The Subverse

The Subverse, presented by Dark ‘n’ Light is a podcast that uncovers the hidden and marginal in stories about nature, culture and social justice. From the cosmic to the quantum, from cells to cities and from colonial histories to reimagining futures. Join Susan Mathews every fortnight on a Thursday for weird and wonderful conversations, narrated essays and poems that dwell on the evolving contingencies of life.

Sonic Earth: Life, Loss and Listening 04/25/2024

Sonic Earth: Life, Loss and Listening We start Season 4 of The Subverse, which will focus on “Earth”, with a conversation with , a writer and biologist. We focus on his latest book, Sounds Wild and Broken, which explores the story of sound on Earth. It was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction and the PEN E. O Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. In it, David writes about how, three and a half billion years ago, sunlight found a new path to sound: life. The wonders of Earth’s living voices emerged after hundreds of millions of years of evolution that unfolded in communicative silence. From the ancient cricket Permostridulus which bears the earliest known sound-making structure, a ridge on its wing, this sonic creativity was spurred on by some amazing marvels, anatomical and otherwise. They range from insect wings and flowering plants to ciliary hair and even human milk. Now, both land and water are far from silent; fish drum and twang, whales sing, birds chirp and wings buzz. The sonic diversity of the world is rooted in the divergent physical worlds and social lives of animals and the happenstances of history. Every species has a logic, a grammar, to its sound making. And still, the process of hearing is one of unity at the cellular level. Sound also travels across oceans, creating a sort of global unity in sonic communication. Sound is ephemeral, instantly dissipating, and yet can be older than stone. So, in listening to animal voices around us, we are taken back into deep time and legacies of sonic geology. But it is also a ledger of loss. Our species is both an apogee of sonic creativity and the great destroyer of the world’s acoustic riches. As we get noisier, we diminish sonic soundscapes, bequeathing the future an impoverished sensory world. This sensory crisis is an important measure of the environmental crisis, and a powerful untapped tool for environmental justice. How do we create a poetics and politics of listening? We tend to think of experiences of beauty and of creativity as somehow separate from politics and ethics, but Haskell points out that they are deeply intertwined. We are embodied sensory beings. As a species, we need to gather and celebrate the voices of non-human beings. Technological advances have allowed us to record these soundscapes to check on the health of ecosystems. But when we get too reliant on technology, we ignore the wisdom of the people who have lived in the forest for centuries and don’t need gadgets to gauge the health of the forest, or to protect it. David spoke of the generative capacity of sound which comes from life and interconnection. He closed with an invitation to take a few minutes of each day and listen, without judgement or expectation, and let sound do its work. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n’ Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes. /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/30982298

Movement, Mountains, Metamorphosis and Music 02/19/2024

Movement, Mountains, Metamorphosis and Music In today's episode, we bring you Stories from the Subverse. Siddharth Pandey, a writer, artist, and historian, extols the wonders of moving, and allowing oneself to be moved. The simple act of walking becomes radical, with the potential to shirk Nazi commands in Munich, to reclaim fresh air and majestic mountain views from imperial exclusivity in Shimla, to change, create and stir the imagination. As he moves through the mountains, Siddharth challenges their apparent immobility, not just in the liveliness that they host and nurture, but in their very genesis. Every step he takes literally shaping perceptions and perspectives, the scene constantly adjusting itself, illustrating another gift of movement: the affordance of variety, of diversity, and of perpetual newness. A transformative magic Siddharth explores in his book, Fossil. Attuned also to non-generative transformation, Siddharth tackles the ostensible contradiction in celebrating the glory of mountains as we hurtle forward into the maw of the Anthropocene. Drawing on the work of Harvard critic Elaine Scarry, he shows how beauty “decentres”, for we are no longer the focus. Our initial focus on the beautiful object is followed by a cultivation of care; an act of movement in a growing field of relations. Music is an important expression of the innate rhythms and cadences of these landscapes. From the Himachali folk songs that Siddharth’s mother sang to him in his early childhood, to the sense of vastness and longing so typical of the desert panoramas of Rajasthan, or the uplands of Celtic Europe. Earthy tunes that seemed to literally stem out of the landscape they sang of. Mountains far near and far inspired a need to compose. And Siddharth heeded that call, creating tunes that captured journeys through his beloved Himachali landscape and beyond. Some of these tunes are generously intertwined in this story. This story was produced by Tushar Das. You can find him on Instagram and his work on the Brown Monkey Studio website. We also thank Vaaka Media for their logistical support. Music in this story: The piano compositions in this story, A Ride to Annandale and a fragment of Flow, have been composed and performed by Siddharth Pandey. The Himachali folk song Udi Jaaya has been performed by the folk artist Anita Pandey (on the vocals) and Siddharth Pandey (on the piano). About Siddharth Pandey: Siddharth Pandey is a writer, cultural historian, visual practitioner and musician hailing from the Shimla Himalayas. Educated in India and the UK, he holds a PhD in Literary and Material Culture Studies from the University of Cambridge. His first book Fossil was published in 2021, and was a finalist for the 2022 Banff Mountain Literature Awards. /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/30009923

Fire Changes Everything 12/08/2023

Fire Changes Everything In this episode, Susan Mathews narrates an eccentric story of fire, an intangible and odd element. She begins with lines from William Blake’s “The Tyger”, which invites us to partake of creation and the paradoxes of the divine, with an equal measure of wonder and terror evoked through fire. But fire is more than just combustion and volatility, a chemical reaction or an ecological stimulus. The history of fire and the history of life are twin flames. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan write in their wonderful book What is Life? that one answer to the titular question is that life is the transmutation of sunlight. It is the sun become the green fire of photosynthesizing beings, the natural seductiveness of flowers and the warmth of the tiger stalking the jungle in the dead of night. The character of burning over deep time is one with twists and turns. It started with a spark of lightning but for fire to become a planetary force, it needed oxygen and fuel. Stephen Pyne, a prolific historian of fire and the first guest in this podcast season, outlines three fires. Plants set ablaze by lightning were the first, humans aiding and abetting fire the second and the third fire is where humans burn lithic landscapes. No longer bounded by season, sun or natural rhythms, this fire without limits made us geological agents. It is also a fire of empire and slavery, of loss and destruction. From a celestial and originary green fire we now see terrifying red plumes and a rising blue fire of the oceans. The world is out of pyric balance. So how do we rewrite this story? In the second half of this episode, Susan introduces some exciting ideas that help us think through fire differently, starting with the myth of Prometheus. In this tale, the role of Pandora is often ignored, downplayed, or forgotten. Elissa Marder, in an article entitled Pandora’s Fireworks describes Pandora, created out of clay and water, as a kind of counterfire (anti puros), a technological counterpart to divine fire. Pandora establishes the defining limits of the human and reminds us of our connection with the rest of the biosphere. From Pandora’s pyrotechnics, we move to the ‘pyrosexual’, a term she borrows from the work of Nigel Clark and Kathryn Yusoff in their article titled Queer Fire: Ecology, Combustion and Pyrosexual Desire. Clark and Yusuff peel back the metaphors of fire and sex and suggest instead a deep, conjoint history of sexual desire and fiery consummation. By contextualizing the ‘pyrosexual’ within the wider economy of earth and cosmos, they seek ways to escape industrial capitalism’s current hyperconsumptive cycles of accumulation. They remind us that plants are sexual beings and challenge more ‘orthodox’ environmentalisms that curb desire and renouncing of pleasure. Fire being a boundary between biologic life and inhuman materialities, it offers a track that restructures the asexual-sexual binary with lateral forms of agency and modes of desire. What else, they ask, can we do with a planet of fire? Susan ends with a tribute to Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a poet and writer who inspired much of Season 2 on water and this one on fire. In a powerful piece published in Harper’s Bazaar this year, she writes that menopause is a powerful lens through which to look at this hot planetary crisis. Apart from the similarities, such as planetary hot flashes caused by toxic environments, menopause is also a liminal space of possibility. She asks whether underneath all this heat, we are meant to learn something about change. Special thanks to Tushar Das and Brown Monkey Studio who added the wonderful effects and sound designed the episode. /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/28986568

Good Wife, Bad Witch: Incendiary Crossings and Theatres of Violence 11/09/2023

Good Wife, Bad Witch: Incendiary Crossings and Theatres of Violence In this episode, host Susan Mathews has a revealing conversation with Professor Pompa Banerjee on fire and gendered and ritualised violence in historical and current practices. Prof. Banerjee teaches courses in early modern literature and culture at the University of Colorado, Denver. Her work focuses on the literary and cultural dimensions of Europe’s cross-cultural encounters in the global Renaissance, especially in the ways they shape identity in the age of discovery. She also studies the unexpected crossings between European witches and Indian widows, and has written extensively on these subjects as well as early modern literature and travel, Shakespeare, and modern Indian adaptations of Shakespeare. In this episode, we spoke of fire’s symbolism and its role in ritualised violence, embodying and enforcing socio-political ideologies that dictate gender roles for women. We refer specifically to her book Burning Women: Widows, Witches and Early Modern European Travellers in India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), where she pores through European travel narratives from 1500 to 1723, where representations of Sati were conventional, even de rigeur, in travelogues of India, and which coincided with successive waves of witch-hunts in Europe. Despite these synchronous occurrences, the ritualised burning in both cases and the burning as public spectacle, these early travel narratives make no correlation between widow burning and witch burning, what Prof. Banerjee terms as a ‘literary haunting’. One reason for this erasure is that practices were coded very differently—the sati’s burning as a heroic sacrifice and the witch’s burning as legitimate retribution. While both women were considered insensible to pain, one was through ascension to literal divinity while the other was through the machinations of the devil. In these theatrical burnings, female bodies become sites of storytelling and ideological reformation. In both practices, the woman is placed centre stage, as it is the witnesses who provide validation and who receive the story being told. The Sati’s deathless love for her husband, itself a tool of economic control, became instrumental in recasting the ideal European wife. We also speak of how the British, in the later colonial period, used narratives of the barbaric practices of brown people to assert their moral right to rule. Finally, we delved into the possible origins of this connection between female subjectivity and deviance. We spoke of the exclusive power women held and hold over the hearth and life-sustaining domestic functions and how these were reconstructed through male fantasies as dangers. Fire has been used in contradictory motifs of resurrection, purity, cleansing, punishment, deification and transcendence, a running theme of course being the disciplining of female desire and sexuality. Women’s bodies become the sites of dispute every time society undergoes upheaval. And the only way to counter these narratives are understanding them and remembering how they’ve been used in the past. You can find more about Prof. Banerjee’s work at the University of Colorado at Denver website: The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n’ Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at www.darknlight.com for episode details and show notes. /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/28564082

Intersecting Heat: Visual Journeys into Caste, Gender and Labour in India 10/26/2023

Intersecting Heat: Visual Journeys into Caste, Gender and Labour in India Dear listeners, this week we return to The Subverse. In this episode, Susan Mathews is in conversation with Bhumika Saraswati, an independent photographer, journalist and filmmaker. We look at how extreme heat is embroiled in caste and labour in India. We speak about Bhumika’s present visual project which focuses on dalit women in agriculture in Uttar Pradesh, India and the impacts of heat, and an earlier short film she had done on workers in crematoriums during the covid-19 pandemic in New Delhi, India, an occupation which is surrounded by fire and heat hazards. The presence of both the women in the fields and the workers at cremation sites is a consequence of various historical, social and economic conditions and even government practices that reinforce caste-based labour practices. Whether it is discussions of those who are ‘most vulnerable’ to heat in air-conditioned rooms, or people visiting a crematorium only interacting with the priest, these are people made invisible or seen through a mainstream gaze, in life and in media. Bhumika navigates the restrictions placed on her as a single woman visiting places with high crime rates, to explore the intersections of caste, class and gender that dalit women in agriculture contend with. In the midst of life-threatening levels of heat, limited protective gear and restrictive clothing, they grow the food that sustains us all. Bhumika captures the sisterhood between these women and the ingenious ways they make their limited resources work. We also briefly touched on how the caste system has restricted access to water and how certain kinds of violence are tied to the lack of basic amenities provided to certain citizens. In 2022, Bhumika was awarded a UNFPA-Laadli Media Award for Gender Sensitive Work and in 2023, she was awarded a Human Rights Press Award by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the Journalism School of Arizona State University, United States of America for her short documentary film, Lives of Sex Workers and Their Children. You can find her on Instagram and on X at , and for the project on women, heat, communities see The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n’ Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes. /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/28427957

Acrx - Vajra Chandrasekera 10/19/2023

Arcx - Usman T. Malik 10/04/2023

Arcx - Payal Dhar 09/20/2023

Arcx - Saad Z. Hossain 09/07/2023

Arcx - Shweta Taneja 08/23/2023

Arcx - Yudhanjaya Wijeratne 08/09/2023

Arcx - Tashan Mehta 07/26/2023

Arcx - Gautam Bhatia 07/12/2023

Unearthing fire: metallurgy, artefacts, and symbolism 07/10/2023

Unearthing fire: metallurgy, artefacts, and symbolism In this episode, The Subverse explores the progression in the use of metals and its impact on the trajectory of human evolution,the role of fire and its symbolism in understanding artefacts, art history, culture, and dance. Susan Mathews speaks with Prof. Sharada Srinivasan, a professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore, India, who studies archaeological artefacts and metallurgy. Through the study of artefacts, we can better understand the history of technology and the progression of metals in civilization. This also helps inform the conservation of artefacts and get better insights into archaeology and art history. In her own work, she has made landmark contributions such as the analysis of bronzes in South India using lead isotopes to identify its metallurgical characterisations and studies on ancient mining and metallurgy in South India. We looked at the fire element in several ways. First, we explored the trajectory of human evolution and its intrinsic links to the increasing ability to master fire. The progressive use of metals and metallurgy was pivotal, and we find that presently no device or pursuit lacks an element of combustion technology. From the hearth to kilns and fiery furnaces, unknown forms and embellishments were forged for the good and for the bad. We spoke about some of these contradictions in the application of heat to metal and some of the gender divides that followed this fiery progression. Prof. Srinivasan brings up interesting illustrations of the ancient art of lost wax casting in India, the making of carnelian beads and the role of women in ceramics, such as Kota women from the Nilgiris. The conversation covered fire symbolism and cultural references in Vedic literature, Buddhist iconography, Tamil Sangam poetry and the Nataraja bronzes. was elected as an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Archaeology in 2021. She received the Padmashri, India’s fourth highest civilian award, in 2019 and has made pioneering contributions to the study of archaeology and history of art from the perspective of engineering applications. /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/27416097

Unequal Heat: Race, Bodies and Thermal Histories 06/26/2023

Unequal Heat: Race, Bodies and Thermal Histories In this episode, Susan Mathews speaks with about the unequal distribution of the effects of heat. For this, we travel to 19th and early 20th century colonial India where heat is a persistent problem for the British empire and a burgeoning climate science is sutured to racial difference. These histories inform contemporary crises as knowledges of heat continue to evolve in an unequal world. is an associate professor at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics with joint appointments in the Departments of History and Anthropology. His current work focuses on the experience of thermal inequality in contemporary India and the United States, the history of how heat has been studied and its effects over the long twentieth century. He is also director of the UCLA Heat Lab. With accelerating climate change, one of the fallouts is extreme heat. In this conversation, Dr. Venkat defined thermal inequality, which is not just the differential impact of heat, but the unequal distribution of heat effects. These effects are filtered or mediated by our environments, by our lives and by the social and political infrastructures that determine how vulnerable we are to heat. The UCLA Heat Lab employs interdisciplinary methods to study the experience of thermal inequality. We spoke in some detail about a journal article he wrote in 2022 on race and thermal sensation in late colonial India. We discussed ‘tropicality’, how central the problems posed by heat were and how various kinds of bodies were understood to be differentially affected by heat, producing both biological variation and pathology. Meteorology and racial ideology intersect in the late 19th and early 20th century and climate science is sutured to racial difference. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n’ Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at for episode details and show notes. /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/27266373

Frankenstein and Fire: Reading from the Margins 05/24/2023

Frankenstein and Fire: Reading from the Margins In this episode, Susan Mathews is in conversation with Prof. Robert Romanyshyn—an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and an author of eight books including Victor Frankenstein, the Monster and the Shadows of Technology: The Frankenstein Prophecies (Frankenstein Prophecies). Romanyshyn’s special area of concern is the psychology of technology, especially in terms of the climate crisis and impact of digital media on our social structures. Much of his life’s work has been devoted to understanding Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a gothic horror tale that, as he points out, has been prophetic in many ways. In his book Frankenstein Prophecies, he asks eight questions that uncover how Shelley’s classic work haunts our world. Combining Jungian theory, literary criticism, and mythology, he seeks answers to the query at the heart of this book: who is the monster? In keeping with the theme of fire in this podcast season, we spoke of the symbolism of fire—both ambiguous and double-edged. In Greek myth in particular, the symbolism of fire is bound up with the myth of Prometheus, one of many stories which explains how humankind came into possession of fire. We zoomed in on the fire related metaphors in Frankenstein (exemplified in the subtitle ‘The Modern Prometheus’, alluding to the Greek fire myth), and how many of these speak to our present ecological crises. There’s fire as lightning that struck down a tree early in the book; the use of electricity and galvanism; the digging up of the dead in cemeteries and charnel houses as analogous to the mining of fossil fuels; solar light versus moonlight; and the Monster running away to the Arctic north, promising to burn in a pyre after Victor Frankenstein’s death. We also discuss a different kind of fire, which is not just a burning down or a melting away or extraction of fossil fuels, but a counter-fire. Counter-fire as in the hope left in Pandora’s jar. In speaking of this fire, Romanyshyn also speaks of splendour of the simple, the extraordinary in the ordinary, the miracle in the mundane, fire as living spirit, and Natura Naturans, the Anima Mundi. Robert Romanyshyn has published essays in psychology, philosophy, literary and education journals, written a play about Frankenstein’s Monster, done radio and TV discussions as well as online interviews, webinars, podcasts and made a DVD movie of his trip to Antarctica. In addition, he has given keynote addresses at conferences, lectured at universities and professional societies, and conducted workshops in the U.S., Europe, Australia, South Africa, Canada, and New Zealand. Check out his website at For his courses, check out . The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n’ Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at for episode details and show notes. /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/26935755

Tracing the Pyrocene: an ecological three-body problem 05/11/2023

Tracing the Pyrocene: an ecological three-body problem In Season 3 of The Subverse, we are journeying into ‘fire’. In this opening episode, we speak with , a fire historian, urban farmer, and emeritus professor at Arizona State University, U.S.A. Pyne has written over 40 books, most of which are centred around fire. In this conversation, we focus on his book The Pyrocene: How we Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next, published in 2021. Apart from being such a prolific scholar of fire, e spent 15 seasons with the North Rim Longshots, a fire crew at Grand Canyon National Park, 12 as crew boss, with another three seasons writing fire plans for other national parks. He lives in Queen Creek, Arizona. His next book is a fire history of Mexico. Susan and Stephen discuss how fire is, for humans, our defining ecological trait. We are unique fire creatures on a unique fire planet, and as keepers of the flame, we need to somehow get the right mix of fire in the world to balance our interests and those of others. In his book, Pyne proposes a fire-centric perspective on how humans continue to shape the Earth. The book renames and redefines the so-called Anthropocene according to humanity’s primary ecological signature, which is our ability to manipulate fire. As he states in the book, “the sum of our fire practices is creating a fire age that is equivalent in stature to the ice ages of the Pleistocene.” In the narrative he lays out, the pyric prism he uses is what he terms as an ecological three-body problem. The history that Pyne narrates chronicles three fires. First-fire is the fire of nature that appeared as soon as plants colonised continents, about 420 million years ago. Thanks to cooking, a dependence on fire became coded into hominin DNA. Second-fire was an act of domestication, perhaps the model for all pyrotechnologies, in which people had transformed wildfire into hearth and torch. Third-fire is qualitatively different. Pyne points out that third-fire burns lithic landscapes no longer bounded by ecological limits. With a source of combustibles, which are essentially unbounded, inadequate sinks for the effluent, from cooking food and landscapes, we are now cooking planets. The sum of Earth’s three fires is creating the fire-informed equivalent of an ice age, and instead of ice amassing more ice, fire is generating more fire. This pyric transition also means that fire vanished as a serious object of inquiry. Fire with its flame, glow, heat, and crackle has been reduced to the most elemental chemical and physical expressions, each isolated and engineered, so that what had been ‘fire’ became ‘combustion,’ and combustion has become only its constituent parts. What we erased were traditional and indigenous knowledges of living with fire. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n’ Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes. /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/26808612

Water and Caste: Part Two Art, Collective Memory, and Anti-Caste history 05/03/2023

Water and Caste: Part One - History of the Mahad Satyagraha 03/27/2023

Drawing the Line: Inventing Rivers, the Dissent of Rain and Embracing Wetness 12/14/2022

Drawing the Line: Inventing Rivers, the Dissent of Rain and Embracing Wetness Susan Mathews speaks with architect and planner . He is an Adjunct Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) and the recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2017, Anuradha Mathur and Dilip Da Cunha founded a design platform called Ocean of Wetness. The organisation is dedicated to imaging and imagining habitation in ubiquitous wetness rather than on a land-water surface. Our chat was a wide-ranging one, starting with the premise in many of his works: the line which separates land from water, which he terms “as one of the most fundamental and enduring acts in the understanding and design of human habitation.” He calls this the first colonialism, which took a wetness that is everywhere and turned it into a land and water binary. This led to the invention of rivers and source, course, and flood, leading us to see a river that flowed between two lines and flooded. Alexander’s eye represents the cartographer and surveyor, and Ganga’s descent is rain, colonised by river. Rain is no longer seen as feeding wetness but contained in gutters. Da Cunha invites us to acknowledge wetness all around us, not contained in a place, and embrace living between the clouds and aquifers. He writes that “water is the first principle in the nature of moist things.” The city reinforces the line which separates water from land on the earth’s surface and it has become the quintessential settlement while reducing other modes of habitation to less settled or unsettled, creating hierarchies. He writes, “those educated with the map, inhabit a surface articulated with rivers, and their extension in pipes and drains.” All this calls for a new imagination, driven by the celebratory event of rain — a re-heralding — and gradual steps, including learning from indigenous and other communities who have extended and nurtured ways of living with wetness. Dilip da Cunha is based in Philadelphia and Bangalore. He has authored several books, such as Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (2001), co-authored with Anuradha Mathur. His most recent book (and the subject of our conversation), The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent, was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2019. In 2020, he received the ASLA Honour award and the J.B Jackson Book Prize for his work. To learn more about his remarkable work, visit The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n’ Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine, or at darknlight.com for episode details and show notes. /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/25321638

Of Relationality and Water: Stories of Kinship, Care, and Belonging Part 2 12/07/2022

Of Relationality and Water: Stories of Kinship, Care and Belonging Part 1 11/24/2022

Of Relationality and Water: Stories of Kinship, Care and Belonging Part 1 Water has played a central role as a resource and property in our dominant worldviews. It has made and unmade empires. In our nation-building, watercourses, waterways, oceans, rivers and freshwaters have all played leading roles, part of a continued and relentless drive to choreograph and subjugate our waters. But it is the indigenous, the subjugated, and the oppressed who seem to best recognise water’s power as both a life force and a catastrophic threat. For them, water is kin, creator, and protector. In this episode, we wanted to explore relationality when it comes to water. The politics of kinship can be complicated, but how would we approach our bodies of water if they were kin? So, we asked three women who have made water, and bodies of water, their life work a range of questions. We wanted to see through their eyes how water has shaped them and how they have shaped their relations with water. In part one of this episode, we will hear descriptions of their work and play as it relates to water, how it has shaped them as people, and why they consider their projects or interventions so important. Our guests are: , an author and editor based in Mumbai, India who has a debut non-fiction book on intertidal wildlife called Superpowers on the Shore, published by Penguin Randomhouse in 2022; Divya Panicker an oceanographer whose work focuses on cetacean distributions, habitat use and behaviour off the southwest coast of India and , a biologist, photographer, adventurer, and educator who has spent the last decade facilitating interdisciplinary initiatives in the fields of ecology, conservation,education, and science communication. The Subverse is the podcast of , a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media , or at for episode details and show notes. /episode/index/show/thesubverse/id/25123467

How to Breathe, and Other Survival Lessons From Marine Mammals 11/02/2022

Sea turtles, Island fever and Magical mysteries: the adventures of an evolutionary ecologist 10/19/2022

Wild Learning: Yuvan Aves on nature as a classroom 10/13/2022

Arcx - Indra Das 10/05/2022

Arcx - Kuzhali Manickavel 09/21/2022

Arcx - SB Divya 09/08/2022

Arcx - Samit Basu 08/25/2022

Arcx - Lavanya Lakshminarayan 08/10/2022

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