Transcripts
As of December 20, 2025, Death Panel is supported by 1,991 paid Patreon members. Our goal is to reach 2500 patrons—at which point we can reliably publish full transcripts for every main feed episode as a standard part of the show.
Right now, transcripts are available for select episodes. We are steadily working through the back and current catalog of releases, but our capacity to make the show fully accessible is shaped by material conditions—not a lack of interest or commitment.
Producing accurate transcripts is skilled, time-intensive labor. For Death Panel, that labor is directly shaped by debility and conflicting access needs: Beatrice’s low vision creates specific access requirements around editing and correction that require additional time and coordination. Historically, transcription work has been undervalued and disproportionately pushed on precarious workers under conditions of low pay and assumed flexibility (this landscape is getting much worse and more dire as a result of the proliferation of AI transcription products). We reject that model and are proud to pay our transcript-workers a fair wage.
We are committed to accessibility and to paying our transcript makers for the incredibly hard work of transcribing our dense and long episodes. Reaching 2,500 patreon supporters would make that commitment materially sustainable. Transcripts are not autogenerated. Each one requires skilled listening, editing, and correction by a human being. Your support on patreon directly contributes to our ability to cover this labor consistently, without relying on error-prone auto-transcription or underpaying the disabled workers who make the transcripts.
If you value this show, and want it to become accessible in a way that doesn’t rely on exploited or invisible labor, becoming a patreon supporter is the most direct way to help. Collective support is what can help us turn access from a desire into a promise listeners can depend on.
Join us on Patreon and help fund full transcripts for every episode. <3
Mask Bans Are Everyone’s Fight (08/22/24)
Death Panel podcast hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant, and Jules Gill-Peterson discuss the mask ban passed in Nassau County last week, the latest in a dramatic rise in legislation criminalizing face masks and targeting the Palestine solidarity movement. We look at what happened in the overtly hostile public hearing over the ban, the history of the New York statute that ban proponents want back, and how the threat of mask bans goes far beyond public health: mask bans embolden racist policing; they’re anti-trans; and they target the whole of the left.
Disabled Ecologies w/ Sunaura Taylor (07/08/24)
Death Panel podcast host Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with Sunaura Taylor about how industrial pollution and systemic abandonment produce networks of disability among people, animals, and what she calls “injured landscapes;” how one community in Arizona organized against longstanding environmental pollution from arms manufacturing; and her new book, Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert.
A Death Panel History of 504 (Parts I & II)
Death Panel podcast hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant and Phil Rocco tell (one version of) the story of Section 504, a landmark piece of civil rights legislation for disabled people in the US. In Part One, we look at the politics leading up to the 504 sit-in and how the implementation of Section 504 very nearly didn't happen because of concerns that it would be "too expensive." In Part Two, our story continues with a look at the sit-in action itself—the longest occupation of a federal government building in US history—and the key role played by the Oakland Black Panthers and other groups in assuring the occupation's success.
“No Use to the State” w/ Micah Khater (04/22/24)
Death Panel podcast hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with Micah Khater about the intersection of race, disability, and incarceration in the southern US in the early 20th century, and her work documenting the history of how Black women experienced and theorized disability from within Alabama prisons.
On NPR’s “Wrestling with my husband's fear of getting COVID again” (03/18/24)
Death Panel podcast hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant and Jules Gill-Peterson discuss a recent piece in NPR, “Wrestling with my husband's fear of getting COVID again,” which presents avoiding covid both as the product of unreasonable “anxiety” and as something immunocompromised people should let go of lest their loved ones consider abandoning them.
Massification, Debility, and 40 Years of Crisis in Bhopal w/ Jiya Pandya (05/16/24)
Death Panel podcast hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Jules Gill-Peterson speak with historian Jiya Pandya about how the Bhopal gas leak—often described as the worst industrial disaster in living memory—continues to be an unchecked crisis 40 years later, what it teaches us about how to respond to more recent crises, and how organizers here in the US can get in touch with Bhopal survivor activists who will be coming to the US later this fall.
Refusing to Forget w/ Vicky Osterweil (03/21/24)
Death Panel podcast host Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with Vicky Osterweil about the events we’re encouraged to forget, repress, and reinterpret in order to abet genocide, carcerality, or abandonment to a pandemic, and the power of refusing to forget.
"The Wheelchair-to-Warfare Pipeline" w/ Liz Jackson and Rua Williams (04/11/24)
Death Panel podcast host Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with Liz Jackson and Rua Williams about the history and ongoing practice of design objects ostensibly created for accessibility being repurposed into tools of war.
Legitimate Protest and the Construction of "Reason" w/ Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu (02/29/24)
Death Panel podcast host Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu about attempts to dismiss Aaron Bushnell’s self immolation as mental illness, and why settler colonialism relies so heavily on drawing lines between madness and “reason.”
#N95s4UCSF w/ Alice Wong (02/01/24)
Death Panel podcast host Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with Alice Wong about Alice's campaign to reinstate a mask mandate at UCSF, a hospital system home to a number of physicians who have played an outsized, deleterious, role in advocating for a premature end to covid protections.
Letters from Gaza w/ Danya Qato (01/25/24)
Death Panel podcast host Beatrice Adler-Bolton shares messages from Death Panel listeners in Gaza and speaks with Danya Qato about how the totalizing nature of the genocide of Palestine can't be captured in death and injury statistics alone.
Pathologizing Palestinian Resistance w/ Liat Ben-Moshe and Leah Harris (01/11/23)
Death Panel podcast co-hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Jules Gill-Peterson speak with Liat Ben-Moshe and Leah Harris about how Palestinian resistance and rebellion is pathologized and the importance of transnational disability solidarity with Palestine.
Covid Year Four (12/12/23)
Death Panel podcast co-hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant, Phil Rocco, Jules Gill-Peterson and Abby Cartus present their 2023 year in review, taking a look back at the last year of major social and political developments that worked to normalize covid in 2023.
Body Politics w/ Jasbir Puar
Death Panel podcast hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Jules Gill-Peterson speak with Jasbir Puar about the violent global effects of settler colonialism and how they shape our understanding of what we mean by “disability” and “debility.” We discuss how events like the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the bombings in 2014 are often described through the number of dead, when they also entail mass disablement and mass debilitation, and how colonial occupation itself can be understood through a theory of debility.
This episode was originally released for Death Panel patrons on November 21st 2022. We are re-releasing it today, alongside a new transcript of the conversation, because in the past few weeks we have found Jasbir’s work tremendously useful in understanding the enormity of what’s happening in Gaza.
DP x S23: Resisting Carceral Sanism (Session 3)
Death Panel podcast collaborated with the organizers of the Socialism Conference to put together five sessions at this year’s conference on the political economy of health and disability. In this session, "Resisting Carceral Sanism" Death Panel podcast co-host, Beatrice Adler-Bolton, is joined by criminologist, author and disability theorist, Liat Ben-Moshe, and mad advocate, author and activist, Leah Harris, discuss the increasing wave of policies and legislation—from Eric Adams’ stance on involuntary hospitalization to Gavin Newsom’s Care Courts—that seek to criminalize madness and people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. They also discuss why it is so critical for the left to work against these policies, and how to understand the politics of what Ben-Moshe has termed “carceral sanism.”
Lifetime Care with William Bronston (UNLOCKED)
Death Panel podcast co-hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Phil Rocco speak with lifelong activist Dr. William Bronston about his experiences trying to take down the infamous Willowbrook institution from within as a young doctor, his appeal to replace “long term care” with “lifetime care," and how his work towards deinstitutionalization informs his ongoing advocacy for single payer healthcare.
The ADA as Welfare Reform (08/03/23)
Bea and Jules mark the 33rd anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) with a discussion of just how limited the law is compared with how it's portrayed, how to understand the ADA as part of the broader story of welfare state retrenchment in the 1980s and 1990s, and the broader story of how it got this way.