August 2nd: The Challenges Facing LGBTQ Homeless Youth
Dr. Cindy Cruz of UC Santa Cruz’s Education Department discusses her research focused on LGBTQ street youth narratives and experiences, including homeless queer and trans-youth in Los Angeles, California. Dr. Cruz addresses how she has come to understand the survival strategies of LGBTQ homeless youth, the role of gentrification in exacerbating precarious conditions, and how the state of California needs to better address this crisis.
August 9th: No show this week.
August 16th: Spirituality and Politics
An interview with Dr. Liz Philipose about spirituality and politics. Dr. Philipose studies and teaches for transformation as a former professor of women’s studies and global politics. In this interview, Dr. Philipose discusses how the social world creates separation between us and about our internal capacity to heal and transform our everyday lives.
August 23rd: The Manafort Conviction, the Cohen Plea, and corruption in U.S. politics
Dr. Molly Talcott is an Associate Professor of Sociology at California State University, Los Angeles, Associate Vice President of the California Faculty Association (the largest higher education faculty union in the US), and the co-founder of LUCI (the Los Angeles Union Cooperative Initiative). In this conversational interview with Dr. Talcott, we discuss the most explosive news of the week, which includes the Paul Manafort conviction, the guilty plea of Michael Cohen, and the stunning refusal of the GOP to hold 45 accountable.
August 30th: Stories about Native life in urban spaces, An Interview with author Tommy Orange
In this interview with author Tommy Orange (enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma), Orange discusses his highly acclaimed debut novel There There. Orange talks about how he conceptualized his novel, his views on the limited representation of Native life in literature, and why engaging with historical memory in his book was necessary for telling a contemporary story about urban Native life.