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.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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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The UCL Gender and Feminism Research Network (GFRN) and qUCL present a conversation with Rahul Rao, Reader in International Political Thought at the University of St Andrews, and inclusive heritage specialist Sean Curran.
On 14 May 2024, Rao gave the GFRN and qUCL joint annual lecture titled 'The Libidinal Lives of Statues'. In this episode, Rao and Curran expand on the central question of the lecture: what is it about statues that has spooked people in the past enough to arouse in them the impulse to destroy.
Standing in front of the Gandhi statue in Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, London they reflect on why statues have become the ground on which struggles around caste and race are played out and why Gandhi statues in particular have become objects of contestation despite the common association of Gandhi as an anti-colonial figure. They move on to talk about statues as gifts from one country to another and whether it is violence to damage, deface or removing a statue. Above the whole conversation lingers the question: what is the future of statues - have they become obsolete?
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Rahul Rao is Reader in International Political Thought in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews and the author of Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (2020) and Third World Protest: Between Home and the World (2010). He is currently writing a book about statues.
Sean Curran is an inclusive heritage specialist with 17 years of experience working in historic houses, libraries, archives and museums. Their PhD at UCL Institute of Education was about LGBTQ+ heritage, and they curated the first ever LGBT History Month exhibition at a National Trust property.
Rao and Curran 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.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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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In this first episode on Indigenous Ecologies, IAS postdoctoral fellows Olivia Arigho-Stiles and Adriana Suarez Delucchi are in conversation with Indigenous K’iche’ Maya scholar and activist Emil’ Keme.
Keme is professor in the English Department at Emory University, Atlanta. His teaching and research focus on contemporary Indigenous literatures and social movements, Central American-American literatures and cultures, and postcolonial and subaltern studies theory. He is a co-founding member of the binational Maya anti-colonial collective, Ix’balamquej Junajpu Wunaq’.
He is also the author of the book Le Maya Q’atzij/Our Maya Word. Poetics of Resistance in Guatemala (2021) that is the starting point for this episode’s conversation. Arigho-Stiles, Suarez and Keme embark on a discussion about the relationship between poetry and resistance, the right to exist for Maya peoples and the struggle to keep their languages alive. They touch upon the idea of plurinationality and the ethos of translating.
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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.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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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Zoltán Kékesi, cultural historian at the Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at University College London, is in conversation with Kelly Jakubowski, Associate Professor in Music Psychology at Durham University, to talk about the psychology of musical memories. They discuss how music shapes our memories, especially when music was experienced in the context of Nazi organisations and events. Why does music tend to evoke much more positive than negative emotions regardless of the emotion the music is expressing? And what is the ‘reminiscence bump’?
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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).
Kelly Jakubowski’s research examines a range of topics within music psychology and empirical musicology, including memory for music, music-evoked autobiographical memory, musical imagery and imagination, earworms, absolute pitch, musical timing and movement, and cross-cultural music perception. She co-leads Durham’s Music and Science Lab, an interdisciplinary research group united by interests in empirical, computational, and biological approaches to understanding music listening and music making, and she is the Co-Director of Durham’s Centre for Research into Inner Experience.
The episode was produced by Marthe Lisson, editor of Think Pieces, and supported by the Pears Foundation.
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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.
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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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Welcome to the fifteenth podcast in our series ‘Life in the Time of Coronavirus’, with Lonnie G. Bunch III, Secretary of the Smithsonian.
In conversation with Tamar Garb, Director of the IAS, Lonnie discusses the impact of the current conjunction of coronavirus and Black Lives Matter in the collections and public programmes of the Smithsonian; the specific role of the National Museum of African American History and Culture; the role that material culture plays in helping us to understand history; Lonnie's experience in South Africa and his approach to museums, reconciliation, reparation and truth telling. Finally, Lonnie explains the approach of the Smithsonian to the current crisis and the virtual space.
Music by Smallhaus. Sound effects by the BBC Sound Archive.
Speaker: Lonnie Bunch III (Smithsonian) and Tamar Garb (IAS, UCL)
Produced and edited by Albert Brenchat-Aguilar
Communications by Patricia Mascarell Llombart
Executive Producer: Tamar Garb
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Welcome to the fourteenth podcast in our series ‘Life in the Time of Coronavirus’. Here Ama de-Graft Aikins, British Academy Global Professor in the Institute of Advanced Studies at UCL, and a social psychologist researching chronic illness and experiences of care in African contexts, considers how artists are shaping current understandings of Covid-19 in Ghana. She situates contemporary responses to Coronavirus in relation to previous pandemics, specifically the Global Flu Pandemic of 1918 as well as the ongoing HIV crisis. Art, she argues provides a space of knowledge production, critical engagement and potential healing in the face of the threat to life and livelihood posed by the virus.
Music by Smallhaus. Sound effects by the BBC Sound Archive.
Speaker: Ama de-Graft Aikins(UCL)
Produced and edited by Albert Brenchat-Aguilar
Communications by Patricia Mascarell Llombart
Executive Producer: Tamar Garb
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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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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.
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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.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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?
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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 philosophy at Stony Brook; Evie Shockley, Professor of English at Rutgers; Alessandro Cini, research fellow in Genetics, Evolution & Environment at UCL; Kenton Kroker, associate professor in the history of biomedicine at York; and Xine Yao, Lecturer in the English department at UCL.
The pieces will be accompanied by the music of ‘Heard Immunity’, an album edited by Subphonics, and the tracks ‘yoker’ by No Snare; ‘Government Mandated Afternoon Jog’ by Drowzee; ‘Quarantino’ by Quentin; ‘Night Tea’ by Laudine; ‘Staying Home’ by Tchaicoughsky; and ‘Sad Gasm’ by King Girl. All their profits go towards the Covid-19 food relief bank of the Trussell Trust to which you can contribute via this link.
The speakers received the following blurb: On March 29, curator Paul Preciado wrote a piece for El Pais drawing attention to Roberto Espósito’s texts on ‘immunity’. The words community and immunity, share the latin root munus, a tribute someone had to pay to be part of the community. Inmunitas, a negation of the munus, was a privilege that freed someone of community duties. On the other hand, communitas, refers to the obligations with the community. The idea of immunity goes further in social history than in public health, the latter only being fleshed out in the 19th century with Pasteur and Koch.
The current Coronavirus crisis has tied up health, community and trade in those countries with rapid spread: the success of one is the failure of the others - Brazil or USA opt for trade, Spain and Italy for health. Meanwhile, most African countries seem to be succeeding in both. Some of us seem to be capable of thinking of an immune body but struggle to think of an immune public space and forms of relation; or an economy that can change form and adapt to new environmental conditions. Furthermore, individual immunity seems to imply a complete segregation of citizens: those who are already immune, those who will be, and those who might never be? And spatial immunity seems to imply another segregation between those who have to work and live exposed to the virus and those who don’t.
Is immunity against a life in community?
If Roberto Espósito appealed to the constitution of the body and its limits to respond, Paul Preciado would finish with the following quote: ‘As the virus mutates, if we want to resist subjugation, we need to mutate. It is necessary to move from forced mutation to deliberate mutation.’ (Paul B Preciado, my translation)
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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 Sound Archive.
Speaker and image: Ann Phoenix (UCL)
Communications by Patricia Mascarell Llombart
Produced and edited by Albert Brenchat-Aguilar
Executive Producer: Tamar Garb
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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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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 of virtual forms of exchange and communication on his practice with his young patients.
Music by Smallhaus and the BBC Sound Archive.
Speaker: Lionel Bailly (Psychoanalysis unit at UCL)
Communications by Patricia Mascarell Llombart
Produced and edited by Albert Brenchat-Aguilar
Executive Producer: Tamar Garb
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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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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 their collapse or dysfunctionality in the context of the mass exodus and precarity of migrant workers, forced to forsake the city because of India’s lockdown.
What comes into focus in her description is not only the failure of the city to support its vulnerable workers, but the way that the survival of the city depends on the bodies it betrays.
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