UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre Podcast

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 

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 

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.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 GermanyProducers: Dr Luke de Noronha and Lucy StaggEditor: Kaissa Karhu

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). Françoise discusses how women’s rights have been deployed in the service of the carceral state, and how a decolonial feminism needs to reimagine a collective politics of protection against violence, pollution, and exhaustion outside of the nation-state form and capital. Françoise calls upon us to strike, unionize, and fight back, to rethink the family, reproduction, and care outside of racialized frameworks of security and deservingness, and to nourish comrade- and friendship, revolutionary love, and inter-generational transmission of feminist thought.

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), 2021-2022HD digital film, colour with sound - two channelwww.youtube.com/watch?v=d8oOp-dX6hkcourtesy the artist and Fondazione in between Art Film Brown Goods (excerpt), 2020HD digital film, colour with sound - single channelwww.youtube.com/watch?v=4RJxFRBjqwscourtesy the artist Transcript: www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/transcript-conversation-karimah-ashadu This conversation was recorded on 2nd September 2022Speakers: 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 ArtsProducer and editor: Kaissa Karhuwww.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 2022Speakers: 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 ScienceProducer: Kaissa KarhuEditors: Amie Liebowitz and Kaissa Karhu www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/podcasts

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 2022Speakers: 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 UCLProducer and Editor: Kaissa Karhuwww.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/podcasts