This is the second half of our conversation with Micaiah Johnson continued from our last episode about necropolitics in Ned Beauman's 'Venomous Lumpsucker'. Micaiah is the author of the Ashtown duology, ‘The Space Between Worlds’ and ‘Those Beyond the Wall’, and we spoke to her about these books in episode 49, loosely on the topic of the Multiverse but more about the social and political aspects of a future dystopia divided by extreme inequality. Since that interview Micaiah has become Dr. Johnson, completing her PhD on those very subjects, and in this episode we focus on her PhD which is titled ‘The Unkilled: White Supremacy's Insidious Preservation of Black Lives'. Here we delve more deeply into social and political science to understand something about the dark underbelly of inequality, violence, and frankly evil which has permeated the foundations of our civilization, and continues to do so in a shockingly relevant moment as we see the eruption of American fascism today. This is a pretty intense conversation addressing some heavy topics, but Micaiah does so with the kind of bright passionate intelligence that it takes to sustain a long fight against the darkness.

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We welcome Micaiah Johnson back to the show, this time in her role as a PhD specialist on the topic of Necropolitics, which we tackled in our last episode on 'Venomous Lumpsucker' by Ned Beauman. This episode is the first half of our conversation, where Micaiah introduces us to the topic of Necropolitics and its origins from Foucault to Mbembe. She discusses how it pertains to Ned's book in terms of harmful practices of 'preservation' gone awry. We also talk about the tyranny of billionaires, Zohran Mamdani's win in New York, joyful hopelessness and the difference between doing good and being seen to do good. The second half of our conversation will continue in our next episode where we take a deep dive into Micaiah's PhD thesis 'White Supremacy's Insidious Preservation of Black Lives'.

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Ned Beauman is the author of 'Venomous Lumpsucker', a biting satire which examines the environmental and social consequences of capitalism run amok, and the dangerous absurdities that can result from using free-market mechanisms to solve the environmental problems we face today. We talk about the political and economic choices and mechanisms that determine which species are preserved and which species go extinct - hence 'necropolitics'. We talk about calibrating our economic and environmental values, about the importance of pragmatism and efficacy, about taking responsibility or fooling our selves and passing the buck to future generations. We also talk about what’s working, what’s going better than expected and having hope for the future.

Ned Beauman's Website

Venomous Lumpsucker : Beauman, Ned: Amazon.ca: Books

Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman | Goodreads

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