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This episode of the Ground Shots Podcast is with Dr. Cara Judea Alhadeff.

We did this interview in person this past summer in Paonia, Colorado. I have been sharing studio space with her partner Wild, a woodworker. This summer I was working on some carpentry in my trailer in the yard of the shop, and we retreated here for this conversation out of the heat and the hubub of the wood studio.

Cara is a Mother, Artist, Author, Professor, Action-Philosopher, Environmental-Justice Organizer

Dr. Cara Judea Alhadeff, Professor of Transdisciplinary Ecological Leadership, has published dozens of interdisciplinary books and articles on critical philosophy, climate justice, art, epigenetics, gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies, including the critically-acclaimed Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era and Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene. Alhadeff’s theoretical and visual work is the subject of documentaries for international films and public television. She has been interviewed by The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Pacifica Radio, NPR, and the New Art Examiner. Alongside Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Vandana Shiva, Alhadeff received the Random Kindness Community Resilience Leadership Award, 2020. Her work has been endorsed by Noam Chomsky, Bill McKibben, James E. Hansen, Eve Ensler, Avital Ronell, David Orr, Alphonso Lingus, Lucy Lippard, SHKG Humpty Hump, Henry Giroux, Paul Hawken, among other activists, scholars, and artists.

Alhadeff’s photographs/performance-videos have been defended by Freedom-of-Speech organizations (Electronic Freedom Foundation, artsave/People for the AmericanWay, and the ACLU), and are in private and public collections including and San Francisco MoMA, MoMA Salzburg, Austria, the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and reproduction, and include collaborations with international choreographers, composers, poets, sculptors, architects, scientists. Her art-based and pedagogical practices, parenting, and commitment to solidarity economics and lived social-ecological ethics are intimately bound. Former professor of Philosophy, Performance, and Pedagogy at UC Santa Cruz and Program Director for Jews Of The Earth, Alhadeff and her family live in their eco-art installation repurposed schoolbus where they perform and teach creative-zero-waste living, social permaculture, and cultural diversity. She is always eager to collaborate with other activists, scholars, and artists from other disciplines.

In this episode of the podcast, we talk about:

the role of awe in social change
how hidden systems infiltrate our interactions with one another and the world
what are different ways interspecies intimacy can look?
some etymological explorations of words of dominance and alienation
using the term ‘Judeo-Christianity’ as an unwriting of history
how the ‘left’ in attempting to language the multiplicity, can often recreate the very hierarchies and power structures that claim they are challenging
we explore the unwillingness to witness complicity and contradiction in our politics
why are the words ‘critical’ and ‘interdisciplinary’ important to look at in today’s reanalysis of culture?
trickster in Arab and Jewish culture
how using certain words become symbols but don’t necessarily translate to lived experience
we get into identity, othering and language as it plays out in the war in Gaza
the sticky uncomfortable dichotomies created between ‘farmer’ and ‘activist’
what does it mean to ‘say the right thing’?
salt as a culturally complex element
‘ecology’ having problematic origins in Nazism, purity philosophy and eugenics
what does it mean to have privilege to live off grid and close to the land?
how do we use ancestral wisdom to inform us in our devestating converging crisis’?
how can we plant curious seeds vs. imposing oppressive judgements?
how does what we see as ‘gross’ tell us about how we see the female body, or any body, the earth, or land based culture?