Public schools are one of the last remaining universal public goods in the United States—and are also some of our most unequal institutions. In Unsettling Choice, Ujju Aggarwal explores how the expansion of choice-based programs led to greater inequality and segregation in a gentrifying New York City neighborhood during the years following the Great Recession, mobilizing mechanisms rooted in market logics to recruit families with economic capital on their side while solidifying a public sphere that increasingly resembled the private. Here, Aggarwal is joined in conversation with Sabina Vaught.

Ujju Aggarwal is assistant professor of anthropology and experiential learning at The New School. She is author of Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education and coeditor of What’s Race Got to Do with It? How Current School Reform Policy Maintains Racial and Economic Inequality.

Sabina Vaught is professor at the University of Pittsburgh and director of the Kinloch Commons for Critical Pedagogy and Leadership. Vaught is coauthor of The School-Prison Trust and author of Compulsory: Education and the Dispossession of Youth in a Prison School.  

Episode references:

Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Christina Heatherton

Cindy Katz

Selma James

João Costa Vargas

Morgan Talty / Fire Exit

Praise for the book:

“A must-read to understand the racialized violence inherent within one of the most fundamental aspects of education in the United States: the logic of choice.”
—Damien Sojoyner

“Read this book, and be moved and transformed.”
—Sabina Vaught

Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education by Ujju Aggarwal is available from University of Minnesota Press.

The first major neo-Nazi party in the US was led by a science fiction fan. So opens Jordan S. Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness, a book that traces ideas about white nationalism through the entangled histories of science fiction culture and white supremacist politics, showing that debates about representation in science fiction films and literature are struggles over who has the right to imagine and inhabit the future. Here, Carroll is joined in conversation with David M. Higgins.

Jordan S. Carroll is the author of Reading the Obscene: Transgressive Editors and the Class Politics of US Literature (Stanford University Press, 2021) and Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). He received his PhD in English literature from the University of California, Davis. He was awarded the David G. Hartwell Emerging Scholar Award by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and his first book won the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars. Carroll’s writing has appeared in American Literature, Post45, Twentieth-Century Literature, the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and The Nation. He works as a writer and educator in the Pacific Northwest.

David M. Higgins (he/they) is associate professor of English and chair of the Department of Humanities and Communication at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Worldwide, and a senior editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books. David is the author of Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-Victimhood, which won the 2022 Science Fiction Research Association Book Award. He has also published a critical monograph examining Ann Leckie’s SF masterwork Ancillary Justice (2013), and his research has been published in journals such as American Literature, Science Fiction Studies, Paradoxa, and Extrapolation. In the public sphere, David has been a featured speaker on NPR’s radio show On Point, and his literary journalism has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Guardian. David serves as the second vice president for the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA).

EPISODE REFERENCES:
James H. Madole

Richard B. Spencer

Dune (Frank Herbert)

The Iron Dream (Norman Spinrad)

Samuel Delany

Alain Badiou

Francis Parker Yockey / “destiny thinking”

“Is It Fascism? A Leading Historian Changes His Mind” by Elisabeth Zerofsky, on Robert Paxton. New York Times Magazine.

Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky)

Fredric Jameson

Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll is available from University of Minnesota Press. This book is part of the Forerunners series, and an open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu.

“Carroll reminds us that our future is contingent. Fascists have a vision for the future that excludes most of humanity, but fascists can be defeated. The future is for everyone—if we make it that way.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books

Policy expert and climate scientist Anna Farro Henderson explores how science is done, discussed, legislated, and imagined in her new book, Core Samples: A Climate Scientist’s Experiments in Politics and Motherhood. Grounded in her experience as an environmental policy advisor to Minnesota Senator Al Franken and Governor Mark Dayton, Henderson brings readers behind the closed doors of discovery and debate—and illuminates the messy, contradictory humanity of our scientific and political institutions. Here, Henderson is joined in conversation with Tenzin Dolkar and Roberta Downing on getting your voice heard in politics.

Anna Farro Henderson is an award-winning writer, PhD scientist, and environmental policy expert. She is a fellow at the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, teaches at the Loft Literary Center, and works in climate advocacy. She lives with her family in St. Paul, where she makes daily visits to the Mississippi River.

Tenzin Dolkar has more than 15 years of experience in policy development, advocacy, community organizing, and management with state and local governments. Dolkar is a council member on the Metropolitan Council, and has previously served as the State of Minnesota’s Rail Director and as a policy advisor on transportation, agriculture, and rural issues for Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton.

Roberta Downing is a public policy professional with more than 20 years of experience. Downing held a congressional fellowship administered by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and served on the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions under Senator Edward M. Kennedy; has held several academic and policy-focused positions, including for the offices of US Senator Sherrod Brown and DC Mayor Muriel E. Bowser; and is principal and co-founder of Harper Downing LLC, a Minnesota-based government affairs consulting firm.

Praise for the book:

“Honest and immersive, this book offers a behind-the-scenes look at how culture (and who crafts it) shapes everything from the sediment the narrator studies to the policies that define climate action today.”

—Elizabeth Rush, author of The Quickening

“Anna Farro Henderson’s deep encounters with Big Science and Big Bureaucracy will help you understand why progress on matters of life and death can be so maddeningly slow; her encounters with herself may help you figure out how to live your own life.”

—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

“With fierce intelligence and wild exuberance, Anna Farro Henderson throws herself headlong into the biggest challenges of our time: how to love fully, create abundantly, and stop the ruin of the precious ecosystems that sustain us.”

—Lia Purpura, author of All the Fierce Tethers

“Some books are so good I want to shout about them to the rooftops. Core Samples is one of those.”

—Vick Mickunas, Dayton Daily News

Core Samples: A Climate Scientist’s Experiments in Politics and Motherhood by Anna Farro Henderson is available from University of Minnesota Press.

In a timely challenge to the potent political role of digital technology, Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology argues that right-wing ideology was built into both the technical and social construction of the digital world from the start. Leveraging more than a decade of research, David Golumbia, who passed away in 2023, traced how digital evangelism has driven a worldwide shift toward the political right, concealing inequality, xenophobia, dishonesty, and massive corporate concentrations of wealth and power beneath the idealistic presumption of digital technology as an inherent social good. George Justice wrote the foreword to Cyberlibertarianism, and is joined in conversation with Frank Pasquale.

George Justice is professor of English literature and provost at the University of Tulsa.

Frank Pasquale is professor of law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School.

David Golumbia (1963–2023) was associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology; The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism; and The Cultural Logic of Computation.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

Tim Wu

Lawrence Lessig

Wikileaks

David E. Pozen: Transparency’s Ideological Drift https://openyls.law.yale.edu/handle/20.500.13051/10354

Stefanos Geroulanos / Transparency in Postwar France

#CreateDontScrape

David Golumbia / ChatGPT Should Not Exist (article)

M. T. Anderson / Feed

Jonathan Crary / Scorched Earth

"If you want to understand the origins of our information hellscape with its vast new inequalities, corrupt information, algorithmic control, population-scale behavioral manipulation, and wholesale destruction of privacy, then begin here."
—Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

"Cyberlibertarianism is essential for understanding the contemporary moment and the recent past that got us here. It stands as a monumental magnum opus from a meticulous thinker and sharp social critic who is sorely missed."
—Sarah T. Roberts, director, Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, UCLA

Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Energy transition is crucial to the struggle against climate change. Imre Szman is concerned with who is trying to lay claim to the narratives guiding our transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, how they are doing it, and why and to what ends. Mark Simpson joins Szeman in conversation about Szeman’s new book, Futures of the Sun: The Struggle over Renewable Life. 

Imre Szeman is director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation, and Sustainability and professor of human geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He is cofounder of the Petrocultures Research group.

Mark Simpson is professor of English and film studies at the University of Alberta, one of the founding collaborators on the research collective After Oil, and a core member of the Petrocultures Research Group.

REFERENCES:

-Imre Szeman, essay, System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster, South Atlantic Quarterly

-Timothy Mitchell / Carbon Democracy

-Seth Klein / A Good War

-Jennifer Wenzel, essay, Forms of Life: Thinking Fossil Infrastructure and Its Narrative Grammar, Social Text

-Extinction Rebellion / Common Sense for the 21st Century

-After Oil Collective / Solarities

-University of Toronto’s Institute for Inclusive Economies and Sustainable Livelihoods, director, Sergio Montero

-Our Common Future, also known as the Brundtland Report

Futures of the Sun: The Struggle over Renewable Life is available from University of Minnesota Press. This book is part of the Forerunners series, and an open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu.

“The content of this book is extraordinary. Imre Szeman is an exceptional expert, well-versed in analysing the complex intersections between energy, society, and politics. The book is a real opportunity to deepen our understanding of contemporary energy and political issues.”
—International Journal of Environmental Studies

"We aren't done with Pee-wee's Playhouse because there's much to learn from sticking with it." So opens Cait McKinney's I Know You Are, but What Am I?, a book that thinks across the ways we remember and misremember Pee-wee. McKinney explores the expansive, mediated landscape of the television show; engages a reparative retelling of the actor Paul Reubens's 1991 arrest in a suburban adult film theater; and gets into the collecting of the iconic Talking Pee-wee dolls and their afterlives on eBay and YouTube. Here, McKinney is joined in conversation with John Stadler.

Cait McKinney is associate professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University.

John Stadler is assistant professor of film studies at North Carolina State University.

I Know You Are, but What Am I?: On Pee-wee Herman is available from University of Minnesota Press as part of its Forerunners series. An open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu.

Identified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, contemporary Macau has metamorphosed into a surreal, hypermodern urban landscape augmented by massive casino megaresorts, including two of the world’s largest buildings. In Betting on Macau: Casino Capitalism and China’s Consumer Revolution, Tim Simpson uncovers various roots of the region’s radical transformation. Here, Simpson is joined in conversation with Cathryn H. Clayton.

Tim Simpson is associate professor of communication at the University of Macau.

Cathryn H. Clayton is associate professor and chair of the Asian studies program at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.

WORKS REFERENCED:

David Schwartz / Suburban Xanadu

Natasha Dow Schüll / Addiction by Design

Susan Strange / Casino Capitalism

Cathryn H. Clayton / Sovereignty at the Edge

PEOPLE REFERENCED:
Sheldon Adelson

John Maynard Keynes

Deng Xiaoping

“A must-read for scholars and practitioners of urban planning and architecture, particularly those working in or studying urbanization in China.”
—Miodrag Mitrašinović

Betting on Macau: Casino Capitalism and China’s Consumer Revolution is available from University of Minnesota Press.

In the decades leading up to the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia, a collective of young artists based in Zagreb used the city’s public spaces as a platform for radical individual expression. The Group of Six Authors and their circle in the period from 1975 to 1985 are the focus of Adair Rounthwaite’s book This Is Not My World: Art and Public Space in Socialist Zagreb, which highlights the friction between public and private that was the foundation of their innovative practices. Rounthwaite is joined here in conversation with Mechtild Widrich.

Adair Rounthwaite is author of This Is Not My World: Art and Public Space in Socialist Zagreb and Asking the Audience: Participatory Art in 1980s New York. Rounthwaite is associate professor of art history at the University of Washington.

Mechtild Widrich is author of Monumental Cares: Sites of History and Contemporary Art and Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art. Widrich is an art historian, curator, and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.   

REFERENCES:

Caroline A. Jones

Terry Smith

Chika Okeke-Agulu 

Vlasta Delimar

Tomislav Gotovac

Ana Mendieta

Sasha Su-Ling Welland

Jenny Lin / Above Sea

Liz Kotz / Words to Be Looked At

Vlado Martek

Mladen Stilinović

Gina Beavers

This Is Not My World is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Across language and politics, feminism and phenomenology, and decolonial theory, Trans Philosophy addresses trans worldmaking in all its beauty and mundanity. The volume’s four editors, Perry Zurn, Andrea J. Pitts, Talia Mae Bettcher, and PJ DiPietro focus on the contributions of trans and gender-nonconforming philosophers from around the globe. Showcasing writing from a range of emerging and established voices, Trans Philosophy addresses discrimination, embodiment, identity, language, and law, utilizing diverse philosophical methods to attend to significant intersections between trans experience and class, disability, race, nationality, and sexuality. Here, the book’s four editors engage each other in conversation.

Perry Zurn is visiting associate professor of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Cornell University and associate professor of philosophy at American University. He is author of Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry and How We Make Each Other: Trans Life at the Edge of the University and coeditor of Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge.

Andrea J. Pitts is associate professor of comparative literature at the University at Buffalo. They are author of Nos/Otras: Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Multiplicitous Agency, and Resistance and coeditor of Theories of the Flesh: Latinx and Latin American Feminisms, Transformation, and Resistance.

Talia Mae Bettcher is professor of philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles. She is author of Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy (Minnesota, 2025); Berkeley's Philosophy of Spirit: Consciousness, Ontology, and the Elusive Subject; and Berkeley: A Guide for the Perplexed.

PJ DiPietro is associate professor of women’s and gender studies and director of the LGBTQ studies program at Syracuse University. They are author of Sideways Selves: Travesti and Jotería Struggles across the Américas and coeditor of Speaking Face to Face: The Visionary Philosophy of María Lugones.

Contributing writers to Trans Philosophy include: Megan Burke, Sonoma State U; Robin Dembroff, Yale U; Marie Draz, San Diego State U; Che Gossett, U of Pennsylvania; Ryan Gustafsson, U of Melbourne; Stephanie Kapusta, Dalhousie U; Tamsin Kimoto, Washington U, St. Louis; Hil Malatino, Pennsylvania State U and Rock Ethics Institute; Amy Marvin, Lafayette U; Marlene Wayar.

WORKS AND PERSONS REFERENCED:

C. Riley Snorton / Black on Both Sides

Perry Zurn / Curiosity Studies and Curiosity and Power and How We Make Each Other

Hil Malatino / Side Affects and Trans Care

Hortense Spiller

Jacob Hale

Gwen Araujo

Special issue of Hypatia: Transgender Studies and Feminism: Theory, Politics, and Gendered Realities, edited by Talia Mae Bettcher and Ann Garry

What Is Trans Philosophy? By Talia Mae Bettcher in Hypatia

Marlene Wayar

Talia Mae Bettcher / Beyond Personhood

Mary Jones

Marsha P. Johnson

María Lugones

Marco Chivalan-Carrillo

Amaranta Gómez Regalado
Marcia Ochoa
Josefina Fernández
Diana Maffia

Lohana Berkins

Tourmaline

Trans Philosophy is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Marlene M. Johnson’s memoir is an essential record of the ascension of women in American politics. In Rise to the Challenge: A Memoir of Politics, Leadership, and Love, Johnson chronicles her life of learning and leadership in activism, entrepreneurship, politics, and public service, weaving professional play-by-plays with candidness about navigating personal loss. Here, Johnson is joined in conversation with Lori Sturdevant and Elisabeth (Betsy) Griffith.

Marlene M. Johnson was Minnesota’s first woman lieutenant governor, serving in Governor Rudy Perpich’s administration from 1983 until 1991. She is cofounder of the Minnesota Chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners and the Minnesota Women’s Campaign Fund and was executive director and CEO of NAFSA: Association of International Educators for nearly two decades. She is on the advisory board of Kakenya’s Dream, a board member of the Washington Office on Latin America, and a trustee of The Alexandria Trust. She lives in Washington, DC.

Lori Sturdevant is a retired Star Tribune editorial writer and columnist who has written about Minnesota government and politics since 1978.

Elisabeth Griffith is an American historian, educator, and activist. She is author of Formidable: American Women and the Fight for Equality: 1920–2020 and In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

OTHER WORKS REFERENCED:
Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief / Pauline Boss

Turnout: Making Minnesota the State That Votes / Joan Anderson Growe with Lori Sturdevant

Loving Someone who has Dementia / Pauline Boss

Praise for Rise to the Challenge:

“Marlene M. Johnson wasn’t just the first woman to be Minnesota’s Lieutenant Governor. She was also the first Lieutenant Governor to have a specific policy portfolio. She had access and influence in ways that laid the groundwork for me and others to follow. Marlene is of a class of women who made important strides in DFL politics, and I'm grateful for her place in Minnesota's history and for this book that tells that story”.

—Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan

“An essential document of the midcentury rise of women into American politics. In this memoir of a remarkable public life, Marlene M. Johnson braids a love story tragically turned into caregiving and the domestic devotion of guardian and advocate. She proves that faithfulness in love and commitment to the betterment of the world are not opposites after all.”

—Patricia Hampl, author of The Art of the Wasted Day

“In the dynamic mid-twentieth-century women’s movement, Marlene M. Johnson stood out and stood up with clarity of vision and purpose. Her multiple public service initiatives propelled her to a national presence and then into international education leadership.”

—Judge Harriet Lansing, retired, Minnesota Court of Appeals

“An important read for aspiring public servants, male or female.”

—J. Brian Atwood, former administrator, US Agency for International Development