Imagine Otherwise by Ideas on Fire - Josef Nguyen on the Politics of Flexibility

Josef Nguyen on the Politics of Flexibility

03/11/22 • 22 min

Cathy Hannabach interviews digital media scholar Josef Nguyen about the promises and perils of flexible planning, why cultural anxieties over uncertain futures are so often routed through debates over flexible educational technology, and ways to put flexibility to use in the classroom, on the page, and in our daily lives in ways that center collective support and more just worlds. Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/145-josef-nguyen

Previous Episode

Anima Adjepong on Interdisciplinary Intuition

The massive changes we’ve collectively experienced over the past two years of a global pandemic have caused many of us to ask some big questions about who we are and what we want to be doing.

It’s also pushed us to embrace our embodied capacity and make conscious changes to nourish our spirit as well as our creative, professional, and communal goals for the future.

It seems only fitting that we close out 2021 with an episode about intuition, or how we learn to listen for and heed that internal voice, that internal sensation, that tells us what we really need.

In episode 144 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews Anima Adjepong. Anima is the author of Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra and their wide-ranging activist and scholarly work focuses on identity, culture, and social change.

In their conversation, Anima and Cathy chat about letting go of a scarcity mindset to make a big career leap before knowing how it will all play out.

Anima also shares how to use intuition to identify the book you really want to write rather than the one that feels more disciplinarily safe.

Finally, we wrap up the episode with a discussion of how we can embrace intellectual promiscuity to build a world in which community means being together in our differences.

Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/144-anima-adjepong

Next Episode

Jennifer Lynn Kelly on Anticolonial Solidarity Tourism

Host Cathy Hannabach interviews feminist studies and ethnic studies professor Jennifer Lynn Kelly about her new book Invited to Witness.

In their conversation, Cathy and Jennifer talk about the temporality and pace of doing ethnographic research for this book while also navigating state visa politics, job search demands, and family commitments can pull in multiple directions.

Jennifer also shares the importance of letting a writing project change itself and change its writer over time, and why slowing down and listening to where our research wants to go makes for richer scholarship.

They close out the episode with a vision for a demilitarized and decolonized future, as well as how we can make space for joy while building that world.

Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/146-jennifer-lynn-kelly