On today’s episode we speak with two of the founders of the Polis Project—Suchitra Vijayan and Francesca Recchia—about their new book, How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners. We are also deeply honored that the eminent Dalit intellectual, and former political prisoner Dr. Anand Teltumbde is with us as well to lend his unique insight into the political situation in India and the realities of being a political prisoner there.

The Polis Project, Inc. is a New York-based hybrid research and journalism organization that works with communities in resistance. Through its  Research, Reportage and Resistanceapproach, they publish and disseminate critical ideas that are excluded from mainstream media. Their work sheds light on the rise of authoritarianism especially in democracies and focuses on issues of racial, class and caste injustice, Islamophobia and State oppression around the world. In September 2019, the United States Library of Congress selected The Polis Project, Inc.’s website for inclusion in its web archives.

Francesca Recchia is an independent researcher, educator and writer whose work is grounded in the values and principles of decolonial philosophy and radical pedagogy. She is interested in the geopolitical dimension of heritage and cultural processes in countries in conflict and she focuses on creative practices of collective resistance in contexts of unequal structures of power. Over the last two decades, Francesca has worked in different capacities in Palestine, Pakistan, India, Kashmir, Iraq and Afghanistan. Her latest assignment in Kabul was as Acting Director of the Afghan Institute for Arts and Architecture.

She was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College of London, has a PhD in Cultural Studies at the Oriental Institute in Naples and a Master in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Besides being a scholar and practitioner in his formal disciplines of Technology and Management, with a corporate career spanning four decades at top management positions, and a decade as an academic, Dr Anand Teltumbde has maintained his parallel career as a civil rights activist, writer, columnist and public intellectual right since his student days.

He contributed to the civil rights movement in India as one of its founding pillars and contributed theoretical insights through his voluminous writings into most issues. He participated and led many fact finding missions and peoples’ struggle. He has  published more than 30 books on contemporary issues and wrote a column Margin Speak for a decade in Economic & Political Weekly before being arrested in the infamous Bhima-Koregaon case.

Suchitra Vijayan is an essayist, lawyer, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. She is the award winning author of the critically acclaimed book Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India (Melville House, New York) and How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners (Pluto Press). Her essays, photographs, and interviews have appeared in The Washington Post, Time Magazine GQ, The Nation, The Boston Review, Foreign Policy, Lit Hub, Rumpus, Electric Literature, NPR, NBC, and BBC. As an attorney, she worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before co-founding the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, giving Iraqi refugees legal aid. She is an award-winning photographer and the founder and executive director of the Polis Project. She teaches at NYU Gallatin and Columbia University’s Oral History Program.

A transcript of Dr Tetumbde’s remarks can be found on SpeakingOutofPlace.com

Today we talk with Sara Ahmed about her new book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. How and why is it that complaining about sexism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of bigotry, is considered impolite?  How is civility uncivil, and the mandate to be “happy” a tool for silencing grievances? Sara Ahmed tackles all those questions, and gives us strength and courage to keep on killingjoy and speaking truth.

Sara Ahmed is an independent queer feminist scholar of colour. Her work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. Her first trade book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook is coming out with Seal Press next month. Previous books (all published by Duke University Press) include Complaint! (2021), What’s The Use? On the Uses of Use (2019), Living a Feminist Life (2017), Willful Subjects (2014), On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012), The Promise of Happiness (2010) and Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others (2006). She is currently writing A Complainer’s Handbook: A Guide to Building Less Hostile Institutions and has begun a new project on common sense. She blogs at feministkilljoy.com

Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with Michael Hardt about his new book, The Subversive Seventies.  This expansive study of a broad range of subversive movements across the globe shows us how the 70s were actually ahead of us in terms of confronting key issues and contradictions that remain with us today and shows what we can learn from them.

Michael Hardt teaches political theory in the Literature Program at Duke University.  He is co-author of several books with Antonio Negri, including Empire.  His most recent books are The Subversive Seventies and (with Sandro Mezzadra) Bolivia Beyond the Impasse.  Together Sandro and Michael host The Social Movements Lab.

Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with Jennifer Jacquet, who is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies and Director of XE: Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement at NYU. She is also deputy director of NYU’s Center for Environmental and Animal Protection. Her research focuses on animals and the environment, Agnotology, and attribution and responsibility in the Anthropocene. She is author of The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World— a work of ‘epistolary non-fiction’ that makes the business case for scientific denial. Among other things, we learn how corporations create an arsenal of experts and pseudo-experts at prestigious universities to create misinformation and disinformation for corporate profit, and at great cost to the public. At the end, we make the case for a partnership between the sciences and the humanities to fight such lies and violence.

Jennifer Jacquet is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies and Director of XE: Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement at NYU. She is also deputy director of NYU’s Center for Environmental and Animal Protection. Her research focuses on animals and the environment, Agnotology, and attribution and responsibility in the Anthropocene.  Along with The Playbook, Jacquet also wrote Is Shame Necessary? (Pantheon/Penguin, 2015) about the evolution, function, and future of the use of social disapproval in a globalized, digitized world. She is the recipient of a 2015 Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship and a 2016 Pew fellowship in m3arine conservation.

Today we talk with Cynthia Franklin about her new book, Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea. Taking on pivotal historical moments like the murder of George Floyd and the emergence of #BlackLivesMatter, the on-going struggle of the Palestinian people against the ethno-nationalist Zionist state, and the fight for Indigenous rights in Hawai’i, Franklin asks the question, what requirements to people have to meet in order to fit into the human narrative?  And what are the possibilities of creating alternate stories of the human that can accommodate individuals who identify more as members of political collectives, and also narratives that exceed the normative category of the human? This powerful book asks fundamental questions about the relationship between art and activism.

Cynthia G. Franklin is Professor of English at the University of Hawai’i, and coeditor of the journal Biography. She is the author of Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea (2023), Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory and the University Today and Writing Women’s Communities: The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary Multi-Genre Anthologies. She has coedited special issues of Biography including “Life in Occupied Palestine” and “Personal Effects: The Testimonial Uses of Life Writing.” For the past ten years, Cynthia has been on the Organizing Collective of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) and she is a founding member and faculty advisor of Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UH (SFJP@UH). She serves on the Editorial Collective for the newly established initiative EtCH (Essays in the Critical Humanities).

In today’s episode of Speaking Out of Place we speak with Dr Jennifer Gomez about her new book, The Cultural Betrayal of Black Women and Girls: A Black Feminist Approach to Healing from Sexual Abuse, which takes on the particular difficulty of centering the voices and experiences of Black women and girls when confronting sexual violence in the Black community.

In her foreword the book, Thema Bryant, President of the American Psychological Association writes, This important work … is a love song to the survival of black sis and trans women and girls. For love to be liberating it must see and affirm survivors holistically. Gomez calls psychologists and other mental health providers to adopt courageous compassion, which means sharing concern and outrage at the realities of sexual violence as well as concern and outrage for the injustices that contextualize the trauma and recovery process for black women and girls. 

In our conversation Dr. Gomez explains how she fought to reconcile the need for solidarity in the Black community with the demand that the abuse of Black women and girls be confronted and healed. Alongside this struggle was her effort to change the ways psychologists and others silence these traumas.

Jennifer M. Gómez is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work and a Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Innovation in Social Work & Health at Boston University, and a Board Member and Chair of the Research Advisory Committee at the Center for Institutional Courage. Her primary research focus is cultural betrayal trauma theory (CBTT), which she created as a framework for understanding the mental, behavioral, cultural, and physical health impact of violence on Black and other marginalized youth, young adults, and elders within the context of inequality.

Written while she was a 2021-22 Fellow at the Stanford University Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), her book, “The Cultural Betrayal of Black Women & Girls: A Black Feminist Approach to Healing from Sexual Abuse” (American Psychological Association; 2023), provides individual, interpersonal, and structural strategies for healing. Website: https://jmgomez.org ; Book Website: https://www.apa.org/pubs/books/cultural-betrayal/; Twitter: @JenniferMGmez1