Nabil Echchaibi is Professor of Media Studies and Director of the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture at the University of Colorado Boulder. His work engages the intersections of media, religion, and public life across transnational contexts. In this interview, he turns a critical lens on the very form of podcasting, asking what it means to keep talking in an age already saturated with speech, images, and outrage. Rather than rejecting the medium, he proposes it as a modest but necessary practice of resistance: a way to recover conversation as a careful, relational, and reflective act. Drawing on bell hooks and Stuart Hall, he treats dialogue as a movement between the intimate and the structural, where the personal is not merely expressive but politically consequential. What emerges is a defense of slow, resonant critique—one that resists both abstraction and immediacy while insisting that intellectual work remain answerable to lived experience.
