History Workshop Podcast

In this episode of the History Workshop Podcast, Elly Robson is in conversation with Professor Vinita Damodaran and Professor Harriet Ritvo to look at the ways that we know nature and how these have been political, in the past and today. Together, they discuss the rise of scientific expertise, its entanglement in projects of empire, and how it has interacted with indigenous and local knowledge. We also hear about whether solutions to climate change today can be left to scientists, what is meant by the Anthropocene, and about the politics of conservation.

Ridley Road has recently gained attention as the subject of a new BBC drama about the revival of fascism in 1960s London and the anti-fascist action taken by the Jewish community in East London.

Ridley Road Market has been around for almost 140 years and has been described as a “hub of connection, interconnections and social interaction”. Historically and today, the market is run by and for diverse communities and forms a public space which is political. Like many markets, however, Ridley Road is at risk from "regeneration", gentrification, and social cleansing.

In this episode by the audio producer May Robson, we hear local residents' memories of Ridley Road's anti-fascist history and about the struggles that market traders face today - from gentrification to lockdown.

Sheila Rowbotham is a writer, an historian, an activist, and an internationally renowned socialist feminist. In 1970 she participated in the first British Women’s Liberation Conference at Ruskin College Oxford, and two years later she published Women, Resistance, and Revolution, a pathbreaking analysis of women’s participation in radical upheavals that was immediately translated into multiple languages and is now recognized as a feminist classic.

In 2000, she published a memoir, Promise of a Dream, which followed her first steps as a political radical and as an activist for women’s liberation over the course of the 1960s. She has now followed it with a second volume, Daring to Hope, a year-by-year exploration of her life in the 1970s, when she gained a global reputation as a writer and activist for whom women’s liberation and socialist revolution inextricably went hand in hand. In conversation with Marybeth Hamilton, she discusses the political challenges of feminist activism and the intimate challenges of navigating a life devoted to transformation, in which the personal was understood to be political.

How can black feminism lead to our collective liberation? Today we hear from the Black feminist writers, thinkers and activists Stella Dadzie and Chardine Taylor Stone, who join Rosa Campbell to discuss internationalism, the importance of collectivity, the role history might play in achieving justice and hope in difficult times.

Listen now on Soundcloud - Apple Podcasts - Spotify - Stitcher - or wherever you get your podcasts.

How has the writing of Black British histories functioned as both a form of historical analysis and a voice of radical oppositional politics? Caroline Bressey, Meleisa Ono-George, and Sadiah Qureshi discuss with Marybeth Hamilton in this episode of the History Workshop podcast.

How can the power and invention of Forum Theatre inform radical histories of oppressed groups, such as the homeless? To mark World Homelessness Day on 10 October, Peter Jones speaks with Adrian Jackson, founder of Cardboard Citizens, a theatre company working with homeless people, on the latest episode of the History Workshop Podcast.

What are we doing when we research and tell stories of families, whether other peoples' families or our own? Julia Laite and guests discuss in this episode of the History Workshop Podcast.

What are transnational solidarities and how do they expand our understanding of interactions beyond the nation state? Do they offer a way to understand how actors beyond the West engage with and shape global transformations? Lydia Walker and Su Lin Lewis discuss with Ria Kapoor in this episode of the History Workshop Podcast.

Hazel Carby’s book Imperial Intimacies: a Tale of Two Islands uses the lens of her own family history to make a deep dive into the workings of patriarchal, racialized, and gendered power. She draws on that book for this year’s Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture, titled "Imperial Sexual Economies." Her lecture forms this episode of the History Workshop Podcast.

In 1910, a sixteen year old New Zealander named Lydia Harvey boarded a steamship bound for Buenos Aires in the company of a husband and wife who promised her a life of glamor and ease. What resulted was a journey into the world of commercial sex that took her from South America to London, where she turned the tables on her traffickers and became a star witness in their criminal trial. Up until now, that witness testimony constituted Lydia Harvey’s lone moment in the historical spotlight. In the sweeping historical dramas of migration, crime, and sexual commerce, she was, at most, a bit player, who steps fleetingly out of the shadows, speaks her two or three lines, and then disappears.

In her new book The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey, the historian Julia Laite places Harvey’s story centre stage. The book that results is a riveting narrative history that puts complex human faces on stories too often told through stock characters: histories of prostitution, of policing, of criminal justice and moral panics. It also is a meditation on the politics of storytelling and the ethics of historical “rescue”, of historians’ efforts to give voice to the voiceless and to spotlight the neglected and obscure.

In this episode of the History Workshop podcast, Julia Laite discusses her book with Marybeth Hamilton.

Listen now on Soundcloud - Apple Podcasts - Spotify - Stitcher - or wherever you get your podcasts.