Defying Gravity: Bird flight, culture and evolutionary grooves
The Subverse
In the final episode of the season, Susan Mathews speaks with Antone Martinho-Truswell, a fascinating behavioural ecologist, Operations Manager at the Sydney Policy Lab, and Research Associate at the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney, Australia. His Substack is called and he is author of The Parrot in the Mirror: How evolving to be like birds made us human (2022). The book, and this episode, considers the parallels between the ‘evolutionary grooves’ of the extremely advantageous traits of humans and birds—the former, by becoming the cultural ape, and...
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Floating on an Ocean of Air: Exploring the intersections of art, activism and science
The Subverse
In episode four of The Subverse, host Susan Mathews talks with Joaquin Ezcurra, an intrepid and adventurous cartographer, marine technician and web developer. Since 2017, Joaquin has been actively involved in , an open-source, experimental practice and movement for eco-social justice founded by artist Tomás Saraceno and carried forward by a growing global community since 2015. Aerocene uses art, site-specific installations and augmented reality sculptures to promote climate change awareness. Joaquin has been involved in its aero-solar flight operations, digital strategies, website...
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Configurations of Air: Matter, Traces and Making a Landscape
The Subverse
In episode three, Susan Mathews continues her conversation with Mădălina Diaconu, a researcher at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria and author of Aesthetics of Weather (2024). Mădălina works on environmental aesthetics, urban aesthetics and phenomenology of perception. Please listen to the first part of this conversation in episode two to hear about the need for a holistic view of our immersion in the atmosphere, thermic auras, and multisensory perception as the basis for empathy. Our conversation began with tornadoes, their radical dynamic form that...
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Under the Weather: Atmospherics, Aesthetics, and Thermic Subjects
The Subverse
In episode two, Susan Mathews speaks to Mădălina Diaconu, a researcher at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria and author of Aesthetics of Weather (2024) who works on environmental aesthetics, urban aesthetics and phenomenology of perception. Re-defining aesthetics to mean not just beauty but perception, Mădălina spoke of weather not just as a frontal experience, but our immersion in the atmosphere, the very medium of our life and existence as it permeates our porous bodies and sensitivities. We experience it not as thinking subjects, but as living...
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Currents of Change
The Subverse
We kick off season five of The Subverse, focused on the element of ‘air’, with host Susan Mathews in conversation with Dr. Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, India. Roxy has made breakthrough contributions to the research, monitoring, and modelling of climate and extreme weather events over the Indo-Pacific region. His work has advanced the scientific understanding of monsoon floods and droughts, terrestrial and marine heatwaves, and cyclones, facilitating the food, water, and economic security of the region. His recent research...
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Sami Ahmad Khan
The Subverse
In episode three of season four, host Anjali Alappat sits down with writer, academic and documentary producer, Sami Ahmad Khan. He is the author of Red Jihad: Battle for South Asia (2012), Aliens in Delhi (2017), and the monograph Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science Fiction (2021). Sami was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar and his fiction has been the subject of formal academic research and a part of university syllabi in India and the US. His overview of Indian SF has been translated into Czech and his...
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The Amazing Morphs of the Golden Cat
The Subverse
In this final instalment of Cataplisms, we join conservation anthropologist Sahil Nijhawan and his collaborator Iho Mitapo in the Dibang Valley on a journey that is both spiritual and scientific. Iho and Sahil are founding members of the Dibang Team, a biocultural conservation initiative led by the Idu Mishmi, the indigenous inhabitants of the Dibang valley, that takes a multi-pronged and multi-disciplinary approach. It has established an ancestral storytelling program (Taju Taye), piloted a program that adapts the traditional system of shamanic learning to present-day socio-economic realities...
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Rashmi Devadasan, Rakesh Khanna & R.T. Samuel
The Subverse
In episode three, we chat with Rashmi Devadasan, Rakesh Khanna, and R.T. Samuel, the brilliant minds behind The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF, which has been making waves in the Indian speculative fiction scene. Rashmi Devadasan is a writer with over twenty-five years of experience in indie publishing, Tamil feature films, and Indian English theatre. At Blaft, she has been part of the selection, editing, design and production of the company's fiction in translation, comic book anthologies, original fiction, and zines. She is the author of Kumari Loves a Monster, a picture book created with...
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Gautam Bhatia
The Subverse
In episode two of season four, lawyer, author, and editor Gautam Bhatia returns! When we last spoke to Gautam, he had just published The Horizon, the much-anticipated sequel to The Wall. Since then, he’s published a variety of non-fiction books, helped curate and edit a new anthology, Between Worlds, for Westland Books, and published a new sci-fi novel: The Sentence. The Sentence is genre crossing, with elements of political thrillers, murder mysteries, and old school science fiction. In it, the protagonist, Nila, is faced with an ethical, legal and political conundrum which will...
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Arcx - Gigi Ganguly
The Subverse
In the first episode of season four, host Anjali Alappat sits down with Gigi Ganguly, to discuss her debut collection of short stories, Biopeculiar: Stories of an Uncertain World (Westland Books, 2024). Gigi began her career as a journalist and, after some years of writing for newspapers, she decided to study creative writing at the University of Limerick. Her first novella, One Arm Shorter than the Other, published in 2022, got her nominated for the Subjective Chaos Kind of Award in 2023. Biopeculiar: Stories of an Uncertain World focuses on the relationship between the human and...
info_outlineIn this episode of Stories from the Subverse, Nayanika Mathur, Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford, delves into the conflict between big cats and humans. Nayanika’s book, Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene (2021), was a key source of inspiration for Cataplisms, which examines the intersections of capitalism through a feline lens. In this piece, Nayanika focuses on the governance of nonhuman animals, their entanglements with humans, and what the consequences are.
Mathur talks about the two types of big cats—the seeda saada (straightforward) ones who are scared of humans and keep their distance, and the crooked cats – the adam khor (maneaters) who prey on people. The reasons why some cats become man-eaters, while others avoid humans, are widely debated. Hypotheses include that the cats have come from elsewhere, due to hunting and poaching, or that they’re children of other man-eaters. This uncertainty has consequences. For example, the tiger Ustad, who resided in Ranthambore, was moved out of the sprawling environment of the national park to be confined in a zoo on the suspicion of being a man-eater. This move stirred a national controversy, eliciting an emotional outpouring and contradictory viewpoints. Ustad’s life may have been restricted without cause. How does one govern the unknown?
Given the precarious status of most big cat species, the fact that hunting crooked cats is the standard solution of the Indian state becomes even more fraught. Especially, as Mathur underlines, when it is difficult to identify which cat is the crooked one. Drastic measures are often taken posthumously to ostensibly abide with the laws of the land and justify a kill.
Mathur emphasises the need to think more deeply about our entanglements with the non-human, revise our laws and institutional practices, and give up our crooked ways.
This audio story is part of the Cataplisms project. You can learn more about it here.
This story was produced by Tushar Das. You can find him on Instagram and his work on the Brown Monkey Studio website.
About Nayanika Mathur
Nayanika Mathur is Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies as well as Fellow of Wolfson College at the University of Oxford, UK. Educated at the Universities of Delhi and Cambridge she is an anthropologist with an interest in studying the state, ethnographic methods, nonhumans, and the climate crisis. At Oxford Nayanika is co-director of a research network ‘Climate Crisis Thinking in the Humanities and Social Sciences’ which explores the ways through which climate change poses a profound challenge to how the academy – from forms of writing and modes of teaching to disciplinary divisions – operates. Nayanika is the author of two monographs – Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy, and the Developmental State in Himalayan India (Cambridge University Press 2016) and Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene (Chicago University Press, 2021). The first is centred upon the study of bureaucrats and the second on big cats, though they are often confused. In her argument on the governance of big cats this connection - between the paper tiger that is the Indian state and the crooked cats that are entangled with the planetary crisis – becomes, one hopes, clearer.