How have companies like Uber and Lyft, Instacart and DoorDash and others, changed the nature of work from bad to horrific? Veena Dubal joins me to explain how such companies have exported globally a technique of algorithmic wage discrimination that pays workers based on data to which they have no access. Owners dangle bonuses before workers but take away work from them as they draw close to achieving their targets; they use psychological tricks derived from video games to create a casino-like environment where the house always wins. Dubal urges us not to fall into the trap of competing against the house, but back to “good old-fashioned organizing.” This is one of the most powerful and significant episodes of Speaking Out of Place.Professor Veena Dubal’s research focuses broadly on law, technology, and precarious workers, combining legal and empirical analysis to explore issues of labor and inequality. Her work encompasses a range of topics, including the impact of digital technologies and emerging legal frameworks on workers' lives, the interplay between law, work, and identity, and the role of law and lawyers in solidarity movements.  Dubal has written numerous articles in top law and social science journals and publishes essays in the popular press. Her research has been cited internationally in legal decisions, including by the California Supreme Court, and her research and commentary are regularly featured in media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, CNN, etc. TechCrunch has called Prof. Dubal an “unlikely star in the tech world,” and her expertise is frequently sought by regulatory bodies, legislators, judges, workers, and unions in the U.S. and Europe.  Professor Dubal is completing a book manuscript that presents a theoretical reappraisal of how low-income immigrant and racial minority workers experience and respond to shifting technologies and regulatory regimes. The manuscript draws upon a decade of interdisciplinary ethnographic research on taxi and ride-hail regulations and worker organizing and advocacy in San Francisco.Prof. Dubal received a B.A. from Stanford University and holds J.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, where she conducted an ethnography of the San Francisco taxi industry. The subject of her doctoral research arose from her work as a public interest attorney and Berkeley Law Foundation Fellow at the Asian Law Caucus where she founded a taxi worker project and represented Muslim Americans in civil rights cases. Prof. Dubal completed a post-doctoral fellowship at her alma mater, Stanford University. She returned to Stanford again in 2022 as a Residential Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.  Prof. Dubal is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Fulbright, for her scholarship and previous work as a public interest lawyer. 

In response to the attacks launched against the Palestinian people in Gaza by the State of Israel, on Oct 12 Speaking Out of Place created a special episode on Gaza with legal experts Diana Buttu and Richard Falk. We did so with the aim to address and correct the proliferation of misinformation that the mainstream press was spewing out.We also solicited and received many statements of solidarity with the Palestinian people.  So many have come in, and continue to come in, that we decided to create a separate podcast episode consisting entirely of these statements.  We will update this episode continually. Listen to these voices, and please help amplify them my sharing this episode as widely as possible.  May there be a just peace for the Palestinian people, may they have the land and freedom that is rightfully theirs.  Free Palestine.A full list of contributors is on our Blog, and will be updated.

Today we talk with Joseph Pierce and Liza Black about the vast number of questions that are opened up when people pretend to be Native when they in fact are not. These cases take on a specific significance when such false identifications allow these people access to privilege and positions of authority. When these falsehoods are found out, they place scholars and activists who have allied themselves with these people in extremely difficult positions, and unfortunately make institutions like colleges and universities the final arbiters of how “justice” is to be served. Finally, these cases put even more pressure on Native peoples to imagine and practice inventing identities that are both rooted and at the same time open to a broader set of possibilities.Liza Black is a citizen of Cherokee Nation. Recently on fellowship at UCLA, Black is currently completing her book manuscript: How to Get Away with Murder: A Transnational History of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, contracted with Johns Hopkins University Press for an anticipated publication date of 2026. How to Get Away with Murder provides six case studies of women, girls, and two spirits disappeared or murdered over the course of the 20th century. Black is an Associate Professor of History and Native American and Indigenous Studies. In 2020, Black published Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, a deeply archival book making the argument that mid-century Native people navigated the complexities of inhabiting filmic representations of themselves as a means of survivance. Black has received several research grants including the Ford pre-, doc and post-doc fellowships; the Institute of American Cultures at UCLA fellowship; and the Cherokee Nation Higher Education Grant.Joseph M. Pierce is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the intersections of kinship, gender, sexuality, and race in Latin America, 19th century literature and culture, queer studies, Indigenous studies, and hemispheric approaches to citizenship and belonging. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019) and co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) as well as the 2021 special issue of GLQ, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” His work has been published recently in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Critical Ethnic Studies, Latin American Research Review, and has also been featured in Indian Country Today. Along with S.J. Norman (Koori of Wiradjuri descent) he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds. He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.  

The volatile situation in Gaza has been grossly distorted in the mainstream western press. By omission, selective editorializing, and misstatement of so-called “facts,” a particular caricature has emerged that has invisibilized the Palestinian people, the history and the nature of the Occupation, and the actual conditions of life in what many have called the world’s largest open air prison. To get a better sense of all of these, we speak with two seasoned experts on Palestine.After our conversation with Diana Buttu and Richard Falk, we conclude this episode with statements of solidarity with the Palestinian people from activists, scholars, and cultural workers from around the world: the Birzeit University Union of Professors and Employees Occupied Palestine; activist and scholar Cynthia Franklin, a long-time champion for Palestinian and other Indigenous peoples’ rights; renown Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, who has been widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation; celebrated feminist scholar, philosopher, and public intellectual Sara Ahmed; Michael Hardt, eminent political philosopher and writer; award-winning poet, scholar and long-time civil rights and anti-Zionist Hilton Obenzinger; legendary abolitionist feminist activist, writer, and scholar Angela Y. Davis.  Following Angela Davis we have a statement from the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective read by scholar Manijeh Moradian, and then a statement from the Palestine Writes Literary Festival, read by executive director and celebrated novelist, Susan Albuhawa.We then solicited statements from others, and received several immediately, with more coming in daily. We will update this podcast and add contributions as they arrive and as we can process them. We invite you to listen to them as you can, and to join in our commitment to Palestinian life, freedom, and land.Diana Buttu is a  Haifa-based analyst, former legal advisor to Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestinian negotiators, and Policy Advisor to Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network.  She was also recently a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.After earning a law degree from Queen's University in Canada and a Masters of Law from Stanford University, Buttu moved to Palestine in 2000. Shortly after her arrival, the second Intifada began and she took a position with the Negotiations Support Unit of the PLO.Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University (1961-2001) and Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, Queen Mary University London. Since 2002 has been a Research Fellow at the Orfalea Center of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Between 2008 and 2014 he served as UN Special Rapporteur on Israeli Violations of Human Rights in Occupied Palestine.Falk has advocated and written widely about ‘nations’ that are captive within existing states, including Palestine, Kashmir, Western Sahara, Catalonia, Dombas.He is Senior Vice President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, having served for seven years as Chair of its Board. He is Chair of the Board of Trustees of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. He is co-director of the Centre of Climate Crime, QMUL. Falk has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times since 2008.His recent books include (Re)Imagining Humane Global Governance (2014), Power Shift: The New Global Order (2016), Palestine Horizon: Toward a Just Peace (2017), Revisiting the Vietnam War (ed. Stefan Andersson, 2017), On Nuclear Weapons: Denuclearization, Demilitarization and Disarmament (ed. Stefan Andersson & Curt Dahlgren, 2019. 

On today’s episode we speak with two of the founders of the Polis Project—Suchitra Vijayan and Francesca Recchia—about their new book, How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners. We are also deeply honored that the eminent Dalit intellectual, and former political prisoner Dr. Anand Teltumbde is with us as well to lend his unique insight into the political situation in India and the realities of being a political prisoner there. The Polis Project, Inc. is a New York-based hybrid research and journalism organization that works with communities in resistance. Through its  Research, Reportage and Resistanceapproach, they publish and disseminate critical ideas that are excluded from mainstream media. Their work sheds light on the rise of authoritarianism especially in democracies and focuses on issues of racial, class and caste injustice, Islamophobia and State oppression around the world. In September 2019, the United States Library of Congress selected The Polis Project, Inc.’s website for inclusion in its web archives. Francesca Recchia is an independent researcher, educator and writer whose work is grounded in the values and principles of decolonial philosophy and radical pedagogy. She is interested in the geopolitical dimension of heritage and cultural processes in countries in conflict and she focuses on creative practices of collective resistance in contexts of unequal structures of power. Over the last two decades, Francesca has worked in different capacities in Palestine, Pakistan, India, Kashmir, Iraq and Afghanistan. Her latest assignment in Kabul was as Acting Director of the Afghan Institute for Arts and Architecture.She was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College of London, has a PhD in Cultural Studies at the Oriental Institute in Naples and a Master in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Besides being a scholar and practitioner in his formal disciplines of Technology and Management, with a corporate career spanning four decades at top management positions, and a decade as an academic, Dr Anand Teltumbde has maintained his parallel career as a civil rights activist, writer, columnist and public intellectual right since his student days. He contributed to the civil rights movement in India as one of its founding pillars and contributed theoretical insights through his voluminous writings into most issues. He participated and led many fact finding missions and peoples’ struggle. He has  published more than 30 books on contemporary issues and wrote a column Margin Speak for a decade in Economic & Political Weekly before being arrested in the infamous Bhima-Koregaon case.  Suchitra Vijayan is an essayist, lawyer, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. She is the award winning author of the critically acclaimed book Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India (Melville House, New York) and How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners (Pluto Press). Her essays, photographs, and interviews have appeared in The Washington Post, Time Magazine GQ, The Nation, The Boston Review, Foreign Policy, Lit Hub, Rumpus, Electric Literature, NPR, NBC, and BBC. As an attorney, she worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before co-founding the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, giving Iraqi refugees legal aid. She is an award-winning photographer and the founder and executive director of the Polis Project. She teaches at NYU Gallatin and Columbia University’s Oral History Program.A transcript of Dr Tetumbde's remarks can be found on SpeakingOutofPlace.com  

Amidst great fanfare, Stanford University created the Doerr School for Sustainability, which immediately said that it would accept funding from the fossil fuel industry. A group of students has pushed back, and built an impressive movement to dissociate from such funds. In this episode, we talk to some of the people leading the movement about what drives them and sustains them in building a True School of Sustainability.June Choi is a PhD candidate in Earth System Science at the Doerr School of Sustainability. Her research focuses on quantifying the impacts of climate change to inform adaptation strategies. Her previous work involved tracking global climate finance flows, setting standards for green bonds and sustainable finance integrity. She holds an MA in International Relations from John Hopkins University and BA in Sociology from Amherst College.Yannai Kashtan is a PhD candidate in Earth System Science at the Doerr School of Sustainability, where he studies health-related hazards of residential fossil-fueled appliances. His most recent project quantified benzene emissions from gas and propane stoves. He earned a BA from Pomona College, where he majored in physics and chemistry and studied organic semiconductors.Belinda Ramírez (they/them) teaches introductory liberal education courses at Stanford as a COLLEGE Fellow, including courses on environmental sustainability, food and culture, and climate/environmental/food justice. They also organize with Stanford’s Environmental Justice Working Group and the Coalition for a True School of Sustainability. Trained in cultural anthropology, their research deals with the social, racial/ethnic, political, and economic dimensions of urban agriculture and other food movements situated within the modern industrialized and corporatized global food system. In researching these topics, Belinda has come to recognize the fulfillment found in experiential learning and working firsthand to change their local food system, receiving agricultural training through local farms and community gardens in southern San Diego. They have also engaged in statewide political advocacy for young farmers through the National Young Farmers Coalition, served as both Board and Food Justice Co-Chair for Slow Food Urban San Diego, and worked as a Soil Farmer for Food2Soil. They consider themselves a farmer-scholar, bridging the worlds between praxis and theory, academia and tangible, on-the-ground work.

Attacks on those protesting the Israeli state policies and practices which have maintained the violent dispossession of Palestinians have commonly misrepresented, distorted, and even manufactured disinformation. This has done great damage to the lives and careers of many.  As public opinion shifts against the Israeli state, attacks by extreme Zionists have increased. On today’s show we speak with two individuals about this phenomenon. Nader Hashemi and Omar Shakir help us understand it from many different angles--legal, historical, and personal.Nader Hashemi is the Director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and an Associate Professor of Middle East and Islamic Politics at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He obtained his doctorate from the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto and previously was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the UCLA Global Institute. Dr. Hashemi was previously the founding Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver.  His intellectual and research interests lie at the intersection of comparative politics and political theory, in particular debates on the global rise of authoritarianism, religion and democracy, secularism and its discontents, Middle East and Islamic politics, democratic and human rights struggles in non-Western societies and Islam-West relations. He is the author of Islam, Secularism and Liberal Democracy: Toward a Democratic Theory for Muslim Societies (Oxford University Press, 2009) and co-editor of The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future (Melville House, 2011), The Syria Dilemma (MIT Press, 2013), Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2017) and a four-volume study on Islam and Human Rights: Critical Concepts in Islamic Studies (Routledge, 2023). He is frequently interviewed by PBS, NPR, CNN, Al Jazeera, Pacifica Radio, Alternative Radio and the BBC and his writings have appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, The Nation, Al Jazeera Online, CNN.com among other media outlets. Omar Shakir serves as the Israel and Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch, where he investigates human rights abuses in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza and has authored several major reports, including a 2021 report comprehensively documenting how Israeli authorities are committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution against millions of Palestinians. As a result of his advocacy, the Israeli government deported Omar in November 2019. Prior to his current role, he was a Bertha Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where he focused on US counterterrorism policies, including legal representation of Guantanamo detainees. As the 2013-14 Arthur R. and Barbara D. Finberg Fellow at Human Rights Watch, he investigated human rights violations in Egypt, including the Rab’a massacre, one of the largest killings of protesters in a single day. A former Fulbright Scholar in Syria, Omar holds a JD from Stanford Law School, where he co-authored a report on the civilian consequences of US drone strikes in Pakistan as a part of the International Human Rights & Conflict Resolution Clinic, an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Affairs, and a BA in International Relations from Stanford.             

Today we talk with Liza Featherstone about this huge victory for ecosocialists, and for everybody actually, in New York, that came with the passage of a bold piece of legislation, the Build Public Renewables Act, or BPRA. Featherstone explains the genesis of the bill, and the specific wrk that activists put into its passage. What obstacles did they confront, how did they work together to overcome those obstacles, and what can other environmental activists learn from this historic moment?Liza Featherstone is the author of Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation, published by O/R Books in 2018, as well as Selling Women Short: the Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Walmart (Basic Books, 2004).  She co-authored Students Against Sweatshops (Verso, 2002) and is editor of False Choices: the Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Verso, 2016). She's currently editing a collection of Alexandra Kollontai 's work for O/R Books and International Publishers and writing the introduction to that volume. Featherstone's work has been published in Lux, TV Guide, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Ms., the American Prospect, Columbia Journalism Review, Glamour, Teen Vogue, Dissent, the Guardian, In These Times, and many other publications.  Liza teaches at NYU's Literary Reportage Program as well as at Columbia University School for International and Public Affairs. She is proud to be an active member of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America and of UAW local 7902.

Sara Ahmed discusses her new book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, challenging the notion of complaining about bigotry as impolite. She explores the connection between happiness, violence, and state institutions, emphasizing the power of killjoy activism in dismantling oppressive structures and envisioning liberation.

Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with Michael Hardt about his new book, The Subversive Seventies.  This expansive study of a broad range of subversive movements across the globe shows us how the 70s were actually ahead of us in terms of confronting key issues and contradictions that remain with us today and shows what we can learn from them. Michael Hardt teaches political theory in the Literature Program at Duke University.  He is co-author of several books with Antonio Negri, including Empire.  His most recent books are The Subversive Seventies and (with Sandro Mezzadra) Bolivia Beyond the Impasse.  Together Sandro and Michael host The Social Movements Lab.