Dr. Samuele Collu is an Assistant Professor of Medical and Psychological Anthropology at McGill University. His research examines the entanglement between psychic life, therapeutic practices, and digital devices. He is currently completing Dreams I Scroll Through, an experimental ethnography immersing the reader in a (mildly psychedelic) social media binge-scroll. Collu is also working on a project titled “Force and Form,” which focuses on learning, trauma, and internal alchemy practices in Montréal.

The topic for today's conversation is his first book, Into the Loop: An Ethnography of Compulsive Repetition, came out with Duke University Press this year (2026). Written in an experimental and literary style that moves fluidly between the academic, the personal, and their uncanny in-betweens, Into the Loop offers a unique window into the repetitive cycles that shape our most intimate relationships and the possibilities for transformation within them.

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to Conversations in Atlantic Theory, a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counternarrative.

Today’s discussion is with Don Deere, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. He has published a number of articles in key journals and edited collections, is the co-translator of Santiago Castro-Gómez’s Zero-Point Hubris: Science, Race, and Enlightenment in 18th-Century Latin America, and is the author of The Invention of Order: On the Coloniality of Space, published in 2026 on Duke University Press as part of their series Radical Américas, which is the occasion for our conversation today. In this conversation, we explore the importance of Latin American theorists for philosophy and philosophers, the challenge of thinking across multiple geographies, and the legacy of colonialism in our understanding of spatiality, place, and the meaning of modernity.

Dr. Jonathan Howard is an Assistant Professor of Black Studies and English at Yale University. His research and teaching broadly interrogate western ideas about race and nature while also exploring black expressive culture as an alternative site of ecological thought and practice. His first book, Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness, undertakes a black ecocritical study of the “deep” as the diffuse subtext of African American literature. It argues that blackness dawns in Middle Passage as an ongoing inhabitation of the deep, which is most fully apprehended not as social death but ecological life.