Many Academies

Gil Anidjar attends to the persistence of the phrase, "Alma Mater," considering what it helps us to see about the place and role of the university in politics and the reproduction and perdurance of our world. 

Katina Rogers describes the value of understanding the ecology of higher education as networks of care and possibility. Discussing her forthcoming book, "Unexpected Flourishing: Growth from Decay in the Mycelial University," she considers the necessity of critical hope when we might be given to despair.

In this episode, Lette Bragg talks with Tim Roberts about the origins of np: From publishing books to starting university presses, the non-profit works to critique the university by finding new ways to produce knowledge and to study. But why is it so hard to do? And what happens in spite of this challenge?

On this episode, celebrating International Open Access Week, Lette talks to Nina Zhuo, the podcast's first research assistant, about how working on The Many Academies Podcast affects her decision to attend graduate school. The conversation is grounded in an awareness of what is possible to do both inside/outside the university, as well as what constrains study and writing.

Lette Bragg talks with Sophie Lewis, author of Full Surrogacy Now, Abolish the Family, and Enemy Feminisms, about actualizing care and thinking. 

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.

On this episode, Lette Bragg and The Cyborg Jillian Weise talk about Borg Diem, a new dictionary edited and curated by Cy Weise and others. 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.

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.

In this episode, I talk to Kriti Sharma and Michal Osterweil about their new book, co-authored with Arturo Escobar. Their book, Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human, moves away from conventional knowledge practices to make legible the possibility of a politics and future removed from our "toxic loops of existence." 

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 of knowledge production.