Pod Academy

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

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 th

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

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

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

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 t

"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

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

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 w

"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

"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 emphasis

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

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,

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

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,

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 publishe