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 her colleagues on the 1992 Los Angeles Race Riots, 'No Humans Involved' (1994), the discussion ranges across fudged data, AI facial surveillance, the pseudo-science of white supremacy, and why a concept of the human beyond the purely biological matters.

Ben Woodard is an affiliated fellow at the ICI in Berlin. He received his PhD in Theory and Criticism from Western University in 2016. He regularly lectures at the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, the School of Materialist Research, and the New Centre for Research and Practice. He has two forthcoming books: Uninhabited: Science Fiction and the Decolonial (Zero Books) and F.H. Bradley and the History of Philosophy: Animating a Lost Idealism (Edinburgh University Press).

Camille Crichlow is a PhD candidate at the UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation. Her research interrogates how the historical and socio-cultural narrative of race manifests in contemporary algorithmic surveillance technologies. Her PhD project traces the historical expansion of biometric facial surveillance, considering both its present and historical iterations within evolving regimes of racial thinking.

Lara Choksey is Lecturer in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures in UCL English, and Faculty Associate in the UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre.

This conversation was recorded on 2 July 2024.

Speakers: Dr Lara Choksey, Ben Woodard and Camille Crichlow

Producer: Dr Lara Choksey and Kaissa Karhu

Editors: Kaissa Karhu

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 in Victorian and contemporary horror and figures of the monstrous, the role of health regulations in the making of racial difference in the Middle East, and a humanistic approach to sociology and history.

This conversation was recorded on 17th June 2024.

Speakers: Dr Gala Rexer, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, University of Warwick // Dr Alexandre White, Johns Hopkins University // students of the MA in REPS cohort: Aisha Rana-Deshmukh, Gabriel Rahman, Julia Snow, and Alex Eaglestone

Producer: Dr Gala Rexer and Kaissa Karhu

Editors: Kaissa Karhu

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 studies, and queer of colour critique does to our understanding of race, gender, and affect, and how we approach literary and cultural text as theory. They discuss how their citational practices shape teaching and scholarship, and explore the modes of affective disobedience that engender counter-intimacies and new forms of decolonial solidarity.

This conversation was recorded on 19th July 2023.

Speakers: Dr Gala Rexer, Lecturer at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre // Dr Xine Yao, University College London

Producer: Dr Gala Rexer and Trisha Hart

Editors:  Kaissa Karhu 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.