Today we talk with Manijeh Moradian about her book, This Flame within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States, which documents the formation of Iranian student activists in the US in the 1970s, and their impact on the Iranian revolution.This Flame Within is not only a book about history, but also a book about memory and the importance of retrieving these memories of anti-imperialist pasts against the backdrop of a thoroughly imperial present for the possibilities of building anti-imperial futures. Among many of the things we discuss is the cross-pollination between these groups and groups based in the US working toward Third World Liberation, supporting Palestinian rights, and protesting the Vietnam war. We also connect all these topics to today’s situation in Iran, and the Iranian diaspora.Manijeh Moradian is assistant professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States, was published by Duke University Press in December 2022.  She has published widely including in American Quarterly, Journal of Asian American Studies, Scholar & Feminist online, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She is a founding member of the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective and on the editorial board of the Jadaliyya.com Iran Page.  

Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with Dr. Tim Hewlett, co-founder of the international protest organization Scientist Rebellion.  With more than a thousand members in more than 25 countries, Scientist Rebellion stages non-violent protests, organizes events and talks, and lobbies other scientists and national leaders to draw attention to the need for immediate and meaningful action with regard to the climate crisis.In today’s show Tim talks about the genesis of Scientist Rebellion, its tactics and strategies, and the blowback the organization is facing from governments seemingly more concerned about protest than the crisis itself.Tim Hewlett obtained his PhD in astrophysics in 2018 from the University of St Andrews, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, researching cosmological relations between galaxies and supermassive black holes. In 2020 he returned to the UK and co-founded Scientist Rebellion, an international climate activist collective which focuses on organising academics in civil disobedience, arguing that if those who study the crisis do not act like they are in a struggle for survival the wider public cannot be expected to do so.  

Today in Speaking Out of Place, we are joined by Anthony Arnove and Haley Pessin, who are the co-editors of a marvelous new volume entitled Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century: Documents of Hope and Resistance. This book is not only a beautiful archive of people's struggles in the 21st century, but also a powerful tribute to and continuation of the work of professor and radical historian Howard Zinn. We speak with Anthony and Haley about the histories of struggles and the possibilities for building a more beautiful future.Anthony Arnove is the editor of several books, including, with Howard Zinn, Voices of a People’s History of the United States and Terrorism and War. He wrote the introduction for the thirty-fifth anniversary edition of Zinn’s classic book, A People’s History of the United States.  Arnove cofounded the nonprofit education and arts organization Voices of a People’s History of the United States, wrote, directed, and produced the documentary The People Speak, and has directed stage and television versions of The People Speak in Dublin with Stephen Rea, in London with Colin Firth, and across the United States with various groups including Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Sundance Film Festival. He produced the Academy Award-nominated documentary Dirty Wars. Arnove is on the editorial boards of Haymarket Books and Tempestmag.org and is the director of Roam Agency, where he represents authors including Arundhati Roy and Noam Chomsky. He lives in Hopewell, New Jersey.Haley Pessin is a socialist activist living  in Queens, New York. They have participated in struggles against police brutality and mass incarceration, in solidarity with Palestine, in defense of abortion rights and reproductive justice, and as a legal service worker and union delegate for 119SEIU (Service Employees International Union). Pessin has spoken at conferences in Switzerland, Australia, Ireland, Quebec, and throughout the United States on the struggle for Black liberation. Their writing has appeared in New Politics and at Tempestmag.org, where they currently serve on the editorial board.

Today we are speak with renown scholar, activist, and writer Silvia Federici about her powerful and inspiring collection of essays, Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. These essays, written over the span of several decades, display her abilities to diagnose and indeed predict the most important issues facing us today, demanding a collective struggle for a new social world.Silvia Federici is a scholar, teacher, and feminist activist based in New York. She is a professor emerita and teaching fellow at Hofstra University in New York State, where she was a social science professor.[2] She also taught at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria. In 1972, she co-founded the International Feminist Collective. In 1995, in the course of the campaign to demand the liberation of Mumia Abu-Jamal, she cofounded the Radical Philosophy Association (RPA) anti-death penalty project, an organization intended to help educators become a driving force towards its abolition. For several decades, Federici has been working in a variety of projects with feminist organizations across the world like Women in Nigeria (WIN), Ni Una Menos, the Argentinian feminist organization; she also has been organizing a project with feminist collectives in Spain to reconstruct the history of the women who were persecuted as witches in early modern Europe, and raise consciousness about the contemporary witch-hunts that are taking place across the world.Federici is considered one of the leading feminist theoreticians in Marxist feminist theory, women’s history, political philosophy, and the history and theory of the commons. Her most famous book, Caliban and the Witch, has been translated in more than 20 foreign languages, and adopted in courses across the U.S. and many other countries. Often described as a counterpoint to Marx’s and Foucault’s account of “primitive accumulation,” Caliban reconstructs the history of capitalism, highlighting the continuity between the capitalist subjugation of women, the slave trade, and the colonization of the Americas. It has been described as the first history of capitalism with women at the center.

Emmaia Gelman and Christine Hong discuss the creation of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, challenging traditional Jewish Studies within radical ethnic studies. They delve into the controversy of a model curriculum in California, Zionist campaign funding, and the importance of diverse perspectives in analyzing Zionism.

Award-winning novelist and activist Susan Albuhawa discusses the 'Palestine Writes' festival, celebrating and promoting Palestinian writers and artists. The festival aims to amplify Palestinian voices, cross cultural boundaries, and address various social issues. Albuhawa shares the festival's genesis, ethos, and political/artistic message, highlighting the importance of unity, representation, and solidarity among Palestinians.

In 1980, a synagogue in Paris was bombed, killing four and injuring 40 others. Thirty-four years later, French authorities settled on one suspect--Hassan Diab. This, despite the fact that it is likely that the bombing was undertaken by a neo-Nazi group, commemorating the anniversary of another one of its anti-semitic attacks. After being extradited from Canada to France in 2014, Diab was arrested and held in detention. In 2018, two of the top anti-terrorist judges in France dismissed the case, and Canadian premier Justin Trudeau publicly decried this miscarriage of justice.Nevertheless, the French prosecutors appealed the decision, and in 2023 Canadian academic Dr. Hassan Diab was convicted in absentia for this unsolved crime.  The two judges who had exonerated him in 2018 testified on Diab's behalf.  Former Secretary General of Amnesty International Canada, Alex Neva, has described the prosecution of Hassan Diab as, “surreal and disgraceful.”Diab has been sentenced to life despite all of the evidence indicating that he could not possibly have committed it. He is currently facing re- extradition from Canada to France. Today we have with us Dr. Hassan Diab, as well as Michelle Weinroth, a long-term member of the Hassan Diab Support Committee, and Bernie Farber, former head of Canadian Jewish Congress who previously advocated for the extradition of Dr. Diab, but now has become one of his supporters. Dr. Hassan Diab is a Canadian citizen and sociology professor who lives in Ottawa. Up until October, 2007, Hassan enjoyed an engaged and productive public life, including teaching, publishing research, and traveling internationally.Bernie Farber is the Founding Chair of the Canadian AntiHate Network. His career spans more than three decades focusing on human rights, diversity, countering antisemitism and extremism. His expertise has been recognized by Canadian Courts, media and law enforcement. His efforts have been documented in numerous Canadian human rights publications, books, films, newspapers and magazines. He is widely respected as a CEO in the not-for-profit world best known internationally as the former CEO of Canadian Jewish Congress. He is a published author and a newspaper columnist. He is a a recipient of numerous medals and awards for his human rights work. In his retirement he is a consultant on antisemitism and extremism to Canadian School Boards and police services, he sits as an advisor to Human Rights Watch Canada and the Mosaic Institute and Chairs the Rights and Ethics Committee of Community Living Toronto.Michelle Weinroth is a writer and teacher living in Ottawa. She taught English literature at the University of Ottawa and at Carleton University for a decade. Her area of specialization is the workings of propaganda in 19th- and 20th-century fiction and non-fiction. Over the past seven years, she has taken a special interest in the Hassan Diab Affair. 

On today’s Speaking Out of Place we talk with journalist., activist, and public intellectual Jeff Chang.  Jeff’s most recent book, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes On Race and Resegregation (Picador), was called by the Washington Post  “the smartest book of the year,” and inspired a four-episode digital series adaptation for PBS Indie Lens Storycast. He was named to the Frederick Douglass 200, as one of “200 living individuals who best embody the work and spirit of Douglass.”  We talk about the Supreme Court’s recent decision on affirmative action. The plaintiffs of that case, “Students for Fair Admission,” an organization started and led by non-student Ed Blum, made particular use of Asian Americans as a kind of stand-in for whites.  Jeff and I talk about the history of that tactic, which dates back the late Sixties, and especially the 1980s, the years of the Reagan presidency. We also discuss the ways in which many liberal and progressive Asian Americans and others took shelter under Harvard University’s defense of “diversity.” Jeff points out that such a move effectively erases the long-term bias Harvard and other elite universities have displayed toward Jews and Asian Americans, and backs away from a true and historically honest confrontation with America’s racism. Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation won the American Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award. His most recent book, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes On Race and Resegregation (Picador), was named the Northern California Nonfiction Book Of The Year, called by the Washington Post “the smartest book of the year,” and inspired a four-episode digital series adaptation for PBS Indie Lens Storycast. He was named to the Frederick Douglass 200, as one of “200 living individuals who best embody the work and spirit of Douglass.” His bylines have appeared in The Guardian, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times. He was previously the Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University and led the Butterfly Lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategy.

Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with Jennifer Jacquet, who is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies and Director of XE: Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement at NYU. She is also deputy director of NYU's Center for Environmental and Animal Protection. Her research focuses on animals and the environment, Agnotology, and attribution and responsibility in the Anthropocene. She is author of The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World-- a work of 'epistolary non-fiction' that makes the business case for scientific denial. Among other things, we learn how corporations create an arsenal of experts and pseudo-experts at prestigious universities to create misinformation and disinformation for corporate profit, and at great cost to the public. At the end, we make the case for a partnership between the sciences and the humanities to fight such lies and violence.Jennifer Jacquet is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies and Director of XE: Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement at NYU. She is also deputy director of NYU's Center for Environmental and Animal Protection. Her research focuses on animals and the environment, Agnotology, and attribution and responsibility in the Anthropocene.  Along with The Playbook, Jacquet also wrote Is Shame Necessary? (Pantheon/Penguin, 2015) about the evolution, function, and future of the use of social disapproval in a globalized, digitized world. She is the recipient of a 2015 Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship and a 2016 Pew fellowship in m3arine conservation.

This August, the Asian American Literary Festival was to take place in Washington, DC.. The event had already garnered substantial investments and expectations from both national and international groups and states. Thus there was considerable shock and outrage when Acting Director Yao-Fen You abruptly cancelled the entire festival, without a word of explanation.The Washington Post and other sources have hinted that it might be because of potentially controversial content.  The Post wrote: "According to emails shared with The Post, You notified Lawrence-Minh Bui Davis, the festival’s director since its founding in 2017 and a curator at the Smithsonian that “due to the current political climate,” Smithsonian leadership had requested that all upcoming exhibitions and multiday programs be reviewed under a policy known as Smithsonian Directive 603, which is meant to help identify any potentially sensitive or controversial content and prepare for potential responses from the public."On today’s show we speak with Ching-In Chen, a poet who was curating a festival event featuring books by trans and nonbinary writers, and Kate Hao, a program coordinator on contract with the Smithsonian for the festival, about the controversy, and about the issues it raises about art for the community vs. art that must conform to state institutional preferences and politics. We discuss why this festival is absolutely essential for the present day, where we have Asian Americans being used to help dismantle affirmative action, and where we see persistent and deadly acts of anti-Asian violence.We also hear about possible plans to go forward without the Smithsonian, and ways we can help support the artists and organizers.Acting Director You declined to comment for this show.Descended from ocean dwellers, Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2009) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing (speCt! Books) and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press, 1st edition; AK Press, 2nd edition) and currently a core member of the Massage Parlor Outreach Project as well as a Kelsey Street Press collective member. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center and the Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They are currently collaborating with Cassie Mira and others on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation, health and environmental justice. They teach in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at University of Washington Bothell and serve as Writer in Residence at Hugo House. www.chinginchen.comKate Hao is a poet and fiction writer, a cultural worker, a shy Leo, an ex-pianist, a soup enthusiast, an aspiring morning person. She grew up in the suburbs of northern Virginia and currently calls Providence, Rhode Island home.