University of Minnesota Press

In the 2010s cities and counties across the US witnessed long-overdue change as they engaged more with questions of social, economic, and racial justice. After decades of urban economic restructuring that intensified class divides and institutional and systemic racism, dozens of local governments countered the conventional wisdom that cities couldn’t address inequality—enacting progressive labor market policies, from $15 minimum wages to paid sick leave. In their book Justice at Work: The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities, Marc Doussard and Greg Schrock visit case studies in cities including Chicago, Detroit, Denver, Seattle, and New Orleans, and show that the contemporary wave of successful progressive organizing efforts is likely to endure—but their success hinges on a few factors including sustaining power at the grassroots. Here, Marc Doussard is in conversation with David B. Reynolds.Marc Doussard is professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is coauthor of Justice at Work: The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities and author of Degraded Work: The Struggle at the Bottom of the Labor Market.David B. Reynolds was director of the Center for Labor and Community Studies at University of Michigan. Reynolds has been a labor educator for 20 years and is coauthor of A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement and coeditor of Igniting Justice and Progressive Power: The Partnership for Working Families Cities.Books and published works referenced:-Justice at Work: The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities by Marc Doussard and Greg Schrock-Degraded Work: The Struggle at the Bottom of the Labor Market by Marc Doussard-A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement by Amy B. Dean and David B. Reynolds-Igniting Justice and Progressive Power: The Partnership for Working Families Cities by David B. Reynolds and Louise Simmons-Partnering for Change: Unions and Community Groups Build Coalitions for Economic Justice, edited by David B. Reynolds (with essay by Reynolds and Jen Kern: Labor and the Living Wage Movement)-”Living Wage Campaigns: An activist’s guide to building the movement for economic justice.” David Reynolds and Jen Kern. (Labor Studies Center, Wayne State University and Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, 2000.)-Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies by John Kingdon-The City Is the Factory, edited by Miriam Greenberg and Penny LewisOther references:-Fight for 15-ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now)-PowerSwitch Action: https://www.powerswitchaction.org/-American Rescue Plan (also known as the American Rescue Plan Act or ARPA)-The Green New DealCities mentioned:SeattleDetroitDenverChicagoSan JoseSan DiegoSilicon ValleyAnn Arbor

Lichens are composite organisms made of a fungus and an alga or cyanobacteria thriving in a mutually beneficial relationship. The Lichen Museum looks to these complex organisms, remarkable for their symbiosis, diversity, longevity, and adaptability, as models for relations rooted in collaboration and nonhierarchical structures. Author A. Laurie Palmer channels the personal, the scientific, the philosophical, and the poetic to imagine a radical new approach to human interconnection. Palmer is joined in conversation with Art after Nature series editors Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard.A. Laurie Palmer is an artist and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.Dr. Giovanni Aloi is an author, educator, and curator specializing in the representation of nature and the environment in art. Aloi is editor-in-chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture.Caroline Picard is a writer, cartoonist, curator, and executive director of Green Lantern Press.Praise for The Lichen Museum:"A deeply engaging, provocative, humorous, and moving account of why we should pay more attention to lichens. As lichens can be found anywhere, the entire surface of the earth becomes the lichen museum." —Heather Davis, author of Plastic Matter"Meditative and inquisitive." —Foreword"Reading this work feels like taking a series of walks with a particularly curious and sensitive companion, consistently attentive to otherwise neglected facets of the actual environment." —e-fluxLearn more about The Lichen Museum at the University of Minnesota Press website.

The first biography of Robert Smithson, Inside the Spiral deepens understanding of his art by addressing the potent forces in his life that were shrouded by his success, including his suppressed early history as a painter; his affiliation with Christianity, astrology, and alchemy; and his sexual fluidity. Author Suzaan Boettger uncovers Smithson’s story with great sensitivity to the experiences of loss and existential strife that defined his distinct artistic language. This biographical analysis offers unprecedented insight into the hidden impulses of one of modern art’s most enigmatic figures. Here, Suzaan Boettger is joined in conversation with Greg Lindquist.Suzaan Boettger is a scholar, arts journalist, and critic based in New York City. She is author of Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson and Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties.Greg Lindquist is an artist, writer, and professor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.References/artworks of Robert Smithson:Spiral JettyBuried AngelPlungeThe Flayed AngelsVile FlowerDark SisterEast Coast/West Coast. Artwork by Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (Emmen, Netherlands)Amarillo RampReferences/published works:-A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey (Robert Smithson, article in Artforum)-The Writings of Robert Smithson / edited by Nancy Holt; 1979.-"Living extinction: Robert Smithson’s Dinosaurs," by Suzaan Boettger (Burlington Contemporary)-Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings / Jack Flam, editor-Robert Smithson. MOCA catalogue, 2004. Connie Butler, Thomas Crow, Eugenie Tsai-The Shape of Time / George Kubler.-”Jackson Pollock/Robert Smithson: The Myth/The Mythologist.” Howard Junker. Arts Magazine, May 1978.-”The Art Establishment,” Harold Rosenberg. Esquire, January 1, 1965.References/people:Virginia Dwan (gallery owner)Doug Chrismas (gallery owner)Isenheim AltarpieceRuth KligmanJackson PollockJasper JohnsLouise NevelsonMore about the book: z.umn.edu/InsideTheSpiral

Modern environments are awash with pollutants. The book Citizens of Worlds is the first thorough study of the increasingly widespread use of digital technologies to monitor and respond to air pollution. Drawing on data from the Citizen Sense research group, which worked with communities in the US and the UK to develop digital-sensor toolkits, author Jennifer Gabrys argues that citizen sensing promises positive change—and also collides with entrenched power structures. What are worlds? Who can do environmental monitoring? How might different means of computation tell a more complete story about pollution and its effects? In this episode, Jennifer talks with Helen Pritchard about Citizen Sense’s collaborative research in northeastern Pennsylvania and southeast and central London.Jennifer Gabrys is chair in Media, Culture, and Environment in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. She leads the Planetary Praxis group, and Citizen Sense and AirKit projects. Her books include Citizens of Worlds: Open-Air Toolkits for Environmental Struggle; How to Do Things with Sensors; and Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet. Her work can be found at planetarypraxis.org and jennifergabrys.net.Helen Pritchard is professor and head of research at IXDM (Institute for Experimental Design and Media Cultures) at the HGK in Basel. Helen is an artist-designer, member of Citizen Sense, co-organizer of The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest, and a contributor to Critical Media Lab. More info: helenpritchard.info.Citizen Sense is a research initiative funded by the European Research Council that investigates the relationship between technologies and practices of environmental sensing and citizen engagement. More info: citizensense.net. The book Citizens of Worlds: Open-Air Toolkits for Environmental Struggle is an open-access title, available to read for free at: manifold.umn.edu/projects/citizens-of-worldsEpisode citations and references include:Alfred North Whitehead on breathing, subjects and worldsFrantz Fanon on combat breathingOpen AirAlexis Pauline GumbsLauren BerlantHeather Love / Feeling Backward

A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema, Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. A new book by Nicholas de Villiers, CRUISY, SLEEPY, MELANCHOLY, offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai’s films and reveals striking connections between sexuality, space, and cinema. Here, the author is joined in conversation with Beth Tsai. Nicholas de Villiers is professor of English and film at the University of North Florida.Beth Tsai is visiting assistant professor of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.REFERENCES:Books by Nicholas de Villiers (all with University of Minnesota Press):-Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual DIsorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang-Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary-Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and WarholBook by Beth Tsai:-Taiwan New Cinema at Film Festivals (Edinburgh University Press)Tsai Ming-liang films:-No No Sleep-Stray Dogs-Goodbye, Dragon Inn-Vive L’Amour-I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone-Rebels of the Neon God-The Wayward Cloud-It’s a Dream-The Hole-Face (Visage)-What TIme Is It There?-DaysOther films:-Saw Tiong Guan / Past Present (documentary)-Fred Barney Taylor / The Polymath -Elizabeth Purchell / Ask Any Buddy (podcast: https://www.ask-any-buddy.com/podcast)-Hou Hsiao-hsien / Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge-Hou Hsiao-hsien / Café Lumière-Albert Lamorisse / Le Ballon Rouge-Wong Kar-wai / Chungking Express-Jon M. Chu / Crazy Rich Asians-Peter Wang / A Great Wall-Edward Yang / The TerrorizersResearch, persons, publications:-Song Hwee Lim / Tsai Mingliang and the Cinema of Slowness-François Truffaut-Elena Pollacchi-Samuel Delany / Times Square Red, Times Square Blue -José Esteban Muñoz / Cruising Utopia-John Paul Ricco / The Logic of the Lure-Alex Espinoza / Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pasttime-Roland Barthes-Elena Gorfinkel’s public lecture: Cinema, the Soporific: Between Exhaustion and Eros-Jean Ma / At the Edges of Sleep-Marcel Proust / Swann’s Way-Jean Ma / Melancholy Drift-Jonathan Flatley’s work on melancholia and modernism-Judith Butler-Douglas Crimp-Anne Cvetkovich / Depression: A Public Feeling-David Eng-Anne Anlin Cheng-Shi-Yan Chao / Queer Representations in Chinese-language Film and the Cultural Landscape-Sianne Ngai-Christopher Lupke / The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien-Zhu Tianwen-Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell Williams Davis / Thirty-Two New Takes on Taiwan Cinema-David Lynch-Sara Ahmed / Queer Phenomenology-Michel de Certeau-Fran Martin-The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Camp: Notes on Fashion-Susan Sontag on camp-Esther Newton / Mother Camp-Jonathan Te-hsuan Yeh-Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, “Camping Out with Tsai Ming-liang”-Stray Dogs at the Museum: Tsai Ming-liang Solo Exhibition -Fran Martin, “Introduction: Tsai Ming-liang’s intimate public worlds,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas Vol. 1 No. 2.-Eve Sedgwick’s idea of camp as a form of reparative reading-Tom Roach / Friendship as a Way of Life-Rey Chow / Writing Diaspora-Michelle Bloom-Fran Martin, “The European Undead: Tsai Ming-liang’s Temporal Dysphoria,” Senses of Cinema (https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2003/feature-articles/tsai_european_undead/) 

Are you feeling merry as a grig? Or merry as a pismire? Pert as a pearmonger? Fit as a fiddle? Where do these idioms come from? Do they make life more fun? If you’ve ever wanted to be in a room full of expert etymologists, this is your ticket. Anatoly Liberman, author of TAKE MY WORD FOR IT: A Dictionary of English Idioms, is joined in conversation by Ari Hoptman and J. Lawrence (Larry) Mitchell. After listening, you will be informed, you will be enthralled, and most importantly, you will never sign off on another letter or e-mail with “All best” again. We are not talking through our hats here. That’s the cheese!Episode references:Notes & Queries, a long-running quarterly scholarly journal est. 1849James H. Murray, primary editor of the Oxford English DictionaryTheodore Francis (T. F.) PowysVirginia WoolfGod’s Acre (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)Walter W. Skeat (the author of still the most authoritative English etymological dictionary)

In queer culture, silence has been equated with voicelessness, complicity, and even death. Queer Silence insists, however, that silence can be a generative and empowering mode of survival. Triangulating insights from queer studies, disability studies, and rhetorical studies, J. Logan Smilges explores what silence can mean for people whose bodyminds signify more powerfully than their words. Smilges is here in conversation with Travis Chi Wing Lau and Margaret Price.J. Logan Smilges (they/them) is author of Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence and Crip Negativity and assistant professor of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. Led by commitments to transfeminism and disability justice, their scholarship and teaching lie at the nexus of disability studies, trans studies, queer studies, and rhetoric. Their other writing can be found in Disability Studies Quarterly, College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Review, and elsewhere.Travis Chi Wing Lau (he/him/his) is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. His research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies. Alongside his scholarship, Lau frequently writes for venues of public scholarship like Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities, Public Books, Lapham’s Quarterly, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry has appeared in Wordgathering, Glass, South Carolina Review, Foglifter, and Hypertext, as well as in three chapbooks, The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press, 2019), Paring (Finishing Line Press, 2020), and Vagaries (Fork Tine Press, 2022). [travisclau.com]Margaret Price (she/her/hers) is an Associate Professor of English (Rhetoric & Composition) at The Ohio State University, where she also serves as Director of the Disability Studies Program, as well as co-founder and lead PI of the Transformative Access Project. Her award-winning research focuses on sharing concrete strategies and starting necessary dialogues about creating a culture of care and a sense of shared accountability in academic spaces. During Spring 2022, she was in residence at the University of Gothenberg, Sweden, on a Fulbright Grant to study universal design and collective access. Margaret’s book Crip Spacetime is forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2024. [http://margaretprice.wordpress.com].References:How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind by La Marr Jurelle BruceMia MingusJennifer NashM. Remi YergeauJasbir PuarCrip Negativity by J. Logan SmilgesA transcript of this episode is available: z.umn.edu/ep53-transcript

In postwar Italy, a group of visionary artists used emergent computer technologies to experiment with art and technology and subvert conceptions of freedom and control. ARTE PROGRAMMATA is a book that describes how Italy’s distinctive political climate fueled the group’s engagement with computers, cybernetics, and information theory, creating a broad range of immersive environments, kinetic sculptures, and other multimedia art and design works. Here, author Lindsay Caplan is joined in conversation with Tina Rivers Ryan and Jacopo Galimberti.Lindsay Caplan is assistant professor in the History of Art and Architecture Department at Brown University.Tina Rivers Ryan is an art historian focused on art and technology. Ryan is curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo, New York, and a critic who writes most frequently for Artforum.Jacopo Galimberti is an art historian and assistant professor at IUAV (Venice).REFERENCES:-The New Museum / Ghosts in the Machine Show (2012)-Jackson Pollock-New Tendencies (Armin Medosch)-Antonio Negri-Michael Hardt-From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Fred Turner)-Christiane Paul (Whitney Museum of American Art)-Edward A. Shanken-Pier Paolo Pasolini-Spazio elastico (Elastic Space, 1967), Gianni Colombo-Guy Debord-Enzo MariTOPICS:gestalt art, abstraction, politics, information theory, freedom, technology, operaismo (or: “workerism”)

A lot of societal structures have been permanently upended by the Covid-19 pandemic. We’re here to talk about two: air travel and dog ownership. Margret Grebowicz, author of Rescue Me, talks about the abundance of pet adoptions during the pandemic and the existential and social implications of this trend. Christopher Schaberg, author of Grounded, discusses contemporary air travel and the broad cultural landscape of empty airports and grounded planes in the early months of the virus’s spread. Both are concerned with philosophical and critical inquiries into their subjects; how to think about things, how to frame phenomena and change, and how the future will continue to reshape these experiences.Rescue Me and Grounded are in the Forerunners: Ideas First series from University of Minnesota Press.Margret Grebowicz is associate professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. She is author of several books, including Rescue Me: On Dogs and Their Humans; Mountains and Desire: Climbing vs. the End of the World; The National Park to Come; and Whale Song.Christopher Schaberg is Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University and author of several books, including Grounded: Perpetual Flight . . . and Then the Pandemic; The End of Airports; and The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth.REFERENCES:-Rescue Me (Margret Grebowicz)-Grounded (Christopher Schaberg)-The End of Airports (Christopher Schaberg)-The Dodo Videos (Facebook videos)-cat videos, Tik Tok-The Ministry for the Future (Kim Stanley Robinson)-Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel; book, TV series)-Tripoli Canceled (film)-Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99 (docuseries)

Amid fervent conversations about antiracism and police violence, Media and the Affective Life of Slavery delivers vital new ideas, analyzing how media culture instructs viewers to act and feel in accordance with new racial norms created for an era supposedly defined by an end to legal racism. Author Allison Page examines U.S. media from the 1960s to today and argues that visual culture works through emotion, a powerful lever for shaping and managing racialized subjectivity. On this episode, Page joins collaborator and friend Brittany Farr in conversation.Allison Page is assistant professor of media studies with a joint appointment in the Institute for the Humanities and the Department of Communication and Theatre Arts at Old Dominion University. Page is the author of Media and the Affective Live of Slavery.Brittany Farr is an assistant professor of law at New York University School of Law. Farr’s areas of research include civil rights, contract law, legal history, property, and race.REFERENCES:-Saidiya Hartman-Represent and Destroy (Jodi Melamed)-Slavery Footprint (website; slaveryfootprint.org)-Ask a Slave (Azie Mira Dungey, YouTube web series; askaslave.com)-A Subtlety (Kara Walker, public project)-Lorraine Hansberry, playwright-Roots (television miniseries)-Dark Matters (Simone Browne)-Alex Haley, writer-Stephanie Smallwood-Christina Sharpe-On Agency (Walter Johnson)-Black Feminism Reimagined (Jennifer Nash)