Always Already Podcast, A Critical Theory Podcast

In this episode, Emily and John are joined by a new guest and friend of the podcast Joseph Bookman for a lively discussion of Anna L. Tsing‘s book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Join us as we try to unpack Tsing’s conceptualization of “salvage capitalism,” […]

Join us for this special episode of the AAP – special because all of your hosts are actually in the same place, and special because we devote the whole episode to pedagogy. Rachel, John, and previous guest host Siddhant Issar convene in St. Louis  to discuss what it means to teach the political theory canon […]

In this very special episode, John talks with Charles W. Mills (Philosophy, The Graduate Center, CUNY) about his new book, Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (Oxford UP, 2017). Mills walks us through some of the main arguments and concepts from the book, including the terminology of racial liberalism, the importance of white supremacy as […]

In this especially agentic episode, Emily, John, and B attempt to meet Karen Barad halfway–examining three chapters from her major work, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Exploring how the concepts of agency, quantum theory, feminist science studies, and “the real” might be updated through Barad’s notion of […]

Join James as he talks with activist-scholar-artist Kai M. Green about the transracial question as presented in his June 2015 The Feminist Wire article. Published on the heels of Rachel Dolezal and Caitlyn Jenner’s dual emergence into news headlines, Green’s article joined social media and academic debates as to the extent to which we should […]

Join James, John, and Emily for another installment of Always Already After Dark. In this episode we (accidentally?) discuss the Twilight franchise before delving into an Emmett Rensin essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books titled, “The Blathering Superego at the End of History.” We discuss the superego as metaphor, as critique, and as […]

Join B, John, and Emily for a patron-suggested discussion of Eric L. Santner‘s book The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty. The conversation explores the book’s use of the terms sovereignty and flesh as we attempt to parse out its central aims and contributions. How do those concepts relate to […]

In this episode James is joined by Dr. Mark Padoongpatt, Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary, Gender, and Ethnic Studies at University of Nevada Las Vegas. Dr. Padoongpatt discusses his involvement with the Fuck Neoliberalism Symposium held in April at the University of California, Merced. The pair unpack the term neoliberalism by pointing out its logic and […]

This episode features James, John, and newly-christened Always Already Correspondent M. Shadee Malaklou in a discussion drawn from a cross-reading of Calvin L. Warren’s “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope” (2015) with Frank Wilderson III’s “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” (2003). The spirited conversation covers the relation of (anti)Blackness to […]

In this episode of the Always Already Podcast we discuss two distinct, overlapping, and not-so-overlapping essays by Jürgen Habermas: “Three Normative Models of Democracy,” written in 1994, and “Notes on Post-Secular Society,” written in 2008. We begin by asking whether Habermas’ conception of deliberative democracy changes from the first to the second piece, taking into consideration […]

In this first installment of Epistemic Unruliness recorded from within the Trump Age, James interviews Barbara Sostaita, a Feministing.com columnist, community organizer, and doctoral student in Religious Studies at The University of North Carolina where she researches Latinx migrant faith practices and communities. Their conversation focuses upon immigration policy and the recent urgencies created by […]

Join us for Rachel’s triumphant return to the podcast as she, Emily, and John discuss a few chapters from Martijn Konings‘ The Emotional Logic of Capitalism: What Progressives Have Missed. As we attempt to unpack the major arguments and contributions of these chapters, we ask: is there a difference between ’emotional logic’ and ‘affect,’ and what […]

In this special crossover episode, James, John, and Emily are joined by Conor, Grace, and Josh from the Unsupervised Thinking podcast. We discuss several chapters from Rebecca M. Jordan-Young’s book Brain Storm: the Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences with these folks who are actual scientists. Join us as we try to situate and work […]

Over at New Books in Global Ethics and Politics, John interviewed Banu Bargu on her recent book. Thanks to the NBN, we are cross-posting the episode here. What is the relationship between state power and self-destructive violence as a mode of political resistance? In her book Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons (Columbia […]

It’s Part 2 of Always Already on the Road (for part 1 click here!), where James attends the American Studies Association Annual Meeting in Denver, CO for conversations with a multiplicity of critical, engaged scholars. In this episode, James and his guests discuss American colonialism and Puerto Rico, Standing Rock and the dispossession of indigenous land […]

In Part 1 of this first-ever Always Already on the Road, James attends the American Studies Association Annual Meeting in Denver, CO. This year’s theme was Home/Not Home: Centering American Studies Where We Are, and this allowed for James and attendees to discuss the urgencies created by the election of Donald Trump, including the rise […]

In a new installment of our occasional series, Always Already Podcast After Dark, James, Emily, John, and B tackle the elephant in political imaginary: Donald Trump and the 2016 election. What the hell happened last week? The team embarks on a critique of American neoliberal ethos and the rising nativism of Trump’s campaign, not to mention […]

In this installment of Epistemic Unruliness, James talks with Suhaly Bautista-Carolina, also known as “The Earth Warrior.” In addition to her work as Director of Programs at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI) in Harlem and Community Relations Manager of the Brooklyn Museum, Suhaly engages the world as an artist, educator, and cultural […]

Join Emily, John, and B as they celebrate a reunion: John’s brief return to New York in this exciting episode on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s critiques of paranoid reading, her theories of affect, and the move toward the reparative. More specifically, upon a listener request from Sug, we read her “Paranoid and Reparative Reading” and “Melanie […]

In our first text-discussion episode in a while (sorry podcast fam!), John is joined by two special guest hosts, his Beloit College colleagues M. Shadee Malaklou (Critical Identity Studies) and Michelle Bumatay (French). We discuss Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon, focusing on the Introduction, “The Man of Color and the White Woman” (chap. 3) […]