The Indian Ocean World Podcast: Recent Episodes
Indian Ocean World Centre
The Indian Ocean World Podcast seeks to educate and inform its listeners on topics concerning the relationship between humans and the environment throughout the history of the Indian Ocean World. Based out of the Indian Ocean World Centre, a research centre affiliated with McGill University’s Department of History and Classical Studies, under the direction of Dr. Gwyn Campbell, the Indian Ocean World Podcast is part of the Appraising Risk Partnership, an international collaboration of scholars and researchers dedicated to exploring the critical role of climatic crises in the past and future of the Indian Ocean World. With generous support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the partnership seeks to create a comprehensive spatial and temporal database of human-environment interaction and interdependence during periods of climatic change.
Gillian Mathys (University of Ghent) joins Philip Gooding to discuss her newly published book "Fractured Pasts in Lake Kivu’s Borderlands:
Conflicts, connections and mobility in Central Africa"
Scholar Profile: https://research.flw.ugent.be/en/gillian.mathys
Book: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/fractured-pasts-in-lake-kivus-borderlands/28EE1FFBB2BDDA8814964DD39656B959
Bukavu Series: https://www.lse.ac.uk/ideas/podcasts/the-bukavu-expo
The Indian Ocean World podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced and edited by Sofia O’Reilly, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership, “Appraising Risk, Past and Present.”
Music: “Nam Nhi-tu” by M. Nguyen Van Minh-Con.
Eric Jennings (University of Toronto) joins Philip Gooding to discuss his newly published book "Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean"
Scholar profile: https://www.history.utoronto.ca/people/directories/all-faculty/eric-jennings
Book: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300264531/vanilla/
The Indian Ocean World podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced and edited by Sofia O’Reilly, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership, “Appraising Risk, Past and Present.”
Music: “Nam Nhi-tu” by M. Nguyen Van Minh-Con.
Kundai Manamere (University of the Free State) joins Philip Gooding to discuss her newly published book "Malaria on the Move: Rural Communities and Public Health in Zimbabwe, 1890-2015."
Scholar profile: https://www.ssrc.org/fellows/f1b62cd1-500a-eb11-a813-000d3a3be5cf/
Book: https://www.ohioswallow.com/9780821425862/malaria-on-the-move/
The Indian Ocean World podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced and edited by Sofia O’Reilly, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership, “Appraising Risk, Past and Present.”
Music: “Nam Nhi-tu” by M. Nguyen Van Minh-Con.
Everjoy Grace Chiimba (University of Bonn) joins Philip Gooding to discuss her ongoing paper, which explores youth narratives and organization following Cyclone Idai.
Scholar profile: https://kulturgeographie-mainz.de/team/everjoy-chiimba/
The Indian Ocean World podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced and edited by Sofia O’Reilly, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership, “Appraising Risk, Past and Present.”
Music: “Nam Nhi-tu” by M. Nguyen Van Minh-Con.
Prof. Devika Shankar (The University of Hong Kong) joins Philip Gooding to discuss her new book, An encroaching sea : nature, sovereignty and development at the edge of British India 1860-1950(Cambridge University Press, 2025).
Scholar profile: https://history.hku.hk/staff-d-shankar/
Book: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/an-encroaching-sea/F95A7CEFEDC145611A2E27DC2751A5D7
The Indian Ocean World podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced and edited by Sofia O’Reilly, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership, “Appraising Risk, Past and Present.”
Music: “Nam Nhi-tu” by M. Nguyen Van Minh-Con.
Prof. Fiona Williamson (Singapore Management University) joins Dr. Philip Gooding to discuss her recently published monograph: Imperial Weather Meteorology, Science, and the Environment in Colonial Malaya (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025). Their discussion covers the development of meteorological science under British rule in colonial Singapore and Malaya, with real implications for how the impacts of global warming are understood in the present.
A specialist in the environmental history of southeast Asia and the wider Indian Ocean World, Prof. Williamson has particular interest in the history of the climate, meteorology and extreme weather in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong.
Scholar profile: https://faculty.smu.edu.sg/profile/fiona-clare-williamson-1066
Book: https://faculty.smu.edu.sg/profile/fiona-clare-williamson-1066
The Indian Ocean World podcast is hosted by D. Philip Gooding, produced and edited by Sam Gleave Riemann and Sofia O’Reilly, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership, “Appraising Risk, Past and Present.”
Music: “Nam Nhi-tu” by M. Nguyen Van Minh-Con
Prof. Alastair McClure (Hong Kong) joins Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) to discuss his first monograph, Trials of Sovereignty: Mercy, Terror and the Making of Criminal Law in British India, 1857-1922 (Cambridge UP, 2024). Their conversation covers state violence, coercive mercy, and Indian national politics under the British Raj.
A specialist in South Asian legal history, Prof. McClure is Assistant Professor in the Department of History, University of Hong Kong.
Links:
University Profile: https://history.hku.hk/staff-a-mcclure/
Book: https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/history/south-asian-history/trials-sovereignty-mercy-violence-and-making-criminal-law-british-india-18571922?site_view=desktop
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced and edited by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership "Appraising Risk, Past and Present."
Music: "Nam Nhi-tu" by M. Nguyen Van Minh-Con
Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) is joined by Adam Bobbette (Glasgow) to discuss his 2023 book, The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java, published by Duke University Press. Their conversation covers the history of plate tectonic theory, human-earth systems relationships, and how to live and do research in the Anthropocene.
Dr. Adam Bobbette is Lecturer in Political Geology in the School of Geographical & Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow. The Pulse of the Earth is his first monograph and is currently being translated into Indonesian. In addition, he has co-edited four books on the academic press; contributed to The London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Cabinet, N+1, and e-flux; and collaborated creatively with filmmakers, architects, and visual artists.
Links:
University Profile: https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/ges/staff/adambobbette/
The Pulse of the Earth: https://dukeupress.edu/the-pulse-of-the-earth
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership "Appraising Risk, Past and Present."
Music: "Nam Nhi-tu" by M. Nguyen Van Minh-Con
In this episode, Sam Gleave Riemann (IOWC, McGill) is joined by Everjoy Grace Chiimba (Bonn), an affiliate of the Appraising Risk project, to discuss her ongoing PhD research into information circulation and social media before, during, and after Cyclone Idai and its devastating effects in Zimbabwe in 2019.
Everjoy Grace Chiimba is a PhD Candidate in Geography at the University of Bonn. She holds a BA in Geography and Archeology in 2014 from the University of Zimbabwe and a MSc. In Geography from Bonn and the United Nations University.
Links:
University Profile: https://kulturgeographie-mainz.de/team/everjoy-chiimba/
2022 Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2022.103012
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership "Appraising Risk, Past and Present."
Music: "Nam Nhi-tu" by M. Nguyen Van Minh-Con
Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) is joined by Dr. Lukas Ley and Tarini Monga (both Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology) to discuss the research group, "S.AND - The Future of Coastal Cities in the Indian Ocean." Their conversation covers the shifting roles of sand in human environments, with particular attention to their current fieldwork in the port of Marseille and peri-urban Goa, respectively.
Lukas Ley is Research Head of the S.AND research group. He holds PhD in Anthropology from the University of Toronto and his first monograph, Building on Borrowed Time: Raising Seas and Failing Infrastructure, was published in 2021.
Tarini Monga is a PhD candidate in the S.AND research group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.
Links:
S.AND project website: https://www.s-and.org/
Dr. Ley's profile: https://www.eth.mpg.de/ley
Ms. Monga's profile: https://www.eth.mpg.de/monga
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced and edited by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership "Appraising Risk, Past and Present."
Music:
"Nam Nhi-tu" by M. Nguyen Van Minh-Con
This week, Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC) is joined by Prof. James Warren (Murdoch) to discuss his monumental new book, Typhoons: Climate, Society, and History in the Philippines. Their conversation covers Prof. Warren's decades-long research project that led to this book, the impact of extreme storms on South East (and especially Philippine) history, and the shifting social dynamics that impact vulnerability to such events.
Prof. James Warren is Emeritus Professor of History at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia. Over his long and celebrated career, he has published 9 books and over 140 shorter pieces, held posts at universities on three continents, and made major contributions to research in South East Asian history, particularly environmental history.
Links:
University profile: https://researchportal.murdoch.edu.au/esploro/profile/james_warren/overview
Typhoons: Climate, Society, and History in the Philippines: https://unipress.ateneo.edu/product/typhoons-climate-society-and-history-philippines
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced and edited by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership "Appraising Risk, Past and Present."
Music:
"Nam Nhi-tu" by M. Nguyen Van Minh-Con
For the first episode of this season, we are trying something new. Instead of an interview, this week we turn the feed over to another, Marit Kleinert, who takes us to Zanzibar in the first episode of her new show, Beyond Theory. It is a fantastic piece of audio documentary, merging music, field recording, interview, and (yes) a little bit of social science theory to explore the dynamic women's cooperative economic sector in the Zanzibar archipelago.
Marit Kleinert is a Masters candidate in the program "Human Geography: Globalisation, Media and Culture" at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. This podcast was produced for a seminar in that program. Marit has a background in musicology and sound studies, as well as Southeast Asian studies, on which she draws in her podcast.
Links:
Beyond Theory & bibliography: https://beyondtheorypodcast.wordpress.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marit-kleinert
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced and edited by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership "Appraising Risk, Past and Present."
Music:
"Nam Nhi-tu" by M. Nguyen Van Minh-Con
"Construisons (Let’s build)" by Destinolas Bwenge
"Do it for me" by Jerybrown
For the second annual Summer Research Roundup, Dr. Philip Gooding sits down with five research assistants employed here at the Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University to explore and recognize the hard work they've put into their research over the last year.
Nadia Fekih is entering her final year in Environmental Studies at McGill. She has been with the IOWC for nearly two years, with a paper (co-authored with Dr. Gooding) forthcoming in the Journal of Southern African Studies.
Lilia Scudamore has just finished her BA and will begin an MA in History at McGill in the fall. She has two years of experience here at the IOWC and a particular interest in the history of infectious disease, the topic of her proposed MA project.
Sienna Hsu is a Computer Science student here at McGill. Her technical expertise has made her an invaluable member of our team, and she has contributed to all aspects of data collection, analysis, and visualization on a number of projects.
Sam Gleave Riemann joined the IOWC upon the completion of his MA in Classical Studies at McGill two years ago. He produces this podcast, helps organize events, contributes to research, and has recently stepped into a Project Manager role alongside Dr. Gooding.
Hannah Sparwasser Soroka is a PhD candidate in History at McGill, entering her fourth year and specializing in Early Modern European intellectual history.
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership “Appraising Risk, Past and Present.”
Music: "Nam Nhi-tu" by M. Nguyen Van Minh-Con
Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) is joined by Prof. Tasha Rijke-Epstein (Vanderbilt) to discuss her wonderful new book, Children of the Soil: The Power of Built Form in Urban Madagascar. Their conversation takes us to Mahajanga, a port city in northwestern Madagascar, considering the city's contested built environment, as well as the human and more-than-human interactions and complex (and sometimes fraught) migration histories that play out against this backdrop.
Prof. Rijke-Epstein is Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. She holds a PhD in History and Anthropology from the University of Michigan and an MPhil from the University of Cape Town. Children of the Soil is her first monograph.
Links:
University Profile: https://as.vanderbilt.edu/history/bio/tasha-rijke-epstein/
Book: https://www.dukeupress.edu/children-of-the-soil
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership "Appraising Risk, Past and Present."
This week, Dr. Nienke Boer (Sydney) joins our producer, Sam Gleave Riemann, to discuss her 2023 book, The Briny South: Displacement and Sentiment in the Indian Ocean World (Duke UP). They discuss the connections between post-colonial and ocean studies, feelings and their representations, and South Africa and the broader Indian Ocean World.
Dr. Boer has been Lecturer in World Literatures at the University of Sydney since early 2023. She was previously Assistant Professor of Humanities (Literature) at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. The Briny South is her first monograph.
Links:
University Profile: https://www.sydney.edu.au/arts/about/our-people/academic-staff/nienke-boer.html/
The Briny South: https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-briny-south
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership "Appraising Risk, Past and Present."
Music: "Nam Nhi-tu" by M. Nguyen Van Minh-Con
In this episode, Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) is joined by Dr. John Lee (Durham) to discuss two recent article-length publications, his 2022 paper, “Sylvan Anxieties and the Making of Landscapes in Early Modern Korea,” and his chapter, “A State of Ranches and Forests: The Environmental Legacy of the Mongol Empire in Korea,” from the 2023 volume, Forces of Nature: New Perspectives on Korean Environments. As these titles suggest, their discussion considers forests and forest management in Korean history, as well as the field of environmental history as a whole.
Dr. Lee is an Assistant Professor of East Asian History in the Department of History at the University of Durham, serving since 2019. He completed his PhD in 2017 at Harvard University and is currently finishing his first monograph.
Links:
University Profile: https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/john-s-lee/
"Sylvan Anxieties": https://doi.org/10.3197/096734022X16551974226081
"A State of Ranches and Forests": https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctv310vm12.9
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership "Appraising Risk, Past and Present."
Music: "Nam Nhi-tu" by M. Nguyen Van Minh-Con
Prof. Krishnendu Ray (NYU) joins Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) to discuss a recent special volume of Verge: Studies in Global Asias, entitled "Culinary Cultures on the Move," which Prof. Ray co-edited, as well as his contribution to that volume, entitled "Food in the Indian Ocean World: Mobility, Materiality, and Cultural Exchange," which he coauthored with Dr. Kathleen Burke (NYU Shanghai) and Stephanie Jolly. This wide-ranging conversation covers the dynamics of academic collaboration across disciplines, competing geographic heuristics between Asia(s) and the broad IOW, and the possibilities of multi-sensory scholarship.
Trained as a sociologist, Prof. Ray teaches in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at NYU and previously at the Culinary Institute of America. He is the author of two monographs, The Migrant's Table (Temple UP, 2004) and The Ethnic Restaurateur (Bloomsbury, 2016), and serves on the Editorial Collective of the journal Gastronomica.
Links:
University Profile: https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/people/krishnendu-ray
Verge, "Culinary Cultures on the Move": https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/50261
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced and edited by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership "Appraising Risk, Past and Present."
Music: "Nam Nhi-tu" by M. Nguyen Van Minh-Con
For the first episode of our new season, Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) welcomes Prof. Arunima Datta (University of North Texas) to discuss her article, "Race, Anxiety and Shopping in the Australian Outback: Indian Hawkers and Victoria's 1884 Smallpox Outbreak," as well as her newly-published second monograph, Waiting on Empire: A History of Indian Travelling Ayahs in Britain (Oxford UP, 2023). Their conversation covers many of the themes that animate Prof. Datta's research: South Asian migration under the British Empire, labour history from a subaltern perspective, and the intersections of gender and race.
Prof. Datta is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at UNT, Associate Editor for both Gender & History and Britain and the World, and Associate Review Editor for the American Historical Review. Her first monograph, Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya, was published in 2021.
Links:
University Profile: https://history.unt.edu/people/arunima-datta
"Race, Anxiety and Shopping": https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003152149-27/race-anxiety-shopping-australian-outback-arunima-datta
Waiting on Empire: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/waiting-on-empire-9780192848239?cc=ca⟨=en&
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced and edited by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership "Appraising Risk, Past and Present."
Music: "Nam Nhi-tu" by M. Nguyen Van Minh-Con
This week, Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) interviews Prof. Chris Gratien (UVA) about his highly-awarded new book, The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier (Stanford UP, 2022). They talk about trends and methods in environmental history, the specific histories of Çukurova that the book explores, and the late Ottoman frontier as a frontier in turn of the vast Indian Ocean World.
Prof. Gratien is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of History. The Unsettled Plain is his first monograph, building from his 2015 PhD Georgetown University doctoral thesis. He also co-founded the Ottoman History Podcast in 2011, where he remains a producer.
Links:
University Profile: https://history.virginia.edu/people/profile/crg8w
Book: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=32948
Ottoman History Podcast: https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/p/about-us.html
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership "Appraising Risk, Past and Present."
Prof. Jeremy Prestholdt (UC San Diego) joins Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) to go behind-the-scenes on the new journal of Indian Ocean Studies, Monsoon, of which Prof. Prestholdt is founding co-editor. They also discuss some of Prof. Prestholdt's recent and upcoming research on the connections of the Western Indian Ocean and Indian Ocean Africa with global economic and cultural systems.
Prof. Prestholdt completed his PhD at Northwestern University in 2003 and is now Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of two books, Icons of Dissent: The Global Resonance of Che, Marley, Tupac and Bin Laden (2023) and Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (2008).
Links:
University Profile: https://history.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/prestholdt.html
Monsoon: Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim: https://www.dukeupress.edu/monsoon
The Africa Institute: https://www.theafricainstitute.org/
"Locating the Indian Ocean" (2015): https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2015.1091639
"Global Currents and the Transformation of Space in Indian Ocean Africa" (2015): https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-10615622
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership "Appraising Risk, Past and Present."
Our producer, Sam Gleave Riemann (IOWC, McGill), is joined by Julien Greschner to discuss his 2023 Masters thesis, "Solutions to Poverty According to Those Who Live It: Case Study in Manyatta B Informal Settlement, Kisumu, Kenya," covering definitions of poverty, community perceptions, and research processes in the global South under pandemic conditions.
Julien Greschner recently completed his MA in Geography at McGill University under the supervision of Prof. Jon Unruh.
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership "Appraising Risk, Past and Present."
Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) is joined by Dr. James Parker (Arizona State University) to discuss his 2022 paper, "Ecologies of Development: Ecophilosophies and Indigenous Action on the Tana River," published in History in Africa. The conversation covers colonial capitalism and its post-colonial hangovers along the river, the complex Indigenous responses to these forces, and the agency of the Tana itself in shaping these stories.
Dr. Parker completed his PhD at Northeastern University in 2020 and, before joining ASU, he held posts at the Carter G. Woodson Center at the University of Virginia and at Texas Women's University.
Links:
University Profile: https://search.asu.edu/profile/4878911
Paper: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/history-in-africa/article/ecologies-of-development-ecophilosophies-and-indigenous-action-on-the-tana-river/195C0B517750990AFC2F1C6010690310?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=bookmark
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership "Appraising Risk, Past and Present."
Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) welcomes Dr. James Beattie (Victoria University of Wellington) for a wide-ranging discussion of Dr. Beattie's work: the 2022 multi-author volume Migrant Ecologies: Environmental History of the Pacific World, which he co-edited with Ryan Tucker Jones and Edward Dallam Melillo; his chapter in that book, "Chinese Resource Frontiers, Environmental Change, and Entrepreneurship in the South Pacific, 1790s–1920s"; and the International Review of Environmental History, a dynamic, refereed, open-access journal of which he is founding editor.
Dr. Beattie completed his PhD at the University of Otago in 2005 and since then has has published widely on Chinese and environmental history in the Pacific World.
Links:
University Profile: https://people.wgtn.ac.nz/james.beattie/about
IREH: https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/journals/international-review-environmental-history
Migrant Ecologies: https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/migrant-ecologies-environmental-histories-of-the-pacific-world/
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership "Appraising Risk, Past and Present."
Producer Sam Gleave Riemann (IOWC, McGill) is joined by Dr. Sophie Chao (Sydney) to discuss the complex ecologies of West Papuan oil palm plantations. They consider multispecies kinships, capitalist aggression, and the various critters who assist and oppose the oil palm's presence in Papua.
Dr. Chao completed her PhD at the Macquarie University in 2019 and is now a DECRA Fellow and Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Prior to pursuing her doctoral studies, she worked for the Indigenous rights organization Forest Peoples Programme in Indonesia and the UK. She is the author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-than-human Becomings in West Papua, which was published in 2022 with Duke University Press.
Links:
"The Beetle or the Bug": https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13592
"The Multispecies World of Oil Palm": https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-08537-6_12
University Profile: https://www.sydney.edu.au/arts/about/our-people/academic-staff/sophie-chao.html
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership “Appraising Risk, Past and Present.”
In the first episode of our fall season, Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) is in conversation with Prof. Tamara Fernando (Stony Brook). Taking Prof. Fernando's 2023 paper, "Mapping Oysters and Making Oceans in the Northern Indian Ocean, 1880–1906," as their starting point, they discuss her research into the 19th-century pearl trade around the Indian Ocean World, which spans several historical subfields—animal and labour histories; the histories of science and empire—and calls us to reexamine the role of non-human actors and indeed of the ocean itself in Indian Ocean World studies.
Prof. Fernando completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2022 and has recently joined Stony Brook University in New York as Associate Professor in the Department of History.
Links:
Article: https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041752200038X
Website: https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/history/people/_faculty/fernando
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership “Appraising Risk, Past and Present.”
On this special episode between seasons, Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) checks in with four of the IOWC undergraduate Research Assistants. Join us as we honour their hard work and learn more about the ongoing research projects at the Indian Ocean World Centre.
Wukai Jiang majors in Geography and minors in History at McGill University.
Nadia Fekih has just completed her second year at McGill, majoring in Environmental Studies and minoring in History.
Alex Springer graduated from McGill this spring with Honours in International Development and a minor in History; he will continue his studies at Imperial College, London in the fall.
Lilia Scudamore is going into her third year at McGill, majoring in History and minoring in both Political Science and Economics.
Link: https://niche-canada.org/2023/03/15/a-gis-approach-to-a-history-of-epidemics-in-19th-century-india/
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership “Appraising Risk, Past and Present.”
Our usual host, Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill), is our interviewee this week, answering a few questions about his first monograph, On the Frontiers of the Indian Ocean World: A History of Lake Tanganyika, c.1830-1890 (Cambridge UP, 2022) with our producer, Sam Gleave Riemann. As well as introducing the book to listeners who haven't had a chance to read it yet, they answer a handful of questions that Philip didn't have time to address at his book launch, considering the role of Christian missionaries and Muslim merchants, narratives of continuity and change, and his varied methodologies.
Philip earned a PhD in History from SOAS London in 2017. He joined the Indian Ocean World Center as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 2018 and since then has published a number of articles on East African and Indian Ocean history, co-edited two multi-author volumes, and served as associate editor of the Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies.
Links:
Book: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009122023
Website: https://indianoceanworldcentre.com/postdoctoral_fellows/philip-gooding/#
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership “Appraising Risk, Past and Present.”
This week, our host Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) joins in conversation with Dr. Alice Nyawira Karuri (Strathmore) to discuss her recent chapter "Adaptation of Small-Scale Tea and Coffee Farmers in Kenya to Climate Change," published in the African Handbook of Climate Change Adaptation (Springer, 2021). Their conversation covers Dr. Karuri's economic research into the challenges facing Kenyan tea and coffee farmers in our current climate crisis, the work that the farmers and their partners are doing—or not—to face those challenges, and the economic, political, and historical forces that shape stakeholder decision-making.
Dr. Karuri is a lecturer in Development Studies at Strathmore University in Nairobi, Kenya. She completed her PhD in Development Studies at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology in 2019 and is currently contributing to the HESTIA Farm Sustainability Toolkit Project at Oxford University.
Links:
Article: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45106-6_70
Website: https://www.shss.strathmore.edu/dr-alice-karuri/
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership “Appraising Risk, Past and Present.”
Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) is joined this week by Prof. Justin Raycraft (Lethbridge) to discuss his 2021 paper, “Islamic Discourses of Environmental Change on the Swahili Coast of Southern Tanzania.” Their conversation covers not just Prof. Raycraft's fascinating analysis of Islam's role in his respondents' interpretation of a changing environment, but covers in depth the ethnographic process by which he collected his data and the broader economic, environmental, and ethnographic contexts of coastal Tanzania.
Prof. Raycraft completed his PhD in Anthropology at McGill in 2022 and, after a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Program on Science, Technology, and Society, Harvard University, he has been Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Lethbridge since late in the same year. His research in coastal Tanzania has led to a number of published articles.
Links:
Article: https://doi.org/10.17730/1938-3525-80.1.49
Website: https://directory.uleth.ca/users/justin.raycraft
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership “Appraising Risk, Past and Present.”
This week, Prof. Pao-Kuan Wang (Academia Sinica) joins Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) to discuss the Reconstructed East Asian Climate Historical Encoded Series (REACHES) database, a staggering initiative that, under Prof. Wang’s directorship, standardizes and makes available climate data based on historical records spanning Ming and Qing China. Their conversation covers the long history of Prof. Wang’s research in historical climatology, the creation of the REACHES database, and its value as a research tool for both scientists and humanists.
After a long career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he still holds an Emeritus professorship, Prof. Wang was elected a Fellow of Academia Sinica in 2013 and is currently also a Visiting Distinguished Chair in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at National Cheng Kung University.
Links:
Article: https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata2018288
Website: https://academicians.sinica.edu.tw/index.php?r=academician-n%2Fshow&id=713&_lang=en
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership “Appraising Risk, Past and Present.”
Prof. Kasia Paprocki (LSE) joins Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) to discuss her first monograph, Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh, which was published by Cornell University Press in 2021. They discuss Prof. Paprocki’s longstanding work with peasant movements in southwest Bangladesh, challenging normative problems in international narratives around climate, development, and sovereignty.
Prof. Paprocki is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she is affiliated with the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and co-organizes the Social Life of Climate Change seminar series. She completed her PhD from Cornell University in 2017.
Links:
Book: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501759161/threatening-dystopias/
Website: https://www.lse.ac.uk/geography-and-environment/people/academic-staff/kasia-paprocki
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership “Appraising Risk, Past and Present.”
Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) welcomes Prof. Ruth Mostern (Pittsburgh) to discuss her 2021 book, The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History. They consider the river’s central role in Chinese history, moving water, sediment, people, and goods, along with the research and publication processes of environmental history.
Prof. Mostern is Professor in Pitt’s Department of History, where she teaches Chinese and world history and is Director of the World History Center. Her first book, Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern: The Spatial Organization of the Song State (960-1276 CE), was published in 2011. Alongside the research project that lead to The Yellow River, she leads the World Historical Gazetteer project.
Links:
Book: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300238334/the-yellow-river/
University Website: https://www.history.pitt.edu/people/ruth-mostern
Twitter: https://twitter.com/RuthMostern
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership “Appraising Risk, Past and Present.”
Prof. Ruth Morgan (Australian National University) joins Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) to discuss her 2021 article “Health, Hearth and Empire: Climate, Race and Reproduction in British India and Western Australia.” Their conversation covers the nuances of 19th-century British imperial policy in the Indian Ocean World, the shortfalls of contemporary climatic theories of race and health, and the value of gender analysis in climate history as a whole.
Prof. Morgan is Associate Professor in ANU’s School of History, where she directs the Center for Environmental History. She works on the histories of science and climate in Australia, the British Empire, and the Indo-Pacific, and her monograph, Running Out? Water in Western Australia, was published in 2015 to wide acclaim, winning a 2016 Western Australian Premier's Book Award.
Links:
Article: https://doi.org/10.3197/096734021X16076828553511
Website: http://www.ruthamorgan.com/
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership “Appraising Risk, Past and Present.”
Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) is joined by Dr. Julia Jong Haines (Cornell) to discuss her archeological research at Bras D’Eau National Park in Mauritius, a former sugar plantation. Their conversation covers trees as archeological artifacts, Mauritian environmental degradation beyond the dodo, and the palimpsestic legacies of slavery and indenture on the Mauritian landscape.
Dr. Haines completed her PhD at the University of Virginia in 2019, and currently holds Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. Her research focuses on Mauritius between the 18th and mid-20th centuries, working with local partners to consider questions of environmental, social, and scientific history.
Links:
Article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10761-021-00629-0
University Profile: https://anthropology.cornell.edu/julia-jong-haines
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding and Dr. Julie Babin, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership “Appraising Risk, Past and Present.”
Prof. Sugata Ray (UC Berkeley) joins Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) to delve into the history of two much-maligned birds of the early modern Indian Ocean world: the dodo and the turkey. As a historian of South Asian art working at the intersection of animal, environmental, and postcolonial studies, Prof. Ray starts with pictures of these birds and expands to discuss their intertwining political, cultural, and ecological roles in the earliest days of the Eurocene collapse.
Prof. Ray is Associate Professor of South and Southeast Asian art in the History of Art Department and the Department of South & Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850, which was published by the University of Washington Press and won the 2021 Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion and the 2020 Religion and the Arts Book Award. With Venugopal Maddipati, he has also coedited the 2020 volume, Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence.
Links:
Article: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691236018/picture-ecology
University Profile: https://sseas.berkeley.edu/people/sugata-ray/
Website: http://www.sugataray.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sugataray1
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding and Dr. Julie Babin, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership “Appraising Risk, Past and Present.”
Prof. Franziska Fay (JGU Mainz) joins Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) to discuss two recent publications, “‘Kuishi Ughaibuni’: Emplaced Absence, the Zanzibar Diaspora Policy, and Young Men's Experiences of Belonging Between Zanzibar and Oman” and “‘To Everyone Who Told Zanzis That They Are Not Omani’: Young Swahili-speaking Omanis’ Belonging in Postdiaspora Oman.” These two papers explore the Zanzibari diaspora while simultaneously deconstructing the category of “diaspora” itself.
Since 2021, Prof. Fay has been Assistant Professor of Political Anthropology at the Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz. She completed a PhD in Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS University of London in 2017 and then held a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Goethe University Frankfurt from 2017–2021. Geographically, her research straddles the western Indian Ocean between the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa, addressing a number of themes including diaspora and language, youth and childhood, gender and ethnic identity.
Links:
Website: https://www.franziskafay.com/
University Profile: https://www.ifeas.uni-mainz.de/jun-prof-dr-franziska-fay/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Franziska_Fay
Article: https://jiows.mcgill.ca/article/view/120
Article: https://journals.openedition.org/cy/7304
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding and Dr. Julie Babin, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership “Appraising Risk, Past and Present.”
Dr. Harriet Mercer (Cambridge) joins Dr. Julie Babin (IOWC, McGill) to discuss her recent article on “Atmospheric Archives: Gender and Climate Knowledge in Colonial Tasmania.” Their conversation and Dr. Mercer’s research delve into the history of “climate history,” challenging established methodologies and epistemologies that exclude certain perspectives along the lines of gender, race, class, and indigeneity.
Dr. Mercer completed a PhD at Oxford University in 2021. She is currently a Research Associate on Making Climate History, a Leverhulme Trust-funded project in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University, exploring the creation and diverse creators of climate knowledge over the last 200 years.
Links:
Article Link: https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/whp/eh/2021/00000027/00000002/art00003
University Profile: https://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/directory/mercer
Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarrietJMercer
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding and Dr. Julie Babin, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership “Appraising Risk, Past and Present.”
Dr. Manikarnika Dutta, a Research Associate in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford, joins Dr. Julie Babin to discuss her research into the intersection of medical, colonial, and maritime history in nineteenth-century Calcutta. This research began with a doctoral thesis completed in 2019, but today we focus on the peer-reviewed paper, "Cholera, British seamen and maritime anxieties in Calcutta, c.1830s-1890s."
Dr. Dutta holds an MA in Modern History from the University of Calcutta, as well as an MSc in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, and a DPhil from the University of Oxford. Her research examines the interplay of medicine, especially public health regimes, and race in colonial India. Her work has been awarded the Taniguchi Medal (2018) and the William Bynum Essay Prize (2021).
Links:
Article Link: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/medical-history/article/cholera-british-seamen-and-maritime-anxieties-in-calcutta-c1830s1890s-the-william-bynum-prize-essay/7EFD13BEDFFDEE41613D49C51BC4AAFB
Chapter Link: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-36264-5_8
University Profile: https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/people/manikarnika-dutta
Twitter: @DManikarnika
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding and Dr. Julie Babin, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership “Appraising Risk, Past and Present.”
Dr. Anna Winterbottom (McGill) and Prof. Victoria Dickenson (McGill) join Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) to discuss the Gwillim Project, a multinational research project exploring the remarkable artistic and epistolary output of two English sisters, Mary Symonds and Elizabeth Gwillim, living in early-nineteenth-century Madras. Elizabeth Gwillim’s high-quality, to-scale natural history drawings of birds, fish, and flowers are held in the Blacker Wood Natural History Collection at the McGill Library. Along with Mary’s paintings and the sisters’ correspondence, these pictures throw light not just on the history of natural history, Prof. Dickenson’s area of expertise, but on all facets of the life and environment of Southern India at the time. Dr. Winterbottom contextualizes the sister's work with insights from her research into the East India Company European settlements around the Indian Ocean.
Prof. Victoria Dickenson is Professor of Practice, Rare Books and Special Collections at the McGill Library. She serves as Principal Investigator for the Gwillim Project.
Dr. Anna Winterbottom serves as Research Associate and Project Manager for the Gwillim Project.
For more information on the Gwillim Project, see:
https://thegwillimproject.com/
The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding and Dr. Julie Babin, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership "Appraising Risk, Past and Present."
What does it mean when we talk about micro-financing the rural economy? And how does micro-financing apply to Cambodia? These questions are explored by Professor W. Nathan Green, Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore. Prof. Green’s research critically examines the political ecologies of agrarian finance and infrastructure in Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on Cambodia. By combining his economic, geographical, and ethnographic study of rural Cambodia, Prof. Green paints us a vivid picture of the development of Cambodian loan and borrowing structures, while delving into the risks associated with having one’s land in collateral. Since the 1980s, micro-financing has been essential to Cambodia’s rise out of the economic and humanitarian turmoil inflicted by the Pol Pot regime. But, as climate change continues to impact the stability of Cambodia and the rest of the world, vulnerabilities amongst those dwelling in this ‘borrowers’ economy have become increasingly noticeable. As is stated by Prof. Green, vulnerability to climate change goes beyond the natural environment to encapsulate structural drivers of vulnerability like political empowerment, the ability to make decisions over one’s own land, entitlements to resources, etc. Rising household indebtedness in Cambodia due to its micro-financing scheme is a major driver of household vulnerability.
To learn more about Prof Green, check out his academic page here: https://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/geowng/
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC; English Common Law, University of Ottawa) and Philip Gooding (postdoctoral fellow, IOWC, McGill).
In this podcast, Dr. Nuno Grancho, a postdoctoral fellow and Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the Centre for Privacy Studies, University of Copenhagen, discusses his research into the architecture of the island city of Diu, Gujarat, West India. Focussing on the five centuries of Diu’s Portuguese occupation (1514-1961) his work demonstrates the complex nature of overlap between spatial and functional categories in the colonial context. Dr. Grancho approaches Diu as a modern artefact of study, with his research extended beyond the tangible aspects of the city’s structure. In doing so, he argues that the history and theory of architecture and urbanism combined with the history and theory of the collision of Portuguese and West Indian cultures have created an exceptional urban architectural environment. This exceptionalism, as remarked by Dr. Grancho, is marked by the fact that “never again was there a place like Diu in the history of European colonial presence in India, in the history of colonial identity in India, and most of all, in the history of European colonial cities in India.”
By comparing Diu’s structure and organization to other European settlements (English, Dutch, Danish, and French), Dr. Grancho’s research contributes to the historiography of imperial architecture and architectural history. Specifically, it highlights the ethnic, racial, social, and spatial divide between Indigenous and European colonial settlements. With regards to the preservation of the rich history within the parameter of Diu’s urban environment, Dr. Grancho maintains that a balance must be found between what is heritage and what is vernacular, and contemporary building techniques of today must be used to preserve the authenticity of this exceptional city.
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC) and Philip Gooding (postdoctoral fellow, IOWC, McGill).
The IOWC Podcast team had the opportunity of interviewing Dr. Hasan H. Karrar, an Associate Professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (“LUMS,” Lahore, Pakistan) who specializes in modern Chinese and Central Asian history and political economy. In this podcast, Dr. Karrar delves into his recent working paper entitled “The Indus Delta Between Past and Future: Precarious Livelihoods and Neoliberal Imaginaries in a Parched Coastal Belt,” which was published in the 5th volume of the Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies (JIOWS). Predominantly located in Pakistan, the Indus delta, at the terminus of the Indus River system, is presently home to 300,000 residents. Over the last century, upriver hydrology has reduced the flow of water through the river. The result of continuous hydrological manipulation is salination and seawater incursion that has led to the loss of arable land – reducing agriculture as a sustainable livelihood. This has created precarious livelihoods whereby people are forced either into the informal fishing sector, or to migrate, representing a stark departure from earlier times when agriculture was the primary vocation.
Dr. Karrar asks what the future holds for the delta region of Pakistan? What solutions might be proposed to these climate-related roadblocks? One solution is utilizing Chinese investment in Pakistan to reduce the environmental impact on the region. This approach moreover presents a future Pakistan that is connected to markets in Asia through its ports, an economic design that has been propagated in Pakistan for decades. However, as is argued by Dr. Karrar, the fixation on the fantastical futures of the Pakistani state, while encouraging investment and economic longevity, does not assist in remedying the problems of a delta-based population stuck in an uncertain present.
In this podcast, our host Philip Gooding interviews Professor Kaustubh Mani Sengupta (Bankura University, West Bengal, India) on his recent article published in the fifth volume of the Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies (JIOWS), entitled “William Tolly and His Canal: Navigating Calcutta in the Late-Eighteenth Century.” Specifically, Prof. Sengupta elaborates on the making of one particularly arduous canal in Calcutta, connecting the port city of Bengal with the eastern districts of the province for better trade and communication. This massive undertaking, headed by a serving officer of the East India Company (EIC), Major Tolly, revealed the material, political, and economic complexities of industrialization in early British India. In addition to discussing the general inefficiency of the Company and its young British servants, Prof. Sengupta advances the environmental history of the region by discussing how canal-building introduced significant shifts in how surrounding populations interacted with their natural environment. Going forward, Prof. Sengupta hopes to apply an enhanced environmental perspective to his ongoing research on Calcutta industrialization, water systems, and sanitation epidemics.
Link to article:
https://jiows.mcgill.ca/article/view/99
Where does your honey come from? Who produces it and who benefits from its consumption?
In this podcast, Dr. Denise Matias (Associate Researcher, Centre for Development Research, University of Bonn) discusses her research into Asian honeybee farming. While predominantly focussing on indigenous practices of honey cultivation in the forests of the Palawan Islands, the Philippines, the podcast sheds awareness on how European standards of wild honey is putting Asian honey at a significant disadvantage in global trade and consumption. The frequent exclusion of Asian honey from Westernized honey markets has been addressed by researchers and NGOs. However, there has been little government initiative to rectify the gap.
As the children of Indigenous honeybee farmers in the Palawan islands continue to be educated away from their traditional lands, their knowledge of traditional honey production dwindles. Reductions in Indigenous knowledge of honey cultivation, combined with the erratic floods and droughts brought forward by climate change, are rapidly shortening the lifespan of the Asian honeybee, as well as reducing the conjugal social-ecological relationship between honeybee farmers and the bees.
Dr. Mikko Toivanen (Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich) joins us to discuss his research on colonial tourism and its relationship with the environment throughout various Southeast and South Asian colonies in the 19th century. While frequently considered through a historical, economic or scientific lens, these colonial strongholds were also developed as havens of leisure tourism for travelling Europeans. By studying British and Dutch imperial travel logs, Dr. Toivanen demonstrates how colonial exploits transformed the natural environments in Ceylon, Java, and the Strait Settlement. He argues that these transformations were largely rooted in imperial competition to develop the most appealing travel destination for the European constituency. Competitive botany, for example, stimulated the construction of fantastical botanical gardens in colonial capitals, providing travellers with a highly exclusive and controlled tropical environment that provided attractive venues for events, performances, rest, and observation.
Perhaps most influential in his work is Dr. Toivanen’s argument that a circuit of transcolonial leisure-travel was developed around the mid-19th century. From the nature of this transcolonial circuit emerged a hierarchy of travel destinations, with Dutch and British invalid travellers seeking out specific colonial strongholds for vacation based on the desirability of their climate. This contradicts the previous belief that early colonial tourism had been restricted to the respective colonies of each European imperialist power.
In this podcast, the IOWC podcast team had the pleasure of interviewing Patrick Slack, a PhD student studying under the McGill University Geography Department. Throughout the conversation, Patrick discusses his ongoing research (MA and PhD) into the role that black cardamom plays in upland, ethnic minority semi-subsistence livelihoods in the western Sino-Vietnamese borderlands. Black cardamom – a medicinal and culinary non-timber forest product – was previously touted as a sustainable rural development livelihood strategy. It provided reliable income to subsidize the lives of borderland farmers for decades, permitting stability, self-determination, and independence among farmers in Vietnam’s northern Lao Cai province.
However, over the past decade, the cultivation of black cardamom has been threatened by two major catalysts: 1) extreme weather events which have decimated harvests; and 2) the increasing regulations that centralized governments have been imposing on highland forests and cardamom cultivation within them. Patrick explores both threats in this podcast. He goes into detail on how he became interested in the crop as a research topic, how ethnic minorities of northern Vietnam are treated by mainstream society, how regulations on the cultivation of black cardamom – also seen as the regulation of ethnically and culturally diverse behaviours – are impacting the ethnic minority populations subsisting off of the crop in the borderlands, as well as how gender roles, climate change, and the Covid-19 pandemic come into play when discussing the continuance of the crop throughout northern highland society. Patrick further explains his hopes for his upcoming PhD research, which will focus on both the Lao Cai province and the west-adjacent province of Lai Chau. The ethnographic study that Patrick intends to produce throughout his doctoral degree will be the first to explore how borderland ethnic minority farmers in upland northern Vietnam have navigated modernity and state interventionism over the past century.
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC), Archisman Chaudhuri and Philip Gooding (both postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill).
In this podcast, Prof. Ling Zhang (Boston College, USA) unravels the multi-layered and multi-faceted impact of a major climatic anomaly in northern Song China in the 11th-century shift of the Yellow River's course north to the Hebei province (1048-1128 CE). She tells us her initial impressions of northern China as a desolate region compared to the prosperous south made her question a crucial and under-explored issue of the Tang-Song transition in China during the medieval economic boom (7th-13th centuries): In a time when China experienced an economic revolution, what happened to northern China? Why did it fall behind? Prof. Zhang's research to answer this question confronted her with the devastating shift of the Yellow River to Hebei (1048CE), and the long-term underbelly of socio-economic and enviro-political processes that preceded and followed the river's shift to Hebei. The Song state prioritised the south, the seat of the empire, against the north to manage the Yellow River's floods - a phenomenon that had been precluded by warmer temperatures and more humidity in the preceding two centuries to facilitate massive agricultural expansion in northern China. This had resulted in long-term soil erosion and increased sedimentation in the Yellow River which, coupled with the state's hydraulic projects, produced the disaster of 1048 CE. If its instant impact had been unexpectedly shocking to Hebei, the longue durée of this climatic anomaly meant a slow death for northern China. As farming became increasingly difficult due to rapidly eroding silt and the river's repetitive floods in the north, farmers could not sustain their previous sedentary lifestyle in the face of decreasing food security and either migrated as refugees or turned to banditry. The government, in its bid to tackle famine among the disaster refugees, turned to conscripting adult males into the army and encouraged richer sections of the society to adopt refugees, in effect leading to famine-induced bondage of women and children. When conscripted soldiers deserted to join bandits in north China, the impact of a climatic crisis eventually snowballed into political and moral bankruptcy for the state in the north. The Song state donned an interventionist avatar and bought foodstuff from other parts to feed the consumer market in north China. Although this boosted production and had a positive economic impact as a corollary, it was founded on the enviro-economic collapse of northern China - a divergence which, Zhang argues, helps us rethink the question of Tang-Song transition and a medieval economic revolution in China. Finally, Prof. Ling Zhang concludes that in dealing with contemporary climate change, humans should learn from their past mistakes, when their profound arrogance in the belief of providing a single solution to conquer nature has repeatedly foundered. In so doing, Prof. Zhang argues in favour of a more inclusive model of knowledge that combines the diversity of local knowledge of environment(s) with social science-based, humanistic-and-eco systematic understandings of environmental issues.
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC), Archisman Chaudhuri and Philip Gooding (both postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill).
In this podcast, Dr Chandni Singh (Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore, India) and Prof. Roger Few (University of East Anglia) discuss the different meanings of recovery from disasters and highlight how disasters are caused as much by physical hazards as they are socially generated. Using case studies from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Singh and Few argue that long-term recovery from disasters should focus not only on the measurable, tangible impact (roads, buildings), but also on rebuilding the well-being of communities. Differential access to resources and assets - e.g., loans to rebuild a house, or collateral - meaning rebuilding and recovery have contrasting connotations for affected communities. Media reports too shape the broader understandings of the impact of disasters. While infrastructural recovery is more visible in the recovery policies of Tamil Nadu that has a long history of disasters, psychosocial recovery of people is harder to achieve - as people displaced by a tsunami and rehabilitated to flood-prone areas in Chennai will find it difficult to grow out of stress induced by climatic anomalies. As social scientists and planners, Singh and Few recommend that disaster management, especially for coastal cities like Chennai in India, should be simply not reactive. Instead, a more proactive approach that a) relies upon preserving the wetlands which can absorb a lot of damage caused by floods and cyclones; b) is more attentive towards vulnerability across temporal scales and social differentiation; and, c) is more democratic by including more of people's voices in what recovery means is a better answer to reimagining recovery from disasters. In so doing, Chandni Singh and Roger Few tell us about a relatively lesser-known aspect of human-environment interaction in the Indian Ocean World.
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC), Archisman Chaudhuri and Philip Gooding (both postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill).
The IOWC podcast team interviews Dr. Lisa Schipper (University of Oxford) an Environmental Social Science Research Fellow at the Environmental Change Institute (ECI). Dr. Schipper’s research explores the interlinkages between climate change and human development, as she seeks to address the question of whether fair and just development is possible in a changing climate. Our discussion covers Dr. Schipper’s exploration of vulnerabilities to climate change that exist in communities in the developing world. She argues that socio-cultural dimensions of vulnerability –such as gender, culture, religion, etc. – relate to structural inequalities of power, justice and equity; ultimately leading to mosaics of different levels of climate change vulnerability within each stand-alone community. Dr. Schipper delves into how the Covid-19 pandemic and its economic, social, and political impacts have increased vulnerabilities throughout the developing world, as well as how downfalls of short-term climate change adaptation strategies, and maladaptation to climate change, have only emphasized existing vulnerabilities within specific communities. Moreover, as a current coordinating lead author of Chapter 18 of the Working Group 2 Contribution to the 6th assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Dr. Schipper delves into the problematic attitude of prioritizing scientific and quantitative data over qualitative data of the human experience in climate change reporting. She warns of the simplification and misunderstandings that are frequently engendered by focusing solely on the numeric values of climate change instead of truly fleshing out the complexities that exist among human beings experiencing vulnerability to climate change. Finally, Dr. Schipper touches on the effects of the frequent exclusion of female voices and voices from the global south, particularly in African countries, from the academic echo chamber. She argues that this form of gatekeeping excludes different perspectives, and perhaps solutions, to the rapidly changing climate.
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC), Archisman Chaudhuri and Philip Gooding (both postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill).
Professor Jakobina Arch (Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington) discusses her research into coastal shipping of Tokugawa Japan (17th century -19th century), and accounts of shipwrecks' survivors as insights on the religious world of sailors. Unraveling how Western and Meiji sources have spoken disparagingly of the designs of the 'bezaisen' or coastal ships of the Tokugawa period, Arch proffers compelling evidence to point out the construction of the 'bezaisen' stemmed from specific environmental exigencies -- they were designed to easily navigate the shallow waters near the coast of Japan. Far from being an unchanging maritime vessel, Arch argues the 'bezaisen' underwent significant innovations during the Tokugawa period, responding to market forces and adapting to better understandings of the coastal environment of Japan. Delving into surviving oral narratives of sailors cast away by shipwrecks, Arch also highlights how the religious world of Japanese sailors caught in storms and/or shipwrecks drew upon a medley of Buddhist and Shinto religious practices to interact with the oceanic and terrestrial environments of Japan. She concludes that accounts of shipwrecks' survivors also form an alternative archive to researching weather and climatic patterns around the Sea of Japan in the early modern period.
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC), Archisman Chaudhuri and Philip Gooding (both postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill).
In this podcast, assistant professor Alexandra Kelly (University of Wyoming) discusses her Spring 2021 publication of Consuming Ivory: Mercantile Legacies of East Africa and New England (Culture, Place, and Nature). Throughout the podcast, Dr. Kelly delves into the complex global legacies of the historical ivory trade. From elephant conservation efforts to the cultural heritage industries in New England and East Africa, her study reveals the ongoing global repercussions of the ivory craze and will be of interest to anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and conservationists.
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC), Archisman Chaudhuri and Philip Gooding (both postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill).
Dr. Emily Brownell (University of Edinburgh) discusses with Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC) her recently-published book, Gone to Ground: A history of environment and infrastructure in Dar es Salaam (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). Dr. Brownell’s book breaks new ground in urban environmental history, discussing how Dar es Salaam’s urban inhabitants oriented themselves to the city’s rural peripheries to literally ‘build’ the urban environment in the 1970s and early 1980s. In so doing, she puts into conversation the everyday experiences of commuters, farmers, and factory workers with concerns about broader structures, including climate change, the 1970s oil crisis, and international conservationism. In this discussion, Dr. Brownell also touches on themes of gender and the idea of ‘crisis’ in Africanist scholarly writing, and she discusses aspects of her forthcoming project: Stories from the Substrate, which aims to narrate East African history from the soil through a variety of case studies of how people, animals, and plants have made and remade the region in the last century.
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC), Archisman Chaudhuri and Philip Gooding (both postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill).
In our latest episode of the Indian Ocean World Podcast, Prof. Annu Jalais, an anthropologist and an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore, talks about the Sundarbans, the largest delta in the world that sprawls across India and Bangladesh along the Bay of Bengal. The Sundarbans supports a unique biodiverse environment of mangroves, tigers, crocodiles, snakes, and humans. Prof. Jalais tells us how she developed an interest in the region as a high school student; why it's imperative for any researcher to understand the forests and its tigers before writing historical and anthropological studies of the Sundarbans; and how the relationship between humans and nonhumans, especially tigers, have highlighted the narratives of development and politics around it in the Sundarbans. Prof. Jalais also discusses a serious impact of climate change in the Sundarbans: disaster fatigue resulting from ever shifting river embankments that change the contours of forested and inhabited lands, regular cyclones, and close encounters with nonhumans (tigers, crocodiles, and snakes) that often have a telling effect on the mental health of the inhabitants of the Sundarbans.
Links:
Published work: https://nus.academia.edu/AnnuJalais
Bio page: https://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/sasja/
"Southern Collective" website on the northern Indian Ocean: https://www.thesoutherncollective.org/
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC), Archisman Chaudhuri and Philip Gooding (both postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill).
In this podcast, the IOWC interviews Professor Jenny Goldstein of Cornell University on her research into Indonesia's peatlands. Her interview offers a discussion of her unique journey from architecture to geography, and an in-depth explanation of how the Indonesian peatlands became her subject of study. She further explores the value of so-called degraded lands from a biodiversity and regenerative standpoint, exploring diverse techniques of rice growth in Peatland environments. Moreover, Professor Goldstein offers a nuanced understanding of how the development of oil palm plantations on Indonesia's peat lands has had multiple effects, including production of divergent scientific knowledge on whether oil palm plantations across Indonesia's peat lands lead to more carbon emissions or not, how these debates shape legislations concerning agriculture and forests in Indonesia, and what could be the climatic impact of such policies eventually.
Relevant Links:
University bio: https://cals.cornell.edu/jenny-elaine-goldstein
Online piece about the Mega Rice Project: http://www.environmentandsociety.org/arcadia/carbon-bomb-indonesias-failed-mega-rice-project
Links to relevant publications: https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12576 https://doi.org/10.1111/sjtg.12319 https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X15599787 This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC), Archisman Chaudhuri and Philip Gooding (both postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill).
Professor Rosabelle Boswell (Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University) discusses with Philip Gooding (IOWC) her recent appointment as the South African Research Chair in Ocean cultures and heritage. This is a new and exciting position designed to contribute to the sustainability of the ocean and to build partnerships with stakeholders. Prof. Boswell discusses her aims for the position, its interdisciplinary characteristics, the challenges therein, and how her past and ongoing research engages with the themes of ocean cultures and heritages.
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC), Archisman Chaudhuri and Philip Gooding (both postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill).
To start off the second season of the Indian Ocean World Podcast, we had the pleasure of interviewing Mustafa Emre Günaydı, a PhD student at Iowa State University, and research assistant working on the IOWC's Appraising Risk Partnership. In our podcast, Günaydi presents his ongoing research into the environmental history of the Ottoman Empire, analyzing the effects of the floods, epidemic, and locust invasion that occurred in Baghdad in 1831 within the context of wider geopolitical developments. He further discusses the responses to both the human and natural challenges that accompanied such disasters, and how leadership within the Ottoman Empire and Baghdad sought to rectify the damages.
For more on Mustafa’s work, see his Iowa State profile: https://history.iastate.edu/directory/mustafa-emre-gunaydi/
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC), Archisman Chaudhuri and Philip Gooding (both postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill).
Gwyn Campbell, founding director of the IOWC, discusses with Philip Gooding, a postdoctoral fellow at the same institution, his forthcoming book, The Travels of Robert Lyall, 1789-1831: Scottish surgeon, naturalist and British agent to the court of Madagascar, which will be published with Palgrave in early 2021: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030516475
The discussion takes the listener through Scotland, London, Russia, and Madagascar. It explores several themes in IOW history, including imperialism, slavery, missionaries, indigenous institutions and beliefs, and the latter’s political, cultural, and social encounters with European empires and ideologies.
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC), Archisman Chaudhuri and Philip Gooding (both postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill).
Dr. Joseph McQuade (University of Toronto) discusses his recent published book, A Genealogy of Terrorism: Colonial law and the origins of an idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2020), as well as his ongoing postdoctoral research.
In A Genealogy of Terrorism, McQuade demonstrates how the modern concept of terrorism was shaped by colonial emergency laws dating back into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with the ‘thugs’, ‘pirates’, and ‘fanatics’ of the nineteenth century, McQuade traces the emerging and novel legal category of ‘the terrorist’ in early twentieth-century colonial law, ending with an examination of the first international law to target global terrorism in the 1930s. Drawing on a wide range of archival research and a detailed empirical study of evolving emergency laws in British India, he argues that the idea of terrorism emerged as a deliberate strategy by officials seeking to depoliticize the actions of anti-colonial revolutionaries, and that many of the ideas embedded in this colonial legislation continue to shape contemporary understandings of terrorism today.
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC), Philip Gooding, and Archisman Chaudhuri (both postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill).
Prof. Angela Schottenhammer (KU Leuven) discusses her and her team’s ongoing research into maritime disasters, risk appraisals, and exchanges of medicinal knowledge in East Asian Waters in c.1500-1800. Several themes are discussed, which transcend the disciplines of climate history, maritime archaeology, and medical history. She refers to typhoons, currents, diseases, and the material cultures of medical practitioners, referring to both East Asian and European sources.
Prof. Schottenhammer and her team are furthermore working on a video called, ‘Piracy in Historical Asia.’ It will be published here, where you can also find out more details now.
Prof. Schottenhammer has additionally published (and continues to publish) widely. More details can be found at https://crossroads-research.net; and https://schottenhammer.net. Additionally, some of her most important recent and forthcoming publications include:
Angela Schottenhammer (ed.), Early Global Interconnectivity Across the Indian Ocean World, 2 vols (Cham, CH: Palgrave, 2019): vol. I, Commercial Structures and Exchanges; vol. II, Exchange of Ideas, Religions, and Technologies.
Robert Antony and Angela Schottenhammer (eds.), Beyond the Silk Roads: New Discourses on China’s Role in East Asian Maritime History (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 2017)
Wim De Winter, Angela Schottenhammer, Mathieu Torck (eds.), Seafaring, Trade, and Knowledge Transfer: Maritime Politics and Commerce in Early Middle Period to Early Modern China [CROS Crossroads – History of Interactions across the Silk Routes] (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2021), forthcoming.
Angela Schottenhammer, “‘Peruvian Balsam’: An Example of Transoceanic Transfer of Medicinal Knowledge’, Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 16:69 (2020), 1-20.
Angela Schottenhammer, “Major ‘International’ Currencies of China and Japan: The Use of Copper Coins, Silver Ingots and Paper Money”, in Steven Serel, Gwyn Campbell (eds.), Currencies of the Indian Ocean World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 17-48.
Angela Schottenhammer, “Die zunehmende Einbindung Chinas in die Welt des Indischen Ozeans bis zum Beginn der Song-Dynastie: Seewege, Verbindungen und Handel”, in Raimund Schulz (Hrsg.), Maritime Entdeckung und Expansion. Kontinuitäten, Parallelen und Brüche von der Antike bis in die Neuzeit, Sonderband der Historischen Zeitschrift (Oldenburg: De Gruyter Verlag, 2019), 139-173.
Angela Schottenhammer, “16-18 seiki ni okeru taiheiyō o matagu suigin no mitsu bōeki” アンゲラ・ショッテンハマー著、「16－18世紀における太平洋を跨ぐ水銀の密貿易」, transl. by Hideaki Suzuki 鈴木英明, in Hideaki Suzuki 鈴木英明編訳 (ed.) Nettowaku to kaiiki: Higashi Ajia kara yūbō suru sekaishi 『ネットワークと海域―東アジアから眺望する世界史』(Akashi shoten, 2019), 230-264.
Angela Schottenhammer, “China’s Rise and Retreat as a Maritime Power”, in Robert Antony, Angela Schottenhammer (eds.), New Discourses on China’s Role in East Asian Maritime History (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 2017), 189-211.
Angela Schottenhammer, “Consolidating Southeast Asia and the Meaning of Force in History: Pax Ming and the Case of Chen Zuyi 陳祖義 (d. 1407)”, China and Asia: A Journal of Historical Studies (2021), forthcoming.
Angela Schottenhammer, Mathieu Torck, Wim De Winter, “Surgeons and Physicians on the Move in the Asian Waters (15th to 18th Centuries)”, Haiyangshi yanjiu 海洋史研究 (2021), in press.
Angela Schottenhammer, “Maritime Disasters and Risk Appraisals in the East Asian Waters”, Études thématiques (2021), forthcoming.
Angela Schottenhammer, “Some Remarks on the Use and Provision of Camphor in Early Modern China and in Spanish Asian and American Colonies”, in Festschrift for Paul David Buell, ed. by Timothy May (2021), forthcoming.
Angela Schottenhammer, “Insights into Global Maritime Trade Around 1600”, in Festschrift for Ranabir Chakravarti, ed. By Suchandra Gosh et al. (Bloomsbury: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021), forthcoming.
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC), Philip Gooding, and Archisman Chaudhuri (both postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill).
With the help of Dr. Alexander Jost, Xu Zhexin (both University of Salzburg) discusses his PhD research into the history of maritime activities in South and Southeast China and its neighbouring regions during the co-called Tang-Song transition period, which is based on his analysis of official records, inscription sources, and visual materials. Thank you also to Prof. Angela Schottenhammer (KU Leuven) for facilitating this interview.
For more on Prof. Schottenhammer’s work and Xu Zhexin’s place in it, see: https://crossroads-research.net/team/
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC), Philip Gooding, and Archisman Chaudhuri (both postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill).
Prof. Shaila Seshia Galvin (Graduate Institute of International Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland) discusses her anthropological and sociological work on organic Basmati rice farming in the Doon Valley, Uttarakhand, India. She explores how a locally produced commodity acquires new meanings through organic certification procedures, as well as the socio-economic and cultural implications of such agrarian practices for sustainable trade and development.
For more information about Prof. Galvin’s work, please see:
- Her forthcoming book – Becoming Organic: Nature and Agriculture in the Indian Himalaya (Yale UP, 2021)
- And two journal articles mentioned in the podcast – ‘The farming of trust: Organic certification and the limits of transparency in Uttarakhand, India,’ American Ethnologist, 45, 4 (2018); and ‘Chains of Meaning: Crops, commodities, and the ‘in-between’ spaces of trade,’ World Development, 135 (2020; co-authored with Sarah Osterhoudt, Dana Graef, Alder Keleman Saxena and Michael R. Dove).
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC), Philip Gooding, and Archisman Chaudhuri (both postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill).
Meera Muralidharan, a doctoral researcher at the School of History, Victoria University, Wellington, discusses her paper, ‘Hortus Malabaricus: Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the Production of Natural History Knowledge in Malabar (1678-1693),’ which won the Research Excellence Award at the Victoria University Awards in 2019 and is a part of her doctoral research. Key themes include global transfers of knowledge, human migration, colonial science, and modern environmental history.
For more on Meera’s work, see her profile at: https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/nziri/fellows/associate-fellows/meera-g-muralidharan
Also, see her recent publication:
‘Cross-Cultural Interactions and Missionary Writings in the Context of the Dutch East India Company, c. 1600–72’ in Malabar in the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region, eds. Mahmood Kooria and M.N. Pearson (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018).
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC), Philip Gooding, and Archisman Chaudhuri (both postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill).
Dr. Anna Winterbottom (McGill) discusses her forthcoming journal article, ‘”Becoming traditional”: A transnational history of neem and biopiracy discourses,’ which is due to be published in 2021 in Osiris. The article is part of a special issue entitled ‘Global medical cultures, properties and laws,’ and explores the shifting uses and cultural meanings of neem, a tree of the mahogany family native to South and Southeast Asia, over time and space. Specifically, the article and the podcast discussion examine how neem became associated with the idea of ‘traditional’ Indian medicine as Western medical companies sought patents on neem derivatives in the 1990s.
For more on the special issue from which the article is taken, see: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/journals/osiris/forthcoming
For more on Dr. Winterbottom’s work, see her IOWC profile.
Also, please check out Dr. Winterbottom’s seminal monograph, Hybrid Knowledge in the early East India Company world (London: Palgrave 2016).
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC), Philip Gooding, and Archisman Chaudhuri (both postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill).
Prof. Thomas Kuehn (Simon Fraser University) discusses his forthcoming chapter, ‘Managing the hazards of Yemen’s natural environment. Nature and imperial governance in Ottoman South West Arabia, 1872-1914.’ Key themes include imperial governance, human-environment interaction in the context of ‘challenging’ environments, and knowledge production in the late Ottoman Empire.
Prof. Kuehn is also the author or several publications related to the topics related to this podcast. See, for example:
Thomas Kuehn, Empire, Islam and Politics of Difference. Ottoman Rule in Yemen, 1849-1919 (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2019).
“‘We Know Nothing About Yemen!’ Ottoman Imperial Governance in Southwest Arabia and the Politics of Knowledge Production, 1871–1914”, Journal of Arabian Studies, 8, 1 (2018), pp. 5-24.
“Translators of Empire: Colonial Cosmopolitanism, Ottoman Bureaucrats and the Struggle over the Governance of Yemen, 1898-1914”, in Cosmopolitanisms in Muslim Contexts, eds. Derryl N. Maclean and Sikeena Karmali Ahmed (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 51-67.
“Shaping and Re-Shaping Colonial Ottomanism: Contesting Boundaries of Difference and Integration in Ottoman Yemen, 1872-1919”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 27, 2 (August 2007), pp. 315-331.
“Colonialisme” and “Yémen” in Dictionaire de l’Empire ottoman – XVe-XXe siècle, eds. François Georgeon, Nicolas Vatin, and Gilles Veinstein (Paris: Fayard, 2015).
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC), Philip Gooding, and Archisman Chaudhuri (both postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill).
Professor Michael Christopher Low (Iowa State University and NYU Abu Dhabi) discusses his new book, Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). Key themes include technological change, disease, and the British and Ottoman Empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
More information about the book can be found at: http://cup.columbia.edu/book/imperial-mecca/9780231190770
More of Prof. Low’s work is available at his Iowa State profile and at his NYU Abu-Dhabi profile.
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC), Philip Gooding, and Archisman Chaudhuri (both postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill).
Dr. Steven Serels (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient) discusses his research into animal diseases as threats to state power in the history of the Southern Red Sea Region (SRSR). The discussion weaves around diseases to camels, horses, and cattle, and brings up key themes of human-environment interaction, military uses for animals, colonial rule, and global climatic anomalies.
More details of Dr. Serels work can be found at: https://www.zmo.de/personen/dr-steven-serels
Please also check out especially his two monographs:
- The Impoverishment of the African Red Sea Littoral 1640-1945 (Cham, CH: Palgrave, 2018): https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783319941646
- Starvation and the State: Famine, power and slavery in Sudan, 1883-1956 (Cham, CH: Palgrave, 2013): https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137383860
This podcast was produced with the help of with Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC) Philip Gooding, and Archisman Chaudhuri (both postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill)
Akash Ondaatje, a recently graduated Masters candidate at Queens University, discusses his thesis, ‘Animal Ascension: Elevation and Debasement Through Human-Animal Associations in English Satire, 1700 -1820,’ thus continuing our recent theme on animal studies, and tracing the lives of some IOW animals into European cultural frameworks. To see the visual format of this podcast, please see: https://www.appraisingrisk.com/2020/09/16/ondaatje-animal-ascension/.
Ondaatje is now working at KnowHistory (https://knowhistory.ca/) as a Research Associate of Indigenous genealogies. His Masters thesis can be found here: https://qspace.library.queensu.ca/handle/1974/27991
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC), Archisman Chaudhuri, and Philip Gooding (both postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill).
Professor Radhika Govindrajan (University of Washington) discusses her award winning book, Animal Intimacies: Interspecies relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018) with Renée Manderville, Archisman Chaudhuri, and Philip Gooding (all IOWC). Animal Intimacies explores what it means to live and die in relation to other animals, alongside the intimate—and intense—moments of care, kinship, violence, politics, indifference, and desire that occur between human and non-human animals.
For more on the book, see: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo28301734.html
For more on Prof. Govindrajan’s work, see her bio at: https://anthropology.washington.edu/people/radhika-govindrajan
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC), Archisman Chaudhuri, and Philip Gooding (postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill).
Martha Chaiklin and Philip Gooding discuss their recently published edited volume, Animal Trade Histories in the Indian Ocean World (Cham, CH: Palgrave, 2020). As part of their discussion, they explore themes including, animals in world history, animals’ relationships to climate change and the anthropocene/capitalocene debate, methodologies for studying animal histories, and cultural symbolisms of animals resulting from trade.
The book is available in ebook and hardcover format.
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC) and Dr. Archisman Chaudhuri (postdoctoral fellow, IOWC).
Professor Margaret Kalacska and Dr. Oliver Lucanus (both McGill) discuss their project, Fish and Forest. This interdisciplinary work uses data from historical aerial photography, satellite imagery, and new information captured by UAV and in-situ observations to investigate and document the historical changes in the habitat of threatened aquatic species. In so doing, it seeks to explain the link between the disappearance of highly endemic and specialized fishes and the loss of forest.
For more on their project, see: http://fishandforests.geog.mcgill.ca/
For more on Prof. Kalacska’s work, see: https://www.mcgill.ca/geography/people-0/kalacska
For related publications, see:
- P.N. Reinthal and M.L.J. Stiassny, ‘The freshwater fishes of Madagascar: A study of endangered fauna with recommendations for a conservation strategy,’ Conservation Biology, 5, 2 (1991): 231-243.
- Jonathan P. Bensted et al., ‘Conserving Madagascar’s freshwater biodiversity,’ Bioscience, 53, 11 (2003): 1101-1111.
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville, Archisman Chaudhuri, and Philip Gooding (all IOWC, McGill)
Professor James Warren (Murdoch University) discusses his past and ongoing research into the effects of global climatic oscillations on the history of the Philippines. In this podcast episode, he examines the role of ENSO-related climatic anomalies and typhoons on the colonial monocrops of tobacco (Spanish era) and sugar (American era). In these contexts, he also responds to questions on the lives of indigenous populations and on colonial science.
For more on Prof. Warren’s work, see:
http://profiles.murdoch.edu.au/myprofile/james-warren/ and
https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/view/author/Warren,_James.html
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC), Archisman Chaudhuri and Philip Gooding (both postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill).
Professor Brian Tomaszewski of the Rochester Institute of Technology discusses his work on digital map-making and disaster management. To see visual formal of this podcast, please see https://www.appraisingrisk.com/2020/07/27/geographic-information-systems-gis-and-disaster-management/. For more information on the materials discussed and Professor Tomaszewski's work, see:
Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/bmtski
Upcoming Publication: https://www.amazon.com/Geographic-Information-Systems-Disaster-Management-dp-1138489867/dp/1138489867/ref=mt_other
Serious GeoGames for Disaster Resilience Spatial Thinking: https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/9/6/405
Refugee GIS or RefuGIS with UNHCR Jordan: https://medium.com/unhcr-innovation-service/how-mapmaking-brings-communities-closer-together-6b52be1e7a4f
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager), Archisman Chaudhuri, and Philip Gooding (postdoctoral fellows of the IOWC).
Professsor Jon D. Unruh of McGill University discusses his work on land rights and restitution in times of conflict in several regions of the contemporary IOW. Some of the works discussed in the podcast include:
Jon D. Unruh and Musa Adam Abdul-Jalil, ‘Constituencies of conflict and opportunity: Land rights, narratives and collective action in Darfur,’ Political Geography, 42 (2014): 104-16.
Jon Unruh and Mourad Shalaby, ‘A volatile interaction between peacebuilding priorities: road infrastructure (re)construction and land rights in Afghanistan,’ Progress in Development Studies, 12, 1 (2012): 47-61.
Jon D. Unruh, ‘Mass Claims in Land and Property Following the Arab Spring: Lessons from Yemen,’ Stability: International Journal of Security & Development, 5, 1, (2016): 1–19.
Jon D. Unruh, ‘Weaponization of the Land and Property Rights system in the Syrian civil war: facilitating restitution?’ Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 10, 4 (2016): 453-71.
For more on Prof. Unruh’s work, see his bio at: https://www.mcgill.ca/geography/people-0/unruh
This podcast was produced with the help of Renee Manderville (Project Manager), Archisman Chaudhuri, and Philip Gooding (both postdoctoral fellows of the IOWC).
Professor Debjani Bhattacharyya, Drexel University joins the IOW Podcast to discuss her book: Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The making of Calcutta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), as well as some of her work in progress on credit, climate, and calamity in the Bay of Bengal.
For more on Prof. Bhattacharyya’s work, see her bio: https://drexel.edu/coas/faculty-research/faculty-directory/DebjaniBhattacharyya/
For more on the book we discuss in this podcast see: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/empire-and-ecology-in-the-bengal-delta/4741DB240F1EACD9E1AFDDDFD9EE74AA
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC), Archisman Chaudhuri and Philip Gooding (both postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill).
Archisman Chaudhuri discusses aspects of his PhD thesis, ‘From Camp to Port: Mughal Warfare and the Economy of Coromandel, 1682-1710.’ This podcast was produced with the help of Renee Manderville (IOWC Project Manager) and Philip Gooding (IOWC postdoctoral fellow).
Philip Gooding, a postdoctoral fellow at the Indian Ocean World Centre, discusses his recent article: ‘Tsetse flies, ENSO, and Murder: The Church Missionary Society’s failed East African Ox-Cart Experiment of 1876-78,’ Africa: Rivista semestrale di studi e ricerche, N/S, 1, 2 (2019). The article is available at https://www.viella.it/rivista/9788833132556 or by contacting Philip Gooding directly: philip.gooding@mcgill.ca.
This podcast was produced with the help of Renee Manderville (IOWC Project Manager) and Archisman Chaudhuri (postdoctoral fellow at the IOWC).
How does the narrative of various pertinent historical realities shift when considered through an Indian Ocean World perspective rather than a Eurocentric vision? Dr. Gwyn Campbell discusses key works which have impacted the understanding of Indian Ocean World Studies, touching on subjects such as slavery, trade, and environmental histories. Interviewed by PhD student and IOWC project manager Peter Hynd, this podcast begins to introduce topics which will be developed later in our series, mentioning some of the great minds of Indian Ocean World Studies.
This episode discusses the human-environment interaction within the Indian Ocean World.
This is the first episode of our subseries, ‘Indian Ocean World – at a glance.’ In this subseries, scholars will use their expert knowledge of the secondary literature to discuss an issue, debate, or case study related to Indian Ocean World studies. It is designed for listeners to gain an informed knowledge of topics that are frequently misunderstood or overlooked, or are especially pertinent to the contemporary IOW.
In this episode, Prof. Jon Unruh (McGill) discusses the conflict and humanitarian crisis in present-day Yemen in historical, environmental, domestic, regional, and global contexts.
For more on Prof. Unruh, see his bio at: https://www.mcgill.ca/geography/people-0/unruh
For Prof. Unruh’s previous podcast based on his own research into land rights and conflict in the IOW, see: https://www.appraisingrisk.com/2020/07/16/podcast-episode-7-unruh-land-rights-and-conflict/
For some of Prof. Unruh’s scholarship on land rights and conflict in Yemen, see: Jon D. Unruh, ‘Mass Claims in Land and Property Following the Arab Spring: Lessons from Yemen,’ Stability: International Journal of Security & Development, 5, 1, (2016): 1–19.
For UNHCR’s work in Yemen, see: https://www.unhcr.org/yemen-emergency.html
This podcast was produced with the help of Renée Manderville (Project Manager, IOWC), Archisman Chaudhuri and Philip Gooding (both postdoctoral fellows, IOWC, McGill).
What is the Indian Ocean World? How does this podcast intend to tackle the complex subjects regarding the entanglement of environmental and human histories in this vast geographical region? With the help of the managing director of the Indian Ocean World Centre, Gwyn Campbell, and PhD student Peter Hynd, our first episodes begins to unravel the environmental marvel that is the Indian Ocean World.