Contributors

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Host

Ali A Alhajji

Ali A. Alhajji is an Assistant Professor of English at King Saud University, specializing in Anglophone Arab literature, postcolonial and transnational studies, and narrative theory. He received his Ph.D. in English from The Ohio State University, where his research examined cross-cultural communication and narrative ethics in contemporary Arab writing in English.


His work engages questions of identity, translation, cultural representation, and world literature, bridging academic scholarship with broader conversations about storytelling, history, and global exchange. In this podcast, he brings literary analysis into dialogue with lived cultural experience, offering critical yet accessible perspectives on literature and culture.

https://faculty.ksu.edu.sa/en/alialhajji

Guests

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Guest

Ausra Osipaviciute

Ausra Osipaviciute is a freelance photographer and videographer from Lithuania, based in the UAE, and the founder of The Road Reel. Through road trips, itineraries, and hiking guides to less-visited destinations, she helps independent travelers move beyond the obvious—and she approaches travel as visual storytelling: not just showing where something is, but shaping what it means.

https://theroadreel.com/

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Guest

Dr. Doug Cardell

Dr. Doug Cardell is an economist and public thinker whose work focuses on economic policy, evidence, and the tension between ideology and lived reality. What drew me to his work is not only the policy side of it, but the deeper question underneath: how economic systems become moral narratives, and how words like fairness, value, freedom, and justice begin to shape the way people imagine the world they live in.

https://dougcardell.com

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Dr. Rachel Karim

Dr. Rachel Karim is a researcher working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, voice technologies, and the humanities. Her work focuses on how language, data, and technological systems shape knowledge production, authority, and interpretation across cultural contexts. She is particularly interested in questions of critical reading, translation, and ethics in AI-mediated communication. Through interdisciplinary research, she examines how emerging technologies reconfigure trust, expertise, and meaning in education and public discourse.

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Dr. Sheldon Greaves

Dr. Sheldon Greaves is the author of The Guerrilla Scholar’s Handbook. He earned a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley while living and working in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom, developing an approach to intellectual life shaped by constraints, independence, and a long career doing serious work outside academia.

https://guerrillascholar.substack.com/
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Joshua Harrison

Joshua Harrison is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Leaf Island, an award-winning green infrastructure company based in New York. He also serves as Director of the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure at UC Santa Cruz. For over three decades, Joshua has worked at the intersection of art, ecology, and systems strategy — from designing immersive installations on ocean collapse to building regenerative models for wildfire-impacted landscapes in the American West. His current focus: transforming cities into functioning ecosystems using modular, scalable technologies — starting with rooftops, walls, streets, and coastlines.

https://leafisland.org

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Serena Low

Serena Low is an ex-lawyer and trauma-informed coach based in Melbourne, Australia. Serena specializes in helping introverts and quiet achievers thrive in an extrovert-biased culture: becoming visible, speaking with authority, and leading effectively without having to act loud or outgoing. She’s also the founder of the Visible Introvert Academy.

https://serenalow.com.au/

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Susan Gooch

Susan Gooch is the author of The Carrington Affairs and The Nonnegotiable. Her fiction returns to the small town not simply as a backdrop, but as a socially charged world shaped by family, history, rumor, loyalty, aspiration, and secrecy. Moving through romance, public life, and private cost, her novels explore the difficult work of seeing another person beyond the story already told about them.

https://www.susangooch.com/

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