John Pring documents the history of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), specifically how this department has inflicted 30 years of violence and austerity on sick and disabled people in Britain.

John Pring is founder and editor of the news agency Disability News Service. He is co-creator of the Deaths by Welfare timeline, and co-editor and specialist advisor on the award-winning Museum of Austerity project. He has written for mainstream publications including the Guardian, Observer, Daily Mirror and Private Eye, and was associate producer on the award-winning Dispatches documentary, The Truth About Disability Benefits. He is the author of Longcare Survivors: The Biography of a Care Scandal.  Earlier this year, Pluto Press published his most recent book, The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence.

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

www.redmedicine.substack.com/

George Severs provides a history of HIV/AIDS in England, paying close attention to the various political and social formations that emerged to address the harms of the virus, which were compounded by institutional homophobia and state abandonment.

Dr George Severs is a historian of HIV/AIDS, sexual violence and sexual health in modern Britain. He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland where he is working on a history of sexual health and race. He is the author of Radical Acts: HIV/AIDS Activism in Late Twentieth-Century England. 

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

www.redmedicine.substack.com/

Nihal El Aasar discusses her recent essay, titled Left-wing Melancholia, which has been published as part of Parapraxis Magazine's Palestine issue.

In the essay Nihal explores the responses to the ongoing genocide in Gaza from people in other Arab countries. In her words “there have been certain weighted expectations for the Arab masses to react more strongly and urgently to this genocide. Some have heeded the call; some have tried and failed.” She draws on the work of people like Ghassan Kanafani, Nouri Gana, and friend of the podcast Hannah Proctor, to explore the relationship between counterrevolution in Egypt, US Imperialism, and Palestinian liberation through the lens of Arab political subjectivity.

Nihal El Aasar is an Egyptian researcher living in London. Her writing has been published by outlets such as Protean, Africa Is A Country, ArtReview, and elsewhere. Her essay can be found here: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/leftwing-melancholia 

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

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Youbin Kang and John Ferretti discuss the compounding issues of austerity, policing, and propaganda on the New York City subway system. Specifically, they explore the way incidents of harm and violence are taken up as part of a cycle of media panics and carceral crackdowns. Youbin's recent essay All Aboard the Moral Panic, published in n+1 magazine, and John's experiences of workplace organising provide the basis for the discussion.

Youbin Kang is a writer and Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University.

John Ferretti is a NYC Subway train conductor and a proud member of TWU Local 100, NYC's Subway and Bus workers' union. John is also a co-founder of the Local 100 Fightback Coalition – a rank-and-file Coalition of NYC Transit workers that is made up of both Revolutionary Socialists and Progressive Democrats in our union which was founded in September of 2018. 

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

www.redmedicine.substack.com/

Helen Charman describes some of the many political and historical struggles over the meaning and status of motherhood, by way of thinkers such as Denise Riley and Jacqueline Rose, as well as figures such as Margaret Thatcher and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 

Helen Charman is a Fellow and College Teaching Officer in English at Clare College, University of Cambridge. Her critical writing has been published in the Guardian, The White Review, Another Gaze, and The Stinging Fly among others. As a poet, Charman was shortlisted for the White Review Poet's Prize in 2017 and for the 2019 Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment, and has published four poetry pamphlets, most recently In the Pleasure Dairy. Charman volunteers as a birth companion in Glasgow.

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

www.redmedicine.substack.com/

Richard Seymour analyses the global far-right, asking how movements across the world have managed to capitalize on the resentment produced by the capitalist system to generate a form of violent rebellion that leaves that same system fully in-tact. 

Richard Seymour is a writer and broadcaster from Northern Ireland and the author of numerous books about politics including Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics and The Twittering Machine. His writing appears in the The New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Guardian, Prospect, Jacobin, and innumerable other places including his own Patreon. He is an editor at Salvage magazine. His most recent book Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization,  publishes this month with Verso Books.

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

www.redmedicine.substack.com/

Sasha Warren explores the history of psychiatry in relationship to the development of capitalism. We discuss how best to frame the different movements that have emerged with the intention of transforming or abolishing psychiatry. We then spend some time talking about figures such as Foucault, Fanon, and R. D Laing that may be familiar to listeners as well as some lesser-known figures such as Sylvia Marcos, and Marie Langer. 

Sasha Warren is a writer based in Minneapolis publishing work on madness, psychiatry, and the history of medicine. His first book Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, Revolt published earlier this year. 

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

www.redmedicine.substack.com/

This episode features a recording of live discussion with Richard Seymour and Helen Charman about the medical imaginaries of the far right. This recording is from illness (3), the third in the event series that runs alongside the podcast. We discuss why the far-right has so many paranoid fantasies about medicine, from race science and eugenics, to attacks on trans and reproductive healthcare.

Helen Charman is a Fellow and College Teaching Officer in English at Clare College, University of Cambridge. Her critical writing has been published in the Guardian, The White Review, Another Gaze, and The Stinging Fly among others. As a poet, Charman was shortlisted for the White Review Poet's Prize in 2017 and for the 2019 Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment, and has published four poetry pamphlets, most recently In the Pleasure Dairy. Charman volunteers as a birth companion in Glasgow. Her first book Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood is now available.

Richard Seymour is a writer and broadcaster from Northern Ireland and the author of numerous books about politics including Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics and The Twittering Machine. His writing appears in the The New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Guardian, Prospect, Jacobin, and innumerable other places including his own Patreon. He is an editor at Salvage magazine. His most recent book Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization is now available.

SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicine

Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

www.redmedicine.substack.com/

Dayna Tortorici and Lisa Borst discuss The Intellectual Situation, a new anthology of writing from the literary magazine n+1. The anthology brings together writing from the period of 20014-2024, including contributions from people such as Gabriel Winant, Alyssa Battistoni, Tabi Haslet, Nikil Saval, and many others. In this conversation Lisa and Dayna discuss putting the collection together, how it feels to read back essays written during different political struggles from the last decade, and how they think about the relationship between writing and organising.

EVENT: bit.ly/3ShrqCi 

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

www.redmedicine.substack.com/

Melinda Cooper describes the combination of austerity and extravagance that characterizes neoliberal monetary policy and how these ideas emerged from the crises of the 1970s. 

Melinda Cooper is Professor in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University. She is the author of Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism and Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance. 

EVENT: bit.ly/3ShrqCi 

SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicine

Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

www.redmedicine.substack.com/

SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicine

Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

www.redmedicine.substack.com/