Podcast · Society & Culture

Radical Futures

by Bhakti Shringarpure · English · Society & Culture

An invitation to imagine freedom, decolonization and liberatory futures.

New episodes: Every two weeks
Typical length: 50 min
Latest: 10 Sep 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

10 Sep 2026 · 57 min

Becoming Afghan, Becoming American After 9/11: Featuring Zohra Saed

“You had to go and perform Afghan-ness,” scholar and poet Zohra Saed recalls as she speaks of the scary and difficult days soon after the towers fell in New York City. Afghanistan was suddenly in the spotlight as the location of 9/11 mastermind and head of Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden. On the one hand, there were drums of war, boycotts of Afghan businesses, and violence towards Afghans in the US. But on the other hand, soft imperialism was in immediate motion as numerous cultural interventions began springing up. Afghan-American youth were being recruited by the US government for a suite of…

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Earlier episodes 28 most recent

S1 · E28 · 2 Sep 2026 · 51 min
Palestine and the Collapse of American Journalism: Featuring Joe Sacco
Joe Sacco admits that he began to clash with many of the existing principles of journalism early in his career. He had graduated with a degree in journalism from a university in the US and had begun following the coverage of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. As news of the massacres of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps reached him, he had an epiphany: “I remember seeing the photographs and looking at all this, and the thought that came to my mind is, ‘Wait a minute, I thought the Palestinians were the terrorists.’” Surprised by his own realization, Sacco resolved to…
S1 · E27 · 16 Apr 2026 · 1 hr 5 min
Complaint Activism, Killjoy Feminism, and the Power of NO! Featuring Sara Ahmed
“Complaints often get us to the politics of how the institution works. And that's how I've tried to see it - as a lens into the institution.” Writer, scholar and activist Sara Ahmed learned the harsh truth about academic institutions over a decade ago. When a group of students and feminist faculty collectively complained about sexual harassment at their institution - Goldsmiths, University of London - a suite of deflective actions from the university ensured that the complaint never saw light of day and that the harassers stayed protected. In what became a long, drawn out battle against the…
S1 · E26 · 4 Apr 2026 · 50 min
Love, Freedom, Feminism, and Keeping Dalit Life Intact: Featuring Nikhil Pandhi
A story about love can “unspool the complexities of caste,” says Nikhil Pandhi, the editor of Love in the Time of Caste: A Dalit-feminist Anthology of Love Stories published by Zubaan Books, an indie feminist press based in India. Such stories not only serve to give space to the rich, inner lives of Dalit communities but they can be an important resource for anyone who is keen to understand caste. “Rather than quoting an academic treatise, I felt like it is just much easier for them to read a short story,” says Pandhi. A collection of 17 stories from across India, Love in the Time of Caste…
S1 · E25 · 23 Mar 2026 · 50 min
Queer, Palestinian and Decolonial: Featuring Tareq Baconi
“I had always placed my queer identity and my Palestinian identity in different buckets,” admits writer Tareq Baconi. This changed when he began writing his memoir, Fire in Every Direction , a first-person account of young Tareq, a Palestinian boy living in Jordan and gradually coming to terms with his sexuality. “Through the writing of this book, and as I became more involved in Palestine organizing, I realized that this separation is obviously a false separation,” Baconi says. “Not only that, I began to understand that I came to Palestine through a queer lens, and specifically through my…
S1 · E24 · 11 Feb 2026 · 49 min
The Ballot as Battleground: Featuring Anjali Enjeti
Today, in the United States, the right to vote is more precarious and more contested than ever. “I have had front row seats to voter suppression,” writer, poll worker, activist and Georgia resident Anjali Enjeti tells me, referring to Shelby County v. Holder , a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 2022 that gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Enjeti explains that things have been going downhill ever since, because “states can now enact voter-suppressing laws and policies that erect tremendous barriers,” especially for Black, brown or Indigenous Democrat voters. Enjeti’s recent…
S1 · E23 · 4 Feb 2026 · 42 min
Is Satire Dead? Featuring Gado
“Satire is dead. Long live satire,” Tanzanian political cartoonist Gado declares, laughing, as we sit down to discuss the role of satire, humor and cartoons in modern public discourse. Godfrey Mwampembwa - pen name “Gado” - is a prolific and prominent political cartoonist with a career that has spanned three decades. Gado’s talent for drawing, coupled with a voracious interest in the news, led him to cartooning at an early age. Studying architecture at the university in Dar-es-Salam did not quite hold his attention, and he landed a job at The Daily Nation, Kenya’s leading daily and one of…
S1 · E22 · 21 Jan 2026 · 46 min
ICE, A Bipartisan Tale of Border Imperialism: Featuring Harsha Walia
“Border regimes are some of the most normalized forms of violence,” writer and activist Harsha Walia says, because even the most progressive people “really struggle with the idea of abolishing the border.” Recently, the murder of Renee Good in the bright light of day, in Minneapolis, has sparked outrage across the US. However, this is a culmination of the past several months of an escalation in the war on migrants and in policing practices. The stories of Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk and Kilmar Ábrego García were early signs that an escalation in abductions and brutalization was coming.…
S1 · E21 · 7 Jan 2026 · 48 min
Venezuela and the Long View: Featuring Geo Maher
“This is a brutal sanctions regime.” Writer, political scientist and educator Geo Maher emphatically reminds us about Venezuela. A bipartisan strategy that began with Barack Obama and got much worse under Donald Trump, sanctions have been a deliberate effort to keep Venezuela in a long term chokehold. The seeds to destabilize Venezuela were thus sowed decades ago, even as last week’s US strikes in Caracas left dozens of Venezuelans dead and the unlawful kidnapping of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro by the United States shocked the world. Maher is disturbed by the speed with which the…
S1 · E20 · 18 Dec 2025 · 39 min
Palestinian Recipes Against Erasure: Featuring Lama Obeid
Ramallah-based culture writer Lama Obeid finds that the genocide has brought about a paradigm shift - not only in the realms of cookery, cookbooks and recipes, but also in the very food that Palestinians are being made to consume. The attack on food, foodways, health and nutrition is sustained, deliberate and systematic, and works alongside tactics of starvation and hunger. Not only is there widespread scarcity, but the food that is available is processed, unhealthy and acts as slow poison. Lama begins by explaining the disruptions in the food supply chain amid frequent raids in the Jenin…
S1 · E19 · 11 Dec 2025 · 59 min
Poetry, Protest and Palestine: Featuring Ammiel Alcalay
In more than two dozen books spanning Iraq, Bosnia, Palestine and Vietnam, poet, translator and scholar Ammiel Alcalay has crystallized a piercing critique of American imperialism. He illustrates a commitment to places and people upon whom the bloody trail left by American excursions is inscribed, whether abroad or at home. Alcalay has crafted a unique insider-outsider approach grounded in poetic practice, a study of languages, and which embraces a wide range of materials: news, poems, letters, books, essays, reports, speeches, music, art, comics, radio, conversations, and more. His work…
S1 · E18 · 19 Nov 2025 · 45 min
Documenting Sudanese Food as an Act of Resistance: Featuring Omer Al Tijani
“Food is politics,” Omer Al Tijani declares. “The documenting of cuisine and culture is an act of resistance against the ongoing oppression that we have been experiencing in Sudan.” In a country ravaged by war and where hunger has been weaponized in extreme ways, Omer’s extraordinary cookbook Sudanese Kitchen works against invisibility and erasure. Sudanese Kitchen is a culmination of decade-long efforts to document Sudanese food and foodways, and to combine the genres of ethnography, archive, memoir and art into one work. The author and his team of photographers undertook a culinary journey…
S1 · E17 · 30 Oct 2025 · 41 min
Undoing Empire, One Story at a Time: Featuring Sunny Singh
Writer, scholar, and educator Sunny Singh explains that everything she does “centers around finding ways to undo empire.” The world we have inherited is “an ongoing colonial project” and thus “the wars, the genocides that we're watching now, are still the same colonial wars.” Imperial powers have poured vast resources into usurping power through shaping narratives. “Before a single shot is fired, before a single grain of rice is confiscated as it happened in the Bengal famine; before a single package of aid is blocked, as is happening now in Gaza, there is a war of stories.” All of Singh’s…
S1 · E16 · 24 Oct 2025 · 49 min
The Marginalization and Policing of Muslims in Kenya: Featuring Samar Al Bulushi
Kenya’s Muslim population has “long experienced political and economic marginalization” says Samar Al-Bulushi, anthropologist and author of War-Making as Worldmaking: Kenya, United States and the War on Terror. Samar traces a rather under-explored contemporary history; that of Kenya’s role in the US-led War on Terror. The book investigates the ways in which Kenya emerges as a significant geopolitical player during the first two decades of the 21st century. With the US outsourcing its wars, Kenya was molded into a willing and violent partner in counter-terrorism programs. At the heart of…
S1 · E15 · 18 Oct 2025 · 54 min
Palestine and the Racist Fiction of a Two-State Solution: Featuring Haidar Eid
“I spent the first two months of the genocide in Gaza,” writer, professor and activist Haidar Eid explains. “In Gaza itself, I was displaced three times.” After being evacuated in December 2023, Eid went from Gaza to South Africa, which became his “fourth displacement.” He is now based on Johannesburg and has been closely scrutinizing the 20-point Gaza ceasefire plan strong-armed by Trump and Netanyahu. Eid’s scrutiny revolves around whether this plan meets even the bare minimum of fundamental rights for people in Gaza, and for Palestinians as a whole. The plan, he says, is only focused on…
S1 · E14 · 9 Oct 2025 · 56 min
Palestine, Black & African Solidarities, and the Perils of Online Activism: Featuring Sisonke Msimang
Sisonke Msimang is clear that she is, first and foremost, an African. “Despite the fact that Africa is not a country, I experience myself, I feel myself, to be African,” she tells me. Sisonke was born to South African activist parents and grew up “a child of the freedom struggle.” Even though she moved around a lot, Sisonke feels at home in many countries and continents, as well as within the global Black diaspora. South Africa, however, remains a political and intellectual anchor. By the time she finished university there, “freedom was on its way,” and for Black South Africans, the…
S1 · E13 · 19 Sep 2025 · 58 min
Will Everyone Have Always Been Against This? Featuring Omar El Akkad
On October 25th, 2023, writer Omar El Akkad wrote a tweet about Palestine: “One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” The narratives about victims and victimizers were already so disproportionate, and the institutional silences so loud given the brutality we were plainly seeing, that El Akkad’s words immediately clicked. The tweet went viral. It also became the title of El Akkad’s literary memoir that emerged out of his rage, shock and despair at the…
S1 · E12 · 11 Sep 2025 · 57 min
Black Muslim Refugee Resistance to US Militarism and Policing: Featuring Maxamed Abumaye
“I have been writing this book almost my whole life,” Maxamed Abumaye admits when asked about the motivation behind his recently published Black Muslim Refugee: Militarism, Policing, and Somali American Resistance to State Violence. Though this is a scholarly book published by a university press, Maxamed deviates from the academic format by making his own life story central to the text. He writes about his family’s journey as they fled the civil war in Somalia and spent many years in a refugee camp in Kenya before being resettled to the US. In the US, Maxamed realized that the violence of…
S1 · E11 · 27 Aug 2025 · 55 min
Discerning Censorship and Rejecting Silence for Palestine: Featuring Anna Badkhen
If you’re being censored or policed, “you learn to recognize the signals your body sends you,” writer Anna Badkhen explains. A few months ago, Anna had turned down an invitation to participate in PEN America’s World Voices festival to protest their “absolutely despicable treatment” of Palestinian writers and journalists. She articulated the reasons for her boycott in a letter which she posted on social media, and in response, Anna received a missive from PEN America that, to her, sounded very much like a threat. She realized right away that it physically triggered memories from when she was…
S1 · E10 · 13 Aug 2025 · 59 min
On the Rise and Fall of Statues: Featuring Rahul Rao
Whether its legacy figures like Cecil Rhodes, Mahatma Gandhi and B.R Ambedkar, or various military men or aggressive phallic sculptures, statues are the public’s direct and unavoidable encounter with institutionally constructed histories. They represent the supremacy of colonialism, race, caste and gender, and so movements centered on either dismantling or building them have become critical for understanding charged debates around history and memory today. Rahul Rao’s book The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire explores these global controversies, and offers…
S1 · E9 · 26 Jul 2025 · 1 hr 2 min
Frantz Fanon Stands for Revolutionary Love, Not Violence: Featuring Hassane Mezine
Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist, prolific scholar, and active participant in the Algerian war of independence against France would have been 100 years old this year. He wrote about a wide range of topics yet it is his reflections on colonial violence and the counter-violence of the colonized that loom large even today, 64 years later. Despite filmmaker Hassane Mezine’s and my own fairly immersive knowledge about Fanon’s life and work, our conversation inevitably turns to Fanon’s theory about violence. Fanon believed that the colonized have the right to use violent means to fight…
S1 · E8 · 16 Jul 2025 · 49 min
Frantz Fanon at 100: Featuring Olivier Fanon [In French]
Podcast was recorded in French. English subtitles are available in the YouTube video included below. Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, scholar and revolutionary, would have turned 100 years old this year had his life not been cut short by leukemia at the age of 36. By then, Olivier Fanon, the son of Frantz and Josie Fanon, had already spent his childhood in Algeria, Tunisia, Ghana and other places where his parents were active participants in the anti-colonial struggle for Algerian independence. He was five years old when his father had a serious relapse and was flown to the US for advanced…
S1 · E7 · 13 Jul 2025 · 1 hr 3 min
The Repression of Palestine on Campuses: Featuring Maura Finkelstein
Anthropologist Maura Finkelstein had always incorporated Palestine in her university teaching and felt that, as an anti-Zionist, Jewish American academic, it was her moral obligation to do so. She knew well the type of repression and harassment that Palestinian academics experienced at US universities, but thought that being a Jewish scholar would likely protect her. Absurdly, Maura became the first tenured American academic to be fired for allegedly making Jewish students at the Muhlenberg College campus feel unsafe due to the “antisemitic” content of her coursework and social media posts.…
S1 · E6 · 6 Jul 2025 · 1 hr 5 min
What Does It Feel Like To Be A Problem? Featuring Huda Fakhreddine
For the last two years, Huda Fakhreddine has endured a barrage of harassment by the US government and her employer, the University of Pennsylvania, for the simple reason that she writes about, teaches and translates Palestinian poetry. The witchhunt for academics associated with Palestine is not new, but has ramped up immensely since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza in the autumn of 2023. The stage has been set over the years and the villains have been pre-decided. In December 2023, Harvard, Columbia and UPenn were questioned at congressional hearings supposedly investigating…
S1 · E5 · 26 Jun 2025 · 42 min
Literary Anthology Shifts the Narrative on Yemen: Featuring Rim Mugahed & Laura Kasinof
The mythology of the city of Sana’a writes itself: nestled in a valley; the charming, crumbling architecture; the winding alleys; and a history and heritage older than time itself. As Yemen’s largest city and its capital, a literary anthology through the lens of Sana’a seems like a natural choice. The Book of Sana'a joins an illustrious list of city fiction anthologies published by Comma Press in the UK. Their series titled "Reading the City" now includes over 30 books. Yet, Yemen today is at a political crossroads and exalting Sana’a did not sit well with many of the writers in the…
S1 · E4 · 11 Jun 2025 · 43 min
A Debut Novel Explores Anti-Blackness in Sudan: Featuring Reem Gaafar
When a little boy drowns in the Nile, a Sudanese village is forced to confront its racist past in Reem Gaafar’s debut novel A Mouth Full of Salt. Narrated through a choral protagonist, the novel weaves together the lives of villagers who are suddenly beset by a curse: the drowning is followed by another death, and cattle begin to contract a mysterious illness. The village is an allegory intended to reflect the broader history of Sudan. A Mouth Full of Salt moves across time, from the 1940s to the 1980s, allowing the reader to glimpse the turbulent civil strife that led to the formation of…
S1 · E3 · 28 May 2025 · 1 hr
How to Be a Queer, Anti-Zionist, Pro-Palestinian Jew: Featuring Sim Kern
Sim Kern’s journey as an outspoken and empathetic activist for Palestinian liberation began when they realized, as a teenager, that global warming would blow up our planet one day. Back in 1999, saving the environment was not a “mainstream” topic and for Sim, these early climate justice concerns became an entry point for understanding that our global system was catastrophically racist, colonial and capitalist. Nonetheless, Sim admits that it was particularly hard to unlearn Zionist indoctrination about settler colonialism, apartheid and occupation in Palestine that was part and parcel of…
S1 · E2 · 19 May 2025 · 46 min
Publishing on Palestine: Exploitation or Activism? Featuring Marcia Lynx Qualey
Writer, editor, and publisher Marcia Lynx Qualey remarked that “the literature currently in the spotlight, in many languages, is Palestinian” while accepting the Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature in 2024. As Israel’s genocide of Palestinians continues, Marcia said that the demand for Palestinian literature has grown exponentially. Submissions to prizes and magazines have ballooned, as have requests from publishers asking Marcia’s advice on various manuscripts. These are not works necessarily written by Palestinians, but that “deal with Palestine in some way,” she…
S1 · E1 · 2 May 2025 · 40 min
A Doctor Tells The Story of Gaza: Featuring Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi
The feature-length documentary A State of Passion (2024) co-directed by Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi takes us deeper into the unfolding war on Gaza through the eyes of Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah. For almost two years, the extraordinary violence in Gaza has been broadcast live on our screens, even as those who strive to document it are being assassinated right in front of our eyes. Yet, the witnessing, documenting, archiving and narrating of the genocide of Palestinians continues, more and more from unlikely sources. Some of the most rigorous accounts of what is happening on the ground are…

About Radical Futures

An invitation to imagine freedom, decolonization and liberatory futures.

Radical Futures is a English society & culture podcast from Bhakti Shringarpure. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Bhakti Shringarpure
Language: English
Category: Society & Culture
New episodes: Every two weeks
Typical length: 50 min
Latest episode: 10 Sep 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1812017818

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