Research Podcast: Reflections on Crises

In the first episode Julia Sauma discusses the current situation in the northern Brazilian states of Para and Amazonas, both regions largely covered by the Amazon rainforest. She has worked in metropolitan and frontier contexts in Brazil with street children and educators, and with Amazonian quilombolas on race and ethnicity, political cosmology and ecology, myth and memory, kinship, gender and the body.

Julia’s work also reflects on personal experiences of racial, gender and disability discrimination, and the importance of miscommunication, in the making of anthropological knowledge. 

Read more about the fundraiser Julia mentioned in the interview

This is a conversation between Adom Philogene Heron, a lecturer in the Goldsmiths Anthropology Department and Schuyler Espirit, the founder of Create Caribbean and Programme Officer at the University of the West Indies Open Campus in Antigua & Barbuda.

They are co-investigators on the ESRC funded project Caribbean Cyclone Cartographies. In this interview they discuss rooting and resilience in Dominica, touching on plantations, hurricanes, the pandemic and more.

In Episode 3, Henrike Donner (Goldsmiths Anthropology), Nandita Dhawan (Jadavpur University Kolkata), Sanchali Sarkar and Anchita Ghatak (both NGO Parichiti) discuss their collaborative project 'A Room for One’s Own' funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund and exploring poor women's access to shelter in marginal urban communities in Kolkata (India). Their project examines gendered vulnerabilities related to access and rights in housing experienced by women living in low-income neighbourhoods. They share they ways in which their interlocutors draw on a variety of sources to build resilience under patriarchal property regimes, but also how these conditions are exacerbated by Covid-19 since Kolkata went into lockdown and work and livelihoods came under threat, and the impact of increased spatial and social discrimination measures by police and government agencies - against minorities and the urban poor generally - on women in these communities.