This episode of Sum Ruminations is a recorded conversation, produced and recorded with generous production support from Herman Pearl at PearlArts Movement & Sound in Pittsburgh, between artist collaborators jaamil olawale kosoko, Dahlia Li, and JS Wu.

Across two episodes the three collaborators, friends, and artists discuss how formative childhood experiences of estrangement, queer/femme sociality, quixotic experiences of race, mystical experiences with media, and the various joys and difficulties of embodied artistic labor shape what it means to make and be made through aesthetic practice. 

Sum Ruminations appears on Podalot, the podcast of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College. This limited series builds on the work of the “Just Art” faculty/staff research seminar. More information about Just Art and Aydelotte can be found here. 

jaamil olawale kosoko is a multi-spirited Nigerian American choreographer, author, performance artist, and curator. jaamil’s interdisciplinary practice merges performance, video, sculpture, and poetry, exploring queer Black theory, emergence, and critical rest-care strategies for BIPOC+ liberation and reparation. jaamil’s works including The (chrysalis) Archives, Black Body Amnesia, Chameleon, séancers, and Bessie Award-nominated #negrophobia have toured to venues including EMPAC, Fusebox Festival, The Guggenheim Museum, ICA at VCU, Montréal Arts Interculturels, Museum of Arts and Design, New York Live Arts, and Wexner Center for the Arts, among many others. jaamil has received a Doris Duke Performing Arts Technology Lab grant, LMCC’s Extended Life Residency, a Slamdance Jury Prize for Best Experimental Short Film, a La Becque Residency (Switzerland), two MacDowell Fellowships, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Choreography, and a Princeton Arts Fellowship. They have held curatorial positions at New York Live Arts and FringeArts, and lectured at Princeton University, The New School, Bennington College, and Sarah Lawrence College. Visit jaamil.com for more information. 

Dahlia Li is a scholar and artist working between the fields of dance and performance, screen-based media, critical diaspora studies, and feminist, queer, and trans poetics. Her manuscript-in-progress, Stranded Affect: Decolonial Screen Ecologies and Diasporas of Disappointment explores these research interests through a global south framework. She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Swarthmore College. She received her PhD in English with certificates in Cinema and Media Studies as well as Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s studies from UPenn. From 2022-2023 she was a Helena Rubenstein Critical Studies Fellow through the Whitney ISP. She has performed, exhibited work, and taught artist's workshops at a variety of venues in Europe and North America including the 2016 Venice Biennale, the 2022 Tanzkongress, Schmorévaz Project Space, p0nderosa dance center, and EmergeNYC, among others. Her writing can be found in The Routledge Companion To Dance and American Popular Culture, The Journal of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, PA Museum Online, Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts, and the exhibition catalog for "The Dancing Plague" at GaMEeC Bergamo. 

JS Wu (they/she) is a scholar and artist thinking about the intersections of labor, technology, and identity in the broadly defined field of animation. They are an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh. Their academic work has been published in Animation Studies and ASAP/Review. They have also published graphic essays on race and new media for general audiences in The Believer and ANMLY. They are currently working on an academic monograph, The Animating In-between: Producing Race in Studio Animation, and a book-length comic, Asian American Psycho: A Graphic Novel.

This episode of Sum Ruminations is a recorded conversation, produced and recorded with generous production support from Herman Pearl at PearlArts Movement & Sound in Pittsburgh, between artist collaborators jaamil olawale kosoko, Dahlia Li, and JS Wu.

Across two episodes the three collaborators, friends, and artists discuss how formative childhood experiences of estrangement, queer/femme sociality, quixotic experiences of race, mystical experiences with media, and the various joys and difficulties of embodied artistic labor shape what it means to make and be made through aesthetic practice. 

Sum Ruminations appears on Podalot, the podcast of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College. This limited series builds on the work of the “Just Art” faculty/staff research seminar. More information about Just Art and Aydelotte can be found here. 

jaamil olawale kosoko is a multi-spirited Nigerian American choreographer, author, performance artist, and curator. jaamil’s interdisciplinary practice merges performance, video, sculpture, and poetry, exploring queer Black theory, emergence, and critical rest-care strategies for BIPOC+ liberation and reparation. jaamil’s works including The (chrysalis) Archives, Black Body Amnesia, Chameleon, séancers, and Bessie Award-nominated #negrophobia have toured to venues including EMPAC, Fusebox Festival, The Guggenheim Museum, ICA at VCU, Montréal Arts Interculturels, Museum of Arts and Design, New York Live Arts, and Wexner Center for the Arts, among many others. jaamil has received a Doris Duke Performing Arts Technology Lab grant, LMCC’s Extended Life Residency, a Slamdance Jury Prize for Best Experimental Short Film, a La Becque Residency (Switzerland), two MacDowell Fellowships, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Choreography, and a Princeton Arts Fellowship. They have held curatorial positions at New York Live Arts and FringeArts, and lectured at Princeton University, The New School, Bennington College, and Sarah Lawrence College. Visit jaamil.com for more information. 

Dahlia Li is a scholar and artist working between the fields of dance and performance, screen-based media, critical diaspora studies, and feminist, queer, and trans poetics. Her manuscript-in-progress, Stranded Affect: Decolonial Screen Ecologies and Diasporas of Disappointment explores these research interests through a global south framework. She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Swarthmore College. She received her PhD in English with certificates in Cinema and Media Studies as well as Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s studies from UPenn. From 2022-2023 she was a Helena Rubenstein Critical Studies Fellow through the Whitney ISP. She has performed, exhibited work, and taught artist's workshops at a variety of venues in Europe and North America including the 2016 Venice Biennale, the 2022 Tanzkongress, Schmorévaz Project Space, p0nderosa dance center, and EmergeNYC, among others. Her writing can be found in The Routledge Companion To Dance and American Popular Culture, The Journal of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, PA Museum Online, Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts, and the exhibition catalog for "The Dancing Plague" at GaMEeC Bergamo. 

JS Wu (they/she) is a scholar and artist thinking about the intersections of labor, technology, and identity in the broadly defined field of animation. They are an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh. Their academic work has been published in Animation Studies and ASAP/Review. They have also published graphic essays on race and new media for general audiences in The Believer and ANMLY. They are currently working on an academic monograph, The Animating In-between: Producing Race in Studio Animation, and a book-length comic, Asian American Psycho: A Graphic Novel.

This episode is the recording of an event held at Swarthmore College on October 27, 2025. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd and Nayanika Ghosh discussed the history of discursive and institutional tactics deployed to delegitimize knowledge-making in the humanities and in the sciences. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd is a historian of US colleges and universities. Shepherd is the author of Resistance from the Right (University of North Carolina Press,2023) and host of the American Campus Podcast. Her forthcoming book projects are Degrees of Liberation withJohn R. Legg and Inventing the Liberal University. 

Nayanika Ghosh is a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies at Duke University. Her research brings interdisciplinary scholarship on science, race, and gender in conversation with the histories of U.S. higher education, the New Left, and the Cold War. She is currently working on her first monograph, Genes and the Left: Sociobiology and the Backlash Against Radical Science.

This episode is the recording of an event held at Swarthmore College on April 14, 2025 between Ruth J. Simmons and Anthony Bogues. They were discussing “Liberal Education and the Current Crisis.”

This event was presented by the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College’s Series on Race, Racism and the Liberal Arts, and the Ruth J. Simmons Center for Slavery and Justice at Brown University

Ruth J. Simmons is a President’s Distinguished Fellow at Rice University and Senior Adviser to the President of Harvard.  She was previously President of Prairie View A&M University, Brown University, and Smith College.

Anthony Bogues is a writer, scholar, curator, and the Director of the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University.

Aydelotte Foundation director, Patricia White, speaks with four Swarthmore faculty members who have organized the speaker series, "From South Africa to Gaza: World History and the Politics of Responsibility."

You can watch Naomi Klein's talk in the series, "Palestine, Zionism, and the Doppelganger Effect," here.

In late February, Andy Hines and Dennis Hogan organized a symposium at Haverford College called, "Universities and Democracy: The Politics of Higher Education Today." It brought together researchers, organizers, elected officials, and many others in the Philadelphia region to discuss the local and national transformation of the political economy of higher education.

Published on the same day as the AAUP's national day of action for higher education, we bring you four of the talks from that symposium by Vineeta Singh, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Donna Murch, and Davarian Baldwin.

We plan to broadcast more of the talks from this event in the future.

Speaker Bios

Vineeta Singh is assistant professor of interdisciplinary studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her writing on critical and abolitionist university studies can be found in Public Books and Critical Ethnic Studies.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. He is the author of the books Elite Capture and Reconsidering Reparations.

Donna Murch is associate professor of history at Rutgers University, where she is chapter president of the New Brunswick chapter of Rutgers AAUP-AFT. Her newest book is Assata Taught me: State Violence: Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives and she is the author of the award-winning Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.

Davarian Baldwin is the Paul E. Rather Distinguished Professor of American Studies and founding director of the Smart Cities Research Lab at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is the award-winning author of several books, most recently, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities. 

The symposium was sponsored by the ⁠John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities⁠, the ⁠Haverford College Distinguished Visitors Program⁠, and the ⁠Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College⁠.

Tim Burke, Rachel Buurma, and Andy Hines speak with Tristan Ahtone and Maria Parazo Rose about their work on "Land Grab Universities," a project that makes a direct, irrefutable claim about how the wealth of land-grant universities is linked to indigenous dispossession. The discussion considers how to understand the present ramifications of the Morrill Act of 1862, how the process associated with land-grant universities might extend to other institutions, and the next phase of their project.

Tristan Ahtone is a member of the Kiowa Tribe and is Editor at Large at Grist. 

Maria Parazo Rose is a spatial data analyst at Grist, where she writes and makes maps about Indigenous affairs, conservation, and climate migration

The Aydelotte Foundation is an interdisciplinary research center and intellectual community located at Swarthmore College. It supports the creation and dissemination of knowledge about liberal arts education as it exists across the broadest possible range of contexts and institutions.

Theme music is "Advocad" by Jonas Hipper.

Tim Burke, Rachel Buurma, and Andy Hines speak with Stephen Sparks take a somewhat different approach to talking about every professor’s favorite subject, namely ChatGPT and AI generally. It is not just an issue for American academics: faculty in South African universities are also reckoning with its impact. The problem of technologically sophisticated strategies for cheating (as well as some of the classics) is painfully familiar there as well as here, all the more so during the pandemic.

Stephen Sparks is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at University of Johannesburg.

The Aydelotte Foundation is an interdisciplinary research center and intellectual community located at Swarthmore College. It supports the creation and dissemination of knowledge about liberal arts education as it exists across the broadest possible range of contexts and institutions.

Theme music is "Advocad" by Jonas Hipper.