CHCI Podcast Roundup, February 2021

New

The Walk & Talk Series

Walk & Talk is a new podcast from the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at Giessen University (Germany). A collaboration emerging from an interdisciplinary group of doctoral researchers, The Walk and Talk Series features, literally, scholars walking and talking about humanities-related topics. The first episode is a conversation with Marija Spirkovska, a Ph.D. researcher whose work concerns the relationships between space, psychopathology, and embodiment in city literature, as they stroll through Giessen.

Notable

In the United States, February is Black History Month. Over the past month, podcasters from around CHCI network have explored black history with the depth, breadth, and nuance that one would expect from innovative humanities organizations around the world.

Humanities Radio - Season 3, Episode 6 (The Origins of Black History Month) & Episode 7 (Afrofuturism)

The Humanities Radio podcast is a produced by the College of Humanities at the University of Utah and is hosted by Director of Marketing & Communications Jana Cunningham. Its third season has focused on the humanities perspective on contemporary issues such as COVID-19 conspiracy theories, cyber security, and presidential politics. For February, the Humanities Radio podcast released an episode on the origins of black history month itself and, this week, another devoted to Afrofuturism.

Episode 6: The Origins of Black History Month

Episode 7: Afrofuturism

Just Three - Alyssa A.L. James

A project of the Center for the Study of Social Difference (Columbia University), the Just Three podcast is organized around three question: How does your work engage with issues of social justice? What do you see as the biggest social justice challenge of our time? How can we foster ethical and progressive social change? Host (and CSSD Executive Director) Catherine LaSota asks these three questions of each guest as way into explore the work of students and faculty affiliated with CSSD. This month's conversation features Alyssa A.L. James, anthropology Ph.D. student and graduate coordinator of the Black Atlantic working group at CSSD, whose work investigates the histories and future of race, colonization and decolonization, and commodification through the prism of coffee production in Martinique.

Community Voices - Episode 5: James Threalkill

The monthly Community Voices podcast focuses on members of the Robert Penn Warren Center's extended network around the city of Nashville, Tennessee (USA). Hosted by Elizabeth Meadows (Associate Director of RPWC), the podcast features artists, scholars, activists, and educators and their unique. The most recent episode finds Meadows interviewing James Threalkill, an artist with broad and deep connections to Vanderbilt and the city, about how the combined crises of COVID-19 and systemic racism have impacted the African American community of Nashville and beyond.

Other podcast episodes from around CHCI on the subject of black history include:

• With Good Reason (Virginia Humanities) - "Invisible Founders"
• Sub Titles (Center for the Advancement of the Humanities - Marquette University) - "Illmatic"
• Ben Franklin's World (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture) - "Ibrahima Seck, Whitney Plantation Museum"
• UO Today (Oregon Humanities Center) - "The Soviet Afro-Asianists: Anti-Imperialism and the Soviet Intelligentsia"
• Shakespeare Unlimited (Folger Shakespeare Library) - "Shakespeare in the Harlem Renaissance"
• BUCH Podcast (Boston University Center for the Humanities) - "Louis Chud-Sokei on his memoir Floating in a Most Peculiar Way"

Other Podcasts with New Episodes in February 2021

The challenge of translation has been an important topic among humanities scholars, and it was the topic of a two-week CHCI-Mellon 2019 GHI in Santiago, Chile focused on the challenges of translation. A recent episode of This is the Place podcast from The Common magazine–partner of the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst College–featured an interview with Jethro Soutar. Working with texts from both sides of the Atlantic, Soutar translated three pieces from Portuguese that were published in Issue 20 of the The Common. In this interview, Soutar explores the history of the Lusosphere, discusses works in Portuguese, and complexities of translation as a process.

Reflection on the state and future of democracy was the subject of another CHCI-Mellon GHI. In June 2019, the CHCI-Mellon GHI on "Crises of Democracy" convened in Dubrovnik, Croatia, and subsequently published an open curriculum on the topic. In October 2020, the Institute of Human Sciences, a CHCI member organization based in Vienna, debuted the Democracy in Question?, a ten-episode, bi-monthly podcast series. Over ten episodes, host Shalini Randeria (IWM's director and member of the CHCI International Advisory Board) podcast explored American democracy and Trump, global varieties of democracy, democratic backsliding, 'soft authoritarianism', climate change, and the influence of the economy of democracy. In the most recent episode, Democracy from Below: What Real Utopias can We Build On, Mary Kaldor (professor at LSE and peace activist) reflects on the roles civil society can play in supporting democratic ideals.

The Fields of the Future podcast amplifies the voices and highlights the work of scholars, artists, and writers who are injecting new narratives into object-centered thinking. With episodes released on a monthly basis, each features an in-depth interview with a scholar whose research is object-centered in some substantial dimension. In the most recent episode of Fields of the Future, Jaipreet Virdi discusses how studies in material culture opened up new archival research trajectories in the history of the deaf and hearing impaired.

The COVID-19 pandemic remains the major structuring event of 2021 and that reality has been reflected in a number of podcast episodes debuting this month. They include:

• BiG Ideas (Institute for the Study of Culture and Society - Bowling Green State University) - Dr. Amílcar Challú and Dr. Chad Iwertz Duffy: COVID and Collaboration
• Lawrence Talks (Hall Center for the Humanities - Kansas University) - Public Health and COVID Testing w/ Ruaa Hassaballa
• Being Human (University of Pittsburgh) - "Miracle-Working in the Pandemic: An Interview with Christopher Nygren"

Bonus Episodes

Former CHCI board member and current Master of St. Peter's College Oxford Judith Buchanan interviewed filmmaker Ken Loach as part of the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities' TORCH Goes Digital! presents Big Tent - Live Events! series.

Simon Goldhill, former director of CRASSH, was part of the recent episode of BBC's In Our Time podcast on the subject of Marcus Aurelius.