Pretty Heady Stuff

Pretty Heady Stuff
  • 5.0 (7)
  • News
  • Updated Daily

This podcast features interviews with a variety of theorists, artists and activists from across the globe. It's guided by the search for radical solutions to crises that are inherent to colonial capitalism. To this end, I hope to keep facilitating conversations that bring together perspectives on the liberatory and transformative power of care, in particular.

  1. 1d ago

    Nina Newington embraces the uncertainty of organizing to protect the natural world

    Nina Newington is a forest protector, organizer and award-winning author. Join us for a conversation about the connections and solidarities that build strength against extractive projects and the exploitation of nature for profit. Originally from the UK, Newington has lived in many countries before immigrating to Canada. In Nova Scotia, her environmental activism began with the model of Extinction Rebellion, with the use of direct action to prevent logging and preserve the land, the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaw people. During the conversation, Newington will share some of the insights she has gained from organizing and describe the specific nature of the struggle for forest protection in Nova Scotia. At a time when it is so easy to succumb to cynicism and defeatism, the trajectory that takes us toward intersectional connection and bigger, more expansive solidarities feels like an altogether preferable one. Learn more about Nina Newington at https://ninanewington.com

  2. 1d ago

    Chris Benjamin and Kate Brooks thoughts on how to decarbonize our lives and build a stable, equitable world

    Kate Brooks works as the EAC's Community Climate Navigator, collaborating with HalifACT and other community groups to create programs supporting climate action. More recently, she joined the Food Team to assist in developing the Halifax Food Council's website. Kate comes from a public library and adult education background and enjoys learning with and from community groups in the Halifax Regional Municipality. She also ran a subsistence farm in the Cape Breton hills for over 20 years and was involved in rural food system work (farmers' markets, school gardens, and school garden entrepreneurship). She believes that tackling the climate crisis will involve learning better ways of communicating, working with and supporting one another — and she's glad to be contributing to climate action through her work on the Food and Operations Teams. Chris is a communications professional and experienced environmental campaigner with two decades of experience. He was the Sustainable City columnist for The Coast for number of years and has also authored four books. He has worked at ENGOs in Toronto and Halifax. His work has had a strong educational and community-building components, including delivering online and in-person workshops that have varied from training aspiring writers to informing grade-school children and senior citizens about the history and ongoing legacy of residential schools. He lives in Halifax with his partner, two children and an 80-pound lapdog. Follow the Ecology Action Centre's critical work and donate at https://ecologyaction.ca/

  3. 1d ago

    Sadie Beaton rages against the extractive status quo and raves about resurgent geography

    Sadie Beaton grew up in rural Nova Scotia where she could see a working wharf from her bedroom window and enjoyed countless hours exploring the rugged shorelines and scrubby Acadian forest. She eventually moved to Halifax where she got a B.A. in English from Kings College and a Masters in Resource and Environmental Management from Dalhousie University. In her recent essay "It Flows/Runs Wildly/Crazily: Unravelling Settler Legacies on Stolen Mi’kmaq Land," Beaton explores the intertwining histories that formed her identity and the relationships of complicity that obtain between her own story and the histories of Mi'kma'ki that entangle us in systems of oppression, but also present us with alternatives to the predictable slow violence of fossilized colonialism.Read Beaton's "It Flows/Runs Wildly/Crazily" at https://bit.ly/3STov6h

  4. Jul 4

    Katherine Stewart decrypts how Christian fundamentalism is seizing power in the United States

    Katherine Stewart has covered the intersection of faith and politics for over 17 years; her work appears in the New York Times, the New Republic, Religion News Service, the Guardian and elsewhere. Her latest book, Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, is one of Foreign Affairs magazine’s Best Books of 2025. Her previous, award-winning title, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, formed the basis of the documentary feature, God & Country. I wanted to speak with Katherine to talk about the United States' evangelical bet on Christianity as a means of galvanizing a divided nation, and her research into the ways that this has been leveraging by the elite as part of a movement for securing minority rule. The Power Worshippers, our main focus here, looks at how "the Religious Right has masqueraded as a social movement preoccupied with a number of cultural issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage.... [T]his is a political movement that seeks to gain power and to impose its vision on all of society. America's religious nationalists aren't just fighting a culture war, they are waging a political war on the norms and institutions of American democracy.#fourthofjuly #july4 #independenceday #americanpolitics #uspolitics #christianity #christianfundamentalism #evangelicalism #dominionism #christiannation #christiannationalism #whitenationalism

  5. Jul 1

    Alex Marland scrutinizes party loyalty in Canada as a program of coerced consent

    What are the politics of party loyalty in Canada? Why do politicians follow the leader and rarely rock the boat? What solutions could exist for strengthening Canada's democracy by injecting more dissent into the system? Alongside Mireille Lalancette and Jared J. Wesley, Alex Marland is the author of No “I” in Team: Party Loyalty in Canadian Politics, a book that offers in-depth analysis of the social and cultural forces that inform party loyalty in Canadian government. Their book is essential reading for anyone that wants to understand why political change is so rare in Canada. What it reveals is that ossification and pious attachment to the ruling party are the rules of the game, that Canada is, in many ways, constitutively allergic to political change at the highest level of governing power. Alex Marland is Acadia University’s inaugural Jarislowsky Chair in Trust and Political Leadership. A Professor of Canadian politics, he has authored or edited over a dozen books, including the acclaimed Brand Command: Canadian Politics and Democracy in the Age of Message Control (2016) and Whipped: Party Discipline in Canada (2020). #canada #canadianpolitics #canadaday #nationalism #partypolitics #partisanpolitics #politics #politicalloyalty #partyloyalty #liberalparty #trudeau #justintrudeau #pierrepoilievre #markcarney #leadership #politicalleadership

  6. Jun 26

    Carl Wilson referees the poptimism wars & explores nostalgia, protest & world-building in music

    Carl Wilson is a Canadian music critic who has written for many publications including The Globe and Mail. He writes wonderful long thought-pieces on music for Slate. Best known for his classic book Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, published in Continuum's 33 1/3 series, Wilson unpacks the claims of that book in terms of contemporary trends in music. Let's Talk About Love is putatively a critique of Celine Dion's bestselling album Let's Talk About Love, but it's more accurately an act of self-reflection and cultural analysis that gives a robust language for understanding what's at stake when we litigate taste. Follow Carl at https://carlwilson.substack.com/ 🎸

  7. Jun 18

    Marta Figlerowicz thinks Maria Janion’s political insights are key to navigating our present chaos

    Why does the nation trigger so much emotion in us? How does being from a specific country shape our understanding of identity, and when does it drift into dangerous territory? Maria Janion, one of Eastern Europe’s most profound and original intellectuals, explores this fine line, and Marta Figlerowicz unpacks the trajectory of her thinking for us in The Bad Child. Janion witnessed some of the most consequential events of the turbulent twentieth century: the rise of authoritarian nationalism in Poland, German occupation during World War II, Soviet control, and Poland’s uneasy integration into the West. As Western countries face their own nationalist resurgences, Figlerowicz believes that Maria Janion’s insights on political ontology are tools for helping us navigate our present chaos. Marta Figlerowicz teaches comparative literature at Yale University. She is a theorist of literature from the eighteenth century to the present and of contemporary visual media. Working in over ten languages, she studies how aesthetic objects depict and mediate interpersonal and transcultural communication. Her first two books, Flat Protagonists (2016) and Spaces of Feeling (2017) reflect on trans-personal and transcultural communication within the purview of literary studies. Her current book in progress, It Must Be Possible: Global Modernisms and the Problem of Transcultural Knowledge, offers an intellectual history of the entanglements of anthropology and comparative literature at the beginning of the twentieth century from the perspectives of ethnically, racially, or (geo)politically marginalized modernist writers. Alongside her academic writing, she comments on contemporary American and Eastern European literature, film, and politics in venues such as Foreign Affairs, Jacobin, The Paris Review, and Boston Review. Figlerowicz was born in Poznan, Poland, and moved to the United States as a teenager. She obtained her undergraduate degree from Harvard University and her doctorate from UC Berkeley. A member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, her research has also been sponsored by the Mellon Foundation. She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two daughters.#philosophy #psychoanalysis #nationalism #theory #identitypolitics #race #belonging #territory #subjectivity #mariajanion #sovietunion #anticolonialism

  8. Jun 12

    Alexander Gallant & Joel Plaskett harmonize on concept albums & finding the lyrical in everyday life

    Alexander Gallant and Joel Plaskett are songwriters based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They have both written extraordinary records that take genre and move it a few degrees to the left to make something unexpected. In this conversation, we talk about Plaskett's foundational relationship to the Halifax Pop Explosion of the 1990s, the music that made that scene, and the ways that sacred spaces for musicmaking and performance solidify a sense of place. Joel was a member of Thrush Hermit in the 1990s, but has written and produced albums solo and with The Emergency in the decades since. Alexander is a prolific folk songwriter with a remarkable new album called The Prince of Birchy Head that is replete with meditations on being pulled madly out in opposite directions: toward love, away from greed, but also toward struggle and away from beauty. We chat about where their inspiration comes from, the pitfalls of social media, the power of working collectively to build and protect vitality at the local level, and how their paths converge at 45 Portland Street in gritty, gorgeous downtown Dartmouth. When you hear a song that speaks to you, listen again. If it stays with you, it pays to wonder why. #songwriting #writing #creativity #inspiration #music #musicians #producing #sound #popculture #art #mcluhan #novascotia #dartmouth #halifax #livemusic #historyofmusic #localmusic

See All (161)

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
7 Ratings

About

This podcast features interviews with a variety of theorists, artists and activists from across the globe. It's guided by the search for radical solutions to crises that are inherent to colonial capitalism. To this end, I hope to keep facilitating conversations that bring together perspectives on the liberatory and transformative power of care, in particular.

Information

  • Creator
    Pretty Heady Stuff
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    161
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Pretty Heady Stuff
  • Show Website
    Pretty Heady Stuff

You Might Also Like