Sarah Stillman

speaker

394 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 28 Jul

Sarah Stillman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Critic and Her Publics · Sarah Stillman · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

I knew I wanted to do something tied to the reality that the U.S.

was in two wars at the point in time that I graduated.

But I don't know if any of you all relate to this.

I also was so intimidated by feeling like, okay, I'm not really qualified to step in here, even to do like deep dive investigative reporting in Iraq.

I felt like, okay, I don't speak Arabic.

I don't have a deep and nuanced understanding of Iraqi history.

And I don't just want to be someone parachuting into a context I'm not sufficiently equipped for.

So I thought about another thing Bruce said, which was like thinking about your comparative advantage in any given terrain.

And, um,

I have family in the audience.

I come from a family of labor organizers.

And so they've always taught me to think about like, where does the working part of the equation reside?

What are the experiences of working people in any given storytelling ecosystem?

And so when it came to the Iraq war, again, I'd seen some headlines about a group of Nepalese workers who

didn't even know they were in iraq literally were on a bus thinking that they had just been recruited to go work in like fancy salons or hotels in i believe it was jordan and dubai some other places in the middle east and it turned out they were actually en route to work on a u.s military base doing logistics work and the bus was hijacked by suny insurgents and they were executed to basically try to get the us to stop using so many foreign workers to support its logistics backbone of its wars

And that was another one of those times I saw a headline.

I was like, that's really wild.

Like, who are these people?

And I started digging and found it's like, not just a few people, it's like 60,000 some people that the U S had brought in from Sierra Leone, Uganda, Sri Lanka, all around the world to do these jobs and often people who were lied to.

So that became another example of a story that was kind of at the margins of a conventional war story, but gave me an entry point.

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