On today's episode of Speaking Out of Place, we speak with Naomi Oreskes, who is Henry Charles Lea professor of the History of Science and affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. She is a world-renown earth scientist, historian, and public speaker. Oreskes is a leading voice in the role of science in society, the reality of anthropogenic climate change, and the role of disinformation in blocking climate action.In 2010, she and her co-author Eric Conway, published Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change, where they identified something called the “tobacco strategy” that became paradigmatic in terms of corporate efforts to debunk science.This discovery led them to explore more deeply and more broadly the attack on science. They found that as science was demoted, the idea of market fundamentalism or the "magic of the market" became a mantra that covered up corporate malfeasance and killed progressive governmental policies that constrained capitalism and benefitted people and the environment.In today's program we discuss Oreskes’ and Conway's new book, the Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe the Government and Love the Free Market.

On today’s episode of Speaking Out of Place, we talk with Professor J. Kēhaulani Kauanui and Professor Sunaina Maira, two people involved in the 2013 effort to get the American Studies Association in support for the academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions, called for by Palestinian civil society groups in 2004. Both Kauanui and Maira were named defendants in a lawsuit brought by pro-Israel members of the ASA. Recently, the court has exonerated the defendants of all charges. We hear about the lawsuit, and the organizing by scholars in the ASA and in the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) that led to the historic boycott resolution, the first by a major US academic association. We spend a great deal of the program talking about the significance of the struggle in solidarity with Palestinian academics and students, and the meaning of this legal victory.J. Kēhaulani Kauanui is Professor of American Studies and affiliate faculty in Anthropology at Wesleyan University, where she teaches courses in critical Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, critical race studies, and anarchist studies. She is the author of Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Duke University Press 2008); Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism (Duke University Press 2018); and editor of Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders (University of Minnesota Press 2018). Kauanui is one of the six co-founders of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. And she is the recipient of the Western History Association’s 2022 American Indian History Lifetime Achievement Award. Sunaina Maira is Professor of Asian American Studies at UC Davis and a founding organizer of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI). She does research in Arab and South Asian American studies and is the author of several books related to the Palestine justice movement such as The 9/11 Generation: Youth, Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror and Boycott!: The Academy and Justice for Palestine. Her book based on ethnographic research in Palestine is Jil [Generation] Oslo: Palestinian Hip Hop, Youth Culture, and the Youth Movement. Maira launched a section on West Asian American Studies in the Association for Asian American Studies has been faculty advisor of SJP and organizer with Faculty for Justice in Palestine.             

Today we talk with Françoise Vergès and Jamille Pinheiro Dias about the difficulty of "decolonizing" the museum, and engaging passionately with another project--creating a "post-museum" dedicated to a poetics of a common world. Leaving behind the pretensions of a "universal museum," filled with dead objects, Vergès and Dias work toward a living, mobile, and heterogenous space of art production in unlikely places.Françoise Vergès is a writer and decolonial antiracist feminist activist. A Reunionnese, she received an education that ran counter to the French hegemonic school  from her anticolonial communist and feminist parents and the members of their organisations. She left Reunion for Algeria to obtain her high school diploma and then stayed. She moved to Paris, France, and was an activist in antiracist, anti imperialist and feminist movements. She became a professional journalist for a feminist magazine and traveled for the publishing house des femmes to collect testimonies of women fighting in the Global South.  She received her Ph.D in Political Theory from Berkeley University in 1995. She has never held a teaching position in France but created the Chair Global South(s) at Collège d’études mondiales where she held workshops on different topics (2014-2018). She is the convener and curator of L’Atelier a collective and collaborative seminar/public performance with activist and artists of color. Recent publications include: Programme de désordre absolu. Décoloniser le musée (2023), A Feminist Theory of Violence (2021), De la violence coloniale dans l’espace public (2021), The Wombs of Women. Capital, Race, Feminism (2021), A Decolonial Feminism (2020).Jamille Pinheiro Dias is currently the director of the Centre of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at University of London’s School of Advanced Study, where she also works as a Lecturer. In addition, she is a von der Heyden Fellow at the Franklin Humanities Institute's Amazon Lab at Duke University. Prior to joining the University of London, she worked as a Research Associate at the University of Manchester as part of the project Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America, funded by the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. Her studies involve environmental issues, Amazonian cultural production, Indigenous arts, and translation studies in Latin America, with a focus on Brazil. Prior to working in the UK, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Modern Languages at the University of São Paulo, where she also received a Ph.D. in Modern Languages. In addition, she was a visiting researcher in Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University, and a teaching assistant at the Institute of Brazilian Studies at the University of São Paulo.

Today on Speaking Out of Place I talk with the intellectual, writer, and activist Hilton Obenzinger about his remarkable life as all those things. He starts by talking about his earliest exposure to art and politics, as both a witness to and participant in such moments as the takeover of the Office of the President at Columbia University in 1968, the Farm Worker’s strike in California, the fight for the I-Hotel in Manilatown, activism around Indigenous rights in the 70s, to his work in the anti-apartheid movement and the anti-Zionist struggle for Palestinian rights, and finally to his recent work on Stanford’s Chinese Railroad Workers History project and his poetry on living through the pandemic, environmental crises, and the fascism of the Trump era. Winner of an American Book Award, and a published scholar, Hilton Obenzinger has been the embodiment of an engaged writer through some of the most important moments in US and world history.Hilton Obenzinger writes poetry, fiction, criticism, and history. His books include Witness: 2017-2020, Treyf Pesach [Un-Kosher Passover], an autobiographical novel Busy Dying, How We Write: The Varieties of Writing Experience at Stanford University, Cannibal Eliot and the Lost Histories of San Francisco, American Palestine: Melville, Twain and the Holy Land Mania, New York on Fire [selected by The Village Voice as one of the best books of the year], and This Passover Or The Next I Will Never Be in Jerusalem, which received the American Book Award. Born in Brooklyn, he participated in the Columbia University rebellion of 1968, graduated in 1969, helped to operate a community printing press in San Francisco’s Mission District, and was active in the anti-imperialist, Native American, and Palestine solidarity movements. He taught writing, literature and American studies at Stanford University, and is Associate Director Emeritus of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America project. 

In this episode of Speaking Out of Place, we talk with Malcolm Harris, author of a new book entitled, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World.  Working our way back from the recent meltdown of the Silicon Valley Bank and the massive, toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, to the founding of the city of Palo Alto by Leland Stanford as a haven from labor unrest in San Francisco and his first endeavor there, the world’s largest stock farm, to the founding of the university that bears his son’s name, we discover the ghostly presence of Capital.From there we move to an in-depth study of Herbert Hoover and the Hoover Institution, and the formation of Silicon Valley itself.Throughout, we find a common thread that links all. This thread is a continuous, if evolving, effort to sort out people into two groups--those that Nature has deemed superior, from those who are meant to serve. This is the “Palo Alto System.”Inspired in part by the rash of suicides at Harris’s alma mater, Palo Alto High School, the author notes that the railroad tracks upon which these young people perished were laid by Leland Stanford, and that the Valley is haunted by the ghosts of people whose lives were destroyed by the “Palo Alto System.We end by discussing his audacious proposal—to give the land back to the Muwekma Ohlone, the first of the dispossessed peoples.Malcolm Harris is a freelance writer and the author of Kids These Days, Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit, and Palo Alto.

Recently the US State Department withdrew its nomination of eminent international human rights scholar Jim Cavallaro, solely on the basis of some tweets in which he called out Israeli apartheid and the undue influence of AIPAC (America-Israel Public Affairs Committee--a pro-Israel lobbying group). In 2019, Israel deported Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch, for issuing reports calling out similar human rights violations. In this episode, we talk to both of them about their individual cases, and then do a deep dive into the difficulties of exposing Israel's violations of human rights, and talk about ways the message is getting out, nonetheless.James (Jim) Cavallaro is a visiting professor at Columbia, UCLA and Yale and a professor of the practice at Wesleyan University.  He is also the Executive Director of the University Network for Human Rights. He has taught human rights law and practice for nearly a quarter century, most recently at Yale Law School (Spring 2020), Stanford Law School (2011-2019), and Harvard Law School (2002-2011). In June 2013, Cavallaro was elected to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. He served as President of that body from 2016-2017.Professor Cavallaro has worked in human rights for more than three decades. He received his BA from Harvard University and his JD from Berkeley Law School. He also holds a doctorate in human rights and development (Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Seville, Spain). In 1994, he opened a joint office for Human Rights Watch and the Center for Justice and International Law in Rio de Janeiro and served as director, overseeing research, reporting, and litigation before the Inter-American system’s human rights bodies. In 1999, he founded the Global Justice Center, a leading Brazilian human rights NGO. Cavallaro has authored or co-authored dozens of books, reports, and articles on human rights issues, a list of which is available below. He is fluent in English, Spanish, and Portuguese and also speaks Italian and French.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.

Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi, a scholar activist, discusses challenges in teaching about Palestine, navigating activism at San Francisco State, controversies over Palestinian imagery on campus, obstacles in establishing international collaborations, and defending activism against accusations of anti-Semitism. The conversation sheds light on the personal and professional struggles faced by advocates for Palestinian rights.

How does the automobile—the All American symbol of freedom--become part of a “cascading” process of unfreedom for recently incarcerated people?  Livingston and Ross, members of the NYU Prison Education Research Lab, talk about how cars, a necessity for securing work for so many and a symbol of independence and mobility, are enmeshed within interlinked systems that create and perpetuate debt, precarity, and sometimes death.  Through predatory lending, unscrupulous auto dealers, revenue-seeking and gratuitously harassing traffic stops and citations, and data systems built into the hardware and software of vehicles that feed into a number of dangerous data bases, the “open road” can become dangerous and deadly, especially for Black and Brown peoples, who often succumb to what Livingston calls the “power of capture.”Against that bleak picture, Ross and Livingston tell stories of support networks and offer us important ways to bring about what they call “Mobility Justice.”“As cornerstones of life under racial capitalism, the automobile and prison exemplify the ease with which the quotidian can become deadly. Livingston and Ross, with the support of formerly incarcerated peer researchers, have produced an extraordinary example of how critical carceral studies can enlighten, complicate and inspire.” Angela Y. Davis.Andrew Ross is a social activist and professor at NYU, where he teaches in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Prison Education Program. A contributor to the Guardian, the New York Times, The Nation, and Al Jazeera, he is the author or editor of twenty-five books, including, most recently, Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing. Julie Livingston is Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University. Her previous books include Self-devouring Growth: a Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa; Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic; and Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana. The recipient of numerous awards and prizes, in 2013 Livingston was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. 

Today Professor Jennifer Freyd speaks out against institutional betrayal, specifically about issues of sexual harassment and violence. We talk about what happens when institutions of higher education, which are supposed to be nurturing young people, teaching them to be better citizens and contributors to society, end up betraying them when they are mistreated.  We talk in particular about the effects this has on students who enter universities hoping to become professors themselves, only to be betrayed by their own departments. Jennifer helps us understand why both individuals and departments deny betrayal, and she makes a forceful argument for changing that state of things. She ends by talking about hope and the future, and the work of her non-profit Institute for Institutional Courage.Jennifer J. Freyd, PhD, is a researcher, author, educator, and speaker.  Freyd is the Founder and President of the Center for Institutional Courage, Professor Emerit of Psychology at the University of Oregon, and Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in the School of Medicine, Affiliated Faculty at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and Affiliated Faculty, Women's Leadership Lab, Stanford University. She is also a Member of the Advisory Committee, 2019-2023, for the Action Collaborative on Preventing Sexual Harassment in Higher Education, National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. Freyd was in 1989-90 and again in 2018-19 a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Freyd currently serves as the Editor of The Journal of Trauma & Dissociation. Freyd is a widely published and renowned scholar known for her theories of betrayal trauma, institutional betrayal, institutional courage, and DARVO. She received her PhD in Psychology from Stanford University. The author or coauthor of over 200 articles and op-eds, Freyd is also the author of the Harvard Press award-winning book Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Her most recent book Blind to Betrayal, co-authored with Pamela J. Birrell, was published by John Wiley, with seven additional translations. In 2014, Freyd was invited two times to the U.S. White House due to her research on sexual assault and institutional betrayal. In 2021 Freyd and the University of Oregon settled Freyd’s precedent-setting equal pay lawsuit.Freyd has received numerous awards including being named a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, an Erskine Fellow at The University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In April 2016, Freyd was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Trauma & Dissociation.  Freyd was selected for the 2021 Christine Blasey Ford Woman of Courage Award by the Association for Women in Psychology.     

On this episode of “Speaking Out of Place” we talk with eminent Middle East historian Joel Beinin on a range of topics that center on the fact that for some scholars, activism and scholarship are not only compatible—they are inextricably linked.Joel will talk about his time as a union organizer in Detriot, working in the automobile industry, and how his learning Arabic was facilitated by talking with Arab autoworkers. He then talks about his first book on labor movements in Egypt. We spend some time talking about the particular challenges of teaching about the Middle East at a place like Stanford, and the effects of its historical conservatism, and current neoliberal trajectory. We end by talking about advice we would give undergraduate and graduate students today. Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History, Emeritus at Stanford University. His research and writing focus on the social and cultural history and political economy of modern Egypt, Palestine, and Israel, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.He received his A.B. from Princeton University in 1970, A.M. from Harvard University in 1974, and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1982. He taught at Stanford from 1983 to 2019 with a hiatus as Director of Middle East Studies and Professor of History at the American University in Cairo in 2006-08. In 2002 he served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America.Beinin has written or edited twelve books, among them: A Critical Political Economy of the Modern Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2021); co-edited with Bassam Haddad and Sherene Seikaly; Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2016); Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa, (Stanford University Press, 1st ed. 2011, 2nd ed. 2013); co-edited with Frédéric Vairel; Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882-1954 (Princeton University Press, 1987), co-autho­red with Zachary Lockman; and Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli Occupation (South End Press, 1989) co-edited with Zachary Lockman.His articles have been published in leading scholarly journals as well as Jacobin, Democracy in Exile, Jewish Currents, +972 webzine, Carnegie Papers, The Nation, Le Monde Diplomatique, Middle East Report, Jadaliyya, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Jose Mercury News, and several blogs. Joel has been interviewed on Al-Jazeera TV, BBC radio, (US) National Public Radio, and many other TV and radio programs throughout the world as well by the global print media.His work has been translated into Arabic, Hebrew, French, and Turkish.