Faculty Spotlight: Alix Olson

Michelle Valigursky • March 24, 2025

Oxford College Associate Professor of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) Alix Olson serves as co-director of Emory’s Studies in Sexualities program. Olson is an accomplished spoken word artist who has traveled the world to launch important conversations about what it means to be a good human being. At Oxford, Olson is inspired by her thoughtful students and colleagues.

Oxford News: You are an educator in social justice, art, and politics. How do these three distinct interest areas inform your views?

Alix Olson: Questions surrounding how to make a more ethical, care-centered, and nurturing world, how to create more livable lives–for us, for other human and non-human animals, and for the earth itself–are at the heart of my work as a political theorist and feminist scholar, as a teacher, and as a poet. I feel lucky to work in an interdisciplinary field like WGSS which allows me to bring these various parts together, as co-collaborators, in my broader commitment to social justice.

Oxford News: Your poetry has been widely published and was even featured in Showtime’s The L Word: Generation Q. How does this form of expression engage with readers?

Alix Olson: American writer and philosopher Audre Lorde wrote, “there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.” Poetry shares an experience of being human in this world. It is never original in the sense that no experiences truly are (and this indeed is what connects us), but poetry allows us to reach out for those connections in intimate and experimental ways.

“Left Lane was produced by a NYC-based filmmaker pal (Sam Farinella) and was featured at international film festivals in New Zealand, Canada, Sweden, Ireland, Israel, France, Australia, Germany, and Hungary, as well as more than twenty U.S. film festivals.” Olson noted that the award-winning film’s openings “allowed us to connect with other artist-activists around the world.” Available on Amazon.

I recently published some poems in academic journals, which felt like a profound cross-hatching of my intellectual and political worlds. My sense is that we should move increasingly in this direction, since some of our most astute analyses come from our artists. In general, I think we need much more collaboration between activists, artists, and political thinkers who are concerned with making a more just world. Part of why I put together courses like Queer and Feminist Art and Politics is to combat this “silo-ing effect.”

Oxford News: Tell us about your documentary Left Lane: On the Road with Alix Olson.

Alix Olson: Left Lane is a feature film about my life as a touring spoken word artist, which was my full-time work from 1998-2008, and follows me (sometimes with my band) for about two years. The project captured a moment in which indie political artists were touring in deeply and intentionally grassroots ways to document the social movements of which we were a part; in this way, it’s a bit of a time capsule. Scenes include shows, protests, and interviews, and some pretty embarrassing shenanigans.

Oxford News: You have three albums and regularly appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, Air America with Rachel Maddow, and NPR. Most fascinating experience?

Alix Olson: I have had so many treasured experiences as a spoken word artist, including performing throughout South Africa as part of their celebration of legalized gay marriage; teaching poetry workshops in the Rikers’ Island prison system to incarcerated women–and beginning to grasp poetry as a liberatory praxis; and, in general, touring domestically and internationally during moments of major political turmoil, and feeling the solidarity, connective tissue, and radical hope that live shows can facilitate.

“My classes take up all kinds of questions about who we are as contemporary subjects, the kinds of logics that inform our ways of being in the world, and how we might want to move forward differently.”

Oxford News: You have shared that “female spoken word artists have become the spokeswomen for a new generation.” Can you share why the women leaders in your book Word Warriors inspired you?

Alix Olson recalls her early days on the road as a touring spoken word artist. “Seemingly mundane experiences were bursting with risk and possibility: long nights of recording and assembling my first poetry cassette tapes with my queer crew in our little Brooklyn living room; touring the U.S. in a red cargo van, with a tattered atlas to get from gig to gig, getting beautifully lost on back roads, and arriving in tiny towns I had never heard of–only to forge powerful connections with those places and the people who lived there.”

Alix Olson: As far as I know, Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution was the first U.S. anthology of women spoken word artists. My aim was to document a vibrant movement of feminist artists doing crucial political work in a domain which had predominantly elevated men’s voices. Black feminist theorist and cultural critic bell hooks said in her endorsement of the book: “Hear it, listen in, let it resurrect you, let it take you from the deep silence into the comfort of soulful sound.” This description captures how the spoken word movement, particularly in its inception, invited people to puncture the status quo with joyful insurgence, intersectional silence-breaking, and in collectivity–which, for me, is also at the heart of feminism.

Oxford News: In your new book The Ends of Resistance: Making and Unmaking Democracy you and your co-author Alex Zamalin looked at 40 years of resistance under neoliberalism and have argued that true resistance to racial neoliberalism must instead be deeply anti-restorative. Can you help us understand this concept?

Alix Olson: The Ends of Resistance was sparked by our shared concern for the ubiquitous post-Trump (round one) cry for a “return to normal,” or the so-called restoration of U.S. democracy. As political scientists alert to the ways in which “normal” neoliberal institutions and practices have increasingly wrought desperation and despair, while decimating conditions for collective resistance, we understood these calls as deeply ahistorical. Ultimately, we argue that we cannot rely upon political and economic elites, who are not only disinterested in active democracy but actively undermining it, to save us. Instead, we should be paying attention to the “unruly world-building” of grassroots social movements who are “doing” democracy in experimental and meaningful ways.

Oxford News: You are working on several new books and grant-funded research projects. What’s coming next for you?

Alix Olson: My co-edited book, titled The Arts of Anti-Racism: Aesthetics, Race, and Contemporary Political Theory, will be published by SUNY Press in December 2025. So, we’ll plan some book release events around that. Currently, I’m completing two book manuscripts. The first, The Failed Promise of Resilience, critically examines the ways in which “resilience” is taken up as a form of neoliberal governance and is under contract with Columbia University Press. The other is co-written with Africana Studies scholar Alex Zamalin and is a brief intellectual history of the concept of liberation and will be published by Princeton University Press. Beyond these projects, I’ll continue developing our WGSS curriculum, brainstorming fantastic speakers and artists to bring to campus, and searching out collaborative possibilities with faculty, staff, and students!