Meeting Street

Dec 06 2023 14 ep. 35 mins 9

Meeting Street Podcast artwork

Host Amanda Anderson explores topics of vital societal interest through conversations with scholars and writers whose voices have helped define issues and shape debates. Special focus on the forms of knowledge that characterize the humanities. Produced by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University.

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AI and the Humanities

Dec 06 2023 30 mins

At a time when headlines repeatedly underscore the dangers of artificial intelligence to human endeavors of all sorts, what role can the humanities play in assessing the uses and limitations of new AI tools such as ChatGPT? What do developments in AI teach us about academic inquiry and humanistic questions in particular?In this episode of “Meeting Street,” Hollis Robbins, schol

Disability Narratives and Research-Creation

Apr 07 2023 42 mins

What happens when illness changes the trajectory of a career? How can disability and chronic pain become generative experiences? And how can we reshape the way we think about disability to better live with differences in and beyond the academy?

Mental Health in History: Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry

Oct 28 2022 40 mins

How did the World Wars shape the practice of psychiatry and the larger mental health field? And how has psychiatric discourse in turn changed how we think about the self? What constitutes mental illness? Who gets to define it and how it should be treated?

Christopher Newfield on Building a More Democratic University

Mar 18 2022 35 mins

How do inequities in working conditions and resources across academic departments jeopardize the central project of higher education? And how might the humanities serve as a model for thinking about university reform and ensuring the democracy of our institutions?

Happiness in Psychology and Philosophy

Dec 10 2021 35 mins

Is pleasure the measure of happiness? Does happiness make life meaningful? How does it factor in economic and political life? The boom of contemporary research on happiness has been driven by psychologists, though historically philosophy has long examined the subject. What happens when philosophy and psychology enter into conversation?While happiness may be found through a wal

Black Aliveness

Nov 05 2021 42 mins

A wide-ranging and revelatory conversation with scholar and writer Kevin Quashie about his new book Black Aliveness, which emphasizes the experience of Black life through readings of poetry and first-person essays. We discuss the notion of aliveness in the context of Afropessimism and anti-Black violence, critique and post-critique, and the fields of aesthetics and cultural studies

On Catastrophe and Planetary Realism

Oct 01 2021 31 mins

How do the humanities help us respond to what feels like a new era of planetary catastrophe? Join Meeting Street host Amanda Anderson as she speaks with literary scholar and humanities institute director Debjani Ganguly about how humanities scholars and contemporary novelists have conceptualized large-scale transformations affecting our planet and our societies. Topics include the

Historical Racism and the Politics of Loss

May 21 2021 36 mins

How do we understand experiences of loss politically? And what role have accounts of loss played historically, from slavery through the Movement for Black Lives and the pandemic? Meeting Street host Amanda Anderson speaks with political scientist Juliet Hooker and historian Emily Owens about their teaching project across the humanities and social sciences. We discuss quantitative v

Feminist Criticism After Trump

Apr 16 2021 28 mins

What does feminism teach us about the Trump years and democratic life today? In this episode of Meeting Street, Amanda Anderson talks with political theorist and cultural critic Bonnie Honig about a form of politics in which misogyny is a central feature, the use of gaslighting and other gendered forms of shock politics in public life, and the politics of refusal.Transcript

Why We Need the Environmental Humanities

Mar 05 2021 41 mins

Humanities scholars are at the forefront of the response to climate change. In this show Amanda Anderson talks with two influential and innovative scholars in the field of the environmental humanities: Bathsheba Demuth, an environmental historian who studies the arctic North, and Macarena Gómez-Barris, a cultural critic whose work focuses on the Global South. Topics include the en