In this episode, Sweta Baniya speaks with Dr. Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq about responsibly balancing regionally focused scholarly inquiry with a respect for local priorities, grass-roots sovereignty, and indigenous knowledges.

Dr. Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq is an Iñupiaq scholar and a Tribal citizen of the Noorvik Native Community in Northwest Alaska. She is an associate professor of technical and scientific communication and the founding director of the Center for Sustainable Engagement in the Arctic (CSEA) at Virginia Tech. Her work focuses on Arctic research, data governance, and research methodologies that support community-led initiatives and scientific innovation. She has extensive experience developing research methods, partnerships, and programs that facilitate collaboration between Arctic communities and research institutions. She is the academic lead for Arctic community-led, transdisciplinary initiatives that focus on language documentation, NLP, data literacy, digital archiving, and increasing local research capacities. She serves as a co-lead for the IARPC Participatory Research and Indigenous Leadership in Research (PILR) collaborative team and as co-lead for the IASC ICARP IV RPT7 on Services, Infrastructure, Logistics, and Technology. Dr. Itchuaqiyaq has received numerous honors, including the 2023 & 2025 CCCC Best Article on Philosophy or Theory of Technical or Scientific Communication.

Sweta Baniya is an associate professor of rhetoric, professional and technical writing at Virginia Tech. She specializes on transnational disaster studies, risk/crisis communication, non-Western rhetorical traditions, and community engagement.

Her research centers around the ever evolving and challenging global issue of natural and manmade disasters, such as earthquakes or climate change. In doing so, her research draws together non-Western and Western paradigms with the goal of demonstrating how such combinations produce not only new insights but also important public interventions. Her applied research draws these non-Western paradigms into dialogue with contemporary rhetorical framings of natural and manmade disasters for the purpose of supporting local and global communities faced with responding to such events.

Her works have appeared on Encultration, Journal of Business & Technical Communication, Journal of Technological Studies. She is also founding member of nextGEN, an international graduate student listserv.

In this episode, Corinne Noirot speaks with Mauro Caraccioli about his recent book, Interlingual Relations: Global Politics in a Polyglot World (University of Michigan Press, 2026). The book is a volume of essays Mauro co-edited with Einar Wigen (University of Oslo). The chapters engage questions of language and translation in global politics, advancing a new research agenda for the study of translation in International Relations and demonstrating how linguistic mediation shapes political life across local, national, and international contexts.

Mauro José Caraccioli is Associate Professor of Modern Political Theory and Director of International Studies in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech. Caraccioli is the author of Writing the New World: The Politics of Natural History in the Early Spanish Empire (University of Florida Press, 2021), which in 2023 received the Best Book Award from the Theory Section of the International Studies Association.

Your host for this episode, Corinne Noirot is a professor of French in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures, Virginia Tech.

After an extended break, Paul Quigley, Director of the Center for Humanities at Virginia Tech, introduces the new season of Vox Humanities. With hosts Corinne Noirot and Sweta Baniya, and producer Joe Forte, Paul speaks about the decision to bring back the podcast, his hopes for what it may accomplish, and the reasons behind a key change in format. Beginning next week, the new season will drop episodes monthly during academic semesters.

Sylvester Johnson talks with Edward Polanco about ancestry, the Nahua peoples, ancient healing techniques, Gender, and settler colonialism.

Dr. Edward Polanco is a Kuskatanchanej – a person from Kuskatan (Western and Central El Salvador) – scholar of Mesoamerica. Although he was born in Los Angeles, CA, his ancestors are from Kuskatan and his parents fled their homeland due to political violence and instability. Dr. Polanco is committed to amplifying and centering Indigenous voices and perspectives in his research, his classroom, and on Virginia Tech’s campus. To achieve this, he works closely with the Latinx and Native communities on campus, and more broadly in the US and Latin America. Dr. Polanco is on leave in the Fall of 2023.

His first book, Healing Like Our Ancestors: The Nahua Tiçitl, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Central Mexico; 1535-1660 (University of Arizona Press; in press, expected August 2024) examines healing ceremonial specialists among 16th and 17th-century Nahua people (Indigenous groups with diverse communities in Mexico and El Salvador) in Central Mexico. Dr. Polanco carefully analyzes the different healing tasks women and men had in their communities, he also unpacks the importance of women as titiçih (healing specialists), and he unearths how Spanish authorities attacked Native healers as they attempted to evangelize and hispanize Indigenous populations in New Spain (today known as Mexico and Central America).

He has published on Indigenous healing knowledge, and gendered understandings of the human body. Various fellowships and institutions have funded Dr. Polanco’s work, including the Fulbright-García Robles research grant, FLAS summer and AY fellowships, and a Newberry Library National Endowment for the Humanities Long-Term Fellowship. For more information and updates, please visit Professor Polanco's personal website.

Dr. Polanco’s teaching interests include Native history, Latin America, Mexico, El Salvador, Mesoamerica, sorcery, race, gender, and class. He has introduced various new courses to Virginia Tech that challenge students to think about the past from Indigenous perspectives.

Professor Premesh Lalu is a distinguished scholar of the humanities and the Director of the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa.

With decades of experience in the field, Professor Lalu is widely recognized as a leading voice in the study of African intellectual and cultural history. His research focuses on the intersections of race, politics, and identity in South Africa and the broader African continent, with a particular emphasis on the role of the humanities in shaping our understanding of these complex issues.

We recorded our conversation with Professor Lalu in March of 2023.

Philip Butler is an Assistant Professor of Theology and Posthuman Artificial Intelligence Systems at Iliff School of Theology. He is the founder of the Seekr Project, a distinctly Black conversational artificial intelligence with mental health capacities. His work primarily focuses on the intersection of neuroscience, technology, spirituality and race. He is the author of Critical Black Futures (2021) and Black Transhuman Liberation Theology: Spirituality and Technology (2019).

For this episode, we spoke with Dr. Tom Ewing, Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research in Virginia Tech’s College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. He is an expert in Russian history, data and society, and modern medical history. Among his publications are: The Teachers of Stalinism, Education & the Great Depression, Separate Schools: Gender, Policy, and Practice in the Postwar Soviet Union. He has also co-edited, Viral Networks: Connecting Digital Humanities and Medical History, which was published by Virginia Tech Publishing in 2018.

His current research project explores the transmission of information about the co-called “Russian Influenza” (1889-1890) using data and digital humanities approaches to medical history. 

Professor Ewing also coordinates the Data in Social Context program, which sustains an interdisciplinary approach of data analytics, computational skills, and critical thinking in the humanities and social sciences. 

He has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to run workshops on the 1918 Spanish Influenza and on Images and Texts in Medical History.

We spoke with Professor Tom Ewing in the spring of 2022.

In January 2022, Sylvester Johnson spoke with Dr. Mxolisi Victor Mavi, a veteran activist of South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement and expert in the study of theology, race, politics, and global liberation movements. Dr. Mavi is a collaborator with the “Future Humans, Human Futures” project on religion, technology, and ethics that has been generously supported by the Henry Luce Foundation. They discussed Dr. Mavi’s advocacy for social justice in South Africa during both the period of formal racial apartheid and more recently under the system of multi-racial democracy that has been shaped by drastic inequality. Their conversation explores the global dimensions of economic change that technology innovation and the “digital divide” have created as major challenges that must be addressed to shape a more equitable future for the twenty-first century.