University of Minnesota Press University of Minnesota Press
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- Education
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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
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The disruptive forces of an oil boom
During the past decade, new oil plays have unsettled energy landscapes and imaginaries in the US. Settling the Boom, a volume of essays, studies how the disruptive forces of an oil boom in the northern Great Plains of Williston, North Dakota, are contained through the extension of settler temporalities, reassertions of heteropatriarchy, and the tethering of life to the volatility of oil and its cruel optimisms. Here, the book’s coeditors Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun are joined in conversation.
Mary E. Thomas is associate professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at The Ohio State University. She is coeditor of Settling the Boom, coauthor of Urban Geography, and author of Multicultural Girlhood.
Bruce Braun is professor of geography at the University of Minnesota. He is coeditor of Settling the Boom and Political Matter, and author of The Intemperate Rainforest.
Episode references:
Cruel Optimism / Lauren Berlant
Pollution Is Colonialism / Max Liboiron
White Earth (film)
Jessica Christy, Through the Window exhibition
Location of focus:
Western North Dakota, including Willison (Williston Basin) and Dickinson, within the Bakken Formation.
Settling the Boom: The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil, is available from University of Minnesota Press. This edited collection includes contributions from Morgan Adamson, Kai Bosworth, Thomas S. Davis, and Jessica Lehman. -
Expelling public schools: Antiracist politics and school privatization.
John Arena examines the more than two-decade struggle to privatize public schools in Newark, New Jersey—a conflict that is raging in cities across the country. Arena’s book Expelling Public Schools reveals the political rise of Cory Booker and Ras Baraka and what this particular case study illuminates about contemporary post-civil rights Black politics. Here, Arena is joined in conversation with David Forrest.
John (Jay) Arena is associate professor of sociology at CUNY’s College of Staten Island. Arena is author of Expelling Public Schools: How Antiracist Politics Enable School Privatization in Newark and Driven from New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization.
David Forrest is associate professor of politics at Oberlin College. He is author of A Voice but No Power: Organizing for Social Justice in Minneapolis.
Works and scholars referenced:
Adolph Reed Jr. (Stirrings in the Jug)
David M. Kotz (The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism)
Cedric Johnson
Frances Fox Piven (Challenging Authority)
Jane McAlevey (No Shortcuts)
Preston H. Smith II (Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis)
Sharon Kurtz (Workplace Justice)
Marc Doussard and Greg Schrock (Justice at Work)
Kristen Buras (Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space)
Touré Reed (Toward Freedom)
Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Laurence Cox (We Make Our Own History)
Colin Barker, Laurence Cox, John Krinsky, and Alf Gunvald Nilsen, editors (Marxism and Social Movements)
Rosa Luxemburg (Rosa Luxemburg Speaks)
Chris Maisano (“What Does Revolution Mean in the 21st Century?”, Jacobin)
Mark R. Beissinger (The Revolutionary City)
People and organizations referenced:
Cory Booker
Chris Christie
Ras Baraka
Newark’s downtown Teachers Village complex
Sharpe James
Cami Anderson
Christopher Cerf
Randi Weingarten
Albert Shanker
Karen Lewis
Al Moussab
Newark Education Workers
This episode was recorded in September 2023.
Expelling Public Schools: How Antiracist Politics Enable School Privatization in Newark is available from University of Minnesota Press.
"Expelling Public Schools offers a fascinating look into the racial politics of corporate school reform in Newark Public Schools. John Arena takes a long view—just over two decades—and examines the reform movements and countermovements in the district from the top down and the bottom up. In assessing corporate school reform efforts under mayors Cory Booker and Ras Baraka, this deeply researched book illuminates the mechanisms that maintain educational inequality."—Rand Quinn, author of Class Action: Desegregation and Diversity in San Francisco Schools
"It is rare to encounter a work that treats actually existing Black life, an approach best articulated by Cedric Johnson, to critically address contemporary Black urban regimes. Thoughtful, careful, and incisive, Expelling Public Schools does just that. In this moment when antiracism (and surface critiques of antiracism) is rife, John Arena’s work provides a wonderful tonic."—Lester Spence, author of Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip-hop and Black Politics -
Blowdown in the Boundary Waters
More than twenty years ago, a bizarre confluence of meteorological events resulted in the most damaging blowdown in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness’s history. It traveled 1,300 miles and lasted 22 hours, flattening nearly 500,000 acres of the Superior National Forest. Hundreds of campers and paddlers were stranded and dozens injured; amazingly, no one died. The historic storm ultimately reshaped the region’s forests in ways we have yet to fully understand. Here, author Cary J. Griffith is joined in conversation with scientist Lee Frelich and Peter Leschak, who was involved in the response and rescue effort.
Cary Griffith is author of several novels and four books of nonfiction, including Gunflint Falling: Blowdown in the Boundary Waters and Gunflint Burning: Fire in the Boundary Waters. He is recipient of a Minnesota Book Award and a Midwest Book Award.
Lee Frelich is director of the Center for Forest Ecology at the University of Minnesota. He is listed among the top 1% of scientists in the Web of Science, Ecology, and Environment and has authored more than 200 publications, and has been featured in the New York Times, Newsweek, and the Washington Post.
Peter Leschak was chief of the French Township fire department in Side Lake, Minnesota, for thirty years. He has written ten books and has worked in a variety of wildfire-related capacities and held positions of leadership in the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Forest Service.
Gunflint Falling: Blowdown in the Boundary Waters is available from University of Minnesota Press.
"In the tradition of The Perfect Storm, Cary J. Griffith brings readers into the Boundary Waters moment by moment as an epic gale sweeps through. Ample maps and in-depth interviews with witnesses both immerse us in one terrifying day and offer a glimpse of the past and future of Minnesota’s boreal forest."—Kim Todd, author of Sensational: The Hidden History of America’s “Girl Stunt Reporters”
"In Gunflint Falling, Cary J. Griffith provides an accurate, comprehensive narrative of those impacted by one of the region’s most devastating storms. The damage and pain brought by the derecho storm was more severe than anything previously experienced in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The reader is taken into the personal experiences of the injured and those searching for them for fourteen days in the million-acre wilderness, and Griffith’s narrative of these experiences demonstrates how, when faced with an emergency, we come together to help one another."—Jim Sanders, retired forest supervisor, Superior National Forest (1996-2011), USDA Forest Service -
Sugar, coal, oil: No more fossils.
What is fossil civilization? In the book No More Fossils, Dominic Boyer tells the story of how we came to rationalize fossil fuel use through successive phases of sucropolitics (plantation sugar), carbopolitics (industrial coal), and petropolitics (oil and plastics), showing what tethers us to petroculture today and what it will take to overcome the forces that mire us in place. What can we do to make electroculture a more just and sustainable alternative? In this episode, Boyer is joined in conversation about modern energy politics with Cara Daggett.
Dominic Boyer is an anthropologist, media maker, and environmental researcher who teaches at Rice University. His books include No More Fossils, Energopolitics, and Hyposubjects.
Cara Daggett is associate professor of political science at Virginia Tech and author of The Birth of Energy.
References:
The Birth of Energy / Cara Daggett
Anna Tsing
Carbon Democracy / Timothy Mitchell
Michel Foucault on biopower
Sweetness and Power / Sidney Mintz
Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History / Susan Buck-Morss
Fossil Capital / Andreas Malm
15-Minute City
John Locke
Alexander Dunlap on Fossil Fuel+
Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More / Alexei Yurchak
Staying with the Trouble / Donna Haraway
Ariella Azoulay
Kyle Powys Whyte
Geontologies / Elizabeth Povinelli
Low Carbon Pleasure / a collaborative experimental art and performance project by Dominic Boyer, Cymene Howe, and others
Stacy Alaimo / ecophilia
No More Fossils is available from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu. -
Comics, visual culture, and feminism in the 1980s
In Visible Archives is a book that explores a number of feminist and cultural touchstones of the 1980s and examines how visual culture interacts with these pivotal moments. Author Margaret Galvan goes deep into the archives to bring together a decade’s worth of research that includes comics, collages, photographs, drawings, and other media produced by women including Nan Goldin, Alison Bechdel, Lee Marrs, and Gloria Anzaldúa. Galvan demonstrates how women represented their bodies and sexualities on their own terms and created visibility for new, diverse identities. Galvan is joined here in conversation with Anna Peppard and Ramzi Fawaz.
Margaret Galvan is assistant professor of English at the University of Florida and author of In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s.
Anna Peppard is a writer, researcher, podcaster, and educator. Peppard is an adjunct lecturer in the department of Communication, Popular Culture, and Film at Brock University and editor of Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero.
Ramzi Fawaz is an award-winning queer cultural critic, public speaker, and educator. Fawaz is a Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and author of Queer Forms and The New Mutants.
Episode references:
Trina Robbins
Hillary Chute / Graphic Women
Gloria Anzaldúa / Borderlands and This Bridge Called My Back
Alison Bechdel
Nan Goldin
Diary (1982) from the Barnard Sex Conference (Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, Marybeth Nelson)
Kristen Hogan / The Feminist Bookstore Movement
Lee Marrs / The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp
Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing (exhibit)
Roberta Gregory
Maria Cotera / Chicana por mi Raza (digital project)
Chicana Movidas / edited by Dionne Espinoza, María Eugenia Cotera, and Maylei Blackwell
In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s is available from University of Minnesota Press. This book has an open-access Manifold edition that is free to read online.
"Margaret Galvan asks all the right questions about queer and feminist visual storytelling from the 1980s: Where were these works situated? How did communities use them? How have they been archived? Both commentary upon as well as an integral part of the activist project begun by the creators themselves, In Visible Archives helps keep these remarkable works visible for us all."—Justin Hall, California College of the Arts, editor of No Straight Lines
"This wonderful book demonstrates the critical importance of community-based archives. Utilizing primary source materials, Margaret Galvan has produced an original and consequential contribution to the history of the feminist sex wars, and her attention to the visual aspects of those documents provides long overdue recognition to the period’s artists, designers, and activists."—Gayle Rubin, University of Michigan -
Care is more than human—it's creaturely.
Benjamin Meiches explores the role of animals laboring alongside humans (mine-clearance dogs, milk-producing cows and goats, disease-identifying rats) in humanitarian operations, generating new ethical possibilities of care in humanitarian practice—and opening up new ethical ways to think about being human in terms of how we interact with nonhuman animals. Meiches, author of Nonhuman Humanitarians, is joined here in conversation with Stefanie Fishel.
Benjamin Meiches is associate professor of politics at the Univeristy of Washington-Tacoma. He is author of Nonhuman Humanitarians: Animal Interventions in Global Politics and The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide.
Stefanie Fishel is lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. Fishel is author of The Microbial State: Global Thriving and the Body Politic and contributor to the edited volume The Long 2020.
EPISODE REFERENCES:
-Emmanuel Levinas, “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,” in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (trans. Sean Hand)
-Heifer International (organization)
-J. M. Coetzee / The Lives of Animals
-Brian Massumi / What Animals Teach Us about Politics
-Liisa Malkki / The Need to Help
-Timothy Morton / Dark Ecology
-Timothy Morton / Ecology without Nature
-David Shannon / Duck on a Bike
-Jack Halberstam / Wild Things
-Eugene Thacker / In the Dust of This Planet