On today’s show we talk with journalists, activists, and political commentators, Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood about the recent Presidential elections. We try to make sense of the fact that a convicted felon, proud misogynist, outright racist, authoritarian figure, and known liar whose first term put nearly all those characteristics on display for four years, will be the most powerful person in the world again. Much of our discussion takes the Democratic party, and Kamala Harris in parti...

Today on Speaking Out of Place we are joined by Shourideh Molavi, who talks about the ways in which Israel has waged a protracted war on both the people and environment of Gaza. Linking this war to its colonial precedents, Molavi explains who she, as a researcher for the Forensic Architecture project, combines technologies like satellite imaging with on-the-ground stories from Palestinian farmers to produce a powerful form witnessing, and testimony to Israel’s war. She connects the trau...

Today we are joined by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins and Jess Ghannam, who comment on a devastating new report authored by Stamatopoulou-Robbins. This report, “Costs of War,” reviews data gathered in Palestine since October 7, 2023. In that year alone, the report finds that the US has spent at least $22.76 billion on military aid to Israel and related US operations in the region. The number of direct deaths, but also so-called “indirect deaths” (and such a term forces us to project such deaths...

Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with scholar-activists Naomi Paik and Ashley Dawson about the close connection between abolition and environmental activism from below. How are the twin projects raising profound questions about borders, carcerality, enclosures, and the separation of humans from each other and all other forms of life, including supposedly “inanimate” objects? How can we create “sanctuary for all” in a radical rethinking of notions like “the commons”? Ashley Da...

Today on Speaking Out of Place we are honored to speak with three international volunteers from the International Solidarity Movement. They are all involved in the effort to save the Masafer Yatta region in the Occupied West Bank.While it has been a common practice of psychological warfare for the IOF to place military firing ranges near villages, neighborhoods, outside Palestinian hospitals, and prisons as a persistent reminder of its power and the possibility of lethal force in every space,...

Today, Sunday morning, October 20, former general Prabowo Subianto is being sworn in as Indonesia’s new president. We release a conversation we had earlier this month with Intan Paramaditha and Michael Vann about the road leading up to this inauguration, beginning in the 1960s with the Suharto regime. Prabowo is a strong-arm authoritarian figure with a bloody record of human rights violations, yet he has remade his image as a cuddly, elder populist figure. We spend some time talki...

Today on Speaking Out of Place we are joined by three members of the University of California faculty who are part of groups that have filed a landmark compliant against the UC system.This September, faculty associations from seven University of California campuses along with the systemwide Council of UC Faculty Associations filed an unfair labor practice, or ULP charge against their employer, the University of California. A nearly 600-page complaint was presented to the California Publ...

Today, on Speaking Out of Place, we are honored to talk with Munira Khayyat, a Lebanese anthropologist whose book, A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon examines what she calls “resistant ecologies in a world of perennial warfare.” Drawing on long-term fieldwork in frontline villages along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel, she examines war not only as a place of death and destruction, but also necessarily, as an environment of living.We appreciat...

Today on Speaking Out of Place, we talk with Maya Wind about her book, Towers of Ivory and Steel, How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, published by Verso. Through meticulous research into the archives of Israeli universities and hundreds of other documents, Wind furnishes proof of just how deeply and completely Israeli universities are essential actors in Israel’s efforts to suppress Palestinian freedom. We originally taped this show in June 2023, as Maya came off a l...

Today we speak with two scholar-activists who are using satellite technologies and other tools to work for environmental justice, with specific attention to prisons and prison populations. They monitor air quality, water quality, extreme weather and other quantities relevant to EJ. Ufuoma Ovienmhada and Nick Shapiro show how people of color and other socio-economically marginalized groups in the United States experience a disproportionate burden of environmental challenges such as exposure to...

Today we speak with Rebecca Vilkomerson and Rabbi Alissa Wise about their foundational work in starting and growing Jewish Voice for Peace. It’s a story captured in their new book, Solidarity Is the Political Version of Love: Lessons from Jewish Anti-Zionist Organizing. We learn about the different phases in the organization’s life—its growing pains, its key transitions and expansions, and the lessons it has learned on the way about organizing and activism for Palestine. As the title indicate...

Recently, twenty-three lecturers in the highly successful Creative Writing program at Stanford were summoned to a Zoom meeting where they were first praised, and then summarily fired. One of the most surprising aspects of this purge is the fact that it was carried out not by top-tier university administrators, but by tenure-track faculty in the program. It was they who decided to brutally terminate their colleagues. On today’s show we speak with two of the lecturers who have been told they wi...

The Palestine Exception opens as campus encampments increase across the US in protest against Israel’s war in Gaza. In the largest anti-war movement since the 1970s, students, faculty and staff make demands on their institutions to divest from companies that do business with Israel. The film unfolds as a character-driven story featuring academics whose lives and scholarship bring into sharp relief historical dynamics behind the censoring of criticisms of Israel and Zionism. To support this cr...

Today we speak with journalists and political commentators Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood about the state of the US Presidential elections. Recorded just after the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, we muse about Kamala Harris’s ascension, her choice of running mate, the strangely abiding popularity of Donald Trump, and the Democratic political calculation to downplay and even ignore our country’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal attacks on Palestine, and to likewise table any ser...

Naomi Paik is the author of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the 21st Century (2020, University of California Press) and Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (2016, UNC Press; winner, Best Book in History, AAAS 2018; runner-up, John Hope Franklin prize for best book in American Studies, ASA, 2017), as well as articles, opinion pieces, and interviews in a range of academic and public-facing venues. Her next book-length pr...

Today we speak with legal scholar and historian Aziz Rana about his deep study into the ways the Constitution has been critiqued, reimagined, and adapted from liberal, conservative, radical, progressive, decolonial, and other groups since its inception. What emerges from his book is a demystification of a document that is both durable and malleable, conservative at its core but open to both radical challenges and appropriation—a true site of contestation.Aziz Rana is a professor of law at Bos...

For our snap episode on the snap elections in the UK and France, we're joined by eminent decolonial scholar activists, Françoise Vergès in France and Priyamvada Gopal in the UK. Following the defeat of right wing parties in both countries in the polls, we discuss what's changed with the elections, what hasn't changed, and what should movements, activists, and organizers be focusing on.Priyamvada Gopal is Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridg...

Charged by the United Nations General Assembly to ascertain the legality of the continued presence of Israel, as an occupying Power, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, on July 19th, 2024, the International Court of the Justice, the highest court in the world on matters of international law, determined that “The Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the regime associated with them have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law.” It ca...

Far too few people know about the terrible war and the massive famine taking place in Sudan. Today learn about the long history behind these events, the people and groups involved, and the roles that foreign governments and international organizations like the IMF have played. Importantly, we learn how civil society groups are bringing a form of mutual aid and support to the people of Sudan where the national government, warring factions, and international humanitarian organizations hav...

For decades, the works of scholar Angana Chatterji and author and journalist Siddhartha Deb have exposed the violence and fascism lying behind the mythology of India as the world's largest democracy. In the wake of India's most recent elections, in which the far right Hindutva BJP was surprisingly reduced from its former majority to a ruling minority government.Siddhartha and Angana join us to discuss the election results, the deep roots of fascism, the enduring structures of colonialis...

Today we speak with acclaimed author and activist, and San Francisco legend, Chris Carlsson about his new novel, When Shells Crumble. It begins in December 2024, when the US Supreme Court nullifies the popular vote in the Presidential election and awards the presidency to an authoritarian Republican, who proceeds to demolish democracy and install a fascistic state that hastens ecological havoc. The novel is much more than your usual dystopian tale—it focuses on how to resist political cynicis...

Today we speak with co-authors Sami Hermez and Sireen Sawalha about their book, My Brother, My Land: A Story from Palestine. The eminent Palestinian author Hala Alyan calls it “A breathtaking display of literary prowess that tells the story of an entire homeland through the frame of one woman’s life.”In our conversation Hermez and Sawalha explain the intricate back and forth that took place as the two collaborated to weave together Sireen’s many stories about her extended family on Palestine ...

Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with Jeanelle Hope and Bill Mullen about their new book, The Black Antifascist Tradition, which uses a vast set of archival materials to show how Black intellectuals and activists regarded anti-Black racism as inseparable from fascism. This is brought out vividly in the ways the law was constructed, labor was extracted, culture oppressed, and lives curtailed. Struggles for Black liberation are therefore connected across national boundaries, just as ...

As the long burning genocide against the Rohingya continues to unfold with recent conflagrations of violence in Rakhine State, we are joined on Speaking Out of Place today with prominent Rohingya advocate and writer Nay San Lwin and veteran journalist Chris Gunness, now with the Myanmar Accountability Project.They take us through recent disturbing developments in the area and the present perils facing the Rohingya. They discuss the pervasive failings of international institutions and the rela...