Think Pieces Podcast

In this second episode on Indigenous Ecologies, IAS postdoctoral fellows Olivia Arigho-Stiles and Adriana Suarez Delucchi are in conversation with Nayanika Mathur, Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at Wolfson College, Oxford University.

Mathur's research is interested in the anthropology of politics, development, environment, law, human-animal studies, and research methods. She is the author of Paper Tiger: Law Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India, which addresses everyday bureaucratic life on the Himalayan borderland.

Her second book, Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene (University of Chicago Press, 2021) is the starting point for this episode’s conversation. Arigho-Stiles, Suarez and Mathur embark on a discuss the term 'anthropocene', conservation practices and its bureaucratic challanges, including the impossibility of applying Western conservation practices to Indian species (and for that matter, non-Western natural environments more broadly).

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Olivia Arigho-Stiles and Adriana Suarez were postdoctoral research fellows at the Institute of Advanced Studies in 2023.

Arigho-Stiles is an interdisciplinary researcher of Indigenous histories and the rural world in Bolivia, focussing on Bolivian Indigenous-campesino movements. She is a lecturer in Latin American studies at the University of Essex.

Suarez Delucchi is a geographer working on natural resource management institutions at different scales in contested environments. Her work seeks to identify, address and challenge the marginalisation of rural and Indigenous groups from dominant management arrangements.

Together, they co-edited a special issue of the IAS online review Think Pieces which you can read here: INDIGENOUS ECOLOGIES & ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS - Think Pieces (thinkpieces-review.co.uk)

The episode was produced by Marthe Lisson, editor of Think Pieces.

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Zoltán Kékesi, cultural historian at the Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at University College London, is in conversation with Neil Gregor, Professor of Modern European History at Southampton University. They talk about the centrality of music in Nazi ideology and its “affective legacies”. How do the ways change in which different generations of listeners hear certain pieces of music that were composed and performed during the war? Have they changed at all and if so, what does it tell us?

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Zoltán Kékesi's research evolves around “Final Account: Third Reich Testimonies”, a collection of interviews by British documentary filmmaker Luke Holland. Between 2008 and 2017, Holland interviewed German and Austrian, non-Jewish men and women who as children and adolescents had joined the Hitler Youth or League of German Girls. To trigger memories, he asked interviewees to sing songs of their childhood. Even when they refused to sing, songs took interviewees back in time and with the songs resurfaced experiences and personal stories of past times. His essay “A Pandora’s Box: The Horst Wessel Song in the Collection ‘Final Account: Third Reich Testimonies’” is available to read here: Musical memories – Compromised Identities? (compromised-identities.org).

Neil Gregor has worked extensively on the cultural history of music in twentieth century Germany. His book, The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany, is forthcoming with The University of Chicago Press.

The episode was produced by Marthe Lisson, editor of Think Pieces, and supported by the Pears Foundation.

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'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 underlying condition (by which is usually meant, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, cancer, asthma.... What are often and misleadingly called “noncommunicable diseases”) And when we’re told that they didn’t have any of these, there is, I think, an extra palpable sense of shock and horror...'

• Music is by Best of Feelings and BBC Sound Archive
• Produced and edited by Albert Brenchat-Aguilar and Catherine Stokes
• Communications by Patricia Mascarell Llombart
• Executive Producer is Tamar garb

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The UCL Gender and Feminism Research Network (GFRN) and qUCL present a conversation with ex-academic writer Sophie Lewis and Victoria Mangan, PhD student in the English Department at UCL.

On 7 March 2025, Sophie Lewis gave the annual qUCL/GFRN lecture on 'The Feminism of Fools: When Real Feminists Do Fascism', which explored the imperial, racist, and otherwise exclusionary legacies of various kinds of feminism – varieties of feminism that have not just been taken up by the regressive right, but have participated enthusiastically and feministly in these movements.

In advance of her talk, Victoria Mangan met with Sophie to ask her a few questions about her new book, 'Enemy Feminisms,' and especially to ask her: why this book, and why now? They went on to discuss the relationship between Sophie's current work and her previous books on family abolition, why it is that we are so attached to feminism as a unilateral 'good' despite evidence to the contrary, and the particular Englishness of certain feminist activism in the 21st century.

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Sophie Lewis, an ex-academic writer, lives in Philadelphia and is the author of 'Full Surrogacy Now, Abolish the Family,' and 'Enemy Feminisms.' Her essays appear everywhere from n+1 to the LRB. She is working on an essay collection, 'Femmephilia,' and a book, 'The Liberation of Children' (forthcoming from Penguin, 2027).

Victoria Mangan is a PhD student researching transgender literatures and theories. Her thesis enquires into how we read and interpret trans literature and what this growing body of work might offer literary criticism as a discipline. She is a Wolfson scholar in the humanities and has taught across several departments at UCL.

Lewis and Mangan are introduced by Alex Hyde, Associate Professor in Gender Studies and Co-Director of the Gender and Feminism Research Network at UCL.

The episode was produced by Marthe Lisson, Editor of Think Pieces.

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Welcome to this podcast on ‘Implication’.

This new episode belongs to our series ‘Concepts for the New Normal’. The idea of these series is to bring together colleagues to explore a key concept of our times; offering a variety of perspectives from the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, on the ideas that are shaping our lives. Today’s concept is ‘implication’.

How might we be implicated in structural problems like racism, the decline of democracy, social discrimination, modern slavery, and sexual violence? What are the background conditions that allow structural violence and injustice to take place? When and how does implication become significant? And how can we transform our implicated positions into collective solidarity work?

By exploring the issue of implication in different contexts, the speakers in this podcast will address some of these questions. I am aware that there are many different forms and degrees of implication. This podcast does not aim to be comprehensive, but rather to open a conversation and invite all listeners to reflect on how they might be implicated in large-scale structures of violence and injustice.

• Speakers: Professor Michael Rothberg (UCLA), Dr Brian Klaas (UCL), Dr Jennifer Ferng (IAS / University of Sidney), Dr Maya Goodfellow (University of Sheffield) and Professor Alexis Shotwell (Carleton University).
• Music by Fuubutsishi, and Fingerspit.
• Artwork: Greet Van Autgaerden, Excursie #2 (2017) | 200 x 300 cm | oil on canvas
• Sound effects are by the BBC Sound Archive
• Producer and Host: Dr Stefano Bellin (IAS/ University of Warwick)
• Co-Producer: Albert Brenchat-Aguilar
• Co-Producer/Editor: Patricia Mascarell Llombart
• Executive Producer and Host: Professor Nicola Miller (IAS Director)

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