UCL Institute of Advanced Studies

Our latest Short Takes podcast is provided by Luke de Noronha, author of Deporting Black Britons: Portraits of deportation to Jamaica. “An ethnography of deportation, and therefore an ethnography of separation, absence and exile”, Luke talks us through the motivation for his research and its contribution to our collective understanding and shared struggles. Transcript: www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-raciali...

The walk will start at UCL, home to the oldest Department of Dutch in the Anglophone world (founded in 1919) and host of one of the largest Dutch libraries in the country. We will walk past Gerard Reve’s former living place, when he unsuccessfully tried to establish himself on the English market in the 1950s, the Elizabeth Anderson Gallery with its connections to Dutch and British feminism, the Eu...

In this podcast Ruth Austin takes us on a ramble around Soho taking Jean Cocteau’s visit in November 1959 as the starting point. Cocteau was in London to paint the chapel of Notre Dame de France in Leicester Place and to oversee a performance of Oedipus Rex with his long-time collaborator, Stravinsky. Ruth Austin is a senior teaching fellow in SELCS, Department of French. She is also co-founder of...

The series closes by visiting a shopping centre which is an important and vibrant meeting place for the Latin American community in London. Nonetheless, the surrounding architecture leads to discussion of how the city is changing, and whether we should think of it as regeneration or gentrification. Further reading: * Elephant and Castle Partnership: https://www.elephantandcastle.org.uk/ * Latin El...

Visiting St. Patrick’s Church and the shrine to the Virgen de Guadalupe provide the stimulus for reflection on the legacy of colonialism and Catholicism in Latin America. Drawing on a range of examples, the relationship between the two is shown to be rather more complicated than it may at first appear. Further reading: * On the history of St. Patrick’s Church: https://stpatricksoho.org/about/histo...

Following a brief introduction to the Senate House library, this episode discusses the British Museum. Reflecting first on the ethics of collecting artefacts which belong to other cultures, the discussion then turns to some of the ways in which the Museum has left an indelible mark on Latin America. Further reading: * Senate House Latin American Collections: https://london.ac.uk/senate-house-libra...

Gradually moving South, the next stop is 23 Park Road, the one time residence of General José de San Martín, The Liberator. The presence of numerous heroes of South American independence in London is discussed, as is the temporal nature of the contemporary city. Further reading: * David Bushnell (1985), ‘The Independence of Spanish South America’, in Leslie Bethell (ed.), The Cambridge History of...

The podcasts open by viewing the expanse of London from the vantage point on Parliament Hill in Hamsptead Heath. The commanding perspective leads to reflections on the power dynamics at play in our representations of space, as illustrated by Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres García. Further reading: * Michel de Certeau (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: Universit...

This podcast outlines the London experiences of Italian writer and director Lorenza Mazzetti (1928-2020). After a traumatic childhood marked by loss and tragedy, Mazzetti arrived in England in the early 1950s and became a student at the Slade School of Fine Art. During her time at UCL, she made two films - K (1954) and Together (1956) - that contributed to the birth of the Free Cinema movement and...

John Hyman is Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic. You can find out more about him here (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/philosophy/people/professor-john-hyman). The great English landscape painter John Constable lived in Hampstead for the last ten years of his life, and painted a series of beautiful skyscapes—pure studies of clouds—on Hampstead Heath. In this podcast, I talk about his paint...

Matthew Beaumont is a Professor of English at UCL and the author of Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London (2015) and The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City (2020). This podcast leads listeners into the streets of Bloomsbury and nearby St. Giles, where it reveals that, in the mid-nineteenth century, Charles Dickens, feeling lost and lonely, roamed the city at night, con...

Acclaimed scholar of race, gender and law, Dorothy E. Roberts discusses the harm and health inequities produced by structural racism, with race correction in medicine disqualifying black people from specialised care, and evident collaboration of doctors and lawyers in promoting juridical ideas about race. Addressing a violent policing system that can be traced back to slave patrols and black codes...

Tamar Garb welcomes Jacob Dlamini for a conversation on the limitations of racialisations and categorisations, the problematic ethnicising of blackness, and understanding the centrality of race while also understanding that race doesn't explain everything. Jacob speaks on his work exploring the role of collaborators during apartheid, and how the traumas of the children of collaborators is importan...

Gail Lewis, psychotherapist and Visiting Senior Fellow at LSE, joins us for a conversation on Britain’s racial formation; speaking across the generational lines; and how music captures life and sustains us. Gail offers her psychoanalysis on black lives ‘mattering’ and how “being present to the aliveness, and the moments of deadening, and the moments of possibility, even in silence, really teaches...

Welcome to the fourteenth podcast in our series ‘Life in the Time of Coronavirus’. Here Ama de-Graft Aikins, British Academy Global Professor in the Institute of Advanced Studies at UCL, and a social psychologist researching chronic illness and experiences of care in African contexts, considers how artists are shaping current understandings of Covid-19 in Ghana. She situates contemporary responses...

Welcome to the fifteenth podcast in our series ‘Life in the Time of Coronavirus’, with Lonnie G. Bunch III, Secretary of the Smithsonian. In conversation with Tamar Garb, Director of the IAS, Lonnie discusses the impact of the current conjunction of coronavirus and Black Lives Matter in the collections and public programmes of the Smithsonian; the specific role of the National Museum of African Am...

Paul Gilroy is joined by George the Poet, for a conversation on poetry, podcasting and storytelling; looking at how hybridity and sociological thought have impacted George’s process of intuition and priorities in advocating for his community. George also discusses how, moving forward, these priorities are evolving around communication systems, value creation and academia. Transcript: www.ucl.ac.uk...

Our latest Short Take is provided by Marlene L. Daut, Professor of African Diaspora Studies at the Woodson Institute, historian of Haiti, and an important voice in the burgeoning historical archive of neglected political and cultural dynamics of the Haitian revolution. Here Marlene talks to us about a forthcoming anthology she has co-edited with Grégory Pierrot and Marion Rohrleitner, titled An An...

Welcome to the thirteenth podcast in our series ‘Life in the Time of Coronavirus’. Here Ramon Amaro, Lecturer in the History of Art Department at UCL, discusses the development of algorithms by IT giants in relation to Covid 19. Amaro considers the logics by which these algorithms work, as well as the perceived need for massive data collection and rapid response. He also looks at the associated pr...

Welcome to the twelfth podcast in our series ‘Life in the Time of Coronavirus’. Here Dr Temitope Abisoye Noah, Visiting Research Fellow in the IAS, provides a personal meditation on the analogies between Coronavirus and racism, which she argues, spreads like a virus, and may exist in the population even while carriers can be unaware of the dangers they present. Do not victims turn to social distan...

David Theo Goldberg, Director of the University of California’s Humanities Research Institute, offers his insight about the state of critical thinking around race and racism, and the effacement of historicality in favour of presentism; and responds to the sanction of comparativisms and relationalities as “racism anywhere is not possible to be upheld without racisms elsewhere”. Transcript: www.ucl....

Welcome to the eleventh podcast in our series ‘Life in the Time of Coronavirus’. Having been asked to speculate on the concepts of immunity and immunisation, Peg Rawes, Professor of Architecture and Philosophy at the Bartlett School of Architecture, thinks about the use of graphic technologies to predict, project and ostensibly protect. Looking at Buckminster Fullers problematic dymaxion maps, the...

Paul Gilroy is joined by Courtenay Griffiths QC, distinguished criminal defence advocate with 40 years of experience, for a conversation on racism within the criminal justice system and its disproportionate effect on black people, and the need to confront patterns of criminalisation, the hierarchy within institutions and reforming education in relation to this. Transcript: www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-rac...

Suresh Grover, Director of the anti-racist grassroots group The Monitoring Group, joins us to discuss his work and campaigning in the struggle against racism in Britain, the notion of black as a political colour and the vision of an inclusive political culture, and the importance of exposing the lived experiences of black communities in addressing institutional and state racism. Transcript: www.uc...

Welcome to the tenth podcast in our series ‘Life in the Time of Coronavirus’ in which Pushpa Arabindoo, Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at UCL, explores the moral, social and pragmatic implications of lockdown. She looks, especially, to the specific case of the Koyambedu market complex in Chennai, dependent on crowds for its functioning but also thought to be the hotspot of a th...