SOAS Radio

In today's episode, I sat down with Georgie Wallis and Alex Causton-Ronaldson, who are campaigners with the Youth Stop Aids Movement.

Youth Stop Aids are a youth-led movement campaigning for a world without AIDS. Their network of young people across the UK speak out, take creative action and engage those in power to ensure that governments, global institutions and corporations are committed to ending AIDS by 2030.

We discussed the HIV/AIDS pandemic, global health inequalities, and what governments need to do to end HIV/AIDS by 2030.

Free music for non-comercial use from www.fesliyanstudios.com

Resources

Youth Stop Aids: http://youthstopaids.org/

Stop Aids: https://stopaids.org.uk/

Terrence Higgins Trust: https://www.tht.org.uk/

Aidsmap: https://www.aidsmap.com/

Panjabi Rhythms, Panjabi Beats, Panjabi Soul, Panjabi Bass. Episode 7 of Panjab In My Eye has a smooth and regenerative vibe featuring artists such as DJ Stin, DJ HMD and Robin Sekhon.

@msb._____#Panjabinmyeye

This week we are joined by Amine Ghoulidi to speak about Online Influencers & Irregular Migration in North Africa. Amine is a researcher at King’s College London currently focusing on European security. A career political risk consultant, Amine advises leading multinational corporations on reputational and security risks particularly linked to their operations in Africa and the Middle East. He was previously part of PwC’s Strategic Threat Management team based in Washington, DC where he assisted Fortune 500 companies in assessing business risks across various industries and jurisdictions. He has served as a senior adviser to leading international NGOs working to prevent and counter violent extremism in North Africa and the Middle East. Amine is a Fulbright Scholar and has Master’s degrees in geopolitics and conflict analysis from King’s College London and the American University in Washington, DC, respectively.

Bollo Speaks is a collaboration between the Widening Participation department and community partner Bollo Brook Youth Centre. Each episode is created entirely by the young people, with conversations around Identity, perception and more, soundtracked by their own music, recorded at Bollo Brook's in-house studio. This episode is about love.

Panj Dariyaavan Da Bass (Bass of the Five Rivers) - Cultural Ambience and Panjabi Identity through an eclectic mix of Panjabi folk, transcultural sound aesthetics and modern Panjabi expression through music. Episode 6 features Adphetti, Sukha 12 Gej and SP Mangat amongst others.

@msb._____ #panjabinmyeye

This week we are joined by Isabelle Amazon-Brown to speak about Designing Chatbots for Social Development. With ten years experience in 'mobiles for development', working on projects funded by UNICEF, DfID, USAID and the World Bank. She started out running and designing feature-phone friendly mobile sites, but in the past few years has been working on chatbots. She's “passionately jaded” about digital development, having seen more projects “fail” than succeed, but still believes in the transformative potential of mobile, if initiatives are designed and developed using the right methodologies, and as part of a considered ecosystem which leverages both traditional and digital approaches.

"WASH is the collective term for Water, Sanitation and Hygiene. Due to their interdependent nature, these three core issues are grouped together to represent a growing sector. While each a separate field of work, each is dependent on the presence of the other. For example, without toilets, water sources become contaminated; without clean water, basic hygiene practices are not possible." (Unicef Website)

Today’s guest is Professor Barbara Evans, who holds the chair in Public Health Engineering in the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Leeds. Her research activities centre on sanitation, hygiene and water services in the global south. Barbara has travelled widely, lived for many years in South Asia, and has worked in over twenty countries. She is active in the global international development arena and is a member of the Strategic Advisory Group of the Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation which reports progress against the Sustainable Development Goals for Water. I talk to her about sanitation development, the politics of international development, and why you should be passionate about faecal sludge management.

Free music for non-commercial use from https://www.fesliyanstudios.com

Resources

Professor Barbara Evans: https://eps.leeds.ac.uk/civil-engineering/staff/478/professor-barbara-evans

water@leeds: https://water.leeds.ac.uk/

Centre for Global Development (University of Leeds): https://cgd.leeds.ac.uk/

About WASH (UNICEF): https://www.unicef.org/wash/3942_3952.html

World Bank Water and Sanitation Program: https://www.wsp.org/

This week, we are speaking to Marie Thaut on The Politics of Language Online. There are more than 7,000 languages on Earth, yet half of the world’s 7.6 billion people speak just 24 of them, and 95 percent speak just 400 of them. That leaves five percent of the global population spread across 6,600 different languages, hundreds of them now spoken by less than ten people.

Marie is doing an MA in Language Documentation and Description and has completed a BA in Language Sciences at the Université Lumière Lyon II and Bachelor degrees in South Asian Studies & Urdu, and Teaching French as a Foreign Language, both at INALCO, the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilisations in France. Marie is also the Project Manager of the Sylheti Project at SOAS University of London, which started as a group of students interested in documenting the Sylheti language as spoken by the various generations of members of a local community in the London Borough of Camden.

In light of the multiple events that have swept the globe this year, DanDana team decided to reflect on some of the music that matters. As protests highlighting the importance of black lives after the brutal killings of George Floyd and Brayonna Taylor and the rise of the decentralized Black Lives Matter movement, we felt the urge to shine a light on the rich musical heritage of black people in the region from Andalusia to Mongolia and from Yemen to Anatolia.

In this episode we dug deep into the musical heritage of the region, and discussed the music produced by some prominent figures on the music scenes like Hamza El Din, Ali Hassan Kuban or Sitti Bent Saad, to more forgotten names like Dahi Ben Elwalid, Asmar Omar and Aster Aweke.

All of these wonderful singers and musicians have captured parts of their struggle and the oppression they have undergone in their melodies and lyrics. From Ethiopia to Djibouti, Zanzibar to Bahrain, these works stand as an acoustic testimony to injustices past and present, that we all listen to for inspiration and reflection.

“Sounds of the Wickedest”, Panjab In My Eye Episode 5 with that Panjabi sound therapy. Investigating Panjabi emotions, the experience of partition on the sounds of the Panjyaab and as always, the ‘Panjabi linear’. Takhat Hazara to Canada, Mehndipur to Birmingham (B21), 1947 to 2020. From Mustard Fields to Disco Lights (Alka Pande). Featured artists include Gitaz Bindrakhia, Surinder Rattan, Himmat Sandhu, Hans Mann and PHANTØM.

*Note to Panjabi and non-Panjabi speaking listeners: feel free to DM regarding translations, feedback and music discourse @msb._____ #panjabinmyeye