Today it’s a special honor to welcome Serhat Tutkal and Hevin Karakurt to Speaking Out of Place. These two scholars engage in a broad discussion of Kurdish history, culture, politics, literature and language, with particular attention to issues of statelessness, identity, and violence. We talk about the current moment with regard to Turkey, Syria, Palestine, and the US-Israel war on Iran and beyond. We use as a starting poet Serhat’s remarkable essay, “Note from Non-People,” and then move to a discussion of his work on dehumanization. We end with imagining paths out of cycles of violence and dehumanization, and consider specifically the way we might imagine new sorts of utopias and vistas of life-affirmation.

Hevin Karakurt is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Stanford University, where she studies Kurdish literature across languages and territories. In this way, she works on the question of how a literature of a collective that shares neither one nation nor any one language might function. Before coming to Stanford, she worked as a researcher in the Swiss National Science Foundation funded research project “Half-Truths. Truth, Fiction, and Conspiracy in the ‘Post-Factual’ Age”, at the University of Basel.

Serhat Tutkal is a Kurdish academic. He is a postdoctoral researcher funded by the Secretariat of Science, Humanities, Technology and Innovation (Secihti) in Mexico. He has a PhD from Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Bogotá) with a dissertation on the legitimation and delegitimation of Colombian state violence. He mainly works on violence, racism, and dehumanization in West Asia and Latin America 

Today it gives me special pleasure to speak with Fernando Racimo, a leading scientist-activist, about his new book, Science in Resistance. This book gives a riveting account of the founding and growth of the international group Scientist Rebellion, in which now thousands of scientists from around the world have organized direct actions to draw attention to the climate crisis. Breaking through the censorship and silencing carried on by big fossil fuel companies, and also scientific groups in and out of academia, which often collude with each other, members of SR have put their careers, and their bodies on the line to raise public consciousness and to spur action. We talk about the connection between power and knowledge, between ecocide and genocide, and the need to democratize education and research if we are going to have the kind of world we want to both live in, and to pass on to other generations.

Fernando Racimo is a scientist-activist and the author of the new book Science in Resistance. He co-founded the Danish chapters of Scientist Rebellion and Academics for Palestine, and works at the intersection of academia and social movement organizing. He earned his bachelor from Harvard University and his PhD from the University of California Berkeley, and is now an associate professor in ecology and evolution at the Globe Institute in the University of Copenhagen. He has written articles and OpEds on the urgent need for scientists to join and support social movements fighting structures of oppression, as well as on strategies for transforming and democratizing academic institutions to serve positive socio-ecological needs. At the University of Copenhagen, he teaches on various topics including ecology and evolution, degrowth and socio-ecological justice, decolonizing global health and social movement theory and practice. He currently co-runs a study circle on Degrowth and Exnovation as part of the Nordic Summer University, to explore creative and democratically engaging ways to undo, dismantle and decommission unsustainable institutions, structures and technologies.

Today I am excited and honored to be talking with Dr. Shamell Bell and Sherena Razek, two activist scholars who join us to talk about their work on the Coalition for Action in Higher Education, which will be convening its Third Annual National Day of Action on April 17th.  We talk about  the unique and central position CAHE occupies on the activist landscape.  The Coalition brings together labor, anti-fascist and anti-racist activists, and those working for Palestinian freedom.   CAHE energizes the educational sphere by refusing to shy away from taking radical positions, by embracing boundary-crossing and close affiliations with diverse communities, by defending the most vulnerable, and insisting on free education in every sense of the word. CAHE aims to both hold university administrators and trustees accountable, but also to recognize and grow our own strength with imagination, creativity, and mutual care.

Dr. Shamell Bell is a global movement artist, scholar, and visionary cultural strategist whose work lives at the intersection of radical imagination, embodied activism, and unconditional love. She earned her Ph.D. in Culture and Performance from UCLA and recently completed a teaching appointment in Theater, Dance & Media at Harvard University.  As an interdisciplinary scholar and documentary filmmaker, Dr. Bell explores the power of embodiment, collective freedom dreaming, and multimedia storytelling to disrupt oppressive systems and ignite transformation. Her social impact work in the entertainment industry includes collaborations with artists such as Common, Dominique Fishback, Lalah Hathaway, and Esperanza Spalding. She also served as Supervising Producer on the Emmy-nominated series Lessons in Chemistry. Dr. Bell is co-social impact director—alongside Ms. Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner—for Ritual of Breath is the Rite to Resist, a performance project responding to state-sanctioned violence. She organizes for economic justice with the Debt Collective as its Visionary Escalator, advocating for student debt abolition and debt-free college for all. She also serves on the steering committee for the Coalition for Action in Higher Education and co-chairs their Antifascism caucus.

Sherena Razek is a diasporic Palestinian feminist educator, scholar, activist, and labor organizer. Currently, she is a President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Gender Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. She holds a PhD from the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University where she was the President of the Graduate Labor Organization and co-founder of the Palestine Solidarity Caucus. Her research focuses on Palestinian visual culture, anti-imperialist struggle, and decolonial feminist ecologies. 

Today, on Speaking Out of Place, I have the pleasure of talking with Say Burgin about her book, Organizing on Your Own: The White Fight for Black Power in Detroit. Tracing the changing terrain of anti-racist organizing and activism in the 1960s and 1970s, Burgin’s book focusses on what became known as “parallel organizing” amongst Blacks and whites.  Delving into fascinating archival materials from many activist organizations at that time, Say finds that groups like the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee both maintained active relations with white activists and also encouraged them to organize within their own communities.  These groups, such as People Against Racism, formed working relations with clergy, labor, and even some in management, and centered their energy in not only job creation, but also the political education of whites as to the structures of racism they inhabited.  Another key focal point was police violence. Risking their lives at this moment intense repression and violence, including that against whites who were working for Black liberation, white groups were ahead of their counterparts in today’s moment, photographing police violence and establishing radical educational projects. Indeed, Say and I end our conversation with a comparison between then, and now, from the moment of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the uprising of the George Floyd killing.

Say Burgin is a professor of history who focuses on 20th century US social movement and African American history. Her book, Organizing Your Own: The White Fight for Black Power in Detroit, was published by New York University Press in 2024. It provides a new way of understanding the Black Power movement’s relationship to white America. She has been active in movements to abolish prisons and build solidarity with Palestine, and she spends a lot of her time helping to run a community bail fund. Follow her on Bluesky @sayburgin.bsky.social. 

Today I have the immense pleasure of talking with Carissa Véliz, an associate professor at the University of Oxford, about her new book, Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future—from Ancient Oracles to AI.  Linking this work to her previous book, Privacy is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data, Véliz writes: “ surveillance and prediction are digital technology’s original sins.”

In our wide-ranging discussion, we talk about how both massive and intrusive invasions of privacy at all levels of society and false claims to be able to predict the future erode democracy, are corrosive to ethics, and undermine people’s ability to think for themselves.  Instead, we are conditioned to trust an unregulated band of “effective altruists” who claim to know better than we what kinds of lives we should prefer and the choices we should make.  Véliz argues instead that we should embrace the uncertain to build resilience, to prepare for contingency but not be determined by what we cannot see, and to foster curiosity and imagination.

Carissa Véliz is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI, and a Fellow at Hertford College at the University of Oxford. She is the recipient of the 2021 Herbert A. Simon Award for Outstanding Research in Computing and Philosophy. She is a member of UNESCO’s Women 4 Ethical AI. She advises companies and policymakers around the world on privacy and the ethics of AI. She is a board member of the Proton Foundation, along with Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Proton’s CEO Andy Yen. She is the author of the highly-acclaimed Privacy Is Power (an Economist book of the year, 2020) and the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics. Her new book Prophecy was described as “The most important book you will read for years” by Roger McNamee, the tech investor and best selling author.

Today it gives me special pleasure to speak with Helen Whybrow about her book, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life.  Besides being a detailed account of the day to day, season by season life on her farm, where she and her family raise sheep, build a broad community, and maintain Knoll Farm, a center for activists, writers, artists and others to share ideas on how to promote healthier and more just ways of living together and in the environment, The Salt Stones is at base about the ways we are losing a sense of belonging, not only with others and with other forms of life on this planet, but also with the cycles of existence, of life and of death. Whybrow shows time and again that it is mostly a matter of developing ways of seeing and noticing what is all around us, and learning about and respecting the ways that generations of people and non-human animals have existed together in sustainable and mutually-dependent ways.

Helen Whybrow is a writer, editor and organic farmer whose book about shepherding, land and belonging, The Salt Stones, was longlisted for the National Book Award and chosen as a New Yorker Best Book of 2025. Her other titles include Dead Reckoning (W. W. Norton, 2001) and A Man Apart (Chelsea Green, 2015). She has a master’s in journalism and has taught writing at Middlebury College and the Breadloaf Environmental Writer’s Conference. She and her family farm and steward a refuge for land justice at Knoll Farm in Fayston, Vermont.

Today I am deeply honored to spend time with poet, activist, and scholar Jamaica Osorio. Shortly after October 7, 2023, she began to write a series of astonishing poems about the war in Gaza and the genocide. Osorio graces us with readings of some of those poems, and engages in a rich, complex, and deeply moving discussion of what went into their composition. Throughout, we talk about the power of poetry to suspend time and allow us the space to contemplate the impossible.  We talk about the nature of not knowing, of the inexpressible, and the ways certain poems can give us the strength, energy, and commitment to persist in working for the liberation of all peoples, even when dwelling in grief.

Dr. Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio is a Kanaka Maoli wahine artist / activist / scholar / storyteller born and raised in Pālolo Valley to parents Jonathan and Mary Osorio. Jamaica earned her PhD in English (Hawaiian literature) in 2018 from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Currently, Jamaica is an Associate Professor of Indigenous and Native Hawaiian Politics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. In 2020 her poetry and activism were the subject of an award-winning film, This is the Way we Rise which premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2021.  In 2022 she was a lead artist and Co-writer of the revolutionary VR Documentary, On the Morning You Wake (To the end of the world),  that premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2022 and won the XR experience Jury award at SXSW 2022. She is a proud past Kaiāpuni student, Ford Dissertation (2017) and Post Doctoral (2022) Fellow, and a graduate of Kamehameha, Stanford University (BA) and New York University (MA). She is the author of the award winning book Remembering our Intimacies: Moʻolelo, Aloha ʻĀina, and Ea which was published in 2021 by The University of Minnesota Press. She believes in the power of aloha ʻāina and collective action to pursue liberatory, decolonial, and abolitionist futures of abundance.

 Starting in the autumn of 2025, the US began attacking small civilian boats in or near Venezuelan waters, summarily executing over 126 people. January, 2026 began with it kidnapping Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and bringing them to the US. This month, just weeks after the kidnapping, Haymarket Books published the immensely useful and urgent book, Venezuela in Crisis. The historical range of the book begins with the regime of Hugo Chavez and ends with the 2024 elections in Venezuela.

We are immensely fortunate to be able to speak with the editor and translator of this collection of essays, Anderson Bean, and two of its contributors, Emiliano Terán and Simón Rodríguez.  The key argument of the book is that, even by his own admission, Chavez was not able to completely transform Venezuela into a socialist state. The book explains the roots of this failure, despite the inspiring successes of Chavismo. It then tracks an ever-increasing neoliberal and oppressive trend carried forward by Maduro, which is characterized by burgeoning extractivism, corruption, and suppression of human rights.  We end by calling on socialists and progressives everywhere to resist the tendency to side with Maduro’s false claims to socialism, and to focus instead on building solidarity with the people of Venezuela.

Anderson Bean is a sociology professor at North Carolina A&T State University, a member of the Tempest Collective, and a North Carolina–based activist and editor. He is a contributor to Venezuela in Crisis: Socialist Perspectives (Haymarket Books) and the author of Communes and the Venezuelan State: The Struggle for Participatory Democracy in a Time of Crisis (Lexington Books).

Simón Rodríguez is a Venezuelan socialist writer and journalist. He was a student organizer and later became professor at the Universidad de los Andes. When he was a member of the national leadership of the Socialism and Freedom Party, he ran as a candidate for the National Assembly in 2015. He is a founding member of Laclase.info and Venezuelanvoices.org and has published articles in Humania del Sur, NACLA Report on the Americas, The New Arab, and Rebelión and on dozens of electronic outlets, and his articles have been translated into six languages. He has given talks and lectures in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. He is coauthor with Miguel Sorans of the book Why Did Chavismo Fail? A Left-Opposition Balance Sheet.

Emiliano Terán is a sociologist from the Central University of Venezuela and has a master’s degree in ecological economics from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is a PhD candidate in environmental science and technology at the same institution. He is also an associate researcher at the Center for Development Studies in Venezuela and a member of the Observatory of Political Ecology of Venezuela  

Today I am deeply honored to speak with novelist, essayist, and scholar Yuri Herrera about his new novel, Season of the Swamp, which is a deeply researched and dazzlingly imagined account of Benito Juarez’s time spent in exile in New Orleans.  We talk about what that time and place offered to Juarez’s understanding of a world coming into being—one of créolité and carnival, of mixedness and multiplicity, and what these sometimes hallucinatory moments offered his political vision.  We talk about what kinds of new visions of freedom are discovered in the midst of forms of slavery that horrify Juarez.  Very importantly, we relate all of this to the present day—to the genocide in Gaza, the violent ICE attacks in the United States, and the descent into unbridled, and unmasked fascism. We are especially grateful to Yuri for reading from his novel, and talking in depth about the importance of mixed languages and the new social worlds they reflect.

Bio

Yuri Herrera (Actopan, México, 1970). His first three novels have been translated into several languages: Kingdom Cons, Signs Preceding the End of the World, and Transmigration of Bodies. In 2016 he shared with translator Lisa Dillman the Best translated Book Award for the translation of Signs Preceding the End of the World. That same year he received the Anna Seghers Prize at the Academy of Arts of Berlin, for the body of his work. His latest books are A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire, Ten Planets, and Season of the Swamp. He is a professor of creative writing and literature at Tulane University, in New Orleans.

Today I am delighted to speak with Andrew Ross about his new book, The Weather Report: A Journey Through Unsettled Climates. In this study, Ross revisits areas of the world that he has written about before—Palestine, the United Arab Emirates, Phoenix, Arizona, and China. While he found no absolute correlates, he did discover that what he calls a “subterranean current of thought” emerged as he spoke with former interviewees and new ones, and visited old sites that became familiar in a different way. In particular, we follow up Andrew’s claim that in Palestine we find a “grisly future arriving there sooner than elsewhere.”  The book focusses on the idea of population and scarcity, and argues that much of the policies that are based on the presumption of scarce resources are actually predicated on what Ross calls “bogus scarcity,” drawn upon to drive capitalist and genocidal and ecocidal violence. This is a violence that awaits us all unless we can find a better way of living together in the world.

Andrew Ross is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, where he is director of the Prison Research Lab. A contributor to The Guardian, the New York Times, The Nation, New York Review of Books, and Al Jazeera, he is the author or editor of about 30 books, including Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel (which won a Palestine Book Prize), and, most recently, The Weather Report: A Journey Through Unsettled Climates. He is the co-founder of several movement groups, and currently is serving on the national steering committee of the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine network.