Name It!

Hey, friends! In this episode we're talking about Josh Kun's term: audiotopia. An idea that names popular music's ability to create utopias for listeners, speak back to American racial hierarchies, and challenge nationalist narratives.

Before we give you the tl;dr (too long; didn't read) of Kun's Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America, we explore the boundary-pushing ability of music in our case study: the public censoring of the Shirelles' 1960 classic, “Will You Still Love me Tomorrow.” How dare a group of black women speak aloud their anxieties about sex and intimacy- blasphemy!

We talk about the audiotopias we create for ourselves. Kohar admits to making 700+ song playlists. Like, who does that?! And Iman flames Kohar for having boomer-adjacent music taste, while she describes herself as moving between the genres of house and hoe.

As always, we close out with our half-baked thoughts. The segment where we share ideas we haven't fleshed out, but stand fully behind. You'll just have to listen to the episode to hear those. 

As a special treat (you're welcome), we created our own Audiotopic playlists. You can listen to Iman’s on Spotify and Kohar’s (much longer playlist) on Apple Music.

Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America by University of California Press, 2005.

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'Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow' Turns 50: An Interview with Beverly Lee," The Takeaway, 2011. 

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Ellon Green, "A Magical Ten Seconds of the Shirelles," The New Yorker, November 18, 2018. 

Hey, friends! In our first episode we're talking about Name It! That's right, this is our self-titled episode *insert Bey meme.*

As our case study we reflect on how Name It! came to be and the political function of naming. We're breaking the fourth-wall and talking about the process of bringing the show into reality (and let us just say it was a process), naming as a survival tool, and all the spaces, places, and people who've passed their survival tools onto us. ​

As our case study, we answer the question: where do you know from? Iman talks about what her name means in Arabic, growing up Black and Muslim in Northeast Ohio, and shares a story about her name change at nine years old. Kohar discusses the genealogy of her family name, what it means in Armenian, and how she discovered art was her intellectual medium.

​As always, we close out with our half-baked thoughts. The segment where we share ideas we haven't fleshed out, but stand fully behind. You'll just have to listen to the episode to hear those. 

Our families, loved ones, friends, and mentors.

Karim, Jamillah. American Muslim Women: Negotiating Race, Class, and Gender within the Ummah. NYU Press, 2008.

Zuroski, Eugenia. "Where Do You Know From?: An Exercise in Placing Ourselves Together in the Classroom." MAI: Feminism (2020).

Avakian, Kohar. "Inheritance." Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 29, no. 1 (2022): 128-128.

AbdoulKarim, Iman. "Islam is Black Lives Matter: The Role of Gender and Religion in Muslim Women's Activism," In Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter, Vanderbilt University Press, 2021.

Iman and Kohar, friends-turned-PhD-students, break down a big idea, changing how they think about the world and talk to each other!  

We're two best friends who met at Dartmouth College and have been bonding over our nerdom since. We started Name It! to share the ideas we've picked up from books, classrooms, sister-friends, and ancestors. Ideas that have helped us name what it means to live at the intersections. Each episode we do the reading and research on one of those ideas so you don't have to. Whether it's Audre Lorde's notion of "the erotic" or Toni Morrison's "safe harbors," consider Name It! your encyclopodia of big ideas that are gonna change how you talk about the world... and you can go ahead and consider us your newest internet besties!