the minor constellations podcast

This episode is the second of a two-part focus on the subject of abolition: which denotes both a theoretical approach and a series of political and social movements that advocate for the overcoming of violent state institutions such as prisons and the police.

In this episode, we talk to Mitali Nagrecha and Anthony Obst of the project Justice Collective, a Berlin-based European project that aims to end society’s reliance on policing and punishment by engaging in advocacy, research, public education, and organizing to reveal and resist punishment as a tool of racism and economic injustice. Our conversation centers on how abolition can look in practice and explores the questions that Justice Collective deals with, particularly in relation to their current focus on Ersatzfreiheitsstrafe (substitute imprisonment) in Germany.

We recorded the conversation in mid-December, and just a week later, the German government agreed to pass the draft bill that Mitali and Anthony criticize into legislation. Although this news is a disappointment to Justice Collective, they are nevertheless continuing their work and building new strategies to respond to this development.

For links, a list of references, and more information about our guest please visit https://minor.hypotheses.org/podcast

Our amazing intro track is by Shane Cooper, called "Bass in the Bathroom", from the album "Small Songs for Big Times", March 2020. For more, please visit https://shanecooper.bandcamp.com/releases

This episode is the first of a two-part focus on the subject of abolition: which denotes both a theoretical approach and a series of political and social movements that advocate the overcoming of violent state institutions such as prisons and the police.

In this episode talk to Vanessa Thompson and Daniel Loick in light of the publication of their German-language reader Abolitionismus, which was published by Suhrkamp in July 2022, and which makes some of the most important voices of the international discussions around Abolition accessible in German for the first time.

We talk about theoretical approaches to abolition, and the question of how these might be translated (both in the literal and wider senses of the word) across different geographic and political contexts, and the kinds of futures that abolition anticipates.

For links, a list of references, and more information about our guest please visit https://minor.hypotheses.org/podcast

Our amazing intro track is by Shane Cooper, called "Bass in the Bathroom", from the album "Small Songs for Big Times", March 2020. For more, please visit https://shanecooper.bandcamp.com/releases

In this episode, we talk to Ben Ratskoff, who is visiting assistant professor in the Louchheim School of Judaic Studies at Hebrew Union College and the University of Southern California. Our conversation departs from two articles he wrote. One was published in Funambulist, titled “Rethinking Jewish Diaspora”,  in which he wants to nuance the concept of Jewish radical diasporism beyond Jewish opposition to Zionism. The other,  titled "Against Analogy" appeared in Jewish Currents, titled "Against Analogy". It was written just weeks after the murder of George Floyd and suggests that progressive Jews need to go beyond invoking Jewish suffering as a means to enable Jewish solidarity with other minorities. The conversation addresses questions of Jewish identity, diaspora politics and analogy.

This time, we recorded our conversation with a live audience, as part of the Minor Cosmopolitan Assembly event, at Silent Green Kulturquartier in Berlin Wedding.

For links, a list of references, and more information about our guest please visit https://minor.hypotheses.org/podcast 

Our amazing intro track is by Shane Cooper, called "Bass in the Bathroom", from the album "Small Songs for Big Times", March 2020. For more, please visit https://shanecooper.bandcamp.com/releases 

In this Episode we talk to Ira Raja, Professor of English at the University of Delhi and she held the Potsdam Postcolonial Chair for Global Modernities in the 2022 Summer Semester. The conversation centres on her article titled, “Nation and Ageing: Mother India’s Mutable Body”, from The Handbook to Ageing, forthcoming from Bloomsbury. We start from the ways in which imaginaries of the nation are often constructed through motherly figures, and how in India, certain mothers, such as Dalit and Muslim mothers, cannot be abstracted to stand in for the nation. Ira then talks about the ambivalence inherent in the figure of the ageing mother as either a token of postcolonial decline, or in the reading she offers, as having great potential in signalling a nation more porous and open to change, crucial in a time of rampant Hindutva.

For links, a list of references, and more information about our guest please visit https://minor.hypotheses.org/podcast

Our amazing intro track is by Shane Cooper, called "Bass in the Bathroom", from the album "Small Songs for Big Times", March 2020. For more, please visit shanecopper.bandcamp.com/

In this episode we talk to Jasmine Nichole Cobb, who is Professor of African & African American Studies as well as of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University, and who has also recently joined the RTG Minor Cosmopolitanism's network of international partners. Our conversation focuses on her latest book, titled New Growth: The Art and Texture of Black Hair forthcoming in December from Duke University Press. The book explores Afro-textured hair as a surface upon which black liberation is represented from slavery to the present day. We talk to Jasmine about how hair functions as a form of representation within black visual culture, before moving to hear her explain how she thinks about hair in relation to scholarly work on the notion of the flesh. Finally, we about how hair is connected to feeling both in the tactile and affective sense.

For links, a list of references, and more information about our guest please visit https://minor.hypotheses.org/podcast

Our amazing intro track is by Shane Cooper, called "Bass in the Bathroom", from the album "Small Songs for Big Times", March 2020. For more, please visit shanecopper.bandcamp.com/

In this episode we talk to David Scott. David Scott is Ruth and William Lubic Professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. He has published numerous works - among them Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality, published 1999, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, published 2004, and Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice, in 2014. He also has two forthcoming books: “Irreparable Evil: An Essay in Moral and Reparatory History,” and, with Orlando Patterson The Paradox of Freedom: A Biographical Dialogue.

He visited the University of Potsdam in July and August as the RTG’s Mercator Fellow, where he gave public talks and master classes, which enabled us to develop an ongoing conversation with him and to have the pleasure of hosting him on this podcast. Our discussions focussed on his preoccupation in the last years with the life and thought of his friend Stuart Hall, specifically on his 2017 book Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity, which is also the center of this episode.

For links, a list of references, and more information about our guest please visit https://minor.hypotheses.org/podcast

Our amazing intro track is by Shane Cooper, called "Bass in the Bathroom", from the album "Small Songs for Big Times", March 2020. For more, please visit shanecopper.bandcamp.com/

In this episode, we talk to Khwezi Mkhize about his current project Home-Made Empire: South Africa’s Imperium, where he moves away from the dominant periodization of apartheid, to think about South Africa as a nation state with its own imperial project, particularly evident in its aspirations toward Namibia. Khwezi brings a different focus to the work of black intellectuals working against colonialism and racial rule in South Africa, adding a global and diasporic dimension to South African intellectual history, a history that has often remained in the shadow of the singular national history of apartheid.

For links, a list of references, and more information about our guest please visit https://minor.hypotheses.org/podcast

Our amazing intro track is by Shane Cooper, called "Bass in the Bathroom", from the album "Small Songs for Big Times", March 2020. For more, please visit shanecopper.bandcamp.com/

Introducing season 2 of the minor constellations podcast!

The Minor Constellations Podcast is the podcast of the Research Training Group Minor Cosmopolitanisms. We feature the work of thinkers and cultural practitioners – people whose work touches on the current moment and who are interested in the ways in which our theories and practices shed light on the relations between knowledge, politics and power.

The RTG is based at the University of Potsdam and in partnership with Humboldt University, the Free University Berlin and University of Koblenz and Landau. It also has 8 international partner universities, located in Australia, South Africa, India and North America.

We are a multidisciplinary group that seeks to reinvigorate the question of how to “think and feel beyond the nation'' in the wake of the unravelling of the cosmopolitan promise. We aim to do this by focusing on that which may be situated within specific local, historical and political situations but makes worlds, throws unexpected connections into relief, or builds forms of cooperation across difference.

In this second season of the podcast, we release an episode every month: conversations with exciting guests, among them David Scott, Ira Raja, Jasmine Cobb, Elad Lapidot, Khwezi Mkhize, Judith Coffey and many more.

Catch up on Season 1, and check our website at minor.hypotheses.org/podcast

In this final episode of the first season, we talk to Professor Elahe Haschemi Yekani about her joint transdisciplinary project Revisualising Intersectionality, a collaboration with Magdalena Nowicka and Tiara Roxanne, which was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, and the book of which is forthcoming this year. The conversation centres on her chapter titled “The Ends of Visibility” in which she interrogates the limits of identity categories in intersectional frameworks by specifically focusing on visuality. In doing so, she draws on discussions from postcolonial and decolonial theory to offer a critique of representation and intersectionality via readings from visual culture that offer, as she puts it, modes of “seeing and being” differently.

For links, a list of references, and more information about our guest please visit https://minor.hypotheses.org/podcast

Our amazing intro track is by Shane Cooper, called "Bass in the Bathroom", from the album "Small Songs for Big Times", March 2020. For more, please visit shanecopper.bandcamp.com/

In this episode we listen in on a conversation between Dr Zoran Terzić, a writer, jazz pianist, and a visual artist and Priyam Goswami Choudhury, a PhD fellow in the RTG minor cosmopolitanisms researching publishing networks of poetry. Zoran and Priyam have known each other for 5 years now, and in August this year they met in Zoran’s apartment in Berlin to chat about his book, Idiocracy: Thinking and Acting in the Age of the Idiot, published in German in 2020 with the English translation forthcoming from Chicago University Press. 

What we hear in this episode is part of a longer conversation which took place on that day, and of their ongoing discussions. We drop in as they talk about how Zoran came to publish a book on the figure of the idiot so timeously, and follow them as they move from different manifestations of the idiot whether in Dostoyevsky, Flaubert or on the internet, through to the reproduction of the self through phenomena such as memes or Tik Tok, and finally, as they come to talk about the direction of the internet and different figures of futurity. 

You’ll also hear Zoran’s musical interludes, played by him on the melodica.

For links, a list of references, and more information about our guest please visit https://minor.hypotheses.org/podcast

Our amazing intro track is by Shane Cooper, called "Bass in the Bathroom", from the album "Small Songs for Big Times", March 2020. For more, please visit shanecopper.bandcamp.com/