What’s The Deal With Tear Gas? with Professor Anna Feigenbaum

Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness

Sony Music

Science, Self-improvement, Comedy, Education, Society & Culture

4.9 • 21.5K Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2021

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You may have seen tear gas marketed as a “non-lethal” or “less lethal” weapon. The truth is more dangerous. This week, Professor Anna Feigenbaum breaks down what’s in tear gas, who manufactures it, and what its poisonous history reveals about profit motivation and modern policing. Professor Anna Feigenbaum works at Bournemouth University in the South of England. She is the author of Tear Gas (Verso 2017). Her recent project The Data Storytelling Workbook (Routledge 2020) provides a guide to telling more effective, empathetic and evidence-based data stories. You can follow Professor Feigenbaum on Twitter @drfigtree. Want to learn more about tear gas? Here are some recommended resources: Tear Gas: An Investigation — Amnesty International RiotID (@RiotID on Twitter) Welcome to Omega Research Foundation | Omega Research Foundation Chemical Weapons Research Consortium DTP Physicians for Human Rights: Through evidence, change is possible. Transcripts for each episode are available at JonathanVanNess.com. Check out Getting Curious merch at PodSwag.com. Listen to more music from Quiñ by heading over to TheQuinCat.com. Jonathan is on Instagram and Twitter @JVN and @Jonathan.Vanness on Facebook.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Getting Curious. I'm Jonathan Van Ness and every week I sit down for a gorgeous conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.
0:09.0	On today's episode I'm joined by Anna Faganbaum where I ask her what's the deal with tear gas.
0:18.0	Welcome to Getting Curious. I'm Jonathan Van Ness. I am so excited for this week's episode.
0:23.0	Welcome to the show Anna Faganbaum who is an associate professor of communication and digital media at Bournemouth University in the Southwest of England.
0:34.0	She is the author of tear gas from the battlefields of World War One to the streets of today published by verso. Welcome Anna, how are you?
0:43.0	I'm good. How are you? Thank you for having me.
0:46.0	Do you watch figure skating at all? Are you like familiar figure skating terms?
0:50.0	Some of them. Well, there's this thing that we call a double-footed landing. Like you don't want to double-foot your landing. You want like a nice clean single foot landing.
0:59.0	So did I single foot landing your last name and the name of your university?
1:04.0	You did, but I just got promoted. So it's actually professor Anna Faganbaum.
1:09.0	Yes, professor. Yes, you better professor Anna Faganbaum. Yes.
1:15.0	I have not had a correction more exciting than that all day. I love that for you. Congratulations.
1:21.0	Yes. Yes. How does it feel to like just be a full blown professor now?
1:26.0	It feels good. It's like one of those things where like I wasn't in a rush to get there. And it won't be any different.
1:32.0	And then it was like immediately totally different. And I felt like the weight of lots of expectations got lifted off of me.
1:37.0	Okay, love that. So hard right. You guys were diving into our subject matter now.
1:42.0	So last year, 2020, lots of protests. This is where the hint of curiosity first was born.
1:51.0	I'm like, what is this tear gas? Where's it come from? Is it literally gas? What is this shit?
1:57.0	All right. So there's like a few different types of tear gas.
2:00.0	We call it tear gas because one of the main things it does is it makes the ice water.
2:05.0	There's kind of two main strands of it. One are thought of as the irritants.
2:09.0	And one are the inflammatory in practice. They both hurt and they both do almost exactly the same bad things to your body.
	...

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