UCD Humanities Institute Podcast

The UCD Humanities Institute Podcast collects recordings from University College Dublin's Humanities Institute: research papers, symposium keynotes, and events about how scholarship gets done. It is institutional audio in the plainest sense. A short spoken introduction names the speaker, the occasion and the venue, and the talk then runs in its own academic register, citations and close readings included. Sarah Colvin, of the University of Cambridge, gives a talk titled 'Haunting Times' on Zhadan's Voroshilovgrad and Bulawayo's Glory. In one passage she stays with a single image, a blood-coloured Icarus bus. She reads it through the myth of Daedalus's son, Persephone's pomegranate and the forgetting waters of Lethe, and pauses to wonder aloud who would name a company Icarus. Tom Nurmi's keynote for a Critical Minerals Symposium, titled 'Quarry of Thought. Minerality and AI', works at a different pitch. It draws on the geographer Julia Klinger to show how frontier narratives recast mining regions as resource hinterlands that feed high-tech production elsewhere. It ends on a lyrical passage about flint and the first human artist. Research practice is covered too. At a research integrity session from the ReCLAIM project, organised jointly with the UCD Earth Institute, a speaker urges ethically sound, environmentally responsible use of generative AI and describes a slide aloud for listeners. Alongside the lectures runs Extracts, a hosted series in the same feed. Megan Custer and a co-host named Sarah talk with artists about mined, excavated and extractive landscapes. Recent Extracts episodes begin with the hosts setting a frame, such as the exploitation of labour or Gloria Anzaldúa's Coyolxauhqui imperative. Jeanine Oleson describes filming Chino Mine in southern New Mexico, the site of a 1950 strike by Mexican-American workers. She shot from a public lookout above the mine because she knew she would never be let inside. Ignacio Acosta talks about drones, a technology tied to military surveillance and the mining industry, and about how activists in Sami territory in northern Sweden used them to show what was happening on the ground. Adrian Balseca recalls removing a car's gas tank and getting the car pushed and pulled from Quito to the Cuenca Biennial by people, horses, donkeys and trucks. The drive normally takes eight or nine hours. His journey took eight days. Side by side, the two strands share a preoccupation. In Nurmi's keynote, extraction is a story told about frontiers. In Extracts, it is something artists film, watch from the air and drag across a country. AI appears in the title of the minerals keynote and is the subject of guidance at the research integrity session. The lectures are dense and allusive and reward a listener willing to follow an argument through its references. For literature, start with Colvin. For art and mining, start with any of the Extracts conversations. Either way, the feed offers the scholarship in its own words rather than a summary of it.