In the decades leading up to the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia, a collective of young artists based in Zagreb used the city’s public spaces as a platform for radical individual expression. The Group of Six Authors and their circle in the period from 1975 to 1985 are the focus of Adair Rounthwaite’s book This Is Not My World: Art and Public Space in Socialist Zagreb, which highlights the friction between public and private that was the foundation of their innovative practices. Rounthwaite is joined here in conversation with Mechtild Widrich.

Adair Rounthwaite is author of This Is Not My World: Art and Public Space in Socialist Zagreb and Asking the Audience: Participatory Art in 1980s New York. Rounthwaite is associate professor of art history at the University of Washington.

Mechtild Widrich is author of Monumental Cares: Sites of History and Contemporary Art and Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art. Widrich is an art historian, curator, and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

REFERENCES:

Caroline A. Jones

Terry Smith

Chika Okeke-Agulu

Vlasta Delimar

Tomislav Gotovac

Ana Mendieta

Sasha Su-Ling Welland

Jenny Lin / Above Sea

Liz Kotz / Words to Be Looked At

Vlado Martek

Mladen Stilinović

Gina Beavers

This Is Not My World is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Marlene M. Johnson’s memoir is an essential record of the ascension of women in American politics. In Rise to the Challenge: A Memoir of Politics, Leadership, and Love, Johnson chronicles her life of learning and leadership in activism, entrepreneurship, politics, and public service, weaving professional play-by-plays with candidness about navigating personal loss. Here, Johnson is joined in conversation with Lori Sturdevant and Elisabeth (Betsy) Griffith.

Marlene M. Johnson was Minnesota’s first woman lieutenant governor, serving in Governor Rudy Perpich’s administration from 1983 until 1991. She is cofounder of the Minnesota Chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners and the Minnesota Women’s Campaign Fund and was executive director and CEO of NAFSA: Association of International Educators for nearly two decades. She is on the advisory board of Kakenya’s Dream, a board member of the Washington Office on Latin America, and a trustee of The Alexandria Trust. She lives in Washington, DC.

Lori Sturdevant is a retired Star Tribune editorial writer and columnist who has written about Minnesota government and politics since 1978.

Elisabeth Griffith is an American historian, educator, and activist. She is author of Formidable: American Women and the Fight for Equality: 1920–2020 and In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

OTHER WORKS REFERENCED:
Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief / Pauline Boss

Turnout: Making Minnesota the State That Votes / Joan Anderson Growe with Lori Sturdevant

Loving Someone who has Dementia / Pauline Boss

Praise for Rise to the Challenge:

“Marlene M. Johnson wasn’t just the first woman to be Minnesota’s Lieutenant Governor. She was also the first Lieutenant Governor to have a specific policy portfolio. She had access and influence in ways that laid the groundwork for me and others to follow. Marlene is of a class of women who made important strides in DFL politics, and I'm grateful for her place in Minnesota's history and for this book that tells that story”.

—Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan

“An essential document of the midcentury rise of women into American politics. In this memoir of a remarkable public life, Marlene M. Johnson braids a love story tragically turned into caregiving and the domestic devotion of guardian and advocate. She proves that faithfulness in love and commitment to the betterment of the world are not opposites after all.”

—Patricia Hampl, author of The Art of the Wasted Day

“In the dynamic mid-twentieth-century women’s movement, Marlene M. Johnson stood out and stood up with clarity of vision and purpose. Her multiple public service initiatives propelled her to a national presence and then into international education leadership.”

—Judge Harriet Lansing, retired, Minnesota Court of Appeals

“An important read for aspiring public servants, male or female.”

—J. Brian Atwood, former administrator, US Agency for International Development

How are spaces once imagined to be empty, vast, and mysterious transformed into something with material and cultural value? Two authors tackle this same question, one from the perspective of the seafloor, and one from Canada’s oil sands: key spaces where the meaning of sustainability is actively negotiated. Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor by Lisa Yin Han looks at oceanic media and shows how deepwater mediation is entangled in existential hopes and fears for our planetary future. Petroturfing: Refining Canadian Oil through Social Media by Jordan B. Kinder looks at how an increasingly influential network of pro-oil groups in Canada work to reform the public view of oil extraction as something socially, economically, and ecologically beneficial. Here, Lisa and Jordan are joined in conversation with Thomas Pringle.

Lisa Yin Yan is assistant professor of media studies at Pitzer College.

Jordan B. Kinder is assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University.

Thomas Pringle is assistant professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Southern California. Pringle is co-author, with Gertrud Koch and Bernard Stiegler, of Machine.

REFERENCES:

Nature’s Metropolis / William Cronon

Ethical Oil / Ezra Levant

Tar Wars / Geo Takach

Sustaining Seas / eds. Elspeth Probyn, Kate Johnson, and Nancy Lee (referencing essay by Lesley Green)

Oceaning / Adam Fish

Animal Revolution / Ron Broglio

Zoe Todd, “Fossil Fuels and Fossil Kin: An Environmental Kin Study of Weaponised Fossil Kin and Alberta’s So-Called ‘Energy Resources Heritage,’” Antipode (2023)

After Oil Collective

Isabelle Stengers

Praise for Deepwater Alchemy:

“An essential contribution to the watery depths of the blue humanities.”

—Jennifer Gabrys

“Deepwater Alchemy tells a story vital to our present.”

—Stefan Helmreich

Praise for Petroturfing:

“A profound and necessary book.”

—Janet Walker

“Offers great insight into an underdeveloped aspect of the cultural study of energy.”

—Stephanie LeMenager

Has the idea of the end of the world captured your imagination? Ted Toadvine’s book The Memory of the World: Deep Time, Animality, and Eschatology contends that a preoccupation with the world’s precarity relies on a flawed understanding of time that neglects the past and present with the goal of managing the future. Toadvine integrates insights from phenomenology, deconstruction, critical animal studies, and new materialism to argue for a new philosophy of time that takes seriously the entangled temporal events spanning cosmic, geological, evolutionary, and human durations. Here Toadvine is joined in conversation with David Morris and Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault.

Ted Toadvine is Nancy Tuana Director of the Rock Ethics Institute and professor of philosophy at The Pennsylvania State University.

David Morris is professor of philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault is a graduate student of philosophy at The Pennsylvania State University.

REFERENCES:

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (body of works including Phenomenology of Perception)

Immanuel Kant

Dipesh Chakrabarty

Michel Serres / The Incandescent

Martin Heidegger

Jacques Derrida

Jean-Luc Nancy

Jerome Miller

Henri Bergson

Edmund Husserl

James Playfair

James Hutton (Hutton’s Unconformity)

John Sallis / Stone

Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson / The Blind Spot

Jane Bennett

Donald S. Maier / What’s So Good About Biodiversity?

Ferdinand de Saussure

Émile P. Torres / Human Extinction

Rachel Carson / Silent Spring

Kyle Powys Whyte

Alfred North Whitehead / The Concept of Nature

The Memory of the World: Deep Time, Animality, and Eschatology is available from University of Minnesota Press.

“The Memory of the World achieves two important things: it steers our understanding of Merleau-Ponty toward a temporal interpretation of his thought and, at the same time, it uses that reading to make a critical intervention amongst theories of environmental apocalypse. Ted Toadvine’s concept of ‘biodiacritics’ should lead to a reorientation of the ‘eschatological imagination,’ producing effects in knowledge that are as insightful as they are impactful. This is a wonderful book that is a pleasure to think alongside.”

—John Ó Maoilearca

Antoine Volodine is the primary pseudonym of a French-Russian writer of many books. The meditative, postapocalyptic noir Mevlido’s Dreams, translated by Gina M. Stamm, is an urgent communiqué from a far-future reality of irreversible environmental damage and civilizational collapse that asks what it means to love and care for others at the end of the world. Here, Stamm is joined in conversation with Joshua Armstrong about translating this key work in Volodine’s post-exotic fictional universe.

Gina M. Stamm is assistant professor of French at the University of Alabama.

Joshua Armstrong is associate professor of French at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Mevlido’s Dreams: A Post-Exotic Novel is available from University of Minnesota Press.

“Translator Stamm does an admirable job of rendering Volodine’s serpentine prose in English, and the noirish, surrealist story turns into an unlikely romp as it riffs on the absurdity of 20th-century political institutions and pop culture.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Certainly the strangest and arguably one of the most accomplished contemporary writers of fiction in French, Antoine Volodine has created a vast and perplexing universe of bad dreams in several dozen works under a variety of pseudonyms over the past forty years. Mevlido’s Dreams provides a new pathway into Volodine’s labyrinth, which for all the horrors it recounts is always cast in stylishly crafted prose.”
—David Bellos, Princeton University

Joanna Brooks’s ancestors were among the early waves of emigrants to leave England for North America. Her book Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America’s First Immigrants reveals the violence and dislocation that propelled seventeenth- and eighteenth-century working-class English emigration, and follows American folk ballads back across the Atlantic to find histories of economic displacement, environmental destruction, and social betrayal at the heart of the early Anglo-American migrant experience. A tenth-anniversary edition of the book has just been released, which includes a new preface and develops a haunting historical perspective on the ancestors we thought we knew. Here, Brooks is joined by Desmond Hassing in conversation.

Joanna Brooks is an award-winning scholar and writer whose work tends to catastrophes of human belonging in American history. The author or editor of ten books on race, religion, colonialism, and social movements, her writing has been featured in the BBC, NPR, the Daily Show, CNN, MSNBC, and the Washington Post.

An enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and a San Diego native, Dr. Desmond Hassing is a conceptual artist, scholar, and activist who focuses on educating Western subjects on the intentionally disremembered subject of the Indigenous Peoples of North America. Hassing is founder of the Indigenous Peoples Reading Room, a planned open-access scholarship archive, and creator of The National Indian Project, an annotated bibliography of Native American, First Nations, and Pacific Islander representations in DC/National comic books of the same period. Hassing is lecturer in the Department of American Indian Studies at San Diego State University.

Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America’s First Immigrants is available from University of Minnesota Press.

“A surprising, bold, and altogether brilliant contribution to our understanding of why people crossed the Atlantic to live in a strange new world.”
—Marcus Rediker