Speaking Out of Place

Three international volunteers share their personal journeys and motivations for joining the International Solidarity Movement in support of Palestinians. They discuss the devastating land grabs and psychological warfare in the Masafer Yatta region, where homes are demolished and families face violence. The conversation sheds light on media distortions surrounding Palestinian narratives and the importance of grassroots activism. The volunteers emphasize the power of nonviolent resistance and the resilience of Palestinians in their fight for justice.

Today, Sunday morning, October 20, former general Prabowo Subianto is being sworn in as Indonesia’s new president. We release a conversation we had earlier this month with Intan Paramaditha and Michael Vann about the road leading up to this inauguration, beginning in the 1960s with the Suharto regime.  Prabowo is a strong-arm authoritarian figure with a bloody record of human rights violations, yet he has remade his image as a cuddly, elder populist figure.  We spend some time talking about how his regime is likely to continue, if not accelerate, aggressive and brutal economic development policies that have wrecked the environment and displaced Indigenous peoples.  We talk a lot about how both the Indonesian media and some of its art world has been enlisted to promote this regime, and how decolonial feminists and others have taken on the task to both resist and present, and embody, other ways of being through listening to and engaging with voices from outside Jakarta and the liberal elites.Intan Paramaditha is an Indonesian writer and an academic based in Sydney. She received her Ph.D from New York University and is now a Senior Lecturer in Media and Film Studies at Macquarie University. Her fiction, academic, and activist works focus on decolonial feminism and the politics of travel and mobility. She is the author of Apple and Knife and The Wandering (Harvill Secker/ Penguin Random House UK, translated by Stephen J. Epstein). Her fiction has been translated into English, Polish, Turkish, German, and Thai. Intan’s latest books are the novel Malam Seribu Jahanam (GPU 2023) and the co-edited volume The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas (Routledge 2024). She is the co-founder of the feminist collective Sekolah Pemikiran Perempuan (SPP/ The School of Women’s Thought).Michael Vann has a Ph.D. from UC Santa Cruz and is a professor of world history at Sacramento State Univesity who specializes in the history of imperialism and the Cold War, with special attention to Southeast Asia. Mike’s hometown is Honolulu, Hawai’i, and he has taught at universities in Indonesia, Cambodia, and the People's Republic of China. Among his publications are The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam and articles on race, film, empire, genocide, pandemics, the politics of Korean zombies, and the political economy of surfing in publications ranging from the Journal of World History and Historical Reflections to Jacobin and The Diplomat. He is currently writing an analysis of depictions of Cold War era mass violence in Indonesia, Vietnamese, and Cambodian museums. Since 1990 Mike has been trying to spend as much time as he can in Indonesia.Please check out the Blog for this episode.  

Today on Speaking Out of Place we are joined by three members of the University of California faculty who are part of groups that have filed a landmark compliant against the UC system.This September, faculty associations from seven University of California campuses along with the systemwide Council of UC Faculty Associations filed an unfair labor practice, or ULP charge against their employer, the University of California.  A nearly 600-page complaint was presented to the California Public Employment Relations Board. What is especially noteworthy about this complaint is that it claims UC’s repression of faculty and student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza cuts to the heart of the educational process, and denies faculty, staff, and students the ability to carry on their work of learning and teaching about critical issues in the world today. Most notably, perhaps, is the fact that the faculty groups say that the university system’s restrictions on activism for Palestine amount to violations of the Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act (HEEERA), which protects employees from retaliation around advocating for changes in the workplace. This raises the issue of just how far universities can go, and the methods they employ, to maintain their complicity with genocide and ethnic cleansing.Anna Markowitz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Education at UCLA. Her work is at the intersection of child development and policy for children and families. She is a member of the UCLA Faculty Association Executive Committee. Wendy Matsumura is Associate Professor in the Dept of History at UCSD. Her work is on the history of Japanese empire and Okinawan anti-colonialism. She is part of the UCSD Faculty Association Executive Committee. She is also part of the Workshops4Gaza (https://www.workshops4gaza.com) collective.Annie McClanahan is an Associate Professor of English at UCI. She works on American culture and economic history and theory. She is the chair of the Irvine Faculty Association board.Please see the Blog linked to this Episode for news and resources about this issue.

Today, on Speaking Out of Place, we are honored to talk with Munira Khayyat, a Lebanese anthropologist whose book, A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon examines what she calls “resistant ecologies in a world of perennial warfare.”  Drawing on long-term fieldwork in frontline villages along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel, she examines war not only as a place of death and destruction, but also necessarily, as an environment of living.We appreciate greatly that she was able to join us now, during the massive and deadly new war Israel is waging on Lebanon. Munira shows how this devastation is a continuation of wars Israel has waged against Lebanon for decades, but also how both the Lebanese people and the Lebanese landscape are resisting death and persisting in life.  This episode is especially useful to those wanting to know more about Lebanon, as Professor Khayyat gives us an informative account of the intertwined histories of Lebanon, Palestine, and the State of Israel.Munira Khayyat is an anthropologist whose research revolves around life in war, intimate genealogies of empire, and theory from the South. Her first book, A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon (University of California Press 2022) examines resistant ecologies in a world of perennial warfare. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in frontline villages along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel, she examines war not only as a place of death and destruction, but also necessarily, as an environment of living.Khayyat is currently working on a second book that fleshes out the complex heart of empire in Saudi Arabia. Heart of Black Gold draws on a personal archive meticulously created by her maternal grandfather, who was among the first Arabian employees of ARAMCO, the Arab American Oil Company. How has oil — its extractive, shiny infrastructures, camps, big men, politics and corporations, its global ecologies — shaped lived environments? Insisting on a feminist and multidisciplinary rearranging of the archive, the book inhabits history-in-the-making as it unfolds in domestic scenes, lived quarters, the affective terrains of oil.Khayyat’s research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Arab Council for the Social Sciences, the Rachel Carson Center. Her writing has appeared in American Ethnologist, Public Culture, JMEWS, Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology News, HAU, and a number of edited volumes. Khayyat was a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2018-2019). Before joining NYUAD, she taught at the American University in Cairo (2013-2023) and the American University of Beirut (2011-2013). She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University (2013), an MPhil in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University (1998) and a BA in history (1997) from the American University of Beirut.

Maya Wind, an author and researcher, discusses her book, detailing how Israeli universities contribute to the oppression of Palestinians. She reveals extensive findings on the complicity of academia in perpetuating violence and erasing Palestinian history. The conversation highlights the impact of education policies on demographic control and critiques the intertwined relationship between Western and Israeli educational institutions. Wind emphasizes the urgency of activism and the necessity to challenge institutional roles in the ongoing conflict.

Today we speak with two scholar-activists who are using satellite technologies and other tools to work for environmental justice, with specific attention to prisons and prison populations. They monitor air quality, water quality, extreme weather and other quantities relevant to EJ. Ufuoma Ovienmhada and Nick Shapiro show how people of color and other socio-economically marginalized groups in the United States experience a disproportionate burden of environmental challenges such as exposure to air pollution, contaminated water, habitat loss, and disrupted livelihood due to natural hazards and climate change. They challenge the idea of scientific neutrality and objectivity, uncover multiple ways that power works to dominate these populations in many guises, and they speak compellingly about listening to and working with communities on projects for liberation and abolition.Ufuoma Ovienmhada is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Arizona, School of Geography, Development, and Environment where she researches satellite data and machine learning applications for measuring flood exposure inequity. Prior to beginning this position, Ufuoma completed a PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department. In her dissertation, she employed a multi-method approach to research the distribution of environmental hazards in carceral landscapes, co-design Earth Observation technologies to support environmental justice advocacy, and make recommendations for how the Earth Observation ecosystem at large can better serve environmental justice goals.Dr. Nicholas Shapiro, Assistant Professor at UCLA’s Institute for Society & Genetics, is a multidisciplinary environmental researcher that studies, and designs interventions into, issues of chemical contamination and climate change. He is the director of Carceral Ecologies, a lab focused on the environmental health conditions of carceral institutions. His first book, Homesick, about how housing became a seat of toxicity and what we can do about it is forthcoming with Duke University Press. Today we speak with two scholar-activists who are using satellite technologies and other tools to work for environmental justice, with specific attention to prisons and prison populations. They monitor air quality, water quality, extreme weather and other quantities relevant to EJ. Ufuoma Ovienmhada and Nick Shapiro show how people of color and other socio-economically marginalized groups in the United States experience a disproportionate burden of environmental challenges such as exposure to air pollution, contaminated water, habitat loss, and disrupted livelihood due to natural hazards and climate change. They challenge the idea of scientific neutrality and objectivity, uncover multiple ways that power works to dominate these populations in many guises, and they speak compellingly about listening to and working with communities on projects for liberation and abolition.

Rebecca Vilkomerson, Co-Director of Funding Freedom and former Jewish Voice for Peace Executive Director, joins Rabbi Alissa Wise, founder of Rabbis for Ceasefire, to discuss their impactful work. They delve into their book's themes of solidarity, love, and the evolution of Jewish activism for Palestine. Key insights include the importance of inclusive spaces within Jewish identity politics, the responsibility encapsulated in 'Not In Our Name,' and the role of grassroots movements in advocating for Palestinian rights. Their experiences shape a powerful narrative of activism and community.

Recently, twenty-three lecturers in the highly successful Creative Writing program at Stanford were summoned to a Zoom meeting where they were first praised, and then summarily fired. One of the most surprising aspects of this purge is the fact that it was carried out not by top-tier university administrators, but by tenure-track faculty in the program. It was they who decided to brutally terminate their colleagues. On today’s show we speak with two of the lecturers who have been told they will leave Stanford in nine months, and one of their students, a published novelist. They explain the devastating nature of this act and share statistics and histories that show this was not at all necessary.  Expediency for senior faculty trumped the survival of a carefully developed and nurtured community of creative writers.Here is the link to a petition we urge our listeners to sign and share as widely as possible to support this program, and these talented and devoted teachers.Sarah Frisch is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and current Lecturer in Stanford's Creative Writing Program. Her work has been published in The Paris Review, the VQR, and The New England Review. She’s won a Pushcart Prize and an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant for fiction and has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Washington University in St. Louis.Malavika Kannan is a queer fiction writer who graduated from Stanford University in 2024 with a minor in Creative Writing, where she served as the Creative Writing peer advisor. Her work appears in Washington Post, Teen Vogue, and elsewhere and her YA novel was published by Little & Brown in 2023. From the Chappell-Lougee and Major Grants to the IDA fellowship and the Honors in the Arts program, Malavika feels thankful for the many opportunities at Stanford to nurture her craft and all the people who supported her. Malavika feels very grateful to her mentor Nina Schloesser Tarano, a Jones Lecturer, for all her support. Nina Schloesser Tárano was born and grew up in Guatemala City. She received her MFA from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Fence and The New Inquiry Magazine. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction 2010-2012, and has been a lecturer in the Stanford Creative Writing Program since 2012

In this enlightening discussion, filmmakers Jan Haaken and Jennifer Ruth delve into their documentary project, 'The Palestine Exception', highlighting the significant campus protests against Israel's actions. Jan, a professor emerita and documentary filmmaker, shares insights on the emotional and ethical challenges of storytelling in sensitive contexts. Jennifer, an expert in film studies, focuses on the importance of reclaiming narratives and preserving academic freedom. Together, they emphasize grassroots activism and the critical need for solidarity in social justice movements.

Today we speak with journalists and political commentators Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood about the state of the US Presidential elections. Recorded just after the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, we muse about Kamala Harris’s ascension, her choice of running mate, the strangely abiding popularity of Donald Trump, and the Democratic political calculation to downplay and even ignore our country’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal attacks on Palestine, and to likewise table any serious discussion of our environmental crisis.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 teachers 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.Doug Henwood is a Brooklyn-based journalist and broadcaster specializing in economics and politics. He edited Left Business Observer, a newsletter, from 1986–2013, and has been host of Behind the News, a weekly radio show/podcast that originates on KPFA, Berkeley, since 1995. He is the author of Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom (Verso, 1997), After the New Economy (New Press, 2004), and My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency (OR Books, 2016). He’s written for numerous periodicals including Harper’s, The New Republic, The Nation, The Baffler, and Jacobin. He’s been working on a book about the rot of the US ruling class for way too long and needs to acquire the self-discipline to finish it.