"Maybe mutual aid is not only about rebuilding the materiality of our lives and neighborhoods in urgent moments, but also about rebuilding our sense of self and alongside our sense of place."

Devastating to families from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, in particular--countries where US meddling has long stoked the violence and instability that cause migrants to flee in the first place--this and other policies of the Trump era can be understood, as Ananya Roy has put it, as an ideological commitment to, and renewal of, “white power in statecraft”.

Melinda Cooper is an associate professor in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on social studies of finance, neoliberalism, and the new social conservativisms.

AbdouMaliq Simone is an urbanist whose work explores the spatial and social compositions of urban regions, the production of everyday life for urban majorities, and the lives of Muslim working-class residents.

Readers will be well aware of the ways in which black women’s representation in popular discourses is deeply caricatured – as angry, as devoutly Christian, as “in the life” of prostitution and drug addiction. Williamson argues that the knee jerk criticism and refusal of stereotypes that sometimes follow from the deployment of these representations can also reproduce structured absences of black women’s sociality.

What might it mean, Andrew Culp asks in Dark Deleuze, to 'give up on all the reasons given for saving this world' (Culp, 2016b: 66)? In response, this interview explores the pathways offered by a 'dark' Deleuze, a politics of cruelty, Afro-Pessimism, partisan knowledges, destituent power, and tactics of escape.

Jared Sexton is Associate Professor of African American Studies and Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where he also holds an affiliation with the Center for Law, Culture, and Society. He is the author of Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Asking if the cyborg has lost relevance is like asking if gravity is no longer applicable. As long as we interact with technology, we are cyborgs and the manifesto articulated by Haraway remains profound. Sisters are doing it for themselves is the name of the game.

By this point, we have perhaps become accustomed to the inquiries from friends and family—“So, what do you study exactly?” The response—“Geography”—is often met by perplexed looks and polite smiles—“And, what do you plan to do with that?” For us, this dreaded question belies more than the familiar ritual of mid-twenty-something professional angst.

The focus of the relatively short interview below is to introduce the controversial turn in Ferraris' work to what he dubs a “new realism,” which finds him a kindred spirit to the speculative realists (Iain Hamilton Grant and Graham Harman have written forwards to the two English translations of his works this past year), as well as Markus Gabriel, whose realist theory of fields of sense has already made a mark in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere (though Ferraris’s turn to realism predated these movements).