UnLivable Cultures

How can psychoanalysis support the flourishing of queer and trans life in light of the discipline’s contested history and present? Why is it preferable to understand gender as a process of becoming instead of something that is a preprogrammed part of the self? In this interview from July 2024, Clayton speaks with Dr. Ann Pellegrini and Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou about their book Gender Without Identity and how their ideas and their psychoanalytic practice seeks to answer these questions.

Avgi Saketopoulou is a psychoanalyst in private practice in NYC, and a member of the faculty at New York University's Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is also the author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia from the Sexual Cultures Series, NYU Press.

Ann Pellegrini is Professor of Performance Studies & Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and a practicing psychoanalyst. Their books include Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race and Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (coauthored with Janet R. Jakobsen).

Clayton Jarrard⁠ is a graduate student at New York University's XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement program and works at the University of Kansas Center for Research, contributing to initiatives at the nexus of research, policy implementation, and community efforts. 

If you like Un/Livable Cultures, share with your friends, consider supporting the podcast on Patreon or leaving us a review! And follow our Twitter @UnlivablePod for updates.

This episode got a little spicy, and is a must listen for anyone who cares about climate change, geoengineering, or collaboration between natural and social scientists.

If you are confused, check out Cody's piece on geoengineering governance: https://blog.castac.org/2024/09/geoengineering-de-facto-environmental-governance-and-alternative-future-making/

References:

Gupta, Aarti, and Ina Möller. 2018. “De Facto Governance: How Authoritative Assessments Construct Climate Engineering as an Object of Governance.” Environmental Politics 28 (3): 480–501. doi:10.1080/09644016.2018.1452373.

Parson, E. A., Buck, H. J., Jinnah, S., Moreno-Cruz, J., & Nicholson, S. (2024). Toward an evidence-informed, responsible, and inclusive debate on solar geoengineering: A response to the proposed non-use agreement. WIREs Climate Change, e903. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.903

In this episode, Cody

Sources:

Sapinski, J. P., Holly Jean

Conditions for Responsible

https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/how-to-participate/org-details/999999999/project/101137642/program/43108390/details

Human remains scattered on the moon, pollution in the night sky, colonizing outer space—that’s capitalism, baby! In this episode, Clayton, Julia, and Cody discuss the idea of a “lunar anthropocene” and how settler colonialism shapes space exploration.  

Sources

Works of Zoe Todd

Staying with the Trouble by Donna J. Haraway

The White House May Condemn Musk, but the Government Is Addicted to Him

Which animals will be the first to live on the moon and Mars?

Navajo Nation’s objection to landing human remains on the moon prompts last-minute White House meeting

A Cosmologist’s Case for Staying Put on Earth

Becoming Martian by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Keep Capitalism Out of Space by Tech Won’t Save Us podcast

Navajo Nation 'relieved' human remains didn't make it to the moon. Celestis vows to try again

Curious about Taylor Swift's Carbon offsets? Well wonder no more. Oxford researcher talks to Cody and Clayton about carbon offsets, Taylor Swift, and what a functioning carbon market could do amidst their mostly catastrophic outcomes.

In this conversation, Clayton is joined by Dr. Mimi Khúc and Dr. Margaret Price to discuss their new books dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss and Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life, both from Duke University Press. The three have a wide-ranging conversation about capitalist mandates for wellness, appropriations of accessibility and cultures of care in the university, the ways race and racism refract experiences of disability and unwellness, and how academe structures the very power imbalances that make crip spacetime and claiming unwellness precarious and often harmful. 

⁠Interview Transcript⁠

De/Instutionalize is a series from Un/Livable Cultures focusing on the ways in which academic cultures are made livable and unlivable and how these institutions can participate in regimes of oppression and subjugation.

Mimi Khúc is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell. She is the creator of Open in Emergency and the Asian American Tarot. Check out dear elia book tour dates and information.

Margaret Price is Associate Professor of English at the Ohio State University, author of Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, and co-founder of the Transformative Access Project.

Clayton Jarrard works at the University of Kansas Center for Research, contributing to initiatives at the nexus of research, policy implementation, and community efforts, and he is an incoming student at NYU's Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement program.

If you like Un/Livable Cultures, share with your friends, consider supporting the podcast on Patreon or leaving us a review! And follow our Twitter @UnlivablePod for updates.

Sources

Disrupting White Mindfulness: Race and Racism in the Wellbeing Industry by Cathy-Mae Karelse

“Writing While Adjunct: A Contingent Pedagogy of Unwellness” by Mimi Khúc in Crip Authorship: Disability as Method edited by Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez

Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity by Simi Linton

Interview Transcript Link

In this episode, Clayton is joined by members of the Access in the Making (AIM) Lab at Concordia University, Prakash Krishnan, Emery Vanderburgh, and Nicholas Goberdhan to discuss the work of the AIM Lab. The AIM Lab is an anti-colonial, anti-ableist, feminist research lab working on issues of access, disability, environment and care through creative experimentation. We talk about why there is a need for work like that of the AIM Lab to intervene in academic and institutional ableism and how the AIM Lab upholds the tenets of anti-colonialism, anti-ableism, and feminism in their research and practice. 

You can follow the AIM Lab on Twitter/X at @accessmaking and find out more on their website at accesinthemaking.ca.

If you like ⁠Un/Livable Cultures⁠, share with your friends, consider supporting the podcast on ⁠Patreon⁠, or leaving us a review! And follow our Twitter ⁠@UnlivablePod⁠ for updates.

Sources

Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds by Arseli Dokumaci

Disability Visibility edited by Alice Wong

Reading for Palestine (AIM Project)

Air, River, Sea, Soil: A History of Exploited Land (AIM Project)

Mobilizing Disability Survival Skills for the Urgencies of the Anthropocene (AIM Project)

Audio Description in the Making (AIM Project)

The It's Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby exhibit for the Brooklyn Museum of Art drew crowds and critiques. The multitude of harsh reviews suggest Gadsby should have stayed in their lane of comedy and stand up. But what does such criticism reveal about the art world itself?

Sources

It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby by Brooklyn Museum

Trailer | It's Pablo-matic: Pablo Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby by Brooklyn Museum

Hannah Gadsby’s Disastrous ‘Pablo-matic’ Show at the Brooklyn Museum Has Some ‘Pablo-ms’ of Its Own by Alex Greenberger

Hannah Gadsby’s Picasso Show Was Meant to Ignite Debate. And It Did. by Robin Pogrebin

A guide to the dozens of exhibitions worldwide marking the 50th anniversary of Picasso's death by José de Silva

Musée Picasso Paris Gives Fashion Designer Paul Smith Carte Blanche to Reinstall Its Permanent Collection to Dazzling Effect by Sarah Belmont

This is an experiment’: is Hannah Gadsby’s Picasso exhibition really that bad? by Lauren Mechling

Hannah Gadsby’s ‘Pablo-matic’ Is Not the Feminist Achievement It Wants to Be by Kady Ruth Ashcraft

The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam

How is suicide an issue of justice? How should our care for people experiencing suicidality  connect with the Land and Water in which people live? What does it mean to care for the life of Land and Water as well as the lives of people? Special guest Dr. Jeffrey Ansloos joins us for a conversation about how colonialism features in the creation of unlivable conditions, threatening the well-being of Indigenous and First Nations communities in particular.

Jeffrey Ansloos is an Associate Professor of Indigenous Health and Social Policy at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Prof. Ansloos is a community health, social policy, community psychology, and Indigenous studies scholar, with a global reputation for his research on Indigenous health justice and social and environmental dimensions of mental health, suicide, and houselessness. You can follow him on Twitter/X at @jeffreyansloos and find out more on his university profile.

If you like ⁠Un/Livable Cultures⁠, share with your friends, consider supporting the podcast on ⁠Patreon⁠, or leaving us a review! And follow our Twitter ⁠@UnlivablePod⁠ for updates.

Sources

“A question of justice: Critically researching suicide with Indigenous studies of affect, biosociality, and land-based relations” by Jeffrey Ansloos and Shanna Peltier

“Hydrocolonial Affects: Suicide and the Somatechnics of Long-term Drinking Water Advisories in First Nations in Canada” by Jeffrey Ansloos

“Is Suicide a Water Justice Issue? Investigating Long-Term Drinking Water Advisories and Suicide in First Nations in Canada” by Jeffrey Ansloos and Annelies Cooper

“Grieving geographies, mourning waters: Life, death, and environmental gendered racialized struggles in Mexico” by Meztli Yoalli Rodríguez Aguilera

Negative Ecologies: Fossil Fuels and the Discovery of the Environment by David Bond

Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds by Arseli Dokumaci

Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology by Matthew Radcliffe

It’s obvious that some lives are valued over others, and some commodities are valued more than life. How have these determinations been made? In this episode, we talk about how medical care prioritizes some patients over others—even to the extent of taking some people’s personal ventilators to give to others who were considered to have a greater life expectancy or quality of life—how supply chain issues exacerbated this problem during the pandemic, and what a system may look like that prioritizes people over profit.  

Sources

Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant

Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure by Eli Clare

State policies may send people with disabilities to the back of the line for ventilators

How the Supply Chain Upheaval Became a Life-or-Death Threat

Eric Garner’s Death Will Not Lead to Federal Charges for N.Y.P.D. Officer

Eric Garner died during a 2014 police encounter. An officer involved might lose his job.