E53: Third Anniversary Celebration (w/ John Oddo, James J. Brown Jr., Derek Handley, Asao B. Inoue, Kendall Phillips, Cameron Mozafari, and Ana Cooke)

re:verb

On this episode, the re:verb editorial team -- Alex Helberg, Calvin Pollak, Sophie Wodzak, and Ben Williams -- kicks back, relaxes, and reflects on three years of podcasting about politics, culture, and language in action. Last Friday, to celebrate re:verb’s three-year anniversary, we held our first-ever livestream via Zoom / YouTube, complete with special guests, new segments, and a hilarious sound-board controlled by Alex. Note: since this was our first time streaming, we had some occasional technical flubs and sound issues, so please bear with us. Along with us on the stream were some of our favorite past guests and collaborators, who joined us to talk about current conversations in politics and culture as well as more recent research they have worked on since we last spoke. In addition, each guest got into the batter’s box and faced off against Calvin’s Curveball, a trivia question related to their research.

We talked to Dr. John Oddo about the foreign policy discourses of Biden vs. Trump; Dr. James J. Brown, Jr. about Clubhouse, Zoom, and other currently-popular digital platforms; Dr. Derek Handley, a re:verb co-founder, about his work on mid-20th-century African-American rhetorics of resistance in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and about the pre-history of re:verb; Dr. Asao B. Inoue about developments in anti-racist writing pedagogy over the last year; Dr. Kendall Phillips about his new project analyzing rhetorics of refusal in contemporary films from Joker to Snowpiercer and the Marvel Cinematic Universe; Dr. Cameron Mozafari about right-wing rhetoric and “cancel culture”; and Dr. Ana Cooke, another of re:verb’s co-founders, about her new project on knowledge-making communities online, as well as the past, present, and future of re:verb.

We hope you enjoy this anniversary celebration replay! Stay tuned to our Twitter (@reverb_cast) for future livestream announcements, and join us in raising a glass to toast to three great years of podcasting!