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EP8. Lockdowns: ‘A Flawed Consensus: COVID-19 in Africa’ with guest Professor Toby Green

Release Date: 05/08/2024

EP 14 Patrick Cockburn: on Syria and Ukraine

Cassandra Voices Podcast

“The Christians are frightened, the Alawites are frightened” It has been one year since Cassandra Voices forayed into podcasting. The guest for our podcast’s first-ever episode — the extraordinary journalist Patrick Cockburn — returns to talk with Luke Sheehan through Syria, Ukraine and Gaza, and his recent writings on these wars. Host: Luke Sheehan Music: Loafing Heroes - Produced by Massimiliano Galli -

EP 13 Philip McDonagh: 'We Urgently Need a Global Vision'

Cassandra Voices Podcast

In a turbulent period in European history, and beyond, we are delighted to draw on the sage input of the former Irish ambassador to Russia, Philip McDonagh, who also worked for a long period on the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland. He explores the possibilities for a lasting, inclusive peace between Russia and Ukraine. He also laments the expansion of military investment in the U.K. and the rest of Europe, calling for a new global vision to contend with the troubles of our time. Host: Frank Armstrong Music: Loafing Heroes - Produced by Massimiliano...

EP 12 My Mother (at the Time)

Cassandra Voices Podcast

‘My Mother (at the Time)’ is a special episode of our Cassandra Voices podcast, fitting for an installment that marks the one year point since its inception. For this episode, host Luke Sheehan travelled to Amsterdam to interview the Irish critic, art historian and Joycean named Patrick Healy. A brilliant scholar, Healy was born to an unmarried mother and raised in fosterage with multiple families. He impressed his peers at college in 80s Dublin but soon felt alienated enough to start a life of intermittent exile, wandering Europe, mastering German and Dutch, evolving into a scholar of art...

EP 11 BONUS EXTRA "It is Abhorrent to Stage an Image" A Conversation with George Azar

Cassandra Voices Podcast

Part 2 of "It is Abhorrent to Me to Stage a Picture…” A Conversation with George Azar Host: Luke Sheehan Music: Loafing Heroes - George Azar: An Introduction George Azar was born in 1959, the descendant of Lebanese olive farmers who had set sail from Beirut a century earlier. They settled in South Philadelphia, a working-class enclave—later immortalized in ‘Rocky’. It was a mix of Italians, Irish, Polish, Jewish, and Lebanese families, a tough, mafia-controlled neighborhood where people staked their claims street by street. After graduating from UC...

EP 11 "It is Abhorrent to Stage an Image" A Conversation with George Azar

Cassandra Voices Podcast

"It is Abhorrent to Me to Stage a Picture…” A Conversation with George Azar Host: Luke Sheehan Music: Loafing Heroes - George Azar: An Introduction George Azar was born in 1959, the descendant of Lebanese olive farmers who had set sail from Beirut a century earlier. They settled in South Philadelphia, a working-class enclave—later immortalized in ‘Rocky’. It was a mix of Italians, Irish, Polish, Jewish, and Lebanese families, a tough, mafia-controlled neighborhood where people staked their claims street by street. After graduating from UC Berkeley in...

EP.10: ‘Inside the Belly of the Beast: Reporting on U.S. Foreign Policy from Washington D.C.’ with guest Anya Parampil.

Cassandra Voices Podcast

As a journalist, Anya Parampil is unafraid of rattling the cage. She now writes for the Grayzone, founded by her husband Max Blumenthal in 2015, an online publication which aims to ‘break through any narrative of the day that is pushing the United States’ public in support of war.’ Previously she worked as a producer and broadcaster, then an anchor correspondent, for Russia Today (U.S.), from which she was fired, after refusing to accept restrictions on her reporting of U.S. foreign policy. In this podcast Anya likens writing about U.S. foreign policy from Washington D.C. to working...

EP.9 HIT IT! Hustling and the Ivory Tower with Max McGuinness

Cassandra Voices Podcast

Dr. Max McGuinness is a Teaching Fellow in French at Trinity College Dublin. He previously taught at University College Dublin, the University of Limerick, and Columbia University, where he received his PhD in French in 2019. His first book – published this Spring – is Hustlers in the Ivory Tower: Press and Modernism from Mallarmé to Proust (Liverpool University Press, 2024), which explores how French modernist writers used the press as a forum for literary experimentation. He is currently co-editing a collection about Marcel Proust and Ireland, The Irish Proust, which is forthcoming from...

EP8. Lockdowns: ‘A Flawed Consensus: COVID-19 in Africa’ with guest Professor Toby Green

Cassandra Voices Podcast

EP7. Spilling the ‘Cup of Tea’: Matt Ridley and Luke Sheehan on China and COVID origins

Cassandra Voices Podcast

In late 2021, Matt Ridley and Alina Chan published the hardback edition of ‘Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19’. Well received by many and loathed by some, it remains the most comprehensive book on the origin of the pandemic that leans in the direction of the lab. In a debate that has neither gone away nor gotten more polite over time, there is one thing that both sides tend to agree upon: unanswered questions lead back to China, to Wuhan, the WIV and Zhongnanhai, the leaders’ compound in Beijing – and to the tropical southern borderlands of Yunnan, Burma and Laos. Evidence...

EP6. ‘The Alphabet is like a Set of Drums’ – an interview with musician of the month John Cummins.

Cassandra Voices Podcast

Aficionados of the Dublin cultural scene over the past decade or two are likely to be familiar with John Cummins. Cutting a dash with a distinctive Rasputin beard and Reggae styles, John’s poetic performances in the Dublin vernacular have mesmerised audiences young and old. His playful, rhyming verse always had great musicality, and it seemed a natural progression for him to begin collaborating with musicians, culminating in the formation of the band Shakalak in 2018, which also contains another former Musician of the Month in Fin Divilly. If you haven’t made it along to one of their gigs...

More Episodes

Toby Green is Professor of Precolonial and Lusophone African History and Culture at King’s College, London and the author of A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (2019). He also wrote, along with Thomas Fazi, The Covid Consensus: The New Politics of Global Inequality (2023). This latter work engages with the impact of lockdowns on African countries which were, for the most part, unaffected by the disease itself. In this podcast, Green discusses the application, more widely, of a form of authoritarian capitalism that lingers to this day, with the onset of perma-crises, continued restrictions on civil rights, and the ascendancy of techno-billionaires. He also points to an intellectual failure on the part of many on the left, who failed to recognise there were two versions of accumulation in conflict, one representing traditional forms of small businesses reliant on in-person contact, the other the monopolies which digital capitalism has favoured and whose power is now far, far greater.

Episode Credits

Host: Frank Armstrong

Music: Loafing Heroes - https://theloafingheroes.bandcamp.com

Shakalak - https://shakalak.bandcamp.com/music

Produced by Massimiliano Galli - https://www.massimilianogalli.com

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