The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
101 episodes listed below
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From Plato to quantum physics, Walter Benjamin to experimental poetry, Frantz Fanon to the history of political radicalism, The Podcast for Social Research is a crucial part of our mission to forge new, organic paths for intellectual work in the twenty-first century: an ongoing, interdisciplinary series featuring members of the Institute, and occasional guests, conversing about a wide variety of intellectual issues, some perennial, some newly pressing. Each episode centers on a different topic and is accompanied by a bibliography of annotations and citations that encourages further curiosity and underscores the conversation's place in a larger web of cultural conversations.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
It turns films, television, and games into precise conversations about craft, politics, adaptation, and the machinery behind franchise culture.
The Podcast for Social Research treats screen culture as material for sustained argument. Its recurring Pop Cultural Marxism conversations bring colleagues and guests together around films, television, and games, moving from close attention to scenes and mechanics into questions…
Andor meets the Battle of Algiers when your Star Wars takes need a harder question.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A wide-ranging panel on the bomb and the hard questions around anti-nuclear politics.
More than 80 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the panel treats the bomb as more than a closed chapter. It moves through physics, history, queer and feminist theory, and political analysis without trying to flatten any of them, so the discussion feels broad and alive rather…
A close, affectionate reading of pop grandeur and devotional weight.
"God Only Knows" gets treated as more than a classic piece of pop craft. Rebecca Ariel Port and Ajay Singh Chowdhury stay close to arrangement, instrumentation, and performance, and that patience lets the track feel newly put together as they move through its parts.
A Kubrick discussion that keeps returning to gaze, class, and perspective.
Eyes Wide Shut gets treated less like a prestige mystery and more like a talk about gaze, class, and what the film allows its women to know. The discussion starts with the film's making and moves through Schnitzler, Freud, and Vienna, but it lands best when it stays close to…
A sharp, theory-led look at Megalopolis that treats style as argument.
Pop Cultural Marxism reads Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis as politics first, and keeps circling the questions that matter: what architecture means in this movie, what empire looks like when it turns into style, and why a film this long in the making can feel so out of step…
A deliberate conversation about humiliation, circulation, and what survives defeat.
This episode follows a careful discussion of humiliation in politics, with Roxanne Euben and the hosts moving from theory to cases like Abu Ghraib and ISIS.
A close listen that turns harmony, range, and arrangement into the main event.
This episode treats the song as a problem of voice, arrangement, and the thin line between unison and harmony. Rebecca and Ajay keep bringing the talk back to specific vocal choices, so it stays grounded in what the parts are doing instead of drifting into broad praise.
A rueful 2024 retrospective that lands as diagnosis, then opens into a slightly brighter close.
The episode treats a 2024 retrospective as a problem worth sitting with: what the year offered, what it repeated, and why that gap feels so plain.
A live Pride Month panel that treats trans politics as a question of history, narrative, and public judgment.
Recorded mostly live at Bisser Central for Pride Month, this episode asks a hard question: what happens when trans people in public view are judged for real or perceived wrongs, and who gets to decide how those wrongs are measured?
Campus radio from the wrong side of reality.
Campus decisions, Northeast news, and Northeast priorities.
How research culture changes in practice.
Conversations from inside the IT channel.
Hannah Leffingwell traces her route from French, English, and Russian literature into queer and gender history, then into a dissertation titled "Becoming Lesbian: The Making and Unmaking of the International Lesbian Movement, 1972 to 1998." She links that training to Dagmar Herzog's Sex After Fascism and its question, "What is the relationship between sexual morality and mass murder and its aftermath?" The episode argues that Nazism was not simply sexually repressed: Herzog's work, as Hannah reads it, tracks premarital sex, extramarital sex, forced sterilization, forced abortion, and military brothels alongside persecution of Jewish, Romani, queer, and disabled people.
The hosts introduce episode 18, discuss listener support options, and preview a discussion on summer-related topics after a break from their previous Andor episodes.
The evening opens with a screening introduction at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
Rebecca Ariel Port and Ajay Singh Chowdhury analyze Brian Wilson's "God Only Knows" from the Beach Boys' 1966 album Pet Sounds, with Ajay choosing it after naming Wilson's death and the song's place on a personal "50 best songs" list.
Episode 14 returns to the show's year-end mode.
The hosts take up Francis Ford Coppola’s *Megalopolis* as a film that wants to be political.
Rebecca Ariel Port opens by framing Orlando Reed’s What in Me is Dark as a study of the “unexpected afterlives” of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Reed says he built the book around 12 readers, from Thomas Jefferson and the Wordsworths to Malcolm X, Hannah Arendt, Jordan Peterson, and his prison students.
A Brooklyn Institute for Social Research memorial screening event for David Lynch, where three scholars provide deep critical analysis of Mulholland Drive.
Rebecca and Ajay continue their Practical Criticism series (episode 71) by analyzing Neko Case's 'Curse of the I-5 Corridor' from the 2018 album Hell On.
Jazz funk fusion succeeds through tight polyharmonic composition, not loose jam sessions
The Faculty Spotlight episode pairs Alfred Lee, a Visser associate faculty member and freelance data consultant, with Hafsah Issa, a PhD candidate at UC Santa Cruz who studies racial discourses in the history of psychoanalysis.
Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Izzy Litko return to Tony Gilroy’s Andor with a focus on the first three episodes of season two, released on April 23, 2025.
Alyssa Battistoni and Ajay Singh Chaudhary discuss Battistoni’s Free Gifts and Chaudhary’s The Exhaust of the Earth through The Giving Tree, Marx, Ricardo, and Jean-Baptiste Say.
Suzanne Schneider opens at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research with Roxanne Euben and Ajay Singh Chaudhary to discuss Euben’s Princeton book, Driven to Their Knees, Humiliation in Contemporary Politics.
The Podcast for Social Research marks the 80th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a panel that combines physics, history, feminism, and literature.
Episode 90 of The Podcast for Social Research centers on “Transgressions — Rights, Wrongs, and Liberal Pieties,” a live Bisser Central recording for Pride Month with Sophie Lewis, Hannah Leffingwell, and Ruth Aberbach.
The episode returns to *Andor* by popular request.
Izzy Lipke and Ajay Singh Chowdhury use episode 13 to look back on 2024 in a retrospective shaped by a pretty lackluster year for cultural objects.
The episode opens with a catch-up.
Faculty from the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research analyze Fritz Lang and Bertolt Brecht's 1943 film 'Hangmen Also Die,' examining the actual assassination of Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, the film's epic theater approach emphasizing collective Czech resistance over individual heroism, tensions between Brecht's modernist vision and Lang's Hollywood conventions, and Hans Eisler's innovative score.
Ghost Peppers (Kevin Meehan, Rita Ghosh, Amrita) perform and discuss their avant-garde fusion project blending Indian Tagore songs, Scottish Burns poetry, and global influences (reggae, Pakistani Urdu, Bengali folk).
Pop Cultural Marxism examines AI's creeping infiltration of culture industries through the lens of institutional response and fan backlash.
Kila Wazana Tompkins discusses her book Deviant Matter at Brooklyn Institute with artist Sarah Klugage.
She drinks salt water from the sea in great gulps, and that's what she's been missing—now she's entirely equal to herself.
An interview discussing the current crisis in Iran, its historical context, and political analysis.
The panel treats Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet as both a Shakespeare adaptation and a teen drama.
Episode 81 of The Podcast for Social Research examines Haskell Wexler’s 1969 film Medium Cool and its mix of fiction with footage from Chicago in 1968.
A live book event featuring authors Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Vincent Cunningham, and Joseph Earl Thomas, hosted by Paige Sweet at Liz's Book Bar.
A faculty member discusses her background in law and legal theory, her path to teaching at the Brooklyn Institute, and the institute's intellectual mission.
An academic discussion introducing a screening of My Beautiful Laundrette for Pride Month, focusing on its social and cultural context.
Hosts Jason Chaudhry and Rebecca Ariel Port discuss a new musical direction from a familiar artist, analyzing the work and its implications.
A discussion about a film's representation of political violence and climate change, drawing on critical theory.
A live-recorded discussion analyzing the queer cult classic 'But I'm a Cheerleader' and its relevance to contemporary issues.
A live podcast episode celebrating Joseph Osmundson's book 'Virology' and discussing pandemic-related topics like economics, epidemiology, and risk.