Explore every episode of the podcast Talking Back with Andrew Fagan

How should progressives, liberals and human rights defenders respond to the actions of the current Israeli government in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and the wider region?

What has become of the human rights project when so many of its defenders do not call out gross human rights violations and alleged genocide?

Are you middle-class, or do you aspire to become middle-class? If so, you really should listen to this!

For my novel on this topic, Scaling the Ladder, check out this link.

What are the costs of poor leadership and bad management in the workplace?

How have league tables distorted education?

What can we begin to do to rod ourselves of poor leadership and bad management?

Do the great and the good still exist?

What do the Epstein Files reveal about leadership in our world?

What do the wealthy and the powerful actually believe in?

This episode introduces you to the publication of my first novel, Scaling the Ladder. It includes my reading two sample chapters from my novel. Hope you enjoy it!

You can purchase Scaling the Ladder here:

Here's a link to my latest journal article, published in Constellations. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8675.70028

What is the alternative to MAGA and authoritarian nationalism?

What remains of liberal progressivism today?

Where does the arc of history bend and is it towards justice?

How did it all go so wrong?

Some further reading:

Andrew Fagan, ‘Taking Class Seriously’, Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 2, (2023) pp. 260-282.

Andrew Fagan, ‘The Gentrification of Human Rights’, Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 2, (2019), 283-308.

Nancy Fraser, How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet and What We Can Do About It. (2022)

Who really leads the Far-right in the UK. Nigel Farage or Tommy Robinson?

Why are so many British white working class people apparently increasingly drawn towards a rising form of authoritarian nationalism?

Who is to blame for the state we’re in?

Do international law and human rights continue to have a point in a world this broken?

This week’s episode addresses this crucial question to coincide with the annual gathering of UN General Assembly, in New York.

For a clear and concise intro to human rights see Andrew Clapham’s Human Rights: a Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2015).

For my analysis of the gentrification of human rights see my 2019 article published by Human Rights Quarterly. Available here.

Hazony’s book is shaping the MAGA movement as it becomes increasingly ideological. Is it any good? Should we take it seriously? Is the pen truly and still mightier than the sword?

Does our tribal politics make us all stupid?

In this week’s episode I engage with this important work.

For a more academic literature on social class and injustice see my 'Taking Social Class Seriously', published by Human Rights Quarterly. Available here.

You might also want to check out a policy paper I wrote and was published by the Fabian Society. Available here.

For a highly informative site which records extreme poverty as a human rights violation check out this UN page.

One of the best academic critiques of identity politics' neglect of social class is Walter Benn Michaels' The Trouble With Diversity: How we Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. (2016).

Still a relevant and insightful study of how a neglect of class increases electoral support for the Right in the US see Arlie Russell Hochshild Strangers in their own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016)

This is the first part of a two-parter in which I engage with a key group in the culture wars and authoritarian populism. Are white, straight male as a group generally and necessarily conservative and lost to any genuine form of radical political project?