FQT Podcast

In this episode, FQT director Che Gossett speaks with Charles Gaines about his artistic practice, his interest in systems thinking and unthinking, and how Gaines takes up questions about seriality and discreteness, difference and repetition in relation to race, materiality and infrastructure. They discuss Gaines's pathbreaking 1993 exhibition with Catherine Lord at the Fine Arts Gallery of the University of California, Irvine, titled "The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism," as well as his 2022 monumental kinetic sculpture Moving Chains commissioned by Creative Time at Governor's Island, and his new 2025 work Hanging Tree, commissioned by the Equal Justice Initiative and installed in Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery, Alabama. Gaines's work is included in prominent public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco), and the Tate (London). Audio Credit: Moving Chains audio, Creative Time, Governor's Island, New York

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett continues their conversation with Professor Susan Stryker about the 1966 Compton's cafeteria uprising and its afterlives, and the history and future of trans studies. Professor Stryker's forthcoming book Changing Gender (FSG, 2026) will be published in August. Stryker takes an autotheoretical approach in the text, as well as offering a pathbreaking account of the historicity of gender as a category, transforming the ways in which it is conceptualized. Music: "We Can Be Together" by Jefferson Airplane

In this (first of two parts) episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Professor Susan Stryker. Stryker is Professor Emerita of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Arizona, as well as Distinguished Visitor and 2025-2026 Faculty Research Fellow at Stanford University's Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Stryker has served as Visiting Professor of Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, and Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women's Leadership, Mills College. She is an executive editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and as co-editor of the Duke University Press book series ASTERISK: gender, trans-, and all that comes after. Stryker is the author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution (2008, 2017), co-editor of the two-volume Transgender Studies Reader (2006, 2013) and The Transgender Studies Reader Remix (2022), as well as co-director of the Emmy-winning documentary film Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria (2005). In episode one of a two part interview, Stryker discusses her field defining scholarship in trans studies, the new of her writing anthology edited by Professor McKenzie Wark, When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader (Duke University Press, 2024), and her recent scholarship bringing together abolitionist politics and trans architectural imaginaries. Music: "Scary Monsters and Super Creeps," David Bowie

In this episode FQT associate director speaks with Harvard Law professor Michael J. Klarman about his award winning scholarship in civil rights and legal history, including From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Oxford University Press, 2004) which received the 2005 Bancroft Prize in History, and his newest book, The Framer's Coup: the making of the United States Constitution (Oxford UP, 2016) which was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize and the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award. Music Credit: "Animosity" by Tupac

In this episode FQT associate director and podcast host Che Gossett speaks with critic, essayist, curator, and professor Nora Khan. Nora Khan recently served as the Arts Council Professor at UCLA in Design Media Arts. Her writing on philosophy of artificial intelligence and emergent technologies is referenced heavily across disciplinary formations in the humanities and the arts. Her books include AI Art and the Stakes for Art Criticism (2025), Seeing, Naming, Knowing (2019) and Fear Indexing the X-Files (2017), with Steven Warwick. She is a member of the Curatorial Ensemble of the 2026 edition of Counterpublic, one of the nation's largest public civic exhibitions, focused next on 'Near Futures', and she also curated Manual Override at The Shed (2020). Khan discusses art and technology, AI, her craft as a writer and curator, and her pedagogy. Music Credit: "One Fateful Night" from the Earthbound soundtrack

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Huey Copeland, Andrew W. Mellon Chair and Professor of Modern Art and Black Study at the University of Pittsburgh, about his work in art history, criticism, and Black diasporic and contemporary art. Professor Copeland is the author of the critically acclaimed book Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (Chicago, 2013), co-editor of the award-winning volume Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World (National Gallery of Art and Yale University Press, 2023), as well over 70 essays, interviews, and reviews that have appeared in a range of journals and exhibition catalogues, including Artforum International, Histórias Afro-Atlânticas: Antologia, Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, Nka, and Represenations. Music Credit: Grace Jones, Pull Up to the Bumper

This 2022 podcast episode is a conversation between Maria Murphy (then associate director of the FQT Center) and Lane Timothy Speidel, Philadelphia artist, musician, writer, and Gender Jawn's podcast producer. In their new exhibition at Vox Populi Gallery, ALL EXITS, Lane Speidel lets us into the backstage of the mind. Sculptures and paintings create a night that is a frozen dream where we can all get lost, take off our underwear, and quit our jobs. Saggy, their music project is deeply discussed, as well as many references from their life practice of surrender. Satre, insomnia, perspectival painting, strikes, and cat accents are all mentioned. Songs by Saggy in order are: "big big sky" (2022) "I can look however I want and I still get to tell you who I am" (2018) "I hate time" (2018) "Anti-Work" (2022) "Clover" (2022) Saggy is made of Lane Speidel and Jim Strong - as well as any others who wish to be included. A limited list based on the episode's recordings : Billy Ray Boyer, Elliott Rosenfeld, Lydia Shea, Schuyler Thumb, Jack, and Ian. More Saggy can be found here: https://ihopeilikethis.com/Saggy

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Jina B. Kim, who is assistant professor of English Language & Literature and of the Study of Women & Gender at Smith College, about her forthcoming book, Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure: Crip-of-Color Writing after the U.S. Welfare State (Duke UP, March 2025). Professor Kim speaks about her articulation of a "crip-of-color critique," and how feminist- and queer-of-color literary responses to state austerity measures -- as seen in the work of writers such as Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and others -- provide critical imaginaries wherein dependency figures not as lack, but rather, as an indispensable resource for crisis laden times. Music Credit: "Bird" by Gaelynn Lea

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Roderick Ferguson, professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and American Studies at Yale University. Ferguson was the 2018-2019 president of the American Studies Association. He is the author of One-Dimensional Queer (Polity, 2019), We Demand: The University and Student Protests (University of California, 2017), The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (University of Minnesota, 2012), and Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (University of Minnesota, 2004). Song Credit: Adrian Piper being interviewed about and performing her street performance piece "Mythic Being", excerpted from "Other Than Art's Sake" a film by Peter Kennedy from 1973

In this conversation FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with poet, author and professor Jackie Wang. Wang is an assistant professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and the author of Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018), and Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun (Semiotext(e), 2023), as well as works of poetry, such as The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void (Nightboat, 2021). In this expansive conversation, Wang discusses her work on carceral technologies -- including AI -- surveillance, and extraction, as well as her interests in pyschoanalysis, mysticism, and tracing the concept of the oceanic in psychoanalytic and Black thought. Music Credit: "Ocean of Tears" by Caroline Polachek

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Paul Gilroy, who is Professor of the Humanities and Founding Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism & Racialisation at University College London. Professor Gilroy's scholarship has been globally influential, especially his books There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack(1987), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), and Against Race (2000). In 2019 Professor Gilroy was awarded the Holberg Prize by the government of Norway in recognition of his scholarship. Che Gossett speaks with Professor Gilroy about his intellectual itinerary, his early career as a journalist, and then as a graduate student working under the tutelage of Stuart Hall, and about the field of Black studies in the UK, radical humanism, and the state of the university. Music credit: "Move on Up" (Extended Version) by Curtis Mayfield

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Austin Svedjan, doctoral student and Hamilton-Law Graduate Fellow in the Department of English at Penn, and John Paul Ricco, professor of Art History at the University of Toronto, about their co-edited special issue of the journal Postmodern Culture, which is freely available online. Song credit: "If You Can't Help Me" by Brontez Purnell.