Catch up on the May 2022 episodes of Projections, a new series from the Money on the Left Editorial Collective hosted by Will Beaman (@agoingaccount). Projections offers short readings of current events that destabilize and contest mainstream conservative narratives on behalf of an inclusive progressive politics.

Tracklist:
1. Up for Grabs
2. The Calls Are From Inside the House
3. Grab-bags & Constellations
4. Cops Don’t Care

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Music: “Lilac” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) draws out the ideological stakes of recent comparisons between teachers and police in the wake of the recent school shooting in Uvalde, TX.

Historian and philologist Brendan Cook joins Scott Ferguson for this special 3-part  Superstructure in which they examine a keystone of the Western philosophical tradition: Plato’s Republic. In Part 1 of their discussion, Brendan and Scott set up a critical consideration of the influential text’s fraught metaphysical commitments and political implications by situating The Republic within Fourth-Century (BCE) Athenian Democracy and teasing out its complex dialogical approach to the question of justice.   

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

This week, Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) offers critical reflection on recent statements by Jacobin Magazine's Matt Karp, in which he dismissed recent Democratic Party primary victories against establishment candidates as moving backwards to a "pre-Bernie era" of "vague constellations of grab-bag progressives."

Reflecting on recent protests outside of Brett Kavanaugh's home as well as a recent news story where police invaded the home of a 16 year old trans twitch streamer, Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) notes ways in which conservative narratives around household and parental identity are unstable and contested.

In this special episode of Superstructure, Cohost Natalie Tabb Smith (@orangeasm) is joined by Erica Robles-Anderson (@fstflofscholars) and Scott Ferguson (@videotroph) to discuss common interests between the Money on the Left Editorial Collective and the Oikos working group on kinship/economy. Naty, Erica and Scott reflect on households, financial forms, and reproductive politics in our contemporary political economy through the prism of Melinda Cooper’s 2017 text, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism.

Continuing their consideration of pleasure for a world of leftist struggle, co-hosts Charlotte Tavan (@moltopopulare) and Natalie Tabb Smith (@orangeasm) turn to a recently published Superstructure article co-authored by Erica Robles-Anderson and Scott Ferguson. Titled "The Visual Cliff: Eleanor Gibson and the Origins of Affordance," the essay critically locates the hidden history of contemporary user-experience design in a well-known psychological experiment. Conducted by Dr. Eleanor Gibson, the experiment placed babies alone atop a visual precipice in order to test their depth perception. Following the essay, Charlotte and Naty question the notion that we must remain frozen forever between false binaries, like babies staring over an impossible visual cliff. Doing so, their discussion weaves through thinkers as diverse as Lynne Segal, Adrienne Maree Brown, Lisa Duggan, Gayle Rubin, and more.

In this first episode of Projections, Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) reflects on some recent comments from US Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va) suggesting Democrats should prioritize inflation over Roe v. Wade in their campaign messaging in the midterms.

Music: “Lilac” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Co-hosts Charlotte Tavan (@moltopopulare) and Natalie Tabb Smith (@orangeasm) discuss conceptualizations of pleasure on the left, looking at a recent article arguing against the radicalism of polyamory in Novara for part 1 of this installment of Medium Femme.

Money on the Left speaks with Dr. Sonia Ivancic about the importance of regionally sensitive and affirmative storytelling in provisioning processes. Assistant Professor in organizational communication at University of South Florida, Dr. Ivancic is a community-engaged researcher, whose work on “place-based narrative labor” offers essential new tools for displacing prevailing scarcity logics and rhetorics of austerity with more capacious ways of thinking, arguing, and narrating. 

Through embedded fieldwork with non-profit, rural Appalachian food distributors, Professor Ivancic has developed astute critiques of the narrative frames used by some grant-making non-profits as they paradoxically seek to address privation and hunger in Appalachia by perpetually framing privation and hunger in Appalachia as the region’s most salient and seemingly default characteristics. In place of this “deficit-driven” characterization–which, owing to the ways that such projects depend on the grant cycle, is nearly always the dominant kind of characterization–Dr. Ivancic identifies and promotes an “asset-driven” mode of place-based narrative labor. With this asset-based approach, the provisioning process affirmatively calls attention to and works to expand the capacities and potentials of a given community, honoring the dignity of particular communities, while opening political imaginaries to include new metrics for collective flourishing and renewal. 

In our conversation, we extend Ivancic’s theorization of asset-driven place-based narrative labor to rethink the challenges and potentials of a Federal Job Guarantee under a future Green New Deal. We also draw rich parallels between her account of narrativity in local provisioning and conceptions of macro political economy in Modern Monetary Theory and other heterodox traditions in political economy. 

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com