Dr. Margaret J. Wiener is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her book Visible and Invisible Realms: Power, Magic, and Colonial Conquest in Bali (University of Chicago Press) won the 1995 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, awarded by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. Her publications have been grounded in many years of field research on the island of Bali, Indonesia’s most famous province, as well as foraging in colonial archives and libraries in The Netherlands. She considers herself an empirical philosopher, who brings an ethnographic sensibility to the clashes involved in colonial encounters while asking broad questions about practices of knowing and making worlds. Inspirations from thinkers in the interdisciplinary field of science, technology, and society (STS) inform her recent book Magic’s Translations: Reality Politics in Colonial Indonesia (Duke University Press, 2025), the topic of today’s conversation. Dr. Wiener examines how the category of magic traveled from Europe through the imposition of colonial rule and the birth of anthropology.

Her current research extends her longstanding interest in the worlds different practices produce to multispecies entanglements and conflicting visions of the future.

Dr. Wendell Marsh is an Associate Professor of African Literature and Philosophy at Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique in Morocco. His work bridges Global Black Studies, African Studies, and Islamic Studies, with a focus on how African and diasporic intellectual traditions and expressive cultures reshape our understanding of knowledge, religion, and the humanities.

In today’s conversation, we discuss his latest monograph, Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities, (Columbia University Press, 2025), where he recasts the role of knowledge in the making of a colonial and postcolonial nation. It makes a case for a new literary and intellectual-historical approach to Islam in Africa.

Dr.José Miguel Palacios is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinematic Arts at California State University Long Beach. His work explores the relations between transnational histories of radical cinemas and questions of migration, solidarity, networks of cinematic exchange, and archival practices He has published in journals like Film Quarterly, Screen, The Moving Image, Jump Cut, and [in] Transition. In today’s conversation, we discuss his book, Transnational Cinema Solidarity: Chilean Exile Film & Video after 1973 (UC Press, 2025) where he offers a politicized understanding of world and transnational cinema that emphasizes geopolitical relations and cinematic alliances based on solidarity.

He is currently working on a second book devoted to the archives of exile filmmaker Raúl Ruiz, which was awarded a Project Development Grant by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) in 2025.