In Material Terms
- IMT01 – The Reality of Academic Gig Work: Inside Adjunct Life
Adjunct professors now make up the majority of instructional labor in U.S. higher education, but their working conditions remain largely invisible. This episode examines adjunctification not just as a labor practice, but as a process that shapes how people think, plan, and live under precarity. Title animation: Kelly Gallagher // purpleriot.com Title music: Ultra Sect // turnuptheoi.com (used with permission) Support In Material Terms on Patreon: patreon.com/@InMaterialTerms - IMT02 – Good Germans / Good Americans: The Structure of Mass Participation
What does the Good Germans problem mean when the Good Germans are Americans? This episode examines one of the most durable moral lessons of the twentieth century and turns it toward the present. Not to flatten history, and not to claim equivalence, but to ask what the figure of the “Good German” has always named: the ordinary people who live between overt perpetration and active resistance. The episode looks at… Read more: IMT02 – Good Germans / Good Americans: The Structure of Mass Participation - IMT03 – Authoritarians Reject Science (and Call It Freedom): Vaccine Refusal as Identity (Part 1 of 2)AVAILABLE NOW ON PATREON – COMING SOON TO YOUTUBE Why do people on the right reject overwhelming scientific evidence and experience that rejection as freedom? Part 1 takes up vaccine refusal as the case where this question can be answered with the most precision. It opens on the unsolving of measles—a disease the United States eliminated in 2000, now back in the thousands of cases, with dead children in Texas… Read more: IMT03 – Authoritarians Reject Science (and Call It Freedom): Vaccine Refusal as Identity (Part 1 of 2)
- IMT03 – Authoritarians Reject Science (and It Costs Lives): Vaccine Refusal and Mass Death (Part 2 of 2)AVAILABLE SOON ON PATREON AND YOUTUBE Part 1 ended on a wager: if denial is obedience, the dead should be countable. Part 2 counts them. The episode provides an original comparative-mortality argument from peer-reviewed sources, built on the anti-vaxxer’s own terms. Anti-vaxxers justified refusal as a stand against a pharmaceutical industry that kills for profit, so the episode sets the two harms side by side and stacks the deck in… Read more: IMT03 – Authoritarians Reject Science (and It Costs Lives): Vaccine Refusal and Mass Death (Part 2 of 2)
- IMT04 – The San Diego Mosque Shooting
Republicans Blamed Trans People and Iran to Protect Fascists A Nazi manifesto should be enough. The San Diego mosque attackers told the world what they were: Nazis, Hitler fans, Great Replacement conspiracy believers, fascists who wanted Muslims dead. Fox News looked at that record and searched for another enemy. That’s the story. The “trans shooter” rumor moved first. Then the manifesto came back fascist, and the right pivoted. Iran. Immigration.… Read more: IMT04 – The San Diego Mosque Shooting
Field Notes
Field Notes is a sub-series of In Material Terms that defines concepts used in the main series. Every episode uses a common method. In Material Terms uses words like liberalism, mass society, and fascism in specific ways. Field Notes asks what those concepts are actually doing and provides an operable definition. The point isn’t what words are supposed to mean, what their defenders say they mean, or what a pristine definition would preserve if history were set aside. We need to know what a word does, where it operates, what it carries, and what it makes possible to see.
The first episode, Defining Concepts, lays out the four criteria that structure the series.
- Liberalism
“Liberalism” does heavy lifting in describing American politics and gets used in incompatible ways. After all, the mainstream of both the Democratic and Republican parties in the 20th century were committed to liberalism. This episode defines “it “liberalism” through what it has done, what it carries, what it is operating in, and what naming it… Read more: Liberalism
Exhibits
Exhibits is a sub-series of In Material Terms that takes a single cultural artifact—usually a film or television series—and treats it as a contained environment for examining how material conditions are sustained or resisted. The frame stays narrow on purpose. What a closed system shows about its own logic is the evidence.
- Exhibit 01 – Dogville: A Town That Sees Everything and Stops Nothing
This episode introduces Exhibits. Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003) stages the architecture of visible cruelty. A fugitive arrives. The town agrees to hide her, on terms. The terms continue to grow: refuge becomes labor, labor becomes ownership. By the end, the only question left on the table is how to prevent her from leaving. This… Read more: Exhibit 01 – Dogville: A Town That Sees Everything and Stops Nothing