The last twenty years have seen a rise in the production, circulation, and criticism of new forms of socially engaged art aimed at achieving social justice and economic equality.
Leigh Claire La Berge, author of Leigh Claire La Berge, Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art (Duke UP, 2019), speaks with Pierre d'Alan ... Show More
Yesterday
Ming-sho Ho, "Be Water: Collective Improvisation in Hong Kong's Anti-Extradition Protests" (Temple University Press, 2025)
During the eventful summer of 2019 in Hong Kong, the Be Water Revolution formed to resist the proposed extradition of fugitives to mainland China’s courts. With its name derived from martial arts master Bruce Lee’s adage “formless and shapeless like water,” the incident turned ou ... Show More
48m 12s
Sep 12
Debarati Sanyal, "Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies at Europe’s Edges" (Fordham, 2025)
Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies at Europe’s Edges (Fordham, 2025) investigates the consequences of unfolding catastrophes across the world and the displacement they continue to produce. Through recent narratives and media representations of the refugee “crisis” at Europe’s ed ... Show More
42m 19s
Sep 8
Voices from North Korea: Refugees Tell Their Stories
n this podcast, North Korean refugees who visited the University of Bradford share their harrowing experiences of life in North Korea, escape, and the challenges of building new lives in freedom. They are supported by Freedom Speakers International (FSI), a Seoul-based non-profit ... Show More
42m 17s
Apr 2021
Danielle Child, "Working Aesthetics: Labour, Art and Capitalism" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)
Working Aesthetics: Labour, Art and Capitalism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) is the story of art and work under contemporary capitalism. Whilst labour used to be regarded as an unattractive subject for art, the proximity of work to everyday life has subsequently narrowed the gap be ... Show More
54m 17s
Oct 2021
E152. Batya Ungar-Sargon Explains How the Media Abandonded the Working Class
Batya Ungar-Sargon stops in to discuss her new book, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy . She and Bridget discuss the history of American journalism and how it was once a crusader for the poor and the working class, when and how that changed, and the vast disparity ... Show More
1h 33m
Jan 2018
Alison Gerber, “The Work of Art: Value in Creative Careers” (Stanford UP, 2017)
Is making art a job? This question is central to The Work of Art: Value in Creative Careers (Stanford University Press, 2017), the new book by Alison Gerber, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology at Lund University. The book explores the working lives of artists by ... Show More
52m 3s
Aug 2022
Karen Archey, "After Institutions" (Les presses du réel, 2022)
Faced with waning state support, declining revenue, and forced entrepreneurialism, museums have become a threatened public space. Simultaneously, they have assumed the role of institutional arbiter in issues of social justice and accountability. The canon of Institutional Critiqu ... Show More
1h 8m
Dec 2020
Episode 30 | Olivia Laing
A conversation about art criticism that is deeply engaged with the lives of the artists. Olivia Laing’s work regularly appears in The Guardian, Financial Times, and Frieze. Her latest book, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, examines the more complicated parts of life through th ... Show More
31m 42s
<p><a href="https://www.bmcc.cuny.edu/faculty/leigh-laberge/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Leigh Claire La Berge</a>, author of <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/marx-for-cats" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow"><em>Marx for Cats</em></a>, talks about political economy an ... Show More
