University of Minnesota Press

What is the opposite of “big” data? In a society where households commonly store personal archives of photos, financial records, and other documents, the “little” database—the personal data collection that is stored and backed up and not accessed frequently—deserves a category of its own. In The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats, Daniel Scott Snelson examines globally accessible little databases, such as Textz, Eclipse, and UbuWeb, explores how digital archives dramatically transform the artifacts they host, and asks how they might help us better understand our own private collections in turn. Snelson is joined in conversation with Vicki Bennett, Craig Dworkin, and Luca Messarra. Daniel Scott Snelson is a writer, editor, archivist, and assistant professor in the departments of English and Design Media Arts at UCLA, where he also serves as faculty with the Digital Humanities Program, the UCLA Game Lab, and the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies. He is author of multiple volumes of experimental poetry and poetics, including Elden Poem, Apocalypse Reliquary, and EXE TXT. Vicki Bennett is a multidisciplinary British artist working under the name People Like Us. Craig Dworkin is professor of English at the University of Utah. Luca Messarra is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University, and founder of Undocumented Press. EPISODE REFERENCES: Alan Liu Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels, “deformance” We Edit Life, film (People Like Us/Vicki Bennett; partnership with Lovebytes) Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record (Internet Archive, 2024, eds. Luca Messarra, Chris Freeland, Juliya Ziskina) Eclipse, an image-based archive of small press poetry books and magazines PennSound, a site distributing audio recordings of poetry readings UbuWeb, a collection of experimental film and video art Allen Institute for AI C4/Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus Christopher Kelty LANGUAGE magazine Christian Marclay’s The Clock Johanna Drucker Memory of the World archive Not Equals language project Future Knowledge podcast Heated Words: Searching for a Mysterious Typeface / Rory McCartney and Charlie Morgan In Praise of Copying / Marcus Boon Praise for the book: “The Little Database is an incredibly powerful intervention into twenty-first-century experimental poetics and avant-garde media practices.” —Stephanie Boluk “The Little Database opens new ground for close reading in an environment that heavily promotes big data techniques and the neoliberal ideologies that accompany it in the new economy of attention.” —Leonardo Reviews The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats by Daniel Scott Snelson is available from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available at Manifold.

What lives in the spaces between dreams and apocalypse? What can Aboriginal filmmaking reveal about Indigenous presence and futures? The product of years of embedded fieldwork within Indigenous film crews in Northwestern Australia, William Lempert’s Dreaming Down the Track delves deeply into Aboriginal cinema as a transformative community process. Here, Lempert is joined in conversation with Karrmen Crey about the process of preserving community stories and enacting sovereign futures. William Lempert is assistant professor of anthropology at Bowdoin College and author of Dreaming Down the Track: Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema. Karrmen Crey is associate professor of Aboriginal communication and media studies in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Crey is author of Producing Sovereignty: The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada and coeditor (with Joanna Hearne) of By Their Work: Indigenous Women’s Digital Media in North America. REFERENCES/MEDIA: Donna’s Story (film) Indians + Aliens (reality television series) The Visit (animated documentary short) Tjawa Tjawa (film) Rutherford Falls (sitcom) REFERENCES/PEOPLE: Mark Moora Faye Ginsburg Jesse Wente Doug Cuthand Donna Gamble Lisa Jackson Billy-Ray Belcourt Jeff Barnaby Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Cynthia Lickers-Sage Taiko Waititi Foucault Coulthard Audra Simpson REFERENCES/OTHER Mark Rifkin / Beyond Settler Time ImagiNATIVE Australia Dreaming Down the Track: Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema by William Lempert is available from University of Minnesota Press, and has an open-access edition through Manifold. Karrmen Crey’s Producing Sovereignty: The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada and By Their Work: Indigenous Women’s Digital Media in North America (a collection co-edited with Joanna Hearne) are also available from University of Minnesota Press.

In interwar Paris, the encounter between surrealism and the nascent discipline of ethnology led to an intellectual project now known as “ethnographic surrealism.” Joyce Suechun Cheng considers the ethnographic dimension of the surrealist movement in its formative years in her new book The Persistence of Masks: Surrealism and the Ethnography of the Subject, the inaugural volume in the University of Minnesota Press’s Surrealisms series. By broadening the scope of ethnographic surrealism, Cheng offers new insights that challenge longstanding beliefs about this multifaceted movement in poetry, the arts, and culture. Here, Cheng is joined in conversation with Surrealisms series editor Jonathan Eburne. Joyce Cheng is associate professor of art history at the University of Oregon and author of The Persistence of Masks: Surrealism and the Ethnography of the Subject. Jonathan Eburne is professor of comparative literature, English, and French and Francophone studies at The Pennsylvania State University. He is author of Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas and Exploded Views: Speculative Form and the Labor of Inquiry. REFERENCES: Michael Stone-Richards James Clifford / The Predicament of Culture Natalya Lusty Effie Rentzou James Leo Cahill / Zoological Surrealism Georges Bataille / Documents Vincent Debaene / Far Afield Severed hand collages Marcel Mauss Hannah Arendt Johannes Fabian / Time and the Other Malkam Ayyahou The Persistence of Masks: Surrealism and the Ethnography of the Subject by Joyce Suechun Cheng is available from University of Minnesota Press and is the first book in its Surrealisms series. The University of Minnesota Press is also publisher of the International Journal of Surrealism.

In Copenhagen in 1972, during the exhilarating early days of women’s liberation in Scandinavia and dramatic social change around the world, seven women had a child together. Recounting her mothers’ history—from the passions and beliefs they shared to the political divisions over sexual identity that ultimately split them apart—Pernille Ipsen’s chronicle of gender, sexuality, and feminism as it was constructed, contested, and lived reminds us that new worlds are always possible. Here, Ipsen is joined in conversation with Adriane Lentz-Smith. Pernille Ipsen is author of My Seven Mothers: Making a Family in the Danish Women's Movement and professor of gender and women’s studies and history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ipsen is a historian of gender, women, feminism, race and colonialism in Scandinavia and the larger Atlantic world. Adriane Lentz-Smith is associate professor of history, African American studies, and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Duke University. Lentz-Smith is author of Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I. Praise for the book: "This book is a treasure, especially for a second-wave American feminist who was thrilled to learn of the boldness and courage of our Danish sisters at the very start of the 1970s women’s movement. I can’t recommend it highly enough." —Vivian Gornick, author of The Odd Woman and the City "My Seven Mothers certainly is not all happiness and light, but that makes it even more moving, and as an American feminist I felt a sense of recognition infused with my own memories." —Linda Gordon, author of Seven Social Movements That Changed America "Compulsively readable and historically insightful, My Seven Mothers reveals the spirit, courage, and tenacity required of the women who paved the way for second-wave feminist organizing in Denmark." —Birgitte Søland, author of Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s My Seven Mothers: Making a Family in the Danish Women’s Movement by Pernille Ipsen is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Chris Washington reads Jane Austen differently from how she is classically understood; rather than the doyen of the cisheteronormative marriage plot, Washington argues that Austen leverages the generic restraints of the novel and envisions a nonbinary future that traverses the two-sex model of gender that supposedly solidifies in the eighteenth century. Here, Washington discusses a politics built on plurality and possibility with Marquis Bey, Christopher Breu, and Alison Sperling. Chris Washington is associate professor of English at Francis Marion University. He is author of Nonbinary Jane Austen and editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. Marquis Bey is professor of black studies and gender and sexuality and critical theory at Northwestern University. Bey is author of several books including Cistem Failure, Black Trans Feminism, and The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender. Christopher Breu is author of several books including In Defense of Sex, Insistence of the Material, Hard-Boiled Masculinities, and coeditor of Noir Affect. Breu is professor of English at Illinois State University. Alison Sperling is assistant professor of literature, media, and culture at Florida State University, and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin. REFERENCES: Derrida’s Of Grammatology Foucault Trans Femme Futures / Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift The Anthropocene Unconscious / Mark Bould; Alison Sperling review in Los Angeles Review of Books The Matrix film Black on Both Sides / C. Riley Snorton Fred Moten Judith Butler We Are All Nonbinary (essay) / Kadji Amin Edward Said Histories of the Transgender Child / Jules Gill-Peterson S. Pearl Brilmyer / “The Ontology of the Couple” issue of GLQ A Mercy / Toni Morrison Sojourner Truth Nonbinary Jane Austen is available in the Forerunners series from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available at manifold.umn.edu. Thank you for listening.

“Lack of political will and corruption of the ruling class are certainly enormous obstacles but do not (fully) explain the widespread inaction against our current multidimensional crisis (ecological catastrophe, failing democracies, permanent and more destructive wars, etc.).” So opens Andrea Righi’s Three Economies of Transcendence, which takes a deep philosophical dive into the fundamental dimensions of subjectivity, society, and time through the lens of transcendence. Here, Righi is joined in a wide-ranging conversation with Michael Lewis about finitude, infinitude, evolution, neoliberalism, and radical change. Andrea Righi is a cultural theorist and professor of European studies and Italian at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Righi is author of Three Economies of Transcendence; The Other Side of the Digital: The Sacrificial Economy of New Media; and coeditor with Cesare Casarino of Another Mother: Diotima and the Symbolic Order of Italian Feminism. Michael Lewis is senior lecturer in philosophy at University of Newcastle Upon Tyne and editor of the Journal of Italian Philosophy. EPISODE REFERENCES: René Girard Adriana Cavarero Emanuele Severino Hannah Arendt Paolo Virno Jacques Lacan Ministry for the Future / Kim Stanley Robinson Fredric Jameson Hardt and Negri Three Economies of Transcendence by Andrea Righi is available from University of Minnesota Press. This book is part of the Forerunners series, and an open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu.

In his book Late Star Trek, Adam Kotsko analyzes the wealth of content set within Star Trek’s sprawling continuity, beginning with the prequel series Enterprise, highlighting creative triumphs and the tendency for franchise faithfulness to get in the way of new ideas. Arguing against the consensus that franchises are a sign of cultural decay, Kotsko zeroes in on their status as modern myths, owned as corporate intellectual property, as a source of creative limitation. Here, Kotsko is joined in conversation with David Seitz. Adam Kotsko teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College and runs an active, free-to-read Substack. He is author of many books including Late Star Trek, Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory, Neoliberalism’s Demons, and What Is Theology? David Seitz is associate professor of cultural geography at Harvey Mudd College. He is author of A Different Trek and A House of Prayer for All People. REFERENCES: Shawna Kidman Frederic Jameson Anna Kornbluh Christopher L. Bennett Kirsten Beyer David Mack Michael Chabon Lauren Berlant / On the Inconvenience of Other People Star Trek references include: Deep Space Nine Enterprise Nemesis Discovery Praise for the book: ​​”Combining the rigorous critical eye of a literary and political theorist with the encyclopedic knowledge of a devoted fan, Adam Kotsko offers an original, persuasive, ethical, funny, grim, and nevertheless hopeful examination of Star Trek’s twenty-first-century incarnations. Late Star Trek is a salutary intervention, a sustained, cogent analysis of what’s gone wrong, what’s gone right, and what possibilities remain for creative and critical storytelling in our late-neoliberal streaming era.” —David Seitz “Adam Kotsko has written an eminently readable and deeply researched book on twenty-first-century Star Trek, providing an analysis that is both timely and long overdue. A must-read for anyone teaching, doing research on, or just thinking about this ever-growing franchise.” —Sabrina Mittermeier, coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek and Fighting for the Future: Essays on “Star Trek: Discovery” Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era by Adam Kotsko is the inaugural volume in the University of Minnesota Press’s Mass Markets series.

Some attributes of the paranormal mind are dismissed as nonsense, but what can an exploration of pseudoscientific phenomena tell us about accepted scientific and cultural thought? In Parascientific Revolutions: The Science and Culture of the Paranormal, Derek Lee traces the evolution of psi epistemologies and uncovers how these ideas have migrated into scientific fields such as quantum physics and neurology, as well as diverse literary genres including science fiction, ethnic literature, and even government training manuals. Here, Lee is joined in conversation with Alicia Puglionesi. Derek Lee is author of Parascientific Revolutions: The Science and Culture of the Paranormal and assistant professor of literature at Wake Forest University. Alicia Puglionesi is a lecturer in the medicine, science, and humanities program at Johns Hopkins University and is author of Common Phantoms and In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession, and the Landscapes of American Empire and Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science. REFERENCES: Society for Psychical Research Roger Luckhurst Stargate Project Ingo Swann Star Fire / Ingo Swann Psitron Adrian Dobbs Philip K. Dick William Butler Yeats Joseph E. Uscinski Praise for the book: “Derek Lee engages the ‘pseudoscience’ moniker, that ultimate rhetorical insult, and seeks to replace it with a more accurate ‘parascience’—a place where science and that which is other than science meet and express themselves in literally global pathways as distinct as pulp and science fiction, environmental thought, Asian and Indigenous ways of knowing, U.S. secret espionage, and ethnic fiction. Lee shows all of this with consummate skill and rigor, pushing us beyond our present impasses. This thing is not going away. This is a revolution.” —Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of How to Think Impossibly “Derek Lee delves into the rich history of the paranormal to instigate a captivating discussion of its influence on literature and science into the twenty-first century through SF and ethnic fictions with the unproven concepts of parascience—precognition, telekinesis, clairvoyance, spectral communication, and telepathy. A classic in the making!” —Isiah Lavender III, author of Afrofuturism Rising Parascientific Revolutions: The Science and Culture of the Paranormal by Derek Lee is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Sasha Davis, an activist and scholar of radical environmental advocacy, brings new hope for social justice movements by looking to progressive campaigns that have found success by unconventional means. From contesting environmental abuse to reasserting Indigenous sovereignty, these movements demonstrate how people can collectively wrest control over their communities from oppressive governments and manage them with a more egalitarian ethics of care. The work is exciting, it’s messy, and it seeks to change the world. Here, Davis joins Laurel Mei-Singh and Khury Petersen-Smith in conversation about his new book, Replace the State: How to Change the World When Elections and Protests Fail. Sasha Davis is an activist and professor in the Department of Environmental and Sustainability Studies at Keene State College in New Hampshire. He is author of Replace the State: How to Change the World When Elections and Protests Fail; Islands and Oceans: Reimagining Sovereignty and Social Change; and The Empires’ Edge: Militarization, Resistance, and Transcending Hegemony in the Pacific. Laurel Mei-Singh is assistant professor of geography and Asian American studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Khury Petersen-Smith is the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow and the Co-Director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. REFERENCES: J. K. Gibson-Graham Haunani-Kay Trask Military Geographies / Rachel Woodward Cooperation Jackson Michel Foucault / biopower Praise for the book: “As the United States is being destroyed, millions of spaces are opening up for something new to emerge. Offering urgent lessons and insights, Replace the State explores relational governance as an alternative to systems that no longer serve. Sasha Davis shows how we can move forward to create and claim a truly inclusive, sustainable world.” —Lisa Fithian, author of Shut It Down: Stories from a Fierce, Loving Resistance Replace the State: How to Change the World When Elections and Protests Fail by Sasha Davis is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

From Get Out to The Babadook to Saint Maud: In his new book, Josh Gooch uses the horror film genre to expose the hostile conditions of life under capitalism, drawing connections between Marxist theory and contemporary narratives of psychological unease. Here, Gooch is joined in conversation with Jo Isaacson. This episode contains spoilers for multiple films (list below). Joshua Gooch is professor of English at D’Youville University in Buffalo, New York. He is author of Capitalism Hates You: Marxism and the New Horror Film; Dickensian Affects: Charles Dickens and Feelings of Precarity and The Victorian Novel, Service Work, and the Nineteenth-Century Economy. Johanna Isaacson is professor of English at Modesto Junior College and author of Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror. EPISODE REFERENCES: Sianne Ngai Michael Löwy / “critical irrealism” Linda Williams on Psycho, essay in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho: A Casebook Søren Mau Nancy Fraser Mariarosa Dalla Costa Silvia Federici Amitav Ghosh Kim Stanley Robinson Jason W. Moore Ruth Wilson Gilmore Sophie Lewis M. E. O’Brien Kathi Weeks Lauren Berlant FILMS DISCUSSED: Psycho Dracula Nosferatu Candyman Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell Joe Lynch’s Mayhem Robert Eggers’s The Witch Gillian Wallace Horvat’s I Blame Society Rose Glass’s Saint Maud Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook Ari Aster’s Hereditary Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair Jordan Peele’s Get Out Jordan Peele’s Us Mariame Diallo’s Master Tim Story’s The Blackening Timothy Covell’s Blood Conscious Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance Romero’s Night of the Living Dead Lamberti Bava’s Demons The Ring Jeremy Saulnier’s Murder Party Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining Praise for the book: "Fiercely smart." —Annie McClanahan, author of Dead Pledges "This is a book not just for fans of horror but for everyone interested in the ways films embed and communicate values, judgments, and affects." —Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, author of Gothic Things Capitalism Hates You: Marxism and the New Horror Film by Joshua Gooch is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Between the World Wars, ideas about meaning, truth, and the ethics of persuasion informed newly articulated principles for combining word and image. The young field of graphic design developed quickly during this period, and photography played a central role as a visual language of modern life. The concept Typophoto was coined by Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy and played a foundational role in the modernist graphic design movement known as the New Typography. Here, Jessica D. Brier, author of Typophoto: New Typography and the Reinvention of Photography, joins Ellen Lupton in conversation about this fascinating period in design history. Jessica D. Brier is curator of photography at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College. She is author of Typophoto: New Typography and the Reinvention of Photography, editor of On the Grid: Ways of Seeing in Print and coeditor of Making a Life in Photography: Rollie McKenna. Ellen Lupton is a graphic designer, writer, and curator who has authored many books about design, including Thinking with Type and Extra Bold, and teaches design theory at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. REFERENCES: Painting, Photography, Film / László Moholy-Nagy Jan Tschichold Walter Benjamin El Lissitzky Never Use Futura / Douglas Thomas Paul Renner Meisterschule für Deutschlands Buchdrucker Bauhaus Praise for the book: “A novel interplay between text and image, Typophoto fused—as Jessica D. Brier demonstrates in this insightful account—the interests of advertisers with those of the avant-garde, thus instigating a process that ultimately resulted in the ubiquitous pixelated imagery of our own day. —Kathleen James-Chakraborty, author of Modernism as Memory “Deeply researched . . . highlights the ways new print technologies enabled photography to become the central medium of modernist visual culture. “ —Paul Stirton, author of Jan Tschichold and the New Typography Typophoto: New Typography and the Reinvention of Photography by Jessica D. Brier is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

From Plato and Derrida to anti-aging treatments, cryogenics, cloning, and whole-brain uploads, the dream of indefinite life is technological and, as Adam Rosenthal shows in Prosthetic Immortalities: a matter of prosthesis, the transformation of the original being. There can be no certainty of immortality and yet, the problem of immortality continues to haunt the soul. Rosenthal engages David Wills and Deborah Goldgaber in a conversation that touches on philosophy, transhumanism, biopolitics, Dolly the sheep and the return of the dire wolf, what it means to extend life or, ultimately, to extend death. Adam R. Rosenthal is associate professor of French and global studies at Texas A&M University. Rosenthal is author of Prosthetic Immortalities: Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life and Poetics and the Gift: Reading Poetry from Homer to Derrida. David Wills is professor of French studies at Brown University and author of Prosthesis. Deborah Goldgaber is assistant professor of philosophy at Louisiana State University and author of Speculative Grammatology: Deconstruction and the New Materialism. REFERENCES: Plato Homer Descartes Heidegger (the Dasein) Derrida Geoffrey Hinton Hegel Nick Bostrum Dolly the sheep David Chalmers Aubrey de Grey Jean-Baptiste Lamarck Praise for the book: “Rigorous, compelling, and beautifully written, Prosthetic Immortalities is at the vanguard of the new wave in Derrida studies.” —Nicole Anderson, founding editor, Derrida Today Journal “Adam R. Rosenthal conjures up the ghosts of metaphysics that return today through the promises of indefinite life from medical science and transhumanist speculations, moving brilliantly between science and science fiction.” —Francesco Vitale, author of Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences Prosthetic Immortalities: Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life by Adam R. Rosenthal, with foreword by David Wills, is available from University of Minneota Press. Thank you for listening.

Presenting a view of fascism as a complex power network that plays out on scales both large and small, Alexander Menrisky, author of Everyday Ecofascism, shows how extremist sentiments have crept into everyday language, stories, and ideas. He illuminates ecofascism’s narrative patterns and their easy permeation of environmentalist discourses, from back-to-the-land movements to the resurgence of psychedelic drugs, food localism, and pandemic politics. Here, Menrisky is joined in conversation with April Anson and Kyle Boggs. Alexander Menrisky is assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is author of Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature and Wild Abandon: American Literature and the Identity Politics of Ecology. April Anson is assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Anson writes and teaches at the intersection of the environmental humanities, Indigenous and American studies, and political theory. Anson is cofounder of the Anti-Creep Climate Initiative and coauthor of Against the Ecofascist Creep. Kyle Boggs is associate professor of rhetoric and community engagement in the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies at Boise State University and author of Recreational Colonialism and the Rhetorical Landscapes of the Outdoors. REFERENCES: Anti-Creep Climate Initiative Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy Tommy Pico Jeff Mann Gloria Anzaldua Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog Theodore Roszak’s From Satori to Silicon Valley Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia Ketan Joshi on lazy ecofascism Mark Rifkin’s Settler Common Sense Emily Martin’s Flexible Bodies Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature by Alexander Menrisky is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

The story of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation and its Historical Committee—and its fifty-year fight to recover and rewrite its history—is the focus of Rose Miron’s award-winning book Indigenous Archival Activism. Miron’s research and writing are shaped by materials found in the tribal archive and ongoing conversations as part of her more-than-a-decade-long reciprocal relationship with the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation. Miron is not Mohican and is careful to consider her own positionality and reflects on what it means for non-Native researchers and institutions to build reciprocal relationships with Indigenous nations in the content of academia and public history, offering a model both for tribes undertaking their own reclamation projects and for scholars looking to work with tribes in ethical ways. Here, Miron is joined in conversation with Jennifer O’Neal. Rose Miron is vice president of research and education at Newberry Library in Chicago and author of Indigenous Archival Activism: Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory, winner of the National Council for Public History Book Award and the Book of Merit Award from the Wisconsin Historical Society. Jennifer O’Neal is assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. Praise for the book: “A necessary volume on the intersection of Indigenous knowledge loss, recovery, and production in the context of settler colonialism.” —Jacki Thompson Rand, Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign “a must-read for archivists, researchers, and tribal historians working with/in Indian Country.” —Shannon Martin, Lynx Clan, Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians; former director, Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways Indigenous Archival Activism: Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory by Rose Miron is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Society has yet to fully grapple with the administrative chaos that has ensued from the growth of the urban. One such city allows tremendous insight into the process of urbanization in the new millennium: Bengaluru. During the past two decades, Bengaluru’s real estate sector and infrastructure investments have exploded in a massive transformation that stimulated rapid urbanization and unbounded growth. The coedited collection of writings Chronicles of a Global City: Speculative Lives and Unsettled Futures in Bengaluru explores how people caught up in the whirlwinds of change—construction laborers, street vendors, gig workers—experience, struggle, strive, and speculate to make a livable city for themselves. Several contributors to this book are gathered here in conversation: Vinay Gidwani is professor of geography and global studies at the University of Minnesota and author of Capital Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India. Hemangini Gupta is lecturer in gender and global politics and associate director of GENDER.ED at the University of Edinburgh. She is author of Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India and coeditor of Feminist Studies: An Introductory Reader. Kaveri Medappa is a postdoctoral researcher in human geography at the University of Oxford. Swathi Shivanand is assistant professor at the Department of Liberal Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences in Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, India. Michael Goldman is associate professor of sociology and global studies at the University of Minnesota and author of Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization. Praise for Chronicles of a Global City: “A nuanced investigation into the precise nature in which Bengaluru (and the global sphere) has embraced what the authors have dubbed 'speculative urbanism', a capital-led paradigm that has monopolised the imagination over public spaces and city-building.” —Frontline Magazine Chronicles of a Global City: Speculative Lives and Unsettled Futures in Bengaluru is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Tamara Dean's quest to live lightly on the planet in the midst of the environmental crises of our time led her to a landscape unlike any other: the Driftless area of Wisconsin, a region untouched by glaciers, marked by steep hills and deeply carved valleys, capped with forests and laced with cold, spring-fed streams. There she confronted, in ways large and small, the challenges of meeting basic needs while facing the ravages of climate change. Here, Dean is joined in conversation with Curt Meine. Tamara Dean is an educator and writer, author of Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless and The Human-Powered Home: Choosing Muscles over Motors. Her essays and stories have been published in The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, the Guardian, One Story, Orion, and The Progressive. Curt Meine is a conservation biologist, environmental historian, and writer. Meine is the award-winning author of the first biography of Aldo Leopold and has written and edited many books on conservation, including The Driftless Reader. REFERENCES: The Land Remembers / Ben Logan Order Upon the Land / Hildegard Binder Johnson Aldo Leopold PRAISE FOR THE BOOK: "Dean writes with a clarity and wisdom that illuminates the past, the present, and the future. Shelter and Storm is an essential book for our time." —Jane Hamilton, award-winning author of The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World "In this remarkable collection of essays, Tamara Dean conveys the depth of our connection to the natural world with careful research and gentle words." —Joan Maloof, author of Teaching the Trees "There is so much to admire in these beautifully written essays, but foremost are Tamara Dean’s sense of awe in the natural world, her citizen science undertakings, and her deep research into both history and biology." —Nancy Lord, former Alaska State Writer Laureate and author of Early Warming Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless by Tamara Dean is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Cities across the US are rethinking streets, going beyond sidewalks and bike lanes to welcome nonmotorists to share the roadway. David L. Prytherch, author of Reclaiming the Road: Mobility Justice beyond Complete Streets, traces the historical evolution of America’s streets and explores contemporary movements to retake them from cars for diverse forms of mobility and community life. Can we design more just streets? Here, Pryterch gets into it with Mimi Sheller and Peter Norton. David Prytherch is professor of geography at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is author of Reclaiming the Road: Mobility Justice beyond Complete Streets; Law, Engineering, and the American Right-of-Way: Imagining a More Just Street; and coeditor of Transport, Mobility, and the Production of Urban Space. Mimi Sheller is Dean of The Global School at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Sheller is founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities, founding co-director of the Centre for Mobilities at Lancaster University, England, and past president of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility. Sheller is author of Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes. Peter Norton is associate professor of history in the Department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia. He is author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City and Autonorama: The Illustory Promise of High-Tech Driving. REFERENCES: John Urry The Death and Life of Great American Cities / Jane Jacobs People for Mobility Justice Robert Moses Complete Streets The Untokening Kimberly Crenshaw Praise for the book: "Reporting from the front lines of recent post-pandemic physical and cultural transformations of public space in nine major American cities, David L. Prytherch raises profound questions about what streets are for and how they might be equitably shared. The result is a fresh, hopeful vision for intersectional mobility justice and public placemaking." —Mimi Sheller, author of Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes "David L. Prytherch gives a crisp, clear, and accessible narrative of the movement to reclaim public streets after one hundred years of domination by private automobile interests. Steering us through the politics of streets during the Covid-19 pandemic and recovery, this is a refreshingly innovative and optimistic book for anyone concerned about our urban mobility future." —Jason Henderson, coauthor of Street Fights in Copenhagen: Bicycle and Car Politics in a Green Mobility City Reclaiming the Road: Mobility Justice beyond Complete Streets by David L. Prytherch is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Cinema can be furtive and intensely beautiful—and it can leave a viewer craving more. Cinemal is Tessa Laird’s passionate inquiry writing about animals and writing about art, juxtaposing the two and burrowing into the ways that films mimic the majesty, mystery, and movements of animals. Here, Laird is joined in conversation with Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard, editors of the Art after Nature series with University of Minnesota Press. Tessa Laird is an artist, writer, and senior lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Her books include a fictocritical exploration of color, A Rainbow Reader, and a cultural history of bats, Bat, in Reaktion Books’ celebrated Animal series. Giovanni Aloi teaches art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is author or editor of many books on the nonhuman and art. Caroline Picard is a writer, cartoonist, curator, and founder of the Green Lantern Press. EPISODE REFERENCES: The Animal That Therefore I Am / Jacques Derrida Donna Haraway Arthur and Corinne Cantrill Michael Taussig Monocultures of the Mind / Vandana Shiva What Animals Teach Us about Politics / Brian Massumi Len Lye, New Zealand modernist artist Sergei Eisenstein Electric Animal / Akira Lippit Baptiste Marizot Undrowned / Alexis Pauline Gumbs Sriwhana Spong Praise for the book: “Original, erudite, and playful all in one, Cinemal is not only a joy to read but estranges the very idea of cinema, and therefore of life, in ways wondrous and wise.” —Michael Taussig, Columbia University “A sparkling, engaging book, a virtuosic and thrilling interleaving of experimental cinema, philosophies of the more-than-human, and stories of animal encounters. Celebrating the variety and inventiveness of cinematic experimentation, Tessa Laird calls for us to remake our human senses in order to align better with the needs of the planet.” —Laura U. Marks, author of The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos Art after Nature is a series edited by Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard that explores epistemological questions that emerge from the expanding, environmental consciousness of the humanities. Cinemal: The Becoming-Animal of Experimental Film by Tessa Laird is available from University of Minnesota Press.

“There is no such thing as a raw, natural, aggressive urge that underlies human violence. While we inherit defense mechanisms, they work only when triggered culturally.” So opens John Protevi’s Regimes of Violence: Toward a Political Anthropology, which takes as its biocultural basis that social practices shape our bodies and minds, and analyzes human aggression throughout history: early nomadic foragers, organized sports, berserkers and blackout rages, maroons escaping slavery, the January 6th invasion of the US Capitol, and responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. Protevi entwines the philosophical with the anthropological and considers why humans’ capacity for cooperation and sharing is persistently overlooked by stories of aggression and warfare. This book is an important contribution to the studies of Deleuze and Guattari, and here, Andrew Culp (Dark Deleuze) and Protevi (“joyous Deleuze”) dig into myriad shades of human expression from philosophical and cultural perspectives. John Protevi is professor of French studies and philosophy at Louisiana State University and author of Regimes of Violence: Toward a Political Anthropology; Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic; Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences; and Edges of the State. Andrew Culp is director of the MA Aesthetics and Politics program at California Institute of the Arts and author of Dark Deleuze and A Guerrilla Guide to Refusal. Episode references: Francisco Varela Evan Thompson Esequiel Di Paolo Hanne De Jaegher Francisco Varela, Eleanor Rosch, Evan Thompson / The Embodied Mind Wilhelm Reich Baruch Spinoza Sigmund Freud Gustave Le Bon Jeremy Gilbert / Common Ground Rodrigo Nunes / Neither Vertical nor Horizontal Manuel DeLanda / War in the Age of Intelligent Machines Manuel DeLanda / A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History Deleuze and Guattari / Anti-Oedipus Bataille Nietzsche Marx Freud Deleuze and Guattari / A Thousand Plateaus Claude Lévi-Strauss / Wild Thought Lisa Adkins / The Time of Money Arline T. Geronimus / Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society Andrew Culp / Dark Deleuze Deleuze and Guattari / What Is Philosophy? Suzanne de Brunhoff / Marx on Money Quentin Badaire Quentin Badaire’s book review of Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott Lewis Henry Morgan Hobbes Locke Daniel Luban / Hobbesian Slavery (essay in Political Theory) Rousseau Case studies discussed in this episode: Berserkers Esprit de Corps Robert Bales Shenetta White-Ballard Praise for the book: "A brilliant and novel political anthropology that updates our most entrenched philosophical biases and looks to a politics of joy beyond the relations of command." —Davide Panagia Regimes of Violence: Toward a Political Anthropology by John Protevi is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Scholars have long challenged the common assumption of midwestern isolationism. In Global Heartland, historian Peter Simons reorients the way we look at the critical period in US history from the 1930s through 1950s, showing how farmers across the Midwest understood their work as contributing to an era of international upheaval, geographical reimagination, and global ecological thinking. Here, Simons is joined in conversation with Michael Lansing about the rural heartland, US foreign policy, and the changing and multidisciplinary ways that scholars approach history. Peter Simons is a historian in upstate New York and author of Global Heartland: Cultivating the American Century on the Midwestern Farm. Michael Lansing is a professor of history at Augsburg University and author of Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics. EPISODE REFERENCES: Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century / Hendrik Meijer The Heartland: An American History / Kristin Hoganson Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the US Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies / Molly P. Rozum Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region / Flannery Burke Supermarket USA: Food and Power in the Cold War Farms Race / Shane Hamilton Nuclear Country: The Origins of the Rural New Right / Catherine McNicol Stock Lester E. Helland Papers, Wisconsin Veterans Museum, Madison Praise for the book: “From Lend-Lease to Food for Peace, Global Heartland reveals how rural Midwesterners came to see their farms as being at the heart of the world.” —Kristin Hoganson “This rich and revealing book transforms the way we think about the rural heartland.” —Michael Lansing Global Heartland: Cultivating the American Century on the Midwestern Farm by Peter Simons is available from University of Minnesota Press.