Katie Walkiewicz on Indigenous and Black Freedom
Imagine Otherwise by Ideas on Fire
Release Date: 06/15/2023
Imagine Otherwise by Ideas on Fire
How can communities creatively adapt and reshape online practices to forge resilient digital publics? In episode 162 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews media studies scholar Raven Maragh-Lloyd about the historical contours of Black digital resistance. The Ideas on Fire team was honored to work with Raven on her new book , which is an insightful analysis of how Black technology users adapt and reshape resistance strategies and forge Black publics in the digital age. The book is out now from the University of California Press. In their conversation, Raven and Cathy chat about...
info_outlineImagine Otherwise by Ideas on Fire
The relationship between dance and politics has long been a complex one. In moments of national and international crisis, artists are often at the center of resistance movements, and the embodied knowledges honed by dancers, choreographers, and performers can become key survival techniques for diverse communities. In episode 161 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews dance studies scholar and Ideas on Fire author Natalie Zervou, author of the new book . The book is out now from the University of Michigan Press, and it offers a deep dive into how the Greek dance world and arts...
info_outlineImagine Otherwise by Ideas on Fire
In episode 160 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews Amber Rose González, Felicia Montes, and Nadia Zepeda—three legendary feminist artists, activists, and scholars from the genre-defying, transnational feminist of color collective Mujeres de Maiz. Amber, Felicia, and Nadia are also editors of a new book called Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento: Spiritual Artivism, Healing Justice, and Feminist Praxis, which was recently published by the University of Arizona Press. In their conversation, Amber, Felicia, and Nadia share their journey with Mujeres de Maiz and the collective...
info_outlineImagine Otherwise by Ideas on Fire
How has the Silicon Valley form of technocapitalism shaped geographies around the world? In episode 159 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews Ideas on Fire author, University of Washington geography professor, and housing justice activist Erin McElroy about the global reach of technocapitalism. Erin is the author of the new Duke University Press book Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times, which is a fascinating multi-sited ethnography of the dispossessions wrought by Silicon Valley on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In their...
info_outlineImagine Otherwise by Ideas on Fire
How do media representations of US–Mexico border tunnels shape immigration discourse, public policy, and anti-immigrant violence? To help us think through how these tunnels are represented and often overrepresented in US media, in episode 158 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews Ideas on Fire author Juan Llamas-Rodriguez about his new book . For all of their visual obscurity and inaccessibility, tunnels are hypervisible in media representations not only of the US–Mexico border region but also the bodies—both real and imagined—that are associated with the...
info_outlineImagine Otherwise by Ideas on Fire
In episode 157 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews media scholar and Ideas on Fire author Tamara Kneese about the complex relationship between Big Tech and mortality, specifically how digital media platforms mediate our experiences of death. Tamara is a senior researcher and project director of Data & Society’s AIMLab, and her new book Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond was recently published by Yale University Press. In their conversation, Tamara and Cathy chat about how platform economies built around planned obsolescence shape our...
info_outlineImagine Otherwise by Ideas on Fire
In episode 156 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews , whose creative and scholarly work celebrates the intertwining of political activism and performance across the African diaspora. Nicosia's play Afiba and Her Daughters, which offers an intergenerational narrative of Jamaican herstory, premiered at the Rites and Reason Theatre in Providence. Nicosia’s new book analyzes the work of four contemporary women-led theater groups and projects with a focus on how their activist productions take on gender injustice, racism, gang and state violence, and economic inequality. In...
info_outlineImagine Otherwise by Ideas on Fire
In episode 155 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews disability media studies scholar Meryl Alper. Meryl is the author of 3 books about how kids with disabilities use digital technologies, including her most recent book, Kids Across the Spectrums: Growing Up Autistic in the Digital Age. Kids Across the Spectrums is out now from MIT Press and it is the first book-length ethnography of the digital lives of diverse young people on the autism spectrum. In their conversation, Cathy and Meryl chat about how autistic and neurodivergent youth and their families resist popular...
info_outlineImagine Otherwise by Ideas on Fire
In episode 154 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews performance artist and gender studies scholar Kristie Soares about the political power of pleasure, laughter, and joy in Latinx media. Kristie’s new book Playful Protest: The Political Work of Joy in Latin Media has chapters about gozando in salsa music, precise joy among the New Young Lords Party, choteo in the comedy ¿Qué Pasa U.S.A.?, azúcar in the life and death of Celia Cruz, dale as Pitbull’s signature affect, and silliness in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s interventions into political violence. In the episode,...
info_outlineImagine Otherwise by Ideas on Fire
Host Cathy Hannabach interviews literature professor Cynthia Franklin about the politics of life writing. Cynthia’s new book Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea traces the complex ways activists, artists, cultural producers, and scholars engage genres like memoir and autobiography to resist racial capitalism, imperialism, heteropatriarchy, and climate change. In their conversation, Cynthia and Cathy chat about why narrative plays such a large role in defining who gets to count as human and how that narrative definition shapes everything...
info_outlineIn episode 151 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews Indigenous studies and literature professor Katie Walkiewicz about states’ rights and the role this concept has played in US settler colonialism, enslavement, and dispossession as well as in radical projects seeking to create alternative political structures.
Katie Walkiewicz is an enrolled citizen of Cherokee Nation, an assistant professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego, and the associate director of the Indigenous Futures Institute.
They chat about Katie’s new book Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State. The book shows how federalism and states’ rights were used to imagine US states into existence while clashing with relational forms of territoriality asserted by Indigenous and Black people.
They also explore how states rights have been mobilized in two landmark Supreme Court cases: McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020) and Haaland v. Brackeen (2023).
In addition to tracing the violent imposition of states’ rights as tools for anti-Indigeneity and anti-Blackness, they also investigate how Black communities and Indigenous nations have sought to reimagine what a state could be, including through statehood campaigns for Black- and Native-run states.
Finally, they close out our conversation with a vision for a world of Indigenous and Black freedom, one beyond the bounds of both the nation and the state.
Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/151-katie-walkiewicz