Interview: Practicing Critical Care Through COVID-19 and Beyond – Epistemic Unruliness 27

In this episode focusing on the hazards of COVID-19, James interviews Dr. Sarmistha Talukdar, a queer, immigrant, neurodivergent audio-visual artist and a postdoctoral geneticist, and Jess Cowing, a PhD candidate working at the intersections of critical disability studies and settler colonialism. Jointly, Talukdar and Cowing are the organizers of the online workshop, “Chronic Illness and Mutual Care in Emergent Times: Preparing for COVID-19 and other Contagious Diseases,” which detailed the late public health crisis within an intersectional healing and disability justice frame that centers the experiences of those communities already held vulnerable and made unwell by the scarcity logic of capitalism and its asymmetrical distribution of resources and knowledge through the medical-industrial complex. How do we practice “social distancing” while mobilizing critical mutual care for our communities? And in an Anthropocene Age which has featured viral apocalypse since at least 1492, can we look through the prism of global pandemic towards the horizon of alternative futures and re-arrangements of our social relations, so that we might dream, imagine, and fantasize together about the world to come after capitalism?

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. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed 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:

• COVID-19 Resources and Information Sheet (compiled by Cowing and Talukdar).
• Disability Justice Resources, Project LETS.
• Medical Industrial Complex Infographic, Leaving Evidence Blog.
• “COVID-19 (Coronavirus) Preparation for People Living with Chronic Illnesses in the United States,” Healing Justice Podcast.
• Marie Solis and Naomi Klein, “Coronavirus Is the Perfect Disaster for ‘Disaster Capitalism,’” VICE News.
• Johanna Hedva, “Sick Woman Theory,” Mask Magazine, Jan. 19, 2016.
• Prentis Hemphill, “Contagion, Consent, and Connection,” (former Healing Justice Director for Black Lives Matter Global Network).
• Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (2018)

 

Ep. 65 – Race, Capitalism, and Intersectionality

Emily, Sid, and John intervene in the resurgent and lively (and possibly trendy?) discussion on “racial capitalism.” By engaging with four articles–Michael Dawson’s (2016), “Hidden in Plain Sight: A Note on Legitimation Crises and the Racial Order“; Nancy Fraser’s (2016), “Expropriation and Exploitation in Racialized Capitalism: A Reply to Michael Dawson“; Ashley Bohrer’s (2018), “Intersectionality and Marxism: A Critical Historiography“; and Michael Ralph and Maya Singhal’s (2019), “Racial Capitalism“–the team interrogates the theoretical foundations and political stakes around the relationship between capitalism, racial domination, patriarchy, and other modalities of hierarchy and oppression.

We raise questions (and often meet them with additional questions) such as: Is race necessary or contingent to the history and structure of capitalism? How, if at all, does contemporary work on racial capitalism move us past the entrenched class versus identity debate? Is the phrase “racial capitalism” an empty signifier, or does it hold generative political possibilities for the left? Tune in and find out where you end up on these questions and more!

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. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed 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:

• The Combahee River Collective Statement
• Boston Review critical forum on slavery, capitalism, and justice
• Robin D.G. Kelley, video of “What is Racial Capitalism and Why Does It Matter?” lecture (2017) and essay on Cedric Robinson and racial capitalism
• Chapter 13 of Angela Davis’ Women, Race, and Class
• The Race and Capitalism Project at the University of Chicago
• Mayra Cotta on Michael Dawson, Nancy Fraser, race, and capitalism
• Video of Michael Dawson talk “Race, Capitalism, and the Current Crisis” (2019)
• Ashley Bohrer talk on “Capitalist Confinement” (2016)
• 2016 panel discussion on Race and Capitalism at U Chicago
• Michael Ralph discussing his book Forensics of Capital on Left on Black

Found at: https://whatson.guide/2019/01/28/rethinking-racial-capitalism-with-gargi-bhattacharyya/

Neoliberal imaginaries and electoral failures: or, what the hell happened last week?- AAP After Dark 2

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 his future presidency. How do we understand this in relation to neoliberalism, whiteness, and identity politics? What does it even mean to ‘explain’ Trump’s election?

What is to be done? Are there ways out of the “blame game” for a Left politics that resituates organizing and safety to spur movements in light of Trump’s racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and Islamophobic sensibilities? Perhaps we need to revisit Marx and to rethink what it means to organize under the banner of intersectionality. Perhaps the discourse on neoliberalism needs to be tempered by a renewed effort to reduce our capitalist penchants–meaning, let’s act on our theoretical inclincations. Our discussion also ranges to talk about fascism, the affects of surprise and shock, Clinton, feminism, and more. Listen for a rousing debate that brings critical theory to bear on our everyday political lives in the age of Trump.

Please support us on Patreon to help with recording equipment. Triple thanks to patrons Matthew R and Matthew S, double thanks to Steve and Angel, and thanks to Bunnie and Lieke.

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. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Thanks to Leah Dion and to B for the music. Get the mp3 of the episode here.

 

Links:

• Neil Irvin Painter, “What Whiteness Means in the Trump Era“
• A #BlackLivesMattter statement on Trump’s election
• Naomi Klein, “It was the Democrats’ embrace of neoliberalism that won it for Trump“
• N. Turkuler Isikel, “Prepare for Regime Change, Not Policy Change“
• Schoolhouse Rock, “I‘m Just a Bill“
• CGP Grey, “The Problems with First Post the Post Voting explained“

 

PAUL BEATY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES, via thestar.com

Interview: Mary Hawkesworth on Embodied Power

Over at New Books in Global Ethics and Politics, John interviewed Mary Hawkesworth on her recent book. Thanks to the NBN, we are cross-posting the episode here. Enjoy!

How can we explain the “occlusion of embodied power” and “lack of attention to race, gender, and sexuality” in the discipline of political science, a field “that claims power as a central analytical concept” (17)? In her new book, Embodied Power: Demystifying Disembodied Politics (Routledge, 2016), Mary Hawkesworth (Political Science and Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University) brings intersectionality, feminist theory, and post- and de-colonial theory to bear on the mainstream study of politics. She argues for the need to move away from customary concepts of “power” and “the political” that mask state practices that construct various forms of hierarchy. These concepts and the methodologies and epistemologies they give rise to, she argues, lead the discipline unable to grapple with issues such as the carceral state or the violence of nation-building. At the same they cover over the ways that “racialization and gendering have been constitutive of knowledge production within the discipline” (17). In the interview, Hawkesworth discusses these conceptual practices of power as well as how intersectional attention to embodied power can reclaim the study of politics.

 

Download the mp3

Ep.4 B-Sides: Laclau, continued

Join us for the continuation of our conversation on Ernesto Laclau. In relation to his “Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Identity” and “Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter for Politics,” we discuss the relationship of empty signifiers to freedom, agency, and politics, what feminist theory, intersectionality, and new materialism might have to say to Laclau’s work, and critique his account of particularity as it relates to gender.

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Advice questions to submit? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Like our Facebook page. Get the mp3 here. RSS feed here. This episode’s music by B Aultman.