Host Cathy Hannabach interviews digital studies scholar and professor Catherine Knight Steele, whose work reveals the central role Black women and Black feminists have played in developing, challenging, and transforming our digital technologies. Approaching Black digital studies holistically, Catherine shows how marginalized groups build lasting community through online, in-person, and hybrid practices, including sustainable models for mentorship and mutual support. In their conversation, Catherine and Cathy chat about why extensions of grace and collaboration are so crucial to building the future of Black digital studies as well as a supportive world more broadly. They also explore the nonlinear paths that bring us to our areas of research and how learning to value that nonlinerarity can often be the key to writing a book or creating a project that feeds your soul, not just professional requirements. Finally, they close out the episode with Catherine’s techniques for redefining the history and future of technology in ways that place Black women at the very center. Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/142-catherine-knight-steele

Imagine Otherwise by Ideas on Fire

Catherine Knight Steele on Black Feminist Extensions of Grace

Even before the global COVID-19 pandemic, access to reliable, high-performance broadband internet was a necessity for many of us to be able to meaningfully participate in our workplaces, schools, and communities. The pandemic has made this even more apparent. The digital divide separating those with access from those without is hardly a new issue but what is less often discussed is how that digital divide looks different in rural versus urban spaces. In episode 141 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews Christopher Ali, who argues that rural broadband access and connectivity is a crucial social justice concern—one with implications for everything from education and healthcare to the food available for us to eat. In the conversation, Chris and Cathy chat about why federal policy has so consistency failed to bring broadband to rural communities and what a rural broadband plan would look like that put the needs of local populations first. Chris highlights the community groups that are connecting themselves and offering creative infrastructure models in the process. They also discuss Chris’s unique interdisciplinary research methodology that involved a 3,600-mile road trip with his adorable hound dog Tuna. Finally, they close out the episode with a vision for a more connected world and what it would take to get there. Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/141-christopher-ali

Christopher Ali on Building a More Connected World

Host Cathy Hannabach interviews filmmaker and media studies scholar Sandra Ristovska about the complex ethical, political, and legal relationship between imagery and human rights. They discuss the role of video evidence in simultaneously exposing and reproducing injustice, the often life-and-death stakes of critical visual interpretation, and what it means to turn the act of seeing each other into a practice of human rights. Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/140-sandra-ristovska

Sandra Ristovska on Seeing Human Rights

Publishing plays a central role in higher education, primarily through the hiring, tenure, and promotion process. Because of this, transforming academic publishing means transforming how scholarly knowledge itself is produced, circulated, and applied. The research process, writing process, and publishing process are all deeply intertwined and all offer opportunities to build the kinds of worlds we want to inhabit. To explore how this process works and the worldmaking possibilities it opens up, in episode 139 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews Dena’ina musician-scholar Jessica Bissett Perea. Jessica is the founder of the Indigeneity Collaboratory, an Indigenous-led and Indigeneity-centered research collective that advances relational ways of being, knowing, and doing. She’s also an associate professor in the Department of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis. In the conversation, Jessica shares various entry points for decolonial intervention that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, editors, and publishers can explore. First up, Cathy and Jessica chat about Jessica’s experience switching research topics early in her career. She shares practical tips on how to find the research topics that inspire you and give back to the communities you care about as well as how to think critically about your specific positionality in relation to your research. They also tackle the writing process. As they discuss, everything from stylistic choices like capitalization and italicization to the citation politics of bibliographies offer opportunities to remake how intellectual labor is exchanged and valued. Finally, Jessica and Cathy turn to academic publishing itself. This is a field that has seen some encouraging progress lately but still has a long way to go toward equity and inclusion. They chat about what faculty journal editors, professional copyeditors, and authors can do to build a more justice-focused publishing world. Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/139-jessica-bissett-perea

Jessica Bissett Perea on Indigenous Transformations in Academic Publishing

We’ve all experienced a LOT of change over the past year and a half. Many of the things we assumed to be stable anchors suddenly turned out not to be, as everything from the global economy and education to politics and media were irrevocably transformed. Many with privilege have responded to such upheaval by demanding a swift and complete return to the same capitalist normal that unevenly organized life in the before times. But those for whom the old normal was a source of oppression rather than comfort have had a different reaction to such changes. Folks have instead invested in practices like mutual aid, unlearning, and interdependency, all which provide models for more just social foundations. In episode 138 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies scholar and professor Priya Kandaswamy. Priya has long been fascinated with how institutions and individuals shape and reshape one another in the context of power. As she details in their conversation, Priya’s career shifted dramatically earlier this year. In March 2021, one full year after COVID-19 had forced major shutdowns across the US, Priya’s employer, Mills College, announced that fall 2021 would be its last year admitting new students and the beloved liberal arts college in Oakland, California, would completely close by 2023. As a result, all faculty and staff would thus need to find other employment. Priya shares how personal upheavals (like a career change) combined with collective upheavals (like a pandemic) provide glimpses into a new normal, one that is organized around permanent change. Drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as prison abolition movements, radical herbalism, feminist of color welfare histories, and the mycorrhizal bonds between trees and fungi, Priya explains how she is learning to embrace permanent transformation as a way to individually and collectively build new worlds. Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/138-priya-kandaswamy

Priya Kandaswamy on Embracing Permanent Change

Host Cathy Hannabach interviews filmmaker and hip-hop scholar Mark Villegas, who has built his career foregrounding the power of collective abundance. Highlighting the strength, inspiration, and generosity that emerges from collaboration, Mark’s endeavors illustrate the transformations that take place when diverse ideas and cultural traditions are brought together. In the conversation, Mark and Cathy chat about why multiracial, transnational, and cross-generational hip-hop cultures have been such a vibrant model of political and artistic abundance. Mark explains how his new book Manifest Technique traces these genealogies as well as how Filipino American DJs and cultural producers use hip-hop to theorize transition and resist colonial legacies. They also talk about the new communication strategies and gathering practices that Brown and Black hip-hop communities have developed during COVID-19 and discuss how they can serve as models for life beyond the pandemic. Finally, we close out the episode with a vision for an abundant relationality, one that can shape new collaborative futures. Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/137-mark-villegas

Mark Villegas on Collaborative Abundance in Hip-Hop Cultures

Community building is a cornerstone of progressive social and intellectual movements. Resisting capitalist individualism, we know how vital social bonds are in sustaining our identities, our dreams, and even our very lives. But it’s easy to romanticize community and forget the work involved in forging and tending those social bonds—labor that often reflects the very power dynamics that we seek to dismantle. In episode 136 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews Kānaka Maoli feminist scholar Maile Arvin, who explains why she approaches community building through the Native Hawaiian concept of kuleana, or a reciprocal relationship of responsibility. In the conversation, Maile and Cathy consider the racially gendered labor of community and responsibility as well how Native Hawaiian communities and curators are drawing on both to transform colonial legacies. The episode wraps up with Maile’s vision of imagining otherwise in the classroom through centering decolonization and accessibility in her Indigenous feminist pedagogy. Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/136-maile-arvin

Maile Arvin on Kuleana and Indigenous Feminist Community

Centuries of Black feminist intellectuals have demonstrated how knowledge production is always deeply political, revealing whose labor and lives we value. Publicly citing and generously engaging with the contributions that others have made to our thinking is a crucial way we remake the world. In episode 135 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews Christen A. Smith, Dána-Ain Davis, and Sameena Mulla, the three co-editors of the recent ground-breaking special issue of Feminist Anthropology, which focuses on the Cite Black Women movement that honors Black women’s transnational intellectual production. The Ideas on Fire team has been privileged to copyedit the Feminist Anthropology journal from its inception, and the Cite Black Women special issue is a superb illustration of the powerful political and ethical transformations this journal and the Cite Black Women movement bring to academic publishing and everyday life. In the conversation, Christen, Dána, Sameena, and Cathy discuss the pleasures and challenges of overhauling academic publishing workflows and norms so that they can embody an intersectional, transnational feminist praxis. They also chat about what it means to honor our intellectual and communal forbearers, which this special issue does in the form of a tribute to the late Dr. Leith Mullings from colleagues, friends, comrades, and former students whose intellectual and personal lives were forever changed through her lifelong commitment to racial, economic, and gender justice. And finally, they close out the conversation with reflections on why making room for marginalized people to speak, write, and publish is a key way we all think and live knowledge production otherwise. Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/135-smith-davis-mulla

Christen A. Smith, Dána-Ain Davis, and Sameena Mulla on Cite Black Women

Movements organized around disability justice, prison and police abolition, queer and trans feminism, and economic justice have long shown how intersecting systems of oppression require intersectional frameworks for resistance. On episode 134 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews Liat Ben-Moshe, who has spent her career tracing what she calls carceral ableism, or the ways the prison industrial complex and anti-disability logics shape one another in our daily lives and our political institutions. Liat’s research and activism illustrate the vital need to foreground disability justice in our efforts to end violence. Liat points out that this kind of work produces a richer and more critical understanding of interdependency, one that neither romanticizes community nor enshrines individualism. In the conversation, Cathy and Liat discuss how community building and mutual aid have shifted during the COVID-19 pandemic and what that means for a post-pandemic future. They also discuss why learning to see one’s identities as political rather than descriptive is so crucial for movement building and why creating a world beyond containment, confinement, and segregation is how Liat imagines otherwise. Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/134-liat-ben-moshe

Liat Ben-Moshe on Community beyond the Carceral State

Over the past few years, we’ve seen more and more vibrant intersectional and interdisciplinary cultural production get the attention it so richly deserves. This work builds on a long history of refusing to separate the personal from the political in Third World and women of color feminism, radical Black and queer activism, and movements for economic, disability, and environmental justice. All of these traditions have valued the role of art in sparking social change, as the creative and the revolutionary are never far apart. In episode 133 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews creative writer, scholar, and professor Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, whose wide-ranging body of work demonstrates the political and ethical stakes of centering queer Black feminist pleasure in both literature and life. In the conversation, Mecca and Cathy chat about navigating intertwined affects of joy and trauma while moving across genres, the long and rich tradition of Black interdisciplinary writing, and why refusing to separate the body from the page is key to how Mecca imagines otherwise. Transcript and how notes: https://ideasonfire.net/133-mecca-jamilah-sullivan

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan on Cultivating Joy through Queer Black Feminist Art

Building an abolitionist university or museum requires more than just updating some policies. It requires rethinking from the ground up what we want out of our cultural institutions and renewing our commitment to bringing that abolitionist vision to fruition. In episode 132 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews scholar, performance artist, and Prince-enthusiast J. Faith Almiron, whose interdisciplinary crisscrossing of academic, artistic, and activist spaces demonstrates the power of such renewal in all its forms. In the conversation, Cathy and J. Faith chat about what it means to renew our commitment to social justice amidst ongoing state violence, why interdisciplinarity is the future of both art and education, how cultural institutions can diversify beyond tokenism, and why harnessing the radical imagination is how J. Faith imagines otherwise. Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/132-j-faith-almiron

J. Faith Almiron on Abolitionist Pedagogy within and beyond Institutions

As scholars, we often like to think we have everything under control. We work hard to meet deadlines, fulfill our responsibilities, and get everything done. So what happens when global and personal events throw all of that out the window? In episode 131 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews La Marr Bruce, whose La new book How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity, ended up on a much windier publication path than expected due to both the global COVID-19 pandemic and La Marr’s devastating loss of his partner David this past August. As La Marr explains in the conversation, this is a book about destabilization and derailment that also became the vehicle through which he traversed that journey, ultimately renewing his commitment to Black and mad studies, mutual care, and collective liberation. A content note: this episode discusses some difficult topics, including the death of La Marr’s partner David. If this is a topic you need to not hear about right now, for any reason, we recommend exploring some of our other recent episodes. Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/131-la-marr-bruce

La Marr Bruce on Renewal, Loss, and Black Creativity

Spring is normally a time of emergence and inspiration but many scholars, artists, and organizers are struggling after a year spent inside and a pandemic that is still far from over. In episode 130 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews Kānaka Maoli food studies scholar Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart. Hi‘ilei’s approach to scholarly and activist inspiration brings the rich histories and futures of Indigenous community building to bear on her daily practices of writing and living during the pandemic. In the interview, Hiʻilei and Cathy chat about using scholarly research to do justice to ancestors and communities, the future of Indigenous food sovereignty activism, and why connecting individual healing practices like gardening to collective movements for decolonization is key to how Hiʻilei imagines otherwise. Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/130-hiilei-julia-kawehipuaakahaopulani-hobart

Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart on Transgenerational Inspiration

How can looking to the past enliven the present and inspire the future? And how can we foment that inspiration in our daily practices and habits? In episode 129 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews Badia Ahad-Legardy, whose most recent book Afro-Nostalgia is a brilliant and energizing archive of Black historical joy. Badia’s work demonstrates the powerful role pleasure plays in motivating social change and forging communal ties across time and space. In the conversation, Badia and Cathy discuss the daily practices she uses to encourage intellectual and political inspiration, including the role of white space and refusals. They also discuss building momentum across large writing projects like a book, and why actively cultivating joy for herself and for others is how Badia imagines otherwise. Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/129-badia-ahad-legardy

Badia Ahad-Legardy on Black Historical Joy and Inspiration

For those of us in the social justice-oriented interdisciplines like gender studies, ethnic studies, and disability studies, our desire to make real people’s lives better is often the reason we became scholars to begin with. But it can be difficult to sustain that inspiration over the long term, especially as the daily grind of academic life, activist burnout, and current events threaten to extinguish the motivating spark that brought us to this vital work in the first place. So how can we cultivate the inspiration we need to nourish ourselves and our communities as we collectively build the worlds we want? To help us figure this out, in episode 128 of Imagine Otherwise host Cathy Hannabach interviews scholar-activist Gwen D’Arcangelis, whose work focuses on the transnational feminist politics of science, environmental justice, and anti-racist praxis. In the conversation, Gwen and Cathy chat about actively cultivating inspiration in our daily lives and staying motivated when writing about challenging topics like war and violence. They also discuss why an intersectional feminist perspective on the current COVID-19 pandemic is so crucial and why making sure scholarship is accountable to activist communities is a key way that Gwen imagines otherwise. Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/128-gwen-darcangelis

Gwen D’Arcangelis on Inspiration for Scholar-Activists

Imagine Otherwise is a podcast by Ideas on Fire about the people and projects bridging art, activism, and academia to build better worlds. Episodes offer in-depth interviews with creators who use culture for social justice, and explore the nitty-gritty work of imagining and creating more just worlds.

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Imagine Otherwise by Ideas on Fire

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