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Think Pieces Podcast

Think Pieces Podcast

Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL

The Think Pieces Podcast is produced by the Institute of Advanced Studies at University College London.

It picks up themes from the Institute's online review Think Pieces engaging in conversations with authors, scholars and policy makers from inside and outside UCL.


The Think Pieces Podcast is succeeding Talk pieces, which was produced by Tamar Garb and Albert Brenchat-Aguilar in 2020 and 2021.


Note on the logo: the blue and green background is a detail of a banner (300x120cm; oil paint, oil pastel and compressed charcoal on canvas) that artist Lucile Haefflinger produced for and which is on display at the IAS.



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Top 10 Think Pieces Podcast Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Think Pieces Podcast episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Think Pieces Podcast for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Think Pieces Podcast episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

Think Pieces Podcast - Cells and Viruses

Cells and Viruses

Think Pieces Podcast

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05/22/20 • 10 min

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 continua amongst environment, bodies and cells, and, provocatively, to think through Chadwick's causational flips from the virus in us to us in the landscape.


Music by Small Haus and the BBC Sound Archive. ​​​​​​​

Speaker: Stephen Walker, University of Manchester. Chadwick's notes read by Chloe Julius (UCL)

Introduction by Tamar Garb

Produced and edited by Albert Brenchat-Aguilar

Communications by Patricia Mascarell Llombart



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Think Pieces Podcast - Speculation

Speculation

Think Pieces Podcast

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01/07/21 • 22 min

The UK Health minister and businesses say that the media speculates, and this affects their speculations. Countries speculate against each other’s speculations. Timescales, vaccines, movements, land, ecological and human alliances, salaries, taxes... everything seems more prone to speculation than ever in the uncertainty of what we tend to refer to as the ‘new’ normal. We can render speculation in terms of social benefit — thinkable futures and catastrophe warnings — or social degradation — conspiracy theories, capital investments and pressures to medical progress. In terms of certainty: from opening multiple possibilities and connections such as in science fiction, art practices or speculative music; to closing down a future for the many such as in capitalist logics. Or in terms of subject-object identification through speculative realism, materialism, psychology and physics. Is speculation a useful term to think about our current times? And can multiple forms of speculation and their conflation help us understand our way into the new normal and our material and psychological circumstances?


Speakers: André M. Carrington (UC Riverside), Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou (SRI, UCL), Ming Tsao (composer) and Marina Vishmidt (Goldsmiths).

Music by Afrikan Sciences, Ming Tsao, Active Denial System and Shō.

Image: Heide Hinrichs, Atemwende (Breathturn) (2018), series of 12 drawings, 27,9 x 21,4 cm, pencil on paper.

Sound effects are by the BBC Sound Archive

Producer, Editor and Host: Albert Brenchat-Aguilar

Executive Producer and Host: Nicola Miller (IAS Director)



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Think Pieces Podcast - The Biopolitics of Algorithms

The Biopolitics of Algorithms

Think Pieces Podcast

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08/04/20 • 16 min

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 problems such as data accuracy, breaches of privacy, surveillance, the potential biopolitical uses of data in the aftermath of the pandemic and the interconnections between testing, trading and commerce.


Music: 'Surveillance' by Smallhaus. Sound effects by the BBC Sound Archive. ​​​

Speaker: Ramon Amaro (UCL)

Produced and edited by Albert Brenchat-Aguilar

Communications by Patricia Mascarell Llombart

Executive Producer: Tamar Garb



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Think Pieces Podcast - Viral Racism

Viral Racism

Think Pieces Podcast

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07/30/20 • 15 min

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 artist Tom Corby’s graphs, chronicling his own long term illness, and the philosopher Gillian Howies meditations on living with dying, she situates the pervasive anxiety the virus has unleashed in relation to older and ongoing issues around representation, vulnerability, and mortality.

  • Music: Smallhaus and the BBC Sound Archive
  • Speaker: Temitope Abisoye Noah (IAS Visiting Research Fellow)
  • Producer and Editor: Albert Brenchat-Aguilar
  • Communications: Patricia Mascarell Llombart
  • Executive Producer: Tamar Garb


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Think Pieces Podcast - Immunology: Visualizing Uncertainty & Vulnerability
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07/28/20 • 17 min

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 artist Tom Corby’s graphs, chronicling his own long term illness, and the philosopher Gillian Howies meditations on living with dying, she situates the pervasive anxiety the virus has unleashed in relation to older and ongoing issues around representation, vulnerability, and mortality.

  • Cover image: Blood and Bones by Tom Corby. Courtesy of the artist.
  • Music: Smallhaus and the BBC Sound Archive
  • Speaker: Peg Rawes (UCL)
  • Producer and Editor: Albert Brenchat-Aguilar
  • Communications: Patricia Mascarell Llombart
  • Executive Producer: Tamar Garb


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Think Pieces Podcast - The Lockdown and the Crowd

The Lockdown and the Crowd

Think Pieces Podcast

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07/13/20 • 11 min

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 third of Covid infections in the regional state of Tamil Nadu. What happens, she asks, when we juxtapose the moral authority of the lockdown with the moral economy of the crowd?

  • Cover image: Koyambedu, Chennai, during Lockdown by Sai Sudharsan. Courtesy of Live from Worktown
  • Music by Smallhaus and the BBC Sound Archive.
  • Speaker: Pushpa Arabindoo (UCL)
  • Produced and edited by Albert Brenchat-Aguilar
  • Communications by Patricia Mascarell Llombart
  • Executive Producer: Tamar Garb


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Think Pieces Podcast - On the Concept of 'Unprecedented'
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06/25/20 • 18 min

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? What, he asks, is the future of the unprecedented and can we know it before it is already happened?


Simon is research fellow at Bielefeld University and assistant professor at Leiden University. He's the author of History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century and The Epochal Event: Transformations in the Entangled Human, Technological, and Natural Worlds.


Music by Arctic Sounds and the BBC Sound Archive. ​​​​​​​

Speaker: Zoltán Boldizsár Simon (Bielefeld and Leiden)

Produced and edited by Albert Brenchat-Aguilar

Communications by Patricia Mascarell Llombart

Executive Producer: Tamar Garb



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Think Pieces Podcast - Gaza: from ghetto to frontier

Gaza: from ghetto to frontier

Think Pieces Podcast

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05/05/20 • 12 min

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 funded research project on the interconnections of power, violence and health in contemporary conflict zones.


We hope you will find this piece informative.

  • Music by Small Haus, Best of feelings and from the BBC Sound Archive. ​​​​​​​
  • Produced and edited by Albert Brenchat-Aguilar
  • Communications by Patricia Mascarell Llombart
  • Executive Producer is Tamar Garb


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Think Pieces Podcast - Sexuality and Stigma

Sexuality and Stigma

Think Pieces Podcast

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04/24/20 • 15 min

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 in the context of empire and under socialism.


Here she reflects on the virus in relation to historical debates on sexuality and the stigmatisation of sex workers. Historians are well placed to think about previous incarnations of disease and spread so that we work out what is and what isn't unprecedented.


We hope you enjoy this piece.

  • Music is by Best of Feelings and BBC Sound Archive
  • Image: The Silence = Death Project by ACT-UP, The AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power. Colour lithograph, 1987.
  • Produced and edited by Albert Brenchat-Aguilar and Catherine Stokes
  • Communications by Patricia Mascarell Llombart
  • Executive Producer is Tamar garb


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Think Pieces Podcast - Concepts for the 'New Normal'. #2 Implication
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10/27/21 • 42 min

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.



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FAQ

How many episodes does Think Pieces Podcast have?

Think Pieces Podcast currently has 22 episodes available.

What topics does Think Pieces Podcast cover?

The podcast is about Humanities, Society, Art, History, Podcasts, Education, Arts and Politics.

What is the most popular episode on Think Pieces Podcast?

The episode title 'Tamar Garb in conversation with Lonnie G. Bunch III' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on Think Pieces Podcast?

The average episode length on Think Pieces Podcast is 22 minutes.

How often are episodes of Think Pieces Podcast released?

Episodes of Think Pieces Podcast are typically released every 10 days, 19 hours.

When was the first episode of Think Pieces Podcast?

The first episode of Think Pieces Podcast was released on Apr 9, 2020.

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