A Thousand Small Fires – Details, episodes & analysis

What would it look like to organise the world around care instead of profit? Not as a fantasy. As a serious, uncomfortable, unresolved question.

A Thousand Small Fires is a podcast that takes anarchist, feminist, and queer thought seriously — not as a doctrine to follow, but as a lens for asking better questions. About work, food, love, land, the state, the prison, the family, the body. About who decides, on whose terms, and what gets built when people refuse to wait for permission.

Each episode is around 15 minutes — long enough to go somewhere real, short enough to earn your attention. The show is philosophical in tone and open in frame. It holds contradictions rather than resolving them. It cites thinkers without hiding behind them. It uses history as evidence rather than as comfort.

The anarchist tradition argues that hierarchy — in governments, workplaces, relationships, and intimate life — is not natural or inevitable. It was made, and it can be unmade. This show follows that argument wherever it goes, including into the places the mainstream left doesn't want to look.

Topics across Season 1 include: mutual aid and what makes it different from charity; the care labour that the economy runs on and refuses to count; food, land, and the global struggle for food sovereignty; the women who built anarchism and were written out of its history; queer liberation as a refusal, not a request; love, relationship anarchy, and the politics of intimate life; prison abolition; settler colonialism; carceral feminism; and what it means to start building the world you want inside the one that exists.

No fixed answers. Only better questions.

New episodes every week.

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