Pod Academy

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 proje

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

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

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 achi

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.  T

'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 cl

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

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 Christm

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? 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 woul

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. ....................... 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

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 m

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

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 sho

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

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 Birming

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 qu

"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 w

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 c