The Intellectual

In this episode we interview China Miéville.

China Miéville is the multi-award-winning author of many works of fiction and non-fiction. His fiction includes The City and the City, Embassytown and This Census-Taker. He has won the Hugo, World Fantasy, and Arthur C. Clarke awards. His non-fiction includes the photo-illustrated essay London's Overthrow. He is also the author of October: The Story of the Russian Revolution. He has written for various publications, and is a founding editor of the journal Salvage. He is also a former member of multiple socialist party formations and organizations.

In this conversation China joins the podcast to talk about his latest book, A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto. The book provides an introduction to The Communist Manifesto which provides readers with a guide to understanding the Manifesto and the many specters it has conjured. Through his unique and unorthodox reading, Miéville offers a spirited defense of the enduring relevance of Marx and Engels' ideas.

The book also contains the full text of the Manifesto and multiple prefaces penned by Marx & Engels.

You can pick the book up directly from Haymarket Books at 40% off currently. We really want to thank Haymarket and China Miéville for donating 40 copies of the book (!!) and also for making a donation to help cover the cost of postage to our incarcerated book club through our partnership with Massive Bookshop and Prisons Kill. We do still need to raise about $150 more dollars to cover the cost of postage to get this book inside, and we'll include a link to contribute to that effort in the show notes. Last month we were able, along with some donations from Massive Bookshop and our patrons to provide 40 copies of Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection to those incarcerated readers.

As for the show itself, It is December, currently for the month we've had more nonrenewals than we have new patrons, which is not unexpected this time of year as people try to balance holiday expenses. However if you have the capacity to become a patron of the show, you can do so for as little as $1 a month or $10.80 per year, at patreon.com/millennialsarekilingcapitalism. We really want to thank all of the folks who support the show, or have supported it when they've been able to, as it is only through your support that conversations like this are possible.

Links:

To purchase A Spectre, Haunting (currently 40% off): https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1990-a-spectre-haunting

To donate to the Prisons Kill book club (to help with postage for the donated copies): https://massivebookshop.com/products/prisonskill-book-club-donation

To check out the Salvage journal that Miéville talked about in the episode: https://salvage.zone

To support the show: patreon.com/millennialsarekilingcapitalism

Christiaan Huygens was the greatest scientist working in the vital period between Galileo and Newton, as the scientific revolution gathered pace. He discovered Saturn’s ring, invented the accurate pendulum clock, and devised a wave theory of light far ahead of its time.

In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to author Hugh Aldersey-Williams to find out more about Huygens and why — more even than Newton — he can be called the father of modern science. 

This episode was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg. 

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This episode of Spotlights features Rowan Deer, PhD, author of Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World (Bloomsbury, 2020), which brings together literary, philosophical, and scientific perspectives to rethink animism for the Anthropocene. She discusses the way her book juxtaposes authors like Virginia Woolf, Lewis Carroll, and William Shakespeare with the Copernican Revolution, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, and Sigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious. She also discusses the the role of deconstruction in her writing, correcting some common misunderstandings of deconstruction and Jacques Derrida.

More information about her book is available on the publisher's website here. 

Some other pieces of interest include her article on fungi and language, "Mycorrhizal Metaphors," available open access at Ecozona.

Another relevant essay is "Reading in the Dark," published by Orion Magazine.

This conversation is with Margret Grebowicz and Kiff Bamford, editors of a new collection of essays entitled Lyotard and Critical Practice, published in late-2022 by Bloomsbury. Margret teaches political theory at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. She is the author of a number of scholarly and popular media pieces, ranging from French critical theory to reflections on mountain climbing and the social-cultural meaning of dogs in contemporary life. Margret is the author of six books: Why Internet Porn Matters (2013), Beyond the Cyborg (co-authored with Helen Merrick in 2015), The National Park to Come (2015), Whale Song (2017), Mountains and Desire (2020), and Rescue Me: Dogs and Their Humans (2021). Kiff is a Reader in Contemporary Art at Leeds Beckett University in England. He is the author of Lyotard and the ‘figural’ in Performance, Art and Writing (2012) and Jean-François Lyotard: Critical Lives (2017), as well as the editor of Jean-François Lyotard: The Interviews and Debates (2020). In this conversation, we discuss the meaning of Lyotard’s legacy, the place of the postmodern in contemporary theory, and the tasks and labor of editing a collection on a critical yet all-but-forgotten late-twentieth century thinker.

In episode ten of season two of A is for Architecture, I speak with Beatriz Colomina and Evangelos Kotsioris, about their book Radical Pedagogies, co-edited with Ignacio G. Galán and Anna-Maria Meister and published by MIT Press in 2022. Beatriz is Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture at Princeton University and Evangelos Kotsioris, Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Radical Pedagogies documents and analyses the long history of experimental architecture education programs that ‘sought to upend disciplinary foundations and conventional assumptions about the nature of architecture […] challenged modernist and colonial norms, decentered building, imagined new roles for the architect, and envisioned participatory forms of practice’ in favour of greater diversity, insight, democratic voice and justice, and away from top-down educational - and practice -models.

You can get the book via MIT Press’ website here; it’s certainly worth a look. You can also find out more about Beatriz Colomina here,  and listen to her lecture on similar themes to the book for the Strelka Institute here, in a lecture she gave in 2019, entitled Radical Pedagogies. Evangelos can be found at MoMA here, on Instagram here, on LinkedIn here and watched speaking about the façade of the UN Secretariat Building as part of MoMA’s ArtSpeaks program here.

As any of us in it, or who’ve gone through it might attest, architectural education seems to trend to the centre, and its base form remains remarkably resilient to change, even in the face of the great technical, social and cultural shifts that have transformed the contemporary world. Radical Pedagogies documents the visions – hopes, I suppose – of folk who tried, and in many cases succeeded, in testing new forms of learning practice in the face of this shifting landscape.

Happy listening!

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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This episode of Guerrilla History comes out just in time for the start of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar! In this episode, we bring back fan favorite Alexander Aviña to discuss the politics behind the World Cup, both historically and in this current edition. We hit on topics of human rights, sports washing, and propaganda in both cases. We also talk about the sport itself and the prospects on the field for this edition of the biggest prize within The Beautiful Game!

Alexander Aviña is historian at Arizona State University, and is author of the book Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrilla in the Cold War Mexican Countryside (Oxford University Press, 2014, https://alexanderavina.com/specters-of-revolution/ ). Find him on Twitter @Alexander_Avina, and listen to the episode we did with him on The Beautiful Game.

You can support Guerrilla History by joining us at patreon.com/guerrillahistory, where you will also get bonus content!

"Collapse" is an evocative and powerful term, but what does it really mean? And how can we use it to help us understand the actual processes and events through which ancient people lived? Professor Guy Middleton is both one of the world's leading experts on collapse as a concept and an accomplished archaeologist of the late Bronze Age Aegean, and we discuss the usefulness of ""collapse"" and how Bronze Age people experienced their famous time of troubles.

Patrick's book is now available! Get The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World in hardcopy, ebook, or audiobook (read by Patrick) here: https://bit.ly/PWverge 

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