Do we have to be legible subjects?
Hosted by Lette Bragg, with music by Sebastian Bauer and art by Jodie Riddex. Supported by Swarthmore College’s Aydelotte Foundation.
About
The Many Academies Podcast interviews scholars, writers, and publishers in the humanities and social sciences who challenge our understanding of academic success. The podcast is inspired by my experience as a graduate student when I wondered if I would find an audience for my work. I felt I had to choose between changing how I wrote or leaving. After years of trying to fit in, I read Arturo Escobar’s Designs for the Pluriverse and began to think about what it would mean if there were many academies (the way there are many worlds). What if I could dislodge the idea that there is one Academy (capital A) to which I must strive to belong?
With this podcast, I work to illuminate a hospitable plurality of networks. While friends contributed music and art, I do most of the work myself–research, invitations for interviews, editing, and transcripts–and spend hours thinking about how to strengthen emerging networks and affirm the radical work of those around me. Listen if you are trying to write and think with integrity, you are tired of trying to make yourself legible, or you are looking for hospitable communities. Let me know if there is someone you think I should interview <3
Episode 6: “The proliferation I see everywhere”: Sophie Lewis on the praxis and theory of utopia and abolition
Lette Bragg talks with Sophie Lewis, author of Full Surrogacy Now, Abolish the Family, and Enemy Feminisms, about actualizing care and thinking.
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Episode 5: Incognito Academic: Pia Deas on How Intellectuals Meet the World
One of the challenges to thinking or being otherwise is naming what you do. On this episode of Many Academies, we name the practices and values that orient Pia Deas within the Black tradition.
Also available for streaming on PodBean
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Episode 4: The Poets Made All the Words
The Cyborg Jillian Weise talks about Borg.Diem, a dictionary created from a game on twitter. The dictionary begins (and stays) a game for disabled people by disabled people, and its format requires changing the rules of academic publishing and thinking about the importance of language. The challenge: how to publish this dictionary ethically. The pleasure and potential: disabled ethos, fragments, being present with language, and finding ways to smuggle ideas and practices into academic publishing.
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Episode 3: Studying at the Night School Bar
In this episode, Lindsey Andrews and D.M. Spratley talk about Night School Bar, a faculty collective offering evening classes in the arts and humanities. We talk about the school’s origins, Marxism, study, and the connections between learning and life, trying to work through the push and pull of the university.
Also available for streaming on PodBean
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Episode 2: What the Seagrass Said
I talk to Kriti Sharma and Michal Osterweil about their new book, which they co-authored with Arturo Escobar. Kriti and Michal talk about the tenderness with which they treat the reader, where they turn for guidance, their interlocutors, and what it takes to transition from one story of existence to another. Doing so, in a conversation that addresses death, the end of the world, writing, and love, they emphasize their dependence on an archive that includes M. Jacqui Alexander, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Joanna Macy, Barbara McClintock, Sylvia Wynter, Bayo Akomolafe, and seagrass.
Also available for streaming on PodBean
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Episode 1: Thinking out loud with punctum books
On the first episode of Many Academies, Eileen Fradenburg Joy and Vincent van Gerven Oei, co-directors of punctum books, talk about the origin and mission of punctum, building an infrastructure to get books out, and how to infiltrate existing structures. Visit punctumbooks.com to browse the catalog, support the press, and to submit a manuscript.
Also available for streaming on PodBean