Critiques of conspiracy thinking abound—but what if our world needs a conspiracy, of people willing to confront their own participation in institutional injustices? Joseph Dumit explains why large corporations knowingly engage in antihuman activities; he also draws from Adrian Piper’s insights into bullying institutions, the impact of bystanding, and the importance of blowing the whistle when we notice harm being inflicted.

Joseph Masco and Lisa Wedeen, eds., Conspiracy/Theory Duke University Press, 2024

Joseph Dumit, Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health Duke University Press, 2012

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For over half a century, Big Oil and the plastics industry, through their trade associations and front groups, have sold the public the false idea that plastics are recyclable. Recycling became the mantra of good ecological stewardship, promoted by the likes of city governments, school children, and environmental groups. Davis Allen lays out the mass-marketing of a deception. (Encore presentation.)

Resources:

Center for Climate Integrity, The Fraud of Plastic Recycling: How Big Oil and the Plastics Industry Deceived the Public for Decades and Caused the Plastic Waste Crisis February, 2024

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What can sex workers add to discussions around transformative justice, prison abolition, and labor organizing? Heather Berg has spoken with sex worker radicals whose perspectives on left theory and practice are informed by encounters with ever-present threats to their lives and livelihoods. (Encore presentation.)

Heather Berg, “‘If You’re Going to Be Beautiful, You Better Be Dangerous’: Sex Worker Community Defense” Radical History Review

Heather Berg, Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism University of North Carolina Press, 2021

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For decades after World War Two, the defense industry polluted the desert near Tucson’s Southside and poisoned the aquifer from which the largely Mexican American neighborhood got its drinking water. Sunaura Taylor, who was born there, reflects on lessons from the residents’ struggle — and asks what a genuine remedy might look like. She discusses an environmentalism that recognizes that we all are or will become disabled — and fights not just for the able-bodied, but to extend care to all, including the rest of the natural world.

Resources:

Sunaura Taylor, Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert UC Press, 2024

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What are discarded materials from extractive activities like mining doing to life on the planet? According to Gabrielle Hecht, what’s happening in South Africa to and around mountainous piles of mining residues crystallizes a number of thorny environmental and sociopolitical issues faced by communities around the globe. (Encore presentation.)

Gabrielle Hecht, Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures Duke University Press, 2023 (open access)

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It’s both a precious resource and a dangerous pollutant, exponentially increasing crop yields, while fouling our waterways with blue-green algae. The element phosphorus has played a crucial role in agriculture and war, while its reserves are unevenly distributed, with much of the world’s supply located in the occupied territories of Western Sahara. Writer Dan Egan discusses the double-edged nature of an element that is increasingly depleted and overused. (Encore presentation.)

Resources:

Dan Egan, The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance Norton, 2023

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More than two million farmworkers do the hard, sometimes backbreaking work of planting, growing, and harvesting crops in the U.S. Focusing on strawberry and grape pickers in California, David Bacon describes what the work involves, where the workers come from, and steps they’re taking to protect their rights and pursue justice.

The Reality Check: Stories and Photographs by David Bacon

David Bacon, More Than a Wall/Mas que un muro El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 2022

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What lessons can we learn from the ways working class people in the U.S., many of them women and people of color, took collective action during the depression of the 1930s? Historian Dana Frank discusses experiments in mutual aid and cooperatives, battles over the expulsion of Mexican and Mexican American workers, small-scale sit down strikes, including by African American wet nurses, as well as working class support for the fascist right.

Resources:

Dana Frank, What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? Stories of Ordinary People & Collective Action in Hard Times Beacon Press, 2024

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Black parents worry about racism’s impact on their children. Jennifer C. Nash is interested in both the nature of racialized anxiety and the way it’s rendered visible to the general public. Among other things, she looks at how Black mothers have used the epistolary form to convey their concerns, fears, and hopes.

Jennifer C. Nash, How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory Duke University Press, 2024

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When we think of potentially dangerous and addictive drugs, most of us think about illegal substances like heroine or cocaine. And yet widely-prescribed drugs like Xanax, Ritalin, Adderall, and Vicodin are also addictive, but legal in the United States. Historian David Herzberg discusses the artificial distinction that has been created between addictive drugs and medicines — with the key difference being the class and race of the consumers who use them and the partial protections that one group receives and the other does not.

Resources:

David Herzberg, White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America University of Chicago Press, 2020

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