In 2018, hundreds of thousands of people in France showed up day after day, month after month, to protest the French government’s attacks on labor, on social benefits, and on the environment, among other things, including police violence.  Anthropologist Ida Susser took part in these communal actions, interviewing a vast array of participants, who came from all walks of life, from political positions across the spectrum, and from many different regions and class identities. We learn how people formed common cause, organized unique social worlds, and how their struggles, defeats, and successes, can teach us critical lessons in making the a new, more just, world.

In the spirit of communing, Ida Susser has made Yellow Vests a free download here.

Ida Susser, PHD, is  Distinguished  Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center and Hunter College, CUNY. Her recent book The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy: taking to the streets of Paris in the 21st Century  (Routledge 2026) focuses on commoning movements and new visions. Her previous books include:  Norman Street (Oxford, 2012)   a study of working class opposition to cutbacks during the New York City fiscal crisis and the transition of Greenpoint-Williamsburg from a working class neighborhood to a gentrified enclave, and AIDS, Sex and Culture: Global Politics and Survival in Southern Africa (Wiley-Blackwell 2009), a history of the power of social movements to transform health. 

Today I am honored to speak with Elizabeth Hinton and  Elsa Julien Lora about their new book, Harm and Punishment: Incarcerated Writers on Violence and the US Prison. Along with two research assistants, Lora and Hinton pored over hundreds of essays by prisoners, found in the American Prison Writing Archive.  They then selected and organized the essays found in this volume, offering illuminating introductions to each section.

Our discussion moves through many topics—the brutal, dehumanizing, and punitive nature of the prison system, the damage it does to lives both inside and outside prison, and the ways prisoners find to survive and offer each other support, despite being pitted against each other. At base, we consider how we, as a society, are “addicted to violence,” and why and how it is crucial to understand that violence can only produce more violence. These essays organically blend personal observations and stories with a deep understanding of the broad, systemic nature of violence.

Elizabeth Hinton is one of the nation’s leading experts on the roots of mass incarceration and enduring inequality in the United States. The Class of 1954 Professor of History, Black Studies, and Law at Yale University, Hinton serves as the founding director of the Justice for Everybody Movement J4EM, a university-based center focused on promoting public safety through education, research, and coalition-building. At Harvard, she is the founding co-director (with Brandon M. Terry) of the Hutchins Center’s Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety.
 
Hinton’s groundbreaking books—From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime and America on Fire—were each named New York Times Notable Books and have become essential texts in policy and social justice circles. A sought-after public intellectual, Hinton’s commentary appears in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The Los Angeles Times and beyond. Her research has been supported by the Carnegie Corporation and the Guggenheim, Mellon, and Ford Foundations. Hinton served on the National Academies of Sciences Committee on Reducing Racial Inequalities in the Criminal Justice System and in 2022 was elected to the American Philosophical Society as one of the youngest members in its history. At J4EM, Hinton is building the infrastructure for a more just and robust democracy—where education is not a privilege, but a cornerstone of public safety.

Elsa Julien Lora is a U.S. historian and interdisciplinary scholar whose research focuses on the history of American prisons and the texture and intimacy of family life. A Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Columbia University Society of Fellows, Elsa is at work on her book, Life in Prison: An Intimate History of American Punishment. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the American Society for Legal History. Elsa’s writing about race, justice, and family has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Aperture, and Public Books, and she is currently producing a documentary about her grandmother, boundary-breaking modern dancer Mary Hinkson. She holds a PhD in African and African American Studies from Harvard University and a JD from Yale Law School.

Today I am honored to welcome activists and organizers from #StopCopCity, a series of actions in Atlanta that drew international attention, and state and federal prosecutions of people involved in protecting the environment and fighting the construction of a massive training facility designed for urban warfare. Ordinary people were labelled antifa terrorists for acts of civil disobedience and for occupying the land as defender. We get an update on the various legal battles that have continued to this day, and talk about what we can learn from organized collective legal resistance. We talk about all this in the context of recent cases such as the Cobb County 3, Broadview, and Prairieland prosecutions, and focus on the struggle for the future in solidarity with others.

Jess Fuller is a dedicated, anti-authoritarian legal worker and organizer. Over the last decade, Jess has coordinated on the ground legal support to struggles including Standing Rock, the U.S./Mexico border, work-place union organizing, the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta and more. Jess is a frontline legal worker experienced in building effective jail support teams and defendant-centered strategies to combat state repression. She knows that solidarity, building power and creative legal strategies are the best defense to the criminalization of resistance.

Dr. Hannah Kass is a scholar-activist and former defendant in the ongoing prosecution of Stop Cop City activists. Her work focuses on struggles for land, food, and abolition, and state strategies of authoritarian repression in the US. She earned her joint PhD in Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2026.

Both are part of the ATL 61+ Defense Committee

In today’s discussion with veteran media historian and critic Robin Andersen, we discuss in depth the ways that the New York Times, CNN, and other legacy media outlets became little more than Israeli propaganda organs, uncritically feeding IDF narratives, images, and self-declared expertise while not only discrediting Palestinian voices, but also becoming  complicit with Israel’s policy of censorship by murder. We talk about the distortions and lies surrounding the destruction of hospitals, patients and medical staff, the purposeful killings of journalists and the cover-ups that followed, and the media attacks on the student encampments that turned peaceful demonstrations into scenes of violence. We come away with a profound respect and admiration for courageous and dedicated Palestinian journalists, the global social media that bore witness, and independent and alternative media that stood steady in their commitment to speak the truth.

Robin Andersen, professor emerita of media studies at Fordham University, author of a dozen books, and writer and member of the Board of Directors for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). She serves as a judge and   contributing writer for Project Censored, and her work can be found at a number of online publications. Her latest book is The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel's Genocide in Gaza.

It’s always a pleasure to talk with Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood, two seasoned political observers, and activists, based in New York City.  Today we discuss the results of the recent primaries in NYC, which saw a wave of impressive victories by DSA candidates and other progressives, defeating incumbent after incumbent.  We discuss some of the causes of these successes, and look to other signs of a surge of interest in socialist candidates in other states. We put all this in the broader context of MAGA, populism, affordability, data centers and AI, and the devastating and welcomed unpopularity of Zionism and the state of Israel in eyes of the American public.

Liza Featherstone is the author of Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation, published by O/R Books in 2018, as well as Selling Women Short: the Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Walmart (Basic Books, 2004).  She co-authored Students Against Sweatshops (Verso, 2002) and is editor of False Choices: the Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Verso, 2016). She's currently editing a collection of Alexandra Kollontai 's work for O/R Books and International Publishers and writing the introduction to that volume.

Featherstone's work has been published in Lux, TV Guide, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Ms., the American Prospect, Columbia Journalism Review, Glamour, Teen Vogue, Dissent, the Guardian, In These Times, and many other publications. 

Liza teachers at NYU 's Literary Reportage Program as well as at Columbia University School for International and Public Affairs. She is proud to be an active member of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America and of UAW local 7902.

Doug Henwood is a Brooklyn-based journalist and broadcaster specializing in economics and politics. He edited Left Business Observer, a newsletter, from 1986–2013, and has been host of Behind the News, a weekly radio show/podcast that originates on KPFA, Berkeley, since 1995. He is the author of Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom (Verso, 1997), After the New Economy (New Press, 2004), and My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency (OR Books, 2016). He’s written for numerous periodicals including Harper’s, The New Republic, The Nation, The Baffler, and Jacobin. He’s been working on a book about the rot of the US ruling class for way too long and needs to acquire the self-discipline to finish it.

Today it is my great pleasure to talk with Dr Lara Sheehi about her new book, From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures. We talk about the ways that those fighting for Palestinian liberation are constantly confronting what Sheehi calls “psychic intrusions,” which seek to interrupt and divert our energies. These intrusions take a number of forms, from direct attacks to insinuations of impropriety. Sheehi argues that these are forms of psychological warfare—backing up these claims by documenting the original tactics and strategies governments and other organizations used to discredit and disarm radical activists in the past, and seeing similar tactics today.  Against these psychic intrusions Lara mounts a forceful argument for us to develop and hold true to what she calls “psychic militancy.” She gives us many examples of both psychic intrusions and psychic militancy, thereby providing us with essential and powerful tools to recognize and resist the mundane and all too common efforts of Zionists and others to distract us from our work. This is a deeply therapeutic and empowering book, and useful to all radical activists.

Lara Sheehi is a Research Fellow at the University of South Africa's Institute for Social and Health Sciences, a licensed clinical psychologist, and the host of the Psychic Militancy podcast. Lara’s work focuses on psychoanalysis, the psychic refusals central to liberation struggles and life-making in the Global South, the psychic dimensions of resistance and revolution, and critical Zionism studies. She is the author of From Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures (Pluto, 2026) and co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022). Lara is a member of the founding collective for the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and is on the advisory board for Forensic Architecture.

Today it is my immense pleasure and honor to welcome Amitav Ghosh to Speaking Out of Place to talk about his new novel, Ghost Eye.  The novel is about reincarnation, but also a lot more. In our conversation we talk about the need to address the terrible set of environmental and other crises we face, and the seeming foreclosure of the imagination by the obsession with technology and the future it offers to us. Instead, we look to how we can fashion beginnings out of endings, aided by a renewed sense of wonder, curiosity, and awe.  We turn to the body, to the haptic, and perhaps most important, to food as more than simply nourishment. In all this, story-telling, the revival of connections between living beings, and a deep sense of other times and places are central.

AMITAV GHOSH grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and has a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford. He is the author of four books of non-fiction, two collections of essays and nine novels. His books have won many prizes and he has received eight honorary degrees, six lifetime achievement awards and four honorary fellowships. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages and he has served on the Jury of the Locarno and Venice film festivals. In 2018 he became the first English-language writer to receive India’s highest literary honor, the Jnanpith Award. In 2019, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade. In 2024 he was awarded the Erasmus Prize and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2025 he was awarded the Pak Kyongni Prize by South Korea’s Toji Foundation, and in 2026 he was given a Fellowship by the Guggenheim Foundation. He is married to the writer Deborah Baker and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

On today’s show we take a deep look into universities, and education more broadly with Tristan Ahtone, Andrew Herscher, and Robert Warrior. We focus on a  critique of land grant universities, which were built on land granted by the federal government. What we learn is that lands were stolen from Indigenous peoples through violence-based treaties and seizures. These 57 universities have used wealth derived from those initial acts of theft to buy more property, expand holdings, and enrich themselves. In contrast, we see the continued harm these universities do to Native peoples. This harm comes what Herscher calls “non-memory,” which creates knowledge that distorts and omits historical truths and impedes upon Indigenous futures. We talk about the deep damage non-memory does to education for all, and the ways people have fought back to retrieve, restore, and grow knowledge through scholar-journalist activism like the Land Grab University project.

Tristan Ahtone (Kiowa) is Editor at Large at Grist and one of the foremost journalists covering Indigenous affairs in America. He previously served as Editor in Chief of the Texas Observer and Indigenous Affairs editor at High Country News. His investigations have been honored with a George Polk Award, an IRE Award, a Sigma Award, a National Magazine Award nomination, and investigative awards from the Gannett Foundation. A multiple Richard LaCourse Award winner, Ahtone was also named Journalist of the Year by Covering Climate Now in 2024. A past president of the Indigenous Journalists Association and a 2017 Nieman Fellow, he is a co-founder of the Indigenous News Alliance.

Andrew Herscher’s work endeavors to bring the study of architecture and cities to bear on struggles for justice, democracy, and self-determination across a range of global sites. He is the co-founder of a series of militant research collectives, including Detroit Resists, Settler Colonial City Project, and the We the People of Detroit Community Research Collective. His scholarly work include Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict (Stanford University Press, 2010); The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2012); Displacements: Architecture and Refugee (Sternberg Press, 2017); The Global Shelter Imaginary: IKEA Humanitarianism and Rightless Relief (co-authored with Daniel Bertrand Monk, University of Minnesota Press, 2022); and Under the Campus, the Land: Anishinaabe Futuring, Colonial Non-Memory, and the Origin of the University of Michigan (University of Michigan Press, 2025). He is teaches at the University of Michigan in architecture, Native American and Indigenous studies, and the history of art. 

Robert Warrior is Hall Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Kansas and a member/citizen of the Osage Nation. He is the author of Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (University of Minnesota Press, 1995) and The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), and coauthor of Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New Press, 1996), American Indian Literary Nationalism (University of New Mexico Press, 2008), and Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective (University of Oklahoma Press, 2009). He is past president of the American Studies Association and was the founding president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (2009-10). He was the founding co-editor of Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAISA’s journal) and edits the Indigenous Americas series at the University of Minnesota Press). Before moving to the University of Kansas, he taught at Stanford, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Illinois. In 2018, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Today I am delighted to talk with Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff about their new book, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. This is much more than a biography or popular account of Elon Musk, it is a radical analysis of a deeply disturbing, computational way of seeing the world.  We see a mind that is profoundly troubled by any contagion spreading into seemingly closed systems—it can take the form of racial others, transpeople, “woke” populations, or most generally and dismissively, “Non-Playing-Characters.” We talk about the dangers this mindset and its manifestations have on democracy and the public sphere, and argue that what we should do is to “embrace the woke-mind virus as a counter-revolutionary act.”

Quinn Slobodian is professor of international history at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His books, which have been translated into ten languages, include Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy, and Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right . His most recent book, co-authored with Ban Tarnoff, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.  Slobodian is a Guggenheim Fellow for 2025-6; he has been an associate fellow at Chatham House and held residential fellowships at Harvard University and Free University Berlin. Project Syndicate put him on a list of 30 Forward Thinkers and Prospect UK named him one of the World’s 25 Top Thinkers.

Ben Tarnoff is a writer from Massachusetts. He is the co-author, with Quinn Slobodian, of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.

Today I am excited to talk with three members of Youth United for Community Action, an organization based in East Palo Alto that has been fighting for community empowerment since 1994, when a small group of young people of color active in their communities came together to form YUCA—“a grassroots community organization created, led, and run by young people of color, the majority from low-income communities. It “provides a safe space for young people to empower[themselves] and work on environmental and social justice issues to establish positive systemic change through grassroots community organizing.”

We talk about how YUCA chooses its causes, the way it interacts with the community, and the most pressing issues it is addressing today. We hear inspiring stories about how YUCA workers interact with people in the community in big and small ways, and how this work is giving them the political education needed for meaningful change. 

Larissa Perez is a junior in high school. She has lived in East Palo Alto for the majority of her life and is passionate about being able to help others and give back to her community. Through her involvement with YUCA, she has deepened her understanding of East Palo Alto’s rich history while also developing the skills to become a strong leader and advocate for justice. 

Estefani Ruiz first joined Youth United for Community Action in August of 2022 and has climbed the pipeline ever since. She first started off as a core member and now finds herself in a Youth Organizer role. Estefani is extremely passionate about giving back to her community and learning new things. This is where her interest in housing and social justice issues first started. She has participated in outreach, community events, and city meetings. She hopes to continue this work as she moves into the next stage of her life by making connections of her prior knowledge to the new area she will find herself in this upcoming academic year.

Filiberto “Fili” Zaragoza is one of the campaign organizers and Co-program director at Youth United for Community Action (YUCA) in East Palo Alto, where he grew up. Since joining YUCA in 2019 as a sophomore in high school and moving into a staff position in 2023, he’s developed organizing skills while fighting for his community. Fili draws his passion for advocacy from witnessing social injustices in East Palo Alto and across the Bay Area. He plans to continue his education while building his career in community organizing.