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The Podcast for Social ResearchAuthor: The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
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. Language: en Genres: Education, Philosophy, Society & Culture Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Podcast for Social Research, Episode 93: Nature's Value — Alyssa Battistoni in Conversation with Nafis Hasan and Ajay Singh Chaudhary
Wednesday, 26 November, 2025
Episode 93 of the Podcast for Social Research is a live recording of an event held at BISR Central to mark the publication of political theorist Alyssa Battistoni's Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Princeton University Press). Battistoni joins BISR's Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Nafis Hasan to discuss how capitalism, as a logic of seemingly relentless commodification, has nevertheless failed to assign value to vital aspects of the nonhuman world, from natural agents in industry to environmental pollution, reproductive labor in the household, and natural capital in the biosphere. Along the way, the three consider the similarities between labor exploitation and ecological exploitation; the Green Revolution in agriculture; the romanticization of nature; the place of reproductive labor in ecofeminist thought; and the case for understanding capitalism as a "planet-making system." What would it mean, they ask, to live freely while valuing nature's gifts?
