The Indian Ocean World Podcast

Justin Raycraft - “Islamic Discourses of Environmental Change on the Swahili Coast of Southern Tanzania”

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.”

Pao K. Wang - The REACHES Database

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.”

Kasia Paprocki - “Threatening Dystopias: The Global Politics of Climate Change Adaptation in Bangladesh”

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.”

Ruth Mostern - “The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History”

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.”

Ruth Morgan - “Health, Hearth and Empire: Climate, Race and Reproduction in British India and Western Australia”

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.”

Julia Jong Haines - “Shaping Landscapes: Environmental History, Plantation Management and Colonial Legacies in Mauritius”

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.”

Sugata Ray - “From New Spain to Mughal India: Rethinking Early Modern Animal Studies with a Turkey, ca. 1612”

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.”

Franziska Fay - “Kuishi Ughaibuni” & “To Everyone Who Told Zanzis That They Are Not Omani”

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.”

Harriet Mercer - “Atmospheric Archives: Gender and Climate Knowledge in Colonial Tasmania”

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.”

Manikarnika Dutta - “Cholera, British Seamen and Maritime Anxieties in Calcutta, c.1830s–1890s.”

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.”