Historian and author Betsy Gaines Quammen returns to the podcast to discuss her new book, True West: Myth and Mending on the Far Side of America, published by Torrey House Press. Building on her previous book, American Zion, Gaines Quammen follows the historical roots and trajectories of troubling political trends in the Western United States, decoupling the myths and material realities of the landscapes and the peoples and the more-than-human lives that occupy them.

Support the podcast and listen to this interview: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness

TEASER: True West w/ Betsy Gaines Quammen

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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.

“And all of a sudden, to maintain what we have—not improve, not get benefits. This isn’t the ‘60s. We aren’t talking about, give us ethnic studies and a health clinic. It’s much worse than that. It’s: don’t displace me. Let me keep paying rent to my landlord; let me keep paying property taxes on the family home; let me keep working a bad job; just don’t make my rent so high that my community is obliterated. 

“And the people that brings us into conflict with aren’t just a local regional rich dude. More and more, they are global financial institutions and the entirety of the political system and civil society. In the places where we live, they’re bringing us into open conflict with the foundation of capitalist society, and that is what we need to navigate through. And if we can, we can win everything.”

Andrew Lee is a writer and organizer exploring the intersection between land, home, resistance, and popular power. Their work has been published in outlets including Teen Vogue, The New Inquiry, and YES! Magazine. 

Episode Notes:

- Learn more about Andrew’s work: https://www.xandrewleex.com

- Purchase a copy of Defying Displacement from AK Press or Bookshop: https://bit.ly/3X2tO33 / https://www.akpress.org/defying-displacement.html

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

WEBSITE: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com

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

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

#365 | Defying Displacement w/ Andrew Lee

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

TEASER: True West w/ Betsy Gaines Quammen

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