Interview: Dr. Vincent Lloyd on Black Dignity and the Struggle Against Domination — Epistemic Unruliness 38

We’re back! After a not-so-brief hiatus, we’re excited to bring you a very special and energizing episode. James and Sid talk with Dr. Vincent Lloyd about his latest book, Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination. In this lively conversation, your hosts and Vincent explore the new moral and political vocabulary of contemporary Black racial justice. Breaking down barriers between activist and academic knowledge-production, Black Dignity offers a novel and urgent perspective on anti-Black domination, Black love, Black rage, Black futures, Black struggle, and, most importantly, Black dignity. In this wide-ranging conversation, we ask Vincent how he engages with debates around Afropessimism and Black optimism, the role of religion, theology, and struggle, Black feminist thinking, the Black radical tradition, differences between liberals and leftists, revolution and abolition, and much, much more. The thoughtful exchanges between James, our resident expert on all things religious, theological, and mystical, and Vincent on ontology, apophatics, soteriology, conjuring, and spirituality are not to be missed.

Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

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Interview: Breea Willingham on Incarceration, Higher Ed, and Abolition – Epistemic Unruliness 37

In this episode, John is joined by his colleague, Dr. Breea Willingham, to discuss her multiple forms of work on higher education in prisons, both within and without academia. Their conversation about the new Journal of Higher Education in Prison, the Jamii Sisterhood, the States of Incarceration Project, and being a Black woman abolitionist in the discipline of Criminal Justice raises several pressing questions: how does one define an academic field that seeks to abolish the need for that very field? How do Black women scholars enact political practices between academic institutions that reject them and carceral systems that would capture them? What is abolitionist pedagogy at a rural PWI in a county and region structured by their carceral warehousing of Black and Brown people? How are Black women made hyper (in)visible by academia and by American society? Listen in as we engage these and related issues.

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

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Photo courtesy of Dr. Breea Willingham

Ep. 72 – Miguel de Beistegui, The Government of Desire

Back from a hiatus in western Massachusetts, B joins John and special guest co-host Alyssa Ruth Mazer to discuss Miguel de Beistegui’s book The Government of Desire: A Genealogy of the Liberal Subject. What is a liberal subject and how does desire open up its discourses and genealogy and governmentalities? Did Beistegui try to out-Foucault…Foucault, the book’s stated intellectual inspiration? The team attempts a reparative reading of the Introduction, Conclusion and Beistegui’s chapters on recognition. But these three self-professed genealogists hit a snag. Critiquing the murky depths of desire and recognition requires more than what the Western canon provides! What happened to queer theory? Is there feminism at all? Could Black and Indigenous theories of personhood have made a more prominent appearance? Is there a “true” kind of resistance? With so much to discuss, you can’t not desire tuning in!

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

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Ep. 71 – Jedidiah Purdy, After Nature

In this episode, Emily and John welcome John’s colleague Gary Kroll for a discussion of Jedediah Purdy‘s After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. We map the contours of the book, asking questions about the scope of the argument and both the promises and limits of its framework. Throughout we interrogate the concepts of the Anthropocene, humanism, the posthuman (are they incompatible??), and democracy, and ask what work the environmental imaginary does. In classic Always Already fashion, notions of scientific authority appear along with our favorite questions: what of capitalism, and wherefore art the feminist lens? And, how would an engagement with Indigenous cosmologies and politics transform Purdy’s own environmental imagination? Tune in to help us welcome our first guest holding the very official title Mother of Dragons! 

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

Links:

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674368224

https://www.law.columbia.edu/faculty/jedediah-s-purdy

Ep. 70 – Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus

John is joined by friends-of-the-show Tyler Tully and Danielle Hanley to discuss Audra Simpson‘s Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Duke UP, 2014). The book — simultaneously a work of political theory, ethnography, and settler colonial studies — thinks with the Kahnawà:ke Mohawks to examine the situated production and assertion of Indigenous political subjectivities, membership(s), sovereignties, knowledges, practices, and much more.

We talk through questions of a politics of refusal (and a politics of recognition and governance by settler states), ongoingness of settler colonialism (and how Simpsons confronts it), race and indigeneity (and why BIPOC might not be so great), Indigenous and settler epistemologies, dispossession and heteropatriarchy, the libidinal economy of white saviorism, and much more. Not to mention, there is extensive and extremely deserved dragging of John Locke. Are we in a post-, de-, and/or anti-colonial frame? Tune in to find out.

And, stay tuned for the glorious return of giving advice to listener questions! We tackle a question about organizing notes, texts, sources, etc., which unsurprisingly becomes a sort of meditation on our own academic trajectories, peccadillos, and bugaboos.

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

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