If you have not been listening to How Do You Like It So Far?...
/You have been missing a lot. I am particularly satisfied with the journeys through popular culture and social change Colin Maclay and I have taken our listeners this past semester. If I was to sum up our key themes this season, it was the nature of being human and our relationship to the environment. Not every episode explored that theme and some are only loosely connected to it, but it was very much in my thinking all term and kept surfacing in our choice of guests, the topics we covered, and the conversations we had. I shared two transcripts of our episodes here and hope to share more in the future, since these were so popular. But today I want to provide an overview of the past season.
Episode 78 Exploring Queeristan with Parmesh Shahani
Parmesh and I have a long relationship — he was my student at MIT, he was my host and tour guide during a three week tour of India a few years ago, and he is a constant inspiration for me as he has emerged as a key corporate and cultural leader and queer activist. Here we talk about queer identity and politics in India in a conversation which ranges from business to religion to popular culture all as they relate to the changing attitudes towards sexuality in his home country. This was a great way to start our season.
Episode 79 New Hope for New Online Public Spaces With Talia Stroud and Eli Pariser
The Civic Signals project, headed by Stroud and Pariser, is doing some of the best work these days about the public sphere, social media, and participatory democracy. We saw this conversation as an extension of ongoing discussions on our show about virtual community life. Their inspirational approach centers on what kind of communities we want to have as opposed to further delimiting the problems we are facing.
Episode 80 What Is a Human With James Paul Gee
James Paul Gee is a longtime educational researcher whose important work on what educators could learn from video and computer games was central to the Digital Media and Learning movement. Now retired and living on a farm, he has published what he says is going to be his final book — a deep reflection on the intelligence of animals and the nature of being a human being. He says that today’s schools may be designed for some alien race but they do not reflect our current understanding of what human beings are.
Episode 81 Warren Hedges on the Fantasy Roots of the Capital Insurrection
Warren Hedges caught our attention with a Facebook post about how he spoke to his students in his seminar on multicultural fantasy about the capital insurrection and the role of the so-called Q-Anon Shaman. I wanted to unpack some of this on our show and walked him through a history of the links between the fantasy genre and white nationalism, the alternatives posed by newer fantasy writers, and the multiple forms of civic imagination that shaped this deeply disturbing chapter in American populism.
Episode 82 Bridgit Antonette Evans and Tracy Van Slyke on the Intersection of Art and Activism
As a show about popular culture in a changing world, a number of our previous guests had been funded by the Pop Culture Collaborative. So we wanted to provide a bigger context for this work by talking with two leaders from the Collaborative and better understanding the models of social change underlying their work. Why might popular culture be such an important site for shifting American’s understandings of the world? How might we best invest time and resources to foster a more equitable, inclusive and sustainable society?
Candis Callison — another of my former students from my MIT years — introduced us to Julian Brave Noisecat, another Indigenous journalist who writes about environmental politics. Together, they discussed what it means to write about these issues through an indigenous lens, how native peoples in the arctic and in Standing Rock, as well as elsewhere, have been leading fights to protect the environment, and why journalism may be ill-suited to covering issues like the environment.
Episode 84 Sarena Ulibarri and Ed Fein on Solarpunk
Solarpunk is an important example of how genre fiction can contribute to movements for social change — in this case, a new genre of science fiction which imagines the consequences of climate change and offer optimistic visions of more sustainable futures. We brought together Sarena, a leading writer and publisher in the Solarpunk movement, with Ed Fein from Arizona State’s Center for Science and the Imagination which bridges between scientists and fiction writers working in the genre. Together, they help us map Solarpunk as offering multiple visions of the future and the ways it sees itself as a political intervention.
Episode 85 Speculative Art and Fiction with SB Divya and Jonathon Keats
Artist Jonathon Keats describes his art which often deals with the relationship between humans and plants as “thought experiments,” intended to foster a spirit of speculation, experimentation, and conversation about environmental issues. We brought him into conversation with SB Divya who is a rising star in the science fiction world (as well as a scientist). Together, they talked about the nature of science as an epistemic project, the role of art and fiction in popular science education, different experiences of time, and why our human-centered vision of the universe blinds us to the larger stakes in climate change.
Episode 86 Ioana Mischie and Howard Blumenthal on the Future of Education
After more than a year of disruption to normative educational practice around the globe, it seemed like a good time to discuss the dead-ends of our current schooling practice and to imagine other ways we might help children to learn. Mischie is a Romanian based artist who is collaborating with children to imagine futures for her country; Blumenthal is a long-time producer of children’s television whose new project involves talking with children around the world about their lives. They bring a playful, imaginative, and critical perspective to bear on this important topic.
Episode 87 Te Rita Papesch and Sharon Mazer on the Living Tradition of Paka Haka
Since the 1970s, Te Rita Papesch has been a legend in the Maori performance tradition of Kapa Haka as a performer, as a scholar, as a commentator, as a community leader, and as the matriarch of a larger clan of performers. Sharon Mazer is a performance scholar who writes about these practices and a long-time friend and student of Papesch. Together, the two women explain what Paka Haka is, how it reflects the living presence of the Maori people in New Zealand culture, how it has changed over time, and what it can tell us about contemporary indigenous life.
Coming soon — the audio recordings from our mini-conference on audio fiction in contemporary podcasting.
Because we work with students to produce the podcast, we are shutting down for the summer but we will be back in the fall with more great conversations. How do you like it so far?
