Anarres Project

In this episode of Conversations on Anarres, we speak with Dr. Stephanie Luce. She is a labor scholar, organizer, and the author of "Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World."We talk about how the US labor movement is resurged in the last decade and how it might react to increasingly authoritarian political times.

On this episode of Conversations on Anarres, we talk with Alexandro Jose Gradilla. He is a professor of Chicana/Chicano Studies at Cal State Fullerton and one of the directors of the Latinx Lab there. The Lab teaches undergraduate and graduate students how to harness the power of storytelling and narrative building.We talk about how the work of the Lab is informed by the idea of Latinx Futurism/Futurities--an outlook that tries to imagine a future in which the ancestral life ways of Latinx people are preserved and used to offer alternatives to the status quo of today.During our conversation, we touch on the way the university in the US has been affected by neoliberal capitalist concerns, focusing on job training and credentials, rather than on history and the radical imagination. We speculate about what alternatives forms of higher education might look like and how AI threatens the cultivation of creativity and different ways of thinking.

In this episode of Conversations on Anarres, we talk with author and organizer Andrew Lee. He is the author of "Defying Displacement" (https://www.akpress.org/defying-displ...) and a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies. Lee recently wrote a pamphlet for the IAS Lexicon series entitled "Democracy Beyond the State" (https://anarchiststudies.org/lexicon-...)We begin by looking into the roots of democracy as a way of life and the kinds of radical values that might arise along with it. Lee also discusses how US American democracy has always fallen short of its promises and is tied to generations of displacement, genocide, and segregation. He is skeptical that much progress toward racial justice has occurred since the Civil Rights Movement, but that if democracy has any hope in the US, it will depend on social movements.

In this Conversation on Anarres, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Ursula K. Le Guin's classic novel, The Dispossessed. We talk with Dr. Alexis Shotwell who is working to spell out Le Guin's anarchist philosophy. Shotwell speculates as to the features of "Odoian anarchism"--what values it expresses and how it is related to other classical anarchist thinkers such as Emma Goldman and Peter Kropotkin-- and she envisions what lessons it might have for our political organizing today.

In this episode of Conversations on Anarres, we speak with author Javier Sethness Castro about his new review of Dune II (2024). Sethness Castro argues that the Frank Herbert's vision of humanity, as laid out in the novels, is one of a multicultural, multiracial, and religiously pluralistic human race spread out among the stars. The persistence of Islam, and of Muslim culture and traditions, is key to this vision.

However, Sethness Castro believes that Dune II downplays and erases this key element from the universe, limiting the radical possibilities of the film. We also talk about how the Dune universe can help us envision anti-imperialist politics in our world today and understand events in the Middle East.

You can read his article "Dune Part Two: A Film of Anti-Muslim Erasure" here.

In this episode of Conversations on Anarres, we talk with Dr. Jason Eberl who is the editor of the book Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy.

In this episode of Conversations on Anarres, we interview artist Will Burrows. In the past few years, Burrows has become popular for his art that blends Star Trek with political themes and LGBTQIA pride.

In this episode of Conversations on Anarres, we talk with Katherine Ann Power about her new memoir, "Surrender: My Journey from Guerilla to Grandmother". For over twenty years, Power was on the FBI Most Wanted List for her involvement in a revolutionary armed cell that sought the overthrown of the US government. After a bank robbery in which a police officer was killed, Power went into hiding and lived a secretive life. Eventually, she decided she needed to redefine her radical politics and she turned herself in. Upon her parole some years later, she began to study philosophy and to think about what social transformation involves if it is to be truly radical.

In this episode of Conversations on Anarres, we speak with New York Times Best Selling author, Dr. Una McCormack. She has written over twenty science fiction novels, many of which are franchise novels that tie into the Star Trek, Firefly, and Dr. Who universes. We talk about how she prepares for writing her work and why she appreciates science fiction.

Dr. McCormack, however, has a deep appreciation for the Star Trek Universe. We discuss what makes this franchise so important in terms of the values it holds up as important for the future of humanity. Star Trek has always portrayed a hopeful vision of the future grounded in diversity, cooperation, and reason. We talk about why these matter and how they help us to analyze the world in which we live today.

We also discuss how the third era of Star Trek, NuTrek, continues to uphold these kinds of values through the series of Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, Prodigy, and Strange New Worlds.

In this Conversation on Anarres, we speak with Dr. David Seitz about his new book A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine.

We talk about how Star Trek came to be part of his academic research project and why Deep Space Nine captured his imagination as a way to talk about radical politics in the world today.

Our conversation touches on how DS9 is important for the way it is infused by themes from the US Black Freedom Struggle (partly as a result of the influence of Avery Brooks) and has lessons to teach us about colonialism, politics of occupation in the world today (particularly about the developments in Palestine), and queer identity.