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Listen to all our episodes of IAS Talk Pieces: Life in the Time of Coronavirus

12 August 2020

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#15in conversation with Lonnie G. Bunch III

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Lonnie G. Bunch III(Secretary of the Smithsonian)andTamar Garb(Director of the IAS)discussthe impact of the current conjunction of coronavirus and Black Lives Matter in the collections and public programmes of the Smithsonian; the specific role of the National Museum of African American History and Culture; the role that material culture plays in helping us to understand history; Lonnie's experience in South Africa and his approach to museums, reconciliation, reparation and truth telling.
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#14Arts and 'Familiar Alien Threats'

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Ama de-Graft Aikins, British Academy Global Professor in the Institute of Advanced Studies at , and a social psychologist researching chronic illness and experiences of care in African contexts, considers how artists are shaping current understandings of Covid-19 in Ghana. She situates contemporary responses to Coronavirus in relation to previous pandemics, specifically the Global Flu Pandemic of 1918 as well as the ongoing HIV crisis. Art, she argues provides a space of knowledge production, critical engagement and potential healing in the face of the threat to life and livelihood posed by the virus.
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#13The Biopolitics of Algorithms

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Ramon Amaro, Lecturer in the History of Art Department at , discusses the development of algorithms by IT giants in relation to Covid 19. Amaro considers the logics by which these algorithms work, as well as the perceived need for massive data collection and rapid response. He also looks at the associated problems such as data accuracy, breaches of privacy, surveillance, the potential biopolitical uses of data in the aftermath of the pandemic and the interconnections between testing, trading and commerce.
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Dr Temitope Abisoye Noah, Visiting Research Fellow in the IAS, provides a personal meditation on the analogies between Coronavirus and racism, which she argues, spreads like a virus, and may exist in the population even while carriers can be unaware of the dangers they present. Do not victims turn to social distancing to avoid those infected, she asks? Is racism not also a global pandemic? And is it enough to notice the symptoms without addressing the cause?
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#11Immunology: Visualizing Uncertainty & Vulnerability

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Having been asked to speculate on the concepts of immunity and immunisation, Peg Rawes, Professor of Architecture and Philosophy at the Bartlett School of Architecture, thinks about the use of graphic technologies to predict, project and ostensibly protect. Looking at Buckminster Fullers problematic dymaxion maps, the artist Tom Corby’s graphs, chronicling his own long term illness, and the philosopher Gillian Howies meditations on living with dying, she situates the pervasive anxiety the virus has unleashed in relation to older and ongoing issues around representation, vulnerability, and mortality.
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#10 The Lockdown and the Crowd

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Pushpa Arabindoo, Associate Professor in the Department of Geographyat , explores the moral, social and pragmatic implications of lockdown. She looks especially at the specific case of the Koyambedu market complex in Chennai, dependent on crowds to function but also thought to be the hotspot of a third of Covid infections in the regional state of Tamil Nadu. What happens, she asks, when we juxtapose the moral authority of the lockdown with the moral economy of the crowd?
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#9 Immunity and Community

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This episode, devoted to the concept of ‘immunity’, is longer than usual as we have gathered voices from different disciplines to disentangle the complexity of ‘immunity’ at the present moment. You will hear from Molopheni Jackson Marakalala, Associate Professor of Infection and Immunity at ; Mary C Rawlinson, Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University; Evie Shockley, Professor of English at Rutgers University; Alessandro Cini, Research Fellow in Genetics, Evolution & Environment at ; Kenton Kroker, Associate Professor in the History of Biomedicine at York Unviersity, Canada; and Xine Yao, Lecturer in English at .
Find about the brief that the speakers received and the music here.


#8 Unexpected Transformational Conjunctions

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Ann Phoenix, Professor of Psychosocial Studies at , explores five forms of inequity that the coronavirus has heightened. These, she explains, have triggered several social responses or disruptions that can only be understood in an interrelated way, as transformational conjunctions.
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#7 On the Concept of 'the Unprecedented'

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In this episode, Zoltán Boldizsár Simon takes up the word and the concept of ‘unprecedented’, repeated now to the point of almost meaninglessness. What, Simon asks, makes something qualify as unprecedented? How is the word used? What are its temporal dimensions? And how does it create a notion of the pre-evental and the post-evental? What, he asks, is the future of the unprecedented and can we know it before it has already happened?
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#6 Virtual Therapeutic Encounters

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In this episode, you can listen to Lionel Bailly, Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Psychoanalysis Unit at , share his experience as a psychoanalyst and child and adolescent psychiatrist during the lockdown. Bailly reflects on the importance of physical presence in the therapeutic encounter and on the effects of virtual forms of exchange and communication on his practice with his young patients.
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#5 Cells and Viruses

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In this episode, you can listen to Dr Stephen Walker, Head of Architecture at the University of Manchester, discuss a series of works by the British artist Helen Chadwick, entitled 'Viral Landscapes'. Using her working notes, here read by Chloe Julius, Walker invites us to consider the position of viruses in the continua amongst environment, bodies and cells, and, provocatively, to think through Chadwick's causational flips from the virus in us to us in the landscape.
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#4 Survival Infrastructures

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In this episode, Ayona Datta, Professor of Human Geography at , thinks about survival infrastructures in Calcutta and their collapse or dysfunctionality in the context of the mass exodus and precarity of migrant workers, forced to forsake the city because of India’s lockdown.
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#3 Gaza: from ghetto to frontier

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In this episode, Haim Yacobi, Professor of Development Planning at the Bartlett School of Architecture at and Michelle Pace, Professor in Global Studies at Roskilde University in Denmark, discuss the potential impact of Covid 19 in Gaza. Their analysis forms part of a wider Wellcome Trust-funded research project on the interconnections of power, violence and health in contemporary conflict zones.
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#2 Sexuality and Stigma

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In this episode, we hear from Philippa Hetherington, Lecturer in Modern Eurasian History in the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at reflecting on the virus in relation to historical debates on sexuality and the stigmatisation of sex workers. Historians are well placed to think about previous incarnations of disease and spread so that we work out what is and what isn't unprecedented.
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#1 Underlying Conditions

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'We’ve all become used to hearing this phrase "underlying conditions" in the context of COVID 19. Our unfortunate newsreaders have to keep repeating it in the daily litany of statistics and particularly the grim daily toll of COVID 19 deaths. We are told that in the vast majority of cases where an individual does badly with this infection that they suffered from one or more underlying condition (by which is usually meant cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, cancer, asthma…. What are often and misleadingly called “non-communicable diseases”). And when we’re told that they didn’t have any of these, there is, I think, an extra palpable sense of shock and horror...'
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Find other series of Think Pieces and Talk Pieces here.