The guest of the podcast Crossroads was political scientist Mukul Sharma. We talked about what the experiences of India's lowest castes can bring to the climate justice debate.

How do touch, taste and smell relate to climate justice? Why do India's lowest castes dislike environmentalists? How have Hindu conservatives appropriated environmental issues and why have they joined the fight against climate change, unlike the Western right? And can yoga really be a cure for the climate crisis? Indian political scientist Mukul Sharma talks about all this, and how to conduct research among the lowest castes from the position of a privileged intellectual, in a new episode of the podcast Crossroads.

In the latest episode of the podcast series Crossroads, we invited Sylvia Tamale who is a Professor of Law at Makerere University, where she was the first female Dean of the School of Law. She founded and served as a coordinator of the Gender, Law & Sexuality Research Project at the School of Law. She is a leading African feminist lawyer, scholar, and feminist activist. She has won several awards for her academic work and for defending the human rights of marginalized groups. She is a co-editor of the journal Feminist Africa. She has been a visiting professor at academic institutions around the world; in 2021 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Law by the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Her latest book Decolonization and Afro-Feminism was awarded the 2022 book prize from the Feminist Theory and Gender Section of the International Sociological Association.

The podcast is moderated by Zuzana Uhde, a social scientist at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The podcast Crossroads is created through a collaboration between Alarm and the research programme Global Conflicts and Local Interactions, which is funded by the AV21 Strategy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The series invites social scientists, whose research addresses important topics and issues of our globalizing world.

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► podcast was recorded at the studio Mr. Wombat
► sound mix Ondřej Bělíček
► sound design Ondřej Bělíček

Why can we find hardly any members of the lowest castes neither in Indian music academies nor in the juries of singing talent shows? Why do Dalit musicians write lyrics not only about their caste heroes but even about the Indian Constitution? How do traditional and modern musical styles come together in the struggle against historical injustices? And how do the privileged higher castes respond to all this? In the new episode of the Crossroads podcast series, Indian political scientist Chandraiah Gopani discusses why the caste system remains an important element of Indian society and how inequalities manifest themselves in music.

Chandraiah Gopani studied political science at the University of Hyderabad. He is now an Associate Professor at the Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute in Prayagraj (formerly Allahabad), India. His main research interests are in critical theory, caste and Dalit studies, and Dalit-Bahujan cultural and intellectual traditions. He is currently writing a book on the invisible and most marginalized Dalit castes.

The podcast the Na rozcestí / Crossroads is created through a collaboration between Alarm and the research programme Global Conflicts and Local Interactions, which is funded by the AV21 Strategy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The series invites social scientists, whose research addresses important topics and issues of our globalizing world. This episode is moderated by Jiří Krejčík, who is a political scientist at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague.

► Follow Global Conflicts and Local Interactions
► Do you like Crossroads? Support our work

► podcast was recorded at the studio Mr. Wombat
► sound mix Ondřej Bělíček
► sound design Ondřej Bělíček