Everything is Ideology: a Cultural Studies Podcast

Episoade

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  Indigenous Solidarity Towards Spanish Exiles in Mexico, 1936–1939 w/ Kevan Antonio Aguilar 04.09.2026 1h 9min

  Buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideologyShownotes: Today I’m joined by historian Kevan Antonio Aguilar, Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, to discuss his recent article, “Decolonizing Refuge: Indigenous Solidarity Towards Spanish Exiles in Mexico, 1936–1939,” and his broader research on Spanish Republican exile, Indigenous politics, and revolutionary Mexico.Our conversation begins with what appears to be a contradiction. In the aftermath of centuries of Spanish colonial domination, Indigenous and campesino communities in Mexico petitioned the revolutionary government of Lázaro Cárdenas to resettle Spanish refugees on their lands. But these communities did not simply understand the refugees through the racial and colonial categories imposed by the Mexican state. Instead, many recognized Spanish workers and peasants as comrades: people who had themselves been dispossessed from the land, displaced by political violence, and drawn into a global struggle against fascism.From there, we explore the politics of agrarian reform and Indigenous land tenure; the racial and eugenic assumptions embedded within revolutionary nationalism; competing ideas of mestizaje, indigeneity, and Mexican identity; and the limits of understanding decolonization solely through the categories of race or national belonging. We also discuss petitions, popular assemblies, anarchist internationalism, and the remarkable circulation of political consciousness between Mexico and Spain.Finally, we turn to culture itself as a terrain of struggle. Traveling exhibitions, political posters, radio, newsreels, and film brought images of the Spanish Civil War into rural and Indigenous communities across Mexico, where audiences transformed spectatorship into political action—organizing, debating, protesting, and building new forms of international solidarity.Kevan Antonio Aguilar is an assistant professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. He is currently completing his first book manuscript “Revolutionary Encounters: Spanish Exiles in the Mexican Countryside.” He is also a cofounder of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP) at UC Irvine and recently served as the vice president of labor relations for the Council of University of Faculty Associations (CUCFA).Links: https://read.dukeupress.edu/radical-history-review/article-abstract/2025/153/116/405053/Decolonizing-Refuge-Indigenous-Solidarity-Toward?redirectedFrom=fulltext
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  "On the Urgency of Radical Palestinian Epistemology" With Amanda Batarseh 20.08.2026 1h 30min

  Buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideologyPatreon.com/everythingisideology Shownotes: Today I’m joined by Amanda Batarseh, an assistant professor of literature whose teaching and research span Palestinian literature, Arabic literature, Arab American and diasporic literature, Indigenous Studies, Mediterranean Studies, and comparative literature.Our conversation centers on Batarseh’s work on radical Palestinian epistemology and what she describes as a Palestine-centered way of knowing. Beginning with the limits of simply applying inherited European theoretical frameworks to Palestinian cultural production, Batarseh asks us to consider Palestinian literature not merely as something to be interpreted through theory, but as a site that produces knowledge and theory of its own.From there, we discuss what colonial unknowing: not simply an absence of information about Palestine, but structures of knowledge that can render Palestinian histories, experiences, and claims unintelligible even when Palestinians have narrated those histories for generations. This pushes us beyond the question of who has permission to narrate and toward a deeper question: what determines whether a narrative can be recognized as knowledge in the first place?We also turn to literature, poetry, and imagination as forms of political and epistemological practice. Palestinian cultural production does not simply document oppression; it can preserve relationships to land, transmit memory, create alternative geographies, and imagine forms of life beyond the structures that seek to contain them. Literature, in this sense, becomes a space of radical creativity whose possibilities extend outward from the individual toward collective liberation.This becomes especially important in our discussion of cartography and Batarseh’s concept of rooted movement. Against colonial maps that transform land into bounded territory and property, Palestinian narratives can orient people through memory, movement, story, ancestry, and lived relationships to place. Rootedness, then, does not necessarily mean remaining fixed. Palestinian ways of knowing can be grounded in Palestine while moving across exile, diaspora, language, political struggle, and intellectual traditions.Biography: Amanda Batarseh (بطارسة / bah–taar–say) is an Assistant Professor of Literature whose teaching and research focuses on Palestinian literature, Arabic literature, Arab American and Arab diaspora literature, Indigenous studies, Mediterranean studies and comparative literature. Her research has been supported by the UC Humanities Research Institute, Hellman Fellowship, Faculty Career Development Program and the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.Links: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0377919X.2026.2683727
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  Amílcar Cabral, Ghassan Kanafani, and the Weapon of Theory w/ Zeyad el Nabolsy 08.08.2026 1h 13min

  Buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideologyShow notes: What does it mean to pursue liberation without romanticizing the past? Can modern science, historical materialism, and even ideas associated with European modernity become tools of anti-colonial struggle? And what might the thought of Amílcar Cabral have in common with the Palestinian intellectual Ghassan Kanafani?Joining me today is Zeyad El Nabolsy, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at York University. His work focuses on modern African intellectual history, African philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, Marxism, and anti-colonial political thought.We turn first to El Nabolsy’s work “Amílcar Cabral’s Modernist Philosophy of Culture and Cultural Liberation” where we examine Cabral’s relationship to modern science, modernity and modernization, and his insistence that ideas or practices cannot simply be dismissed as “Western” because of where they historically emerged. This raises larger questions about reason, progress, language, cultural autonomy, and whether something introduced through histories of conquest can eventually become endogenous to a society.In the second half of our conversation, we bring Cabral into dialogue with the Palestinian political theorist, Ghassan Kanafani. We discuss historical materialism, the Palestinian revolt of 1936, the failures of postcolonial nationalism, Afro-Arab solidarity, the relationship between Palestine and African liberation movements, and Cabral’s famous demand for the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie to commit what he called “class suicide.”Biography: Zeyad el Nabolsy has a Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Cornell University. He has an M.A. in philosophy and a B. Eng. (in chemical engineering) from McMaster University. Zeyad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at York University. His main area of focus is modern African Intellectual History. His dissertation "Science, Modernity, and Progress in Nineteenth Century West and North Africa: A Comparative Study of Africanus Horton and Rifa’a al-Tahtawi" seeks to answer the question: how does our understanding of the role of modern science in African societies change when we cease to ignore the early reception of some of the modern sciences by nineteenth century African intellectuals such as Africanus Horton (1835–1883) in West Africa and Rifa'a al-Tahtawi (1801 - 1873) in North Africa, prior to the Scramble for Africa?Links: https://www.soufflesmonde.com/posts/amilcar-cabral-and-ghassan-kanafani-on-nation-and-class-in-colonized-societieshttps://philpapers.org/archive/NABACM.pdfhttps://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-89775-7
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  "Gramsci's Bones: Reclaiming the Material Life of the Subaltern" with Mauro Puddu and Saskia Kroonenberg 24.07.2026 1h 9min

  https://buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideologyShow notes: Antonio Gramsci is often remembered through a single image: the imprisoned intellectual, the theorist of hegemony, the author of the Prison Notebooks. His concepts have traveled across disciplines—from political theory and cultural studies to education, media, and postcolonial thought. Yet in becoming an icon, Gramsci has also been flattened into a head without a body, a thinker detached from the material conditions that made his thought possible.Joining me today are Mauro Puddu and Saskia Kroonenberg to discuss their co-authored article, "Written on the Subaltern Body: Gramsci and the Material Politics of Sardinian and Italian Prison Lives," published in Cultural Studies by Routledge. The work brings together archaeology, literary studies, history, and materialist philosophy to rethink Gramsci through bones, objects, illness, food, labor, and imprisonment. Rather than treating Gramsci as an isolated genius, they reconstruct the social and bodily world that produced his political imagination. Through osteobiography, archaeological evidence, prison letters, and historical archives, they reveal how colonialism, poverty, disability, nutrition, and everyday material life became conditions of thought itself.Biography: Mauro Puddu is an Italian archaeologist whose research focuses on the Roman world, particularly the archaeology of identity, mobility, and marginalized communities in the ancient Mediterranean. He is a Young MSCA Researcher Fellow at the University for Foreigners of Siena, where he leads the PAAST (Posthumanist Approaches to Ancient Social Transformations) project, examining mobility and social inequality in Roman-period Sardinia through posthumanist, feminist, and archaeological perspectives. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in Archaeology from the University of Cagliari, a second M.A. in Theoretical Archaeology from University College London, and a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Cambridge. His scholarship has appeared in leading journals including the Cambridge Archaeological Journal and the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Journal. His work combines archaeology, postcolonial theory, and bioarchaeology to recover the histories of marginalized communities and reinterpret the ancient Mediterranean through questions of inequality, embodiment, and social justice. Biography: Saskia Kroonenberg is a cultural studies scholar at Radboud University in the Netherlands whose research explores Italian literature, the political philosophy of Antonio Gramsci, gender studies, postcolonial studies, and new materialism. As a Fellow at Inheritance and Transformation, she investigates the intersections of epigenetics and literary studies, bringing together scientific and humanistic approaches to questions of memory, embodiment, and history. She previously held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities in Cologne and has been a visiting fellow at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome, the Eric Auerbach Institute for Advanced Studies, the University of Zurich, and Utrecht University. Her doctoral research examined Gramsci's political philosophy, postcolonial literature, and new materialism, earning the Antonio Gramsci Dissertation Prize from the Associazione Internazionale Gramsci di Biella. Her work bridges literary criticism, philosophy, and cultural theory to examine how marginalized histories and embodied experiences shape political thought.Link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09502386.2026.2615901
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  "The Sound of Attica: Archie Shepp, Black Music, and Resistance" with Christopher R. Rogers 16.07.2026 1h 21min

  Show Notes: Today we're exploring the relationship between music, memory, abolition, and Black political thought through the lens of Christopher R. Rogers' essay, "How to Sample and Stretch a Prison Break: A Prelude to the Attica Blues." Using Archie Shepp's Attica Blues as a point of departure, the essay asks what it means to write in the spirit of Black music—not simply to analyze it, but to think, feel, and create through its rhythms, improvisations, and traditions.Our conversation ranges across the long legacy of the Attica uprising, insurgent listening, the relationship between music and writing, and the ways Black communities preserve history, memory, and political possibility through sound. We also discuss what it means to write for one's community rather than simply for the academy, how place shapes intellectual and artistic practice, and why archives are often found not only in books and institutions, but in neighborhoods, performances, conversations, and songs.Throughout, we reflect on the influence of figures including Archie Shepp, George Jackson, Toni Morrison, Clyde Woods, Katherine McKittrick, and many others, while considering how Black music continues to function as a living archive, a form of theory, and a rehearsal for collective liberation.Biography: Christopher R. Rogers is an educator, scholar, and cultural worker whose work centers on abolitionist education, Black studies, community organizing, and cultural preservation. Based in Philadelphia and originally from Chester, Pennsylvania, Rogers serves as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Writing Program at Haverford College, where he teaches courses on Black popular culture, educational justice, and social transformation. Rogers is a facilitator and member of the leadership team of the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction, a political education initiative that prepares organizers working against poverty, policing, mass incarceration, and other systems of oppression. Rogers also co-coordinates the Friends of the Henry Ossawa Tanner House, leading efforts to preserve the historic home of the renowned Black artist as a center for community education, Black heritage, and neighborhood organizing. His research includes studies of abolitionist organizing, community storytelling, and collaborative learning, he co-edited How We Stay Free: Notes on a Black Uprising, and published My City Needs Something: Portraits and Prose for Black Existence featuring photography by Karim Brown.Link: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/15/6/145
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  "The UWI Campus as Caribbean Music Laboratory" with Andrew Martin 10.07.2026 1h 21min

  Show notes: Universities often present themselves as neutral institutions devoted to the pursuit of knowledge. But what counts as knowledge? Who decides which ways of learning are legitimate? And why have certain forms of education—particularly those rooted in community, oral tradition, and collective practice—so often been excluded from the academy in favor of European models of expertise?Today, we're exploring these questions through the lens of Caribbean music in higher education. I'm joined by ethnomusicologist Andrew Martin to discuss his article, "Traditional Methods: The UWI Campus as Caribbean Music Laboratory."Together, we discuss the history of steel pan and its transformation from a grassroots music tradition into an object of academic study. We examine how colonialism continues to shape what universities recognize as legitimate knowledge, why experiential and community-based learning often remains subordinated to lecture-based instruction, and how practices such as liming challenge dominant assumptions about productivity, education, and social life.We also explore the relationship between universities and the communities that surround them, asking how music can serve as a bridge between formal and informal education rather than remaining confined to the classroom. Along the way, we discuss oral traditions and alternative systems of musical notation, the politics of curriculum design, the influence of tourism on Caribbean musical cultures, and the surprising role American universities played in legitimizing steel pan studies before many Caribbean institutions did.Biography: Andrew Martin holds a Ph.D. in Musicology/Ethnomusicology, an M.A. in Musicology, and an M.M. in Percussion Performance. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay. In 2011, he served as an academic fellow with the Arbeitskreis Studium Populärer Musik at the Institute for Musicology and Music Pedagogy in Osnabrück, Germany. At Inver Hills Community College, Dr. Martin teaches courses in music history, music analysis, and percussion. He also directs the Inver Hills African Drum and Dance Ensemble and the Inver Hills Steelband Ensemble. His research has appeared in journals such as American Music, Pan Podium: The Journal of the British Steel Band Society, and The Journal of New York Folklore, as well as in The Grove Dictionary of American Music. He is the author of the book Steelpan Ambassadors: The US Navy Steel Band, 1957–1999.Link: https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase26?openform&fp=clrjames&id=clrjames_2024_0999_12_19_116
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  Fanon and Glissant on Breaking with the Colonial Past with David Ventura 22.06.2026 1h 14min

  Show notes: In this episode, I'm joined by David Ventura, Associate Res earcher at Newcastle University, whose work engages the Black Radical Tradition, colonial temporality, and practices of refusal. We discuss his recent article, "History and Histories: Fanon and Glissant on Breaking with the Colonial Past," which revisits an enduring question within decolonial thought: What relationship should struggle for liberation have to the past?Drawing together the work of Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant, Ventura challenges readings that position the two thinkers in opposition. Instead, he argues that both provide indispensable resources for thinking about how colonial histories continue to structure contemporary life, while also illuminating the traces of resistance, invention, and fugitivity that make decolonized futures imaginable.Our conversation explores Fanon's psychiatric practice in Algeria, Glissant's distinction between History with a capital "H" and plural histories, the political significance of creolization, debates surrounding Negritude, and competing interpretations of revolutionary rupture, historical memory, and the possibility of invention. Along the way, we consider what it means to read Fanon and Glissant together, not as rivals, but as complementary thinkers whose work helps us better understand the temporalities of colonialism, the persistence of its afterlives, and the poetic and ethical practices through which they might be refused.Biography: David Ventura is an Associate Researcher at Newcastle University (UK), where he recently completed a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship focused on Édouard Glissant. Broadly speaking, David’s work engages the Black radical tradition to interrogate how the history of transatlantic slavery continues to structure the political coordinates of today’s world, as well as the radical practices and poetics through which that structuration might be displaced and refused. David’s research has featured in Philosophy & Social Criticism, The C.L.R. James Journal, and with German Primera, he recently co-edited a special issue of Paragraph on the topic of time and refusal. David is currently working on a book project, titled Poetics of Refusal: Refiguring Fugitivity with Édouard Glissant, which expounds Glissant’s imaginary of refusal by examining a series of figures of refusal that appear in his fictional writings. Links: https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase26?openform&fp=clrjames&id=clrjames_2024_0030_0001_0221_0248
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  Western Civilization in Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism with Zeyad el Nabolsy 16.06.2026 1h 7min

  Patreon.com/everythingisideologyBuymeacoffee.com/everythingisideologyShow Notes: In this episode of  I sit down with philosopher Zeyad el Nabolsy to discuss his article, "The Concept of Western Civilization in Black Marxism: Cedric Robinson as an Ethnophilosopher." Together, we explore one of the most influential and debated texts in Black Studies and political theory: Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism.Our conversation examines Robinson's conception of Western civilization as a transhistorical formation structured by racism, his account of the Black Radical Tradition, and his critique of Marxism. We discuss whether racism can be understood as a continuous essence running from classical antiquity to the modern world, the relationship between capitalism and racial domination, and the historical development of concepts such as equality, human rights, slavery, and dehumanization.Along the way, we explore the Valladolid debate, Aristotle's theory of natural slavery, the Haitian Revolution, liberalism and its emancipatory possibilities, the influence of Western intellectual traditions on anti-colonial thinkers such as C.L.R. James and Amílcar Cabral, and the methodological debates surrounding ethnophilosophy and African philosophy. We also consider Robinson's treatment of Islam, Orientalism, and the broader question of how intellectual traditions travel, transform, and become tools for liberation in new historical contexts.Biopgraphy: Zeyad el Nabolsy has a Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Cornell University. He has an M.A. in philosophy and a B. Eng. (in chemical engineering) from McMaster University. Zeyad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at York University. His main area of focus is modern African Intellectual History. His dissertation "Science, Modernity, and Progress in Nineteenth Century West and North Africa: A Comparative Study of Africanus Horton and Rifa’a al-Tahtawi" seeks to answer the question: how does our understanding of the role of modern science in African societies change when we cease to ignore the early reception of some of the modern sciences by nineteenth century African intellectuals such as Africanus Horton (1835–1883) in West Africa and Rifa'a al-Tahtawi (1801 - 1873) in North Africa, prior to the Scramble for Africa?Links: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08935696.2025.2516348
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  “Fueling Masculinity: How Ads for Plant-Based Burgers and Electric Trucks Reinforce Gender Norms and Resist Sustainable Imaginaries" with Emily Contois 10.06.2026 1h 13min

  patreon.com/everythingisideology buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology.Show notes: In this episode, I sit down with Emily Contois to discuss her recently published article, “Fueling Masculinity: How Ads for Plant-Based Burgers and Electric Trucks Reinforce Gender Norms and Resist Sustainable Imaginaries.” We explore the politics of food, masculinity, consumer culture, and advertising.Drawing on her work in food studies, media studies, and public health, Contois examines how everyday objects—from Impossible Burgers to Ford F-150s—become powerful cultural symbols through which ideas about gender, identity, expertise, and citizenship are constructed and contested.Together, we discuss the hidden ideologies embedded in food marketing, the relationship between meat consumption and hegemonic masculinity, the rise of alternative proteins, the gendered history of dieting, and the surprising parallels between the advertising of electric vehicles and plant-based meat. Along the way, we explore concepts such as petromasculinity, food anxiety, and carno-nostalgia, as well as the ways advertising simultaneously reflects and shapes our collective visions of the future.Biograhpy: Emily Contois researches media within consumer culture, focusing on how identities are formed at the vital intersection of food, the body, and ideas about health. She is the author of Diners, Dudes, and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) and co-editor of Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation (University of Illinois Press, 2022). A richly interdisciplinary scholar, her academic work has been published in Advertising & Society Quarterly, American Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Gastronomica, and Fat Studies, among others. She has also written for NBC News, Jezebel, and Nursing Clio; been interviewed on podcasts, such as The Sporkful, Gastropod, and Good Food; and appeared on CBS This Morning and Ugly Delicious on Netflix. She is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa, where she also serves as Faculty in Residence. She holds a PhD and an MA in American Studies from Brown University, an MLA in Gastronomy from Boston University, and an MPH focused in Public Health Nutrition from the University of California, Berkeley. 
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  “Intergenerational trauma and complex implication in Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (2019)” With Noreen Kane 30.05.2026 1h 19min

  Show Notes: When we think about colonialism, countries like Britain, France, and Spain often come immediately to mind. Italy, by contrast, is frequently imagined through a different set of narratives—art, culture, food, and, perhaps most significantly, a national mythology that has long obscured the realities of its colonial past.In this episode, we're joined by scholar Noreen Kane to discuss her article “Intergenerational trauma and complex implication in Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (2019)” examining how contemporary writers Igiaba Scego and Maaza Mengiste confront these silences through fiction. Drawing on trauma studies, postcolonial theory, and memory studies, Kane explores how these authors challenge dominant narratives of Italian innocence by revealing the interconnected histories of colonialism, fascism, the Holocaust, and present-day migration.Our conversation moves across a wide range of themes: the persistence of the "good Italian" myth, the relationship between colonial violence and collective memory, the politics of naming and forgetting, and the ways literature can make visible histories that official narratives often leave unspoken. We also explore concepts such as the implicated subject, multidirectional memory, and cosmological trauma, asking how fiction creates new possibilities for reckoning with the past and imagining more ethical futures.Biography: Noreen Kane has a BA and MA in Italian Studies from University College Dublin and worked for over a decade in English language education. In January 2026, she received her PhD from University College Cork. Her thesis, entitled “Transgenerational Trauma and the Gendered Body: Postcolonial Women’s Writing in Italy”, was funded by the Irish Research Council and a National University of Ireland Travelling Doctoral Studentship. Her research has appeared in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Quaderni d’italianistica, and Atlantic Studies. She is currently guest editor for a special issue of Notes in Italian Studies on Memory in Italian Culture. She has lectured on a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses at University College Cork and University College Dublin on topics including contemporary Italian women’s writing, trauma narratives, Italian hip-hop, and Italian mobilities. Her research interests are cultural memory studies, decolonial feminist approaches to trauma, and postcolonial Irish and Italian women’s writing and music. Links: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17449855.2024.2384916
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  “On Taylor Swift and Broken Glass: Confessional Pop, Psychological Intimacy, and Two-Way Authentication,” with Max Blansjaar and Jacob Kingsbury Downs 22.05.2026 1h 9min

  Show notes: I’m joined by Max Blansjaar and Jacob Kingsbury Downs for a wide-ranging conversation on their article, “On Taylor Swift and Broken Glass: Confessional Pop, Psychological Intimacy, and Two-Way Authentication,” we explore why honesty has become such a central aesthetic category in popular music and what it means when listeners begin to understand themselves through artists they consume. Throughout the conversation, we discuss how confessional pop music creates what Max and Jacob describe as a “two-way authentication,” where listeners are not simply consuming an artist’s private life, but actively projecting themselves into the music. We think through the politics of intimacy, headphone listening, TikTok, fandom, neoliberal selfhood, indie aesthetics, and the blurred boundary between performer and listener. Along the way, we unpack the genealogy of confessional expression from mid-century poetry to singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and contemporary pop icons, asking how authenticity itself became a marketable aesthetic. We also spend time thinking about fragmentation, mirrors, broken glass, fantasy imagery, monstrosity, reinvention, and the strange tension between vulnerability and hyper-capitalism in Taylor Swift’s music and public persona. We close by reflecting on the ethical and political stakes of confessional culture more broadly — from celebrity branding and fandom to politics, social media, and the contemporary obsession with “rawness” and transparency.Biography: Max Blansjaar is a musician and writer from Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He holds a BA in Music from St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford, where he was awarded the Gibbs Prize by the Faculty of Music in 2024. His work centres around cultural politics in popular music and the negotiation of social identities and relations through music and sound, with recent essays published in Sound Studies, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and the Journal of Extreme Anthropology, as well as the popular magazines Dirt, The Mortar, and The Story. He currently holds a Clarendon Scholarship at Jesus College, University of Oxford.Biography: Dr Jacob Kingsbury Downs is Departmental Lecturer in Music and Chair of Faculty in the Faculty of Music, as well as Organizing Tutor in Music at Lady Margaret Hall. He is also Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield. He studies listeners’ and musicians’ experiences with music and sound technologies, combining qualitative empirical methods with historical research and theoretical approaches drawn from the fields of musicology, sound studies, phenomenological philosophy, and music psychology. He is currently working on two book projects. He Received his PhD from the University of Sheffield in 2021, studying under Nicola Dibben.Links: https://online.ucpress.edu/jpms/article/37/2/117/212143/On-Taylor-Swift-and-Broken-GlassConfessional-Pop
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  “Reparative Museology and Its Limits” with Colin Sterling 18.05.2026 1h 7min

  Show notes: In this episode speak with Colin Sterling about his article, “Reparative Museology and Its Limits.” We discuss the broader political, philosophical, and cultural questions surrounding museums, memory, and institutional critique. Drawing from critical heritage studies, museum studies, psychoanalysis, and environmental humanities, we discuss the growing “reparative turn” within museums and cultural institutions, particularly as they attempt to respond to histories of colonialism, extraction, displacement, and social violence.Throughout the conversation, we unpack the distinction between museology and the museum, asking whether the practices of storytelling, collecting, archiving, and communal memory-making necessarily require the modern museum institution at all. We explore how museums increasingly position themselves as moral and reparative actors while simultaneously remaining entangled within the political and economic structures that produced many of the harms they now seek to address.We also discuss projects such as Strike MoMA, reparative abolition, restitution, alternative and mobile museum forms, and artistic interventions that challenge the authority and legitimacy of hegemonic museum structures. Along the way, we reflect on psychoanalytic theories of repair, the politics of institutional reform, and the possibilities of imagining new cultural forms beyond the limits of the neoliberal museum.Biography: Colin Sterling is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer, and educator working at the intersection of critical heritage studies, museum studies, artistic research, and the environmental humanities. He is Assistant Professor of Heritage, Museums and the Environment at University of Amsterdam and previously served as a postdoctoral researcher and UKRI Early Career Leadership Fellow at University College London. Sterling earned his MA and PhD from the UCL Institute of Archaeology and his BA from The University of Manchester. His research focuses on critical and creative approaches to heritage, memory, and museums.Links: https://read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/article-abstract/43/4%20(165)/33/406077/Reparative-Museology-and-Its-Limits?redirectedFrom=fulltext
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  “Prison of the Womb: Gender, Incarceration, and Capitalism on the Gold Coast of West Africa, c. 1500–1957” with Sarah Balakrishnan 09.05.2026 1h 11min

  Buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideologyPatreon.com/everythingisideology Show notes: We are joined once again by historian and writer Sarah Balakrishnan to discuss her article “Prison of the Womb: Gender, Incarceration, and Capitalism on the Gold Coast of West Africa, c. 1500–1957” the conversation explores a largely erased history of indigenous prison systems in the Gold Coast and the central role women’s bodies played in the development of debt, trade, and colonial economies from the fifteenth century through the twentieth.Drawing from archival discoveries, oral testimonies, and overlooked colonial records, Balakrishnan traces how women were held as collateral in systems of credit, hostage-taking, and imprisonment long before and during European colonial rule. The discussion examines the emergence of debtor’s prisons in West Africa, the gendered logic of incarceration, the relationship between kinship and finance, and the ways colonial administrations simultaneously condemned and depended upon these prison systems for economic stability.Along the way, we discuss mercantile capitalism, palm oil economies after abolition, Victorian colonial morality, matrilineal social structures, public women and prostitution, and hostage-taking, and the violent intersections of sexuality, reproduction, and governance. The conversation also reflects on the ethical and emotional weight of archival work, particularly the testimonies of incarcerated women whose voices survived in scattered colonial documents despite deliberate attempts to erase these systems from official history.Biography: Sarah Balakrishnan is a Canadian-Indian writer and scholar based in the Department of History at Duke University. Balakrishnan is the 2022 Narrative Prize winner, the winner of Narrative Magazine’s Best Under 30 writing contest, and a finalist for the Cecilia Joyce Johnson Award for Short Fiction from the Key West Literary Seminar. Since 2020, BalaKRISH NIN has served as a fiction editor at The Maple Tree Literary Supplement. Her fiction writing has been supported by grants from Craigardan, Hedgebrook, and American Short Fiction. Balakrishnan received a PhD in History from Harvard University in 2020 and a BA in History and Political Theory from McGill University in 2014. She was a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge, a postdoctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, and a postdoctoral fellow in the History Department at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Balakrishnan scholarly research has appeared in a number of prestigious venues, including The Journal of African History, The Journal of Social History, and Comparative Studies in Society and History.Links: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/64BC1FC4663980DC8003820860462F1B/S0010417522000469a.pdf/div-class-title-prison-of-the-womb-gender-incarceration-and-capitalism-on-the-gold-coast-of-west-africa-c-1500-1957-div.pdf
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  "False Friends? Quakers, fronts, and the rise of popular abolitionism" with Stuart Anderson-Davis 30.04.2026 1h 11min

  Patreon.com/everythingisideologyBuymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology Show Notes: In this episode, we’re diving into a history that feels uncannily familiar—one where media, persuasion, and strategic communication shape public opinion in ways that still resonate today. I’m joined by Stuart Anderson Davis, a doctoral researcher at Columbia University studying the history of deception and disinformation. To discuss his article “False Friends? Quakers, fronts, and the rise of popular abolitionism.” Together, we explore how these forces were already at work centuries ago in the transatlantic struggle over slavery.Our conversation centers on a group that often sits at the margins of this history: the Quakers. While they’re frequently remembered for their moral opposition to slavery, what emerges here is something far more complex. We unpack how Quaker activists navigated suspicion, marginalization, and political exclusion to build one of the earliest modern social movements—experimenting with tactics that feel strikingly contemporary: media campaigns, narrative framing, anonymous publishing, and even forms of strategic deception.Their abolitionist efforts weren’t just moral or religious gestures. They were systematic, coordinated, and deeply strategic. At a time when slavery was foundational to global economies and widely accepted as normal—even justified—Quakers were helping to build a counter-public that insisted it was not only wrong, but intolerable.We talk about how they transformed abolition into a movement. This meant organizing some of the first large-scale petition campaigns, lobbying politicians directly, and circulating pamphlets that exposed the realities of the slave trade—especially the violence of the Middle Passage and plantation life. They weren’t just raising awareness; they were actively trying to reshape what people believed was possible.At the heart of this discussion is a tension that still defines activism today: how do you persuade a public that may not want to be persuaded? And what happens when moral arguments collide with entrenched economic and ideological systems? From pamphlet wars and propaganda battles to the shaping of public consciousness across the Atlantic, this episode traces how abolition became not just a moral cause, but a communications project.We also explore the contradictions within these movements—the internal divisions among Quakers themselves, the role of formerly enslaved voices in shifting public perception, and the emergence of competing narratives that sought to defend slavery through disinformation and distortion.Biography: Stuart Anderson-Davis is am currently studying for a Ph.D. in Communications from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. his academic work is focused on the history of deception and disinformation. Anderson-Davis’s dissertation examines the ways in which deceptive communications shaped events - and influenced public opinion - in Britain and the United States during the 18th and 19th centuries. He also writes about politics, media, communications, and disinformation for various publications, including the Columbia Journalism Review. He holds a B.A. in History and Ancient History from the University of Nottingham and an M.Phil. in Modern European History from Cambridge University.     Links: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14788810.2025.2493437
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  "Uncovering Radical Histories: Anna Budu-Arthur’s Everyday Politics of Decolonization and Transnational Solidarity" with Bright Gyamfi 25.04.2026 1h 8min

  buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideologyShownotes: In today’s episode, we’re in conversation with Dr. Bright Gyamfi about a fascinating and necessary rethinking of decolonization, memory, and historical narrative. But rather than retelling familiar stories centered on nation-states or political elites, this conversation turns toward what has been overlooked—and often structurally erased.At the heart of this discussion is a shift in how we understand history itself. What happens when we take seriously the lives and intellectual labor of women who have been excluded from official archives? What new forms of knowledge emerge when we move beyond traditional sources—toward oral histories, personal archives, funeral pamphlets, photographs, and everyday practices?The conversation explores how African women—particularly figures like Ana budu Arthur—functioned not just as participants in decolonial movements, but as active producers of knowledge, shaping political consciousness through spaces often dismissed as apolitical: the home, the kitchen, fashion, and social life. These sites become arenas of resistance, where culture, care, and aesthetics operate as tools of decolonization.The conversation also pushes us to think critically about erasure and historical memory—how national narratives and state commemorations systematically sideline women, even as communities continue to remember and honor them in other ways. In doing so, it challenges the persistence of “great man” histories within decolonial thought itself.At the same time, Gyamfi traces a broader intellectual and geographic arc: from Ghana to London, from port cities to global Black networks, from Pan-African congresses to intimate dinner-table conversations. What emerges is a vision of decolonization not as a singular political event, but as a lived, everyday practice shaped by race, space, labor, and transnational connection.Biography: Bright Gyamfi is an Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. He holds a Ph.D. in History from Northwestern University, an MSc in African Studies from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Political Science and History (Honors) from the University of Notre Dame. Prior to joining Rutgers, he served on the faculty at the University of California, San Diego, and was awarded the Presidential Fellowship, Northwestern University’s highest honor for graduate students. His research examines the transnational networks of Ghanaian and African intellectuals whose work reshaped African Studies, Black Studies, Black Internationalism, and economic development thought following African independence. His scholarship examines the global circulation of Nkrumahist and Pan-Africanist thought across the U.S., the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa. Gyamfi’s work has been supported by numerous fellowships, including the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, the SSRC Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship, and the Fulbright Fellowship. He has conducted extensive research across Ghana, Senegal, Grenada, Suriname, Trinidad & Tobago, Brazil, France, the U.K., and the U.S. In addition to his scholarship, Gyamfi serves on the Board of Directors of the West African Research Association, the Ghana Studies Association (as Acting President), and the Ghana Oxford and Cambridge Society. He is also actively engaged in public-facing work, including policy consulting, media interviews, public lectures, exhibitions, and documentary filmmaking.Links: https://read.dukeupress.edu/radical-history-review/article-abstract/2025/153/60/405057/Uncovering-Radical-Histories-Anna-Budu-Arthur-s
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  “Cinemas on Fire: Walter Benjamin's Spielraum and the 1979 Revolution in Iran" with Ehsan Hanif 20.04.2026 1h 44min

  Patreon.com/everythingisideologyBuymeacoffee.com/everythingisideologyInstagram.com/everythingisideology Music: "Building Nests in the Ruins" By nihilore creative commons music projectShownotes: Welcome back to Everything is Ideology, I’m your host Dr. Lee Caplan. Today were joined by Ehsan Hanif a PhD candidate at Cornell University whose work explores the intersections of architecture, oil, and political life in Iran. We discuss his recently published essay, “Cinemas on Fire: Walter Benjamin's Spielraum and the 1979 Revolution in Iran.” We begin with Ehsan’s engagement with Walter Benjamin, using ideas like Spielraum—a “room for play” or possibility—to ask how different spaces open or limit collective action. From there, the conversation moves through a series of contrasts: cinema and theater, passivity and participation, privatized consumption and communal experience.As we move into the Iranian context, these questions reverberate on a new register. We discuss the rise of cinema, its association with modernization and Westernization, and why it became a target during the 1979 revolution. In contrast, we explore Ta’zieh, a form of traditional performance rooted in theological ethical-political commitments that embeds in everyday life, where performance, mourning, and collective participation blur together. Rather than simply representing politics, these spaces actively produce different kinds of social and political possibilities.  Throughout, the conversation returns to a central tension: how do people come to act together? And what kinds of spaces—cultural, architectural, and affective—make that action possible?Biography: Ehssan Hanif is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Architecture and Urban Development at Cornell University. His research, tentatively titled Domesticating Oil: Corporate Colonialism and Labor Negotiating Housing Policies in Iran (1929-1963), explores the history of oil and architectural modernity within Iranian domestic spaces, mapping it from Abadan to Tehran. In his work, he examines how the interplay between oil workers’ movements, international interests in Iran’s subsoil resources, and nationalist discourses reshaped housing projects across Iranian cities. Prior to his time at Cornell, he worked as an independent researcher and translator in Iran, translating several seminal texts into Persian, including Architecture and Modernity (Hilde Heynen), Benjamin for Architects (Brian Elliot), and The Story of Post-modernism (Charles Jenks). His work has been published in the Journal of Architectural Histories, Xorein, Middle East Critique, Sharestan, and British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, among other venues. His latest contribution, titled “An Island within an Island: The Establishment of an Oil Company Town in the ‘Desert’ Island of Abadan, Iran (1908–1930s),” is forthcoming in the Journal of Fabrications.
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  “Rolling Stone Magazine: Co-opting the Counterculture” with Laura Sikes 18.04.2026 1h 21min

  If you like what we do please subscribe to the show at Patreon.com/everythingisideology or give a one time donation at buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideologyShow notes: Welcome back to Everything is Ideology. I’m your host Dr. Lee Caplan. I’m joined by Dr. Laura Sykes, and we will be discussing her recently published essay “Rolling Stone Magazine: Co-opting the Counterculture.” Today’s episode is really about a tension—between aesthetics and politics, between counterculture and capitalism, and between what something claims to be and what it actually does in the world and we start with her work on rock criticism—especially figures like Richard Goldstein, Ellen Willis, Lester Bangs, and Jann Wenner—but very quickly the conversation opens up into the role of the Magazine Rolling Stone helped shape not just music culture, but the way people understood themselves as part of a movement, even when the political commitments behind that movement were in contradiction. Along the way, we talk about things like the use of New Left aesthetics without the politics behind them, the role of gender and race in music criticism, and how ideas get packaged, circulated, and sometimes stripped of their original meaning. There are moments where we zoom in—on specific articles, specific figures—and others where we step back and think about the broader question: what does it mean for culture to feel radical without necessarily being radical. It’s a conversation that moves between history and the present, and it raises questions that are still very much with us.Biography: Laura Sikes is from West Monroe, Louisiana. She attended Louisiana State University for her undergraduate degree. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Rochester, studying under Joan Shelley Rubin. The focus of her research is rock and roll criticism from its origins in the 1960s through to today. Of particular interest to her are cultural hierarchies, radical politics, print culture, race, and gender. Her dissertation, In the Groove: Rock Criticism from 1966-1978, examines Richard Goldstein, Ellen Willis, Lester Bangs, and Jann Wenner, analyzing their contributions to musical, cultural, and political discourse. She is currently adapting it for publication as a book. She is an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University—Texarkana. There, she runs the Red River Center for Regional History and Culture. She is also the editor of the Red River Series for the Texas A&M University Press. She is a proponent of public history.Links: https://online.ucpress.edu/jpms/article/38/1/22/217706/Rolling-Stone-MagazineCo-opting-the-Counterculture
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  “Writing with Emo Nostalgia: Toward Musical Mattering” with Steve Lamos 04.04.2026 1h 23min

  Show Notes: In today’s episode we dive into his recent work, “Writing with Emo Nostalgia Toward Musical Mattering” where we explore how nostalgia functions not just as a backward glance, but as a way of imagining alternative futures. We’ll talk about emo beyond its stereotypes—less as individual angst and more as a site of community, affect, and critical engagement. We’ll also unpack concepts like “writing with” music, critical punk orientations, and the unexpected afterlives of cultural production in digital and social spaces.At the center of this discussion is the concept of nostalgia, not as passive longing or sentimental reflection, but as something active—something that shapes how we make meaning in the present and how we move toward the future. We unpack how nostalgia operates psychologically, culturally, and pedagogically, and why it might matter more than we think.We also dig into the idea of “writing with” music—a challenge to traditional academic thinking that separates mind and body, subject and object. Instead, this approach asks what happens when we treat music as something lived, embodied, and co-constructed—where writing becomes less about analysis and more about participation, sensation, and transformation.Along the way, we touch on emo’s shifting aesthetics, questions of gender, race, and inclusion, and the strange ways cultural forms circulate—through scenes, technologies, and generations—often taking on new meanings far beyond their original contexts.This is a conversation about how culture moves, how it lingers, and how it continues to shape us—even when we think we’ve left it behind.If you like what we do here please subscribe and support show on patreon.com/everythingisideology or follow us on Instagram.com/everythingisideologyBiography: Steve Lamos is Associate Professor in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric and the English Department. His work focuses on issues of race and racism within U.S. college-level writing instruction, particularly in the context of “basic writing” programs; on issues of teaching-track labor in contemporary U.S. writing programs; and on novel forms of literate becoming at the intersection of the sonic and the alphabetic.  Lamos’ published work includes the book Interests and Opportunities: Race, Racism, and University Writing Instruction in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Pitt UP, 2011), winner of a 2013 “Special Commendation” from the Conference on College Composition and Communication Outstanding Book Award committee; the essay “Toward Job Security for Teaching-Track Composition Faculty: Recognizing and Rewarding Affective-Labor-in-Space,” which won the 2016 Richard C. Ohmann prize for outstanding essay in College English; and a range of pieces in College Composition and Communication, College English, Journal of Basic Writing, Writing Program Administration, Composition Studies, and several edited collections. Dr. Lamos’ current book project is tentatively titled Resonant Rhythms: Drumming, Writing, and Professing a Literate Life.  It explores intersections between his academic work and his work as the drummer and trumpet player for the indie/emo band American Football. American Football is routinely included among important contemporary emo artists by outlets including Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Pitchfork, NPR and many others.Links: https://online.ucpress.edu/jpms/article/38/1/3/217703/Writing-With-Emo-NostalgiaToward-Musickal
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  "Train and its fugitive rhythms: rewriting empire, violence, and the politics of sound" with Dr. Rachmi Diyah Larasati 29.03.2026 1h 12min

  Biography: Dr. Rachmi Diyah Larasati of the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies Is a passionate dance practitioner, innovative choreographer, and author of works such as The Dance that Makes You Vanish, she has explored aesthetics and narrative through numerous writings. As Professor of Transnationalism and Aesthetics at the University of Minnesota, she is also affiliated with American Studies, Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, and advises the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change.  She serves as editor for the upcoming special edition of Lembaran Anthropology (Indonesia, spring 2026), co-editor for Bodies that Haunt (Culture Studies), and sits on the editorial board of the Asia Journal of Women Studies.Show Notes: Today’s episode is an expansive conversation with Dr. Diyah Larasati—scholar, artist, choreographer, and professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. We discuss her recently published “Train and its fugitive rhythms: rewriting empire, violence, and the politics of sound.”We begin by situating her work within the political aftermath of the 1965 Indonesian genocide—an event that remains under-discussed globally despite its scale and its deep entanglement with Cold War geopolitics. But rather than approaching history through a strictly linear or archival lens, Dr. Larasati reframes time itself. She describes her work not as history, but as narration—as something lived, fragmented, embodied, and constantly in motion. From there, our conversation opens into questions of memory and form. What does it mean to write about violence without reproducing it? How do we resist turning trauma into something consumable? Larasati pushes back against what she calls the overproduction of violent narrative, suggesting instead that we must ask why violence happens—and how it continues to live within bodies, spaces, and sounds.One of the most striking threads throughout this her article is the figure of the train. What begins as a symbol of colonial infrastructure—of extraction, surveillance, and control—quickly becomes something more complex. The train is rhythm. It’s memory. It’s childhood. It’s fear. It’s also, paradoxically, a space of possibility—where noise creates cover, where secrecy becomes survival, and where fleeting moments of freedom and communication emerge. We also spend time thinking through feminist methodology—not as an abstract framework, but as something grounded in lived practice. Dia traces this back to her own upbringing, where women negotiated land, labor, and survival within militarized environments. In this context, feminism isn’t just theory—it’s knowledge of seasons, of crops, of bodies, of how to speak and when to remain silent. It’s a way of navigating power on the most intimate and material levels.Throughout the episode, we return to questions of fugitivity, sound, and theory itself. What does it mean to speak as someone whose experience has historically been spoken for? What role does theory play—not as abstraction, but as a language that allows different histories and bodies to enter the same conversation?Links: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09502386.2025.2527031
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  “Colonizing Accra: Experiments in Storytelling" with Sarah Balakrishnan 18.03.2026 47min

  Biography: Sarah Balakrishnan is a Canadian-Indian writer and scholar based in the Department of History at Duke University. Balakrishnan is the 2022 Narrative Prize winner, the winner of Narrative Magazine’s Best Under 30 writing contest, and a finalist for the Cecilia Joyce Johnson Award for Short Fiction from the Key West Literary Seminar. Since 2020, BalaKRISH NIN has served as a fiction editor at The Maple Tree Literary Supplement. Her fiction writing has been supported by grants from Craigardan, Hedgebrook, and American Short Fiction. Balakrishnan received a PhD in History from Harvard University in 2020 and a BA in History and Political Theory from McGill University in 2014. She was a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge, a postdoctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, and a postdoctoral fellow in the History Department at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Balakrishnan scholarly research has appeared in a number of prestigious venues, including The Journal of African History, The Journal of Social History, and Comparative Studies in Society and History.Show Notes: Welcome to Everything Is Ideology a cultural Studies Podcast  I’m Lee Caplan, and in this episode I’m joined by Dr. Sarah Balakrishnan, a Canadian Indian writer and historian based in the Department of History at Duke University In our conversation, we discuss her wonderful essay, “Colonizing Accra: Experiments in Storytelling,” In our conversation we discuss how she approaches the colonial archive not simply as a record of imperial power, but as something more textured, layered, and contested—something like a woven cloth. We talk about what it means to read for stories within the archive, how narrative can make abstract structures like colonialism concrete and lived, and why history from below can reveal a very different account of when and how colonial rule was actually experienced on the ground. We also explore the relationship between storytelling and historical method, the role of contingency in the making of history, and the challenge of recovering voices and events that dominant historical canons have obscured. Along the way, Balakrishnan reflects on writing as both a historian and a fiction writer, on the influence of narrative form in her scholarship, and on the possibilities and limits of the archive itself. If you like what we do here make sure to like to subscribe and support us on our Patreon account where you will have access to all of our episodes.Links: https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/130/4/1677/8404816