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The Podcast for Social Research

The Podcast for Social Research

The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

From Plato to quantum physics, Walter Benjamin to experimental poetry, Frantz Fanon to the history of political radicalism, The Podcast for Social Research is a crucial part of our mission to forge new, organic paths for intellectual work in the twenty-first century: an ongoing, interdisciplinary series featuring members of the Institute, and occasional guests, conversing about a wide variety of intellectual issues, some perennial, some newly pressing. Each episode centers on a different topic and is accompanied by a bibliography of annotations and citations that encourages further curiosity and underscores the conversation’s place in a larger web of cultural conversations.
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Top 10 The Podcast for Social Research Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best The Podcast for Social Research episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to The Podcast for Social Research for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite The Podcast for Social Research episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

In episode 66 of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at BISR Central, Daniel M. Lavery, erstwhile “Prudence” of Slate’s popular advice column, dropped by to discuss his latest book—a collection of “greatest hits” from his tenure as “Prudie,” interspersed with reflections on the uses and affordances of the advice column, the role and persona of the advice-giver, and the varieties of human experience, from the sacred to the profane, that the advice column offers up to view. Danny sat down with BISR’s Kali Handelman, Abby Kluchin, and Rebecca Ariel Porte for a truly wide-ranging discussion of the history, ethics, and gnarly practicalities of advice-giving—from Greek oracles to the micro-targeting of micro-identities in the internet age, from Aristotelian “practical wisdom” to the psychoanalytic scene of transference, from “agony aunties” to Miss Lonelyhearts. What is it we're actually asking for, or about, when we ask for advice? Stay tuned as the podcast wraps with the panel providing extemporaneous advice in real time to thorny questions from the audience!

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The Podcast for Social Research - Practical Criticism No. 65—Dark Side of the Moon
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11/22/22 • 134 min

In episode 65 of the Podcast for Social Research's "Practical Criticism" series, the game has changed. For a special live recording of the final episode of 2022, everyone knew in advance that the sonic object would be Pink Floyd's landmark concept album—and favorite laser light show accompaniment—Dark Side of the Moon . A gathering of dedicated listeners joined Rebecca and Ajay "in studio" for an immersive collective listening experience to this classic of prog rock on vintage vinyl. And the surprises spun out from there, beginning with a musicological breakdown of borrowed sounds, followed by a detour through Franz Schubert’s Winterreise song cycle (with insights from Adorno on poetry and escape), thoughts about the concepts at work in concept albums, plagal cadences and passacaglia, receptiveness to the sounds of ordinary life, the reverb of history, the history of lasers, and much more.

This podcast includes the whole of the approximately 45-minute album, so if you’re short on time, hop off at minute 5:56 and tune back in for the conversation that picks up again at minute 49:05. If you’re in it for the complete experience, this is one to listen to with headphones on!

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The Podcast for Social Research - Practical Criticism No.58—Pavement

Practical Criticism No.58—Pavement

The Podcast for Social Research

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02/18/22 • 90 min

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The Podcast for Social Research - Podcast for Social Research, Episode 52: the End of Abortion
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05/27/22 • 113 min

In episode 52 of the Podcast for Social Research, BISR faculty Nara Roberta Silva, Sophie Lewis, Jenny Logan, Abby Kluchin, and Alyssa Battistoni discuss Samuel Alito's Dobbs draft opinion, recently leaked, and the impending overturning of Roe v. Wade. Questions considered include: Alito’s reasoning, its implications for other rights, the validity of the “rights-based” approach itself (grounded in what’s implicitly a masculine (while also dis-embodied) liberal subject), abortion discourse (and the tendency to euphemize), the violence of enforced gestation, political strategy, the need for a truly mass feminism—and beyond.

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The Podcast for Social Research - (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Episode 3: Elden Ring: Endless Purgatorio
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12/09/22 • 162 min

In episode three of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay and Isi welcome fellow faculty and videogame connoisseur Joseph Earl Thomas to talk about Elden Ring, the acclaimed 2022 RPG videogame, directed and created by Hidetaka Miyazaki and Japan's FromSoftware studio (alongside some "worldbuilding" by Game of Thrones writer George R.R. Martin.) After a few preliminaries (a revisit to Andor and discussions of the recent Sight and Sound "best movies" poll, Pokemon, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 as communist allegory, and more), the talk turns to Elden Ring's "endless purgatorio," its "nihilistic" setting, its "open-world" structure (just how "open" are open worlds?), the meaning and limits of agency in videogame play, taking pleasure in difficulty, "affective difficulty," why videogame playing might be like dancing (with reference to BISR's late Jeffrey Escoffier), affect theory (and feeling bad about killing), gender, playing dress-up, and much more besides.

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In episode 68 of the Podcast for Social Research, live-recorded at BISR’s recent symposium The Frankfurt School and the Now, panelists William Paris, Nathan Duford, Eduardo Mendieta, and Paul North tackle the question: What use does Frankfurt School critical theory, a thought movement composed largely of mid-20th-century white men, have for contemporary thinking about race, sex and gender? The conversation touches on, among other things, the Frankfurt School’s amalgam of Marx and Freud; the patriarch as racketeer (the threatening figure who protects the woman from himself); the pitfalls of moralism and the fetishization of suffering; Walter Benjamin’s paradoxical understanding of the “tradition of the oppressed”; and Frantz Fanon’s notion of race as a pathology of time (that is, the denial of our capacity to live, in the future, in a different sort of world). How can we understand the seemingly inextricable relationship between gender panic and normativity and authoritarianism? What will race come to mean in the context of a warming planet (which most threatens black and brown people in the global south)? Who are the thinkers who have taken up Frankfurt School critical theory and pushed it in feminist directions?

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In episode 60 of the podcast, recorded live at Goethe-Institut New York, BISR's Ajay Singh Chaudhary joins translator Tess Lewis, political theorist Corey Robin, and novelist Jessi Jezewska Stevens for a wide-ranging discussion of Ernst Jünger’s 1939 novel On the Marble Cliffs, now out from NYRB in a new translation by Lewis. Prompted by the question, “Why read Jünger today?,” their talk explores the various “tangled” scenes of Jünger reception—from his contemporaries (excoriated by Thomas Mann and Walter Benjamin) to his apologists (defended for his denunciation of the Nazis—if only for their vulgarity) to patent aesthetic and thematic parallels in contemporary anime and manga. Is it possible, or worthwhile, to read Jünger in the context of the contemporary right and its concern with its own worldview losing traction in a changing world? Is Jünger literary aristocracy—or, rather, a kind of literary adolescent? And, what is it like to translate something that you feel at odds with?

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The Podcast for Social Research - Podcast for Social Research, Episode 64: Lucy Dhegrae—Music and Trauma
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05/19/23 • 88 min

Episode 64 of the Podcast for Social Research is a live-recording of mezzo-soprano Lucy Dhegrae's sound lecture, Music and Trauma, recently delivered at BISR Central. Between performances of selections from her acclaimed Processing Series, including the frenetic "Dithyramb" and the ethereal "No," Dhegrae talks to BISR faculty Paige Sweet and Danielle Drori about the interrelationship—the push-pull—between trauma, body, psyche, and sound—particularly in the wake of traumatic experience. What does it mean to sublimate trauma, and how is it "felt" and processed in the body? How, moreover, is trauma expressible (and what does Julia Kristeva have to say about it)? How can we understand the difference between language and music, words and sounds? And how can we think about the interrelationship of the voice and the body, of "vibration against bone"?

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After a brief hiatus, Ajay and Isi are back with another episode of (Pop) Cultural Marxism! In episode 7, they sojourn amidst the splendid ruins of Hyrule in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the much celebrated 2023 game from Nintendo’s EPD development group, directed and produced by Hidemaro Fujibayashi and Eiji Aonuma. Before delving into the series’ past and present iterations, the two spend some time catching up on what’s new at the movies—including the expected summer blockbusters, relative degrees of quackery, and other matters. Then it’s on to Nintendo and its quasi-mercantilist business model, the awe-inspiring complexity of the latest entry in the Zelda franchise, leading to excurses on Situationist psychogeography, flânerie, combinatorial aesthetics, architectural reasoning and silent film techniques. Taking up Tears of the Kingdom as a kind of Trauerspiel in the Benjaminian sense, they explore the dialectical tension between humor and mourning, diegetic and critical knowledge formation, comparative religion, and the beauty of works that are incomparably more than the sum (or multiplication) of their parts. Stay tuned for answers to burning listener questions on the game’s environmental (or extractivist) dimensions—with reference to Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke—and the (fairly incomprehensible) class structure of Hyrule.

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The Podcast for Social Research - (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Episode 1: Elves and Dragons
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09/30/22 • 111 min

Introducing Episode 1 of the new Podcast for Social Research subseries (Pop) Cultural Marxism, in which Ajay and Isi (and special guests!) will be exploring the "fantastic form" of pop-cultural commodities—from film and television to toys and games to objects of every conceivable consumer variety. In the premier episode, they turn their attention to the genre of fantasy, and in particular to the recent prequels to The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones. Listen in as they discuss, among other things, Amazon aesthetics, "the liberal imagination," beautiful failures, faux and real political realism, gif-able moments, Tolkien for neofascists, mimetic regression, billion-dollar budgets, and potential affinities between fantasy and socialist thought.

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FAQ

How many episodes does The Podcast for Social Research have?

The Podcast for Social Research currently has 123 episodes available.

What topics does The Podcast for Social Research cover?

The podcast is about News, Sociology, Literature, Society & Culture, Art, Street, School, Podcasts, Books, Economics, Education, Religion, Philosophy, John and Politics.

What is the most popular episode on The Podcast for Social Research?

The episode title 'Podcast for Social Research, Episode 66: Dear Prudence—Danny Lavery on the Art and Ethics of Advice-Giving' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on The Podcast for Social Research?

The average episode length on The Podcast for Social Research is 87 minutes.

How often are episodes of The Podcast for Social Research released?

Episodes of The Podcast for Social Research are typically released every 20 days, 1 hour.

When was the first episode of The Podcast for Social Research?

The first episode of The Podcast for Social Research was released on Dec 16, 2011.

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