Conversation is one of my very favourite things in the world, and so it’s always a delight to be invited to talk with people about things I care about. Here are some of the podcasts and talks where I’ve shared work:
Podcasts:
Ursula Le Guin’s Anarchist Alternative
Rejecting Purity and Claiming Bad Kin on Medicine for the Resistance podcast
Resisting Purity Culture on For The Wild podcast
Purity politics in compromised times on the Green Dreamer podcast
Alexis Shotwell outs the lie of individual purity & encourages an entangled sense of responsibility on Pretty Heady Stuff
Against Purity on This is Not a Pipe
IAS Talk Pieces: Concepts for the ‘New Normal’. #2 Implication
Ex Urbe Ad Astra #11 – The Problem of Evil in Narrative
Coronavirus: Containment versus Care on Against the Grain (KPFA)
Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay & Alexis Shotwell diagnose systems & document the timescales of disease on Pretty Heady Stuff
Talks and panels:
School of Resistance, Ep 7 Environmental Repercussions with HowlRound Theatre Commons
Cultures and Media of Environmental Health | “Planet Now!” series conversation at Rice University
Zero Footprint Zero Change: Panel @ IMPAKT Festival 2020
Slowing Research: Reflecting on Theories of Change Slowing Research: Reflecting on Theories of Change
Recorded lectures
No higher purpose: Ursula Le Guin’s existentialist anarchism (Ústav svetovej literatúry SAV)
Ursula Le Guin on anarchism and the responsibility of choice
What is food? Eating and Mutual Aid
“Shary Boyle: Outside the Palace of Me” Virtual Spotlight Tour: Whiteness, at the Gardiner Museum
Digital KOLLEG-LECTURE by Alexis Shotwell: “Ethical orientations toward repair in climate change”
Purity and Contamination | Kunstverein Freiburg
Plastic Hypersea session 2, with Alexis Shotwell & Sissel Marie Tonn
If you like to know what a podcast is about before you click on it:
Ursula Le Guin’s Anarchist Alternative – “In this Conversation on Anarres, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic novel, The Dispossessed. We talk with Dr. Alexis Shotwell who is working to spell out Le Guin’s anarchist philosophy. Shotwell speculates as to the features of “Odoian anarchism”–what values it expresses and how it is related to other classical anarchist thinkers such as Emma Goldman and Peter Kropotkin– and she envisions what lessons it might have for our political organizing today.”
Rejecting Purity and Claiming Bad Kin on Medicine for the Resistance podcast – “Inside and outside the church we all have ideas about purity that drive our decisions and relationships. People are too radical, not radical enough. Their beliefs or goals don’t align perfectly with ours. Our lives become more defined by what we don’t do, where we can’t shop, what we won’t eat all in a quest for purity that we will never achieve.
So how do we live with impurity?
And how does that apply to our relatives, not only in the sense of family but more broadly. Who claims you? And what do you do about that.”
Resisting Purity Culture on For The Wild podcast – “This week we are joined by guest Alexis Shotwell to discuss how we might turn from the purity politics that govern many of our lives and this hurting world toward collective struggles for transformation and liberatory futurisms. Rather than forfeiting our complicity and implication in a world with mounting problems, we learn of a helpful heuristic for transforming inaction or the urge to be the perfect activist to a ground where we might be better- equipped to stick around for the long hall in struggles for social justice.” (transcript here)
Purity politics in compromised times on the Green Dreamer podcast – “What is it that drives our individualistic pursuits for ethical purity? How do we embrace complicity as the starting point and begin to take responsibility for our messy histories?”
Alexis Shotwell outs the lie of individual purity & encourages an entangled sense of responsibility on Pretty Heady Stuff – “Alexis Shotwell, is a social theorist and professor of sociology and anthropology at Carleton University who has a rare gift for addressing and expressing the unbelievable complexity of our current system. Her book Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (2016) was released at a moment where it had become impossible to ignore the overlapping emergencies that we now face. How do we explain why the political reaction to these disastrous effects doesn’t translate into more mass dissent and a greater sense of shared vulnerability? Shotwell says that a doctrine of “purism” or “purity politics” turns us against each other: cultivating and asserting one’s own individual purity against these unsettling feelings of contamination. If we aren’t sure of how to implicate the system effectively, it is because available practices of self-purification, clean eating and detoxing only give us the comfortable feeling of being innocent, ourselves.”
Against Purity on This is Not a Pipe
IAS Talk Pieces: Concepts for the ‘New Normal’. #2 Implication – “How might we be implicated in structural problems like racism, the decline of democracy, social discrimination, modern slavery, and sexual violence? What are the background conditions that allow structural violence and injustice to take place? When and how does implication become significant? And how can we transform our implicated positions into collective solidarity work? By exploring the issue of implication in different contexts, the speakers in this podcast will address some of these questions.”
Ex Urbe Ad Astra #11 – The Problem of Evil in Narrative – “In this episode, Ada and Jo speak with Alexis Shotwell about the issues that arise from ill-intentioned characters, and the moral questions they present to readers.”
Coronavirus: Containment versus Care on Against the Grain (KPFA) – “The coronavirus has laid bare the divisions and inequalities of our society. It’s also exposed the stark differences in possible approaches to the pandemic. Radical scholar Alexis Shotwell argues that we need to frame our fight as one for collective care, rather than containment and control. She discusses solidarity and the lessons of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.”
Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay & Alexis Shotwell diagnose systems & document the timescales of disease on Pretty Heady Stuff – “We discuss Baj’s new book from Fernwood Publishing, Country of Poxes: Three Germs and the Taking of Territory. In the book, we get an innovative technique for telling the history of colonialism and its effects on past and present capacities for collective survival, threatened as it has always been by microscopic entities that enter our bodies and undermine a misplaced and sinister pretence to mastery. In this conversation we talk about the question of culpability. Baj’s book prompts Alexis to think about agency and how illness is distributed. In her reading, its argument stresses how social actors have made consequential choices in the past, and how, as Baj writes in the book, “reflecting on these experiences in the past” can enable “those of us who believe in a more just, a more healed… future” to “contribute in some way to cobbling together a truer liberation.” You won’t just learn a lot by reading Country of Poxes—a text that focuses on the colonial continua of smallpox, tuberculosis, and syphilis—you’ll also learn, I think, to think differently about the tendency to accept suffering and death.”
School of Resistance, Ep 7 Environmental Repercussions with HowlRound Theatre Commons – “When a recent UN report noted that the 4-7% CO2 emission drop caused by the Corona virus would have to be replicated every year until 2030 in order to control the climate crisis, it seems like the modern world opened Pandora’s box. From predictions of mass flooding and water-borne disease to uninhabitable temperatures and irreparable destruction to biodiversity, visions of the future are bleak. With such a dark, but very real message, how do we find hope? How do we resist in a way that can build a future, rather than just preserve the present? And how do these new ecological hopes shape our methods of resistance; should we be occupying coal fields and rainforests in order to push for renewable energy or reject modern consumption altogether and move closer to nature? In the seventh episode of the School of Resistance series, NTGent and the IIPM bring together some of the leading fighters in the environmental movement as well as thinkers and theorists, such as the co-founder of the movement Extinction rebellion Gail Bradbrook, the Canadian philosopher Alexis Shotwell and the climate justice activist Alice Swift, to discuss their strategies of resistance and environmental visions, hoping to find where they converge. This will be a discussion about the diversity of ecological thinking, and what ‘resisting’ might well entail.”
Cultures and Media of Environmental Health | “Planet Now!” series conversation at Rice University – “Heather Houser, associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, and Alexis Shotwell, professor at Carleton University, discussed “Cultures and Media of Environmental Health” on April 14, 2021, as part of the Rice University “Planet Now!” Conversations in Environmental Studies.”
Zero Footprint Zero Change: Panel @ IMPAKT Festival 2020 – “Panel discussion with Shivant Jhagroe, Alexis Shotwell and Melle Smets, moderated by Evanne Nowak at the IMPAKT Festival 2020 Zero Footprint. As individuals and consumers we are constantly asked to make choices to minimise our ecological footprint. But what does making green choices really mean for our planet? The term ‘carbon footprint’ was used and popularized in smart PR campaigns of oil multinational BP. These campaigns are placing the responsibility on the individual rather than on the polluting industry. All around us we are misled by ‘greenwashing’: organizationz and products presented as being cleaner than they actually are.”
Slowing Research: Reflecting on Theories of Change Slowing Research: Reflecting on Theories of Change – “a kickoff to Athabasca University’s (AU) 2022 FHSS Research Talks Seminar Series on “Theories of Change in Research,” jointly hosted by AU’s J-Series with guest speakers Alexis Shotwell, Denise Taliaferro Baszile, and Shaista Patel. The theme of “Theories of Change in Research” was drawn from a series of provocations offered by Unangax̂ scholar Dr. Eve Tuck, who writes about the settler colonial roots of the academy, damaged-centred research, and the imperatives of interrogating theories of change underpinning research. The featured speakers were invited as scholars whose work engages with questions of social and political action, thinking about the self as formed through both formal and informal education, and the challenges of collaborative research between communities and researchers.”