12:00 PM Pacific Time: Mondays - Wednesdays
Acclaimed program of ideas, in-depth analysis, and commentary on a variety of matters—political, economic, social, and cultural—important to progressive and radical thinking and activism. Against the Grain is produced and hosted by Sasha Lilley.
Many are the names forgotten to history, of people who fought to transform our world for the better. One of them was Benjamin Lay, a trailblazing figure who opposed slavery and devoted his life to forcing his fellow Quakers to end their complicity in the enslavement of others. Historian Marcus Rediker seeks to rescue a … Continued
What happens when missionaries try to get indigenous people to read and write English? Sometimes what results is very different than what the missionaries intended. Laura Rademaker describes how members of an aboriginal community in Australia resisted and repurposed English literacies. (Encore presentation.) Tony Ballantine, Lachy Paterson and Angela Wanhalla, eds., Indigenous Textual Cultures: Reading and Writing … Continued
The urgency of the climate crisis can’t be overstated. Yet the impediments to a rapid shift to a carbon-free future are numerous. These include not just the obvious problem of the entrenched political power of the fossil fuel industry, but according to Holly Jean Buck, national revenues derived from fossil fuels and the elimination of … Continued
Helena Sheehan participated, as an activist, educator, and Marxist philosopher, in a great variety of radical movements and groupings, among them the New Left, the IRA, and the Communist Party of Ireland. She describes her engagements with many of the key ideas and debates around socialism and communism, both in the U.S. and abroad. (Encore … Continued
Few things sound as American as choice. And in the United States, the freedom to send one’s child outside of the traditional public school system is a choice that has been promoted aggressively since the legal end to segregation in schools. Scholar Jon Hale traces how the notion of school choice was used to fight … Continued
William Morris’s designs are still admired and revered, but his radical politics and utopian inclinations are less well known. Michael Robertson discusses the nineteenth-century Englishman’s insistence on craftsmanship, his critiques of industrialism, his turn toward socialism, and his utopian novel News From Nowhere. (Encore presentation.) Michael Robertson, The Last Utopians: Four Late Nineteenth-Century Visionaries and Their Legacy Princeton University Press, … Continued
A hallmark of our age is feeling we’re perpetually struggling with time—not having enough of it to accomplish seemingly endless tasks and obligations, while swimming in a sea of distractions. Can we cope if we learn, following the gurus of time management, to become ever more disciplined and productive? Or does that just feed into … Continued
Michael Staudenmaier uses the case study of a small binational (Chicanx/Puerto Rican) revolutionary group in the U.S. to examine the phenomenon of internal colonialism; the scapegoating of populations; competing theorizations of fascism; state repression in the Americas; neo-Nazi and Klan activity; and panethnic Latinx identity and solidarity. (Encore presentation.) Michael Staudenmaier, “‘America’s Scapegoats’: Ideas of Fascism … Continued
The Republican Party is gripped by a hatred of immigrants. But geographer Reece Jones argues it has not always been so. Instead, one man, the late John Tanton, was responsible for making nativism appear a central concern of conservatives, by propagating scores of anti-immigrant organizations, some which eventually helped staff the Trump Administration. And, as … Continued
According to Joseph Masco, the two key existential dangers of our time are climate disruption and nuclear weapons. The first, he maintains, is the product of petrochemical capitalism; around the second an elaborate, fear-based U.S. national security culture has been constructed. Masco contends that addressing these twin crises requires grasping their origins and pursuing fundamental structural … Continued
