What Is to Be Done?
In her luminous biography Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life (Yale UP, 2011), Vivian Gornick brings us back to this question, originally made by Lenin after a novel which suggests that in order to achieve egalitarianism and sexual liberation, revolutionaries have to live “as though hunted:” no romance, no sex, no friends, no conver ... Show More
Yesterday
Marnie Hughes-Warrington, "Artificial Historians" (Routledge, 2025)
I spoke with Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington about her 2026 book Artificial Historians, co-authored with Anne Martin and Lewis Yarlupurka O’Brien. A distinguished historian, philosopher, academic leader, and Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) based at the University of Ade ... Show More
1h 2m
Sep 4
Chika Watanabe, "Play to Survive: Disaster Preparedness Along the Ring of Fire" (Stanford UP, 2026)
We live in a fragile world. This much is evident as stories abound of natural disasters that wipe out communities in an instant. How can we survive the future on such a planet, amid intensifying climate change? This question is particularly poignant along the Ring of Fire, a tect ... Show More
55m 39s
Sep 4
Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, "Alterhumanism: Becoming Human on a Conservation Frontier" (U Arizona Press, 2025)
In the Anthropocene, a question has become increasingly urgent: What does it mean to be human? Set against the backdrop of southern Chile’s conservation frontier, Alterhumanism: Becoming Human on a Conservation Frontier (University of Arizona Press, 2025) invites us to recognize ... Show More
58m 47s
Jul 2025
Anarchists, Lovers, and the Birth of the FBI
July 23rd, 1892. Henry Clay Frick is one of America’s leading industrialists. To Alexander Berkman, he’s one of America’s leading villains. Berkman is an anarchist, along with his partner, Emma Goldman. They believe the current order of things needs to change, and one way to make ... Show More
45m 20s
Feb 2024
Human Conditions: ‘The Second Sex’ by Simone de Beauvoir
Judith Butler joins Adam Shatz to discuss a landmark in feminist thought, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). Dazzling in its scope, The Second Sex incorporates anthropology, psychology, historiography, mythology and biology to ask an ‘impossible’ question: what is a woma ... Show More
12m 41s
Jun 2021
The Life and Legacy of Alexandra Kollontai
<p><a href="https://kristenghodsee.com/" target="_blank" rel= "nofollow noopener">Kristen R. Ghodsee</a> returns to the show, this time to discuss the life, work, and legacy of the famous Marxist Feminist Alexandra Kollontai. We discuss her life, her radicalization, her relations ... Show More
1h 21m
Nov 2024
Roxani Krystalli, "Good Victims: The Political as a Feminist Question" (Oxford UP, 2024)
In the latest edition of Ethnographic Marginalia, we talk with Roxani Krystalli about her new book Good Victims: The Political as a Feminist Question (Oxford UP, 2024). Roxani describes the dilemmas she faced in her research on encounters between those recognized as victims of th ... Show More
58m 21s
Aug 2023
Long Reads: Simone de Beauvoir's Socialist Feminism w/ Emma McNicol
<p>When Simone de Beauvoir died in 1986, French TV news described her as a “symbol of women’s liberation,” but they couldn’t resist bracketing her name with that of Jean-Paul Sartre, her lifelong partner. Almost four decades later, Beauvoir’s reputation as a pioneering feminist t ... Show More
44m 15s