The Andrea Mitchell Center Podcast

Interviewer: RAFAEL KHACHATURIAN. Political scientist THEA RIOFRANOS discusses her book, Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, which looks at the mining behind the clean energy transition. Drawing on her fieldwork in Chile, Nevada, and Portugal, she explores the global scramble for lithium and makes the case for a greener future that needs far less extraction.

Interviewer: MIRANDA EDITH SKLAROFF. Historian and theorist SUSAN STRYKER joins the Andrea Mitchell Center to discuss her new book, Changing Gender: The History and Future of a Concept, and the histories and politics that shape how gender is understood. The conversation explores the contemporary politics of trans rights, the relationship between trans liberation and feminism, and Stryker's account of gender as a system of social and linguistic classification. Drawing on histories of anthropology, cybernetics, psychedelic science, and her own experience, Stryker considers how gender has been constructed and how it might be imagined differently.

Interviewer: JOSHUA ROSE. In this episode, host Joshua Rose speaks with DR. NATASHA PIANO, Assistant Professor of Political Theory at UCLA, about her book Democratic Elitism: The Founding Myth of American Political Science. Together, they revisit early twentieth-century political theorists who challenged conventional understandings of democracy, elections, and elite power. Their conversation explores how concerns about plutocracy, political accountability, and democratic legitimacy shaped twentieth-century political thought, and why these debates remain deeply relevant as contemporary democracies grapple with growing inequality, institutional distrust, and democratic backsliding.

Interviewer: JOSHUA ROSE. In this episode, host Joshua Rose speaks with DR. NAREMAN AMIN about her new book, Is God for Revolution? Affect, Youth, and Islam in Post-2011 Egypt. Drawing on interviews with young Egyptians who lived through the 2011 revolution and its aftermath, Dr. Amin explores how political upheaval transformed not only civic participation but also religious identity, authority, and spirituality. The conversation examines the complex relationship between Islam and political activism, the emotional legacy of revolution, and how a generation continues to grapple with hope, disappointment, and the search for meaning in the years since Egypt's democratic opening closed.

Interviewer: MATTHEW ROTH. The acts of the current administration, as well as the OBBBA legislation passed by Congress, point to an economic vision that rejects sharing resources to relieve economic inequality, arguing that money diverted from rewarding success in the private sector is generally money wasted. Journalist ALISSA QUART, in her work as Executive Director of the non-profit Economic Hardship Reporting Project (founded with Barbara Ehrenreich) and as the author of several books, has worked to counter this vision, but also to understand its deep roots in American cultural history. In her discussion with histodrian Matthew Roth, she describes the way economic precarity has climbed the class ladder, as documented in her book Squeezed (2018). In her follow-up, Bootstrapped (2022), she argued that punishing economic policies are undergirded by the narrative of the American Dream, which attributes financial success or struggles entirely to individual merit or decisions. And with the ascendance of a self-described self-made billionaire to the White House, she argues that without the growth of counter-ideals of interdependence and mutual support, economic inequality is only going to get worse.