Childfree and Happy: Transforming the Rhetoric of Womens' Reproductive Choices (Utah State University Press, 2023) examines how millennia of reproductive beliefs (or doxa) have positioned women who choose not to have children as deviant or outside the norm. Considering affect and emotion alongside the lived experiences of women who have chosen not to have ch ... Show More
Apr 2025
Amy Zhang, "Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China" (Stanford UP, 2024)
After four decades of reform and development, China is confronting a domestic waste crisis. As the world's largest waste-generating nation, the World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, the volume of household waste in China will be double that of the United States. Starting in ... Show More
1h 7m
Aug 3
Magdalena E. Stawkowski, "Atomic Collective: Radioactive Life in Kazakhstan" (U Toronto Press, 2025)
In the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, Kazakhstan inherited the remnants of one of the world's most contaminated landscapes: the Semipalatinsk Test Site, known locally as the Polygon. Resigned to dispossession, residents have chosen to remain on the abandoned nuclear te ... Show More
56m 3s
May 3
Arely M. Zimmerman, "Contentious Citizenship: Salvadoran Activism and Belonging Across Borders" (U Arizona Press, 2026)
Contentious Citizenship: Salvadoran Activism and Belonging Across Borders (U Arizona Press, 2026) reshapes how we understand belonging, identity, and political participation in the context of migration. Drawing on decades of Salvadoran activism from the 1980s solidarity movement ... Show More
23m 24s
Sep 2024
Why Are More Women Saying No To Having Kids? With Peggy O'Donnell Heffington
<p>More and more women in the United States are saying no to motherhood. Alarmingly, in 2023, the U.S. fertility rate reached the lowest number on record. But the idea of non-motherhood is actually not a new phenomenon, nor did it come out of the modern feminist movement. For cen ... Show More
32m 4s
May 2024
Choosing to be child free, with Jennifer Watling Neal, PhD
A growing number of adults in the U.S. are choosing not to have children. Jenna Watling Neal, PhD, of Michigan State University, talks about her research that’s found 1 in 5 adults are child free, why people are choosing not to have kids, the stigma child-free adults face, whethe ... Show More
32m 52s
Nov 2024
Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, "What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)
Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman's book What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice (St. Martin's Press, 2024) presents a modern argument, grounded in philosophy and cultural criticism, about childbearing ambivalence and how to overcome it.
Becoming a parent, once the exp ... Show More
38m 21s
Nov 2024
Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, "What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)
Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman's book What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice (St. Martin's Press, 2024) presents a modern argument, grounded in philosophy and cultural criticism, about childbearing ambivalence and how to overcome it.
Becoming a parent, once the exp ... Show More
38m 21s
Jun 2024
Paloma Faith: Outspoken women, fertility, and MILFs
<p>Is the world ready for free women? Paloma Faith feels society grooms girls and women to make themselves smaller, to take up less space, and to dismiss their own needs... and she’s calling bullshit on it.</p><p> </p><p>In this chat Fearne and Paloma discuss the exhaustion ... Show More
1h 4m