Best Civics Radio Network Podcasts (2025)

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Carol Atack, "Plato: A Civic Life" (Reaktion, 2025) 1:12:55

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2d ago1:12:55

1:12:55

Plato is a key figure from the beginnings of Western philosophy, yet the impact of his lived experience on his thought has rarely been explored. Born during a war that would lead to Athens’ decline, Plato lived in turbulent times. In Plato: A Civic Life (Reaktion, 2025), Carol Atack explores how Plato’s life in Athens influenced his thought, how he…

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Natacha Chetcuti-Osorovitz and Sara Garbagnoli "La Pensée Wittig: Une Introduction" (Payot, 2025) 43:23

3d ago43:23

43:23

How is it possible to be a subject when faced with oppression? The revolutionary thought and work of French novelist and lesbian thinker Monique Wittig are today in dialogue with feminist and LGBTQIA+ analyses and politics. Her materialist theorization of lesbianism subfuses contemporary feminism and queer political and social movements. By proposi…

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Constance Bailey, "Conversations with Kiese Laymon" (UP of Mississippi, 2025) 1:07:26

5d ago1:07:26

1:07:26

This is a very special episode of the New Books Network, as the editor of Conversations with Kiese Laymon (UP of Mississippi, 2025), Dr. Constance Bailey, discusses the process of selecting, compiling, and publishing the volume with the subject himself, award-winning author, Kiese Laymon. Conversations with Kiese Laymon provides an in-depth look at…

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Robert F. Carley, "Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice" (SUNY Press, 2019) 48:49

6d ago48:49

48:49

While scholars of social and political movements tend to analyze tactics in terms of their effectiveness in achieving specific outcomes, Robert F. Carley argues by contrast that tactics are, above all, what social movements do. They are not mere means to an end so much as they are a public form of expression pointing out injustices and making just …

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Kenja McCray, "Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership" (NYU Press, 2025) 1:09:54

7d ago1:09:54

1:09:54

Academics and popular commentors have expressed common sentiments about the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s—that it was male dominated and overrun with autocratic leaders. Yet women’s strategizing, management, and sustained work were integral to movement organizations’ functioning, and female advocates of cultural nationalism often exhi…

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Marcus Rediker, "Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea" (Penguin Group, 2025) 1:04:57

9d ago1:04:57

1:04:57

Conspiracy, mutiny and liberation on America’s waterfront by the award-winning author of The Slave Ship. Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea (Penguin Group, 2025) is a gripping history of stowaway slaves and the vessels that carried them to liberty. Up to 100,000 fugitives successfully fled the horrors of bondage in the A…

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Paying Attention with Anya Daly 32:30

10d ago32:30

32:30

In this episode Pat speaks with Dr Anya Daly. Dr Anya Daly investigates the intersections of phenomenology with philosophy of mind, the philosophy of perception, the philosophy of psychiatry, embodied and social cognition, enactivism, ethics, aesthetics and Buddhist Philosophy. They discuss meditation and perception, the divide between continental …

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Zahi Zalloua, "Fanon, Žižek and the Violence of Resistance" (Bloomsbury, 2025) 1:08:36

12d ago1:08:36

1:08:36

n a novel pairing of anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon with Marxist-Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Zahi Zalloua explores the ways both thinkers expose the violence of political structures. This inventive exploration advances an anti-racist critique, describing how ontology operates in a racial matrix to produce some human bodies that count an…

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187. Japan’s Railways: Culture, Planning, and Precision_PX 42:23

15d ago42:23

42:23

In this episode of Planningxchange, Jess Noonan and Peter Jewell are joined by Stephen Turner, founder of TS Japan Rail a well respected commentator on Japanese rail travel.Stephen has lived in Japan since the early 1990s and has featured on NHK World’s Japan Railway Journal and Japanology Plus. Through his work, he helps visitors craft memorable j…

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Matthew Benjamin Cole, "Fear the Future: Dystopia and Political Imagination in the Twentieth Century" (U of Michigan Press, 2025) 1:48:38

16d ago1:48:38

1:48:38

Are we already living in some kind of fascist or technocratic dystopia? How do we avert the AI dystopia? These are the types of things that you'll see thrown about in op-eds and analysis pieces all over the net and the press. Dystopia is doing some kind of work in our political vocabulary that goes beyond a reference to those iconic dystopian novel…

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Laura Garbes, "Listeners Like Who?: Exclusion and Resistance in the Public Radio Industry" (Princeton UP, 2025) 42:07

16d ago42:07

42:07

Why is radio so white? In Listeners Like Who? Exclusion and Resistance in the Public Radio Industry (Princeton UP, 2025) Laura Garbes, a Sociologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, explores the history of public radio, theorising it as a white institutional space. Alongside the rich history and theoretical fram…

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Simon James Copland, "The Male Complaint: The Manosphere and Misogyny Online" (Polity, 2025) 1:11:32

17d ago1:11:32

1:11:32

Inspired by leaders such as Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson, the online Manosphere has exploded in recent years. Dedicated to anti-feminism, these communities have orchestrated online campaigns of misogynistic harassment, with some individuals going as far as committing violent terrorist attacks. Although the Manosphere has become a focus point of …

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Anna Strhan and Rachael Shillitoe, "Growing Up Godless: Non-Religious Childhoods in Contemporary England" (Princeton UP, 2025) 38:05

19d ago38:05

38:05

What do children believe in? In Growing Up Godless: Non-Religious Childhoods in Contemporary England (Princeton UP, 2025) Anna Strhan, a Reader in the Department of Sociology at the University of York and Rachael Shillitoe, a senior social scientist in the UK civil service and honorary fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of York…

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Ariel Colonomos, "Pricing Lives: The Political Art of Measurement" (Oxford UP, 2023) 44:34

20d ago44:34

44:34

Pricing Lives: The Political Art of Measurement (Oxford UP, 2023) discusses how human lives are equated with the material, and argues that pricing lives lies at the core of the political; in fact, as in Plato or Hobbes, and in the Weberian ethics of responsibility, measurement is considered to be one of its central features. Ariel Colonomos argues …

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Robert T. Tally, Jr., "For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists: Literature in an Age of Capitalist Realism" (Zero Books, 2022) 1:53:44

22d ago1:53:44

1:53:44

Robert T. Tally, Jr.'s book For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists: Literature in an Age of Capitalist Realism (Zero Books, 2022) takes as its point of departure two profound and interrelated phenomena. The first is the pervasive sense of what Mark Fisher had called “capitalist realism", in which (to cite the famous expression variously attribu…

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Lyndsey Stonebridge on Hannah Arendt's Lessons on Love and Disobedience (JP) 56:24

24d ago56:24

56:24

An Arendt expert has arrived at Arendt-obsessed Recall This Book. Lyndsey Stonebridge discusses her widely praised 2024 We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. Lyndsey sees both radical evil and the banality of evil at work in Nazi Germany and in the causes of suffering and death in Gaza today. She compare…

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Santiago Zabala, "Signs from the Future: Philosophy of Warnings" (Columbia UP, 2025) 53:45

25d ago53:45

53:45

Returning to NBN is the philosopher Santiago Zabala, here to introduce his new book Signs from the Future: A Philosophy of Warnings (Columbia University Press, 2025). Warnings, for Zabala, are not synonymous with predictions. They are instead as much about the present as the future. They point towards already present crisis and contradictions. They…

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David McNally, "Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History" (U California Press, 2025) 43:05

26d ago43:05

43:05

David McNally's Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History (U California Press, 2025)presents the first systematic Marxist account of the capitalist character of Atlantic slavery. McNally argues that enslaved labour within the plantation system constituted capitalist commodity production, and crucially, reframes the resistance of enslaved people…

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1
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Conversations w/ Ms.B

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1
Carol Atack, "Plato: A Civic Life" (Reaktion, 2025) 1:12:55

1
Natacha Chetcuti-Osorovitz and Sara Garbagnoli "La Pensée Wittig: Une Introduction" (Payot, 2025) 43:23

1
Constance Bailey, "Conversations with Kiese Laymon" (UP of Mississippi, 2025) 1:07:26

1
Robert F. Carley, "Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice" (SUNY Press, 2019) 48:49

1
Kenja McCray, "Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership" (NYU Press, 2025) 1:09:54

1
Marcus Rediker, "Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea" (Penguin Group, 2025) 1:04:57

1
Paying Attention with Anya Daly 32:30

1
Zahi Zalloua, "Fanon, Žižek and the Violence of Resistance" (Bloomsbury, 2025) 1:08:36

1
187. Japan’s Railways: Culture, Planning, and Precision_PX 42:23

1
Matthew Benjamin Cole, "Fear the Future: Dystopia and Political Imagination in the Twentieth Century" (U of Michigan Press, 2025) 1:48:38

1
Laura Garbes, "Listeners Like Who?: Exclusion and Resistance in the Public Radio Industry" (Princeton UP, 2025) 42:07

1
Simon James Copland, "The Male Complaint: The Manosphere and Misogyny Online" (Polity, 2025) 1:11:32

1
Anna Strhan and Rachael Shillitoe, "Growing Up Godless: Non-Religious Childhoods in Contemporary England" (Princeton UP, 2025) 38:05

1
Ariel Colonomos, "Pricing Lives: The Political Art of Measurement" (Oxford UP, 2023) 44:34

1
Robert T. Tally, Jr., "For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists: Literature in an Age of Capitalist Realism" (Zero Books, 2022) 1:53:44

1
Lyndsey Stonebridge on Hannah Arendt's Lessons on Love and Disobedience (JP) 56:24

1
Santiago Zabala, "Signs from the Future: Philosophy of Warnings" (Columbia UP, 2025) 53:45

1
David McNally, "Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History" (U California Press, 2025) 43:05