Life Update May 2026

What happens when critical theory gets personal? In this episode of Theoryish, we talk with Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan, the editors of Autotheories, a collection that maps autotheory as a field still taking shape. We are also joined by Kit Brown, who takes Paola’s place this episode as she was preparing to move house at the time.  Autotheory blends life writing, philosophical encounter, embodied theorising, and cultural critique, crafting a language that is intimate, analytic, playful, and insurgent. We ask Alex and Vilashini how they understand the term, autotheories genealogies, and why they resist settling it into a fixed genre. We also discuss the figures the editors use to frame the books: autotheory as a strut of style, a straddle of disciplines, a proliferation of selves, an axis of identifications, an index of attachments, and an archive of loves. We also get into the making of a transdisciplinary volume with contributors including Judith Butler, Paul B. Preciado, Carla Freccero, Jamieson Webster, and many more. The conversation covers what it means to theorise from the body and from lived experience, and where autotheory sits in today’s politics and intellectual landscape.  Sources and Media You kind find all source material discussed in the episode here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CcEANUAqd6sLIwiu5EOETnSpord7w-eoTErx76jS2O0/edit?usp=sharing  Contact Us You can get in touch with us via our email: [email protected] Socials We are on Twitter  and Instagram at theoryish_pod | Facebook at theoryishpod Music My Tiny Love by Soundroll 

Why would anyone join a movement that explicitly aims to restrict their own autonomy? In this episode of Theoryish, we sit down with Lois Shearing to talk about their book ‘Pink-Pilled: Women on the Far Right’. As the far right has gained popularity and acceptance around the work, its ranks have swelled with an unlikely category of members: women. They show up as propagandists, as ‘prizes’ to be won, and as mother-warriors of the nation, yet their role has largely been overlooked. Drawing on interviews with leading experts and time spent inside communities of tradwives and femtrolls, Lois’ investigation reveals how the far right uses online spaces to recruit women, and the misogyny and violence many of them encounter inside. PLEASE NOTE: This episode was recorded mid-2025.  Sources and Media You kind find all source material discussed in the episode here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X4f7JYioTjjpQP-I241vg-TErTmDJEjsq5qkuryFaAc/edit?usp=sharing  Contact Us You can get in touch with us via our email: [email protected] Socials We are on Twitter  and Instagram at theoryish_pod | Facebook at theoryishpod Music My Tiny Love by Soundroll 

Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous creature, and his first worry is that he’ll be late for work. Franz Kafka’s 1915 book is one of the most famous and most debated works of modernist literature, and it remains strange, funny, and painful in equal measure.  In this episode of Theoryish, we dig into The Metamorphosis and ask what the transformation actually means. Is it a story about alienation under capitalism, a man who has already been reduced to his function as breadwinner before he ever grows a shell? A study of family dependence and the way love turns conditional the moment someone stops being useful? A parable of illness, disability, and contempt? Or somethign that resists interpretation altogether, as the term “Kafkaesque” suggests? We look at Gregor’s slow erasure, the family’s shifting response, the role of work, shame, and guilt, and why Kafka insisted the insect never be illustrated. Sources and Media You kind find all source material discussed in the episode here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wjv6J8ZO4yorGALAE2yp6Lhb94l7ZhUZYeAe6_u69cw/edit?usp=sharing  Contact Us You can get in touch with us via our email: [email protected] Socials We are on Twitter  and Instagram at theoryish_pod | Facebook at theoryishpod Music My Tiny Love by Soundroll 

Hegel’s short essay “Who Thinks Abstractly?” (1808) argues that “abstract thinking” is something the ‘uneducated’ partake in, not the educated. Through a string of vivid scenes – a crowd sneering at a condemned murderer, an old market woman reducing a rival to a single insult, a servant reduced to nothing but his function – Hegel shows how flattening a person into one label (“just a murderer,” “just a servant”) is itself the crude, abstract move, while genuine thought holds a person’s full, contradictory concreteness together.  In this episode of Theoryish, we work through Hegel’s essay, unpacking why he insists thinking concretely is harder than it sounds; what his examples reveal about class, judgment, and moral condemnation, and why this brief, almost comic, piece has become one of the most quoted entry points into Hegelian thought. Along the way, we ask what “abstraction” means for Hegel versus how we use the word today, and why an essay about a hanged man and some rotten eggs still has something to say about how we categorize each other now.  Sources and Media You kind find all source material discussed in the episode here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SrRXq57UaEje1zPYSi2evh_cAsy36PCyyvqZCt3-u84/edit?usp=sharing Contact Us You can get in touch with us via our email: [email protected] Socials We are on Twitter  and Instagram at theoryish_pod | Facebook at theoryishpod Music My Tiny Love by Soundroll 

In 1910, architect Adolf Loos stood before a Viennese audience and declared ornament a crime, a moral failing, a symptom of degeneracy and a drag on cultural progress. “Ornament and Crime” remains one of modernism’s founding manifestos, the text that helped strip architecture down to clean lines and bare surfaces. This set the tone, for better or for worse, for everything from the Bauhaus to the glass towers of today.  This week on Theoryish, we’re joined by Dr. Matthew Bliss to dig into Loos essay, thinking about what it argues, why he reached for the language of crime and degeneracy to make an aesthetic point, and how his comparisons to “primitive” tattooing reveal the racial and evolutionary assumptions baked into his theory of progress.  We also confront the uncomfortable question that shadows any serious engagement with Loos: he was a convicted pedophile, and that fact sits uneasily – impossible to ignore, difficult to reconcile – alongside his outsized influence on modern design. What do we do with a foundational text when its author’s life implicates him in real harm to child?  It’s a conversation about ornament, morality, empire, and the limits of seperating the art from the artist. Content note: This episode includes discussion of child sexual abuse in the context of Adolf Loo’s biography. Listener discretion advised.  Sources and Media You kind find all source material discussed in the episode here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zkJBZYKU5COfEwbDmJ17-gUiZf7-4O7iiyRoIJP2yWk/edit?usp=sharing  Contact Us You can get in touch with us via our email: [email protected] Socials We are on Twitter  and Instagram at theoryish_pod | Facebook at theoryishpod Music My Tiny Love by Soundroll 

Hello all! We have an incredible episode for you today. In this episode of Theoryish, we’re joined by Akane Kanai, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, to discuss her new book The New Politics of Online Feminism. Drawing on interviews with young feminists in Australia, Kanai’s research moves past familiar stories of online feminism as pure activism and resistance, instead tracing the everyday dilemmas young women face as they try to be “good” feminists in digital spaces. This is a candid, theoretically rich conversation about what feminist politics actually feels like to live inside, online, right now. Sources and Media You kind find all source material discussed in the episode here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VmgsLnSrc_y8RDgxAyCH_QRYlmPAZnp46MMoQDJNjcg/edit?usp=sharing  Contact Us You can get in touch with us via our email: [email protected] Socials We are on Twitter  and Instagram at theoryish_pod | Facebook at theoryishpod Music My Tiny Love by Soundroll 

Hello all, welcome to our first video episode! This is a shorter episode that aims to explain our year long hiatus in a bit more detail. We have a backlog of new episodes to share with you, and we look forward to sharing more theory with you soon. Contact Us You can get in touch with us via our email: [email protected] Socials We are on Twitter  and stagram at theoryish_pod | Facebook at theoryishpod Music My Tiny Love by Soundroll 

Updating the trailer now that me and Paola are both doctors! Contact Us You can get in touch with us via our email: ⁠[email protected]⁠ Socials We are on ⁠Twitter⁠  and ⁠Instagram⁠ at theoryish_pod | ⁠Facebook⁠ at theoryishpod Music Food For The Soul by ⁠Soundroll⁠ 

In this episode, we sit down with author Christopher Ewing to discuss his groundbreaking book The Color of Desire: The Queer Politics of Race in the Federal Republic of Germany after 1970. Together, we explore how race, sexuality, migration, and national identity intersected in post-1970 West Germany, and how queer communities both challenged and reproduced racial politics during a period of profound social change.Christopher Ewing unpacks the histories of activism, desire, belonging, and exclusion that shaped queer life in the Federal Republic of Germany, revealing the often-overlooked experiences of queer migrants and people of color. The conversation also examines the broader political and cultural currents of the era — from postwar memory to liberation movements and debates around citizenship and identity.This episode offers a rich and thought-provoking discussion for listeners interested in queer history, race and ethnicity, German studies, migration, and the politics of identity in modern Europe.Sources and Media You kind find all source material discussed in the episode here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FcWv8mQg-PPWv0pL2CG7e0dW5DYUjJtZEluDbJnILKk/edit?usp=sharingContact Us You can get in touch with us via our email: [email protected] Socials We are on Twitter  and Instagram at theoryish_pod | Facebook at theoryishpod Music My Tiny Love by Soundroll 

Today we bring you an incredible author interview with the lovely Erika Herrera Rosales, who released her book Ambivalent Humanitarianism and Migration Control Colonial legacies and the Experiences of Migrants in Mexico in 2025. This book explores the complex relationship between migrants and local aid organisations, unpacking the implications of humanitarian actors in migration governance and bordering practices, which have serious and long-lasting effects on the lives of migrants. Sources and Media You kind find all source material discussed in the episode here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12ZAgvq5PQg35U0qAICNSrzobfOkzC2za0X2EbmRRr6I/edit?usp=sharingContact Us You can get in touch with us via our email: [email protected] Socials We are on Twitter  and Instagram at theoryish_pod | Facebook at theoryishpod Music My Tiny Love by Soundroll