Ways of Knowing

An audio show about the humanities

Season 1: Ways of Knowing

This first series is an introduction to different analytical methods and disciplines in the humanities, from close reading, deconstruction, and translational analysis, to black studies, material culture, and disability studies. The season is produced in partnership with University of Washington.

Episode 1: Reading – The literary traces of climate change and how Derrida can help us pinpoint the exact start of the Anthropocene. With English professor Jesse Oak Taylor.

Episode 2: Close Reading – The rhythm, rhyme, and meaning of undying love; why a poem is not a car; and how to read for insight, not information.

Episode 3: Close Reading, Redux – Children denied childhood; elders turned into symbols of history; masters controlling knowledge of time: black lives and the social construction of age.

Episode 4: Environmental Humanities – Wilderness is beautiful, no it’s terrifying, no it’s for sale! The cultural subjectivity of society’s views on nature from 16th century French poetry to 21st century tourism.

Episode 5: Disability Studies – Before we empathized with the Thing, comic books were filled with white, chiseled heroes battling swarthy, impaired villains.

Episode 6: Visual Literacy – First these items were left behind at the US-Mexico border. Then they were photographed. Then they became propaganda for both border vigilantes and humanitarian groups.

Episode 7: Material Culture – White colonizers thought it had been built by giants and contemporary Ohians used it as a golf course, but really it’s a giant astronomical clock—one of the thousands of American Indian earthworks that once covered the US east of the Mississippi.

Episode 8: Translation – A white Belgian songwriter, a black American singer, and the journey of Ne Me Quitte Pas through race and culture.

Episode 9: Translation, Redux – All the Alices in Wonderland. One piece of culture, traced through its many, many different forms: literature, song, theater, opera, video games, schlocky merchandise... So many things, so much to analyze.