The Chatterbox

In this episode of Battle for African Agriculture, Million Belay speaks with Jennifer Clapp, Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability and Professor in the School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo, Canada, and a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems. She explains how a handful of corporations came to dominate seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and farm machinery, locking farmers into industrial systems built on monocultures. The conversation examines the technological and policy “lock-ins” shaping farming choices, the financialization of food and its impact on price volatility, and trade rules that disadvantage African farmers. Clapp argues that confronting corporate concentration is key to advancing food sovereignty and creating space for agroecology and territorial markets.

Content Note: This episode discusses gender-based violence and femicide. Please take care of yourself while listening. 

Gender-based violence is often described as a crisis. But what if it’s also a system?

In this episode of Intersectional Psychology, we examine how patriarchal ideology helps produce and sustain gender-based violence in South Africa. From early childhood socialisation to cultural practices, institutional failures, and historical inequalities, violence against women does not emerge in isolation — it grows out of deeply embedded power structures.

The episode also examines the profound psychological, social, and economic consequences of domestic violence for survivors, families, and communities. Finally, we explore what research tells us about prevention: why community-driven interventions are often more effective than isolated policy responses, and what it might take to dismantle the systems that allow gender-based violence to persist.

Because ending gender-based violence requires more than responding to individual acts of harm. It requires confronting the structures that make that harm possible.

🎁 Support the podcast and get exclusive bonus content at Patreon.com/IntersectionalPsychology.

🌈 If this episode resonates, please share it, rate the show, and send us your thoughts. 

📄 Download a transcript of this episode on IntersectionalPsychology.com.

| 00:00:00 Short introduction 

🔗 Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

You can contribute to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund at https://www.pcrf.net/ 

Gqola, P.D. (2015) Rape: A SA Nightmare. Johannesburg: MF Books.

See Privacy Policy at https://intersectionalpsychology.com/privacy-policy/ 

You may never have heard of private equity firms like Blackstone, KKR, Bain Capital or the Carlyle Group, but in recent decades they have quietly become some of the most powerful companies in the world. They own your hospitals, your nurseries, your energy systems. Their reach stretches from formerly public utilities to the home you rent and the food you eat. In their rise to power, they have reshaped capitalism in their own image – all by using debt as a weapon to produce vast returns for the companies who own and control them. The implications for inequality, for how our economy functions, and for the fight to build a sustainable future, are profound.

Our guest this week is the Guardian journalist Hettie O’Brien, who is the author of new book The Asset Class: How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself.

Ibram X. Kendi, professor of history and the founding director of the Howard University Institute for Advanced Study, and the author of Stamped from the Beginning and his latest, Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age (One World, 2026), talks about his new book charting the history of the idea that motivates many white nationalists, and how to counter it.

cover image courtesy of the publisher

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The supposed evils of postmodern culture have been endlessly catalogued: moral relativism, the loss of shared values, ironic detachment, a pathological aversion to sincerity, and all rooted in a philosophical worldview that casts a sceptical eye on master narratives and the concept of transcendent truth. But have we finally moved on from postmodernism? This week we explore the concept of metamodernism, a cultural disposition that seeks to reintroduce interiority and feeling to postmodern playfulness.

Despite it's mainstream presence for more than a decade, Bitcoin has yet to make a convincing argument about its use case. Nevertheless, the cryptocurrency space has become the home of a fascinating subculture - that of the Bitcoin Bros.

But who are these people? Why do they hinge their identity to this digital casino? And finally - do they actually believe in crypto, or are they in it for other reasons?

As someone who actually used to work in the space (although reluctantly) I was more than happy to turn to Prof. Dan Cassino, author of the recently released book, Bitcoin Bros: Masculinity, Cryptocurrency, and the Future of Men.

Over the last 50 years, nearly $79 trillion that could have gone to the bottom 90%…didn’t.

Where did it go—and what did that cost you?

Nick and Goldy are joined by Carter Price, senior mathematician at the RAND Corporation, to break down how rising inequality reshaped wages, growth, and even the federal budget—and why the economy feels so disconnected from everyday life. Because this isn’t just about who got richer. It’s about what everyone else lost.

Carter Price is a Senior Mathematician at the RAND Corporation and Professor of Policy Analysis at the RAND School of Public Policy

Social Media:

@CarterCPrice

Further reading: 

Measuring the Income Gap from 1975 to 2023

RAND Budget Model: Groundbreaking insights into the everyday impacts of federal policy

Unlocking the Tax Code with RAND's Tax Code Analysis Tool

Preliminary Strategies for Reducing the Burden of Federal Debt

Impacts of the Retirement Savings for Americans Act

Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com

Facebook: Pitchfork Economics Podcast

Bluesky: @pitchforkeconomics.bsky.social

Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics

Threads: pitchforkeconomics

TikTok: @pitchfork_econ

YouTube: @pitchforkeconomics

LinkedIn: Pitchfork Economics

Twitter: @PitchforkEcon, @NickHanauer

Substack: ⁠The Pitch⁠

What do the Soviet Union and the current British economy have in common? What can studying the philosophy of science reveal about our economic systems? Is the depoliticisation of economics a dangerous pipe dream?

Join political economist Abby Innes as she argues that treating society as a closed system that can be controlled and regulated ignores man's unrelenting capacity for new ideas and technologies. Abby Innes is Associate Professor of Political Economy in the European Institute at the LSE.

To see your favourite thinkers tackle philosophy's most current issues, buy tickets for our upcoming festival: https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/

And visit our website for many more articles, videos, and podcasts like this one: https://iai.tv/

You can find everything we referenced here: https://linktr.ee/philosophyforourtimes

And don't hesitate to email us at [email protected] with your thoughts or questions!

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Scholars argue that streaming platforms have turned music into a technology of surveillance. Thanks to music streaming, now more than ever before, music accompanies us as we move across the physical, social and geographical spaces that define our everyday lives. 

Music has been traditionally imagined as a means of self-expression. More often than not, it is used to channel our emotions and deal with our everyday lives. Music becomes a soundtrack to the routine, to the mundane, to the banal, but also of the special and most eventful moments of our lives. 

Today, with the help of our guest, we will start from this idea, but we will problematise it by outlining how streaming platforms use and commercialise the relationship between music and everyday life, collecting and selling behavioural data. 

Concepts discussed: commodity, commodification, decommodification, consumer surveillance, social reproduction, crisis of social reproduction, self-care, protest music, resistance. 

Host: Dr Frank Maracchione, SOAS University of London. 

Guest: Professor Eric Drott, Professor of Theory at the University of Texas in Austin. His research spans several subjects, including contemporary music cultures, streaming music platforms, music and protest, genre theory, digital music, and the political economy of music. His first book, Music and the Elusive Revolution (University of California Press, 2011), examines music and politics in France after May ’68. His second book, Streaming Music, Streaming Capital (Duke University Press, 2024), examines the political economy of music streaming platforms. He is also co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Protest Music with Noriko Manabe. 

References:

Appadurai, A. (Ed.). (1986). The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge University Press.

Baumol, W.J. and W.G. Bowen. (1966). Performing Arts. The Economic Dilemma. A study of Problems common to Theater, Opera, Music and Dance. New York: The Twentieth Century Fund.

Drott, E. A. (2018). Music as a Technology of Surveillance. Journal of the Society for American Music, 12(3), 233–267.

Drott, E. (2019). Music in the Work of Social Reproduction. Cultural Politics, 15(2), 162–183.

Drott, E. (2024). Streaming Music, Streaming Capital. Duke University Press.

United Musicians and Allied Workers. (2026). Justice at Spotify. https://weareumaw.org/justice-at-spotify 

This episode is produced by the SPERI Presents… committee, including Chris Saltmarsh, Josh White, Frank Maracchione, and Andrew Hindmoor. This episode was edited by Frank Maracchione with support from Chris Saltmarsh. Music and audio by Andy_Gambino. Hosted on Acast. See https://acast.com/privacy for more information. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.