Everything is Ideology: a Cultural Studies Podcast

“Intergenerational trauma and complex implication in Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (2019)” With Noreen Kane

Show Notes: When we think about colonialism, countries like Britain, France, and Spain often come immediately to mind. Italy, by contrast, is frequently imagined through a different set of narratives—art, culture, food, and, perhaps most significantly, a national mythology that has long obscured the realities of its colonial past. In this episode, we're joined by scholar Noreen Kane to discuss her article “Intergenerational trauma and complex implication in Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (2019)” examining how contemporary writers Igiaba Scego and Maaza Mengiste confront these silences through fiction. Drawing on trauma studies, postcolonial theory, and memory studies, Kane explores how these authors challenge dominant narratives of Italian innocence by revealing the interconnected histories of colonialism, fascism, the Holocaust, and present-day migration. Our conversation moves across a wide range of themes: the persistence of the "good Italian" myth, the relationship between colonial violence and collective memory, the politics of naming and forgetting, and the ways literature can make visible histories that official narratives often leave unspoken. We also explore concepts such as the implicated subject, multidirectional memory, and cosmological trauma, asking how fiction creates new possibilities for reckoning with the past and imagining more ethical futures. Biography: Noreen Kane has a BA and MA in Italian Studies from University College Dublin and worked for over a decade in English language education. In January 2026, she received her PhD from University College Cork. Her thesis, entitled “Transgenerational Trauma and the Gendered Body: Postcolonial Women’s Writing in Italy”, was funded by the Irish Research Council and a National University of Ireland Travelling Doctoral Studentship. Her research has appeared in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Quaderni d’italianistica, and Atlantic Studies. She is currently guest editor for a special issue of Notes in Italian Studies on Memory in Italian Culture. She has lectured on a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses at University College Cork and University College Dublin on topics including contemporary Italian women’s writing, trauma narratives, Italian hip-hop, and Italian mobilities. Her research interests are cultural memory studies, decolonial feminist approaches to trauma, and postcolonial Irish and Italian women’s writing and music.  Links: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17449855.2024.2384916 [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17449855.2024.2384916]

“On Taylor Swift and Broken Glass: Confessional Pop, Psychological Intimacy, and Two-Way Authentication,” with Max Blansjaar and Jacob Kingsbury Downs

Show notes: I’m joined by Max Blansjaar and Jacob Kingsbury Downs for a wide-ranging conversation on their article, “On Taylor Swift and Broken Glass: Confessional Pop, Psychological Intimacy, and Two-Way Authentication,” we explore why honesty has become such a central aesthetic category in popular music and what it means when listeners begin to understand themselves through artists they consume.  Throughout the conversation, we discuss how confessional pop music creates what Max and Jacob describe as a “two-way authentication,” where listeners are not simply consuming an artist’s private life, but actively projecting themselves into the music. We think through the politics of intimacy, headphone listening, TikTok, fandom, neoliberal selfhood, indie aesthetics, and the blurred boundary between performer and listener. Along the way, we unpack the genealogy of confessional expression from mid-century poetry to singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and contemporary pop icons, asking how authenticity itself became a marketable aesthetic.  We also spend time thinking about fragmentation, mirrors, broken glass, fantasy imagery, monstrosity, reinvention, and the strange tension between vulnerability and hyper-capitalism in Taylor Swift’s music and public persona. We close by reflecting on the ethical and political stakes of confessional culture more broadly — from celebrity branding and fandom to politics, social media, and the contemporary obsession with “rawness” and transparency. Biography: Max Blansjaar is a musician and writer from Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He holds a BA in Music from St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford, where he was awarded the Gibbs Prize by the Faculty of Music in 2024. His work centres around cultural politics in popular music and the negotiation of social identities and relations through music and sound, with recent essays published in Sound Studies, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and the Journal of Extreme Anthropology, as well as the popular magazines Dirt, The Mortar, and The Story. He currently holds a Clarendon Scholarship at Jesus College, University of Oxford. Biography: Dr Jacob Kingsbury Downs is Departmental Lecturer in Music and Chair of Faculty in the Faculty of Music, as well as Organizing Tutor in Music at Lady Margaret Hall. He is also Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield. He studies listeners’ and musicians’ experiences with music and sound technologies, combining qualitative empirical methods with historical research and theoretical approaches drawn from the fields of musicology, sound studies, phenomenological philosophy, and music psychology. He is currently working on two book projects. He Received his PhD from the University of Sheffield in 2021, studying under Nicola Dibben. Links: https://online.ucpress.edu/jpms/article/37/2/117/212143/On-Taylor-Swift-and-Broken-GlassConfessional-Pop [https://online.ucpress.edu/jpms/article/37/2/117/212143/On-Taylor-Swift-and-Broken-GlassConfessional-Pop]

“Reparative Museology and Its Limits” with Colin Sterling

Show notes: In this episode speak with Colin Sterling about his article, “Reparative Museology and Its Limits.” We discuss the broader political, philosophical, and cultural questions surrounding museums, memory, and institutional critique. Drawing from critical heritage studies, museum studies, psychoanalysis, and environmental humanities, we discuss the growing “reparative turn” within museums and cultural institutions, particularly as they attempt to respond to histories of colonialism, extraction, displacement, and social violence. Throughout the conversation, we unpack the distinction between museology and the museum, asking whether the practices of storytelling, collecting, archiving, and communal memory-making necessarily require the modern museum institution at all. We explore how museums increasingly position themselves as moral and reparative actors while simultaneously remaining entangled within the political and economic structures that produced many of the harms they now seek to address. We also discuss projects such as Strike MoMA, reparative abolition, restitution, alternative and mobile museum forms, and artistic interventions that challenge the authority and legitimacy of hegemonic museum structures. Along the way, we reflect on psychoanalytic theories of repair, the politics of institutional reform, and the possibilities of imagining new cultural forms beyond the limits of the neoliberal museum. Biography: Colin Sterling is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer, and educator working at the intersection of critical heritage studies, museum studies, artistic research, and the environmental humanities. He is Assistant Professor of Heritage, Museums and the Environment at University of Amsterdam and previously served as a postdoctoral researcher and UKRI Early Career Leadership Fellow at University College London. Sterling earned his MA and PhD from the UCL Institute of Archaeology and his BA from The University of Manchester. His research focuses on critical and creative approaches to heritage, memory, and museums. Links: https://read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/article-abstract/43/4%20(165)/33/406077/Reparative-Museology-and-Its-Limits?redirectedFrom=fulltext

“Prison of the Womb: Gender, Incarceration, and Capitalism on the Gold Coast of West Africa, c. 1500–1957” with Sarah Balakrishnan

Buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology [https://Buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology] Patreon.com/everythingisideology [https://Patreon.com/everythingisideology] Show notes: We are joined once again by historian and writer Sarah Balakrishnan to discuss her article “Prison of the Womb: Gender, Incarceration, and Capitalism on the Gold Coast of West Africa, c. 1500–1957” the conversation explores a largely erased history of indigenous prison systems in the Gold Coast and the central role women’s bodies played in the development of debt, trade, and colonial economies from the fifteenth century through the twentieth. Drawing from archival discoveries, oral testimonies, and overlooked colonial records, Balakrishnan traces how women were held as collateral in systems of credit, hostage-taking, and imprisonment long before and during European colonial rule. The discussion examines the emergence of debtor’s prisons in West Africa, the gendered logic of incarceration, the relationship between kinship and finance, and the ways colonial administrations simultaneously condemned and depended upon these prison systems for economic stability. Along the way, we discuss mercantile capitalism, palm oil economies after abolition, Victorian colonial morality, matrilineal social structures, public women and prostitution, and hostage-taking, and the violent intersections of sexuality, reproduction, and governance. The conversation also reflects on the ethical and emotional weight of archival work, particularly the testimonies of incarcerated women whose voices survived in scattered colonial documents despite deliberate attempts to erase these systems from official history. Biography: Sarah Balakrishnan is a Canadian-Indian writer and scholar based in the Department of History at Duke University. Balakrishnan is the 2022 Narrative Prize winner, the winner of Narrative Magazine’s Best Under 30 writing contest, and a finalist for the Cecilia Joyce Johnson Award for Short Fiction from the Key West Literary Seminar. Since 2020, BalaKRISH NIN has served as a fiction editor at The Maple Tree Literary Supplement. Her fiction writing has been supported by grants from Craigardan, Hedgebrook, and American Short Fiction. Balakrishnan received a PhD in History from Harvard University in 2020 and a BA in History and Political Theory from McGill University in 2014. She was a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge, a postdoctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, and a postdoctoral fellow in the History Department at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Balakrishnan scholarly research has appeared in a number of prestigious venues, including The Journal of African History, The Journal of Social History, and Comparative Studies in Society and History. Links: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/64BC1FC4663980DC8003820860462F1B/S0010417522000469a.pdf/div-class-title-prison-of-the-womb-gender-incarceration-and-capitalism-on-the-gold-coast-of-west-africa-c-1500-1957-div.pdf [https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/64BC1FC4663980DC8003820860462F1B/S0010417522000469a.pdf/div-class-title-prison-of-the-womb-gender-incarceration-and-capitalism-on-the-gold-coast-of-west-africa-c-1500-1957-div.pdf]

"False Friends? Quakers, fronts, and the rise of popular abolitionism" with Stuart Anderson-Davis

Patreon.com/everythingisideology [https://Patreon.com/everythingisideology] Buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology [https://Buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology] Show Notes: In this episode, we’re diving into a history that feels uncannily familiar—one where media, persuasion, and strategic communication shape public opinion in ways that still resonate today. I’m joined by Stuart Anderson Davis, a doctoral researcher at Columbia University studying the history of deception and disinformation. To discuss his article “False Friends? Quakers, fronts, and the rise of popular abolitionism.” Together, we explore how these forces were already at work centuries ago in the transatlantic struggle over slavery. Our conversation centers on a group that often sits at the margins of this history: the Quakers. While they’re frequently remembered for their moral opposition to slavery, what emerges here is something far more complex. We unpack how Quaker activists navigated suspicion, marginalization, and political exclusion to build one of the earliest modern social movements—experimenting with tactics that feel strikingly contemporary: media campaigns, narrative framing, anonymous publishing, and even forms of strategic deception. Their abolitionist efforts weren’t just moral or religious gestures. They were systematic, coordinated, and deeply strategic. At a time when slavery was foundational to global economies and widely accepted as normal—even justified—Quakers were helping to build a counter-public that insisted it was not only wrong, but intolerable. We talk about how they transformed abolition into a movement. This meant organizing some of the first large-scale petition campaigns, lobbying politicians directly, and circulating pamphlets that exposed the realities of the slave trade—especially the violence of the Middle Passage and plantation life. They weren’t just raising awareness; they were actively trying to reshape what people believed was possible. At the heart of this discussion is a tension that still defines activism today: how do you persuade a public that may not want to be persuaded? And what happens when moral arguments collide with entrenched economic and ideological systems? From pamphlet wars and propaganda battles to the shaping of public consciousness across the Atlantic, this episode traces how abolition became not just a moral cause, but a communications project. We also explore the contradictions within these movements—the internal divisions among Quakers themselves, the role of formerly enslaved voices in shifting public perception, and the emergence of competing narratives that sought to defend slavery through disinformation and distortion. Biography: Stuart Anderson-Davis is am currently studying for a Ph.D. in Communications from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. his academic work is focused on the history of deception and disinformation. Anderson-Davis’s dissertation examines the ways in which deceptive communications shaped events - and influenced public opinion - in Britain and the United States during the 18th and 19th centuries. He also writes about politics, media, communications, and disinformation for various publications, including the Columbia Journalism Review. He holds a B.A. in History and Ancient History from the University of Nottingham and an M.Phil. in Modern European History from Cambridge University.      Links: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14788810.2025.2493437 [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14788810.2025.2493437]