KPFA - Against the Grain
KPFA
Acclaimed program of ideas, in-depth analysis, and commentary on a variety of matters—political, economic, social, and cultural—important to progressive and radical thinking and activism. Against the Grain is co-produced and co-hosted by Sasha Lilley and C. S. Soong.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Feb 19, 2024 • 60min
Oil & Capital
What accounts for worker injuries and fatalities in the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota? Should they be viewed as localized phenomena, or are larger socioeconomic processes at work? In his effort to explain oil-boom representations and calamities, Bruce Braun considers and extends Lauren Berlant’s analysis of worker precarity, “crisis ordinariness,” and “slow death.”
Braun and Thomas, eds., Settling the Boom: The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil University of Minnesota Press, 2023
The post Oil & Capital appeared first on KPFA.

Feb 14, 2024 • 60min
Israeli Universities and the State
Israeli universities are heralded in the West for their liberalism and diversity, but critics assert that they are a crucial part of Israel’s war making machine. Israeli Jewish academic Maya Wind argues that even before the formation of the state of Israel, universities played a key role in the project of Zionist state-building. She makes the case for an academic boycott and discusses the demonization of Boycott Divestment Sanctions against Israel as it gathers strength.
Resources:
Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom Verso, 2024
The post Israeli Universities and the State appeared first on KPFA.

Feb 13, 2024 • 15min
Israeli Universities and the State
Israeli universities are heralded in the West for their liberalism and diversity, but critics assert that they are a crucial part of Israel’s war making machine. Israeli Jewish academic Maya Wind argues that even before the formation of the state of Israel, universities played a key role in the project of Zionist state-building. She makes the case for an academic boycott and discusses the demonization of Boycott Divestment Sanctions against Israel as it gathers strength.
Resources:
Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom Verso, 2024
The post Israeli Universities and the State appeared first on KPFA.

Feb 12, 2024 • 60min
Responding to Racism
What would it mean to have authentic dialogues around race and racism? How would one engage in a way that promotes transformation, not polarization? Roxy Manning reveals how nonviolent communication principles and practices can be used to interrupt racist conduct in ways that foster the creation of what Dr. King called Beloved Community. (Encore presentation.)
Roxy Manning, How to Have Antiracist Conversations: Embracing Our Full Humanity to Challenge White Supremacy Berrett-Koehler, 2023
(Image on main page by RMHare.)
The post Responding to Racism appeared first on KPFA.

Feb 7, 2024 • 60min
America’s Drug Binge
Americans as a population have an unusually large appetite for psychoactive drugs, whether legal or illegal. And American history has been marked by periodic moral panics over drug use and normalization or legalization, as we’re experiencing right now. Why is that? What is it about US society that makes drug use simultaneously so appealing and reviled? Writer and scholar Benjamin Fong weighs in.
Resources:
Benjamin Yen-Yi Fong, Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge Verso, 2023
The post America’s Drug Binge appeared first on KPFA.

Feb 6, 2024 • 60min
Food & Freedom
Reclaiming the commons sounds good in the abstract, but what’s being done on a practical level? Gaye Chan and Nandita Sharma, the Hawai‘i-based co-founders of Eating in Public, describe projects like Free Gardens and Free Stores. Also: Wren Awry discusses the volume to which Chan and Sharma contributed an essay.
Eating in Public
Wren Awry, ed., Nourishing Resistance: Stories of Food, Protest, and Mutual Aid PM Press, 2023
The post Food & Freedom appeared first on KPFA.

Feb 5, 2024 • 29min
Radical vs Liberal Antiracism
Arun Kundnani, an expert in racial politics and author, discusses liberal anti-racism versus radical anti-racism and critiques the efforts made to address systemic racism. The podcast explores the origins of anti-racism, the role of racial capitalism, and the need to dismantle barriers to wealth redistribution. It also delves into the level of repression faced by activists supporting Palestine and the alignment of liberal institutions with the far right.

Jan 31, 2024 • 25min
Microwork’s Impact
Microwork involves the performing of short, discrete tasks on digital platforms, usually at the worker’s home and often after dark. Paul Apostolidis applies his analysis of nocturnal labor under capitalism, and its impact on worker’s lives, to microwork, for which people in many countries are paid miniscule wages. (Encore presentation.)
James Muldoon and Paul Apostolidis, “‘Neither work nor leisure’: Motivations of microworkers in the United Kingdom on three digital platforms” New Media & Society
(Image on main page by Kulik Stepan.)
The post Microwork’s Impact appeared first on KPFA.

Jan 30, 2024 • 60min
Half-Earth Socialism
As the world rushes headlong into the climate emergency, what might a liberatory approach look like, that would avert ecological disaster while making another world possible? Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese have laid out one vision for eco-socialism that takes on the difficult question of how to plan society in a radically different way. (Encore presentation.)
Resources:
Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese, Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics Verso, 2022
Half-Earth Socialism: A Planetary Planning Game
The post Half-Earth Socialism appeared first on KPFA.

Jan 29, 2024 • 60min
Police Militarization & Empire
What accounts for the militarization of the police in the U.S., and how long has it been going on? Julian Go links police militarization with colonial conquest, imperial control, and the racialization of crime and disorder. The domestic effects and implications of the so-called imperial boomerang, Go reveals, have been momentous and longstanding. (Encore presentation.)
Julian Go, Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the U.S. Oxford University Press, 2023
(Image on main page by Tony Webster.)
The post Police Militarization & Empire appeared first on KPFA.