Son[i]a
T.L. Cowan and Jas Rault
In this podcast, we talk with Jas and T.L. Cowan, coauthors of Heavy Processing (2024), about their early ambition to digitally chart every TFQ cabaret in existence, beginning with Cabaret Commons. From there, we explore the dialectics between computational logics and digital archives, and move into the thick of digital research ethics. We delve into risks, refusals, feelings, ephemeralities, and intimacies. Their deep humor and care animate a self-reflexive, collaborative approach to knowledge-making – one that generously shares what forms their past trajectories in relation to the temporal crises of today and the ethics of time itself.
Alana Osbourne
Anthropologist and researcher Alana Osbourne works at the crossroads of anthropology, critical geography, postcolonial thought, and Black studies, tracing how histories of empire continue to shape contemporary ways of seeing, knowing, and organizing the world. Her work is attuned to the subtle but persistent afterlives of colonialism, that extend beyond obvious political or economic structures into cultural institutions, scientific practices, and even imaginaries of the future. In this podcast, Osbourne reflects on how these layered histories demand new critical tools and interdisciplinary approaches capable of holding together questions of race, space, materiality, and power.
Marta Echaves
In this podcast, we speak to esearcher, writer, and cultural producer Marta Echaves about the political persistence of the mystery and multidimensionality of substances. We follow a chemical pendulum between trust and distrust, while exploring writing practices, epistles, and fabulation as methodology. We look at the temporal undulations and curves of the dance floor and Marcia Moore’s shimmering visions as fragments of a genealogy yet to be written, sparking a conversation about ways in which we might challenge spirituality today, in an openly antagonistic way.
Mariam Barghouti
In this podcast, Palestinian-American writer, journalist, and researcher Mariam Barghouti talks about the double labor of journalism when you are both its practitioner and its subject: the negotiations with editors, the hierarchy of credibility in international newsrooms, and what gets lost when the only legible Palestinian is the suffering one. As she argues, “before the bombs are dropped people are killed with language”. So we spend time dissecting seven systemic levers of narrative that sustain the manufacturing of consent and danger, that make Palestinian life either hypervisible as tragedy or invisible as politics. And we return, again and again, to a conviction that runs through all her work: Palestinians are not victims waiting to be documented. Palestinians are a people in struggle, determined to remain.
Leonardo Tello
Born to an Achuar mother and a Kukama father, Leonardo Tello has been director of Radio Ucamara in the Peruvian Upper Amazon since 2010. In this podcast, we talk to Leonardo about the continuities between colonialism and extractivism in the Amazon, and about the forms of resistance that have helped to preserve the memory of that violence. A memory that lives on in stories, songs, and figures such as the black tiger, which are both an archive of the past and a tool for interpreting the present.