In Afroindigenization: A Theory of Grassroots Cultural Practice (Duke University Press, 2026), Catherine A. John addresses the underbelly of spiritual resilience shaping a range of African diasporic institutions, traditions, and practices. John argues that repressed forms of indigenous African knowledge systems manifest in a myriad of culturally embodied ways in African diaspora spaces and places. From mermaid lore in rural Jamaica to hip-hop trance-induced dance in Los Angeles to the stories of two debaters-turned-social-media-influencers, John shows how the descendants of enslaved Africans express the signs and substance of their afroindigenous power through collective creativity. Drawing from scholars such as Vèvè Clark, Hortense Spillers, Dianne M. Stewart, and Sylvia Wynter, Afroindigenization exposes the cultural and spiritual ancestries that lie at the heart of modern Black identities and practices.

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In John Charles Simon and Jennalee Donian’s Understanding Laughter and Humor: Why We Laugh, Why We Don’t, and Why It Matters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), the authors put forward a comprehensive new theoretical approach to understanding laughter and the humour we use to inspire it. Applying an evolutionary and biological lens to these complex and universal human behaviours, the book distinguishes itself from classical and contemporary theories by focusing not simply on laughter’s causes and effects, but on what can be gleaned from considering its communicative meaning.

At the centre of the book is the Mutual Vulnerability Theory (MVT) of Laughter, which understands laughter as a vital form of nonverbal communication, one that seeks in various ways to “lift” or “lower” moments of physical, emotional, cognitive, or social vulnerability between people. From this perspective, laughter sheds light on the social dynamics that govern human interaction, both positive and negative. It reveals the importance of vulnerability and status in our conscious and subconscious lives, while also underscoring our desire to cooperate, our respect for those who compete fairly, and our disdain for those who do not.

Wide-ranging and highly accessible, Understanding Laughter and Humor will be of interest to general readers, humour scholars, psychologists, anthropologists, comedians, and anyone curious about a seemingly mundane but vital aspect of everyday life — one intrinsic not only to human sociality, but also deeply connected to our great ape relatives and evolutionary past.

Additional content mentioned in the episode:

Understanding Laughter and Humor: A Companion and Guide, Volume 1, the first in a companion-guide series applying MVT to examples of humour and laughter across different media and formats.

John’s Psychology Today blog, Laughter and Humor 101, which expands on and explores various aspects of the Mutual Vulnerability Theory.

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What is kinship? This central question in cultural anthropology is standardly answered in terms of culturally constructed relationships that are unconstrained by biological relationships. In Kin Matters: Relational Beings in the Fragile Sciences (Oxford UP, 2026), Robert Wilson proposes an alternative view that does not separate kin relations from biological facts about reproduction that are universally known, such as the fact that human females are pregnant before they give birth. On the Progenerative View, kinship is the cultural elaboration of reproductive relations, which act as constraints on kin relations. Wilson, who is professor of philosophy at the University of Western Australia, also analyzes incest avoidance from this perspective, and draws on clinical findings, primatology, and philosophy of mind and philosophy of biology to develop his biologically-based yet non-reductive and culturally variable view of kinship.

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In a world obsessed with expertise and control, the figure of the idiot illuminates deeper truths about society. In this interview, Morteza Hajizadeh interviews Leonhard Emmerling about his book The Idiots: The History of the Homo Nullus (Seagull Books, 2026)

Dostoevsky and Nietzsche wrote about him; Dadaists and punks idolized him; artists like Warhol and Beuys made him their icon. From holy fool to punk rebel, the idiot—a figure that traces its roots back to the Greek idiotes, a person who was alienated from public life—has always challenged society’s norms from the margins. Far from a simple madman, the idiot is a powerful subversive, a person who disregards norms and finds profound insight in a state of unmediated inspiration. Using a cross-disciplinary approach bridging literature, religion, art, and philosophy, this volume traces a rich journey up to the present, where the idiot reemerges in a dramatic twist: a public figure who inverts social norms, confounds the boundary between private and public, and declares a new, paradoxical view of the world.

Leonhard Emmerling has worked as an art historian in different capacities: as curator and director of art institutions in Germany and New Zealand; as teacher at art academies in Auckland, Düsseldorf, and Munich; and as advisor and director for the Goethe-Institut. His most recent publication is Aesthetics: What For?.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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“The general thrust of capitalist policy in this period aims at the intensified imposition of work in response to ongoing struggle against it.”

—Harry Cleaver, “Work Is Still the Central Issue: New Words for New Worlds,” in Points of Departure, ed. Robert Ovetz and Kevin Van Meter, p. 35.

 What changes if we begin the history of capitalism not with what capital does to workers, but with what workers force capital to do?

This reversal helps set Harry Cleaver’s approach to Marxism apart from more traditional accounts of capitalism and labor. In Points of Departure: Refusal of Work and the Crisis of Capitalism, editors Robert Ovetz and Kevin Van Meter bring together Cleaver’s writings from several decades, including hard-to-find and previously untranslated work.

The first volume in Common Notions’ new Class Compositions series presents Cleaver’s work not simply as theory, but as a practical way of making sense of everyday struggles from the worker’s standpoint. The refusal of work, unwaged labor, class composition, capitalist crisis, and self-valorization take on renewed significance amid contemporary struggles over work and organization. Greek and Turkish translations are also in the works.

Listeners may know Cleaver from his landmark 1979 book Reading Capital Politically. For more than five decades, he has helped develop what became known as autonomist Marxism, an approach that places working-class self-activity at the center of its analysis. In this interview Ovetz and Van Meter discuss the traditions from which his work emerged, and what they hope a new generation of readers might do with it in their search for alternatives. 

Although more conventional accounts of political economy often begin with companies restructuring workplaces, introducing new technologies, moving investment, or tightening workplace discipline. Cleaver instead, turns the perspective around by asking what forms of worker resistance may have compelled capital to make those changes in the first place.

That reversal in turn raises questions the editors grapple with, such as: How do everyday acts of resistance become collective power? How can we demonstrate that corporate restructuring is actually a response to worker resistance, and what might other approaches add to or supplement Cleaver’s inversion of class perspective? And when workers create organizations of their own, how can those institutions preserve autonomy without hardening into less responsive bureaucracies?

Drawing on concepts like workers’ inquiry, workplace cooperation, self-valorization, cooperatives, as well as the significance of Zapatistas, we consider what it means to move beyond refusing existing forms of work toward creating new forms of collective life.

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I spoke with Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington about her 2026 book Artificial Historians, co-authored with Anne Martin and Lewis Yarlupurka O’Brien. A distinguished historian, philosopher, academic leader, and Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) based at the University of Adelaide, my guest explores how the logic of history, defined around trivalent logic (the “maybes,” the “ifs,” the ontological uncertainties), intersects with and challenges the logic of dominant AI algorithms.

The book raises urgent questions about the changing status of human agency, the ethics of AI-powered data collection about us, and the de facto histories that AI is writing about us every second—histories that may decide whether we can travel, access education, or receive medical care. We talk about the opportunities that this perspective on AI presents to humans (and historians in particular!), how some non-Western conceptions of history—for instance, those of the Indigenous nations of Australia—complicate the dominant Western understanding of what history is, and the challenges we must address as we hand over more and more data and delegate the writing of actual human histories to AI.

Aristotle makes a cameo, and my guest talks about how the economy might be shifting from knowledge bias to ethics bias.

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We live in a fragile world. This much is evident as stories abound of

While there

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book

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In the Anthropocene, a question has become increasingly urgent: What

Reflecting on more than a decade of ethnographic

Rather

Piergiorgio

Yadong

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Can laws be unjust and yet remain, in some sense, morally legitimate? In Political Philosophy: The Puzzle of Legitimate Injustice (Princeton UP, 2026), Jonathan Quong considers central issues in political philosophy through the lens of this single question. He explores and evaluates recent influential work on this topic and then proposes a novel approach of his own. The puzzle at the heart of his account is the phenomenon of legitimate injustice—laws and policies that are substantively unjust yet may be legitimately imposed by government officials. How can such laws be legitimate if, as some have argued, justice is the first virtue of social institutions?

Quong analyzes the work of those who deny that injustice committed by states can be legitimate simply by virtue of its democratic or procedural pedigree; the Kantian account of legitimate institutions and justice; instrumental approaches to political legitimacy; and the recent wave of work in democratic theory focused on its egalitarian character. Arguing that these analyses do not offer an adequate solution to the puzzle and that there are compelling reasons to revise or reject them, Quong lays out his view and explains the implications for more general theories of political morality. He argues that we can explain legitimate injustice by appeal to distributive justice. If political disagreement is inevitable, then unjust legislation is largely unavoidable; it constitutes a burden that must be distributed according to just principles. Quong’s novel and illuminating framework offers a unique introduction to crucial questions in political philosophy.

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The idea of civility goes back to classical Rome and the ways in

I had the pleasure of discussing Civility Unbound

The various contributing authors to Civility Unbound

We discussed the First America podcast during the conversation. Here is a link to the podcast website: First America Podcast

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics

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