The Identities Podcast

Welcome to The Identities Podcast, the podcast of the journal Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power exploring questions of race, ethnicity and culture. The Identities Podcast engages with different methodological approaches to help bridge the gap between the inside and the outside, the personal and the political.
Hosted by: Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power
Produced by: Michaelagh Broadbent, Editorial and Content Officer

​Episode 3: The Contested Conjuncture

​This episode is based on a panel session from the symposium, ‘The Contested Conjuncture – Authoritarian Populism and Progressive Possibilities’, co-convened by Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power and The Stuart Hall Archive Project in June 2024. The panel connects discussion of ‘conjunctures’ to contemporary crises and their respective terrain of struggle, in policing the crisis in the 21st century (Montel Gordon, University of Glasgow), class and everyday life (Kirsteen Paton, University of Glasgow), populism and the far right (Aaron Winter, Lancaster University), and articulations of resistance in music (Les Back, University of Glasgow). Chaired by Nasar Meer (University of Glasgow).

Episode 2: Race, Ethnicity and the UK General Election 2024

The political representation of ethnic and racial minorities in Britain occupies an important place in public debates on society-wide representativeness, anti-racism and the quality of democracy. The distance between holding and exercising political rights, however, is not straightforward, as seen in intended and untended obstacles that span the institutions of political life (such as the Westminster and devolved Parliaments), the systems that reproduce these (such as the electoral process and party politics), and the changing dynamics of social relations (such as shifts in identities and values). In this episode we bring together people who have helped us to understand current developments across the UK, and ask what the UK General Election 2024 will mean for political representation, anti-racism and democratic engagement more broadly.

Episode 1: On Dread: Facing Futureless Futures

In this episode, Professor Nasar Meer speaks with Professor David Theo Goldberg, author of Dread: Facing Futureless Futures and Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Irvine, where he holds faculty appointments also in comparative literature, and criminology, law and society. David is the author of numerous other books and studies including The Racial State (2002) and Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (1993). His wider contribution to knowledge is simultaneously taken up in political theory, race and racism, ethics, critical theory, cultural studies, and increasingly, the digital humanities. Together with Dr Anjali Prabhu and Dr Aaron Winter, Nasar and David discuss the nature and implications of dread and analyze the politics of the world we inhabit today. Drawing on a published symposium in Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, they delve into a conversation about the book’s politics of refusal and resistance and the social experience of dread.