Doomed To Repeat

Looking for Direction: Adia Reid on the Work of Care in Babysitting, Teaching and the Theater by Nic Hoffmann and Alex Cummings

In this episode we talk with LA artist Chris Springer about her journey from a traumatic family life to shutting down a dangerous childcare facility and running a hair salon, working in creative arts and design, rescuing children in need, advocating for tenants' rights, and also... vampires under the Staples Center. This conversation really contains multitudes.

As a CNA, billing specialist, and medication aide, Monica Kick saw the goods and evils of the healthcare system up close -- especially during the Pandemic. She also saw a high-flying CEO piloting seniors through the skies, outrageous and systemic wage theft, and stymied attempts at unionizing her underpaid coworkers. She tells her story here.

We talked with Tanya Martinez about her experience surviving Pandemic Year One in the depths of NYC's crisis back in December 2020.

Jeramie Rain Dreyfuss went from Charleston, WV to NYC to Hollywood and then to Sun Valley. Now she wants to go to Animal Heaven

Maliha Ahmed was an undergraduate student at UC Santa Cruz, studying linguistics, when she began working as a caregiver. From the good moments to the bad, the experience of working with people in need in their homes taught her a lot about the complicated dynamics of care. In this installment of The Tactile World, we talk with Ahmed about how many spoons it takes to get a cell phone fixed.

We talk with Scott Clark about life in the Navy, the Catholic Worker movement, and meeting COVID head-on in Iowa City.

Thomas Lawrence Long has had a fascinating journey from the priesthood to literary studies to the School of Nursing at the University of Connecticut. Here we have an in-depth interview with the scholar and writer about queer history in America and his efforts to develop the field of medical humanities.

Alex talks with clinical research coordinator Krissy Jahnke about her life and work.

In this interview, Alex Sayf Cummings interviews the historian Kristin Szylvian of St. John's University about her groundbreaking book The Mutual Housing Experiment at the SACRPH conference in Cleveland, Ohio.

How have universities reshaped the environment of American cities? How have they wielded their power, influences, and resources to transform the built environment and local economies? In this conversation at the SACRPH conference, Alex Sayf Cummings talks to Professor LaDale Winling of Virginia Tech about his new book Building the Ivory Tower: Universities and Metropolitan Development in the Twentieth Century (Penn, 2017).

Alex and Will talk to Morna Gerrard, the librarian for Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University, and hear from the oral histories that have been documented about the historic Women's March of 2017, the biggest political mobilization in American history. You can find incredible resources collected and curated by Gerrard and others here: http://research.library.gsu.edu/atlantamarch

Alex talks to UVA historian Andrew Kahrl about his books The Land Was Ours and Free the Beaches, and the joys of laborious research in Hartford, Connecticut basements. Good news -- the audio quality is terrible!

Professor Janet Bednarek of the University of Dayton talks about her work on the history and politics of airport construction at the 2017 SACRPH (Society of American City and Regional Planning History) conference.

At the Society for American City and Regional Planning History conference in Cleveland, Alex Sayf Cummings talks with Barbara Brown Wilson, historian and planning practitioner at UVA, about the ways that disempowered communities can take control of planning decisions that affect their lives.

For our last big episode of the season, Doomed to Repeat is touching on one of the most polarizing issues in American politics: immigration and so-called "sanctuary cities." In the age of the Dreamsicle President, matters of law and migration have taken a vastly greater political, economic, cultural, and emotional valence that at any time in recent memory. In dissing Trump, we do not mean to belittle the issue at all. People are afraid. One of our two co-hosts, in fact, has family who are now unable to flee violence and disorder in Libya and come to join family in the United States because of the administration's appalling "Muslim ban." To address this issue we have a historian talking about sanctuary cities (Dr. H. Robert Baker) and an attorney specializing in immigration law (Georges Hoffmann).

In this special mini-episode, contributor Juan Guzman interviews poet Gary Soto and talks about his museum.

For some reason, people keep asking us to talk about Russia; not sure why, but it turns out that there has always been an interesting history there. We have two great interviews talking about the history of Russia and the end of the Cold War. Enjoy!

In this episode of Doomed to Repeat, we explore the history of the anti-vaccination movement from Victorian Britain to the modern day in America!

In this mini-episode Nic Hoffmann and Ben Parten sit down and talk about the Confessions of Nat Turner, how they were assembled, published and understood in their time.