LISTEN: Episode 7 "UTOPIAS"

FLOATS PODCAST SERIES

Lesvos, Greece

Moderated by Miriam Ticktin (The New School for Social Research)

 ‘Let all know how empty and worthless is the power of kings’…A Sea View - Bridget Anderson, University of Bristol

 Bridget Anderson is Professor of Mobilities, Migration and Citizenship at the University of Bristol. After a degree in Philosophy and Modern Languages she worked organising undocumented domestic workers in London in the 1980s. She walked backwards into academia: obtaining a grant to explore the situation of migrant domestic workers in Europe, and needing to find an institutional home for the grant, someone suggested she do the research as a PhD and bring the grant to a university. Since then she has continued to combine her academic work with an engagement with migrants’ organisations and trades unions. She hates potted bios.

Dystopic Utopias & the Uchronian Dystopias Across the Seas: The Imagination of Futurism - Marwa Elshakry, Columbia University

Marwa Elshakry is an Associate Professor in the History Department at Columbia University who writes on a variety of topics in Mediterranean histories, the history of science and the history of ideas. She teaches a range of subjects from the History of Utopia and the History of Emotions to the Archives of Colonialism and Orientalism and Its Others. She is currently working on a project on universal histories of Islam and the history of the history of science while also enrolled in a psychoanalytic training program to investigate questions of trauma, memory and forgetting. She is now concurrently embarking on a new history of the Mediterranean Sea and its renegades and revolutionaries from the eighteenth century to present.

All that solidarity does not melt into the sea - Nikolas Kosmatopoulos, American University of Beirut

Nikolas Kosmatopoulos teaches International Affairs, Politics and Anthropology at the American University of Beirut. He became a political anthropologist when his previous efforts - as tour guide, Santa Claus, economist, and Trotskyist among others - did not yield a better understanding of the complexity of the world. Subsequent teaching and research posts in Berlin, Budapest, Cairo, Zurich, Geneva, Paris, New York, Barcelona and Beirut helped considerably, but the world kept expanding. He is currently finalizing a manuscript about the expert politics of violence in Lebanon tentatively called Master Peace. Since the participant observation on board the Gaza Freedom Flotilla he left his heart at the sea off Palestine.