The guest of the podcast Crossroads was political scientist Mukul Sharma. We talked about what the experiences of India's lowest castes can bring to the climate justice debate.  

How do touch, taste and smell relate to climate justice? Why do India's lowest castes dislike environmentalists? How have Hindu conservatives appropriated environmental issues and why have they joined the fight against climate change, unlike the Western right? And can yoga really be a cure for the climate crisis? Indian political scientist Mukul Sharma talks about all this, and how to conduct research among the lowest castes from the position of a privileged intellectual, in a new episode of the podcast Crossroads.

In the latest episode of the podcast series Crossroads, we invited Sylvia Tamale who is a Professor of Law at Makerere University, where she was the first female Dean of the School of Law. She founded and served as a coordinator of the Gender, Law & Sexuality Research Project at the School of Law. She is a leading African feminist lawyer, scholar, and feminist activist. She has won several awards for her academic work and for defending the human rights of marginalized groups. She is a co-editor of the journal Feminist Africa. She has been a visiting professor at academic institutions around the world; in 2021 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Law by the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Her latest book Decolonization and Afro-Feminism was awarded the 2022 book prize from the Feminist Theory and Gender Section of the International Sociological Association.  

The podcast is moderated by Zuzana Uhde, a social scientist at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The podcast Crossroads is created through a collaboration between Alarm and the research programme Global Conflicts and Local Interactions, which is funded by the AV21 Strategy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The series invites social scientists, whose research addresses important topics and issues of our globalizing world.

► Follow Global Conflicts and Local Interactions
► Do you like Crossroads? Support our work

► podcast was recorded at the studio Mr. Wombat
► sound mix Ondřej Bělíček
► sound design Ondřej Bělíček

Why can we find hardly any members of the lowest castes neither in Indian music academies nor in the juries of singing talent shows? Why do Dalit musicians write lyrics not only about their caste heroes but even about the Indian Constitution? How do traditional and modern musical styles come together in the struggle against historical injustices? And how do the privileged higher castes respond to all this? In the new episode of the Crossroads podcast series, Indian political scientist Chandraiah Gopani discusses why the caste system remains an important element of Indian society and how inequalities manifest themselves in music.

Chandraiah Gopani studied political science at the University of Hyderabad. He is now an Associate Professor at the Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute in Prayagraj (formerly Allahabad), India. His main research interests are in critical theory, caste and Dalit studies, and Dalit-Bahujan cultural and intellectual traditions. He is currently writing a book on the invisible and most marginalized Dalit castes.

The podcast the Na rozcestí / Crossroads is created through a collaboration between Alarm and the research programme Global Conflicts and Local Interactions, which is funded by the AV21 Strategy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The series invites social scientists, whose research addresses important topics and issues of our globalizing world. This episode is moderated by Jiří Krejčík, who is a political scientist at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague.

► Follow Global Conflicts and Local Interactions
► Do you like Crossroads? Support our work

► podcast was recorded at the studio Mr. Wombat
► sound mix Ondřej Bělíček
► sound design Ondřej Bělíček

In the latest episode of the podcast Crossroads we invite dr Kristine Krause. Dr Krause is an anthropologist working at the intersections of political and medical anthropology, interested in subjectivities and health, citizenship and care. At the University of Amsterdam she is a member of the Health, Care and the Body Programme and the Long-term Care and Dementia Research Group. Together with Jeannette Pols she runs the Anthropology of Care Network. In her current, ERC founded research ReloCare, she looks at care outsourcing within Europe, where geographic discrepancies in cost, access and salaries are played out. She analyses care as a social-material practice involving many different actors, driven by flows of people, and capital, but where family, state, and market remain influential.

The podcast the Na rozcestí / Crossroads is created through a collaboration between Alarm and the research programme Global Conflicts and Local Interactions, which is funded by the AV21 Strategy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The series invites social scientists, whose research addresses important topics and issues of our globalizing world. This episode is moderated by Petra Ezzeddine, who is a social anthropologist and an assistant professor at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague.

► Follow Global Conflicts and Local Interactions
► Do you like Crossroads? Support our work

► podcast was recorded at the studio Mr. Wombat
► sound mix Ondřej Bělíček
► sound design Ondřej Bělíček

In the latest episode of the podcast Crossroads we invite professor Brigitte Aulenbacher. She is a Professor of Sociological Theory and Social Analysis, the Head of the Department of the Theory of Society and Social Analyses at the Johannes Kepler University of Linz in Austria and a co-editor of Global Dialogue – the Magazine of the International Sociological Association. In addition, she is the vice-president of the International Karl Polanyi Society. Her fields of research include social inequalities and justice, and theoretical and empirical work on labour, care, marketization and science. She is a distinguished scholar and author of many academic publications whose work has made important contributions bridging theories of contemporary capitalism, Critical Theory and feminist theory. In 2019 she received the Kurt-Rothschild-Award for her work on Karl Polanyi.

The podcast the Na rozcestí / Crossroads is created through a collaboration between Alarm and the research programme Global Conflicts and Local Interactions, which is funded by the AV21 Strategy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The series invites social scientists, whose research addresses important topics and issues of our globalizing world. This episode is moderated by Zuzana Uhde, a social researcher who works at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

► Follow Global Conflicts and Local Interactions
► Do you like Crossroads? Support our work

► podcast was recorded at the studio Mr. Wombat
► sound mix Ondřej Bělíček
► sound design Ondřej Bělíček

The podcast Crossroads invites Oksana Dutchak who is the Deputy Director of the Centre for Social and Labour Research (Kyiv) and a co-editor of Commons: Journal of Social Criticism. She is an activist of Essential Autonomous Struggles Transnational or E.A.S.T. and one of the initiators of the manifesto ‘“The right to resist”: A feminist manifesto’. She holds a PhD in sociology from the Department of Sociology in Ihor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (Kyiv) and an MA in sociology and social anthropology from the Central European University. She is now a Fellow at the Berlin Institute for Empirical Integration and Migration Research. She has published extensively on labour issues, labour protests, gender inequality, socio-economic inequality.

► Follow Global Conflicts and Local Interactions
► Do you like Crossroads? Support our work

► podcast was recorded at the studio Mr. Wombat
► sound mix Ondřej Bělíček
► sound design Ondřej Bělíček

Mariya Ivancheva is a British-Bulgarian anthropologist and sociologist, currently based at the University of Strathclyde. Her longterm research interest is the precarity in academic work. She is currently the president of European Association of Social Anthropologists and she co-founded the Precanthro iniative focused on working conditions of European anthropologists. In the new episode of the Crossroads podcast, she talks about precarity in British academia and elsewhere as well as about her career beginnings in post socialist Bulgaria and how it impacted her career.

► Follow Global Conflicts and Local Interactions
► Do you like Crossroads? Support our work

► podcast was recorded at the studio Mr. Wombat
► sound mix Ondřej Bělíček
► sound design Ondřej Bělíček

Christophe Jaffrelot is the guest of the new episode of the Crossroads podcast. Christophe Jaffrelot is a Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s College London and Research Director at the Centre d'études et de recherches internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po (Paris) and at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). He is also president of the French Association of Political Science. His research focuses on Hindu nationalism and the role of caste and religion in politics of contemporary South Asia. In 2021, he published a new book Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy (Princeton University Press).

► Follow Global Conflicts and Local Interactions
► Do you like Crossroads? Support our work

► podcast was recorded at the studio Mr. Wombat
► sound mix Ondřej Bělíček
► sound design Ondřej Bělíček

In the podcast Crossroads, we welcome Dr. Alessandra Mezzadri. She is Associate Professor of Development Studies at SOAS University of London. In her research and teaching, she focuses mainly on inequalities and trade, global supply chains and production networks, informal work and work regimes, global labour standards, modern forms of slavery, feminism in development, gender and globalization, social reproduction and reproductive work, or political economy of India. Alessandra actively works with international non-profit organizations such as the ILO, Action Aid, Labor Behind the Label, and War on Want, which focus on gender issues, global labour standards, anti-sweat campaigns, and modern forms of slavery. In 2016, she published the book The Sweatshop Regime: Laboring Bodies, Exploitation and Garments Made in India (Cambridge University Press).

► Follow Global Conflicts and Local Interactions
► Do you like Crossroads? Support our work

► podcast was recorded at the studio Mr. Wombat
► sound mix Ondřej Bělíček
► sound design Ondřej Bělíček

Sabelo Ndlovu-Gathseni is a professor and Chair of Epistemologies of the Global South with a focus on Africa at the University of Bayreuth in Germany. Originally trained as a Historian in Zimbabwe he held various prestigious research positions and directorships at universities in South Africa. In this podcast he is speaking about the unfinished process of Decolonization, what is meant by the concepts of epistemic violence and of coloniality of power. He explains that it is important to question how and from where we acquire knowledge and how this is linked to our identities and also, how we can better grapple with the contested social construct of ‘race’.

► Follow Global Conflicts and Local Interactions
► Do you like Crossroads? Support our work

► podcast was recorded at the studio Mr. Wombat
► sound mix Ondřej Bělíček
► sound design Ondřej Bělíček