Sylvain Tesson's wandering journey of solitude through the countryside of France

During the past decade, new oil plays have unsettled energy landscapes and imaginaries in the US. Settling the Boom, a volume of essays, studies how the disruptive forces of an oil boom in the northern Great Plains of Williston, North Dakota, are contained through the extension of settler temporalities, reassertions of heteropatriarchy, and the tethering of life to the volatility of oil and its cruel optimisms. Here, the book’s coeditors Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun are joined in conversation.

Mary E. Thomas is associate professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at The Ohio State University. She is coeditor of Settling the Boom, coauthor of Urban Geography, and author of Multicultural Girlhood.

Bruce Braun is professor of geography at the University of Minnesota. He is coeditor of Settling the Boom and Political Matter, and author of The Intemperate Rainforest.

Episode references:

Cruel Optimism / Lauren Berlant

Pollution Is Colonialism / Max Liboiron

White Earth (film)

Jessica Christy, Through the Window exhibition

Location of focus:

Western North Dakota, including Willison (Williston Basin) and Dickinson, within the Bakken Formation.

Settling the Boom: The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil, is available from University of Minnesota Press. This edited collection includes contributions from Morgan Adamson, Kai Bosworth, Thomas S. Davis, and Jessica Lehman.

John Arena examines the more than two-decade struggle to privatize public schools in Newark, New Jersey—a conflict that is raging in cities across the country. Arena’s book Expelling Public Schools reveals the political rise of Cory Booker and Ras Baraka and what this particular case study illuminates about contemporary post-civil rights Black politics. Here, Arena is joined in conversation with David Forrest.

John (Jay) Arena is associate professor of sociology at CUNY’s College of Staten Island. Arena is author of Expelling Public Schools: How Antiracist Politics Enable School Privatization in Newark and Driven from New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization.

David Forrest is associate professor of politics at Oberlin College. He is author of A Voice but No Power: Organizing for Social Justice in Minneapolis.

Works and scholars referenced:

Adolph Reed Jr. (Stirrings in the Jug)

David M. Kotz (The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism)

Cedric Johnson

Frances Fox Piven (Challenging Authority)

Jane McAlevey (No Shortcuts)

Preston H. Smith II (Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis)

Sharon Kurtz (Workplace Justice)

Marc Doussard and Greg Schrock (Justice at Work)

Kristen Buras (Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space)

Touré Reed (Toward Freedom)

Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Laurence Cox (We Make Our Own History)

Colin Barker, Laurence Cox, John Krinsky, and Alf Gunvald Nilsen, editors (Marxism and Social Movements)

Rosa Luxemburg (Rosa Luxemburg Speaks)

Chris Maisano (“What Does Revolution Mean in the 21st Century?”, Jacobin)

Mark R. Beissinger (The Revolutionary City)

People and organizations referenced:

Cory Booker

Chris Christie

Ras Baraka

Newark’s downtown Teachers Village complex

Sharpe James

Cami Anderson

Christopher Cerf

Randi Weingarten

Albert Shanker

Karen Lewis

Al Moussab

Newark Education Workers

This episode was recorded in September 2023.

Expelling Public Schools: How Antiracist Politics Enable School Privatization in Newark is available from University of Minnesota Press.

"Expelling Public Schools offers a fascinating look into the racial politics of corporate school reform in Newark Public Schools. John Arena takes a long view—just over two decades—and examines the reform movements and countermovements in the district from the top down and the bottom up. In assessing corporate school reform efforts under mayors Cory Booker and Ras Baraka, this deeply researched book illuminates the mechanisms that maintain educational inequality."
—Rand Quinn, author of Class Action: Desegregation and Diversity in San Francisco Schools

"It is rare to encounter a work that treats actually existing Black life, an approach best articulated by Cedric Johnson, to critically address contemporary Black urban regimes. Thoughtful, careful, and incisive, Expelling Public Schools does just that. In this moment when antiracism (and surface critiques of antiracism) is rife, John Arena’s work provides a wonderful tonic."
—Lester Spence, author of Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip-hop and Black Politics

More than twenty years ago, a bizarre confluence of meteorological events resulted in the most damaging blowdown in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness’s history. It traveled 1,300 miles and lasted 22 hours, flattening nearly 500,000 acres of the Superior National Forest. Hundreds of campers and paddlers were stranded and dozens injured; amazingly, no one died. The historic storm ultimately reshaped the region’s forests in ways we have yet to fully understand. Here, author Cary J. Griffith is joined in conversation with scientist Lee Frelich and Peter Leschak, who was involved in the response and rescue effort.

Cary Griffith is author of several novels and four books of nonfiction, including Gunflint Falling: Blowdown in the Boundary Waters and Gunflint Burning: Fire in the Boundary Waters. He is recipient of a Minnesota Book Award and a Midwest Book Award.

Lee Frelich is director of the Center for Forest Ecology at the University of Minnesota. He is listed among the top 1% of scientists in the Web of Science, Ecology, and Environment and has authored more than 200 publications, and has been featured in the New York Times, Newsweek, and the Washington Post.

Peter Leschak was chief of the French Township fire department in Side Lake, Minnesota, for thirty years. He has written ten books and has worked in a variety of wildfire-related capacities and held positions of leadership in the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Forest Service.

Gunflint Falling: Blowdown in the Boundary Waters is available from University of Minnesota Press.

"In the tradition of The Perfect Storm, Cary J. Griffith brings readers into the Boundary Waters moment by moment as an epic gale sweeps through. Ample maps and in-depth interviews with witnesses both immerse us in one terrifying day and offer a glimpse of the past and future of Minnesota’s boreal forest."
—Kim Todd, author of Sensational: The Hidden History of America’s “Girl Stunt Reporters”

"In Gunflint Falling, Cary J. Griffith provides an accurate, comprehensive narrative of those impacted by one of the region’s most devastating storms. The damage and pain brought by the derecho storm was more severe than anything previously experienced in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The reader is taken into the personal experiences of the injured and those searching for them for fourteen days in the million-acre wilderness, and Griffith’s narrative of these experiences demonstrates how, when faced with an emergency, we come together to help one another."
—Jim Sanders, retired forest supervisor, Superior National Forest (1996-2011), USDA Forest Service

What is fossil civilization? In the book No More Fossils, Dominic Boyer tells the story of how we came to rationalize fossil fuel use through successive phases of sucropolitics (plantation sugar), carbopolitics (industrial coal), and petropolitics (oil and plastics), showing what tethers us to petroculture today and what it will take to overcome the forces that mire us in place. What can we do to make electroculture a more just and sustainable alternative? In this episode, Boyer is joined in conversation about modern energy politics with Cara Daggett.

Dominic Boyer is an anthropologist, media maker, and environmental researcher who teaches at Rice University. His books include No More Fossils, Energopolitics, and Hyposubjects.

Cara Daggett is associate professor of political science at Virginia Tech and author of The Birth of Energy.

References:

The Birth of Energy / Cara Daggett

Anna Tsing

Carbon Democracy / Timothy Mitchell

Michel Foucault on biopower

Sweetness and Power / Sidney Mintz

Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History / Susan Buck-Morss

Fossil Capital / Andreas Malm

15-Minute City

John Locke

Alexander Dunlap on Fossil Fuel+

Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More / Alexei Yurchak

Staying with the Trouble / Donna Haraway

Ariella Azoulay

Kyle Powys Whyte

Geontologies / Elizabeth Povinelli

Low Carbon Pleasure / a collaborative experimental art and performance project by Dominic Boyer, Cymene Howe, and others

Stacy Alaimo / ecophilia

No More Fossils is available from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu. 

In Visible Archives is a book that explores a number of feminist and cultural touchstones of the 1980s and examines how visual culture interacts with these pivotal moments. Author Margaret Galvan goes deep into the archives to bring together a decade’s worth of research that includes comics, collages, photographs, drawings, and other media produced by women including Nan Goldin, Alison Bechdel, Lee Marrs, and Gloria Anzaldúa. Galvan demonstrates how women represented their bodies and sexualities on their own terms and created visibility for new, diverse identities. Galvan is joined here in conversation with Anna Peppard and Ramzi Fawaz.

Margaret Galvan is assistant professor of English at the University of Florida and author of In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s.

Anna Peppard is a writer, researcher, podcaster, and educator. Peppard is an adjunct lecturer in the department of Communication, Popular Culture, and Film at Brock University and editor of Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero.

Ramzi Fawaz is an award-winning queer cultural critic, public speaker, and educator. Fawaz is a Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and author of Queer Forms and The New Mutants.

Episode references:

Trina Robbins

Hillary Chute / Graphic Women

Gloria Anzaldúa / Borderlands and This Bridge Called My Back

Alison Bechdel

Nan Goldin

Diary (1982) from the Barnard Sex Conference (Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, Marybeth Nelson)

Kristen Hogan / The Feminist Bookstore Movement

Lee Marrs / The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp

Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing (exhibit)

Roberta Gregory

Maria Cotera / Chicana por mi Raza (digital project)

Chicana Movidas / edited by Dionne Espinoza, María Eugenia Cotera, and Maylei Blackwell

In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s is available from University of Minnesota Press. This book has an open-access Manifold edition that is free to read online.

"Margaret Galvan asks all the right questions about queer and feminist visual storytelling from the 1980s: Where were these works situated? How did communities use them? How have they been archived? Both commentary upon as well as an integral part of the activist project begun by the creators themselves, In Visible Archives helps keep these remarkable works visible for us all."
—Justin Hall, California College of the Arts, editor of No Straight Lines

"This wonderful book demonstrates the critical importance of community-based archives. Utilizing primary source materials, Margaret Galvan has produced an original and consequential contribution to the history of the feminist sex wars, and her attention to the visual aspects of those documents provides long overdue recognition to the period’s artists, designers, and activists."
—Gayle Rubin, University of Michigan

Benjamin Meiches explores the role of animals laboring alongside humans (mine-clearance dogs, milk-producing cows and goats, disease-identifying rats) in humanitarian operations, generating new ethical possibilities of care in humanitarian practice—and opening up new ethical ways to think about being human in terms of how we interact with nonhuman animals. Meiches, author of Nonhuman Humanitarians, is joined here in conversation with Stefanie Fishel.

Benjamin Meiches is associate professor of politics at the Univeristy of Washington-Tacoma. He is author of Nonhuman Humanitarians: Animal Interventions in Global Politics and The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide. 

Stefanie Fishel is lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. Fishel is author of The Microbial State: Global Thriving and the Body Politic and contributor to the edited volume The Long 2020.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

-Emmanuel Levinas, “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,” in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (trans. Sean Hand)

-Heifer International (organization)

-J. M. Coetzee / The Lives of Animals

-Brian Massumi / What Animals Teach Us about Politics

-Liisa Malkki / The Need to Help

-Timothy Morton / Dark Ecology

-Timothy Morton / Ecology without Nature

-David Shannon / Duck on a Bike

-Jack Halberstam / Wild Things

-Eugene Thacker / In the Dust of This Planet

What inspires desire for plants? In The Cactus Hunters, Jared Margulies takes readers through the intriguing world of succulent collecting, where collectors and conservationists alike are animated by passions that sometimes exceed the limits of the law. His globe-spanning journey offers complex insight into the fields of botany and criminology, political ecology and human geography, and psychoanalysis. Here, Margulies is joined in conversation with Samantha Walton.

Jared Margulies is assistant professor of political ecology in the Department of Geography at the University of Alabama. Margulies is author of The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade.

Samantha Walton is professor of modern literature at Bath Spa University in England. Walton is author of Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure and The Living World: Nan Shepherd and Environmental Thought.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

Nan Shepherd

The Detectorists (British comedy series)

Sheffield Branch of the British Cactus and Succulent Society

Cactus and Succulent Society of America

Jacques Lacan

Sigmund Freud

Hannah Dickinson

Paul Kingsbury

Anna Secor

Lucas Pohl

Robert Fletcher / Failing Forward

Alberto Vojtech Frič

Locations discussed:

England

Brazil

Czech Republic

Mexico

The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade is available from University of Minnesota Press.

"This book offers a powerful example of the value of close attention to the entangled lives of plants and their people."
—Thom van Dooren, author of A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions

"A deeply felt and nuanced reckoning with desire as a structurally produced and world-making force—a unique and major contribution to political ecology."
—Rosemary Collard, author of Animal Traffic: Lively Capital in the Global Exotic Pet Trade

“There is always some moment when other-than-human life bursts into presence amid the clamor of urban routine.” —Maan Barua, Lively Cities

One of the fundamental dimensions of urbanization is its radical transformation of nature. The book Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology departs from conventions of urban studies to argue that cities are lived achievements forged by a multitude of entities, drawing attention to a suite of beings, human and nonhuman, that make up the material politics of city making. From macaques and cattle in Delhi to invasive parakeet colonies in London, author Maan Barua examines the rhythms, paths, and agency of nonhumans across the city. Barua is joined here in conversation with Sandra Jasper.

Maan Barua is a university lecturer in human geography at the University of Cambridge.

Sandra Jasper, a geographer and urbanist, is assistant professor of geography and gender at Humboldt University of Berlin.

References:

Matthew Gandy

Tom Fry

Garry Marvin

Vinciane Despret

Anindya Sinha

ARCH+ exhibit Cohabitation: A Manifesto for the Solidarity of Non-Humans and Humans in Urban Space (https://archplus.net/de/cohabitation-EN/)

Yi-Fu Tuan

Deleuze

Charles Elton

Marx

Laura Fortunato

Sylvia Federici

Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Terrorism on Trial examines the contemporary role U.S. domestic courts play in the global war on terror. Author Nicole Nguyen advocates for a rethinking of popular understandings of political violence and its root causes, and exposes how dominant academic discourses, geographical imaginations, and social processes have shaped terrorism prosecutions—and disempower communities of color.

Author Nicole Nguyen is joined here in conversation with Nadine Naber. This conversation was recorded in August 2023.

Nicole Nguyen is associate professor of criminology, law, and justice at the University of Illinois Chicago, and is author of Terrorism on Trial: Political Violence and Abolitionist Futures;  Suspect Communities: Anti-Muslim Racism and the Domestic War on Terror; and A Curriculum of Fear: Homeland Security in U.S. Public Schools.

Nadine Naber is professor in the Gender and Women’s Studies and Global Asian Studies programs at the University of Illinois Chicago. Naber is founder of Liberate Your Research Workshops.

Terrorism on Trial is available from University of Minnesota Press.

In Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood, Charlotte Wrigley considers how permafrost—and its disappearance—redefines extinction to be a lack of continuity that affects both life and nonlife on earth. With a look at the coldest regions in the world, Wrigley examines the wild new economies and mitigation strategies responding to thawing permafrost, including such projects as Pleistocene Park, Colossal, and Sooam Biotech, and offers a new angle on extinction through the concept of discontinuity. Here, Wrigley is joined in conversation with Pey-Yi Chu.

Charlotte Wrigley is a postdoctoral researcher at The Greenhouse – Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger, Norway. She is author of Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood: Permafrost and Extinction in the Russian Arctic.

Pey-Yi Chu is associate professor of history at Pomona College in Claremont, California. She is author of The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science. 

PUBLICATION REFERENCES:

The Life of Permafrost / Pey-Yi Chu

Once Upon the Permafrost / Susan Crate

The Breath of the Permafrost / Nikolai Sleptsov-Sylyk

Cryopolitics / Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal, editors

PLACES REFERENCED:

-Yakutsk, the capital of the Russian region of the Sakha Republic

-Chersky, Arctic port in the Sakha District on the Kolyma River

-Permafrost bank on the Kolyma called Duvanny Yar

-Pleistocene Park in Chersky

PEOPLE MENTIONED:
-Sergey and Nikita Zimov, geophysicist and son behind Pleistocene Park project

-George Church of Harvard University, behind the business Colossal

-Hwang Woo-Suk (Sooam Biotech), biotechnology expert and veterinarian who claimed to clone human embryonic cells and does work in Yakutsk with mammoths.

-Stewart Brand, environmentalist and founder of the Long Now Foundation, known for quote: “We are as gods, so we have to get good at it.”

More about the book: z.umn.edu/EarthIceBoneBlood