This Is Not A Pipe

Stephen J. A. Ward discusses his book Objectively Engaged Journalism: An Ethic with Chris Richardson. Ward is an internationally recognized author, media ethicist and historian of ideas whose research is on the ethics of global, digital media, the rise of extreme media, and its impact on democracy. He is professor emeritus and Distinguished Lecturer on Ethics at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada. He has written and edited 10 books on media ethics, including the award-winning Radical Media Ethics and The Invention of Journalism Ethics. He is editor-in-chief of The Handbook of Global Media Ethics featuring chapters by over 80 media scholars and journalists around the world. A former war reporter, he is founding director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin, co-founder of the UBC School of Journalism in Vancouver, and former director of the Turnbull Media Center at the University of Oregon in Portland. He has won the President’s Award for lifetime contribution to journalism from the Canadian Association of Journalists.

Scott Newstok discusses his book How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from A Renaissance Education with Chris Richardson. Newstok is Professor of English and Founding Director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College. Newstok is the author of Quoting Death in Early Modern England: The Poetics of Epitaphs Beyond the Tomb (Palgrave, 2009) and How to Think like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education (Princeton, 2020); and editor of Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare (Parlor Press, 2007), Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Perforance (Palgrave, 2010, with Ayanna Thompson), and Paradise Lost: A Primer, written by his late mentor Michael Cavanagh (Catholic University of America Press, 2020).

Anna F. Peppard discusses her book Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy and the Superhero with Chris Richardson. Peppard is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellow in the department of Communication, Popular Culture, and Film at Brock University. She’s published widely on representations of race, gender, and sexuality within a variety of popular media genres and forms, including action-adventure television, superhero comics, professional wrestling, and sports culture. She’s currently working on a monograph about the iconic 1960s spy-fi TV show The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and writing entirely too much X-Men fanfiction. She co-hosts the podcast Three Panel Contrast (a monthly discussion of comics classics), and The Oh Gosh, Oh Golly, Oh Wow! Podcast (a weekly discussion of the classic Marvel comics series Excalibur).

Jonathan Cohn discusses his book The Burden of Choice: Recommendations, Subversion, and Algorithmic Culture with Chris Richardson. Cohn is an assistant professor of digital cultures and head of the digital humanities program at the University of Alberta. His research focuses on digital culture and history, critical algorithmic studies, film and media, postfeminist and postracial discourses…and television. With Dr. Jennifer Porst, he is co-editing Very Special Episodes: Event Television and Social Change (Rutgers, forthcoming) on the history of how the television industry has confronted traumatic events and cultural change. In the meantime, he is thinking a lot about what differences might exist between algorithmic and AI culture, and the experiences of incoherence endemic to our current moment. In an effort to make our relationship with AI more collaborative, ethical and egalitarian, he is also creating a program to help humanities scholars co-write and research with AI.

Sorcha Ní Fhlainn discusses her book Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture with Chris Richardson. Ní Fhlainn is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and American studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom. She is a founding member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies and author of Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture (Palgrave, 2019). She has published widely on socio-cultural history, subjectivity and postmodernism in Film Studies, American studies, Horror studies, and Popular Culture. Previous books include Clive Barker: Dark imaginer (Manchester UP, 2017), and The Worlds of Back to the Future: Critical Essays on the Films (McFarland, 2010), and articles in Adaptation (Oxford UP), and Horror Studies (Intellect). She is currently leading a research project and writing a monograph on the popular culture of the 1980s.

Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter discuss their book Reactionary Democracy: How Racism and the Populist Far Right Became Mainstream with Chris Richardson. Aurelien Mondon is a Senior Lecturer in politics at the University of Bath. His research focuses predominantly on the impact of racism and populism on liberal democracies and the mainstreaming of far right politics through elite discourse. His first book, The Mainstreaming of the Extreme Right in France and Australia: A Populist Hegemony?, was published in 2013 and he recently co-edited After Charlie Hebdo: Terror, racism and free speech published with Zed. His new book Reactionary democracy: How racism and the populist far right became mainstream, co-written with Aaron Winter, is now out with Verso.Aaron Winter is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of East London. His research is on the far-right with a focus on racism, mainstreaming and violence. He is co-editor of Discourses and Practices of Terrorism: Interrogating Terror (Routledge 2010), Historical Perspectives on Organised Crime and Terrorism (Routledge 2018) and Researching the Far Right: Theory, Method and Practice (Routledge 2020), and co-author with Aurelien Mondon, of Reactionary Democracy: How Racism and the Populist Far Right Became Mainstream (Verso 2020). He has also published in the journals Ethnic and Racial Studies, Identities and Sociological Research Online, and been interviewed by NBC, BBC, The Times, The Telegraph, New Statesman, Vice and Wired. He currently an associate editor of Identities and co-editor of the Manchester University Press (MUP) book series Racism, Resistance and Social Change.

Chris Richardson discusses his book Batman and the Joker: Contested Sexuality in Popular Culture with Diana Richards. Richardson is (usually) the host of This Is Not A Pipe podcast. He is also Associate Professor and Chair of the Communication Studies Department and Program Coordinator for Popular Culture at Young Harris College.He grew up in Toronto, ON, where he studied Journalism and Cultural Studies before earning his PhD in Media Studies from Western University. He has previously published Habitus of the Hood (2012), Covering Canadian Crime (2017), and Violence in American Society: An Encyclopedia of Trends, Problems and Perspectives (2020). He is now a recluse living in the Blue Ridge Mountains with his partner and their adopted dogs.Diana Richards is a Trans Woman who has enjoyed the privilege of living full-time in her preferred gender since January of 2020. She is also a life-long reader and collector of comic books. In 2017, she donated her collection of some 8,000 books--many dating back to when she first bought them in the early 1960s and 70s--to Young Harris College. It is from this connection that she and Chris became friends, and she is thrilled to have had this conversation with him and now to share it with others...Excelsior!

Hadar Aviram discusses her book Yesterday’s Monsters: The Manson Family Cases and the Illusion of Parole with Chris Richardson. Aviram is the Thomas Miller Professor at UC Hastings College of the Law. She holds law and criminology degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from UC Berkeley, where she studied as a Fulbright Fellow and a Regents Intern. Professor Aviram specializes in criminal justice and civil rights from a socio-legal perspective. She is the author of Cheap on Crime: Recession-Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment (UC Press, 2015), and the coeditor of The Legal Process and the Promise of Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2019.)Professor Aviram has published on domestic violence, behavioral perspectives on policing, prosecutorial and defense behavior, unconventional family units, public trust in the police, correctional policy, criminal justice budget policy, and the history of female crime and punishment. She served as President of the Western Society of Criminology and as a Trustee of the Law and Society Association and is currently the book review editor of the Law & Society Review. One of the leading voices in California and nationwide against mass incarceration, Professor Aviram is a frequent media commentator on politics, immigration, criminal justice policy, civil rights, the Trump Administration, and the Mueller Report. Most recently, Professor Aviram has been deeply involved in the struggle to provide relief to California's prison population, which is being ravaged by COVID-19. Her popular blog covers crime and punishment in California.

Robert K Elder discusses his book Hemingway in Comics with Chris Richardson. Elder is the Chief Digital Officer at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an award-winning author of 12 books and founder of Odd Hours Media. He also serves as a mentor at TechStars, 1871 Chicago and Northwestern University’s The Garage. Elder specializes in launching new products, expanding brands and developing corporate innovation strategies. Elder is also the founder of Odd Hours Media LLC, which consults and creates branding campaigns and TV production. In 2018, he also became a founding partner of Token. Agency, a consulting firm focused on emerging technology and blockchain projects. Elder is also the author or editor of several books, including 2018’s The Mixtape of My Life, a journal that guides users to write their autobiography through their music collection. His 2016 book, Hidden Hemingway: Inside the Ernest Hemingway Archives of Oak Park, won a Gold Medal at the Independent Publisher Book Awards.

Jo Littler discusses her book Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power, and Myths of Mobility with Chris Richardson. Jo Littler is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Director of the Gender and Sexualities Research Centre at City, University of London, UK. Her work on in/equality and cultural politics is wide-ranging and includes Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility, Routledge (2018) Radical Consumption? (2008) and with Roshi Naidoo (2005) The Politics of Heritage: The legacies of ‘race’ (2005). She is a co-editor of the European Journal of Cultural Studies and part of the editorial collective of Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture. She is currently working on a book of interviews with left feminist academics and, as part of ‘The Care Collective’, The Care Manifesto (Verso, 2020).

Brian Jefferson discusses his book Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age with Chris Richardson. Jefferson is Associate Professor of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. He edits the digital magazine societyandspace.org, serves on the editorial boards of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers and Urban Geography, and is author of Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age.

Kevin M Gannon discusses his book Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto with Chris Richardson. Gannon is Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, and Professor of History, at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa. He is the author of Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto, and writes regularly for the Chronicle of Higher Education and on his blog, The Tattooed Professor. In 2016, he appeared in the Oscar-nominated documentary 13th. Find him on Twitter: @TheTattooedProf

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas discusses her book The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games with Chris Richardson. Thomas is Associate Professor in the Literacy, Culture, and International Educational Division at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. A former Detroit Public Schools teacher and National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, she was a member of the NCTE Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color’s 2008-2010 cohort, served on the NCTE Conference on English Education's Executive Committee from 2013 until 2017, and is the immediate past chair of the NCTE Standing Committee on Research. Currently, she serves as co-editor of Research of the Teaching of English, and her most recent book is The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (NYU Press, 2019). She is an advisory board member and consultant on Teaching Tolerance’s Teaching Hard History project.

Luke Fernandez and Susan Matt discuss their book Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings about Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter with Chris Richardson. Luke Fernandez is Asst. Prof. in the School of Computing at Weber State University. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Theory from Cornell University. He also is a software developer. His writing has appeared in a range of publications, including the Washington Post, Slate, Lapham's Quarterly, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.Susan J. Matt is an historian of the emotions and Presidential Distinguished Professor of History at Weber State University. She is author of Homesickness: An American History (Oxford University Press, 2011), and Keeping Up with the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Society, 1890-1930 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Journal of American History, among other places.

Marc Singer discusses his book Breaking the Frames: Populism and Prestige in Comics Studies with Chris Richardson. Singer is Associate Professor of English at Howard University in Washington DC, where he studies twentieth and twenty-first-century American literature, with interests in contemporary fiction, comics, and film. He is the author of Breaking the Frames: Populism and Prestige in Comics Studies (Univ. of Texas Press, 2018) and Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2012) and the editor, with Nels Pearson, of Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World (Ashgate, 2009).

Catherine A Sanderson discusses her book Why We Act: Turning Bystanders into Moral Rebels with Chris Richardson. Sanderson is the Manwell Family Professor of Life Sciences (Psychology at Amherst College. She received a bachelor's degree in psychology, with a specialization in Health and Development, from Stanford University, and received both masters and doctoral degrees in psychology from Princeton University. Her research has received grant funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Health. Professor Sanderson has published over 25 journal articles and book chapters in addition to four college textbooks, middle school and high school health textbooks, and trade books on parenting as well as how mindset influences happiness, health, and even how long we live (The Positive Shift). In 2012, she was named one of the country's top 300 professors by the Princeton Review.

Arthur I. Miller discusses his book The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI-Powered Creativity with Chris Richardson. Miller is fascinated by the nature of creative thinking. He has published many critically acclaimed books, including Insights of Genius; Einstein, Picasso (shortlisted for a Pulitzer); Empire of the Stars (shortlisted for the Aventis Prize); and 137. He writes for the Guardian, The New York Times, Wired magazine and Salon. He is professor emeritus of history and philosophy of science at University College London. An experienced broadcaster and lecturer, Miller has judged art competitions and curated exhibitions on art/science. His previous book, Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science is Redefining Contemporary Art, tells how art, science and technology are fusing in the twenty-first century. The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI-Powered Creativity spins off the hundred-odd interviews Miller did with scientists on the cutting-edge of AI-created art, literature and music. It is the culmination of over three decades of work on creativity in humans and creativity in machines and is a tour of creativity in the age of machines. Far from being a dystopian account, it celebrates the creative possibilities of AI in the arts.

Robert Moses Peaslee and Robert G. Weiner discuss their book The Supervillain Reader with Chris Richardson. Peaslee is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Journalism & Creative Media Industries. He holds a PhD in Mass Communication from the University of Colorado-Boulder, and his publications have focused on media-related tourism and festivals, superheroes and contemporary popular culture, documentary and feature film, and international communication. He is the co-editor of four volumes on various dimensions of comics, film, and television, and his work has appeared in journals such as Adaptation, Transformative Works & Cultures, Visual Communication Quarterly, Mass Communication and Society, and the International Journal of Communication. Originally from Milford, NH, he now calls Lubbock, TX home, and lives happily with his wife Kate and their three superhero kids, Coen, Hazel, and Nora.Robert G. “Rob” Weiner is Popular Culture Librarian and liaison to the College of Visual and Performing Arts. He also teaches for the Honors College. His research interests include sequential art, popular music, and the history of film. He has authored/edited/co-edited over 15 books including Graphic Novels and Comics in Libraries, The Supervillain Reader (with Robert Moses Peaslee), Marvel Graphic Novels, In the Peanut Gallery with Mystery Science Theater 3000 (with Shelley Barba) Python Beyond Python: Critical Engagements with Culture (with Paul Reinsch and Lynn Whitfield), Perspectives on the Grateful Dead, Graphic Novels and Comics in the Classroom (with Carry Syma), Marvel Comics into Film (with Matt McEniry and Robert Moses Peaslee) and The Joker: A Serious Study of the Clown Prince of Crime (with Robert Moses Peaslee). Rob has also published articles and book chapters in The International Journal of Comic Art, ImageText, Journal of Pan African Studies, Texas Library Journal, Secret Origins of Comic Studies, The Routledge Companion to Comics, The Vietnam War in Popular Culture, What's Eating You: Food and Horror on the Screen, and Global Glam and Popular Music, Race in American Film: Voices and Visions that Shaped a Nation. Most recently he published several pieces in The American Superhero.

Lochlann Jain discusses Things That Art: A Graphic Menagerie of Enchanting Curiosity with Chris Richardson. Jain is an award-winning scholar and artist. Jain’s work in the medical anthropology and the history of medicine and law has investigated how scientific research questions are framed and what factors are excluded. Jain is the author of three books. Most recently, a book of drawings, Things that Art (University of Toronto Press, 2019), reconsiders and interrupts the ways in which categories underpin knowledge systems and also aims to realize drawing as a useful and provocative method in the social sciences. Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (UC Press: 2013) examines the ways in which institutions such as law, medicine, and the media have established ways of understanding, justifying, and carefully managing the social understanding of cancer. Injury (Princeton UP: 2006), analyzed the twentieth century emergence of tort law in the United States as a highly politicized and problematic form of regulating the design of mass-produced commodities in light of their propensity to injure naïve consumers. The book analyzes the history of the way in which product design has encoded assumptions and biases that have impacted how injuries are distributed and subsequently understood in law. Jain is Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University and a Visiting Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’ College London.

Liam Burke discusses his co-edited book The Superhero Symbol: Media, Culture & Politics with Chris Richardson. Associate Professor Liam Burke is the discipline leader in Cinema and Screen Studies at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. Liam has published widely on comic books and adaptation, with his books including The Comic Book Film Adaptation: Exploring Modern Hollywood’s Leading Genre, Superhero Movies, and the edited collection Fan Phenomena Batman. His most recent book, the edited collection The Superhero Symbol (with Ian Gordon and Angela Ndalianis), was published by Rutgers University Press in 2019. Liam is a chief investigator of the Australian Research Council funded project Superheroes & Me.

Ian Reilly discusses his book Media Hoaxing: The Yes Men and Utopian Politics with Chris Richardson. Reilly is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University. Reilly’s research explores the intersections of politics, humor, civic engagement, and media activism. He is the author of Media Hoaxing: The Yes Men and Utopian Politics (2018), published by Lexington Books. His work has appeared in numerous publications and book collections; in 2012, he was awarded the Carl Bode Award for Outstanding Article published in the Journal of American Culture. He has taught graduate and undergraduate courses on humor, youth and media, Internet politics, visual communication, media criticism, telecommunications policy, and media history.

"My friend, Art Spiegelman, who very graciously provided the cover for the book, initially wanted to put Trump on the cover and I said, no, no, you can’t do that."

"It's only a taste, a fragment of what Bowie must have experienced, but I really feel my head got in a strange space during that period of time."

"I was feeling something that I couldn't articulate."

"A language around livelihoods has the possibility of helping people to see their own lives differently and to appreciate who they already are in a different way."

"Those kinds of neat categories seem to be breaking down quite a bit. We see more and more industry reaching out to create transformative works."

"My decision to take on that labor had everything to do with the fact that I didn't have someone like me available. I didn't have anyone to help me demystify the process of the academy."

"This is one of the paradigmatic examples where the 'worlds' and 'words' come together and impact each other."

"As much as they want to add up to a grand unifying reading that says, "this, exactly, is America," I think that there's something that always goes astray."

"Many people are obviously aware that this nation was founded on a system of slavery, but what many people don't know is that the origins of policing in the United States can be traced to the institution of slavery."

"Even if you're working against the cliff face of some of the darkest and most devastating genocidal movements in capitalism, the trick is to bring joy to your revolt."

"Learning conventional journalism is not a bad thing to do, but it's like learning how to restore antique furniture when the world is full of Ikeas."

"It’s hard to deny stories. And I think that’s why stories are so important. And that’s why qualitative research is so important."

"There is a whole host of things that have to happen after that button gets pushed. And I think it's extremely desirable to hide all of that."

"That is an interesting tension in comics, because it is sort of self-evidently not 'the truth.'"

"If you want to fix [the media] by having 'The Bureau of Truth'...oops..that's going to make things worse."

"We treated Reagan, we treated Bush, and we treat Trump too often as if they're idiots. I have no idea whether they are or not, but I don't think that it's a good strategy to assume your opponent is an idiot."Buy @notapipepodcast a coffee!Lawrence Grossberg discusses his book Under the Cover of Chaos: Trump and the Battle for the American Right with Chris Richardson. Grossberg is the Morris Davis Distinguished Professor of Communication and Cultural Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (since 1994), and he has held additional appointments in American Studies, Anthropology and Geography. He studied at the University of Rochester (with Hayden White and Richard Taylor), the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Birmingham, England, with Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart) and completed his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois (with James W. Carey) in 1976.He was the editor of the journal Cultural Studies from 1990 through 2018. He has published ten books and edited another eleven, as well as over 250 essays and dozens of interviews, in English. His work has been translated into twenty languages and additionally, he has published numerous original books and essays in other languages, and lectures all over the world. He has advised over fifty doctoral students, and been honored for his scholarship, teaching and mentorship by the International Communication Association, the (U.S.) National Communication Association, the Association for Cultural Studies, and the University of North Carolina.His work has addressed a wide range of questions especially the specificity of cultural studies, developments in contemporary theory, the affective nature of the popular, and the changing political culture of the U.S. He has approached these in writings on: U.S. popular music, youth culture and politics; the construction of kids as a political field; value theory: struggles over modernities; the state of progressive oppositions and countercultures; and post-war reconfigurations of the conservative and reactionary rights.In 2019, Under the Cover of Chaos won the National Communication Association’s Diamond Anniversary Book Award. His other recent books include Cultural Studies In the Future Tense, We All Want to Change the World (available free online), Under the Cover of Chaos, and (co-edited) Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983.

"One of the quotes that Hannah Arendt said that I kept over my desk as I was writing is "Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it."

"We once, at least for a very brief moment, understood that the purpose of higher education was not just individual in nature but that it served a social good for us to have a broadly educated public equipped with the tools for social mobility."

"People can do terrible things. But you don't really appreciate the impact of what they've done unless you fully understand how complicated they in fact are."

"One way to know what kind of ethnographer you are is to think about how you feel when you see the police approaching."

"[Foucault] has something to say to almost every field in the arts, humanities, and social sciences."

"If somebody dies in the game because of your actions, in a way, there is a sense of responsibility...even if it's just in fictional form."

"You have to take into account the history of race and surveillance when you're talking about any new predictive policing technology...Every time we have seen an innovation of surveillance, we've turned it on communities of color and poor people first."

"We can't dismiss the woman on the platform playing Candy Crush Saga as simply a dupe of capitalism."

"This is not just a trend but one with significant implications for how law is carried out, how law is constructed. And it's going to continue with increases of computing power and the gathering of big data."

"They were training it according to US Hollywood movies. So [the bot] was talking not according to how people talk but how Hollywood script writers believe people talk."

"Aphorisms are interesting concepts because they don't arrive via an argument. You don't get syllogistically to an aphorism. An aphorism simply, but not merely, feels true. It feels right, which I think is often how poems work as well."

"So much of how we see artists as interacting with each other--and their work as interacting with each other--comes from the art historian as opposed to from the work itself."

Intro/Outro: AllIknow (Hip Hop) by Makaih Beats is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.

Intro/Outro: AllIknow (Hip Hop) by Makaih Beats is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.