In this Always Already After Dark 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary Debate Special™, Emily, John, Sid, and James give their wide-ranging and free-wheeling take on the current terrain of American electoral politics. This fantastic four discusses the debates held June 26-27th in both their form and content: as the spectacle of a two-night battle royale between […]

In this episode we (finally!) get to the third section of Rosa Luxemburg‘s The Accumulation of Capital, “The Historical Conditions of Accumulation.” This juicy–and oft-quoted section–addresses the ongoing nature of primitive accumulation and the violences of capitalism, the non-capitalist markets required for the expanded reproduction, and the ways this reproduction necessitates imperialism and militarism. The team mulls over what, precisely, Luxemburg […]

Join Rachel, John, and Sid as they tackle Part II of Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital. Picking up where Part I left off, the team waste no time in connecting Luxemburg’s analyses of nineteenth-century economic debates to the neoliberal present. Spurred by Luxemburg’s witty inquiry into the ways vulgar economists, classical and Marxist alike, understood […]

After a dissertating hiatus, James returns with a new Epistemic Unruliness interview featuring Dr. J.T. Roane, Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Univ. of Cincinnati. The pair discuss J.T.’s article, “Plotting the Black Commons,” recently published in Souls, A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, that reads an archive of Black […]

In what could be their first trio podcast, co-hosts James, Emily, and B tarry with the Preface and a Chapter titled “Occult Philosophy” from Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of this Planet: Horror of Philosophy, vol. 1. Before launching in, James shares some good news, and B befriends a finger monster. The team was at […]

In this special crossover episode of Epistemic Unruliness, James sat down with Kaitlin Smith, the founder of the Wild Mind Collective and host of their podcast, for an intimate conversation focusing on the spiritual praxis of critical cultural studies. The pair discussed the inspiration behind Epistemic Unruliness and the interpersonal relationships between Always Already hosts, James’s […]

Join Rachel, John, and newly-appointed co-host Sid for the first entry in the first ever AAP podcast series, a multi-part exploration of Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital. In Part I, the team examines Luxemburg’s account of the reproduction of capital, including its relationship to Marx’s Capital, the relation of individual capitalists to capitalism as a whole, […]

After a year of dissertating, graduating, and professor-ating, B reunites with Emily and John as they all discuss Mariana Ortega’s book In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self. Why did B suggest this book for the group? Was it because of their rekindled affinity for Heideggerian phenomenology? Maybe. Is Latinx Feminism and narrative space […]

In this episode, James A. Chamberlain (Political Science, Mississippi State) joins John to discuss his recent book, Undoing Work, Rethinking Community: A Critique of the Social Function of Work. After situating the book in relation to recent political theory literature on work and labor, they delve into the way work society–and even some radical post-work thinkers–define […]

In this episode, James, Shadee, and John settle into unsettling the ongoing colonial project with Sylvia Wynter’s “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument.” The trio work through Wynter’s textured genealogy that traces the transmutations of the European conception of the human from its early days as a Christian […]

In this episode Emily, James, and John discuss Donna Haraway‘s When Species Meet (2008), a personal and at times intimate figuring/figuration of human-companion species relations. We plot this work within Haraway’s journey from her essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985) to her recent book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), as […]

In this episode of AAP, John and Emily are joined by guest and friend of the podcast Amy Schiller for a discussion of Kylie Jarrett‘s book Feminism, Labor, and Digital Media: The Digital Housewife. We attempt to unpack “the digital housewife” as a device, method, standpoint, and subjectivity for understanding the role that affective labor plays in […]

Join John as he interviews Kyla Schuller (Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers) about her new book The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Duke UP, 2017). The book develops concepts of impressibility and sentimentalism in order to interrogate practices of race science, race-making, and sex differentiation in 19th century America (and beyond). […]

In this episode, James is joined by AAP Fanon correspondent M. Shadee Malaklou as they welcome a new guest, Derrais Carter, assistant professor of Black Studies at Portland State University. The trio discuss Alexis Pauline Gumbs‘ forthcoming M Archive: After the End of the World (Duke UP, March 2018), the second book of her “planned experimental triptych.” M […]

In this episode of AAP, Rachel, Emily, and John tackle a special request from Patreon supporter Alex. We discuss Byung-Chul Han‘s The Burnout Society, positioning the account alongside other contemporary theories of neoliberalism. We interrogate the relationship of the disciplinary society to what Han posits as the achievement society, think through the consequences of his view for democracy, and […]

James and John are joined by our official Fanon correspondent M. Shadee Malaklou for an impromptu, lo-fi episode delving into the ongoing dustup between Cornel West and Ta-Nehisi Coates. We puzzle through both the substance of their ongoing arguments and what is attending the spectacle of it all on social media. In the process we […]

We’re back, and with an episode featuring frequent guest of the show Sid Issar joining Rachel and John! The trio engages with a two-part article (here and here) by Geraldine Heng, “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages.” How does Heng’s work reconfigure the temporality of race and racism? What does race-making look […]

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 Wrong: 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 F**k Neoliberalism Symposium held in April at the University of California, Merced. The pair unpack the term neoliberalism by pointing out its logic and […]