UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre Podcast

A conversation about Rahul Rao’s book, ‘The Psychic Lives of Statues’. The conversation considers the agitation caused by attempts to remove celebratory statues of figures involved in the violence of the Atlantic Slave trade or of colonialism. Are statues made into ‘idols’ by people who want to defend these histories? How should we understand the sudden ‘coming alive’ of these previously forgotten...

Luke de Noronha is joined by Gavan Titley, Professor in the Department of Media Studies at Maynooth University. Gavan has written several books on race, racism and multiculturalism, with a particular focus on the generative role of media and communication, including Is Free Speech Racist? with Polity Press in 2020. They discuss the question of free speech, which has become so central to questions...

Luke de Noronha welcomes Sita Balani, Senior Lecturer in English at Queen Mary University of London and the author, most recently, of  Deadly and Slick: the Sexual Life of Race in Britain  (Verso Press, 2023). They discuss Sita’s recent writings on culture wars, melodrama as a mode of political communication, and the difference between the ordinary and normal.  This conversation was...

Radical Abundance – understanding the reconfiguration of the global economy and how we might survive it Keir Milburn and Kai Heron in conversation with Gargi Bhattacharyya. This conversation was recorded in the summer of 2025 and discusses the changing role and approach of the United States and the extreme hardships arising from climate catastrophe as triggers to re-imagine the global economy. The...

Radical Abundance – understanding the reconfiguration of the global economy and how we might survive it Keir Milburn and Kai Heron in conversation with Gargi Bhattacharyya. This conversation was recorded in the summer of 2025 and discusses the changing role and approach of the United States and the extreme hardships arising from climate catastrophe as triggers to re-imagine the global economy. The...

Radical Abundance – understanding the reconfiguration of the global economy and how we might survive it Keir Milburn and Kai Heron in conversation with Gargi Bhattacharyya. This conversation was recorded in the summer of 2025 and discusses the changing role and approach of the United States and the extreme hardships arising from climate catastrophe as triggers to re-imagine the global economy. The...

Gala Rexer talks to Edna Bonhomme, culture writer, historian of science, journalist, and author of “A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, from Cholera to COVID-19” (2025). The conversation covers theoretical and methodological questions about the relationship between confinement and disease, Edna’s anti/inter-disciplinary approach to writing, health...

In this podcast, Subhadra Das answers ten questions on ten lies that make up Western Civilisation. The conversation covers looting, the value of art, the history of statistics, remaking public history, repatriating stolen objects, and what museums and institutions could be doing with their zombies. Subhadra Das  is a writer, historian, broadcaster and comedian who looks at the relationship be...

Discussion of Gargi’s research and the new module designed to open conversations about how we might understand the interplay between global politics and the global economy in this moment of rapid realignment. Speakers: Gargi Bhattacharyya, Paige Patchin, Luke de Noronha Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Discussion of Paige’s research on questions of health, racism and why we must learn to understand the languages of the biological and the pharmaceutical if we are to grasp emerging technologies of racialisation. Speakers: Paige Patchin, Luke de Noronha, Gargi Bhattacharyya Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Discussion of Luke’s research and why thinking about movement and bordering allows us understand emerging machineries of (perhaps) racialised violence. Speakers: Luke de Noronha, Paige Patchin, Gargi Bhattacharyya Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this Short Takes, Luke reads the preface to the paperback edition of Deporting Black Britons: Portraits of Deportation to Jamaica , published with Manchester University Press in June 2025.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr Clive Chijioke Nwonka is joined by Baroness Lola Young of Hornsey. Lola Young became one of the first Black Women members of the House of Lords in 2004. Raised in foster care in north London, she studied at the New College of Speech and Drama, then worked as an actress, before becoming Professor of Cultural Studies at Middlesex University. Later, she worked in arts administration before receivi...

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...

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. Throug...

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 h...

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...

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 stud...

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...

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...

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 f...

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 joi...

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 need...

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 www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8oOp-dX6hk courtesy the artist and Fondazione in between Art...

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 T...