UCL Institute of Advanced Studies

Robert Reid-Pharr, Professor of African and African American Studies as well as Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University, provides a taster of his eagerly anticipated publication of his major study on James Baldwin. Speaking on Baldwin’s former teacher, Abel Meeropol, writer of 'Strange Fruit' which later became an anthem of the anti-lynching, anti-white supremacis...

Welcome to the ninth podcast in our series ‘Life in the Time of Coronavirus’. This episode, devoted to the concept of ‘immunity’, is longer than usual as we have gathered voices from different disciplines to disentangle the complexity of ‘immunity’ in present times. You will hear from Molopheni Jackson Marakalala, Associate Professor of Infection and Immunity at UCL; Mary C rawlinson, professor of...

This Short Take has been generously provided to us by Suzanne Scafe, co-author of the ground-breaking 1985 book Heart of the Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain, and known for her involvement in supplementary schooling and the Brixton Black Women's Group. In this episode, Suzanne speaks to us about her new work in process and soon for publication, How Literature Matters: An Ethical Reading of Bla...

Nikhil Pal Singh, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at NYU, talks us through ‘the unfinished struggle for democracy’ and the racialised ordering of systems in the United States; the balance of forces of the right and left; and the voice of corporate multiculturalism and celebrity renunciations of white privilege in response to Black Lives Matter. Transcript: www.ucl.ac.uk/racis...

Welcome to the eighth podcast in our series ‘Life in the Time of Coronavirus’. Ann Phoenix, Professor of Psychosocial Studies at UCL, explores five forms of inequity that the coronavirus has heightened. These, she explains, have triggered several social responses or disruptions that can only be understood in an interrelated way, as transformational conjunctions. Music by Smallhaus and the BBC Soun...

Welcome to the seventh episode in our series ‘Life in the Time of Coronavirus’. Here, Zoltán Boldizsár Simon takes up the word and the concept of ‘unprecedented’, repeated now to the point of almost meaninglessness. What, Simon asks, makes something qualify as unprecedented? How is the word use? What are its temporal dimensions? And how does it create a notion of the preevental and the postevental...

Achille Mbembe, author, commentator and philosopher, addresses his recent work The Universal Right to Breathe and Brutalisme in the context of the racial disparity of deaths and racially inflicted violence; speaking on the power of witnessing in preventing others from being expropriated of their breath, and the significance of respiration at the beginning and end of life. Transcript: www.ucl.ac.uk...

Distinguished writer, commentator and American legal scholar, Patricia J. Williams joins Paul Gilroy to talk about the legacies of Critical Race Theory, the eugenic character of racialised governance and the current call to defund the police. Transcript: www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/transcript-conversation-patricia-j-williams This conversation was recorded on 12th June 2020. Apologies for th...

Paul Gilroy and Gary Younge, Professor of Sociology at Manchester University and distinguished journalist, reflect on Mark Twain’s reputed words ‘history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes’, the first political memories that shaped them, and the potential in engaging sympathy and humour critically. Transcript: www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/transcript-conversation-gary-younge This conversatio...

Alondra Nelson, President of the Social Science Research Council in the US and Harold F. Linder Chair in Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, joins us to question who is assumed to be the disposable demographic, and the politics of genetic data and racial biology being used to understand the ‘black body’ during the Covid-19 pandemic. Transcript: www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-rac...

We’re joined by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Professor of Geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences at CUNY, for a conversation on the current crises of Covid-19 and state violence, touching on the desire for learning as a means of activism, the political geography of mobilisation and double consciousness. ​​​​​​​ Transcript: www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/transcript-conversation-ruth-wilson-gilmo...

by Lionel Bailly Welcome to the sixth podcast in the IAS series 'Life in the Time of Coronavirus'. Here you can listen to Lionel Bailly, Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Psychoanalysis Unit at UCL, share his experience as a psychoanalyst and child and adolescent psychiatrist during the lockdown. Bailly reflects on the importance of physical presence in the therapeutic encounter and on the effects o...

In this episode of Short Takes, we’re joined by Joy White, author of the eagerly anticipated book Terraformed: Young Black Lives in the Inner City, published recently by Repeater, and Joy is going to talk a little bit about the arguments in her book and introduce the urgency of this intervention, particularly now in the context for our political culture created by the Covid emergency and racialise...

One of the most amazing publications of the last few years in the broad field of Black Studies and African American Studies has been Bénédicte Boisseron’s book Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question, published by Columbia University Press. In the second of our Short Takes series, Boisseron joins us now to talk about Afro-Dog, and to discuss the places where the study of racism and racialisati...

by Stephen Walker Welcome to the fifth podcast in the IAS series 'Life in the Time of Coronavirus'. Here you can listen to Dr Stephen Walker, Head of Architecture at the University of Manchester discuss a series of works by the British artist Helen Chadwick, entitled 'Viral Landscapes'. Using her working notes, here read by Chloe Julius, Walker invites us to consider the position of viruses in the...

Welcome to our Short Takes podcast series. In the first of our series, Sirpa Salenius, the biographer of Sarah Parker Remond, and author of An Abolitionist Abroad: Sarah Parker Remond in Cosmopolitan Europe (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), is going to present some elements of Sarah Parker Remond’s life in Europe, and show why we felt it was such a wonderful thing to be able to use Sarah...

by Ayona Datta This is the fourth podcast in our series ‘Life in the Time of Coronavirus’ in which specialists from arts, humanities and social sciences, think about the questions that the virus poses to our ways of life, of being and self understanding, both now and in the past. In this contribution Ayona Datta, professor of Human Geography, thinks about survival infrastructures in Calcutta, and...

by Michelle Pace and Haim Yacobi This is the third podcast in the IAS series on ‘Life in the Time of Coronavirus’. Here we listen to Haim Yacobi, Professor of Development Planning at the Bartlett School of Architecture and Michelle Pace, Professor in Global Studies at Roskilde University in Denmark discuss the potential impact of Covid 19 in Gaza. Their analysis forms part of a wider Welcome Trust...

by Philippa Hetherington Welcome to the Institute of Advanced Studies' podcast series on ‘Life in the Time of Coronavirus’. In this second episode we hear from Philippa Hetherington, Lecturer in Modern Eurasian History in the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. Philippa is a scholar of international legal history, biopolitics and feminist theory, particularly i...

by Megan Vaughan 'We’ve all become used to hearing this phrase ‘underlying conditions’ in the context of COVID 19. Our unfortunate newsreaders have to keep repeating it in the daily litany of statistics and particularly the grim daily toll of COVID 19 deaths. We are told that in the vast majority of cases where an individual does badly with this infection that they suffered from one or more underl...

Rashid Khalidi (Columbia) in conversation with Seth Anziska (UCL) The last century for Palestine and the Palestinians has been one of denial: denial of statehood, denial of nationhood, and denial of history. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is Rashid Khalidi’s powerful response. Drawing on his family’s experiences and archives, and those of other Palestinians, he reclaims the fundamental right...

An informal conversation with Phyllida Barlow (artist, RA), Catherine Borowski & Lee Baker (Skip gallery), Tamar Garb (IAS, UCL), and Hilary Powell (artist, Hoe Street Central Bank) In 2019/20 we are researching the theme of ‘Waste’ in the broadest possible terms. For this occasion, we will look at waste in the production of art and exhibitions, the financially and environmentally taxing work of t...

Dr Atul Bharwaj will present India’s encounter with the post-war hegemony and address why America occupies limited space in India’s postcolonial historiography. He rejects the conventional orthodoxy that assigns a limited role to America and challenges narratives which neglect the natural asymmetries and focus on discord and differences to define India-America relations. He provides a fresh perspe...

Panel discussion exploring artistic interventions in a plasticised world, with presentations by art historian Amanda Boetzkes (University of Guelph, Canada), author of Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste (MIT Press, 2019) and Polish artist Diana Lelonek, creator of the Centre for Living Things (2016-), a response by Wood Roberdeau (Critical Ecologies, Goldsmiths), moderated...

In this seminar, Fernando Degiovanni, Professor in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures, CUNY, will discuss his most recent book with Mark Thurner (ILAS, University of London) and Nicola Miller (History, UCL)