Poet and author Nina Mingya Powles (Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai and Small Bodies of Water) shares how language learning and playing with texts are a core focus of her written work, which examines critical placemaking and geographies, food, the natural world and climate change, migration, and colonialism. In this illuminating conversation, Nina reflects on her ongoing research process in colonial structures and her “in-betweenness” in multiple and complex spaces.

Dr. Katherine McKittrick (Queen’s University) talks about interdisciplinarity, citations and footnotes, geographies, curiosity, and radical storytelling through creative texts. In the conversation, we discuss her two monographs, Dear Science and Other Stories and Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, as they connect to broader conversations about Black Studies, critical race theory and biological essentialism, and the relationship between poetics and the sciences.

Jenny Qi reflects on the process of grief and how her scientific and artistic lives merged in her debut poetry collection Focal Point. Jenny, who wrote much of the book during her Ph.D. program in cancer biology, thinks about life in the lab, the language and communication of science, different disciplinary writing genres/methods, the emotional immediacy in poems, and trying to make sense of the world.

Poet, playwright, and oral historian Kelli Stevens Kane is the author of Hallelujah Science. Kane shares her process of writing and structuring her debut poetry collection as a time capsule, and how the themes and visions of science are imagined in experimental and numerical language, in the body, in fever dreams, and in nature. We also discussed the complementary aspirations of science and oral history, rather than the conventional (and “modern”!) view of them as opposites.

Grace M. Cho (College of Staten Island, CUNY) discusses her hybrid text Tastes Like War: A Memoir (a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction) and how her framing of memories and the geopolitical context of her mother’s life are sociological investigations. Topics discussed include the biological gaze on schizophrenia, writing to uncover unspeakable and unknowable traumas, hearing voices as an experience that gives insight into the past rather than a symptom of pathology, and food as a form of resistance in her mother’s life.

I discuss the anthology What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories about Food and Family and its motivations with editor Sun Yung Shin and two contributors, V.V. (Sugi) Ganeshananthan and Roy G. Guzmán. Sun Yung was inspired by an article written by Viet Thanh Nguyen, who wrote about “narrative plentitude” in response to a world of “narrative scarcity”, and how they conceived of the project as a way to think about the everyday person who might happen to write about food. Following Sun Yung’s call, Sugi and Roy reflect on their own essays, how centering Minnesota is not merely a local perspective, and the collapse of academic and creative writing in what Roy calls “somewhere between theorizing and imagining”.

Dr. Jelani Ince (University of Washington) shares thoughts on research and how he sees it as both a form of collaboration and a way to be held accountable, avoiding the reproduction of harm and exploitation. In the conversation, he reflects on his past research on communities and social movements, his role as a professor during this critical moment for educators in the university, what is good data, who determines what is good data, and much, much more.

Dr. Victor Ray (University of Iowa) discusses his academic work and theory of racialized organizations, the connection between empirical sociology and social theory, the racial politics of citations, and the current debates on critical race theory. He ends with a nod to scholars who also write for the public, for the possibility of provoking society to reflect on itself.

Poet and journalist Khalisa Rae discusses her beautiful debut poetry collection, Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat, which examines race and racism, temporality, geography, ancestry, spirits and ghosts, language, body, trauma, and the genre and craft of poetry. She shares that specific poems reference particular people and topics as a way for her to contend with the current social moment and to foster a critical perspective through poetry, and calls her collection a mixture of prose and poetry or poetry in verse.

Ming-Cheau Lin is the author of the cookbook Just Add Rice: Stories and Recipes By a Taiwanese South African and memoir Yellow and Confused: Born in Taiwan, Raised in South Africa and Trying To Make Sense of It All. We discuss her two texts, with particular emphasis on displacement, relocation, and unlearning, how language and references travel, the difficulty of translating to both white communities and our families, and how her cookbook was a primer for introducing Taiwnese food and culture in South Africa.