Pod Academy: Recent Episodes
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“My grandchildren are so busy with all their extra classes that I seem to spend most our time together acting as a taxi service.”
“When the children come to stay I’m constantly worried about keeping them safe.”
“ I’d love to have fun with them, but my daughter expects me to supervise their homework and test them on their spelling.”
Are today’s grandmothers too protective and anxious? Benedetta Cappelini, Professor of Marketing at the University of Durham, certainly thinks so. She talks to Sally Feldman, who is currently writing a book of advice for new grannies, about the effects of the new trend in intensive parenting.
‘Intensiveparenting’, with its emphasis on extra curricular activities, supervised ‘playdates’ and conversations about thoughts and feelings is fast becoming the norm for this generation of parents, requiring the investment of significant amounts of time, money and energy in raising children. What are the implications for grandparents who did not raise their own children in this way, but who regularly look after their grandchildren?
“My grandchildren are so busy with all their extra classes that I seem to spend most our time together acting as a taxi service.”
“When the children come to stay I’m constantly worried about keeping them safe.”
“ I’d love to have fun with them, but my daughter expects me to supervise their homework and test them on their spelling.”
Are today’s grandmothers too protective and anxious? Benedetta Cappelini, Professor of Marketing at the University of Durham, certainly thinks so. She talks to Sally Feldman, who is currently writing a book of advice for new grannies, about the effects of the new trend in intensive parenting.
‘Intensiveparenting’, with its emphasis on extra curricular activities, supervised ‘playdates’ and conversations about thoughts and feelings is fast becoming the norm for this generation of parents, requiring the investment of significant amounts of time, money and energy in raising children. What are the implications for grandparents who did not raise their own children in this way, but who regularly look after their grandchildren?
What are grandmothers for? That’s what Sally Feldman wondered when she first learned that her daughter was pregnant. As a former editor of BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour she was familiar with so many aspects of female experiences. But faced with the prospect of a grandchild, she realised she was clueless. So now she’s writing a book of advice for new grandmothers. This podcast is a conversation with four grandmothers. Their discussion is a taster of the forthcoming book, featuring some of the joys and challenges of this most precious role.
Sally would love to hear from other grandmothers, so do send your comments here, or else contact her at: sallyjoyfeldman@gmail.com
With Covid rates remaining stubbornly high and a huge pent-up demand for hospital care, the UK's National Health Service faces a tough winter. Intensive care wards are the canary in the mine, reports Rachael Jolley.
Mark Toshner: We can make beds, but what we can't make are specialised staff to run those beds. The accident and emergency department needs a very specific skill set. And once you run out of their capacity, you don't really have anywhere to turn.
The winter is going to be tough. I think that nobody's envisaging anything other than a really difficult winter and how difficult that is, I think we don't know, but it's going to be difficult.
If you hear people from intensive care, telling you things are tough, that's a really important canary down the mine, because these people are the SAS of clinical staff. And if they are telling you it's tough, you should be listening.
Andrew Conway Morris: My unit is about a third full of COVID. We have spilled out into our higher independency area and we are ventilating patients in the high dependency area.
Rachael Jolley: Welcome to Pod Academy. My name is Rachael Jolley. I'm a journalist and podcast producer. In this episode, we look at the challenges for the National Health Service as it faces COVID in winter 2021.
With Welsh hospitals reporting some of the longest waiting times ever and the Scottish government calling in the army to help drive ambulances are we as prepared as we can be for the winter ahead?
And what does it feel like inside one of the UKs most famous hospitals right now? In September Prime Minister Boris Johnson said further restrictions could be put in place if the NHS is threatened this winter. By the end of the month COVID hospitalisations were already at a high level. To find out more and see how different this winter might be from the last one I spoke with two doctors who work at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge.
We talked about how they'd coped so far and how they're preparing for this winter and what their biggest worries were. I spoke with Mark Toshner, an academic at Cambridge University, who is also a pulmonary physician, a specialist in illnesses relating to the lungs, at Addenbrooke's. While Mark doesn't normally work in intensive care last year, he was called into help out during the worst of the emergency. And Pod Academy also heard from Andrew Conway Morris, a clinical scientist at Cambridge University and a consultant working in intensive care at Addenbrookes.
First we heard from Mark Toshner.
Mark, if I were the Secretary of State for Health, what would you be asking me to do right now?
Mark Toshner: The first thing I would be asking is for our really honest acknowledgement that we're in a difficult place and that we have just under, I think we might even have topped 8000 people in hospital now and we've had that for weeks now, between about 7000 and 8,000 and that this was supposed to be our period of rest, or quiet time, during the summer. In actual fact we've seen almost historic highs of healthcare utilisation.
That's a really tough start to then go into winter for, and, so we're in a really vulnerable position.
Rachael Jolley: And Andy, what is it like in intensive care right now?
Andrew Conway Morris: My unit is about a third full of COVID. We have spilled out into our higher independency area and we are ventilating patients in the high dependency area
Mark Toshner: I've got plenty of colleagues who've essentially just been the coal face now for the better part of a year and a half or longer, and you can see the toll that it's taken on some of them. And it has a pretty heavy toll. And so the winter is going to be tough. I think that nobody's envisaging anything other than a really difficult winter and how difficult that is I think we don't know, but it's going to be difficult. We start off with one of the lowest ratios of doctors to population any way.
It's not about individual countries. It's not about individual regions. It's not even about blocks. This doesn't work unless we vaccinate everybody. But is geopolitics getting in the way of good public health policy as we strive to overcome COVID-19?
In this podcast, Rachael Jolley, former editor-in-chief of Index on Censorship and research fellow at the Centre for Freedom of the Media at the University of Sheffield considers how geopolitics is affecting government decisions around vaccines and distribution, with guests from the US, UK and the Philippines.
Mark Toshner: It's not about individual countries. It's not about individual regions. It's not even about blocks. This doesn't work unless we vaccinate everybody.
John Nery: The survey shows that something like 68% of Filipino adults have doubts about whether they should take the COVID-19 vaccine or not. Then that's just really worrying.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom: So we can think of it as soft power sort of related to having a space program, to have this idea that Beijing is one of the world capitals that's at the forefront of various technologies.
Michael Jennings: And if you look at many African countries, they've responded extremely effectively. They've made use of technology. Rwanda has been making use of drones to get messaging to very remote communities.
Rachael Jolley: Hello, my name is Rachael Jolley and welcome to this episode of a series of podcasts I've hosted for Pod Academy on the global politics of the pandemic. In this episode, I talk to academics in the UK, USA and the Philippines about how national agendas are affecting decision-making, how the virus has to be tackled internationally and how history can sometimes get in the way.
We also talk about misinformation around the disease and why, if we don't think globally, then in the end, the virus wins. Geopolitics is increasingly a major factor in the discussions around COVID whether about access to PPE or access to the vaccine. Delivery of stocks or stopping vaccine supply arriving over a border often gets tied up with the politics and economics between countries.
As some nations trumpet how well they've done, they rank themselves against others. There's something of a global competition to see which national leader can take the most glory. In the midst of this, there are countries trying to win friends and influence people by delivering stocks of vaccine to those that don't have any. Economic alliances are being built or improved while others are being undermined.
With us on the podcast are Mark Toshner, a lecturer at the University of Cambridge and a pulmonary vascular physician who spends a lot of time on Twitter answering the public's queries about vaccines when he's not looking at the impact of long COVID. We also hear from John Nery, who's based in Manila in the Philippines and teaches media and politics, and is the chair of the journalism centre at the Ateneo de Manila University. Also joining the conversation are Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor in the history of China at the University of California at Irvine, and Michael Jennings, Michael is a reader in international development in the department of development studies at SOAS, University of London, and researches global health and development.
I started by talking to Mark Toshner. Mark, are you worried about geopolitics getting in the way of people's acceptance of vaccines?
Mark Toshner: [00:03:09] The short answer to that is yes. I usually deal on social media with individual concerns about vaccines. And so I spend a lot of my time just addressing people and what their concerns are and, and I think they're complex and they vary from region to region.
They vary from place to place, but the one thing that I think hasn't really been addressed very well in looking at how we improve uptake is that we've got a whole world to vaccinate here. So it's not about individual countries.
Cautiously, museums across the world are opening their doors. But there's one place where, even during the pandemic, you always get to be up close - the virtual museum. In the digital environment, the museum can take on a new role, less a place of authority, more an agora of ideas. But we have to think outside the box to solve curatorial issues in the digital space. Zara Karschay takes us on a tour......
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To see each and every brushstroke. To handle priceless objects. A place where figures in famous works of art turn to look back at you. A place where you can stay as long as you like in front of the Mona Lisa. Virtual collections aren't new. But for much of last year, our only option to see museum was online. And 2020 had many more cultural institutions racing to develop their virtual collections and tours. As we enter the promised ‘new normal’, or perhaps even a ‘virtual-first’ era, where we might come to see a collection and objects online before going in person, we wonder, what can virtual collections give us that physical collections cannot? How can we turn the novelty of technology into something more meaningful, something that introduces us to new stories that helps us change our minds? Or maybe, that even changes the perspective the museum has of itself?
ME: We are definitely rethinking how we're using digital in our collection.
ZK: This is Maria Economou, Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Glasgow.
ME: The digital is not just the technology that underpins it, but also affects the way the museum is seen. It affects its identity, the way we see ourselves. I think the first few years of digital heritage and digital activity, the digital, unfortunately, was the strong partner, and the cultural heritage was the weakest relative. It's improved a lot, but you see even today that sometimes the whistles and bells and the graphics the tech was really the main driving engine rather than, “Who are we doing this for?” “Who are the users?” “What do these collections require?” and being focused more that way.
ZK: In the digital environment, the museum can take on a new role, less as a place of authority and more, an agora of ideas, which also reforms the way that visitors see their role in the museum.
ME: To think of themselves not just as end-users and consumers and producers of this material, but to put themselves in the position of being critically engaged with this. How do we make sense of personal memories? What do we feel are common memories to be shared? What gives us and helps us define ourselves? It's a shift in your position, in your role, and much more active one.
ZK: In 2018 Professor Economou produced the Digital Heritage Strategy for the university's museum, the Hunterian. One of its themes was to find ways to engage a broader public by building and sharing knowledge. From the digital agora to the ancient Roman marketplace, the Hunterian can tell stories about associated but disparate collections, well beyond the walls of the museum.
ME: The actual act and art of storytelling has been taking place for so long. And all good cultural institutions are doing some form of storytelling. Even if it's just by putting objects together, even the juxtaposition and placement in space is telling a story and a narrative. We have, for example, in the Hunterian an important part of the Antonine world collections, which is from Roman Scotland. So, one of the parts of the Roman Empire’s most northern frontier, then it goes all over Europe, and then the rest goes south to Africa. So, it's a great big scheme for UNESCO to connect all the sites that relates to the frontiers of the Roman Empire. We were looking at how digital storytelling can support emotional engagement with our collections. So, even for people who actually don't really care that much about Roman Scotland, or history or some of those objects,
The death of writer and activist Nawal el Saadawi has just been announced. In 2011 Tess Woodcraft interviewed her at a conference organised by the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Right Organisation for Pod Academy. We reproduce it here.
Typically, and at 80 years old, she had stopped off at the Occupy encampment around St Paul's Cathedral on her way from the airport, before coming on to the conference.
Note: there is also an Italian translation of this podcast, by Federica di Lascio, below.
Nawal el Saadawi is one of the foremost Egyptian writers. A doctor by profession, she has written over 40 books of fiction and non-fiction, which have been translated into 30 languages. Since her very first novel, written in her twenties, she has taken on some of the most difficult, challenging, controversial subjects, including: female genital mutilation, domestic violence, child marriage, prostitution, the impact of war on women and children, so-called ‘honour killing’ and the laws that maintain women’s status as minors.
It is not surprising perhaps that this has made her many powerful enemies. She has been forced out of employment, she was imprisoned by the Egyptian authorities in the 1980s and in the 1990s she lived under serious death threats from religious fundamentalists. Indeed, she was forced into exile. But now she is back in Egypt where, although now in her eighties, she took an active role in the demonstrations in Tahrir Square last Spring and continues to fight to ensure that women’s rights are part of the political settlement in Egypt. Her writing and activism are seen by women around the world as a beacon of light and she has received many awards, literary and academic.
This interview was recorded at a conference in London organised by IKWRO, the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation, which works to end honour killing and sexual violence against women.
Tess Woodcraft: What did you mean when you wrote in your autobiography: ‘writing is my sole refuge, it’s like breathing’?
Nawal el Saadawi: My work is my love and when you love your work you can do it well. Since childhood I was forced to study medicine, to become a doctor. But I didn’t dream of being a physician – I dreamt of art, music, poetry, dancing, writing novels.
Of course there is no separation of creativity in science and art, but when I was a child I loved to move my body, to dance and this is natural. But in Egypt at that time it was a taboo to be a dancer or a film actress, and it was very respectable to be a doctor. So I accepted the advice of my parents and went into the medical profession. But all the time I felt that my writing was my life, and all the time I kept a secret diary under my pillow, and I have never stopped writing from then till now. It is more than oxygen, it is my life. It is more than breathing
TW: How do you see the relationship between your writing and your political activism?
N el S: They are inseparable. Writing and fighting are inseparable. Why do we write? Because it gives us pleasure. Creativity gives us pleasure. The pleasure of creativity is above everything – it can cure us of all our pains. But of course creativity can also lead to you to prison and to exile because you challenge the system. But the pleasure of creativity is more than the pain
Nawal el Saadawi at the IKWRO conference
TW: You’ve tackled some of the most difficult issues, – one of these is female genital mutilation. Despite efforts to outlaw it, it is still practised in many countries. Is it possible to change this?
N el S: Of course, but there are many sexual problems in the lives of women – female genital mutilation, rape, honour killing, forced marriages. They are usually tackled separately, but we have to connect in order to cure. In order to cure the problem, we have to know why we have it. Why is the clitoris of women cut? (and we have to link male genital mutilation to female genital mutil...
Journalism has sometimes been a dangerous profession during the pandemic, but there has been real innovation, too. In this, the third part of our series on Journalism in the Pandemic, Rachael Jolley, former editor-in-chief of Index on Censorship and research fellow at the Centre for Freedom of the Media at the University of Sheffield considers how Covid 19 has influenced the future of journalism.
Rachael Jolley: Welcome to Pod Academy and our third podcast in this series on journalism during the pandemic. In this episode we look at the challenges that reporters were just not prepared for. And what are the innovations and changes that come out of the crisis that will be significant for the years ahead.
As the pandemic kicked off, the big challenge for many news organisations was to move their reporting teams to work completely remotely, so there was a massive shifting of equipment to people's homes. Suddenly all sorts of questions were being asked about filing stories in different ways and how to cover stories while reducing risks of infection.
Very few had experience covering a pandemic before. And so there was no obvious formula to follow. Then there were the technical challenges of using new equipment or older equipment differently. At the same time, staff were off sick or on furlough or newsrooms were cut back because of financial pressures.
So what were the toughest obstacles and what are the innovations that might make a difference to how journalism is done in the future? We talked to experts around the world to find out. First, we went to Milan, the epicenter of the pandemic in Italy, and talked to Laura Silvia Battaglia, the coordinator, and soon to be director of the Catholic University of Milan's journalism school and a journalist herself. We kicked off by talking about the challenges for the journalism school and its students.
Laura Silvia Battaglia: Here in Milan, we started in February thinking about how could it be possible to cover the pandemic. But we weren't really conscious about the challenges for our profession and also about the risks at the beginning. No one knew exactly what COVID-19 was.
We started thinking about the safety for our students and the risks related to covering these areas. So the challenges were very significant because we used to send our students around like every reporter does. But at the same time they are students. We told them immediately, to try to keep a distance, the safety distance, how to cover yourself using masks, using face shields. So we provided all this stuff to our students and we decided only the people that really wanted to go out for reporting (of course, covering themselves and trying to avoid any risk and following the rules). So only the people that wanted to they did it and the others who didn't want to go reporting, they would not, they would work at a desk for our publications.
Rachael Jolley: Here is Richard Sambrook, a former director of global news at the BBC and now director of the centre for journalism at Cardiff University on why it was difficult for news organisations to know where to start....
Richard Sambrook: Nobody has had direct experience of reporting a pandemic like this before. So I think it took quite a while for people to understand how to use the statistics, how to use the figures, what to expect from the science and so on as well. That took quite a lot of catching up with even for some of the health specialists. There's the whole question of being remote from the community they serve. Because actually, if anything that we've learned over the last few years is journalism has been too remote needs to get closer to the community. But now the pandemic's come in and now got in the way of that as well. So trying to report the impact, you know, in ways that are still COVID compliant is difficult and challenging and quite complicated.
And then we've seen a huge rise in disinformation around COVID and around ...
Authoritarian restrictions on the press, attacks on journalists in the streets and more accusations of 'fake news' - it's like a war zone out there. Rachael Jolley looks at the dangers of reporting during the Covid -19 pandemic.
Jolley (@londoninsider) has developed a series of podcasts for Pod Academy on News in the Pandemic, this is the second in the series.
William Horsley: They say that the first casualty of war is truth, but pandemic is in the same category
Jean-Paul Marthoz: Today being a journalist, you don't show necessarily that you are press. It's like going to a war zone
Lada Price: In Bulgaria, there are several reports of journalists being attacked, despite clearly identifying themselves as members of the press.
Kirstin McCudden: We started keeping track of journalists who were harassed for covering the protests (which would be part of a normal news gathering routine, of course)
Donald Trump: They are the fake, fake, disgusting news
Rachael Jolley: My name is Rachael Jolley and welcome to Pod Academy. This the second in our series on journalism during the pandemic. Worryingly, we're seeing the escalation of violence and aggression during this global pandemic as journalists literally battle to report on vital and public interest stories. From physical attacks to attacks on journalists' reputations to governments introducing new legislation, putting limits on reporting, those that don't want journalists to report an issue will try all sorts of measures to try and stop them even threatening to try and infect them. These are terrifying trends. The pandemic appears to have allowed the powerful to gain more tools in their armoury when it comes to squeezing media freedom.
William Horsley is co-founder and international director of the Centre for Freedom of the Media at the University of Sheffield's department of journalism. William is also a former television and radio journalist at the BBC.
William Horsley: They say that the first casualty of war is truth. It turns out that pandemic is in the same category because what it does is it increases physical risk in many ways for journalists as they go about their business, particularly for example, reporting on the lockdowns.
But also it gives governments the reason to assume much more executive power. And this happened against the background, of course, of a shift towards a much more authoritarian style, particularly assaults against the free and independent media.
Rachael Jolley: Lada Price, a senior lecturer in journalism from Sheffield Hallam University, talks about the way that this kind of emergency legislation brought in during the pandemic has been used in Eastern Europe to restrict what journalists can do.
Lada Price:If you look at reports that have been issued by organisations such as Freedom House, Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders they have all raised the alarm about emergency measures that have restricted media freedom severely. Let's take, for example, Eastern European countries, such as Hungary, where at the onset of the pandemic, the government introduced laws, or rule by decree, indefinitely bypassing parliament. And that is known as the Authorisation Act. And that included actually prison terms from one to five years for those, and that could include journalists, that spread misinformation and false hope.
Rachael Jolley: It's not just in Eastern Europe that governments have used COVID-19 to pass laws to restrict freedom of the press
William Horsley: By June of 2020, Reporters Without Borders was reporting that half the UN member states had already enacted emergency laws, which were endangering free speech. At the end of the year, the UN Secretary General himself said that there was a pandemic of misinformation and that although the role of journalists was much more important because of the need for good information about the pandemic, in fact,
Local newspapers have been in decline for years, but the decline has been massively exacerbated by the Covid pandemic. Can a new type of hyper-local journalism be the answer for local news and local democracy? And how will it be funded?
Rachael Jolley (@londoninsider), research fellow @sheffjournalism and former Editor-in-Chief of Index on Censorship, has developed a series of podcasts for Pod Academy on News in the Pandemic. This one, on local journalism, is the first in the series.
Intro excerpts...
Rachael Jolley: My name is Rachael Jolley. Welcome to Pod Academy and our series of three podcasts, exploring journalism during the pandemic.
In the first of the series, we talk about local journalism. it's economics and job losses, the hurdles and the technical challenges and find out about pink slime sites.
Our, first guest is Damian Radcliffe, professor of journalism at the University of Oregon. We started off by talking about how journalists have responded to the challenges of working during the pandemic.
Damian, what do you think have been the biggest challenges for local journalists in the US and elsewhere during this period?
Damian Radcliffe: [00:00:21] Well, I think there's been a lot of different challenges that local news outlets have faced. Some of those are sort of long-term structural issues in terms of trust. It access to, to read as an audience is advertising revenues and so forth. And then we've also seen a whole bunch of pandemic-era, issues that have suddenly emerged, such as reporting safely and from a distance, the emergence of culture wars around mask wearing, which has been very pronounced, , here in the United States and massive uncertainty about the future of the profession as [00:01:00] a result of both.
Large-scale job losses that we have seen, you know, they're not unique to local journalism. We've seen that over the course of the last 10, 15 years, but have really, really accelerated over the course of the last nine to 10 months and a real reckoning about the sort of future of local journalism against a new civil rights movement and kind of racial backdrop, which is rightly making a lot of newsrooms ask if they are still fit for purpose.
Rachael Jolley: [00:01:28] Interestingly, we have seen quite a surge in readership for some local news sites. Why does that happen do you think?
Damian Radcliffe: [00:01:36] I think the biggest reason why we've seen that surge is that there was so much, and there continues to be so much, uncertainty about the implications of the pandemic and what it means for you and your family, for your work, for your community and so forth.
And you just can't get the level of granularity that you might need to make informed decisions about your life. And what you do day to day if [00:02:00] you're accessing national news. So in that environment, local news really comes into its own in terms of being able to take that bigger picture and being able to unpack it for audiences at a local level.
So I think that's been a key reason why we've seen, particularly in the early stages of the pandemic, a lot of growth of, of interest in, in local journalism, because it's answering questions that other outlets are just not answering.
Rachael Jolley: [00:02:26] You've mentioned in some of the work that you've done, that local news sites such as the San Francisco Chronicle and the Seattle Times have seen a spike in readership. But that's not true of the readership of some more directly partisan sites. What do you think is happening here?
Damian Radcliffe: [00:02:43] It's a great question. I think to be honest part of it, we just don't know, but I wonder if some of the reasons for that are around trust and kind of going to sort of more neutral sources and kind of more non-partisan sources to try and get a sense of what's going on.
And, critics of some of those outlets would still say that they have an agenda, but I think they're sort of more,
A Scottish Laird becomes Lord of the Bedchamber in the Abyssinian/Ethiopian court and finds the source of the Nile.
Like many of his wealthy contemporaries in the 18th and 19th centuries, Lord James Bruce of Kinnaird made the grand tour of Europe (see the companion blog to this podcast). Unlike many of them he also ventured further afield. For three years, from 1769 to 1772, the six-foot four Scottish laird with vivid red hair, travelled to Abyssinia, the old Ethiopian Empire comprising the northern half of present-day Ethiopia. But his reasons for going are shrouded in mystery. Was he trying to find the source of the Nile or like an 18th century Indiana Jones, was he really searching for the Ark of the Covenant?
Our producer Antonia Dalivalle takes up the story….
Bruce arrived in the country at a time when Abyssinians weren’t exactly fans of Europeans. A century earlier, the Emperor had kicked out the Portuguese Jesuits. They had pushed their luck and tried to convert the already-Christian Ethiopians to Catholicism.
After the last of the Portuguese fled with their tails between their legs, Abyssinia closed itself off to outside influence – barricading itself against those they called the hyenas of the west. Abyssinians paid each other to spread ‘fake news’ to foreigners about the journey into the interior– hoping they would turn around and go back the way they came. A common bluff was that a rampant warlord was blocking the road.
With a couple of exceptions, Bruce was pretty much the first European to set foot in the country since the expulsion of the Jesuits. A notable exception was the seventeenth century French doctor Jean-Baptiste Poncet, who exclaimed that the Abyssinian highlands, fragrant with flowers, reminded him of “The most beautiful part of Provence!”
Bruce surely achieved his passage to Gondar not only because of the liberal distribution of gifts - from gold to English pistols - but also because he was fluent in Ethiopian languages, having studied them industriously before leaving Europe.
He arrived in Gondar on the occasion of an outbreak of smallpox. But this unfortunate event had a silver lining for Bruce. Europeans before him had used medicine to get into the Abyssinian court. Luckily for Bruce, he had studied medicine in Arabia, and was able to lend a hand.
As a Protestant Scot, Bruce was in a position to forge a closer bond with the imperial family, who were anti-Catholic. At one point, Bruce placed his hand on a Bible, and explained to the Abyssinian Queen, the Iteghe,
“I declare to you, by all those truths contained in this book, that my religion is more different from the Catholic than yours is. There has been more blood shed between the Catholics and us, on account of the difference of religion, than ever was between you and the Catholics in this country."
In Abyssinia, royal and religious history are interwoven. If asked ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’, Abyssinian Queens could justifiably say the Queen of Sheba. Abyssinian royalty traced their lineage back to the King of Kings, King Solomon.
Bruce was similarly insistent about his royal lineage. He commissioned the Bruce of Kinnaird tartan to be woven from fourteen colours of yarn – twice the royal seven. Bruce was the direct descendant of the fierce Scottish warrior-king, Robert the Bruce.
After a grueling interrogation from the teenage Emperor on the subject of England, he became Lord of the Bedchamber. The Scottish laird was now an official member of the glorious Gondarian court. Fluent in Amharic and Ge’ez, with his hair curled and perfumed in the ‘Abyssinian fashion’, he was the most punctilious guest.
And Bruce said about the Emperor: “Nor did I ever after see, in his countenance, any marks either of doubt or diffidence. But always, on the contrary, the most decisive proofs of friendship, confidence, and attention”.
Musical Interlude----‘Duelling African Lyres: The Ancient Egyptian Lyre ...
Take a look at The Tribuna of the Uffizi by Johan Zoffany. What do you see? A group of Georgian Grand Tourist poseurs. But one figure, towers above the rest, stands apart, on the far right of the painting. It is James Bruce of Kinneard, the real Indiana Jones.
James Bruce is introduced in this blog, and in the accompanying short podcast by our producer, Antonia Dalivalle. Antonia explores the story of Bruce's travels in Abyssinia/Ethiopia in her longer podcast The Real Indiana Jones - coming soon.
In the left-hand corner of the painting, a jumble of valuable artefacts - including a distressed looking lion sculpture – are strewn across the floor. The connoisseurs are crowded into a chapel-like space, the Tribuna in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. This was a ‘Holy of Holies’ – a ‘Hollywood Walk of Fame’ – of treasured European antiquities and artworks.
They were on an eighteenth-century equivalent of the ‘Gap Year’. They weren’t finding themselves – but rather, the roots of European culture, through art, literature and archaeology.
Between coffee breaks at Rome’s Caffè degli Inglesi, the go-to-place for Brits abroad, members of the landed gentry would draw classical antiquities and attempt to elevate their minds.Zoffany’s painting was designed to be a ‘conversation piece’. And it achieved its aim. In November 1779, Horace Walpole sent a letter to Sir Horace Mann, sneering that the piece is ‘crowded with a flock of travelling boys, and one does not know or care whom’. Bit awkward, considering Horace Mann himself is in the painting. The son of Robert Walpole (the first Prime Minister of Britain) Horace himself had sashayed through Europe on a Grand – or rather, Grandiloquent - Tour. Instead of following the pack of milordi around the to-do list of Florentine sights, Horace enjoyed balmy evenings on the Ponte Vecchio bridge in his wide-brimmed straw hat and linen nightie, recounting a list of all the sights he couldn’t be bothered to go and see.
Back to the Tribuna. On the right, a small gathering of Grand Tourists admire the voluptuous posterior of the Venus de’ Medici. One of them goes in for a closer look with his magnifying glass. One figure, towering above the rest, stands apart. In the midst of the swaggering, sniggering gaggle of Grand Tourists, he almost escapes our notice. He’s at the margin of the painting, and seemingly an outsider, but he’s an essential compositional device. He’s one of only three participants in this painting who meet our gaze directly. The ruddy face of Zoffany peeps at us from behind the Niccolini Madonna and Titian’s sassy Venus of Urbino gives us the eye. Is Zoffany trying to tell us something, trying to mark this person out from the others? Who was he? Zoffany thought he was a ‘great man – the wonder of his age’.2 He had presence. A six-foot four, red-headed Scottish laird, with a loud, booming voice. Despite his raging tempers, he was empathetic and charismatic. His name was James Bruce of Kinnaird.
In 1774, he was in Florence, having just been on a diversion in his Grand Tour. It was a very long and unusual diversion. He went to ‘Abyssiniah’ on his Gap Year. James Bruce of Kinnaird was the real Indiana Jones. On his black horse Mizra, Persian for ‘scholar’, he visited the ancient city believed to be the Queen of Sheba’s hometown and dwelling-place of the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy of Holies. But Bruce was no interloper. He stayed in Abyssinia, today known as Ethiopia, for three years, from 1769 to 1772. He would become a familiar of the Abyssinian royal court. Appointed Lord of the Bedchamber to the Emperor, he would gain unique insights into the country’s royal and political history.
He became friends with the Machiavellian Governor of Tigray and fell in love with his wife,Ozoro Esther, a beautiful and brutal princess. When he left Abyssinia, she threw a lavish party for him. They dined on honey and hunted buffalo.
What does it mean to be a 'good man'? With so much talk about toxic masculinity, there is, perhaps. a pre-supposition that there is no good masculinity.
This lecture by Dr Nina Power, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University, is based on her forthcoming book, What do Men Want? It is part of the IF Project's 2019 lecture series, Thinking Between the Lines: truth, lies and fiction in an age of populism.
Nina Power points to the resentment men feel towards women (and women's resentment of men). Nowhere is that resentment more apparent than in the male only groups that are springing up such as Fathers for Justice, INCEL men, and Men Going their Own Way (mgtow), whose website says. Happiness is a man who protects and cares for his family, goes forth and conquers, gives of himself for a greater cause, and ensures his legacy – because that’s what he was made to do.........But today’s men are ... told to “man up” and tough it out through turbulent waters while being called misogynists for expecting sustenance. They’re shamed into putting down roots in infertile hypergamous soil that offers no support, then are financially ruined and separated from their children when they cannot weather the storm. It is this that Nina Power, as a feminist, is seeking to understand. Pointing to the popularity of Jordan Peterson - his sell-out book 12 Rules for Life, the fact that he recently filled the O2 Arena in London - she suggests that men are searching for a role. Peterson, says Nina Power, is a patriarchal figure. Patriarchs in the bible like Abraham are protectors, they take responsibility. Feminsts talk about 'the patriarchy'but where are the patriarchs now? she asks
This lecture roams over the post Me Too fear of touch, male suicide, trans men ,pick-up artists, sex on campus, men who live without contact with women, and time and again, men's uncertainly about their role.
But we live in a hetero-social society, men and women work together, live together, play together. Nina Power suggests that we need to talk more, understand each other more, and have more fun together.
Photo: "Making Men" by Damien Schumann is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
This lecture on Left populism is part of the IF Project’s lecture series, Thinking between the Lines: Truth, Lies and Fiction in an age of populism. Dr Marina Prentoulis, Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies at University of East Anglia and a member of Syriza, explores the differences between Left and Right Wing populism.
She recognises that Left and Right populism are often seen as two sides of the same coin, and points to What is Populism? by Jan-Werner Müller (one of the best known books on populism) as being an analysis which wrongly conflates left wing and right wing populism, in part because it uses a journalistic rather than a rigorous theoretical approach, focusing on form rather than policy. For example, Werner contends that
“populist claim that they, and only they, represent the people” p. 20 “populists live in a kind of political fantasy world: they imagine an opposition between corrupt elites and a morally pure, homogeneous people” (p. 41) “Populists create a Homogeneous people in whose name they have been speaking all along” (p.48) “…populism is thus a moralized form of anti-pluralism…” (p.20)
By contrast, Dr Prentoulis challenges the notion of a 'homogenous people' and argues that it is policy that makes left and right populism very different from one another, with open borders, internationalism and inclusion being fundamental to all forms of left populism, and 'nation' and exclusion being an intrinsic part of all right wing populisms.
Picture: Occupy London 2011 Global Democracy Now Occupy London Tents in front of St Pauls, London Sunday 16th October 2011 by Neil Cummings
"No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other, and no one, as far as I. know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues.
Lies have always been regarded as necessary and justifiable tools not only of the politician's or the demagogue's but also of the statesman's trade.
Why is that so? And what does it mean for the nature and the dignity of the political realm, on one side, and for the nature and the dignity of truth and truthfulness, on the other?"
From Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought So says political philosopher Hannah Arendt, the subject of this lecture which is part of the IF Project's lecture series, Thinking between the Lines: Truth, Lies and Fiction in an age of populism.
Dr Dan Taylor of Goldsmiths, University of London, takes the title Truth and Politics (the title of Arendt's essay quoted above), to explore the testy and troublesome relationship between truth and politics.
Are all politicians just liars? asks Dr Taylor. No, but some lie a lot more than others. Why? he asks. Is there something about being powerful and wealthy that makes you lie to mystify the conditions of your own power to suggest that your position is well earned, natural?
And why do we place such a premium on the truth, anyway, when we are so cynical about it?
Dr Taylor uses Arendt's work as a tool to consider Donald Trump's 'alternative facts', Ivanka Trump, Extinction Rebellion and climate deniers, the Pentagon Papers, Rudy Giuliani (who said the truth is not the truth), and the 'spin' of Tony Blair.
Facts are just facts, says Dr Taylor, but lies create an alternative reality and undermine our faith in democracy. Totalitarianism relies on a network of lies, that reinforce each other and create an alternative reality.
Hannah Aarendt is perhaps best known for writing about "the banality of evil" in connection with the trial of Adolf Eichmann 1961-63.
Who is allowed to make things up? What does fiction writing have to do with life? Is a novel a document? This is the second lecture in the If Project series, Thinking Between the Lines: truth, lies and fiction in an age of populism. Dr Katie da Cunha Lewin (@kdc_lewin) explores what it means to 'make things up' in literature, especially looking at writing by women.
“I don’t have to go anywhere, I don’t have to imagine anything. It’s in the living room with me. – Sheila Heti The quote above from Sheila Heti, a Canadian writer whose recent work Motherhood (2018), dealt with the many questions that underpin the idea of mothering and child-rearing, helps us think about the central idea of this lecture: what does it mean to ‘make things up’ in literature? Who is allowed to make things up? And what happens if writing avoids doing that all together?
In my argument for this lecture, I want to unpack some of these questions, but I also want to suggest something about the politics of making things up.
This lecture will be split into two sections: in the first, I’ll be talking about writing and its relationship to life; that is, writing and our idea of its relation to truth. In the second section, I want to discuss the relationship between writing, invention and reality in contemporary American writing by women. I want to think about how this relation to truth changes according to who is doing the writing, and importantly how that truth is perceived by the wider reading public. In this, we find lots of issues to do with authority, agency, and labour – but there is also a wider question about why we want our fiction to be ‘made up’ and what it is that our fiction looks like. And also want to look ahead slightly to (perhaps the not so distant future) about the effect on technology and our ‘truth.’
This theme has come from my own research on the idea of the genius and who is allowed to ‘be’ a genius. I don’t particularly like the term, but the way it is used, thrown around in reviews, or used as selling points for exhibitions interests me. Much of what comes to define a genius is, I suggest, that we know what the genius looks like: a single, solitary man, brooding somewhere remote: like THIS [SLIDE – Image 1] or THIS [SLIDE – Image 2]. The first image shows us the isolated romantic hero, surveying the land and looking out at the contrasts and beauties of nature, isolated in a wild landscape beyond human reckoning. In the other we have the idealised image of solitude, the man alone in his room, thinking deeply and engaging with the world from within his own domain. This image of the solitary genius is defined the space in which the genius lives: this space, the ‘writing room’ as we may think of it, is quiet, owned by them in some capacity, out of way enough to allow them to work undisturbed, and often full of particular possessions, books, posters, artwork, comfy chairs, writing equipment, and a desk.
I’ll be looking at some extracts from novels, and some short stories, but I’ll also be including some extracts from interviews and also reviews. In this way, we can see not only what women were writing about but also the reception of the work. This is how the lines of culture are drawn: it is not only through readers that authors meet their fate; it is also through the tastemakers, those who help facilitate the production of culture, publishers, editors, cultural critics, magazine editors, radio programmers etc. etc. It’s important to remember that by the time a book is published it has gone through many hands already; once is out there in the world it also has to be sorted, assigned a genre, a place on the bookshelf, the sort of home it goes to – pre/post. In today’s world of publication – which, we mustn’t forget is also a business – there are certain trends and certain styles of writing which are of interest. So, in the book industry, we now have an interesting tension between writing that dubs itself autofiction (o...
"We need to get away from the idea that knowledge, expertise and truth are obvious and given."
This first lecture in the IF Project lecture series 2019, Thinking Between the Lines: Truth, lies and fiction in an age of populism is given by Professor Will Davies of Goldsmith's, University of London.
Professor Davies's powerpoint can be found here.
What does it mean to know the world? Why can't we agree on what is true anymore? Why do many people no longer trust experts?
Professor Davies sets out to fathom what is driving the conflicts and fragmentations in the infrastructure underpinning our understanding of the world. Using his most recent book, Nervous States, as a jumping off point he analyses the the disintegration of consensus, identifying the roles played by the ubiquity and speed of technology as well as economics and psychology.
Importantly he asks, what is a fact? And in answer looks back in history, drawing on the work of Mary Poovey (A History of the Modern Fact ) who traced the origins of 'accepted facts' to the development of accountancy conventions in the 17th century for merchants in Amsterdam who needed to have a commonly understood, accepted, shared and trusted basis for commercial transactions.
He considers why facts that describe the world in this 'neutral' way, independent of political, moral and theological argument (such as where civil servants collect data on births, marriages, deaths, road and rail use, levels of immigration, home ownership etc and on which they then base policy recommendations) seem to be less and less persuasive. He suggests that this is because establishing these neutral facts takes time - in a world guided by feelings and emotions, where we have to be constantly adaptive and alert, decisions are often gut reactions, taken fast.
He ends with a plea for time - time for research, time for reflection. But concedes that this is swimming against the current tide.
Main picture:"Day 15 #Truth" by mishey_mouse, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
Pat Thane, Research Professor at King's College, London and Professor Emerita, University of London, explores the social and political history of Britain over the past 100+ years with Pod Academy's Lee Millam, as they discuss her latest book, Divided Kingdom.
This podcast is a tour de force as Professor Thane takes us from the founding of the Labour Party in 1900 in response to low wages and poor working conditions, through 2 world wars and the arrival of globalisation with its attendant precarity and poverty wages. Highlighting changing living standards and expectations and inequalities of class, income, wealth, race, gender and sexuality, she reveals what has (and has not) changed in the UK since 1900, explaining how our contemporary society, including its divisions and inequalities, was formed.
Over the years there are recurring themes such as housing shortages and women's campaigns for equality, and there are some surprises - the much derided 1970s were actually the time of the greatest equality!
Divided Kingdom, a history of Britain 1900 to the present by Professor Pat Thane is published by Cambridge University Press.
What is the real cost of IVF? As Louise Brown the world’s first “test tube” baby celebrates her 40th birthday – this seminar organised by the Progress Educational Trust explores not just the economic cost, but also the emotional and psychological costs. Worldwide there have been 60 million live births as a result of IVF, but it is still the case that over 60% of IVF cycles don't work.
Does receiving fertility treatment confer any benefit to patients, even if there is no baby to take home at the end? Is unsuccessful fertility treatment more devastating than no treatment at all, or is it better to at least have had the chance to try?
The event was held at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG). You may be interested to read the RCOG scientific impact paper on multiple pregnancies following assisted conception, referred to in the seminar
Chaired by Sally Cheshire, Chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority
Speakers
Dr Rebecca Brown Jacky Boivin Professor of Health Psychology and Chartered Health Psychologist at Cardiff University's School of Psychology
Research Fellow at the University of Oxford's Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
Jessica Hepburn Author of the books The Pursuit of Motherhood and 21 Miles: Swimming in Search of the Meaning of Motherhood
Professor Lesley Regan President of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists
Photo: Test tube baby by Brendan Dolan-Gavitt
This podcast is drawn from a Progress Educational Trust (PET) event called Putting Your Genome to Work: For the NHS, for Industry, for the UK Post-Brexit Chair: Sarah Norcross, Director of PET Speakers:
Dr Eliot Forster, Chair of MedCity Dr Edward HockingsFounding Director of Ethics and Genetics Dr Athena Matakidou, Head of Clinical Genomics at AstraZeneca's Centre for Genomics Research, and Consultant in Medical Oncology at Cambridge University Hospitals Dr Jayne Spink, Chief Executive of Genetic Alliance UK
We are at the beginning of a biomedical revolution built on the promise of genomics. The British government has put this at the heart of its post-Brexit industrial strategy. So what is the potential of genomics, what is the journey we are setting out on, and what are the pitfalls?
The British Government's Industrial Strategy White Paper Building a Britain Fit for the Future sets out an ambition for the UK to 'be the world's most innovative economy' and play a leading role in a 'fourth industrial revolution... characterised by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological worlds'.
The White Paper argues that 'the government, the NHS and charities can all contribute to make the UK an attractive location for businesses to invest and for patients to benefit'. According to the first in a series of Sector Deals published in the wake of the White Paper, the Life Sciences Sector Deal, 'a new genomics industry is beginning to emerge... with UK companies like AstraZeneca, Cambridge Epigenetix, Genomics plc and Congenica working with Genomics England'.
The Sector Deal discusses investments from and agreements with a variety of companies, involving the whole genomes of around 70,000 participants in the 100,000 Genomes Project and around half a million participants in UK Biobank. GSK and others have committed to sequencing the whole genomes of the latter, while a separate consortium coordinated by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals will sequence the exomes (partial genomes) of these same participants in the shorter term.
Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt says the Sector Deal 'proves that life science organisations of all sizes will continue to grow and thrive in the coming years, which means NHS patients will continue to be at the front of the queue for new treatments'.
However, there remains a degree of public unease about the involvement of commercial interests in health. This unease may be intensified at a time when how best to fund and manage the NHS, how best to approach Brexitand who can be trusted with health-related data are all matters of ongoing concern.
Issues discussed at the event included:
What are the benefits of genomics for patients?
How can we ensure that the NHS, and its patients, derive reciprocal benefit from scientific and medical advances that involve people's genomic data?
How can we address the view that there is, or should be, a clear partition between public and private involvement in health, when the development of medicines and diagnostics has always been led by the private sector (and now the Industrial Strategy involves closer collaboration)?
What can we learn from the world of direct-to-consumer genetic testing, where consumers often consent to their data being used in research (to the commercial benefit of the testing company)?
Finally, can we learn anything from proposals by a US company to treat members of the public neither as patients nor as consumers but rather as 'data owners', who will use blockchain technology to make their genomic data accessible (or inaccessible) to whomever they wish?
Photo: PLOS One Pyhlogeny Comparative genomic DNA hybridization and in silico comparison of gene content within mobile elements of bovine and human SA isolates
Maxwell Ward talks to Dr Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of the Berkeley Centre for Right-Wing Studies, about the Alt-Right’s unlikely journey into the mainstream of US politics and their more recent struggles. What are their ambitions? What do they really think of Donald Trump? And where do they go from here?
But the first thing Maxwell wanted to know… who and what are the Alt-Right?
Dr Lawrence Rosenthal: The Alt-Right represents what has long been called in the USA the fringe of American politics. What made them the fringe, or the very definition of the fringe, is that they are outside of the mainstream and do not have particularly a role in national politics. The kinds of ideology that we’re talking about are things that have characterised the Klu Klux Klan in this country and Neo-Nazi organisations in this country. They have not had a role in American Politics nationally since the 1920s and 1930s. But, they continued to exist and they existed in atomised corners. There would be groups in rural Ohio or rural Michigan. There would be numbers of them. But, comes the internet age, and above all social media, they networked. So that’s step one. These guys networked.
Two, there were events that made these people come together beyond simply politics. That has to do with what is better understood as culture. Above all, there was a thing called Gamergate. To some extent, the base of the Alt-Right online consists of what used to be called in Social Science “alienated young men” and they were gamers online. A controversy arose around the place of women in the gamer world. It provoked an immense backlash against feminism itself. Very anti-women. That consolidated this element of what would constitute the Alt-Right. Donald Trump famously said, “Well, these online things aren’t necessarily from Russia. They could have been from some 400-pound kid lying on his mother’s bed somewhere.” The point being that there are these unhappy young men who are engaged more culturally than politically. So, you get the rise of this essentially nihilistic internet culture in which things like Pepe the frog become symbolic and there is a vast array of these symbols. Basically, the thrill of it is it’s edgy and anti-establishment and it’s anti all establishments. Left, right, etc. So you have those guys, the alienated young men and you have the formerly atomised neo-Nazi and KKK groups who have discovered social media and are now not atomised anymore but are a social network or networking on social media.
Finally, you get step three which is the candidacy of Donald Trump. What happens in the world of what would become the Alt-Right is they are electrified. They are electrified because suddenly, at the level of presidential politics in the USA, somebody is talking their language. So, the experience, the decades long political experience of being marginalised, of being the fringe, has suddenly changed. Somebody who is running for president is talking about immigrants the way they talk about them, the very premise of whose campaign is anti-Mexican, anti-Muslim, anti-feminist… well, let me be clear about that, anti- “political correctness”. Donald Trump would say things like, “the biggest problem in this country is political correctness.” That, above all, had two constituent elements for the Alt-Right. One was feminism and the other was multi-culturalism. Both of which seem forced down their throats by elites and in these two, in particular, the liberal elites. Donald Trump was like a siren call from the thoroughly unexpected province of not only national politics but presidential politics. So, the Alt-Right became mobilised and a participant in the election of 2016 in a way that that kind of ideological warrior had not participated in American elections since the 1920s and 1930s.
MW: You talk about these disparate groups that have come together. Would you say that, apart from that kind of combative element, that there is a thread,
Hello, this is Pod Academy.
Of late, there has been much talk of sexism, in particular sexual harassment, behind the scenes in the film industry. But what about the films themselves? Pod Academy’s Tatiana Prorokova took a look at the hit movie Beauty and the Beast. One of the highest grossing films this year, it has taken over $1bn worldwide.
The recent adaptation of the famous Disney cartoon – Beauty and the Beast – is the film that through a children's story raises the profound questions of female oppression and sexism that have existed in our society for centuries.
The story focuses on the girl Belle (played by Emma Watson) who lives with her father in a small village in France. Belle is considered weird by most of the villagers and the reason for that is her love for books. The girl is frequently portrayed with a book in her hands; such an image, however, provokes rather negative responses from the people around her primarily because they believe that education, which, in this context, is access to books that Belle has, is not for women. The scene that illustrates this idea even more vividly takes place later in the film when Belle is teaching a small girl how to read. The crowd largely disapproves of that. Sexism thus manifests itself not only through the reactions to the girl who likes reading but also, and perhaps even more crucially, through the idea that men and women have different privileges. This foregrounds gender inequality and reminds the audience about the perverse norms that were generated and sustained by patriarchy.
Belle later finds herself in the castle, where she came to save her father (played by Kevin Kline). She chooses to stay there instead of him, sacrificing herself for the well-being of her parent. Her stay in the castle supports the ideas of sexism and female inequality in multiple ways. First and foremost, being the Beast’s (played by Dan Stevens) prisoner, she is literally locked in the castle. Yet one can interpret this imprisonment from a different angle and argue that it figuratively embodies the existing gender inequality. The visibly subordinate relationship between Belle and the Beast metaphorically visualizes patriarchy in the family life or perhaps even stands for family tyranny. In this respect, the image of the Beast only intensifies the power and cruelty of the oppressor. The castle becomes Belle’s cage where she is both literally and symbolically locked. The girl can only wait for someone from the outside to come and save her. That savior, as the audience can easily guess, could be Gaston (played by Luke Evans) – the former soldier who wants to marry Belle. Belle is thus portrayed as a fragile girl who is oppressed by a male and who can be ultimately saved only by another male.
In the castle, the enchanted servants forcefully redress Belle so that she can look like a real lady – again, the image that is constructed by patriarchy as the only right one and imposed on women. Belle is portrayed in a pompous dress, she is wearing a wig, and her face is richly covered with vulgar makeup. The girl ultimately rejects these clothes, preferring to stay in her old ones.
While the castle symbolizes Belle’s cage, it is pivotal that this is the only place where she is not laughed at for her love for books. The Beast shows her his large library and Belle’s heart seems to melt, for she now has something that she wanted to have so much – access to education. Nevertheless, Belle remains a prisoner; thus while she gets something what she likes, she is still under full control of the Beast.
Apart from Belle, there is another important female character in the film that is introduced to support the issue of sexism provoked by patriarchy. This is Agathe (played by Hattie Morahan). Agathe is first introduced to the audience as a beggar who saves the life of Belle’s father but later turns out to be the enchantress. There are several scenes in the film with Agathe and Gaston that ...
A radical vision for arts policy should be at the heart of any progressive government argue Professor Rod Stoneman and Adam Stoneman.
Note: This is not a transcript of the podcast interview with Rod and Adam, but rather the text of a paper by them on arts policy.
Restoring financial support for the arts would hardly amount to a radical transformative vision for the arts. The major proposals in a recent document from the Labour party, for example, were entirely defensive: ‘reinstate arts funding’, ‘safeguard our galleries and museums’, ‘protect the BBC’.
It does not have to be like this; in 1965, Government Minister Jennie Lee published Britain’s first cultural white paper, ‘A Policy for the Arts: The First Steps’, in which she addressed uneven regional distribution and unequal access to the arts and committed state support for infrastructure. The paper led to the creation of countless museums, galleries and concert halls across the country and completely transformed Britain’s cultural landscape. Rather than attempting to merely return to this post-war model of funding however, we should apply its principles to the challenges of the present.
Access and involvement.
Research shows that well-educated middle-class professionals are most likely to be drawn to the areas of the cultural sector that are dependent on public funding such as opera and theatre, with those on less well-educated unskilled and semi-skilled workers tending to be more involved in the commercial culture industry. Instead of restoring a subsidy model that entrenches this division, we should seize the opportunity to change the funding system in a way that broadens and deepens the audiences that engage with publicly funded arts.
The prevalence of unpaid internships and unpaid labour in the arts presents a major financial barrier to access for those who do not come from privileged backgrounds. Discussion of a ‘real living wage’ to protect arts workers is a good start but there should be a root and branch approach to tackling the lack of diversity in arts organisations, from the shop floor to upper management – of the directors of our ten most popular museums, all are white and only one is a woman.
Renewed and dynamic versions of culture need to be brought out of the institutions into the widest public sphere; for large sections of the population there are invisible barriers to entering galleries, arts centres and concert halls – we can unconsciously assume “those places are not for me”. We should be looking to bring art activities beyond existent facilities to intervene directly in public spaces and within communities. Theatre groups working on civic initiatives, artists’ placements, musical ensembles from housing estates, filmmakers in workplaces and writers conducting workshops in local libraries enable myriad forms of individual and group self-activation. A focus should be placed on facilitating and empowering marginalised communities to speak without constant mediation; this would include the funding of workshops, training and skills-based initiatives, enabling communities to shape discourse about themselves from the very beginning. Importantly this should not be sidelined into ‘community art’ as once-off, philanthropic gestures but should be a guiding principle of national arts policy.
Public art can renew the sense that urban space belongs to all of us. The success of the Fourth plinth project in Trafalgar square, or the use of billboards to display modern painting in Tehran demonstrates this well. Too much of our visual environment is dominated by commercial marketing; companies operating billboards on public land could be required to periodically devote space to classical or contemporary art.
Regional access should be inclusive, localised and democratic; London, and to a lesser extent, the other select urban centres benefit disproportionately from arts funding. Publicly funded theatre, dance,
When you use a SatNav, or check a modern weather forecast, you're using technology made possible by space exploration. Emerging space industries include tourism, and some tentative plans to mine asteroids, or the Moon, for rare materials. Space now has its lawyers, its policymakers, and even its ethicists. Robert Seddon went to King's College, London, to meet Tony Milligan, a moral philosopher who has worked extensively on the ethics of space exploration.
Robert Seddon: So, how did that begin?
Tony Milligan: Well, that’s a piece of guidance from my students, in fact. There was a student who wanted to work on the issue of terraforming—which is one of the big, sexy issues in space ethics—and I thought, hmmm, does the world really need this to be done? And then I looked into it, and he produced the work, and it was a good piece of work. So I thought, this bears looking into a little bit closer; so I did a short course, and the blurb advertising the course was picked up by Space Policy, the journal: they invited me to write an article. And then from the article other people wanted other things, so it sort of snowballed into a new research direction for me, which was good, because it’s a fresh area, and it’s interesting stuff, and you’re also dealing with things that matter. And that’s always a nice added bonus.
RS: Do you see much engagement from people involved in space industries in practical terms?
TM: Well... up to a point. I think there are people who want to have a story about the importance of space. Elon Musk wants to have a story about backing up the biosphere and the ethical significance of what they’re doing, and he’s got shareholders that he has to keep happy, and so on. So there is that high level interest, and the stories aren’t particularly convincing ones from an academic ethicist’s point of view, but they’re interesting stories. And then you’ve got the wilder reaches of the ethics of space, which is all about really big questions, and it doesn’t connect up with the agencies.
And then you’ve got stuff that’s done by people like myself, Jacques Arnould... And we try, in our own modest ways, to be embedded, not... We would like, ideally, more of a dialogue, I think, with the players within industry, but you already have the agencies, you have NASA, you have the European Space Agency, and we connect up at that level.
And so at the moment, for example, there’s a white paper getting put together—I’m meant to be doing editing; I’ll diligently do that tomorrow—and that’s for the establishing of a European institute for astrobiology, and the role of the key people that you would want across Europe, with some feed-in from NASA people and elsewhere, to the rationale to get that off the ground and funded. And one of the things that we say in the white paper is that we need to get, to move, beyond that level of academics talking to the institutions. We also need much more of a dialogue with people from industry.
RS: Do you think Musk and co. will get what they want, or will they have to make do with something else?
TM: Well, nobody ever gets quite what they want... or if they do then they’re never quite sure that it’s what they wanted. When you’ve got investors, when it’s a big money game, when there’s a lot on the line, you have to sell things quite hard. So it’s difficult to understand, or difficult to separate out, what’s the image, what’s the sales patter, from what he realistically expects will be realised. One of the things that usually is over-optimistic is time scales. So there are people: Mars One and so on... (That’s not Elon Musk; Musk’s much more... He’s got the technology to do stuff. Mars One doesn’t.) But they’ll talk about: well, we’re going to put somebody on Mars within a couple of years—and that’s ridiculous: there’s nothing... There’s no way you’re getting there. So they’ll change their time scales, and so on, and you get the same thing up to a point with Musk,
Journalism has been called 'the first draft of history', and as a first draft it may be written over, forgotten, ignored. In this podcast, journalist Martin Bright (@martinbright) considers one tiny strand of the story of the Iraq war. It illustrates truth and fake news, things that are very much on our minds at the moment. It is taken from a lecture Martin gave for IF, the free university in London, in its series 'Thinking Without Borders' in 2017.
Martin Bright: Let's begin with the rules of journalism - never befriend a politician, never befriend a PR, never betray a source and never use PowerPoint (though that one I am ignoring....)
I'm going to look at one story that plays its part in the history of the lead up to the Iraq war which you may or may not have heard about. It is a story in which I as a journalist felt I was writing the first draft of history. It's a story I wrote while working on The Observer [a UK Sunday newspaper] in early 2003. It is a story left out of the reports on the Iraq war (it was not in either the Chilcot or the Hutton reports). It is just a footnote in history, maybe less than a footnote.
It is the story of Katharine Gun, who,in 2003, was working at GCHQ. GCHQ is the third arm of British Intelligence - there is MI6 (foreign intelligence), MI5 (domestic intelligence) and GCHQ (surveillance).
Katharine was born in Taiwan, is a fluent Mandarin speaker, and she spent her days at GCHQ listening to China and deciding what was interesting - Chinese broadcasts, bugged conversations etc. She enjoyed her job, she considered herself a patriot, she didn't see anything wrong with spying, she felt she was working in the British national interest, for the good of the country.
But she became increasingly concerned about the build up to war in Iraq, she was sceptical, she didn't think the British intelligence service should be used to further the war aim of the Government.
One day she was working, translating, when she received a memo from the National Security Agency (NSA) in the US. Subsequently, the NSA and GCHQ have become much more high profile institutions since the Edward Snowden leaks (we know a lot more about what they can tap into) but there has always been a close relationship between the two agencies.
In January 2003, we were being told that war was not a forgone conclusion, there were still negotiations going on in the UN and Tony Blair and George Bush were saing that should Saddam Hussein give up his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) there would be no need to go to war. But it was a period of high tension.
There were inspectors in Iraq looking for WMD and having difficulty finding them.
Such was the tension within GCHQ itself that on 24 January 2003, a memo was sent to all GCHQ staff reassuring them that they would not be asked to do anything unlawful (which is interesting in itself since you might expect that to be the case anyway!).
At the same time what is happening in the US is a continuing hardening up of the documents being fed to the US government as to what is going on in Iraq and the weapons Saddam is supposed to have. Then, rather inconveniently, on 27 January 2003, Hans Blix (one of the main weapons inspectors) and his team state that Iraq has no nuclear capacity and has been cooperative. The French Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, states that France won't go to war while inspections continue. So it is getting tricky for those who want to go to war. We also know that there will be a presentation to the UN by Colin Powell to argue that Iraq is in breach of its international commitments.
And while all this is happening, this memo from Frank Koza arrives in Katharine Gun's inbox, just after midnight on January 31st: To: [Recipients withheld] From: FRANK KOZA, Def Chief of Staff (Regional Targets) CIV/NSA Sent on Jan 31 2003 0:16 Subject: Reflections of Iraq Debate/Votes at UN-RT Actions + Potential for Related Contributions
Following the election of Donald Trump, the alt-right has come to play a significant role in American political discourse. They are an upstart political movement that rejects traditional conservatism and championed Trump and his opposition to political correctness. But how did a movement rooted in online and video game culture come to be so influential? Angela Nagle (@angnagle) is an Irish writer and academic who has written extensively on the rise of anti-feminism and the revitalised culture wars. She’s recently written a new book called Kill All Normies, in it she documents how fringe online politics and discussion boards have become mainstream.
Alex Burd spoke to Angela to discuss the book. He started by asking when the alt-right became a mainstream force.
Angela Nagle: It has to be the election of Donald Trump. I know that's very recent. Maybe you could say something like Gamergate brought a lot of different right leaning movements and forums and things that weren't very overtly political ended up much more closely mingling over Gamergate. Those are the younger ones. The more serious people like American Renaissance and Richard Spencer and people like that, they're a bit older and have been around for years. They've been taking things much more seriously and have been for a long time. But it's only when all these geeky online sub cultures started to come together that it started to be more legitimate to call them the Alt-Right rather than just the far right.
Alex Burd You reference the Gamergate movement. How is that it went from something that was about 'ethics in games journalism' to a political ideology built around the twin pillars of misogyny and white supremacy?
AN: Well essentially, depending on who you ask. Gamergate - the gamers say it's about 'ethics in games journalism', the people on the other side say they were merely pointing out sexism in gaming and ended up getting viciously attacked. The people involved in it love endlessly having these competing stories about the precise details of particular attacks which I don't find remotely interesting. Even if you take the most conservative estimate of the levels of attack that were going on they were really bad. Even the ones that are out there for the public to see. And you know a critic should be able to argue that gaming is dominated by sexist attitudes, but essentially it was viewed by gamers - where they got the 'ethics in games journalism' line from is a very long, boring story - essentially it was over political correctness. What they perceived to be feminists and anti-racists and liberals trying to change the culture and take away their fun hobby and destroy everything through liberal censorship. One of the reasons I'm not very sympathetic to that is I just think that, as in film, there's room for different viewpoints. These people were not saying games containing sexism should be banned. They were just saying that the kind of style that dominates has an attitude towards women that they had an issue with. It became basically, for whatever reason, it brought together all these different groups from the Daily Stormer, which is a Nazi website, through to apolitical vaguely sort of pro-free speech types. It brought together a whole range of people that saw themselves in different ways as opposing political correctness.
AB: And they were politicised by the fact that a largely white male space was becoming invaded leftist politics and women in particular?
AN: Yeah, definitely. Leftist cultural politics, yeah.
AB: How did it go from a misogynist reaction to that to something that has become heavily based around white supremacy and racial politics?
AN: Well when I started looking at reactionary forums of different types, I started my PHD about seven years ago, I finished about two years ago, I was looking at anti-feminist forums and at that time opposition to feminism was the main issue that really animated these kind of forums.
We appear fascinated with the phenomenon of the woman who kills. In the last year alone in the UK, both ITV and channel 4 have launched popular documentary series chronicling the shocking lives and crimes of women who commit murder. But what is it about the murderess that renders her so interesting? To social historian Dr Anna Jenkin (@acjenkin), it is her ability to offer unique insight into the gender dynamics, and broader cultural climate, of the society in which she lives. Anna's PhD thesis explores female perpetrated homicide in eighteenth-century London and Paris.
Dr Sarah Burdett caught up with Anna to discuss the findings of her research.She began by asking what it was that inspired her to investigate the topic.
Anna Jenkin: I started as an undergraduate studying eighteenth-century London, and in the second year of my undergraduate I looked specifically at the case of Sarah Malcolm, who is a serial killer, mass murderess, in 1730s London. I found the case a really interesting insight into an aspect of life in London, and women's lives specifically, that often you don't get a lot of detail about. So although it was quite an extreme example of a woman who killed her employer and two other maids in the household that she was working, in telling her story you actually get much more about the intricacies of everyday life in London at this time. So I thought this was a really interesting way of thinking about how men and women were living in these cities, but also, of much broader dynamics of power. Because female murder is such a rare act, and was such a rare act, it was particularly distressing to the society in which it took place, particularly in these very close urban areas, so you find a lot of much broader dynamics of power projected onto these cases. So that is why I decided on the question of female murder. I wanted to look specifically at eighteenth-century London and Paris because it was a time when both cities were undergoing very major paths of modernisation and growth. There were great deals of similarities between these two cities which were undergoing huge amounts of population expansion as well as economic booms, which were leading to the growth of a bourgeoisie, or middling sort, but on the other hand, politically, there were these huge differences between London post-Glorious Revolution, and France before the French Revolution, which meant that there are some really interesting similarities and differences that can be unpicked between these two cities. Female homicide is such a rare crime, that contemporary commentators don't have the general narratives of criminality or of violence to project onto them, so when trying to understand and unravel these crimes people drew from much more complicated, or perhaps more run of the mill everyday narratives in seeking to explain and understand what was going on. So I used this very small lens to understand much bigger narratives of change that these two cities were going under, at the same time but also in quite different ways.
Sarah Burdett: I asked Anna to elaborate on the proportion of female perpetrated murder, to male perpetrated murder. AJ: Female homicide in the eighteenth century, particularly in London and Paris, was about 10 percent of male homicide. I found about 2000 cases of male perpetrated homicide in London in the period 1715-1789, and for that same period about 200 cases of female perpetrated homicide, and the same in Paris. The Parisian court is much larger so I found about 500 cases of female perpetrated homicide and 5000 cases of male homicide. So in both cities it's about a tenth, which interestingly is the same proportion as today. So it is a much rarer crime. But I think what is interesting about the urban context is that you often find in historiography and in writing about female homicide in this period quite a lot of stereotypes of female homicide as being something that is very polarised. When women are treated in the court,
What is the scorecard for President Donald Trump after the first 100 Days? "C minus overall," says Peter Trubowitz, Professor of International Relations and Director of the US Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Associate Fellow at Chatham House, Royal Institute of International Affairs. Trump said he was going to shake up Washington, and he has, but on the legislative front he has done little of what he promised in his first 100 days.
Alex Burd (@alexburd) talked to Professor Trubowitz last year during the presidential race, now he returns to get the Professor's view on the new President's first 100 days......
On January 20th Donald Trump became the 45th president of the United States. April 29th marks his 100th day in office. They honeymoon period has been short, however: he has already clashed with the media, the courts and his own people. Despite running on a platform of isolationism and non-intervention, President Trump has become increasingly active in the area of foreign policy.
Last August I met with Professor Peter Trubowitz, an expert on US foreign policy and the director of the United States Centre at the London School of Economics. Today I returned to find out what the professor thinks of the new president’s actions on the world stage in his first 100 days of power - but we started by grading the opening stages of the Trump administration.
Professor Trubowitz: I think I could probably get myself to a C- minus, using the American grading scale of A to F. He came into office saying he was going to shake things up in Washington and that he was going to pass a raft of legislation, he laid that out in his 100 day contract with the American people - he ran on that. I'd say he has shaken things up in Washington, but on the legislative front you'd be hard pressed to find one item on his list, it filled the full page, that document was a two page document. I have it open on my computer right here, I looked it up just to make sure and go back over it, and none of those things have passed. He put one of them forward, repealing and replacing Obamacare, which went down in flames. There is a lot of talk about bringing it back, you know, zombie-style and perhaps it comes back. But I think overall he's made good on the promise of shaking things up, but in terms of accomplishments the record is pretty thin and I think that's why you’re seeing all this last minute activity, where he'll announce tax cuts or at least to lay out his principles because he realises he is likely to get hoisted on his own petard by the mainstream media over this.
Alex Burd: Do you think the 100 day marker is a useful one for US presidents or is it kind of a little more of a media invention?
PT: It is not a media invention. It dates back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first 100 days where he passed 15 major acts. That’s a tough act to follow and every president ever since has shied away from the 100 day bar. I think the media makes a big deal about it. It is a big story - you can rate people, you can ask them what kind of grade are you going to give the president. I think it’s important only in the sense that what you can expect in the first 100 days from a president is; you have reason to expect some sense of the tone and the style of an administration and what their aspirations and principles are and an agenda and really even a time table about how you're going to get there. So I think that is fair to compare him against that: nobody stacks up well against President Roosevelt. Trump is saying no president has been as successful as he has. FDR was a Titan.
AB: When we last spoke, you spoke about how foreign governments would be concerned that America would withdraw from the world with Trump’s election. Do you think that’s come to pass, or do you think we've seen a more active US than we expected.
PT: I'm reminded of that old line from Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong's premier.
What is the scorecard for President Donald Trump after the first 100 Days? "C minus overall," says Peter Trubowitz, Professor of International Relations and Director of the US Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Associate Fellow at Chatham House, Royal Institute of International Affairs. Trump said he was going to shake up Washington, and he has, but on the legislative front he has done little of what he promised in his first 100 days.
Alex Burd talked to Professor Trubowitz last year during the presidential race, now he returns to get the Professor's view on the new President's first 100 days.
Listen to Alex Burd's earlier podcasts with Professor Trubowitz: The Rise and Rise of Donald Trump (July 2016) and Clinton and Trump (August 2016)
Photo by Gage Skidmore
(Transcript to follow)
"A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on," said Winston Churchill. If that was the case then, how much more valid is it today. The explosion of social media and its ability to circulate and generate misinformaton has completely changed the political landscape.
And it has led to a whole new branch of journalism - political fact-checking.
This interview was first posted on the New Books Network and was conducted in the heat of the 2016 US Presidential Election campaign. In it, Lucas Graves, assistant professor in the school of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin Madison talks to James Kates about the emergence of fact checking as a necessary, if often maligned , attempt to get at the this elusive thing called 'truth'.
As George Orwell said, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable...."
Lucas Graves book, Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism came out in 2016 from Columbia University Press
Photo of bumper sticker in parking lot near school. By WoodleyWonderWorks
Why and how should we interpret visual art? With a vast historical sweep - from early medieval art on the walls inside the Basilica of San Vitale to Banksy's 2015 stencils of shipwrecked refugees on walls in Calais, by way of Caravaggio, Nevelson and Rothko - author, artist and film maker Gillian McIver looks at various theories of art criticism and helps us understand how to approach visual art. This lecture was part of series on Thinking put on by the IF Project, the free university in London. IF is an innovative project offering free humanities courses to young people who have been priced out of today's higher education market.[We have another podcast from the IF lecture series, looking at the relevance of studying history: here.]
Gillian McIver starts from the premise that "The most important mechanism for interpreting visual art is your own eyes and your ability to really see and to really look.....Go, stand in front of the work of art, literally, physically, look at it. Walk around it, look at its texture, look at its colour..." She goes on to explore how different approaches in art criticism can inform what and how we look. She considers traditional ways of looking at art (eg the historical approach, looking at historical periods) looking at influences and techniques, artistic movements, looking at the artist, and looking at the times in which the artist lived, the cultural and social environment in which the artwork operates.
Artworks considered are:
Basilica of San Vitale Medieval Hans Memling: Virgin with the child and angel (National Gallery, London) Late Middle Ages Titian: Bacchus and Ariadne (National Gallery, London) Renaissance Claude: A Seaport (National Gallery, London) Baroque period. David: Oath of the Horatii (Louvre, Paris) John Singleton Copley The Death of Major Pierson 6 January 1781 (Tate Britain, London) History Painting Also mentioned Henry Osawa Tanner - first major black artist in European tradition Caravaggio: The Supper at Emmaus (National gallery London) Caravaggio Supper at Emmaus (Milan) Mark Rothko: Black on Maroon (Tate Modern, London) Louise Nevelson: Black Wall (Tate Modern, London) Also mentioned Robert Rauschenberg (forthcoming Tate Modern exhibition December 2016 - April 2017) Nazeer Tambouli - site specific art on housing estate
Banksy: We're not all in the same boat. Calais.
Ericault: Raft of the Medusa (Louvre)
They say a fish can fall in love with a bird, but where would they live?
However, when it comes to fluid dynamics, birds and fish come from more similar neighbourhoods than you might think. This podcast is about the physics of fish schooling and bird flocking and how these animals use their fluid environment - and each other - to get around. That's schooling and flocking.
Dr Hassan Masoud is Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, University of Nevada, Reno and he recently co-authored a paper on the hydro dynamics of collective locomotion. Birds fly in flocks and fish swim in schoools - so why? It turns out that fluid dynamics can go a long way to answering that question.
Dr Masoud talks to Meg Rosenburg in this podcast which first appeared on Physics Central, the 'physics buzz blog' of the of the American Physical Society.
Photo: Starlings and sunset, Brighton by Joe Flintham
Always on our smartphones and other digital devices, we live in an expository society, says Prof Bernard Harcourt. The landscape described in his new book is a dystopia saturated by pleasure. We do not live in a drab Orwellian world, he writes. We live in a beautiful, colourful, stimulating, digital world a rich, bright world full of passion and jouissance–and by means of which we reveal ourselves and make ourselves virtually transparent to surveillance. This is digital exposure, exposing a great deal about our lives.
This podcast is an edited version of a longer interview which first aired on the New Books Network.
Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Harvard University Press, 2015) guides us through our new digital age, one that makes it so easy for others to monitor, profile, and shape our every desire. We are building what he calls the expository society a platform for unprecedented levels of exhibition, watching, and influence that is reconfiguring our political relations and reshaping our notions of what it means to be an individual.
Other actors from advertisers to government agencies can compile huge amounts of information about who we are and what we do. Whether they use it to recommend other products to buy or track our movements, Harcourt argues that the influence and interests of other actors is often hidden from us. Despite leaks of classified materials about the extent of this surveillance, public outrage is limited and mild. The scale of data collection and tracking is not a national let alone a global scandal.
According to Exposed, our appetites are too well satisfied and our attentions too distracted. Harcourt prods us to practice digital disobedience, to tackle this digital exposure, lest we will remain in a digital mesh that will only continue to restrict our privacy and anonymity underneath its beautiful, shiny suit.
Watch 'Damn, Daniel' here.
Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age
Photo: Smartphones by Esther Vargas
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http://podacademy.org/podcasts/digital-breadcrumbs-our-data-trail/
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This is the second in our series on the 2016 US Presidential election, in which Alex Burd talks to Peter Trubowitz, Professor of International Relations and Director of the US Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Associate Fellow at Chatham House, Royal Institute of International Affairs. [ The first podcast, on Donald Trump can be found here.]
With the Democrat and Republican conventions now complete and the candidates confirmed, attention turns to the general election. Donald Trump, the self-appointed outsider, faces Hilary Clinton, the first female Presidential nominee in the history of the two main parties. Clinton is no stranger to government however, having been the First Lady of the United States, Senator for New York, and Barack Obama’s Secretary of State in a career of public service that spans three decades. The campaign has been vitriolic from the outset with Trump dubbing Clinton ‘crooked’, while Democrats and been quick to argue that Trump is unfit to hold the office. To predict that battle ahead I’ve been speaking Professor Peter Trubowitz, director of the US centre at the London School of economics. He explains why the he expects the upcoming election to be one of the most negative in history.
ProfessorTrubowitz: I've written and I think this, that this election is going to be about war, sex, and work. Both of these candidate have very high negatives. Both are up in the 50-60% ratio. It may not be unprecedented, maybe the 1968 campaign with Nixon, Wallace and Humphries was similar. It's very unusual and what it means is that both sides are going to hammer away at those unfavorable. And for Clinton what means is that she's going to go after Trump after on something where he scores very low which is a sense that he's in command on the issues, that he's reliable, and his ratings there are unbelievably low. She's going to focus on who's got the finger on the nuclear button. That may not be as salient as it was in the 1964 election when Lyndon Johnson and when people were worried about Barry Goldwater because he talked very loosely about nuclear weapons and using them and I think she's going to hammer that very hard and she's going to get a lot of traction. What Trump is going to do very hard is go after her husband. He'll be able to do two things there, he'll be able to raise issues about the Clintons and whether they can be trusted and where they've taken the country before, but it's also a way to remind the public that Hilary Clinton is not new and she's part of the establishment. By drawing the connection with the husband and the presidency in the 1990s.
Alex Burd: Hilary Clinton has built her campaign on the promise of being a solid, reliable hand on the tiller – in contrast to the erratic and unconventional Trump. With over twenty years experience her time in public life has not been mistake-free and she will not be able to ride the same wave of optimism and hope that carried Barack Obama to power. Her judgement and honesty has been called into question by her opponents following terrorist attacks in Benghazi in 2012 and her use of a private email server when secretary of state.
PT: The way this game is played is that you look for the other sides vulnerabilities and you go after your opponent’s strengths. She comes across who's someone who's much more calculating and steady and she'll really try to play on her experience but I think he'll go after that and say experience doesn’t equal judgment and so forth as Bernie Sanders has done in the Primaries. I think both of them have room to go after the other way and to play on the others unfavorable. Her weakness, especially with young people is that she's not viewed as trustworthy. And whether that's fair or not you can see it in the poll results. While Trump as that shortcoming as well, he'll go after her on that dimension. He'll try and driver her negatives higher, it's also a way to solidify his base support.
"The American dream is dead. I will bring it back and we will make America great again....." In nine months Donald Trump has stunned the political establishment, brushing aside other contenders to become the Republican nominee in the race for the White House. How has the man made famous for saying 'You're fired' come so close to landing the biggest job in the western world?
To find out, Alex Burd went to talk to Peter Trubowitz, Professor of International Relations and Director of the US Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Associate Fellow at Chatham House, Royal Institute of International Affairs, who has been trying to untangle the secrets of the rise of Trump.
Business magnate and reality TV star Donald J Trump announced his intention to run for the Republican presidential nomination on 16 June 2015. His announcement was met with bemusement and ridicule. Within nine months he had stunned the political establishment and forced his final opponent, Ted Cruz, into withdrawing from the race. In that time, he’s announced his intention to build a Great Wall on the border with Mexico, ban all Muslims from entering the United States, and to Make America Great Again.
Prof Trubowitz started by discussing the moment at which he feared Donald Trump had a chance at becoming President.
Prof Peter Trubowitz: First you know my reaction was that he was just looking for air time and publicity. But it became clear pretty early on that he was getting some political traction, but the reason that I took him seriously early was because I thought the Republican field was weak. I never thought that Jeb Bush was going to get a lot of traction inside the party, he just had too much baggage given his brother's presidency and the legacy within the Republican party, let along the body politic in general. Ted Cruz I felt was too far to the right and Marco Rubio too inexperienced. There were some other possibilities, some other people that could get traction and I will say that I always thought that the candidate that would be strongest for the Republican party was not trump, but was Jon Kasich. I think that he would have done very well with independents and conservative democrats and would've posed a serious, serious problem to Hilary Clinton.
Alex Burd: The Republican Party has long valued experience and proven leadership in its Presidential candidates but involvement in Washington politics became a smear in many of the recent Primaries. Much of this is down to the development of the Tea Party movement which began in response to Barack Obama’s election and inauguration in 2009. The group combines social and fiscal conservatism with an embedded distrust of authority and government. From small beginnings it has become a key contingent of the Republican party and an increasingly important factor in determining the GOP’s direction. PT: You can't understand in a sense Trump's rise without understanding the level of anger and resentment inside the Republican Party. You know the rise of the Tea party and its frustration with it's won leadership and the Washington establishment - especially the Democrats, but not only. And that is one of the things that made Donald Trump so attractive to many inside the party, simply because he's viewed as untainted by the political and Washington establishment and the political process. Of course the irony there is this is somebody that has worked the inside of the Republican and Democrat party for years, nevertheless he's never held elected office, he's not party of the Washington establishment. He kind of came up, not self made by any means but pursued an independent trajectory separate from politics. But I think that so many of them were painted with that brush and I think because of he Bush name he just couldn't disassociate himself from that even though he's never held office in Washington DC.
AB: Trump’s rise from novelty to viable candidate confounded the p...
"We always write - and read - history thought the prism of our contemporary concerns," So why study history? What do we mean by 'history'?
This podcast is a lecture by Dr Richard Barnett, which was part of a course on Thinking run by the IF Project, the free university in London.
"We always write - and read - history thought the prism of our contemporary concerns," says Dr Barnett. "There is no such thing as an objective reading of history. This doesn't render history completely subjective, what it means is that history is always coloured, always brought to light, and sometimes distorted, by our present preconceptions, our own concerns, our political concerns and identity where we stand in our own societies, where we want to go. So history in some ways always serves the needs of the present. That doesn't make it worthless, in some ways it can make it even more valuable."
Drawing on the story of John Snow - seen as the father of epidemiology because of his work on cholera - Dr Barnett explores history, heritage, historiography, and historical sources (whose voices are heard and whose voices are absent). He starts with a visit to the John Snow pub in London's Soho........
John Snow pub, Soho, London
Pictures:
Skull: dncnh John Snow pub by Ewan Munro
How does life work? How does nature produce the right numbers of zebras and lions on the African savanna, or fish in the ocean? How do our bodies produce the right numbers of cells in our organs and bloodstream?
Biologist Sean B Carroll talks to Craig Barfoot about his latest book, The Serengeti Rules.They explore how life works at vastly different scales.
We find out how wolves can change the physical shape of rivers and why, on the plains of the Serengeti, 150kg is the number which determines whether you will likely get eaten or not.
This is a thoughtful and at times humorous conversation about the state of our world's wildlife areas and the rules which determine how nature operates.
Reviews of the book:
"In The Serengeti Rules, the author goes from E. coli to elephants to lay out the basic rules that shape so much of what’s around us and inside us."--Brian Switek, Wall Street Journal
"In this remarkably engaging book, Carroll . . . persuasively argues that life at all levels of complexity is self-regulated, from the inner workings of cells to the larger relationships governing the Serengeti ecosystem. . . . Carroll superbly animates biological principles while providing important insights."--Publishers Weekly
"The Serengeti Rules is one of the best biology books for general readers I've ever encountered. It should be required reading for every college student, regardless of major."--Andrew H. Knoll, Harvard University
"A compelling read filled with big, bold ideas. . . . Through compelling storytelling, key insights of distant, isolated biologists are brought to life. . . . I suspect that many will find new insights and inspiration here… Carroll has made a strikingly clear case that ecology is a science on a par with molecular biology and genetics. In many ways, this book is an homage to Charles Elton. . . . Building on his vision, Carroll provides a passionate motto for the twenty-first century: ‘better living through ecology.’ Are the Serengeti Rules a panacea? No, but Carroll convincingly reveals them to be a sturdy foundation for the future of biology, for human well-being, and for conservation and management."--Brian J. Enquist, Nature
"A thought-provoking challenge to complacency."--Kirkus
Once upon a time, in the land of Great Britain, Amanda woke up to the sun shining on a bright Monday morning. Before she got out of bed, she opened the BBC weather app on her phone to check the weather for the day ahead. She had started leaving her trail of digital breadcrumbs.......
She took a shower, made some breakfast, brushed her teeth and left the house. Amanda used Facebook to send a message to her friend telling him she was almost at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, United Kingdom.
Her friend replied: “No you’re not! Your message location says you’re still at home!”
Oops. Amanda was busted!
She tapped her Oyster Card at the Underground Station and read the news on The Guardian app using the Wifi available underground.
Arriving at Russell Square Station, she bought coffee at a cafe using her contactless card and made her way to SOAS for her first lecture of the day.
Amanda was blissfully unaware that her morning schedule had created a trail of “Digital Breadcrumbs.” This means, she can be traced and tracked through the apps she accessed and the technology she used. But what does that really mean? Who has access to this information? And can it be used against us?
Are we all blissfully unaware like Amanda? And should we be worried?
Welcome to Digital Breadcrumbs by George Philip, Jennifer Anne Lazo, Rooham Jamali and Rudy Al Jaroodi. Our podcast explores the digital trails or digital footprints we create in our daily lives.
The majority of applications we use require our location information. We willingly tag ourselves in specific locations through social media platforms, and freely use contactless cards and debit cards, which give retailers, banks and various other organisations information about our daily movements. We are constantly monitored on CCTV and everything we research online is data being collected or stored. In this episode, we’ll be talking to lecturers and students to discover the real cost of our digital footsteps.
So first of all, what is a digital trail? We interviewed Dr. Elisa Oreglia, a lecturer in Global Digital Cultures at SOAS, to find out more about our digital footprints.
Dr. Elisa Oreglia: A “digital trail” is a trace you leave behind you. It’s almost like Breadcrumbs. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally when you use a mobile phone; but also when you use a computer, or when you use really any kind of technology that has a chip in it.
Basically, when you have a phone, you have a series of censors and you have this constant background communication between the phone and the cell towers, but also if its connected online between the phone and the internet so there are all these apps that are getting information about your phone, about your environment.
Narrator: Dr. Oreglia tells us that all this communication is sent elsewhere, it doesn’t just stay on your phone. And it’s constant. It accumulates over time. But where is it being stored? According to Dr. Oreglia, it is going to several different places. The signal on your mobile phone tells your mobile phone network where you are.
EA: But then you have (you know) your GPS, that might be signals that go through a satellite, so it's a system to position your phone.
Narrator: She goes on to tell us about how information in your apps is stored locally and via the internet to the app's creators. The information can be dispersed through Wifi, or through your phone’s operator. Basically, there are a lot of apps, a lot of background processes and often, we don’t know exactly what they’re doing.
We then proceeded to ask Dr. Oreglia about what happens to data we have researched.
EA: When you do a search on google, that information goes through Google Servers. First of all it has to travel to a variety of internet service providers and then it gets stored into Google Servers. And they can really be anywhere in the world.
When the gun is replaced by the melody: how does music resist?
‘Even if they don’t have a message, the act of actually playing music itself is resistance,’ says Dr. Sara McGuiness, senior teaching fellow in Music at SOAS.
Classical Thai musician Luang Pradit Pairoh fought through the melodies of his songs surrounded by oppression; Ahmed Maher signed petitions to bring down the Morsi government in Egypt whilst at concerts around the country, and the melody of an old Catalonian song travelled almost a century of different resistance movements.
This is a podcast of musical adventures. It features conversations with musicians, writers and academics with special guest appearances from random people pulled off the street.
The podcast was produced by Lara Şarlak, Fino Patanasiri, Diego M. Mosquera and Kelly O’Donovan, students on 'Digital broadcasting', an MA course taught as part of the skills training options offered to MA students studying within the school of arts (which combine music, media and history of art and archeology) at SOAS, University of London. This course exposes students to the latest thinking in digital podcasting, social media research and social entrepreneurship. During the course students make a group podcast on a theme related to research at SOAS and are encouraged to disseminate them as widely as possible using digital platforms. Pod Academy is involved in the teaching on the course.
Ahmed Maher: Listening to the concert on a CD and attending one on the street, in the middle of everything cannot be compared to one another.
Esteve Sala: They were trying to mobilize a society against the dictatorship with their songs.
Fino Patinasiri: So instead of fighting back actively, he chose to use music as a weapon of hidden resistance.
Vox Pops
E contare e camminare insieme, lo sai fare?
Sì, penso di sì...
Allora forza. Conta e cammina. Dai.
Uno, due, tre, quattro, cinque, sei, sette, otto..
[Song: Modena City Ramblers (I Cento Passi) ]
Vox pop: My resistance song is “i cento passi.” It is the story of the son of a mafia boss who resisted against his father and go killed in Italy, and no one ever spoke about it for a long time.
[Song: Chuck Berry (Roll Over Beethoven)]
Vox pop: “Roll Over Beethoven” is a protest song because it was a sort of protest against almost a sort of your parents’ culture, your grandparents’ culture.
[Song: Ton Steine Scherben (Live on TV)]
Vox pop: “Ton Steine Scherben”
[Song: Bob Marley (Exodus)]
Vox pop: Umm, “Exodus”? Bob Marley.
[Song: Victor Jara (Los Estudiantes)]
Vox pop: “Los Estudiantes” by Victor Jara.
[Song: I Solisti Dell’Oltrepo Pavese (Bella Ciao)]
Vox pop: This guy called Deniz Gezmiş. He was executed by the Turkish army. He was whistling this song. “Rodrigo’s Guitar.”
[Concierto De Aranjuez For Guitar And Orchestra: II - Narciso Yepes]
Vox pop: My favorite resistance song is “Bella Ciao.” It’s about the partisan movements and resistance to fascism in Italy.
[Song: Shehzad Roy(Ham Aek Hein)]
Vox pop: In Pakistan there is a growing tradition of songs about unity. There’s one called “Ham Aek Hein”, which in Urdu means “We are one.”
[crowds cheering ‘’Azadi song]
Vox pop: Kashmir is a conflict zone, so there are many resistance songs. People sing against the Indian state. Azadi. “Azadi” means freedom. So they always chant, “What do we want? We want freedom.”
[Song: N.W.A.(Fuck the Police)]
Vox pop: Particular song, ummm. I don’t know. N.W.A., “Fuck the Police.” That’s kind of a guess. But I’m quite into like hip hop. I guess that’s kind of a form of resistance, kind of voice of the oppressed working against oppression. Yeah.
Interviews
[Song: Okay Temiz (East Breeze)]
Dorian Lynskey: I’m Dorian Lynskey. Music journalist, and author of 33 Revolutions per Minute: A History of Protest Songs.
Class is not only one of the oldest and most controversial of all concepts in social science, but a topic which has fascinated, amused, incensed and galvanized the general public, too.
But what exactly is a ‘class’? How do sociologists study and measure it, and how does it correspond to everyday understandings of social difference? Is it now dead or dying in today’s globalized and media-saturated world, or is it entering a new phase of significance on the world stage?
In this podcast, first published on Ideasbooks.org, Craig Barfoot talks to Dr Will Atkinson, author of the book Class to explore these questions. They take us through theoretical traditions in class research, the major controversies that have shaken the field and the continuing effects of class difference, class struggle and class inequality.
Class:
Class is published by Polity Press and is part of their Concepts in Social Sciences series.
You may also be interested in our BookPod on Tony Atkinson's book Inequality- what can be done? in which Prof Tony Atkinson talks to Fran Bennett.
The internet has long been seen as a force of global connection, But this notion of a global internet has never been entirely accurate. Language barriers, access limitations, censorship and the human impulse to stay within your own social circles contribute to us staying local. And then there is the larger architecture of the internet. This podcast looks at at how this architecture, specifically the Domain Name System (DNS) has been used and developed in China to localize control there. In this podcast, Adriene Lilly talks to Séverine Arsène, a researcher at the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China in Hong Kong and Chief Editor of China Perspectives – a journal dedicated to cultural, political and economic trends in China. She is also author of the recent article Internet Domain Names in China: Articulating Local Control with Global Connectivity part of a special feature of China Perspectives 'Shaping the Chinese Internet'
The internet has long been seen as a force of global connection, bringing together people of different cultural, political and economic backgrounds. Understood as a horizontal network and a community that is structurally decentralized. But this notion of a global internet has never been entirely accurate. Language barriers, access limitations, censorship and the human impulse to stay within your own social circles contribute to us staying local. Beyond social constraints, there is the larger architecture of the internet to take into account. Essential structures that hold the internet in place, yet remain mostly unknown. Today, we're looking at how this architecture has been used and developed in China to localize control there.
Understanding the Domain Names System is a big step in understanding the architecture of the internet. The Domain Names System, or DNS, is the global addressing system for the internet. You can think of the DNS like a phonebook. It takes numbers (IP addresses) and attributes them to names (domain names). When you type in an address in your browser (i.e.podacademy.org) your using the DNS to look up and call the number in this global phonebook. This global system is coordinated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICANN.
China was a major pioneer in using the DNS as a political tool, creating a vast web of regulation, censorship and blocking. This has been an evolving system since the early days of the internet, and continues to change to this day. Only last month,a new draft law was reported that could force website owners operating in China to apply for China-base domain names – this means websites ending in .com or .net must also register with .cn or Chinese character domain names like .中国(meaning “.China”) or .公司 (meaning “.Corporation”). Like many similar regulations, the draft of this law is vague in its wording and its exact implications are yet to be seen. In this episode Séverine discusses how laws like this have evolved over time and what they might really mean.
“The very point of using the DNS to block particular websites, or using keyword filtering, is to have a selective blocking or a selective connection to the global internet. It enables the Chinese state to have the best of both. The best of the global internet: access to trade, to fashion trends, to self-expression in a certain way - it helps people to vent off, express their identities, their wills, without necessarily being critical about the state of their own country. And, at the same time is allows a certain amount of political control...”
This selective access has become known as 'The Great Firewall of China.' The term can be misleading, implying an internet that is structurally isolated from the rest of the world when, in reality, it is more a 'selective' access.
“...the term “Great Firewall” was invented at the end of the 1990s/2000s, it is a very powerful image to represent a separated network that would be really very different than the rest of the...
Autism is a condition that affects about one in a hundred of us. But few people understand or can recognise it. This can have serious implications when people with autism encounter the criminal justice system. Recent research by City University and the University of Bath suggests that most people with autism, and about 75% of their parents, are left very upset after dealings with the police. April is Autism Awareness Month, and Pod Academy's Lee Millam went to talk to Dr Laura Crane of City University London, to find out more.
Lee Millam: Autism is a complex condition for which there is no cure. The main features are problems with social communication and interaction.
Laura Crane: Everyone with autism is very different, but people with autism all show the same key features - impairment in interacting with people socially and repetitive behaviours, interests and activities.
These really vary so you could have one persion with autism who is very verbally and intellectually able, whereas others may not speak, they may have intellectual disabilities and may need full time care to meet their needs.
Autism can affect anybody, we don't know what causes it and it is sometimes quite hard for people to be diagnosed because some signs can be very subtle. But it can affect anybody. One in a hundred means 700,000 people in the UK.
Because we don't know what causes autism there are no treatments, but there are lots of interventions available to enable people with autism to lead rewarding and fulfilling lives - in schools, in the community - to help people with autism get jobs or help them learn in the classroom. But there is no cure. If you have autism you live with it throughout your life.
There have been lots of high profile cases in the media where people with autism have come in contact with the police and the outcomes haven't been very positive.
We wanted to see whether these experiences were rare, but actually they were very common. It wasn't just these extreme cases we hear about. We did a survey of 400 police officers and 100 member of the autism community (parents and autistic adults) and we asked them about the experiences of autism within the criminal justice system - what they think worked well and not well.
The police were generally fairly satisfied with how they worked with individuals with autism but the autistic adults and their parents were not. 69% were dissatisfied. It shows there is a disparity between the views of the police and the view of people with autism themselves. That is something that needs to be addressed.
One of the key problems is that the police often direct their resources towards people with quite classic signs of autism - difficulties with language, intellectual impairment, very clear social impairments. And on the other end of the spectrum you have individuals who are very articulate, very verbally and intellectutally able and they're often termed as having 'high funtioning autism' or Asperger's syndrome. When the police come into contact with someone with a diagnosis of high functioning autism or Asperger's syndrom, they might see that their symptoms aren't very obvious. They can verbalise what happened and give a fairly good account of what's gone on, but actually they need a lot of help and support as well and I think the police might overlook that because they'll over estimate the capabilities of that person.
I think one of the key issues is autism awareness. Lots of people have heard of autism, they may be aware of a friend or family member who has an autism diagnosis, but few people know exactly what that means. They wouldn't necessarily know if someone they met had autism. It is a hidden condition unlike other conditions (eg Down's Syndrome where people have a characteristic appearance). Training police officers about the characteristics of autism - so when they encounter someone with autism they can identify that this person is vulnerable a...
This podcast is the second in our series on new concert music. New music can be unfamiliar and challenging - this series, written and presented by composer Arthur Keegan-Bole, is designed to present new music in a non-scary way or at least to explain that composers are making logical music - not trying to make weird, 'difficult' music to confound the listener.
The sublime music in this podcast, I will Pour Out My Spirit, ‘Effundum Spiritum Meum’, is a newly composed piece by Benedict Todd relating to the lost sounds of a ninth century Iberian liturgy. It was composed as part of Bristol University's exciting Old Hispanic Office project.
Now over to Arthur to introduce this podcast.......
Arthur Keegan-Bole: Hello, you’re listening to I will Pour Out My Spirit, ‘Effundum Spritum Meum’, a podcast about how a newly composed piece of music relates to the lost sounds of a unique liturgy called the Old Hispanic Office which was first sung on the Iberian Peninsula before the 9th Century.
Hold on, stay there, stay with me. It’s not as niche-an-episode as you might think. No working knowledge of early medieval Spanish church-going is necessary… I promise.
My name is Arthur Keegan-Bole and I’m a composer the purpose of these podcasts is to explain ways that new music relates to music of the past. In this episode we are going way back to music first written down in the Tenth Century and how musicological research into this repertoire has directly inspired the piece of music you’re hearing.
The piece was written in 2015 by Benedict Todd (hello Benedict!). You’ll hear much more from him as we discuss then interaction of music and text and how the medieval notation greatly influenced his piece of music.
We’ll also hear from Dr Emma Hornby who leads the cross-disciplinary research team investigating the Old Hispanic Office and whose project spawned the call for new works. All this to come, but for now lets just enjoy this really good bit…
Before getting onto the new stuff, lets explore what the Old Hispanic Office actually is by first hearing what it is not. It’s not the familiar sound of Gregorian chant which forms the Roman Catholic liturgy and which could be said is the genesis of the entire Western tradition.
Emma Hornby: The old hispanic office is what was sung across most of Iberia until about the year 1080 when there was a big suppression of it by the pope.
[AKB]
This is Dr Emma Hornby, an early music specialist and reader in music at the University of Bristol. She heads up the Old Hispanic Office project.
[EH]
It’s a Western, Latin, Christian church but it’s not the Roman liturgy - that’s the Gregorian chant.
[AKB]
Okay, so brass tacks - ‘liturgy’ we’re talking about how the church goes about structuring services through the day
[EH]
Exactly so, yes. So the Office is the way that monks and clerics go around and around singing the Psalms, singing chants, readings, prayers and the shape of how they do that in medieval Iberia was unique, different from anywhere else in western Europe. It’s not just that the melodies are different and that the texts are different, it’s that the whole shape of the liturgy is different, so you get through the day in different ways and it’s almost entirely un-studied.
[AKB]
Interesting stuff to an early musicologist or historian maybe but what has this got to do with composers? That stems from Emma’s novel response to a problem with the sources for this music - the notation does not give enough information for the sound to be fully recreated. We can’t know what it sounded like.
[EH]
As I was planning this research I kept coming against the sticking point that I want to share my research with the widest possible audience and that’s not just… I mean, there aren’t many other scholars interested in Old Hispanic chant before you start. There aren’t even that many scholars interested in Gregorian chant, it’s a niche interest.
How did we transition from candles to kerosene? or kerosene to electricity? What and when were the conditions ripe for energy transitions of our past? and what lessons do they have for us in the 21st century as we make a transition from high carbon intensity fossil fuels to renewable energy..
In this podcast Chaitanya Kumar from Sussex University talks to Roger Fouquet from the Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics.
The podcast was first broadcast on The Shift, a great new on-line platform for conversations on energy and climate
This is a short version of the transcript
Chaitanya Kumar: What are the key patterns that you've seen emerge from your study of historical energy transitions?
Roger Fouquet Under every single energy transition like biomass to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas etc, is a disaggregation of a number of sectors and services. Services like heating, lighting and every sector like transport, housing etc; each one of those needs to make a transition of its own. The technology needed for this transition potentially differs from each sector and service and the result of which is a very slow transition.
In energy transitions, technology or new energy sources that emerges and eventually becomes dominant always start as a niche product. There are a small group of consumers who are willing to pay a premium for the energy services attached to the new technology. Economies of scale subsequently improve the technology and drive down its cost, making it competitive with the incumbent energy technology/source. For instance, kerosene was used for lighting in the late 1800's largely by the poor population that couldn't afford gas lighting. But it never dropped cheap enough to compete with gas lighting.
C. What was the trigger for energy transitions and what parallel can we draw to the modern energy transition that we need?
R. First people used candles, gas lighting came in in early 1800's which involved the infrastructure of pipes and was originally available to the wealthier populations. 1860's introduced kerosene which was able to compete and was much cheaper to candles. Gas for the rich and oil for the poor was the way things were for decades till electricity came around. Electricity became a competitor for gas at which point gas companies became alert and started providing the poor population with gas to capture a greater market. Companies in this case invested in piping infrastructure and charged consumers later for gas. Electricity therefore was subdued by market forces and took over 6 decades to compete with gas lighting and in the 1930's we saw the explosion of electricity provided lighting.
C. What were the infrastructure support structures to make this transition happen?
R. It was very much led by industry and which we are partly anticipating today. But it is important to note that the state played the role as an observer and as a regulator for energy pricing etc. There are more lessons to draw from that regulation aspect than suggesting that Government's encouraged a certain technology or energy source.
C. What are the key differences between the modern day transition and past energy transitions?
R. We are currently concerned about environmental pollution and climate change. We are now looking at the public paying a premium for a public good i.e. improvement in environmental quality and climate stabilisation and there is a market failure here. Unlike previous transitions where people adopted new sources of energy for better energy services for private benefit as opposed to public good. Ultimately we are seeking Governments to create the incentives for a valuation of that environment quality and climate stabilisation through regulation and influence prices.
C. How do you factor the use of information in energy transitions?
R. I think information can be helpful. Make people more aware, smart technologies help improve efficiency but I suspect that will allo...
The films of truly outstanding director Spike Lee take a special niche in American cinema. More than that, they especially enrich so-called Black cinema. Lee’s oeuvre includes a great number of films. To mention just some of them: She’s Gotta Have It (1986), Do the Right Thing (1989), Jungle Fever (1991), Malcolm X (1992), He Got Game (1998), Love & Basketball (2000), Bamboozled (2000), Red Hook Summer (2012), finally, his recently released Chi-Raq (2015).
This podcast is presented and produced by Tatiana Prorokova a Doctoral Candidate in American Studies at Philipps-University of Marburg, Germany.
Lee’s works have received a lot of acclaim from their audience as well as from film critics due to the issues raised by the director and the way these problems are formulated and presented to us. African American director Spike Lee manages to present to America racial problems the country has wallowed in in the most authentic and explicit way. Houston A. Baker, Jr., comments: “Lee’s first films are low-budget, minor masterpieces of cultural undercover work. They find the sleeping or silenced subject and deftly awaken him or her to consciousness of currents that run deep and signify expensively in Black America” (166). The scholar continues, shrewdly pinpointing the peculiarity of Spike Lee’s cinema: “Now, it is not that Lee’s films are devastatingly original, telling us always things we do not know. What is striking about his work is that it is, in fact, so thoroughly grounded in what we all know, but refuse to acknowledge, speak, regret, or change” (167, author’s emphasis). Dan Flory contends that the main goal of Lee’s works is “to make the experience of racism understandable to white audience members who ‘cross over’ and view his films” (40). In this respect, one can even talk about particular types of characters or images created by this director, like, for example, “‘sympathetic racists,’” defined as “[white] characters with whom mainstream audiences readily ally themselves but who embrace racist beliefs and commit racist acts”; or “unsympathetic black characters with whom many audience members might feel little or nothing in common” (40-41). At the same time, Baker singles out another aim that Lee seeks to fulfill in his films: “His [Lee’s] mission is freedom – that monumental and elusive ‘it’ that Black folks have always realized they gotta have” (175).
Spike Lee’s new film, Chi-Raq, however, stands out of the long row of Lee’s previous works due to the problems raised as well as the projected urgency of doing something about these issues. The director starts his film reporting shocking details about the death rate in one of America’s largest cities – Chicago. While in its most recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States has lost 2,349 and 4,424 Americans respectively, during the same period, 7, 356 people were murdered in Chicago, which, shockingly displays that it has been safer for Americans in war-torn countries in the Middle East rather than in this American city. Thus, calling Chicago Chi-Raq, Lee claims that it is America’s second Iraq. The film later criticizes U.S. foreign and domestic policy that arguably led to the criminal activity in Chicago. For example, when a priest, being overwhelmed by the numbers and age of the recently killed people, exclaims: “Where was their freedom? Where was their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?” He overtly refers to America’s mission in the Middle East to liberate the oppressed; however, he implicitly argues that while fighting far away, the United States does not notice the growing problems on its own territory, among its own citizens, specifically among “young black males”. The issue is later touched upon again by one of the heroines (Angela Bassett) who openly blames America for what is happening in Chicago: “The U.S. spends money on the Iraqi people – to train them, govern them, help them build an economy.
Science Fiction can often help us understand realpolitik in the real world.
Is Tyrian Lannister a realist or a liberal? What would Mr. Spock have to say about rational choice theory? And what did Stanley Kubrick read to create Dr. Strangelove? Stephen Dyson is the author of Otherworldly Politics: The International Relations of Star Trek, Game of Thrones, and Battlestar Galactica(Johns Hopkins University Press 2015) and associate professor of political science at the University of Connecticut. In this interview with Heath Brown (originally made for the New Books Network) he takes on these questions with an enjoyable exploration for how the classic theories of International Relations have been played on our television and movie screens.
Heath Brown: Even those of us who don’t study International Relations know about the classic divide between ‘realists’ and ‘liberals’. You look to the fictional world of Game of Thrones to explain this. So, who are the realists and who are the liberals in the world of Westeros?
SD: I think the whole first season of Game of Thrones is an excellent illustration of this whole liberal/realist divide. The liberals are the idealists, of course, people who believe politics should be about values and ethics, and human nature is fundamentally good, and the way you promote peace in the world – and peace is achievable – is that you act in accordance with your values and you trust other people. I think they were represented, especially in the first season, and later, by the Starks in Game of Thrones, the Guardians of the North. People like Ned Stark, an extremely stubborn individual, very moralistic, someone who always wanted to do the right thing, but who was (as many liberals are, as idealists are) pretty bad at the down and dirty work of politics. In Game of Thrones Ned is doing well in the North, he is among his own people, and he understands its politics and is able to make a virtue of his idealism. Then the king, his old friend, comes to see him and says, ‘I need you in the South’. But Southern politics is very different, the realm of Real Politique, the realm of the Stark’s great antagonists the Lanisters, who represent the realist point of view.
Ned, very unwisely, follows his friend down south. It is the right thing to do, he gave his word to his friend, he owes duty to his friend, the king, and he meets a sticky end in the south because he is out manoevered by realists.
HB: And we can say, for those who haven’t watched the show…..
SD: ……yes, spoiler alert…..
HB: that you haven’t yet been spoiled! You write in the book about Star Trek, Game of Thrones, Battlestar Gallactica, but not about Star wars - so no Star Wars spoilers, either!
One of the central concerns of scholars in lots of fields is the extent to which rationality is an abstract idea, or something that really drives decision making. Trekkies have their own ways to express this debate…..how does Star Trek use Mr Sock’s rationality?
SD: Mr Spock is probably the greatest fictional representative of what is, in academic circles, in danger of being the pretty boring and bloodless theory of rational choice. When you try to explain it, eyes glaze over but if you can dramatise it in the figure of someone like Mr Spock you can keep them interested. Spock, on Star Trek, was a Vulcan, someone committed to making decisions from a logical standpoint calculating the costs and benefits. The greatest example was in the movie The Wrath of Khan, my favourite movie. Again, spoiler alert if you haven’t seen it, Spock applies his utilitarianism, his rationality throughout the movie to help his friend Kirk (the embodiment of feeling and emotion) – Spock is cool and Kirk is hot – and when they work together they can be really successful. And they ARE successful. They beat Kirk’s nemesis, Khan, and it is Spock’s rationality and Kirk’s emotion that work together, but at a huge cost!
‘Lock them up and throw away the key!’ is something that is often heard. But does locking someone up for committing a crime really work to punish an individual? What about having them come back into society a changed person, asks presenter and producer Lee Millam in this podcast.
Prisons, why do we send people there? Does it work? Should it work? This was the subject of a recent lecture at Gresham College in the City of London. It is one lecture from a series on Law and Lawyers at Gresham College, presented by Professor Sir Geoffrey Nice QC. He explains why we lock up criminals…..
Geoffrey Nice: …..for a range of reasons, many of them not fully articulated. You could look back and say thata there are some coherent lines of justification – deterrence, retribution, rehabilitation (those are the standard ones). But does it really explain our attitude towards imprisonment. I rather doubt it.
Not only are people complex, but our reactions to people are complex too. Take those who, on some objective calculation, would be less culpable but get more opprobrium and heavier sentences than those who are in one sense guiltier but get lesser sentences. The most obvious examples are those who really cannot control themselves because of their upbringing - such as sex offenders who have themselves been formed by childhood, have been victims of sex offences and may become sex offenders themselves. They draw the maximum opprobrium from society, and not the understanding that they themselves are victims.
So we are complicated in the way we respond to crime. There is no great political dividend in rehabilitating people, at least there doesn’t seem to be in our country.
Interestingly there are changes around the world. Norway is rather leading the way. Its prisons are so shockingly liberal that people from America and England can’t probably recognise them as prisons at all! Their purpose is to enable people to rejoin society. And these prisons have a recidivist rate of 20% whereas the US and England have recidivism rates of about 70%. Why aren’t we spending more time looking at that/
Lee Millam: If other countries are more successful at rehabilitating prisoners, then there must be lessons to learn from other systems in other parts of the world. But there are some crimes where prison is the only answer.
GN: There are some people who are so dangerous they do have to be restricted so that is one justifiable expense – though whether it has to be done in this way, given modern technology, is another issue.
I think it is really a desire to punish people that justifies what we do. I may not be on that wing of public opinion, but what is clear is that you have to carry public opinion with youon an issue like this. Change from where we are to something more humane, or rather more liberal (as it would now be described) is going to take some time.
It is also going to be more difficult to do that in a society where so many of the other structures, in their own way, almost require punishment and offenders. The rich need the poor, the good need the bad, the apparently lawful need criminals.
You could argue, in a rather nasty way, we don’t actually want to live in a crime free society. So if you’ve got an aggressively capitalist society with great divergence of wealth, it is probably inevitable that you are going to want to punish, or will punish, those who offend the implied values of such a society. Maybe as long as you’ve got a society that , since the 1960s has believed in all aspects of sexual liberalism, it is in some curious and perverse way particularly hard on those who transgress what is left of the law on sexual control. Mary Whitehouse may well be shown, in due course, to have been right. More and more people may be thinking it wasn’t quite so good to create a sexually liberal society, one of the consequences of which is that people had to do more thing to temper it.
This is a podcast about music. A podcast about Nocturne. A podcast of a Nocturne inspired by the BBC's nightly Shipping Forecast. Produced and presented by composer, Arthur Keegan-Bole
A K-B: Oh dear, I crashed the pips. In the world of radio, crashing the pips - that is, talking over the six sine tone beeps that mark the hour on BBC radio - is a serious faux pas. So, please, let me start again.
Hello you are listening to Nocturne, a podcast about music, its relationship with the night. My name is Arthur Keegan-Bole and I’m a composer. The music you’re hearing is a piece I finished at the start of this year. It is called Nocturne and Nocturne is what this podcast is about. In it you will hear about the music’s materials and meaning, especially the role of radio extracts in the sound-world of the music which includes the BBC pips and, everyone’s favourite sedative, the Shipping Forecast. The piece was written and premiered in America so we will also discover how a non-U.K. audience without knowledge of these niche British sounds might understand this music. Let’s start by thinking about what a nocturne is. This is musicologist David Fay…
David Fay: As you can probably tell from the words relationship with the English adjective ‘nocturnal’ a nocturne is a piece of music suggestive of the night. Although the Italian form of the word ‘notturno’ had been used frequently in the 18th Century as a name for pieces that were designed to be performed at night, it was Irishman John Field who first coined the French word ‘nocturne’ to describe a particular musical genre in a set of piano pieces published in 1815. Thereafter the Nocturne became a popular genre of composition for romantic pianist-composers most famously Frederick Chopin whose twenty-one Nocturnes remain the pinnacle of the genre. Field’s Nocturnes and many of those composed by others subsequently are lyrical in nature, with the pianist’s right hand playing a graceful, singing melody over broken chords in the left. The relationship with the night in these piano Nocturnes is usually in their evocation of a tranquil atmosphere which can be associated with the nocturnal ambience of a calm, still night… presumably in the countryside. However, despite the quietly lyrical, pianistic connotations of the word ‘Nocturne’ it has been used as a title for pieces written for other instruments and ensembles particularly from the Twentieth Century onwards. Some of these explore other aspects of the nocturnal environment - whether the natural sounds we hear at night or the world of dreams, or, perhaps, nightmares to which we succumb nightly.
A K-B I hope my piece simply has the sound of a nocturne - unspecifically yet unequivocally conjuring night-time. However, we all like a story to guide us, and a narrative of some kind helps the composing process a great deal. So, let me ask you… have you ever fallen asleep to the sound of the Shipping Forecast? Between 12:40 and 1:00am a magical series of sounds are broadcast on BBC Radio 4. This is Closedown. A tune called Sailing By kicks it off, this is what is known in the trade as an ‘identifier’ so those trying to tune in can easily find the station, it is also a ‘buffer’ filling time so that the Shipping Forecast (which follows) starts exactly the scheduled time. I’ve always wondered why they use Ronald Binge’s light orchestral tune. Would it not be clearer to continually repeat the name of the station? Perhaps, but that is certainly not good radio. So, to an extent at least it’s an aesthetic choice. For a long time I struggled to sleep, from time-to-time I still do but I can always count on this bit of radio to help me drift. It is about drifting between one state and another all sorts of strange, ‘in-between’ landscapes and seascapes. This is the narrative behind the first half of this music. It is a strange lullaby, drifting between the real and the unconscious, lingering in a penumbral state.
Translational medicine is collaborative science that translates work in the laboratory into practical medical treatments - it is sometimes termed 'bench to bedside medicine'. Because it often includes trials on animals it can be controversial. So can animal testing be justified?
Scarlett MccGwire put on her wellies and met up with Francis Henson to find out.
Dr Frances Henson: I'm Frances Henson, Research Fellow in the Division of Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery, Department of Surgery, Addensbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, and I am also Senior Lecturer in Equine Surgery, Department of Veterinary Medicine, Cambridge Veterinary School.
What I do is work in the lab with basic scientists to generate treatments for various orthopedic diseases. I am interested in lame animals and lame people and we use a large animal model - a sheep - to try our experiments before we take them on to use them either to treat human patients or veterinary, animal, patients.
Our current research is looking at a novel bio-material. I have colleagues in Newcastle who have made a brand new bio material, they have put two special materials together and they are going to be using those to treat large surface defects in joints - knee joints in people - that will also be applicable to our veterinary species.
Scarlett MccGwire: You are trialing this on sheep?
FH: Yes, we are. What we do with these osteochondral plugs, as we call them, is we take our sheep, make little holes in the joints and we fill those holes with our novel treatmentt to prove that treatment is both safe and really offers a significant improvement in the expected outcome. If you didn't put the scaffold in, the joints wouldn't heal.
SM: What are you finding out so far?
FH: We are finding that these new products are very good at treating joint surface defects. Within our group, we have developed a novel way of looking at this. We don't want these animals to suffer pain, so we monitor their pain, immediately after surgery and through the experiment because we do data analysis, recording the amount of weight bearing on the leg that has been operated on. Interestingly we can show no difference in the animals we have operated on, compared to animals that have not been operated on, very quickly - within a matter of hours after the surgery. The surgical procedures are very benign and the osteochondral plugs really allow the joints to heal very well.
SM: What does this mean for humans? Will knee replacement surgery be much easier? Is this the end of the pain of arthritis?
FH: Let's take these in two parts. First, the early osteoarthritis. Arthritis occurs when you have a defect in the joint, the joint is very ppor at healing itself and at the current time, if we have pain in our joint, the doctor give us painkillers and we limp around for a while until it is too painful and you go for a joint replacement (which is not a cure, it is amputation and putting in a prosthesis.
The joint surface defects we want to cure with the scaffold are big lesions in joint, due to sports injuries and trauma in road traffic accidents. These cause big damage in the joint and currently there is no treatment for that. Left untreated it will go to arthritis. We have the ambitious hope that using these scaffolds we can stop osteoarthritis before it starts, cure the joint and get it back to a healthy environment.
SM: We are using sheep to make incredible progress for humans?
FH: We are using our sheep to make incredible progress, I hope, in curing joint disease in both humans and animals. I am a veterinary surgeon, I spend half my time in the lab, but the other half in my surgery with animals, particularly horses and the treatments we are developing are all part of a 'one health' agenda. If we can treat joint defects in man, we can also treat them in animals. So, while the sheep is being used, it is for the benefit of animals in veterinary medicine and in human medicin...
“Originality doesn't mean creation from nothingness.....it can also mean reusing something in a very creative and innovative way... if we took the standards of how people create that are implicit in a lot of copyright law cases, that basically say 'you can't copy', most of what we consider to be great classical works couldn't have been created...” In this episode, Adriene Lilly talks to Olufunmilayo Arewa, Professor of Law at University of California Urwin about her work on musical borrowing and copyright law in the United States.
Olufunmilayo, who goes by Funmi, is a law professor at University of California Irvine. Her work on music and law includes: From J.C. Bach to Hip Hop: Musical Borrowing and Cultural Context about the diverse range of borrowing and inspiration in music across history and genre; Copyright on Catfish Row: Musical Borrowing, Porgy & Bess and Unfair Use focusing on the influences on George Gershwin's work, and his estate's tight hold on it's copyright. She is currently writing a book about the influences of African American music and the business and legal implications of it's global reach. You can find links to some of her other work, and a little more information here.
What does it mean for something to be creative? Original? How much transformation must occur before we allow an artists to claim ownership of an idea? Appropriation, inspiration and creative borrowing is common across disciplines and traditions. Existing in everything from science to painting, from cooking to film. Today, we're focusing on appropriation in music.
“...There is a conception that some types of music are more original than others, and we often make those determinations in a very de-contextualized way. Originality doesn't mean creation from nothingness, it could mean that (not often the case in music), but it can also mean reusing something in a very creative and innovative way. So I think, originality should not be the opposite of copying. Originality might involve copying and it might not, that depends on genre, composer, [...etc]” (from the podcast)
We talk about the history of the idea of originality and creativity in music; The evolution of music copyright; The differences between music and literature; The many meanings of 'musical borrowing'; The role of estates in copyright enforcement; And some of the current trends in copyright cases brought against musicians. We briefly discuss the recent Blurred Lines case (information about the case here, and music here), and the work of George Gershwin (Porgy and Bess, Summertimeand the spiritual Sometimes I feel Like a Motherless Child).
Funmi's work considers the historic and conceptual issues that we find embedded in various rulings regarding musical borrowing. In 'From J.C. Back to Hip Hop' she tackles the actual creative practices of classical composers versus the myth of how we often believe they composed.
“... if we took the standards of how people create that are implicit in a lot of copyright law cases, that basically say 'you can't copy', most of what we consider to be great classical works couldn't have been created...” (from the podcast)
Her works highlights the huge variety of creative practices that exist, and have existed, throughout music history. Beethoven, for example, was known to be a skilled improvisational player and Debussey a commentator on Wagner. Yet, today we see many of these musicians as artists who crafted work in isolation, as if unaffected by their own social context and histories. Her work makes the argument that by recognizing some of these similarities between actual classical practice and contemporary practice, we can begin to embrace the multiple ways that creativity can occur.
“...hip hop artists are not the first artists to encounter this reaction to what some might perceive as too much borrowing...” (from the podcast)
In Copyright on Catfish Row she discusses the work of George Gershwin and through this exampl...
As the Paris global climate negotiations get under way, we in Britain face the prospect of increased flooding. . What can we do about it?
Gresham College in the City of London was founded in 1597 and over 400 years has provided a range of free lectures on different subjects to those who live and work in London. One recent lecture was The next big flood, Britain underwater. Pod Academy's Lee Millam went to talk to Professor Carolyn Roberts about the facts, figures and ideas in her lecture, which was part of Gresham College's Britain in Troubled Waters series.
...............
The UK has a series of problems associated with flooding. One of them is to do with the physical things that are creating the flooding - intense rainfall, high windspeeds in oceans, sea levels, storminess and so on. Another significant element is how we manage it, what we do about managing both the water and the damage the water creates when it gets into inappropriate places like people's living rooms. The third element is to do with the ways things are shifting as the climate shifts, so that the risks are becoming more intense, particularly in certain parts of the country. So it is a complex, threefold problem.
Climate change is part of what we are talking about, but flooding is a natural phenomenon - rivers have always over topped their banks (they almost never 'burst' their banks). We have altered the environment very significantly with what we do, how we farm, the way we constrain rivers etc, so it's a mixture of a naturally induced phenomenon (flooding always happens) and the result of how we behave in circumstances close to rivers and close to the coast.
In 2007 we had some very severe flooding over quite wide areas of England and Wales and from that we have learned a lot. One of the things that happened after those floods was changes in administrative arrangements for the management of flooding, although I'd say those are still to be tested in reality.
The other thing that happened following the 2007 flood was that considerable amounts of money were put into research and that has been an astonishing British success story in terms of understanding how floods are generated, where flood water goes, predicting and forecasting events - we are now pretty good with the science, but we're a lot less good and have learned far fewer lessons about the politics of managing flooding. So that is, perhaps, where we need to turn our attention now.
In terms of the way we manage floods and the way politicians behave, at both local and national level they have an eye to the short term, so they are concerned about the next election when their role in their constituency will come up for renewal. And they tend to want results over very short periods of time - three, four, five years. But that is not realistic in terms of dealing with flooding.
We are also in an era of austerity and that is making it difficult to find the money to do some of the things that really do need doing.
Flood signs in Morpeth, Northumberland, UK. Photographer Ian Britton
In the longer term it makes sense, just as it does for climate change itself, and it makes sense to invest now to avert future costs. The costs that emerging now in the latest research on flooding, the costs of flooding under different climate scenarios and different kinds of population growth, those costs are enormous. We have to do something to avert them. But that requires taking quite difficult decisions now about how we spend limited budgets. One understands the difficult choices politicians have to make both locally and nationally, but sometimes people have to grasp the nettle.
There are four types of flooding. The most important - both in cost terms and the number of people at risk is undoubtedly from rivers. So the large rivers - the River Ouse in Yorkshire, the Severn, parts of the Thames above London - those are areas of some significance (and there are others).
Craig Barfoot talks to Julian Assange.
Wikileaks came to prominence in 2010 with the release of 251,287 top-secret State Department cables, which revealed to the world what the US government really thinks about national leaders, friendly dictators, and supposed allies. It brought to the surface the dark truths of crimes committed in our name: human rights violations, covert operations, and cover-ups.
This bookpod is an interview with WikiLeaks cofounder Julian Assange, who has written the introduction for the book, The Wikileaks Files, The World According to US Empire (Verso, 2015). The podcast, produced and presented by Craig Barfoot, first appeared on the Ideas Books website.
The WikiLeaks Files presents expert analysis on the most important cables and outlines their historical importance. In a series of chapters dedicated to the various regions of the world, the book explores the machinations of the United States as it imposes its agenda on other nations: a new form of imperialism founded on varied tactics from torture to military action, to trade deals and “soft power,” in the perpetual pursuit of expanding influence. It illustrates the close relationship between government and big business in promoting US trade.
The number of couples seeking fertility treatment is rising every year. But donor assisted conception poses huge ethical and human rights issues. Up until 10 years ago, sperm donors and women who donated eggs had a right to remain anonymous. Then the law was changed in 2005 giving donor conceived people the right to information about their donors. Most people agree that this was a milestone to be celebrated, but does it go far enough?
This podcast explores the issues. it is drawn from an event organised by the Progress Educational Trust and is introduced by the Chair of the event, Charles Lister, Chair of the National Gamete Donation Trust, and former Head of Policy at the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. He quoted a speech by the Public Health Minister, Melanie Johnson made in 20014, 'Clinics decide to provide treatment using donors; patients make a decision to receive treatment using donors; donors decide to donate. Donor-conceived children, however, do not decide to be born – is it therefore right that access to information about the donation that led to their birth should be denied to them?' This quote encapsulates the essence of the debates that led to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (Disclosure of Donor Information) Regulations 2004, which allow donor-conceived people born from donations made after 1 April 2005 access to identifying information about their donor on reaching the age of 18. It also set the scene for a series of lively presentations from a panel of five experts, who took to the stage to offer their perspective on the impact of the legislation.
L to R Charles Lister, Juliet Tizzard, Susan Golmbok, Jo Rose, Venessa Smith, Eric Blythe
First to speak was Juliet Tizzard, Director of Strategy at the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), who gave the regulator's perspective on the change in law. Tizzard identified the lack of reliable outcome metrics in relation to donor conception as a key challenge, and hindrance, to accurate impact evaluation of the 2004 regulations. She also opined that the assessment of post-regulation sperm and egg donation trend as proxy measure of impact showed a gradual but steady increase in number of new donors registering in the UK – a reality that is a far cry from the doomsday prophecies of the early critics of the law, who predicted the possibility of severe donor shortages arising as a result of the end to donor anonymity.
Next on stage was Dr Jo Rose, a donor-conceived adult who won a landmark court case that contributed to the decision to end donor anonymity in the UK. In her presentation, Rose argued that donor-conceived children should, as a matter of course, have more support and the right to access full and complete information about their genetic parent, particularly because 'wrong and incomplete medical history kills people'. She also argued that a lack of retrospective access to identifying information means a number of donor-conceived people born before April 2005 live the rest of their lives 'tortured' by not knowing who their genetic family is.
'Why then should we have legislation that protects the rights of donors but ignores the rights of donor offspring?' she asked the audience, and quoted Kevin Staudt's song, Novum:
Rose's presentation gave a personal note to the debate and made it easy to appreciate the rationale behind her call for retrospective disclosure of donor identity. According to her, more needs to be done to ensure 'equality and respect for genetic kinship and identity for all groups of the society'.
Eric Blyth, Emeritus Professor of Social Work at the University of Huddersfield, also made a case for retrospective disclosure of donor identity. Using data from the HFEA, Professor Blyth argued that the lack of retrospective access to identifying donor information means that upwards of 20,000 donor-conceived people born between 1991–2004 in the UK are denied the right to ...
First published in 1983, Lise Vogel's Marxism and the Oppression of Women - toward a unitary theory is regarded as one of the founding texts of Marxist Feminism. It has now been relaunched, and Pod Academy was at the relaunch.
Lisa Vogel was joined on the platform by Dr Tithi Battacharya, Purdue Liberal Arts University, in US, Dr Sue Ferguson, Laurier Brantford University in Canada and Kate Davison, Melbourne University
Tithi Battacharya said she had first read the book in the early 1990s, when 'Marxism was not common parlance in academia', and she kept going back to it for several reasons. Firstly, it was a book that was explanatory rather than descriptive. To her, Lise Vogel's book was one of the clearest explanatory texts to speak of the relationship between the capitalist system as a whole and the oppression of women.
Secondly, Battacharya said the word 'unitary' had resonance for her - it countered the growing view at the time that patriarchy was a system of oppression that was independent of capitalism - the view that there was capitalism, and then there was racism and sexism etc. Vogel's book uses the word 'unitary' to reject this notion of autonomous tracks of social relations, Vogel asserts that capitalism is a unitary system and we need to explain it. She also suggested that 'unitary' was a fantastic word to use in an age of the celebration of 'the fragment', 'the cult of the particular' [see also our podcast on Beyond the Fragments here]. In that age the book brought thinking back to a unitary way of thinking.
Tithi Battacharya said that Lise Vogel restored to prominence the role of the family within the system as a whole. The book explored why the family is a source of oppression within its role in capitalism. It theorised the role of the family in capitalism, at the level of production, rather than simply at the level of exchange. Vogel, she said, takes some of Marx's insights in Capital, and builds on them, exploring the gaps and silences. She looks at what labour power is, how it is regenerated, and what it means to labour under capitalism.
Thirdly, in Tithi Battacharya's view, this thinking is of strategic importance because it looked outside the workplace. This is particularly important, she said, now that 40 years of neoliberalism has denuded the labour movement. She suggests we will see much struggle starting outside the workplace (such as that in Ferguson), and to misunderstand these struggles as not class struggle would be a strategic error for this generation of the left.
Next up was Kate Davison who started by saying she had felt star struck when she realised who else would be on the panel, 'But', she added to laughter, 'I dealt with it!' Quoting Sue Ferguson, she described the ideas put forward by Lise Vogel as 'The path not taken', and said that had they known, in the 1980s, about Vogel's work, feminists might have avoided 'much blood letting'. At that time, she said, if you had been able to stick with the label 'socialist feminist' and brave the attacks from adherents of identity politics, you nevertheless often developed distrust of Leninism and by extension of Marxism altogether. A small group turned towards socialism or anti-capitalist politics at the end of the 1990s, and undertook a re-evalutation of identity politics, eventually abandoning it in favour of the uniting power of the working class or the anti capitalist movement. Kate said that she herself has dropped the 'feminist' from Marxist-Feminist when describing herself.
She went on to say that the book is being re-published at a time of the re-emergence of struggles around sexual and gender based violence (eg the Slut Walks), sexism etc. But many activists and revolutionary Marxists, she said, have little knowledge or understanding of these debates. While some of the issues have come up around gay and lesbian issues (eg the campaign for equal marriage rights),
In this podcast, Tatiana Prorokova considers gender ambiguity in Vietnam War films.
The Vietnam War takes a specific place in U.S. military history. Having influenced generations of Americans, the conflict unsurprisingly found a wide reflection in American cinema. The most famous, as well as the most significant ones were the films created in the 1970s-80s, including Michael Cimino’s Deer Hunter, (1978), Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986), Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War (1989). In these films, the directors aptly touch upon the questions of the army, war, and morality, which are generally the key themes of war films. Yet, they also unveil the issue of gender representation, discussing the problem of masculinity. The issue of gender, precisely the problem of masculine power and female vulnerability, is one of the leading themes in these films. Interestingly, such issues as class, race, and nationality apparently disappear “in the ‘brotherhood’ of war,” while gender always remains a thorny question (Messner 25). What one can see in the films on Vietnam is that masculinity establishes itself as the only right and legitimate agency. Women practically do not appear in films on Vietnam, and even if they do, they are depicted as prostitutes, a role that serves to reaffirm masculinity as well: to erase femininity as it is and strengthen the power of a masculine collective. The examination of the above mentioned films, therefore, allows me to contend that Vietnam War films overtly focus on the issue of gender; yet, they celebrate masculinity and mock femininity.
To illustrate the problem of “mocked” femininity, I look over the representation of women in Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and Casualties of War. First of all, it is important to mention that women always appear as individuals rather than in groups. We often see one woman, usually weak and dependent, surrounded by a group of men (for example, the prostitute in Full Metal Jacket or the kidnapped Vietnamese girl in Casualties of War). I argue that this technique visually helps directors oppose masculinity and femininity. A woman is always depicted as patently distinguished from a man: she is lonely and weak. Moreover, she is obviously the only one who does not belong to the world of war, which is made obvious from the way she is dressed, i.e., she does not wear a uniform, and from the absence of any physical power that is, indeed, an important aspect in war. Thus, all the three directors draw a thick red line between men and women, and, as a result, between masculinity and femininity in their conventional sense. Therefore, Vietnam War films reject the idea of feminization that can be applied to men, strictly identifying it only with women. The issue is visually illustrated through images of demeaning and weak women, whom men always have to try to separate themselves from, both visually and verbally, or exercise power over. Hence, male soldiers do not only clearly differentiate themselves from these women but they also subdue any manifestation of womanliness in themselves.
Notably, women appear as part of the Vietnam War only in two movies: Full Metal Jacket and Casualties of War. I do not consider Linda (Meryl Streep) from The Deer Hunter because we see her only at the beginning of the film – during the wedding – and in the end, when the war is over. Hence, she is never shown on the battlefield, but rather, is represented as part of a domestic environment, taking a traditional female role in patriarchal society. Both Full Metal Jacket and Casualties of War, however, clearly support my idea that the main role the woman is given in a Vietnam War film is the one of a prostitute. This is made apparent in Full Metal Jacket as we literally see a female prostitute. The same idea is obliquely conveyed in Casualties of War as the main female heroine is entirely disrespected, humiliated,
'A spindly shit coppice, with ghosts of plastic bags rustling in its branches.' This week's podcast, by artist Robin Bale, is an evocation of a windswept rubbish dump under the M11 motorway. It starts with the sounds of moving through undergrowth, traffic in the background. A twig snaps. Abstract and slow percussion fades in.......
A burnt boot…crushed cans…ashes…binbag, spilling its guts…burnt plastic…soles detached…from shoes…ashes…roof tiles…single rubber glove…over the mounded and overgrown rubble…sparks of new, blue off-licence bags leap out against the leaves…the green and the brown…and the traffic on the road beyond flickers between the trees.
[sound of traffic and birdsong fades. Percussion continues then fades]
I wish to talk about spaces. It could be that as soon as the first building was built and the city was founded, that there came into being a margin or corner - the angle of two walls, the space just down there, just past where the bins are. Only existing in relation to that building, only coming into existence with it, this site was where things were left, forgotten, hidden; with the understanding that they were left or forgotten there and should be left alone, although not far away. Almost in plain sight. Children, strangers and fugitives would go there and it would nearly be in sight and earshot of that first structure; just outside the window, just against the wall.
[percussion returns quietly]
I wish to tell you about such a place, that I have named the Bike Cemetery.
The Bike Cemetery is a mere crumb of land, a piece of what I suppose could be called urban waste ground, an increasingly rare commodity in the city now, especially one less than a mile from the site of the 2012 Olympics - that place of victorious national becoming.
[sound of traffic fades in]
It is demarcated - you might say cut adrift - by a busy main road and a slip road and overpass for the M11. A spindly shit coppice, with ghosts of plastic bags rustling in its branches. The sort of place you might find yourself first light on a Monday morning, in the piss-thin drizzle, wondering how you got there and knowing that you were meant to be somewhere else and thinking "not again".
As far as I know it lacks a name, so I have called it the Bike Cemetery. When I first came across it early this century it was full of the stripped carcasses of bicycles that I assume were nicked somewhere nearby and cannibalised on the site.
[traffic and percussion, with bird song field recording from site]
I have called it an entrance to the underworld, at other times, the unacknowledged centre of the city or the centre of the state.
The Bike Cemetery also attracted a writer and bricoleur. The wall of the overpass was liberally graffitied. The texts, constructed from single words or short phrases, heavy on repetition and play, were not the usual - not political slogans, football chants, sexual slander or biblical quotations.
[percussion fades leaving field recording, traffic and bird song]
There were portmanteau words, a stuttering repetition of syllables, an obsessive chant running through its centre: Wolf Vanish.
This was interspersed with collaged printed matter, predominantly magazine images of animals, fashion photographs from the late 1980s, Monopoly money and food packaging; some porn, though not nearly as much as might be expected. Judging from the dates on the magazine pages the work was done sometime around 1991. [percussion returns] Due to the handwriting of the graffiti and the thematic consistency of the whole thing, and that the same paint was used to write and stick the images to the wall, I'd say that the entire wall was the work of one person. It has remained there for almost a quarter of a century, under different governments, different weathers.
[percussion and traffic]
After having been a fairly regular visitor to the site I have not returned there for around two years until yesterday,
Podcast produced and presented by Alex Burd In December 2011 a Tunisian vegetable vendor set himself alight in protest at the economic policies of his country. The death of Mohamed Bouazizi would light the touch paper in Tunis and the surrounding Arab world which would see dictators toppled, wars break out and millions of people displaced in what would become known as the Arab Spring.
Many seasons have come and gone since then and Tunisia has gone on to hold its first free elections since the country’s independence in 1956. However the wider region remains in a state of severe unrest. Professor Richard Falk of Princeton University in the United States is an expert in the Middle East and has reported on the Israel-Palestine conflict for the United Nations. His new book – Chaos and Counterrevolution: The Arab Spring (Zed Books 2015) argues that the initial optimism of 2011 has been replaced by oppressive government or brutal civil war. He spoke to me from his home in Istanbul via Skype about the major topics in the book. With the Arab Spring representing a multitude of movements in several countries we focused on a several case studies – the uprising in Egypt, the civil war in Syria and the reaction in America.
The domino fall of authoritarian regimes in the region was greeted with optimism in both the West and the Middle East, however Professor Falk believes this was misplaced, no more so than in Egypt.
Prof Richard Falk: What seemed so exciting in 2011 and was recognised as the Arab Spring especially by the mainstream media always seemed to me to be a premature celebration. That these uprisings in the Arab world which were certainly unexpected and more formidable than could have been anticipated were still not very clear in their program or their understanding of the pre-conditions of a genuinely transformative politics. For instance in Egypt the most important country in relation to the Arab world, the notion that you could transform the Egyptian political scene merely by getting rid of the hated leaders and his immediate entourage and leaving the armed forces more or less in control of the state was a naive notion.
For real change to take root Falk believes that change must be wholesale and absolute. For inspiration he thinks the current movement should look back to 1979 and the Iranian revolution.
RF: What the Iranian revolution did achieve was a rupture with the political past which was associated with the Shah's government. But what was missing in the context of the Arab Spring is that you can't really have a rupture with the past unless you transform the bureaucracy that was operating in the in the past. In Egypt particularly with its strong political centralisation has a very strong bureaucracy and very centralised government structure. And, to depend as the uprising in Tahir square did depend on the good will of the military was a very precarious way to achieve a transition to a more inclusive and democratic political order, which was the goal of the Arab uprising.
Having not thought past the initial challenge to existing regimes the movements that make up the Arab Spring have found themselves struggling to control the vacuum left behind by the men they’ve displaced.
RF: There were two main scenarios depending on the particular conditions in each of the principal Arab countries which existed. One was the restoration of authoritarian rule the like of which existed during the Mubarak period. And then was re-established in even more severe form by the July 2013 coup led by General Sisi. The alternative was a period of protracted conflict and chaos epitomised by the situation that emerged in 2011 in Syria but then has subsequently to Lydia and Yemen.
The West initially championed the uprisings around the Arab world. With the movement in Egypt led by a new generation of activist, active on social media, the West hoped that the Arab Spring would usher in secular,
Most of the study of economics deals with commodity markets, where the price of a good connects sellers and buyers. But what about other kinds of “goods,” like a kidney or a surrogacy arrangement. This is the territory of matching markets, where “sellers” and “buyers” must choose each other, and where in most parts of the world, no money changes hands. So what is a matching market? And how does it work?
In this bookpod, Craig Barfoot talks to Nobel Laureate Alvin Roth, Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and 2016 president elect for of the American Economics Association about his book on matching markets, Who Gets What and Why. Professor Roth has made significant contributions to the fields of game theory, market design and experimental economics, and is known for his emphasis on applying economic theory to solutions for "real-world" problems.
This bookpod was first aired on Ideas Books where you will find a feast of fascinating podcast interviews by Craig Barfoot.
Podcast produced by Lee Millam
Slang. In this podcast Tony Thorne, former Head of the Language Centre, now Visiting Consultant, at King’s College, London and author of the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang, looks at what slang is, how it's used, where it comes from and what words are being used as part of our everyday language.
Slang should be easy to define, but in fact no one has ever come up with a satisfactory definition. Slang is one of the most informal varieties of language, it is usually new, controversial, exotic, often naughty and deviant (or pretends to be).
Probably all languages have had slang, but it was not recorded until the 18th century. It was marginal and taboo, the language of criminals, beggars and tramps.
It is a language that keep the outsiders out (parents, police etc) and using it makes you an insider, part of an exclusive elite. It is often developed in closed communities (prisons, public schools), and by private groups (taxi drivers, soldiers, sailors, criminals) but now that is not the main source of new slang - the internet has introduced something totally new - now most slang is developed by young people from 12 years of age. Words like
Dench - wonderful Moist - awful Dint - a stupid, embarrassing person CBA - can't be arsed Butters - unattractive
Some slang words have been around for over a hundred years, for example, 'cool', 'dosh', 'punk'. Whereas punk has changed its meaning over that time, cool and dosh have stayed roughly the same, which is unusual because mostly slang has to be reinvented to remain exclusive.
Social media have had two main impacts on slang. Firstly they have introduced new language to go with what people do with a medium, eg FaceBook - 'fraped', 'frenemy', and LOL and OMG. Secondly, social media have enabled slang to spread, indeed we do not know where in the Anglosphere some words have originated - was 'dint' first used in Australia, Canada, US, the Caribbean, UK?
Lots of parents and teachers are afraid it is damaging young people's ability to use standard language, but that is not the case, it is about speech communities who share a language. It does not usually undermine young people's language ability. Most young people are very good at 'code switching', they don't use slang in a job interview or essay, but they do use it in the club, in the street, in the school playground.
Slang is no longer taboo, it creeps into all the media - newspapers and magazines as well as online media. It is no longer forbidden, it is allowed in the home. And of course we no longer have those authority figures who in the past could proscribe the use of slang. Young people do not any longer listen to the police, the government or parents as a linguistic authority. They have their own domains in which to communicate. Saga has developed an app for the over 50s explaining sports slang to older people.
But old people can feel uncomfortable with all this - they feel they are losing control of language and language is, after all, what gives us our identity. There is a dictionary of 'granny slang' with words like 'galivanting' and 'bamboozling' - words that young people think are slang but are just colloquial expressions used by granny's generation!
There is no danger in slang as long as we talk about it and analyse it, and it is good to exchange examples of slang between the generations.
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Picture: Slang graffiti, Leake Street by Duncan C Music: Andreas DSP by Jonas and Good Enough by CuzOH
Did you know that jellyfish can sink boats, compromise fisheries by destroying captive breeding pens, and enter industrial sites that use seawater intake for cooling – including desalination plants, nuclear plants and nuclear aircraft carriers.
Yes, they have all fallen victim to jellyfish.
A poorly understood member of “the other 99%” as the invertebrates are known, jellyfish are simple creatures, floating, stinging, eating, and breeding en masse, in immense 'blooms', that can be 1,000km in length. Blooms occur worldwide and to some it seems they are becoming more prevalent, or perhaps they are now being monitored more closely.
A 'Bloom'
So....how big, how bad and why? Take a listen to this podcast to find out.
Michael Schubert talks with Lisa Gershwin.
This is our first podcast from Sound Minds a brand new podcast platform set up by three academic broadcasters from Australia, who met during a digital content diploma programme and were teamed up serendipitously for a project, which has now turned into a podcast series. We will certainly be featuring more of their great podcasts - watch this space!
FEATURED Current Oriented Swimming by Jellyfish Dr Lisa Gershwin
MUSIC Koop – Jellyfishes Deya Dova – Jellyfish
PICTURES
Main picture of jellyfish: Mark Morgan Jellyfish bloom by JR
Wilfred Bion (1897 – 1979) was an influential (if at times 'gnomic') psychoanalyst who spent much of his working life at the Tavistock clinic in London. He is perhaps best known for Experiences in Groups (London:Tavistock 1961), a key text in the emerging group psychotherapy and encounter group movements of the 1960s,and for Learning from Experience (1962)
Podcast produced and presented by Naomi Wynter-Vincent.
Naomi writes: The title of this podcast, Making the best of a bad job.' refers to an essay written by Wilfred Bion in his final year (in 1979, when he was 81. Both the essay and its title are classic Bion: wryly self-deprecating, yet devastating in its emotional impact, the essay describes the way that 'when two personalities meet, an emotional storm is created' and the way that psychotherapy can only ever aim to 'make the best of a bad job' by turning that storm between the two people in the room to good account. I chose it as a title not least as an ironic reference to the progress of my own PhD.
Naomi Wynter-Vincent is a PhD student at Sussex University, writing her thesis to demonstrate the many ways in which Bion's work can help us to think about writing. The writers she is looking at in detail include: JG Ballard, BS Johnson, Stevie Smith, Jean Rhys, Mary Butts, Sigmund Freud, and Nicholas Royle. As she says in the podcast, she thinks Bion is an interesting writer in his own right: he experiments with form and theory to 'dream' and 're-dream' the traumas of his own life, which include his experiences during the First World War.
Production: This podcast was first developed as part of the Critical Waves project at Birbeck, University of London, and aired on ResonanceFM. The male vocal part of Wilfred Bion is spoken by Dan Smith; thanks are due to him also for help with recording and sound engineering.'
"We know the jockey wants to win the race, and it is beguiling to imagine the horse knows what the challenge is, knows somehow the significance of the finishing post and therefore is a willing participant in this endeavour.
If you buy into that framework you can imagine the horse views the whip strikes purely as a form of encouragement. 'Thanks for the encouragement, I needed that....'" The use of the whip in horse racing is an issue. It is banned in some countries and there are regulations governing its use in others. It is widely used and as Dr Paul McGreevy explains in this podcast, it can be misused.
This is our second podcast on animal welfare and horse racing in collaboration with Knowing Animals, a podcast show from Australia which looks at academic research in the field of animal rights and animal welfare.
In this podcast, vet Dr. Paul McGreevy from the University of Sydney talks about his paper Whip use by jockeys in a sample of Australian thoroughbred races – an observational study ( authors: Paul D. McGreevy, Robert A. Corken, Hannah Salvin, Celeste M. Black PLOS ONE i2012) with Dr Siobhan O'Sullivan of Knowing Animals. He also explains his policy work trying to create policy change around the use of whips on racehorses in Australia.
The goal of the study was to explore the use of the whip in horse racing and to characterise the area struck and the visual impact of whip use at the level of the horse. Dr McGreevy and his colleagues measured the ways in which both padded and unpadded sections of the whip made impact. There was evidence of at least 28 examples, in 9 horses, of breaches of the whip rules (one seam contact, 13 contacts with the head, and 14 arm actions that rose above the height of the shoulder). The whip caused a visible indentation on 83% of impacts. The unpadded section of the whip made contact on 64% of impacts. The results call into question the ability of Stewards to effectively police the rules concerning whip use and, more importantly, challenge the notion that padding the distal section of whips completely safeguards horses from any possible whip-related pain.
Photo: Corinne
You may also be interested in our podcast on horse deaths in jump racing - another collaboration between Knowing Animals and Pod Academy
New Zealand is an important place for thoroughbred breeding and racing. Most races are on the flat, but jumps racing is conducted in the cooler months. At the 2013 National Jumps Day at Te Rapa, Hamilton, two horses were put down after bad falls over the jumps. In this conversation Dr Siobhan O'Sullivan of the podcast show, Knowing Animals talks to Professor Phil McManus of Sydney University about what happened that day and how these horse deaths were then represented on social media.
The discussion revolves around Prof McManus's recent paper, The construction of human–animal relations: National Jumps Day 2013 at Te Rapa, Hamilton, New Zealand (Phil McManus, Raewyn Graham and Karen Ruse, New Zealand Geographer Journal) which explores competing narratives of the horses' deaths that day at Te Rapa and demonstrates how animals, people, activities and places are constructed, including making animal deaths unrecognisable to perpetuate activities that are questioned by contemporary animal geographies
This podcast was first aired on Knowing Animals, a great podcast show which features conversations with animal studies scholars about animal welfare and animal rights, and in particular the construction of human–animal relations.
We will also be featuring a second podcast from Knowing Animals on the use of the whip in horse racing.
Picture by Paul
You may also be interested in our other podcast on animal welfare in horse racing - the use of the whip in horse racing - another collaboration with Knowing Animals.
Journalism is changing, and so is the way we consume journalism. On the eve of the 2015 Future of Journalism Conference, Tess Woodcraft talks to Angela Phillips, Professor of Journalism at Goldsmiths, University of London and author of Journalism in Context (Routhledge 2015) about how strong news journalism is crucial for informed citizenship, and how our increasing reliance on Facebook and YouTube for news may have serious implications for democracy.
Prof Angela Phillips: I’m interested in the way in which news journalism is changing, and in particular how news audiences are changing in relation to changes in the industry. So I have looked at audiences in my book, Journalism in Context, but I have also been looking at young news audiences in an international context to see how young people are accessing news.
Tess Woodcraft: What’s been happening in journalism?
AP: News journalism is changing and so is the way we consume it. Facebook is now a major source of news for young people.
TW: What are the implications?
AP: Since the rise of the internet, there have been big changes, not only in how journalism is produced, but how it is consumed. These two things are in lockstep. At the end of the last century and the beginning of this one, a lot of people were very enthusiastic about the kind of changes. They saw the internet as a means of democratising news. They saw audiences being much more involved in news production and they talked about journalism being less elitist, more involved with audiences, that journalism would become a much more collaborative process.
TW: To a certain extent that has happened, hasn’t it? For example, at Shoreham Airshow (August 2015) ordinary people’s videos of the air crash were all over the news.
AP: In very marginal ways this ‘pro-sumer’ revolution – the idea that the consumer also produces – has come to pass, but not in anything like the way those web enthusiasts imagined it would. What we have today is bystanders with cameras. Whereas before journalists would have gone and interviewed people about what they saw, and it would have been secondhand information, now if there is a big event like an aircrash or bombing, there will always be people in the vicinity who have camera phones and will very often put that information into social media where journalists can access it. But this does not make them journalists, they are still sources. And although all that information moves around – via Facebook, or Twitter or YouTube, for example – most of what happens is that it is curated by journalists who bring it together and construct a narrative around the information and repackage it in a different way. So it is not collaborative.
We are seeing journalists with more and more power than they used to have – the power to find their way into places where they never otherwise have managed to be. The likelihood of a journalist being in the right place at the right time when a bomb goes off are miniscule. So the difference is that we now have access (to pictures particularly) where we didn’t have access before, but it doesn’t really fundamentally change the job of journalist or the relationship between journalist and audience in any way.
Certainly if you are on social media and you are on social media and you are interested in news, the chances are that you’ll get some of this information via social media. But what is interesting to me is looking at who gets what information and just how democratic this process is. Because when you look at the overall statistics not very much has changed in any fundamental way. You still find the major traditional news sources – the biggest newspapers (NY Times, Daily Mail, The Guardian), the BBC and in America the major broadcasters are all in the top 10 of the rankings for what people are looking at.
So we are still seeing the same major titles being the major purveyors of news,
We have a lifetime's association with our bodies, but for many of us they remain uncharted territory. In Adventures in Human Being, Gavin Francis leads the reader on a journey through health and illness, offering insights on everything from the ribbed surface of the brain to the secret workings of the heart and the womb; from the pulse of life at the wrist to the unique engineering of the foot.
This podcast is produced and presented by Craig Barfoot, and first appeared on Ideas Books.
Drawing on his own experiences as a doctor and GP, Gavin Francis blends first-hand case studies with reflections on the way the body has been imagined and portrayed over the millennia. If the body is a foreign country, then to practise medicine is to explore new territory: Francis leads the reader on an adventure through what it means to be human.
Both a user's guide to the body and a celebration of its elegance, this book will transform the way you think about being alive, whether in sickness or in health.
Published in association with Wellcome Collection.
In this podcast Dr Sonja Schillings explores how the use of the Latin term Hostis Humani Generis (the enemy of all mankind), which was originally applied to pirates, now creates an extralegal space which is being used to legitimise the assassination of international terrorists all over the world.
This is just part of her forthcoming book, Hostis Humani Generis and the Narrative Construction of Legitimate Violence.
Podcast presented and produced by Tatiana Prorokova.
Tatiana Prorokova: Hello and welcome to Pod Academy. My name is Tatiana Prorokova and I am glad to have here Dr. Sonja Schillings to discuss her forthcoming book based on her dissertation titled Hostis Humani Generis and the Narrative Construction of Legitimate Violence.
Before we proceed, however, I’d like to say a couple of words about Dr. Schillings’ academic career. She wrote her dissertation at the graduate school of North-American Studies at Freie-Universität Berlin in Germany, where she also held a position of a substitute junior professor for North-American Literature in summer semester 2014. And since October 2014, she is a post-doctoral researcher at the International Graduate Center for the Study of Culture at Giessen University in Germany.
So, Sonja, in your dissertation, your main concern is the relationship between two criminal groups - pirates and terrorists. You argue that both have one thing in common and that is they can be characterized as Hostis Humani Generis.
Could you elaborate on that and maybe explain your choice of these particular groups?
Sonja Schillings: My basic concern is about Hostis Humani Generis. It is a legal term of arts, a Latin term, which means “enemy of all human kind”,. It is, quite generally, a legal fiction that is assigned to perpetrators who are considered not just enemies but enemies of the law, of the normative order. They are enemies so hostile and so extreme that you can commit legitimate violence against them, just because you commit it against them. And it’s a term that was traditionally, in legal history, equivalent or synonymous with the crime of piracy. And “the enemy of all” means that everybody, without distinction, is being attacked by them. This is why violence against them is said to be representative of the entire human race. Or rather it’s claimed to be. The claims I look at are only ever in text. So much for that.
So, pirates and terrorists. As I’ve been saying, Hostis Humani Generis was originally designated to describe pirates only, until the early nineteenth century when Hostis Humani Generis and the crime of piracy separated and Hostis Humani Generis was also used to describe slave traders – international slave traders. And then later, in the twentieth century, it was also used about perpetrators of crimes against humanity - the torturer is the most established example here.
And now, what we see since the 1980s, is the political initiative to describe international terrorists as pirates. It is this link that originally spurred my interest in the topic of Hostis Humani Generis because other than the fiction itself, other than , the legal description of Hostis Humani Generis, and other than the characterization of what they do to society (i.e. the orders they attack), pirates and terrorists have very little in common. Even so, they were constantly combined or associated with each other, despite the grave reservations of the entire maritime securities community. This is what the “pirate-terrorist nexus” refers to.
T.P: So, you provide a brief historical overview of this “pirates-terrorists nexus”. But can you actually spot any difference between pirates and terrorists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Was there any shift after 2000/2001?
S.S.: Well, yes and no. There was certainly a shift of it being more do-able – first of all that. And, second of all, you suddenly had Somali pirates, which is why maritime security became seen as piracy - mariti...
This podcast is about how a group of women campaigners and academics worked together and achieved a change in the law - making the possession of rape pornography illegal.
It features author and former barrister Elizabeth Woodcraft in conversation with Professor Erica Rackley, University of Birmingham, Dr Fiona Vera Gray of Rape Crisis South London and Sarah Green Acting Director & Campaigns Manager of End Violence Against Women Campaign (EVAW).
Rape pornography has been widely available, including on free porn sites, in the UK - ensuring that boys and men can freely access porn that eroticises rape and violence against women. In 2006 the government began a consultation process to see whether the laws on pornography should be updated to reflect the growth of pornography via the internet. This resulted in legislation in 2008 which outlawed some 'extreme' pornography, but excluded images of rape.
The Scottish Parliament however, enacted separate legislation, which did include rape pornography.
So, in England and Wales, though not in Scotland, websites with domain names such as 'Brutal Rape', 'Cruel Rape' were still lawful in 2012, when a number of women's organisations working with women who have been the victims of sexual violence were appalled to discover the ubiquity of these sites. And shocked to find that they were not illegal.
Feminist academics, too, had for some time been concerned at the framing of the legislation in England and Wales and that the concept of 'harm' was absent.
The two groups came together in 2012 and launched a high profile campaign for a change in the law. This podcast explores how they went about it.
The Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015 which makes illegal the possession of extreme pornography showing images depicting rape, came into force on 13 April 2015.
In the ‘old game’, the analogue world of centralised knowledge institutions, knowledge was power. But now that knowledge is everywhere, the rules of the game have changed.
In his essay “Digital tailspin: 10 rules for the internet after Snowden” writer and activist Michael Seemann (@mspro) examines how we’ve lost our ability to control the way information is spread online.
Discussing everything from flashmobs to whistle-blowers, twitter to email encryption. Michael takes us from the ‘old game’ into the ‘new game’ – where information is no longer easily controlled.
Anyone who has been the victim of revenge porn, or found themselves the star of a viral video is acutely aware of how helpless we are to fight the spread of information in the ‘new game’.
What’s more, with sites like Wikileaks even governments and large corporations have found themselves similarly powerless.
In his essay, Michael calls this idea the ‘kontrolverlust’ (‘loss of control’ – German) or ‘digital tailspin’, and lays out ten strategies for how to deal with it, including:
You can’t fight the digital tailspin Knowledge is asking the right questions You are the freedom of the other Data control creates hegemony
How we – users, scholars, journalists or politicians – understand the digital tailspin can alter how we interpret and ultimately use the internet. In effect our understanding ends up shaping governmental and institutional policies, crafting our social interactions and creating a wide range of networked based phenomena.
In this podcast Michael Seemann and Adriene Lilly discuss the significance of the Kontrolverlust; some of the factors causing the loss of control; the role of social media platforms in policing our online interactions; and how to be hospitable online.
One key part of their conversation centres on privacy – how the concept of privacy has been fundamentally altered. As Michael says, we used to have walls and distances – in the ‘old game’ privacy was not just a right, it was the default setting. It took a lot of effort to bring information to someone outside the room in which you were speaking. Now things have changed dramatically and it is the other way around - you have to make a great effort NOT to distribute information all over the world.
We have to understand the new order, he says, assume it. We have to adapt to the new situation, but not surrender to it. Traditional institutions and concepts of freedom are threatened by the digital tailspin. But that doesn’t mean we are lost. A new game emerges, where a different set of rules applies.
Photo: Olivia Bennett
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Michael Seemann is a cultural theorist based in Berlin. He blogs and hosts a German language podcast on digital policy (in German) which can be found online at mspr0.de. The Digital Tailspin can be accessed and downloaded (in English) for free at the Institute of Network Cultures.
You may also be interested to know about Netzpolitik,one of the voices in Germany on privacy and internet policy – demonstrations have been in held in Germany in solidarity with two of it’s journalists who are under investigation for a piece they published. A detailed article on the journalists under investigation can be found at The Intercept. Here is an RT post about the demonstrations that have taken place July/August 2015.
14th January 1795 ANN HAWKINS was indicted for feloniously stealing, on the 7th of January , a feather bed, value 20s. a flock and feather bolster, value 10d. two woollen blankets, value 3s. a linen sheet, value 2s. a linen counterpane, value 12d. a looking glass in a walnut-tree frame, value 4s. a pair of tongs, value 6d. a brass candlestick, value 6d. a wooden pail, value 6d. and a tin kettle, value 4d. the goods of Thomas Norwood , in a lodging room .
How can we discover whether it was changing tastes and fashion that drove consumption during the industrial revolution or if it was falling prices (as goods were increasingly mass produced)?
One place we can look for evidence is the court reports of the time.
The records of the Old Bailey give a good idea of what ordinary people owned, because they record what was stolen!
In this podcast Dr Sara Horrell, Senior Lecturer in the Economics Department of Cambridge University, and Fellow of Murray Edwards College, discusses with Scarlett MccGwire how she and her colleagues, Jane Humphries and Ken Sneath, unravelled the consumption conundrums of the industrial revolution(Consumption Conundrums Unravelled, History Review Dec 2014) by looking at the Old Bailey records, which are now online.
We know that during the period of the industrial revolution (the late 18th and early 19th centuries) ordinary people owned and consumed more - coffee, tea, nice china, for example. And many historians have asked whether people were willing to work harder and longer to purchase these goods because they were fashionable, or whether it was just the fact that with mass production they got a lot more affordable.
However, since ordinary people rarely appear in the historical record, it has been difficult to trace their acquisitions and consumption.
So the researchers turned to look at the Old Bailey records to discover the trends. Specifically, they looked at thefts – what was being stolen, what did people have in their houses that thieves wanted to steal?
And fashions are there in the data – clothing , for example, accounts for about half the thefts. Sleeves and buckles, appear in the earlier records, but they stop being stolen as they go out of fashion, - then it is underwear and umbrellas which begin to be stolen. Clearly it was easy to sell on fashionable items, and some thieves were even apprehended wearing the fashionable items themselves.
Thieves stole anything and everything – sometimes whole houses were ransacked – large heavy good like mirrors and beds, as well as smaller items linen, clothing etc are to be found in the court records.
Sara and her colleagues looked at things that, over time, moved down the social scale, such as watches which became cheaper with the advent of silver plating.
Table linen was taken, because there was a good resale market, and as time wore on, more of such items were taken from those down the social scale – but at the same time the goods stolen from richer people became better quality (eg damask). The rich are differentiating what they own, it is elite consumption.
Stockings are a good example – they were often stolen – initially the rich had silk stockings, and worsted stockings were worn by poorer people. Then cotton stockings became fashionable (as cotton began to be imported), and they were bought by everyone, i.e. we see the democratisation of fashion. However, differentiation remains important and the rich continue to be the only people with silk stockings , which become even more expensive.
The Old Bailey records reflect consumption in London - but Is it only London where we see these trends? The metropolis is the centre of consumption,people are wealthier. However, fashion trends usually move from the metropolis to the regions and he researchers believe that the records can be seen as representative of the country as a whole.
At the time, the victim of a theft had to get hold of the perpetrator to t...
"Current economic orthodoxy", says Christian Felber, "confuses means and ends. It says we should strive for the accumulation and maximisation of money and capital, but they are the means, not the ends......The end is the common good."
He proposes a new approach to economics, putting the system on a new course. Key to this new economy is moving from evaluating the 'means' to assessing the 'goals', and grounding them in shared values. It means redefining economic success. Indeed, one of the main objectives of his work is to demonstrate that there are alternatives to the current economic order.
Listing the values of the common good as human dignity, solidarity, social justice, ecological sustainability, democracy and freedom, he points out that many democratic consitutitions already contain a commitment to these values, but goals are not based on them.
These ideas are set down in his book, Change Everything: Creating an Economy for the Common Good (2015, Zed Books). Felber is magister philosopiae, Vienna and Madrid Universities, but this is not just an academic treatise, it has spawned a movement in Europe and Latin America, with local chapters taking action on a community level.
And as part of this movement there are already hundreds of companies, local governments and educational institutions striving to live by the new common good indicators, asking themselves if their products/services satisfy human needs? do they have humane working conditions? are their sales activities ethical?
Creating an economy for the common good will require a greater engagement from citizens than is expected in a representative democracy - there will be lengthy consultations and a demand to get involved in public interest companies, but Christian Felber insists there will be plenty of time to get on with your life.
So is this a utopian dream? Listen and make up your mind.
"We are developing the discipline of feminist legal history, which scarcely even exists in this country...Feminist history asks a different set of questions." (Rosemary Auchmuty) In this podcast about the Women's Legal Landmarks project, author and barrister Elizabeth Woodcraft talks to Professor Rosemary Auchmuty of Reading University's School of Law and Professor Erika Rackley of Birmingham Law School.at the very start of the project. Their conversation ranges over the aims and methodology of the work, some of the landmarks they will be exploring and, importantly, their aspirations for the project.
2019 marks the centenary of women’s formal admission into the legal profession.This was a key legal landmark for women but, of course, it was not first. Feminists have a long history of engaging with law and law reform with the result that women’s legal history is full of landmarks – key events, cases and statutes – shaping and responding to women’s lives and (diverse) experiences.
To commemorate the centenary of women’s admission into the profession, this project aims to bring together interested feminist scholars to engage in the process of identifying and writing about key legal landmarks for women. It will not be accounts of the 'usual suspects' - not, for example, the Equal Pay Act - but rather the Ford Dagenham women workers' strike that was so important in the development of the legislation.
This discussion ranges across time and place - Scotland, Wales, Ireland and England. Importantly, it points to the campaigning that underpins all of these landmarks - from the campaigns for animal cruelty legislation in which women campaigners played a central part (because of the fashion for ostrich plumes in hats), and anti-slavery campaigns to recent campaigns for women on banknotes, and from the totally different style of campaigning by the women of Greenham Common to recent successful campaigns against rape pornography.
This is early days for the Women's Legal Landmarks project it is estimated to be a two-year project (2015-2017) - there has just been a call for papers, and the first workshops have been held. So over the next few years, Pod Academy will keep you posted on progress. In the meantime, do get in touch with the project , they are keen to hear from women and men who want to celebrate women's legal history. and to encourage the development of a network of feminist scholars and activists.
The collected landmarks (each essay between 1000-6,000 words) will be published in an edited collection, accompanied by an extract of the relevant primary material, photograph or other source. In addition, there will be a website in the form of an online exhibition with further links to primary sources.
Photo: Craftivist Collective
If you have enjoyed this podcast, you may also be interested in two of our other podcasts about women and the law.
Being a Feminist Barrister Feminism and the Law
Podcast produced and presented by Craig Barfoot Cloning extinct species - such as woolly mammoths - presents massive ethical as well as practical challenges. And at the moment there is no legal oversight of the issues.
Beth Shapiro, author of How to Clone a Mammoth explores the complexities - both ethical and scientific - in this interview with Craig Barfoot.
We may get excited by the idea of cloning dinosaurs (not possible as dinosaur DNA has long since turned to stone) or woolly mammoths (so far only 9 of the hundreds of genes needed have been identified), but why would we do it? The ethics of creating a creature, only to put it on display in a zoo, are surely questionable.
And genes are only half the story. Environment is also a key part of species development - and we cannot re-create the environment (herd, terraine etc) of a mammoth.
This is a fascinating and eye-opening podcast. Listen and share it.
There's a little red-faced man, Which is Bobs, Rides the tallest 'orse 'e can- Our Bobs. If it bucks or kicks or rears, 'E can sit for twenty years With a smile round both 'is ears- Can't yer, Bobs? That is the ditty British troops would recite about Field Marshall Lord Roberts (1832-1914) veteran of the Boer War and the 19th century wars in Afghanistan. In this podcast, produced by Love Archaeology for Pod Academy, Tom Horne and Terence Christian explore the life of Lord Roberts whose statue in Kelvingrove, Glasgow has been restored recently. They talk to his biographer, Dr. Rodney Atwood (The Life of Field Marshall Lord Roberts) and then take a walk in the rain to Kelvingrove to see the statue.
Popularly known as ‘Bobs,’ Roberts was born in 1832 and died on the Western Front in 1914. Roberts won the Victoria Cross, as his son would go on to do, in the Boer War in South Africa. He’d also be involved in the strategic defence of India. As a course of this, he campaigned successfully in Afghanistan. Later on he also saved the British army from disaster in South Africa before going on to introduce army reform and campaigning for national service. He was one of the few who recognised that Imperial Germany was going to be a threat to European and world peace.
Before and after his death, Field Marshal Lord Roberts was honoured with memorials in Glasgow, Kolkata, and London and also, during his life, he was immortalised in poetry by none other than Rudyard Kipling. Also, being very much aware of the power of the press and the necessity to craft one’s own image, he published an autobiography entitled Forty-One Years in India. When he died visiting the troops in France in 1914, he lay in state in Westminster Hall – joining Winston Churchill as the only other non-Royal to have this honour bestowed upon them in the 20th century. Thereafter, he was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral in a ceremony that can only be likened to that of Lord Nelson a hundred years before.
So who is this Lord Roberts, the person behind poems, and memorials throughout the length of the former British Empire? And why is a figure who was buried by his King alongside the bodies of Wellington and Nelson been neglected in recent years? This is a darkness and light story of empire, fame, notoriety, and charity. From hanging 'traitors' in Afghanistan and using scorched earth tactics and even concentration camps during the Boer War in South Africa to his family providing charity and opportunity for wounded veterans, Roberts—once paralleled with the Duke of Wellington himself—remains a compelling, if problematic, figure who won incredible victories including a famous march from Kandahar, foresaw the Great War with Imperial Germany, carefully crafted his own legend in pursuit of recognition at home, and even interacted with figures as well known as Rudyard Kipling and Lord Kitchener with whom he served in the Boer War.
Lord Roberts became our subject of long-term interest due to the proximity of his Glasgow statue. For many years, Lord Roberts’ state stood, nestled in a grove of trees, outside my house. I would walk by him each day on my way to and from the Glasgow University Archaeology Department. His prominence and anonymity—he seems to have every honour available and fought in every 19th century colonial war but without any sort of modern name recognition—made us wonder: “Who was this man of past importance?” The conservation of his statue by Nicholas Boyes Stone Conservation and Glasgow City Council in 2014/2015 made us even more curious.
In researching Field Marshall Lord Roberts’ incredible and varied life—which reads as though it is a “Boys’ Own” adventure—we met his biographer, Dr. Rodney Atwood. Dr. Atwood kindly spoke to us about Lord Roberts.
After the interview, stay with us and we will walk down to Lord Roberts’ statue and discuss its aesthetics and place in the Kelvingrove Park landscape.
Dr.
There is growing concern about the widening gap between rich and poor. The 99% and the 1% are much written and talked about, not just by campaigners, but even by the Managing Director of the IMF. However, people rarely talk about solutions – it is as if there are at work natural forces that are beyond human control.
Not so, says Sir Tony Atkinson Fellow of Nuffield College and Centenial Prof at LSE, and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, 'The world faces great problems but collectively we are not at the mercy of forces outside our control, the future is very much in our hands’. The economy is about political and economic choices and the means to reduce inequality are within our grasp.. In this interview with Fran Bennett, Senior Research and Teaching Fellow in the Dept of Social Policy and Intervention at the University of Oxford, he challenges academics and politicians to rethink the economy
Tony Atkinson, who has been dubbed the ‘Godfather of inequality economics’ by Brian Nolan and Fran Bennett met up at the Oxford Martin School to talk about his recently published book, Inequality: What Can Be Done? .
Inequality matters, he says because it spills over into all parts of our lives – huge wealth can control politics and the media, inequality can affect the stability of the world economy, and at home even equality of opportunity cannot be guaranteed when you have such large disparities of income and wealth.
Fran Bennett and Tony Atkinson explore his radical solutions including higher taxation (in the UK we have been under-taxing ourselves for 20-30 years, he says, and unless we cut back on public services very radically indeed we will need to raise taxes to ensure fiscal sustainability), higher child benefit, to be seen as the right of the child, and a citizen’s participation income. He revives the discussion around contributory benefits, suggesting insurance based benefits could be a way to square the circle of public concern about social security benefits.
Importantly he also raises the spector of the way technology is in danger of increasing disparities of wealth, by reducing the number of jobs and concentrating power and wealth in the hands of those with the capital to introduce the technology – his example of meals on wheels delivered by drones is only partly humorous- illustrating as it does the implications of technological choices for jobs and human contact. As he says, 'The way technology evolves reflects decisions, and economic forces and these forces are not derived from outer space but by companies and governments.” Prof Atkinson goes on to note, with some concern, the fact that there was very little discussion about inequality in the recent UK general election (he monitored media reports), and points out that equality appears to be a greater issue for the European Union than the UK government.
With special thanks to the team at Oxford Martin School for this recording.
Pic by Mseattle
Drones are widely used in the 'war on terror'. Unmanned airplanes with hellfire missiles on board, controlled from another country, they kill from the sky.
Drones and drone warfare are highly controversial - on ethical, legal and utilitarian grounds - as Andrew Cockburn explains in this conversation with Craig Barfoot about his latest book Kill Chain. Cockburn is an assiduous investigator and delivers a trenchant critique of the people he call the 'High Tech Assassins'.
Picture: Peace Quilt
There is well documented evidence that if you change how a stammerer hears they way they are speaking, they will stammer less. Using this finding, 10 years ago saw the introduction of new devices (especially in-ear devices) that purported to help people stop stammering. But these fluency aids have not lived up to early promise- indeed many people who were thought to be 'cured' have found their stammer is back, as marked as before.
Now Oliver Cheadle has been conducting new research at UCL, this time using vibration, through the skin, rather than sound. He discusses his findings with Lee Millam in this podcast.
Oli used a vibrotactile device. On average, the device reduced stuttering by 22%, but the average figure masks massive variation.
Vibrotactile speech feedback significantly reduced stuttering, albeit much less so than in previous studies (an average 22% reduction in stuttering as compared to an average 71-80% reduction in earlier studies). The different types of vibrotactile speech feedback used (i.e. different placements on the body, different amplitudes, different delays) did not significantly affect how much it reduced stuttering. There was a lot of variation between participants - one participant experienced a 60% reduction in stuttering under vibrotactile speech feedback while another experienced a 39% increase.
There was no carry-over - when the vibration was switched off, the person stuttered as usual.
Drawn to this area of research from his own personal circumstances, Oli's conclusion is that some people will find the device useful for specific situations (perhaps when having to give a presentation), and it can be worn discreetly, at low vibration levels.
However, he counsels against miracle cures and suggests instead that the best course of action for people who stammer is to do therapy that focuses on accepting stammering; accepting that you are a person who stammers - but it is not the most important thing about you.
Picture: Art made by sound vibrations by Jennicatpink Music from www.freemusicarchive.org
Project 5am - The Dream Lucky Dragons - Open Melody
Some background information on Stammering Stammering – or stuttering – is a relatively common speech problem in childhood but can also persist into adulthood. Stammering is characterised by:
the repetition of sounds or syllables – such as saying ‘mu-mu-mu-mummy’ prolonging sounds – for example 'mmmmmmummy' pausing or 'blocking' – when a word gets stuck or doesn't come out at all
It usually occurs at the beginning of speech, and people will often avoid certain words or speaking situations to try to hide it. Stammering varies in severity from person to person. A person might find that they have periods of stammering followed by times when they speak relatively fluently. Read more about the signs of stammering. Types of stammering There are two main types of stammer:
Developmental stammering is the most common type of stammering that many people are familiar with. It develops during childhood as a child is first learning how to speak. Acquired or late-onset stammering can occur in older children and adults as the result of a severe head injury, stroke or a progressive neurological disease (disease affecting the nervous system). It can also be caused by certain drugs or medication, or psychological or emotional trauma.
What causes stammering? The exact cause of developmental stammering is still unclear, although it is largely thought to be the result of the parts of the brain involved in speech being 'wired' differently.
Studies have shown differences in the structure and functioning of the brain of people who stammer compared with most other people.
In young children, the wiring of the brain is still developing, which may be why many children eventually 'grow out' of stammering and why it is usually easier to treat children while they are still young.
With the increasing frequency, complexity and sophistication of cyber attacks - such as Stuxnet, the Sony Hack - how is attribution done?
This podcast is an interview with Ben Buchanan about a paper he recently published with Thomas Rid, Professor of Security Studies at Kings College, London on Attributing Cyber Attacks The paper can be found in the Journal of Strategic Studies. Additional information about the various reports mentioned in the podcast are linked throughout the transcript.
This podcast was produced and is hosted by Adriene Lilly.
Adriene Lilly: With the increasing frequency of cyber attacks in the media I think it's worth taking a few minutes to try and understand how attribution is done - how do we find out who is doing it, why, how, and where from. What exactly is attribution in the cyber context, why do we try to attribute attacks? How is it different than it's offline equivalent in criminal investigations? Where does data and forensic evidence come from? And who – be it the government or private companies – is actually involved in the process of attribution? Today I'm talking to Ben Buchanan....
Ben Buchanan: good to be with you Adriene. So I'm Ben Buchanan, I'm a PHD Candidate at Kings College London.
AL: He's recently published a paper with Thomas Rid in the Journal of Strategic Studies called “Attributing Cyber Attacks” their paper attempts to get to the essence of attribution in cyber crime and sets up a model that they hope can help streamline the process. Before we begin though, there are a number of major cyber attacks that have popped up in the media over the past couple of years. So just in case you're like me and may need a refresher, let's start with a few of those stories. Let's begin back in 2010 with the discovery of Stuxnet. Stuxnet was a piece of malware – or malicious software – that is generally cited as being one of the most if not they most sophisticated computer viruses to date. And while no one has officially taken credit for it, best guesses it's a product of the US and Israeli governments. The software was specifically designed to target a uranium enrichment facility in Iran by subtly changing how some of the mechanical structures in the facility operated. Specifically the spinning speed of a number of centrifuges. Stuxnet was designed to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program. It's significant for a number of reasons, but the one that I want to emphasize here is the complexity and sophistication of the operation.. here's Ben..
AL: Ok, now your brought up the centrifuges in Iran so I'm assuming you're talking about Stuxnet..
BB: Sure, so Stuxnet was a long cyber operation against Iranian centrifuges that by some reports involved building a replica of the Iranian nuclear facility and testing the code against this model before it was deployed against Iran. That's an operation that probably cost hundreds of millions of dollars when you consider all the physical expenses. It's believed to have been conduced by the US, likely working in partnership with Israel, and it had the effect of manipulating the centrifuges in a number of ways over a number of years in an attempt to slow down the Iranian nuclear program.
AL: Who discovered it and who did it?
BB: So the tech side of the operation was discovered by researches who were alerted when a computer in Iran kept restarting for unknown reasons. They looked in the code and they discovered that it was what looked like a cyber weapon against the Iranian nuclear facility. People immediately assumed, or guessed, that it was the US or Israel but there was no concrete proof for quite awhile. And in that case, what is today the most credible attribution of the Stuxnet attack came from a reporter, came from David Sanger at the New York Times who working inside the beltway of sources found out that it was in fact likely a US or Israeli operation and then further reporting seems to indicate that's the case,
The late Stuart Hall said cultural studies, within a Marxist tradition, enables us "to understand culture - cultural discourse - the place and relationship of the ideological."
In this podcast, which is part of our Marxism in the 21st Century series, Steve Edwards, Professor of History of Art at the Open University talks to Kieron Yates about Marxism and Culture. They explore how Marxism can be seen as a profoundly aesthetic philosophy, with many of its central categories coming from thinking about art and aesthetics, the organisation of sensibility......
VOICE: STUART HALL: It's not that Marxism is not around but that the kind of conversation which Cultural Studies conducted with … against some aspects of … around the questions… expanding a Marxist tradition of critical thinking... that is absent and that is a real weakness. I think important gains were made which enable us to understand culture... cultural discourse… the place and relationship of the ideological. So I think a lot of ground was covered... kind of conceptual ground was covered which could go to enrich the position provided the basic conversation is re-engaged but if it's not re-engaged then that interim period... you know ... Cultural Studies lost its way and will find it again.
Kieron Yates: Hello and welcome to Pod Academy. You just heard the late Stuart Hall with an assessment of the status of Marxism in Cultural Studies he gave to the academic Sut Jhally in 2012.
In this edition of Pod Academy I speak to Steve Edwards - Professor of History of Art at the Open University - about the development of culture studies in Britain out of particular Marxist traditions and ask if more recently Marxism has been able to reassert the relevance. I began by asking what Marx and Engels themselves had to say about cultural phenomena.
Steve Edwards: Its patchy to start with. I think there are two things to say about that… they were very educated men of there time, with very extensive literary tastes in the high culture of particularly Europe… very well read. I don't think that there is any point where they... there is no extensive development in the ideas of Marx and Engels. Marx did originally plan to write an aesthetic he never did so ... he wrote poetry as a young man... Engels wrote some kind of ... there are occasional pieces... largely on literature but I think beyond that what's important about what they did is to recognise that in some senses Marxism is a profoundly aesthetic philosophy... that so many of its central categories come from thinking about art and aesthetics… the organisation of sensibility. So the whole debate for instance on alienation on the alienation of labour ... the debate about fetishism...the whole sense about a kind of future society which will overcome the divisions between mental and manual ... that will heal the rifts of class; these are fundamentally aesthetic categories. So I think, more than just thinking about what they explicitly wrote about art or literature, what's important is to think about how the discussions and thinking, particularly in German idealist philosophy, about art entered fundamentally into shaping their view of the world.
KY: Marx and Engels can be seen as part of a tradition of social criticism that was taking place in the Nineteeth century that encompassed thinkers and writers on aestheticism such as Ruskin, Carlyle, Arnold and Dickens. At times intensely conservative, romantic in sensibility and anti-modern, this aesthetic critique of capitalism also found a more progressive voice in William Morris.
SE: There's a separate trajectory there, which is there's a kind of tradition of British social criticism that's very centred on art in the 19th century. One might think about Ruskin, about Carlyle, about Dickens and Arnold. These are figures that fundamentally reject capitalism... they reject the new kind of modernity.
These days many of us check out TripAdvisor if we are booking a hotel. We want to see what people like us think of the service, the staff, the food, the pool.......
It's a great idea for bed and breakfast, but is the TripAdvisor approach, where consumers are encouraged to give their unvarnished views, the right approach for Fertility Clinics, where life changing decisions are being made?
The UK's Human Fertility and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has decided to give more prominence to patient views and an event, A Trip Advisor for Fertility Clinics - Would You Recommend It? was held at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in London's Regent's Park last month (April 2015) organised by Progress Educational Trust and sponsored by the British Fertility Society, to look at how best to do so.
The HFEA's plans are consistent with an emphasis on patient choice and patient empowerment in recent health policy. Since 2007, for example, the NHS Choices website has published patient feedback on NHS hospitals and services, in the form of both star ratings and free text. Last year the National Information Board, of which the HFEA is a member, issued proposals which take this approach further.
But such an approach is contentious. TripAdvisor has attracted controversy, with critics questioning its ability to vouch for the honesty and reliability of customer reviews. And since more than half of all fertility treatment in the UK is carried out in the private sector, people writing and reading feedback may be customers as well as patients.
So clinicians, patients, companies and representatives of patients' organisations gathered at the event to explore the issues. All agreed. that the patient view is very important, and must be reflected, along with metrics such as success rates and inspection reports. Patients want to see what other patients are saying.
But there was also concern expressed that a small numbers of responses could give a misleading impression, that clinics with active public relations staff could ensure good feedback, and that untried and unproven treatments, such as homeopathy, might get the thumbs up from patients despite having no rigorous evidence base.
Speakers were:
Juliet Tizzard, Director of Strategy and Corporate Affairs at the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority Dr Yacoub Khalaf, Member of the the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, and Director and Person Responsible of Guy's Hospital's Assisted Conception Unit Susan Seenan, Chief Executive of Infertility Network UK, and Co-Chair of Fertility Fairness Antonia Foster, Senior Associate at solicitors, Carter-Ruck
The event was chaired by Professor Adam Balen, Chair of the British Fertility Society, and Consultant in Reproductive Medicine and Surgery at the Leeds Centre for Reproductive Medicine
This is a recording of the event.
Photo by Mehmet Pinarci
Is it possible to describe the origins of the universe, dark matter, planets, alien worlds, particle physics, galaxies and telescopes in just 1000 words? Yes, says astrophysicist, Dr Roberto Trotta in this interview with Craig Barfoot.
Roberto Trotta, Senior Lecturer in Astrophysics at Imperial College, University of London has written The Edge of the Sky, a tale of the great discoveries and outstanding mysteries in modern cosmology, all in the 1000 most common words in the English language, and in the process has created an entrancing and lyrical account of the wonders of the universe.
Through the eyes of a female scientist (student-woman) looking for dark matter in far-away galaxies (Star-Crowds) with one of the biggest telescopes (Big-Seers) on Earth (Home-World), Dr Trotta explains what we have learnt about the universe (All-There-Is) and our place in it.
Photo of Night Sky in Grand Canyon National Park, by Grand Canyon National Park
First published in 1983, Lise Vogel's seminal work, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Towards a Unitary Theory, was seized on by a generation of feminists who called themselves Marxist feminists, but were finding the fragmentation of socialism and feminism difficult to navigate. Now republished, it was launched (or, rather, re-launched) at the Historical Materialism Conference in London in late 2014. Pod Academy was at the launch, and recorded the platform speakers:
Lise Vogel, Professor (retired) of Sociology at Rider University and the author of numerous books and articles. Before becoming a sociologist, she had an earlier career in art history. Dr. Tithi Battacharya. associate professor at Purdue Liberal Arts University in the US, Kate Davison, of Melbourne University Dr Sue Ferguson, Associate Professor of Digital Media and Journalism at the Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, who co-wrote, with David McNally, the introduction to the new edition of the book.
This bookpod has been made possible by a grant from the Amiel Melburn Trust
You may also be interested in our recording of the Beyond the Fragments event held in London in 2013.
Podcast produced and presented by Craig Barfoot The past 25 years have witnessed the most rapid economic and social development the world has ever seen.
In our increasingly globalised world, if something happens in one place, the aftershocks move quickly around the globe. Globalisation creates systemic risks.
Professor Ian Goldin,Director of the Oxford Martin School, University ofOxford. and author, with Mike Mariathasan, of The Butterfly Defect: How globalization creates systemic risks, and what to do about It talks to Craig Barfoot about the joys and perils of gloabalisation.
By any measure – life expectancy, nutrition, infant mortality, income – we see improvements. But the unintended consequences of hyper globalisation such as microbial resistance, obesity, water shortages, climate change, as well as the threats from hyper complexity and integration - growing inequality, cyber attack, terrorist attack, pandemics and financial crises suggest that the gap between the world’s ability to control its affairs, and what is happening on the ground, is widening.
If we look backwards at globalisation, the glass if half full – there has been significant progress. But if we look forward 25 years and ask is this progress likely to be sustained, the answer is probably not, it is essential that we learn to manage globalisation and the systemic risks it poses.
A systemic risk is one that cascades across sectoral boundaries – it is not confined to an industrial or commercial sector, or a country. The 2008 financial crisis was the first systemic risk, it started with the banking industry, but crossed industrial boundaries, flattening industries and putting people out of work, and it fanned out across national borders.
The financial crisis should be seen as a wake up call. We need to learn from the financial crisis, put in place the necessary reforms. But the lessons have not been learned and it is likely that there will be another financial crisis.
The Butterfly Defect looks in detail at the financial crisis, but transposes some of the lessons to potential crises involving pandemics, infrastructure, supply chains, ecology, environment and business systems.
The question is, how do we manage complexity and prevent our hyper connected systems leading to contagion and risk? How, for example, do we ensure that airports are places for conveying people and prevent them becoming places that convey pandemics?
Part of the answer lies in understanding the nature of the risks we face. For example, we must ensure that no place, as well as no industry, is too big to fail. Much risk has become geographically concentrated (eg servers in Nevada, banks in Wall Street).
It is also crucial that our international institutions are up to the challenges posed by globalisation – the World Health Organisation, the World Bank, the United Nations, for example. At present they are not.
Ian Goldin also discusses the paradox of the rise of nationalism in this increasingly globalised world. Many people feel that the world is out of control and respond by trying to put up walls (trade protectionism, anti immigration laws, referenda for leaving the EU ) and go back to an imagined, safer past.
This is Professor Goldin's second podcast for Pod Academy. See also Divided Nations: global challenges, global governance
Photo by Lars Plougman
Jo Barratt talks to architect, designer and inventor, Alistair Parvin in this latest podcast from Civic Radio.
Alistair Parvin says it is easier to capture what a citizen is not, than what a citizen is, and notes the language of ‘customers’ and ‘consumers’ that has been increasingly employed as public services have been privatised.
But he points to the growing movement of those who are reframing ‘democracy’ (so that it isn't just about registering a vote every few years) and challenging how public services are provided. He suggests that new technology enables a true revolution – in which we move away from centralised civic structures, towards a world in which community planning and construction is done by citizens rather than to citizens. Where architects are not just working for the rich and for huge construction companies, but supporting more people have more power over their environment.
This is not just a theoretical position. Alistair is part of Zero Zero, a company that encourages and coordinates the development of Open Source architecture blueprints of houses, (the WikiHouse) that can be downloaded free of charge, and made, in kit form, with 3D printing. The kit can then be constructed by those with no traditional construction skills, in a matter of days.
Scale model of Wikihouse in New Zealand pic by Martin Luff
You can also see Alistair Parvin's Ted Talk here.
Child and family therapist Dr Marilyn Wedge talks to Craig Barfoot about her latest book, A Disease Called Childhood: Why ADHD Became an American Epidemic.
Over the course of her career as a child and family therapist, Marilyn Wedge has witnessed an 'astronomical rise' in the number of children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Until 1995 she had hardly heard of ADHD, but over the following decades the number of children on medication for ADHD grew and grew until now 13% of boys and 5% of girls in the US - 6 million children - are on prescription drugs (mainly Ritalin and Adderall) with that diagnosis.
But this approach is not shared by other countries, A child in the US is 8 times more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than in France, and 80 times more likely than in Finland! Dr Wedge says this is because in those countries, when a child is exhibiting difficult behaviour they look at the context - perhaps the child is unhappy at school, or seeing their parents fight at home - and they address the problem rather than medicate the child. She points out that in the US a child can be taken to the doctor, and receive a diagnosis of ADHD and a prescription for drugs in 15 minutes, while in France the observation and consultations are likely to take 8 hours.
Why? because 'biological psychiatry has taken over the field of psychiatry in the US' says Dr Wedge. The view that the problem is in the child's brain or nervous system, rather than in his or her environment was set out for the first time in DSM 3 in 1980, and Dr Wedge points the finger at the pharmaceutical companies for this approach.
Dr Wedge argues that psychiatry needs to completely change it approach, and look at the child's environment, offering help to parents through parenting classes etc.
Website mentioned in podcast:
http://www.propublica.org/article/dollars-for-docs-the-top-earners
Marylin's blog on Psychology today:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/suffer-the-children
Photo: Family Portrait by Jörg Schubert
Podcast produced and presented by Lee Millam "A chocolate hug". That's how one person we talked to describes her 'addiction' to sugar and chocolate. Sugar is everywhere. It is added to virtually all processed foods from pizza and curry sauces to soups, and fishcakes.
The average person in the UK eats the equivalent of 15 teaspoons a day (that's probably an underestimate as few people are honest about their sugar intake)- but the recommended level is no more than 6 teaspoons per person per day. We crave chocolate and other sweet things.
And it has had a huge impact on our health and our health services. Not only is it very bad for our teeth (Queen Elizabeth 1 had black teeth from eating too much sugar), but it is a major contributor to obesity and Type 2 diabetes.
In this podcast Lee Millam talks to Professor Graham MacGregor of the Wolfson Institute who says we are not exactly 'addicted' to sugar, but rather, we are habituated to sugar. We now expect it in our food. "You get used to a lot of sugar in things and your sugar taste receptors get suppressed and you then prefer more and more sugar."
So why are we consuming so much sugar? Professor MacGregor points the finger at the food industry. The food industry, he says, is feeding us rubbishy, cheap, tasteless food, and making it more attractive by adding sugar, salt and palm oil - all of which are very bad for us. Sugar is a cheap additive, it bulks up the food and makes us crave it. The industry is good at marketing cheap foods to poor communities, including children in poor communities, and the result is high rates of obesity and diabetes. And now, he says, they are planning on moving into India and China and Vietnam to sell this 'rubbish food'.
So what is to be done? Professor MacGregor dismisses the idea of promoting healthy eating, and says we have to ban products with high sugar content (and high levels of saturated fat and salt). And all of us, individually, must avoid eating biscuits, and confectionery and give up drinking soft drinks and fruit juice. All music from freemusicarchive.org:
EX LUNA - Serial Project - LAFAYETTE Abstract Nostalgic Fractals Systems – Floating In A Lake Of Happiness Project 5am - The Dream
Photo, Lips Like Sugar AJC
The New Citizenship project wants to challenge the idea of an individual as a consumer - and replace it with the individual as a citizen, using the techniques of marketing and public relations(usually associated with consumerism) to do so.
in this latest podcast from Civic Radio, Jo Barratt talks to Jon Alexander and Irenie Wilson, the Directors of the New Citizenship Project.
Has the world of commerce encroached irrevocably on our civic spaces, and how much do we care? How much is civic exclusion growing because of what participation demands or expects of us? Civic Radio is on the road, seeking out the people and organisations that are exploring these topics in different ways.
The New Citizenship Project is interested in how you create a shift in the dominant story of the individual in society from the Consumer to the Citizen.
Subscribe on iTunes to Citizen Radio..
Produced by Jo Barratt.
This is the latest podcast in the Civic Radio series.
Other podcasts in this series can be found here:
Launch of Civic Radio with writer and urbanist Adam Greenfield Social inequality and civic participation featuring Simon Willis, CEO of the Young Foundation At the service of the citizen:redefining civic tech conversation with tech activist Laurenellen McCann Re-imagining local government with Anna Randle of Lambeth Borough Council, London Aral Balkan on being a citizen Can public servants change the face of local government? with Dave Seliger, a New York civil servant. Civic Innovation and the Interconnected City with Bryan Boyer
Podcast produced and presented by Lily Ames This podcast is part of our Feast for the Senses strand and is the first of a mini series on the study of Sound by Lily Ames. Mike Wyeld: It’s a new world, it’s like the sound is in the air as everybody jokes about at the moment and it really is, we have that ability now to have people who are dedicated to thinking about how we hear and what kind of rich culture is that.
Lily Ames: Mike Wyeld has many roles a the Royal College of Art, including instructing in both the animation and sound departments. For the last few years he has run the Sound Lab at RCA. In this programme we will hear from Mike and a few of his students about how they’re breaking new sound in the academic world.
MW: So I suppose in sound at the Royal College of Art we treat it in a couple of ways.
First of all as a post production technique for filmmaking, so for animation we have quite a well respected animation department, the tracks are entirely crafted here so the students learn how to create their own foley, their own sound effects, atmospheres, that kind of thing and learn how to record it themselves. They also move on, we mix it professionally, we have full 5.1. pro tools based sound mixing facility and we also have a large sound recording area so large live room and we have everything from bands to orchestras to individual musicians to foley sessions - you name it, we do it. So that’s the more conventional part of it. In an academic sense we also think of sound in a fine art context. A few years ago, here in the UK an artist by the name of Susan Philipsz won what is generally considered one of Britain’s most biggest art prizes - the Turner Prize. It was for a work rendered entirely in sound and since then we’ve kind of seen an explosion in people wanting to work in sound for its own sake - so sound for galleries, sound for installation. And really, the way to think of it is to think of the ear temporarily displacing the eye as the seat of thinking.
I suppose in the last five or six years we’ve seen an explosion in people working in sound in a number of different ways. We’ve also seen the explosion of people being able to work with sound because of its democratization. Pro tools, the grandaddy of software for example, now works on a laptop and now avid, the company that owns it have announced there will be a 16 track version of it for free for everyone to use on earth. So, people are able to now manipulate sound, design sound and think about sound in new ways without a great deal of knowledge or expertise. They can now just get going with it. So we’ve seen that happen and we’ve also seen people become interested in some of the myths of sound, so there’s a lot of sound in terms of what it can do to the body and how it can affect you physically and we know that it does have physical effects. So we’re seeing a lot of new technology and everyday people starting to grapple with that, including artists.
LA: As sound technology becomes more accessible, students have started to show interest in the field.
MW: I’ve noticed people being able to think and speak more intelligently about sound, because there’s a lot more thinking out there about sound, so that’s the first thing. The other thing is I’ve noticed people starting to want to engage in sound, it used to be the case that you would go into a gallery and if there was a moving image work it would often be silent and I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I think people are more brave about accompanying their image with sound they’ve deliberately chosen as opposed to sound that is naturally upon the chosen image. So people have intentionally brought sound to their moving image work. I’ve also noticed people realizing the emotional power that sound has. In terms of enrollment, RCA has seen an increased enrollment over the last five or six years, and studying fine art despite the increased expense is more popular than e...
"Citizenship is about participating in a thing that is bigger than yourself and in which everyone has an equal stake.” says architect Bryan Boyer.
In this latest podcast from Civic Radio, Bryan Boyer a US architect who spent some time in the Finnish Innovation Fund in Helsinki, talks to Jo Barratt about re-imagining the libraries in New York and the importance of reconceptualising the civic.
With a bill for repairs that would top $1bn dollars (more than a universal childcare pledge), a grand library building programme was unlikely to be championed by New York politicians, so Boyer and his team had to find another approach, one that would leverage alternative forms of capital – time, expertise and also the institutional weight of individuals, communities, museums, and non-profit organisations - which could effectively de-risk investment in civic assets. It is, he says, crucial to demonstrate that innovation can bring good results, and at the same time de-risk the innovation (innovation can be scary for politicians), so that local politicians can buy in.
So what role does he see for public institutions? For Boyer they provide ‘continuity and scale’. Pubic institutions are important because, he says, they deal with large numbers of people in equal, fair and consistent ways. However, because of their sheer scale they have often abstracted the detail – it is statiscitcal analysis rather than the experiences and needs of individuals, that drives policy. The big issue is making public instituions more responsive.
A lot of people in the UK are talking about a ‘digital public space’,could this be the answer? According to Boyer it is important (and he commends gov.uk for its friendly interface), but ‘we still need to coexist on the street.’ We have to rethink how the core of an institution works.
So, do civil servants really understand the potential of open data portals? Boyer is clear that top civil servants know that a different approach is needed(but feel constrained by the system), and certainly front line staff at the bottom of the food chain know what is at stake and have the best ideas of what is needed. But there are two problems. Firstly, the tech community is not coming up with the killer apps that will seize the initiative, and secondly the huge number of civil servants in what he calls the ‘Fat Middle’ (a term he used in Helsinki) is so disconnected from the everyday concerns of citizens that they cannot see the need for a new way of working.
How can ‘civic spaces’ (such as schools, parks, post offices and libraries) retain their importance at the heart of the community when they are increasingly facing competition from private providers? The so-called ‘white flight’ from US cities in the 1980s meant a lower tax base for public services, which led to a vicious cycle of decline – the services deteriorated, so few people were then prepared to fight for them, they became sink services.
In part, says Boyes, this is a failure of the conceptualisation of the civic. We need to develop services that people really want to use, and persuade them to participate in those services as citizens but, importantly, it is also about initiating a healthy conversation about funding the civic parts of our lives.
A key recognition is that civic institutions are linked – the swimming pool and the library and the park together give us an understanding of the connectedness of the city as a whole – and of utmost importance is affordable, efficient public transport that enables us to move around the city, and the safety and cleanliness of our streets. Here there is also a role for civic tech – to connect us to what is going on (though as Boyes points out, he doesn’t know of one single place where information on all the events and activities being run by the public authorities can be viewed.)
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Photo of Tampa, Florida by John T Howard
This podcast about urban smellscapes was produced by Jo Barratt and first aired on Life in Scents. It is part of our 'Feast for the Senses' series. Have you ever stepped off a plane and been aware of a different smell in the air - the smell of a country, a city, a terrain?
This podcast is a fascinating exploration of our urban smellscapes. We are all familiar with landscapes - 'smellscapes' are the smell equivalent.
It is drawn from a lecture by Victoria Henshaw lecturer in Urban Design and Planning at University of Sheffield, whose specialism is smell. The lecture took place after one of Victoria's 'Smell Walks', organised by Scratch and Sniff events and explores how we live and navigate using our noses, how cities can be mapped by aroma, and how architects and planners might use a consideration of this in their work.
It starts by looking at how we adapt to different smells. Usually we are smelling so many different things but we don't process them all consciously as it would be overwhelming to do so. Some smells are cultural, some smells we are more tolerant of at certain types of day(such as beer at night), some smells we experience differently depending on our genes (eg Androstenonethe the hormone in body odour - sometimes called the caveman odoour - which 60% of us can smell, but 40% cannot smell. Of those who can smell it, 90% smell body odour, but 10% smell flowers!) Have we 'sterilised' our environment, rid it of the smells?
Victoria finishes with a bit of futurology, and she tells us to expect smells for our mobile phones - which will give us different smells for different callers!
If you are interested in further exploration in the world of smell, the absolute go-to podcast platform is Life in Scents, which has lots of podcasts of interviews with people looking at their lives through smell. Also take a look at Victoria Henshaw's great blog, Smells and the City, and Odette Toilette's olefactory adventure events.
Photo, Amsterdam: Fons Heijnsbroek
And find our podcast on Anosmia here.
This interview takes us to the heart of a new age of scientific discovery.
The ability to read DNA has changed how we view ourselves. Genomics is literally changing our understanding of humanity's place in nature.
Professor Dawn Field of the University of Oxford, and Dr Neil Davies, Senior Fellow, Berkeley Institute for Data Science are the authors of Biocode -The New Age of Genomics. In conversation with Craig Barfoot, they take us on a dazzling ride through new fields of scientific discovery.
We visit Moorea where Neil Davies and his colleagues have taken on the massive task of mapping the genome of an entire ecosystem, creating a library of genetic markers and physical identifiers for every species of plant, animal and fungi on the island, the database of which will be publicly available as a resource for ecologists and evolutionary biologists around the world.
They help us view the fast developing science of genomics. The structure of DNA was identified in 1953, and the whole human genome was mapped by 2003. Since then the new field of genomics has mushroomed and is now operating on an industrial scale. Genomes can now be sequenced rapidly and increasingly cheaply. Currently used in crime detection, in paternity suits and to identify susceptibility to medical conditions - the potential for misuse is alarming, but it also opens up unprecedented possibilities.
One of the most fascinating parts of the interview is a discussion about human beings as ecosystems. Sequencing technology has made the invisible world of microbes visible - biodiversity genomics is revealing whole new worlds within us and without. The findings are transformational. Our bodies are home to millions of bacteria - in fact we have more bacteria in us than human cells - these species help us to function as human beings. We have seen microbes as the enemy, and have been fighting them with penicillin since the middle of the last century - but what we now find is that only 200 species of microbes are pathogens out of millions of bacterial species. When we understand this ecosystem better it will revolutionise healthcare. "The genome is the foundation of our bodies, like trees in a forest, but there are lots of other flora and fauna that make up the whole ecosystem of the forest."
Photo: Libertas Academica
"Government is made up of people", says Dave Seliger, a civil servant in New York City. So, what might public servants do to change the face of local government?
This is the 6th podcast from Civic Radio. In it Dave Seliger talks to Jo Barratt about the role of civil servants and local government officers in developing a new local government. Dave is the co-founder of Civic Service at Parsons DESIS Lab and a public servant in the NYC Mayor's Office.
There are 300,000 civil servants in New York, and Dave says it is important to involve all of them, not just the Mayor and City Hall, in rethinking local government. So he trains and connects civil servants, bringing together Heads of Local Government Innovation, getting them to meet activists and community advocates, and helping them understand the role and potential of civic tech.
He also asks how we might get people involved in public service, and particularly looks at why tech savvy people rarely join government - why do they opt for working with Google instead, when the problems they'd have to grapple with in government are so much more challenging.......
"Being a citizen is crafting the society you live," in says Aral Balkan, Founder of Ind.ie and a champion of democracy and design.
In this podcast, the 5th from Civic Radio, Aral Balkan talks about how we communicate with each other, the tools and programmes we use to do this (and the perhaps hidden costs we give in exchange) and how we might build systems that better support the interests of the people who use them.
Likening Twitter to a shopping mall, rather than a public park, he questions the way we confuse private spheres, run by Silicon Valley corporations, with public spheres and calls for more social organisations, independent of venture capital that build things that add to the commons.
The deep past extends its tentacles into the present and, in Work, Sex and Power Willie Thompson, until his retirement Professor of Contemporary History at Glasgow Caledonian University, demonstrates how this affects our species.
He talks to Pod Academy's Craig Barfooot about how, in recent years such approaches, covering lengthy stretches of time and continents, have taken on greater prominence, with terms like ‘Deep History’ and ‘Big History’ entering the vocabulary. This approach has been stimulated by a deepening awareness of the apocalyptic threat to humanity caused by runaway global warming and species destruction. The inability of the small-scope historiography favoured in previous decades to generate much illumination regarding this crisis has proven its limits.
Willie Thompson's book is part of this new tendency but with a differing emphasis in important respects. It begins with argument on humans’ place in the universe and where they stand in the evolutionary process. It is concerned to emphasise both the continuity of humans with the animal kingdom and the wider biosphere, but also the categorical difference of their existence as social creatures equipped with language and, in their forelimbs, manipulative abilities possessed by no other creature. One early chapter discusses the evolution of conscious thought and the unique attribute of humans, in that through a developed form of consciousness they envisage their future selves, and their future projects, unlike any other species.
WORK
In this interview, Willie Thompson and Craig Barfoot explore the Palaeolithic era in which the original Homo sapiens lived their hunter-gatherer foraging lives in isolated family groupings and clan communities. This was a prehistoric period of human history, distinguished by the development of the most primitive stone tools and covers roughly 95%[1] of human technological prehistory.
The discussion then turns to the next ten thousand years following what is sometimes referred to as the ‘Neolithic Revolution’ which rapidly emerged over all the continents with the exception of Australia.
Crucially, it is notorious for ushering in the shift to production (via agriculture and herding) of animal and vegetable foodstuffs which replaced the earlier process of food acquisition ‘in the wild’. These techniques originated in what we now call the Middle East and also developed quite independently in different areas of the globe such as the Americas and China. The driving force was almost certainly climate change – as the glaciation of the latest ice age melted, humans experienced both environmental catastrophe, but also beneficial effects.
The consequences of this transformation for the societies involved were truly enormous and are still noticeable today. In the words of Jared Diamond,author of Guns, Germs, and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years ‘The hand of history’s course at 8000 B.C. lies heavily on us’.
Working the Fields by DaiLuo
The history since the Neolithic Revolution has been the history of forced labour, which has four structural forms varying in their details and frequently intermixed: exaction of tribute from producers; serfdom or bonded agricultural labour; outright slavery and wage labour. Debt emerged as a powerful mechanism used to force individuals into one or other of these forms of forced labour.
Work, Sex and Power explains how wage labour in the context of market economies became the prevalent form of economic compulsion thanks to the second great historical transformation: the creation of technologies that succeeded in unlocking the immense energies imprisoned in fossil fuels, a process that commenced around 300 years ago and proceeded to give us the world we now experience.
SEX
the history of civilisation has been the history of forced labour it has also been the history of misogyny. One gender has cruelly exploited the other,
The deep past extends its tentacles into the present and, in Work, Sex and Power Willie Thompson, until his retirement Professor of Contemporary History at Glasgow Caledonian University, demonstrates how this affects our species.
He talks to Pod Academy's Craig Barfooot about how, in recent years such approaches, covering lengthy stretches of time and continents, have taken on greater prominence, with terms like ‘Deep History’ and ‘Big History’ entering the vocabulary. This approach has been stimulated by a deepening awareness of the apocalyptic threat to humanity caused by runaway global warming and species destruction. The inability of the small-scope historiography favoured in previous decades to generate much illumination regarding this crisis has proven its limits.
Willie Thompson's book is part of this new tendency but with a differing emphasis in important respects. It begins with argument on humans’ place in the universe and where they stand in the evolutionary process. It is concerned to emphasise both the continuity of humans with the animal kingdom and the wider biosphere, but also the categorical difference of their existence as social creatures equipped with language and, in their forelimbs, manipulative abilities possessed by no other creature. One early chapter discusses the evolution of conscious thought and the unique attribute of humans, in that through a developed form of consciousness they envisage their future selves, and their future projects, unlike any other species.
WORK
In this interview, Willie Thompson and Craig Barfoot explore the Palaeolithic era in which the original Homo sapiens lived their hunter-gatherer foraging lives in isolated family groupings and clan communities. This was a prehistoric period of human history, distinguished by the development of the most primitive stone tools and covers roughly 95%[1] of human technological prehistory.
The discussion then turns to the next ten thousand years following what is sometimes referred to as the ‘Neolithic Revolution’ which rapidly emerged over all the continents with the exception of Australia.
Crucially, it is notorious for ushering in the shift to production (via agriculture and herding) of animal and vegetable foodstuffs which replaced the earlier process of food acquisition ‘in the wild’. These techniques originated in what we now call the Middle East and also developed quite independently in different areas of the globe such as the Americas and China. The driving force was almost certainly climate change – as the glaciation of the latest ice age melted, humans experienced both environmental catastrophe, but also beneficial effects.
The consequences of this transformation for the societies involved were truly enormous and are still noticeable today. In the words of Jared Diamond,author of Guns, Germs, and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years ‘The hand of history’s course at 8000 B.C. lies heavily on us’.
Working the Fields by DaiLuo
The history since the Neolithic Revolution has been the history of forced labour, which has four structural forms varying in their details and frequently intermixed: exaction of tribute from producers; serfdom or bonded agricultural labour; outright slavery and wage labour. Debt emerged as a powerful mechanism used to force individuals into one or other of these forms of forced labour.
Work, Sex and Power explains how wage labour in the context of market economies became the prevalent form of economic compulsion thanks to the second great historical transformation: the creation of technologies that succeeded in unlocking the immense energies imprisoned in fossil fuels, a process that commenced around 300 years ago and proceeded to give us the world we now experience.
SEX
the history of civilisation has been the history of forced labour it has also been the history of misogyny. One gender has cruelly exploited the other,
This podcast on the rainforest music of the BayAka was produced and presented by Jo Barratt It is part of our series on ethnomusicology made with the sound archive of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. In this podcast you'll hear the sound of the BayAka people of the Central African Republic. Specifically a collection of recordings made by Louis Sarno. All of these recordings, and more, are available on the Pitt Rivers Reel to Real sound archive website In other programmes in the Pitt Rivers series, we look at different aspects of ethnomusicology, but here we are taking an in-depth look at a single collection of sounds, the rainforest music of the Bayaka and, through it, telling some of the story of the BayAka people. Guiding us through this podcast is Noel Lobley from the Pitt Rivers Museum. The interviewer is social anthropologist Sarah Winkler Reid from the University of Bristol.
Here is Noel to introduce us to the man who made these recordings:
Noel Lobley: Louis Sarno is a guy from New Jersey who fell in love with the BayAka music from the rainforest of the Central African Republic/Northern Congo. He bought himself a one way ticket, a tape player, batteries and some spare tapes to record the music and more or less never came back. He became a part of the community and over the last 30 years has made the world's most important collection of BayAka music. It currently stands at about 1500 hours worth of music recorded. He has recorded every hunter-gather community and mapped its relationship to forest and the environment. He has gone from being a recorder to an advocate, living amongst the community and helps to mobilise healthcare.
BayAka singing has been well documented, but the instrumentation has not been looked at as much.
Amongst the community he has been living with, there is a beautiful four note flute called a mbyo (sometimes called mobio), it is made from climbing palm. A musician may play it for many reasons, sometimes for entertainment. But it is usually played at night, when the rest of the camp is asleep. They will wonder around the camp and it is played to enter your dreams. If you think about it, when you are asleep, the sound echoes around the canopy and the forest is sometimes described as a cathedral, due to the way the sound resonates. A musician may play at night for benediction, protection or for the camp.
Bear in mind Louis has recorded it in its context: its relationship to the rain forest, acoustic and environment. When you listen carefully, you can sometimes hear musicians playing against the canopy, so the overtones weave in and out as the musicians are playing. So sometimes it sounds like two people singing perfectly together.
You can hear the forest soundscape. You can hear the insects, and if it is a heavy sheet of insects, it can tell you whether it is late at night or early in the morning. Sometimes you can pick out the pulse of the insects the musicians are playing with. You can sometimes hear they are playing to a rhythmical structure that is in the forest. The music is very much of the forest and a gift for the forest. Most of these instruments are made from the forest. It sounds very much to me like an exploration of the acoustic properties of the forest.
In this community, it is not played any more. Over the time Louis has been there, there were three master musicians, but they have all died. The last player who played this, and who knew how to make the flutes gave one to Louis to look after. Louis says he never hears it played anymore. No one knows how to make it, or which particular plant is needed to make it. He looked after the last flute (mbyo) in Yanduombe and it was on its way to us in April earlier this year. There has been oucoup d'état in the Central African Republic. Seleka Rebels have overthrown the government. President Bozize has fled. Rebels have overtaken the capital. In April last year, Louis posted from the Central African Republic...
Anna Randle, Head of Strategy at London Borough of Lambeth in south London talks to Jo Barratt about redefining local government in the fourth Civic Radio podcast
If citizenship is a reciprocal relationship between the individual citizen and everyone else in the communities of which we are part, what is the role of local government? This is something that Lambeth councll is grappling with, as they develop the notion of a 'cooperative council' seeking to establish a more equal relationship with their citizens.
But what does it mean in practice? What is involved in re-imagining local government? What does it mean to shift from being 'a paternalistic provider of services' to a 'facilitative enabler'. Is it just about doing local government on the cheap?
In this thoughtful interview, Anna Randle talks persuasively about how a council can empower its citizens, without washing its hands of its responsibilities.
Open spaces, parks etc, in the borough provide a good example of the approach as Anna explains, "There was a point at which we realised we needed to say, 'these are your spaces, they aren't the council's spaces, they are the community's spaces, you own them. You don't have to ask for permission to do stuff, we want you to do stuff, so if you want to go and plant some bulbs, just do it'."
Civic Radio is part of Civic Workshop.
Picture of Barnsley Council offices by James Sheriff
This podcast was produced and presented by Kieron Yates Climate change, environmental pollution, privatisation of the biosphere, water crises are all signs of the impact of neoliberal policies on our environment, but where will the solutions to these problems come from? Thirty years ago, there seemed to be a disconnect between an ecology movement that had emerged in the 1960's and the traditional left - neither readily embraced the other. But over the last two decades there's been a rediscovery of a strand in Marx and Engels' writings that relates to the environment, and this has led to the growth of an eco-socialist movement that campaigns not just on issues of environmental concern but also social justice.
Pod Academy's Kieron Yates talked to Chris Williams, Adjunct Professor at PACE University in the Department of Chemistry and Physical Sciences and Gareth Dale, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Brunel University
Kieron began by asking Chris Williams what was the reality of the disconnection between the environmental movement and socialist politics of the 1980's.
Chris Williams: There was a strand in Britain of what could be termed deep ecology which was more commitment to protecting the earth and naturral systems... saving the whale and natural systems and less concerned with the social world or social justice questions... which is obviously more of a left sociualist concern.
But there was also another strand to environmental concerns in the 1980's, in Britain anyway... which was CND and the campaign for Nuclear Disarmamanet... and just the general idea that the world was in a very bad sitauation with regards to the possibility of nuclear warfare and what did that mean in connection to nuclear power stations and nuclear power.
I think in Britain my recollection is that there were different strands but certainly the left was somewhat disassociated from both in a certain regard but certainly much more so from the idea that we should promote the natural world over and above any concerns for the people in it, as if there was this big split between the two and we didn't depend on each other. That was proababy most evident in the United States with the people of Earth First which split off from what they thought were the sellouts of the mainstream environmental movement and turned anti-human in many ways... and some sections of it embraced HIV and AIDS as a way of cleansing the earth, depopulating it of a human virus and other despicable ideas like that. So, there were different strands even within the deep ecology movement... some of them were overtly racist and so the left would obviously have condemned that anyway. The situation has definitely moved on since then.
Kieron Yates: When I began doing research for this podcast I was surprised to discover Marx and Engels themselves had a highly developed concept of the relationship between capitalism and the environment and it's a theme that is explored in both Marx's Capital and some of Engels' later writings - in fact, to my mind, their thinking still seems remarkably contemporary and holistic. I asked Gareth Dale if this was a fair assessment.
Gareth Dale: I think your surprise is related to the fact that the thought of Marx and Engels was for a long time interpreted in very orthodox ways by social democratic and communist parties for most of the twentieth century and these were parties that were linked to very state centered modernizing projects… geared to economic growth, and geared to urbanising society and to capital accumulation at the end of the day… whether that was in the form of state capitals in Soviet Union and eastern Europe and in social democratic nation states in western Europe and elsewhere.
These were parties therefore that interpreted Marxism in a very growth orientated modernising framework which fetishised technology. I remember I lived in East Germany for a couple of years and I remember the children’s...
This is the third of our podcasts from Civic Radio, exploring the role of the 'civic' in today's world - a world in which commerce often squeezes out our collective experience as citizens, and in which the term 'citizenship' is usually used to mean the individual's relationship with government, rather than citizens' interdependence with each other.
This is the theme explored by tech activist Laurenellen McCann, in conversation with Jo Barratt, In particular they consider the emergence of the 'Civic Tech' movement, in which Laurenellen played a major role, but of which she is now increasingly critical.
The roots of civic tech are in gov2.0, E.gov, and OpenGov in the early 2000s and are for the tech initiated. Civic technology is vital, but, says LaurenEllen, what does a white tech dude have in common with a single mother on welfare? How can he really understand what she needs? Open Gov techies continue to work within a definition of citizenship which focuses on the citizen's relationship to governrnent, how their preoccupations and their 'solutions' work for people with different and specific needs?
Civic tech should be about people, rather than technology, so, Instead, she suggests, a new definition for civic tech, "Any tool, approach, process or solution which is created with public good in mind" and she argues that we should move from a civic tech which is based on 'hardware, software and APIs' to put technology at the service of deliberative processes, in which everyone can become involved.
Our podcast is an extract from the Civic Radio podcast - for the full version click here.
You can also subscribe to Civic Radio on Itunes.
Laurenellen McCann @elle_mccann.
Laurenellen is a key player in the world of technology and democracy in the US, here she is on a panel at the Code for America Summit 2014 with Catherine Bracy, Diana Nucera and Denise Taylor).......
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah_xi31pyoA
In this second podcast from Civic Radio, Jo Barratt talks to Simon Willis, Chief Executive of the Young Foundation about social inequality ad civic participation.
Willis says that many people in the UK feel forgotten and disenfranchised, he is concerned to find ways to hand voice and power to people who feel excluded, to enable them to establish their own ways of doing things, on their terms, when political parties fail to address their needs.
For half a century Professor Ted Robert Gurr has conducted social science research and theorised about the causes and consequences of organised political rebellion and protest.
His latest book, Political Rebellion Causes Outcomes and Alternatives is a collection of essays looking at how and why, and to what effect, millions of people - from the Castro-inspired revolutionary movements of Latin America in the 1960s to Yugoslavia’s dissolution in ethno-national wars of the 1990s, and the popular revolts of the Arab Spring - have risked their lives by participating in protests and rebellions.
In this interview with Professor Gurr, Pod Academy's Craig Barfoot explores
In which political systems are rebellions likely to be successful and in which are they likely to be unsuccessful How effective are protest movements as alternatives to rebellions and terrorism? What public and international responses lead away from violence and toward reforms?
Political Rebellion: Causes Outcomes and Alternatives is published by Routledge
Has the world of commerce encroached irrevocably on our civic spaces, and how much do we care? Civic Workshop is asking that question and looking at ways to reframe our everyday local experiences with an awareness of our collective social and political future.
A key part of Civic Workshop is the new Civic Radio. We are hoping to cover a lot of their output here on Pod Academy - take a listen to this first podcast in which Jo Barratt talks to writer and urbanist Adam Greenfield @agpublic about a new vision for the civic. How much is civic exclusion growing because of what participation demands or expects of us?
Civic Radio will be on the road, seeking out the people and organisations that are exploring these topics in different ways.
http://www.civicworkshop.city/blog/2015/2/10/civic-radio-episode-01
For many British families au pairs are the only workable solution to the ‘childcare crisis’. But au pairs are only 'affordable' because their work is not recognised and their poor conditions are justified through discourses of cultural exchange and adventure.
Researchers Dr Rosie Cox, Reader in Geography and Gender Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and Dr Nicky Busch of the Foundation for International Education have been looking into the ‘perfect storm’ of long working hours, high childcare costs, the cultural devaluing of reproductive labour and the availability of a large, low-waged labour force from other EU countries which make the UK home to about 90,000 au pairs at any one time.
Au pairing is a significant form of low-paid domestic labour that is depended upon by tens of thousands of households in order to balance the demands of work and family life. The seminar from which this podcast is drawn reported on findings from the two-year ESRC funded Au Pair research project.
The research project brings together two important issues for contemporary society – women’s changing relationship to the home and paid work and the growth in labour migration. The project worked with au pairs and host families, stakeholders in the sector and collected data from 1000 advertisements for au pair posts in order to understand what au pairing is in contemporary Britain. Another speaker at the seminar was Bridget Anderson, Professor of Migration and Citizenship and Deputy Director of the Centre for Migration, Policy and Society at the University of Oxford who looked at the way migration is changing how the family performs its role in social reproduction.
A full recording of this fascinating seminar, by Backdoor Broadcasting, can be found here.
What exactly is money? Craig Barfoot spoke to Nigel Dodd, Professor of Sociology at LSE and author of The Social Life of Money, to find out.
Nigel Dodd: We usually think of money as notes and coins, or even gold. But, in fact, it mostly takes the form of claims made through the banking system, mediated by plastic cards! Money has a dynamic quality – it is more like a verb than a noun.
Money is claims that move between people, and it is that movement that sustains its value. It has value not because it has intrinsic qualities, but because of the series of relationships it is part of. For example, you accept euros or pounds or dollars or yen in return for your work, and you then exchange them for goods and services.
In other words, money is what it does rather than what it is.
Craig Barfoot: So is it about trust?
ND: Money is partly about trust. We want to trust that the money in our pocket will retain its value. We don’t want to be worrying about money, indeed as soon as we do it means money is in trouble eg in periods of hyperinflation. As soon as it is under threat, we start thinking about it, which we don’t normally do. If you ask people in Britain, for example, if they want to join the euro, you find out all sorts of things about the assumptions people make and the way they think about their money – it means something to do with values, history, culture etc.
CB: One idea is that money is a claim on society
ND: David Frisby, translator of Georg Simmel's The Philosophy of Money, reminded me that my book was about money, not banking! And he was right, what we had witnessed in 2008-9 was a financial crisis, and that was not the same as a crisis about money. Money is not the same as finance, it is not reduceable to the banking system.
I saw this banner at the occupy movement rally in Paternoster Square which said, ‘We are the true currency’. And I remember thinking, ‘that is really interesting, what is being suggested here is that there is a representation of money which is much closer to our core humanity, or communality, our sociality.’ It is not the state or wall street or the banks – money is us, it isn’t the banks, we need to reclaim it.
Money is a claim upon society – we have a generalised claim that we can levy on anyone else. We can exchange the money for goods. With any payment community – the European Union, UK, or in Bristol, the Bristol pound.
Money is a claim on social life. Each chapter in my book is an iteration of Georg Simmel's idea of money as 'a claim on society'.
CB: You talk about monies – not money, but surely I have just one currency, euros.
ND: Air miles, euros, pounds, store cards, the Brixton pound, Bitcoin, local currencies emerging in Greece – they are all forms of money.
And what is more, the way we pay is changing. Soon we will all be paying with our mobile phones. And that means participating in payments networks that aren’t connected to the banking system, such as ApplePay.
CB: So can anyone start their own currency?
ND: Yes, but that was not always the case. In Austria in 1920s, a town launched a successful currency, and several others started up, but that was stopped by an Austrian law. However, in most countries you can, though you obviously have to go through certain regulatory rules, eg the Bristol pound is backed by pound sterling. What is happening is that smaller and smaller groups are establishing their own money for certain things – that is exciting
CB: Control of money supply is control of power. Why are governments prepared to allow others to start their own currency?
ND: This is about the end of the national monopoly over the production of money, rather than the end of national money. What we see emerging is small, minor currencies which answer a need – eg currencies that work for the unbanked. For example, in Argentina after the default the official currency collapsed and smaller local currencies,...
On Friday 7th November 2014, Manchester Metropolitan University and the Centre for the Study of Football and its Communities hosted a conference entitled ‘Football and Culture 2014.’ The event aimed to explore the relationship and interaction between football and wider forms of cultural representation, with papers exploring topics as diverse as fanzines, commemorative statues, fictional representations of the game, and emerging online phenomena. Pod Academy’s Christopher Daley was the co-organiser of the event and he managed to find time to conduct a series of interviews with some of the speakers. Below you can find further information about each of the speakers featured in the above podcast.
David Goldblatt Conference paper: England is Paradise? The Meaning of Football since Thatcherism David Goldblatt is a writer, academic and broadcaster. He has published widely on world football and his new book, The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football, explores the recent history of the English game. In the podcast he discusses some of the themes in his new work, whilst also touching upon the specific transformations within the sport since the reign of Margaret Thatcher and the establishment of the English Premier League in 1992.
David Webber Conference paper: Karl Polanyi and the Cultural ‘Everyday’ Political Economy of English Football David Webber is a Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick and spoke at both the conference and to Pod Academy about the work of the political economist Karl Polanyi and how his ideas might be applied to a critical analysis of the everyday experience of watching and following football.
Joel Rookwood Joel is a Senior Lecturer in Sport Management at Liverpool Hope University. At the conference he screened his short film Rio: Football and Favelas, which was followed by an informative talk. He spoke to Pod Academy about his time in Brazil and his experience of visiting a favela in Rio during the 2014 World Cup.
You can watch Joel’s film here.
Ronnie Close Conference paper: Filming Sublime Conflict in Contemporary Football Ronnie Close is an artist and filmmaker and he treated the conference to a screening of his most recent film, Serious Games, which also focused on the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Ronnie spoke to us about this recent project but also touched upon his broader reasons for selecting football as the focal point for many of his films.
You can see clips from Ronnie’s films through his website, which can be found here.
For further information about this event, visit the Football and Culture webpage.
Pod Academy has a podcast on Racism in the Beautiful Game in which Mark Doidge of the University of Brighton talks to Alex Burd.
Here at Pod Academy we are convinced that podcasting is a great way to get research out to a wide audience, to make an impact.
If you'd like to try your hand at making a podcast, here are some tips to help you, they came out of a course we ran for our volunteer producers. And take a listen to the podcast above - it demonstrates a number of different approaches you might take.
Preparation
Preparation 1: Preparing around the CONTENT
What are you trying to achieve?
First of all decide, what are your objectives for the podcast. Of course two of your principal objectives will be:
To make people care about the subject To entertain
But you may have other objectives, such as: –
To get the audience to see the relevance for themselves of this research To help your audience understand something complex To inform them about something new in the field To introduce them to something quirky they may not know about
It may be that your objectives span all or none of these, but whatever you are aiming to achieve, be clear about it from the outset as this will help in your preparation and will inevitably influence the questions you ask, the tone, the writing and the editing.
What is the story? Why should we care?
This American Life’s Alex Blumberg says you should be able to pitch a story in this way:
I want to make a podcast about….. It’s important because…..
According to Alex this simple formula will give you the story. Other people talk about this as ‘the angle’ of your podcast. It is certainly an essential stage to go through in the preparation for your podcast.
To decide what is the angle, have a preparatory conversation with the academic whose research you are covering and really pin him/her down on the following questions:
Why is your research/your work/your book important? What is the significance of your research/this area of study/your work? We hear a lot about……….these days – how does your research relate to that? What is your big idea? What is the take-home message of your research/your work/your book? What is the story? What is ground breaking about it? Why should the audience care about your research? If it were a newspaper article, what would the headline be?
Remember, one way of finding the angle is to see if there is an ‘est’ word associated with the research – the first, the best, the worst, the biggest, the smallest, the most, the last etc. Ask the academic.
After that conversation, think about it yourself. Decide: What is this podcast about?
The audience
Part of your preparation should be to think about your audience and what would interest them. Pod Academy has a broad audience, but it is helpful to imagine just one listener, because then you are more likely to make an appealing podcast, that works as a communication from one person to another. Try this listener:
A bright, engaged 28year old who is prepared to listen to and maybe even sign up with Charity street fundraisers, who probably plays or watches a bit of sport, has good friends who he/she values, has a favourite soap opera, and listens to an eclectic range of music. Importantly, has a 40 minute commute to work, during which time they listen to podcasts.
How can you engage/entertain/inform this listener?
Chunking the content
Think of your content in 4 chunks (note: they might not divide up as neatly as this suggests – for example, in the interview you might ask some of the more detailed questions in Chunk 4 when you are on chunk 3 about the significance of the research.)
Chunk 1: Why did they undertake this research?
You are looking for 2 main things here – personal motivation, any important background/context about this field.
The sorts of questions to ask……
Why did you undertake this research; what attracted you to this area of research? Is there any significant history to this area of research? What’s been happening in this field?
In the next couple of weeks, Greece will elect a new government and according to the polls, the emerging Syriza party could form that government. They are calling for an end to austerity measures and their Marxist Communist roots are causing quite a bit of concern in the wider Europe. Greece, austerity and the European Monetary Union are a heady mix!
But regardless of who wins this election, Greece faces substantial problems. Among them, a huge, and growing, public debt.
Craig Barfoot spoke to Greek economist Dr Yiannis Kitromilides, an Associate Member of the Cambridge Centre for Economic and Public Policy, Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge, about the current situation and the position of Greece within the European Monetary Union (EMU).
He started by asking Dr Kitromilides to comment on the repeated narrative that high public spending and widespread tax evasion, combined with the credit crunch, were the causes of Greece’s problems.
Yiannis Kitromilides: This narrative is correct. There was widespread tax evasion, and avoidance. There is tax avoidance in most countries, but there was tax evasion on a large scale in Greece; there was corruption; an overblown public sector (politicians were creating jobs in the public sector and employing their supporters, even in key positions).
Craig Barfoot: so where are we now?
YK: The current economic situation in Greece is best compared to the economic situation in the US in the 1930s. Since 2009 the economy has lost 25% of its output, they are 25% poorer, unemployment is 25%, youth unemployment is about 60% and the prospects of growth are – as in the wider Eurozone – quite bleak. And yet the debt, the original form of the problem, is increasing.
So, after five years of sacrificing all this output the prospects are bleak.
CB: When we talk about austerity measures specifically for Greece, what was implemented?
YK: Austerity measures are those measure imposed in order to produce a balance in the annual budget. The reason you owe money is that you are spending more than you’re earning, so if you are an individual who wants to avoid insolvency the only way to get out of it is to cut down on your spending and increase your income.
If you apply this to governments, it means cutting government spending and increasing taxes, as in Greece.
CB: That sounds reasonable….
YK: But this is a process that many economists believe to be counterproductive. If you are trying to pay your debts as a country, you must not look at the solution for an individual family. It is what the economists call the ‘fallacy of composition’ - what is true for the part is not always true for the whole.
This is something that has a long history in economic thought going back to the 1930s, when Keynes argued along similar lines about what needed to be done to deal with the 1930s depression in the UK and USA. That if you are in a bad situation economicallhy, the solution is not to act in the same way as a family in economic difficulties (ie to impose austerity), but rather to do the opposite.
It sounds paradoxical and counter intuitive, but some people say this is what needed to be done, not only in Greece but also in other indebted economies. By trying to solve the problem of indebtedness by austerity, you are making the problem worse.
CB: Who does Greece owe its debt to?
YK: Not to the European banks, though they were the original lenders, but rather to international institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank (ECB) - which means Greece owes money to the other members of the Monetary Union.
Syriza is asking them to cut the debt by 50% - to forgive 50%. The other 50% they say they will repay as soon as Greece achieves sustainable growth of 3-4%. They says this was exactly what was done for the German debt in 1953 - it is what the allies agreed – to give Germany more time to repay,
'Water wars' used to seem like the stuff of science fiction. But water poverty is creating major geopolitical upheaval right now in the real world. It contributed to the Arab Spring in Egypt, and to the growth of ISIS in Syria argues Dr Karen Piper, who teaches post colonial studies and English and is adjunct professor of geography at the University of Missouri.
In this conversation with Pod Academy's Craig Barfoot, about her extensively researched book, The Price of Thirst: Global Water Inequality and the Coming Chaos Dr Piper paints a disturbing picture of the world's journey towards the 'coming chaos' - including dams that dessicate neighbouring countries and an International Monetary Fund that insists on developing countries handing over their water to multinational corporations who make a profit from drought.
The UN has declared access to clean drinking water to be a human right, but can do little to enforce that right. Karen Piper says that is was scary in conducting her research, to talk to climate scientists, and to see the droughts and coastal erosion and species moving. But, she says, she met dedicated activists, and her hope is that people can make the change.
Picture of water droplets by Matt Newman
If you have seen the film, Pride, about the involvement of lesbian and gay activists in the UK miners' strike of the 1980s - or even if you haven't - you will find this discussion that took place at Birkbeck, University of London, hosted by BiGS (Birkbeck Gender & Sexuality) and The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities fascinating.
The event was called Pits and Perverts Revisited, a reference to the benefit ball organised by LGSM (Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners), at which the line up included Bronski Beat.
The discussion starts with the making of the film and goes on to look at the politics of the Thatcher era when, as Mike Jackson says, you had to be a "very brave person indeed" to declare your homosexuality. It explores the legacy of the Miners strike and the relevance of LGSM to today.
The first section brings together Mike Jackson and Sian James MP, both active in the strike and featured in Pride. It is chaired by Daniel Monk.
In the second part of the event,Diarmaid Kelliher of Glasgow University focuses on the politics of the 1970s and 1980s and explores the culture of solidarity that was so important in the strike and beyond.
In the final section, Bev Skeggs, Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London 'commits a sociology' as she considers the 'enemies within'.
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A couple of years ago, we carried a blog by Chris Creegan which also considered the legacy of that period (Margaret Thatcher had just died). It carried a picture of Chris's copy of the Pits and Perverts poster, one of the few still in existence, and reflected on Chris's own experience as a gay trade unionist and how Thatcher's triumph on the economic front contributed to her defeat in the social arena.
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One of the most moving parts of the film Pride was Bronwen Lewis singing Bread and Roses - and here it is......
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiiKgST_G2Q
It is a hundred years since the start of the first world war, and this Christmas marks the 100th anniversary of the Christmas Truce - the soldiers' truce - in that war.
Our special Christmas podcast is introduced by Stephen Sedley, former Appeal Court Judge and Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law at Oxford University, who, nearly 50 years ago, recorded the interview with Frank Austin, which is at the heart of this podcast. Frank was a 21 year old soldier when he took part in the 1914 Christmas Truce.
Stephen Sedley: Frank Austin was a Fleet Street compositor in the days when newspapers were set in hot metal. He was born in 1893 and was still an apprentice when he signed up in 1914 without a second thought, after all, everyone knew the war would be over by Christmas....
In 1966, in his sitting room in Edgeware, Middlesex, I recorded some of Frank's memories of a conflict that, by pure good fortune, he survived - one of fewer than 30 known survivors of an entire regiment. But on the first Christmas day of the war, Frank had both witnessed and taken part in one of the most significant and dramatic events in the history of warfare. As he reflects in this recording, in that brief moment of time, the troops could have stopped the war.
This is the account he gave me half a century later.
Frank Austin: A day or two before Christmas, we were given Princess Mary's Golden Gift Box. It was flat, gilt, and there were cigarettes on one side and pipe tobacco on the other and also a photo of Princess Mary, as she then was.
Princess Mary Golden Gift Box
On Christmas day, dawn broke. And not a shot was fired.
A little further down to the right we saw a white flag flying. And several Germans came out, very slowly, and one officer was waving a white handkerchief. We could see that there was a sort of ........armistice?
They were very friendly. We gave them some of our rum, or rather our sergeant did, and we had some of their schnapps. I can't remember what they gave us to eat. I handed out one or two tins of Maconochie's M&V [Meat and Veg] ration. I don't know what they thought of the bully beef others gave them!
I remember sitting on a log - there were two Germans and my own sergeant as well - and they showed me their photographs of their wives and children. One of them could speak English very well - he'd been a student and had had a job in the West End for some time. He seemed to be politically conscious, because he asked the sergeant, I remember this very well, if he knew why we were fighting. And of course we had no more idea than that we thought it was the right thing to be doing.
This business went on all day, and a good many of us got rather drunk and they were actually in our trenches, and some of our lads (I didn't go myself) went up to their dug outs - I don't know what they got up to!
There was football, I don't know whether it was a real football, or simply a lot of newspapers tied up with string (some said one thing and some the other), I didn't actually see it. There was a game, on a flat piece of ground between the trenches, with two piles of grey uniforms and two piles of khaki uniforms - and some sort of a ragtime game was arrived at.
It seems incredible looking back on it.
It must have worried the General Staff a whole lot. Because when the dawn broke the following day, the Germans didn't come out of their line at first on Boxing Day morning, but to our surprise we heard the rattle of machine guns further off to our right. I have heard that the Staff sent up a battalion of the Guards to open fire, and of course once the machine guns started up the battle was on once more. As far as I was concerned that was the end of the Christmas celebrations. Two nights later I was almost the last to leave the trenches, and we'd had no casualties worth talking about.
I have often thought......all that slaughter that followed......
To begin at the beginning:
It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and- rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.
[Under Milk Wood] 2014 is the centenary of the birth of the poet Dylan Thomas.
Scarlett MccGwire went to talk to Dr. Leo Mellor who writes and teaches about 20th century literature, particularly Anglo Welsh Literature and modernism, at Murray Edwards college Cambridge, where he is the Roma Gill Fellow in English.
She started by asking him what’s so special about Dylan Thomas that the centenary of his birth is being celebrated around the world?
Leo Mellor
Dr.Leo Mellor: I think it is to do with the way he brings a particular intensity to language. To the way he writes poems, that force or push language into moments of unexpected power and beauty and strangeness. He makes us see everyday things as strange again and he helps us see a beauty in things one would not normally consider beautiful.
Scarlett MccGwire: Like?
LM: I suppose you could think of his most famous radio play ‘Under Milk Wood’ and how he takes the average life of people in a little town there. Petty jealousy, their loves, their desires, and transforms them into something that is funny, beautiful and terribly moving - it’s just one night, in one little bible-black town. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now. SM: Do you think he captures Wales?
LM: He captures a certain part of Wales but he also turns Wales into a place that is shaped by Dylan Thomas’s way of looking, thinking and feeling about things. This is not reportage, this is not the lives of people as lived in the 1930’s and 40’s in his formulation of 'South Wets Wales' and Swansea. He takes things from an area and he transforms them.
SM: Under Milk Wood is celebrated around the English-speaking world, so it’s much bigger than Wales isn’t it?
LM: Yes, because it’s a way of using radio, using a medium, where you don’t get to see anything. You get to see, in your mind’s eye, the characters who are constructed through how they speak and how they describe other people, and sound effects. So, it’s a play that is apparently about a small seaside town in west Wales, but uses a medium to do something quite incredible.
SM: He is most famous for Under Milk Wood, but also there are poems.
LM: It is important for us to remember how long his career was. He died age 39, but he was writing poems as a teenager, and these are not adolescent works, these are published in the Volume 18 Poems and they are amazingly good. I will read the first stanza of the first poem from the 18 poems I see the boys of summer
I see the boys of summer in their ruin Lay the gold tithings barren, Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils; There in their heat the winter floods Of frozen loves they fetch their girls, And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.
These boys of light are curdlers in their folly, Sour the boiling honey; The jacks of frost they finger in the hives; There in the sun the frigid threads Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves; the signal moon is zero in their voids.
I see the summer children in their mothers Split up the brawned womb’s weathers, Divide the night and day with fairy thumbs; There in the deep with quartered shades Of sun and moon they paint their dams As sunlight paints the shelling of their heads.
I see that from these boys shall men of nothing Stature by seedy shifting, Or lame the air with leaping from its heats; There from their hearts the dogdayed pulse
This podcast is a conversation between political cartoonist Martin Rowson and writer Neil Gaiman, originally recorded for Index on Censorship.
In it, Gaiman and Rowson talk about Alan Moore and Milo Minara, whether comics are unrepentantly in the gutter, how the work of Hogarth and Gilray speaks across the centuries, how the bible contains more shocking stuff than they could make up, and how as children and teenagers they were enthralled by Judge Dredd.
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Martin Rowson: I wanted to talk about various themes. I wanted to talk about the visual and I wanted to talk about offence - how things are offensive and why they are in different ways. Have you caught up on this nonsense over here on Hilary Mantel’s short story the Assassination of Margaret Thatcher?
Neil Gaiman: Yes! I thought it was wonderful. I haven’t read the story, but I’ve read an interview with her and saw the thing from Sir Lord Emperor Bell. I thought it was wonderful that column inches in newspapers were being given to a short story.
Neil Gaiman (pic by Mika Stetsovski)
There’s part of you that’s going, as long as people are getting upset, then a medium is not dead. And as long as a poem could send the editor of Gay News to prison in 1979 you knew that poetry was not dead. And as long as Tim Bell can call for the arrest of Hilary Mantel for writing a story you know that the short story is not dead.
Having said that, what for me immediately flashed up was some of these cases in America - some stuff that I’ve dealt with directly and some stuff that has just crossed my screen - where people would find themselves essentially arrested for ‘thought crimes’. Where people would write short stories - in which people would die, in which illegal sexual acts would occur, in which bad things happened - and find themselves under arrest, find themselves losing their jobs.
MR: It’s happening here, people sending texts about legal practices like fisting, it’s illegal to send a text about a legal practice like fisting. Likewise. I was tweeting last week about how grateful I was that Tim Bell showed himself to be so indestructibly stupid to actually say somebody’s got to be investigated by the police because of something they’ve made up in their head, which hasn’t happened, which isn’t real. I’ve got a quote here, “A nice easy place for freedom of speech to be eroded is comics because comics are a natural target whenever an election comes up.”
We’re both of an age where we can remember they were impounding Robert Crumb coming into Britain in the late 70s.
NG: The last Robert Crumb thing that I remember was about 1987 or 1988 and it was particularly notable because on the one hand customs were impounding Crumb stuff coming into the country and it was stuff being imported to tie in with a BBC 2 Arena special on Robert Crumb!
MR: I always feel very uneasy about attempts to make the medium respectable. I actually think when there are Arena specials about Robert Crumb, that’s when the medium is dying. Attempts to turn what is essentially a specific genre which works in a specific way within the ecology of all fiction, shouldn’t be up there with the Booker Prize. It shouldn’t be treated as if it is respectable. That’s probably the satirist in me, because in the word of newspapers, I am down in the servants' quarters drinking Mackeson, while my journalist colleagues are up in the drawing room drinking schooners of sherry! But you are a global star, treated with respect by a large group of people – don’t you feel that you should being doing something to get your books burnt in the high streets of America and indeed Britain?
NG: You covered three different things here. You’ve nipped carefully from topic to topic. The first is comics as gutter medium, yes or no? I would definitely put my vote in for yes. Partly because I loved being part of a gutter medium. I loved the fact that most of my life was spent writing comics an...
This podcast is part of our Rupture, Crisis and Transformation series looking at new perspectives in the field of US Studies, drawn from the event of the same name at Birkbeck, University of London. It is the keynote presentation from world-renowned author Caryl Phillips.
The conference organiser Anna Hartnell, explains
Anna Hartnell: Caryl Phillips is a major contemporary writer whose large body of fiction and non-fiction explores various aspects of his own Caribbean, British and now American identities. Though coming in from a different perspective from Wai Chee Dimock [the other keynote speaker at the conference, whose presentation you can find here], he has been involved in thinking about the United States, in various de-centered ways, that are really helpful for this particular conference.
Bart Moore-Gilbert: Caryl is one of the most interesting and thought-provoking writers around today. Born in the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, he was brought up in Leeds and studied Literature at Oxford before moving eventually to the US. He has worked for a number of institutions in the US, and is currently professor of English at Yale. He is actually a colleague of our first keynote today.
Caryl’s complex background of multiple cultural affiliations have given him a very distinctive and authoritative perspectives on the range of issues which are germane to this conference, including the ways in which racial, class, national diasporas, and national identities, get re-articulated in times of rupture, crisis and transformation. He has explored these preoccupations in a wide range of genres, including drama, fiction, screenplays and a variety of non-fictional modes, notably autobiography, travel writing and literal criticism, genres which characteristically co-exist in a relation of productive tension and collaboration in much of his work. This dual track pattern of output is reflected in his two most recent books, the novel ‘In the Falling Snow’ of 2009 and the non-fiction collection ‘Colour me English’ of 2011.
The importance of Caryl’s work has been recognized in a number of prestigious awards, including the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, James Tate Black Memorial Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. So distinguished is Caryl’s CV that I thought I had to find one blot on it and eventually I discovered that he is a passionate supporter of Leeds United. [Laughter] But we can forgive him that, I’m sure. So, the title of Caryl’s talk is ‘The Star Spangled Banner‘ and I think this is going to offer a writerly rather than academic perspective on some of the new directions in US Studies, which are suggested by notions of crises, rupture and transformation. So, please give a big hand to Caryl Phillips. [Applause]
Caryl Phillips: Those of us who grew up in Britain have been spared the ordeal of having to hear the dreary tones of the national anthem ‘God Save the Queen’, on any kind of a regular basis. Dating back to 1619, the author of the national anthem is unknown, but the anthem first appeared in a published version in 1744. I’m just about old enough to remember when God Save the Queen was played at the end of films in the cinema. At such moments, we were expected to stand to attention, before filing out of the auditorium and onto the streets. Mercifully, this practice became obsolete before I was out of short trousers. In recent years, I’ve seldom had to endure the drone of the national anthem. As a nation, we hear it before the kick-off of England football matches. We also hear it on the rare occasions, at least prior to 2012, that a British athlete won a gold medal at an athletics championship or the Olympics. We might hear a snatch of it on the news whenever the monarch turns up on an official visit. But the fact is, God Save the Queen probably reached the height of its popularity during the heyday of the British Empire when nearly all the colonial territories utilised it as their national theme tune.
This podcast is one of two keynotes at the Rupture, Crisis, Transformation conference on the future of American Studies held at Birkbeck in November 2014 [the other, Caryl Phillips on the Star-spangled banner can be found here]
Rejecting ideas of American exceptionalism, Wai Chee Dimock looks at the work of author William Faulkner in a world context, seeing him as a regional writer. In doing so, she is able to explore how his is the voice of the defeated southern States of America - a thesis she develops with reference to things he said and wrote while in Japan in 1955 (then a recently defeated nation).
American novelist William Faulkner was born into an old Southern family in the US. The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936) are perhaps his best known works and in 1949 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for "his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel".
Wai Chee Dimock presents a radically new reading of Faulkner, and it was an important contribution to the theme at the heart of the conference, "At the end of the 'American Century', how do we understand the United States?"
Wai Chee Dimock has written on every period of American literature, from Anne Bradstreet to Star Trek. She also writes movie reviews for the Los Angeles Review of Books. She argues for a broad conception of American literature, embracing a variety of time frames, bringing together materials both high and low, and scales both local and global. Her work has appeared in publications ranging from Critical Inquiry to Salon. Dimock’s book, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (2006), received Honorable Mention for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association and the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association. This approach is further developed in a collaborative volume, Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (2007). She is now working on two book projects, ‘Weak Theory,’ and ‘Low Epic: World Literature as Downward Recycling.’
This Podcast is part of our Rupture, Crisis, Transformation series drawn from the conference of the same name held at Birkbeck, University of London in November 2014, offering new perspectives on American Studies. It is the paper given by Pieter Vermeulen.
This presentation was followed by a panel discussion in which Pieter was Joined by Georgiana Banita.
Pieter's paper explores the institutional challenges facing American studies by interrogating two of the key figures of the anthropocene imagination as it is taking shape in American culture - the future archeologist and the future historian.
If the former will be left to read mankind’s geological footprint after its extinction, the latter will (less dramatically) chronicle historical errors that will turn out not to have been fatal. These figures recur in contemporary American fiction (from Teju Cole’s Open City to Max Brooks’s World War Z), but also in, for instance, historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization. I show how these figures convey anxieties and desires unleashed by the radical reorganization of knowledge production in the present and how they point to the crucial role of narrative in apprehending the anthropocene: not as a device to impose meaning, but, as a way of inhabiting the present as the object of a future memory.
The 'Rupture, Crisis, Transformation' series was produced by Jo Barratt with Lucy Bradley
Pieter Vermeulen is Assistant Professor in American Literature at the University of Leuven. He works in the fields of critical theory, the contemporary novel, and memory studies. He is the author of Romanticism After the Holocaust (Bloomsbury/Continuum) and Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form (Palgrave Macmillan). He is currently working on three edited collections: on the dynamics of memory studies, on the institutions of world literature (for Routledge), and on the notion of the creatural (for the European Journal of English Studies).
This Podcast is part of our Rupture, Crisis, Transformation series, drawn from the conference of the same name offering new perspectives on American Studies, held at Birkbeck, University of London in November 2014. .
In Petrochemical Gothic, Georgiana Banita addresses the new, shifting interface of American Studies and the emerging field of Energy Humanities. Through a discussion of the anti-humanist HBO series True Detective, the paper shows that at this juncture American Studies must inevitably absorb the ethical narrative of diminishment and limit so closely interwoven with the Anthropocene and hydrocarbon culture. Yet in placing this show in a broader context, I argue that American Studies should respond to the formless menace of peak oil with an erudite historiography of energy concepts and a molecular hermeneutic capable of detecting energy traces in deep (literary and visual) subtexts.
From the derelict refineries that form the backdrop of iconic film noir shootouts to the morally saturated finale of David Fincher's 1995 thriller Se7en, where giant power lines index the primal wiring of the human mind and its high-voltage potential for irreparable destruction, an intriguing pattern has emerged around the imagination of energy and evil. The roots of this entwinement can be found in fictions of the dark romantic period, whose obsessions with exhumation and excavation resonate with the Gothic inflections of Southern literature in the mid-twentieth century at the height of the oil boom.
The eclectic traces of this energy unconscious surface in the first season of True Detective, which drapes the literary idiom of the Southern Gothic over a sacrificial Louisiana landscape in a state of terminal environmental decline and moral exhaustion. Leaning upon a growing archive of petro-environmental photography, the series' refinery landscapes intimate a systemic, non-localizable infestation initially associated with isolated human wrongdoing, but then gradually expanded to a morally bankrupt psychosphere as pervasive as petrochemical fumes.
The series unpacks a variety of energy discourses both within and outside traditional American Studies—geochemical, ecological, thermodynamic, and cosmological—to complicate familiar narratives of energy ultimacies. It negotiates forms of gratification and exploitation in ways that link natural detritus to human depression, and the sinister post-industrial anthroposcene of toxic Louisiana to the perverted minds bred by this poisoned soil. Ultimately, I would argue, it helps us understand how the energy imaginary has invisibly shaped US literary and cultural history, and devise a melancholy methodology to anticipate its exit.
The podcast was produced by Jo Barratt with Lucy Bradley
Georgiana Banita
Georgiana Banita is Assistant Professor in North American Literature and Media at the University of Bamberg. She studied and worked at the University of Konstanz, Yale, and the University of Sydney. She is the author of Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture after 9/11 (U of Nebraska P, 2012) and co-editor of the forthcoming collection Electoral Cultures: American Democracy and Choice. She is currently completing her second book, a study of how the oil industry has shaped the development of transnational American literature, and she has published widely on US, Canadian, and global energy cultures, including oil movies, petrofiction, energy photography, comics about strip mining, and the role of energy rhetoric in US presidential elections.
Is technology pushing us too fast? Do we need time to catch up and get to know how the technologies we use actually work? How do we understand technology in the the overall depictions of America in crisis? Does the narrative of 'progress' get in the way?
Chairing the panel, Dr Zara Dinnen reflects on Richard Linklater's film, Boyhood, to demonstrate the change in technologies we use. Filmed over 12 years, Boyhood presents technologies from gameboy to ipad - but it not only shows us media, it is media.
For Lev Manovich, ‘the speed with which new technologies are assimilated in the United States makes them “invisible” almost overnight’. The panel discussion considers technological conditions of crisis in US culture, and crises of technology in the twenty-first century. The 2008 economic crash made visible the technology of speculative finance, just as wikileaks, Manning and Snowden brought to light the cyclical machinations of contemporary technocratic geopolitics.
Dr Zara Dinnen (University of Birmingham) opens the panel with some reflection on technological slow time, before introducing Dr Clare Birchall (KCL) speaking on ‘Data Crisis’, Dr Kristin Veel (University of Copenhagen) speaking on ‘Information Crisis’ and Dr Seb Franklin (KCL) presenting ‘Networks, Black Boxes, Switches: on the Metaphors of Empire’. After these short talks there is a discussion and Q&A. This Podcast is part of our Rupture, Crisis, Transformation series offering new perspectives on American Studies.
The podcast was produced by Jo Barratt with Lucy Bradley
16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence is an international campaign, spearheaded by the United Nations, which takes place each year, and runs from 25 November, (International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women), to 10 December (Human Rights Day),
‘16 Days Campaign’ is used as an organizing strategy by individuals and groups around the world to call for the elimination of violence against women and girls.
Pod Academy's Isabella Grotto went to talk to researcher and campaigner, Betsy Stanko, Honorary Professor of Criminology at Royal Holloway, University of London and to Diana Nammi and Sara Browne of IKWRO (Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation) which works on so-called 'honor based' violence such as forced marriage, domestic violence and female genital mutilation.
They looked at the shocking levels of violence against women in Europe, described earlier this year in the research report, Violence against women: an EU-wide Survey and at the work Betsy Stanko has done in quanitfying the economic costs of violence against women.
Refuges in the UK are closing, and cuts in legal aid have had a devastating impact on women's safety. But Betsy Stanko says this is very shortsighted, and not only as a moral issue. The costs of violence against women and children reverberate down the generations.
Here is the transcript of the podcast:
Isbella Grotto: Earlier this year the EU issued a report on violence against women, which made headlines in the UK and beyond. Based on interviews with over 40,000 across 28 EU member states, it revealed that one in three women had reportedly experienced some form of physical or sexual abuse since the age of 15.
Betsy Stanko: I think what’s important about the recent EU study is that one has some comparative data; but also what we find in that study is it seems like the countries where the conversation about violence against women is the most advanced, that is they talk about it as something that is common in their lives, they actually have the highest numbers of reports of violence against women. So Sweden has high figures in this study, the UK has high figures and I think that has something to do with enabling women to name what experience they have had better than women in other countries, where they just think it’s something that women endure, it’s just part of their lives and it’s not an unusual thing to be named. What we’re saying is that it’s common, but it’s also something that we don’t want.
IG: As early as the 1990s Betsy’s research focused on investigating the issue of violence against women from an economic perspective. In particular, it sought to analyse the cost to society of these crimes.
BS: I did my first walk up Fifth Avenue in 1971, I started a refuge for battered women in 1978 and I’ve done lots of work around rape and sexual violence as well. I think we, as feminist researchers, spent a lot of time trying to quantify how much violence against women there was, a lot of work on naming it and changing the concept and moving it from “that’s just what it’s like to be a woman” to “we would like to be able to not have this in our lives. By the Nineties it was always a debate around how much, how prevalent, and to me I thought, well, prevalence is one thing, but actually it’s a hidden cost; not only the consequences in terms of how you bear that cost, that is individually as a woman you bear that cost, but I was trying to move the argument from: “it’s an individual problem” to “it’s a societal problem”, because the consequences are actually very costly, particularly in a welfare state. Now, not only has that been borne out over time, but actually there are different discourses now, in terms of thinking about the issues. Even in a troubled family discourse, that is, what are the kinds of family that draw most on the public purse, what you find in those families are high levels of violence,
"Nature has been defined as a woman, and both nature and women were then defined into objectification and therefore into objects of violence. Ecofeminism is a celebration of the creativity of nature and the creativity of women," says Dr Vandana Shiva, world renowned Indian environmentalist, activist and scientist, in this conversation with Pod Academy's Lucy Bradley about her book, Ecofeminism (co-authored with Maria Mies, Zed Books).
This podcast, which also includes the presentation by Vandana Shiva at SOAS, in October 2014, is produced and presented by Lucy Bradley.
Vandana Shiva has written many books, (including Staying Alive-Women, Ecology and Development; Monocultures of the Mind; and Soil not Oil) and Lucy started by asking her how this book, EcoFeminism, came about:
Vandana Shiva: Well the book has a very interesting genesis. Maria Mies had written Patriarchy and Capital Accumulation on a World Scale, I had written Staying Alive and that had done very well and it was the first time a title was connecting, the issues of the paradigm of development happening to women in the third world and what was happening to ecosystems in the third world. Zed [publishers] asked if both of us could do a book combining North and South perspectives. Of course we didn’t have the time to actually sit together so we just decided to write our chapters and share them every month.
And it shows there are common patterns [being experienced in these different places] because we’d write chapters and they’d be about the similar phenomena. And one was in rich, rich, rich Germany and the other was in India - which at the time we wrote it was not part of this ‘shining’ India campaign – and the book chapters then just fell into place, not because we’d planned and said we’ll write chapters on this, but because both Maria and I do thinking engaged in activism.
There’s an illusion that you have to be either an intellectual or an activist and the two don’t meet. In my view, real reflection of the world we’re in can only come from engagement in that world, not by sitting in an ivory tower and imagining you know all. When you don’t write with a vested interest, when don’t write because you are serving some master, when you write in the freedom of your mind and your spirit, with a deep connection of compassion and involvement and inclusion with every being and every person whose being trampled on you don’t get dictated [to].
Lucy Bradley: And what’s the main thesis of the book?
VS: Eco feminism is really looking at the dominant world view and structures it has created which have been driven by the convergence of capitalism and patriarchy, and looking at it from the point of view of nature and women. This is for a number of reasons, first because the oppression of nature and women served the building of this paradigm; nature was defined as a woman and both were then defined into objectification and therefore into objects of violence. Ecofeminism is a celebration of the creativity of nature and the creativity of women and it is basically in a way waking us up to see the illusion that capital creates.
The new edition of Ecofeminism of course is an update. [But] everything we said –whether it was the violence had just gotten worse and whatever we said about alternatives have just flourished better, and I’m sure if we were to reissue twenty years from now, I don’t’ know if we will be around, but the two trends will just have deepened.
LB: You have anticipated my next question, is ecofeminism gathering momentum?
VS: when we wrote ecofeminism there was a whole new generation of young women who were fed up with academic feminism which had in a way totally turned it’s back on the women’s movement. We mustn’t forget that women’s studies grew out of the womens’ movement and in the early days theorising and activism was one, and then you got into this academic strand. And what happened was at that time when young women who were ...
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Revelation. But what about Josephus or the Book of Enoch? Did you know that the Bible with which we are familiar is not the complete story? Or that there are mistakes in the accepted version? And did you know that Jesus had a brother, James?
Pod Academy's Craig Barfoot talks to Dr. Joel M. Hoffman, author of The Bible's Cutting Room Floor about how some theological writings were left out for political or theological reasons, others simply because of the physical restrictions of ancient bookmaking technology. At times, the compilers of the Bible skipped information that they assumed everyone knew. Some passages were even omitted by accident!
The writings not included are more numerous than those that actually made it into the bible - The Bible's Cutting Room Floor explains how the 150 Psalms are just a 'best of' collection
An estimated 1% of children worldwide are described as autistic. But what exactly does that mean? What is autism? And what are the promises, perils and politics of pharmaceutical intervention - could, should autism be treated?
This podcast features some of the key points raised by autistic people and their families at an event held at Kings College, University of London in late October 2014 to discuss the EU AIMS project (European Autism Interventions - A Multicentre Study for Developing New Medications). To play this edited version click the button above. A podcast of the full, unedited, event can be found here.
The event was chaired by Sandy Starr, Progress Educational Trust
Speakers were:
Prof Ilina Singh, King’s College London Prof Declan Murphy, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London Prof Richard Ashcroft ,Queen Mary, University of London Virginia Bovell: Ambitious About Autism Russell Stronach: Autistic UK
Importantly, as Ilina Singh and Sandy Starr say, autism has multiple claims on those involved in this event, both speakers and participants. Many are living with autism or are parents of children with autism.
Autism affects how someone communicates with and relates to other people, it can also affect how they make sense of the world. But it is what is called a ‘spectrum condition’ – which means that different autistic people are affected in different ways depending where they are on the spectrum. And it’s a wide spectrum - some autistic people have above average intelligence and some have severe learning disabilities.
So, autism can be described (although as Richard Ashcroft said at the event, 'when you have met one person with autism, you have met one person with autism') but almost nothing is known about why one in a hundred of us will have the diagnosis. Are the causes genetic, hormonal, social,or is it something to do with the wiring of the brain – or is it a combination of those things? No one knows.
And that is why the EU AIMS project has been set up. It is the largest ever academic/industry collaboration aimed at understanding autism and finding new methods for developing drugs for the autism spectrum disorder.
It is led by Kings college London (with partners in 13 other centres of academic excellence around Europe) and by Pharmaceutical company Roche, in partnership with other huge global pharma companies.
Although it is clear that new drugs are the longer term aim of the project (and there is no evidence for the efficacy of any of the current treatments for the core symptoms of autism), the first phase is about understanding Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). And there is much to understand. The EU AIMS project has brought together researchers from diverse backgrounds –genetics, neuroscience and cellular biology – and they are all beavering away looking for an answer to the question – what is autism?
So we’ve got big pharma and we’ve got academic researchers. But where are the people with autism and their families? They live day in day out with autism, they must have crucial insights and experience to feed into the research programme…. Given the fact that the scientists don’t know what autism is, surely their knowledge and perspective is indispensable.
That gap has been recognised - although perhaps a little late in the day given that EU AIMS is in its second year. This event was just one of a series of events around Europe planned for the next few months.
A video describing the work of EU AIMS can be found here
Photo: Snorkeling at Surfers for Autism by Robert Neff
What would it mean to develop medical treatment for the core features of autism?
Recent research has enriched our understanding of the biology of autism, as well as the social experiences of being autistic, but the core biological features of autism are still not well understood.
Any medication for the core symptoms of autism is thus still some way off in the future. Nonetheless, much research is now looking for biological markers for which treatments might be developed.
‘EU-AIMS’ is a collaboration seeking new methods for the development of biological markers and drug treatments for autism. There is considerable support for such an endeavour, including from groups representing autistic people, and their families and allies. However, other autistic people, some autism self-advocacy groups, and some ethical and legal scholars, are concerned about autism coming to be defined only as a biological disorder in need of treatment – and have called for wide debate on the relationships between biology, treatment, and difference in autism.
This public dialogue, organised by the Ethics Advisory Board of EU-AIMS, brings together autism advocates and self-advocates, psychiatrists, and ethicists, to discuss these issues.
Treating Autism: full recording of EU AIMS dialogue October 2014
An edited version of the even can be found here.
"Nature has been defined as a woman, and both nature and women were then defined into objectification and therefore into objects of violence. Ecofeminism is a celebration of the creativity of nature and the creativity of women," says Dr Vandana Shiva, world renowned Indian environmentalist, activist and scientist, in this conversation with Pod Academy's Lucy Bradley about her book, Ecofeminism (co-authored with Maria Mies, Zed Books).
This podcast, which also includes the presentation by Vandana Shiva at SOAS, in October 2014, is produced and presented by Lucy Bradley.
Vandana Shiva has written many books, (including Staying Alive-Women, Ecology and Development; Monocultures of the Mind; and Soil not Oil) and Lucy started by asking her how this book, EcoFeminism, came about:
Vandana Shiva: Well the book has a very interesting genesis. Maria Mies had written Patriarchy and Capital Accumulation on a World Scale, I had written Staying Alive and that had done very well and it was the first time a title was connecting, the issues of the paradigm of development happening to women in the third world and what was happening to ecosystems in the third world. Zed [publishers] asked if both of us could do a book combining North and South perspectives. Of course we didn’t have the time to actually sit together so we just decided to write our chapters and share them every month.
And it shows there are common patterns [being experienced in these different places] because we’d write chapters and they’d be about the similar phenomena. And one was in rich, rich, rich Germany and the other was in India - which at the time we wrote it was not part of this ‘shining’ India campaign – and the book chapters then just fell into place, not because we’d planned and said we’ll write chapters on this, but because both Maria and I do thinking engaged in activism.
There’s an illusion that you have to be either an intellectual or an activist and the two don’t meet. In my view, real reflection of the world we’re in can only come from engagement in that world, not by sitting in an ivory tower and imagining you know all. When you don’t write with a vested interest, when don’t write because you are serving some master, when you write in the freedom of your mind and your spirit, with a deep connection of compassion and involvement and inclusion with every being and every person whose being trampled on you don’t get dictated [to].
Lucy Bradley: And what’s the main thesis of the book?
VS: Eco feminism is really looking at the dominant world view and structures it has created which have been driven by the convergence of capitalism and patriarchy, and looking at it from the point of view of nature and women. This is for a number of reasons, first because the oppression of nature and women served the building of this paradigm; nature was defined as a woman and both were then defined into objectification and therefore into objects of violence. Ecofeminism is a celebration of the creativity of nature and the creativity of women and it is basically in a way waking us up to see the illusion that capital creates.
The new edition of Ecofeminism of course is an update. [But] everything we said –whether it was the violence had just gotten worse and whatever we said about alternatives have just flourished better, and I’m sure if we were to reissue twenty years from now, I don’t’ know if we will be around, but the two trends will just have deepened.
LB: You have anticipated my next question, is ecofeminism gathering momentum?
VS: when we wrote ecofeminism there was a whole new generation of young women who were fed up with academic feminism which had in a way totally turned it’s back on the women’s movement. We mustn’t forget that women’s studies grew out of the womens’ movement and in the early days theorising and activism was one, and then you got into this academic strand. And what happened was at that time when young women who were ...
These days most universities actively help their researchers develop their ideas into products for market. It's called the commercial exploitation of research. One such support is the Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) at Surrey University's Advanced Technology Institute, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), which aims to accelerate the process of research exploitation in order to enhance the impact of past, present and future EPSRC funded projects.In this podcast Dr Radu Sporea visits a showcase event to talk to some of the researchers taking part.
The projects he hears about include
Pervasive Intelligence Ltd's intelligent sofware that enables museums and art galleries to put together an app to augment their exhibitions at a fraction of the cost of most packages of this type. The museum visitor has the app on their smartphone, they point it at an exhibit and can get a wide range of different types of information about the artefact. But more than that, the museum can track the visitor's journey through the exhibition and gain valuable visitor statistics which enable them to enhance/streamline the experience.
Tom Mee from the Chemical Engineering Department describes his project that helps the NHS with demand planning - it could revolutionise cancer treatment in the UK.
Plastipack swimming pool covers that heat the water in the pool AND inhibit algae growth- other covers do one or the other. This is a major advance.
Photo by Kev Shine
More and more women are going into the law as solicitors, barristers, legal executives, academics. Indeed, in England and Wales more women than men now qualify as barristers. But far fewer women get promoted to the highest levels. There is only one woman, Brenda Hale, on the UK Supreme Court.
Around the world, feminists have been developing an important critique of legal systems and the assumptions underpinning law making.
So what does it mean, 'being a feminist barrister'? Two feminist lawyers, Alison Diduck, Professor of Law at University College London, and barrister and novelist Elizabeth Woodcraft spoke at a meeting of the Haldane Society - Pod Academy was there to record what they said.
Elizabeth Woodcraft, whose latest collection of short stories, A Sense of Occasion has just been published, made another podcast for Pod Academy, about feminist legal judgments, what would be the impact of having feminism informing the writing of legal judgments. The podcast features supreme court judge Justice Baroness Brenda Hale and Professor Rosemary Hunter of Queen Mary College, Univ of London and Professor Rosemary Auchmuty, of Reading University.
Photo: Mike Cough/Blogtrepreneur
'Virtual economies' are all around us, from social media, to bitcoin, to the games on our smartphones. But what exactly is a virtual economy? And is there anything that these virtual economies can teach us about 'real world' economics?
Pod Academy's Alex Burd returned to the Oxford Internet Institute to speak to Vili Lehdonvirta, a research fellow there. Alex previously interviewed Vili about Bitcoin for us (podcasts: Bitcoin 1 and Bitcoin 2).
This time he went to talk about Vili's new book, Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis (by Vili Lehdonvirta and Edward Castronova, MIT Press, 2014)
In developing digital games, designers often develop an economy within the game itself. These economies can drive the game, just as an economy does in the real world. Then there is bitcoin - is that developing into a useable currency? And can we learn anything about economics from understanding what is involved in clicking 'like' or 'retweet'? Vili became intrigued by what these virtual economies might teach us. He started by explaining that he and Edward Castronova first got the idea for the book at a conference of digital game developers in San Francisco:
Vili Lehdonvirta: I’ve been going every year for the past 5 years to a digital developers' conference to give a talk there about what the academic study of virtual economies can teach game developers and digital developers. In 2010 I was there on a panel about virtual economies in online games, it was a panel where all of the panelists were academics and the game developers were quizzing us. One of the questions was ‘What should I read if I want to make use of economics and economic sociology. Should I just pick up an economic textbook.’ My co-author, Edward Castranova, was also on that panel. The two of us thought ‘well, if you pick up an economics textbook in theory everything is the same. But in practice everything is focused on very different objectives'.
Then we thought, we’ll write the text book for you! Obviously we also wanted to make it interesting to academics so it’s a slightly broader book than just for developers.
Alex Burd: So you you wanted to write a book for developers who wanted to know more about economics and academics who wanted to know more about games.
VL: That’s right, game developers and digital developers more broadly. Not just games but anyone who is developing online communities or shared information pools or crowd sourcing systems or a new virtual currency – that’s one of the audiences.
The other audience is academics and social scientists who are interested in media and social communications and are interested in behaviour and power in digital media.
Basically we’re arguing to scholars that if you want to understand how digital media affects behaviour, whose power it enhances, what kind of behaviours are valued and privileged, and what kind of constraints and budgets are placed on use, then you really have to take this economic perspective on digital media. You can’t just treat it as communication, as speech, as abundant bits that are only restricted by creativity.
There also these very concrete constraints and choices and ownership and exclusivity that are programmed into the infrastructure of digital media, everything from social media to numerous games that people play every day. And understanding that is crucial for any scholar studying digital media.
AB: Looking at social media specifically, it’s about being able to put some kind of value on the interactions that users have with publishers. What value someone clicking 'like', or someone clicking 'retweet', has?
VL: It’s that, yes, but it goes beyond just economic value. Microeconomics fundamentally is a science of choice, choice under constraint. Most internet scholarship is about how suddenly scarcity disappears and there is abundance. You don’t have to choose which music file you want because you can download both and then share them to your f...
What is the universe made of? What is 'dark matter'? Why is the universe still expanding? These are just some of the questions astrophysicist Professor Katherine Freese tackles in this wonderfully accessible interview with Pod Academy's Craig Barfoot.
Katherine Freese, is the George Eugene Uhlenbeck Collegiate Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan and author of The Cosmic Cocktail: Three parts dark matter, the inside story of the epic quest to solve one of the most compelling enigmas of modern science—what is the universe made of?
The ordinary atoms that make up the known universe—from our bodies and the air we breathe to the planets and stars—constitute only 5 percent of all matter and energy in the cosmos. The rest is known as dark matter and dark energy, because their precise identities are unknown.
Prof Freese explains that new galaxies come about when dark matter clumps together, indeed it is dark matter that dominates structure formation rather than atoms. However, we are not sure what dark matter actually is (though the favourite candidate is WIMPS (weakly interactive massive particles))
Prof Freese is one of the world's leading astrophycists, but this is an interview that the layperson can enjoy. For example, she talks of telescopes as 'time machines' - light takes 10 minutes to reach us from the sun, but the further out into space we look, towards distant galaxies, the further back in time was the light emitted, maybe even a million years ago.
'My secret mission is to encourage young people, especially young women, to become scientists', says Katherine Freese, 'When people talk about creativity, they think about the arts - but it is scientists who are in the sweet spot here'.
The New Scientist magazine said of The Cosmic Cocktail:
Physicist Katherine Freese drinks deep of her life's adventures and cosmic mysteries alike in her captivatingly frank book The Cosmic Cocktail
Podcast produced by Lee Millam What makes us happy? It is not just how we think but how we act, says Paul Dolan, Professor of Behavioural Science in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science and author of Happiness by Design.
Professor Paul Dolan: For me happiness is in our experiences of life. Things that we feel day to day, moment to moment. And [in the book] I talk about pleasure and purpose.
OK, so my name is Paul Dolan, I’m at London School of Economics and my book is called ‘Happiness by Design - Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life’. So, happy lives are ones that contain some balance; it’s not the same for everybody and it is not in equal measures. But some kind of balance between things that we find fun on the one hand and things that we find fulfilling on the other.
Music: Abstract Nostalgic Fractals Systems – Floating In A Lake Of Happiness
PD: Well, it is a subjective experience. I think everything ultimately matters because it makes us feel better, so I can describe to you the things I think are pleasurable and the things that I find purposeful. And I can also give you a good sense of how much I find them pleasurable and purposeful. And equally, of course, things that I find painful and things that I find pointless, so I think we are now getting a better insight into the quantities and natures of those elements.
Music: Abstract Nostalgic Fractals Systems – Floating In A Lake Of Happiness
Vox pop: Happiness for me is a very ethereal thing, I think. By that I mean that it is very difficult to say what is, and it can be different, at different stages of my life. But in essence, happiness for me, as I have grown older, is quite a few intangible things, things which make me think that life is worth it, so it is spending time with the people I want to be with, it’s not just living from moment to moment but actually just being in the moment and doing the things that are most important. So the places are really important for me, and often, actually, it is later on that you realise the happy times; well I am getting better at that.
PD: We are getting many observations on many people over many years, and there seems to be something sensible coming through from the answers people give us. We get association with some things which you would expect them to be associated with, you know, poverty makes people more miserable but being rich doesn’t make people happy. So there are some nice insights coming through from this data. Time we spend with other people that makes us feel nice, time spent on trains and on tubes and on buses, not so nice
Music: Blue Ducks – Floss Suffers From Gamma Radiation
Vox pop: The things that make me happy are: spending time with my friends and family, going out for dinner, going to watch my football team play football, playing with my cat.
PD: Well I think how we use our time is absolutely critical, it’s the scarcest thing we have got right? The few moments we have been talking now, or I have been talking now, are moments closer to death and it is time I won’t ever get back, so I think it is incumbent on us all to think about how we use that time and just reorient some of it away from things that we find painful and pointless. And spend a bit more time, you know, with things that we find pleasurable and purposeful which would include spending time with people we like being with; will include spending a bit more time outdoors, maybe listening to music, all of these things, I think most use of us know if we stop and think for a moment, would make us feel happier. The interesting question is why we don’t do more of it? And helping others too , makes us feel nice, so all these things that we get good feedback for if we paid attention to those experiences but one of the reasons why we don’t do those things most is we don’t pay attention to those experiences as much as we might,
In October 2013, the British government gave a green light to the UK's first nuclear power station in a generation. It will be built at Hinckley Point in Somerset by a consortium which is led by France's EDF Energy and includes Chinese investors.
The government is backing nuclear energy and is guaranteeing to pay £92.50 per megawatt hour for the electricity generated, twice the current wholesale price.
Professor Keith Barnham of Imperial College, author of The Burning Answer, says there are many reasons to think this is far from a sound proposition - not only do we not know the carbon footprint of nuclear power, but the price guarantee for the consortium may end up being way above the costs of energy in 10 years time, with the taxpayer having to foot the extra bill.
This short podcast is an extended extract from Prof Barnham's interview with Dr Radu Sporea of the Surrey University Advanced Technology Institute, in which they discuss the potential for renewables to meet all our energy needs.
You can find the full interview between Keith Barnham and Radu Sporea, Solar power, the burning answer? It looks at the potential of renewables, in particular solar power.
Photo: Reactor by Paul Stevens . Photo taken at the decommissioned nuclear reactor in Dounraey, Scotland
We've got to beat global warming within 50 years, and renewables are the way to do it according to Professor Keith Barnham of Imperial College, London, author of The Burning Answer, in this conversation with Dr Radu Sporea of Surrey University's Advanced Technology Institute.
Photovoltaics should be at the heart of our energy generation, says Prof Barnham, - even on a gloomy English afternoon, he reckons he can heat all his hot water from solar power.
Professor Barnham, who has worked at Cerne and Berkley, is a leading researcher and developer of silicon solar cells and, for a while, his team held the world record for the most efficient version of this rapidly improving technology. Despite the naysayers, he is confident that renewables can deliver, if we are prepared to invest in their development. It is about action, decision, attitude, a global effort is needed.
That global effort needs governments and scientific establishments to invest, says Prof Barnham. But he believes we can all do something - switch to all renewable electricity suppliers, use ground source heat pumps, and get involved in one of the growing number of local action groups producing their own electricity.
We have produced a separate short podcast, Nuclear, a safe bet?, drawn from the same interview between Keith Barnham and Radu Sporea, specifically looking in more detail at nuclear power.
The Burning Answer by Keith Barnham ..."cuts through the current morass of fossil-fuel and nuclear lobbyists' negative propaganda with a clear and original vision for solar power." (Review in The Guardian)
Podcast produced by Jo Barratt Susan Sontag said smelling ‘gives one a sensation of knowledge rinsed clean of thought’. The effect of smell is powerful, but rarely articulated and therefore rarely recorded.
So how does an historian of smell go about his work? There are millions upon millions of smells, but how can he recreate them and how does he understand what they meant to people?
In this podcast, first broadcast on Life in Scents, William Tullett – an historian at Kings College London specialising in 18th Century England and in particular Sensory history, Smell, History of Perfumes, History of the Senses, and Gesture, – talks about how he rebuilds sensescapes from the things left behind.
This podcast is presented and produced by Craig Barfoot In 2007, Alan Greenspan, then Chairman of the US Federal Reserve was asked by the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger who, in his view, would be the next president of the United States. He replied, "We are fortunate that, thanks to globalization, policy decisions in the US have been largely replaced by global market forces. National security aside, it hardly makes any difference who will be the next president. The world is governed by market forces" So, is electoral democracy compatible with the forces of global capitalism? Or are western governments just ‘buying time’ with short term economic fixes in order to win elections, while real power lies not with the people but somewhere else entirely?
These are the questions at the heart of Craig Barfoot’s conversation with German sociologist Professor Wofgang Streeck, Director of the Max Planck Institute as they discuss Professor Streeck’s book Buying Time: The delayed crisis of democratic capitalism (Verso, 2014)., which is based on his 2012 Adorno lectures.
Tracing the transformation of postwar capitalism that began in the 1970s , Wolfgang Streeck explores how the relationship between democracy and capitalism in Europe and the US has changed and continues to change. He argues that western governments have been ‘buying time’ with public spending deficits and private debt (in order to win elections), and that the 2008 economic demonstrated the conflict of interests between the financial markets and the popular will.
After World War II, there was a consensus that those who had fought a war should have the right to the full benefits of citizenship, which included a share of the growing prosperity that came from a growing economy. But now, says Professor Streeck, we have a democracy that is very different - collective bargaining, a system that ensured wages kept pace with growth, and allowed for redistribution both for social justice and to stimulate the economy, is largely gone. Increasingly growth is seen as flowing from the empowerment of the rich, for example via tax cuts.
Governments have bought time, but can they do that for ever?
This podcast is produced and presented by Craig Barfoot In the 20th Century, humans killed hundreds of thousands of wild animals as we sought to build new homes and develop agriculture. Now the 21st century is characterised by conservation and re-wilding - but can ranchers and environmentalists, wildlife managers and animal-welfare activists, humans and animals ever really co-exist?
Yes, says John Shivik of Utah State University's National Wildlife Research Center /Predator Research in this fascinating conversation with Craig Barfoot. In parts of the United States, stories of 'backyard bears' and 'cat-eating coyotes' are becoming increasingly common—even for people living in non-rural areas. Farmers anxious to protect their sheep from wolves aren’t the only ones concerned: suburbanites and city dwellers are also having more unwanted run-ins with predators from the wild.
And as carnivore populations increase their proximity to people, pets, and livestock leads to more conflict, and we are once again left to negotiate the uneasy terrain between elimination and conservation. In his book The Predator Paradox, John Shivik argues that we can end the conflict while still preserving and protecting these key species as fundamental components of healthy ecosystems.
As the boundary between human and animal habitat blurs, preventing the war between humans and wildlife depends both on changing animal behaviour and shifting our own perceptions, attitudes, and actions.
You might also be interested in this blog about re-wilding in Chile
Podcast produced and presented by Craig Barfoot What makes us human? When, why and how did the human brain evolve?
Professor Clive Gamble argues that it was not the tools that form the bulk of the archaeological record, but rather the social world within which our ancestors lived that drove the development of the human brain.
In this conversation with Pod Academy's Craig Barfoot, he suggests that the evolution of the social brain tells us not only about human behaviour in the past but also about the importance of networking in our complex modern world.
Clive Gamble is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton. His work involves the study of our earliest ancestors and in particular the timing of global colonisation. This podcast focuses on his most recent book, Thinking Big: How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind. .
The featured photo with this podcast is by PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE
Research suggests that 10% of children are victims of bullying and 5% of children are involved in bullying others.
Defined as 'repeated aggressive behaviour intended to harm, and involving an imbalance of power', being bullied can feel like an unending nightmare to a child who is being targeted.
So who is likely to be a bully, and can we predict who is more likely to be bullied? What are the gender differences? And what about cyber bullying?
In this podcast, Emeritus Professor Peter K Smith of Goldsmiths, University of London talks to Pod Academy's Craig Barfoot about his book, Understanding School Bullying, Its Nature and Prevention Strategies, he explains what forms bullying talkes and what parents can do to help.
You may also be interested in our podcast on Young Girls Friendships, which explores the often worrying dynamics of girls' friendship groups.
Featured photo by Thomas Ricker
This podcast is part of our Geoff Dyer series – a series of recordings from a conference dedicated to Dyer’s work held at Birkbeck, University of London. It features Dr Bianca Leggett, Teaching Fellow in British Studies at Harlaxton College and is presented by Jo Barratt.
This year marks 25 years since the publication of Geoff Dyer’s first novel, The Colour of Memory. Geoff is a multi-award winning writer who has written 4 novels and is also known for his essays. He’s been described by the New York Times as ‘one of our greatest living critics’
The colour of memory series was recorded for Pod Academy at Birkbeck, University London at a conference dedicated to Dyer's work.
This podcast is a talk given by Bianca Leggett from Harlaxton College, University of Evansville on Dyer's latest book Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush.
Photo by Chris Boland: www.chrisboland.com
Click here for the other podcasts in the series
What colour was the 1990s?
Counting Backwards: a quarter-century of The Colour of Memory
This podcast is part of our Geoff Dyer series – a series of recordings from a conference dedicated to Dyer’s work held at Birkbeck, University of London. It features Dr Morgan Daniels of Queen Mary College, University of London and is presented byJo Barratt
This year marks 25 years since the publication of Geoff Dyer’s first novel, The Colour of Memory. Geoff is a multi-award winning writer who has written 4 novels and is also known for his essays. He’s been described by the New York Times as ‘one of our greatest living critics’
The colour of memory series was recorded for Pod Academy at Birkbeck, University London at a conference dedicated to Dyer's work.
In this podcast, Morgan Daniels steps slightly away from directly discussing the authors work to consider the fascinating proposition: “What colour was the 1990s?’
Photo by Chris Boland: www.chrisboland.com
Click below for the other podcasts in the series:
What colour was the 1990s?
All at Sea: Soldiers and Slackers in the Writing of Geoff Dyer
Counting Backwards: a quarter-century of The Colour of Memory
This podcast is part of our Geoff Dyer series - a series of recordings from a conference dedicated to Dyer's work held at Birkbeck, University of London. It features Dr Joe Brooker, Reader in Modern Literature at Birbeck and is presented by Jo Barratt.
This year marks 25 years since the publication of Geoff Dyer’s first novel, The Colour of Memory. Geoff is a multi-award winning writer who has written 4 novels and is also known for his essays. He’s been described by the New York Times as ‘one of our greatest living critics’
The colour of memory series was recorded for Pod Academy at Birkbeck, University London at a conference dedicated to Dyer's work.
In this podcast, Joe Brooker from Birkbeck University of London, looks back at the colour of memory.
Photo by Chris Boland: www.chrisboland.com
Click below for the other podcasts in the series, produced and presented by Jo Barratt.
What colour was the 1990s?
All at Sea: Soldiers and Slackers in the Writing of Geoff Dyer
Photo: @AlexJohnWill
This podcast was presented and produced by Jo Barratt This year marks 25 years since the publication of Geoff Dyer’s first novel, The Colour of Memory. Geoff is a multi-award winning writer who has written 4 novels and is also known for his essays. He’s been described by the New York Times as ‘one of our greatest living critics’
The colour of memory series was recorded for Pod Academy at Birkbeck, University London at a conference dedicated to Dyer's work.
In this introductory podcast the author sits down with conference convenor Bianca Leggett to talk openly and widely about his work and also hear from several experts on his work.
The following recording accompanies this podcast series and is Geoff Dyer reading two passages from his latest book ‘Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush’
http://podacademy.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/GD_Reading.mp3
Photo by Chris Boland: www.chrisboland.com
Click here for the other podcasts in the series
What colour was the 1990s?
All at Sea: Soldiers and Slackers in the Writing of Geoff Dyer
Counting Backwards: a quarter-century of The Colour of Memory
Transcript to follow
Photo credit: www.alexander-williamson.com
This podcast was produced and presented by Lee Millam Lee Millam has lived in high-rise blocks of flats in London for years. In this podcast he explores the highs and lows of living high up, and also asks whether high rise is a viable option for tackling current problems in the housing market.
Lee Millam: I used to live on the 16th floor, then moved to my current flat which is on the 8th floor.
Even after all these years, I am still fascinated by how incredibly light my living space is. I love the views from the windows - and the sense of the whole city being below me. I watch the trains as they go in and out of the train station – they look like toys; the cars as they travel on the roads and people going about their business.
Up in my flat I get a different perspective on the way the city of London moves.
I wanted to know about other people’s experience of living up high. Firstly, though, I take you to The London School of Economics, to talk to Paul Cheshire, Professor of Economc Geography about the housing crisis.
Paul Cheshire: There is a housing crisis because we have been constantly not building enough houses for more than thirty years so we have a shortfall of building compared to what we should have been building in England of between 1.6 and 2.3 million houses.
The lack of building is a symptom of the problem.. But the root of the problem is our planning system. Simply, it does not permit you to build. And there is very little land; it is highly constrained with our urban containment boundaries around all our major cities - the Green-Belt covers nearly thirteen percent of England for example. But equally, we have height restrictions so you can’t build upwards either.
LM: And is this just a problem for London or is this a problem across the country?
PC: The housing is worst in London and the pressure on space is worst in London but it is a problem across the country; worst in the South East of England. Outside London, Oxford has the most expensive housing relative to incomes
Vox pops: I like living High up because, living in London, it is very hard to see horizons but when I come home, I can see a distance. I have a lot of light; I feel safer because I can leave my windows open without anyone coming in. But really it is the fact that I can see a long distance, and people can’t actually look into my flat. So there is a sense of space, a sense of freedom and a sense of privacy that I really enjoy. Paul Cheshire : Basically the planning system zones so much land as off limits, you simply can’t build on it. Green-field land, or green-belt land, covers 13% of the surface of England, compared to cities which cover only 10% of the surface area of England. So all the people in England are crammed into ten percent of our space and we don’t allow any more. And as people get richer then they try to buy more space; they try to get better homes with bit of gardens and bigger rooms. LM: But some of us are going to have to compromise, maybe live in flats?
PC: Of course, some people indeed want to live in flats, or flats can be very suitable for some people. But is it difficult to build them too because you can’t build high. And flats are much more effective and efficient if they are in relatively large chucks of housing construction.
Vox pop: I have been asked to say how I would feel about living in a high rise flat, and I definitely wouldn’t like it. I think the only advantage would be the view. But I think I would feel quite cut off from the rest of the world if I lived quite high up. I would see it as a barrier to the outside world because you can’t just open your front door and be outside and there is all the palaver of using the stairs, and having to depend on the lift. And I could get quite scared, if I was stuck in the lift with someone that looked a bit frightening. Yeah, so I really don’t think I would like to live very high up. I sort of like to think that it is easy to get out,
In 1958 Charles Keeling began measuring the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere - the graph of his year-on-year measurements is called 'The Keeling Curve'.
Fast forward 50 years, and we are all familiar with debates on global warming, but it is a complex, interrelated problem, with no clear end point. Humankind seems unable to get to grips with it.
Craig Barfoot talks to Dr Joshua Howe,of Reed University about his book, Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming.
We can't afford to fail on curbing emissions, and yet failure is inevitable, we are already failing. Joshua Howe argues that any contribution is valuable and points to local and regional Climate Action Plans [in the UK that might be the Transition Towns movement as well as local authority enviornmental plans] that address our moral responsibility, and enable us to take action.
This podcast is presented and produced by Kieron Yates. Although he’s one of France’s most widely read and popular authors of the twentieth century, Boris Vian has never won the international recognition gained by friends and contemporaries such as Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
Kieron Yates talks to Alistair Rolls, Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Newcastle, Australia about the life and work of Boris Vian
Even within France, apart from a few doctoral studies, Vian’s work has remained outside the consideration of academia and to some degree is still frowned upon by scholars.
The closest most English speaking audiences will have come to Vian’s work is probably Michel Gondry’s 2004 film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which drew inspiration from two of Vian’s novels. More recently Gondry has directed a film of Vian’s most famous book, L’Ecume des Jours. Titled Mood Indigo for English speaking audiences, the film stars Audrey Tautou and gets its US and UK cinema release this summer.
A recent translation of Vian’s poems and short stories – If I say If- published by the University of Adelaide Press, and co-edited by Alistair Rolls means that for the first time all of Vian’s short stories are available in English.
Born in 1920 at Ville D’Avray, a bourgeois town on the western edge of Paris, Boris Vian was raised in a world of imagination fuelled by literature and society games. His parents were well-off and his early life was carefree and comfortable. But, in 1929 the stock-market crash ended the Vian fortune. The Vian’s were forced to move into the caretaker’s cottage of the family home so they could rent out the main house. At the age of twelve Vian was diagnosed with a heart condition that consigned him to his bedroom and to the care of his mother.
Boris’s health improved in his teenage years and he went on to become a brilliant scholar who, reputedly, had read everything.
Alistair Rolls: He was clearly very talented from an early age. One of his next door neighbours as a child was Yehudi Menuhin and Menuhin and he used to play chess together. He was very sharp. He was very mathematically alert… very musically alert early on and he was brought up in a very culturally alert environment so he was exposed early on to opera and all kinds of classical music.
I kept on coming across the expression, “Il a tout lu”…he’s read everything. No one’s read everything. Then the people in the Boris Vian Foundation in Paris took me aside and said , “You have to understand that you know that we publish more now than we used to publish.” So back in the 1920′s it was not possible to read everything but you could give it a damn good shot.
So he had this ongoing heart condition which he had from early on. I think it wasn’t just the heart condition that stifled Vian. It was then people’s reaction to the heart condition notably his mother. So he was certainly over mothered when he was young and I think he rebelled against that. And then you have this overwhelming thesis which is such that Vian killed himself by living. He lived too hard and brought about his own death.
KY: Boris’s obsession with literature and language led to him cultivating a passion for punning and wordplay. He also began to learn English in his spare time.
Music also played a major role in Boris’s teenage life. At the age of 16 he developed a passion for jazz and went on to become not only a competent trumpeter and band leader but a highly regarded critic and editor for jazz magazines.
In the immediate post-war years Vian could be found in the trendy hotspots of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, rubbing shoulders and exchanging ideas with other luminaries of the area or simply playing his trumpet in the lively clubs.
MUSIC: Basin Street Blues – Boris Vian with Radiodifussion France introduction:
It was around this time that Vian’s first literary works began to be published.
How much of our social status is tied to that of our parents and grandparents? How much does this influence our children? More than we wish to believe. While it has been argued that rigid class structures have eroded in favour of greater social equality, Gregory Clark's The Son Also Rises, proves that movement on the social ladder has changed little over eight centuries.
In this bookpod, Gregory Clark, a Professor of economics at the University of California, Davis, talks to Craig Barfoot about his novel technique of tracking family names over generations to measure social mobility across countries and periods. It led him to conclude that even in countries apparently committed to equality - like Sweden and the USA - it can take hundreds of years for high status families to revert to the mean of ordinariness.
This podcast is about the relations between the social sciences and the neurosciences, and what it might mean to do interdisciplinary work between these areas. Des Fitzgerald and Felicity Callard, two social scientists interested in stepping outside the bounds of social-science methods, and especially experienced in engaging with neuroscientific experiments, offer a new way of thinking about collaboration between the social- and neuro-sciences. They call their approach ‘Experimental Entanglements’. Research on the brain, as well as the widespread dissemination of this research, has significantly shaped our understanding of what it is to be human in the 21st century. Indeed, many facets of human life that were, for much of the twentieth century, primarily understood through the abstractions of ‘culture’ or ‘society’ – commercial and economic life, historical change, identity, mental illness – are increasingly understood as functions of the cerebral architecture of individuals or of groups of individuals. This rapid growth in the neurosciences has produced a wide variety of reactions. Steven Pinker has recently argued that neuroscience offers the greatest intellectual resource for the humanities and social sciences; Raymond Tallis has, in contrast, argued that it poses the gravest of intellectual threats. Indeed, Tallis is far from being the only one to have worried about the reductive and potentially anti-humanist tendencies of the neurosciences. And yet, beyond such debates, it is increasingly clear that the more that scientists experiment on and with the human brain, the more it becomes clear that our brains, and the experimental and intellectual practices that attend to them, are bound up in cultural, semiotic, bodily, societal and aesthetic ‘webs’. The current situation in cognitive neuroscience – with techniques such as functional neuroimaging available in ever more sophisticated forms – is ripe for a new level of interdisciplinary engagement. In the last few years, both Callard and Fitzgerald have participated in a number of explicitly designed ‘interdisciplinary’ ventures that have attempted to bring neuroscientists and social scientists together. The European Network of Neuroscience and Society (ENSN) and the Volkswagen Foundation’s European Platform for Life Sciences, Mind Sciences and the Humanities are two of these. Indeed, Fitzgerald and Callard first developed their approach of ‘experimental entanglement’ in a workshop held at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, which they co-designed, and which was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. In this podcast they reflect especially on the opportunities and constraints offered by such ‘interdisciplinary’ ventures. They counter a model in which social scientists and neuroscientists simply ‘interact’ with one another, secure in their own disciplinary arenas, and instead propose a much more complex and awkward practice of ‘experimental entanglement,’ in which to collaborate both in and beyond the neuroscientific laboratory. The podcast touches on existing experimental collaborations. Fitzgerald discusses his research in the Urban Brain Lab at King’s College London, which focuses on the overlap between sociology and neuroscience in questions around city life and mental health – and asks what a shared investigation across these disciplines can and should look like. Callard discusses her on-going collaboration on the brain and mind ‘at rest’ with neuroscientists and psychologists. For much of the twentieth century, psychologists were heavily preoccupied with studying how people respond to external tasks, which made it harder for scientists to bring together biology, psychology and culture to get at what the brain, mind and body are doing when they are ‘at rest’ (i.e. not responding to an external task). In contrast to usual social scientific interest in effects, ethics, or outcomes of the neurosciences as such, Fitzgerald’s and Callard’s collaborative approa...
Introducing Hari Kunzru Hari Kunzru is an award-winning British novelist famous for authoring several highly acclaimed novels, including The Impressionist (2002), Transmission (2004), My Revolutions (2007) and Gods Without Men (2011). Named among the twenty best young British novelists by Granta in 2003, Kunzru is also a PEN activist and 2014 Guggenheim Fellow. Since his debut novel’s publishing in 2002, he has cemented his role as one of Britain’s most acute observers and commentators on modern life and its intricacies.
Photo credit: Jamie Diamond
“Transmission: A Conversation with Hari Kunzru”, was an event in honour of the author held at Birkbeck, University of London, in June 2014. In the Podcast, Kunzru answers questions about his work and there is additional insight and context provided by experts studying his work. There is also advice on ‘where to start with Kunzru’ for listeners wishing to learn more about the novelist.
A roller-coaster ride of surrealism, dystopia and satirical humour, Kunzru’s works come to life to both challenge preconceptions and shatter the boundaries of genre in contemporary British writing.
This podcast was produced and presented by Jo Barratt, with Isabella Grotto
Transcript
Jo Barratt: Welcome to Pod Academy. In this podcast we welcome the author Hari Kunzru, who came to read and answer some questions about his work at an event at Birkbeck university of London. The event was co-convened by Bianca Leggett, who explained her reasons for bringing this group of academics, writers and fans together to discuss Kunzru's work.
Bianca Leggett: My work looks at British contemporary fiction and new cosmopolitan forms and tries to bridge those things together, which is something Hari's work does. I have been very struck by the sense that Hari Kunzru's work, by being so restless and inventive, really stretches over a great deal of expertise and scholars haven't been brought together before and I was determined to make that happen, and I'm delighted it finally has.
JB: Before Bianca speaks to the author, we're going to get an introduction from some of the attendees on the day. Dave Gunning is a lecturer in English literature at the University of Birmingham.
Dave Gunning: Hari Kunzru first really came into prominence in this country as one of the Granta best young British novelists in 2003 on the strength of his one published novel at that time and academics get worked up about to what extent he can be classed as a British novelist, given the global themes that are inside his work, but certainly they seem to identify the talent correctly. The Impressionist, which also won the Betty Trask prize, is the story of an Indian boy travelling around various identities in the early Twentieth century. It takes a sort of romp through the colonial era, but it's also completely tied in to contemporary concerns about identity, what it means to be authentic, what it might mean to actually possess an identity, and throughout subsequent works we see this mix of an intellectually informed level of understanding of debates around culture, and particularly contemporary culture, tied to this wonderful storytelling sense. We see how the contemporary world is experienced and how people orientate themselves within that. In Transmission, the second novel in 2005, we get a computer virus bringing together the worlds of Bollywood cinema, brand management, fortress Europe, and the low status of Indian "tech" workers in the US. It's a broad, intertwining and very funny book. In 2007, My Revolutions is more serious in tone and revisits the political activism of the 1960s in Britain. In 2011 he revisited this the network novel, his interconnected narratives, in Gods Without Men, with these broad marks of crossing historical periods, both finding a geographical base in the unearthly landscapes of the Mojave Desert. Last year, Kunzru's story, Memory Palace formed the centre of an exhibition at the V&A in whic...
A third of workers, internationally, earn less than $2 a day.
The World Bank sets the poverty line at $1.25 a day, and on that basis asserts that poverty is declining. But is that right? Where did that figure come from? The New Economics Foundation estimates that it should be set at $5 a day, and others suggest $10.
Craig Barfoot talks to Dr Ben Selwyn Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Sussex University about his book the Global Development Crisis.
Rejecting the idea that 'the poor' need to rely on benign assistance, and that the market provides the answer, Dr Selwyn puts forward the view that the capital/labour relationship is the reason most of the world's workers are poor, and advocates labour-centred development - where 'the poor' (the global labouring classes), and their own collective actions and struggles constitute the basis of an alternative form of non-elitist, bottom-up human development.
You can catch up with Ben Selwyn lecturing at Sussex in this YouTube video: here
This book pod is produced and presented by Craig Barfoot.
This podcast is produced and presented by Lee Millam. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, OCD, is a clinically recognised disorder which affects around 1-2% of the population. It is debilitating and paralysing. People with OCD experience intensely negative, repetitive and intrusive thoughts, combined with a chronic feeling of doubt or danger (obsessions). In order to quell the thought or quieten the anxiety, they will often repeat an action, again and again (compulsions). [definition from OCD Action] Psychologists believe the condition may run in families or that people with OCD have an imbalance of serotonin in the brain. Now new research is being done at Goldsmiths, University of London that could, in the future, help with treatment. It identifies the precuneus, considered as a central hub between posterior and prefrontal brain regions (and often involved with processing of self-attribution, responsibility and causal reasoning) as a key area for intervention. In the meantime, for those with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, its impact can be devastating as Imogen and Maria explain.... Maria: I was affected by imperfections in goods I'd bought, or around the flat I'd see a mark and that would bother me - I'd have to try and cover it or do something with it. And if something was really bad, I'd lose the ability to function. I'd go into a deep depression and just sit there, not being able to do anything. And that led eventually to a nervous breakdown when I was about 32, which is when it was diagnosed. Imogen: I can remember I was really scared of being told off in school. I'd do everything I could to prevent being told off. I'd get all my school clothes ready in the morning and I wouldn't go in my bedroom after 7am. I'd get changed in the hallway, I'd have everything out there. If I'd left something in my room I'd have to get someone else to go in and get it for me because I just felt 'no I can't'. I thought if I did go in something bad was going to happen - I wasn't aware of what - perhaps getting told off at school, or someone getting hurt - I just didn't know. LM:Help is available from the helpline OCD Action. Olivia Bamber, OCD Action: OCD can affect anyone of any age, in any job, any gender. From as young as possible to as old as possible. Anyone. Maria: You feel that if you don't think a certain way some harm will happen to someone you love or you care about. Sometimes you have to count certain numbers in your head. You do things but you don't realise it because you are so living with it all the time. Half the time you don't realise what you are doing. Most people with OCD have to keep washing their hands or performing tasks all the time, whereas I don't do that. Mine is a different form of OCD - checking things for imperfections etc. When I was diagnosed, I had peculiar obsessions - ones I don't have any more. But I still have OCD. LM: What 'peculiar' obsessions? Maria: When I had my nervous breakdown it was over my little dog, Cherie. Initially my partner bought her for me as a puppy because I thought if I had a dog it would help the OC - it would sort it out - but unfortunately she became the focus of my OCD. She was imperfect. I'd look into her eyes, see a vein that I thought shouldn't be there, and I'd keep checking her and checking her, until I got to a point where I thought there is something not right here, I've got to do something. I don't want to harm her - it was the worst fear I ever had of harming that little dog that I loved (and I did love her) but I couldn't function, I couldn't do anything. I'd be laying in bed and I remember just crying, I couldn't bear her near me. I completely broke down and I was taken to hospital and diagnosed with OCD. Imogen: I had great support from my family. They took me to see a CAMS specialist (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service). CAMS has lots of therapists who children and adolescents can talk to to get help.
Mario Balotelli, Patrice Evra, Kevin Prince Boateng and Dani Alves are just some of football's most decorated players to have endured racial abuse from fans in the past few seasons.
For eighteen months, Dr Mark Doidge, a sports sociologist, has been studying the efforts to combat racism of three of Europe's biggest clubs - one in Poland, one in Germany and one in Italy . Last month he presented his findings to UEFA at their headquarters in Geneva.
Alex Burd caught up with him on the phone to discuss his report. He started by explaining how he picked his case studies.
Mark Doidge: I used Legia Warsaw in Poland, Borussia Dortmund in Germany and Roma in Italy. The reasons for these clubs was twofold really. One was to have a representative of a club from the north, south and east of Europe so you get a fairly wide geographic spread. The other one was through discussions with UEFA, the clubs should be of sufficient size but also have a bit of contestation within the fan group so it wasn’t a universal group with a particular political persuasion. In Italy especially fan groups have political persuasions and some of them are seen as left wing or right wing. Left wing groups might automatically incorporate anti racism into their approach whereas if you chose a club like Roma which had a mixture of groups with political persuasions you get a sense of contest and a real sense of what’s happening on the ground.
AB: So looking specifically at Italy, we've seen one of Italy’s most prominent black players, Mario Balotelli, receive racial abuse as he trained with the national team ahead of this summer’s World Cup. What are Italian clubs like Roma doing to counteract this?
MD:That’s an excellent question and it’s a very easy answer – very little. One of the recommendations I made in my report to UEFA is that the clubs should support anti-racism measures. That way they can remove it from being an ideological approach. Unfortunately anti-racism has been tied into a left wing identity politically in Poland and Italy, and this automatically gets rejected by those who don’t see themselves as left wing. This liberal lefty thing they don’t want to be incorporated with. Whereas when the football club takes it on board, it’s still political but it’s no longer an ideological position. It’s human rights, it’s common sense, it’s a normal thing that should be done.
One of my recommedations to the UEFA was that Borussia Dortmund was the model club for taking a real interest in this and taking it seriously. There is a picture of Gundogan, one of their players, holding up a club scarf saying ‘against racism’ and this was something you could buy in the club shop. The club also support a fan project which runs modules on civil courage which teaches interaction without resorting to violence and being assertive in public. There is another on cultural learning and another on anti-racism and the far right. They hold these within the club stadium and participants get a club tour at the end of it. So to me Borussia Dortmund are the model club; unfortunately from what I saw in Legia Warsaw and Roma this hasn’t been taken on board.
AB: If we go back two years Polish football’s record on racism was under heavy scrutiny ahead of the 2012 European Championships. So you would suggest that these fears of racism towards black players had some basis with Legia?
MD: That’s a very good question. There was that BBC Panorama programme which provided a good case study on how the media present things, and the impact that has. There are two things of at work here. First I feel, a personal opinon, that the British media are very good at pointing the finger at other people as if to say ‘racism has dissipated in Britain but look at these foreigners, aren’t they uncivilised in comparison to Britain.’ Let’s not get away from the fact that Britain has had very similar problems in the 1970s and 1980s. Although fantastic work has been done by the FA,
Money. We all know what it is, but who creates money? The answer is actually surprising. 97% of money in our economy is created by private banks when they make loans, and this is carried out by these banks simply typing numbers into a computer. In doing so, private banks invariably divert this newly created money into house price bubbles and other forms of financial speculation.
So, in response to this, a campaigning organisation named Positive Money has sought to raise public awareness about such money supply issues, highlighting, in a recent book named Modernising Money(2012), how house price inflation, high levels of personal debt and widening inequality can all be linked to who has the power to create money.
I went to speak with Positive Money’s founder, Ben Dyson, in their London office. I started by asking about the aims and objectives of the organisation.
Ben Dyson: We're trying to get a banking system that works for society and not against it. We have seen all of the chaos that the financial system has caused over the last few years and since then there hasn't really been fundamental change. There's been a lot of tweaking around the edges, but we haven't actually addressed the root cause of the financial crisis and also the root cause of many of the social and economic problems that we are facing today.
Christopher Daley: So, Positive Money is therefore looking to bring forth quite radical changes rather than tinkering around the edges of monetary reform?
BD: Yeah, we have got some ideas about fundamental things that need to change, which some people say are radical; in reality they have been done in the past. But, it is a big step further than what the authorities have made with regards to fixing the banking system in response to the crisis.
CD: Ok, could you just outline, very quickly, what those big changes you want to see are?
BD: At the moment it's really about the power to create money and who has this power and how they use it, and if you ask people in the street, most people are under the impression that money can only be created by the government, because that's what you see on every £10 or £20 note. The reality is that the government only actually creates 3% of all the money that exists. The other 97% is just numbers in a computer system, it's those numbers you see when you check your bank balance. They don't represent any real money, they're just an electronic entry into a computer. What that means is that those numbers are created by banks when they make loans, so when you walk into a bank and take out mortgage, that money is not coming from someone's life savings, it's actually created out of nothing. This has implications for almost everything, from debt to poverty to inequality to how much your house costs to whether there is a financial crisis or whether the economy is growing or shrinking. What we're advocating is that we shouldn't be leaving the power to create money in the hands of the same banks that caused the financial crisis and we should remove that power from those banks and return it to a democratic, transparent, accountable body that works in the public interest rather than in the short term interests of the financial sector.
CD: So that led me to ask Ben why, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, these issues surrounding the control of money supply have not featured more prominently in the news. And I also asked whether these debates about money supply have been seen before?
BD: It's a good question. There used to be huge debates about this a hundred years ago, particularly around the time of the Great Depression as well, and this discussion of money creation was debated by really high profile economists. In the US, when the New Deal was implemented after the Great Depression to get the US economy going again, the only other alternative that was really being considered was the proposal that we have, which is to remove the power to create money from the ...
Between 1975 and 2010 the style of gourmet dining, in America and beyond, was transformed. Increasingly, restaurants of ‘fine’ dining incorporated food, décor, and other elements previously limited to the ‘casual’ dining experience. The celebrity chef, working in an open kitchen, took over from the Maitre D as the most important player, and in many places starched white tablecloths gave way to scrubbed wooden tables. Innovation, experiment and diversity (rather than the long established rules of French cuisine) have become the order of the day. In this podcast Eric Lemay talks to Alison Pearlman, author of Smart Casual: The Transformation of Gourmet Restaurant Style in America (University of Chicago, 2013). It first aired on the New Books in Food channel of the New Books Network . The gourmet experience, of our imagination - an elegant restaurant with a single candle flickering at the center of a luminous white tablecloth, a quartet playing somewhere in the background, a waiter slipping a perfectly plated appetizer of escargot before you, which you proceed to nuzzle out of their shells with silver tongs and that dainty fork - has changed. It was, perhaps, when Food & Wine magazine declared Roy Choi one of its “Best New Chefs” of 2010 for the food he was serving up in his Kogi BBQ truck, that this sea change in our idea of gourmet eating was confirmed. And that’s the very change that Alison Pearlman explores in her book, Alison describes a gourmet experience “replete with eroded hierarchies and pointed style contrasts, convergences of haute and ordinary.” And, of course, food trucks - they may have started in Los Angeles, but as she points out, they have spread much further. For example, London street food is cause for foodie celebration and serious London foodies can be found standing on the windy embankment of the Thames eating a pulled pork roll at the The Real Food Market on the SouthBank. And do listen to Kieron Yates brilliant podcast, The Best Burger in the World? about a food truck in Paris. In a keen investigation of every element of the dining experience, from menus to molecular gastronomy, Pearlman’s book reveals the surprising nature of what fine dining means for us today.
Christopher Daley: These days we are used to hearing about the power of banks, GDP percentages, hedge funds, shareholders, stock market reports, house prices, the business cycle, deficits, debts, surpluses – but has it always been this way? Has money and finance always been such a prominent focal point for the popular consciousness? And if so, how has the representation of money changed and what does this tell us about our society?
To try to explore some of these questions, I went to speak with Professor Nicky Marsh from the University of Southampton, who has published widely on the interactions between finance, literature and popular culture. I started by asking how she became interested in this line of research.
Nicky Marsh: It was actually visual culture that looped me into it, although it has taken me a long time to get back to that. So when I think about the moment, I had been working on questions of publics, counterpublics and politics and gender for a long time and I had been working on, in my teaching, British culture in the 1980s and the changes that took place in the 1980s, and I was thinking about the next project, and I was thinking about Gilbert and George and there’s a quote from Gilbert and George where they say, “everything’s just always about money”, and I can remember the moment really, really clearly and thinking, “yes that’s true – I’ll just do that”. And so there was initially two strands that I tried to keep going; one is a political commitment to research. Why do we do research? We do research because it illuminates things in the world that we don’t understand and that need to be illuminated. So then I’m interested in the processes of financialisation; financialisation of the everyday, neo-liberalism, governmentality, of how these politics have made their way into mainstream life. And the second thing I’m interested in is the question of the representation of money, so what actually is money itself as a form, as a phenomena? How do we think about it as an abstract thing, how do we think about it as a material thing? They’re the two strands which I pulled from the Gilbert and George quote.
CD: So that, of course, led into the monograph that was produced in 2007, just at the moment of the financial crisis erupting, and it was entitled Money, Finance and Speculation in Recent British Fiction and you analysed here a wide variety of literary texts ranging from Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger through to Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones novels in the late 1990s. Could you just give us a brief potted history of how British fiction’s representation of money and finance has changed since the second world war, up to the present day?
NM: Sure, so if I think about it in terms of finance in particular, and in terms of the financial class, the way in which that’s represented: the fifties to the seventies were very quiet periods, the questions of financialisation weren’t central, I think because the model of the economy that we were working with was largely Keynesian. So, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a Phillips machine? So a Phillips machine was designed by a maverick economist to imagine the British economy, and we can imagine the British economy as a hydraulic machine where we could pull the levers of monetary control and we could influence consumer spending, taxes, investments and exports. So I think in that period the very way in which the economy was imagined as a finite national thing that government's could control in relationship with capital meant that there wasn't the same interest in speculation, it just wasn't possible, there wasn't a culture for it. And then we know that things began to change in the early seventies, and then in 1979 in Britain we have the Conservative government coming in, and I think it's really then that things begin to appear and this question of financialisation appears in literary texts as a main theme, and I was interested in the way in which it appears in some texts as the...
"The ethos is the genius of the institution, and Civitas is our ethos..."
"Civitas is something you can do to help someone else ‘s day – big or small. A small thing you can do is opening the door for someone or telling them there is something on their back, anything, just to help someone and make their day better than it was before."
"We want the pupils to have a deep understanding of what it means to be a good person, a virtuous person, and by having a concept with tangible examples, which we ask them to consider and actually practise, it make it become much more real."
"If only five out of ten people do it, it will make the school better, even that small bit. But the more people that do it, the better everyone’s day will get, and slowly the whole school will be a positive environment.” This is a podcast about the role schools can play in developing 'character'. In it Tess Woodcraft talks to Tim Dainty, Senior Vice Principal - Pupils & Inclusion at the Ark Academy in Wembley, where they are building, in their words, 'a school of civic pride and social justice' in which the development of character is an intrinsic part.
There’s been a bit of a brouhaha in the British press over the past few days after Richard Walden, chairman of the Independent schools Association claimed that state schools fail to provide their pupils with a ‘moral compass’. Then the general secretary of the Head Teachers Association responded that those who led us into the financial crash were mostly privately educated.
Actual research by Birmingham University suggests that neither state nor private schools are doing particularly well at engendering morality in their pupils. In a survey of year 10 children across dozens of private and state schools they found children seemed to be scoring lower on some traditional virtues, such as honesty and courage, than most of us would want to see.
So Tess Woodcraft went to the Ark Academy in North West London, to see what they are doing.
It is an imposing, newly built school, all glass and straight lines, standing almost in the shadow of Wembley Stadium with its iconic white arch. This is one of the poorest areas in the UK, and most of the pupils come from two estates with tough reputations.
The school calls its approach 'Civitas' – so Tess asked Senior Vice Principal Tim Dainty what exactly is Civitas?
Tim Dainty: We don’t even pronounce it in the way Latin scholars would pronounce it (which would be Kiwitas or Kivitas), we pronounce it Civitas (sivitas)and that speaks volumes because it is very much our own word, our own concept and idea. It means a lot more than its original meaning of citizenship. It means kindness, altruism, being kind, being considerate.
Tess Woodcraft: How did you come up with it?
TD: It was the Principal’s notion. She was a serving head teacher in East London in a Catholic girls’ school and she developed her own concept of ‘Serviam’ and it was very powerful and she saw, through her own headship, children take ownership and it give real meaning and meat to virtue and character. We transferred it over and realised how important it was.
Tim Dainty
The pupils have made it their own, they have directed us in how we use it. Initially it was just a noun, a thing, an idea, a concept, but now it’s an adjective. They say things like, ‘that was very civitas!’
Jai: They don’t tell you why you should be civitas, because we all understand. It is not that they are trying to make you be civitas for your own benefit.
TD: That idea was central to our Civitas campaign. All pupils were asked to write down on whiteboards examples of civitas behaviour and we took photographs and it was included in the Civitas Magazine (which is edited by pupils) and they had ownership of it. It made them think about the little details, like leaving their plates in the dining room or not picking up litter when they see it.
This podcast was produced by Jo Barratt and first aired on Life in Scents. Have you ever stepped off a plane and been aware of a different smell in the air - the smell of a country, a city, a terrain?
This podcast is a fascinating exploration of our urban smellscapes. We are all familiar with landscapes - 'smellscapes' are the smell equivalent.
It is drawn from a lecture by Victoria Henshaw lecturer in Urban Design and Planning at University of Sheffield, whose specialism is smell. The lecture took place after one of Victoria's 'Smell Walks', organised by Scratch and Sniff events and explores how we live and navigate using our noses, how cities can be mapped by aroma, and how architects and planners might use a consideration of this in their work.
It starts by looking at how we adapt to different smells. Usually we are smelling so many different things but we don't process them all consciously as it would be overwhelming to do so. Some smells are cultural, some smells we are more tolerant of at certain types of day(such as beer at night), some smells we experience differently depending on our genes (eg Androstenonethe the hormone in body odour - sometimes called the caveman odoour - which 60% of us can smell, but 40% cannot smell. Of those who can smell it, 90% smell body odour, but 10% smell flowers!) Have we 'sterilised' our environment, rid it of the smells?
Victoria finishes with a bit of futurology, and she tells us to expect smells for our mobile phones - which will give us different smells for different callers!
If you are interested in further exploration in the world of smell, the absolute go-to podcast platform is Life in Scents, which has lots of podcasts of interviews with people looking at their lives through smell. Also take a look at Victoria Henshaw's great blog, Smells and the City, and Odette Toilette's olefactory adventure events.
And find our podcast on Anosmia here.
July marks 20 years since the end of the Rwandan genocide. In the summer of 1994 the death of president, Juvenal Habiyaramana sparked brutal violence between the country’s two major ethnic groups. The genocide took place over 100 days but left an estimated one million people dead.
Two decades on,Pod Academy's Alex Burd went to Manchester to speak to Dr Richard Benda, a Rwandan academic and genocide survivor. Their conversation has been split into three podcasts - of which this is the third (the first was about faith and reconciliation; the second about ethnicity and democracy).
In this episode he recalls the events of the genocide and begins by explaining what it was like growing up in Rwanda as a half Hutu, half Tutsi...
Richard Benda: It made your life uncomfortable and I think that is a good thing – not to be comfortable in either group because the lack of comfort makes you sick. A better way of dealing with things but once you are told that you are Tutsi 100% or Hutu 100% it is as your life is pre-determined to a go certain way so operating on the margin of both groups it wasn’t easy. As a child you take your father’s identity but you can’t deny your mother’s side of the family.
Alex Burd: Which was which in your family?
RB: So the father was Tutsi and the mother was Hutu. But then even on both sides it wasn’t that clear cut so I’ve never been comfortable calling myself a Tutsi or a Hutu because it really doesn’t register. And you try to convey that idea to people who have a certain stability in their ethnic identity and it’s as if the image is that everyone is... you’re either one or the other. But I think that debates are showing that there are quite a lot of people on the margins. You negotiate the reality as it comes, some days are good, some days are bad. You could escape violence or you could die because of that ambiguity of your identity. But given the choice I would still remain in an ambiguous state and you can open your heart and your mind to accepting more people, to accepting distance because you live a state of contradiction within yourself so you accept that contradictions exist in society as well so I developed that mentality at a younger age anyway. I have cousins in one group, I have cousins in another group, I have uncles in one group. You sleep in one house today, then another house. How do you choose?
AB: How did you then negotiate that, almost a tightrope I guess, during 1994, while you were at university?
RB: It wasn’t a good time to start university. We started university in ’93 and it was a bad, bad time. We started university when the president of Burundi had been assassinated, so that was a Hutu president being assassinated and we had quite a few Burundian students in our midst, so tensions were palpable when we started. The war was still going on so there were tensions within Rwanda and there were endless killing of Hutu politicians. I had a girlfriend in 1993 at university so I suppose I had an outlet for my feelings – I lost her in ’94, but then... what I’m trying to say is that you had someone to share those difficult times with. We had to escape university because before the genocide started the university was on lockdown and the students were on strike. They don’t know if it was a politically engineered strike so even then it was dangerous for people of certain ethnicity to be on campus and we had to be quiet I suppose, to not make yourself more visible the you wanted to be and certainly my girlfriend what you would call a visible Tutsi person so she was even more of a target so we had to find a way of leaving the campus. Some of the friends we left behind were killed and we left our belongings, and I don’t have anything from prior to ’94 that belongs to me. The only item I have from before ’94 is my secondary school diploma, that’s the only thing I have from 1990. I don’t have a photo, an item of clothing because everything was lost at university.
In 2015, the UN's eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) - broad targets for eradicating poverty and disease and improving worldwide rates of primary education, maternal health and gender equality- will be replaced with newly agreed goals.
The MDG approach was a new one for development policy, seeking to focus the attention and efforts of the international community on a clear set of shared targets - but inevitably there were criticisms that some crucial areas had been overlooked. One overlooked area was Higher Education.
Now, as the world discusses what should replace the MDGs, the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU) is campaigning for recognition of the fundamental importance of Higher Education for development.
A vibrant Higher Education sector is crucial for many reasons, as Jay Kuber of the ACU explains in this podcast. Firstly, universities undertake research that can inform government policy making; secondly, through their teaching, they also produce the educated men and women needed to run businesses, public services, engineering and agriculture; and thirdly, by building partnerships with local communities, they also make a major contribution to sustainable development on a local and regional level.
The ACU campaign - The world beyond 2015: Is Higher Education ready? - poses the following questions:
Why does the Post-2015 agenda matter for higher education? How are universities already addressing local, national and international issues? How can universities prepare to respond ot the Post-2015 agenda? What partnerships should universities establish to achieve their objectives? How can universities champion thier contributions to wider society? How relevant and realistic are the Post-2015 goals likely to be?
If you want to know more, or you want to join the ACU's campaign to raise awareness of how higher education can and should respond to global challenges beyond 2015, go to their website: www.acu.ac.uk/beyond-2015 and follow them on Twitter @HEbeyond2015.
"Why would you choose to keep basing your politics on a concept which is as destructive as ethnicity?.......Twenty years is a landmark. We should rethink Rwandan post-genocide politics and how we start to implement a democracy which is more inclusive". This is the second of our podcasts to mark the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, in which Rwandan academic and genocide survivor, Dr Richard Benda is in conversation with Pod Academy's Alex Burd.
In this interview Dr Benda explores current issues around ethnicity and the role of the state, and in particular the role of the President Paul Kagame, in developing alternatives to the narrative of Hutu and Tutsi identity in Rwanda
Dr Benda began by explaining the state of ethnicity in Rwanda today.
Richard Benda: I think the issue is still there. The government came out and said outright that ethnicity is abolished. As a political discourse that works; you can’t pretend to be a government and say: ‘Fine, carry on’ But in reality the problem is there. And I don’t think it’s softening just because it is no longer talked about. I see danger in that.
Alex Burd: You think because it’s not talked about?
RB: Because people don’t come to that realisation alone, by a process of rediscovery of another identity, they come to that position because again the state or the government is telling them so. I think it is one of the dangers of successive regimes in Rwanda - that you tell people what to do as if people can’t come to the same conclusion by a process of democratisation, of dialogue. When you listen the words ‘Hutu’ and ‘Tutsi’ are very key to the dialogue so it means that it is in the subconscious of the Rwandan people and they have to come out. If they are constructs you can only expose them and then deconstruct them and show how dangerous they are. Rwandans are smart people. Why would you choose to keep basing your politics on a concept which is as destructive as ethnicity. By opening the debate people can actually challenge themselves and find a better solidarity which is Rwandaness. We don’t know what that it is yet, but Ndi Umunyarwanda is supposed to help people find out what it is.
AB: For so much of Rwanda’s history it’s been governed along those lines of Hutu and Tutsi, so to all of a sudden decide that there’s no such thing as ethnicity is hard for the people who still remember that time before and change tack.
RB: What I’m trying to say is that Rwandans have never had a healthy relationship with ethnicity because of the way ethnicity appeared, at least as a political component. I believe, as many people do, that the Belgians or the Germans or the missionaries did not coin the words because they are Rwandan concepts. So they are a Kinyarwanda concept and they existed in the culture and in the society. People disagree and agree, and agree to disagree about what it meant to be a Hutu, or a Tutsi before colonialism but certainly they were not as associated with political violence as they became in the 1950s. When they started being imposed on Rwandans in the 1930s Rwandans didn’t really have much of a choice –‘You are a Hutu, you are a Tutsi.’ Sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly. In the 1950s ethnicity was recuperated as a tool to overthrow monarchy and install democracy; democracy was wasn’t a national goal, it was almost the rule of the majority who happened to be Hutu. And then ’73 and ’90 and ’94, which is why I don’t think Rwandan people have had any time to sit and think about what is this thing called ethnicity which seems to govern our lives.
We need to give people time to look ethnicity in the face and say ‘we don’t like what it’s doing to us’ and governments can’t just decide and say you are this today and you are not this tomorrow because people will always subvert those decisions.
AB: So since 1994 Rwanda has been hailed as a success story I guess, in terms of economic progress under the leadership of Paul Kagame,
July marks 20 years since the end of the Rwandan genocide. In the summer of 1994 the death of the country’s president, Juvenal Habyarimana, sparked brutal violence between the country’s two major ethnic groups. The genocide took place over a hundred days, but left an estimated one million people dead.
This is the first of a series of three podcasts in which, Rwandan academic and genocide survivor Dr Richard Benda, talks to Alex Burd about the process of reconciliation and the country’s charismatic leader, President Paul Kagame, as well as his own memories of the genocide.
Richard Benda's research at Manchester University addresses key questions in relation to religious authority and the role of faith in response to the complexity of African identity-based conflicts, of which the Rwandan genocide is an extreme case. In this podcast he explores the role of religion, and the role of the state, in Rwanda’s healing process.
Richard Benda: After the genocide, there were debates as to which faith community handled the genocide better. Some said Muslims behaved more rightly than Christians, but I find the difference between the Muslim and Christian response is that the Muslims responded as a group whereas Christians reacted as individuals.
But after the genocide both groups were interested in developing a reconciliation framework which takes faith seriously or which accepts that faith has capital that can contribute greatly to reconciliation. So they came together, the initiative was chaired by the Mufti of Rwanda and the Rwandan Archbishop Emanuel Kolini. The idea was to provide a platform where faith can contribute to building the country after the genocide because they recognised that they did little before the genocide and during the genocide, well, not as much as was expected, anyway.
The interfaith programme is still going on. It started with work in prison, with prisoners, people who had been convicted of genocide, getting them ready to face their moral responsibility, to confess – the emphasis was on repentance, confession, and facing criminal responsibility with a clear conscience (as much as possible).
Alex Burd: Is this about forgiving themselves?
RB: Yes, and it is very important. Theologically it’s another understanding of justice when you deal with people who have been involved in acts of violence, acts of evil as you’d say in religious language. You want them to face their responsibilities. First and foremost you want them to discover themselves as humans and the path to doing that is accepting themselves as still God’s children. Christians believe God’s grace is already there and God forgives. The problem Is knowing if they can forgive themselves. So you’re right, it is getting them to accept their own selves, forgive themselves and take steps to ask forgiveness of others. The first step must be the person – if they aren’t reconciled with themselves it becomes very difficult to be reconciled with others.
It is not as if the people involved in Inter Faith came to the perpetrators first – some perpetrators longed for that experience, that cleansing.
AB: That spiritual guidance…..
RB : Yes, it’s almost a pastoral care exercise, but also a political exercise.
AB: How do you mean, a political exercise?
RB: You don’t preach or help them to find their way back just in church, you also want them to become better citizens, to reintegrate into the wider political community because after prison they will have to go out and live back in their villages, in their towns and you can’t just cater for their souls. They will have to go about community activities, vote, so yes there is a political aspect. And political too, in that the government encouraged the pastoral care, supported it, gave access to prisoners. So there is a mutuality between religious leaders helping the state and vice versa.
AB: Can you explain the religious demographics in Rwanda?
Involving citizens in the governance of public services - education, housing, transport - holds out the promise of more responsive, better run and more democratically accountable services.
But it is a big ask. Many people won't have the experience, the time or the confidence to get involved.
In this podcast, which was first broadcast on the New Books Network, Heath Brown talks to Daniel Altschuler about the factors that can help ensure successful participatory governance.
This question has long drawn the interest of scholars in political science. The promise of increasing civic engagement through institutions that allow citizens to participate has been studied extensively, but often in urban environments.
Daniel Altschuler and Javier Corrales build on this literature in their book, The Promise of Participation: Experiments in Participatory Governance in Honduras and Guatemala, but shift to rural parts of Honduras and Guatemala. The book focuses on Community Managed Schools and the participation of parents in school administration.
Their extensive study demonstrated positive impacts on organisational learning and civic engagement for participating parents, but they conclude that it is crucial to offer training and support.
If you enjoyed this podcast, why not check out others on the New Books Network, like PAUL-BRIAN MCINERNEY's From Social Movement to Moral Market: How the Circuit Riders Sparked an IT Revolution and Created a Technology Market
Richard Branson, Tom Cruise, Darcy Bussell and Noel Gallagher are among the celebrity dyslexics mentioned on the website of the British Dyslexia Association. But what does it mean to be dyslexic? Pod Academy's Lee Millam went to find out.
A new book, The Dyslexia Debate, says the term dyslexia is a broad and meaningless label. The book also suggests that children are often labelled dyslexic when exhibiting a range of different reading difficulties. One of the authors is Prof Julian Elliot from Durham University.
Julian Elliot: One of the things that happens quite often when a youngster is struggling with their reading is that some well meaning soul will come along and say, ‘ Have you ever though that little Jimmy might be dyslexic? Perhaps you should send him off for dyslexa assessment and see whether he is. If he is, great!’
There are all sorts of problems with that. Firstly, making a diagnosis of dyslexia is not scientific because the criteria used vary greatly from one person to another. In other words, what one person thinks is Dyslexia, another person doesn’t.
So firstly you can’t make a decision in a clear , consistent way about whether a child is dyslexic. Secondly, even if you do determine that a child is dyslexic, having done that there is no educational intervention or treatment which you’d do differently for that child than you would do for any other child who is struggling to learn to read. There are some weird and whacky interventions but none of those have the support of academic scientific research.’
Lee Millam: But having a test and a diagnosis for dyslexia can be a positive thing as we hear now from Patricia Simmonds.
Patricia Simmonds: I was diagnosed in, probably, 1997 when I went to college. It was the first time I was diagnosed with dyslexia.
LM: How old were you at the time?
PS: I was probably 17 or 18.
LM: So you went through the whole school experience being dyslexic but not knowing it?
PS: Yes, I did. At primary school they didn’t give me any extra help, but they knew I had difficulties with reading and writing, so maybe the teacher might take more time working with me. At secondary school I think they realised I wasn’t learning like the other children, I went to an all girls school, and my tutor realised I needed extra help with, again, my reading and writing. And I believe I’d have been about 12 when I started getting extra support. At times it would be in the classroom or I’d be taken out of the classroom and sit with a tutor and just go though some reading.
LM: So you were given extra support at school. Did that help?
PS: Yes it did! It was still a bit difficult because I didn’t know why I needed extra help. Nobody could explain it to me. I knew I was struggling but it was as if I was different from the other kids in the class, because I had to be taken out of the classroom to get the extra help (which I really appreciated).
It was good to have someone who could spend one to one time with me, to go through everything, because I felt confused in the classroom when the teacher would talk about something and I’d have to sit down and present a piece of work. And then I’d always struggle and I couldn’t quite work out why. So I found it helpful sitting with a tutor one to one and them going through things with me.
LM: So you were given this extra help. How were you feeling?
PS: I was really pleased about it. I was thinking ‘fantastic, I can start to understand things or start to do the work a lot easier. I was really grateful for the extra help, but it did make me feel outside the group. I’d be taken out of the class for these one to one sessions, on occasion someone would sit in the room, but that was more embarrassing for me – so to be taken out of the class was helpful, but I’d miss what was going on in the class with the other students, so I felt a bit excluded.
LM: So when you were 17, at college,
The Young Lives Project is a unique, long term study of childhood in 4 countries - Peru, Vietnam, India and Ethiopia. It is exploring the impact of poverty on children's development, and identifying the most effective policy interventions that could enable poor children to reach their full potential.
In this podcast, Amanda Barnes talks to Alan Sanchez, Principal Investigator in the Young Lives Project which is based at Oxford University, about the research he has been doing on child development in Peru. She started by asking him to explain the Young Lives study and what it is trying to achieve.
Alan Sanchez
Alan Sanchez: The Young Lives study is an international longitudinal study of childhood poverty. We started in 2002 and the intention is to track the livelihood of families for basically 15 years. And we are working in four different countries: in Peru, in Ethiopia, Vietnam, and Andhra Pradesh in India. The study is led by Oxford University and has research partners in each of the countries.
We use a variety of methods: quantitative methods and also qualitative methods. The main objective is to have a better understanding of the causes and consequences of childhood poverty.
Amanda Barnes: So how many children altogether are included in the study?
AS: In total, twelve thousand. And then we have eight thousand kids that we have been tracking since they were aged between one and two years old ( in the year 2002). We call them the younger cohort. And then there are another four thousand kids that we are tracking, also since 2002, and they were between seven and eight years old the year when we started with the survey. So by now they are 18 years old.
AB: That’s a lot of kids. So generally, a sample of that kind of size: is that something that’s statistically representative of the population as a whole more or less?
AS: Well, we do not intend to be nationally representative. We want our samples to be very informative of each of the countries and to observe children growing up in communities with a variety of living standards and variation in terms of geographical location and ethnic groups. So that even though our intention was not to claim national representativeness, we can certainly say many things about the characteristics in which these children are growing up in each of the countries.
AB: Why were those particular countries chosen?
AS: One important thing was to have diversity. So even within each country we were looking to have diversity in terms of the communities in our sample. But it was also important to have diversity in terms of the countries that we selected. So on the one hand we were looking for regularities. So we wanted to be able to say whether certain processes are very similar regardless of the country, which we have found. But at the same time some policies are very country-specific and if you only focus on one country then it means you are only able to say things about that specific country and the specific policies that take place in that place. But if you have other countries it means you observe a variety of social policies and see their effects on children.
AB: Yeah, well that makes pretty good sense.
AB: So your research, some of it looked at what the data could tell you about what factors in early childhood had an impact on outcomes for them at later stages – even up to their mid-teens. Can you tell us what specifically your study was trying to find out?
AS: Yes, well to let you know a bit more about the background. This study is based on two studies that I did previously. In one of the studies, using data for Peru for instance, we found that there was a food price crisis a few years ago and we were able to measure that this crisis had consequences on the early nutrition of those kids that were very young at the time that the crisis took place. But not only that, also that these kids later on had a lower cognitive development because of this...
Hello!
My name's Dave Pickering and I make the weekly podcast Getting Better Acquainted where I record conversations with people I know,
Part interview show, part oral history project, the show was nominated for a 2012 Radio Production Award, goes out regular on Resonance 104.4 FM and was featured on the Radio 5 Live podcast special, Helen and Olly's Required Listening.
In GBA 41 I got better acquainted with Chris. He was my one of my lecturers at university but I hadn't seen him since I'd graduated. We talked about academia, journalism, media, the Iraq War and government cuts. It was recorded on a university campus so it was a trip down memory lane where I faced my past lessons and past prejudices.
It's a conversation about ideas but also about people. Chris charts his journey from plumber to van driver to academic and critic. And he makes the argument for how, in a world so influenced and controlled by the media, media studies is far from being an irrelevant subject.
If you liked this conversation with Chris you might want to check out some of my other conversations, the other conversations with academics are collected here, and there are conversations with all kinds of people available in the main feed fom iTunes, Stitcher and Soundcloud.
“Biography is actually a quest for lives that speak to us” said biographer Hermione Lee. So what is the role of the biopic in contemporary film culture? What is it that we are looking for in the increasingly popular 'biopic' genre - films like Selma, Diana, Saving Mr Banks, 12 Years a Slave or The Wolf of Wall Street that claim to be based on real life events and aim to depict episodes in the lives of their protagonists? Pod Academy's film specialist, Esther Gaytan Fuertes, went to talk to Tom Brown and Belen Vidal, two lecturers in Film Studies at King’s College London, about their recent book, The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture, to find out more about this genre. Esther started by asking them if they felt the biopic was a neglected area in Film Studies.
Belen Vidal: Well, yes and no – it’s been studied but yes, perhaps it hasn’t been studied enough. The thing is that the biopic as a genre has always been there, I mean, it goes back to the beginning of film history.
1915 Birth of a Nation about Abraham Lincoln
But the biopic has also cropped up as part of other genres and that’s the way it’s been looked at mainly by scholars - as biopics that were part of the musical genre, or gangster films or Westerns... All those genres would have biographical elements or would occasionally do stories that are based on real characters, or real lives or people that existed. So, in a way, there’s been forming an idea of the biopic throughout film history as part of the popular genres, but the truth is that when Tom and I came into this project we also did it because we were interested that, in all this time, basically what we have is only two books, which are two excellent starting points to study the biopic, but it seemed very little considering the popularity of the genre.
It’s worth mentioning that the first book that took the genre seriously or did a kind of serious comprehensive approach was George Custen’s book called Bio/pics: How Hollywood constructed public history – this was a book on the classical biopic, mostly films made in the 30s and 40s, and it focused on Hollywood. After that, recently we’ve had a book coming out by Dennis Bingham [Whose Lives are they Anyway?] about the biopic in contemporary film culture. And again this is a book that tackles the modern biopic - the biopic since the post war period and up to the contemporary moment. But, again, it’s very heavily leaned towards the English language. So we thought, why not doing a kind of more reviewing of the biopic in the last twenty years especially and how also the genre has spread, has become more visible internationally? Because what Tom and I were struck by was the huge number of films coming from very different national cinemas all marketing themselves as biographical films and many of them very often being immensely popular. If we think about La Môme (that was called La Vie en Rose) here, a French film about a French singer, Edith Piaf, making it all the way to the Oscars, all the way up to kind of the big time in Hollywood and it’s distributed all over the world. What were the conditions that were creating this appetite for biographical narratives and how these films are now becoming much more visible not only from Hollywood but from all over the world? So we wanted to study this phenomenon and say something about the biopic in contemporary film culture and that’s what the book is about.
What approach do you adopt in your book to study the biopic?
Belen Vidal: What we are really interested also is in the narrative structures, in the tropes that recur time and again. Is there such a thing as the poetics of the contemporary biopic? Is there such a thing as a kind of certain structures that are being used and reused time and again, new genres forming...? That’s what we were interested in when we were looking at the different chapters and bringing the work together and trying to find the different points in common between chapters that ve...
If newspapers' online production is taking over from print - how should they be regulated? They carry video and audio, yet are not subject to the same constraints as broadcast media. This is the issue addressed by Hugh Linehan (twitter: @hlinehan), Digital Development Director of the Irish Times in this, the second half of his lecture at the Huston School of Film and Digital Media.
The first half of the lecture, Hugh says, 'I work in a dying industry' and considers how newspapers can construct a business model that will fund good quality journalism. That podcast can be found here.
Is the need for ritual hard-wired into human beings?
From a Cherokee medicine man smoking a pipe to Sufi mystics whirling in ecstasy or Pope Francis celebrating mass – different as they may seem, all of these people engage in a form of religious ritual. There are even secular rituals, such as the chanting on football terraces. Wherever you go in the world, you will find people engaging in some form of ritual.
What is it that makes rituals so universally meaningful and compelling? To find out, Jane Little talks to Nicholas Taylor, a shamanic practitioner who’s undergone a ritualistic live burial; Peter Williams, a traditional Catholic; and Isabel Clarke, a clinical psychologist.
This podcast was produced by CTVC for its Things Unseen series of podcasts. CTVC is an award-winning media company producing television, radio and new media content on social issues, current affairs, religion, ethics, history and education. Pod Academy is grateful to them for enabling us to carry this podcast in our Faith and Non Belief Strand. About Things Unseen In 2013, the independent production company, CTVC, commissioned a piece of original research, The Spirit of Things Unseen, on belief in post-religious Britain.
The findings showed that over three-quarters of all adults (77%) and three fifths (61%) of non-religious people believe that “there are things in life that we simply cannot explain through science or any other means.”
The research also revealed that nearly 60% of the UK population believe in some kind of spiritual being, and more than half of all adults think that spiritual forces have some influence on earth.
To engage with the growing group of people who place themselves outside formal religion, but have a sense that there is “more to life than meets the eye”, CTVC created a new regular podcast, Things Unseen.
Things Unseen aims to address the needs and interests of those who no longer feel they belong to a religious community, but retain some spiritual beliefs. At the same time, it also wants to engage with people who still identify with one of the main faiths – and provide a platform for both groups to talk to each other.
You can contact the Things Unseen team by emailing:podcast@ctvc.co.uk
Some of us love fashion. But all that alluring glamour comes at a price. Sally Feldman talks to journalist and campaigner, Tansy Hoskins, about her book Stitched Up: The anti-captalist book of fashion.
They explore what is behind the clothes we wear - the money, the advertising that distorts women's bodies and the production in poor countries around the globe.
But would fashion be any more sustainable under a different political system? Is green fashion a realistic alternative? And do Soviet designers like Popova and Stefanova really offer an alternative?
Designs by Lyubov Popova
Tansy E. Hoskins is a writer, journalist and activist. She has worked for Stop the War Coalition, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Islam Channel. She writes for theGuardian and Business of Fashion, and has appeared on the BBC, Al Jazeera and Channel 4's Ten O'Clock Live.
"I work in a dying industry. Newspapers will die.
"And what happens to you when you know you're going to die? It focuses the mind, it brings to the fore certain existential questions like, 'Who am I?' 'Why am I here?' 'What has it all been about?'
"It might even raise the questions, 'Is death the end?' ' Is there life after death?' What am I going to leave behind me?' And,of course, it also raises the question, 'Help! Is there any medicine that can fix me or at least keep me going for a little while longer...." That is the view of Hugh Linehan, the Digital Development Editor of the Irish Times talking at The Huston School of Film and Digital Media in Galway, University of Ireland.
The podcast is drawn from that presentation. In it, Hugh Linehan takes a frank and sweeping look at the challenges facing newspapers – in print and online.
We've known for a long time that big trouble was coming, he says. The twin pillars of newspaper revenues - sales and advertising - have been falling for many years.
Using the Irish Times as his case study, Hugh Linehan explores the three key issues that must be addressed if newspapers are to solve the ‘innovators dilemma’ (whereby innovation necessitates killing off the previous industry) - the business model, the technology and content creation.
This is just part of Hugh Linehan’s lecture, the second part looking at the law surrounding the digital news operation will be available shortly.
When we think of the stuff that dreams are made on, we might think of the spirits that Shakespeare’s Prospero conjures up in “The Tempest”; we might think of stars, rainbows, maybe even wishing wells, but what probably doesn’t leap to mind is a loaf of Wonder Bread. And yet, ever since the invention of the mass-manufactured loaf of white bread in the 1920s, that spongy tasteless loaf has been a way in which Americans have defined themselves and one another.
This podcast was made for the New Books Network, on their New Books on Food strand. In it Eric LeMay talks to Aaron Bobrow-Strain, from Whitman College.
In his new book, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf (Beacon Press, 2012), Aaron Bobrow-Strain shows us how that familiar slice of white bread is much more than a food. It’s a symbol, one that in its nearly hundred-year-old existence has come to represent “the apex of modern progress and the specter of physical decay, the promise of a better future to come and America’s fall from small-town agrarian virtue.”
The history Bobrow-Strain tells us ranges from the immigrant bakeries of turn-of-the-century America to the Cold War to the rise of yuppie and “locavore” eating habits. It’s a history, as he writes, “of the countless social reformers, food experts, industry executives, government officials, diet gurus, and ordinary eaters who have thought that getting Americans to eat the right bread (or avoid the wrong bread) could save the world—or at least restore the country’s moral, physical, and social fabric.
Numbers have come to dominate our politics and our news cycle. GDP, inflation, CPI, RPI, credit ratings, FTSE, debt ratios, discount rates, the list goes on.
While politicians and commentators wield these numbers to justify their decisions and criticise their opponents, not everyone is convinced we should allow numbers to dominate our political discourse.
In this podcast, Alex Burd talks to Lorenzo Fioramonti, Associate Professor at the Department of Political Sciences and director of the Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation of the University of Pretoria. and author of a new book, How Numbers Rule the World: The Use and Abuse of Statistics in Global Politics. Note: An Italian translation is available below this English transcript.
Lorenzo began by explaining his thesis.
Lorenzo Fioramonti: We have created a system of accounting, of calculation, of numerical production that is governing all the decisions we take as a society. They dictate the choices that our policy makers take, they dictate what we consider productive or not.
It’s like a meta-analysis, our economists and policy makers are not so powerful as we think in terms of what decisions we take or they are powerful and they find ways of justifying their decisions by using numbers that give an appearance of neutrality to the decisions that they take so that the society can accept them, often when they’re hard, and have a severe impact on our wellbeing; because the numbers somehow make these decisions look inevitable.
Alex Burd: They’re used to mask the motives of controversial decisions, such as in Britain the recent spending cuts?
LF: Yes, I would say that ‘austerity speak’ these days, especially in Europe, is being cloaked under the power of these numbers.
Take GDP. GDP is often used as a way of curbing popular dissent against certain pro market decisions because GDP says the only way for us to develop and grow is to support certain sectors in the business community and therefore we need to be willing to take tough decisions to reduce spending, to reduce benefits and so on. And often at the same time, while we do that, we pay for the subsidies that go into the pockets of those who produce the growth that is reflected in GDP.
So all these numbers, and I could go on and on with other examples, are used in times of austerity to justify the difficult cuts that our governments are putting forward at the moment.
AB: A lot has been made of the fact that UK chancellor, George Osborne, is a politician and many of the people around him are politicians without real world experience. George Osborne also doesn’t have any economics background. Is this a problem as numbers become more and more important?
LF: It is a problem to a certain extent. Numbers are created by experts (or technocrats, as I call them). So when politicians who have been elected by citizens to take decisions in the name of social justice and redistribution and collective wellbeing use numbers without even understanding the methodological components then we have a double problem. We have a problem because those who execute these decisions are doing it in the name of numbers that they themselves do not understand, and they become even more dangerous perpetrators, or executors, of decisions they do not themselves control.
So on the one hand the politics of numbers has given a lot of power to technocrats; some of these technocrats are operating behind the scenes. We don’t see them. Some of them are executive directors in central banks; or they are part of very powerful think tanks and so. Some of them also play political roles, but often the policy makers, those that make the ultimate decisions are influenced by numbers they themselves don’t understand.
AB: I see. You mentioned earlier that one of the numbers you have a problem with is the continued use of GDP. Why when it’s so flawed is it still persisted with?
"Freedom of expression is the ultimate freedom. It means the freedom to live, to think, to love and be loved, to be secure, to be happy...." So said Pakistani campaigner Shahzad Ahmad accepting the Advocacy Award at this year's Freedom of Expression Awards in London last week.
Shahzad Ahmad (photo: Alex Brenner)
Index on Censorship annual awards ceremony, honours the bravery, and dogged determination of campaigners, journalists and digital activists around the world who put their passion and commitment to free speech before their own personal safety, who challenge governments, gangs, and corporate interests who threaten freedom of expression.
Our podcast gives you a brief insight into the courage of the nominees, and finishes with a great song from Egyptian hip hop artist Mayam Mahmoud (pictured) who addresses issues such as sexual harassment and women's rights in Egypt through her music. Mayam won the Arts Award. You'll find more information on the Awards on the Index website.
Advocacy Award nominees
Colectivo Chuhcan, a mental health pressure group from Mexico Rommy Mom, Nigeria's leading human rights lawyer Generation Wave Institute from Burma who promote democratic engagment in Burma Shahzad Ahmad, cyber freedom activist from Pakistan (winner)
Journalism Award nominees
Abdulelah Haider Shaye imprisoned for reporting on drone strikes in Yemen Callum Macrae and C4 News who documented the truth about Sri Lankan Human Rights abuses Azadliq - one of the few remaining independent newspapers in Azerbaijan (winner) Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras for their work on the NSA surveillance Dina Meza and investigative journalist from Honduras
Digital Activism nominees
Edward Snowden who leaked the documents uncovering the mass surveillance by NSA and GCHQ Free Weibo, the uncensored version of China's social network, SinaWeibo Shubhranshu Choudhary who set up a mobile phone news service in rural India (winner) Tails, a free open source encryption tool that protects journalists and sources in any country
Arts Award nominees (this section was introduced by playwright Howard Brenton, who you can hear on the podcast)
David Cecil, imprisoned in Uganda for producing a 'pro-gay' play Meltem Arikan, playwright, whose play 'Mi Minor' enraged the Turkish Government Lucien Bourjeily, Lebanese playwright who confronted the Lebanese Censorship Bureau Mayam Mahmoud, Egyptian hip artist and women's right campaigner (winner)
Photo of Mayam Mahmoud by Alex Brenner Mayam's song Girls in our society are divided Into those who wear the niqab, those who wear the veil And those who are in between There are a lot of cases that depend on the girl How she dresses And how she looks But this is not the rule How can you judge me By my hair or by my veil? If one day you look at me I am not going to be the one Hiding her/my embarrassment You cat call and you harass Thinking this is right not wrong Even if these are words This is not the kind of treatment These are stones It is not her clothing that is inappropriate or wrong It’s this way of thinking which is Sometimes the clothing is too much But you are the one to blame One look can be could hurt And it is not right of you to be staring You deserve to be slapped twice on the face Femininity in Egypt is divided into two parts There is a difference between what men and women consider And both are wrong Who said that femininity is about dresses Femininity is about intelligence and intellect It is also about the way she was raised And her religiosity Girls have lost confidence in themselves Now she puts in makeup And dresses in different colours on top of each other The problem is not with the girl The problem is with the society that influences the girl every second If you ask girls if they have good taste in dressing They will say yes we have But our lives can not be described
This podcast is drawn from a lecture by celebrated Egyptian author Ahdaf Souief about the ongoing revolution in Egypt. It was the annual lecture of the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) at Kings College, London and was held at the end of 2013.
The State Crime Initiative studies and records the violations of human rights by governments and other state actors – genocide, torture, brutality and also corruption, cronyism, economic exploitation and negligence.
Tear gas in Muhammed Mahmoud Street, Cairo
As Ahdaf Souief makes clear, these things often go together, and overturning a criminal state is a long term and dangerous undertaking.
Jika
She takes as her starting point the events in Mohammed Mahmoud Street, one of the streets running into Tahrir Square, which has been the site of much police and army brutality, and where many activists have been killed, including Jika .
On the day of the lecture, there were memorial demonstrations in the street, and Ahdaf had come from there to London for the the lecture.
Ahdaf is introduced by Professor Penny Green, co-director of the International State Crime Initiative.
A video of the complete lecture by Ahdaf Souief can be found here
There is also a blog on Pod Academy, which you might like to read together with this podcast: Mubarak's Egypt: Nexus of Criminality
You might also be interested in our podcast of the ISCI Annual lecture 2011 by Noam Chomsky, Changing contours of world order.
Links Al Jazeera on shootings in Cairo in July 2013
Khaled Mohamed Saeed killed in Alexandria June 2110 - seen as the act that ;launched the revolution' the
News piece on Jika 1
News piece on Jika 2
Disaster and emergency management expert, Samantha Ridler, explores the beginning of modern seismology .
Samantha Ridler
The earth has, since it creation been convulsed by earthquakes. But mankind has only relatively recently come to study them in a scientific manner. And much of this is thanks to an Englishman called John Milne.
It is perhaps surprising that a man born in Liverpool in the 1850 is considered by some as the ‘Father’ of seismology. After all the UK experiences very few earthquakes that are of a scale even noticeable by residents. The majority of earthquakes that the UK does experience are often out in the North Sea.
However John Milne studied Geology and Mining in the UK and was sent to Japan to teach about these subject, to the Japanese that had only a few decades earlier been forced from seclusion to open up to the rest of the world by the US.
Now Japan is very different to the UK in it’s Geology. Japan is part of the Pacific ring of fire and sits on top of the junction of 4 tectonic plates pushing and grinding against each other, which means it quite regularly experiences earthquakes of a moderate to severe nature. However at the time nobody knew about ‘Tectonic plates’ - the Japanese superstitiously believed the reason they experienced so many earthquakes, was that beneath Japan there was a large Catfish (or Namazu in Japanese) and this huge catfish was pinned down by a god called Kashima - whenever the god wasn’t watching or neglected his duties this catfish would wriggle and thrash and it was this wriggling and thrashing that caused the earth to shake.
John Milne
So John Milne who arrived in Japan in 1876 to teach about geology, would not have been there long before he noticed the earthquakes and decided to study them.
It must have been a very exciting time to be in Japan because in that period Japan was experiencing rapid change. The majority of men and women still wore Kimonos, there were still some Samurai wearing swords and some married Japanese women would still paint their teeth black. There was rapid development with western railroads being built, traditional wooden housing being cleared for large masonry structures and western influences creeping into a place long seeped in tradition.
In 1880 a moderate earthquake shook Yokohama – a seaport town not far from Tokyo and populated by many westerners. And it was after this quake that John Milne called together a meeting of the Japanese Seismological Society the first such society in the world – and as no 'science of seismology' existed at the time, consisted of a mix of scientist, engineer and amateurs. Their first task was to try and create a measurement device for earthquakes. At the time the European scales for assessing earthquake size was based on damage and cracking to masonry structures, but in Japan, despite the rapid growth, there were relatively few of these - Japanese traditional wood housing would either wobble and stay upright( with little damage), or be completely flattened providing few degrees of variation to scale earthquake size.
The seismographic device created was a collaborative effort between Milne and two others, Ewing and Grey. It used a Horizontal pendulum to detect shifts in the earth which is still a concept used in the core of many seismographs today.
Although Japan has the longest written record of Earthquakes (due to it’s temples keeping records of such events), no centralised system for monitoring existed. If you felt an earthquake in your village, you would not know where it’s epicenter was or if people in other villages had experience the same earthquake to a greater or lesser extent than yourself.
John said he had ‘Earthquakes for breakfast, lunch and supper’ in Japan, and this gave him plenty of opportunity both to refine the seismograph further to make a more mobile device to distribute to locations across Japan and to establish the world's first s...
Mathematician Vicky Neale, senior teaching associate in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics in the University of Cambridge and director of studies at Murray Edwards College, is excited.
She’s been watching some recent breakthroughs that mathematicians around the world have been making in a huge and open collaboration on an ancient mathematical problem. Neale tells Adam Smith how she is now building the news into her work that aims to improve the ways maths is taught.
This podcast is produced and presented by Adam Smith
Adam Smith: I’m listening to a story about a lightbulb moment. That second when a school pupil’s eyebrows soar and her head lifts up: she’s got it. In this case, she’s found a solution to an algebra problem.
Vicky Neale
Vicky Neale ...She suddenly realised that this algebra, which she’d sort of been introduced to at school, that she sort of half understood, that she could see why these manipulations worked. We drew a little picture, we talked about it, but she also suddenly understood how that had helped her to answer a problem. She’d been trying some numerical patterns, which is really important, that’s a lot of what mathematicians do, but we were chatting about how the next stage is to try and come up with a convincing argument.
I might use the word ‘proof’, that’s sort of technical jargon, and she said, “But I’m not going to be able to do that ‘cause I can’t check all of these examples.” And I said, “That’s right, you’re going to have to come up with some other kind of justification.”
And via this algebra, by a little calculation, she was able to do that and see that it was always going to be true and for her, I could see, “Oh, this is something a bit different from what I’m used to, I’m quite excited by that, I can see how this algebra gives me the capacity to do something much more than I ever thought I was going to be able to do...”
AS: I’m Adam Smith. Welcome to Pod Academy.
Vicky spends most of her time on a project with researchers and teachers trying to improve the ways mathematics is taught. Running beneath all of this work, like an underground river, is the enterprise of mathematics itself—the questions and the problems are flowing and bouncing off rocks and pushing forwards constantly through university mathematics departments across the world. I met Vicky at the college and started by saying that it seems to me that maths is a bit like Marmite—people either love it or hate it...
VN: That’s right and I find that very sad for two reasons. One is that I think very often the people who are saying that who don’t understand why I’m so excited about maths, that’s because they don’t know what it is that I’m excited about. They have this perception that’s very different from my perception. The other is that I think sometimes people have this perception that maths is an ability either you have or you don’t have. It just sort of depends how you were born. And I start from the perspective that everybody is capable of thinking as a mathematician, is everyone going to go and get a Fields Medal in mathematics—the equivalent of a Nobel Prize? No of course not, because not everybody is going to want to spend their time, immerse themselves in it, but I strongly believe that everybody has the capacity to make progress, to understand all sorts of things. And we see in schools, extraordinary examples where successful teachers, successful departments are able to have this impact, of course it's trying to help everybody to have a positive experience so that whatever they go on to do they don't feel that maths is not relevant to them, they don’t feel that they’re unable to engage with it.
AS: One of the other funny perceptions that a lot of people have about mathematics, probably myself included, is that it’s static, that there is a set of rules, your teachers try and teach you and that there are just these rules and you’ve just got to learn it,
"Our minds are made up of all the same atoms and molecules as everything else in nature - the architecture of our brains was born from the same energy principles, the same pure mathematics that happens in flowers, and jellyfish and Higgs particles..." says astrophysicist Alan Lightman, Professor of the Practice of the Humanities. Creative Writing, Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in his new book The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew.
In this podcast he talks to Pod Academy's Craig Barfoot about the Big Bang (apparently it wasn't like an explosion), and how the universe created time and space when it started to expand. He also takes us on a trip around multiverses, the many universes that science predicts exist, but which may be very different indeed from our own universe.
But while it is possible that science may soon explain everything in the physical world, will it ever, he muses, be able to explain the feeling of being in love?
Professor Lightman is an astrophysicist and also a poet and novelist. His best selling novel, Einstein's Dreams, about the young Albert Einstein working on his theory of relativity but troubled by dreams explores human beings' relationship to time. It has been translated into thirty languages.
It is this combination of science and humanities which is at the heart of this podcast.
The night sky, UK 2013, Michael J Bennett
In this podcast, David Garland, Professor of Sociology, Law at New York University and author of Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition talks to Benjamin Concannon Smith, co-host of the American Studies channel of the New Books Network. They explore....
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Why is it that the United States continues to enforce the death penalty when the rest of the Western world abolished its use a little over three decades ago?
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Many US states were in the vanguard of the 20th century abolition movement - what changed?
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Why does a country so concerned to contain the power of the state, nevertheless allow the state to take the lives of its citizens.
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Why are the majority of death sentences (which are always discretionary, never mandatory) meted out to black men convicted of killing white people - so that the death penalty is widely seen as 'legal lynching' among African Americans and Latinos.
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How come only 'Death Qualified Jurors', those who approve of the death penalty, get to sit on juries in murder cases, making murder juries overwhelmingly white and male?
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What is the role of aggravating evidence, 'victim impact statements'?
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In the past, executions (burning at the stake, firing squad, beheadings) were violent and public, designed to demonstrate power and control . What is the role of lethal injection in relative privacy?
Dr Garland's provocative study highlights the uneven application of capital punishment in America––a phenomenon widely discussed but rarely understood––and offers a succinct and thoughtful analysis of the historical roots of this contemporary issue.
The featured photograph concerns the execution of Troy Davis in 2011, in which Troy Davis was put to death for the 1989 killing of police officer, Mark McPhail. Troy Davis's case illustrates many of the issues explored in this interview - the black man convicted of a white person's murder in a southern US state, the lengthy appeal process, the issue of doubt about the conviction and the the involvement of the victim's family in 'aggravation' statements.
Professor Garland is Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Professor of Sociology at New York University. Peculiar Institution is the recipient of numerous awards including: 2012 Michael J. Hindelang Award (American Society of Criminology), 2012 Edwin H. Sutherland Award (American Society of Criminology), 2011 Barrington Moore Book Award (American Sociological Association), Co-Winner 2011 Mary Douglas Prize (American Sociological Association), A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of 2011, and the 2010 Association of American Publishers PROSE Award for Excellence.
"The Filipino is a truly global labour force. Filipino workers can be found in hundreds of countries around the world. It is astounding to think that this archipelago in the middle of the Pacific can produce so many people who leave for so many destinations around the world," says Dr Robyn Rodriguez, assistant professor of Asian American Studies and author of Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World.
In this podcast, first made for New Books in Asian American Studies, part of the New Books Network, Robyn Rodriguez explores 'labour brokerage' with Christopher Patterson of University of Washington. Labour brokerage describes how the Philippine state mobilises its citizens and sends them abroad to work for employers throughout the world while generating profit from the remittances that migrants send back to their families and loved ones remaining in the Philippines.
Christopher started by asking Robyn how she came to write about ‘labour brokerage’.
Robyn Rodriguez: I was born and raised in the bay area, and spent most of my growing up in Union City California, which has a sizeable Filipino immigrant population. For many Filipinos in the US, Union City is in our constellation of key sites for Filipino settlement. I grew up in a place where literally the whole block was Filipino immigrants. My schools – from kindergarten to high school - had a good number of Filipinos (it felt as if we were the majority, even if we weren’t!). And my growing up in Union City shaped a lot of what would eventually become my research questions, and the core of my political activism, because so much of my academic work emerges from my political work as an immigrant rights advocate.
When I think and talk about my work, I’m talking about my scholarly work, but also about my activism.
I recall in high school, one of the big issues in the 80s was the proliferation of gangs and gang violence – particularly among Filipino Americans – and I started getting really involved with the different community based projects that were responding to gang violence, initiated by the Filipinos for Affirmative Action based in Oakland, now Filipino Advocates for Justice. I got involved in different dialogues organised to facilitate better communication between the youth and their parents, dialogues between the police and the youth and parents – a number of different activities. I think that was where my interest in Ethnic Studies began and that carried through into my undergraduate career.
I eventually attended UC Santa Barbara, where there was an Asian American Studies programme, and where I began to encounter ethnic studies as a student, and to think seriously about being an Asian American scholar. Along the way I continued my organising work around immigration issues. As student activists we also took Asian American studies into our own hands, not necessarily waiting to take courses, but to take what we were learning and to educate our peers, creating our own curriculum. That is where a lot of my work as a teacher and scholar began.
That shaped the questions that I would eventually seek to answer in my book, in large part because I continued to do activist organising work.
I entered graduate school in 1996 in the Department of Sociology, at UC Berkeley. I continued to be involved in social justice work and was taking a keen interest in what was happening to Filipino migration. 1996 was just a year after the hanging of a Filipino domestic worker by the Singaporean government. Many Filipinos had been falsely accused, there seemed to be a lot of elements to her conviction that seemed to be off (she was convicted of murder).
Christopher Patterson: Was this Flor Contemplacion?
RR: Yes. A lot of Filipinos were concerned she might have been set up. She had been accused of killing another Filipino domestic worker and the child that woman was taking care of.
How good are we at understanding each other?
Other people are complicated, so when we try to guess what they’re thinking we often get it wrong. Even with our partners! Research suggests that partners are hardly any better (and sometimes worse) at guessing what each other believe or feel than a stranger.
In this wide ranging conversation with Professor Nicholas Epley from Booth School of Business at Chicago University, and author of Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want, Pod Academy's Craig Barfoot finds out about empathy, anthropomorphism, hubris and egocentricity.
One thing they discuss is how our egocentricity makes us feel far more noticeable than we are. As David Foster Wallace said, in Infinite Jest, “You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.” This was confirmed in what Professor Epley describes as 'the most liberating experiment in the entire field of psychology'. Research by Kenneth Savitsky; Thomas Gilovich; Gail Berger and Victoria Medvec found that no one in a room remembered the person wearing a Barry Manilow teeshirt, whereas the wearer of the teeshirt, embarrassed to be seen in this way, thought 50% of the room would remember!
Other issues covered are: do we know what it is like to be tortured? or what it is like to be poor? and how modern warfare has distanced us from death (because if we are too close it is difficult to kill someone).
This is a fascinating exploration of what scientists have learned about our ability to understand the most complicated puzzle on the planet—other people—and the surprising mistakes we so routinely make.
United Nations officials have called for a complete end to genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) to ensure the dignity, health and well-being of every girl. There has been much talk about 'zero tolerance'. But is zero tolerance the most effective way to
end this abusive practice
?
A huge international drive against female genital mutilation (FGM) by women’s rights and health campaigners has resulted in the outlawing of FGM in many countries,. But it continues to be widely practised.
Amanda Barnes talks to Dr Kirrily Pells from the Young Lives research study at Oxford University’s International Development Department, about their research on FGM in Ethiopia.
Amanda Barnes: Kirrily, a Young Lives study looked at FGM in Ethiopia and the efforts the government’s been taking to eliminate it there.
Kirrily Pells There’s considerable variation in the country between different ethnic and religious groups and between the different regions of the country in terms of the prevalence of FGM, which form of FGM and at what age it occurs. For example, it’s less common in urban areas.
In 2011 the proportion of girls in urban areas who underwent FGM was around 15 per cent compared to 24 per cent in rural areas. And then between the different areas of the country it ranges from between ten percent in Addis Ababa, the capital city, to about 60 per cent in the Afar region in the east of the country.
And there are also differences in terms of what type of FGM is practised. In the north of the country it tends to be performed on girls shortly after birth and takes the form of cliterodectomy, which is the partial or total removal of the clitoris. The other form practiced in the northern region of the country is excision, which again involves the removal of the clitoris but also the removal of the inner labia or the inner and outer labia. In the south of the country FGM tends to be performed just before puberty and it’s very much linked to adolescence and preparation for marriage: and the form practised there tends to be clitorodectomy again. In the east of the country in the Afar and Somali regions of the country infibulation is practised, and this is what’s often viewed as the most extreme form of the practice where both the clitoris and inner and outer labia are cut off and then the resulting wound is sewn nearly shut, just leaving a small hole through which urine and menstrual blood can pass.
AB: What’s the Ethiopian government doing at the moment to try and get parents to stop subjecting their daughters to FGM.
KP: The Ethiopian government has taken a very strong stance against FGM. It’s designated it as a harmful traditional practice and it’s prohibited by the 2005 criminal code. And this sets out the theories of punishment, including fines and imprisonment, for both those who perform the cutting and also those who commission ceremonies: whether that’s parents or other members of the community. And it’s also a crime to publically encourage the practicing of FGM. Alongside the legislative efforts, the government has promoted a wide range of other preventative actions. This includes advocacy campaigns within schools and the media and encouraging local associations to also be active in promoting knowledge around the adverse health and social consequences.
Alongside the government there’s also very active civil society. NGOs have been very active in trying to combat FGM: both national and international NGOs. And there’s a national network of organisations that are working together to try and combat the practice. AB: So how much have things changed there then? KP: Well, within the country the prevalence of FGM is declining, although quite slowly, and also there’s variation between the different regions. For example, the percentage of mothers who had one daughter being circumcised in 2000 was 51.7 per cent. But by 2005 this had reduced to 37.7 per cent. But the greatest change was seen in urban areas,
In a globalised market economy, even nations have been branding themselves. 'Cool Britannia', Brazil a vibrant world class player, Italy the nation of high fashion and great food are just some examples. Can rebranding really maintain, extend, or even reconstitute the nation?
Jeff Pooley of Muhlenberg College, interviews Rutgers' Melissa Aronczyk, author of Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity.
This podcast first appeared on New Books in Communications, a channel of the New Books Network.
Melissa Aronczyk
In Branding the Nation, Melissa locates the rise of nation branding as a response to the perceived need to sculpt national identity in the face of a fiercely competitive global economy.
Tracking the history of the nation-branding phenomenon, Aronczyk recounts the rise and spread of the very idea of national “competitiveness,” a discourse that, in effect, created a market that branding specialists then tapped. The book engages with the large scholarly literature on nations and nationalism, arguing that nation branding should not be dismissed as merely the invasion of business practices into the national imaginary—though it has this character, undeniably—but that the practice should also be read as a discourse that maintains, extends, and reconstitutes the nation.
Based on dozens of interviews with nation-branding specialists over a five-year period, Aronczyk develops major case studies of Poland and Canada in particular, and substantial treatments of a number of other cases spanning the globe, including Botswana, Chile, Estonia, Georgia, Jamaica, and Libya. In Branding the Nation, Aronczyk tells the story of how national identity came to be seen, and sold, as a form of added value in a competitive global market, and how these campaigns fed back into the ongoing process of thinking, and imagining, the nation.
You might also be interested to see that just last month, The Atlantic carried an article about the 'rebranding of America'
In 1960 the Congo was in turmoil, facing instability, civil war and secession after its newly won independence. It asked, not for the last time, for the help of the United Nations and UN troops were sent.
A year later, a Swedish aircraft on a peace mission carrying 16 people, one of them the UN Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjöld, circled over the rain forest of Central Africa. As it came into land it crashed, killing all on board.
There has never been a satisfactory explanation of that plane crash, despite three inquiries. Unsurprisingly, conspiracy theories and speculation are legion.
Now, more than 50 years later, a Commission of distinguished jurists, has re-opened the case and they have come up with some startling new leads.
The Hammarskjöld Commission is a voluntary body of four international jurists who were invited by an international Enabling Committee to report whether in their view the evidence now available would justify the United Nations in reopening its inquiry pursuant to General Assembly resolution 1759 (XVII) of 26 October 1962.
The Panel of jurists, who make up the Commission are:
The Rt Hon Sir Stephen Sedley (Chair) Swedish Ambassador Hans Corell South African Justice Richard Goldstone Justice Wilhelmina Thomassen (European Court of Human Rights)
You can download a copy of the Commission Report here.
Tess Woodcraft went along to Stephen Sedley's chambers in central London to discuss the Commission's findings. She began by asking him to describe the background to the events of that fateful night in 1961
SS: Dag Hammarskjöld was the second Secretary General of the UN, a Swede, very highly regarded, who was on a mission at the time of his death, to try to stop the break away of the province of Katanga from the newly independent Congo from escalating into a full scale civil war. he was flying on the night of 17th September 1961, a Sunday, from Leopoldville in the Congo to Ndola in what was then Northern Rhodesia (and is now Zambia)to meet with the president of the breakaway state of Katanga, Moise Tshombe, to try to negotiate a ceasefire between his forces, which included a large number of European mercenaries, and the UN forces that were trying to pacify Congo.
The geo-political situation was complicated - it always is - but essentially it was a world we'd no longer recognise. The US and the Soviet Union both supported the efforts of the UN to support de-colonisation, in particularl in Africa, and it was the colonial powers (Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal) who were opposing this in one form or another.
Britain, however, had a very interesting and ambivalent role. On one hand, it was the parent country of Northern Rhodesia, which was then the Federation of Rhodesia. But it was also a loyal member of the UN, and regarded itself as bound to try to support the efforts of the UN to bring peace to the Congo and reunite it as a political entity - not withstanding that the government of N. Rhodesia were bitterly opposed to everything the UN was doing. That ambivalence shows up in places in our report.
Tess Woodcraft: The UN was very new at that point, Dag Hammarskjöld was only the second Secretary General. Do you think there is any significance in that?
SS: Yes. Secretary General was a relatively new role, which Dag Hammarskjöld had done an astonishing amount to forge into a world diplomatic job, and had succeeded in securing the respect of most of the world political community. There was nothing in his terms of employment that said he had to fly to combat zones to sort things out - he did it because it seemed to him the best way to carry out his mandate.
TW: That's interesting given the UN's continuing role in in Congo even now.
So what was the remit of the Hammarskjöld Commission?
SS: The idea for the Commission was sparked off by a book published on the 50th Anniversary of the crash in 2011 by London Universtiy scholar, Susan Williams,
The abiding rhetoric of US foreign policy is 'freedom and democracy':
"We will support democracy from Asia to Africa; from the Americas to the Middle East, because our interests and our conscience compel us to act on behalf of those who long for freedom." [President Barack Obama, 2nd term inauguration speech].
But as David Sylvan, Professor of International Relations, and Former Head of the Political Science Department at Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, co-author of the book US Foreign Policy in Perspective: Clients, Enemies and Empire, explains to Craig Barfoot, it really isn't quite like that. Much of US foreign policy (as even the CIA would concede, says Professor Sylvan) revolves around acquiring clients, maintaining clients and engaging in hostile policies against enemies deemed to threaten them. It is a peculiarly American form of imperialism.
Ranging over examples - from US support for a monarchy in Saudi Arabia, its support for coup against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile (when Henry Kissinger said, 'I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people'), its role in persuading Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to step down, and its support for the military in Egypt, Professor Sylvan paints a picture of a US foreign policy based on maintaining the status quo in its client states. Change is almost always seen as threatening.
The US has military bases in client states. US helicopters in S Korea
The book argues that having all these client states was not a grand planned strategy but one that emerged because of the policy instruments available to policymakers. That the US bureaucratic instruments themselves have created and maintained the situation of a client state empire.
Nevertheless although the US client empire differs from the European Empires of the 19th and 20th centuries in many respects (there is no direct government, for example), there are many similarities - US bases are sited in client countries, the US ambassador often has enhanced access to the client government and will often lecture it on such things as domestic spending or agricultural reform.
This book has a dedicated website featuring additional case studies and data sets,
Notes:
You might also be interested in Risa Arai's podcast Empire: The features of American global power in which she talks to Dr Alex Colas of Birbeck, University of London.
The role of large corporations in lobbying for policy change was the subject of a workshop at Medact's recent conference.
A number of Government appointed expert committees have recently made recommendations on pressing health issues, including minimum pricing of alcohol and food labelling. But their proposals have been kicked into the long grass by government after intensive lobbying by the food and drinks industry.
David Miller, Professor of Sociology at the University of Bath explained how companies have a number of different ways of exerting influence on policy at a national and European level, including the presence and popularity of their brands, think tanks, lobbying groups, 'partnership bodies' where EU civil servants and industry representatives together advise the EU on policy, charities (funded by the industry) which purport to represent 'consumer interests', sophisticated PR, and 'the revolving door' through which civil servants move from Government departments straight into related jobs in industry.
Here are links to, or about, some of the organisations mentioned by Professor Miller:
Business Europe Food Industry Lobby Group European Snacks Association Elite Policy Planning Groups European Policy Centre Scotch Whisky Association Spirits Europe Europe Transport Safety Council World Federation of Advertisers European Sponsorship Association European Forum for Responsible Drinking (note their former web address www.efrd.org now defaults to Spirits Europe EU Alcohol and Health Forum International Center for Alcohol Policies Cancer United TOAST (The Obesity Awareness and Solutions Trust) Scientific Alliance Social Issues Research Council
Professor Millier is a co-founder of Spinwatch, a public interest investigations organisation.
Medact is an organisation of health professionals working for a 'safer, fairer and better world'.
Research is changing the way we think about energy efficient electronics. This podcast, from the coalface of electronics and materials research, is produced and presented by Dr Radu Sporea of Surrey University's Advanced Technology Institute. It looks at the work currently being undertaken on the new generation of energy efficient lighting - used not just in lighting rooms, but in screens for our electronic devices.
This is the fourth in Radu's occasional series from the Institute. See also:
New frontiers in electronic engineering Solar technology: harnessing the power of the sun The future of electronics is flexible
Dr Radu Sporea: A great advantage of podcasts and audiobooks is that you can still enjoy them after lights-out. But light is an essential ingredient for most active human pursuits. Early members of our species prolonged their hours of activity by burning things in order to imitate sunlight. Even back then they kept an eye on energy efficiency as some things burned less well than others. In the 19th Century pioneers like Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison successfully harnessed electricity and used it to heat up materials until they glowed white hot. For more than a century, incandescent bulb technology has been the way to light a supper (and for that matter a fancy dinner soiree).
But in 2011, the L-Prize for efficient lighting showed that we can do a lot better. The winning design by Philips, a long-standing expert in all things lighting, is six times more efficient than a conventional bulb and a third more economical than energy-efficient bulbs.
By heating up materials or burning them in an attempt to produce light, we waste a lot of the energy as heat. Efficient light generation, as the prize-winning approach shows, relies on semiconductors. Dr Lynn Rozanski is a Research Fellow working on efficient energy conversion. She explains:
Lynn Rozanski Semiconductor materials have a property that allows them to emit light when electricity is passed through them in a certain way.
Light emitting diodes or LEDs are electronic devices which allow us to control the intensity of the light coming out by the amount of electrical energy we feed into them.
They are efficient because a larger proportion of the energy gets converted to light than in conventional bulbs.
Wavelength. Depending on material properties we get certain colours of light.
RS: Efficient generation of coloured light is all well and good, but rare are the instances when a deep red ambiance is all that’s required. White light, which resembles the sun’s rays is the most versatile and most desirable. So how do we create white light?
Lynn Rozanski White light is in fact composed of a multitude of colours. The sun’s white light contains all colours of the rainbow mixed together. But we can cheat and create good-enough white light by mixing yellow and blue.
So a trick we sometimes use is to use a blue LED together with a material called a phosphor which converts some of the blue light to yellow. The yellow mixes with the remaining blue to appear white.
RS: Organic semiconductors can be much cheaper to make into electronics through their ability to be processed from a liquid state. Are they any good at producing light?
Lynn Rozanski Some materials are very good at producing intense, coloured light. We can definitely use them as light emitters.
But they are not terribly energy efficient, so the amounts of light they produce are not great. There’s a way still to go until they can be used in general lighting.
One could envisage, though, ambient or mood lighting which can change colour subtly - made on large area flexible panels like wallpaper – very cheap.
RS: But coloured light emitters have another, very useful application: display screens. Organic light emitting diodes or OLEDs are starting to be used in palm-sized screens as a consequence of their improved energy efficiency.
It's official, the world's longest echo can be heard at an oil storage complex at Inchindown, near Invergordon in Scotland. Hear it by hitting the play button above.
The 1970 Guinness Book of Records holds the last claim for the longest echo. When the solid-bronze doors of the Hamilton Mausoleum in Scotland slammed shut, it took 15 seconds for the sound to die away to silence. The Inchindown echo is a full minute longer.
Professor Trevor Cox of Salford University discovered the Inchdown echo while working with Allan Kilpatrick, an archaeological investigator for the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland.
Allan fired a pistol loaded with blanks about a third of the way into the storage tank, and Trevor recorded the response picked up by the microphones about a third of the way from the far end - a standard technique used in concert hall acoustics. At 125 Hertz, a frequency typically made by a tuba, the reverberation time was 112 seconds. Even at the mid-frequencies important for speech, the reverberation time was 30 seconds. The broadband reverberation time which considers all frequencies simultaneously was 75 seconds. They had discovered the world’s most reverberant space
All of this was just part of Trevor's research on his new book, Sonic Wonderland: A Scientific Odyssey of Sound, published by Vintage Digital, part of the Random House Group. It is an exciting journey for anyone who delights in audio treats, and a passionate plea for a deeper appreciation of, and respect for, our shared sonic landscapes.
Some of the other sounds can be heard here:
Sonic Wonderland – The Great Stalacpipe Organ Sonic Wonderland – Bearded Seals Sonic Wonderland – Burping Sand Dune Sonic Wonderland – Kielder Forest, most tranquil place in England Sonic Wonderland – High-Tide Organ Sonic Wonderland – Musical Road
And as a footnote on that echo - here are some typical reverberation times at mid-frequency:
· Living room: 0.4 seconds · Opera house: 1.2 seconds · Concert hall for classical music: 2 seconds · St. Paul’s Cathedral: 9.2 seconds
To ensure their future food security, rich countries are buying up land in poor countries. Ah, that's China, you may think! But as Stefano Liberti, author of Land Grabbing: Journeys in the New Colonialism, explains to Craig Barfoot, China is a minor player in this land grab - the truth is much more complex. Our pension funds, European corporations, and countries like Saudi Arabia are all getting in on the act.
The food crisis of 2007/8, resulting from poor harvests and propelled by the movement of capital into corn, soya beans, rice and wheat, was the tipping point. Since then, the race to acquire land in the southern hemisphere has become ever more intense. Stefano calls it the new colonialism.
But it is not without contradictions. Many African countries are very keen to get this investment and send trade missions to rich countries to 'sell' their land. A country like Ethiopia, a major aid recipient, now exports large quantities of grain. And under UN laws, if there is famine in a country, they can legally shut down the export of foodstuffs (which means that in another global food crisis, rich countries could not benefit from their investments).
But it is in exploring the plight of poor farmers, thrown off their land as the big corporations move in, that Stefano is at his most eloquent.
According to the World Health Organisation, more than 350 million people of all ages, suffer from depression. Indeed it is a growing cause of disability worldwide and is a major contributor to the global burden of disease.
This podcast looks at what is depression and at the latest research on mindfulness. It is made up of excerpts from two conversations between Professor Mark Williams, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Oxford University and journalist, Dr Danny Penman. These conversations are part of an Oxford University series, The New Psychology of Depression, formed of 6 podcasts:
What is depression How is depression treated Can treatments such as cognitive therapy help Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy: A new approach to treating depression Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy on trial Mindfulness and the brain
[The conversations we have drawn on are starred. They were published by Oxford University under a Creative Commons licence].
Depression is different from usual mood fluctuations and short-lived emotional responses to challenges in everyday life.
Especially when long-lasting and with moderate or severe intensity, depression may become a serious health condition. It can cause the affected person to suffer greatly and function poorly at work, at school and in the family. At its worst, depression can lead to suicide.
There are, however, effective treatments. One treatment that is currently attracting a lot of attention is 'mindfulness' which draws on ancient Buddhist teaching, and is supported by developments in Neuroscience research.
In this podcast Professor Williams explains what mindfulness is and how it can help those suffering from depression. He also talks us through a couple of mindfulness exercises.
Notes:
Mark Williams and Danny Penman are the authors of Mindfulness: A practical guide to peace in a frantic world
Oxford University has a Mindfulness Centre, which hosts courses and suggests books, audio and video resources on mindfulness..
Watch Professor Mark Williams's Ted Talk on Mindfulness
You may also be interested in Pod Academy's podcasts on Children's mental health, and Yoga and mental health.
The term ‘ethnomusicology’ was coined in 1959 by Dutch academic, Jaap Kunst. Put simply, it is the social and cultural study of music – whether that is gamelan, hip hop, British folk or any other kind.
A Spanish translation of this podcast is set out below the English transcript. We are very grateful to Héctor Pittman Villarreal for producing it for us.
Jo Barratt and Sarah Winkler Reid went to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford to interview Dr Noel Lobley, the museum’s ethnomusicologist to find out more about ethnomusicology and hear about his personal experiences working particularly in the Eastern Cape of South Africa.
Jo and Sarah have produced 2 other podcasts from the Pitt Rivers collection:
Pitt Rivers Collection: Louis Sarno and the BayAka Pitt Rivers Collection: Reel to Real
Noel Lobley: What is ethnomusicology? That’s a good question and it has been debated and argued about for at least the last 60 years. Ethnomusicology was coined as an academic term in 1959 by Jaap Kunst, a Dutch scholar working mainly in Indonesia. Before that ethnomusicology was known as comparative musicology.
Simplistically, it is the social and cultural study of music. It’s very interdisciplinary, it was originally a divergence from more traditional musicology, which was very much about wertern art music, about the cannon, German composers, this is the only music that matters. Ethnomusicologists were those who started to be interested in Indian music, folk music - just the variety of musics that are out there in the world- and realised that the musicological approach (transcription, score based analysis) doesn’t necessarily apply or doesn’t work anything like what we understand as harmony.
Musicologists realised they needed different methods of dealing with different musics, so they started to say it is the study of music in culture, music as culture, the study of all the human processes that are important in the making of music eg psychology, biology, what happens in the cells. But the most important threads are still the anthropological approaches to music. This means participant observation, fieldwork, long term immersion with a culture. Ethnomusicology used to be defined by what it studied, but it isn’t any more because Ethnomusicologists study techno, hip hop, noiseart. I don’t think there is a genre of music or sound that Ethnomusicologists don't look at now. It's not just traditional music from Africa or India. It's the social and cultural study of music, trying to find interdisciplinary ways of understanding what enable us to make music.
Sometimes that involves non-human processes. There is research into the relationship between insect sounds, bird sounds and whale sounds, and our music. The natural environment and our music.
So it is a very vibrant and exciting area of musical study.
Jo Barratt: Does this mean recorded sound is your primary source?
NL: In the development of ethnomusicology recording has been hugely influential. , - the making of ethnographic recordings, where scholars/researchers/travellers/ anthropologists went somewhere and made their recordings. As soon as the invention of the phonograph in 1877, it has probably been the central method, alongside participant observation.
Ethnomusicologists used to do analysis just through recordings, which might not have bee made by them, so they could listen to the recorded objects and they might get it worng, through not understanding the context - not knowing what went into making the recording. If the recording is too fast and there is no picture reference you can make mistakes.
But the recorded object has been hugely influential. We've made millions of hours of these ethnomusicology recordings, piled them up in sound archives or private collections. But the next stage, what to do with those documents is not always so obvious. Traditionally once they'd been transcribed the recording would be discarded,
The financial and ecological costs of driving, and the time we waste sitting in traffic jams, is leading many people to think about a more 'walkable' city. The man who has thought and written most widely on this is city planner and architectural designer Jeff Speck, the author of ‘Walkable Cities - How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time. Craig Barfoot interviewed him for Pod Academy.
In rural, tribal societies with no technology, people move on average at three miles per hour because they are walking everywhere. In most developed countries, if you add up the costs of driving a car, the time you spend earning that money and the time you spend in traffic, it has been estimated that we, too, move at about 3 miles per hour!
Building new roads is no answer because the extra capacity is absorbed within 2 or 3 years by new car journeys. A better solution might be to price driving at its true cost to society, and Jeff points to London’s congestion charge as one of the successes of this approach.
But his big idea is ‘the walkable city’. We have learned that we have a smaller carbon footprint and a healthier population if we live in walkable cities. More and more young professionals (brought up on Seinfeld, Sex in the City and Friends) are opting to live in city centres, as are empty nesters who want to be able to get out and about even when they can no longer drive. As Jeff says, “Downtown has become the new place of choice for those who have a choice.”
Edinburgh, Scotland - a very walkable city (especially during the Festival)
But those who don’t have a choice are pushed towards the suburbs and transport costs they can ill afford, where ‘they require hyper-mobility just to buy catfood!’
So city centres are changing fast. They are increasingly seen as desirable places to live. The next question is whether the young professionals in their twenties will stay in the centre, or move out to the suburbs ‘for the schooling’ when they have children.
Jeff Speck's Ted Talk about walkable cities is here
And you might also want to listen to our podcast on Walking tours of London, Is London like it used to be?
The UK government has just announced tax breaks for companies fracking for shale gas. Is that a sound investment in our future energy security, or a misguided waste of public money? Should the money have been allocated to renewables? Are fracking protesters just 'scaremongering'? Are these tax breaks just another example of business as usual for the big fossil fuel companies?
This podcast records the fracking debate in The Rational Parliament, which explored all sides of the argument around hydraulic fracturing for shale gas.
The Rational Parliament, founded by science journalist Adam Smith, aims to have rational debates on hot topics of the day, debates that are not subject to unchallenged wild claims, debates that balance views and values alongside research evidence. The Parliament even has a 'rhetoric officer', Johnny Unger who comments on the rhetorical devices used by speakers in the debate.
Members of the Rational Parliament relax before the debate
The first debate of the Parliament, earlier this year, was about GM food. This, the second debate, looked at 'fracking' (hydraulic fracturing). Chaired by science writer, Michael Brooks, and overseen by Alice Casey (the process officer of the Parliament), it was kicked off by Joseph Dutton, Research Associate, Global Gas Security Project, University Of Leicester.
"The development of shale gas in the US has caused a stir across the globe for both good and bad reasons. Many countries hope to develop shale, seeking to replicate the US’s employment and financial gains, along with low domestic energy prices and natural gas self-sufficiency. But there are also those that worry about the negative impacts that shale gas development might have on the environment, both locally and nationally and also globally in terms of climate change. In the UK, the opponents and proponents of UK shale gas development point to the US experience for evidence of both the benefits and threats that fracking and shale gas can bring.
Before considering the differing points of view, it is important to note that fracking has already been carried in the UK. Over 200 conventional onshore oil and gas wells have been fracked in the UK, including horizontal wells at the Wytch Farm oilfield in Dorset and Beckingham oilfield in Nottinghamshire and vertical gas wells in Lancashire, geothermal development in Cornwall, and coal bed methane projects in Scotland. However, fracking for shale gas is different to conventional gas, both geologically and from a technical and engineering standpoint.
Opponents of fracking in the UK base many of their arguments on the experiences of shale development in the US, using alleged incidents to highlight the risks and damage that may occur should development begin in the UK. However, false comparisons have been made between the two countries. For example, there are assertions that the patchy regulation of fracking in the US (including a number of legislative exemptions) will be mirrored in the UK. It is the case that all parts of the fracking process are covered by existing UK legislation, while the final decision on development rests with local planning authorities, not national government. Those arguing against development based on environmental impacts point to studies from the US detailing alleged groundwater and aquifer contamination, water usage issues, air pollution, and fugitive methane emissions.
Shale development and fracking do have impacts, as all industrial processes do; however, further study has shown impacts to be less than initially claimed, or in some cases unrelated to fracking. For example, water usage for fracking a well appears to be high, but overall that shale gas sector’s water use is lower than that of mining industries and agriculture. Nonetheless, the development of shale gas in areas that are already subject to water shortages is clearly an issue. The US Environmental Protection Agency’s estimates of fugitive emissions from fr...
Professor Carol Propper, Professor of Economics at Imperial Collect Business School and the Economics Department of Bristol University has just completed a major study on levels of physical activity in Britain which suggests that most adults do so little exercise that they are risking their health.
Lee Millam went to talk to her.
Most work in this field has involved small scale studies, but Professor Propper’s research involved a million people over 5 years, across Britain, and questions included 400 plus sports.
When you have so much data it is possible to look at the individual correlations of exercise with class, income, ethnicity, geographical location, family size etc.
The study was not about attitudes to exercise, so it did not look at why people do or don’t do exercise. It simply described who does what. And from this we know that education levels appear to have a major influence on exercise. Only 12% of people with degrees don't do any exercise (so 88% do), but for those who left school with no A-levels, the involvement in sport is much lower. . As Professor Propper says, 'What people don't do enough of are the inexpensive everyday activities.' Exercise gurus and academics know know about this, but the scale of the study enables us to say with certainty that
80% of us don't hit government activity target Walking is the most common form of exercise Ethnicity is a major factor e.g. women of South East Asian heritage tend to take less exercise than others
Richer people do more exercise, particularly they do the 'more expensive' sports that require equipment and time.
Children develop language and literacy skills in all sorts of settings, but perhaps one of the most overlooked settings is the church, the temple, the mosque - especially for communities who have recently settled in the UK.
Focusing on four groups who have come to London in the last 50 years - the Ghanaian Pentecostal community, the Polish Catholic community, the Bangladeshi Muslim community and the Tamil Hindu community - the three year long ESRC funded BeLIFS project (Becoming Literate in Faith Settings) of the Education Department at Goldsmiths, University of London found that the places of worship, services, classes and home lives of the children, centring around their faith, were important not just for literacy, but for the children's multi-lingual identity.
In this podcast, anthropologist Dr Sarah Winkler Reid talks to Professor Eve Gregory, who headed up the project. [You can also see and hear Eve Gregory talk about the project in this video]
Here is the Transcript:
Becoming literate in faith settings: Language and literacy learning in the lives of new Londoners (BeLIFS)
Sarah Winkler Reid: Faith plays an important part in the lives of many children in Britain, but as Eve Gregory, Professor of Language and Culture in Education at Goldsmith’s University told me, very little research has focused on language and literacy learning in faith settings. Eve’s three year long project aimed to find out about the sorts of learning that happens as children take part in faith activities in places of worship, in faith classes or at home.
The project focused on four groups of ‘New Londoners’, communities of shared origins and faith who have come to live in London in the last fifty years. The Ghanaian Pentecostal community, Catholic Polish community, the Bangladeshi Muslim community and the Tamil Hindu community.
The project was a collaborative ethnography, Eve’s team of eleven conducted participant observation in the faith settings and the children and their families had video cameras so they could record their activities at home. Having recently completed the project Eve told me what had surprised her and her team most about their research findings.
Eve Gregory: Generally we were very surprised by the scope of learning going on in children lives, we were surprised that in many families, because we’re convinced that our families were not exceptional that actually faith permeates children’s everyday lives. Not only are many children involved in regular worship at the Temple or Mosque or the Church, but they are on a daily basis referring to their faith, using text, narratives, hymns, songs, art work from their faith. So we were surprised at the extent of learning and the way in which faith does interpenetrate lots and lots of different learning.
We were surprised that you couldn’t really separate language and literacy learning. Although the original intention of our project was to focus on language and literacy learning we realised you couldn’t separate them from cultural learning, from aesthetic learning, artistic learning, creative learning and moral learning as well. And all of the formed becoming part of a community, because that was the crucial thing, all of that gave children a framework, a sort of guide book for their lives actually.
[Audio of children singing as part of Children’s day at the Ghanaian Pentecostal Church].
The Ghanaian Pentecostal setting
SWR: Can you give some descriptions of the settings the children were learning in?
EG: Yes there were lots of different contexts; maybe I could just take a couple of contrasting ones. The Polish children were all very fluent Polish speakers.
[Audio of Polish children speaking in Polish in their Catholic faith class]
Polish Catholic setting
EG: Now we found out that was not necessarily because the children had come to the country more recently but indeed there is a history behind all of that.
Jeremy Seabrook talks to Caspar Melville about life in Muslim communities in the slums of Kolkata, and paints a powerful and shocking picture of people who have suffered centuries of expropriation, loss, driven migration and involuntary separations and now find themselves at the wrong end of globalisation. The conversation draws on the study by Jeremy Seabrook and Imram Ahmed Siddiqui, People Without History (Pluto Press)
Caspar started by asking Jeremy to describe the Kolkata slums.
Jeremy Seabrook: The first thing you notice in the poorest part of Topsia is the canal – which is the channel for waste water. So the first thing you notice is the smell. The smell of decaying garbage and sewage. It is overwhelming. The second is the way houses have been constructed out of industrial debris, old bamboo, wood, boxes, and old bags of fertiliser and phosphate, all kinds of stuff. It is a very improvised looking place. It is very stony, the houses are very close together. There is just about room to trundle a cart from which people are selling mouldy bananas, specked oranges, the very poor quality goods that are on sale for the people who live here. This is perhaps one of the worst places in Kolkata. It is very crowded, very densely populated.
As you walk in the thoroughfare, you see many people who are addicted to drugs. It is a major outlet for opium, ganga, heroin. People are seriously addicted. You only have to open one of the curtains in front of the huts and you can see 6,7 or 8 men who are stoned out of their minds. It is all done in the daylight, in full view of the officials – the police, the local authority, the local communist party (though of course they have just been defeated in the elections, but it won't make any difference to these people).
The huts have very sparse interiors - maybe an old tin chair, a trunk, a string with changes of clothing across the room, a bed roll. Sometimes a huge wooden bed fills the whole room, on which the whole family sleeps.
And what strikes you is that everybody is working. They are sitting on the threshold, women especially, and they are cutting away the rubber from sandals moulded in local factories. Or they are making and selling snacks in the streets. Everybody is doing something, even young children.
The slum areas of Kolkata have changed considerably over the 10-15 years I have been going there. Topsia in Kolkata is an archaic form of dwelling - made of industrial rubbish. At one time all slums were like this, but now people have got a bit better off, and they are making their houses out of tin, metal or rough brick. Or they are renting rooms in roughly made and illegally built brick-built slums – they are illegal and could be demolished at any time. So although it apparently looks as though the worst of the slums are being eliminated – poverty has been stacked up inside high rise dwellings. Inside they are just as crowded, insanitary, dark, fetid and unpleasant as the things they replaced, but they are no longer so visible to the visitor from outside, who thinks ‘oh they are buildings, they must be OK’.
Two things are happening with the urban poor. Firstly they are being stacked up vertically. And secondly, compression. They are being squeezed into a smaller and smaller area of the city’s base. As the middle class expands, so new areas are taken over for development. You get all these building sites with artists impressions of places called ‘Mayfair Towers’ or ‘Berkley Villas’,they're idealised views of what these places will be. They are rising up in slum areas but whoever moves in won’t want the eyesore of the poor people living close. So you can see that the next lot are ripe for eviction.
There is a constant process of movement and change. Slums are not static. They are in a ferment of economic activity and also of social upheaval. People are removed either shoved out to the far periphery or put into rented high rise.
This is the first of a new occasional series of ‘Research Bytes’ podcasts – looking very briefly at a cross section of research projects in an academic institution. In this podcast we talk to six academics from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Goldsmiths is, of course, the alma mater of most of the YBAs - Young British Artists – Damien Hirst, Mark Wallinger, Gillian Wearing, Sam Taylor Wood and has a long history of cultural study, artistic expression and iconaclism.
So it is not surprising to find academics in every department at Goldsmiths concerned about creativity. And we start the podcast by looking at Professor Joydeep Bhattacharya 's research project on the neuroscience of creativity.
Next up is composer Jeremy Peyton Jones, from Goldsmith’s music department who is involved in practice research – on a project called 'Ending's, around the last pages of books including James Joyce's Ulysses and Jack Kerouac's On the Road.
Computers and creativity come together in Dr Kate Devlin’s research – she is not only a computer expert but also an archaeologist, seeking to understand the past better using computer technology.
A colleague of Kate Devlin’s in the Department of Computing is Dan McQuillan, lecturer in creative and social computing, and human rights activist who has been involved in establishing Crypto Parties, where people share computer skills particularly aimed at staying out of the way of the NSA, and when I spoke to him, he was getting ready for the first Crypto Festival.
We’ve just learned that Goldsmiths computer whizzes has won a major government grant for PhD students to take forward the digital games industry in the UK
Another important Department at Goldsmiths is the Education Department – Pod Academy has had other pieces about their groundbreaking research – this time I spoke to Clare Kelly, who heads up the BA in Education, Culture & Society, about her work on children’s literacy
My last port of call in Goldsmith’s was with Dr Jo Lloyd, lecturer in occupational psychology – who is currently working on policies and practices for transgender people in the workplace
If your college or university would like us to make a similar podcast, showcasing some of your research, drop a line to thepod@podacademy.org
“I began to see some of the high profile, very dramatic experiments in social psychology of the 1950s and 60s, as what they were – metaphors. We invest them with a truth and authority that often goes way beyond what we’ve demonstrated in the lab” says Gina Perry.
The particular experiments she is taking a fresh look at in her book, Behind the Shock Machine, are the Milgram experiments, conducted at Yale University in 1963, which suggested that 65% of people would give fatal electric shocks to complete strangers if asked to do so by an authority figure. These experiments have been used to ‘explain’ the behaviour of Nazis in the holocaust.
Stanley Milgram’s findings are shocking, but are they valid? That is the central question Perry seeks to address.
Craig Barfoot’s interview with Gina Perry explores the evidence....
In this podcast about how neuroscience is offering new approaches to treatments for drug addiction, science journalist Ryan O'Hare speaks to
Harry Shapiro of Drugscope, the UK organisation supporting professionals working in the field of drug misuse. Dr Amy Milton, a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge Barry Everitt, Professor of behavioural neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. Dr Sunjeev Kamboj, a lecturer in clinical psychology at University College London Andy [not his real name], a recovering addict
[Andy] - “Trying to justify to yourself that you could take it possibly take it very sporadically, but yeah, there’s a lot of mental trickery going on,”
[Sunjeev Kamboj] - “There isn’t really, at the moment, any long-term treatment that you receive and then stop taking and you’re cured,”
[Harry Shapiro] “When someone has collapsed all of their problems into one, to the exclusion and detriment of everything else in their lives, that’s addiction,”
[Amy Milton] - “We need to think of addiction much more as a chronic disorder so it’s more like treating diabetes or hypertension than some short term disease”
Ryan O'Hare: When it comes to drug and alcohol addiction the numbers speak for themselves. With 800 million pounds a year being spent on drug treatment and recovery services in the UK alone, it’s estimated that one in five of us have experienced addiction or know someone who has.
Although there are a number of treatments to try and tackle the problem in the short-term, such as chemical replacements, and abstinence and psychological therapies for the dependence, relapse in the long-term is still a problem. Harry Shapiro is head of communications for the UK charity, Drugscope.
Harry Shapiro: There’s a bit of a kind of mantra, cliché, whatever, there’s many ways into addiction and many ways out. There is no typical pathway out, and some people won’t go anywhere near a treatment system but might manage to get off the actual drinking or drugs and then might spend much of their time in AA or NA meetings. So, there are several pathways that people will take and they will jump from one to another.”
For someone who has become used to using drugs or alcohol as a way of coping with problems there is always the chance that if more problems present themselves that there’s a kind of learned behaviour there and the way that you deal with this, in terms of coping, is to go back on drugs or start drinking again.
One of the reasons why a lot of residential rehabs are based sited well out of city centres, out in rural communities and all the rest of it, is this idea that you need to be well away from your old haunts and your old habits. Because it’s true, people do start getting cravings, some people do, if they walk past some alley way where they used to shoot up a few years ago, it all kind of starts coming back.
RO'H: We are becoming more and more aware that getting someone off of drugs and alcohol is only half the problem. The challenge for the long-term means trying to target the very mechanism which has evolved to help us make sense of the world around us, our memory.Though, brilliantly adapted to help us find food, a partner and to avoid the dangers of our environment, it can also be one of the biggest barriers to long-term drug treatment.
But in order to understand the underlying pathways used by our brains, we need to start with something a little more every day.
Walk into a bakery and the smell of fresh bread hits you. Immediately it stirs up a thousand memories, you may not even be aware the process is happening, you may start to salivate, and your stomach may even start to rumble with hunger.
But all of this is triggered in a flash, before you’ve even seen a loaf. Just from a simple cue, the smell of the bread. Dr Amy Milton, is a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge...
Since the end of the Cold War, American military superiority has been an undeniable fact. But this superpower dominance is not the norm in world affairs. With the rise of China as a ‘peer rival’ of the US, are we seeing a return to a more contested ‘business as usual’ ? And if we are, what are the implications?
In this podcast, Pod Academy’s Craig Barfoot speaks to Dr Ian Speller, co author of Understanding Modern Warfare (Cambridge University Press 2008, £25.99) about various developments in naval capability, and in particular the naval aspects of China’s resurgence. China is expanding its navy, and although Washington sees this as a threat, the Chinese themselves say any developing country would want to build up its sea power (given that historically threats to China have come from the seas, it is perhaps understandable that they would feel this way).
But for now, the US navy fleet has greater capability than all the rest of the world’s fleets put together. This fleet is deployed in international waters as ‘protector of the global commons’, and it is not uncommon for fleets from different nations to meet and acknowledge each other in international waters. But as global politics, and economic power, evolve and change – how long will this situation continue?
Dr Ian Speller is a Lecturer in the Department of History at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He also lectures in defence studies at the Irish Defence Forces Military College and in maritime strategy at the UK Defence Academy and at the National Maritime College of Ireland. He is the author of The Role of Amphibious Warfare in British Defence Policy, 1945-56 (2001) and the editor of The Royal Navy and Maritime Power in the Twentieth Century (2005).
Our podcast explores aspects of modern naval warfare, but Understanding Modern Warfare also looks at
Strategy Land warfare Air and space warfare Irregular warfare Weapons of mass destruction
Dr Speller is one of a number of co-authors, the others are:
David Jordan, King's College London James D. Kiras, School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, Maxwell Air Force Base, USA David J. Lonsdale, University of Reading Christopher Tuck, King's College London C. Dale Walton, Missouri State University
If you have enjoyed this podcast you may also be interested in one or more of the following podcasts:
Empire: the features of American global power The East India Company and its legacy Divided Nations: global challenges, global governance UN in DRC 2: The challenges of the UN’s new offensive approach
Clasificadores trundle round Montevideo collecting and sorting the rubbish that others throw away. But now the city authorities want to clean up their act. Ben Weisz reports.
Ben Weisz: Friday 26th July, 2013, Montevideo, Uruguay. Dozens of horse-drawn rubbish carts have blocked the Avenida 18 de Julio, one of the city centre’s main roads. They’ve pulled up to protest outside Montevideo’s Palacio Municipal, headquarters to the city council or Intendencia.
The carts belonged to members of UCRUS – the union of clasificadores of solid urban waste. Clasificadores do their rounds of the city, some in horse-drawn carts, others pulling hand-carts or even shopping trolleys, rummaging through the large rubbish containers stationed on Montevideo’s streets. They salvage what they can, sort it, and sell it on.
A survey carried out by the Intendencia in May 2013 counted 3188 clasificadores in the city, though as you will hear, UCRUS puts the figure much, much higher. The Union was protesting recent changes proposed by the Intendencia to ban the clasificadores’ horse-drawn carts, or ‘carros’ from three city centre districts, and to limit the collection and sorting of waste in other districts to those “duly authorised” by the Intendencia. Clasificadores see this as a threat to their livelihood – the three central districts are seen to be the areas whose rubbish skips contain the richest pickings, while there are fears that only large multinationals with fleets of bin lorries will be “duly authorised”.
The clasificadores want to protect their way of life from its perceived threats. Not only the new rules proposed by the Intendencia, but toughening economic climates . This programme investigates the question of whether it is sustainable for Uruguay to protect the clasificadores lifestyle in the 21st century. There are fears that child labour is rife among families of clasificadores. The Intendencia worries that the presence of clasificadores is holding back both the city’s infrastructure and its ability to organise a modern system of waste recycling.
But are these fears justified? And what will the human cost be if the perceived threats to the clasificadores’ livelihoods become reality?
As with most industries in Uruguay, the Clasificadores have their own Union. UCRUS- the Union of Clasificadores of Solid Urban Waste. Travelling north, away from the hustle and bustle of the city centre, you arrive in the impoverished Villa Espanola district. Occupying a small hut on the Camino Corrales, UCRUS hold their meetings. In a store cupboard, filled with books of Marxist-Leninist theory and propaganda posters,
I spoke with Walter Rodriguez, UCRUS’s president. I asked him why the Clasificadores felt threatened by the intendencia proposals.
Walter Rodriguez: The state has pursued a series of measures which are set to harm clasificadores. The big producers of waste, the supermarkets, the factories, all of these generate great riches in terms of materials to recycle. Nowadays they are punished by the City Council if they give their waste to the rubbish carts of the clasificadores. The first time, they’re hit with a fine – I don’t remember exactly how much – the second time, a bigger fine, and the third time they can even come and close down the business, the factory, whatever it might be. So we understand that this is another little move in a game which has been going on for a while now – they want us to disappear from the streets.
BW: Walter suggested that the Intendencia’s plans to ‘duly licence’ refuse collection was a sly means of privatisation by the back door, eliminating clasificadores in favour of large multinationals.
WR: What they really want is privatisation – that multinationals deal with all the rubbish. Nowadays, hanging over us is the idea…no, they’re already bringing forward plans to build incinerators to generate electricity, enormous recycling plants which earn millions of dollars.
For the last twenty years of his life, Marcel Duchamp was working secretly in a studio in New York to construct an installation called Étant Donnés, Things Given. In this, the final part of our series, Seeing is Believing: the Politics of the Visual, Rod Stoneman analyses Things Given and he reflects on how Duchamp opened new ways of thinking about art and creativity. The series is presented and produced by Esther Gaytan Fuertes You will find other podcasts in the series here:
Podcast 1 on Fashion images Podcast 2 on graffiti Podcast 3 on music videos Podcast 4 on film and climate change
Rod Stoneman: For the last twenty years of his life, Marcel Duchamp was working secretly in a studio in New York to construct an installation called Étant Donnés, or ‘things given’, —one, the waterfall, two, the lighting gas— which no one in the outside world was aware of. These images show the outside door and in that wooden door there are two small peep holes which, if the spectator gets close, you look through into the interior and the image [above] indicates what can be seen.
And the most extraordinary aspects of this major work by certainly one of the twentieth century’s most significant visual artists, was to make something outside of the public domain and only release it after his death. So there was no marketing, there was no gallery, there was no commercial dimension. It was a most significant commitment to an activity but it was done in a way that, very subversively, was outside of the art world, the art market.
A few years before he died he gave a speech called ‘The creative act’. Interestingly before ‘The death of the author’ by Roland Barthes or Foucault’s essay or The Role of the Reader by Umberto Eco, Duchamp talked about the way the meaning of the work of the art is actually made by the spectator.
His Étant Donnés offered the spectator a direct and physical experience of that meaning. Duchamp legislated that it couldn’t be photographed the first 15 years of its existence in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Obviously this was an epoch —in 1968 when it was constructed in that Museum— it was an epoch before everyone had a camera in their mobile phone. But actually the first photographs of it were only seen in the 80s, when that restriction had been lifted. So the spectator had to see it directly and personally and its implications and its meanings were constrained to that one-to-one relationship.
This actually indicates something of a different way of making art and a much wider and more open and more democratic basis for art-making —leaving aside the commercialised, celebrity basis of commercial art galleries and artists. Duchamp actually suggested that all activity of making, which can be embarked upon by a wide or inclusive range of people actually could be understood as art-making. And it occurs to me that when sometimes people suggest that only professional training and high ability should legitimate creativity that the activity that everyone makes in the middle of the night, which is the highly textured coloured specific strange work of dreaming is actually an indication of the way Duchamp is right. Artistic creativity, imagination, intelligence and meaning are manufactured in a strange brilliant way by all of us on a daily basis. And the definition of what could be seen as a work of art needs to be rethought.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this series. Remember you can listen to the six parts of Seeing is Believing: the Politics of the Visual on Pod Academy’s website, where you can also find our other podcasts and stay up to date with the latest research.
Rod Stoneman
Seeing is Believing: the Politics of the Visual by Rod Stoneman is published by Black Dog (UK £19.95, US £29.95) It explores the complex and reciprocal dynamic between world and image in this most visually mediated society. Everyone ‘knows’ images can be false or deceptive, but we all live and work in constant denial of this ...
‘Due to lack of interest, tomorrow has been cancelled’ was the title of a famous 1971 TV documentary about how the world was walking towards ecological disaster with its eyes shut. In this, the fourth installment of our series Seeing is Believing: the Politics of the Visual, Rod Stoneman remembers the impact of the images of that programme and how it echos today in the growing concern about climate change. To listen to other podcasts in the series, which is presented and produced by Esther Gaytan Fuertes, click on the links below:
Podcast 1 on Fashion images Podcast 2 on graffiti Podcast 3 on music videos
Rod Stoneman: This photograph [above] is a picture of Los Angeles under smog, a problem that’s been addressed in recent years but for a long time, the inhabitants of Los Angeles were living through a self-inflicted ecological disaster. This came in focus for me personally when I saw a BBC science programme, Horizon in fact, in 1971 when I was in college. The title of this Horizon programme was, ‘Due to lack of interest, tomorrow has been cancelled’. And for 45 minutes the programme assembled a case of the danger to the planet, talking about the Colorado Dust Bowl, the overuse of DDT pesticides killing species, the smog in Los Angeles for sure, and a lake in Russia which had been eliminated by factory pollution. And the television programme ended with the memorable phrase of an American scientist saying “Maybe Man is like a dinosaur shot in the back brain —maybe already dead, but it doesn’t know it”.
What I can’t help but reflecting on now is the way in which such a strong warning, if you like, in a BBC programme was something that I was able to ignore for the following 30-40 years and like most other people in Western countries the issue of ecology was set aside. As it began to emerge onto political agendas in 2005, 2006 —even the urgency was beginning to be brought home— the media found it very difficult to foreground the ecological questions because they don’t fit within most news agendas, most criteria for coverage. And there’s really never really been a strong, iconic image —I mean, perhaps at other point, when the hippies being a subculture taking ecology more seriously, when the hippies were active the famous picture from the NASA spacecraft of the blue planet tried to have that effect. But really there is been no equivalent to —if you take the historical example of the Lisbon earthquake, which was devastating when it happened, which was in 1755, and a had a subsequent effect on the Enlightenment, on Voltaire and other European philosophers thereafter. Something like the tsunami in Indonesia in 2004 and the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, there are not directly linked to the human abuse of the planet and therefore have not shifted perception in an effective way.
Trying to understand and explain how the ecological crisis has really had little impact over the years, because there were scientists from previous centuries, the Scandinavian Svante Arrhenius in 1896 or GS Callendar in the 1930s were warning about the dangers of climate change and of global warning but in a very optimistic way, they seemed to think that, as the planet got warmer, it would be good for agriculture and there’d be more crops for a larger population. And that’s symptomatic of a kind of anthropocentric ego, which means we, mankind, are the centre of all things and our ego is expansive and it’ll work out ok for us.
The pathetic fallacy in literature —‘it rains in the town, it cries in my heart’, would be an example— is another version of human self-centeredness, the sense that it’s got to work out for us because the centre of all the things. And maybe the smog in Los Angeles is somewhat better now, but the general attitude about the urgency of the catastrophe we face has not really taken it on board, has not come to the point where... Well, I hope it’s not true and that we are not a dinosaur that’s been shot in the back brain...
The music video: "What had been a liberating possibility for visual artists working in film, to bring their work towards a wider audience, without the pressure of narrative, without the necessity to tell stories, has become an absolutely fixed promo for the consumerism aimed at the youth market". So says Professor Rod Stoneman in this, the third in Pod Academy’s series based on his book, Seeing is Believing: the Politics of the Visual. which is produced and presented by Esther Gaytan Fuertes. In this podcast, Rod Stoneman talks about the visual experimentation made possible by the music video, which pushes the boundaries of mainstream narrative film. You can find other podcasts in the series here: Podcast 1 on Fashion images and Podcast 2 on graffiti Rod Stoneman: This image [above] comes from a film called Berlin Horse made by Malcolm Le Grice in 1970, an experimental film from the London Filmmakers’ Co-op. And it’s a striking visual image made from permutations of colour printing, using loops, a horse going round in a circle and a clip from an early American silent film, working alongside music in an interesting way. The music is created by Brian Eno using loops of guitar chords, which the chords are of different lengths so as they go round they change the relationship of the different sets of guitar chords to one another. And it suggests a previous history of work with sound and image happening in the experimental domain: Kenneth Anger made Scorpio Rising and Kustom Kar Kommandos even within I’d say mainstream films but even within feature film productions like Performance by Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell there is a sequence where Mike Jagger comes out of character to create a music video, you could say, or premonition of, and Bob Dylan’s famous film with the different lines from Subterranean Homesick Blues.
These are precursors of something that really developed when music television started in the early 70s, when MTV was created. Gary Kemp from Spandau Ballet was absolutely right when he said, video was something that a band had to be good at; if you weren’t visual, if you couldn’t work in front of a camera you were not going to happen as a band.
It's absolutely clear that, at that moment, MTV offered a possibility for brave and experimental work which didn’t have to be concerned with story telling or narrative to connect with contemporary music and reach a wider audience. But, quite quickly industrial constraints exerted themselves and some videos were taken to be too difficult or too experimental or —occasionally the phrase was used— not ‘MTV- friendly’. That excluded some work, also contracts to be drawn up —I mean, a pop-promo is precisely a promotional tour— and contracts began to be drawn up defining what the film-maker had to achieve in terms of, say, featuring a medium close shot of the lead singer of the band within the first 30 seconds.
So that began to close what had been a liberating possibility for visual artists working in film, to bring their work towards a wider audience, without the pressure of narrative, without the necessity to tell stories. The current version of music videos is an absolutely fixed promo for the consumerism, aimed at the youth market. MTV itself has moved off to other formats, to reality television, and the space for something as extraordinary as Malcolm Le Grice’s Berlin Horse —which, interestingly, was used in the Doves’ music video Catch the Sun in a rather decorative way— the space for new visually experiment has really been closed off.
If you have enjoyed this podcast, remember you can listen or download the rest of this series from our website, www.podacademy.org
Seeing is Believing: The politics of the visual is published by Black Dog (UK £19.95, US £29.95) It explores the complex and reciprocal dynamic between world and image in this most visually mediated society. Everyone ‘knows’ images can be false or deceptive,
This is the second in our two-part series on the UN's new offensive mandate in the Democratic Republic of Congo in which SOAS’s Dr Phil Clark talks to Paul Brister from Pod Academy about some of the causes of the conflict in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and some of the challenges facing the United Nation’s (UN) new Intervention Brigade that has recently deployed there. [You can find the first podcast in the series here] This podcast looks at the implications of the UN in DRC and its new proactive and aggressive approach – for the DRC, the wider region and for peacekeeping and the UN itself. It also contains a postscript outlining some of the developments that have taken place since Paul spoke to Dr Clark. First Paul Brister gives some background on peacekeeping...
Paul Brister: UN peacekeeping missions are normally authorised by UN Resolutions passed under Chapter 6 of the UN Charter, and are guided by three basic principles: consent of the parties; impartiality; and non-use of force except in self-defence and defence of the mandate. A UN peacekeeping force is thus deployed in a context where there is a peace to be kept. It often involves monitoring and enforcing a cease-fire agreed between two or more former combatants, who view the UN force as being neutral and impartial.
Of course events on the ground can change rapidly: cease-fires may be broken, consent can become withdrawn, peace keeping forces may be tempted to stray into peace enforcement. And in the past the UN Security Council has been to slow to react. The classic case is Rwanda in 1994. During the 100 days of mass-genocide, the commanders of the UN forces on the ground [United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR)] repeatedly made ardent requests for authorisation to use their Belgian troops to intervene. These demands were consistently rebuffed and their mandate was never beefed up. Instead the troops were forced to stand idly by and helplessly watch the butchering. The UN troops had found themselves with a weak peacekeeping mandate in a situation that urgently required peace enforcement and were thus useless.
Peace-enforcement operations are authorised under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter and have far more robust mandates, sanctioning armed intervention to impose a solution. They tend to take place in a context of conflict rather than peace – a situation that is preferred by one or more of the belligerents. Therefore, unlike with peacekeepers, peace-enforcers are not welcomed by at least one of the belligerents and are not regarded as neutral. The insertion of a peace-enforcement force can convince belligerents that compliance with an imposed peace is less painful to battling this force. Sometimes though, the conflicts have proved too deep-rooted and intransigent, and little more than a pause between rounds has ensued. In other cases the cycle of violence has been broken, providing the conditions necessary for a political process that paves the way to a lasting peace.
Usually the aim of peace-enforcement has been to bring belligerents to the negotiating table. The goal has not been military victory but facilitating a settlement. And peace-enforcement operations have generally been outsourced or sub-contracted to other organisations. Although, for example, the UN Protection Force in Bosnia (UNPROFOR) was authorised to use enforcement action, coercive action was in reality left to NATO, which had been sanctioned to undertake enforcement measures alongside the UN peacekeeping force. This culminated in the replacement of UNPROFOR by the more ‘muscular’ NATO-led force, IFOR. Although the NATO-led operation rested notionally in the hands of the Security Council, in real terms NATO leaders, not the UN, called the shots.
Historically, it has generally been the case that the more aggressive the UN mandate for military action has been, the less control the UN has had over of it. This has been due to an understandable unwillingness o...
This is the second in our series based on Rod Stoneman's book, Seeing is Believing: the Politics of the Visual. In the podcast, Rod analyses the subculture of graffiti and its social and political significance, using this Banksy graffito in Cleveland Street London W1 as his jumping off point.
The podcast is produced and presented by Esther Gaytan Fuertes.
Rod Stoneman: This image is a photograph taken in a central London street and it shows a graffito made by Banksy. The original starting point for street art and for graffiti —obviously there are precedents in ancient cultures in different times and different places, quite apart from Pompeii and Herculaneum and Greek cities in Western civilisations, it’s not just a phenomenon of the West, one could even look further afield to Mexico, where contemporary political graffiti stencilled in Oaxaca, for example, since in 2006 when there there was a teachers’ strike, connects with the mural painting of the 1920s and 30s when politicised painters worked on art that would be more open and accessible because it was painted on walls, Riviera and Siqueiros being two of the leading ones, and perhaps even there’s resonance before that in Mexico with other civilisations, the Mexica or the Mayan civilisations used highly coloured paint on some of their wall decoration. So its most current versions in the last fifty years, tagging and subway graffiti in New York and painting in the street in Los Angeles, have spread through to most cities in the world.
Politicised use of graffiti is perhaps a narrower tradition but still an interesting development from, say, an Australian group in the seventies called with the marvellous title BUGA UP which was an acronym standing for Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions, and they devised kind of long poles that could be used to take a spray can 10 or 15 up a billboard to make modifications that changed it. May’68 in Paris was obviously an explosion of art in a very imaginative and engaged way.
'Paris May '68'It is forbidden to forbid'
Perhaps one should also remember the troubles in Northern Ireland with the mural work that’s taken place there.
Belfast mural
So these different and diverse moments of politicised street art come through to contemporary subvertisement, as a neologism to talk about what the French situationists might have called détournement, taking an original image and changing it by word or visual modification. And they all show potential for counteraction, potential for an alternative and indeed more democratic two-way communication. There is a word for communication studies that is, the phatic, which is about opening a channel of communication where you pick up a phone and say, ‘are you there?’ and ‘yes, I can hear you’ and that’s the beginning of a conversation. That’s perhaps the most hopeful and optimistic dimension of graffiti in its various forms at the moment that suggests that the visual landscape that we encounter in cities does not have to be dominated —well, after architecture— by publicity and advertising, that actually artists and young people more generally can make visual material which has the power to make people think, reconsider, change and respond a more open process.
Empty advertsing billboard
If you want to know more about the politics of the visual, here is another in the series -
Seeing is Believing 1: The language of fashion
Seeing is Believing: The politics of the visual is published by Black Dog (UK £19.95, US £29.95) It explores the complex and reciprocal dynamic between world and image in this most visually mediated society. Everyone ‘knows’ images can be false or deceptive, but we all live and work in constant denial of this idea and its implications. In a world saturatedwith media we act as though we are immune to their effects.Structured in six parts “History/Politics”; “Art/Culture”; “Film/Television”; “Products/Possessions”; “The Quotidian/The Stran...
What does an image tell us about the reality it represents?
Rod Stonemanʼs latest book, Seeing is Believing: the Politics of the Visual, explores the relationship between world and image in our visually mediated society. In this series, produced and presented by Pod Academy's Esther Gaytan-Fuertes, Rod Stoneman talks about some of the images analysed in his book.
In this first instalment of the series, he examines the language of fashion.
Rod Stoneman: This photograph is quite extraordinary in many ways. It comes from a magazine called Glamour, Glamour Magazine and it represents a young woman in a vivid red cardigan, I think, well I imagine itʼd be cashmere and sheʼs over intently reading a book by V.I. Lenin called The State and Revolution. It opens a whole series of questions about the relationship of fashion to the image system.
One can say that the world of art thatʼs included in the domain of art within the image system has been widened and the boundaries are soft and inclusive —one probably can thank Marcel Duchamp for that, the ready made and some of his other contributions began to question and open the boundaries of the domain of art. Certainly by the XXI century many museums actually combine art and architecture or craft and art and also specific exhibitions may address fashion or food or even advertising.
It somewhat integrates the domain of the commodity economy in art and to take fashion as an example of that. Fashion obviously extends back historically to all known forms of human history and society and was analysed in a more structural and rigorous way, I think, first by Roland Barthes who 1967 published a book in France called The Fashion System. He was just looking at verbal discourse and the way that it worked in the industry of fashion, but actually his approach can also work for visual representation. And there are many Fashion Studies courses in different colleges at the moment, the question is how critical they are, to what extent they perpetuate the fashion industry without deeper analysis and thought, to what extent they might begin to open up the political economy of fashion, the basic economy of fashion.
I remember a strange moment when, quite a while ago, I was walking near Postbridge in Dartmoor, in Devon (South West of England) and encountered a farmer who was shearing all his sheep on that summer afternoon. And he explained that each fleece would be paid at £1 and the sheep takes a year to grow wool. And actually, coincidentally that thick fleece would produce enough wool for one sweater that Benetton would be selling for about £80. There was a kind of epiphany with an extraordinary disparity of relationship of 80 to 1 between the cost of the original raw material and the eventual consumer price of the finished garment, after manufacture, marketing and distribution.
So thatʼs a dimension of fashion which is crucial; another one might be or could be called the libido of economy, the economy of the body. How fashion is part of a visual system that affects people and unleashed eating disorders such as anorexia... you know, thatʼs being well debated recently and Kate Moss, a model, was famous for her succinct phrase, ʻNothing tastes as good as skinny feelsʼ. All of these factors carry fashion in to an effect on social and economic structure and in fact, that effect is created with increased speed as people are affected by and respond to the fashion system and buy new garments on a increasingly speedy basis. The average purchase of garments in America by young people in 1991 was 33 a year, by 2006 that had risen to 69. And actually we donʼt have more living space to store or to keep so I guess the immediate obsolescence leads to clothes being discarded more frequently. And I guess itʼs time to think about that kind of economy.
.................
Rod Stoneman
Seeing is Believing: The politics of the visual is published by Black Dog (UK £19.95,
Podcast produced and presented by Jo Barratt.
"No human sense is more neglected in ethnographic museums than sound". The Reel to Real project at the Pitt Rivers Museum seeks to redress the balance by making available, both in and beyond the museum space itself, the important sound collections donated to the museum over the past 100 years.
In this podcast, the second in our Pitt Rivers series, Jo Barratt and Sarah Winkler Reid from the University of Bristol talk to ethnomusicologist, Dr Noel Lobley about the hundreds of hours of historically important and rare ethnographic sound held in storage in the museum, much of it known only to a handful of scholars. These sound recordings – which range from children’s songs in Britain to music from South America and the South Pacific, and from improvised water drumming to the sound of rare earth bows in the rainforests of the Central African Republic – have been preserved but until the Real to Real project have remained unavailable to members of the public, teachers, students, or to the communities from which the sound originates.
Listen here to the first podcast, Louis Sarno and the BayAka
Note: The Reel to Real archive is being made available via SoundCloud Transcript Welcome to the Pitt Rivers museum at the University of Oxford. This is Pod Academy and I'm Jo Barrett. We're here for a series looking at the ethnographic sound archive at the museum. This episode is going to look in detail at the Reel to Real project and the work being done to make the most of an unappreciated resource. We also hear how sound can contribute to the overall museum experience. Noel Lobley is going to be an ever-present voice in this series as he guides us through several aspects of his work in ethnomusicology and sound archive.
Noel Lobley: My name is Noel Lobley. I work here at the Pitt Rivers museum as an ethnomusicologist. I deal with a lot of the music and sound collections. For the last 18 months or so a lot of my time has been devoted to developing the sound archive. Pulling it out of storage and getting it digitised, heard and available. Also programming events to engage different audiences with the sound collections that we have here.
JB: You will also hear from Sarah Winkler-Reid an anthropologist from the University of Bristol. Who joined Noel and I in Oxford. For those of you who do not know about the museum, here is Noel to tell us about his place of work.
NL: The Pitt Rivers Museum is the University of Oxford's museum of anthropology and world archaeology it's got wonderful ethnographic galleries that are absolutely crammed with hundreds and thousands of objects from cultures all over the world. Some pre-historic, some modern. It was established by General Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers who donated his collection here and has been curated here since [sic] 1884.
Henry Balfour was the first curator here, he was a polymath, he was ahead of his time. He was interested in decorative art, sound and music which started the collection of sound here which has been happening for over 100 years. There are photographic, manuscript and massive object collections. What you see in the galleries are used as research, teaching resources, and to engage the general public, such as children and schools. It is a very family friendly museum, it has won awards for being accessible to children. We have our own education department here. It's a varied and diverse museum, but it is a part of Oxford University.
JB: Noel is here to talk to us about the Reel to Real project which is the focus of this episode. I asked him to sum up the project in one sentence.
NL: Reel to Real is giving the Pitt Rivers' museum sound collection a voice. Reel to Real is a project designed to digitise, catalogue and make available online, in the museum galleries spaces, and further afield all of our unique ethnographic collections. The project finished this year in March when we launched th...
Nic Dawes [@NicDawes] (until last month editor of South Africa’s Mail and Guardian newspaper) has a formidable reputation as an investigative journalist and campaigner for press freedom. His last 2 years at the Mail and Guardian have been marked by tough struggles between leading South African journalists and the South African government,
As he prepared for a new challenge at the Hindustan Times in India, he talked to Rachael Jolley, Editor of Index on Censorship magazine about the importance of social media, which he said ‘outsources part of the editing function to the wider community’, the moves by the ANC to put in place a Media Appeal Tribunal with political appointees, a secrecy bill that would have made it almost impossible for the public or the media to uncover evidence about corruption or to protect whistleblowers, and the way the Marikana Mine massacre eventually hit the headlines, though the Mail and Guardian had covered the appalling conditions at the mine a year earlier.
Despite his concerns, he says that the threats to press freedom in South Africa must be seen in an international context of growing use and abuse of secrecy legislation including in those established democracies like the US, and UK and Canada – this is emphatically not just a South Africal problem.
A full article by Rachael Jolley drawn from the interview, Mandela's legacy too easily dismissed is to be found in the current edition of Index on Censorship
This is the first of a two part series in which Pod Academy's Paul Brister looks at the fundamentally new approach the UN appears to be taking to the crisis in the Kivu provinces in the East of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In it he speaks to Dr Phil Clark, Reader in Comparative and International Politics, with reference to Africa, from The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), to consider the causes behind the conflict; why the UN is changing tack and deploying an aggressive intervention Brigade; and what this brigade’s chances of success are. But first Paul explains the context.... The paradoxically named Congo Free State was famously the setting for Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. The country has changed its name four times since then, but the title of Conrad’s novella seems as apt a description of the DRC today as it was then. Sat astride the equator and covered in jungle, the country receives high rainfalls – and has the highest frequency of thunderstorms in the world. Beset on all sides by countries that have themselves been ravaged by conflict – including Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, and South Sudan – armed rebel groups have repeatedly strayed across its porous borders, spilling conflict into the DRC and igniting war there. Following the Rwandan genocide in 1994 – which was perpetrated by the Hutu Interahamwe and republican guard – the Hutu regime in Rwanda was overthrown by the Tutsi rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Around two million Hutu refugees fled into neighbouring countries, including Zaire, as the DRC was then known. These refugees included many Hutu troops and militia members who had participated in the genocide, and who promptly proceeded to militarise refugee camps, which they used as bases to make incursions into Rwanda to bring down the new RPF-dominated government. This led to the First Congo War. By 1996, the RPF’s patience had run out. Allied with Uganda, Rwanda launched an invasion of Zaire in support of their favoured proxy force, the AFDL [Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo] led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila. The border refugee camps were rapidly flushed out and the fleeing Hutu militants pursued westwards. The regime of longstanding dictator Mobutu Sese Seko crumbled and Kinshasa was taken. In May 1997 Kabila pronounced himself president of the retitled Democratic Republic of Congo. Before long however, fearing that they were planning a coup, Kabila turned on his erstwhile military backers, ordering all foreign forces out of the country and forming an alliance with the very Hutu rebels he had previously fought. Withdrawing to the East, Rwanda and Uganda each established a new rebel group – [the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Democratie (RCD) and the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC)]. The following year these two rebel groups and their backers attacked the DRC army igniting the Second Congo War. The ensuing conflict sucked in a further six African nations and as many as twenty non-state armed groups were involved, leading some to describe it as the African World War. Over five million people were killed, mostly from preventable diseases, and there was widespread use of rape and torture. By the time the war had officially ended in 2003, the country was on its knees. Despite its huge wealth in untapped mineral resources – which at some estimates are in excess of US$24 trillion – the DRC has the second lowest nominal GDP per capita in the world. The DRC also takes joint last place with Niger on the Human Development Index scale, scoring just 0.304. Measured in terms of life expectancy, literacy, education, standards of living, and quality of life, the lot of the Congolese is the most miserable in the world. So in this most troubled region, the DRC stands out among its peers as the most troubled. And in this shattered country, the provinces of North and South Kivu in the far east of the country stand out as the most woebegone.
Are you sick of the overheated, braying politics of Westminster, where there is a lot of heat, but not much light?
What’s the alternative? Try this: A rational parliament would be ruled by free thinking and would respect the balance between personal values and scientific research. It would value independent reasoning above organised thinking, such as uncritical political party allegiance. It would debate current live topics. It would be open to reform. It should be configured in a horseshoe and at least two individuals who have conducted publicly funded academic research on the topic would have to be in attendance. Every member would have the same right to speak, and no one should make a personal attack on a fellow member of the speaker. In its debates, claims of research findings should be supported with references to academic literature and provided on request. Members proposing a motion should take no more than five minutes to do so and any member who receive payment related to the views they take on a topic must declare such payments. Well, Pod Academy’s very own Adam Smith (producer of many of our science podcasts) has launched such a Rational Parliament, and it held its first debate earlier this month – on genetically modified foods (the attached podcast gives you a flavour of the opening presentations). The first sitting was characterised by live tweeting about the debate (with all #GMatRP tweets projected onto a huge screen at the front of the hall), and by the services of a ‘rhetoric officer’, Johnny Unger, a linguist from Lancaster University, who pointed out the rhetorical devices people were using to persuade others. In the end the following motion was passed:
This House agrees that GM food has a contribution to make in meeting global food demand.
Future topics are likely to include badgers and bovine TB, alcohol minimum pricing, wind farms, climate change and education – all highly controversial topics which would benefit from the Rational Parliament’s ‘let’s look at the evidence and the ethics’ approach.
If you are interested in attending the next RatParl, either as an MRP (member of the rational parliament) or an observer in the gallery, just sign up at the ratparl website, and follow them on twitter at @ratparl .
It is now 5 years since the collapse of Lehman Bros and the start of the financial crisis that collapse precipitated. Though most of us grow more and more cynical and angry about the financial system, how many of us really understand it?
Brett Scott is well placed to lead us on an exploration of radical approaches to global finance, shareholder activism.. An anthropologist and former whizz kid broker, his Heretic's Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money offers the reader a framework for approaching the financial system based on hacking, activist entrepreneurialism, DIY and open source culture.
In the podcast, Brett talks to Craig Barfoot about the creative disruption of hacking and describes ‘the sheer joy and curiosity of exploring an economic system……..once you’ve explored the financial system enough you can see the weak points and how you can exploit them.”
Brett’s hacker approach is to take the existing technology and play with it creatively - changing the DNA of a financial instrument. So he looks at how campaigners have used financial instruments and subverted them - shareholder activists buy shares, others press for Socially Responsible Investment Funds (which, as he points out are tiny compared with the massive investment funds they run alongside), the divestment movement aims to get large organisations to divest from companies involved in mining or the arms industry, and those using the ‘social return’ model push for something different on the bottom line. As he points out, the aim of much of this is education as well as advocacy – by getting involved we learn more about the financial system.
But he counsels that you have to maintain radical input, you must not allow the social impact bond, for example, to be co-opted by Goldman Sachs and used in their PR campaigns!
Nevertheless he says it is a mistake to see bankers as just the stereotypical 'greedy bankers', arguing that people go into finance for a variety of reasons - financial reward is just one of those reasons. with family pressures and intellectual challenge being equally important.
This is an excellent starting point for anyone who wants to begin to understand the financial system in order to change it.
Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money is published by Pluto Press, price £11.50.
Pod Academy's Daniel Marc Janes speaks to playwright and academic Dan Rebellato, Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Royal Holloway and one of Britain’s leading theatrical commentators.
Daniel Marc Janes: I’m in the Calder Theatre Bookshop in London. It couldn’t be better located to evoke Britain’s theatrical heritage, situated as it is on The Cut alongside the Old Vic and the Young Vic. Looking at the bookshop’s selection, I can see plays from some of the most distinguished British playwrights of recent years. Here’s David Greig... Sarah Kane... Dennis Kelly... Mark Ravenhill. What all these writers have in common is that they all studied drama at the university level. But drama at the university is a recent innovation. Many of Britain’s most brilliant playwrights have been autodidacts: Tom Stoppard, George Bernard Shaw, William Shakespeare. So why study drama?
I’m in the downstairs rehearsal space of the Calder Theatre Bookshop. This is a place where writers and performers go to make plays come alive. But how far can the inscrutable, mysterious act of playwriting be taught in an academic environment? What is the role of drama in the university? To talk about these topics, I’m joined by Dan Rebellato, Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Royal Holloway, author of numerous stage and radio plays and of several books, most notably 1956 And All That: The Making of Modern British Theatre. Professor Rebellato, thank you for joining us.
Dan Rebellato: Thanks very much.
DMJ: So before we start to unpack the broader questions, I’m wondering whether you could outline for us a kind of potted history of drama as an academic discipline in the British university.
DR: There are lots of examples, of course, of theatre being made in universities and that goes back centuries, but drama as an academic discipline really starts in the late 1940s at the University of Bristol. Oxford University, during the war, set up a commission to see if drama was a suitable subject for the universities and it was a very ramshackle affair. They booked the wrong flights and they lost their luggage and they ended up with half the amount of time they were supposed to have. And they recommended that you shouldn’t do drama at the university. But the University of Bristol decided that it was a good subject and that was the first degree – I think that started in about 1947, 1948, something like that – and the big waves of expansion followed from there. Manchester, Hull was quite early, but the 1970s had a lot of expansion and the 1990s saw another big wave of expansion as well.
DMJ: But what’s interesting is that drama, as an academic course outside of English, took some time to be accepted. Even at Bristol it took them 21 years for drama to be a full honours degree. You mentioned the committee at Oxford; Oxford and Cambridge stopped short of having full honours drama courses. Where do you think that this lack of acceptance comes from?
DR: A lot of things that I think are interesting about the theatre are the reasons why it can sometimes be a difficult subject in the academy. Because it’s neither purely literary, nor is it purely a live experience. It’s a kind of mixture of the two. I think that in academic terms – of course there are certain kinds of theatre that are, in a sense, purely live and also purely literary – but also I think there’s a sense in which theatre is clearly a collection of different crafts and skills, because you have scenic designers and you have actors and you have directors and you have writers and composers and so on and so on. That maps on in the academy into the fact that it’s a very interdisciplinary subject. So in order to fully – if you could ever fully understand theatre – you’d have to be a bit of a linguist, a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a psychologist, a bit of an archaeologist and so on and so on and so on. And the question is left: if you took those things away,
Federica di Lascio writes: NATCEN [the National Centre for Social Research, UK] recently held a panel focusing on the relationship between flexible working and work-life balance. It was chaired by Dalia Ben-Galim, Associate Director of IPPR.
Starting from some recent research (Workplace Employment Relation Study, 2011), and comparing them with older ones (The Time of our Lives; 2003, 2008), the panelists agreed that there is actually a strong business case for flexible working, even though it is still considered simply a staff benefit.
The speakers underlined the reality of the new workplace - looking at global competition (with businesses facing increasing demands for flexibility and efficiency), the changing labour market, the changing size and structure of businesses, and also the changing needs of staff, such as looking after older relatives as we become an aging society.
According to research, the majority of UK managers would consider the possibility of introducing flexible working arrangements (part-time, compressed hours, working at home, etc.), but the risk they fear – a decrease in productivity - looms lager than the advantages. Indeed there are now more employers who believe it is solely up to the employee to balance home and work than there were in 2004
Nevertheless, especially for women - who still bear the greatest responsibility for caring for children and elderly relatives - flexible working would enable them to combine a professional career, productivity and social care.
But as panelists noted, a major problem is the lack of welfare security for flexible workers. This tends to mean that flexible options that result in reduced hours are less popular than those that enable employees to craft a way of working that fits their lives (such as being able to work from home)
Ideally, priorities should reflect the aspirations and needs of everyone - from the bottom to the top, and should be built on the recognition of the changing business environment. There should be help made available to businesses, and information campaigns. Flexible working can be good for the economy, and for the wellbeing of workers. It is especially possible within small businesses, where the scale enables a more personal approach, providing potentially greater flexibility in considering workers as people and not mere numbers.
The challenge is to help employers understand the real advantages of flexible work, enabling their employees to craft a way of working that combines career and private needs – and overcoming employers’ fears of ‘certain loss’. And there is another challenge, too, the challenge at the State level to make law favourable, especially in guaranteeing welfare security to flexible workers. You can find more information from the seminar and about NatCen here. And here a short podcast with extracts from the seminar by clicking this link: Is there a business case for flexible working_edit3
The panel
Speakers at the seminar were Jenny Chanfreau (Senior Researcher at NatCen), Fiona Cannon (Director of Inclusion and Diversity at Lloyds Banking Group), Michael Mealing (Chair at Employment Policy Unit, Federation of Small Businesses) and Sarah Veale (Head at Equality and Employment Rights Department, TUC).
This podcast looks at how even disadvantaged kids in Vietnam are educationally years ahead of their counterparts in India, despite per capita GDP being broadly the same in both countries.
Amanda Barnes talked to Professor Jo Boyden, director of the Young Lives research programme at the Department of International Development at Oxford University, about their research findings.
Amanda Barnes: The Young Lives study has been following the progress of thousands of children in the developing world. And you’ve got some new findings from a survey of ten year-old pupils in Vietnam. What did the Young Lives study find out about education in Vietnam?
Jo Boyden: Young Lives has established that pupil performance is really exceptional in some very important ways. Around 19 out of every 20 ten year-olds, for example, can add four -digit numbers. At the same time 85% can subtract fractions and 81% are able to find X in a simple equation.
This is partly to do with the school systems but it’s also to do with the fact that there’s a strong focus in children’s home lives on their education. So out of school hours around about 85% spend more than an hour a day on homework and 87% report reading books outside of school.
At the same time the education system in Vietnam is relatively equitable and this means that poorer children really get the same deal as those who are better-off than they are. And they are therefore not less advantaged in the school system.
AB: That’s really interesting. How does Vietnam compare with India?
I think perhaps the most dramatic thing we can say is that the best-performing children in India, and in this case Young Lives is looking at the state of Andhra Pradesh in particular, don’t do as well as those children who perform worst in Vietnam.
So you see an enormous disparity between the two countries. And what I think this can be translated into in terms of families’ and children’s responses is that disappointment in the standards in state schools has resulted in a dramatic increase in the proportion of eight year-olds being educated in low-fee private schools: the figure almost having doubled between 2002 and 2009.
These kinds of findings are actually reported by other studies. For example, India’s ASER research centre found that 47% of ten year-olds were unable to add even two-digit numbers in India. And 68% of grade three children in government schools couldn’t read a task designed for first-year pupils. Research from the University of California also found that only the top 10% of school students are at the age-appropriate level and the bottom 10% appear to learn nothing in school at all.
So I think the point is that India really short-changing it’s children in terms of education.
AB: Why did you decide to compare Vietnam with India?
JB: Young Lives is studying in four different countries. But the reason we compare Vietnam with India is because both are Asian countries and both have experienced dramatic rates of growth over recent years. This of course means that there’s enormous potential to do something about education to make sure that education systems are strong. At the same time, they have similar GDP levels and the population of young people roughly about 50% of the total.
AB: The International Community’s united behind the Millennium Development Goal of achieving primary education for all by 2015. How good is the primary school learning in other developing countries that you’ve looked at?
JB: Unfortunately Young Lives has found that children generally are receiving much poorer quality education than is the hope of the International Community. So in other words the trends in India are much more typical than are the trends in Vietnam. And the early focus, which was a very appropriate one at the time, was getting children into school in the first place, which meant basically looking at resources and facilities, setting up schools,
Are drones a vital piece of modern weaponry, or inhuman and illegal weapons that galvanise potential recruits for Al Qaeda?
The conflict in Syria demonstrates the growing importance of crowd-sourced news, but it is crucial to cut through the fakes and the propaganda to verify it.
Every day the sun throws 165,000 terra watts of energy at the earth. But the energy required by the world's 7bn people is just 10-15 terra watts per day. A new generation of solar power promises a sustainable future.
Year-in, year-out the circus comes to town. But in 2013 circuses are in trouble. Seen by many as entertainment from a bygone age and facing Government action to ban circuses with wild animals, what is it that keeps circuses on the road? Why do they carry on going?
In this podcast, Lee Millam talks to Professor Ron Beadle, Director of Research Ethics at Northumbria University, who has published the first major study of the motivations of circus-owner directors in the UK and Ireland. His research, published in The Journal of Business Ethics, examines the factors that drive circus managers to continue in the industry despite such intense opposition and obstacles. “The people who run Britain’s circuses do it for love, not for money…Their business is vulnerable to the weather, to animal rights protestors, hostile local authorities and increasing fuel costs. Yet they continue because of an emotional bond with their art form and the people who perform it. The circus is a unique form of entertainment. Unlike the theatre, the artists create their own performance and on every circus you can find people from across the world living and working together in a single travelling community. Like many modern organisations, circuses are both global and local and have been like that for a very long time.”
The modern circus began in Britain in the 1760s before being exported to the rest of the world. They became enormously popular in the 19th Century and the first half of the twentieth century but the last few decades have seen a marked decline.
Professor Beadle’s research, entitled Managerial work in a practice-embodying institution: The role of calling, the virtue of constancy, is published in The Journal of Business Ethics.
As the world changes, so sexual identities are in flux. Have globalisation and mass communication disrupted and reshaped traditional patterns of identity and intimacy?
Volcanoes - Andy Warhol painted them, scientists study them, tourists gawp at them and legendary vulcanologist Haraldur Sigurðsson has spent 50 years taking the temperatures of these exploding mountains.
Part 2 of our Bitcoin podcast looks at the political and philosophical implications of private currencies and what they can teach existing systems
Will Bitcoin, a private digital currency, replace national currencies such as euros, dollars and pounds? Will it languish as an anonymous currency for money laundering and drug deals? Is it a speculative investment rather than a currency? First part of a 2 part podcast.
Why is there such a marked disengagement from politics among the white working class? And why such widespread cynicism about politicians?
The Cinema Memories Project: British cinema-going in the 1960s and the nature of cultural memory.
Audio-visual art is familiar, but the audio-olfactory is surprising. Oswaldo Maciá explains why he uses sound and smell to construct knowledge in his exhibition The Library of Cynicism at CHELSEA space until July 20th.
Can art produce a space where people can create change, make change or at the very least be heard?
The Rio Earth Summit was held exactly a year ago. This interview, made at the time by the Public Library of Science, explores how important, and how contested, are the issues of climate change and biodiversity.
We are all familiar with the idea of the tortured genius. Recent research appears to bear this out, finding a strong link between high intelligence and bi-polar disorder.
Why Latin America has moved from the neo-liberal consensus of the 1980s and 1990s to the 'pink revolution' of Chavez, Morales and Correa over the past 10 years.
Discontent has been building for some time in Turkey. Andrew Finkel explains what is behind the protests sweeping the country.
Anosmia is to smelling what blindness is to sight, or deafness is to hearing. It is living with no sense of smell. This podcast is based on a lecture at Birkbeck by photojournalist, Eléonore de Bonneval, who has been documenting the lives of people with anosmia.
The 'precariat', those precarious people who have no secure foothold in the world of work, are a dangerous new class, argues Professor Guy Standing.
The rigid electronics of today will one day seem as clumsy as the telegraph machines of the nineteenth century appear to us. Researchers believe glass computer screens will be replaced by flexible carbon screens that will roll up to look like a pen.
One in ten adults in Britain is in a relationship but not living with their partner. They have no official status and are most often counted as single in government statistics. Listen here to the launch of a groundbreaking research report on people living apart together
To celebrate National Walking Month (May 2013), Pod Academy finds out about nightwalking in London from Medieval times to the Romantics.
Does it really rob children of their innocence to introduce them to the idea that some people fall in love with members of the same sex? Might it even be important to do so?
Today's hyper-connected world faces big challenges e.g. pandemics, climate change, cyber-crime, financial crises. Can the UN and other international institutions provide adequate global governance?
We report from the AMS Spring Meeting which brings together young doctors, who, inspired by their hands on experience with patients, also undertake clinical research into the causes and cures of a wide range of illnesses.
This podcast is the first in a new series about the latest developments in electronics research - looking at new technologies that will change our lives over the next few years.
The UK government is keen to strengthen its trade ties with India. What is the role of universities?
Why did the Malian Army stage a coup? Why did the French send in troops? Françafrique? Get the backstory.
It is 10 years since the invasion of Iraq. Was the war worth it? A panel of speakers including Clare Short, Owen Jones, David Aaronovich and Haifa Zangana debate the issues at Goldsmith's University of London.
Dyspraxia can lead to social isolation, anxiety and depression. Now researchers at Goldsmiths think playing with Wii Fit may help improve coordination.
Free societies are robust, argumentative, noisy. The citizens in them have a right to criticise, satirise and mock. They also have the right to be offended.
UK composer Graham Fitkin's pieces responding to the Iraq War and Guantanamo, Chain of Command and No Doubt, bring together words and music in uncompromising ways.
With over 1 million young people out of work in the UK, there is growing evidence that a period of youth unemployment scars people for life, both emotionally and financially, and costs £5bn in welfare payments and £10bn in lost economic output. What can be done?
A musical journey from Bach to Dappy, looking at pitch, auditory illusions, 'perfect pitch', musical synysthesia and why cash machines use the tritone!
The East India Company (1600-1858) was the biggest corporation in world history. All but forgotten in the UK - though elsewhere a byword for exploitation and oppression - it leaves an important legacy for the City of London, and, more widely, for what it means to be British.
As the gap between rich and poor widens, epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson, author of The Spirit Level, explains that more unequal societies are bad for almost everyone within them and suggests steps that need to be taken for the good of all of us.
Is the USA an Empire? We look at the differences and similarities between the USA and historical empires - the characteristics of USA relations with non-state actors, civil societies and other global powers.
The British public was outraged by the MP's expenses scandal - but this had virtually no impact on the way they voted in the 2010 general election - why ever not?
The illegal drugs trade is worth $321bn dollars a year worldwide. An increasing number of high-profile activists, including former presidents and UN officials, are calling for an alternative to the failed 'war on drugs'.
The Mars rover Curiosity found evidence that water once flowed on Mars. Now there is also evidence of organic compounds on the Martian surface. Astrobiologists are getting excited....
In this 4th Huston lecture, British film theorist Laura Mulvey analyses the relationship between stillness and the moving image in cinema, drawing on Rossellini's Journey to Italy.
Lord Leveson's inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of the British press will report on 29 November. Angela Phillips looks at what motivated the tabloids to get stories by hacking phones and considers the options for reform.
In the nineteenth century, dramatic discoveries and new theories were turning the world upside-down. And much of this groundbreaking scientific research was conducted, at home, by scientific families like the Herschels.
A portrait of French film-maker, Jean-Luc Godard - director of Breathless and Weekend, writer for Cahiers du Cinema and one of the creators of the French New Wave.
It is a hundred years since the Titanic sank. Out of 2224 passengers and crew, only 722 survived. In his book, Titanic, the last night of a small town, social historian John Welshman has developed a new narrative based on the accounts of 12 of the survivors. Here he explains how he approached the task.
In the second podcast in our series on Belief and Non-Belief, author Francis Spufford suggests that despite everything Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense in the 21st century, and explains what he and Sarah Palin have in common.
Groundbreaking new genetic research holds out the promise that no more babies will be born with mitochondria disease. But it raises big ethical questions. Adam Smith investigates.
A guide through the Syria conflict with one of Britain's most experienced foreign correspondents
The vOICe technology is a computer programme that helps blind people see with sound. The software scans and converts visual information from a camera into a coded soundscape, which can be interpreted as a sort of ‘synthetic vision’ – effectively allowing the user to see with their ears!
Musician, DJ and radio producer, Chris Berrow, discusses live music and what the word "live" actually means.
Shakespeare in the Arab world, from a production off the coast of Yemen within Shakespeare's lifetime to an early Egyptian Hamlet that is a musical with a happy ending.
Dr. Hilary Rose considers the promise of interdisciplinarity, and explains her concerns about what she thinks might be the dulling of criticality through such endeavours.
We don't have earlids, like we have eyelids - so we have to hear sounds whether we like it or not. World famous sound recordist, Chris Watson, seen in the picture recording ants, talks to Ed Prosser about the noise pollution that bombards us day and night.
Think tourism is just for out-of-towners? Think again. Alex Bingham takes a stroll and encounters some of London’s walking guides. She finds out about University of Westminster's guiding course and a lot more about London.
"A human body is no different from the chicken that you buy. It needs refrigerating. You keep it cold, it doesn't go off." Forensic pathologist Dr Stuart Hamilton takes us for a tour of the morgue.
As the gap between rich and poor widens, we look at the corrosive effects of poverty and how positioning it as a human rights issue might strengthen campaigns for greater equality.
Hollywood screenwriter, Howard A Rodman, talks about how to write a compelling film scene, and says that a formulaic approach to screenwriting has lead to movies that are all the same.
Public services should help people create good health, respecting and drawing on the assets in their communities - passions,perseverance, skills, family, friends - rather than treat them as a bundle of deficits that need remedial treatment.
"Lots of people just passively accept the religious identity they’re born with." Alom Shaha, author of the Young Atheist's Handbook, describes how he came to give up Islam. This is the first podcast in our new series on religion and non belief in contemporary society in partnership with New Humanist magazine.
" I was walking down the central corridor of Liverpool’s Alder Hey children’s hospital when I became aware of the sound of birdsong". Can birdsong help children get well?
We love those stunning images of the dark side of the Moon or colourful nebulae or rotating galaxies. But more and more astronomers are turning off their telescopes and opening their ears to the sounds of space.
George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier is still a shocking book to read. By revisiting the road to Wigan, this podcast explores to what extent things have changed since Orwell's time.
The remarkable life of A.L Lloyd: folk collector, writer, activist, broadcaster and an influential figure in the British folk revival
Adam Smith takes a tour of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Europe's leading genetics institute, home to the team that made the largest single contribution to the sequencing of the human genome.
Irish feminist filmmaker Pat Murphy talks about the people, ideas, events and contexts that have influenced her work, including Brecht, the Troubles and the long shadow of James Joyce.
Sujatha Fernandes discusses the power of hip hop in political movements around the world.
Egyptian writer, Nawal el Saadawi, took an active part in the Tahrir Square. "I have been dreaming since I was a child that there would be a revolution in Egypt, but also worldwide, that would cause the whole world to change. So when the Tahrir Square revolution came, I found myself there, as if I was living my dream."
If all the salt in the ocean could be removed and spread evenly over the Earth’s land surface it would form a layer more than 166 metres thick - about the height of a 40-storey building. Adam Smith discovers why the salt of the Earth is so important.
Charles Dickens was a francophile who had a little known passion for the French language, life and culture. A Tale of Two Cities, set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, is only part of the story. Much of his journalism was also about France.
IPPR researcher Rick Muir, author of the report, Pubs and Places: The Social Value of Community Pubs, talks to Claire Cain about the dramatic decline of pubs, their role in society and the actions we can take to hold on to a British institution.
NASA’s Kepler mission made some remarkable discoveries - Kepler-16b, 200 light years away and Kepler 22-b, a planet that may have the perfect conditions for life.
A new UK think tank, British Future, has been set up to look into identity, integration, migration and opportunity in modern Britain. Their new research report, Hopes and Fears, looks at what it means to be British in 2012.
Earthquakes and volcanoes capture our imaginations for the power they wield. But most of us are unaware that they are also connected to climate change
This podcast is about the books that have been forgotten, the literature that no one reads any more. Dr. Kate Macdonald is a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Ghent, in Belgium. She seeks to uncover the literary gems of the recent past; books which achieved huge commercial success when they were published but are now rarely read or are no longer in print.
Left-handedness is certainly an everyday phenomenon. We all probably know somebody who writes with their left hand or possibly do so ourselves. But how often do we pause to think about what might be the cause of such a preference or how, something as natural as left-handedness, might be understood in societies other than our own? In his book, The Puzzle of Left-handedness, Rik Smits addresses some of the enigmas, rumours and paradoxes surrounding the left-handed among us. Rik begins by telling us about his background and how he came to approach writing a book about left-handedness. Rik Smits: Well I started out as a linguist, first in universities and then, when universities couldn’t afford me any more, I went in for writing because I always liked to tell people, who had no access to everything that we knew and were finding out, what was going on in the heads of these people and why that was interesting in a way that they would listen and could understand. That’s how it all began and I have been doing that ever since although not only on language but always on things that have vague connections to language. JB: Were here to talk about left handedness. Are you you left-handed yourself? RS: Yes I am. JB: Have you always had an interest in this? When did you start thinking about what it meant? RS: Well not at all at first. You are confronted with it when you are young, when you go to school and you learn to write, that is the first time it really becomes an issue. But I was lucky. I had an understanding teacher and she just said you put your paper like that and you sit on that side of your neighbour and that's it. And then I forgot about it for a large part of my life until a publisher said will you read this manuscript from America, he said it's about left-handedness and asked if it was suitable for translation. And it was horrible. So I told him and he said, well, maybe you should write a book about it and I said, well ,I don't know if there’s anything to talk about. I went in to libraries and within three days time I had a pile of 300 books and articles to work with so I said, 'yes, I'll do the book'. JB: Could you explain, in maybe two sentences, what left-handedness actually is? RS: Usually it is not what you think. People normally think you write with your left hand and you do other things with your left, probably you are left-footed and it is about dexterity, about doing difficult things. But actually it is about doing very mundane things. You find very stong tendencies for left or right in things like striking a match. So, if you look at violinists they always play right-handedly. But look at what they do, the really difficult stuff they all do with their left arm. And most of them are right-handed. That is the arm that does the fingering and makes the notes and the right arm just bows away. People always think you have right-handers and left-handers but actually it is a sort of sliding scale where you find a sort of line and at both ends you find clusters. Towards the right end and, a ten time smaller cluster but still a sizable cluster, towards the left hand. But it is not at the end it is a bit towards the centre. So you find relatively few people who do everything left-handedly or everything right-handedly. I don't know why you would, but is it a skill that you can learn and develop the preference for. You can become proficient with either hand. This is testified by hundreds of thousands of people who have lost the use of their preferred arm for one reason or another. Take Nelson for instance, and there are many, many, many more. People have accidents and they just have to learn to cope with their other hand. Some have to change their writing hand and you will see that the handwriting comes back - the same letters, the same forms. It looks the same which is really crazy because the way you form the letters is definitely different. This doesn't happen with everybody but it happens with some at least.
Mladen Ostojic explores the impact of international justice on post-conflict states that are undergoing a political transition. He asks whether international tribunals are a threat to stability in targeted countries - do justice and truth, or justice and peace, always go hand-in-hand?
In the last ten years the humanities has become obsessed with stuff – things, ephemera, paraphernalia and possessions. Writer and critic Brian Dillon speaks to Steven Connor, Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck College, London, about the curious magic of everyday things.
Noam Chomsky is a world renowned linguist and one of America's foremost social critics. He is Institute Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at M.I.T. He is the author of numerous books for Pluto Press, including Pirates and Emperors Old and New, Fateful Triangle, The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo and Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs. In October 2011 Professor Chomsky visited King’s College London in order to promote the launch of International State Crime Initiative’s new journal, State Crime. State Crime is the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to state crime scholarship.
Anupama Srinivasan argues that what we know about gender violence in South Asia - dowry harassment, domestic violence, acid attacks - is just the tip of the tip of the iceberg. Anupama is Programme Director at the Gender Violence Research and Information Taskforce (GRIT) at Prajnya. Based in Chennai, India, she has spent the last year carrying out research in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh into gender violence, looking at it through the lens of security. Rachael Jolley: Could you talk me through the motivation for doing this research? Anupama Srinivasan: The starting point was that gender and sexual violence remains an under researched area. It tends to fall into many different categories - you see some work on it under the label of human rights, and some under the label of women’s issues. As a result, different people take, or abdicate, responsibility for it. It is everyone’s problem and no one’s. So the starting point was, what is the big picture? And also, what is the evidence we have to back up the statement that ‘gender and sexual violence is highly prevalent in South Asia?’ We say this all the time, and we say it with a fair amount of confidence, but what are the numbers behind it? How do they correlate with the anecdotal evidence that is more publicly visible through newspaper reports or documentary films. And who are the different players on this scene? What are their roles, their responsibilities and their motivations? I happened to see a call for proposals, from the Global Consortium on Security Transformation, and they were interested in looking at different security issues. Human security issues. And it was important for me to be able to place the issue of gender and sexual violence within the idea of security. Traditionally you tend to look at security as military security, national security. But there is also the idea of looking at it as human security, health security. RJ What were the sources of material you looked at? AS There were two kinds of sources. One was the existing literature – both country specific and specific to certain forms of violence. Gender violence is a very broad label and you can and must break it up to look at very specific forms of violence, whether defined by where it takes place or defined by the degree of violence itself. So the literature was one, main starting point. The other was conducting in depth qualitative interviews with a range of people who have many years of experience working on this issue. I also travelled to Sri Lanka to do interviews there. Unfortunately there was no real budget provision to travel to the other South Asian countries. Obviously that would have been ideal. So one of the challenges was identifying the right people to speak to. The other was getting access to them. We make assumptions about the levels of internet access sometimes, and I did find that particularly challenging with Nepal and Bangladesh. I think those two countries remain gaps in this research to a certain extent. RJ You say in your report, that gender violence remains invisible and shrouded in silence – what are the factors that make that true? AS What has always been true is that someone who experiences violence is either too scared, ashamed or embarrassed (or a combination of all these things) to talk about it. That goes with the fact that as a society we don’t really encourage or create public platforms or spaces that enable this kind of conversation – even one on one (e.g. accessing a mental health professional). That is a big stumbling block. One of the things we say when we work on this issue is that what we know is just the tip of the tip of the iceberg. That has pretty much become an assumption. But we know more now because we have more legislation. Many countries have been trying to work with police forces to sensitise them a little more on how to respond – what are the things you say,
Stephan Wolf and Dino McMahon use radar to track bee behaviour. By doing so, they hope to find out why bee populations have, in some parts of the world, gone into such rapid decline.
The challenges of identifying disease genes using exome sequencing and whole genome sequencing.
Speakers explore the merits, practicality and value of maintaining a multiplicity of languages at the University of Reading.
The Researchers' Night is a Europe-wide event bringing together the public and academic researchers. The aim is to showcase university research, exploring its relevance and importance for all of us.
1 in 10 children in the UK suffers from a diagnosable mental health problem. What can be done to prevent depression, stress and anxiety amongst children?
Most judges are men, and although they would consider themselves to be neutral, feminists are increasingly concerned that their judgments are underpinned by a male view of the world. So a group of lawyers has rewritten some important legal judgments from a feminist perspective.
Special friends, group hugs, someone to talk to - it all sounds idyllic, but Rosalyn George describes how, for girls at primary school, friendship can be more like walking through a minefield.