June 6, 2017: Activism Then and Now.  An interview with distinguished professor Bettina Aptheker of Feminist Studies. She is a renowned scholar of history in areas ranging from women’s history, feminist oral history and memoir, and African American feminist history. We discussed the current political climate in the United States, about comparing and contrasting 60s/70s activism with today’s social movements including Black Lives Matter, about academic freedom, and her recent appointment as the inaugural endowed chair of the Peggy and Jack Baskin Foundation Presidential Chair of Feminist Studies.

June 13, 2017: Spotlight Interviews. Interview highlights featuring excerpts with Professor Vijay Prashad, a Professor of International Studies and South Asian History at Trinity College in Connecticut and a renowned journalist (air date May 2 & 9, 2017), Professor Catherine Ramirez, Director of the Chicano Latino Research Center and Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at UC Santa Cruz (air date April 11, 2017), and Claudia Lopez, a PhD candidate in Sociology, with Designated Emphases in Feminist Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies, at UC Santa Cruz (air date May 16, 2017).

June 22, 2017: Meditation, Citizenship & Social Justice. An interview with Chair and Professor Dean Mathiowetz of Politics at UC Santa Cruz.  His research and teaching focus on political theory. He’s particularly interested in the forces that impede democratic participation and the everyday resources and practices that can be mobilized to overcome those impediments. He’s the author of Appeals to Interest: Language, Contestation, and the Shaping of Political Agency (2011, Penn State University Press) and numerous articles of political theory. We discussed his writing on meditation and citizenship, specifically drawing from a recent journal article called “Good-for-Nothing Practice and the Art of Paradox: The Exemplary Citizenship of Ta-Nehisi Coates.”

June 29, 2017: No show aired this day.