Everything is Ideology: a Cultural Studies Podcast

About Everything is Ideology: a Cultural Studies Podcast

Everything is Ideology: A Cultural Studies Podcast is a collection of interviews hosted by Dr. Lee Caplan, featuring conversations with scholars, writers, and thinkers whose recent work contributes to the broad and interdisciplinary field of Cultural Studies. Each episode centers on a newly published article, book, or research project, using it as a starting point to explore larger questions about power, ideology, culture, and everyday life.

Publisher

Lee Caplan

Category

society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

7 Mar 2026

Latest episode

2 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

25 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   2 Oct 2026

   Smuggling Freedom: Palestinian Prisoners, Carcerality, and Resistance w/ Basil Farraj

   Show notes: I’m joined by Basil Farraj, director of the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute of International Studies and assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Birzeit University. Our conversation begins with Farraj’s deeply personal essay, “I Have Seen The Terminal: Israel, the US, and Regimes of Racialized Mobility in the Age of Genocide.” Drawing from his own experience of being detained and denied entry into the United States while traveling to give a lecture on Israeli carceral practices, Farraj examines the connections between borders, prisons, surveillance, and racialized regimes of mobility. From the United States and El Salvador to Palestine, we discuss how carceral power extends far beyond the walls of the prison—and how systems of control increasingly operate across national boundaries. We then turn to the history of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement and to what Farraj calls “smuggling freedom”: the clandestine circulation of letters, books, political writings, photographs, cell phones, and even sperm across prison walls. These practices reveal how prisoners create forms of political education, communication, family, and collective life under conditions designed to foreclose them. Through the writings and experiences of Palestinian prisoners such as Walid Daqqa, we explore literature and storytelling not simply as representations of imprisonment, but as practices through which people imagine and produce futures beyond it. As Farraj argues, surveillance is never completely totalizing. Something escapes. A letter gets out. A story survives. Knowledge circulates. A family is created. And within those cracks, another conception of freedom becomes possible. Buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology (https://Buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology) Links: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0377919X.2026.2636575 (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0377919X.2026.2636575) https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4877&context=clcweb https://al-shabaka.org/authors/basil-farraj/ (https://al-shabaka.org/authors/basil-farraj/)

2. 

   4 Sept 2026

   Indigenous Solidarity Towards Spanish Exiles in Mexico, 1936–1939 w/ Kevan Antonio Aguilar

   Buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology (https://Buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology) Shownotes: Today I’m joined by historian Kevan Antonio Aguilar, Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, to discuss his recent article, “Decolonizing Refuge: Indigenous Solidarity Towards Spanish Exiles in Mexico, 1936–1939,” and his broader research on Spanish Republican exile, Indigenous politics, and revolutionary Mexico. Our conversation begins with what appears to be a contradiction. In the aftermath of centuries of Spanish colonial domination, Indigenous and campesino communities in Mexico petitioned the revolutionary government of Lázaro Cárdenas to resettle Spanish refugees on their lands. But these communities did not simply understand the refugees through the racial and colonial categories imposed by the Mexican state. Instead, many recognized Spanish workers and peasants as comrades: people who had themselves been dispossessed from the land, displaced by political violence, and drawn into a global struggle against fascism. From there, we explore the politics of agrarian reform and Indigenous land tenure; the racial and eugenic assumptions embedded within revolutionary nationalism; competing ideas of mestizaje, indigeneity, and Mexican identity; and the limits of understanding decolonization solely through the categories of race or national belonging. We also discuss petitions, popular assemblies, anarchist internationalism, and the remarkable circulation of political consciousness between Mexico and Spain. Finally, we turn to culture itself as a terrain of struggle. Traveling exhibitions, political posters, radio, newsreels, and film brought images of the Spanish Civil War into rural and Indigenous communities across Mexico, where audiences transformed spectatorship into political action—organizing, debating, protesting, and building new forms of international solidarity. Kevan Antonio Aguilar is an assistant professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. He is currently completing his first book manuscript “Revolutionary Encounters: Spanish Exiles in the Mexican Countryside.” He is also a cofounder of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP) at UC Irvine and recently served as the vice president of labor relations for the Council of University of Faculty Associations (CUCFA). Links: https://read.dukeupress.edu/radical-history-review/article-abstract/2025/153/116/405053/Decolonizing-Refuge-Indigenous-Solidarity-Toward?redirectedFrom=fulltext

3. 

   20 Aug 2026

   "On the Urgency of Radical Palestinian Epistemology" With Amanda Batarseh

   Buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology (https://Buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology) Patreon.com/everythingisideology (https://Patreon.com/everythingisideology) Shownotes: Today I’m joined by Amanda Batarseh, an assistant professor of literature whose teaching and research span Palestinian literature, Arabic literature, Arab American and diasporic literature, Indigenous Studies, Mediterranean Studies, and comparative literature. Our conversation centers on Batarseh’s work on radical Palestinian epistemology and what she describes as a Palestine-centered way of knowing. Beginning with the limits of simply applying inherited European theoretical frameworks to Palestinian cultural production, Batarseh asks us to consider Palestinian literature not merely as something to be interpreted through theory, but as a site that produces knowledge and theory of its own. From there, we discuss what colonial unknowing: not simply an absence of information about Palestine, but structures of knowledge that can render Palestinian histories, experiences, and claims unintelligible even when Palestinians have narrated those histories for generations. This pushes us beyond the question of who has permission to narrate and toward a deeper question: what determines whether a narrative can be recognized as knowledge in the first place? We also turn to literature, poetry, and imagination as forms of political and epistemological practice. Palestinian cultural production does not simply document oppression; it can preserve relationships to land, transmit memory, create alternative geographies, and imagine forms of life beyond the structures that seek to contain them. Literature, in this sense, becomes a space of radical creativity whose possibilities extend outward from the individual toward collective liberation. This becomes especially important in our discussion of cartography and Batarseh’s concept of rooted movement. Against colonial maps that transform land into bounded territory and property, Palestinian narratives can orient people through memory, movement, story, ancestry, and lived relationships to place. Rootedness, then, does not necessarily mean remaining fixed. Palestinian ways of knowing can be grounded in Palestine while moving across exile, diaspora, language, political struggle, and intellectual traditions. Biography: Amanda Batarseh (بطارسة / bah–taar–say) is an Assistant Professor of Literature whose teaching and research focuses on Palestinian literature, Arabic literature, Arab American and Arab diaspora literature, Indigenous studies, Mediterranean studies and comparative literature. Her research has been supported by the UC Humanities Research Institute, Hellman Fellowship, Faculty Career Development Program and the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. Links: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0377919X.2026.2683727 (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0377919X.2026.2683727)

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