The Channel: A Podcast from the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS)

The Channel: A Podcast from the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS)

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The Channel: A Podcast from the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) episodes

  • Coastal Entanglements in Northeast Japan with Andrew Littlejohn

    This episode features a conversation with Andrew Littlejohn, assistant professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of Leiden University. He specializes in environmental anthropology and political ecology, with a particular focus on Japan. Littlejohn currently heads the project “Climate Citizenship: Infrastructures, Environments, and Democracy in the Era of Climate Change,” for which he received a Starting Grant from the European Research Council. In this episode, Littlejohn mostly discusses his new book, We Live with the Sea: Ecologizing Safety in Post-Tsunami Japan, published this past July by Duke University Press. Beginning with the massive earthquake and tsunami that occurred in East Japan in March 2011, the book examines the contestations over recovery and the varied proposals designed to mitigate and prevent future disasters.


    The audio composition discussed and excerpted at the end of the episode is called "Shizugawa." Listeners can read about the piece and listen to more of the audio here: https://www.gruenrekorder.de/?page_id=18621

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    59 min
  • Memories of Timor with Rita Padawangi
    This episode features an interview with Rita Padawangi, a sociologist and Associate Professor at Singapore University of Social Sciences. Her work explores the politics of urban placemaking and city development, particularly in Southeast Asia, and she's been very involved with several key IIAS programs over the years, especially as co-coordinator of the Southeast Asia Neighborhoods Network, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. This episode features a conversation about the recent documentary Ingatan dari Timor or Memories of Timor. The film was produced by Rita and directed by Ari Trismana, and it was released by the documentary production house WatchDoc. Memories of Timor explores the violent history of Timor Leste, which is often omitted from Indonesian textbooks and concealed from Indonesian students. Listeners can watch the film with English subtitles for free on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydfbHFPnzuc

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    46 min
  • Cannabis and Colonialism with Utathya Chattopadhyaya
    This episode features an interview about the social history of cannabis in colonial South Asia. Utathya Chattopadhyaya is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and coeditor of the journal The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs. Utathya's new book is Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India, which was recently published by the University of California Press. Presenting a sweeping social history of ganja in colonial India, the book examines the collision between different ways of viewing, using, and valuing cannabis products – namely, those of local religious, cultural, and political groups on the on the one hand and those of colonial administrators on the other. Through a multi-species analysis, the book uses ganja to explore broader themes of taxation, governance, transgression, and social identity. The book is available as an Open Access title here: https://www.luminosoa.org/books/m/10.1525/luminos.276

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    41 min
  • Sounds of the Matua with Carola Lorea
    This episode features a conversation about the Matua community with Carola E. Lorea, Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tübingen. Lorea is interested in gender, oral traditions, and popular religious movements in South Asia, and she leads the ERC-funded project MANTRAMS: Mantras in Religion, Media, and Society in Global Southern Asia. Lorea is the author of Folklore, Religion and the Songs of a Bengali Madman (Brill, 2016), and with Rosalind Hackett, she also co-edited the volume Religious Sounds Beyond the Global North: Senses, Media and Power (2024, IIAS “Global Asia” series). Her latest book is Communities of Sound: Religion, Displacement, and Caste in the Bay of Bengal, published this year by Wesleyan University Press. Through an ethnographic approach that is both multimodal and multi-sited, the book explores how sound and performance shape the large community of Matua devotees across time and space. In this conversation, Carola discusses the centrality of music, performance, poetry, and storytelling within the history and contemporary religious lives of the Matua community across the Bay of Bengal.

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    42 min
  • Public Diplomacy and Casa Asia
    This episode features a recording from a recent event hosted at the International Institute for Asian Studies. On May 18, José Pintor Aguilar gave a talk about the importance of public diplomacy and collaborative knowledge exchange, drawing especially on his work as the Director General of Casa Asia in Barcelona. The Casas’ network represents an innovative approach that the Spanish government has undertaken to build bridges between multiple constituencies and sectors across scales. The audio was recorded live here at Leiden University. After opening and introductory remarks from Philippe Peycam and Laura Erber of IIAS, José Pintor discusses the Casas model of fostering active trust and long-term partnerships in Asia-Europe relations.

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    47 min
  • Dreaming of Words with Nandan
    This episode features a conversation with Nandan, a filmmaker and writer from Keralam, India. After training and working as a civil engineer, Nandan moved to Mumbai to pursue his passion for filmmaking. As an author, he has published four books: The Dream Balloon, Manam, New Desertlands, and Click, and he has also contributed to several comic anthologies. Nandan’s films, including Breath and Dreaming of Words, have been screened at festivals and academic conferences around the world. Our discussion mostly focuses on the latter, Dreaming of Worlds, which explores the life and work of Njattyela Sreedharan, an elementary school drop-out who embarked on a 25-year quest to compile a dictionary connecting four major Dravidian languages. The documentary earned Nandan the National Film Award as both director and producer. Listeners can watch the film with English subtitles for free on YouTube.

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    34 min
  • Indian Ocean Worlds with Tom Hoogervorst, Mahmood Kooria, Ariel C. Lopez, and Aireen Grace Andal
    This episode features a conversation with four colleagues involved in the International Consortium for Indian Ocean Studies (ICIOS). Mahmood Kooria is Lecturer in the History of the Indian Ocean World at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests are in the premodern Indian Ocean world, global history of law, Islamic cultures, matrilineal-matriarchal communities, Afro-Asian connections, and manuscript traditions. He is the author of the book Islamic Law in Circulation, published by Cambridge University Press in 2024. Tom Hoogervorst is a professor at KITLV. His research explores human connections and cultural contact through food and language. His doctoral work traced Southeast Asian influence on the early Indian Ocean world through loanwords and linguistic borrowing. His most recent book is Language Ungoverned: Indonesia's Chinese Print Entrepreneurs, 1911–1949, published in 2021 by Cornell University Press. In 2024, he launched a project on the culinary influence of early communities with roots in the Indonesian archipelago in Sri Lanka, South Africa, and Suriname. Ariel C. Lopez is Associate Professor and Assistant to the Dean for Research, Publications, and Information at the Asian Center, University of the Philippines, Diliman. His areas of interest include Indonesian Studies, Colonial and Maritime History, Philippine History and Southeast Asian History. He is the author of the book Philippine Confluence: Iberian, Chinese and Islamic Currents, C. 1500-1800, published by Leiden University Press in 2020. Finally, Aireen Grace Andal is a researcher at the Airlangga Institute for Indian Ocean Crossroads, Airlangga University, and she is currently a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies. She is a cultural geographer whose work focuses especially on children’s experiences of – and engagements with – cities, and she also researches island geographies and peripheral urban transformations. The primary focus of discussion is the newly relaunched International Consortium for Indian Ocean Studies, which builds upon earlier initiatives started in Leiden nearly a decade ago. In introducing the new consortium, the guests also discuss the importance of collaborative, multi-centered, and multi-vocal approaches to research, and they reflect on how an Indian Ocean perspective can disrupt and unsettle the traditional cartographies inherited from earlier area studies divisions.

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    38 min
  • Soundscapes of Dutch-Japanese Waterworks with Arjan Rietveld
    This episode features a conversation with Arjan Rietveld, a writer and curator in the world of electronic music. Arjan is the founder of Field Records, which has released a string of experimental and artistically driven albums since the label was launched in 2008. In this discussion, Arjan introduces Waterworks, a multimedia project he spearheaded which catalogues the centuries-long history of Dutch hydraulic engineers working on water management in Japan. That catalogue primarily takes the form of an interactive map detailing over 50 projects across Japan during the Meiji Era. In addition to the map, the Waterworks project yielded a trilogy of albums exploring this history through a mixture of ambient music, environmental recordings, and experimental audio production. Listeners will hear selected excerpts in this episode, but all of the recordings, the interactive map, and more historical details are available on the project website: https://waterworksproject.nl/en. 

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    31 min
  • The Belt and Road Initiative around the World with Jewellord T. Nem Singh, Linda Tjia Yin-nor, Angela Tritto, and Guanie Lim

    This episode features a discussion on current research into China's Belt and Road initiative, particularly as it relates to the Global South. Jewellord T. Nem Singh is a Principal Research Fellow in Global Political Economy at the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex. He is the author of Business of the State: Why State Ownership Matters for Resource Governance (Oxford University Press, 2024). Linda Tjia Yin-nor is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public and International Affairs at City University of Hong Kong. Her research interests focus on China's domestic railway and logistics development, as well as the political economy of China's overseas foreign aid and industrial projects in Central and Southeast Asia. She is the author of the book Explaining China’s Railway Reform: A Train of Property Rights Re-arrangements, published by Routledge in 2015. Angela Tritto is an Honorary Fellow at the University College of London, European & International Social & Political Studies Centre. She was formerly with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where her research focused on examining China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Southeast Asia and beyond. Her publications analyze the role of public, private, and third-sector organizations in affecting development outcomes and sustainability. Finally, Guanie Lim is Assistant Professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS), Japan. His main research interests are comparative political economy, value chain analysis, and the Belt and Road Initiative in Southeast Asia. Guanie is also interested in broader development issues within Asia, especially those of China, Vietnam, and Malaysia. 

     

    Along with several other colleagues, these four guests recently produced a special issue of the journal Competition & Change, entitled “China’s Quest for Soft Power and the Rebirth of National Strategies in the Belt and Road Initiative.” The issue explores the current state of the BRI, resisting master narratives of the policy to show the diverse, complicated, contextual ways host states strategically engage with China's global influence.

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    1 hr 12 min
  • A Maldivian Supper (Guest Episode: The Migration Menu)
    This episode comes from our friends over at The Migration Menu, a podcast co-hosted by James Staples and Luke Heslop, both based at Brunel University London. As anthropologists with research interests in South Asia, James and Luke created The Migration Menu podcast series to highlight the interrelations of food, global migration, and identity, specifically as related to South Asian communities in the UK. In each episode, the co-hosts talk to restaurant owners, chefs, and others to explore diverse culinary traditions in and around London, using food as an entry point into wider discussions of history, culture, and politics. In this episode, originally titled “Measure with the Heart,” James and Luke sample food from the Maldivian Supper Club run by Mie Ali Didi. Even within Asian Studies, The Maldives archipelago tends to receive far less attention than larger South Asian nations, and we thought listeners would like to hear this episode of The Migration Menu, which is presented here in full.

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    32 min

About The Channel: A Podcast from the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS)

From the publisher's feed

The Channel is the flagship podcast from the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) at Leiden University. Each episode delves into a particular Asian Studies topic from across the social…