Pretty Heady Stuff

Researcher and communicator Joe Duggan, a doctoral researcher at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, talks to me about why he created the "Is This How You Feel?" project, which asks climate scientists to compose handwritten letters expressing how the climate crisis makes them feel.

Author and activist Max Haiven outlines some radical ways of approaching the challenges that we face globally, in a moment that seems characterized by a series of unprecedented and growing crises.

Artist and communicator Jodi Cooper discusses the complicated and exciting process of making a film that speaks to the fans who are financing it and satisfies the artists who made it.

"The Woodsmen"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYB3sl6RJDs

Bestselling graphic non-fiction author Box Brown speaks with me about nostalgia and popular culture, wrestling as an analogue for the theatre of politics, and (especially) the graphic medium of comics as a distinct way to look at history. His book Is This Guy for Real? The Unbelievable Life of Andy Kaufman, just won a much-deserved Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work -- Kaufman played in the lines between reality and fiction and Brown talks about the ways that writing about Kaufman's life meant figuring out relatable ways to represent an artist that defied categorization.

In this episode we discuss the importance of seeing culture, ideas and ideology as central parts of the struggle for climate action and an end to neoliberal extractivism. Jeff identifies a troubling "mood" that dominates conversations about the climate; this mood is part of a larger "haze" that prevents us from fully accepting the extent of the damage or the urgency of the threat.

Following a federal election that exposed some serious issues with Canadian democracy, author and activist El Jones sat down with me to discuss how the rhetoric of emotion is used to simplify political debates around race and how the insularized ways we communicate get in the way of critical dialogue.