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How does the literature of a collective that shares neither one nation nor any one language function? What can the study of state violence in Latin America teach us about the dehumanization occurring in West Asia? And how do we imagine paths out of generations of violence to build new utopias?
In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Serhat Tutkal and Hevin Karakurt to Speaking Out of Place. These two scholars engage in a broad discussion of Kurdish history, culture, politics, literature and language, with particular attention to issues of statelessness, identity, and violence. We talk about the current moment with regard to Turkey, Syria, Palestine, and the US-Israel war on Iran and beyond. We use as a starting poet Serhat’s remarkable essay, “Note from Non-People,” and then move to a discussion of his work on dehumanization. We end with imagining paths out of cycles of violence and dehumanization, and consider specifically the way we might imagine new sorts of utopias and vistas of life-affirmation.
Hevin Karakurt is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Stanford University, where she studies Kurdish literature across languages and territories. In this way, she works on the question of how a literature of a collective that shares neither one nation nor any one language might function. Before coming to Stanford, she worked as a researcher in the Swiss National Science Foundation funded research project “Half-Truths. Truth, Fiction, and Conspiracy in the ‘Post-Factual’ Age”, at the University of Basel.
Serhat Tutkal is a Kurdish academic. He is a postdoctoral researcher funded by the Secretariat of Science, Humanities, Technology and Innovation (Secihti) in Mexico. He has a PhD from Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Bogotá) with a dissertation on the legitimation and delegitimation of Colombian state violence. He mainly works on violence, racism, and dehumanization in West Asia and Latin America.
(3:54) READING "NOTE FROM NON-PEOPLE"
(8:00) DECODING STATELESSNESS
The foundational aspects of Kurdish identity and existing outside the nation-state
(17:00) THE STRUGGLE OF LANGUAGELESSNESS
What it means to borrow languages when your native tongue is unrecognized.
(31:00) DEHUMANIZATION & ACADEMIA'S ROLE
Examining the legitimation of violence and the changing role of the university in critical thought
(44:00) DATA RESEARCH & GEOPOLITICS
Connecting data research on social media racism to current events in Turkey, Syria, Palestine, and Iran.
(1:05:00) IMAGINING UTOPIAS
Episode Website
www.palumbo-liu.com
https://speakingoutofplace.com
Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social Instagram @speaking_out_of_place

“The United States has this mentality that if somebody is serving a prison sentence or if somebody is in jail, they somehow deserve whatever happens. Whether it is medical neglect, whether it is abuse by staff or the other incarcerated people, whether it is terrible food, whether it is not being able to communicate or see their family members and loved ones. What happened in 2020 is that being incarcerated became a possible death sentence. Because we saw that prison deaths jumped 77% compared to the previous year where there was not a pandemic in the United States.”
In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu speaks with veteran journalist Victoria Law. She is the author of such books as Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, Prison By Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms (co-authored with Maya Schenwar), and “Prisons Make Us Safer” and 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration. Today we talk about her new book, Corridors of Contagion: How the Pandemic Exposed the Cruelties of Incarceration.
In this devastating study, Law shows how instead of focusing on care during the outbreak of COVID, prisons took the pandemic as an opportunity to amplify their inhumanity, cruelty, and violence. We hear how contagion spread through ventilation systems and through guards who spread viruses from outside to the prisoners, we learn how things like solitary confinement and strip searches only intensified their worse aspects, and how extractive communications systems preyed on those hungry for news from their loved ones. Law also tells us of the personal stories she was able to track that give a human dimension to the statistics of the pandemic, and also remarkable stories of self-sacrifice and solidarity, as prisoners gave each other the care and support so badly needed. We end by learning about organizations that are at the forefront of fighting for decarceration and restructuring of parole boards, and other actions to fight against the inhumane and cruel practices of the prison industrial complex.
(0:00) Corridors of Contagion
(2:21) Pre-Pandemic Prison Conditions Severely crowded and destabilizing environment of jails and prisons before COVID-19
(8:42) Global Releases vs. US Incarceration
(12:44) The Horrors of Solitary Confinement An exploration of how isolation cells offer no protection from respiratory droplets or viruses
(16:55) Punished for Seeking Safety
(19:07) Dehumanization Through Video Visits
(26:47) Extractive Electronic Messaging
(33:43) Humanizing the Statistics
(43:56) Solidarity Behind Bars
(51:57) The Fight for Decarceration
Episode Website
www.palumbo-liu.com
https://speakingoutofplace.com
Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social
Instagram @speaking_out_of_place

“By pretending like science is neutral or apolitical, we're really feeding a particular discourse which serves whatever political structures are in place right now, whatever status quo is in place right now. Science can never be apolitical because it's a human activity, it's practiced in society with others, with human and more-than-human beings.”
In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Fernando Racimo, a leading scientist-activist, about his new book, Science in Resistance. This book gives a riveting account of the founding and growth of the international group Scientist Rebellion, in which now thousands of scientists from around the world have organized direct actions to draw attention to the climate crisis. Breaking through the censorship and silencing carried on by big fossil fuel companies and also scientific groups in and out of academia, which often collude with each other, members of SR have put their careers and their bodies on the line to raise public consciousness and to spur action. We talk about the connection between power and knowledge, between ecocide and genocide and the need to democratize education and research if we are going to have the kind of world we want to both live in and to pass on to other generations.
(2:00) Moving to Direct Action
(6:00) The Power of the Teach-In
(10:00) The Climate Killjoy
(11:00) The Myth of Scientific Neutrality
(15:00) Fossil Fuel Complicity in Universities
(23:00) Education for a World on Fire
(30:00) Ecocide and Genocide
(36:00) Learning from the Global South
Racimo is a scientist-activist and the author of the new book Science in Resistance. He co-founded the Danish chapters of Scientist Rebellion and Academics for Palestine and works at the intersection of academia and social movement organizing. He earned his bachelor from Harvard and his PhD from UC Berkeley and is now an assoc. professor in ecology and evolution at the Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen. He has written articles and OpEds on the urgent need for scientists to join and support social movements fighting structures of oppression, as well as on strategies for transforming and democratizing academic institutions to serve positive socio-ecological needs. He teaches ecology and evolution, degrowth and socio-ecological justice, decolonizing global health and social movement theory and practice.
Episode Site
www.palumbo-liu.com
https://speakingoutofplace.com
Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social
IG @speaking_out_of_place

Today, we hear from writers Yann Martel, Carl Safina and David George Haskell on the practice of listening to the living world. Tom Chi discusses the dangerous volatility of a one-degree shift. Clayton Aldern explores how climate change alters brain health and behavior, while Ami Vitale,Osprey Orielle Lake and Martín Von Hildebrand remind us of the kinship we share with nature. Fred Pearce discusses 40 years as a journalist reporting on climate from around the world, while Richard Black of the environmental think tank Ember and Paula Pinho, European Commission’s Chief Spokesperson, talk about policy, hope and the radical empathy required to protect the planet for future generations.
(0:00) Clayton Page Aldern – Finding awe and beauty in the world
(0:40) David George Haskell – On consequences of humans tuning out the sounds of the living world
(2:11) Yann Martel – How animals ask us to step out of our humanity
(3:12) Carl Safina – The interior lives of non-human animals
(5:08) Ami Vitale – Environmental collapse and human conflict
(6:37) Martín von Hildebrand – Indigenous views of nature
(8:00) Richard Black – Transition to clean energy and massive fossil fuel subsidies
(10:01) Tom Chi – Climate destabilization
(11:07) Paula Pinho – Europe’s vision for energy independence
(14:04) Osprey Orielle Lake – Māori concept of "I am the river and the river is me”
(16:08) Bill Hare – On limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees
(17:19) Fred Pearce – A realistic path to hope through nature’s resilience
To hear more from each guest, listen to their full interviews.
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
@creativeprocesspodcast

“Storytelling, which is a very whole person kind of activity, is one that delivers all kinds of truths. It's on the factual ground of reality that we build our cathedrals and our castles that we live in. And those are not just made of facts. They're made of other kinds of truths that make the stories of who we are, the cities we live in, the languages we speak—these are made of fact and fiction together, and those are the stories that define our lives.”
My guest today is Yann Martel,the internationally acclaimed author best known for his Booker Prize-winning Life of Pi and weaving philosophy, imagination, and profound human questions into unforgettable stories. His new novel, Son of Nobody, is a feat of literary imagination. Written in Homer-esque verses and layered with footnotes, the book draws us into the voice of a Greek storyteller while simultaneously mirroring our own present moment. It’s a work rich with history and intertextual echoes—ancient stories resurfacing in modern life, reminding us how deeply the past still speaks through us.
At its heart, Son of Nobody isa meditation on life, death, grief, and the fragile ways our human vanity can cloud our search for meaning. Through myth, memory, and philosophical storytelling, Martel explores what it means to long for home, to wrestle with ambition, and to confront loss. It’s a deeply moving reflection on how ancient tales—told and retold across centuries—can still teach us compassion, humility, and perhaps the courage to recognize that we can be nobody and still matter. It’s a beautiful, sometimes haunting story about what we can learn from the past when it comes to homesickness, love, grief, and ambition—and about remembering to value what we have before the search for more blinds us to it.
(0:00) Why is there human suffering? Why humanizing conflict is essential to understanding it
(5:48) The Limits of Rationality & Magical Thinking Why pure logic fails to answer life's deepest philosophical questions
(6:41) Education is Everything
(8:59) Why War Needs Stories How individual narratives help us comprehend the true tragedy of conflict
(9:44) Facts vs. Truth in Storytelling How psychological and emotional truths surpass factual accuracy
(11:47) The Iliad vs. The Gospels
(15:21) The Heroism of Translators
(16:03) AI vs. Human Creativity
(17:07) Animals as Ambassadors of the Wild
(18:08) Art, Religion and Ways to Go Beyond
Episode Website
www.creativeprocess.info/pod
Insta @creativeprocesspodcast