A sequel to our first, live, election-themed episode of the podcast (Slouching towards Election Day), Episode 16 responds to the urgent need for critical reflection in the wake of the recent, deeply divisive presidential election. Guests Kazembe Balagun (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung) and Bhaskar Sunkara (Jacobin) convene with BISR faculty including Tony Alessandrini, K. Soraya Batmanghelichi, Raphaële Chappe, Ajay Singh Chaudhary, Samantha Hill, Audrey Nicolaides, Rebecca Ariel Porte, Suzanne Schneider, and Jude Webre. What went wrong in the lead-up to the election? And what is to be done in its aftermath? How should we define Trumpism and and how can we understand it? In addition to contending with these questions, this panel wrestles with the implications of an increasingly authoritarian executive branch, the problems of political resistance, and the question of how afraid we should really be.

Notations for this episode may be found here.

The first live recording of the Podcast for Social Research, episode fifteen takes up the forms and feelings of American electoral politics in light of the least popular election in recent American history. Audrey, Ajay, Jude, Tony, and Rebecca consider the historical background of presidential politics, the apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding the current election, affect in the American political scene, sleek sharks in tailored suits, mythical civilities of the Enlightenment, and recent arguments advanced by Nancy Fraser, Andrew Arato, Arun Gupta, and Lauren Berlant. This episode, recorded just before a screening of the third and final presidential debate of 2016, also includes a live Q&A session.

Notations for this episode may be found here.

In the fourteenth episode of the Podcast for Social Research, Anjuli, Tony, and Ajay talk through the life, work, and legacy of Frantz Fanon, the Martiniquean psychiatrist and philosopher of decolonization who was also a veteran of World War II and an adherent of the Algerian revolution. This conversation takes up major texts in Fanon’s oeuvre (Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth) as well as profound theoretical controversies that radiate from them—idiocy, the literary dimensions of Fanon’s work, his strangeness of form and methodology, the psychological inflections of his writing, the political structure of states and colonies, the best footnote in all of twentieth-century philosophy, and particularly the nature and meaning of violence as praxis, “perfect mediation,” symbol, and atmosphere—violence as reason to despair—and as reason not to.

Notations for this episode may be found here. 

The thirteenth episode of the Podcast for Social Research considers a recent work of poetry by Robin Coste Lewis (Voyage of the Sable Venus) and a recent work of poetic, theoretical memoir by Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts)—both of which deploy the metaphor of travel by ship. Rebecca and Yanyi converse about narrative and fragmentation in contemporary poetry, Coste Lewis’s subversive genealogy of representations of the black female body, theories of voice and self, conceptual writing, and Nelson’s meditations on queer family-making and love.

Notations for this episode may be found here.

The Podcast for Social Research returns with an episode centered on theories of the radical. Departing from Emily Bazelon’s recent New York Times piece, “Who’s Really ‘Radical’?” Suzy, Tony, and Ajay discuss the etymological origins, historical weight, and contemporary political force of the category of radicalism, asking, in the course of the conversation, who and what we call radical and what it means when we do. Case studies range from the Red Decade to political Islam.

Notations for this episode can be found here.