Interweaving

In this episode of Interweaving, host John Collins speaks with Catherine Tedford, curator of the Street Art Graphics digital archive. They discuss her work collecting and analyzing political stickers from around the world and look at examples of stickers expressing a wide range of views on social and political issues ranging from war and workers’ rights to refugees and the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this episode of Interweaving, host John Collins talks with media scholar Bill Yousman (Sacred Heart University) about recent trends in disinformation in the age of COVID and mass school shootings. They discuss how claims of secret conspiracies, facilitated by social media algorithms, can manipulate even the most critical media analysts and deflect attention away from much-needed structural analysis of corporate and state power.

In this episode of Interweaving, host John Collins speaks with Skylar Bergeron, author of three recent Weave News articles about the Chueca neighborhood in Madrid, Spain, a point of intersection for numerous political and cultural struggles. In addition to exploring the tensions between pinkwashing and queer liberation, they explore the increasing presence of fascism in the US and Spain and the importance of coalition building for resisting far-right attacks on “gender ideology.”

In this episode of Interweaving, host John Collins speaks with Camila Gonzalez Herrera, author of two recent Weave News articles about the 2021 Colombian National Strike. In addition to discussing the strike itself and how it revealed the power of the people, they also explore the limitations of establishment media coverage, the importance of independent media and social media for grassroots mobilization, and the impact of the strike on Colombia’s historic 2022 elections.

In this episode, we feature a roundtable discussion about the intersection of settler colonialism, ecological responsibility, and the rights of nature in northern New York/Haudenosaunee territory and beyond. In addition to exploring the past and present reality of dams and energy issues in the region, the conversation addresses broader ethical questions about how to move beyond our current system of extractive capitalism.

In this episode of Interweaving, host John Collins talks with Somdeep Sen, author of a recent article on how race and racism have shaped the field of international relations. They talked about how deeply racism is entrenched in the way we talk and think about geopolitics, both in general and in relation to stories such as the ongoing war on Ukraine.

In this episode of Interweaving, host John Collins talks with religious studies scholar Damon Berry about Christian nationalism and its relevance to the war on Ukraine. They discuss how Christian nationalists in the US see the world through a lens of white nostalgia, where their views connect with Vladimir Putin’s agenda, and why it is politically necessary to look closely at these views even if we find them abhorrent.

In this episode of Interweaving, host John Collins talks with Claudia Hoffmann (University of Miami) about how a critical understanding of race and xenophobia can help us understand public discourse surrounding Ukrainian refugees. Drawing on her experience in Germany, Hoffmann insists that European hypocrisy regarding migrants from different parts of the world can be overcome if we focus on the humanity of the migrants themselves rather than the polemical debates surrounding them.

In this episode of Interweaving, host John Collins talks with sociologist Mark Ayyash about how the war on Ukraine connects with the ongoing colonization of Palestine. Ayyash discusses how his experience as a Palestinian Canadian shapes his view of the Ukraine situation, the sudden liberal embrace of molotov cocktails and other methods of resisting military occupation, and the prevalence of racist and ethnocentric news coverage surrounding Ukraine.

In this episode of Interweaving, host Nicole Roché talks with author Pedro Ponce, who won the 2020 Don Belton Fiction Prize for his new short story collection, The Devil and the Dairy Princess. They discuss his narrative use of misdirection, “unreliable omniscience,” and much more. The book was published in October 2021 by Indiana University Press.