The Podcast for Social Research

The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
The Podcast for Social Research

From Plato to quantum physics, Walter Benjamin to experimental poetry, Frantz Fanon to the history of political radicalism, The Podcast for Social Research is a crucial part of our mission to forge new, organic paths for intellectual work in the twenty-first century: an ongoing, interdisciplinary series featuring members of the Institute, and occasional guests, conversing about a wide variety of intellectual issues, some perennial, some newly pressing. Each episode centers on a different topic and is accompanied by a bibliography of annotations and citations that encourages further curiosity and underscores the conversation’s place in a larger web of cultural conversations.

  1. 8 DE NOV.

    Podcast for Social Research, Episode 82: The Worst Laid Plans — Initial Reflections on the U.S. 2024 Election

    In episode 82 of the Podcast for Social Research, Patrick Blanchfield and Ajay Singh Chaudhary take up the dismal U.S. election results, what brought us here, what comes next, and more. With the excellent Nara Roberta Silva and Isi Litke unfortunately both out sick but present in spirit and mind Patrick and Ajay reflect on how themes of depletion, exhaustion, and illness offer a perfect point of departure for processing the general morass of our moment’s florid pathologies and generally grim vibes. Their conversation proceeds by unpacking psychoanalytic theories of libidinal economy in terms of trauma response, repression, and “pathic projection” alongside a materialist interrogation of the structural, political-economic conditions of misery in a crumbling and violently flailing U.S. empire. How did the two campaigns appeal to the anxieties and antipathies of voters by ratifying or disavowing their feelings, and by offering them competing accounts of whom to blame? What is or isn't negotiable for the U.S. imperial project abroad and for social reproduction at home, and how does that relate to what is or isn't sayable, or even thinkable, in domestic US discourse? How should we understand “Trumpism” in relation not just to terminological debates over fascism, but in the context of global political trends? How does Trump’s brand of nativism, theocratic Christianity, and patriarchy mesh with longstanding features of the American project, where does it depart from them, and how does it resonate with other nationalisms abroad? And how do the Biden presidency, the Harris campaign, and initial responses from media and political figures demonstrate the increasing hegemony of such positions among elites? Against a backdrop of genocidal violence, mounting climate crisis, and ever-shrill chauvinism, this episode is the first in a series of confrontations with the starkly bleak conditions of current American politics.

    2h25min
  2. 25 DE OUT.

    Faculty Spotlight: Bohemia Is An Imaginary City — Jude Webre on Dawn Powell, the Lady Wit, and the American Mid-Century

    In this episode of Faculty Spotlight, hosts Mark DeLucas and Lauren K. Wolfe sit down with Jude Webre, cultural historian and practicing musician, to discuss the life and legacy of Dawn Powell, the urbane, acerbic, and woefully undercelebrated “lady wit” of Greenwich Village in its mid-century heyday. Attracted, as many of her generation were, by the allure of bohemia, its promise of liberation and self-realization, Powell exchanged her native midwest environs for an artist’s life in the city. Known, if not unremittingly beloved, by nearly all the literary lights of 1940s New York City—Edmund Wilson, Ernest Hemingway, Diana Trilling, Dorothy Parker, John Dos Passos, e.e. Cummings, and Jean Stafford to name just a few—it is hard to reconcile Powell’s social acumen, bracing wit, and the vitality of her literary output with the obscurity into which her life’s work has fallen in the six decades since her burial in a pauper’s grave. What were the manners, mores, and moods of mid-20th-century American bohemia? And how did Powell both share in and depart from them, both capture and censure them? What is it to follow a moral judgment and an aesthetic conviction, be they ever so slightly out of step with prevailing tastes? And what, finally, accounts for lasting literary fame?  The Podcast for Social Research is produced by Ryan Lentini.

    53min
  3. 24 DE JUL.

    Podcast for Social Research, Episode 80: On Realism, World-Building, Violence, and Desire—Joseph Earl Thomas, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Vinson Cunningham, and Paige Sweet in Conversation

    What does literary realism look like in the 21st century—and what can it do? In episode 80 of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at Liz’s Book Bar in Brooklyn, BISR faculty Paige Sweet sat down with fellow faculty and debut novelist Joseph Earl Thomas plus special guests, writers Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and Vinson Cunningham, to talk about what it means, what it takes, and what it feels like to represent social reality in contemporary fiction. In novels that test the boundaries of realism, traditionally conceived—borrowing techniques from autofiction, speculative fiction, dystopia, satire, and academic non-fiction—Thomas (God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer), Adjei-Brenyah (Chain-Gang All-Stars), and Cunningham (Great Expectations) get beneath the detailed depiction of everyday life to discuss, among other things, the world-building that happens in every act of writing; how fiction can serve as a testing ground for theoretical commitments; the carceral nature of our social institutions and their ripple effects through our intimate lives; the violence that goes on under the guise of pleasure; and how to feel and depict life as precious in even the most devastating and dehumanizing conditions. Persons and things touched upon include: the US Constitution, bell hooks, Gayatri Spivak, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Henry James, Solmaz Sharif, Saidiya Hartman, Goodreads, love, looking, “boundaries,” and beauty.  This episode was produced by Ryan Lentini.

    1h38min
4,1
de 5
32 avaliações

Sobre

From Plato to quantum physics, Walter Benjamin to experimental poetry, Frantz Fanon to the history of political radicalism, The Podcast for Social Research is a crucial part of our mission to forge new, organic paths for intellectual work in the twenty-first century: an ongoing, interdisciplinary series featuring members of the Institute, and occasional guests, conversing about a wide variety of intellectual issues, some perennial, some newly pressing. Each episode centers on a different topic and is accompanied by a bibliography of annotations and citations that encourages further curiosity and underscores the conversation’s place in a larger web of cultural conversations.

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