Academics Henry Jenkins and Colin Maclay use their combined knowledge to dig deeper and ask more ambitious questions than most pop culture podcasts out there – not doing recaps or just remaining on the level of entertainment coverage. For them, popular culture offers resources for asking questions about who we are and where we are going, questions that can be political, legal, technological, economic, or social, but often cut across all of the above.
https://www.howdoyoulikeitsofar.org/
episode 1: Pilot: Race and Star Wars
So, in the first cluster of episodes, we are turning out attention onto The Last Jedi, which we are coming at from multiple angles. The first episode, which you can access here, is an interview with Ahmed Best, the actor who played the part of Jar Jar Binks in the Star Wars prequels, perhaps one of the most hated characters in the franchise. But Best could not be a nicer or more thoughtful guy, and he’s spent much of the past decade plus digging deeper into issues of inclusion and representation, so we focused our interview mostly around the racial politics of Star Wars, and in the process, learned more about representational politics in contemporary Hollywood.