Red Medicine – Details, episodes & analysis

Sasha Warren explores the history of psychiatry in relationship to the development of capitalism. We discuss how best to frame the different movements that have emerged with the intention of transforming or abolishing psychiatry. We then spend some time talking about figures such as Foucault, Fanon, and R. D Laing that may be familiar to listeners as well as some lesser-known figures such as Sylvia Marcos, and Marie Langer. 

Sasha Warren is a writer based in Minneapolis publishing work on madness, psychiatry, and the history of medicine. His first book Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, Revolt published earlier this year. 

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

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This episode features a recording of live discussion with Richard Seymour and Helen Charman about the medical imaginaries of the far right. This recording is from illness (3), the third in the event series that runs alongside the podcast. We discuss why the far-right has so many paranoid fantasies about medicine, from race science and eugenics, to attacks on trans and reproductive healthcare.

Helen Charman is a Fellow and College Teaching Officer in English at Clare College, University of Cambridge. Her critical writing has been published in the Guardian, The White Review, Another Gaze, and The Stinging Fly among others. As a poet, Charman was shortlisted for the White Review Poet's Prize in 2017 and for the 2019 Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment, and has published four poetry pamphlets, most recently In the Pleasure Dairy. Charman volunteers as a birth companion in Glasgow. Her first book Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood is now available.

Richard Seymour is a writer and broadcaster from Northern Ireland and the author of numerous books about politics including Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics and The Twittering Machine. His writing appears in the The New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Guardian, Prospect, Jacobin, and innumerable other places including his own Patreon. He is an editor at Salvage magazine. His most recent book Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization is now available.

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

www.redmedicine.substack.com/

Gabriel Winant and Taj Ali discuss the surge of labor organising that has taken place in British and American healthcare over the last few years.

Gabriel Winant is an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago and the author of The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America. His writing has been published in Dissent, n+1, Jacobin, The New York Review of Books.

Taj Ali is the co-editor of Tribune Magazine and has been writing about trade unions and workers rights for a number of years. He has a forthcoming book about the history of political activism in the British South Asian Community.

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

www.redmedicine.substack.com/

SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicine

Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

www.redmedicine.substack.com/

Julian Go explains the 200 year history of police militarization in Britain and the U.S. He highlights the relationships between race, moral panics, and criminalization before describing how these connections shed light on the struggles against colonialism, imperialism, and policing.

Julian Go is Professor of Sociology and Faculty Affiliate of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture and the Committee on International Relations at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory (Oxford, 2016). He is the winner of Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting in Sociology given by the American Sociological Association and former President of the Social Science History Association. His new book Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US is now available from Oxford University Press. 

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

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Jules Gill-Peterson explains what trans misogyny is, why the state cultivates and enlists it, and how this shapes our current political moment.

Jules Gill-Peterson is writer, academic, and author based in the US. She is a tenured associate professor of History at Johns Hopkins University and a General Editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Her writing has appeared in publications such as New Inquiry, Jewish Currents, The Baffler, Parapraxis, and many others. She is the author of Histories of the Transgender Child and A Short History of Trans Misogyny. 

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

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Writer Adam Shatz discusses the life and work of the revolutionary, psychiatrist, and philosopher Frantz Fanon

Adam Shatz is the US editor of The London Review of Books and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other publications. He is also a visiting professor at Bard College, and the host of the podcast “Myself with Others." He is the author of two books: Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination (Verso); and The Rebel’s Clinic: the Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (FSG) and the editor of Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing about Zionism and Israel (Nation Books). 

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

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Jess Thorne updates us on the struggle Health Care Assistants in the Wirral face to win adequate wages.

Jess Thorne is a writer, historian and trade union organiser. She works as a local organiser for UNISON in the North West region, where she has been assisting healthcare assistants on the Wirral in a re-banding dispute.

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

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Ramsey McGlazer discusses the work of radical psychoanalyst Elvio Fachinelli. Specifically, he traces the history of an anti-authoritarian kindergarten which Fachinelli founded, how this informed his broader engagement with psychoanalysis, and how that work might inform our own understanding of authority, adulthood and freedom.

How to Touch Grass by Ramsey McGlazer: https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/how-to-touch-grass/

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

www.redmedicine.xyz

SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicine

Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

www.redmedicine.substack.com/

Lara Sheehi, Stephen Sheehi and James Schneider discuss events currently unfolding in Palestine and the strategies used media to stifle support for Palestinian liberation and normalize settler colonialism.  

Lara Sheehi is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the George Washington University Professional Psychology program. Co-editor of Studies in Gender & Sexuality and of Counterspace in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society.

Stephen Sheehi is the Sultan Qaboos Professor of Middle East Studies and Director of the Decolonizing Humanities Project at William & Mary, where he is also a Professor of Arabic Studies. Stephen is the author of a number of books including Camera Palaestina: Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine (with Salim Tamari and Issam Nassar), Arab Imago: A Social History of Portrait Photography, 1860-1910, and Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims and Foundations of Modern Arab Identity.

Together Lara and Stephen are also the authors of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine.

James Schnieder is a political organizer, writer and Communications Director for Progressive International. He co-founded the left-wing grassroots movement Momentum. He is also the author of Our Bloc.

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

www.redmedicine.xyz

SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicine

Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

www.redmedicine.substack.com/

Craig, Adam and Will from Acid Horizon discuss their book Anti-Oculus: A Philosophy of Escape, including reflections on cybernetics, police, paranoia, disability, and Ocularity.

Acid Horizon is a podcasting collective of artists, musicians, and philosophers formed in 2020 with a focus on Marxist, post-structuralist, and anarchist philosophy. They also run seminars on philosophers such as Deleuze, Foucault, and George Bataille and run a sub-imprint, Zer0 Horizonz, over on Zer0 Books.

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

www.redmedicine.xyz

SUPPORT: www.buymeacoffee.com/redmedicine

Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

Twitter: @red_medicine__

www.redmedicine.substack.com/