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In an election season, all of our political speeches and interviews seem to come back to questions of our national relationship to our founding ideals: how far are we fallen from that revolutionary moment, or how far do we have yet to travel in order to realize them at last? Today’s guests  help us to remember, as … Continue reading Episode 7: The Revolutions We Inherit →

Is health care a right, as Bernie Sanders claims? This episode explores what this kind of assertion of right implies, how “rights talk” has come to dominate this sort of political discourse, the ways in which such rights have historically been won, and why they continue to be contested. Our guests today are all scholars of legal history, … Continue reading Episode 6: What Are Rights, Really? →

Our guiding question in Episode 1 was: How scientific is the practice of medicine?  In this deeper dive of a follow-up effort, we’re pursuing a different and more radical question: Just how scientific is the practice of science? Natasha Myers, author of Rendering Life Molecular, from Duke University Press, discusses her study of protein crystallographers at work, and … Continue reading Episode 5: Science and Medicine, Pt. 2 →

Is corporate personhood really different from regular personhood?  What is the relationship between the body — the corpus — and the self? How were the technological and economic circumstances of the 17th and 18th centuries involved in imagining what it was like to be a subject.  What elements of human life are left out of the … Continue reading Episode 4: the Paradox of the Enlightenment Subject →

This episode features four stellar scholars talking about one of the academy’s most commonly heard, and most often misunderstood, terms: Neoliberalism.  These four authors engage neoliberalism and its discontents in literary manifestations, in domestic American political movements, and in global spaces, particularly Colombia and Nigeria. Mitchum Huehls, of UCLA’s English Department, addresses the theory underneath neoliberalism, … Continue reading Episode 3: Neoliberalism at Home and Abroad →

While the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s — Supreme Court victories, sit-ins and marches — provides the enduring images of African American political activism in public memory, the civil rights era both emerged from and gave rise to broader and more eclectic traditions of cultural and intellectual work. Our guests this week explore … Continue reading Episode 2: African American Political Thought, Part 1 →

Just how scientific is the practice of medicine?  How do doctors talk about and make use of scientific evidence?  How do scientists see their own work and its applicability in the world at large? Helping us dissect these issues are Ryerson University’s Colleen Derkatch, Stanford’s Colin Gottlieb, and the University of Michigan’s John Litell. You can … Continue reading Episode 1: Science and Medicine →