Everything is Ideology: a Cultural Studies Podcast

Lee Caplan

Everything is Ideology: A Cultural Studies Podcast is a collection of interviews hosted by Dr. Lee Caplan, featuring conversations with scholars, writers, and thinkers whose recent work contributes to the broad and interdisciplinary field of Cultural Studies. Each episode centers on a newly published article, book, or research project, using it as a starting point to explore larger questions about power, ideology, culture, and everyday life.

  1. “Intergenerational trauma and complex implication in Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (2019)” With Noreen Kane

    May 30

    “Intergenerational trauma and complex implication in Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (2019)” With Noreen Kane

    Show Notes: When we think about colonialism, countries like Britain, France, and Spain often come immediately to mind. Italy, by contrast, is frequently imagined through a different set of narratives—art, culture, food, and, perhaps most significantly, a national mythology that has long obscured the realities of its colonial past. In this episode, we're joined by scholar Noreen Kane to discuss her article “Intergenerational trauma and complex implication in Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (2019)” examining how contemporary writers Igiaba Scego and Maaza Mengiste confront these silences through fiction. Drawing on trauma studies, postcolonial theory, and memory studies, Kane explores how these authors challenge dominant narratives of Italian innocence by revealing the interconnected histories of colonialism, fascism, the Holocaust, and present-day migration. Our conversation moves across a wide range of themes: the persistence of the "good Italian" myth, the relationship between colonial violence and collective memory, the politics of naming and forgetting, and the ways literature can make visible histories that official narratives often leave unspoken. We also explore concepts such as the implicated subject, multidirectional memory, and cosmological trauma, asking how fiction creates new possibilities for reckoning with the past and imagining more ethical futures. Biography: Noreen Kane has a BA and MA in Italian Studies from University College Dublin and worked for over a decade in English language education. In January 2026, she received her PhD from University College Cork. Her thesis, entitled “Transgenerational Trauma and the Gendered Body: Postcolonial Women’s Writing in Italy”, was funded by the Irish Research Council and a National University of Ireland Travelling Doctoral Studentship. Her research has appeared in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Quaderni d’italianistica, and Atlantic Studies. She is currently guest editor for a special issue of Notes in Italian Studies on Memory in Italian Culture. She has lectured on a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses at University College Cork and University College Dublin on topics including contemporary Italian women’s writing, trauma narratives, Italian hip-hop, and Italian mobilities. Her research interests are cultural memory studies, decolonial feminist approaches to trauma, and postcolonial Irish and Italian women’s writing and music.  Links: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17449855.2024.2384916

    1h 20m
  2. “On Taylor Swift and Broken Glass: Confessional Pop, Psychological Intimacy, and Two-Way Authentication,” with Max Blansjaar and Jacob Kingsbury Downs

    May 22

    “On Taylor Swift and Broken Glass: Confessional Pop, Psychological Intimacy, and Two-Way Authentication,” with Max Blansjaar and Jacob Kingsbury Downs

    Show notes: I’m joined by Max Blansjaar and Jacob Kingsbury Downs for a wide-ranging conversation on their article, “On Taylor Swift and Broken Glass: Confessional Pop, Psychological Intimacy, and Two-Way Authentication,” we explore why honesty has become such a central aesthetic category in popular music and what it means when listeners begin to understand themselves through artists they consume.  Throughout the conversation, we discuss how confessional pop music creates what Max and Jacob describe as a “two-way authentication,” where listeners are not simply consuming an artist’s private life, but actively projecting themselves into the music. We think through the politics of intimacy, headphone listening, TikTok, fandom, neoliberal selfhood, indie aesthetics, and the blurred boundary between performer and listener. Along the way, we unpack the genealogy of confessional expression from mid-century poetry to singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and contemporary pop icons, asking how authenticity itself became a marketable aesthetic.  We also spend time thinking about fragmentation, mirrors, broken glass, fantasy imagery, monstrosity, reinvention, and the strange tension between vulnerability and hyper-capitalism in Taylor Swift’s music and public persona. We close by reflecting on the ethical and political stakes of confessional culture more broadly — from celebrity branding and fandom to politics, social media, and the contemporary obsession with “rawness” and transparency. Biography: Max Blansjaar is a musician and writer from Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He holds a BA in Music from St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford, where he was awarded the Gibbs Prize by the Faculty of Music in 2024. His work centres around cultural politics in popular music and the negotiation of social identities and relations through music and sound, with recent essays published in Sound Studies, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and the Journal of Extreme Anthropology, as well as the popular magazines Dirt, The Mortar, and The Story. He currently holds a Clarendon Scholarship at Jesus College, University of Oxford. Biography: Dr Jacob Kingsbury Downs is Departmental Lecturer in Music and Chair of Faculty in the Faculty of Music, as well as Organizing Tutor in Music at Lady Margaret Hall. He is also Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield. He studies listeners’ and musicians’ experiences with music and sound technologies, combining qualitative empirical methods with historical research and theoretical approaches drawn from the fields of musicology, sound studies, phenomenological philosophy, and music psychology. He is currently working on two book projects. He Received his PhD from the University of Sheffield in 2021, studying under Nicola Dibben. Links: https://online.ucpress.edu/jpms/article/37/2/117/212143/On-Taylor-Swift-and-Broken-GlassConfessional-Pop

    1h 9m
  3. “Reparative Museology and Its Limits” with Colin Sterling

    May 18

    “Reparative Museology and Its Limits” with Colin Sterling

    Show notes: In this episode speak with Colin Sterling about his article, “Reparative Museology and Its Limits.” We discuss the broader political, philosophical, and cultural questions surrounding museums, memory, and institutional critique. Drawing from critical heritage studies, museum studies, psychoanalysis, and environmental humanities, we discuss the growing “reparative turn” within museums and cultural institutions, particularly as they attempt to respond to histories of colonialism, extraction, displacement, and social violence. Throughout the conversation, we unpack the distinction between museology and the museum, asking whether the practices of storytelling, collecting, archiving, and communal memory-making necessarily require the modern museum institution at all. We explore how museums increasingly position themselves as moral and reparative actors while simultaneously remaining entangled within the political and economic structures that produced many of the harms they now seek to address. We also discuss projects such as Strike MoMA, reparative abolition, restitution, alternative and mobile museum forms, and artistic interventions that challenge the authority and legitimacy of hegemonic museum structures. Along the way, we reflect on psychoanalytic theories of repair, the politics of institutional reform, and the possibilities of imagining new cultural forms beyond the limits of the neoliberal museum. Biography: Colin Sterling is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer, and educator working at the intersection of critical heritage studies, museum studies, artistic research, and the environmental humanities. He is Assistant Professor of Heritage, Museums and the Environment at University of Amsterdam and previously served as a postdoctoral researcher and UKRI Early Career Leadership Fellow at University College London. Sterling earned his MA and PhD from the UCL Institute of Archaeology and his BA from The University of Manchester. His research focuses on critical and creative approaches to heritage, memory, and museums. Links: https://read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/article-abstract/43/4%20(165)/33/406077/Reparative-Museology-and-Its-Limits?redirectedFrom=fulltext

    1h 7m
  4. “Prison of the Womb: Gender, Incarceration, and Capitalism on the Gold Coast of West Africa, c. 1500–1957” with Sarah Balakrishnan

    May 9

    “Prison of the Womb: Gender, Incarceration, and Capitalism on the Gold Coast of West Africa, c. 1500–1957” with Sarah Balakrishnan

    Buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology Patreon.com/everythingisideology Show notes: We are joined once again by historian and writer Sarah Balakrishnan to discuss her article “Prison of the Womb: Gender, Incarceration, and Capitalism on the Gold Coast of West Africa, c. 1500–1957” the conversation explores a largely erased history of indigenous prison systems in the Gold Coast and the central role women’s bodies played in the development of debt, trade, and colonial economies from the fifteenth century through the twentieth. Drawing from archival discoveries, oral testimonies, and overlooked colonial records, Balakrishnan traces how women were held as collateral in systems of credit, hostage-taking, and imprisonment long before and during European colonial rule. The discussion examines the emergence of debtor’s prisons in West Africa, the gendered logic of incarceration, the relationship between kinship and finance, and the ways colonial administrations simultaneously condemned and depended upon these prison systems for economic stability. Along the way, we discuss mercantile capitalism, palm oil economies after abolition, Victorian colonial morality, matrilineal social structures, public women and prostitution, and hostage-taking, and the violent intersections of sexuality, reproduction, and governance. The conversation also reflects on the ethical and emotional weight of archival work, particularly the testimonies of incarcerated women whose voices survived in scattered colonial documents despite deliberate attempts to erase these systems from official history. Biography: Sarah Balakrishnan is a Canadian-Indian writer and scholar based in the Department of History at Duke University. Balakrishnan is the 2022 Narrative Prize winner, the winner of Narrative Magazine’s Best Under 30 writing contest, and a finalist for the Cecilia Joyce Johnson Award for Short Fiction from the Key West Literary Seminar. Since 2020, BalaKRISH NIN has served as a fiction editor at The Maple Tree Literary Supplement. Her fiction writing has been supported by grants from Craigardan, Hedgebrook, and American Short Fiction. Balakrishnan received a PhD in History from Harvard University in 2020 and a BA in History and Political Theory from McGill University in 2014. She was a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge, a postdoctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, and a postdoctoral fellow in the History Department at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Balakrishnan scholarly research has appeared in a number of prestigious venues, including The Journal of African History, The Journal of Social History, and Comparative Studies in Society and History. Links: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/64BC1FC4663980DC8003820860462F1B/S0010417522000469a.pdf/div-class-title-prison-of-the-womb-gender-incarceration-and-capitalism-on-the-gold-coast-of-west-africa-c-1500-1957-div.pdf

    1h 11m
  5. "False Friends? Quakers, fronts, and the rise of popular abolitionism" with Stuart Anderson-Davis

    Apr 30

    "False Friends? Quakers, fronts, and the rise of popular abolitionism" with Stuart Anderson-Davis

    Patreon.com/everythingisideology Buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology Show Notes: In this episode, we’re diving into a history that feels uncannily familiar—one where media, persuasion, and strategic communication shape public opinion in ways that still resonate today. I’m joined by Stuart Anderson Davis, a doctoral researcher at Columbia University studying the history of deception and disinformation. To discuss his article “False Friends? Quakers, fronts, and the rise of popular abolitionism.” Together, we explore how these forces were already at work centuries ago in the transatlantic struggle over slavery. Our conversation centers on a group that often sits at the margins of this history: the Quakers. While they’re frequently remembered for their moral opposition to slavery, what emerges here is something far more complex. We unpack how Quaker activists navigated suspicion, marginalization, and political exclusion to build one of the earliest modern social movements—experimenting with tactics that feel strikingly contemporary: media campaigns, narrative framing, anonymous publishing, and even forms of strategic deception. Their abolitionist efforts weren’t just moral or religious gestures. They were systematic, coordinated, and deeply strategic. At a time when slavery was foundational to global economies and widely accepted as normal—even justified—Quakers were helping to build a counter-public that insisted it was not only wrong, but intolerable. We talk about how they transformed abolition into a movement. This meant organizing some of the first large-scale petition campaigns, lobbying politicians directly, and circulating pamphlets that exposed the realities of the slave trade—especially the violence of the Middle Passage and plantation life. They weren’t just raising awareness; they were actively trying to reshape what people believed was possible. At the heart of this discussion is a tension that still defines activism today: how do you persuade a public that may not want to be persuaded? And what happens when moral arguments collide with entrenched economic and ideological systems? From pamphlet wars and propaganda battles to the shaping of public consciousness across the Atlantic, this episode traces how abolition became not just a moral cause, but a communications project. We also explore the contradictions within these movements—the internal divisions among Quakers themselves, the role of formerly enslaved voices in shifting public perception, and the emergence of competing narratives that sought to defend slavery through disinformation and distortion. Biography: Stuart Anderson-Davis is am currently studying for a Ph.D. in Communications from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. his academic work is focused on the history of deception and disinformation. Anderson-Davis’s dissertation examines the ways in which deceptive communications shaped events - and influenced public opinion - in Britain and the United States during the 18th and 19th centuries. He also writes about politics, media, communications, and disinformation for various publications, including the Columbia Journalism Review. He holds a B.A. in History and Ancient History from the University of Nottingham and an M.Phil. in Modern European History from Cambridge University.      Links: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14788810.2025.2493437

    1h 12m
  6. "Uncovering Radical Histories: Anna Budu-Arthur’s Everyday Politics of Decolonization and Transnational Solidarity" with Bright Gyamfi

    Apr 25

    "Uncovering Radical Histories: Anna Budu-Arthur’s Everyday Politics of Decolonization and Transnational Solidarity" with Bright Gyamfi

    buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology Shownotes: In today’s episode, we’re in conversation with Dr. Bright Gyamfi about a fascinating and necessary rethinking of decolonization, memory, and historical narrative. But rather than retelling familiar stories centered on nation-states or political elites, this conversation turns toward what has been overlooked—and often structurally erased. At the heart of this discussion is a shift in how we understand history itself. What happens when we take seriously the lives and intellectual labor of women who have been excluded from official archives? What new forms of knowledge emerge when we move beyond traditional sources—toward oral histories, personal archives, funeral pamphlets, photographs, and everyday practices? The conversation explores how African women—particularly figures like Ana budu Arthur—functioned not just as participants in decolonial movements, but as active producers of knowledge, shaping political consciousness through spaces often dismissed as apolitical: the home, the kitchen, fashion, and social life. These sites become arenas of resistance, where culture, care, and aesthetics operate as tools of decolonization. The conversation also pushes us to think critically about erasure and historical memory—how national narratives and state commemorations systematically sideline women, even as communities continue to remember and honor them in other ways. In doing so, it challenges the persistence of “great man” histories within decolonial thought itself. At the same time, Gyamfi traces a broader intellectual and geographic arc: from Ghana to London, from port cities to global Black networks, from Pan-African congresses to intimate dinner-table conversations. What emerges is a vision of decolonization not as a singular political event, but as a lived, everyday practice shaped by race, space, labor, and transnational connection. Biography: Bright Gyamfi is an Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. He holds a Ph.D. in History from Northwestern University, an MSc in African Studies from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Political Science and History (Honors) from the University of Notre Dame. Prior to joining Rutgers, he served on the faculty at the University of California, San Diego, and was awarded the Presidential Fellowship, Northwestern University’s highest honor for graduate students. His research examines the transnational networks of Ghanaian and African intellectuals whose work reshaped African Studies, Black Studies, Black Internationalism, and economic development thought following African independence. His scholarship examines the global circulation of Nkrumahist and Pan-Africanist thought across the U.S., the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa. Gyamfi’s work has been supported by numerous fellowships, including the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, the SSRC Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship, and the Fulbright Fellowship. He has conducted extensive research across Ghana, Senegal, Grenada, Suriname, Trinidad & Tobago, Brazil, France, the U.K., and the U.S. In addition to his scholarship, Gyamfi serves on the Board of Directors of the West African Research Association, the Ghana Studies Association (as Acting President), and the Ghana Oxford and Cambridge Society. He is also actively engaged in public-facing work, including policy consulting, media interviews, public lectures, exhibitions, and documentary filmmaking. Links: https://read.dukeupress.edu/radical-history-review/article-abstract/2025/153/60/405057/Uncovering-Radical-Histories-Anna-Budu-Arthur-s

    1h 9m
  7. “Cinemas on Fire: Walter Benjamin's Spielraum and the 1979 Revolution in Iran" with Ehsan Hanif

    Apr 20

    “Cinemas on Fire: Walter Benjamin's Spielraum and the 1979 Revolution in Iran" with Ehsan Hanif

    Patreon.com/everythingisideology Buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology Instagram.com/everythingisideology Music: "Building Nests in the Ruins" By nihilore creative commons music project Shownotes: Welcome back to Everything is Ideology, I’m your host Dr. Lee Caplan. Today were joined by Ehsan Hanif a PhD candidate at Cornell University whose work explores the intersections of architecture, oil, and political life in Iran. We discuss his recently published essay, “Cinemas on Fire: Walter Benjamin's Spielraum and the 1979 Revolution in Iran.” We begin with Ehsan’s engagement with Walter Benjamin, using ideas like Spielraum—a “room for play” or possibility—to ask how different spaces open or limit collective action. From there, the conversation moves through a series of contrasts: cinema and theater, passivity and participation, privatized consumption and communal experience. As we move into the Iranian context, these questions reverberate on a new register. We discuss the rise of cinema, its association with modernization and Westernization, and why it became a target during the 1979 revolution. In contrast, we explore Ta’zieh, a form of traditional performance rooted in theological ethical-political commitments that embeds in everyday life, where performance, mourning, and collective participation blur together. Rather than simply representing politics, these spaces actively produce different kinds of social and political possibilities.   Throughout, the conversation returns to a central tension: how do people come to act together? And what kinds of spaces—cultural, architectural, and affective—make that action possible? Biography: Ehssan Hanif is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Architecture and Urban Development at Cornell University. His research, tentatively titled Domesticating Oil: Corporate Colonialism and Labor Negotiating Housing Policies in Iran (1929-1963), explores the history of oil and architectural modernity within Iranian domestic spaces, mapping it from Abadan to Tehran. In his work, he examines how the interplay between oil workers’ movements, international interests in Iran’s subsoil resources, and nationalist discourses reshaped housing projects across Iranian cities. Prior to his time at Cornell, he worked as an independent researcher and translator in Iran, translating several seminal texts into Persian, including Architecture and Modernity (Hilde Heynen), Benjamin for Architects (Brian Elliot), and The Story of Post-modernism (Charles Jenks). His work has been published in the Journal of Architectural Histories, Xorein, Middle East Critique, Sharestan, and British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, among other venues. His latest contribution, titled “An Island within an Island: The Establishment of an Oil Company Town in the ‘Desert’ Island of Abadan, Iran (1908–1930s),” is forthcoming in the Journal of Fabrications.

    1h 45m
  8. “Rolling Stone Magazine: Co-opting the Counterculture” with Laura Sikes

    Apr 18

    “Rolling Stone Magazine: Co-opting the Counterculture” with Laura Sikes

    If you like what we do please subscribe to the show at Patreon.com/everythingisideology or give a one time donation at buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology Show notes: Welcome back to Everything is Ideology. I’m your host Dr. Lee Caplan. I’m joined by Dr. Laura Sykes, and we will be discussing her recently published essay “Rolling Stone Magazine: Co-opting the Counterculture.” Today’s episode is really about a tension—between aesthetics and politics, between counterculture and capitalism, and between what something claims to be and what it actually does in the world and we start with her work on rock criticism—especially figures like Richard Goldstein, Ellen Willis, Lester Bangs, and Jann Wenner—but very quickly the conversation opens up into the role of the Magazine Rolling Stone helped shape not just music culture, but the way people understood themselves as part of a movement, even when the political commitments behind that movement were in contradiction. Along the way, we talk about things like the use of New Left aesthetics without the politics behind them, the role of gender and race in music criticism, and how ideas get packaged, circulated, and sometimes stripped of their original meaning. There are moments where we zoom in—on specific articles, specific figures—and others where we step back and think about the broader question: what does it mean for culture to feel radical without necessarily being radical. It’s a conversation that moves between history and the present, and it raises questions that are still very much with us. Biography: Laura Sikes is from West Monroe, Louisiana. She attended Louisiana State University for her undergraduate degree. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Rochester, studying under Joan Shelley Rubin. The focus of her research is rock and roll criticism from its origins in the 1960s through to today. Of particular interest to her are cultural hierarchies, radical politics, print culture, race, and gender. Her dissertation, In the Groove: Rock Criticism from 1966-1978, examines Richard Goldstein, Ellen Willis, Lester Bangs, and Jann Wenner, analyzing their contributions to musical, cultural, and political discourse. She is currently adapting it for publication as a book. She is an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University—Texarkana. There, she runs the Red River Center for Regional History and Culture. She is also the editor of the Red River Series for the Texas A&M University Press. She is a proponent of public history. Links: https://online.ucpress.edu/jpms/article/38/1/22/217706/Rolling-Stone-MagazineCo-opting-the-Counterculture

    1h 22m
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Everything is Ideology: A Cultural Studies Podcast is a collection of interviews hosted by Dr. Lee Caplan, featuring conversations with scholars, writers, and thinkers whose recent work contributes to the broad and interdisciplinary field of Cultural Studies. Each episode centers on a newly published article, book, or research project, using it as a starting point to explore larger questions about power, ideology, culture, and everyday life.

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