Imagine Otherwise by Ideas on Fire Cathy Hannabach

In episode 155 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews disability media studies scholar Meryl Alper.
Meryl is the author of 3 books about how kids with disabilities use digital technologies, including her most recent book, ​​Kids Across the Spectrums: Growing Up Autistic in the Digital Age.
Kids Across the Spectrums is out now from MIT Press and it is the first book-length ethnography of the digital lives of diverse young people on the autism spectrum.
In their conversation, Cathy and Meryl chat about how autistic and neurodivergent youth and their families resist popular assumptions about their media use while also using digital technologies like TikTok, Scratch, and YouTube to build community, explore identity, and learn new skills.
Meryl also shares some behind-the-scenes context about how she navigated ethnographic research during the pandemic and found the spark for this current book in some of her earlier research.
They delve into why moral panics over how autistic kids use media often index broader cultural anxieties over how technology is altering society and what it means for the actual youth caught in the middle of these debates.
Cathy and Meryl close out the episode with how Meryl imagines otherwise to help build a more just future that centers the worldviews, needs, and desires of neurodivergent and disabled youth.
Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/155-meryl-alper
 

In episode 154 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews performance artist and gender studies scholar Kristie Soares about the political power of pleasure, laughter, and joy in Latinx media.
Kristie’s new book Playful Protest: The Political Work of Joy in Latin Media has chapters about gozando in salsa music, precise joy among the New Young Lords Party, choteo in the comedy ¿Qué Pasa U.S.A.?, azúcar in the life and death of Celia Cruz, dale as Pitbull’s signature affect, and silliness in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s interventions into political violence.
In the episode, Kristie shares her journey into studying what joy can do for social and political movements as well as the pleasure-filled genealogies of feminist, queer, and trans of color artists and cultural producers that shaped her approach to political joy.
She also gives us a behind-the-scenes look into some almost-book moments, or what didn’t end up in this book but that opened onto a new project about queer excess.
Cathy and Kristie close out the conversation with Kristie’s project of building a world where QTPOC  joy is not policed and pleasure is embraced as an integral part of social, economic, and political life.
Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/154-kristie-soares
 

Host Cathy Hannabach interviews literature professor Cynthia Franklin about the politics of life writing. 
Cynthia’s new book Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea traces the complex ways activists, artists, cultural producers, and scholars engage genres like memoir and autobiography to resist racial capitalism, imperialism, heteropatriarchy, and climate change.
In their conversation, Cynthia and Cathy chat about why narrative plays such a large role in defining who gets to count as human and how that narrative definition shapes everything from economic policy and medical care to police violence and environmental degradation. 
Cynthia shares how movements like Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, Students for Justice in Palestine, and the Native Hawaiian movement to protect Mauna a Wākea push back against such narrative humanity, using collaborative praxis and transformative solidarity to build new models for collective care and liberation. 
Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/153-cynthia-franklin

In episode 152 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews education scholars and leaders Magdalena L. Barrera and Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales about their new book The Latinx Guide to Graduate School.
Magdalena and Genevieve teamed up to write this guide after many years of advising Latinx graduate students struggling to navigate the hidden curriculum of academia—a curriculum built around norms of whiteness, wealth, and settler heteronormativity.
Demonstrating the brilliance, scholarly rigor, and leadership these graduate students bring to academia, they created this guide to center the worldviews and lives of Latinx communities in graduate education.
In their conversation, Magdalena and Genevieve share about their process for researching and writing the book, particularly how they navigated the co-authoring process amidst busy teaching and administrative responsibilities.
They also explain how faculty and advisors can support prospective and current graduate students in embracing their full lives—lives that extend beyond many graduate programs’ myopic focus on research productivity alone.
Cathy, Magdalena, and Genevieve close out their conversation with Magdalena and Genevieve’s vision for remaking PhD and MA programs in the service of a culturally liberatory education.
Magdalena L. Barrera is the vice provost for faculty success at San José State University, where she provides leadership on all aspects of faculty recruitment and professional advancement.
Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales is a professor in the School of Education at the University of San Francisco, where her research focuses on the educational and political lives of Latinx communities, undocumented young people, and immigrant families at the Mexico–US border.
Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/152-barrera-negron-gonzales

In episode 151 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews Indigenous studies and literature professor Katie Walkiewicz about states’ rights and the role this concept has played in US settler colonialism, enslavement, and dispossession as well as in radical projects seeking to create alternative political structures.
Katie Walkiewicz is an enrolled citizen of Cherokee Nation, an assistant professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego, and the associate director of the Indigenous Futures Institute.
They chat about Katie’s new book Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State. The book shows how federalism and states’ rights were used to imagine US states into existence while clashing with relational forms of territoriality asserted by Indigenous and Black people.
They also explore how states rights have been mobilized in two landmark Supreme Court cases: McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020) and Haaland v. Brackeen (2023).
In addition to tracing the violent imposition of states’ rights as tools for anti-Indigeneity and anti-Blackness, they also investigate how Black communities and Indigenous nations have sought to reimagine what a state could be, including through statehood campaigns for Black- and Native-run states.
Finally, they close out our conversation with a vision for a world of Indigenous and Black freedom, one beyond the bounds of both the nation and the state.
Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/151-katie-walkiewicz

Host Cathy Hannabach interviews Black visual studies scholar Jasmine Nichole Cobb about haptic blackness and the cultural politics of Black hair in US visual culture.
Jasmine is a professor of African and African American studies and of art, art history, and visual studies at Duke University. Her recent book New Growth: The Art and Texture of Black Hair traces the history of Black hair in visual culture across documentary films, portrait photography, advertising, sculpture, and television.
In the episode, Jasmine shares how haptics—or the mixing of touch and vision—has been central to how blackness has been lived, represented, and imagined across historical periods.
Jasmine and Cathy also discuss why the 1990s and early 2000s were such a rich period for independent documentaries about Black women’s hair in particular and how more recent series like The Hair Tales and Hair Love adapt this genealogy to our contemporary moment.
Finally, they close out the episode with Jasmine’s vision for a haptic Black futurity centering Black embodiment and freedom.
Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/150-jasmine-nichole-cobb