‘Human life is not more interesting or worthwhile because it occurs in the centers of capitalism.’ That’s the tagline of Peripheries, the online journal co-run by Katja Perat, who joined us for the 40th edition of the Versopolis Podcast. Katja’s early poetry collections, which earned her a cult following, were written against the backdrop of the 2008 global financial crisis and captured a specific moment: Slovenia drifting into neoliberalism under the cover of liberal democracy. Her relationship with poetry at the time was, she says, fraught, shaped by a tendency to hyper-intellectualize rather than feel.

After earning her PhD in 2022 into a brutal humanities job market, she took a position teaching English at a communitycollege in northern Alaska, the northernmost in North America. The move tied together her longstanding fascination with the Far North and her commitment to minor languages: teaching in a community where Iñupiaq is spoken, she draws a quiet parallel to her grandmother’s work with Slovene as a minority language. ‘There’s an untapped wealth of literary inspiration in these spaces where the rural collides with the urban,’ Katja says, ‘the literary markets just isn’t as interested in covering peripheral knowledge. And I think, just from an epistemological perspective, that’s a huge loss.’

Katja Perat is a Slovenian poet, novelist, essayist and journalist whose work spans multiple literary forms and languages. She published her first poems in 2007 in the Slovene literary magazine Literatura andthe bilingual Slovenian Bosnian magazine Dignimo pero/Dvignimo pero. Her debut poetry collection, The Best Have Fallen (Najboljši so padli, 2011), received the Best Debut Award and the Kritiško sito Award from the Slovenian Literary Critics’ Association. Her second collection, Value-Added Tax (Davek na dodano vrednost, 2014), was nominated for both the Jenko Award and the Veronika Award. That same year, her work appeared alongside Eileen Myles in Fear of Language, the third issue of Sternberg Press’s Poetic Series. 

Her novel The Masochist (Mazohistka), translated into English by Michael Biggins and published by Istros Books in 2020, has taken on an international life of its own in translation, earning a nomination for the Dublin Literary Award. In 2019, she published the essay collection Make America Graspable Again. A Slovene immigrant and minor language speaker, Perat holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis. As a scholar, author and teacher, she explores the relationship between complexity and accessibility, and brings her transcultural, multilingual background to the writing classroom.

The Hotel Lutetia in central Paris lived several lives in the tortured times of the 1930s and 1940s. Before the war, it was the hub of dissenting activity from anti-Nazi German exiles. During the war, it was the HQ for German military intelligence – and after the war, it was a deportee relocation centre. Jane Rogoyska, author of Hotel Exile, talks to David Musgrove about what we can learn about the remarkable story of the this ever-evolving building.

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In this episode we are joined by Rob Arcand to discuss his work on Spotify, streaming, and the financialization of culture. We begin with Spotify's emergence as a supposed democratizing force for working musicians, even as its model relied on surveillance and data-trawling. We explore how this data-driven promise — that listener analytics could be leveraged for touring and merch — reshaped the relationship between artists and audiences, often in ways that reinforced precarity rather than alleviated it.

From there, we turn to Arcand's comparison of Spotify's ambitions to Uber and Airbnb, situating streaming within the broader logic of platform capitalism. We discuss how corporate consolidation has shaped the power dynamics of the music industry over the past several decades, and how subscription and ad-supported services emerged from a moment of crisis as neoliberal adaptations to instability.

Our conversation also examines how disenfranchisement has paradoxically opened space for new labor struggles within the culture industries, and what a more equitable path forward might look like in an industry dominated by monopoly capitalism. We trace Spotify's shift from search-centric functionality to playlist curation, its "Music for every moment" strategy, and its rebranding from a "celestial jukebox" into lifestyle accessories for individual listeners.

Arcand helps us unpack Spotify's editorial logic — from "chill" playlists to hyperpop — and how mood-based categorization blurs the boundaries between artistic expression, consumer mood management, and financialized cultural assets. We consider the assimilation of subcultural genres into profit-seeking structures, the emergence of "Spotifycore," and the recalibration of genre itself for algorithmic infrastructures.

Rob is a writer, editor, web developer, and PhD candidate at McGill University in Montreal. He's a former staffer at Pitchfork and SPIN, and has published work on music, visual art, books, film, and technology with outlets like n+1, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Artforum, Art in America, The Nation, The Fader, Rolling Stone, Vice, and more. Twitter: @robarcand

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The Same Stream Twice by Rob Arcand

With the 2026 World Cup just weeks away, France once again enters the tournament as one of football’s superpowers — but what does the French national team actually represent in modern France? In this gripping episode, co-hosts Guy Burton and Francesco Belcastro sit down with Bangor University's Senior Lecturer in French (Studies), Jonathan Ervine, to unpack the explosive intersection of football, politics, identity, race, religion and nationalism in French society. From the myth of the 1998 “Black-Blanc-Beur” champions to the rise of the far right, the tensions of secularism, and the political symbolism of stars like Kylian Mbappé and Zinedine Zidane, this episode reveals why French football is about far more than what happens on the pitch. 

The discussion explores immigration, the banlieues, anti-racism campaigns, homophobia in Ligue 1, the hijab controversy in women’s football, Ramadan debates and the growing pressure on players to speak out politically. The hosts also look ahead to France’s World Cup chances, Didier Deschamps’ expected departure and why Zidane’s likely appointment could become one of the most politically charged moments in recent French sporting history. Essential listening for anyone following the 2026 World Cup, European politics or the deeper forces shaping global football today.

Jonthan's various publications associated with French football include "Negotiating Breton Celtic identity on and off the pitch: contemporary football in Brittany" (with Paddy Hoey), "Football and antisemitism in France: visibility and invisibility," "France - Les Bleus and the Republic: Diversity, Difference and Discrimination" and "Nicolas Anelka and the Quenelle Gesture: A Study of the Complexities of Protest in Contemporary Football."

At a hillside gathering in Watt Town, Jamaica, drums, prayer, and song converge in a living tradition that reaches beyond the island and across the generations to Africa. Kirt Henry is part of the community of revivalists who worked to secure Unesco recognition for a practice long misunderstood and marginalised. In this intimate journey into Jamaican spiritualism, scholar and practitioner, Kirt, reflects on faith shaped by memory, resilience, and ancestral connection. Through stories of healing, trance, ritual clothing and the sacred language of the body, Kirt explores a spiritual world where the boundaries between the earthly and the unseen are fluid. Revivalism emerges, not as a relic of the past, but as a way of life, one that carries the weight of colonial trauma while offering belonging, continuity and hope.

When Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism was published in 1974 Freudianism was seen by most feminists as ineradicably patriarchal and inimical to the women’s movement. Mitchell’s brilliant exegesis, drawing on Lacan and Laing as well as Freud himself, instead sees Freud's asymmetrical view of masculinity and femininity as reflecting the realities of patriarchal culture, and seeks to use his critique of femininity to critique patriarchy itself.

To mark a new edition of her seminal work from Verso Mitchell revisits its arguments in conversation with curator, art historian and writer Frances Morris who was, from January 2016 to February 2023, director of the Tate Modern.

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Should you judge a book by its cover? Victorian historians and their readers did; and through examining the decisions that went into binding, titling, annotating and prefacing historical works, we can recover some of the anxieties and labour that went into creating the image of the historian we have today.

This is Elise Garritzen's task, in 'Reimagining the Historian in Victorian England: Books, the Literary Marketplace, and the Scholarly Persona': a work which draws on over 500 nineteenth-century publications to shed light on the struggle to impose a respectable order on the chaos of history. Hosted by Joshua Shortman