The NAB Project Podcast

What are the racial consequences of underfunding public universities? What are "new universities" and how is their focus on underserved student populations transforming U.S. higher education? What is “postsecondary racial neoliberalism” and how does the term capture key facets of the extant crisis in public higher education? How does the “culture of austerity” in U.S. public higher education delimit choices for administration and staff? Why do public universities often support trite models of diversity?

We explore these questions and more with Laura Hamilton and Kelly Nielsen the author's of Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities. Hamilton is Professor and Chair of Sociology at University of California Merced. She co-authored Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality (2013) with Elizabeth A. Armstrong, and authored Parenting to a Degree: How Family Matters for College and Beyond (2016). Kelly Nielsen is a Senior Research Analyst at the University of  San Diego Extension Center for Research and Evaluation. He is the author of numerous articles, including "Fake It 'Til You Make it': Why Community College Students' Aspirations 'Hold Steady,'" and, "Beyond 'Warming Up' and 'Cooling Out': The Effects of Community College on a Diverse Group of Disadvantaged Young Women."

What has been the legacy of Bob Dylan on modern cultural life? How can research on Dylan be co-collaborative with the public toward meaningful ends? How can popular music institutes and centers model a new route for the humanities? How ought the humanities to engage and co-collaborate with the world outside of the academy? What is the relationship between public humanities work and the liberal arts?

We explore these questions and more with our guest Sean Latham, the Pauline McFarlin Walter Endowed Professor of English at the University of Tulsa, the director of the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities, the editor of the James Joyce Quarterly, and the director of the University of Tulsa Institute for Bob Dylan Studies. He works with a team at The University of Tulsa and the Tulsa-based George Kaiser Family Foundation to bring together the Bob Dylan Archive, the Institute for Bob Dylan Studies, and a new Bob Dylan Center in downtown Tulsa (scheduled to open May 10, 2022), as a new hub for publicly engaged humanistic research and scholarship. In particular, they aim to create in Tulsa a hub for popular music appreciation and reflection (including the Woody Guthrie Center, which is also in the city). He has written and edited numerous books on modern culture, and organized over 100 public humanities events including exhibitions, performances, conferences, and community-engaged research projects. He recently organized the edited collection The World of Bob Dylan (Cambridge UP, 2021) and has been working on a new book, Bob Dylan’s Odyssey: A Creative Biography.

How has the proliferating use of bibliometrics as a means to evaluate academic research shaped academic subjectivity? How are bibliometrics being used as a new technology of neoliberal, biopolitical governmentality, alongside the host of other ‘metrics’ (led by biometrics) that have emerged in the last two decades? What of most importance has been lost in the use of marginalia by scholars as a personal and political act? Does the production of neoliberal subjectivity and the power of bibliopolitics within academia exaserbate the two tier system of tenured and adjunct labor in higher education? Are there ways to resist the bibliometric regime and its multifarious form of surveillance and subjectivity formation? If so, what channels and modes of organizing should we be thinking about to resist our current trajectory?

We explore this questions and more with our guest Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Deakin University. He works on classical philosophy and modern receptions thereof, and the early modern period, up to and including the French enlightenment. He is interested in the history of Western receptions of its classical past, and the rich ethical legacy left by Stoic and academic schools in particular. He also has expertise in Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis and has published one single-authored and one coauthored book on Slavoj Zizek's work, and with Joanne Faulkner, Understanding Psychoanalysis. In the past, he has published on aesthetics, the theory of ideology, eschatology and political theology, and critical theory. He has written on a host of different thinkers: for instance John Macdowell, Jacques Lacan, Montaigne, Voltaire, Maimonides, Pierre Hadot, and Epictetus. He is also the author of Camus, Philosophe: To Return to Our Beginnings (Brill, 2015/16), the first monograph to bring the philosophy as a way of life (PWL) framework to the analysis of Camus' literary and philosophical work. Since 2011, he has published extensively on the work of Pierre Hadot and the 'very idea' of PWL, and most recent co-authored with Michael Ure, Philosophy as a Way of Life; History, Dimensions, Directions  (Bloomsbury, 2021). He has published several articles on Francis Bacon's ethics and wider conception of philosophy. He is also a co-translator of The Selected Essays of Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as Practice (Bloomsbury, 2021), and he is presently coordinating with Michael Chase and Eli Kramer a new PWL book series with Brill: Philosophy as a Way of Life: Text and Studies.

How can we help college and universities students (both undergraduate or graduate), or other participants, navigate the fraught worlds of intimate social interaction, romance, and abuse in the 21st century? Are there any gaps between how issues surrounding consent, assault, and sexual violence are talked about in the academic literature and how higher education students experience these issues in their lives? What sort of interpersonal and bottom up programming could be done to address issues of sexual assault, violence, and other sorts of coercive dynamics in graduate departments?

We explore these questions and more with Lori Bednarchik a professor and one of the leading national experts on sexual consent and communication, and in particular sex-positive and skills-based approaches to violence prevention. Alongside her scholarship and research, she has worked closely with athletes, fraternity men, and college students across the country, challenging the norms surrounding relationships, consent, and sex. Bednarchik received her PhD in Human Communication from Arizona State University, and an MPH in Health Education and Health Promotion, and BA in English and Gender Studies from The University of Maryland. She lectures at Arizona State University, San Diego State University, California State University at San Marcos, among other universities. Previously, she worked as a Health Educator at San Diego State University where she created several award-winning programs on bystander intervention education, and alcohol risk-reduction. She also re-designed and facilitated a Peer Health Education Program specifically for fraternity men called FratMANers (Fraternity Men Against Negative Environments and Rape Situations).

What is world-systems research and how did it emerge from the student movements of 1968? What is “diagonalism” as a mode of organization for meaningful theory and social change? From a world-systems perspective, what are the major global changes that are likely to occur within the next 30 years, and how might social movements influence those changes? In particular, what will U.S. and global higher education look like 30 years down the road?

We explore these questions and more with our guest Christopher Chase-Dunn, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of California-Riverside. Chase-Dunn specializes in "crossnational quantitative studies of the effects of dependence on foreign investment" as well as "studies cities and settlement systems in order to explain human sociocultural evolution. His research focuses on interpolity systems, including both the modern global political economy and earlier regional world-systems." He is the founder and a former editor of the Journal of World-Systems Research and the Series Editor of a related book series with Johns Hopkins University Press. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2001. We join him today as he prepares for retirement and reflects on his career is it developed in the foment of the 68 student movements.

What was it like to be involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the height of the civil rights movement? What was the philosophy of education for liberation advanced by SNCC at their first residential freedom school they launched in Chicago, and what lessons does it have for higher education today? How did SNCC practice direct democracy, what value does that kind of decision-making have, and could it be integrated into higher education today? How should higher education in the Americas address its legacy of participation in the slave trade, segregation, and other dimensions of white-supremacy?

Today we explore these questions and more with are guest Dr. Fannie Rushing. Rushing was a SNCC field secretary and co-founder of SNCC's first residential freedom school in Chicago in the early sixties. She was a key co-leader of the movement. She is also a historian of the movement as co-chair of the Chicago Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee History Project. She received her Ph.D. in Latin American and Caribbean History from the University of Chicago. Rushing is currently an associate professor in the Department of History at Benedict University.

If and how should online media companies exercise censorious power over people on their platforms? How do we support and protect critical and honest independent media? What is Project Censored, and how can it support the development of critical media literacy in college and university classrooms?

In today's podcast we talk with our guest Mickey Huff on these issues and more. Huff is the current director of Project Censored. He is also the president of the nonprofit Media Freedom Foundation, and professor of social science and history at Diablo Valley College (where he is co-chair of the History Program and is chair of the Journalism Department). He edits or co-edits the Censored book series for Seven Stories Press. His publications include the co-authored work with Nolan Higdon United States of Distraction: Media Manipulation in Post-Truth America (and what we can do about it) (City Lights Books, 2019). His research explores media and propaganda, fake news, and critical media literacy. He is a co-founding member of the Global Critical Media Literacy Project.

What "gaze" does the US higher education study abroad industry want to cultivate amongst students?  How does the lack of diversity in US study abroad programs affect the narratives told about it and diverse student experiences of it? What role should study abroad, and/or other cross-cultural experiences play in a liberal arts education? Despite it being a much heralded competence putatively cultivated during a study abroad experience, is global citizenship often empty of content in practice? How has the Covid-19 Pandemic shaped study abroad media and practice, including the new work in "virtual study abroad" programs?

We discuss these questions and more with Kelly Hankin, Professor of Film Studies at the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies of the University of Redlands, and the author of the new book Documenting the American Student Abroad: The Media Cultures of International Education (Bucknell University Press, 2021). This dynamic interdisciplinary work illuminates a greatly heralded but little researched domain in humanistic higher education, the study abroad experience and its media cultures. Hankin was also Eli's undergraduate advisor at the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies, a student-centered integrative degree program and living-learning community at the University of Redlands.  Hankins' leadership and collective work in this unique creative center in higher education greatly shaped and informed their new book.

* See here for more on the The Australian Consortium for 'In-Country' Indonesian Studies (ACICIS) Creative Arts & Design Professional Practicum virtual study abroad program, mentioned in today's episode.

What should be the role of philosophy as a shared, personal, and vulnerable endeavor in today's higher education system? As part of the authentic learning experience, how open should philosophy teachers be with their undergraduate students about their personal lives and challenges? Is there room in professional philosophy for personal and vulnerable philosophical teaching and writing?  What should philosophers highlight and advocate for in today's liberal arts and higher education system?

We explore these questions and others with John Kaag, chair of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, in today's episode. He is the author of American Philosophy: A Love Story (2016), which was an NPR Best Book of 2016 and a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Hiking With Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are (2018), and Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life (2020). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, and many other publications. He is known for works that interweave autobiography and history of philosophy, inviting readers to walk with him on his own philosophical journey while he serves as a psychogogic guide to them on their own quests to ever become who they are.

What can be learned from ethnographic interviews of Amazon’s last mile delivery workers in the greater LA area about the current global economy? How can undergraduate student researchers participate in this kind of labor research? Can academic and student research build opportunities for labor organizing, and resist the precarity that dominates the economy because of companies like Amazon? What are the purposes and goals of Labor Studies?

We explore these questions and more with our guests Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Ellen Reese, the co-editors of an important new collection entitled The Cost of Free: Shipping Amazon in the Global Economy (Pluto Press, 2020). This work explores the hegemony of Amazon on our imagination and economy, and what can be done to resist it. Jake Alimahomed-Wilson is Professor of Sociology at California State University, Long Beach, whose previous works include: Solidarity Forever? Race, Gender, and Unionism in the Ports of Southern California (Lexington Books, 2016), (co-author) Getting the Goods: Ports, Labor, and the Logistics Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2008). Ellen Reese is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside, whose previous works include: They Sat Cutback, We Say Fightback! (Russel Sage Foundation, 2011) and (co-editor) Wages of Empire: Neoliberal Policies, Repression, and Women's Poverty (Routledge 2007).