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Radicals in Conversation
by Pluto Press
’Radicals in Conversation’ is a monthly podcast from Pluto Press, one of the world’s leading independent, radical publishers.
Episodes
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Why Lone-Wolf Prepping Fails and Building Community Wins!
With Eric Shonkwiler. Amidst intensifying climate change, the re-emergence of fascism, and the approach of economic and environmental collapse, 'prepping' has truly emerged from the margins into the mainstream. For the political right, prepping often begins and ends at home – with buckets of...
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Zack Polanski and the Battle for Britain's Future
With Russell Warfield. The election of Zack Polanski to the leadership of the Green Party of England and Wales in 2025 caused a political earthquake. Polanski's first year of leadership transcended the wildest expectations of his supporters: quadrupling the party membership, doubling its polling,...
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The Gaza Tribunal: with Jeremy Corbyn, Neve Gordon & Shahd Hammouri
Over the last three years Israel has systematically destroyed Gaza's healthcare, education and agricultural infrastructure. It has deliberately targeted medical workers, journalists, academics and children, in its effort to erase the past, and destroy the future of the Palestinian people.…
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Seizing Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures
With Lara Sheehi. This month, we are joined on the podcast by Lara Sheehi, author of From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures. As Sophie Lewis writes, “this book embodies a despecialized psychoanalytic praxis of revolutionary anticolonialism that is genuinely…
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Decolonizing Money: The Promise of Abolishing the US Dollar
With Julio Linares. To change the world, we need a money revolution. Yet the debate over money has been dominated by two perspectives: those free-market capitalists who want money to rule everything, and those who want to use the state to harness money's power. In his new book, Decolonizing…
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Money in the Mountains: The Cultural Trauma of Appalachia
With Rayelle Davis. If the United States is in a state of decline, then at the thin end of the wedge sits Appalachia, one of the country’s most deprived regions, mythologized by outsiders and misunderstood the world over. Embedded as a therapist within this community, Rayelle Davis frames the...
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How to Sell a Genocide: The Media's Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza
With Adam Johnson. As bombs rained down on Gaza in October 2023, images of mass death and destruction gripped the world, and openly genocidal statements from Israeli leaders foretold the magnitude of horrors to come. But mainstream media was quick to downplay, obscure, and repackage an emerging...
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Dismantling the Master's House: Radical Justice and the Law
Economic inequality is rampant, the climate crisis is at its tipping point. Fascists are poised to take power, or already hold it. It feels like the amount of work needed to overcome these injustices is too much to handle. But what if there is a way to lower the threshold to action? We are joined...
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How White Feminism Harms Muslim Women
Growing up, journalist Shahed Ezaydi was often asked how she could call herself a feminist and still practise her faith. It’s a question that reveals a deeper issue that Muslim women often face: being ignored in feminist spaces entirely, or cast as passive victims in need of being saved. Shahed...
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Lessons from the Margins: How Migrants are Redefining Mental Health
With Dr Sohail Jannesari. In this episode we look at the intersecting worlds of sanctuary-seeking and mental health. We consider how refugees, asylum seekers and other people on the move don’t just survive displacement, but rather build strength, community, and new ways of coping that challenge...
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Can a River Take Us to Court? Exploring the Rights of Nature
With Jessica den Outer. For centuries, our legal systems have treated nature as something to be owned and exploited, for human gain. In recent decades, the tenor of conversation may have shifted towards conservation and protection, but nature remains an object. The environmental laws, treaties…
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Did Ancient Pirates Invent Democracy?: Exploring Radical Antiquity
With Christopher Zeichmann. In his new book, Radical Antiquity: Free Love Zoroastrians, Farming Pirates, and Ancient Uprisings, Christopher Zeichmann takes us on a unique journey in search of anarchy, statelessness, and social experimentation in the Graeco-Roman world. We meet communities of...
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Why Liberal Abundance is Bullsh*t
With Kai Heron, Keir Milburn and Bertie Russell. Capitalism has created a world of bullsh*t abundance and artificial scarcity, where we have too much of what we don’t need and too little of what we do. The system’s pursuit of profits has put us on a collision course with social and ecological...
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Radical Friendship: Reimagining the World and Fighting the Far Right
With Laura C. Forster and Joel White. What draws people into political movements? And what sustains us, in the face of defeat, infiltration and state repression? For the authors of Friends in Common: Radical Friendship and Everyday Solidarities, friendship is an undertheorised, but vital piece of...
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Empire, Slavery, and Reparations
With Paul Lashmar and Luke Daniels. In this episode we talk about the new book Drax of Drax Hall: How One British Family Got Rich (and Stayed Rich) from Sugar and Slavery, and the growing international movement for reparations. Paul Lashmar and Luke Daniels discuss the journalistic investigation...
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Fascist Yoga!
With Stewart Home. Legend of counterculture, Stewart Home, joins us on the podcast to talk about his new book, Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists, and the New Order In Wellness. Stewart is in conversation with Pluto's Patrick Hughes. Patrick is a veteran of the book trade who...
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The New Racial Regime: Recalibrations of White Supremacy
With Alana Lentin. In this episode we discuss the ways in which racial capitalism reproduces itself. Beyond the distracting framings of culture wars and moral panics, Alana Lentin shows how, from Australia to the USA, the attacks on Black, Indigenous and anticolonial thought and praxis reveal the...
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Immigration Detention Inc.: The Big Business of Locking up Migrants
With Nancy Hiemstra and Deirdre Conlon. The USA locks up more migrants in its immigration detention facilities than any other country in the world. Already operating over capacity, the Trump administration has ramped up its campaign of immigration raids, allegedly instructing ICE to hit quotas of...
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Democratic Living in Times of Fascism
With H. L. T. Quan and Dylan Rodríguez. This is the final installment of our three-part mini series, 'Beyond the Ballot Box', which explores some of the major political currents in US politics today. Chris Browne and James Kelly are joined by H. L. T. Quan and Dylan Rodríguez for a conversation...
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Tenant Unions Fighting the Housing Crisis
With Jacob Stringer. We are joined on the show by Jacob Stringer, a housing and social movements researcher and organiser, and the author of Renters Unite: How Tenant Unions Are Fighting the Housing Crisis. We discuss the many local and international dimensions to housing crisis in countries…
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Billionaires and Guillotines: The Board Game
With Max Haiven. In this special episode of Radicals in Conversation, we take a first look at the new board game, Billionaires & Guillotines, in which players take on the role of 2-5 rival plutocrats vying to grab the wealth of the world before their actions trigger a revolution where they all…
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Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7
With Nicholas Mirzoeff. Content Warning: Sexual abuse In this episode we discuss the new book, To See in the Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7. Nicholas Mirzoeff shares how experiences of domestic, political and sexual violence - in both his family history and his own childhood…
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Eros and Alienation: Capitalism and the Making of Gendered Sexualities
With Alan Sears. In this episode we discuss the new book, Eros and Alienation: Capitalism and the Making of Gendered Sexualities. Alan Sears lays out his expansive understanding of key ideas like labour, alienation, social reproduction, and eroticism. We discuss 'erotic enclosure' in 19th century...
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Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds
With Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift. In our first episode of 2025, we discuss the themes of the new book, Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds. We talk about what is entailed by trans and femme practices, the value of critical theory, and how trans liberation moves...
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Radicals in Conversation: 2024 Curated Highlights
Our 2024 roundup features curated highlights from episodes released throughout the year: We speak to John Pring, about the British government’s Department for Work and Pensions, and its horrific work capability assessment. We speak to Robert Chapman, about why the neurodiversity movement emerged...
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Beyond the Ballot Box: Pacification and Intergenerational Memory in Social Movements
With Peter Gelderloos and Vicky Osterweil. Whether it is in the fight against police violence, ecological destruction, or any other manifestation of patriarchal white supremacy, time and again, the hard-earned lessons of past struggles seem to get forgotten. Our social movements are capable of...
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Western Complicity and the Human Cost of the Arms Trade in Gaza
With Ahmed Alnaouq, Andrew Feinstein and Anna Stavrianakis. It has now been over a year since Israel embarked on its genocidal campaign in Gaza. In that time, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been killed or injured. Furnishing Israel with more than just diplomatic cover, Western...
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Resisting Cop Cities and the Militarization of Policing
What happens when the police become an army? Since 1997, the US Department of Defense has transferred more than $7.2bn in military equipment to law enforcement agencies. This militarization has, unsurprisingly, been shown to unjustly impact on Black communities and is associated with increased...
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Beyond the Ballot Box: On the Far Right with Mike Wendling
This is episode 1 of ‘Beyond the Ballot Box' - our new mini-series exploring some of the major political currents in US politics. With the presidential election just around the corner, American politics is increasingly a focus of international attention as well. Electoralism, reproductive…
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The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence
In the early 2010s, reports began to emerge of deaths linked to a government department. Suicide notes, coroners' reports, and research by disabled activists pointed to failings within the Department for Work and Pensions – the DWP – the government body responsible for the disability benefits...
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Labour Movement Solidarity with Palestine
At the time of recording, Israel’s relentless bombardment of Rafah continues. Around 1 million people have been forced to flee the city. Condemning the assault on Rafah, Spain, Ireland and Norway have joined 140 other countries in officially recognising a Palestinian state. It is a symbolic…
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Constellations of Care: Anarcha-Feminism in Practice
'Whether one is an anarchist or not, the contemporary turn of geopolitical events—from the global phenomena of pandemics, fascistic regimes, and collapsing infrastructure for any sort of social well-being, to capitalist-fueled climate catastrophes and displacement, to occupations spiraling into...
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Enough: Why It's Time to Abolish the Super-Rich
Forbes' annual rich list reveals that 2,781 people in the world have fortunes in excess of $1 billion. 141 people joined the list in 2023, with a combined wealth of around $14 trillion - a $2 trillion collective increase on the previous year. There are now more billionaires than ever before. It…
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On Abolition Feminism with H.L.T. Quan
We’re excited to have H.L.T. Quan on the pod this month, as we publish her new book Become Ungovernable: An Abolition Feminist Ethic for Democratic Living. Joined by Professors Barbara Ransby and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, the conversation circles the themes of the book, exploring topics such as...
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Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism
In our first episode of 2024 we speak to Robert Chapman, author of Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism. Awareness around and diagnoses of neurodiversity have exploded in recent years, but as Robert argues, we are still missing a wider understanding of how we got here and why. In...
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On Palestine with Ghada Karmi
Almost two months have passed since Hamas’s October 7th attack, in which it killed around 1,200 Israeli civilians. The retaliatory campaign that has been waged since then by the Israeli state against the Palestinian population—predominantly in Gaza, but also in the West Bank—has been nightmarish…
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A People’s History of Football
From England, France and Germany to Palestine, South Africa and Brazil, the 'beautiful game' has been a powerful instrument of emancipation for workers, feminists, young people and protesters around the world. Football has often found itself at the heart of anti-colonial struggles; a tool of...
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Let Them Eat Crypto: The Blockchain Scam That’s Ruining the World
The subject of immense hope, hype and confusion, crypto has amassed countless headlines in recent years. Right now, one of crypto’s biggest names, Sam Bankman-Fried, is set to go on trial in New York, accused of having defrauded millions of investors at his FTX cryptocurrency exchange, stealing...
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Family Abolition with M. E. O’Brien
For many of us on the left, it would probably be uncontroversial to say that seek a political horizon in which class society, and all of its manifold expressions, has been overcome - wage labour, private property, the capitalist state, white supremacy, settler colonialism and anti-Blackness. But...
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RIC in-haus: Space Crone: Ursula K. Le Guin on Feminism and Gender
Radicals in Conversation in-haus is a podcast series collaboration between Pluto Press and Bookhaus, an independent bookshop in Bristol. RIC in-haus is recorded on location at Bookhaus. The bookshop’s ‘in-haus’ events programme features authors of some of the most exciting radical nonfiction…
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Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health
Mental health is a political issue, even though we often discuss it as a personal one. So how is the current mental health crisis connected to capitalism, racism and other social issues? And in a different world, how might we transform the ways that we think about mental health, diagnosis and...
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RIC in-haus: Mussolini’s Grandchildren: Italian Fascism in 2023
Radicals in Conversation in-haus is a podcast series collaboration between Pluto Press and Bookhaus, an independent bookshop in Bristol. RIC in-haus is recorded on location at Bookhaus. The bookshop’s ‘in-haus’ events programme features authors of some of the most exciting radical nonfiction…
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Locating Legacies: ’Abolition in the UK’ with Ruth Wilson Gilmore
In the sixth and final episode of Locating Legacies, series host Gracie Mae Bradley speaks to Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Often dismissed or set aside as a US-based movement, Gracie and Ruth sit down together to explore how we can think about the histories, legacies and politics of abolition in the...
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RIC in-haus: Friends of Israel: The Backlash Against Palestine Solidarity
Radicals in Conversation in-haus is a podcast series collaboration between Pluto Press and Bookhaus, an independent bookshop in Bristol. RIC in-haus is recorded on location at Bookhaus. The bookshop’s ‘in-haus’ events programme features authors of some of the most exciting radical nonfiction…
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Locating Legacies: ’Queer Class Politics’ with Sita Balani
In episode 5 of Locating Legacies, series host Gracie Mae Bradley speaks to Sita Balani. They explore the legacies of queer liberation struggles on contemporary class politics, and the ways in which queer radicalism has expanded notions of liberatory politics in the everyday. They also discuss…
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Queer Footprints: LGBTQIA+ Solidarity, Protest and Pride
In May 2023, Pluto published Queer Footprints: A Guide to Uncovering London’s Fierce History, by Dan Glass. The book is a groundbreaking guide that takes you through the city streets to uncover the scandalous, hilarious and empowering events of London's 'queerstory'. Accompanied by a chorus of...
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Locating Legacies: ’The Cold War’ with Vijay Prashad
In episode 4 of Locating Legacies, series host Gracie Mae Bradley speaks to Vijay Prashad. They discuss the legacies of the Cold War from the vantage point of the Global South, to contextualise the global economic, ecological and political crises that we're struggling through today. They also...
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Locating Legacies: ’Identity Politics’ with Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
In episode 3 of Locating Legacies, series host Gracie Mae Bradley speaks to Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. They discuss how politics moves between the world of ideas and the material world, the process by which radical ideas are co-opted by elite interests, and the importance of organising across difference....
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Private Worlds: Growing up Gay in Post-War Britain
In 1950s suburban England, a friendship bloomed between Jeremy Seabrook and Michael O'Neill - both gay men coming of age during a time when homosexuality was still a crime. Their relationship was inflected by secrecy and fear, and when the prohibition on same-sex relationships was partially…
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Locating Legacies: ’The Politics of Decolonisation’ with Françoise Vergès
In episode 2 of Locating Legacies, series host Gracie Mae Bradley speaks to Françoise Vergès. They explore the connections and disparities between the anticolonial politics of the 1950s and 1960s in relation to today's movements to decolonise educational, arts and heritage institutions. Françoise...
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Radicals in Conversation have?
Radicals in Conversation currently has 100 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Radicals in Conversation about?
’Radicals in Conversation’ is a monthly podcast from Pluto Press, one of the world’s leading independent, radical publishers.
How often does Radicals in Conversation release new episodes?
Radicals in Conversation has 100 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Radicals in Conversation?
You can listen to Radicals in Conversation on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Radicals in Conversation?
Radicals in Conversation is created and hosted by Pluto Press.
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