UNLOCKED: Anarchist writer, musician, and podcaster Margaret Killjoy returns to the podcast to discuss the political act of writing fiction and imagining the “ambiguous utopia”—à la Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed and Killjoy’s A Country of Ghosts. I ask Margaret to define what hope is or can be, and how her work communicating the stories of radical individuals and movements during pivotal moments throughout history on her podcast, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, can help us (re-)frame contemporary struggles for liberation, justice, and peace in the world today.

Listen to the full interview: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness

TEASER: The Ambiguous Utopia w/ Margaret Killjoy [UNLOCKED]

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Writer and organizer Andrew Lee joins me to discuss their new book Defying Displacement: Urban Recomposition and Social War, published through AK Press and the Institute for Anarchist Studies. 

Defying Displacement grounds itself in one of the main sites of contemporary class struggle: communities facing the multi-headed hydra of gentrification. Andrew Lee directs our attention to the on-the-ground realities of urban displacement, and in turn, provides a new theory of the state and capitalism in the 21st century.

Support the work and listen to the full interview: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness

TEASER: Defying Displacement w/ Andrew Lee

This is a segment of episode 363 of Last Born In The Wilderness, “The Jail is Everywhere: The Quiet Jail Boom & The Insidious Logic Of Carceral Humanism w/ Lydia Pelot-Hobbs & Jack Norton.” Listen to the full episode: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/pelothobbes-norton

Learn more about The Jail is Everywhere and purchase a copy from Verso Books or Bookshop: https://bit.ly/49YrCMS / https://bit.ly/4dsnTuf

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs and Jack Norton, co-editors of the collection The Jail is Everywhere, join me in this interview to discuss the “quiet jail boom” in numerous counties across the United States. They examine how the county jail has become the preeminent site of the adaptive, expansive, and shapeshifting carceral state, as well as the local and nationwide struggles to end it.

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs is an Assistant Professor of Geography and African American & Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky, and author of Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana.

Jack Norton is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Governors State University, and was a senior research associate at the Vera Institute of Justice. He conducted research for the In Our Backyards initiative and investigated how counties across the United States use their local jails.

WEBSITE: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com

PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness

DONATE: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

SUBSTACK: https://lastborninthewilderness.substack.com

BOOK LIST: https://bookshop.org/shop/lastbornpodcast

DROP ME A LINE: Call (208) 918-2837 or http://bit.ly/LBWfiledrop

EVERYTHING ELSE: https://linktr.ee/patterns.of.behavior

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs & Jack Norton: The Quiet Jail Boom & The Insidious Logic Of Carceral Humanism

Investigative journalist Arun Gupta returns to the podcast to report on the pro-Palestine student encampments that have bloomed on university and college campuses across the United States and around the world over the past several weeks. He has been documenting the protests on campuses across New York City, including Columbia University and City College of New York (CCNY), which has seen some of the most high-profile repression from police and counter-demonstration agitators.

“This movement is really about hope, and we should not lose sight of this fact. That is the most important story that should be coming out, that students acted because they had great hope. Hope is not woowoo; it is hardcore Marxist, materialistic, and dialectical. Hope comes from our collective strategizing and imagination, which is rooted in the material conditions. It is dialectical in the sense that you cannot achieve political change without having great hope and the imagination that we can do this: we will win—not that we can, but we will—and that is just absolutely fundamental. It’s not enough—you still need strategizing, leadership, organization, and some degree of luck. But radical change doesn’t flow from oppression. It flows from people who believe, amid the great horrors and traumas that the ruling class visits upon us, that we can collectively make the situation better, and that’s what all these students all exuded.”

Arun Gupta is an investigative reporter who has written for the Guardian, the Daily Beast, the Intercept, The Washington Post, and other publications. He is a graduate of the French Culinary Institute, cooked professionally in New York City, and is author of the forthcoming, Apocalypse Chow: A Junk-Food Loving Chef Explains How America Created the Most Revolutionary Food System in History (The New Press).

Episode Notes:

- Read his article, Students for Gaza are Undeterred: https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2024/05/16/students-gaza-columbia

- Subscribe to Arun’s newsletter, Life, the universe, and most things: https://arunnews.substack.com

- Read his work at Yes! Magazine: https://www.yesmagazine.org/authors/arun-gupta

- Follow him on X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/arunindy

- Music produced by Epik The Dawn: https://epikbeats.net

WEBSITE: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com

PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness

DONATE: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

SUBSTACK: https://lastborninthewilderness.substack.com

BOOK LIST: https://bookshop.org/shop/lastbornpodcast

DROP ME A LINE: Call (208) 918-2837 or http://bit.ly/LBWfiledrop

EVERYTHING ELSE: https://linktr.ee/patterns.of.behavior

#364 | “Students acted because they had hope” w/ Arun Gupta

This is a segment of episode 362 of Last Born In The Wilderness, “Tourism Is A Prism: Cultural Homelessness & The Consequences Of Hypermobility w/ Chris Christou.” Listen to the full episode: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com/episodes/chris-christou

Learn more about The End of Tourism and subscribe: https://www.theendoftourism.com / https://chrischristou.substack.com

Chris Christou joins me in this winding discussion to explore the subjects and themes raised in his phenomenal podcast, The End of Tourism, described as “a project about the deep causes and consequences of tourism, wanderlust, spectacle, exile,” and “an invitation into the local resistance and resilience movements in the face of each of these things.” In my discussion with him, Chris reflects on the historical moment he chose to begin this project: during the earliest waves of the global pandemic, at a time when global tourism effectively collapsed.

“[Locals] are also now experiencing this sense of, what is home? Where is my home? Am I a homeless person within a place that apparently has all this culture? So, that’s arrived, and that’s there. Part of the dilemma for local people, that largely goes unnoticed, is that it’s not new. It’s not five years old. It’s been around for a while, and it’s just now becoming noticeable to people, and because of the cathartic short-term memory of twenty-first century society, culture, or people, there is an unwillingness and inability to recognize what’s gone unrecognized. And I think that in order to understand the patterns in all this and the way the light shines off that prism, and see what’s to come, we have to be able to understand what we couldn’t see 10 or 20 years ago, and understand why we couldn’t see it. So, suddenly, it’s all here; the dilemmas are in our face now, but nobody is willing to ask how it got this way because then they might actually be implicated in how it came to be, and then they might actually be responsible. And I don’t mean guilty; I’m not talking about guilt. I’m talking about our ability to respond to what’s happened and what’s to come.”

Chris Christou is a writer, educational curator, and activist. Born and raised in Toronto, Canada, he moved to Oaxaca, Mexico in 2015 after a decade of delirious wanderlust. In 2016, Chris began concurrently working in and writing about the tourism industry, founding Oaxaca Profundo, a deep learning organization focused on food culture and radical hospitality. In 2021, alongside friends and strangers, he organized and launched the End of Tourism Podcast. He is the author of a book of poetry entitled the Black Braid of Memory, as well as forthcoming books on the psychedelic culture, the unauthorized history of tourism, and radical hospitality. Finally, he is a student of all things chocolate and cacao-related.

WEBSITE: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com

PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness

DONATE: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

SUBSTACK: https://lastborninthewilderness.substack.com

BOOK LIST: https://bookshop.org/shop/lastbornpodcast

DROP ME A LINE: Call (208) 918-2837 or http://bit.ly/LBWfiledrop

EVERYTHING ELSE: https://linktr.ee/patterns.of.behavior

Chris Christou: The Consequences Of Hypermobility

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs and Jack Norton, co-editors of the collection The Jail is Everywhere, join me in this interview to discuss the “quiet jail boom” in numerous counties across the United States. They examine how the county jail has become the preeminent site of the adaptive, expansive, and shapeshifting carceral state, as well as the local and nationwide struggles to end it.

The Jail is Everywhere: Fighting the New Geography of Mass Incarceration is edited by Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, Jack Norton, and Judah Schept, with contributions by, and interviews with, numerous anti-jail organizers across the United States. It was published through Verso Books.

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs is an Assistant Professor of Geography and African American & Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky, and author of Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana.

Jack Norton is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Governors State University, and was a senior research associate at the Vera Institute of Justice. He conducted research for the In Our Backyards initiative and investigated how counties across the United States use their local jails.

Episode Notes:

- Learn more about The Jail is Everywhere and purchase a copy from Verso Books or Bookshop: https://bit.ly/49YrCMS / https://bit.ly/4dsnTuf

- Read an excerpt from the book at The Baffler: https://bit.ly/4aT8VeU

- Music produced by Epik The Dawn: https://epikbeats.net

WEBSITE: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com

PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness

DONATE: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast

SUBSTACK: https://lastborninthewilderness.substack.com

BOOK LIST: https://bookshop.org/shop/lastbornpodcast

DROP ME A LINE: Call (208) 918-2837 or http://bit.ly/LBWfiledrop

EVERYTHING ELSE: https://linktr.ee/patterns.of.behavior

TEASER: The Ambiguous Utopia w/ Margaret Killjoy [UNLOCKED]

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