A Conversation with FEISAL G. MOHAMED

The words on the page give us a sense of loss. The blank space also gives us the sense of the loss that we don't know and can never know. The sense that there has been an absolute destruction. Absence has been imposed on places where there were lives and a culture that was vibrant and rich. That sense that this is a genocide for which there is much evidence and that we have watched unfold in real time and that we have seen, we have had it, the evidence crowding in upon us at every moment.

A Conversation with ADRIAN DAUB

What Silicon Valley calls governing is detached from and disinterested in human nature and normal life. Even when it comes to normal life with technology and the internet, it is fixated on privilege and hierarchies for their own sake. And whatever intellectual ambition it possesses is easily seduced by ideologies that support these privileges and hierarchies.

FADY JOUDAH · Palestinian American Physician · Poet · Translator

What is enough childhood for a people to stay alive? What is enough childhood for a people to stay alive? What image of childhood is enough for a people to stay alive?

A Conversation with IDA SUSSER · Author · Anthropologist

In Paris, when these same people, who had friends who were their police, came to Paris and found themselves tear gassed and shot with LBDs and losing their eyes and feet, and coming back with red all down their faces and blood everywhere, and they began to understand that the violence is beyond legal. And so they began to understand what was happening in areas, what we might call the ghettos or the poor areas of Paris, where Black people or people of color were being harassed by the police.

AMITAV GHOSH · Author of Ghost-Eye · The Shadow Lines · The Hungry Tide · Sea of Poppies · The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

Imagining with precision is a very fundamental part of my work. When I sit down to write about anything, whether it be The Hungry Tide in the Sundarbans, or let's say The Shadow Lines, or Ghost-Eye. It's very important for me to get the topography right, to get the outlay of the streets or the house exactly right so I can actually picture all of that in my head. It's very important for me to have a sort of pictorial sense of what I'm seeing and what I'm writing about. Before I can write about it, I need to see it, as it were. So that's absolutely fundamental to my craft. That's just how I go about it. Like the Sufis say—behind the apparent reality is a hidden or ba- reality.

I guess that's always been something of great interest to me. How do you square these two realities and make them come together on a page? And really that is what, in some sense, the work of the imagination is. We know that we're in the grip of an intensifying planetary crisis. We can see signs of it everywhere.

JULIAN BRAVE NOISECAT · Author of We Survived the Night · Oscar-nominated Filmmaker · Champion Powwow Dancer

Everything from the title to the words and style all the way up to the structure I'm working with, I describe them as forms from my own culture... that come from my own people.

Iranian Journalists FATEMEH JAMALPOUR & NILO TABRIZY

Imagine losing your internet access just as airstrikes begin in your city, severing you from loved ones and the outside world. Jamalpour and Tabrizy authored a book on Iran's women-led uprising and continue to report on the lives of ordinary Iranians, civilian casualties and infrastructure damage.

A Conversation with ANDERSON BEAN, SIMÓN RODRÍGUEZ & EMILIANO TERÁN

I guess we can start with what happened on January 3. The United States carried out a direct military operation against Venezuela. US forces bombed targets in and around Caracas and other areas. They struck the electrical grid, killed over 100 people and abducted Venezuela's sitting president, Nicolás Maduro, along with his wife, Deputy Cilia Flores. Within hours, Trump declared that the United States would run Venezuela until a safe transition was completed. The United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio underscored this regional warning by saying, “If I lived in Havana, I would be worried.” Trump threatened other countries too, Colombia and Mexico, showing again that this wasn't about democracy—it was about submission.

A Conversation with ANANYA ROY & VERONIKA ZABLOTSKY

This question is of, all right, if we are a sanctuary city, how and why do ICE agents and other federal agents, including Border Patrol, have the power that they do to undertake these forms of detention and disappearance?

Scholar · Journalist · Activist THEA RIOFRANCOS

Biodiversity and territorial rights of indigenous and other land-dependent peoples. That those two values of rapid, urgent climate action, which I completely subscribe to, and the value of protecting and allowing to flourish non-human life, our ecosystems, our water systems, our soil systems and the peoples who are primarily indigenous, though not exclusively, that steward those non-human relationships and cultivate them and are immersed in them in their own livelihoods and cultural practices. And the idea that these two sets of really important phenomena that have deep significance and are both harmed by extractive capitalism in lots of intense and durable ways, the idea that there would be a fork in the road that either we have to choose climate action or we choose the protection of life.

A Conversation with RODERICK FERGUSON

I think when we're talking about institutionalization, we're really talking about the period after the epic protests that would go on to establish the interdisciplinary fields, especially ethnic studies and gender studies and the protests that were taking place among queer and trans folks post-Stonewall. To use Judith Butler's phrase—there's a real psychic life of power that happens at that moment, and that's always intrigued me. Because it's one thing to say that this stuff is external, but when it sets up shop inside of us, we crave the recognition. We don't think that we've achieved anything unless it is authorized and celebrated by the institution on its terms.

A Conversation with NILO TABRIZY

This interview complements another episode I did with her collaborator, Fatemeh Jamalpour. Ms Tabrizy tells us about her work in Visual Forensics, which she used to complement Ms Jamalpour’s reporting on the ground. The two pieces together form a vivid account of the uprising, and the repression that preceded and followed it.  Nilo draws on other examples of Open Source reporting during the #BlackLivesMatter protests and in Palestine. Like her collaborator, Nilo Tabrizy also explains the ways this reporting was for her deeply personal.

A Conversation with NICOLAS MIRZOEFF & PRISCILLA WATHINGTON

I think politics is now the meeting of the visible and the unspeakable. Unspeakable in that what is visible is so awful as to be beyond ordinary words. Unspeakable in that what is visible is forbidden to be said. What has been sayable about the unspeakable? It has been poets who have found ways to make language do what it should not have to do.

Associate Professor of Geography · University of Washington
Cofounder · Anti-Eviction Mapping Project

There were very different histories of land, housing, race and technology in San Francisco and in Romania. I became interested in those very different histories and how they led not just to different types of housing tensions, but to different struggles more generally—different erasures of the past and different ways that the past itself was getting evicted from historical memory. So that is the premise or the context, grounded in ongoing commitments to justice and racial justice in the midst of technological transformation. It is also grounded in really wanting to understand the sort of deeper layered histories that lay the groundwork for the present.