This week we hear from Julian Stallabrass, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.

Julian has written a new book, Killing for Show: Photography, War, and the Media in Vietnam and Iraq, published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers in 2020.

We discuss the role of photography in war reporting, the weaponization of photographers and the press more broadly by the U.S. government during the war in Iraq, and how technological change has bought new ways of covering and seeing conflict.

This week we hear from Çağatay Edgücan Şahin and Mehmet Erman Erol. They are the editors of The Condition of the Working Class in Turkey: Labour under Neoliberal Authoritarianism, published by Pluto Press in 2021.

They discuss the current state of the Turkish economy, which is seeing colossal inflation, neoliberalism's effects, and pay and conditions for workers in Turkey.

This week we hear from Shyamika Jayasundara-Smits, the author of An Uneasy Hegemony: Politics of State-Building and Struggles for Justice in Sri Lanka, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

Shyamika discusses the recent protests in Sri Lanka, how social divisions served the country’s elite, and what Sri Lanka can teach other movements worldwide.

Shyamika is Assistant Professor at the Erasmus University in the Netherlands.

This week we hear from Louis Yako, an independent anthropologist and writer. Louis is the author of a new book, Bullets in Envelopes: Iraqi Academics in Exile, published by Pluto Press in 2021.

Louis discusses education in Iraq before the Gulf war, the effects of the U.S.-led sanctions, and the neoliberalization of the education system following the U.S. invasion in 2003.

This week we’re joined by Christine Leuenberger and Izhak Schnell, the authors of The Politics of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of Israel/Palestine, published by Oxford University Press in 2020.

They discuss the birth of mapping and the nation-state, early maps of the State of Israel, and how maps are used to form public perceptions of nationhood, particularly concerning Palestine.

Christine Leuenberger is a Senior Lecturer at Cornell University, and Izhak Schnell is an Emeritus Professor of Geophysics at Tel Aviv University.

This week, we hear from Fred Scharmen, author of Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space, published by Verso in 2021.

He talks about imagining utopian futures in outer space, the connection between space and the sea, and recommends some reading to our listeners.

This week we are joined by Ahmed Al-Rawi who has written a book called Cyberwars in the Middle East, published by Rutgers University Press in 2021.

The book looks at how different actors in the Middle East, from states to activists, use hacking as a form of political disruption.

Ahmed is an Assistant Professor of News, Social Media, and Public Communication at Simon Fraser University.

This week Yafa Shanneik discusses her book The Art of Resistance in Islam: The Performance of Politics Among Shi'i Women in the Middle East and Beyond, published by Cambridge University Press in January.

In the book, Yafa, a Visiting Professor at Lund University, uses first-hand ethnographic insights to ask how Shi'i religious women in the Middle East and Europe resist state, gender, and communal structures.

This week we hear from Tariq Ali, a leading figure on the left, a prolific author, an activist, and a member of the editorial board of the New Left Review.

Tariq discusses his new book, Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes, published by Verso in May 2022.

In the book, Tariq tackles the cult of Churchill that has had a pervasive impact on imperial history and contemporary politics in Britain. Churchill, Tariq highlights, was a white supremacist whose policies contributed to the deaths of millions of people abroad and enacted violence against the working class at home.

This week we hear from Dipesh Chakrabarty, the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History at the University of Chicago.

Dipesh is one of the most important historians of the past few decades. In the last few years, he has turned his attention to the Anthropocene: the idea that human actions have caused such a disruption to planetary systems that we have entered a new geological epoch.

In his latest book, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, published by Chicago University Press in 2021, he argues that climate change has changed ideas of history, modernity, and globalization.