Gastrocolonialism and the Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Southeast Asia with Dr. Sophie Chao

The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast with guest Dr. Sophie Chow, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Sydney's School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry and the Charles Perkins Center. Her research explores Southeast Asia's intersections of capitalism, indigeneity, and health. Sophie previously worked for the Indigenous Rights Organization Force People's Program in Indonesia as well.

Andy:

Sophie, thanks for joining us. Could you introduce yourself?

Dr. Chao:

Hi there, Andy. I'm Sophie Chao. I'm a researcher and anthropologist at the University of Sydney and I've been working previously with indigenous organizations in Southeast Asia in a human rights context.

Andy:

Awesome, so I want to talk about the work you've done in the past, especially in Southeast Asia. I think a lot of people are familiar with this general idea that across the globe, corporations and governments have been pushing indigenous people out of lands that are worth a lot of money because of the materials on them. What's going on in this region and why is this kind of a unique story?

Dr. Chao:

Yeah, you're right in saying that the story of Indigenous people being pushed out and dispossessed and displaced and disempowered for capitalist profit is one that we're hearing across the tropics and beyond. In many ways, those dynamics of dispossession and displacement are also very much part of the contemporary landscape in Southeast Asia. What I would say is different? Well, there are several aspects, I suppose. The first is that there's been an incredible momentum in terms of activism, land rights movements, and Indigenous coalitions, who are all pushing for legal reforms and changes to the practices of corporations and the government in the region to ensure that land-based developments are happening in ways that are respectful of Indigenous people's right to give or withhold their consent to these developments.

Another important difference, I think, boils down to the sort of landscapes we're talking about. Most of the landscapes that are being threatened by these agro-industrial projects are, you know, forested landscapes that are immensely high in biodiversity. But more than that, some spaces are of deep cultural, spiritual, and cosmological significance to indigenous peoples across the Indonesian archipelago. These landscapes are not just resources. Plants and animals are often understood to be kin. Family members with whom indigenous peoples share common descent change the story from one of capitalist profit to one of multi-species relationships that are very much being transformed and undermined by the advent of these simplified sorts of ecologies.

Andy:

You've mentioned right now this idea of some land projects that it sounds like there's some indigenous input into those. Could you talk a little bit further about that?

Dr. Chao:

So that goes back to the principle of consent that I mentioned, which is, you know, a right of Indigenous peoples enshrined in international law, namely this idea that Indigenous peoples have the right to give or withhold their consent to any project that will affect their lands and territories.

And I think it's vital to here avoid, you know, the tendency sometimes to homogenize or to romanticize or to simplify the story of Indigenous peoples' engagements with capitalism, in the sense that often many Indigenous communities that I've worked with, certainly in Southeast Asia, are very much perceiving these projects as a company with the promise of employment and development and poverty alleviation and so forth. So the question is not a black or white, oppose or embrace, but it's more finding ways for Indigenous peoples to participate in an equitable, inclusive, and egalitarian manner in these projects, all the way from the moment in which these projects are designed through to their implementation, and then questions of monitoring and verification and validation of sort of, you know, the principles that these corporations are deploying in their everyday practices.

So that's where the question of consent comes in. It's not just a question of consent to the project, it's a question of consent to how indigenous peoples are going to benefit from these projects both in the present and intergenerationally.

Andy:

So I've got to ask how are they gaining any power in these conversations. Because historically there's never really been an ability to do that.

Dr. Chao:

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's an ongoing and difficult struggle of leveling the playing field, the power field, between Indigenous communities, government entities, corporate bodies, and the international financial institutions that are also often invested or involved in some way or another in these large-scale land acquisitions. The truth is that, certainly in Indonesia and other countries of Southeast Asia, the law is often against Indigenous peoples in the sense that their rights might be recognized in international human rights frameworks that are unfortunately often voluntary or non-binding, but they are not then enshrined in national binding legislation.

Indigenous peoples come across this issue of national interest, whereby their rights tend to be trumped in the name of development projects that are said to be for the interests of, for instance, national food security or national food sovereignty rights. So there's a tension here between the law and the benefits that accrue to indigenous peoples.

In Indonesia, Indigenous communities have been incredibly savvy in establishing networks with international and transnational organizations to try to bring their cases to a more global stage and seek redress and remedy for violations of their rights.

So these collaborative networks operate transnationally, often in very effective ways. I think another way in which Indigenous peoples in Indonesia have sought to level the playing field is to never really rely on a single strategy but rather to deploy multi-pronged approaches, submitting court cases to national and provincial courts, activating UN mechanisms, urgent complaint mechanisms, sending communication petitions to UN reporters on the right to food or the right of indigenous peoples and that's often accompanied with much more direct on-the-ground actions and protests, demonstrations, blockades, petitions and these sorts of grassroots resistance movements.

And it's sort of through a kind of strategic deployment of different avenues and different networks and actors that I think indigenous peoples are working to level that playing field, all the while, of course, recognizing that this playing field is often situated within a much broader geopolitical economy of extraction and, you know, political, invested, political and economic vested interests which are the bigger struggle, I suppose.

Andy:

It's really interesting, like you're talking about all these things that they're doing and I'm like, oh, we see that happening here in the US a lot, except for the international piece, because we're kind of in the belly of the beast, so to speak. When you think about activists blockading logging sites and things like that, you know that's the short-term solution while they're trying to enforce court cases and things like that, but there's no international community coming to arbitrate those conversations. So it's really interesting to hear that in a lot of ways we're doing the same things. We're just much less effective because we're in the belly of the beast, so to speak.

In your opinion, do you think the resistance that they're putting forward is pretty effective, or is there anything you think in particular from your experiences and exposures, that is or isn't particularly effective? Or I'm just curious about your thoughts as somebody who's been around it for a bit.

Dr. Chao:

That's a really great question, I suppose, looking back on the five or six years I spent working for the Forest People's Program, which is a human rights organization that works in coalition with indigenous peoples to secure their rights to land, and then the later ethnographic research I did on this possession in West Papua. It's really hard to conjure success stories right. Often NGOs get asked by donors to report on the success stories and it's really difficult to quantify and even qualify, for that matter, what counts.

In some instances, Indigenous communities have been able to reclaim certain plots or portions of the land that had been allocated by the government to corporations, although those tend to represent very small portions of the very large-scale concessions that we're talking about. You know 200,000, 300,000 hectares. In some cases, successful resistance has taken the form of compensation, for instance, vegetation, crops, and human infrastructure that have been destroyed to make way for these industrial plantations, so in cash or kind, I think.

Another success, I suppose, of the resistance movement in Indonesia has been the development of what are called indigenous legal protocols. So this is an attempt by indigenous peoples to get their customary laws recognized by the Indonesian government right as law, as complements to national laws, in the name of sort of a legal pluralism right, a system that can recognize different ways of understanding, you know, justice-seeking procedures and instruments. So a number of the communities that I worked with were able to develop these protocols and had them ratified and recognized by local governments.

Taking those to the national level and seeking recognition at the national level is often far more tricky because of this question of national interests trumping local priorities. But again, it's hard to pin down success and a large part of that also boils down to the fact that indigenous peoples themselves this certainly came out from my research have very different internal ideas about what they want for their futures, for their children and their grandchildren. Gendered dynamics are super important but often effaced in the context of advocacy.

So you know, often women, you know, don't necessarily have a voice, even within customary decision-making processes. I heard a lot of grievances from women who felt they weren't being heard even within their communities, let alone beyond. So those kinds of internal differences and sometimes tensions and disagreements, I think are a big part of the reason why it's hard to identify success and success in the eyes of the people themselves who are primarily concerned and affected by the outcomes of their advocacy, of their advocacy.

And I also just want to add that certainly in West Papua, where I've been doing my research on the western half of the island of New Guinea that was colonized by Indonesia in the 1960s, resistance has been met with a highly militarized response from the Indonesian government, which has undermined the capacity of indigenous peoples to speak up because of the fear of reprisals and the form of intimidation and harassment and coercion and so forth. So sometimes the political and historical contexts of particular regions make a big difference to the extent to which resistance is successful, particularly when the right to self-determination in political, territorial terms, is the bigger picture within which these smaller struggles are nested.

Andy:

One of the things I really struggle with is, like just what you brought up, this idea that there isn't a homogenous voice for indigenous people in a region, and it's so hard then to say what are you supposed to throw your weight of support behind? And here in the US, it's more convoluted because we exist on lands that are stolen. And I'm just really interested in these conversations of indigenous rights and someplace like Indonesia, like what is the relationship historically between the I guess the term would be ethnicities that have most of the economic power and a lot of these marginalized groups, these marginalized indigenous, traditional, traditionally living people?

Dr. Chao:

It's a really important distinction that you're bringing up right Colonized, settler, colonized, post-colonial, anti-colonial societies. Sometimes they can get glossed over when there are really important differences, and in Indonesia, I mean different parts of the archipelago. We're talking about a vast and diverse archipelago, so each region has had particular and different sorts of historical trajectories, and different sorts of encounters with various colonial forces, both within the region in the form of sultanates and then in the form of European forces, the Dutch particularly.

But what certainly, you know, emerges quite strongly from those diverse histories is the kind of the centrality of Java as kind of the economic, cultural, and political heart of what became Indonesia following independence from Dutch rule right. So in that light, many of the Indigenous peoples who live in the so-called remote or outlying islands of the archipelago very much see their decision-making abilities and capacities relegated to a subsidiary position compared to the heart of the country which is Java, which is where the big political economic decisions tend to be made.

The question of colonization is also part of the landscape to some extent, particularly in regions like West Papua. Right, west Papuans are Melanesian. They're not, you know, ethnically Malay. They are generally Catholic. So they see themselves as religiously distinct also from Java, primarily Muslim. So they have a very sort of different kind of cultural and religious and historical kind of context. So in West Papua, the discourse of land back is very much part of the picture as well. If not land back, then, you know, settlers out.

I suppose there's been a huge influx of migrants from across Indonesia into this particular region, a migration that's often driven by the rhetoric of, you know, this vast area of pristine, untouched land that's sort of just waiting to be developed and used or made useful. So there's a very strong kind of paternalistic sort of, you know, discourse that tends to accompany or justify migration into West Papua.

But it's leading to a significant population dilution. Papuans are minorities on their own lands in many parts of the area and that of course has brought and brings up all kinds of concerns about cultural continuity across generations. So, yeah, diversity across the country, I think, made for different kinds of histories, but always a sort of yeah sense that Java makes the decisions and that, you know, the laws of the center tend to dominate and the Indigenous peoples are often subject to developmental discourses. Development is said to uplift them from punitive poverty and even if they don't perceive their ways of life or livelihoods or modes of subsistence you know as poor in any shape or form themselves, that dilution is really important to keep in mind because it has so many effects and one of the things we see I feel like I keep talking back around where I live but the idea of, like, continuity of tradition and culture and then trying to reclaim it.

Andy:

And what does that reclamation look like once it's been cut off, soldered off, and then tried to regrow from that spot years later, generations later? It's a messy and complicated process forward and there's no easy way to solve it without Well, there's just no easy way to solve it. Period.

So you talk a lot in your other research about this concept of gastrocolonialism. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Dr. Chao:

Sure, so the concept of gastrocolonialism is not one that I coined myself. It's one that I borrowed and expanded from an Indigenous scholar, poet and activist called Craig Santos Perez, who works at the University of Hawaii, Craig uses this term to talk about how colonialism manifests beyond the structural, ideological, and political in our gut, really in how colonialism has reconfigured the foodways and associated ecosystems and traditions of indigenous peoples in ways that have been highly detrimental to their well-being, well-being understood in the broadest sense of the term to encompass physical health but also mental health and cultural sort of continuance and survivance right. So in his work, he looks at commodities like canned meat, fizzy drinks, biscuits, that sort of thing.

In Indonesia, I've also looked at how gastrocolonialism manifests in the transformation of Indigenous peoples' forest-based and slash-and-burn-based foodways to imported commodified, process-based foodways, and particularly how these changing food systems are once again often couched in developmental discourse right where particular kinds of foods become associated with modernity and progress and sort of integration of Indigenous peoples into a global consumer community.

Foods are never neutral. Their significance goes well and sort of integration of indigenous peoples into a global consumer community. So foods are never neutral. Their significance goes well beyond sort of calories, food groups, and nutrients and they are profoundly imbued with political, cultural, and moral significance. So that's how I sort of deploy the concept of gastrocolonialism.

Andy:

It's not even just the food in terms of buying it. It's the context in which food exists outside of the consumption component that gets erased. It reinforces that if your food is not from your local place, you can't grow it even if you wanted to, and it puts a nice layer in between people and their landscape.

Dr. Chao:

That's right. You've hit the nail on the head and that's one of the biggest motifs among many of the indigenous people that I worked with is that food is as much about the substance as it is. The origin and the people who sweat are invested in the materiality of this food, the relationship of significance, that kind of coalesce in what food is, and they affect, you know, the palatability, the palatability of foods, as much as they affect their sort of symbolic significance.

Andy:

Going back to this idea of the government kind of intervening on behalf of corporations and kind of trying to find you could call it the third way between the corporations completely just like killing everyone and the indigenous people having their sovereign right to own their land. How is this idea of offering foods and subsidizing getting these types of foods into these communities? Could you talk a little bit about what that process has looked like In terms of this? I don't know if there's anything to speak on in terms of the actions of the activists who are trying to keep those communities sovereign against pushing back on that.

Dr. Chao:

Great question. So in West Papua, where I've been working, often these imported processed commodities are offered by corporations and the government as compensation for land that communities are surrendering for agribusiness developments, be it ball, palm, timber, or other sorts of crops. So the foods themselves are taken as of the same value as these lands ceded, which you know they are not in the eyes of indigenous peoples.

But again, the idea is, you know, certainly in many of the consultations and meetings that I attended that involved multi-stakeholder groups of government, corporations, indigenous peoples, you know, foods like rice, foods like instant noodles, were described as not just, you know, nutritionally better than forest-based foods, which they're not always, not necessarily the case, even when they're biofortified. But the idea is very much that the transformation of Indigenous peoples from nomadic hunter-gatherers to modern members of the Indonesian nation-state begins with what they eat right, and their identity is very much, you know, bound to what they eat. So there's a very nationalistic discourse often that accompanies the introduction of these foods.

There's a big educational dimension as well. So often governments and corporations and shame and blame are a big part of the story, this idea that often it's the women who are targeted, or rather who are offered these foods and then told that you know that this is the proper way to feed your children. To be a responsible mother is to, you know, offer these nutritious, you know imported commodities to your children instead of Sago or Forest Game or Forest Hubers.

So there's a sort of a sort of a responsabilization placed on mothers as carers and food providers, and children, child viewers, to integrate these food ways within the local systems. But a big dimension I think of also the ways in which these foods are being offered is that, you know, often many people in Papua are very offended by the ways, the actual ways in which these foods arrive. So people often are made to queue up right in front of the corporate headquarters to receive their rations or their packages of food. Often they're made to wait for many, many hours under the scorching heat. If they don't arrive wearing shoes and a t-shirt, they might be refused the food because they need to be dressed properly, right? Most people in the villages I work with don't need to wear shoes, and so there's a lot of stigma that then comes attached with the processes entailed in these exchanges of food and land, right, for many of the communities.

Andy:

That sounds exactly like how our military operates. They basically try to break you down in order for you to have like the basic meaning or things that you need to survive, and then they can basically tell you what you're going to do and you just say yes, because you've been broken. And that sounds exactly like the same thing and that's like frightening and horrifying that they could do this, and horrifying that they could do this.

Dr. Chao:

You're absolutely right. You're making me think of a quote from one of my interlocutors, an Indigenous woman from West Papua who was talking precisely about the attritive effect of these introduced food ways and she said you know, these introduced foods the rice, the instant noodles they're there to keep us alive but they don't make a life worth living. And I remember that, really stuck with me because it was true. Right, the food you know satiates our basic need to eat, to consume, to keep our bodies alive. But that's a very different story to what makes a life worth living. And for many, you know, it's about the forest and it's about the environment, it's about their cosmology and spiritualities, in ways that vastly transcend the pragmatics of simply feeding oneself.

Andy:

I understand that the government's doing marketing to sell this type of program to the people in order for them to buy in, but I've got to imagine there must be more to it in terms of like; is it because of the fact that they've decimated so much of the landscape that, like, maybe there's less game available and it's making these types of opportunities more appealing? I don't know if you could speak at all to that do you mean more appealing for the communities?

Dr. Chao:

Absolutely. The sobering reality of it is that, indeed, you know, vast swaths of the native forests that indigenous peoples in West Papua traditionally relied on for their subsistence form of hunting, fishing and gathering are now giving way to monocrop plantations where little food is to be found. So there's that context and the truth is that there are also many people, certainly that I worked with, who are, yeah, embracing these introduced foods.

Not just that, there are also many people, certainly that I worked with, who are yeah, embracing these introduced foods not just because there are little alternatives but also because they do believe that it is a way of expanding their world and integrating into globalized sort of food ways and, yeah, expanding their sort of sense of the world and their place in that world. So that's also part of the story and it's a big source of conflict, actually, and tension and arguments among many indigenous peoples themselves, right, and that are often infected across generational lines, so where the younger generations are not interested in hunting or fishing or sego, and would much rather have instant noodles and rice. So those again moving away from that sort of homogenization, all kinds of internal disagreements, I suppose, of gastropolitics. But I think you know, for a lot of the people that I worked with I guess it's a bit of a chicken and egg right.

If you start to embrace these introduced foodways then you're in some ways endorsing or legitimating the further destruction of the forest and its own kinds of foodways. So where does it begin? Where does it end? And another big part of the story of foodways in Papua is that, you know, people often talk about the ways in which deforestation and urban expansion are not just causing hunger and malnutrition in the villages, they're also causing hunger for the species of the forest, the animals, the birds, all of these creatures that they consider to be their kin, their siblings, their grandparents.

Hunger is kind of distributed across species lines. So to embrace introduced foods also means, you know, accepting or endorsing the destruction of a whole ecosystem that feeds and is fed by these other deeply significant non-human others. So we're talking about a kind of very multi-species way of thinking about food and relations of feeder and fed and of eating and being eaten less.

Andy:

Yeah, it's very much the mutually assured destruction of the old 60s movie Dr. Strangelove— the potential nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the US. It's this idea that, without humans to intervene and improve the landscapes through these slash and burn, swidden agriculture, cycling of various stages of the forest in different areas, there's always these different margins where animals can hunt and thrive, you've basically determined that the forest should look something else and even without the plantations moving in, that means that there are going to be a massive reconfiguration of what species exist and ultimately, in most cases, less life period.

Dr. Chao:

Absolutely yeah. A radical simplification and homogenization of the life world. I suppose that once were these diverse ecosystems, including their human dwellers.

Andy:

Yeah, now looking forward. What are your thoughts on the way things are trending right now? Do you have hope or is it just, like you think, a slow churn that will just continue to destroy more and more?

Dr. Chao:

That's always the big question. Hope. I'm so torn about hope. My Indigenous friends in Papua; when I start to lose hope, they always tell me that I'm not allowed to because they haven't. And if they haven't, then who am I, a Eurasian, foreign, privileged anthropologist, to give up hope when they're living in the midst of this predicament, right, and most deeply and directly affected by it? At the same time, I think hope can be kind of pharmaconic sometimes, because it's often such a disputed kind of disposition, right? What does one hope for? How are hopes, multiple and sometimes conflicting, even within a single society or a single village, or even a single family, or indeed a single being? It's a slippery kind of thing, isn't it?

But I do think we need it and I think it is there. And part of the reason for that is that, you know, it goes back to this strategy of this multi-pronged activist strategy that many Indigenous peoples in Indonesia have deployed, where they're trying to broaden the capillaries of action and communication at the national and transnational level. They're really beginning to get their voices heard, and they have been ongoingly doing that, as Indigenous peoples, you know, for a very, very long time.

That activism I don't think is going to stall or stop, it will continue. I think that I mean, I always sort of wonder about consumer awareness and whether we, as purchasers of commodities that do connect us to these seemingly out of the way places, whether we do have any power at all to make differences at that sort of structural sort of you know large, you know higher sort of level. I think sort of everyday decisions, you know matter, but I do think they need to be accompanied with much broader sort of structural, legal kind of reforms that can affect change and transformation, you know, at a broader kind of scale.

I want to believe in it. That's the best answer I can give you. I want to believe that there is hope. I think otherwise there is a risk of sinking into a paralyzing politics of despair and resignation in the face of these seemingly insurmountable forces that indigenous peoples are facing. But the truth is, Indigenous peoples are still around and they are still fighting and they are still surviving, they are still continuing, they are working together across the tropics, across the world to preserve and protect their lands and futures. So it's in their hands. I think that that hope lies again. That's in line with, I suppose, the broader principle of self-determination, and where we can offer allyship and solidarity to those struggles, we should.

But of course, it then raises up some much bigger questions right Around, questions of positionality and reflexivity. For people like me, you know an anthropologist, God knows that's a discipline that is weighed in and bound at the hip with colonialism. So then, you know, ethical questions come up as to who we speak for and against and with, and how our own situatedness within these colonial legacies shapes or affects what stories we can and can't tell, and then the way we tell them. So I guess my hope is that we don't stop telling bitter stories but we start telling better bitter stories in conversation with the peoples who are again most deeply and directly mired in the predicament of hope.

Andy:

Yeah, extremely well said. So the reason why I wanted to bring up this question of hope is, that I feel like when I was doing the research for this, the last half of the previous piece, and trying to figure out where things stand today, there seems to be a lot of articles, at least online, that suggest that the government has started to realize in the last few years the value of some of these traditional force management practices. As somebody that actually has some exposure and knowledge of what's actually going on, is this something that's more for, like the international public to, you know, quell their concerns? Or do you think there is some kind of actual meaningful change, maybe even just kind of bubbling below the surface, but there?

Dr. Chao:

Indonesia is a really interesting context to think about this question because in recent years there's been quite a proliferation of different laws that recognize traditional forest management practices by so-called customary law communities which is the Indonesian term for glossed as indigenous peoples. And you know some of these laws, they often apply at the village level or the district level and they have allowed communities to preserve certain patches of forest from agribusiness developments, to continue their own forms of agroforestry, and that tend to be anchored in polycropping, right? Selective management and maintenance of different sorts of food crops.

One of the biggest challenges to the ongoingness of these traditional management practices has to do with scale, Andy. So if you think about slash and burn, for instance, as you described, this is a very cyclical, temporally distributed process that requires time for particular patches of forests to regenerate. So that all works fine and well if you've got a significantly large area of land where these different stages of the cycle can occur across time. But often what happens is that the lands customary lands of communities are so restricted or narrowed or smallened as a result of the allocation of broader patches to corporations that these cycles don't have enough time or space to actually unfold in the way that they should right, and everything needs to sort of be accelerated, and whatever can be produced from these areas in terms of food crops tends to be less or has to happen in a more intense agricultural sort of mode. So more planting on smaller areas of land.

So that question of how much land is enough to allow for traditional ecological practices to continue, I think is the big one, and it's certainly one that many of the people that I worked with brought up, and also accompanied with a sense of injustice as to why polycropping is, you know, relegated to small patches, whereas monocropping, you know, necessitates these hundred thousand hectares of land, to which, of course, corporations have their own arguments in terms of productivity and yield and profit and so forth.

So I'd say these traditional forest management practices are there, they require the land that they do, and that's it. It still boils down to a question of rights to land, sovereignty over land and, you know, participation of Indigenous peoples in terms of land management and use sort of decisions.

Andy:

It speaks to the fact that there's this thing that's not being quantified in the conversation about how Indigenous land management practices have benefit and value. And just because they're not profitable doesn't necessitate that they're of lesser production. It's that production is much more nuanced and it's not intrinsically tied to humanity in the sense of like we consume it. In a way we do, but it's air, it's healthy ecology, it's all these other things. It's not food in the sense of a monocrop, where it's net in, net out and you know you can make the argument that that's inherently insustainable because you've simplified an ecosystem.

And I'm just really curious if that's like somewhere deep in the heart of like these conversations about like giving some giving some voice to these ideas of traditional land management, if there's this realization happening that these skills are probably going to be very important in the future, because the way we're doing things can't continue forever. There's just no possible way, scientifically speaking. The materials don't exist forever, the petrochemicals we use for fertilizers don't exist forever, and so on and so forth.

It's always just this very interesting dynamic to figure out how these governments with very smart people in them are thinking about these issues in a way that must be rational. If they're just kicking, you know they're playing hot potato and it's not their problem right now, so who cares? Or if they deep down know at some point things have to change and they're of laying the framework for that, where they don't look as terrible as they should. But I don't, I don't really have an answer to that, I just it's an interesting time to be alive, that's for sure.

Dr. Chao:

Yes, absolutely.

Andy:

Sophie, this is fantastic If people want to hear more from you or read some of your work is there anywhere you want to send them to?

Dr. Chao:

Yeah, absolutely from you, or read some of your work. Is there anywhere you want to send them to? Yeah, absolutely, you can direct them to my website, More than Human Worlds, where you can find all my publications and also media engagements as well.

Andy:

Awesome, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much.

To hear this interview in its entirety, tune into episode 83 of the Poor Proles Almanac.