UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre Podcast

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.Speakers: George the Poet, spoken-word artist, poet and podcast host of Have You Heard George’s Podcast // Dr Clive Chijioke Nwonka, Associate Professor in Film, Culture and Society and Faculty Associate in the UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre.

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.This conversation was recorded on 2 July 2024.Speakers: Dr Lara Choksey, Ben Woodard and Camille CrichlowProducer: Dr Lara Choksey and Kaissa KarhuEditors: Kaissa Karhu 

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.This conversation was recorded on 17th June 2024. Speakers: Dr Gala Rexer, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, University of Warwick // Dr Alexandre White, Johns Hopkins University // students of the MA in REPS cohort: Aisha Rana-Deshmukh, Gabriel Rahman, Julia Snow, and Alex EaglestoneProducer: Dr Gala Rexer and Kaissa KarhuEditors:  Kaissa Karhu 

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. This conversation was recorded on 19th July 2023. Speakers: Dr Gala Rexer, Lecturer at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre // Dr Xine Yao, University College LondonProducer: Dr Gala Rexer and Trisha HartEditors:  Kaissa Karhu 

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. This conversation was recorded on 6th July 2023. Speakers: Dr Gala Rexer, Lecturer at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre // Professor Akwugo Emejulu, University of WarwickProducer: Dr Gala Rexer and Trisha HartEditors:  Kaissa Karhu 

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.  This conversation was recorded on 13th January 2023.  Speakers: Dr Luke de Noronha, Lecturer in Race, Ethnicity & Postcolonial Studies Producer:  Dr Luke de Noronha Editors: Kaissa Karhu

Gala Rexer welcomes Maya Mikdashi, Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Lecturer in the Middle East Studies Program at Rutgers University, to talk about her book Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism and the State in Lebanon (Stanford, 2022). Maya reflects on the multi-disciplinary genealogy of her book, and describes what it means to take different fields (anthropology, gender studies, and Middle East studies) seriously. This conversation also engages with the relationship between geopolitics, epistemology, and methodology, and with the making and unmaking of categories when we ask the same question from different locations. Maya also talks about doing ethnography and archival work, and our own investment in meaning and the desire to fix truth as scholars.   This conversation was recorded on 27th January 2023. Speakers: Dr Gala Rexer, postdoctoral fellow at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre // Maya Mikdashi, Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University.   Producer: Lucy Stagg and Dr Gala Rexer Editors: Kaissa Karhu