Jan 14
Angie Hobbs, "Why Plato Matters Now" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Does Plato matter? An ancient philosopher whose work has inspired and informed countless thinkers and poets across the centuries, his ideas are no longer taught as widely as they once were. But, as Angie Hobbs argues in this clear-sighted book Why Plato Matters Now (Bloomsbury, ... Show More
1h 18m
Jan 14
Vanessa Díaz and Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, "P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance" (Duke UP, 2026)
P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance (Duke UP, 2026) explores the work of Puerto Rican musical superstar Bad Bunny (Benito A. Martinez Ocasio), focusing on his cultural and political significance.Global superstar Bad Bunny, like many other Pue ... Show More
57 m
Jan 14
Peter F. Burns et. al, "Disneyland Politics: How a Medium-Size City and Corporate Giant Coexist" (Temple UP, 2025)
When Walt Disney decided to build Disneyland in Anaheim, CA in the 1950s, the move presented a puzzle for Anaheim’s government: How would the city balance the interests of private investors against those of the citizenry when the two came into conflict? Disneyland Politics: How a ... Show More
34m 29s
Jun 2025
Yasmine Motawy, "Children’s Picture Books and Contemporary Egyptian Society" (AUC Press, 2025)
Children’s picture books are some of the most transparently ideological materials available to parents and educators, and as cultural objects they are an expression of the zeitgeist of a particular era. They reveal much about the hopes, values, and aspirations of the society that ... Show More
47m 34s
Sep 2025
Living stories: art, space and memory
What does it mean to tell stories through the spaces we live in? And how can architecture be a source of memory and repair?In this bonus episode of Our World, Connected, host Christine Wilson revisits a powerful conversation with Kabage Karanja, architect, researcher, and co-foun ... Show More
15m 10s
Aug 2024
Ludovico Silva, "Marx's Literary Style" (Verso, 2023)
In Marx’s Literary Style, the Venezuelan poet and philosopher Ludovico Silva argues that much of the confusion around Marx’s work results from a failure to understand his literary mode of expression. Through meticulous readings of key passages in Marx’s oeuvre, Silva isolates the ... Show More
1h 6m
Apr 2023
Nancy K. Miller and Tahneer Oksman. "Feminists Reclaim Mentorship" (SUNY Press, 2023)
Mentorship continues to loom large in stories about women's work and personal lives-- sometimes for the better, but often for the worse. If mentors can nurture and support, they can also bitterly disappoint, reproducing the hardships they once suffered and reinforcing the same ol ... Show More
1h 14m
Jan 2025
Comics & Memes x Culture Text with Neale Barnholden
<p>This week, longtime friend of the pod, Neale Barnholden (he/him), joins Marcelle and Hannah to discuss the materiality of comic books and their influence on modern-day meme culture! They talk reading conventions, colonization, de- and re-contextualization, as well as the raced ... Show More
1h 4m
Apr 2024
Cathy Yue Wang, "Snake Sisters and Ghost Daughters: Feminist Adaptations of Traditional Tales in Chinese Fantasy" (Wayne State UP, 2023)
Contemporary Chinese film and literature often draw on time-honored fantastical texts and tales which were founded in the milieu of patriarchy, parental authority, heteronormativity, nationalism, and anthropocentrism. Cathy Yue Wang's Snake Sisters and Ghost Daughters: Feminist A ... Show More
36m 7s
Dec 2024
Samuel Hodgkin, "Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and the Soviet East bonded over their shared love of the classical Persian verses of Hafiz and Khayyam. At writers' congresses and in communist litera ... Show More
1 h
Analyzing the way that recent works of graphic narrative use the comics form to engage with the “problem” of reproduction, Shiamin Kwa’s Perfect Copies: Reproduction and the Contemporary Comic (Rutgers UP, 2023) reminds us that the mode of production and the manner in which we perceive comics are often quite similar to the stories they tell. Perfect Copies c ... Show More
