Shows
This Authoritarian LifeUnsafe Positions: How Precarity and Repression Silence the University (Frontlines) #4🎙️ Season 2 of This Authoritarian Life continues at another frontline: the university — where political repression and economic precarity work together to silence critical voices and disempower those who produce knowledge.In this episode, we speak with Aslı Vatansever — a sociologist of work who was dismissed from her position in Istanbul after signing the 'Academics for Peace' petition and now lives and works in Berlin, where she wrote At the Margins of Academia: Exile, Precariousness, and Subjectivity.Why are precarity and repression "two sides of the same coin" — and how do t...
2026-01-281h 05This Authoritarian LifeDefund, Co-opt, Replace: How Authoritarians Reshape Culture (Frontlines) #3🎙️ Season 2 of This Authoritarian Life continues at another frontline: culture — where authoritarian power doesn’t just silence dissent, but reshapes the institutions that decide what gets staged, funded, and celebrated.In this episode, we speak with Piotr Rudzki (dramaturg; formerly of the Polski Theater in Wrocław) and Kristóf Nagy (anthropologist; author of an ethnography of the Hungarian Academy of Arts) about how cultural worlds are reorganized under illiberal rule.Why is defunding today’s most effective form of censorship?How does co-optation
2025-12-2957 min
Everything Cookbooks151: Capturing Family Heritage in a Cookbook with Polina ChesnakovaMolly and Kate speak with cookbook author Polina Chesnakova about her newest and most personal work yet, Chesnok. Polina talks about falling in love with her family's food which led her to writing, teaching and, eventually, a cookbook deal. While her first two books were less personal, this one is layered with family history, traditional recipes and tales from the diaspora and Polina unpacks the process behind its creation. She shares behind the scenes tidbits like the title selection, cover design and the sometimes maddening process behind nailing down the details of the recipes. She shares some of the...
2025-12-0350 minThis Authoritarian LifeFrom Blockades to Reclaiming Politics: Serbia’s Student Uprising (Frontlines) #2🎙️ Season 2 of This Authoritarian Life continues one another urgent frontline: Serbia.In this episode, we speak with activist-journalists Anastazija Govedarica Antanasijević and Iskra Krstić about the student-led uprising that has reshaped political life in Serbia. What began with campus blockades after the collapse of a train-station canopy rapidly grew into a nationwide movement demanding systemic change.How did students introduce direct democracy through plenums and zborovi?How did they build alliances that cut across class, region, and ethnic divisions—including between Orthodox and Muslim communiti...
2025-11-2848 minThis Authoritarian LifePolitics of Life and Death: Gaza and the Weaponization of Medicine (Frontlines) #1🎙️ Season 2 of This Authoritarian Life begins at one of today’s most tragic frontlines: Gaza.In this episode, we talk with Guy Shalev, anthropologist and executive director of Physicians for Human Rights Israel, about how medicine has become a political weapon in Israel’s war on Gaza and in the broader occupation of Palestine.How has Palestinian healthcare been de-developed over the years and what did this mean for the residents of the West Bank and Gaza before the genocide? What were the possibilities and limitations of human rig...
2025-10-281h 11This Authoritarian LifeThe Language of Authoritarianism (Origins) #6In this sixth episode of This Authoritarian Life we look at how language is used to entrench authoritarian power. Authoritarian leaders have long realized the power of propaganda, deploying radio, television and more recently social media to cement certain ideas as truths, to vindicate an exclusive right to lead the political community, to name threats and enemies, and to delegitimize critics and opponents. While they are not the only ones to deploy propaganda, they do this in particular ways. We talk to linguist and communication expert Anna Szilágyi who, after working for a decade as a j...
2025-03-141h 03This Authoritarian LifeIntertwined: The Regime and the Far-Right in Russia (Origins) #5In this fifth episode of This Authoritarian Life we continue to investigate the impact of war on contemporary politics. We look at the case of Russia where our guest Arkadij Lomonosov has until recently worked as a journalist and anti-fascist activist. Reflecting on his own upbringing and personal infatuation with the young Putin in his teens, knowledge derived from long years of monitoring ultranationalist and neo-fascist groups, Arkadij illuminates Putin's appeal and the narrower attraction exercised by the neo-fascist street scene, the mutually beneficial and constantly evolving relationship between the regime and different factions of the far-right...
2025-02-141h 10This Authoritarian LifeThe Psychic Life of Authoritarianism (Origins) #4In this fourth episode of This Authoritarian Life we focus on the destructive dimension of contemporary politics. Looking at the case of Israel and its latest campaign in Gaza, psychoanalyst Iris Hefets reflects on the post-1967 history of Israel as the gradual suspension of the superego and the displacement of internal aggression on Gaza, which, building on Freud, she describes as Israel’s ‘Id’. In turn, author Richard Seymour, drawing on his latest book Disaster Nationalism, sees cycles of violence as being rooted in capitalist and planetary crises, which fuel feelings of shame and weakness. He arg...
2025-01-1452 minThis Authoritarian LifeVeiling and Unveiling: Everyday Gender Struggles in Iran (Origins) #3Pursuing our exploration of the ‘Origins’ of authoritarianism, in this third episode of This Authoritarian Life we will continue to focus on the role of the body in authoritarian politics. More specifically, we will turn our attention to the female body, which functions as an object of control and a site of resistance, and look more closely at the example of the Islamic Republic of Iran, where tensions over the policy of mandatory veiling have surfaced in a violent manner in the past years. Our guests, sociologist Firoozeh Farvardin and artist Yasaman Pishvaei, reco...
2024-12-1345 minThis Authoritarian LifeAftershocks of the Past: Reunification and Resentment in East Germany (Origins) #2Resentment may lay dormant for decades, before suddenly erupting and inundating public life. In this second episode of This Authoritarian Life, we continue to explore the ‘Origins’ of authoritarianism by asking how the past can exercise a decisive influence in and over the present. We do this by focusing on the case of East Germany, where guests 𝐀𝐧𝐧𝐚 𝐒𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐝𝐞 and 𝐄𝐥𝐬𝐤𝐞 𝐑𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐟𝐞𝐥𝐝 have conducted research and staged artistic performances.How does the experience of a curtailed revolution inscribe itself into the human body? How does it play into East Germans’ overwhelming sense of political abandonment? And how has the far right taken advantage of all this? 🎧 To find out, tune into the second episod...
2024-11-141h 03