***Update 1/17/18: Transcript available here (transcribed by Scott McLellan)*** Special guest co-host James Padilioni, Jr. joins B and John to discuss several works in the vital, burgeoning discourses of Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism. Join us as we talk about texts from Jared Sexton, Hortense Spillers, Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, and Frank B. Wilderson III. After […]

Join Rachel, B, and John as they discuss the decolonial theory of Walter D. Mignolo, reading “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference” and “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and De-Colonial Freedom.” What is epistemology and why is it important? What is the relation between materiality, the body, and epistemology? What is colonial epistemology and […]

In this very special episode of Always Already, join all four co-hosts as they peer into the depths of Jane Bennett’s vital materialism in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. That’s right! Emily, Rachel, John, and B are all together to unravel the meaning of non-human agency, objects-as-subjects (or the collapse of that divide all […]

Join B and John as they interview Nicholas Tampio, Associate Professor of Political Science at Fordham University, about his new book, Deleuze’s Political Vision, which comes out later this summer from Rowman & Littlefield. Professor Tampio tackles Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, mining it for its political and ethical possibilities. Using imagination as his […]

In this episode of Always Already, Rachel, B, and Emily attempt to de-jargonizify the concepts universal and particular as they circulate in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality by Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, and Ernesto Laclau.  In this discussion of Butler’s chapter “Competing Universalities” and Žižek’s chapter “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes please!” the team tries to unpack what the […]

In this episode of Always Already, Rachel, B, and Emily attempt to de-jargonizify the concepts universal and particular as they circulate in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality by Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, and Ernesto Laclau.  In this discussion of Butler’s chapter “Competing Universalities” and Žižek’s chapter “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes please!” the team tries to unpack what the […]

In this episode of Always Already, Emily, John, and B engage in a little film analysis for their first time on the show (and possibly in their lives!) Starting with the Pakistani cartoon Burka Avenger, your critical team struggles to uncover whether there is a reproduction of liberal rights discourse. Is there a colonized narrative […]

In this episode of Always Already, Emily, John, and B engage in a little film analysis for their first time on the show (and possibly in their lives!) Starting with the Pakistani cartoon Burka Avenger, your critical team struggles to uncover whether there is a reproduction of liberal rights discourse. Is there a colonized narrative […]

In this episode, John, Emily, and B get down to the brass tacks of an affirmative biopolitics in Roberto Esposito’s  book Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy. After exploring what Esposito’s project and method are, generally, the team wonders: Is it Nietzsche-the-ironist (ahem…B) and/or Nietzsche-the-dark-eugencist who offers a more generative analysis of biopolitics’ beginnings? We leave that […]

On this week’s episode, we discuss two chapters from Mel Chen’s Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. We ask what Chen’s main project is throughout the segments we read, pondering the meaning of sociality, toxicity and animacy, and the critical ambivalence generated by the work. We also talk briefly about the use of affect theory in […]