Tamara Dean's quest to live lightly on the planet in the midst of the environmental crises of our time led her to a landscape unlike any other: the Driftless area of Wisconsin, a region untouched by glaciers, marked by steep hills and deeply carved valleys, capped with forests and laced with cold, spring-fed streams. There she confronted, in ways large and small, the challenges of meeting basic needs while facing the ravages of climate change. Here, Dean is joined in conversation with Curt Meine.

Tamara Dean is an educator and writer, author of Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless and The Human-Powered Home: Choosing Muscles over Motors. Her essays and stories have been published in The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, the Guardian, One Story, Orion, and The Progressive.

Curt Meine is a conservation biologist, environmental historian, and writer. Meine is the award-winning author of the first biography of Aldo Leopold and has written and edited many books on conservation, including The Driftless Reader.

REFERENCES:
The Land Remembers / Ben Logan

Order Upon the Land / Hildegard Binder Johnson

Aldo Leopold

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:
"Dean writes with a clarity and wisdom that illuminates the past, the present, and the future. Shelter and Storm is an essential book for our time."
—Jane Hamilton, award-winning author of The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World

"In this remarkable collection of essays, Tamara Dean conveys the depth of our connection to the natural world with careful research and gentle words."
—Joan Maloof, author of Teaching the Trees

"There is so much to admire in these beautifully written essays, but foremost are Tamara Dean’s sense of awe in the natural world, her citizen science undertakings, and her deep research into both history and biology."
—Nancy Lord, former Alaska State Writer Laureate and author of Early Warming

Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless by Tamara Dean is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Cities across the US are rethinking streets, going beyond sidewalks and bike lanes to welcome nonmotorists to share the roadway. David L. Prytherch, author of Reclaiming the Road: Mobility Justice beyond Complete Streets, traces the historical evolution of America’s streets and explores contemporary movements to retake them from cars for diverse forms of mobility and community life. Can we design more just streets? Here, Prytherch is joined in conversation with Mimi Sheller and Peter Norton.

David Prytherch is professor of geography at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is author of Reclaiming the Road: Mobility Justice beyond Complete Streets; Law, Engineering, and the American Right-of-Way: Imagining a More Just Street; and coeditor of Transport, Mobility, and the Production of Urban Space.

Mimi Sheller is Dean of The Global School at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Sheller is founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities, founding co-director of the Centre for Mobilities at Lancaster University, England, and past president of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility. Sheller is author of Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes.

Peter Norton is associate professor of history in the Department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia. He is author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City and Autonorama: The Illustory Promise of High-Tech Driving.

REFERENCES:
John Urry

The Death and Life of Great American Cities / Jane Jacobs

People for Mobility Justice

Robert Moses

Complete Streets

The Untokening

Kimberlé Crenshaw

Praise for the book:
"Reporting from the front lines of recent post-pandemic physical and cultural transformations of public space in nine major American cities, David L. Prytherch raises profound questions about what streets are for and how they might be equitably shared. The result is a fresh, hopeful vision for intersectional mobility justice and public placemaking."

—Mimi Sheller, author of Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes

"David L. Prytherch gives a crisp, clear, and accessible narrative of the movement to reclaim public streets after one hundred years of domination by private automobile interests. Steering us through the politics of streets during the Covid-19 pandemic and recovery, this is a refreshingly innovative and optimistic book for anyone concerned about our urban mobility future."

—Jason Henderson, coauthor of Street Fights in Copenhagen: Bicycle and Car Politics in a Green Mobility City

Reclaiming the Road: Mobility Justice beyond Complete Streets by David L. Prytherch is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Cinema can be furtive and intensely beautiful—and it can leave a viewer craving more. Cinemal is Tessa Laird’s passionate inquiry into the desire to write about animals and to write about art, juxtaposing the two and burrowing into the ways that films mimic the majesty, mystery, and movements of animals. Here, Laird is joined in conversation with Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard, editors of the Art after Nature series with University of Minnesota Press.

Tessa Laird is an artist, writer, and senior lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Her books include a fictocritical exploration of color, A Rainbow Reader, and a cultural history of bats, Bat, in Reaktion Books’ celebrated Animal series.

Giovanni Aloi teaches art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is author or editor of many books on the nonhuman and art.

Caroline Picard is a writer, cartoonist, curator, and founder of the Green Lantern Press.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

The Animal That Therefore I Am / Jacques Derrida

Donna Haraway

Arthur and Corinne Cantrill

Michael Taussig

Monocultures of the Mind / Vandana Shiva

What Animals Teach Us about Politics / Brian Massumi

Len Lye, New Zealand modernist artist

Sergei Eisenstein

Electric Animal / Akira Lippit

Baptiste Marizot

Undrowned / Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Sriwhana Spong

Praise for the book:

“Original, erudite, and playful all in one, Cinemal is not only a joy to read but estranges the very idea of cinema, and therefore of life, in ways wondrous and wise.”
—Michael Taussig, Columbia University

“A sparkling, engaging book, a virtuosic and thrilling interleaving of experimental cinema, philosophies of the more-than-human, and stories of animal encounters. Celebrating the variety and inventiveness of cinematic experimentation, Tessa Laird calls for us to remake our human senses in order to align better with the needs of the planet.”
—Laura U. Marks, author of The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos

Art after Nature is a series edited by Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard that explores epistemological questions that emerge from the expanding, environmental consciousness of the humanities.

Cinemal: The Becoming-Animal of Experimental Film by Tessa Laird is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Scholars have long challenged the common assumption of midwestern isolationism. In Global Heartland, historian Peter Simons reorients the way we look at the critical period in US history from the 1930s through 1950s, showing how farmers across the Midwest understood their work as contributing to an era of international upheaval, geographical reimagination, and global ecological thinking. Here, Simons is joined in conversation with Michael Lansing about the rural heartland, US foreign policy, and the changing and multidisciplinary ways that scholars approach history.

Peter Simons is a historian in upstate New York and author of Global Heartland: Cultivating the American Century on the Midwestern Farm.

Michael Lansing is a professor of history at Augsburg University and author of Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century / Hendrik Meijer

The Heartland: An American History / Kristin Hoganson

Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the US Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies / Molly P. Rozum

Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region / Flannery Burke

Supermarket USA: Food and Power in the Cold War Farms Race / Shane Hamilton

Nuclear Country: The Origins of the Rural New Right / Catherine McNicol Stock

Lester E. Helland Papers, Wisconsin Veterans Museum, Madison

Praise for the book:

“From Lend-Lease to Food for Peace, Global Heartland reveals how rural Midwesterners came to see their farms as being at the heart of the world.”
—Kristin Hoganson

“This rich and revealing book transforms the way we think about the rural heartland.”
—Michael Lansing

Global Heartland: Cultivating the American Century on the Midwestern Farm by Peter Simons is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Talia Mae Bettcher’s Beyond Personhood provides an entirely new philosophical approach to trans experience, trans oppression, gender dysphoria, and the relationship between gender and identity. Arguing that the tense relation between trans oppression and resistance is mediated through the complex social phenomenon of gender make-believe, Bettcher introduces the groundbreaking theory of interpersonal spatiality, which requires rejection of the philosophical concepts of person, self, and subject. Here, Bettcher is joined in conversation with Judith Butler.

Talia Mae Bettcher is professor of philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles, and author of Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy and coeditor of Trans Philosophy.

Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. They are author of several books including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and, most recently, Who’s Afraid of Gender?

Praise for the book:

"It's a beautiful book. Challenging, crucial, indispensable to our times."
—Judith Butler (in this episode)

"Profound and provocative . . . broadly relevant to many disciplines and social movements."
—Susan Stryker, Clayman Institute for Gender Research, Stanford University

Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy is available from University of Minnesota Press.

​"Infrastructure is invisible until it breaks." How do we visualize something that cannot be physically seen? What limitations do existing knowledge structures impose that reverberate through planetary problem-solving processes, including public health and environmental crises? This episode brings together two scholars who think elementally: Lisa Yin Han, who operates in the blue humanities or ocean humanities, who studies mediation and the deep seafloor; and Gloria Chan-Sook Kim, who focuses on scientific problems of knowledge and visualization and more specifically, microbes. Their astounding conversation goes from emerging microbes to the seabed to places where their research intersects, including catastrophic deferral, scalar mediation, the figure of the plume, and the concept of resolution.

Lisa Yin Han is assistant professor of media studies at Pitzer College and author of Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor.

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim is a scholar of visual culture, media studies, and science and technology studies, assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Microbial Resolution: Visualization and the Security in the War on Microbes.

Episode references:

Melody Jue

Celina Osuna, desert humanities

Nicole Starosielski

Christopher P. Heuer / Into the White

Andrea Ballestero

Adriana Petryna / Life Exposed

Celia Lowe

Stefan Helmreich / Alien Ocean

James Hamilton-Paterson / Seven-Tenths

Deepwater Alchemy and Microbial Resolution are available from University of Minnesota Press.

There's living coral, and then there's Coral—the iconicity and imaginary of living coral. As Melody Jue writes in Coralations, coral alternates between signifying an organism and signifying an environment, all too often imagined as a tourist destination. In rethinking the limitations of Coral, Jue opens up possibilities for a more expansive sense of environmental media, more inclusive goals for multispecies justice, and more nuanced forms of oceanic care work. Here, Jue is joined in conversation with Ann Elias.

Melody Jue is associate professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Jue is author of Coralations and Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater and coeditor of Saturation: An Elemental Politics with Rafico Ruiz.

Ann Elias is professor emerita of visual culture at the University of Sydney. Elias is author of many books including Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity.

REFERENCES:

Coral Whisperers (Irus Braverman)

Situated Knowledges (Donna Haraway, in the journal Feminist Studies)

Her Seal Skin Coat (Lauren Beukes, short story)

Sylvia Earle

Jacques Cousteau

California Against the Sea (Rosanna Xia)

Jean Painlevé

Zoological Surrealism (James Leo Cahill)

Alien Ocean (Stefan Helmreich)

Chasing Coral documentary

Coralations by Melody Jue 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.