NIAS podcast Room to explore... living in a more than human world

Rahul Rao, Reader in International Political Thought at the University of St Andrews and Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London, has spent his career examining anti-colonial movements, race, gender and sexuality politics. His current project asks how foundational concepts in political theory would need to shift if non-human animal life were taken seriously, with cetaceans (whales and dolphins) as his central case.

Timothy Stacey, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Urban Futures Studio within Utrecht University’s Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, researches the relationship between culture, religion and transformative political change. His NIAS project, Ecology and Belonging, examines how the language of belonging has been ceded to the far right and how environmental politics might reclaim it.

Their conversation ranges across the entanglement of human and non-human life, the role of symbols and narratives in political mobilisation, the tension between democratic deliberation and urgent action, and the structural conditions that make radical change feel both necessary and remote. It is a conversation, as they put it themselves, that they find genuinely rewarding. And it shows.

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Room to explore is researched and interviewed by Annick van Rinsum. Find Annick on LinkedIn.

Listen to all episodes of Room to explore on Spotify