UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre Podcast

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 mapp...

Luke de Noronha welcomes Kojo Koram, Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck School of Law and author of Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire (John Murray Press, 2022) . Discussing his recent book, Kojo addresses questions around 20th century decolonisation, neoliberalism and national sovereignty, tying these threads to today’s spiralling global wealth inequality, accelerating climate crisis,...

Co-author of Social Media and Hate , Shakuntala Banaji joins Clive Nwonka to delve into the theoretical and practical intersections of misinformation and online hate speech in contemporary societies. Shakuntala discusses online and offline activism, the intellectual source that inspired her work, and the broader question of media and communication study and its relevance for the analysis of race a...

Clive Nwonka is joined by Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of Read Until You Understand , a deeply personal and wide-ranging mediation on Black culture, political freedom and humanity. Farah discusses writing with an ethic of care, honouring grace, mercy and beauty, and the relationship between rage and resistance. Farah also reflects on what she sees as the three sites of engagement for African-Amer...

Luke de Noronha welcomes  Lisa Lowe , Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Race and Migration, to talk about her book,  The Intimacies of Four Continents , where she examines links between transatlantic slavery, Asian indenture, imperial trades and colonialism. Concerning liberalism, Lisa discusses how ideas of reason, civilisation and freedom are continually dividing the human a...

Laleh Khalili ,, Professor of International Politics and author of Sinews of War & Trade , joins us for a conversation on land reclamation, dredging and the role of maritime infrastructures as conduits of the movement of technologies, capital, people and cargo. Addressing the significant bodies of water around which a politics has taken shape, Laleh discusses the tension of the sea as a romant...

Alexis Pauline Gumbs , writer, independent scholar and poet, joins us to reflect on engaging with the works of Black feminist scholars, ancestral listening and her connectedness to seals. Author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals , Alexis discusses how colonialism, enslavement and the plantation economy resulted in the extinction of the Caribbean monk seal. Alexis also talks...

Luke de Noronha welcomes  Nandita Sharma , activist scholar and Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, to discuss borders, migration and citizenship in relation to the pandemic and climate catastrophes. Nandita addresses the demand for a planetary commons, and the need to live in a worldly space in which the fundamental political foundation is freedom from exclusion, fr...

We’re joined by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Professor of History and author of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age , for a conversation on his intellectual trajectory and the idea of the planetary. Speaking on the climate crisis and the human condition, Dipesh states that “ unless we realise our geological agency and the geomorphological role we play that is changing the landscape of the planet, we...

Luke de Noronha is joined by Gracie Mae Bradley, policy expert, writer and campaigner, and Interim Director of Liberty. Involved in the wider grassroots movement for social justice in the UK and having written extensively on state racism and civil liberties, Gracie joins us to speak about the state response and policing throughout the pandemic, race disproportionality, and the trend towards pre-cr...

Shabaka Hutchings, jazz musician and band leader, joins us to talk about his new album with Sons of Kemet, Black to the Future , delving into transcending from the individual to the collective state, and the healing and spiritual force of music. Discussing his musical influences and progression, Shabaka reflects on how “… being in a metropole makes you think that you understand what culturally is...

Adam Elliott-Cooper joins Luke de Noronha to talk about resistance to racist state violence in Britain, and how this resistance is shaped by histories of imperialism and anti-imperialism. Discussing his book, Black Resistance to British Policing (MUP, 2021), Adam situates current mobilisations in a longer history of anti-racist resistance in the UK, and explores the politics of abolitionism and an...

Luke de Noronha welcomes Robbie Shilliam , Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University, to discuss his recent book Decolonizing Politics: An Introduction (Polity Press, 2021). Across his writing, Robbie’s made several critical interventions on questions surrounding race, colonialism and global order, and in Decolonizing Politics he methodologically looks at what it might mean...

One of the ways in which eugenics became incorporated into mainstream society all around the world was through the birth control movement. Early twentieth-century birth control pioneers like Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger were also ardent eugenicists, and their motives were bound up with imperial concerns about, as eugenicists saw it, the deterioration of the 'white race'. Their arguments were t...

The places and spaces we inhabit profoundly affect our lives and how we live them in ways we need to think about more critically. At the launch of the project that is the subject of today's episode, Kamna Patel spoke to how people have been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic by saying "It is not who we are and what we eat that will kill us, but where we live and where we work." Subhadra’s guests in...

Along with being inherently racist, eugenics was also an inherently ableist concern. In this episode Subhadra speaks to experts in the field of disability studies to explore the ways in which power delineates difference between people, and how this relates to the much broader structures of our society, as well as how we think and perceive of ourselves. Transcript: www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisatio...

Two of the fields where eugenic thinking had an enormous influence, and where some of its legacies continue to hold sway are Psychology and Education Studies. An influential figure in both those fields was a former UCL Professor of Psychology, Sir Cyril Burt. In this episode Subhadra and her guests wade through Burt’s legacy and reflect on how to confront and confound eugenic thinking in both thes...

This episode documents and commemorates a collaborative research project at UCL, which brought together geneticists, historians, archaeologists and museum curators to consider how science mediates the dilemma of death. It was called  Curating Heads  and its scientific aims were to use the latest techniques in Ancient DNA analysis to sequence the genomes of two historic figures at UCL: th...

It has often been argued that eugenicists were not real scientists, but almost all of their ideas were grounded in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century scientific discourse. Science is a social and a socialised endeavour. Scientists are people, and their work is embodied in the social and historical contexts in which they live. In this episode, Subhadra speaks to science historians and comm...

Our latest Short Takes comes from  Ian Sanjay Patel , author of the new book  We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire  (Verso, 2021). This important book provides a global history of post-war migration to the UK, offering fresh insights into the relationship between migration, citizenship and decolonization. Transcript: www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation...

Paige Patchin is joined by science journalist,  Angela Saini , for a conversation on her book  Superior: The Return of Race Science , discussing the resurgence of race science, pseudoscientific racial myths and problematic narratives of human difference. Angela looks at how the changing figure of the Neanderthal is an example of how the circle of humanity can be used as tool of raci...

Nicholas De Genova  joins Luke de Noronha for a conversation about the relationship between bordering, migration and the pandemic, and his current thinking around  The Migrant Metropolis . Nicholas discusses why it’s important to think of migrant crises as racial crises, recapturing the subjectivity of migration, and the autonomy of migration as a framework. Transcript: www.ucl.ac.uk/rac...

As we approach the 40th anniversary of the  Black People’s Day of Action  march that took place on 2nd March 1981, Paul Gilroy welcomes Linton Kwesi Johnson, poet and activist, to reflect on the events of that day and year, and discuss how we see these patterns repeated in Black life in this country today in the forms of inequality and conflict and demands for truth, right and justice. T...

Luke de Noronha is joined by  Les Back , Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, to talk about the concept of the ‘metropolitan paradox’, reflecting on how the events of 1981 – the New Cross house fire and the resulting Black People’s Day of Action march – formed his thinking and future academic work. Discussing how the tragedy of Grenfell Tower paralleled that of 1981, Les explores how the dem...

Dennis Bovell, UK reggae pioneer and writer of the hit song  Silly Games , joins Paul Gilroy for a conversation about his career as a producer, multi-instrumentalist, sound engineer and more. Dennis discusses not having any musical boundaries, working across reggae to country to afrobeats, and recounts stories of working with Linton Kwesi Johnson, Leroy Smart, Fela Kuti and John Kpiaye. Trans...