In this episode, I join my beloved friends and colleagues Sarah Wells and Emily Boch to talk about why learning about art and culture from the edges of respectable society matters so muchtoday, especially in an era where many American cling to the ideals of normality, conformity, nostalgia, and popularity. Against all odds, the three of us have built vibrant careers studying media, art, and cultural practices created and enacted by people commonly left out of democratic public life:union workers on strike, queer of color performance artists, Jewish American comics creators, queer and feminist filmmakers, psychedelic mixed-media artists, Latin American filmmakers, and much more. We start our conversation bysharing our own stories of how we made our way to participate in artistic or creative worlds traditionally deemed taboo, underground, illegitimate or immature—from superhero comics to queer performance scenes—and then trace how our early attachments became rich areas of study and teaching that we share with students in our day-to-day professional lives. A central concept throughout our conversation is the simple but life-changing practice of permission giving: the idea that sharing, circulating, and discussing marginalized art and culture extends permission to others to explore surprising, unexpected, and unorthodox forms of human expression. For us, themarginal is always in fact, central: central to living freely; central to communing with others in non-violent ways; central to expanding one’s perspective about the diversity of life on earth.

In this episode, I sit down with two of my former Ph.D. students, Adam Schuster and Elaine Cannell, both now full-fledged doctors and professors of English. I ask them what it’s been like to inaugurate their careers during this extraordinarily challenging time for higher education broadly and the humanities in particular. Adam and Elaine spent the better part of a decade learning how to conduct research, teach undergraduates, and write publishable scholarship in literature and cultural studies here at UW Madison. They were also among the kindest, most intellectually generous, joyful, and loving members of our community; as the first two of my students to get their Ph.D. under my mentorship, they hold a very cherished place in my heart. Today, Adam and Elaine are both beloved and respected professors at their universities, Cal State University, Bakersfield for Adam and Saint Mary’s College for Elaine. Despite the bleak conditions of university humanities education, the two have found themselves surrounded by students from every class background, geographical origin, and age, eager to gain the variety of human capacities and professional skills that come with learning how to study literature and popular culture, explore histories of Black and feminist activism, and harness the power of the arts to transform public life for the better. Neither starry eyed and idealistic about the profession, nor cynical and hopeless, Adam and Elaine model a clear-eyed, pragmatic view of today’s intellectual scene. In this episode, they remind listeners that: 1) young people still need community, mentorship, and direction to achieve their goals; 2) despite all the pomp and circumstance about declining literacy rates, Americans still love reading, watching movies, consuming YouTube videos, and playing video games, all of which require some ability to interpret or make meaning of the cultural products we cherish; and perhaps most importantly, 3) sitting in a classroom with thirty to three-hundred and fifty student students at a time during a mass loneliness epidemic is a nourishing and life sustaining practice.

Since the explosive aftermath of nation-wide student activism in support of Palestinian self-determination in the Fall of 2024, the right of scholars to take strong political positions on the most pressing issues of our time has come under extraordinary scrutiny. Despite the supposed protections of tenure, which are intended to protect professors from retaliation for unpopular beliefs or intellectual claims, faculty across the country have been summarily fired or censured not only for explicit political critiques of Israel, but also for supporting initiatives for diversity, equality and inclusion, teaching about histories of marginalized and oppressed people in the U.S. and around the globe, even questioning homophobic and transphobic sentiments made by students in their writing assignments. Echoing the era of McCarthyism, when the mass termination of suspected Communist sympathizers in the academy was coupled with the institution of political purity tests and loyalty oaths, today, professors are pressured into claiming false and intellectually bankrupt forms of political neutrality, backing away from teaching so-called controversial issues and rewriting grant and fellowship applications to remove all references to questions of diversity,histories of violence and oppression, or progressive political values. Pitting the term activist against the idea of the scholar destroys the transformative potential of both: it suggests that activists are problematic upstarts, malcontents and contrarians who contribute nothing but headaches tonational belonging and harmony, while relegating scholars to inert, boring purveyors of supposedly neutral knowledge incapable of having an impact on public affairs. The purpose of this move is to remove professors from public life and to demote their extraordinary influence on generations of American youth.

In this episode, I gather with two of the profession’s most energetic and unflagging scholar-activists, Noura Erakatand Caroline Levine. Far from rejecting or denying the link between scholarly work and activist practice, we argue that the fundamental role of the scholar is to be an unwavering, bold, and courageous intellectual activist fighting forthe values of free thought and expression, collective deliberation, the pursuit of truth (in its many forms), and the sharing of perspectives in the public realm, even those worldviews that many would rather not tolerate or evenconsider. We underscore that taking positions, sharing one’s distinct beliefs, and making a case for why they matter is, in fact, central to the job of a responsible scholar, who’s aim is to teach students how to formulate their own, unique beliefs in dialogue with others.

At the same time, we expand the definition of activism, to include a vast range of practices beyond street level protest, including the facilitation of in-class debate and discussion;the presentation of public talks outside the university; and participation in the crafting of new policy around issues like climate change, international human rights, and universal access to healthcare. In so doing, we reframe the professor as a figure of moral and ethical responsibility, who must play adynamic role in helping generations of youth identify our society’s sources of suffering and come up with varied solutions to collective struggle. We stress that professors with political commitments do not traditionally teach and mentor with the purpose of imposing their beliefs on others, but share them in a spirit of open-ended exchange. This kind of activism is reciprocal, dynamic, playful, imaginative, and meant to inspire the movement of minds, bodies,beliefs, and social worlds against the potential political stagnation and inertia that hounds all projects for democratic freedom.