My conversation this month is with queer and feminist cultural historian, educator, podcaster, and public speaker Ramzi Fawaz.
https://www.ramzifawaz.com/
https://www.instagram.com/nerdfromthefuture/
Ramzi Fawaz is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and host of the podcast "Nerd from the Future". He is the author of two books, including The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (2016) and Queer Forms (2022), both published by NYU Press. The New Mutants received the 2017 ASAP Book Prize from the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. Fawaz is a contributing editor to Film Quarterly, where he writes a column titled “Imagination Unbound.” He is also a co-editor of the NYU Press book series Postmillennial Pop with Gayle Wald and Aaron Trammell. Fawaz is currently working on a new book project titled _How to Think Like a Multiverse: Psychedelic Pathways to Embracing a Diverse World._ In it, he argues for a rethinking of humanities education as a form of collective psychedelic therapy, which uses literature, art, and media, rather than psychoactive medicines, to induce positive, long-term transformations in students’ mental wellbeing. As part of this project, He recently edited a special issue of _South Atlantic Quarterly_ on the topic of “Psychedelic Imaginaries,” which was published in April 2025.
We talk about teaching as an act of love, psychedelics as tools for loosening rigid thought, and how imagination can help us live with difference instead of fearing it. Ramzi describes entering the classroom as a “radiant light,” grounded, joyful, and fully present with students. At the heart of his pedagogy is **attention as care**: treating students as people worth listening to, challenging them without shaming, and creating a "cone of trust" where risk, disagreement, and mistakes are part of learning. Ramzi shares insights from his upcoming book, **How to Think Like a Multiverse: Psychedelic Pathways to Embracing a Diverse World**, arguing that both art and psychedelic experience can soften hardened thinking and help us approach human difference with curiosity rather than fear. Together we ask: How do we practice being with people we don’t agree with? How do we act when theory fails us? How do we cultivate imagination that changes the world rather than escapes it?
We mention:
Hannah Arendt (enlarged mentality)
Linda Zerilli (_Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom_)
Judith Butler (performativity and grieveability)
Lauren Berlant (cruel optimism)
The movie Everything Everywhere All At Once_
The series Heated Rivalry
