Conversations in Atlantic Theory

Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy
  • 5.0 (3)
  • PHILOSOPHY

These conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counternarrative.

  1. Akane Kanai on The New Politics of Online Feminism

    1D AGO

    Akane Kanai on The New Politics of Online Feminism

    Dr. Akane Kanai is a feminist cultural studies scholar, currently based in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick. She researches the relational politics of identity, with a focus on how the emotional life of social media informs cultures of everyday knowledge. Her previous book, Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture, contributed a critique of relatability in theorizing the everyday regulation of emotion for young women online. Prior to joining Warwick in 2025, she was a senior research fellow at Monash University in Melbourne (Naarm), Australia.    In today’s conversation, we discuss her latest monograph The New Politics of Online Feminism, where she argues that for young feminists online culture often poses more dilemmas than it solves. Dr. Kanai foregrounds the importance of moving beyond the polarities of correct and incorrect feeling to enable the everyday practices of listening to and learning about experience and difference.

    58 min
  2. Marisa Solomon on The Elsewhere Is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life

    MAR 3

    Marisa Solomon on The Elsewhere Is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life

    Dr. Marisa Solomon is an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she teaches courses in feminist intersectional science studies, environmental humanities, Black geographies, feminist theory and queer of color critique. She is currently the director of Barnard’s Interdisciplinary Race and Ethnic Studies Minor (ICORE/MORE), an editorial board member of Women’s Studies Quarterly (WSQ) and Scholar and Feminist Online.   She has written a number of articles on the relationship between waste and Black life in the U.S., including, “The Ghetto is a Gold Mine” for the Journal of Labor and Working-Class History and “Ecologies Elsewhere” for GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies. Her work also appears in a number of edited volumes such as, Waste as Critique (Oxford University Press), Black Environmentalisms (forthcoming with Duke University Press) and The Politics of Disposability (Duke University Press). One of her essays, “The Edge of the Usual,” also appears in a compilation of essays for the 2023 Venice Biennial on Everlasting Plastics.    In today’s conversation, we discuss her new book, The Elsewhere is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life (Duke University Press 2025), which received Duke University Press’s Scholar of Color First Book Award, considers ecological politics from the position of Black dispossession. In so doing, The Elsewhere Is Black points us to the durability of racism and its many material forms: toxicity’s movement through soil and bodies, the placement of landfills, waste infrastructure, and the technocratic planning and management of Black life and death.

    52 min
  3. Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez on Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines

    FEB 24

    Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez on Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines

    Dr.  Kathleen "Kat" Cruz Gutierrez (Ph.D. Southeast Asian Studies, Berkeley) is Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian history and the history of science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She writes on the history of botany, botanical taxonomies, and the recent scholarly "plant turn." Her research has been generously supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her previous affiliations include De La Salle University, Manila, the Humanities Institute of the New York Botanical Garden, and the Oak Spring Garden Foundation. She presently serves as co-Principal Investigator for a community-engaged research initiative on Filipino agrarian labor and migration titled "Watsonville is in the Heart." For her work, she was awarded in 2024 the Richard E. Cone Award for Emerging Leaders in Community Engagement by LEAD California, a biannual honor that recognizes a single individual in higher education evidencing steadfast commitment to community engagement in their early careers.    In today’s conversation we discuss her latest monograph Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines where she traces a history of botany in the Philippines during the last decades of Spanish rule and the first decades of US colonization.  Through this history, she redefines the vernacular, expanding it to include embodied, cosmological, artistic, and varied taxonomic practices.

    40 min
  4. Joseph M. Pierce on Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair

    FEB 10

    Joseph M. Pierce on Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair

    Dr.  Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation citizen) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature and the Founding Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Stony Brook University.    In today’s conversation, we discuss Dr. Pierce’s latest monograph, Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair (2025, Duke University Press) where he analyzes a range of materials—from photography, literature, and sculpture to film and ethnography—revealing how speculation, as a form of situated knowledge production, can repair and reimagine the worlds that colonialism sought to destroy.

    1h 18m
  5. Deborah A. Thomas on Exorbitance: A Speculative Ethnography of Inheritance

    FEB 3

    Deborah A. Thomas on Exorbitance: A Speculative Ethnography of Inheritance

    Dr. Deborah A. Thomas is Chair and the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology, and the Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania.  She is also core faculty in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, holds secondary appointments with the Graduate School of Education and the Department of Africana Studies, and is a member of the graduate groups in English, Comparative Literature, and the School of Social Policy and Practice.  She is also a Research Associate with the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Johannesburg.  Prior to her appointment at Penn, she spent two years as a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for the Americas at Wesleyan University, and four years teaching in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University.    In today’s conversation, we discuss Dr. Thomas’ latest monograph, Exorbitance:  A Speculative Ethnography of Inheritance, where she calls for new approaches to political sovereignty grounded in the embodied forms of autonomy and relation created in daily life.

    53 min
  6. Bimbola Akinbola on Transatlantic Disbelonging: Unruliness, Pleasure, and Play in Nigerian Diasporic Women’s Art

    JAN 20

    Bimbola Akinbola on Transatlantic Disbelonging: Unruliness, Pleasure, and Play in Nigerian Diasporic Women’s Art

    Dr. Bimbola Akinbola is an artist and scholar currently based in Chicago. Working at the intersection of African diapora studies, performance, and visual art, her scholarly and artistic work is concerned with the complicated and nagging nature of belonging, queerness, and the concept of family.   Dr. Akinbola's newly published book, Transatlantic Disbelonging: Unruliness, Pleasure and Play in Nigerian Diasporic Women's Art examines anti-respectability, queer kinship, and diasporic homemaking in the creative work of contemporary Nigerian diasporic women artists. Her essays have also been published in Text and Performance Quarterly and Women Studies Quarterly.

    52 min
  7. drea brown on Conjuring the Haint: The Haunting Poetics of Black Women

    12/09/2025

    drea brown on Conjuring the Haint: The Haunting Poetics of Black Women

    Dr. drea brown is a queer Black feminist poet-scholar whose writing has appeared in journals and anthologies such as Stand Our Ground: Poems for Marissa Alexander and Trayvon Martin, the Smithsonian Magazine, Southern Indiana Review, Bellingham Review and About Place Journal. drea is the author of dear girl: a reckoning, winner of the Gold Line Press 2014 chapbook prize, and co-editor of Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature (U Pittsburgh 2021).    In today’s conversation, we discuss her latest monograph Conjuring the Haint: The Haunting Poetics of Black Women where she argues that for Black women, haunting is both a condition and a strategy in lived experiences and literary productions.

    55 min
  8. Atiya Husain on No God but Man: On Race, Knowledge, and Terrorism

    12/02/2025

    Atiya Husain on No God but Man: On Race, Knowledge, and Terrorism

    Dr. Atiya Husain is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and a faculty affiliate in Anthropology/Sociology at Williams College. Her work has been published in scholarly journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, as well as popular outlets including Boston Review, Slate, and Adi Magazine. She is a founding co-editor of the University of Toronto Press series “Dimensions: Islam, Muslims, and Critical Thought,” a founding board member of Communication and Race, and has also served as Associate Editor of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. She has a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a BA from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor.   In today’s conversation, we discuss her latest monograph No God but Man: On Race, Knowledge, and Terrorism, where she traces the origins and logics of the FBI wanted poster and argues how this logic continues to structure wanted posters, as well as much contemporary social scientific thinking about race.

    55 min
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
3 Ratings

About

These conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counternarrative.

Information

  • Creator
    Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    112
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2022 JFFP
  • Show Website
    Conversations in Atlantic Theory

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