Some attributes of the paranormal mind are dismissed as nonsense, but what can an exploration of pseudoscientific phenomena tell us about accepted scientific and cultural thought? In Parascientific Revolutions: The Science and Culture of the Paranormal, Derek Lee traces the evolution of psi epistemologies and uncovers how these ideas have migrated into scientific fields such as quantum physics and neurology, as well as diverse literary genres including science fiction, ethnic literature, and even government training manuals. Here, Lee is joined in conversation with Alicia Puglionesi.

Derek Lee is author of Parascientific Revolutions: The Science and Culture of the Paranormal and assistant professor of literature at Wake Forest University.

Alicia Puglionesi is a lecturer in the medicine, science, and humanities program at Johns Hopkins University and is author of Common Phantoms and In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession, and the Landscapes of American Empire and Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science.

REFERENCES:

Society for Psychical Research

Roger Luckhurst

Stargate Project

Ingo Swann

Star Fire / Ingo Swann

Psitron

Adrian Dobbs

Philip K. Dick

William Butler Yeats

Joseph E. Uscinski

Praise for the book:

“Derek Lee engages the ‘pseudoscience’ moniker, that ultimate rhetorical insult, and seeks to replace it with a more accurate ‘parascience’—a place where science and that which is other than science meet and express themselves in literally global pathways as distinct as pulp and science fiction, environmental thought, Asian and Indigenous ways of knowing, U.S. secret espionage, and ethnic fiction. Lee shows all of this with consummate skill and rigor, pushing us beyond our present impasses. This thing is not going away. This is a revolution.”

—Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of How to Think Impossibly

“Derek Lee delves into the rich history of the paranormal to instigate a captivating discussion of its influence on literature and science into the twenty-first century through SF and ethnic fictions with the unproven concepts of parascience—precognition, telekinesis, clairvoyance, spectral communication, and telepathy. A classic in the making!”

—Isiah Lavender III, author of Afrofuturism Rising

Parascientific Revolutions: The Science and Culture of the Paranormal by Derek Lee is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Sasha Davis, an activist and scholar of radical environmental advocacy, brings new hope for social justice movements by looking to progressive campaigns that have found success by unconventional means. From contesting environmental abuse to reasserting Indigenous sovereignty, these movements demonstrate how people can collectively wrest control over their communities from oppressive governments and manage them with a more egalitarian ethics of care. The work is exciting, it’s messy, and it seeks to change the world. Here, Davis joins Laurel Mei-Singh and Khury Petersen-Smith in conversation about his new book, Replace the State: How to Change the World When Elections and Protests Fail.

Sasha Davis is an activist and professor in the Department of Environmental and Sustainability Studies at Keene State College in New Hampshire. He is author of Replace the State: How to Change the World When Elections and Protests Fail; Islands and Oceans: Reimagining Sovereignty and Social Change; and The Empires’ Edge: Militarization, Resistance, and Transcending Hegemony in the Pacific.

Laurel Mei-Singh is assistant professor of geography and Asian American studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Khury Petersen-Smith is the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow and the Co-Director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

REFERENCES:

J. K. Gibson-Graham

Haunani-Kay Trask

Military Geographies / Rachel Woodward

Cooperation Jackson

Michel Foucault / biopower

Praise for the book:

“As the United States is being destroyed, millions of spaces are opening up for something new to emerge. Offering urgent lessons and insights, Replace the State explores relational governance as an alternative to systems that no longer serve. Sasha Davis shows how we can move forward to create and claim a truly inclusive, sustainable world.”

—Lisa Fithian, author of Shut It Down: Stories from a Fierce, Loving Resistance

Replace the State: How to Change the World When Elections and Protests Fail by Sasha Davis is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

From Get Out to The Babadook to Saint Maud: In his new book, Josh Gooch uses the horror film genre to expose the hostile conditions of life under capitalism, drawing connections between Marxist theory and contemporary narratives of psychological unease. Here, Gooch is joined in conversation with Jo Isaacson. This episode contains spoilers for multiple films (list below).

Joshua Gooch is professor of English at D’Youville University in Buffalo, New York. He is author of Capitalism Hates You: Marxism and the New Horror Film; Dickensian Affects: Charles Dickens and Feelings of Precarity and The Victorian Novel, Service Work, and the Nineteenth-Century Economy.

Johanna Isaacson is professor of English at Modesto Junior College and author of Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

Sianne Ngai

Michael Löwy / “critical irrealism”

Linda Williams on Psycho, essay in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho: A Casebook

Søren Mau

Nancy Fraser

Mariarosa Dalla Costa

Silvia Federici

Amitav Ghosh

Kim Stanley Robinson

Jason W. Moore

Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Sophie Lewis

M. E. O’Brien

Kathi Weeks

Lauren Berlant

FILMS DISCUSSED:

Psycho

Dracula

Nosferatu

Candyman

Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell

Joe Lynch’s Mayhem

Robert Eggers’s The Witch

Gillian Wallace Horvat’s I Blame Society

Rose Glass’s Saint Maud

Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook

Ari Aster’s Hereditary

Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair

Jordan Peele’s Get Out

Jordan Peele’s Us

Mariame Diallo’s Master

Tim Story’s The Blackening

Timothy Covell’s Blood Conscious

Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance

Romero’s Night of the Living Dead
Lamberti Bava’s Demons

The Ring

Jeremy Saulnier’s Murder Party

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining

Praise for the book:
"Fiercely smart." —Annie McClanahan, author of Dead Pledges

"This is a book not just for fans of horror but for everyone interested in the ways films embed and communicate values, judgments, and affects." —Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, author of Gothic Things

Capitalism Hates You: Marxism and the New Horror Film by Joshua Gooch is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Between the World Wars, ideas about meaning, truth, and the ethics of persuasion informed newly articulated principles for combining word and image. The young field of graphic design developed quickly during this period, and photography played a central role as a visual language of modern life. The concept Typophoto was coined by Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy and played a foundational role in the modernist graphic design movement known as the New Typography. Here, Jessica D. Brier, author of Typophoto: New Typography and the Reinvention of Photography, joins Ellen Lupton in conversation about this fascinating period in design history.

Jessica D. Brier is curator of photography at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College. She is author of Typophoto: New Typography and the Reinvention of Photography, editor of On the Grid: Ways of Seeing in Print and coeditor of Making a Life in Photography: Rollie McKenna.

Ellen Lupton is a graphic designer, writer, and curator who has authored many books about design, including Thinking with Type and Extra Bold, and teaches design theory at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.

REFERENCES:

Painting, Photography, Film / László Moholy-Nagy

Jan Tschichold

Walter Benjamin

El Lissitzky

Never Use Futura / Douglas Thomas

Paul Renner

Meisterschule für Deutschlands Buchdrucker

Bauhaus

Praise for the book:

“A novel interplay between text and image, Typophoto fused—as Jessica D. Brier demonstrates in this insightful account—the interests of advertisers with those of the avant-garde, thus instigating a process that ultimately resulted in the ubiquitous pixelated imagery of our own day.

—Kathleen James-Chakraborty, author of Modernism as Memory

“Deeply researched . . . highlights the ways new print technologies enabled photography to become the central medium of modernist visual culture. “
—Paul Stirton, author of Jan Tschichold and the New Typography

Typophoto: New Typography and the Reinvention of Photography by Jessica D. Brier is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

From Plato and Derrida to anti-aging treatments, cryogenics, cloning, and whole-brain uploads, the dream of indefinite life is technological and, as Adam Rosenthal shows in Prosthetic Immortalities: a matter of prosthesis, the transformation of the original being. There can be no certainty of immortality and yet, the problem of immortality continues to haunt the soul. Rosenthal engages David Wills and Deborah Goldgaber in a conversation that touches on philosophy, transhumanism, biopolitics, Dolly the sheep and the return of the dire wolf, what it means to extend life or, ultimately, to extend death.

Adam R. Rosenthal is associate professor of French and global studies at Texas A&M University. Rosenthal is author of Prosthetic Immortalities: Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life and Poetics and the Gift: Reading Poetry from Homer to Derrida.

David Wills is professor of French studies at Brown University and author of Prosthesis.

Deborah Goldgaber is assistant professor of philosophy at Louisiana State University and author of Speculative Grammatology: Deconstruction and the New Materialism.

REFERENCES:

Plato

Homer

Descartes

Heidegger (the Dasein)

Derrida

Geoffrey Hinton

Hegel

Nick Bostrum

Dolly the sheep

David Chalmers

Aubrey de Grey

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

Praise for the book:

“Rigorous, compelling, and beautifully written, Prosthetic Immortalities is at the vanguard of the new wave in Derrida studies.”

—Nicole Anderson, founding editor, Derrida Today Journal

“Adam R. Rosenthal conjures up the ghosts of metaphysics that return today through the promises of indefinite life from medical science and transhumanist speculations, moving brilliantly between science and science fiction.”

—Francesco Vitale, author of Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences

Prosthetic Immortalities: Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life by Adam R. Rosenthal, with foreword by David Wills, is available from University of Minneota Press. Thank you for listening.

Presenting a view of fascism as a complex power network that plays out on scales both large and small, Alexander Menrisky, author of Everyday Ecofascism, shows how extremist sentiments have crept into everyday language, stories, and ideas. He illuminates ecofascism’s narrative patterns and their easy permeation of environmentalist discourses, from back-to-the-land movements to the resurgence of psychedelic drugs, food localism, and pandemic politics. Here, Menrisky is joined in conversation with April Anson and Kyle Boggs.

Alexander Menrisky is assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is author of Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature and Wild Abandon: American Literature and the Identity Politics of Ecology.

April Anson is assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Anson writes and teaches at the intersection of the environmental humanities, Indigenous and American studies, and political theory. Anson is cofounder of the Anti-Creep Climate Initiative and coauthor of Against the Ecofascist Creep.

Kyle Boggs is associate professor of rhetoric and community engagement in the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies at Boise State University and author of Recreational Colonialism and the Rhetorical Landscapes of the Outdoors.

REFERENCES:
Anti-Creep Climate Initiative

Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy

Tommy Pico

Jeff Mann

Gloria Anzaldua

Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God

Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence

Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog

Theodore Roszak’s From Satori to Silicon Valley

Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia

Ketan Joshi on lazy ecofascism

Mark Rifkin’s Settler Common Sense

Emily Martin’s Flexible Bodies

Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature by Alexander Menrisky is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

The story of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation and its Historical Committee—and its fifty-year fight to recover and rewrite its history—is the focus of Rose Miron’s award-winning book Indigenous Archival Activism. Miron’s research and writing are shaped by materials found in the tribal archive and ongoing conversations as part of her more-than-a-decade-long reciprocal relationship with the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation. Miron is not Mohican and is careful to consider her own positionality and reflects on what it means for non-Native researchers and institutions to build reciprocal relationships with Indigenous nations in the content of academia and public history, offering a model both for tribes undertaking their own reclamation projects and for scholars looking to work with tribes in ethical ways. Here, Miron is joined in conversation with Jennifer O’Neal.

Rose Miron is vice president of research and education at Newberry Library in Chicago and author of Indigenous Archival Activism: Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory, winner of the National Council for Public History Book Award and the Book of Merit Award from the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Jennifer O’Neal is assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon.

Praise for the book:

“A necessary volume on the intersection of Indigenous knowledge loss, recovery, and production in the context of settler colonialism.”
—Jacki Thompson Rand, Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“a must-read for archivists, researchers, and tribal historians working with/in Indian Country.”
—Shannon Martin, Lynx Clan, Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians; former director, Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways

Indigenous Archival Activism: Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory by Rose Miron is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Society has yet to fully grapple with the administrative chaos that has ensued from the growth of the urban. One such city allows tremendous insight into the process of urbanization in the new millennium: Bengaluru. During the past two decades, Bengaluru’s real estate sector and infrastructure investments have exploded in a massive transformation that stimulated rapid urbanization and unbounded growth. The coedited collection of writings Chronicles of a Global City: Speculative Lives and Unsettled Futures in Bengaluru explores how people caught up in the whirlwinds of change—construction laborers, street vendors, gig workers—experience, struggle, strive, and speculate to make a livable city for themselves.

Several contributors to this book are gathered here in conversation:

Vinay Gidwani is professor of geography and global studies at the University of Minnesota and author of Capital Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India.

Hemangini Gupta is lecturer in gender and global politics and associate director of GENDER.ED at the University of Edinburgh. She is author of Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India and coeditor of Feminist Studies: An Introductory Reader.

Kaveri Medappa is a postdoctoral researcher in human geography at the University of Oxford.

Swathi Shivanand is assistant professor at the Department of Liberal Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences in Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, India.

Michael Goldman is associate professor of sociology and global studies at the University of Minnesota and author of Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization.

Praise for Chronicles of a Global City:

“A nuanced investigation into the precise nature in which Bengaluru (and the global sphere) has embraced what the authors have dubbed 'speculative urbanism', a capital-led paradigm that has monopolised the imagination over public spaces and city-building.”
—Frontline Magazine

Chronicles of a Global City: Speculative Lives and Unsettled Futures in Bengaluru is available from University of Minnesota Press.