movements, and digital technology. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is author of Movement Media: In Pursuit of Solidarity (Oxford University Press) and co-editor of We Are Each Other’s Liberation: Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities (Haymarket Books). She is a founding member and current affiliate of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies and a co-founder of the Asian American Feminist Collective. She also co-edited two special issues on Asian American abolition feminisms for Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies and guest edited the World Without Cages project with the Asian American Writer’s Workshop.  She holds a PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University.  

Today I have the privilege and pleasure of speaking with Nicholas Mirzoeff and Priscilla Wathington about the genocide in Gaza, and how developing a new way of seeing and writing is demanded of us to address this historical moment. In the words of Silvia Federici, “Palestine is the World.”  We take Nick’s recent book, To See in the Dark, and animate it by having Priscilla read from her poetry. Nick writes: “After a year of genocide, I think politics is now the meeting of the visible and the unspeakable. Unspeakable in that what is visible is so awful as to be beyond ordinary words. Unspeakable in that what is visible is forbidden to be said.What has been sayable about the unspeakable? It has been poets who have found ways to make language do what it should not have to do.”The goal behind this dynamic interplay is to create the grounds for solidarity with Palestine, and with all other oppressed peoples in the world, and with the planet itself.See this blog for the poems read by Priscilla Wathington.Nicholas Mirzoeff is Professor and chair in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. To See In The Dark: Palestine and Visual  Activism  (2025) is being translated into Czech, Italian and Spanish. It is the most recent of more than a dozen books, including How To See The World (2015), translated into eleven languages. Since Occupy Wall Street (2011), his work has been in dialogue with social movements, including Black Lives Matter (The Appearance of Black Lives Matter) and #MeToo. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, The Nation and LARB. He lives in New York.Priscilla Wathington is a Palestinian American poet/editor and the author of the chapbook, Paper and Stick, which draws from her past human rights advocacy work. She is asking you to resist the lie that you are too helpless, or too busy, or too small to change anything. Take your small hand and your small voice and add it to this symphony against the genocide taking place in Gaza; and speak up not only about Gaza but also Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and your own backyard, and everywhere that humanity is at risk.

Intimidation, repression, and punishment with regard to activism for Palestine has only increased over the past year. Today I speak with three campus organizers from Students for Justice in Palestine who remain determined and committed, even in the face of their university’s complicity with genocide.  They come from both coasts of the United States—from the City University of New York and from San Jose State University. They explain what is happening on their campuses, and the ways in which they have created new tactics and actions in order to continue their work.Haddy Barghouti is the secretary of Students for Justice in Palestine at San José State University.  He is a senior majoring in journalism.Lucien Baskin is a doctoral student in Urban Education at the Grad Center researching abolition, social movements, and the university. Their dissertation focuses on histories of solidarity and organizing at CUNY. Lucien’s writing has been published in outlets such as Truthout, Society & Space, The Abusable Past, and Mondoweiss. Currently, they serve as co-chair of the American Studies Association Critical Prison Studies Caucus, are an inaugural Freedom and Justice Institute fellow at Scholars for Social Justice, and work as a media and publicity fellow at Conversations in Black Freedom Studies at the Schomburg Center. They organize with Graduate Center for Palestine and are a (strike-ready!) rank-and-file member of the PSC.Sarah Southey is a third year student at CUNY School of Law and a member of CUNY Law Students for Justice in Palestine and CUNY4Palestine. In 2024, Sarah and other C4P members submitted a freedom of information act request for CUNY's investments as part of a campaign to demand that CUNY divest from companies aiding and profiting off of israeli settler colonialism and genocide. CUNY illegally denied that request. C4P challenged the denial in court and won disclosure in Southey v CUNY. CUNY is now appealing that decision in a shameful attempt to continue to evade their legal and moral obligation to disclose and divest.

Today I am delighted to welcome activist and scholar Erin McElroy to the podcast. She is the author of a remarkable book, Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies in Postsocialist Times. At the center of this rich and provocative study is the Romanian city of Cluj, which has been dubbed the “Silicon Valley of Eastern Europe.”  McElroy untangles this notion by going back to the socialist period, whose technological advances made Romania a particularly attractive site for foreign tech investment after the fall of Communism. Erin explains how the arrival of what were called “digital nomads” into Cluj was first made possible by the brutal eviction of its Roma population.  As enticing as it is to map these evictions to similar displacements of racial minorities and the poor in the San Francisco Bay Area, Erin explores the fissures and disconnects between the two cases, as well as their eerie convergences. We end by, as McElroy writes, “reflecting on what bringing abolitionist and ant- imperial geographies together in post-socialist contexts can do. Just as global capital connections mapped the Siliconizing moment, other connections scaffold the very possibilities of unbecoming Silicon Valley.”Erin McElroy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington, where their work focuses upon intersections of gentrification, technology, empire, fascism, and racial capitalism, alongside housing justice organizing and transnational solidarities. McElroy is author of Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times (Duke University Press, 2024) and coeditor of Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance (PM Press, 2021). Additionally, McElroy is cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project—a data visualization, counter-cartography, and digital media collective that produces tools, maps, reports, murals, zines, oral histories, and more to further the work of housing justice. At UW, McElroy runs Landlord Tech Watch and the Anti-Eviction Lab which produce collaborative research and collective knowledge focused on intersections of property, surveillance, technocapitalism, and technolibertarianism.