The Critical Lede

Hot damn do we have a good interview for you all this week. We get a chance to talk with Lauren Berlant about what we are promised, what we get, and why optimism isn't necessarily good for us. We mean it, this one is a must-listen.

In this review we discuss visual rhetorical analysis, psychoanalysis and how they play out at the Cody Museum of firearms. Really interesting stuff.

In this episode we discuss Stacy Holman-Jones' new article in TPQ. We deal with questions of sexuality, autoethnography, writing and much more. Provocative stuff.

In this episode we review a recent article from Qualitative Inquiry about bullying in academia.

Matt May’s new QJS piece, “Hobo Orator Union: Class Composition and the Spokane Free Speech Fight of the Industrial Workers of the World” gives us plenty to talk about. The performance of oratory, the IWW, and some good ole’ Marxism. Check it out.

We are thrilled about this interview! We chat with Dr. Halberstam about The Queer Art of Failure - a book that is both brilliant and accessible. This is, no joke, one of our most engaging interviews to date! We chat about queer failure (of course) and the reason why it is a viable method of unbecoming.

Back to the Review of Communication! In this episode we tackle Gender, Media, and Madness: Reading a Rhetoric of Women in Crisis Through Foucauldian Theory. We talk through the authors five media texts and the relationship to discourses of madness within popular culture.

Dr. Tamas’s new book Life After Leaving: The Remains of Spousal Abuse is an evocative autoethnographic accounting of surviving domestic abuse. In this interview we chat about her method, the ethics of authethnography, and Tamas’s unique articulation of testimony.

After reading this article, we knew we had to chat with the authors! Rufo and Atchison’s From Circus to Faces: The Disciplinary Politics of Citizen and Citizenship is a provocative piece that challenges how contemporary scholars make sense of the public and the citizen. After an extensive analysis, the authors critically engage the work of Rob Asen and his discourse theory of citizenship.

We are chatting with Dr. Mari Ruti about her recent book The Summons of Love. We discuss her unique writing style (for an academic audience, at least), her pschyoanalytic influences and the control that the desire for love has on us.