The Chatterbox

Our guest today is Minna Salami, the feminist author, social critic and currently Program Chair at The New Institute. Her first book was Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone, and her writing can be found in the Guardian, Project Syndicate, Al Jazeera, and The Philosopher, and many others.

In her new book, Salami explores the question Can Feminism Be African?. Drawing from feminist thought, postcolonial theory, historical insights, and African knowledge systems, Salami combines personal reflection with cultural criticism to offer a vivid and cohesive discussion about power, identity, patriarchy, imagination, and the human condition.  

Joining Salami to discuss the book is Hannah Dawson, historian of ideas at King’s College London and editor of The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing.

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Ruha Benjamin, sociologist and professor of African American Studies at Princeton University discusses the concept of "us topia" as an alternative between dystopia and utopia, which accomodates shaping the future through collective agency. Benjamin says technology also can play a role in representing the public good and shares the example of Barcelona’s Decidim app which promotes democratic participation in city governance. Aaron Robertson, author and writer talks about the utopian ideal and how it influenced a group of Black thinkers, artists and political leaders in the 1960’s.

Guests:

Ruha Benjamin

Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, Founding Director of the Ida B. Wells JUST Data Lab, and author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code,"  Other books include  Imagination: A Manifesto, Viral Justice, People’s Science 

Aaron Robertson

Writer, editor, and author of “The Black Utopians:Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America.”  

Copyright has become a tool for privatizing everything — the opposite of what it was designed to do when it was invented in the eighteenth century to protect published works. In their book Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs (Penguin Random House, 2024), Princeton professors David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu provide a lively account of that turnaround, to the point where “the bulk of American culture is in copyright prison,” the world’s largest companies earn their revenue from intellectual property, and creative rights to everything from wallpaper, computer code, choreography, a “vibe” or a banana costume can be disputed, claimed and monetized. Join Vass and Paul for this engaging tag team with David and Alexandre as they discuss both historical and contemporary examples of the power of copyright and where we might be headed with new technologies such as generative artificial intelligence.

Mentioned:

• Statute of Anne of 1710: www.copyrighthistory.com/anne.html
• Landmark copyright case, Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co. 499 US 340 (1991)
• Copyright Law of the United States (Title 17): www.copyright.gov/title17/
• “Fair use in America simply means the right to hire a lawyer to defend your right to create”: Lawrence Lessig in Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity (Penguin Random House, 2005, chapter 12)
• TRIPS Agreement: www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/intel2_e.htm
• Berne Convention of 1886: www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/
• Copyright Act (RSC 1985, c C-42): https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-42/Index.html

Further Reading: 

• David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu, Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs (Penguin Random House, 2024)
• Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity (Penguin Random House, 2005)
• Katy Waldman, “Did a Best-Selling Romantasy Novelist Steal Another Writer’s Story?” (The New Yorker, January 6, 2025)
• CBC Arts, “Court tosses out another Da Vinci Code plagiarism case” (CBC, November 13, 2006)
• Associated Press: “Media Talk; Dustin Hoffman Loses Appeals Court Case” (The New York Times, July 9, 2001)
• Racheal Muldoon and Mark Bailey: “Getty v Stability AI: A ‘tantalising glance’ of what’s to come for AI firms and creators” (Charles Russell Speechlys, January 16, 2025)
• Kari Paul, “Court of a-peel: nasty split over banana costume leads to legal monkey business” (The Guardian, August 1, 2019)

Show Notes:

• More on copyright history, current questions around legislation, and rights of publicity: BBC Arts & Ideas podcast, “Dickens, Disney and copyright” (with guests David Bellos, Katie McGettigan and Hayleigh Bosher; December 21, 2023)
• On Creative Commons movement and Wikipedia: Creative Commons, “Celebrating 20 Years of CC Licenses — Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig” (YouTube, April 6, 2022)

Credits:
Policy Prompt is produced by Vass Bednar and Paul Samson. Our technical producers are Tim Lewis and Melanie DeBonte. Fact-checking and background research provided by Reanne Cayenne. Marketing by Kahlan Thomson. Brand design by Abhilasha Dewan and creative direction by Som Tsoi.

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Listen to new episodes of Policy Prompt biweekly on major podcast platforms. Questions, comments or suggestions? Reach out to CIGI’s Policy Prompt team at [email protected].

Neoliberalism has so many meanings that some say it has no meaning. Nailing down a consensus is also hampered by the fact that no one calls themselves a “neoliberal.” There’s even calls to abandon the term altogether since it’s become more a slur than doctrine needing analysis. Enter Max Trecker. He took the debate over neoliberalism as an opportunity to investigate its intellectual origins in the 1920s and 1930s. What did it mean then? What was neoliberal thought a reaction to? And what would those neoliberals think today? Also, in this interview, Max talks about an additional project: How Ukraine has been imagined as an economic space. It’s an issue not only of historical import, but enormous relevance today as Ukraine plans its postwar future.

Guest:

Max Trecker is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the History Department at the University of Pittsburgh and an economic historian and postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for History and Culture of Eastern Europe in Leipzig, Germany. He’s the author of Red Money for the Global South: East-South Economic Relations in the Cold War published by Routledge.

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In Mother State (Allen Lane), Helen Charman uses this provocative insight to write a new history of Britain and Northern Ireland. Beginning with Women's Liberation and ending with austerity, the book follows mothers' fights for an alternative future. Here we see a world where motherhood is not a restrictive identity but a state of possibility. ‘Mother’ ceases to be an individual responsibility, and becomes an expansive collective term to organise under, for people of any gender, with or without children of their own. It begins with an understanding: that to mother is a political act.

Charman discusses her book with Lola Olufemi, author of Feminism, Interrupted and Experiments in Imagining Otherwise.

Find more events at the Bookhsop: https://lrb.me/eventspod

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Lucia Pradella studied Philosophy, Social Sciences and Migration Studies at the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari and the Humboldt University in Berlin. She collaborated with the project of historical-critical edition of Marx’s and Engels’s complete works at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. After completing her PhD on globalisation and the history of political economy using that edition (jointly at the University of Naples Federico II and Paris X Nanterre), she conducted a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship in Sociology of Economic Processes and Work at Ca’ Foscari. She taught in the areas of International Political Economy, Migration, and Welfare Policies at Brunel, SOAS and Ca’ Foscari. She is a Research Associate in the SOAS Department of Development Studies and in the Centre for the Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex, and member of the Laboratory for Social Research at Ca’ Foscari. She joined King’s as a lecturer in International Political Economy in 2015.

I am a high school teacher of history and economics at a public high school in NYC, and began the podcast to help demystify political economy for teachers.  The podcast is now within the top 2% of podcasts worldwide in terms of listeners (per Listen Notes) and individual episodes are frequently listed by The Syllabus (the-syllabus.com) as among the 10 best political economy podcasts of a particular week.  The podcast is reaching thousands of listeners each month.  

The podcast seeks to provide a substantive alternative to mainstream economics media; to communicate information and ideas that contribute to equitable and peaceful solutions to political and economic issues; and to improve the teaching of high school and university political economy.  

Best,

Lev

How global capitalism intersects with inter-state relations? How are forces of private equity and transnational capital shaping the domestic and foreign policies that governments design to fulfill capital accumulation and geopolitical interests - often at the expense of human and environmental rights and dignity?

An interview with Dr. William T. Armaline, Professor of Sociology and Human Rights at the San José State University and co-author of the new book Human Rights Praxis and the Struggle for Survival with Davita Silfen Glasberg.

Join us in this exploration and subscribe to our podcast newsletter community here.⁠

Listen to related episodes: 

Ep. 86 Chloé Meulewaeter on Global Military Spending & Demilitarization Efforts

Ep. 91 Dr. Paul Slovic & Dr. Scott Slovic on the Science Behind the Limits of Compassion

Ep. 151 Dr. Luke Moffett on Reparations in Post-Conflict Societies

Ep. 180 Dr. L. Ayu Saraswati on Pain, Power and Transnational Feminism

Recommended links to this episode:

Today’s episode is a recording of Feb. 3 livestream that Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson hosted with George Ingram and Tony Pipa, both Senior Fellows in Global Economy and Development at the Brookings Institution, and Jonathan Katz, Senior Director of the Anti-Corruption, Democracy, and Security project also at Brookings—all three of whom are also alumni of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Among other topics, they discussed the USAID’s tumultuous experience over the first two weeks of the Trump administration, the serious consequences of the sudden freeze President Trump installed on U.S. foreign assistance, the sudden removal of hundreds of USAID personnel, and rumors that USAID is set to be subsumed into the U.S. Department of State.

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