UCL Institute of Advanced Studies

Vron Ware and Jim Scown join Lara Choksey for a conversation about the histories that connect soil to colonialism and imperialism, and why these connections matter for agricultural production now and in the future. Vron and Jim reflect on links between militarism and the English countryside, online far-right content and the decline of rural mental health services, and what nineteenth-century soil science might tell us about national identity. Discussing Vron’s book, Return of a Native (Repeater 2022), and their shared interest in the organic chemist Justus von Liebig, the conversation addresses the many scales operating in our sense of the local, from the parochial to the planetary.

Clive Chijioke Nwonka is joined by George the Poet. George is a spoken word artist, poet, rapper, podcast host and author, who has gained a following of over millions through his commentary and creative work addressing systemic injustice in the UK. Here, we discuss his latest book, Track Record, a fascinating memoir in intellectual exploration of race, belonging, music and injustice. Throughout this podcast, they’ll be discussing George’s latest book, its themes, their shared experiences growing up in North West London, and some of the ideas that formed and shaped George’s writing and intellectual work.

Lara Choksey welcomes Ben Woodard and Camille Crichlow for a conversation on scientific racism, drawing together the work of evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould and decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter. Focusing on two key works, Gould's The Mismeasure of Man (1981) that debunks the statistical methods and cultural beliefs of biological determinism, and Wynter's open letter to her colleagues on the 1992 Los Angeles Race Riots, 'No Humans Involved' (1994), the discussion ranges across fudged data, AI facial surveillance, the pseudo-science of white supremacy, and why a concept of the human beyond the purely biological matters. Ben Woodard is an affiliated fellow at the ICI in Berlin. He received his PhD in Theory and Criticism from Western University in 2016. He regularly lectures at the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, the School of Materialist Research, and the New Centre for Research and Practice. He has two forthcoming books: Uninhabited: Science Fiction and the Decolonial (Zero Books) and F.H. Bradley and the History of Philosophy: Animating a Lost Idealism (Edinburgh University Press). Camille Crichlow is a PhD candidate at the UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation. Her research interrogates how the historical and socio-cultural narrative of race manifests in contemporary algorithmic surveillance technologies. Her PhD project traces the historical expansion of biometric facial surveillance, considering both its present and historical iterations within evolving regimes of racial thinking. Lara Choksey is Lecturer in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures in UCL English, and Faculty Associate in the UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre. Transcript available here: www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisati…on-alexandre-white www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/

Gala Rexer and a group of Race, Ethnicity, and Postcolonial Studies master students, Aisha Rana-Deshmukh, Gabriel Rahman, Julia Snow, and Alex Eaglestone, welcome Alexandre White, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University and author of Epidemic Orientalism (Stanford University Press, 2023). Dr. White discusses health and illness through the lens of racial and sexual boundaries in Victorian and contemporary horror and figures of the monstrous, the role of health regulations in the making of racial difference in the Middle East, and a humanistic approach to sociology and history. Transcript available here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/transcript-conversation-alexandre-white www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/

The UCL Gender and Feminism Research Network (GFRN) and qUCL present a conversation with Rahul Rao, Reader in International Political Thought at the University of St Andrews, and inclusive heritage specialist Sean Curran. On 14 May 2024, Rao gave the GFRN and qUCL joint annual lecture titled 'The Libidinal Lives of Statues'. In this episode, Rao and Curran expand on the central question of the lecture: what is it about statues that has spooked people in the past enough to arouse in them the impulse to destroy. Standing in front of the Gandhi statue in Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, London they reflect on why statues have become the ground on which struggles around caste and race are played out and why Gandhi statues in particular have become objects of contestation despite the common association of Gandhi as an anti-colonial figure. They move on to talk about statues as gifts from one country to another and whether it is violence to damage, deface or removing a statue. Above the whole conversation lingers the question: what is the future of statues - have they become obsolete? ****** Rahul Rao is Reader in International Political Thought in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews and the author of Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (2020) and Third World Protest: Between Home and the World (2010). He is currently writing a book about statues. Sean Curran is an inclusive heritage specialist with 17 years of experience working in historic houses, libraries, archives and museums. Their PhD at UCL Institute of Education was about LGBTQ+ heritage, and they curated the first ever LGBT History Month exhibition at a National Trust property. Rao and Curran are introduced by Alex Hyde, Associate Professor in Gender Studies and Co-Director of the Gender and Feminism Research Network at UCL. The episode was produced by Marthe Lisson, Editor of Think Pieces.

In this second episode on Indigenous Ecologies, IAS postdoctoral fellows Olivia Arigho-Stiles and Adriana Suarez Delucchi are in conversation with Nayanika Mathur, Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at Wolfson College, Oxford University. Mathur's research is interested in the anthropology of politics, development, environment, law, human-animal studies, and research methods. She is the author of Paper Tiger: Law Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India, which addresses everyday bureaucratic life on the Himalayan borderland. Her second book, Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene (University of Chicago Press, 2021) is the starting point for this episode’s conversation. Arigho-Stiles, Suarez and Mathur embark on a discuss the term 'anthropocene', conservation practices and its bureaucratic challanges, including the impossibility of applying Western conservation practices to Indian species (and for that matter, non-Western natural environments more broadly). ****** Olivia Arigho-Stiles and Adriana Suarez were postdoctoral research fellows at the Institute of Advanced Studies in 2023. Arigho-Stiles is an interdisciplinary researcher of Indigenous histories and the rural world in Bolivia, focussing on Bolivian Indigenous-campesino movements. She is a lecturer in Latin American studies at the University of Essex. Suarez Delucchi is a geographer working on natural resource management institutions at different scales in contested environments. Her work seeks to identify, address and challenge the marginalisation of rural and Indigenous groups from dominant management arrangements. Together, they co-edited a special issue of the IAS online review Think Pieces which you can read here: The episode was produced by Marthe Lisson, editor of Think Pieces.

In this first episode on Indigenous Ecologies, IAS postdoctoral fellows Olivia Arigho-Stiles and Adriana Suarez Delucchi are in conversation with Indigenous K’iche’ Maya scholar and activist Emil’ Keme. Keme is professor in the English Department at Emory University, Atlanta. His teaching and research focus on contemporary Indigenous literatures and social movements, Central American-American literatures and cultures, and postcolonial and subaltern studies theory. He is a co-founding member of the binational Maya anti-colonial collective, Ix’balamquej Junajpu Wunaq’. He is also the author of the book Le Maya Q’atzij/Our Maya Word. Poetics of Resistance in Guatemala (2021) that is the starting point for this episode’s conversation. Arigho-Stiles, Suarez and Keme embark on a discussion about the relationship between poetry and resistance, the right to exist for Maya peoples and the struggle to keep their languages alive. They touch upon the idea of plurinationality and the ethos of translating. ****** Olivia Arigho-Stiles and Adriana Suarez were postdoctoral research fellows at the Institute of Advanced Studies in 2023. Arigho-Stiles is an interdisciplinary researcher of Indigenous histories and the rural world in Bolivia, focussing on Bolivian Indigenous-campesino movements. She is a lecturer in Latin American studies at the University of Essex. Suarez Delucchi is a geographer working on natural resource management institutions at different scales in contested environments. Her work seeks to identify, address and challenge the marginalisation of rural and Indigenous groups from dominant management arrangements. Together, they co-edited a special issue of the IAS online review Think Pieces which you can read here: https://thinkpieces-review.co.uk/indigenous-ecologies-environmental-crisis/ The episode was produced by Marthe Lisson, editor of Think Pieces.

Zoltán Kékesi, cultural historian at the Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at University College London, is in conversation with Neil Gregor, Professor of Modern European History at Southampton University. They talk about the centrality of music in Nazi ideology and its “affective legacies”. How do the ways change in which different generations of listeners hear certain pieces of music that were composed and performed during the war? Have they changed at all and if so, what does it tell us? ****** Zoltán Kékesi's research evolves around “Final Account: Third Reich Testimonies”, a collection of interviews by British documentary filmmaker Luke Holland. Between 2008 and 2017, Holland interviewed German and Austrian, non-Jewish men and women who as children and adolescents had joined the Hitler Youth or League of German Girls. To trigger memories, he asked interviewees to sing songs of their childhood. Even when they refused to sing, songs took interviewees back in time and with the songs resurfaced experiences and personal stories of past times. His essay “A Pandora’s Box: The Horst Wessel Song in the Collection ‘Final Account: Third Reich Testimonies’” is available to read here: https://compromised-identities.org/musical-memories/ Neil Gregor has worked extensively on the cultural history of music in twentieth century Germany. His book, The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany, is forthcoming with The University of Chicago Press. The episode was produced by Marthe Lisson, editor of Think Pieces, and supported by the https://pearsfoundation.org.uk/

Zoltán Kékesi, cultural historian at the Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at University College London, is in conversation with Kelly Jakubowski, Associate Professor in Music Psychology at Durham University, to talk about the psychology of musical memories. They discuss how music shapes our memories, especially when music was experienced in the context of Nazi organisations and events. Why does music tend to evoke much more positive than negative emotions regardless of the emotion the music is expressing? And what is the ‘reminiscence bump’? ****** Zoltán Kékesi's research evolves around “Final Account: Third Reich Testimonies”, a collection of interviews by British documentary filmmaker Luke Holland. Between 2008 and 2017, Holland interviewed German and Austrian, non-Jewish men and women who as children and adolescents had joined the Hitler Youth or League of German Girls. To trigger memories, he asked interviewees to sing songs of their childhood. Even when they refused to sing, songs took interviewees back in time and with the songs resurfaced experiences and personal stories of past times. His essay “A Pandora’s Box: The Horst Wessel Song in the Collection ‘Final Account: Third Reich Testimonies’” is available to read here: https://compromised-identities.org/musical-memories/ Kelly Jakubowski’s research examines a range of topics within music psychology and empirical musicology, including memory for music, music-evoked autobiographical memory, musical imagery and imagination, earworms, absolute pitch, musical timing and movement, and cross-cultural music perception. She co-leads Durham’s Music and Science Lab, an interdisciplinary research group united by interests in empirical, computational, and biological approaches to understanding music listening and music making, and she is the Co-Director of Durham’s Centre for Research into Inner Experience. The episode was produced by Marthe Lisson, editor of Think Pieces, and supported by the https://pearsfoundation.org.uk/

Gala Rexer welcomes Xine Yao, Associate Professor at UCL and author of Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke University Press, 2021). Reflecting on how Disaffected has travelled as a book, a theory, and a method over the past two years, Xine speaks about what thinking though and with the fields of Black studies, Indigenous studies, Asian diasporic studies, and queer of colour critique does to our understanding of race, gender, and affect, and how we approach literary and cultural text as theory. They discuss how their citational practices shape teaching and scholarship, and explore the modes of affective disobedience that engender counter-intimacies and new forms of decolonial solidarity. Transcript available here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/podcasts/transcript-conversation-xine-yao www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/

Gala Rexer welcomes Akwugo Emejulu, Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick and author of Fugitive Feminism (Silver Press, 2022). Discussing the figure of the fugitive from a Black feminist perspective, Akwugo addresses questions about solidarity and coalitional work, strategies of counter-storytelling and playing with new forms of writing, and discusses the difficulties of staying in the liminal space of fugitivity as a mode of experimentation, ambivalence, and disidentification from the figure of the Human. Transcript available here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/conversation-akwugo-emejulu www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/

Luke de Noronha welcomes Musab Younis, senior lecturer in politics and international relations at Queen Mary, University of London, and author of On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought (University of California Press, 2022). Musab traces the themes and arguments of his important new book, which examines the reverberations of anticolonial ideas that spread across the Atlantic between the two world wars. Musab gathers the work of writers and poets, journalists and editors, historians and political theorists whose insights speak urgently to contemporary movements for liberation. Transcript available here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/conversation-musab-younis www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/

Maya Mikdashi is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and a lecturer in the program in Middle East Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. In conversation we discuss Maya's first book, Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon. Transcript available here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/conversation-maya-mikdashi www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/

Luke de Noronha welcomes Maurice Stierl, researcher at Osnabrück University in Germany and author of Migrant Resistance in Contemporary Europe (Routledge, 2019). Maurice describes the varied patterns of movement and militarisation at the sea borders of Europe: the Atlantic, Central Mediterranean, Aegean and Channel crossings. In both his intellectual and activist work, Maurice joins those demanding free movement for all and an end to Europe’s border violence. This conversation charts those urgent political struggles by and for people on the move.  Transcript: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/transcript-conversation-maurice-stierl This conversation was recorded on 15th December 2022. Speakers: Dr Luke de Noronha, Lecturer in Race, Ethnicity & Postcolonial Studies, SPRC // Maurice Stierl, researcher at Osnabrück University in Germany Producers: Dr Luke de Noronha and Lucy Stagg Editors: Kaissa Karhu www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/podcasts

Gala Rexer welcomes Françoise Vergès, franco-Reunionnese activist, independent curator, and public educator, to talk about her most recent books, A Feminist Theory of Violence (2022), The Wombs of Women. Race, Capital, Feminism (2020,) and A Decolonial Feminism (2019). Transcript: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/transcripts/transcript-conversation-francoise-verges This conversation was recorded on 25th October 2022. Speakers: Gala Rexer, postdoctoral fellow at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre // Françoise Vergès, political scientist, historian, film producer, independent curator, activist and public educator.  Producer:  Julia Thomas and Lucy Stagg Editors: Amie Liebowitz and Kaissa Karhu www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/podcasts

Karimah Ashadu joins the SPRC podcast to discuss two of her recent films, 'Brown Goods' (2020) and 'Plateau' (2022), on the labour and labourers that sustain informal economies of waste disposal and tin mining in Germany and Nigeria. 'Plateau' (excerpt), 2021-2022 HD digital film, colour with sound - two channel https://youtu.be/d8oOp-dX6hk courtesy the artist and Fondazione in between Art Film 'Brown Goods' (excerpt), 2020 HD digital film, colour with sound - single channel https://youtu.be/4RJxFRBjqws courtesy the artist Transcript: www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/transcript-conversation-karimah-ashadu This conversation was recorded on 2nd September 2022 Speakers: Lara Choksey is Lecturer in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures at UCL English, and Faculty Associate at the UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre. // Karimah Ashadu is a British-born Nigerian artist and recipient of the 2020 ars viva Prize for Visual Arts Producer and editor: Kaissa Karhu www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/podcasts

Coretta Phillips, Professor of Criminology and Social Policy, joins Clive Nwonka for a conversation on race, criminal justice and social policy. Coretta discusses ethnographically capturing both the organic experiences of multi-culture and the more structured and governed forms of multiculturalism taking place within the prison system, her recent work on criminal justice experiences of Gypsy and Traveller communities in England since 1960, and the complacency and the complicity in racist practices in higher education. Transcript: www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/transcript-conversation-coretta-phillips This conversation was recorded on 20th May 2022 Speakers: Clive Nwonka, Lecturer in Film, Culture and Society at UCL’s Institute of Advanced Studies // Coretta Phillips, Professor of Criminology and Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science Producer: Kaissa Karhu Editor: Amie Liebowitz and Kaissa Karhu www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/podcasts

Professor Gregory Thompson explains more about the emphasis of the BA Creative Arts and Humanities programme on careers and the future of work.

Medical anthropologist, James Doucet-Battle, joins us to talk about his book, Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk and Type 2 Diabetes. Discussing the importance of delinking race from risk in order to tell a more holistic, anthropological story of what it means to be Black, James brings autobiographical elements into his work and explores the relationship between race, gender and ancestry, the mapping of Henrietta Lacks’ HeLa cells and his own journey into Black feminist thought. Transcript: www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/transcript-conversation-james-doucet-battle This conversation was recorded on 9th June 2022 Speakers: Paige Patchin, Lecturer in Race, Ethnicity & Postcolonial Studies, UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre // James Doucet-Battle, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz // Alya Harding, Elinor Gibbs and Liz Kombate, MA students in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies at UCL Producer and Editor: Kaissa Karhu www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/podcasts

Luke de Noronha welcomes Kojo Koram, Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck School of Law and author of 'Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire' (John Murray Press, 2022). Discussing his recent book, Kojo addresses questions around 20th century decolonisation, neoliberalism and national sovereignty, tying these threads to today’s spiralling global wealth inequality, accelerating climate crisis, migration and bordering, and the precarity expanding across so many different sectors in our society. Transcript: www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/transcript-conversation-kojo-koram This conversation was recorded on 15th April 2022 Speakers: Luke de Noronha, Lecturer in Race, Ethnicity & Postcolonial Studies, UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre // Kojo Koram, Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck School of Law, University of London Producer: Kaissa Karhu Editors: Anita Langary and Kaissa Karhu www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/podcasts