Red Medicine

Audio from illness #1, the first Red Medicine event held at The Horse Hospital on May 25th. The evening was a night of readings from Micha Frazer-Carroll, Amber Husain and Matt Colquhoun on the political, cultural and historic significance of illness. 

TIME STAMPS:

05:00 - Red Medicine introductory text

12:15 - Micha Frazer-Carroll (https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745346717/mad-world/)

20:50 - Amber Husain (https://mackbooks.co.uk/products/meat-love-an-ideology-of-the-flesh-br-amber-husain)

47:12 - Matt Colquhoun (https://repeaterbooks.com/product/narcissus-in-bloom/) 

Micha Frazer-Carroll is a columnist at the Independent. She has previously edited for gal-dem, the Guardian and Blueprint, a mental health magazine that she founded. Micha has also written for Vogue, HuffPost, Huck and Dazed. She was nominated for the Comment Awards’ Fresh New Voice of the Year Award, and the Observer/Anthony Burgess Award for Arts Criticism. She is invested in using journalism to challenge systems of power.

Amber Husain is an essayist and academic, currently researching the relationship between psychosomatic medicine and neoliberal biopolitics. She is the author of Replace Me (Peninsula Press, 2021) and Meat Love (Mack, 2023), and is currently working on a new non-fiction book.

Matt Colquhoun is a writer and photographer from Hull, UK. They are the author of Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher (2020) and the editor of Mark Fisher’s Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures (2021). Their next book, Narcissus in Bloom, is forthcoming from Repeater Books in 2023. Currently based in Newcastle upon Tyne, they blog at xenogothic.com.

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington 

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Victoria Browne discusses her work developing a feminist philosophy of miscarriages, still births and pregnancy.

Victoria Browne is Reader in Political Theory at Oxford Brookes University. She is a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective and the author of two books Feminism, Time and Nonlinear History and Pregnancy Without Birth: A Feminist Philosophy of Miscarriage. 

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Keir Milburn analyses the 'Cosmic Right' a new wave of reactionary politics built around conspiracy theories and new age spirituality and calls for the construction of a Weird Left to counter this worrying turn.

Keir Milburn is a writer, researcher, and political activist. His most recent book is Generation Left. He works on municipalism, economic democracy and political economy for the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, and is a research associate for the think tank Common Wealth. He co-hosts the #ACFM podcast on Novara Media and is part of the Red Plenty Games collective.

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Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla explains how an internationalist politics can and should shape international health policy away from structures designed by and for capitalist countries in the Global North towards a system based on sovereignty and solidarity.  

Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla is a Cabinet member of Progressive International and leads its policy pillar, Blueprint.

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Jeremy Gilbert traces the politics of the body through the counterculture's experiments in music and medicine, comparing the affordances of control and liberation available in the clinic and on the dance-floor.

Jeremy Gilbert is Professor of Cultural & Political Theory at the University of East London. He is the author of Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism, Anticapitalism and Culture: Radical Theory and Popular Politics and Twenty-First Century Socialism. He writes regularly in the British press, is the current editor of the journal New Formations, and hosts three regular podcasts: #ACFM (on Novara Media); Love is the Message; Culture, Power, Politics.

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Erik Baker discusses two of his recent essays which cover the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio and the history of bereavement leave. In reflecting on both of these pieces, Erik asks what it would mean to politicize experiences of grief and illness.  

Erik Baker is a historian of science and labor at Harvard, and an associate editor at The Drift. He is currently writing a book for Harvard University Press titled Make Your Own Job: The Entrepreneurial Work Ethic in Modern America.

It Is Happening Again: www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/it-is-happening-again/

The Right to Grieve: www.jewishcurrents.org/the-right-to-grieve

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Joy James discusses revolutionary love, care under racial capitalism and the captive maternal.

Joy James is a political philosopher, academic and author. She is the author of numerous books including Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics, Resisting state violence, and Seeking the Beloved Community. She has edited collections including The Angela Y. Davis Reader, Imprisoned Intellectuals, and The New Abolitionists. Her most recent book In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love published with Divided Press in December of last year and includes a foreword by Da’Shaun L. Harrison and an afterword by Mumia Abu Jamal. 

EVENT LINK: https://bit.ly/3ZPFu7H 

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington 

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Psychoanalyst Jaimeson Webster discusses her collection of essays, Disorganization and Sex, drawing on thinkers such as Freud, Lacan and Paul Preciado to explain what psychoanalysis offers in understanding sexuality, medicine and the body.

Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst based in New York. She is the author of numerous books including The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis and Conversion Disorder. Her writing has appeared regularly in publications such as Artforum, Spike Art Magazine, Apology and the New York Review of Books.

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Lynne Tillman discusses her recent book Mothercare. In one of the few examples of Lynne writing about her own life, Mothercare documents the period when her mother develops and then sadly passes from a rare health condition.

Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, cultural critic and author of various books including Haunted Houses, Weird Fucks, American Genius and Men and Apparitions. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and an Andy Warhol Creative Capital Arts Writing Fellowship. Tillman is Professor and Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at The University of Albany and teaches at the School of Visual Arts’ Art Criticism and Writing MFA Program in New York.

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In this episode Malcolm Harris describes  the interconnected histories of eugenics and American capitalism in California throughout the 19th and 20th Century as well as how this history shapes tech and politics today.

Malcolm Harris is an American journalist, critic and editor. He is the author of three books, the most recent of which is titled Palo Alto: A History of California Capitalism and the World. 

EVENT LINK: https://bit.ly/3ZPFu7H 

Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington 

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In this episode Natasha Lennard reports on the story of two reproductive rights activists who are being charged under a law intended to protect abortion clinics, as well as the broader implications this may have on the struggle for reproductive care and bodily autonomy more generally.

Natasha Lennard is a columnist for The Intercept. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Bookforum and the New York Times, among others. She teaches critical journalism at the New School for Social Research in New York and is the author of “Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life.”

EVENT LINK: https://bit.ly/3ZPFu7H

Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

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Mark Spencer updates us on the struggle to stop the Atlanta Police Foundation building the largest police training facility in the US in Weelaunee Forest, Atlanta. He also explains why ‘health’ is a useful lens by which to understand the overlapping processes of racial capitalism, ecological destruction and the expanding carceral state in Atlanta and elsewhere.

Mark Spencer has a MD from Georgetown University School of Medicine and a BS in Neuroscience from Johns Hopkins University. He works as an Internal Medicine Resident physician at multiple hospitals across Atlanta. He is part of a coalition that builds support among healthcare workers for community based movements like Atlanta's Communities over Cages campaign to close the Atlanta Detention Center and also Stop Cop City.

More info on Red Medicine event at The Horse Hospital on May 25th coming soon...

https://defendtheatlantaforest.org/

https://atlsolidarity.org/

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicine

Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington 

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Nadia Abu El Haj describes the history of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and what it reveals about psychiatry, American imperialism and anti-war politics. She tracks PTSD’s shifting status in medical discourse from Vietnam war veteran 'rap groups' through to its depoliticized iteration in the 21st century.

Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University and a recipient of numerous awards, including the MacArthur Fellowship. She is the author of Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in post-9/11 America

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

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In this episode James Wilt explains how alcohol corporations have caused and profited from a health crisis relating to drinking. He explains how capitalist accumulation and expansion has caused a health crisis that disproportionally effects working class, racialized and colonized communities internationally. 

We also discuss how the left need to balance the complex harms caused by the corporate alcohol industry with people’s real desire for collective pleasure. 

James Wilt is a freelance journalist, PhD student, and the author of two books, firstly Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars? Public Transit in the Age of Google, Uber, and Elon Musk published in 2020. And more recently Drinking Up the Revolution: How to Smash Big Alcohol and Reclaim Working-Class Joy which was published by Repeater Books in the summer of last year.

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

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Founded by friend of the show, Hannah Zeavin, Parapraxis is a new magazine about psychoanalysis with a commitment to uncovering the psychosocial dimensions of life. In this conversation Alex Colston and M.E. O'Brien discuss what it means to think psychoanalytically about politics and politically about psychoanalysis. As well as their experiences of putting together the magazine.  

M. E. O’Brien writes and speaks on gender freedom and capitalism. She has two books: a co-authored speculative novel, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072, published with Common Notions in 2022 and Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care which is forthcoming from Pluto Books June of this year. She is one of the Associate Editors of Parapraxis magazine.

Alex Colston is a PhD student in clinical psychology at doo kayn University, as well as a writer, and editor. He is the deputy editor of Parapraxis and codirector of the Psychosocial Foundation.

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Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi discuss what it means to practice psychoanalysis in Palestine under constant attack from the settler colonial project of the Israeli state. They explain how Palestinian clinicians see their role in the liberation struggle and what their work teach us about the relationship between the psychic and the political. 

Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington 

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In the second in a two-part interview with Beatrice Adler-Bolton, she discusses the work and legacy of the Socialist Patients Collective. Beatrice is a writer, artist & co-host of Death Panel, a podcast about the political economy of health. She is a co-author, (along with Artie Vierkant) of the recently published Health Communism from Verso Books.

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington 

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In this, the first of a two-part interview, Beatrice Adler-Bolton explains how capitalism shapes what we think of as health. Beatrice explains how health communism provides us with the tools to critique the National Health Service from the left. Specifically, we discuss the the long history of healthcare being used as a way to discipline and punish the working class and why we shouldn’t be afraid to demand more from the NHS despite the establishments enforced austerity.  

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington 

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Chelsea A Jackson is an academic, activist and member of Cradle Community which is a collective of organizers committed to radical education and building understanding of prison abolition and transformative justice. Last year the collective published their first book with Hajar Press. Titled Brick by Brick, the book provides an introduction to abolitionist theory and a manifesto for those of us who want to build a society free from prisons and police.

In this episode we discuss abolitionism and what an abolitionist critique entails in relationship to how we think about healthcare. Chelsea explains how prisons and police shape healthcare provisions in the UK, how austerity has made access to healthcare more predatory and dangerous, and the importance of mutual aid as a tool for building a better system.

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In this episode Dr Rita Issa discusses the forthcoming strikes in the NHS. She explains the ongoing pressures faced by healthcare workers including austerity, privatization and poor working conditions and pay. Rita also explains how the COVID-19 pandemic has made all of these things worse and how workers are organizing ahead of unprecedented strike action in an attempt to turn things around for the benefit of workers and patients. 

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