Interstitial

Karla Slocum is Thomas Willis Lambeth Chair of Public Policy, professor of anthropology, and director of the Institute of African American Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Free Trade and Freedom: Neoliberalism, Place, and Nation in the Caribbean (University of Michigan Press, 2006) and Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West (The University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

More about the book: https://uncpress.org/book/9781469653976/black-towns-black-futures/

For the transcript and recommendations for further reading: https://thinkbelt.org/shows/interstitial/black-towns-black-futures-karla-slocum

Daniel A. Barber is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Chair of the PhD Program in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. His books—Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning and A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Solar Energy in the Cold War—examine historical relationships between architecture and global environmental culture, reframing the means and ends of architectural expertise to frame a more robust engagement with the climate crisis of the present. Barber edits the Accumulation series on the e-flux Architecture online platform, an annual dossier of essays that explore how media analyses provide access to processes of accumulation, material and symbolic, that are endemic to climate instabilities. He is cofounder of Current: a platform for the discussion of environmental histories of architecture, launching summer 2020.

More about the book: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691170039/modern-architecture-and-climate

Transcript and recommendations for further reading: https://thinkbelt.org/shows/interstitial/modern-architecture-and-climate-daniel-barber

Leslie Kern is the author of two books on gender and cities, including Feminist City: Claiming Space in Man-Made World (Verso). She holds a PhD in women’s studies from York University and is currently an associate professor of geography and environment and director of women’s and gender studies at Mount Allison University, in Sackville, New Brunswick. Leslie writes about gender, gentrification, and feminism and teaches urban, social, and feminist geography. She runs an academic career coaching service and blog at lesliekerncoaching.com and tweets about all things feminist, academic, and urban on Twitter @LellyK.

Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World is out now from Verso: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3227-feminist-city

William O. Gardner is Professor of Japanese language, literature, and film at Swarthmore College. His most recent work explores the intersection of architecture and science fiction in postwar Japan, which builds upon his earlier research on intermedial relationships in Japanese prewar modernism as well as postwar science fiction. His previous publications include Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920’s, and “The Cyber Sublime and the Virtual Mirror: Information and Media in the Works of Oshii Mamoru and Kon Satoshi.”

More about the book: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-metabolist-imagination

Erin Y. Huang is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Her work often explores the interdisciplinary dialogue among Marxist geography, postcolonial theory, feminist theory, cinema and media studies, and Sinophone Asia. She is the cofounder of Asia Theory Visuality—an intellectual platform that harbors collaborative thinking on experimental and theoretical approaches to Asian Studies.

More about the book: https://www.dukeupress.edu/urban-horror

Edward Onaci is an Associate Professor of History and African American & Africana Studies at Ursinus College. His first book, Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), explores the history of the New Afrikan Independence Movement and the lived experience of revolutionary activism. Also known as Brotha Onaci, Edward is a DJ-producer and activist who co-founded the People’s DJs Collective and Sonic Diaspora.

More about the book: https://uncpress.org/book/9781469656144/free-the-land/

Nina Lakhani is the environmental justice reporter for the Guardian US. Previously she was a freelance journalist covering Central America and Mexico for the Guardian, BBC, Al Jazeera, Global Post, the Daily Beast, and elsewhere.

More about the book: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3180-who-killed-berta-caceres

Why do we design our landscapes to inflict particular kinds of coercive activities on other people? In these week's episode, a rebroadcast of Interstitial EP005 from September 2019, geographer and filmmaker Brett Story invites us to see, and unsee, the spaces of carceral power.

Digital images of iconic architecture have become more valuable and more real than the completed building—if it ever gets built at all. Simone Brott reveals how the superficiality of the image is a technique of neoliberal globalization and an instrument of ideology.

C.J. Alvarez is an assistant professor in the department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at The University of Texas Austin and a Mellon Fellow at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is the author of Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the U.S.-Mexico Divide and is working on a book about the history of the Chihuahuan Desert.

More about the book: https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/alvarez-border-land-border-water