Top Rank Podcast
Top Rank is a process-oriented research platform, founded in 2015, that highlights people whose work is challenging and shaping our perceptions of contemporary culture. Co-hosted by Isabel Attyah Flower and Marcel Rosa-Salas
Episodes
June 20, 2025 • 58 mins
Our 47th episode welcomes dynamic duo Melissa Sáenz Gordon & Molly Salas of Soft Power Vote: a civic engagement resource that leverages digital, print, and live formats to encourage New Yorkers—and especially millennials and Gen Z—to vote! While just a few days away from the Democratic mayoral primary election in NYC, we’re honored to share the perspectives of two people who have been extremely busy engaging us, and so many of our ...
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March 12, 2025 • 65 mins
On episode 45, we welcomed scholar, community arts educator, curator, and artist Dr. Jillian Hernandez (@pastelitocookie), whose work challenges the ways racialized and working-class bodies, sexualities, and cultural practices are policed through gendered tropes of deviancy and respectability. We spoke to Jillian about her debut book “Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment” (2020); the insurgent M...
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March 12, 2025 • 57 mins
For episode 46, we spoke to scholar and author Francesca Sobande, whose research focuses on the impact of digital media in shaping how we perceive, understand, and experience the world and each other. Our conversation explores Francesca’s numerous books (which address topics such as the online lives of Black women in the UK, the ways that big brands manipulate, exploit, and even derail social justice movements, and the commodificat...
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March 12, 2025 • 57 mins
For our 43rd episode, and our first after a multi-year (and multi-child) parental leave, we sat down face to face with artist June Canedo de Souza (@junecanedodesouza) on the occasion of Deli Radio—a platform she created with Daniel Santos while in residence at Recess Art in Brooklyn—which Top Rank was delighted to be included in.
We spoke to June about the enduring impacts of childhood on our perspective, obsessions, and creativ...
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March 12, 2025 • 53 mins
For episode 44, we invited illustrator, author, and comedian Daisy Ruiz (@draizys) to bring us into her journey as an award-winning cartoonist and, more recently, aspiring comedian. We talked with Daisy about her highly-acclaimed, super inspiring, and hilarious first comic book—”Gordita: Built Like This” (2023)—and how she combined memory, fiction, and humor to create a parable about the body politics of girlhood. Our conversation ...
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November 18, 2022 • 43 mins
On episode 42 we are joined by Mims — an artist, abolitionist, and facilitator based in Los Angeles, CA. Mims is the mind behind “Uncle Ronnie’s Room,” an art-driven campaign to mobilize the general public and media around the story of Ronald (Ronnie) Coleman Jr. and Carl Coleman’s wrongful conviction over 20 years ago.
At 29 years old, Ronald Coleman Jr. was sentenced to two life sentences plus 65 years for a murder case that he...
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October 24, 2022 • 40 mins
This episode features our conversation with Destiny Mata, an NYC/San Antonio photographer and filmmaker whose work focuses on topics pertaining to subculture and community. Her photography book "The Way We Were" documents the alternative punks of color scene in NYC.
Destiny is formerly the Director of Photography Programs at the Lower East Side Girls Club and her work has been published in Vogue, Vice’s Noisey, Vibe, The Source,...
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May 13, 2022 • 57 mins
Over the last decade, manifestation-based rhetorics to “love yourself,” “believe in yourself” and “feel good in your own skin” have become guiding social directives for people, and especially for women. We see these mantras in social media captions, advertising campaigns, and song lyrics that seem to promise that, through a confidence-based mindset, we will be able to transform our psychology, and therefore the material conditions ...
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April 5, 2022 • 44 mins
Celebrity culture thrives on granting us vicarious access to our favorite stars. But rarely on display are the paparazzi and reporters whose hidden labor makes the story happen. In "Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood", anthropologist Dr. Vanessa Díaz brings us inside the world celebrity media production and reveals the complex racial and gendered power relations at play in the production of ...
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February 17, 2022 • 56 mins
We’re honored to have had the chance to interview a scholar whose work we’ve appreciated for a long time—lauded sociologist Jessie Daniels, who is a professor at Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center and a faculty affiliate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
She is an expert on racism’s manifestations in the media and online, as well as the author of several books, including “White Lies”—a look at white s...
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December 13, 2021 • 53 mins
For our last episode of 2021, we shared a special conversation with artist, writer, and organizer Eilen Itzel Mena (@eilen.itzel.mena), whose interdisciplinary visual art practice synthesizes elements of Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism with spiritual frameworks of the African Diaspora. Eilen is co-director and creative collaborator for @_honeyandsmoke_—an artist community & platform that makes space for artists to meditate on...
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August 18, 2021 • 65 mins
The social media influencer is one of today’s most talked about and divisive figures. They represent the convergence of technology and the surveillance state with a consumer culture that encourages us to conceptualize our identities through market logic—each of us entrepreneurs within our own lifestyle brands.
On our latest episode, we spoke with Anuli Akanegbu (@anuliwashere), anthropologist & NYU doctoral student, about the ris...
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March 4, 2021 • 45 mins
Cosmetic surgery is one of the fastest growing medical procedures in the United States. According to 2019 figures from the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, the US has the highest number of cosmetic procedures conducted annually, as well as the largest number of practicing cosmetic surgeons, who are among this country's highest paid medical professionals. Cosmetic surgery is also a rapidly growing industry globall...
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December 24, 2020 • 49 mins
For our final episode of 2020, we welcomed a personal hero of both of ours—the trailblazing designer, entrepreneur, and thinker April Walker (@iamaprilwalker), who in the past three decades has been instrumental in shaping the industry and aesthetic category we now call “streetwear.”
In 1987, Walker launched her custom clothing boutique, Fashion in Effect, out of her own home. The following year, she opened her first shop on Green...
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August 20, 2020 • 55 mins
As mega media companies merge, and social media platforms siphon us into echo chambers, independent content creation remains one of the most empowering aspects of our current moment. Those with access to a computer and wifi connection can develop and distribute their own media - and point of view - with a sense of urgency, creativity and scale that was once thought to be unimaginable.
@lifewithjrdn is a writer, curator of the ...
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August 3, 2020 • 48 mins
It is impossible to separate the workings of the art world – and what these institutions deem valuable — with the compounding racist, sexist, and classist ideas that run through American society. For artists who identify with the pan-ethnic category of Latinx, institutional marginalization in the contemporary art world brings forth urgent questions around the politics of identity, the marketing of ethnicity, and the future of arts ...
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July 3, 2020 • 58 mins
Tech is one of the biggest, fastest changing, and most in-demand industries in terms both of services and of jobs. It is also a fraught and largely yet-to-be traversed territory, that comes with many critical and even existential questions, from AI and automation to privacy and surveillance. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the role of technology in our lives into high relief, while also forcing us to totally reimagine the workpla...
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June 26, 2020 • 52 mins
Over the past few weeks, starting in Minneapolis and spreading across the US and the globe, people have taken to the streets to express their fury, grief and immense collective frustration at a broken system built upon genocide, exploitation, racial capitalism and police brutality—a system that has resisted the same demands for change over generations.
We are in the midst of an enormous cultural shift in the ongoing struggle for l...
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May 11, 2020 • 66 mins
We are all being watched. From our phones to our Facebook activity, our data is being collected—and, in many cases, sold—to target us with ads, predict our identities and interests, determine our credit worthiness, and even evaluate our propensity for commiting crimes.
In the midst of a crucial moment in conversations about surveillance and public “safety,” we talked with Sareeta Amrute, associate professor of anthropology at the ...
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April 21, 2020 • 57 mins
“Diversity”—in particular, the lack of it—has become a buzzword in the past two decades, especially within the realms of education, entertainment, and corporate America. Companies and institutions alike are spending millions of dollars on programs to make their ranks more inclusive and reflective of ever-shifting demographics. Yet, as journalist and professor Pamela Newkirk (@ptnewkirk) argues, diversity remains “conspicuously lack...
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