Positions

About Positions

Critical reflection on cultural studies for scholars, students, and a general audience. Published by Lateral, Journal of the Cultural Studies Association. Produced by Mark Nunes and Elaine Venter. Season Two: Hosted by Delores B. Phillips / Production by Elaine Venter, Lucy March, Mark Nunes, and Kathalene Razzano / Editorial by Mark Nunes, Theodora Danylevich, Anthony Grajeda, Howard Hastings, Reed Van Schenck, Kathalene Razzano, Jennifer Scuro, and Elaine Venter / Music by Matt Nunes Season One: Hosted by Andrew Culp / Production by Elaine Venter, Hannah Bailey, Nick Corrigan, and Lucy March / Editorial by Mark Nunes, Jeff Heydon, Evan Moritz, Hui Peng, and Richard Simpson / Music by Matt Nunes

Publisher

Positions

Category

education · society & culture · technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

27 May 2023

Latest episode

12 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

8 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   12 Sept 2026

   Digital Platforms and Agency

   Delores Phillips and Cultural Studies Association’s New Media & Digital Cultures Working Group Co-Hosts Reed Van Schenck and Elaine Venter discuss their special section entitled Digital Platforms and Agency, which appeared in Lateral 14.2 (Fall 2025), with additional content from three of the included authors: Kelsey Cummings (Christopher Newport University), Nina Medvedeva (Winona State University), and Nathalie Schäfer (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar) This podcast is accompanied by a scholarly commentary by Chris Alen Sula.

2. 

   31 Jan 2026

   Crip Silences, Crip Futurities, Crip Joy

   Six Ways of Looking at Crip Silence1 By Angela M. Carter As listeners might expect,Critical Disability Studies scholarsPatsavas, Spurgas, Whatcott, and Danylevich do two useful things in Season 2, Episode 3 of Positions. First, they reflect on the authorial processes of “Cripistemologies of Crisis: Emergent Knowledges for the Present,”2 as well as the cultural and political moment from which the special section emerged. Second, they expand the theoretical and methodological interventions we made then—during “Trump 1.0”—to analyze what we’re experiencing today. Of course, their discussion acknowledges that “what’s happening now has always been happening.” But the conversation isn’t in search…

3. 

   19 May 2025

   AI Literacy and the Changing Digital Political Landscape

   AI literacy, digital politics, and the 2024 US presidential election Delores Phillips and Cultural Studies Association’s New Media and Digital Cultures Working Group Co-Host Reed Van Schenck discuss AI literacy, digital politics, and the 2024 US presidential election with authors Elizabeth Losh (William and Mary) and Rita Raley (UC Santa Barbara). This podcast is accompanied by a scholarly commentary by Stefania Milan. A note on our cover image for this episode: "Erica" and "Derek" (named by ChatGPT) are DALL-E-generated images depicting what ChatGPT offered as a response to the following prompt: "How would you describe a profile for the "undecided voter" going into the 2024 presidential election in the United States? Provide two: one leaning toward the democratic candidate and one leaning toward the republican candidate." Image generated on May 13, 2025, using GPT-4o and DALL·E 3.

4. 

   19 Feb 2025

   Chimerica: Disorienting Politics

   Delores Phillips and Cultural Studies Association’s Globalization and Culture Working Group Co-Host Kathalene Razzano discuss Disorienting Politics: Chimerican Media and Transpacific Entanglements (University of Michigan Press, 2024) with author Fan Yang, along with writer and historian Mark Tseng-Putterman. This podcast is accompanied by a scholarly commentary by Marcus Breen.

5. 

   16 Sept 2024

   Infrastructures of Transiency: On Cruise Ships

   Learning with Infrastructures of Transiency: On Cruise Ships  By Francesca Savoldi This episode elaborates critical perspectives on the social and spatial phenomenon of “cruise ship cities,” defined by Dr. Richard Simpson as a new urban dynamic where the accumulation of spatial strategies are shaped by disproportionate tourism in which tourists outnumber residents.1 The sense of “disproportion” is an emblem of the cruise industry: revenue distribution shows a massive discrepancy between the industry’s profit (with unclear amounts destined for tax havens) and economic benefits provided to port cities at destination. Most cruise lines employ workers from the global south to keep…

6. 

   30 May 2024

   The World as Abyss

   Andrew Culp and Cultural Studies Association’s Black and Race Studies Working Group Co-Host Shauna Rigaud discuss The World as Abyss: The Caribbean and Critical Thought in the Anthropocene (University of Westminster Press, 2023) with authors Jonathan Pugh and David Chandler. This podcast is accompanied by a scholarly commentary by Richard T. Stafford.

7. 

   24 Oct 2023

   Let's Relax!

   Andrew Culp and the Cultural Studies Association’s Performance Working Group Co-Chair Hui Peng discuss “relaxed performance” with Leigh Jackson, Director of Accessibility & EDI Programming at People's Light outside of Philadelphia, and Dr. Hannah Simpson, Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and author of Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance (Palgrave, 2022). This podcast is accompanied by a scholarly commentary by Patrick McKelvey.

8. 

   27 May 2023

   For the Moment, I Am Not Scrolling

   Andrew Culp and Cultural Studies Association's New Media and Digital Cultures Working Group Co-Chair Claudia Skinner take a look into Adi Kuntzman and Esperanza Miyake&rsquo;s new book Paradoxes of Digital Disengagement: In Search of the Opt-Out Button, published by University of Westminster Press (2022). Accompanied by a scholarly essay by Tero Karppi. The Misunderstanding(s) of Disconnection Studies By Tero Karppi &ldquo;This is often how our work is misunderstood: as that we are calling people to live in the woods and kind of get off the grid,&rdquo; explains Adi Kuntsman towards the end of this episode of Positions. Kunstman together with Esperanza Miyake is the author of a recent book Paradoxes of Digital Disengagement and in this episode, they characterize the state of our current digital dependency. The fallacy Kuntsman&rsquo;s statement above outlines&mdash;that academic studies of digital refusal are simultaneously driving an abstention from technology&mdash;is important because it shows a tendency to give an oversimplistic solution to a complex problem. The acts of switching off, imposing a moratorium, or moving to a blackout zone all seem like acts of instrumental rationality, but the reasoning only applies if technology is external, like an add-on feature, to our culture and not its constitutive part. In other words, to imagine that one can switch off technology is to imagine that one can switch off culture. Through this lens, I will discuss some of the ways the podcast articulates the challenges of studies of our dependencies with Internet-based culture. Tiziana Terranova quickly recaps the origin story of our cultural moment from the perspective of a network: the Internet begun as &ldquo;a set of interoperable network protocols governed by a series of public and/or voluntary non-profit organizations&rdquo; and after the network was commercialized, it gave power to big companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta.1 (https://csalateral.org/podcast/positions-1-for-the-moment-i-am-not-scrolling-skinner-culp-kuntzman-miyake-karappi/#fn-12099-1) Individuals and businesses alike found themselves being bonded with digital services in different walks of their lives. Being always on and actively engaging on social media, what Ludmilla Lupinacci calls &ldquo;compulsory continuous connectedness,&rdquo;2 (https://csalateral.org/podcast/positions-1-for-the-moment-i-am-not-scrolling-skinner-culp-kuntzman-miyake-karappi/#fn-12099-2) became a necessity for thriving, and in some cases surviving in the changing media environment. Some users turned into influencers and started making money through social media. Others followed, not the influencers&rsquo; paths, but their daily Instagram and TikTok feeds. Kuntsman and Miyake, however, go beyond social media and maintain that the state of &ldquo;compulsory digitality&rdquo; characterizes our living in modern society in general. The digital is our relationships maintained on social media, the digital is our mortgage handled through electronic banking, and the digital is Uber&rsquo;s algorithm that determines who gets the next ride and when. The term &ldquo;digital&rdquo; works as an abstraction of all the practical and sometimes impractical ways our lives are connected to the Internet and its online services. In their book, Kuntsman and Miyake explain that compulsory digitality peaked during the COVID-19 pandemic when individuals and organizations shifted &ldquo;most everyday activities online, to facilitate social distancing and minimise exposure to coronavirus.&rdquo;<a id="fnref-12099-3" href="https://csalateral.org/podcast/positions-1-for-the-moment-i-am-not-scrolling-

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

2 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

4 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 36 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

48

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

60

Contact Positions

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.