As medical advancements continue to shape the detection, diagnosis, and treatment of disability and illness, technology is often presented as a path to autonomy. Rebecca Monteleone shows how such technologies contribute to a cruel double bind, forcing disabled people to be accountable for adapting to a world built by and for nondisabled people while dismissing their lived experiences in favor of medical expertise. In the new book The Double Bind of Disability, Monteleone explores anecdotes about prenatal genetic screening, deep brain stimulation, and do-it-yourself artificial pancreas systems, exposing new relationships among disability, authority, knowledge, and responsibility. Monteleone is joined here in conversation with Ashley Shew.

Rebecca Monteleone is associate professor of disability and technology at the University of Toledo.

Ashley Shew is a professor of science, technology, and society at Virginia Tech and author of Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

-Ally Day

-“Transmobility: Possibilities in Cyborg (Cripborg) Bodies,” Mallory Kay Nelson, Ashley Shew, and Bethany Stevens / Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience

-Jackie Leach Scully

-Dana Lewis

-Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in the U.S. / Adele E. Clarke, Laura Mamo, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, Jennifer R. Fishman, Janet K. Shim, editors

Praise for the book:
"A generous, timely, and essential contribution to understanding the current politics that shape medical technology and disability in the context of neoliberal ableism. A book that I will be thinking-making-feeling with for many years to come!"
—Laura Forlano, Northeastern University

The Double Bind of Disability: How Medical Technology Shapes Bodily Authority by Rebecca Monteleone is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

What is the opposite of “big” data? In a society where households commonly store personal archives of photos, financial records, and other documents, the “little” database—the personal data collection that is stored and backed up and not accessed frequently—deserves a category of its own. In The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats, Daniel Scott Snelson examines globally accessible little databases, such as Textz, Eclipse, and UbuWeb, explores how digital archives dramatically transform the artifacts they host, and asks how they might help us better understand our own private collections in turn. Snelson is joined in conversation with Vicki Bennett, Craig Dworkin, and Luca Messarra.

Daniel Scott Snelson is a writer, editor, archivist, and assistant professor in the departments of English and Design Media Arts at UCLA, where he also serves as faculty with the Digital Humanities Program, the UCLA Game Lab, and the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies. He is author of multiple volumes of experimental poetry and poetics, including Elden Poem, Apocalypse Reliquary, and EXE TXT.

Vicki Bennett is a multidisciplinary British artist working under the name People Like Us.

Craig Dworkin is professor of English at the University of Utah.

Luca Messarra is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University, and founder of Undocumented Press.

EPISODE REFERENCES:
Alan Liu

Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels, “deformance”

We Edit Life, film (People Like Us/Vicki Bennett; partnership with Lovebytes)

Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record (Internet Archive, 2024, eds. Luca Messarra, Chris Freeland, Juliya Ziskina)

Eclipse, an image-based archive of small press poetry books and magazines

PennSound, a site distributing audio recordings of poetry readings

UbuWeb, a collection of experimental film and video art

Allen Institute for AI

C4/Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus

Christopher Kelty

LANGUAGE magazine

Christian Marclay’s The Clock

Johanna Drucker

Memory of the World archive

Not Equals language project

Future Knowledge podcast

Heated Words: Searching for a Mysterious Typeface / Rory McCartney and Charlie Morgan

In Praise of Copying / Marcus Boon

Praise for the book:
“The Little Database is an incredibly powerful intervention into twenty-first-century experimental poetics and avant-garde media practices.”
—Stephanie Boluk

“The Little Database opens new ground for close reading in an environment that heavily promotes big data techniques and the neoliberal ideologies that accompany it in the new economy of attention.”
—Leonardo Reviews

“Snelson targets the fundamental assumption underlying much of contemporary DH work: that meaningful interpretation necessarily depends on the deployment of massive amounts of data.”
—Oxford's Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

“This book, while short in length, is certain to be long in influence, as it lays groundwork for future scholars, artists, readers, website makers, and archivists. The twists and turns, both in methodology and in specific analyses, are far more exciting than any summary, or even multiple readings of them, could serve.”
—Digital Humanities Quarterly

The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats by Daniel Scott Snelson is available from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available at Manifold.

What lives in the spaces between dreams and apocalypse? Two authors discuss their books on Indigenous media: Karrmen Crey, whose Producing Sovereignty: The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada considers the political and cultural conditions that enabled the proliferation of Indigenous media across Canada in the early 1990s. The product of years of embedded fieldwork within Indigenous film crews in Northwestern Australia, William Lempert’s Dreaming Down the Track delves deeply into Aboriginal cinema as a transformative community process. Crey and Lempert are joined in conversation here about the process of preserving community stories and enacting sovereign futures.

Karrmen Crey is associate professor of Aboriginal communication and media studies in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Crey is author of Producing Sovereignty: The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada and coeditor (with Joanna Hearne) of By Their Work: Indigenous Women’s Digital Media in North America.

William Lempert is Osterweis Family Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bowdoin College and author of Dreaming Down the Track: Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema.

REFERENCES/MEDIA:

Donna’s Story (film)

Indians + Aliens (reality television series)

The Visit (animated documentary short)

Tjawa Tjawa (film)

Rutherford Falls (sitcom)

REFERENCES/PEOPLE:

Mark Moora

Faye Ginsburg

Jesse Wente

Doug Cuthand

Donna Gamble

Lisa Jackson

Billy-Ray Belcourt

Jeff Barnaby

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Cynthia Lickers-Sage

Taiko Waititi

Foucault

Coulthard

Audra Simpson

REFERENCES/OTHER

Mark Rifkin / Beyond Settler Time

ImagiNATIVE Australia

Karrmen Crey’s Producing Sovereignty: The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada and By Their Work: Indigenous Women’s Digital Media in North America (a collection co-edited with Joanna Hearne) are available from University of Minnesota Press. Dreaming Down the Track: Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema by William Lempert is available from University of Minnesota Press, and has an open-access edition through Manifold.

In interwar Paris, the encounter between surrealism and the nascent discipline of ethnology led to an intellectual project now known as “ethnographic surrealism.” Joyce Suechun Cheng considers the ethnographic dimension of the surrealist movement in its formative years in her new book The Persistence of Masks: Surrealism and the Ethnography of the Subject, the inaugural volume in the University of Minnesota Press’s Surrealisms series. By broadening the scope of ethnographic surrealism, Cheng offers new insights that challenge longstanding beliefs about this multifaceted movement in poetry, the arts, and culture. Here, Cheng is joined in conversation with Surrealisms series editor Jonathan Eburne.

Joyce Cheng is associate professor of art history at the University of Oregon and author of The Persistence of Masks: Surrealism and the Ethnography of the Subject.

Jonathan Eburne is J. H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. He is author of Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas and Exploded Views: Speculative Form and the Labor of Inquiry.

REFERENCES:

Michael Stone-Richards

James Clifford / The Predicament of Culture

Natalya Lusty

Effie Rentzou

James Leo Cahill / Zoological Surrealism

Georges Bataille / Documents

Vincent Debaene / Far Afield

Severed hand collages

Marcel Mauss

Hannah Arendt

Johannes Fabian / Time and the Other

Malkam Ayyahou

The Persistence of Masks: Surrealism and the Ethnography of the Subject by Joyce Suechun Cheng is available from University of Minnesota Press and is the first book in its Surrealisms series. The University of Minnesota Press is also publisher of the International Journal of Surrealism.

In Copenhagen in 1972, during the exhilarating early days of women’s liberation in Scandinavia and dramatic social change around the world, seven women had a child together. Recounting her mothers’ history—from the passions and beliefs they shared to the political divisions over sexual identity that ultimately split them apart—Pernille Ipsen’s chronicle of gender, sexuality, and feminism as it was constructed, contested, and lived reminds us that new worlds are always possible. Here, Ipsen is joined in conversation with Adriane Lentz-Smith.

Pernille Ipsen is author of My Seven Mothers: Making a Family in the Danish Women's Movement and professor of gender and women’s studies and history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ipsen is a historian of gender, women, feminism, race and colonialism in Scandinavia and the larger Atlantic world.

Adriane Lentz-Smith is associate professor of history, African American studies, and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Duke University. Lentz-Smith is author of Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I.

Praise for the book:

"This book is a treasure, especially for a second-wave American feminist who was thrilled to learn of the boldness and courage of our Danish sisters at the very start of the 1970s women’s movement. I can’t recommend it highly enough."

—Vivian Gornick, author of The Odd Woman and the City

"My Seven Mothers certainly is not all happiness and light, but that makes it even more moving, and as an American feminist I felt a sense of recognition infused with my own memories."

—Linda Gordon, author of Seven Social Movements That Changed America

"Compulsively readable and historically insightful, My Seven Mothers reveals the spirit, courage, and tenacity required of the women who paved the way for second-wave feminist organizing in Denmark."

—Birgitte Søland, author of Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s

My Seven Mothers: Making a Family in the Danish Women’s Movement by Pernille Ipsen is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

“Lack of political will and corruption of the ruling class are certainly enormous obstacles but do not (fully) explain the widespread inaction against our current multidimensional crisis (ecological catastrophe, failing democracies, permanent and more destructive wars, etc.).” So opens Andrea Righi’s Three Economies of Transcendence, which takes a deep philosophical dive into the fundamental dimensions of subjectivity, society, and time through the lens of transcendence. Here, Righi is joined in a wide-ranging conversation with Michael Lewis about finitude, infinitude, evolution, neoliberalism, and radical change.

Andrea Righi is a cultural theorist and professor of European studies and Italian at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Righi is author of Three Economies of Transcendence; The Other Side of the Digital: The Sacrificial Economy of New Media; and coeditor with Cesare Casarino of Another Mother: Diotima and the Symbolic Order of Italian Feminism.

Michael Lewis is senior lecturer in philosophy at University of Newcastle Upon Tyne and editor of the Journal of Italian Philosophy.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

René Girard

Adriana Cavarero

Emanuele Severino

Hannah Arendt

Paolo Virno

Jacques Lacan

Ministry for the Future / Kim Stanley Robinson

Fredric Jameson

Hardt and Negri

Three Economies of Transcendence by Andrea Righi is available from University of Minnesota Press. This book is part of the Forerunners series, and an open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu.

In his book Late Star Trek, Adam Kotsko analyzes the wealth of content set within Star Trek’s sprawling continuity, beginning with the prequel series Enterprise, highlighting creative triumphs and the tendency for franchise faithfulness to get in the way of new ideas. Arguing against the consensus that franchises are a sign of cultural decay, Kotsko zeroes in on their status as modern myths, owned as corporate intellectual property, as a source of creative limitation. Here, Kotsko is joined in conversation with David Seitz.

Adam Kotsko teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College and runs an active, free-to-read Substack. He is author of many books including Late Star Trek, Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory, Neoliberalism’s Demons, and What Is Theology?

David Seitz is associate professor of cultural geography at Harvey Mudd College. He is author of A Different Trek and A House of Prayer for All People.

REFERENCES:
Shawna Kidman

Frederic Jameson

Anna Kornbluh

Christopher L. Bennett

Kirsten Beyer

David Mack

Michael Chabon

Lauren Berlant / On the Inconvenience of Other People

Star Trek references include:

Deep Space Nine

Enterprise

Nemesis

Discovery

Praise for the book:

​​”Combining the rigorous critical eye of a literary and political theorist with the encyclopedic knowledge of a devoted fan, Adam Kotsko offers an original, persuasive, ethical, funny, grim, and nevertheless hopeful examination of Star Trek’s twenty-first-century incarnations. Late Star Trek is a salutary intervention, a sustained, cogent analysis of what’s gone wrong, what’s gone right, and what possibilities remain for creative and critical storytelling in our late-neoliberal streaming era.”

—David Seitz

“Adam Kotsko has written an eminently readable and deeply researched book on twenty-first-century Star Trek, providing an analysis that is both timely and long overdue. A must-read for anyone teaching, doing research on, or just thinking about this ever-growing franchise.”

—Sabrina Mittermeier, coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek and Fighting for the Future: Essays on “Star Trek: Discovery”

Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era by Adam Kotsko is the inaugural volume in the University of Minnesota Press’s Mass Markets series.