Speaking Out of Place

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. 

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.