In this shortcast edition of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live as part of BISR's Occasional Evenings event series, BISR's Isi Litke and Rebecca Ariel Porte talk with documentarian Ted Kennedy about his film, B.F. Skinner Plays Himself, composed of found footage from a never-released educational film about the famed radical behaviorist. The conversation covers the political contexts for radical behaviorism, its legacies and missed opportunities, and the behaviorist resistance to psychoanalytic perspectives. The three also consider documentary aesthetics, working with found footage, and what studying Skinner as a documentary subject can teach us about the conditions that produce new behaviors.

This episode was produced by Ryan Lentini.

Learn more about upcoming courses on our website.

Follow Brooklyn Institute for Social Research on Twitter / Facebook / Instagram / Bluesky.

Episode 94 of the Podcast for Social Research is a live recording of an event held at BISR Central to mark the publication of political theorist Roxanne Euben's Driven to Their Knees: Humiliation in Contemporary Politics (Princeton University Press). The text examining visual, verbal, and embodied rhetorics of humiliation across a wide variety of Arabic sources alongside related especially American examples, showing how humiliation is understood as the "imposition of impotence by those with undeserved power." Euben joins BISR faculty Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Suzanne Schneider for a wide-ranging conversation about the place of humiliation in contemporary politics. Together, the three ask: What sort of political projects does the experience of humiliation authorize? How does humiliation rhetoric encode and constitute gendered political subjects? And how might such rhetoric galvanize collective political struggle?

The Podcast for Social Research is produced by Ryan Lentini.

Learn more about upcoming courses on our website.

Follow Brooklyn Institute for Social Research on Twitter / Facebook / Instagram / Bluesky.

Episode 93 of the Podcast for Social Research is a live recording of an event held at BISR Central to mark the publication of political theorist Alyssa Battistoni's Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Princeton University Press). Battistoni joins BISR's Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Nafis Hasan to discuss how capitalism, as a logic of seemingly relentless commodification, has nevertheless failed to assign value to vital aspects of the nonhuman world, from natural agents in industry to environmental pollution, reproductive labor in the household, and natural capital in the biosphere. Along the way, the three consider the similarities between labor exploitation and ecological exploitation; the Green Revolution in agriculture; the romanticization of nature; the place of reproductive labor in ecofeminist thought; and the case for understanding capitalism as a "planet-making system." What would it mean, they ask, to live freely while valuing nature's gifts?