Biography: Dr. Jamil Khader is a Palestinian-American scholar of English literature, literary theory, and cultural politics whose work explores how stories shape our understanding of power, identity, and justice. Across a career spanning institutions in the Middle East and the United States, he has cultivated a distinctive intellectual voice—bringing together Marxist critique, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and anti-colonial thought to interrogate the entanglements of culture, power, and global inequality. He earned his Ph.D. in English literature from The Pennsylvania State University and served as  Dean of Research at Bethlehem University in Palestine and as Editor-in-Chief of the Bethlehem University Journal.  He currently serves as Associate Professor of English at Bethune-Cookman University, an HBCU in Florida. Dr. Khader is the author of two books and numerous academic and public-facing essays.

Show Notes: Our conversation centers on Khader’s recent article, “Universalizing Capital, Foreclosing Necro-Imperialism, and Žižek’s Liberal Zionist Response to the Gaza Genocide.” Published in Middle East critique In it, Khader offers a rigorous immanent critique of Slavoj Žižek’s writing on the Gaza genocide. Khader tracks how Žižek repeatedly shifts the explanatory ground away from settler colonialism and necro-imperial political economy, and toward moral equivalence, “tragic” framing, and the language of liberal Zionism. We talk through Zizek’s three strategies of foreclosure that Khader calls the—mythic, geographic, and ethical—and how these moves can render Palestinian political subjectivity unintelligible, even inside theories that claim emancipation as their horizon.

Along the way, we get into the larger stakes: Western Marxism and its limits, the problem of universality, the role of organization and praxis, and why thinking from Palestine isn’t a narrowing of theory—but an insistence that universality must be rebuilt from the standpoint of those made disposable under empire.

Links: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19436149.2025.2602098

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11841-020-00799-0

Biography: Sydney Beckmann earned her PhD in American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, where she was a Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bolinski Fellow. Her research is interdisciplinary and intersects the areas of religion, race, and colonialism. She focuses on the legacy of colonial discourse and its effect on urban indigeneity particularly how government policies and rhetoric around urbanity perpetuate colonial ideologies designed to erase indigenous people and further entrench settler colonial domination of indigenous lands. Her teaching and research engage critical indigenous theory and center theories and methodologies around relationality. Her current book project, The Pan-Indian Problem, Relationality Within and Beyond Colonialism, explores the largely under-researched of pan-Indianism.

Show Notes: Our conversation centers on Sydney Beckmann’s article, “Pan-Indianism and Authenti(city): Refusing Colonial Borders,” published in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal Beckmann’s argument shows, that the term Pan-Indianism isn’t neutral, and it isn’t simply descriptive. It’s a label with a history—one that moves through anthropology’s mid-century acculturation studies, through federal policy in the Termination Era and relocation programs, and into the present as a lingering framework that still shapes how Indigenous presence in cities is narrated, measured, and too often pathologized.

Along the way, we get into how pan-Indianism becomes a kind of catch-all signifier—sometimes used to critique appropriation and flattening, other times used to describe intertribal alliance and collective resistance. Beckmann pushes us beyond the gridlock question of “good or bad” and instead asks: Where did this term come from? What political work was it designed to do? And how does it keep doing that work today—especially in the settler-colonial “grammar” of urban space?

We talk about the power of naming, the refusal of colonial categories, and the persistent “deficiency” narratives imposed on Indigenous life—particularly the assumption that urban Indigeneity must mean assimilation, loss, or longing. If you like what we do here please like a subscribe and share.

Links: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/09j929rj

Biography: Dr. Alex Moulton earned his PhD in Geography from Clark University, with a MS in Geography from East Carolina University and a BSc in Geography and Geology from the University of the West Indies, Mona. His research examines Black geographical epistemologies and history, ecological justice, community resource governance, landscape legacies of colonization, and political ecology of environmental change. Working at the intersection of critical social science, the environmental humanities, and physical geography, his research draws on a range of methodologies and epistemologies. Prior to Hunter College, Dr. Moulton was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville with previous teaching appointments at Middle Tennessee State University and the University of the West Indies, Jamaica.

Show Notes: In this episode we discuss Dr. Alex Moulton and Inge Salo’s "Black geographies and Black ecologies as insurgent ecocriticism." The conversation centers on Dr. Moulton’s work on Black geographies and Black ecologies and how these frameworks challenge traditional approaches to environmental thought and eco-criticism.

The discussion begins with the concept of insurgent eco-criticism, which Moulton describes as a way of rethinking ecological scholarship by centering race and racialization—not simply adding them into existing frameworks, but questioning the assumptions and categories that structure environmental knowledge in the first place. From there, the conversation traces the genealogies of Black geographies and Black ecology, examining how these fields developed out of the political and intellectual contexts of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly through the work of scholars responding to civil rights struggles, urban segregation, and emerging environmental debates.

Moulton explains how Black geographies emerged through scholars studying the spatial realities of Black life, including segregation, redlining, and sundown towns, while Black ecology developed through critiques of mainstream environmentalism, particularly its neglect of urban environments and communities of color. Although these traditions emerged through different disciplinary pathways, the conversation highlights how both share a common concern with understanding how Black communities navigate, transform, and create spaces of life within conditions shaped by colonialism, racial capitalism, and environmental inequality.

The episode also explores methodological questions within Black geographies, including how scholars draw on archives beyond traditional academic sources. Moulton discusses the importance of poetics, music, oral traditions, foodways, and everyday cultural practices as forms of knowledge production that reveal relationships between people, space, and nature that conventional research methods often overlook.

Throughout the discussion, we engage major thinkers in the field—including Clyde Woods, Katherine McKittrick, Nathan Hare, and Sylvia Wynter—and reflect on concepts such as blues epistemology, demonic ground, and the plurality of Black geographies. The conversation ultimately emphasizes that Black geographies do not simply add Black experiences to existing frameworks but instead rethink how knowledge about space, nature, and society is produced.

Links:

https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/environment-and-society/13/1/ares130110.xml