Podcast Summary:

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Darcie DeAngelo et al., "Demilitarizing the Future" (Anthem Press, 2025)
Date: September 10, 2025
Host: Elena Sabrina

Episode Overview

This episode features a roundtable discussion with the four co-editors of the forthcoming anthology, Demilitarizing the Future (Anthem Press, October 2025): Darcie DeAngelo, Josh Reno, Leah Zetti, and Rebecca Castleman. The conversation explores the concept and practice of demilitarization and militarization, highlighting how military waste, ecologies, activism, creative writing forms, and interdisciplinary collaboration shape the anthology. The editors discuss their individual research backgrounds and contributions, the anthology’s relationship with activism, the role of creative forms of writing, and influences from diverse disciplines. They also share upcoming projects and close by reading a resonant quote from Jasbir Puar’s afterword.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins and Structure of the Project

[03:11–05:51]

• The editors came together from diverse disciplines—anthropology, literary studies, performance theory—united by shared engagement with military waste, its afterlives, and demilitarization.
• Sparked by work in military waste studies, notably “wastelands,” the team recognized the value of multidisciplinary collaboration, especially integrating literary and speculative approaches.
• Rebecca Castleman was specifically brought in to enrich the project’s literary and speculative dimensions, adding critical perspectives from theater and performance studies.

“The three of us have been thinking about this for a really long time... And it has been a great pleasure of this project to bring in Rebecca and to bring in other thinkers from other disciplines to create a project that spans all of the complex messiness of militarization.”
—Leah Zetti [05:20]

2. Definitions: Militarization, Demilitarization, and Expansive Futures

[08:24–12:28]

• The editors defined militarization as a social and political process where military aims become the principal orientation of society, often unconsciously.
• Leah Zetti frames militarization as “a field of practice for creating certain futures,” highlighting its role in shaping collective trajectories and the importance of qualitative research to uncover alternative possibilities.
• Rebecca Castleman expands on demilitarization, emphasizing it not as a simple binary opposite, but as a set of practices: “loosening” militarism by living with, against, or alongside its structures.
• The anthology is both manifesto and documentation of demilitarizing practices already in existence.

“Militarization is a social and political orientation towards war, to the exclusion of all other goals…all parts of a society are contributing towards military aims.”
—Leah Zetti [08:41]

“What does it mean to put a D in front of that…? It’s not only as a prefix that cancels out, but sometimes means to put down, or to be logically alongside…ways of loosening militarism.”
—Rebecca Castleman [11:07]

3. Ecologies, Infrastructure, and the Afterlives of War

[12:28–17:12]

• The anthology’s chapters explore explosive military waste beyond individual trauma or PTSD, grounding their analysis in environments and ecological afterlives.
• Notable is Un Nguyen’s photographic essay on post-war Vietnam, where bomb craters become watering holes and sites of cultivation; this frames homeland (dat nuoc) as earth and water—a reminder of enduring, transformed ecologies.

“Despite the military waste embedded in the ground of Southeast Asia, it still is people’s homeland…they are implicated in the ecology there, the kind of post-war ecology.”
—Darcie DeAngelo [13:16]

• The team challenges the narrowness of PTSD as an analytic and emphasizes infrastructure, relational suffering, and the persistence of daily life.

4. Engagement with Activism and Knowledge-Making

[19:57–22:50]

• The anthology situates activism as both content (studying activists and veteran citizen scientists) and method (amplifying non-academic forms of knowledge).
• Chapters examine how knowledge of militarized sites circulates through communities (e.g., construction workers, local journalists) outside of—and often in resistance to—official channels.
• The editors position the anthology to serve both academic and activist audiences, underlining its relevance beyond any single political platform.

“We’re looking past [activism] to the very conditions of life and death that shape the sorts of political claims that people are making in the first place.”
—Leah Zetti [20:44]

“Who does the knowing in a community and what structures of knowledge are produced through their everyday actions...that becomes a particularly relevant question when we’re thinking about systems of militarization deliberately preserved as clandestine.”
—Rebecca Castleman [21:32]

5. Creative Forms: Poetry, Performance, and Speculation

[24:07–29:48]

• Many contributions blur boundaries between scholarship and art—field poems, speculative performances, walking tours, and first-person narratives.
• Leah Zetti recounts how the extremity of witnessing military waste in Laos compelled her to write poetry during fieldwork: “Creative methods kick in when I’m at the extremes of what I know how to study.”
• Rebecca Castleman’s contribution is a speculative performance piece modeled on “closet drama,” reimagining hidden military sites as theaters.
• Nomi Stone’s chapter expands Leah’s “field poem” in a military training context, exploring the “constructedness of the war preparedness environment.”
• The editors argue that creative, poetic forms are especially suited to demilitarization because they resist capture by militaristic logic and offer “moving targets” for critique.

“Creative methods kick in when I’m at the extremes of what I know how to study because they offer a wider toolkit for understanding the human experience.”
—Leah Zetti [25:19]

“Part of the reason that it’s useful to have moving targets for demilitarizing practice is because they are in a sort of struggle with attempts to otherwise justify or continue supporting militarism.”
—Josh Reno [29:20]

6. Influences and Inspirations

[31:16–35:33]

• Darcie DeAngelo discusses Cambodian artist collectives, their approach to “forgetting to remember” (Buddhist memorialization of war), and how art mediates grief and history.
• Contemporary Cambodian artists like Sakantevi Orr, and the negotiation between evidence and ritual, “allowing war…to be forgotten in the Buddhist way, which is that it becomes part of the cycle of samsara,” provide frameworks for the anthology’s ethos.

7. Military Waste, Toxicity, and Uneven Harm

[35:36–42:21]

• Leah Zetti distinguishes between familiar (economic, destructive) forms of military waste and the expansive, often hidden ecological and bodily harms that persist long after wars end. She emphasizes the toxic byproducts of high explosives—deliberate, predictable, and largely disavowed in U.S. policy.
• Josh Reno connects this to environmental justice and Jasbir Puar’s concept of debility: “It’s not just that different people are unevenly exposed to harm…some bodies are made more vulnerable than others by the context of their lives.”
• Rebecca Castleman notes temporality as another unevenly distributed harm—wasting time (sleeplessness, ongoing rehearsal of mourning), thinking through theater as a form to address these temporalities.

8. Current and Future Projects

[42:38–48:09]

• Darcie DeAngelo: Studying pest-human relationships and the ecological disasters of colonialism, with a focus on rats; also co-producing a film on landmine-detection rats with Cambodian collaborators.
• Josh Reno: Working on a book about chickens and vulnerability (“To Get to the Other Side”), examining the ethics and affective relationships created by animal husbandry in new urban and suburban contexts.
• Rebecca Castleman: Completing Profaning Religion on the Modern Stage (Cambridge, 2026), on theater’s relationship to religious ritual and the development of aesthetic forms; starting a project on theatrical choruses and collectives.
• Leah Zetti: Writing Dynamite Empire (Johns Hopkins University Press), tracing the history of dynamite and explosive power in shaping America; her anthology chapter bridges this and her earlier work on military waste in Laos.

9. Memorable Closing Reflection & Notable Quote

[48:09–48:51]

• Leah Zetti reads from Jasbir Puar’s afterword, capturing the anthology’s vision for demilitarization as both challenge and actuality:

“To demilitarize the future, then, requires a radical shift in what we believe is possible. It requires a turning away from the logics of dominance, extraction and surveillance. It requires recovering forms of life and relations that have long been buried under the ruins of empire, as well as honoring forms of life arduously, crafting different modes of material being and becoming to survive genocide. It demands the nurturing of practices that affirm rest, care, memory and transformation. And it is increasingly clear that that shift is underway on an unprecedented scale. Demilitarization is not only imaginable, it is already here.”
—Jasbir Puar (Afterword) read by Leah Zetti [48:09]

Notable Quotes, Timestamps, & Speaker Attributions

• [05:20] “It has been a great pleasure…to create a project that spans all of the complex messiness of militarization.” — Leah Zetti
• [08:41] “Militarization is a social and political orientation towards war, to the exclusion of all other goals…” — Leah Zetti
• [11:07] “What does it mean to put a D in front of that...? It’s not only as a prefix that cancels out…but also…ways of loosening militarism.” — Rebecca Castleman
• [13:16] “Despite the military waste embedded in the ground of Southeast Asia, it still is people’s homeland...” — Darcie DeAngelo
• [20:44] “We’re looking past [activism] to the very conditions of life and death that shape the sorts of political claims…” — Leah Zetti
• [25:19] “Creative methods kick in when I’m at the extremes of what I know how to study.” — Leah Zetti
• [29:20] “It’s useful to have moving targets for demilitarizing practice…they are in a struggle with attempts to otherwise justify militarism.” — Josh Reno
• [48:09] “To demilitarize the future, then, requires a radical shift in what we believe is possible…” — Jasbir Puar, read by Leah Zetti

Segment Highlight Timestamps

• [03:11] How the editors came together; introduction of contributors’ backgrounds
• [08:24] Definitions and concepts: militarization versus demilitarization
• [12:28] Chapters on ecologies, infrastructure, and the afterlives of war
• [19:57] Relationship to activism and knowledge-making
• [24:07] Engaging with poetry and creative forms of writing
• [31:16] Inspirations from art and Buddhist memorialization
• [35:36] Military waste, toxicity, and environmental harms
• [42:38] Editors’ upcoming projects
• [48:09] Jasbir Puar’s afterword; concluding reflections

Tone & Style

The episode is collaborative, scholarly yet accessible, reflective, and at times, poetic. The editors speak with a sense of urgency and hope about the challenges of military waste and the creative, collective possibilities for demilitarizing the future.

“Demilitarization is not only imaginable; it is already here.”
—Jasbir Puar (as read by Leah Zetti) [48:48]

For more, read Demilitarizing the Future (Anthem Press, October 2025).**