We’d Like A Word hosts Paul Waters and Stevyn Colgan have a chat and a laugh with Subhadra Das, writer, historian, broadcaster, comedian and curator, about her book, Uncivilised: Ten Lies That Made The West. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.
Subhadra looks at the relationship between science and society. She specialises in the history and philosophy of science, particularly the history of scientific racism and eugenics, and what those histories mean for our lives today. (She’s funny. Honest.) For nine years, she was Curator of the Science Collections at University College London where she was also Researcher in Critical Eugenics at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation. (No really, we do have a laugh. We had to delay recording part 3 because Paul got a fit of the giggles.) Subhadra has written and presented podcasts, curated museum exhibitions, done stand-up comedy & been on radio and telly.
In this 3-part episode we talk about racist Gandhi, mispronouncing Bangla names, white supremacy baked into our idea of western civilisation, science not being neutral, comforting lies, Francis Galton, eugenics, the inventor of the questionnaire, spoiling things for white people, why female comics like Victoria Wood Dawn French & Jennifer Saunders avoided the QI TV show, the Defiance TV show on Channel 4, Hamza Yousef, Paul McCartney’s song Blackbird & reply guy, “empty places” v “emptied” places, the presence of writing as a measure of civilisation, rich eejit Erich von Däniken, fake Tibetan monk Lobsang Rampa aka Cyril Henry Hoskin, cuddly Columbo, Golden Age detective fiction as “the mental equivalent of pottering”, Magna Carta & Forest Charter, swan upping, US federal government & the Iroquois nation’s Haudenosaunee, Abraham Maslow & his hierarchy of needs, which he learned from the Blackfoot Nation, Ryan Heavyhead, the UK citizenship test, & editor Harriet Poland.
