217 avsnitt • Längd: 35 min • Veckovis: Torsdag
A show for curious minds. Join us each week as academic experts tell us about the fascinating discoveries they’re making to understand the world, and the big questions they’re still trying to answer. A podcast from The Conversation, hosted by Gemma Ware.
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The podcast The Conversation Weekly is created by The Conversation. The podcast and the artwork on this page are embedded on this page using the public podcast feed (RSS).
Few places on earth are immune to the explosion of anti-vaccination conspiracy theories and health disinformation fuelled by the COVID pandemic. But in countries like Brazil, where the disinformation flowed from the very top of government, the problem is even more acute and some people are exploiting the fear of others to make money.
In this episode we speak to Ergon Cugler at the Brazilian Institute of Information on Science and Technology about his new research into how peddlers of disinformation on social media also sell fake cures and vaccine detoxes. And we ask disinformation researcher Igor Sacramento at Brazil's Oswaldo Cruz Foundation why some people are looking for solutions to their health problems in these dangerous chemicals and unproven protocols.
Editor’s note: The Conversation learned after publishing this podcast that one of the interviewees, Igor Sacramento, passed away in late April. He was interviewed on 27 March for this episode. We’re deeply saddened to learn of his death and send our deepest sympathies to his friends, family and colleagues.
This episode was written and produced by Gemma Ware with assistance from Mend Mariwany. Sound design and mixing by Eloise Stevens and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Read the full credits for this episode and sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, an independent, not-for-profit news organisation.
The Birkin bag made by French luxury retailer Hermès has become a status symbol for the global elite. Notoriously difficult to obtain, the world's rich obsess over how to get their hands on one. But when US retailer Walmart recently launched a much cheaper bag that looked very similar to the Birkin, nicknamed a "Wirkin" by others, it sparked discussions about wealth disparity and the ethics of conspicuous consumption.
In this episode we speak to two sociologists, Parul Bhandari from the University of Cambridge in the UK and Aarushi Bhandari from Davidson College in the US, about the Birkin and what it symbolises.
This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood. Sound design and mixing by Eloise Stevens and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Read the full credits for this episode and sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, an independent, not-for-profit news organisation.
Some of the leading brains behind generative AI have warned about the risk of artificial superintelligence wiping out humanity, if left unchecked. But what if the influence of AI on humans is much more mundane, influencing our evolution over thousands of years through natural selection?
In this episode we talk to evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks about what AI could do to the evolution of humanity, from smaller brains to fewer friends.
This episode was written and produced by Gemma Ware. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Read the full credits for this episode and sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, an independent, not-for-profit news organisation.
Five years since Covid, not only has the pandemic affected the way we live and work, it’s also influencing the way researchers are thinking about the past.
In this episode archaeologist Alex Bentley from the University of Tennessee explains how the pandemic sparked new research into how disease may have affected ancient civilisations, and the clues this offers about a change in the way humans designed their villages and cities 8,000 years ago.
This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood and hosted by Gemma Ware. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Read the full credits for this episode and sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, an independent, not-for-profit news organisation.
Ships transport around 80% of the world’s cargo. From your food, to your car to your phone, chances are it got to you by sea. The vast majority of the world’s container ships burn fossil fuels, which is why 3% of global emissions come from shipping – slightly more than the 2.5% of emissions from aviation.
The race is on to reduce these emissions, and quickly, to meet the Paris agreement targets. In this episode we find out what technologies are available to shipping companies to reduce their carbon emissions – from sails, to alternative fuels or a 'Google maps for the ocean'. Featuring Daniel Precioso, post-doctoral researcher at IE University in Spain and Alice Larkin, Professor of Climate Science and Energy Policy, University of Manchester.
This episode was written and produced by Gemma Ware with assistance from Mend Mariwany. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Read the full credits for this episode and sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, an independent, not-for-profit news organisation.
For over 40 years, the Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK, has waged an armed insurgency against Turkey, fighting for Kurdish rights and autonomy.
But in late February, Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK’s imprisoned founder, called for the group to lay down its arms and dissolve itself. Days later, the PKK, which is labelled as a terrorist organisation by Turkey, Europe and the US, declared a ceasefire with Turkey.
In this episode, we speak to political scientist Pinar Dinc at Lund University in Sweden about what’s led to this moment and whether it could be the beginning of a lasting peace between Turkey and the Kurds.
This episode was written and produced by Mend Mariwany. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, an independent, not-for-profit news organisation.
When the first cases of COVID-19 began to spread around the world in early 2020, people in Iquitos, a remote city in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon, weren’t unduly worried. They assumed their isolation would protect them. It didn’t. Peru, and Iquitos, were hit fast, and hard.
In a surreal situation, people were left to fend for themselves, fighting to get hold of oxygen on the black market for their loved ones and forced to put themselves in danger to survive.
In this episode we speak to researcher Japhy Wilson from Bangor University in Wales who spent a year living in Iquitos, trying to understand what happened there during the pandemic.
This episode was written and produced by Gemma Ware with assistance from Mend Mariwany and Katie Flood. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, an independent, not-for-profit news organisation.
One hundred years ago, a paper was published in the journal Nature that would radically shift our understandings of the origins of humanity. It described a fossil, found in a lime mine in Taung in South Africa, which became known as the Taung child skull.
The paper’s author, an Australian-born anatomist called Raymond Dart, argued that the fossil was a new species of hominin called Australopithecus africanus. It was the first evidence that humanity originated in Africa.
In this episode, we talk to science historian Christa Kuljian about Dart’s complicated legacy and to paleoanthropologist Dipuo Kgotleng about what’s happened to the city of Taung itself, and how paleoanthropology has changed over the last century.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was presented by Gemma Ware and written and produced by Katie Flood with assistance from Mend Mariwany. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens, and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, an independent, not-for-profit news organisation.
Every day that he was locked up in a scam compound in Southeast Asia, George thought about how to get out. "We looked for means of escaping, but it was hard," he said.
Scam Factories is a podcast series taking you inside Southeast Asia's brutal fraud compounds. It accompanies a series of multimedia articles on The Conversation.
In our third and final episode, Great Escapes, we find out the different ways survivors manage to escape, what it takes for them to get home, and what is being done to clamp down on the industry.
The podcast series was written and produced by Gemma Ware with production assistance from Katie Flood and Mend Mariwany. Sound design by Michelle Macklem. Leila Goldstein was our producer in Cambodia and Halima Athumani recorded for us in Uganda. Hui Lin helped us with Chinese translation. Editing help from Justin Bergman and Ashlynee McGhee.
A few weeks after Ben Yeo travelled to Cambodia for what he thought was a job in a casino, he found himself locked up in a padded room. “It’s a combination between a prison and a madhouse,” he remembers. He was being punished for refusing to conduct online scams.
Scam Factories is a podcast and multimedia series taking you inside Southeast Asia's brutal fraud compounds. The Conversation collaborated for this series with three researchers: Ivan Franceschini, a lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Melbourne, Ling Li, a PhD candidate at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, and Mark Bo, an independent researcher.
In the second episode, Inside the Operation, we explore the history of how scam compounds emerged in Southeast Asia and who is behind them. We hear about the violent treatment people receive inside through the testimonies of two survivors, Ben, and another man we're calling George to protect his real identity.
The podcast series was written and produced by Gemma Ware with production assistance from Katie Flood and Mend Mariwany. Sound design by Michelle Macklem. Leila Goldstein was our producer in Cambodia and Halima Athumani recorded for us in Uganda. Hui Lin helped us with Chinese translation. Editing help from Justin Bergman and Ashlynee McGhee.
Scam factories is a special three-part series taking you inside Southeast Asia's brutal fraud compounds. Hundreds of thousands of people are estimated to work in these scam factories. Many were trafficked there and forced into criminality by defrauding people around the world.
The Conversation collaborated for this series with three researchers: Ivan Franceschini, a lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Melbourne, Ling Li, a PhD candidate at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, and Mark Bo, an independent researcher.
In episode 1, our researchers travel to a village in Cambodia called Chrey Thom to see what these compounds look like. And we hear from two survivors about how they were recruited into compounds in Laos and Myanmar.
The podcast series was written and produced by Gemma Ware with production assistance from Katie Flood and Mend Mariwany. Sound design by Michelle Macklem. Leila Goldstein was our producer in Cambodia and Halima Athumani recorded for us in Uganda. Hui Lin helped us with Chinese translation. Editing help from Justin Bergman and Ashlynee McGhee.
As the Trump administration ratchets up its threat to slap tariffs on allies and economic rivals alike, the world is bracing for another wave of costly economic disruption. This protectionist shift is all the more remarkable given how the US championed trade liberalisation for decades.
So what does it actually take for a country to use protectionism to grow its economy? Some developing countries have successfully used tariffs to do so, while others have struggled. In this episode, we talk to Jostein Hauge, a development economist at the University of Cambridge in the UK, about who wins and who loses from tariffs and protectionism.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Mend Mariwany with assistance from Katie Flood and Gemma Ware. Sound design was by Michelle Macklem, and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, an independent, not-for-profit news organisation.
Since Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter in 2022, many users have looked for alternatives, fuelling a wave of online migration from the social media platform.
How do alternative platforms such as Mastodon or Bluesky differ from traditional social media, and what does the future hold for these online spaces? In this episode, we speak to Robert Gehl, Ontario Research Chair of Digital Governance at York University, Canada, about the evolving landscape of decentralised social media.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Mend Mariwany with assistance from Katie Flood and Gemma Ware, Sound design was by Michelle Macklem, and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, an independent, not-for-profit news organisation.
As Germany heads towards elections on February 23, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AFD) is polling in second place on 20% of the national vote. The AFD's roots are in nationalistic and racist movements. It continues to take an ultra anti-immigration stance and is calling for "demigration" – effectively the deportation of migrants.
In this episode, Rolf Frankenberger, an expert on right-wing extremism at the University of Tübingen in Germany, talks to Laura Hood, senior politics editor at The Conversation, about where the AFD draws its support from and what type of Germany it wants to return to.
This episode was Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware with sound design by Michelle Macklem. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up for The Conversation Europe's newsletter to get the best from our European scholars in a weekly digest.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, which is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation.
Quantum computers have the potential to solve big scientific problems that are beyond the reach of today’s most powerful supercomputers, such as discovering new antibiotics or developing new materials. But to achieve these breakthroughs, quantum computers will need to perform better than today’s best classical computers at solving real-world problems. And they’re not quite there yet. So what is still holding quantum computing back from becoming useful?
We speak to quantum computing expert Daniel Lidar at the University of Southern California in the US about what problems scientists are still wrestling with when it comes to scaling up quantum computing, and how close they are to overcoming them.
This episode was written and produced by Gemma Ware and Katie Flood with production assistance from Mend Mariwany and sound design by Michelle Macklem. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, which is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. And please do rate and review the show wherever you listen.
Firefighters in Los Angeles continue to battle devastating wildfires that have killed at least 27 people and left thousands of homes destroyed. Today, we’re revisiting an interview we ran in late 2023 with Emily Lindsey, a paleoecologist who works at the La Brea tar pits archaeological site in Los Angeles, about a wildfire warning from southern California’s ice age history.
The interview originally aired in November 2023. This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens and Michelle Macklem. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, which is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. And please do rate and review the show wherever you listen.
From Gaza to Ukraine, today’s war zones are being used as testing grounds for new systems driven by artificial intelligence. Billions of dollars are now being pumped into AI weapons technology, much of it from Silicon Valley venture capitalists.
In this episode, we speak to Elke Schwarz, a reader in political theory at Queen Mary University of London in the UK who studies the ethics of autonomous weapons systems, about what this influx of new investment means for the future of warfare.
This episode was written and produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware with sound design by Michelle Macklem. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, which is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. And please do rate and review the show wherever you listen.
Every year, 400 million tons of plastic are produced worldwide, and every year, approximately 57 million tons of plastic waste is created. And yet in November, the latest round of negotiations to agree the first legally binding international treaty on plastics pollution collapsed.
So what can we really do about the plastics pollution problem? In this episode we sat down with Mark Miodowonik, professor of materials and society at UCL in the UK, to understand the history of plastic, how it’s shaped our lives, and what can be done to make sure more plastic is recycled and less ends up polluting the planet.
This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood and Gemma Ware with sound design by Michelle Macklem. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, which is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. And please do rate and review the show wherever you listen.
In a special episode to start 2025, we’ve brought together three science editors from The Conversation’s editions around the world to discuss what to look out for in the world of science and technology in the coming year.
Host Gemma Ware is joined by Paul Rincon from The Conversation in the UK, Elsa Couderc from The Conversation in France and Signe Dean from The Conversation in Australia.
This episode was written and produced by Gemma Ware and Katie Flood with sound design by Michelle Macklem. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, which is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. And please do rate and review the show wherever you listen.
Zimbabwe is on the cusp of abolishing the death penalty after its Death Penalty Abolition Bill was approved by the senate on December 12. The bill is now sitting on the desk of Zimbabwe’s president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, a known opponent of the death penalty, waiting for his assent.
In this episode, we speak to two experts on the death penalty, Carolyn Hoyle and Parvais Jabbar from the University of Oxford's Death Penalty Research Unit, who explain how Zimbabwe got here and what abolition means for both the country, and the continent.
This episode was written and produced by Gemma Ware and Mend Mariwany with sound design by Michelle Macklem. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, which is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. And please do rate and review the show wherever you listen.
Surveys suggest that in many western democracies, political trust is at rock bottom. But is it really such a bad thing for people living in a democracy to distrust their government?
In this episode, we talk to political scientist Grant Duncan, visiting scholar in politics at City St George's, University of London, about why he thinks a certain level of distrust and scepticism of powerful politicians is actually healthy for democracy. And about how populists, like Donald Trump, manage to use people’s distrust in political elites to their advantage.
This episode was written and produced by Gemma Ware, Mend Mariwany and Katie Flood with sound design by Michelle Macklem. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, which is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. And please do rate and review the show wherever you listen.
An orca that pulled along the corpse of its baby for 17 days. An opposum that plays dead to fool predators. And a chimpanzee that cleaned the teeth of its dead baby. Observations of behaviours like these suggest animals have a complex relationship with death.
In this week’s episode, we speak to Susana Monsó, an associate professor of philosophy at the National Distance Education University in Madrid, Spain, about the different ways animals understand death.
This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood with sound design by Michelle Macklem and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, which is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. And please do rate and review the show wherever you listen.
Further reading
The online retail giant Amazon is known for its resistance to unions. In this week’s episode, we tell the story of what happened at one warehouse in Coventry in the UK when its workers tried to gain official recognition for the GMB union, one of the country’s biggest labour unions.
We talk to Tom Vickers, a sociologist at Nottingham Trent University in the UK, who spent weeks observing workers’ efforts to unionise at the warehouse as part of a research secondment with the GMB. And John Logan, a professor of labor and employment Studies at San Francisco State University in the US, explains why some companies, many of them American, are so doggedly anti-union. The episode also includes an introduction from Sarah Reid, business and economy editor at The Conversation in the UK.
This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood with sound design by Michelle Macklem and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, which is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. And please do rate and review the show wherever you listen.
It's been 50 years since the American paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson discovered the fossil of ancient hominin 'Lucy' in the Afar region of Ethiopia. The find took the story of human evolution back beyond 3 million years for the first time. Yet, despite largely centring on the African continent as the "cradle of mankind", the narrative of hominin fossil discovery is striking for its lack of African scientists.
In this week's episode, Yohannes Haile-Selassie, director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University in the US, explains why the story of ancient human origins is so western-centric, and why he's calling for the decolonisation of paleoanthropology.
This episode was produced by Mend Mariwany with sound design by Michelle Macklem and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, which is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. And please do rate and review the show wherever you listen.
For generations, cod fishing was a way of life in Newfoundland and Labrador, the easternmost province in Canada. But in 1992, after cod stocks in the north Atlantic plummeted, the federal government imposed a moratorium on cod fishing. It was to last for 32 years until June 2024, when the government lifted the ban in a controversial decision.
In this episode we speak to Tyler Eddy, a research scientist in fisheries science at Memorial University of Newfoundland, to shed light on what’s happened. It's a story that offers a cautionary tale for those politicians trying to balance the complex demands of protecting ecosystems that also support substantial economies.
This episode was produced by Katie Flood and Gemma Ware. Sound design was by Michelle Macklem and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, which is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. And please do rate and review the show wherever you listen.
What happens when a gangster leaves their life on the street? How do they transition to something new? We find out through the life stories of two people who joined them as young men and came out the other side.
Featuring an interview with Gaz, a former gang member in Sierra Leone, and Dennis Rodgers, a research professor at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland who leads a global research project on gangs.
This episode was produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware. Sound design was by Michelle Macklem and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, which is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. And please do rate and review the show wherever you listen.
Amid deep political polarization and extreme campaign rhetoric, the U.S. presidential election on November 5 is likely to be decided by a small number of voters in swing states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan. But why is it so close?
In this episode Naomi Schalit, senior politics editor at the The Conversation U.S., speaks to Jesse Rhodes, associate professor of political science at UMass Amherst, who has been surveying Americans on the issues that matter to them, and their concerns as the election approaches.
This episode was produced by Katie Flood with assistance from Mend Mariwany. Sound design was by Michelle Macklem and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, which is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. And please do rate and review the show wherever you listen.
Take a walk along a beach in parts of South Australia, and you may come across unusual patches of pink sand. When a team of geologists began analysing samples of this mysterious sand to find out where it comes from, their search took them back through time to a previously undiscovered mountain range in Antarctica. In this episode Sharmaine Verhaert, a PhD candidate in earth sciences at the University of Adelaide, explains how the discovery was made.
This episode was produced by Gemma Ware, Katie Flood and Mend Mariwany. Sound design was by Michelle Macklem and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, which is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. And please do rate and review the show wherever you listen.
Further reading:
Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were awarded the 2024 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for their discovery of microRNA, tiny biological molecules that tell the cells in our body what kind of cell to be by turning on and off certain genes.
In this episode, we speak to Ambros, who is professor of natural sciences at UMass Chan Medical School in the US, about the discovery that led to his Nobel prize and find out what he’s researching now. And we hear from Justin Stebbing, professor of biomedical sciences at Anglia Ruskin University in the UK, about how a deeper understanding of microRNA is opening up new avenues for potential treatment of diseases such as cancer.
This episode was produced by Gemma Ware, Katie Flood and Mend Mariwany. Sound design was by Michelle Macklem and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, which is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. And please do rate and review the show wherever you listen.
In an extra episode this week, we're running the first part of Know Your Place: what happened to class in British politics, a new series from The Conversation Documentaries. Host Laura Hood, senior politics editor at The Conversation in London, explores when the relationship between class and voting in the UK broke down and why.
Featuring John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde and senior research fellow at the National Centre for Social Research, Paula Surridge, professor of political sociology at the University of Bristol, Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London and Geoffrey Evans, professor in the sociology of politics at the University of Oxford.
Subscribe to The Conversation Documentaries to listen to the full series.
Know your place is a series supported by the National Centre for Social Research. It's produced and mixed by Anouk Millet for The Conversation. This episode of The Conversation Weekly was mixed by Michelle Macklem. Full credits available here.
The Conversation Documentaries, formerly The Anthill podcast, is home to in-depth audio series from The Conversation UK, a not-for-profit independent news organisation. Find out more and donate here. And consider signing up for our free daily newsletter.
Further reading
The Middle East is perilously close to all-out war. In the year since the October 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, millions of people have been displaced from their homes in Gaza, Israel, the West Bank and now Lebanon, and tens of thousands killed.
In this episode, we speak to two experts from the Middle East, Mireille Rebeiz and Amnon Aran, to get a sense of the strategic calculations being made by both Israel and its neighbours at this frightening moment for the region. Rebeiz is chair of Middle East Studies at Dickinson College in the US and Aran is professor of International Relations, City St George's, University of London in the UK.
This episode was produced by Mend Mariwany and mixed by Michelle Macklem. Full credits for this episode are available.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, which is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. And please do rate and review the show wherever you listen.
A new drug to prevent HIV infection is showing hugely promising results in clinical trials when injected every six months.
In this episode, we speak to South African HIV doctor and scientist Linda-Gail Bekker at the University of Cape Town about her involvement in one of the trials for lenacapavir and why she thinks it could be so ground-breaking.
This episode was written and produced by Mend Mariwany and sound design was by Michelle Macklem. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, which is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. And please do rate and review the show wherever you listen.
What makes some people more likely to feel disproportionate sympathy to people facing accusations of sexual misconduct – a concept known as himpathy? In this episode, we speak to a human behaviour expert whose research seeks to understand the psychological factors behind it.
Featuring Samantha Dodson, assistant professor of organizational behaviour and human resources at the University of Calgary in Canada, and an introduction form Eleni Vlahiotis, business and economy editor at The Conversation in Canada.
This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood with assistance from Mend Mariwany and sound design by Michelle Macklem. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, which is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. And please do rate and review the show wherever you listen.
A rare and ancient plant has been waiting for its long-lost mate. The only known specimens of Encephalartos woodii, a rare and ancient species of cycad, are male, all clones of the same plant found over 100 years ago deep in a South African forest. Now a team of researchers is on a mission to find an elusive female version of the plant with the help of drones and artificial intelligence.
In this episode we speak to Laura Cinti, a research fellow at the University of Southampton in the UK, about her determined quest to save the species – called the world's "loneliest" plant.
The story in this episode came out of our series Plant Curious, exploring scientific studies that challenge the way you view plantlife. The episode was written and produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with assistance from Katie Flood and sound design by Michelle Macklem. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation. A transcript is also available.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, which is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. And please do rate and review the show wherever you listen.
An epidemic of mpox in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, is spreading quickly, particularly among young children. Mpox is a serious, at times fatal, virus – and the world knows how to prevent it. There are effective vaccines stockpiled in many western countries. Yet, after an earlier global epidemic in 2022 was largely brought under control in Europe and North America, the ongoing battle to protect people in Africa from mpox was ignored.
In this episode we ask a virologist and a paediatrician why Africa's mpox crisis was so neglected and what needs to happen now to save lives, particularly children's.
Featuring Nadia Adjoa Sam-Agudu, professor of paediatric infectious diseases at the University of Minnesota in the US and Wolfgang Preiser, head of the division of medical virology at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, with an introduction from Nadine Dreyer, health and medicine editor at The Conversation Africa.
This episode was written and produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with assistance from Katie Flood and sound design by Michelle Macklem. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, which is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. And please do rate and review the show wherever you listen.
Dating apps are having a rocky moment, with some of the biggest struggling to attract paying users. In this episode, we hear from researchers exploring how dating apps have changed modern dating and the expectations around it. And we find out why some dating app users aren’t actually there looking for love, but keep on swiping anyway.
Featuring Treena Orchard, associate professor at the School of Health Studies at Western University in Canada, and Carolina Bandinelli associate professor in media and creative industries at the University of Warwick in the UK.
This episode was written and produced by Mend Mariwany, with assistance from Katie Flood and sound design by Michelle Macklem. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, which is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. And please do rate and review the show wherever you listen. If you listen on PocketCasts, they've just launched the ability to rate shows here.
In the second of two episodes on geoengineering, we hear the case against trying to reflect sunlight to cool the Earth.
Solar radiation modification has attracted attention and investment in recent years as a way to potential reverse the effects of climate change, but it remains a controversial idea.
We hear from researchers pushing a non-use agreement for solar geoengineering who explain why they believe these types of technologies are a dangerous distraction from what needs to be done to reduce fossil fuel emissions.
Featuring Chukwumerije Okereke, professor in global governance and public policy at the University of Bristol, and Co-Director at the Center for Climate Change and Development at Alex Ekwueme Federal University in Nigeria and Aarti Gupta, professor of global environmental governance at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. And responses from Shaun Fitzgerald at the Centre for Climate Change at the University of Cambridge in the UK
Listen to the first episode to hear scientists who argue modifying the climate can help buy the world time.
This episode was written and produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with assistance from Katie Flood and sound design by Michelle Macklem. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
Geoengineering, the modification of the climate using technological interventions to reverse climate change, is a hugely divisive issue and we’ve decided to explore it in two episodes.
In this first episode, we talk to scientists working on potential geoengineering technologies who argue the case for conducting research into these interventions. We speak to Shaun Fitzgerald, director of the Centre for Climate Repair at the University of Cambridge in the UK and Hugh Hunt, deputy director at the Centre, as well as Ben Kravitz, assistant professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Indiana University in the US. We're also joined by Stacy Morford, environment and climate editor at The Conversation in the US.
Part two, out tomorrow, will focus on the case against a particular type of solar geoengineering called solar radiation management.
This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood, Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Michelle Macklem. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
As we take a short production break in August, we're re-running an episode from 2023 about Neanderthals, and what new discoveries about their research could tell us about Homo Sapiens.
For generations, Neanderthals have been a source of fascination for scientists. This species of ancient hominim inhabited the world for around 500,000 years until they suddenly disappeared 42,000 years ago. Today, the cause of their extinction remains a mystery.
Archaeologist Ludovic Slimak at the University of Toulouse III, Paul Sabatier in France and his team have spent three decades excavating caves, studying ancient artefacts and delving into the world of Neanderthals and they've recently published provocative new findings. He tells us more about how Neanderthals lived, what happened to them and why their extinction might hold profound insights into the story of own species, Homo Sapiens.
This episode was produced and written by Mend Mariwany with assistance from Katie Flood. The executive producer was Gemma Ware. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript is now available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
As The Conversation Weekly takes a short production break in August, we're bringing you a recent episode from our partners at the Borders and Belonging podcast about Japan’s evolving stance on immigration.
With a rapidly ageing population and a shrinking workforce, Japan is facing an unprecedented crisis: by 2030, it's projected to have a shortfall of nearly 6.4 million workers. But despite Japan’s reputation for being closed off to migrants, there are signs that the country’s national immigration policy is starting to shift.
Each episode of Borders and Belonging takes an in-depth look at a different regional migration issue and puts it into a global context. They do this through interviewing people with deep knowledge and experience of the region, including a couple of academic experts. The show is hosted by Maggie Perzyna, a researcher with the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and integration programme at Toronto Metropolitan University in Canada.
This episode features Nicholas A. R. Fraser, a senior research associate at Toronto Metropolitan University, Ito Peng, professor of sociology and public policy at the University of Toronto and Nana Oishi, associate professor in Japanese Studies at the University of Melbourne.
Borders and Belonging is produced by CERC Migration in collaboration with Lead Podcasting. Sound design for this episode of The Conversation Weekly was by Michelle Macklem, with production by Mend Mariwany. Sign up for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation and to support what we do, please consider donating to The Conversation.
A chance to hear an episode from the first season of The Conversation's Curious Kids, a new podcast where kids from around the world get to ask their questions direct to experts.
In this episode: do you think your dog is the cutest thing you've ever seen? Ten-year-old Grace does! But why? She joins our host Eloise and psychologist Deborah Wells from Queen's University Belfast to find out!
You can read an article of this episode here or explore more articles from our Curious Kids series on The Conversation.
The Conversation's Curious Kids podcast is published in partnership with FunKids, the UK's children's radio station. It's hosted and produced by Eloise. Gemma Ware is the executive producer.
Subscribe to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation. To support what we do, please consider donating to The Conversation.
Momentum is growing against clauses in investment treaties that permit companies to sue a state if it decides to keep fossil fuels in the ground. In this episode, we revisit the secretive world of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), which some experts are worried could jeopardise global efforts to save the climate and cost countries billions of dollars in the process.
Kyla Tienhaara, Canada research chair in economy and environment at Queen's University, Ontario in Canada, comes back on The Conversation Weekly to update us on the latest resistance to these clauses.
Part of this episode was first aired in October 2022. You can listen to the original episode here. It was produced by Gemma Ware and Mend Mariwany, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
Chronic pain affects hundreds of millions of people around the world. But the opioid crisis in North America led many health care providers to realize they relied too heavily on drugs to help patients manage their pain.
In this episode, a pain management specialist discusses new developments in pain treatment and why there’s hope for patients with chronic pain. Rachael Rzasa Lynn Associate Professor of Anesthesiology, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus speaks to Amanda Mascarelli Senior Health and Medicine Editor at The Conversation in the US about emerging chronic pain treatments.
This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood with assistance from Mend Mariwany. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive editor. Full credits available here. Subscribe to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation. To support what we do, please consider donating to The Conversation.
Across the world, fans will soon be tuning in at all hours of the day and night to watch the Paris Olympics. In a world where on-demand media streaming is now increasingly the norm, sport is something of a rarity. It’s watched live, often with other people.
Can something as simple as watching a sporting competition at the same time bring people closer together? In this episode, we explore this question with a Garriy Shteynberg an associate professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee in the US who studies the impact of shared experiences.
We're running a listener survey to hear what you think about the podcast. It should take just a few minutes of your time and we’d really appreciate your thoughts. You can fill it in here.
This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood with assistance from Mend Mariwany. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive editor. Full credits available here. Subscribe to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation. To support what we do, please consider donating to The Conversation.
A few days after Labour leader Keir Starmer was elected British prime minister on July 4 with a landslide victory, ending 14 years of Conservative-led rule, a coalition of left-wing parties came out on top in the French legislative elections. It was a good week for the left in this corner of Europe.
In this episode, we’ve brought together an expert from each country to help analyse the results and what they tell us about the right in French and British politics. Featuring Tim Bale, Professor of Politics, Queen Mary University of London and Safia Dahani, post-doctoral researcher in sociology at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
We're running a listener survey to hear what you think about the podcast. It should take just a few minutes of your time and we’d really appreciate your thoughts. You can fill it in here.
This episode was written and produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive editor. Full credits available here. Subscribe to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation. To support what we do, please consider donating to The Conversation.
Seagrass, a marine plant that flowers underwater, has lots of environmental benefits – from storing carbon to preventing coastal erosion. In this episode, we speak to Isabel Key, a marine ecologist at the University of Edinburgh in the UK, about her work recording the soundscape of Scottish seagrass meadows to uncover more about the creatures living within them.
She also explains how this is the first step in the development of a seagrass sound library and potentially even artificial intelligence tools that could help us better understand the sounds of the sea.
This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive editor. Full credits available here. Subscribe to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation. To support what we do, please consider donating to The Conversation.
Further reading:
We’re bringing you an extra episode this week from Don’t Call Me Resilient, another podcast from The Conversation. Hosted by Vinita Srivastava at The Conversation in Canada, Don’t Call Me Resilient is your weekly dose of news and current events through a sharply-focused anti-racist lens.
In this episode Vinita talks to Nisrin Elamin about the ongoing war in Sudan, which has displaced more than 10m people. Elamin, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Toronto in Canada, says that in the absence of a properly functioning government and looming famine, grassroots groups are stepping in to help people survive. This episode originally aired on May 30, 2024.
You can listen to or follow Don’t Call Me Resilient on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Further reading and listening:
3D-printed guns are now appearing the world over, including in the hands of organised criminals in Europe and anti-junta rebels in Myanmar. Made using a 3D printer and a few metal parts that can be easily sourced online, these shadow guns are untraceable, and becoming a popular choice for extremists too.
In this episode, we talk to researcher Rajan Basra at King's College London about this clandestine world, and about his hunt to uncover the real identity of the man who designed the world's most popular 3D-printed gun, the FGC-9. Read an article by Basra from our Insights series about his research too.
This episode was written and produced by Gemma Ware with assistance from Mend Mariwany and Katie Flood. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive editor. Full credits available here. Subscribe to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading
A controversial British government plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda has been central to the UK’s response to a recent sharp increase in the number of people making the dangerous journey across the English Channel in small boats. But if the Conservative party lose the general election in early July, the Rwanda plan is likely to be abandoned.
In this episode, two experts in UK immigration policy explain how the Rwanda plan became such a crucial part of the immigration debate in the UK. And how, whatever happens in the election, it’s already shifting the wider conversation in Europe about how to deal with migrants and asylum seekers.
Featuring Nando Sigona, professor of international migration and forced displacement and director of the Institute for Research into International Migration and Superdiversity at the University of Birmingham and Michaela Benson, professor in public sociology at Lancaster University. They're both co-hosts of the Who do we think we are? podcast. This episode also includes an introduction from Avery Anapol, one of the politics team at The Conversation in the UK.
This episode was written and produced by Mend Mariwany with assistance from Katie Flood. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive editor. Full credits available here. Subscribe to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
It’s one of the biggest puzzles in cosmology. Why two different methods used to calculate the rate at which the universe is expanding don’t produce the same result. Known as the Hubble tension, the enigma suggests that there could be something wrong with the standard model of cosmology used to explain the forces in the universe. Now, recent observations using the new James Webb Space Telescope are shaking up the debate on how close the mystery is to being resolved.
In this episode, Vicent J. Martínez, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Valencia in Spain, and his former teacher, Bernard J.T. Jones, emeritus professor of astronomy at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, explain why the Hubble tension matters so much for our understanding of the universe. Also featuring Lorena Sánchez, science editor at The Conversation in Spain.
This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood with assistance from Mend Mariwany. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive editor. Full credits available here. A transcript will be available shortly. Subscribe to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
If you’ve ever experienced a state of creative flow, perhaps when writing, playing music, or even gardening, you’ll know that it feels like everything just clicks into place. But what is actually happening inside the brain? In this episode, we speak to a neuroscientist who scanned the brains of jazz musicians as they were improvising, and revealed the secret ingredients need to achieve a state of flow.
Featuring John Kounios, professor of psychological and brain sciences at Drexel University in the US, plus an introduction from Kate Kilpatrick, Philadelphia editor at The Conversation in the US.
This episode was written and produced by Mend Mariwany, with assistance from Katie Flood. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive editor. Full credits available here. A transcript is available here. Subscribe to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Snake bites kill tens of thousands of people around the world each year. But we still use techniques invented in the late 19th century to make antivenom, and each bite needs to be treated with antivenom for that specific type of snake.
We hear from two scientists whose recent breakthroughs – and failures – could save many more lives and help achieve the holy grail: a universal antivenom. Featuring Stuart Ainsworth, senior lecturer at the University of Liverpool in the UK and Christoffer Vinther Sørensen, postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Antibody Technologies at the Technical University of Denmark.
This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood, with assistance from Mend Mariwany. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive editor. Full credits available here. A transcript will be available shortly. Subscribe to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
After six weeks of voting in the world’s largest democracy, on June 4, Indians will learn who is to be their next prime minister. Narendra Modi, standing for a third term, is the frontrunner. Critics of Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party argue that India’s democracy has been hollowed out during his premiership. Thousands of Indians have taken to the streets to protest against Modi’s policies.
For Indrajit Roy, professor of global development at the University of York in the UK, these pushbacks by Indians against threats to their democracy is an example of an audacious type of hope. He talks to us for this episode about what it means to be living in hope, and where he sees moments of that in India.
This episode was written by Gemma Ware and produced by Mend Mariwany and Katie Flood. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits available here. A transcript will be available shortly. Subscribe to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading and listening:
A growing number of countries now permit some form of assisted dying and politicians in a number of others, including Ireland, Scotland and France, are now seriously debating it.
In Canada, where medical assistance in dying, known as MAID, became legal in 2016, the government intends to extend eligibility to people whose sole reason for ending their life is mental illness. But the planned expansion, now twice delayed, is controversial. In this episode, we speak to a leading psychiatrist, Karandeep Sonu Gaind, professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto about the situation in Canada and why he’s a vocal opponent of the expansion.
Also featuring Patricia Nicholson, health and medicine editor at The Conversation in Canada.
This episode was written by Gemma Ware and produced by Mend Mariwany and Katie Flood. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits available here. A transcript will be available shortly. Subscribe to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading and listening:
As global temperatures continue to rise, the ramifications of climate change – from more frequent and severe extreme weather events to rising sea levels and ecosystem disruptions – are becoming increasingly evident around the world. But their effects are not evenly distributed, often hitting vulnerable communities the hardest.
In this episode we speak to Katherine Browne, a research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute, and Margaret Angula, a senior lecturer at the University of Namibia, about a UN pilot programme in Namibia that's trialling a new approach to financing climate adaptation by empowering local communities. Also featuring an introduction with Kofo Belo-Osagie, commissioning editor at The Conversation in Nigeria.
This episode was written and produced by Mend Mariwany with assistance from Katie Flood. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Full credits available here. A transcript will be available shortly. Subscribe to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading and listening
Content created with the help of generative artificial intelligence is popping up everywhere, and it’s worrying some artists. They’re concerned that their intellectual property may be at risk if generative AI tools have been built by scraping the internet for data and images, regardless of whether they had permissions to do so.
In this episode we speak with a computer scientist about how some artists are trying novel ways to sabotage AI to prevent it from scraping their work, through what’s called data poisoning, and why he thinks the root of the problem is an ethical problem at the heart of computer science.
Featuring Daniel Angus, professor of digital communication at Queensland University of Technology in Australia. Plus an introduction from Eric Smalley, science and technology editor at The Conversation in the US.
This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood with assistance from Mend Mariwany. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Full credits available here. A transcript will be available shortly. Subscribe to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Some young South Africans have begun to question Nelson Mandela's legacy, and the choices made in the transition to democracy after the end of apartheid in 1994. Some have even called him a "sellout".
In the third and final part of our special series What happened to Nelson Mandela's South Africa?, marking 30 years of democracy in South Africa post-apartheid, we talk to two academics about the way Mandela is viewed by young South Africans today, and the challenges facing the African National Congress, which has governed the country for three decades, and its current president, Cyril Ramaphosa.
Featuring Sithembile Mbete, lecturer in political science at the University of Pretoria and Richard Calland, associate professor in public law at the University of Cape Town.
This episode was written and produced by Mend Mariwany with assistance from Gary Oberholzer and Katie Flood. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Full credits available here. A transcript will be available shortly. Subscribe to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
In the second part of our special series What happened to Nelson Mandela's South Africa?, marking 30 years of democracy in South Africa post-apartheid, we talk to two experts about the economic policies introduced to transform the country under Mandela's successor, Thabo Mbeki, and the ensuing turmoil of the Jacob Zuma presidency that followed.
Featuring Mashupye Maserumule, a professor of public affairs at Tshwane University of Technology and Michael Sachs, adjunct professor of economics at the University of Witwatersrand.
This episode was written and produced by Mend Mariwany with assistance from Gary Oberholzer and Katie Flood. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Full credits available here. A transcript will be available shortly. Subscribe to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
It was a moment many South Africans never believed they'd live to see. On 10 May 1994, Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as president of a democratic South Africa, ending the deadly and brutal white minority apartheid regime.
To mark 30 years since South Africa's post-apartheid transition began, we're running a special three-part podcast series, What happened to Nelson Mandela's South Africa? In this first episode, two scholars who experienced the transition at first hand reflect to Thabo Leshilo, The Conversation's politics editor in Johannesburg, on the initial excitement around Mandela's election, the priorities of his African National Congress in the transition and the challenges that lay ahead for South Africa as it set out to define its post-apartheid future.
Featuring Steven Friedman, professor of political studies at the University of Johannesburg and Sandy Africa, associate professor of political sciences at the University of Pretoria.
This episode was written and produced by Mend Mariwany with assistance from Gary Oberholzer and Katie Flood. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Full credits available here. A transcript will be available shortly. Subscribe to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
It's been 30 years since Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa and the country's brutal and deadly apartheid system came to a formal end. As part of The Conversation's coverage of the anniversary, we're running a special three-part podcast series this month on The Conversation Weekly.
In What happened to Nelson Mandela's South Africa?, Thabo Leshilo, politics and society editor at The Conversation Africa, speaks to prominent political scholars who experienced South Africa's post-apartheid transition, about the country's journey over the past three decades.
Listen to the trailer for What happened to Nelson Mandela's South Africa? The first episode will be available on April 11.
For almost 15 years, scientists have debated whether the Anthropocene should be an official geological epoch marking the profound influence of humans on the planet. Then in March, an international panel of scientists formally rejected the proposal for a new Anthropocene epoch.
In this episode, two scientists give us their different opinions on whether that was the right decision and what it means for the future use of the word Anthropocene.
Featuring Jan Zalasiewicz, professor of palaeobiology at the University of Leicester in the UK, and Erle C. Ellis, professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in the US. Plus an introduction from Will de Freitas, environment and energy editor at The Conversation in the UK.
This episode was written and produced by Tiffany Cassidy with assistance from Katie Flood. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Full credits available here. A transcript is now available <podcast:transcript url="https://cdn.theconversation.com/static_files/files/3235/Anthropocene_Transcript.pdf?1714492717" type="text/html"/>
will be available shortly. Subscribe to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading
We’re bringing you an extra episode this week from Don’t Call Me Resilient, another podcast from The Conversation. Hosted by Vinita Srivastava at The Conversation in Canada, Don’t Call Me Resilient is your weekly dose of news and current events through a sharply-focused anti-racist lens.
In this episode, Vinita talks to Hilal Elver about the use of hunger as a tool of war in Gaza. Hilal is a former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food and a research professor of Global Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara in the US. This episode originally aired on March 21, 2024.
You can listen to or follow Don’t Call Me Resilient on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Further reading and listening:
Our experiences of the world are diverse, often changing as we move across borders from one country to another. They can also vary based on language or subtle shifts in climate. Yet, we rarely consider what causes these differences and divisions.
In this episode we speak to geographer Maxim Samson at De Paul University in the US about the unseen boundaries that can shape our collective and personal perceptions of the world – what he calls "invisible lines".
This episode was written and produced by Mend Mariwany with assistance from Katie Flood. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Full credits available here. A transcript is available now. Subscribe to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading
As the climate crisis gets ever more severe, the fossil fuel industry is struggling to recruit new talent. And now a number of existing employees are deciding to leave their jobs, some quietly, some very publicly, because of concerns over climate change. In this episode we speak to a researcher about this phenomenon of climate quitting.
Featuring Grace Augustine, associate professor in business and society at the University of Bath in the UK, and Sam Phelps, commissioning editor for international affairs at The Conversation in the UK.
This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood with assistance from Mend Mariwany. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Full credits available here. A transcript will be available shortly. Subscribe to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
As Russians head to the polls for presidential elections, conspiracy theories are swirling everywhere. In this episode we speak to a disinformation expert about the central role these conspiracy theories play in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Featuring Ilya Yablokov, lecturer in journalism and digital media at the University of Sheffield in the UK. Plus an introduction from Grégory Rayko, international editor at The Conversation in France.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Gemma Ware and Katie Flood with assistance from Mend Mariwany. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits available here. A transcript will be available shortly. Subscribe to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
High heels, lace and handbags. In recent decades, there’s been a huge shift in the role of North Korean women and the choices they’re able to make – including what they wear. In this episode, we hear about new research on how North Korean women are driving a new form of grassroots capitalism, and changing the country in the process.
Featuring Bronwen Dalton, head of the department of management at the University of Technology Sydney Business School in Australia, and Kyungja Jung, Associate Professor at the University of Technology Sydney. Plus an introduction from Justin Bergman, international affairs editor at The Conversation in Australia.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Gemma Ware and Mend Mariwany with assistance from Katie Flood. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits available here. A transcript will be available shortly. Subscribe to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
With unlimited information at our fingertips and dozens of platforms on which to share our opinions, it can sometimes feel like we’re supposed to be experts in everything. It can be exhausting. In this episode, we talk to a psychologist whose research and experiences of intellectual humility have taught him that acknowledging what we don’t know is as important as asserting what we do know.
Featuring Daryl Van Tongeren, associate professor of psychology at Hope College in Michigan, and Maggie Villiger, senior science and technology editor at The Conversation in the US.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Katie Flood with assistance from Mend Mariwany. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Full credits available here. A transcript will be available shortly. Subscribe to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
When the war in Gaza eventually ends, pressure will mount for negotiations to begin for a deal. When that day comes, how can opposing sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict find enough common ground to reach an agreement? In this episode, we hear about a method called peace polling, tried out successfully in Northern Ireland, that could offer a blueprint for how to reach a settlement between Israelis and Palestinians.
Featuring Colin Irwin, a research fellow at the Department of Politics at the University of Liverpool in the UK, and Jonathan Este, senior international editor at The Conversation in the UK.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written by Gemma Ware and produced by Mend Mariwany with assistance from Katie Flood. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Full credits available here. A transcript will be available shortly. Subscribe to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation, and a fortnightly Gaza Update email.
Humans spend about one third of our lives asleep and while most of us dream regularly, some people remember their dreams more than others. But scientists still know surprisingly little about why or how we experience dreams. In this episode we find out about new research from a sleep lab in France that has unlocked a way to find out more by communicating with people as they dream.
Featuring Başak Türker, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute du Cerveau in Paris, and Lionel Cavicchioli, health and medicine editor at The Conversation in France.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Katie Flood with assistance from Mend Mariwany. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Full credits available here. A transcript will be available shortly. Sign up to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Indonesia, the world’s third-largest democracy, goes to the polls on February 14 to elect a new president. It’s one of the largest elections to take place since an explosion of generative AI tools became available that can manipulate video and audio – and a number of deepfake videos have gone viral during the campaign.
In this episode, we look at what Indonesia’s experience is revealing about the disinformation battleground ahead in 2024, when an estimated four billion voters will be eligible to vote in an election.
Featuring F.X. Lilik Dwi Mardjianto, a journalism researcher at Universitas Multimedia Nusantara in Inodnesia and Nuurrianti Jalli, assistant professor of Professional Practice, School of Media and Strategic Communications, Oklahoma State University in the US.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware with assistance from Katie Flood. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits available here. A transcript will be available shortly. Sign up to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
In some cultures, people are frugal while in others they tend to be generous. Some cultures favour meticulous planning while others favour living in the moment. Theories abound about how and why differences like these between cultures emerge and, increasingly, researchers are looking to the environments people live in for answers.
In this episode, Mend Mariwany explores what role ecological factors, including the climate, play in shaping cultural norms and behaviour. Featuring Michael Varnum, associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University in the US.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written by Mend Mariwany, and produced by Mend Mariwany and Meher Batia with assistance from Katie Flood. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. The executive producer is Gemma Ware. Full credits available here. A transcript will be available shortly. Sign up to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
In our chaotic, rapidly changing modern world, many of us have come to rely on science for objectivity and to provide sense of order. So it may be disconcerting to learn that there is no single, definitive list of all life on Earth. And there never has been.
In this episode, we take you inside the world of taxonomy, where competing lists, rogue taxonomists and recent accusations of anarchy have revealed the messy struggle to classify the world around us.
Featuring Stephen Garnett, professor of conservation and sustainable livelihoods at Charles Darwin University in Australia, and Signe Dean, science and technology editor for The Conversation in Australia.
This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood with assistance from Mend Mariwany. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. The executive producer is Gemma Ware. Full credits available here. A transcript will be available shortly. Sign up to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation and to The Conversation's Science Wrap newsletter.
Nearly eight decades on from the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27 1945, the number of concentration camp prisoners forcibly tattooed, remains, for many, the symbol of the Holocaust. The Nazis murdered six million Jews, one million of whom died at Auschwitz. Today, there are ever fewer survivors still alive to bear witness to this genocide.
In this episode, brought to us by Dale Berning Sawa, we find out what motivates some descendants of Holocaust survivors to replicate the Auschwitz tattoo of their parent or grandparent on their own bodies, and hear about the reactions they’ve had. Featuring Alice Bloch, professor of sociology at the University of Manchester, Orly Weintraub Gilad and David Rubin.
This episode was written by Dale Berning Sawa and produced by Mend Mariwany, with assistance from Gemma Ware and Katie Flood. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. The executive producer is Gemma Ware. Full credits available here. A transcript will be available shortly. Sign up to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
When you think about the far right, you probably picture groups of young, white men carrying images of swastikas or torches. But the face of the far right is changing, at least on social media. In this episode, we hear about new research into a cohort of women influencers pushing far right ideology on mainstream platforms like Instagram and YouTube.
The Conversation's Avery Anapol speak to Eviane Leidig, a postdoctoral research fellow at Tilburg University in the Netherlands who focuses on far right ideology, gender and the internet.
This episode was written and produced by Mend Mariwany with production assistance from Katie Flood. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. The executive producer is Gemma Ware. Full credits available here. A transcript is also available. Sign up to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
At every moment, your body’s internal organs are sending signals to your brain. You’ll be mostly unaware of them, but sometimes they cut through: for example when you’re hungry, or when you need to go to the bathroom. Our ability to tap into these hidden signals is called interoception – sometimes known as a sixth sense. In this episode, we speak to a cognitive neuroscientist and expert on interoception about how new research on this connection between our minds and bodies could lead to breakthroughs in mental and physical healthcare.
Featuring Sarah Garfinkel, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London in the UK, and Vivian Lam, associate health and biomedicine editor at The Conversation in the US.
This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood with production assistance from Mend Mariwany. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. The executive producer is Gemma Ware. Full credits available here. A transcript is now available. Sign up to a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading and listening:
Wolves are making a comeback across Europe. As their populations grow, 65,000 livestock are killed each year by wolves. Now, moves are underway to change the protection status of the wolf in the European Union. In this episode we speak to a social scientist researching the best ways for humans and wolves to coexist.
Featuring Hanna Pettersson, a postdoctoral research associate at the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity at the University of York in the UK and Jack Marley, environment and energy editor at The Conversation in the UK.
This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood with production assistance from Mend Mariwany. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. The executive producer is Gemma Ware. Full credits available here. A transcript will be available shortly.
Sign up to Imagine, a newsletter from The Conversation in which researchers imagine a world where climate action is the norm.
Further reading and listening:
Ever found yourself scrolling through social media late at night and accidentally buying something you regretted? In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we talk to an advertising expert about research into how social media can overload ours brains and make us buy products we don’t need or want.
Featuring Matthew Pittman, a professor of advertising at the University of Tennessee in the US, and Kate Kilpatrick from The Conversation in the US.
This episode was written and produced by Mend Mariwany with production assistance from Katie Flood and our intern Jusneel Mahal. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. The executive producer is Gemma Ware.Full credits available here. A transcript is now available.
Further reading and listening:
Across parts of academia, concerns are mounting that the Israel-Gaza war is having a chilling effect on academic freedom. In the second of two episodes exploring how the war is affecting life at universities, we speak to an Israeli legal scholar, now based in the UK, about the pressures that academics and students are facing to rein in their views about the war.
Featuring Neve Gordon, professor of international law and human rights, Queen Mary University of London in the UK.
This episode was written by Gemma Ware and produced by Mend Mariwany. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits available here. A transcript is now available.
Further reading and listening:
Tensions have been running high at many universities around the world since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 and the subsequent Israeli assault on Gaza. In the first of two episodes exploring how the war is affecting life at universities, we explore what's been happening at one American public college campus.
Featuring David Mednicoff, chair of the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies and an associate professor of Middle Eastern studies and public policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Naomi Schalit, senior politics and society editor at The Conversation in the US.
This episode was written by Gemma Ware and produced by Mend Mariwany. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits available here. A transcript is now available.
Further reading and listening:
Kenya is marking 60 years since its independence from British colonial rule on December 12, 1963. Each year, the country celebrates the occasion with a national holiday, Jamhuri Day. And for much of the past 60 years, patriotic choral music has been a regular feature of those celebrations. In this episode, we explore how much one song can tell you about the politics of a new nation – and who controls what gets remembered and what gets forgotten.
Featuring Doseline Kiguru, a research associate in cultural and literary production in Africa at the University of Bristol in the UK, plus Julius Maina, East Africa editor at The Conversation based in Nairobi.
This episode was produced by Katie Flood and Mend Mariwany. It was written by Gemma Ware, who is the executive producer of the show. Full credits for this episode are available here. A full transcript is now available.
Further reading:
As world leaders and their climate negotiators gathered at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai in early December, on the other side of the world, Brazil was experiencing an unprecedented drought in the Amazon. Scientists fear it could release of billions of additional tons of carbon into the atmosphere. In this episode, we speak to an ecologist who has spent 45 years living and studying in the Amazon about the causes of the drought, why it’s so dangerous for the planet and what can be done to protect the rainforest.
Featuring Philip Fearnside, ecologist and professor at the National Institute of Amazonian Research in Brazil.
This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood with production assistance from Mend Mariwany. Gemma Ware is the executive producer of the show. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript is also available.
Further reading:
In the weeks since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 and the Israeli bombardment and ground assault on Gaza, both sides have traded accusations of genocide. Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis and took more than 200 hostage, while Israel’s subsequent aerial and ground attack on Gaza have killed more than 15,000 Palestinians and displaced millions. In this episode we speak to an expert on genocide about the history of the term and what’s needed to prove it under today’s international legal definition.
Featuring Alexander Hinton, distinguished professor of anthropology and director for the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University Newark in the US.
This episode was written and produced by Mend Mariwany with production assistance from Katie Flood. Gemma Ware is the executive producer of the show. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript is also available.
Further reading:
Amid the flurry of billboards promoting cut price deals in the run up to Black Friday, some activists have slipped in the odd spoof advert. By subverting public advertising space, they’re risking legal action to try and make serious points about the excesses of consumer culture and the perilous state of the environment. In this episode, we find out about the subvertising movement and its links to a wider conversation about mass consumerism and the environment.
Featuring Eleftheria Lekakis, a senior lecturer in media and communication at the University of Sussex in the UK.
This episode was written, produced and sound designed by Eloise Stevens, with production assistance from Mend Mariwany and Katie Flood. Gemma Ware is the executive producer of the show.. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript is now available.
Further reading:
The rise of drug-resistant infections is one of the biggest global threats to health, food security and development. Antibiotic-resistant superbugs were estimated to kill 1.27 million people in 2019, and the UN projects that drug-resistant diseases could cause 10 million deaths a year by 2050. In this episode, we hear from a microbiologist at a hospital in Nigeria working on the frontlines against antibiotic resistance, and find out about the new scientific techniques, including artificial intelligence, being deployed to find new potential antibiotics.
Featuring Nubwa Medugu, a clinical microbiologist at Nile University of Nigeria and André O. Hudson, dean of the College of Science and professor of biochemistry at Rochester Institute of Technology in the US.
This episode was written and produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware with assistance from Katie Flood. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive producer of the show. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript is also available.
Further reading:
Two months after the earthquake, we hear why Marrakech and its medina are so important to Islamic heritage – and why some researchers are worried that the expertise of the city's traditional artisans could being overlooked in the reconstruction.
Featuring Abbey Stockstill, assistant professor of art history at Southern Methodist University in the US; Nour Eddine Nachaoune, professor of heritage at Université Mohammed V in Rabat; and Kalpana Jain, senior religion and ethics editor and director of the Global Religion Journalism Initiative at The Conversation in the US.
This episode was written and produced by Gemma Ware and Katie Flood with assistance from Mend Mariwany, who also recorded the English voiceover in this episode. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive producer of the show. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript is now available.
Further reading:
In recent years, Californians have had to deal with some deadly and destructive wildfires. But in fact, this part of the western United States has been shaped by fire for millennia. And in this episode we hear about new research from California into a decades-old mystery about the extinction of large animals at the end of the Ice Age, which is providing some worrying lessons from history about the way humans, fire and ecosystems interact.
Featuring Emily Lindsey, associate curator at La Brea Tar Pits and adjunct faculty at University of California, Los Angeles, and Stacy Morford, environment and climate editor at The Conversation in the US.
This episode was produced and written by Katie Flood Gemma Ware. The executive producer was Gemma Ware. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript will be available soon. Sign up for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
Homs was once the centre of the Syrian revolution. Today, 12 years on, much of the city remains scarred and deserted after years of siege and heavy bombardment. In this episode we speak to an architect from Homs about what the deliberate destruction of homes and neighbourhoods, known as domicide, does to people displaced by conflict – and his perspective on the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.
Featuring Ammar Azzouz, research fellow in geography and the environment at the University of Oxford in the UK.
This episode was produced and written by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware. The executive producer was Gemma Ware. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript will be available soon. Sign up for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
We’re bringing you an extra episode this week to share an interview from Don’t Call Me Resilient, another podcast from The Conversation. Hosted by Vinita Srivastava at The Conversation in Canada, Don’t Call Me Resilient is your weekly dose of news and current events through a sharply-focused anti-racist lens.
In this episode which we're running in full, Vinita talks to Daniel Martinez HoSang, a professor of ethnicity, race and migration and American studies at Yale University about why brown and Black people are being drawn to far-right politics in the United States. It originally aired in early October 2023.
You can listen to or follow Don’t Call Me Resilient on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Further reading:
Imagine a particle so small that it’s the same relative size to a soccer ball as that football is to the planet Earth. That’s the size of a quantum dot – a type of nanocrystal that changes colour depending on its size, and was once thought impossible to actually make. Now, three scientists who helped discover and synthesise these quantum dots have been awarded the 2023 Nobel prize in chemistry.
In this week’s episode we speak to Louis Brus, one of these new Nobel laureates, and an emeritus professor of chemistry at Columbia University in New York, about his work on quantum dots and what winning the accolade means.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced and written by Gemma Ware and Katie Flood with assistance from Mend Mariwany. The executive producer was Gemma Ware. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript will be available soon. Sign up for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
For generations, Neanderthals have been a source of fascination for scientists. This species of ancient hominim inhabited the world for around 500,000 years until they suddenly disappeared 42,000 years ago. Today, the cause of their extinction remains a mystery.
Archaeologist Ludovic Slimak at the University of Toulouse III, Paul Sabatier in France and his team have spent three decades excavating caves, studying ancient artefacts and delving into the world of Neanderthals and they've recently published provocative new findings. In this week’s episode he tells us more about how Neanderthals lived, what happened to them and why their extinction might hold profound insights into the story of own species, Homo Sapiens.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced and written by Mend Mariwany with assistance from Katie Flood. The executive producer was Gemma Ware. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript is now available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
Australia goes to the polls on October 14 in a referendum on whether to enshrine an Indigenous advisory body, known as the Voice to Parliament, into the country's constitution.
In this episode, a political theorist from the Torres Strait Islands, an archipelago between Australia and Papua New Guinea, explains the background to the Voice and the arguments for and against it. Plus, we hear a view from Canada on how the Voice proposal compares with Indigenous systems of representation elsewhere in the world.
Featuring Sana Nakata, principal research fellow at James Cook University in Australia. And Kiera Ladner, professor of Indigenous politics and Canadian politics at the University of Manitoba in Canada. Hosted by Gemma Ware with Carissa Lee, First Nations and public policy editor at The Conversation in Melbourne.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced and written by Gemma Ware and Mend Mariwany. The executive producer was Gemma Ware. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript is available here. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading and listening:
The world has waited decades for a malaria vaccine, and now two have come along in quick succession. On October 2, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended that a new malaria vaccine developed by the University of Oxford be rolled out for the prevention of malaria in children, just two years after another vaccine, the RTS,S, got their endorsement. We find out why it's been so hard to find a malaria vaccine – and hear from the scientists behind the new breakthrough. We’ve been waiting for the official announcement to publish this story, so listeners will hear from former hosts Daniel Merino and Nehal El-Hadi.
Featuring Faith Osier, co-director of the Institute of Infections at Imperial College London; Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute at Oxford University, and Alassane Dicko, professor of epidemiology and public health at the Malaria Research and Training Center at the University of Bamako.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced and written by Katie Flood. The hosts are Dan Merino and Nehal El-Hadi. The executive producer was Mend Mariwany. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript is now available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
Spanish women are having fewer and fewer children, and yet the country has become the egg donation capital of Europe. We find out about the experiences of women who decide to donate their eggs, and whether there are enough protections in place to prevent them from being exploited.
Featuring Anna Molas, research fellow in anthropology at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Spain.
This episode was produced and written by Katie Flood with assistance from Mend Mariwany. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive producer of The Conversation Weekly. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript will be available soon. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
In part 3 of Inside the Oslo Accords we explore the legacy of the Oslo peace process and the future of a two-state solution for Israel-Palestine.
Hanan Ashrawi is a Palestinian political and civil society leader and in the 1990s was the official spokesperson of a joint Palestinian-Jordanian delegation to the Middle East peace process. Yossi Beilin was Israel's deputy foreign minister and one of the key participants during the secret negotiations in Oslo.
This series is made in collaboration with James Rodgers, reader in international journalism and Amnon Aran, professor of international politics, both at City, University of London in the UK.
This episode was produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware with production assistance from Katie Flood. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript is now available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
In part 2 of Inside the Oslo Accords, a special series marking the 30th anniversary of the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, we hear from two negotiators about what happened in the years after the famous handshake on the White House lawn.
Hanan Ashrawi is a Palestinian political and civil society leader and in the 1990s was the official spokesperson of a joint Palestinian-Jordanian delegation to the Middle East peace process. Yossi Beilin was Israel's deputy foreign minister and one of the key participants during the secret negotiations in Oslo.
This series is made in collaboration with James Rodgers, reader in international journalism and Amnon Aran, professor of international politics, both at City, University of London in the UK.
This episode was produced by Mend Mariwany with production assistance from Katie Flood. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript is now available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
Inside the Oslo Accords is a three-part series marking the 30th anniversary of the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. It's hosted in collaboration with James Rodgers, reader in international journalism and Amnon Aran, professor of international politics, both at City, University of London in the UK. They'll revisit the history of this moment in history, through conversations with leading participants in the Oslo process.
In part 1, we hear from Jan Egeland, who was deputy foreign minister of Norway in the early 1990s, about his role in the secret negotiations that led to the Oslo Accords.
This episode was produced by Mend Mariwany with production assistance from Katie Flood. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript is now available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading
Around half of all life on Earth is on the move because of climate change. It's another staggering statistic from the recent synthesis report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a shift explored in a recent episode of Fear & Wonder, a new podcast from The Conversation. We're running that full episode through our channel this week. It features Finnish fisherman scientist Tero Mustonen and Australian marine ecologist Gretta Pecl from the University of Tasmania.
Fear and Wonder is hosted by IPCC lead author Joelle Gergis and journalist Michael Green. It's produced by Michael Green and is sponsored by the Climate Council, an independent, evidence-based organisation working on climate science, impacts and solutions.
Further listening:
The Conversation Weekly will be taking a production break in August and will be back in September with new episodes. Stay tuned and subscribed!
Based on Michael Crichton's novel by the same name, Jurassic Park told the story of an ambitious theme park that used resurrected dinosaurs as its attractions. But as the story unfolds, things start to go wrong. We speak to Travis Holland, who researches media and fan studies,at the popular and scientific cultural impact Jurassic Park continues to have today.
Featuring Travis Holland, Senior Lecturer in Communication at Charles Sturt University in Australia.
This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood. The executive producer is Mend Mariwany. Eloise Stevens does our sound design and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript will be available soon. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
The human body is a complex organism, made up of trillions of cells. But not all of them are human. About half of them are fungi, microbes and bacteria. Scientists are starting to understand how and why these communities — referred to as microbiomes — are crucial to the functioning of various body systems. We speak to three experts who study the gut microbiome: a gastroenterologist, a neuroscientist and a biological engineer. Their research considers how these microbiomes are important, what the relationship is between microbiomes and well being, and how synthetically engineered microorganisms promise new forms of therapies.
Featuring Chris Damman, a gastroenterologist and clinical associate professor at the University of Washington, Andrea Merchak, an incoming postdoctoral scholar at the University of Florida, who studies the gut biome as it affects and is affected by various conditions, and Tae Seok Moon, a biological engineer at Washington University at St. Louis, who looks at how synthetic biology can be employed within the gut.
This episode was written and produced by Mend Mariwany, who is also the show’s executive producer. With production assistance from Katie Flood. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript will be available soon. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
The history of restaurants, food and, especially, fine dining, is deeply tied to the history of immigration to the U.S. and French cultural power in the early 20th century. Not surprisingly, the story that leads to Yelp and Anthony Bourdain is not without its share of racism that the modern food world and its taste makers are still grappling with today. We speak to three experts who study food culture and fine dining about the perceptions and definitions of what’s considered good food. We explore how food trends are deeply tied to immigration, how the history of western culinary techniques limits the creativity and authenticity of modern restaurants and how social media compares to the Michelin Guide as a tool in the quest for "good food."
Featuring Krishnendu Ray, a professor of food studies at New York University in the US, Zeena Feldman is a professor of digital culture at King's College in London, in the UK, and Gillian Gualtieri is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Barnard College in the US.
This episode was produced and written by Dan Merino and Katie Flood. Mend Mariwany is the executive producer of The Conversation Weekly. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading:
Around the world, borders between countries are getting tougher. Governments are making it more difficult to move, especially for certain groups of vulnerable people. This comes with a message, subtle or not: that people are moving to higher-income countries to take advantage of the welfare system, or the jobs of people already living there. But research shows that much of what we think about migration in the Global North is wrong, and political narratives shape the conversation and public attitudes toward migration. We speak to three experts who explain what migration really looks like around the world, what drives people to uproot their lives and move, and how some countries in Africa are welcoming refugees.
Heaven Crawley is a researcher at UN University Centre for Policy Research based in New York in the US, Valentina Di Iasio is a research fellow at the University of Southampton in the UK, and Christopher Nshimbi is a researcher at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.
This episode was written and produced by Avery Anapol and Mend Mariwany. The executive producer is Mend Mariwany. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript will be available soon. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
Modern protest movements, like the ongoing protests in Iran, often center around women who have been killed or harmed by agents of authoritarian governments. While it can be easy to chalk up this consistent, state-sponsored abuse of women to simple sexism, researchers say there is a deeper story at play. We speak to three experts who have studied protests and the role of gendered ideology, images and social media as tools of resistance as well as of oppression.
Parichehr Kazemi is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Oregon, in the US, Aliaksei Kazharski researches international politics and security at Charles University in Prague, in the Czech Republic, and Michaela Grančayová is an independent researcher who focuses on language and politics, at Comenius University in Slovakia.
This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood. The executive producer is Mend Mariwany. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript will be available soon. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
Over the past few decades, countries across Latin America have witnessed a surge in demands by its people for increased political participation and representation. Colombia and Chile stand out as notable examples of countries responding to these calls through constitutional reform. We speak with two researchers about Latin America’s ongoing democratic transition, with a particular focus on the involvement of populations in democratic processes in Colombia and Chile. We examine how countries are looking to empower their populations through crowdsourcing participation, what the implications of these reforms for marginalized communities are and how Chile’s rejection of a progressive constitution remains a significant step for empowering citizens.
Featuring Carlos Bernal, professor of Law at the University of Dayton in the United States, and commissioner of the America Human Rights Commission, and Jennifer Piscopo, associate professor of politics at Occidental College in Los Angeles, in the United States.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced and written by Mend Mariwany, who is also the show’s executive producer. With assistance from our producer Katie Flood. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
Making yourself more beautiful can result in tangible, material rewards. Pretty privilege, as it is called, can lead to greater access to money and social capital, resulting in a better quality of life.
In Brazil, this understanding that beauty is important to one’s social status and mental and emotional wellbeing has prompted the state to subsidize cosmetic surgery. But this pursuit of beauty carries a dark side, and can often mean exposure to harm. We speak to an anthropologist and a cancer researcher about the potential harm inherent in seeking beauty treatments.
Featuring Carmen Alvaro Jarrín, associate professor of anthropology at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, in the US, and Maria Zhivagui, a postdoctoral researcher in environmental toxicology and cancer genomics at the University of California, in the US.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced and written by Nehal El-Hadi and Mend Mariwany, who is also the show’s executive producer, and with assistance from our producer Katie Flood. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
A number of activist groups, mostly from developing nations already facing the realities of a changing climate, are taking a new legal approach to climate action. They are arguing that climate change cases are human rights cases and in doing so are wading into unprecedented legal waters. We speak with three scholars about current legal cases tying climate change and human rights together, what these cases might mean for the climate movement and how human rights law can produce real change on the ground.
Featuring Niak Sian Koh, postdoctoral researcher in Sustainability Science at the Stockholm Resilience Center at Stockholm University in Sweden; Zoe Nay, PhD candidate with Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne, Australia; and Jackie Smith, professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, in the US.
This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood. The executive producer is Mend Mariwany. Eloise Stevens does our sound design and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
In countries across the Global South, the launch of IMF programs often sparks considerable concern. This is because of the IMF’s reputation: during the 1980s, many nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America turned to the IMF seeking loans to mitigate economic challenges. These loans were accompanied by stringent conditions, and countries faced pressure to reduce public subsidies and social spending, downsize the public sector workforce, and increase taxes. We speak with two researchers about the impact of IMF loans on recipient countries and why countries continue to rely on IMF loans. We also discuss potential alternatives to this system.
Featuring Danny Bradlow, a professor of International Development Law and African Economic Relations and senior fellow at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and Attiya Waris is Ambassador of Fiscal Law and Policy at the University of Nairobi in Kenya.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced and written by Mend Mariwany, who is also the show’s executive producer. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
One of the key findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Synthesis Report is that there are solutions available right now, across all sectors of the economy, that could at least halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. “The problem is getting worse,” explains Greg Nemet, a Canadian renewable policy expert and IPCC author. “But we’ve got solutions now that are so much more affordable than they were.”
Fear & Wonder is a new podcast from The Conversation that takes you inside the UN’s era-defining climate report via the hearts and minds of the scientists who wrote it. In this episode, we’re delving into one of the major shifts in the public communication of climate change – the attribution of extreme weather events to climate change.
Featuring Gregory Nemet, Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US, and Yamina Saheb, Senior Energy Policy Analyst at OpenEXP.
Fear and Wonder is produced by Michael Green and is sponsored by the Climate Council, an independent, evidence-based organisation working on climate science, impacts and solutions.
Further reading:
Ten years ago this month, much attention turned to the global garment industry when a group of garment factories collapsed at Rana Plaza near Dhaka, Bangladesh. The accident, called a “mass industrial homicide” by unions in Bangladesh, killed 1,124 people and injured at least 2,500 more. Most of the people who went to work that day were young women, almost all were supporting families with their wages and all were at the bottom of the global production chain.
We feature an episode from our colleagues of the series Don’t Call Me Resilient, to look back at the Rana Plaza disaster to explore how much — or how little — has changed for garment worker conditions since.
Featuring Dina Siddiqi, Clinical Associate Professor of Liberal Studies at New York University in the US, and Minh-Ha T. Pham, Associate Professor at Pratt Institute, also in the US.
This episode of Don’t Call Me Resilient was produced by Vinita Srivastava, the associate producer is Boke Saisi, with contributions from Jennifer Moroz and Ateqah Khaki. Sound design is by Rehmatullah Sheikh and the show’s student journalist this year was Ollie Nicholas. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
Small amounts of rain can mean the difference between struggle and success. For nearly 80 years, an approach called cloud seeding has, in theory, given people the ability to get more rain and snow from storms and make hailstorms less severe. But only recently have scientists been able to peer into clouds and begin to understand how effective cloud seeding really is. We speak with three researchers about the simple yet murky science of cloud seeding, the economic effects it can have on agriculture and research that may allow governments to use cloud seeding in more places.
Featuring Katja Friedrich, Associate Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder; Dean Bangsund, Research Scientist in Agribusiness and Applied Economics at North Dakota State Univeristy; and Linda Zou, Professor of Civil Infrastructure and Environmental Engineering at Khalifa University.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced and written by Katie Flood. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
In countries across Africa and Latin America, old used cars from places like the U.S. and Europe provide vital access to transportation to people who would otherwise be unable to afford their own vehicles. While this process extends the lives of these cars, the practice is not without problems, in particular with regards to pollution and passenger safety. We speak with two researchers about why richer countries export used cars, what impacts they have in developing nations and whether import restrictions are effectively stemming the rise in pollution and accidents caused by this practice.
Featuring Festival Godwin Boateng, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Sustainable Urban Development at The Earth Institute at Columbia University in the US, and Paul Bledsoe, Professional Lecturer at American University in the US.
This episode was written and produced by Mend Mariwany, who is also the executive producer of The Conversation Weekly. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript will be available soon. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
Last month the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its Synthesis Report of the Sixth Assessment Report. It showed global temperatures are now 1.1℃ above pre-industrial levels. This warming has driven widespread and rapid global changes, including more frequent and intense weather extremes that are now impacting people and ecosystems all over the world. But when an extreme weather event hits, how certain can we be that it was made more likely by climate change? How do we know it wasn’t just a rare, naturally-occuring event that might have happened anyway?
Fear & Wonder is a new podcast from The Conversation that takes you inside the UN’s era-defining climate report via the hearts and minds of the scientists who wrote it. In this episode, we’re delving into one of the major shifts in the public communication of climate change – the attribution of extreme weather events to climate change.
Featuring Dr Friederike Otto, Senior Lecturer in Climate Science at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London in the UK, David Karoly honorary Professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, and Tannecia Stephenson, Physics Professor at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica.
Fear and Wonder is produced by Michael Green and is sponsored by the Climate Council, an independent, evidence-based organisation working on climate science, impacts and solutions.
Further reading:
Conserving or protecting natural resources, like landscapes or products, can involve limiting people's access or use. When natural resources are connected to cultural, religious or spiritual practices, conservation needs to consider both biological and cultural diversity. Indian or red sandalwood, highly valued for its wood and oil, is a natural resource with significant economic and cultural value. The fragrant wood is used for carvings, furniture and in buildings, while the oil distilled from its heartwood has perfume, incense and medicinal applications. We speak with a chemist, an environmental historian and an environment and society researcher on why cultural preservation is key to the sustainable management of natural resources like sandalwood.
Featuring Danny Hettiarachchi, chemist and adjunct research fellow at the University of Western Australia, Ezra Rashkow, an environmental and South Asian historian at Montclair State University in the US,, and Jules Pretty, professor of environment and society at the University of Essex in the UK.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced and written by Nehal El-Hadi and Mend Mariwany, who is also the show’s executive producer. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
We speak with three researchers who study how climate research is funded to find out whether the pomp and circumstance of high-profile climate innovation prizes outweighs the actual research they fund, or whether they actually play an important role in the larger effort to find climate solutions.
Featuring David Reiner, University Senior Lecturer in Technology Policy at the Cambridge Judge Business School; Abbas Abdul, Researcher at the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex; and Mark Maslin, professor of Earth System Science at University College London.
This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood. The executive producer is Mend Mariwany. Eloise Stevens does our sound design and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript will be available soon. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
In an era of ceaseless notifications from apps, devices and social media platforms, as well as access to more information than we could possibly consider, how do we find ways to manage? And is the way that we think, focus and process information changing as a result? We speak with three researchers who study human-computer interaction, technology design and literacy about how all of these demands on our attention are affecting us, and what we could possibly do about it.
Featuring Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at the University of California, in the United States, Kai Lukoff, assistant professor at Santa Clara University, US, and Daniel Le Roux, a senior lecturer at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced and written by Mend Mariwany, who is also the show’s executive producer. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
Both the U.S. and China have plans to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon. You might be wondering: why now? The answer to that is the relatively recent discovery of water on the Moon. The question of how humanity will establish a Moon base is perhaps a deeper and more important one. We speak with two people, a planetary scientist who studies lunar geology and a scholar who works on space law and politics, about the challenges facing nations as humanity heads to the Moon.
Featuring Mahesh Anand, Professor of Planetary Science and Exploration at The Open University in the UK, and Michelle L.D. Hanlon, Professor of Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi in the US.
This episode was written by Katie Flood and produced by Dan Merino and Katie Flood. The executive producer is Mend Mariwany. Eloise Stevens does our sound design and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript will be available soon. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
If you like The Conversation Weekly, we encourage you to check out two limited series podcasts produced by The Conversation: Fear & Wonder and Great Mysteries of Physics. Available on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen to your podcasts.
On March 19, 2003, the United States led an unlawful invasion into Iraq, occupying the country for over eight years until the official withdrawal of troops throughout 2011. It is estimated that around 405,000 deaths occurred as a direct result. Most of these deaths were of Iraqi civilians, hundreds of thousands of others were injured, and over nine million displaced. The invasion was followed by the rise of sectarian violence that followed between 2006 and 2010, and the Islamic State group’s occupation in parts of the country from 2013-17. We speak to two researchers who examine the impact the invasion and conflict have had on the lives of Iraqis.
Featuring Sana Murrani, associate professor in spatial practice with a background in architecture and urban design at the University of Plymouth, UK, and Inna Rudolf, senior research fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Divided Societies, King's College London in the UK.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced and written by Mend Mariwany, who is also the show’s executive producer. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
Without a sense of time, leading us from cradle to grave, our lives would make little sense. But on the most fundamental level, physicists aren't sure whether the sort of time we experience exists at all. We talk to three experts and find out if time could potentially be moving backwards as well as forwards.
Featuring Sean Carroll, Homewood professor of natural philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, Emily Adlam, postdoctoral associate of the philosophy of physics at Western University and Natalia Ares, Royal Society university research fellow at the University of Oxford.
This episode was presented by Miriam Frankel and produced by Hannah Fisher. Executive producers are Jo Adetunji and Gemma Ware. Social media and platform production by Alice Mason, sound design by Eloise Stevens and music by Neeta Sarl. A transcript is available here. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
When ChatGPT burst onto the technology world in November 2022, it gained 100 million users within just two months after its launch. The technology itself is fascinating, but part of what makes ChatGPT uniquely interesting is the fact that essentially overnight, most of the world gained access to a powerful generative artificial intelligence that they could use for their own purposes. We speak with researchers who study computer science, technology and economics to explore how the rapid adoption of technologies has, for the most part, failed to change social and economic systems in the past – but why AI might be different, despite its weaknesses.
Featuring Daniel Acuña, Associate Professor of Computer Science, at the University of Colorado Boulder in the US, Kentaro Toyama, Professor of Community Information at the University of Michigan, also in the US, and Thierry Rayna, Professor of Innovation and Entrepeneurship Management, École polytechnique in France.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced by Katie Flood and Dan Merino, and also written by Katie Flood. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Mend Mariwany is the show's executive producer. Full credits for this episode are available here. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
An international team of biologists has discovered a tiny new species of owl, called the Príncipe scops owl, living in a remote forest on an island off the west coast of Africa.
Featuring Bárbara Freitas, a Ph.D. fellow who studies bird evolution at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid.
This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood and hosted by Dan Merino. The interim executive producer is Mend Mariwany. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.
Full credits for this episode are available here. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
Our dependence on fossil fuels is one of the biggest challenges to overcome in the fight against climate change. But production and consumption of fossil fuels is on the rise, and expected to peak within the next decade. We speak to two researchers who examine the political challenges of transitioning to a world after oil, and what it means for those states who rely on oil for resources.
Featuring Caleb Wellum, Assistant Professor of U.S. History, at the University of Toronto in Canada, and Natalie Koch, Professor of Human Geography at the University of Heidelberg, in Germany.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced and written by Mend Mariwany who is also the show's executive producer. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
Social isolation and loneliness are increasingly becoming a societal problem, as they increase polarization and impact on our physical health. In 2018, two years before the pandemic, the United Kingdom created a ministerial portfolio for loneliness. Japan, where nearly 40 per cent of the population report experiencing loneliness, began a similar position in 2021. We speak to three researchers who invite us to more deeply consider loneliness and social isolation, and their impacts on our health and society.
Featuring Ananya Chakravarti, an associate professor of the history of emotions at Georgetown University in Washington in the US, Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University in the US, and Kate Mulligan, an assistant professor at the Dalla Lana School of Health in Canada.
This episode was produced by Mend Mariwany, who is also the show’s executive producer. Eloise Stevens does our sound design and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript will be available soon. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
Despite the many biological differences between people of different sexes, races, ages and life histories, chances are that if two people walk into a doctors office with the same symptoms, they are going to get the same exact treatment. As you can imagine, a whole range of treatments – from drugs to testing – could be much more effective if they were designed to work with many different kinds of bodies, not just some abstract, generic human. We speak to three researchers who are looking at ways to make medicine more precise. It starts with simply making sure that clinical trial participants look like the actual patients a drug is meant to treat. And in the future, precision medicine could help each person get medical care that is tailored to their own biology, just like a custom shirt.
Featuring Jennifer Miller, professor of medicine at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, in the US, Julia Liu, professor of medicine at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, in the US, and Keith Yamamoto, head of Precision Medicine at the University of California San Francisco in the US.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced and written by Katie Flood. Mend Mariwany is the show's executive producer. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the demographics of cities shifted. As stay-at-home orders, remote work and bubbling reduced social interaction, and restaurants, venues and arts destinations shut down temporarily, people started reconsidering their decision to remain in a big city. We spoke with two urban theorists about why people were leaving larger cities for smaller ones, how authenticity was marketed using social media influencers, and why smaller and mid-sized cities are underrated.
Featuring Avi Friedman, a professor of architecture at McGill University in Montréal, Canada, and David A. Banks, lecturer in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Albany in New York, US.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced and written by Mend Mariwany who is also the show's executive producer. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
Whether you’re looking at tropical forests in Brazil, grasslands in California or coral reefs in Australia, it’s hard to find places where humanity hasn't left a mark. The scale of the alteration, invasion or destruction of natural ecosystems can be mindbogglingly huge. Thankfully, researchers, governments and everyday people around the world are putting more effort and money into conservation and restoration every year, but the task is large. How do you plant a billion trees? How do you restore thousands of square miles of wetlands? How do you turn a barren ocean floor back into a thriving reef? In some cases, the answer lies with certain animals – called ecosystem engineers – that can kick start the healing. We talk to three experts about how ecosystem engineers can play a key role in restoring natural places and why the human and social sides of restoration are just as important as the science.
Featuring Josh Larsen, associate professor in water science at the University of Birmingham in the UK, Dominic McAfee, a postdoctoral researcher in marine ecology at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and Andy Kliskey, professor of landscape architecture and Co-director of the Center for Resilient Communities at the University of Idaho in the US.
This episode was produced by Katie Flood. The executive producer is Mend Mariwany. Eloise Stevens does our sound design and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript will be available soon. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
During the years of suffering and tragedy that defined the Warsaw Ghetto in the midst of World War II, a team of Jewish doctors secretly documented the effects of starvation on the human body when the Nazis severely limited the amount of food available in the Jewish ghetto.
Featuring Merry Fitzpatrick, an assistant professor at Tufts University who studies food security and malnutrition.
This episode was produced by Mend Mariwany and hosted by Dan Merino. The executive producer is Mend Mariwany. Eloise Stevens does our sound design, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.
Further reading:
Across the globe, health-care workers have gone on strike to protest the stress placed on them by the global COVID-19 pandemic and economic downturn, pushing already-strained services beyond their limits. These labour actions are part of the challenges faced by countries attempting to provide welfare services to their populations. We talk to three experts about why social welfare services are being cut, and what actions governments may need to take to ensure better access.
Featuring Miguel Niño-Zarazúa, senior economics lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in the UK, Christine Corlet Walker, a research fellow at the Center for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity at the University of Surrey, also in the UK, and Erdem Yörük, assistant professor at Koç University in Istanbul in Turkey.
This episode was produced by Mend Mariwany and Katie Flood. The executive producer is Mend Mariwany. Eloise Stevens does our sound design and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript will be available soon. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
Reindeer's noses may not glow red, but these cold-loving creatures have evolved the ability to change the color of their eyes to help them thrive in northern winters. A neuroscientist explains how he discovered that a part of the reindeer eye called the tapetum lucidum is perfectly adapted to the dim, blue in the Arctic.
Featuring Glen Jeffery, a professor of neuroscience at the Institute of Opthamology at University College London in the UK.
This episode was produced by Katie Flood. The interim executive producer is Mend Mariwany. Eloise Stevens does our sound design and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript will be available soon. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading
How reindeer eyes transform in winter to give them twilight vision
Five ways reindeer are perfectly evolved for pulling Santa’s sleigh
If you want to know what happened in the earliest years of the universe, you are going to need a very big, very specialized telescope. Much to the joy of astronomers and space fans everywhere, the world has one – the James Webb Space Telescope. In this episode, we talk to three experts about what astronomers have learned about the first galaxies in the universe and how just six months of data from James Webb is already changing astronomy.
Featuring Jeyhan Kartaltepe, Associate Professor of Astrophysics at Rochester Institute of Technology, Jonathan Trump, Associate Professor of Physics at University of Connecticut and Michael J. I. Brown, Associate Professor in Astronomy at Monash University.
This episode was produced by Katie Flood and Daniel Merino, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. It was written by Katie Flood and Daniel Merino. Mend Mariwany is the show’s executive producer. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
How do you get a country to change its national diet? That’s what China has been trying by introducing potato as a staple as part of an effort to improve food security. In this episode, we talk to three experts about why countries need to shift what their citizens eat, and what the optimum diet for our planet might be.
Featuring Xiaobo Xue Romeiko, assistant professor of Environmental Health Sciences at University at Albany, State University of New York in the US, Paul Behrens, associate professor of energy and environmental change at Leiden University in The Netherlands and Marco Springmann, professor of climate change food systems and health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the UK, and a senior researcher at the University of Oxford.
This episode was produced by Mend Mariwany and Katie Flood with sound design by Eloise Stevens. It was written by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware is the show's executive producer. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
In the latest episode of Discovery, an ongoing series where we explore the stories behind new research discoveries from around the world, we hear about how a Muslim celebrity footballer helped reduce Islamophobia. In this episode, Salma Mousa, assistant professor of political science at Yale University in the US, explains how she found a "Mo Salah effect" and why she's now testing how durable it is.
This episode was produced and written by Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our other producers are Mend Mariwany and Katie Flood. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.
More episodes of our Discovery series will be published via The Conversation Weekly every couple of weeks.
Further reading and listening:
How to depolarise deeply divided societies – podcast
Brazil’s iconic football shirt was a symbol of Bolsonaro – here’s how the World Cup is changing that
The amount of alcohol young people drink in many high-income countries has seen a marked decline since the early 2000s. But in many developing countries, the opposite is happening. In this episode we talk to three experts studying trends in youth drinking to find out why and explore the questions this raises about the way young people see themselves and their place in the world.
Featuring Amy Pennay, research fellow at La Trobe University in Australia, Jonas Raninen, a researcher at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and Emeka Dumbili a lecturer at Nnamdi Azikiwe University in Nigeria.
This episode was produced by Katie Flood, Dan Merino and Mend Mariwany. It was written by Katie Flood and Dan Merino. The executive producer is Gemma Ware. Eloise Stevens does our sound design and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript will be available soon. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
Mental illnesses like obsessive compulsive disorder, depression and addiction are notoriously hard to treat and often don't respond to drugs. But a new wave of treatments that stimulate the brain with electricity are showing promise on patients and in clinical trials. We talk to three experts and one patient about the history of treating mental illness, how new technology and deeper understanding of the brain are leading to better treatments and where the neuroscience of mental illness is headed next.
Featuring Rachel A. Davis, a psychiatrist and researcher at University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in the US and her patient Moksha Patel, a physician and professor at the University of Colorado who has severe obsessive compulsive disorder. We also hear from Joseph J. Fins, a neuroethicist and professor of medicine at Wei Cornell Medical College, part of Cornell University in the US and Jacinta O'Shea, a neuroscientist and associate professor at the University of Oxford.
This episode was produced by Katie Flood, Dan Merino and Mend Mariwany. It was written by Katie Flood and Dan Merino. The executive producer is Gemma Ware. Eloise Stevens does our sound design and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript will be available soon. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
There are many competing theories about what causes Alzheimer's disease. For more than 30 years, Ruth Itzhaki has been accumulating evidence that viruses are involved in its development in the brain. We investigate in the In the third and final part of Uncharted Brain: Decoding Dementia.
Featuring Ruth Itzhaki, professor emeritus of molecular neurobiology at the University of Manchester in the UK, Dana Cairns, a postdoctoral research fellow at Tufts University in the US and Davangere P. Devanand, director of geriatric psychiatry and professor of psychiatry and neurology, Columbia University Medical Center in the US.
The series is hosted by Paul Keaveny and Gemma Ware and was initially published via The Anthill podcast from the team at The Conversation in the UK.
Uncharted Brain was produced by Tiffany Cassidy with sound design by Eloise Stevens. The executive producer is Gemma Ware. The Conversation Weekly theme music is by Neeta Sarl.
Further reading:
In the second of a three-part series, Uncharted Brain: Decoding Dementia, we explore chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a form of dementia that athletes from a whole range of sports can develop. We hear about the toll it can take on family members, who are often unaware of what’s happening to their loved ones.
Featuring Matthew Smith, a senior lecturer in sport and exercise psychology at the University of Winchester in the UK and Lisa McHale, director of family relations at the Concussion Legacy Foundation.
The series is hosted by Paul Keaveny and Gemma Ware and was initially published via The Anthill podcast from the team at The Conversation in the UK.
Uncharted Brain was produced by Tiffany Cassidy with sound design by Eloise Stevens. The executive producer is Gemma Ware. The Conversation Weekly theme music is by Neeta Sarl.
Further reading:
This week we're running a three-part series called Uncharted Brain: Decoding Dementia exploring new research searching for answers to how dementia works in the brain and the damage it leaves behind.
The series is hosted by Paul Keaveny and Gemma Ware and was initially published via The Anthill podcast from the team at The Conversation in the UK.
In the first episode, we explore how a study which began just after the end of the second world war is revealing new insights into the risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease. Featuring Marcus Richards, professor of psychology in epidemiology and Jonathan Schott, professor of neurology, both at UCL in the UK and David Ward, one of the cohort study participants.
Uncharted Brain was produced by Tiffany Cassidy with sound design by Eloise Stevens. The executive producer is Gemma Ware. The Conversation Weekly theme music is by Neeta Sarl.
Further reading:
Momentum is growing for objects stolen during the colonial era that are now held in museums in Europe and North America to be returned to the places and communities that they were taken from. We talk to three experts about what happens to these objects once they're returned and the questions their restitution is raising about the relationship between communities and museums in Africa.
Featuring John Kelechi Ugwuanyi, senior lecturer in archaeology and tourism at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, Farai Chabata, visiting lecturer in heritage studies at the University of Zimbabwe and senior curator of ethnography for the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe and Aribiah David Attoe, lecturer in philosophy at the University of Witwatersrand.
This episode was produced by Mend Mariwany and Katie Flood. The executive producer is Gemma Ware. Eloise Stevens does our sound design and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript will be available soon. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading
From the US, to Brazil, to India, deepening political polarisation is used as a frame through which to see a lot of 21st century politics. But what can actually be done to depolarise deeply divided societies, particularly democracies? In this episode we speak to a political scientist and a philosopher trying to find answers to that question.
Featuring Jennifer Lynn McCoy, professor of political science at Georgia State University in the US and Robert B. Talisse, professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University in the US.
This episode was produced by Mend Mariwany and Katie Flood. The executive producer is Gemma Ware. Eloise Stevens does our sound design and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. Read a transcript of this episode. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading and listening:
Welcome to the first episode of Discovery, a new series via The Conversation Weekly where we hear the stories behind new research discoveries from around the world. In this episode, Ruth Mace, professor of anthropology at University College London in the UK, explains how her research with the families of Tibetan monks in China suggests celibacy might have some surprising evolutionary advantages.
This episode was produced by Mend Mariwany, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. The executive producer was Gemma Ware. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.
More episodes of our Discovery series will be published via The Conversation Weekly every couple of weeks.
Further reading:
Humans do a lot of different things to the environment, and there aren’t many natural processes that can rival the scale of changes brought on by human activity. In this episode, we speak to three experts who study different ways that human action – from radiation to pollution to urbanization – is affecting how plants and animals evolve, and how humanity has become the single biggest driver of evolutionary changes on Earth.
Featuring Germán Orizaola, a biologist at the University of Oviedo in Spain, Andrew Whitehead, a professor of environmental toxicology at University of California, Davis in the US and Marc Johnson, a professor of biology at the University of Toronto in Canada.
This episode was produced by Mend Mariwany and Daniel Merino and the executive producer is Gemma Ware. Eloise Stevens does our sound design and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript will be available soon. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading and listening:
Digital nomads who work as they travel are often attracted by a life of freedom far removed from the daily office grind. Many head to cities that have become known hotspots for remote workers. In this episode, we find out what impact digital nomads have on these cities and the people who live there, and how governments are responding to the phenomenon.
Featuring Dave Cook, PhD candidate in anthropology at UCL in the UK, Adrián Hernández Cordero, head of sociology at Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico and Fabiola Mancinelli, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Barcelona in Spain.
This episode was produced by Mend Mariwany, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. Read a transcript of this episode. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading and listening:
Soon after Jair Bolsonaro’s election as president of Brazil in 2018, he began making it a lot easier for people in the country to buy guns. In this episode, we speak to two experts about Brazil’s boom in private gun ownership and why it’s exacerbating fears about political violence ahead of a run-off presidential election on October 30.
Featuring Erika Robb Larkins, associate professor of anthropology and director of the Behner Stiefel Center for Brazilian Studies at San Diego State University in the US and Juliano Cortinhas, professor of international relations at the University of Brasilia in Brazil.
This episode was produced by Gemma Ware and Mend Mariwany, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. Read a transcript of this episode. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading and listening:
A new barrier to climate action is opening up in an obscure and secretive part of international trade law which fossil fuel investors are using to sue countries if policy decisions go against them. We speak to experts about the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism and how it works. Many are worried that these clauses in international trade deals could jeopardise global efforts to save the climate – costing countries billions of dollars in the process.
Featuring Kyla Tienhaara, Canada research chair in economy and environment at Queen's University, Ontario in Canada, Emilia Onyema, reader in international commercial Law at SOAS, University of London in the UK, Lea Di Salvatore, PhD researcher at the University of Nottingham in the UK and Maria-Rita D'Orsogna, anti-oil activist and professor of mathematics at California State University, Northridge in the US.
This episode was produced by Gemma Ware and Mend Mariwany, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript is also available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
As research into psychedelics and their medical uses makes a comeback, scientists are having to deal with the legacy – both scientific and social – of a 40-year near total freeze on psychedelic research. In this episode, we speak with three experts about the early rise and fall of psychedelics in western science and culture, how the mystical and often vague language of the 60s and 70s still pervades research today and what it’s like to actually run clinical trials using psilocybin.
Featuring Robin Carhart-Harris at the University of California, San Francisco in the US; Wayne Hall, at the University of Queensland in Australia; and Josjan Zijlmans at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
This episode was produced by Mend Mariwany, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript is also available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
The Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is one of many bodies of ice that are melting, but this massive glacier is uniquely important when it comes to sea level rise. In this episode we talk to three experts studying the glacier in Antarctica to find out what's happening and why it's so significant.
Featuring Yixi Zheng, a PhD candidate in Oceanography at the University of East Anglia in the UK, Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder and Paul Holland, an ocean and ice scientist at the British Antarctic Survey.
This episode was produced by Mend Mariwany, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript is also available. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
For thousands of years, people living in parts of the world used to high temperatures have deployed traditional passive cooling techniques in the way they design their buildings. But "modern" styles of architecture using concrete and glass often usurped local building techniques better suited to hotter climates. In this episode, we explore why that happened, and how some architects are championing traditional techniques to help keep buildings cool.
Featuring Anthony Ogbuokiri, senior lecturer in architectural design at Nottingham Trent University in the UK, Vyta Pivo, assistant professor of architecture at the University of Michigan in the US and Susan Abed Hassan, professor of architectural engineering at Al-Nahrain University in Baghdad, Iraq.
This episode was produced by Mend Mariwany, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript is available here. Sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.
Further reading:
M was a double agent during the cold war, working on the side of the west. But when the Iron Curtain fell, he felt abandoned by the secret services he risked his life for.
M's story is told by Eleni Braat, associate professor of international history at Utrecht University and Ben de Jong, research fellow at Leiden University. They've been interviewing him in depth for their research on what happens to spies when their secret service days come to an end.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced by Gemma Ware and Mend Mariwany. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here.
Further reading:
As the latest Jurassic World Dominion film hits cinemas, we’re re-running a story originally aired in 2021 about what dinosaurs really looked liked – and how scientists' understanding of their appearance keeps evolving.
Featuring Maria McNamara, professor of palaeobiology at University College Cork in Ireland and Nicolas Campione, senior lecturer in paleaobiology at the University of New England in Australia.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode available here.
Read a transcript of the original version of this story.
Further reading:
A little update about The Conversation Weekly podcast and what we'll be up to over the next few months.
If you've not yet completed our listener survey, we'd love to hear what you think about the show. It should take about five minutes to complete. Thank you!
India and Pakistan have been sweltering under an unprecedented heatwave, the severity of which scientists attribute to climate change. In this episode we explore how much worse heatwaves in the region could get and how farmers can prepare for it.
Featuring Alan Thomas Kennedy-Asser, a research associate in climate science at the University of Bristol in the UK, Andrew King, a senior Lecturer in climate science at the University of Melbourne in Australia and Shruti Bhogal, who's just finished working as a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Cambridge in the UK.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. A transcript will be available shortly.
Further reading
As Australians prepare to vote in federal elections on May 21, in this episode we explore how the country’s political landscape is shifting – and why it's not looking good for Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
Featuring Michelle Grattan, a professorial fellow at the University of Canberra and political correspondent for The Conversation in Australia. Grattan, who is one of Australia's most respected political journalists, also hosts the Politics with Michelle Grattan podcast for The Conversation.
We'd love to hear what you think about The Conversation Weekly. Please let us know via our listener survey, which should take about five minutes to complete. Thank you!
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here.
Further reading
We'd love to hear what you think about The Conversation Weekly. Please let us know via our listener survey, which should take about five minutes to complete. Thank you!
Parents and doctors have known about childhood ADHD – attention deficit hyperactivity disorder – for decades, but it is only recently that the medical field has started to recognise, diagnose and seriously study ADHD in adults. In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we explore what adult ADHD looks like, how it is diagnosed today and the many new treatments available to help those with the disorder live better lives.
Featuring Laura E Knouse an associate professor of psychology a the University of Richmond in the US, and Tamara May, senior research fellow at Monash University in Australia.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced by Mend Mariwany. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here.
You can also read a full transcript of this episode too.
Further reading
We'd love to hear what you think about The Conversation Weekly. Please let us know via our listener survey, which should take about five minutes to complete. Thank you!
When war breaks out, what does it mean for a country to remain neutral? In this episode we explore the advantages and disadvantages of neutrality – and what responsibilities come with the choice not to take sides. We talk to an historian about how an age of neutrality emerged in the 19th century and what lessons it has for the war in Ukraine. And we dig down into the reasons why one country – India – has decided to remain neutral on the conflict.
Featuring Maartje Abbenhuis, professor of history at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and Swaran Singh, professor of diplomacy and disarmament at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced by Gemma Ware and Mend Mariwany. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode are available here. You can read a transcript on The Conversation's website.
Further reading
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is challenging the structures of international collaboration in space. In this episode, we talk to two experts about how space is entering a new era of international competition – and whether the existing laws are ready for what comes next.
Featuring Kuan-Wei (David) Chen, executive director of the Centre for Research in Air and Space Law at McGill University in Canada and Svetla Ben-Itzhak, assistant professor of space and international relations at Air University in the US.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced by Gemma Ware. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode available here. A transcript is also available to read.
Further reading
How much does your cultural background influence the way you react to music? Or whether you think a piece of music sounds happy or sad? That's what George Athanasopoulos and his colleagues decided to investigate. They travelled to a remote part of northwest Pakistan to spend time with the Kalash and Kho people who live there and find out how they reacted to western music. Athanasopoulos, an ethnomusicologist at Durham University in the UK, tells us what they discovered.
This episode is an extended version of an interview first published on February 3.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading:
Indonesia plans to move its capital city from Jakarta on the island of Java to a new forest city on the island of Borneo called Nusantara. We talk to three experts in urban planning and ecology to find out why, what the problems are with Jakarta – and what the environmental impacts of the project could be.
Featuring Eka Permanasari, associate professor in urban design, Monash University Australia, Hendricus Andy Simarmata, lecturer in urban planning at the University of Indonesia and Alex Lechner, associate professor in landscape ecology at Monash University Indonesia.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading
Can makeup really kill you? That’s the myth attached to Maria Gunning, the Countess of Coventry, an 18th century socialite who reportedly died from her lead-based makeup in 1760, aged just 27. In this episode, we speak to Fiona McNeill, a professor of physics at McMaster University in Canada, who has recreated some centuries-old recipes for white lead makeup to test how dangerous these cosmetics really were.
Plus, an extract from a special episode of The Conversation's Don't Call Me Resilient podcast, about Will Smith's Oscar slap.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with reporting from the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra by Ellen Duffy. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading
The Aboriginal Tent Embassy – a site of First Nations protest in Canberra, Australia – marks its 50th anniversary this year. In this episode, Carissa Lee, First Nations and public policy editor at The Conversation in Australia, explores its history and hears how the ongoing protest has influenced a new generation of Indigenous activism.
Featuring Bronwyn Carlson, professor of Indigenous studies and director of the Centre for Global Indigenous Futures at Macquarie University in Australia; Lynda-June Coe, a PhD candidate at Macquarie University and her Aunty Jenny Munro, a member of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy protest site in Canberra.
Plus, new research into how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the lives of young people born into poverty around the world – and their job prospects. We talk to Catherine Porter, director of the Young Lives study at the University of Oxford. (Listen from 33m46s)
This episode of the The Conversation Weekly is supported by the UK/Australia Season Patrons Board, the British Council and the Australian Government as part of the UK/Australia Season, which centres on the theme Who Are We Now? The season's programme reflects on the two countries’ shared history, explores their current relationship, and imagines their future together.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with reporting from the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra by Ellen Duffy. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading
It's been five years since Emmanuel Macron rocked the French political establishment with his victory in the 2017 presidential elections. France is now returning to the polls for two rounds of voting and Macron is favourite to win a second five-year term on April 24. In this episode, we ask two French politics experts: how has Macron changed the French political system?
Featuring, Gilles Ivaldi, a researcher in political science at Sciences Po Paris in France, and Anne-Cécile Douillet, a professor of political science at the University of Lille.
And, we talk to bee expert Adrian Dyer, an associate professor at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, about humanity’s long love affair with bees – and his research showing how people expressed this appreciation through art for thousands of years. (From 33m55)
And Claudia Lorenzo, culture editor for The Conversation in Madrid, Spain, talks about the Ukrainian cultural heritage at risk from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (From 44m20)
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Thanks to Dale Berning Sawa for the voiceover in this episode. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading
What does it mean to be a Ukrainian? In this episode, we talk to three experts about the origins of Ukrainian nationalism, and how Ukrainian national identity is changing. Featuring Volodomyr Kulyk, head research fellow at the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv; Dominique Arel, professor and holder of the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa in Canada; and Olga Onuch, senior lecturer in politics, University of Manchester in the UK.
And we hear about a rare archive of Ukrainian dissident literature from the Soviet era. Katja Kolcio, associate professor of dance and environmental studies at Wesleyan University in the US, whose father collected the archive, explains why it's now in danger. (From 36m)
Finally, Moina Spooner, news editor for The Conversation in Nairobi, Kenya recommends some analysis marking the two-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic. (From 48m)
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading
The life of limbo for people in immigration detention is often deeply traumatic. In this episode we talk to two experts on immigration detention in Australia and the UK about why people are waiting months, sometimes years, for a decision about their future – and the impact it's having on them. Featuring Madeline Gleeson Senior Research Fellow, Andrew & Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW Sydney in Australia and Blerina Kellezi, associate professor in social and trauma psychology at Nottingham Trent University in the UK.
And as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushes more than two million refugees to flee the country, we speak to sociologist Irina Kuznetsova, associate professor at the University of Birmingham in the UK, about Russia’s history of using refugees from Ukraine as geopolitical tools. (From 32m55)
Finally, Martine Turenne, editor in chief for The Conversation in Montreal, Canada, recommends some recent stories tied to International Women's Day. (From 46m32)
This episode of the The Conversation Weekly is supported by the UK/Australia Season Patrons Board, the British Council and the Australian Government as part of the UK/Australia Season, which centres on the theme Who Are We Now? The season's programme reflects on the two countries’ shared history, explores their current relationship, and imagines their future together.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Mau Loseto. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading
Scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just published a stark new warning about the impacts climate change is already having on our planet. Some of these impacts are already irreversible. In this episode, we talk to three of the scientists involved in the report about what the future may hold – and the narrowing window of opportunity to adapt to climate change.
Featuring Mark Howden, director of the ANU Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions at Australian National University, Balsher Singh Sidhu, postdoctoral research fellow in resources, environment and sustainability at the University of British Columbia in Canada and Edward R. Carr, professor and director of international development, community, and environment, Clark University in the US.
And a section of a rocket is about to crash on the Moon. Paul Hayne, assistant professor of astrophysical and planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder in the US tells us what he’s hoping to learn from studying the collision. (Listen from 36m)
And Jonathan Este, international politics editor at The Conversation in Cambridge in the UK, recommends some recent analysis on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Listen from 46m30)
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading
Scientists at a nuclear fusion lab in the UK just broke the world record for the amount of energy produced in a single fusion reaction. In this episode, we ask two nuclear experts what this means, and how long it’ll take before we can switch on the world’s first nuclear fusion power plant.
Featuring Livia Casali, assistant professor in nuclear engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in the US and Angel Ibarra Sanchez, a research professor in fusion technology at the Center for Energy, Environmental and Technological Research in Madrid, Spain.
And in our second story, we explore why living in a country that scores highly on global happiness rankings might not be all that it's cracked up to be. Brock Bastian, a professor of psychological sciences at the University of Melbourne in Australia, talks to us about his new research on the social pressure some people feel to be happy.
And Eric Smalley, science and technology editor at The Conversation in Boston, recommends some recent analysis on the cybersecurity and technology dimensions of the unfolding Ukraine war.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading
Military juntas have seized power in a series of coups in recent months in Mali, Guinea and Burkina Faso. We ask three experts what the coups mean for the war against jihadi insurgents in the Sahel – and for the future of French and European soldiers in the region.
Featuring Folahanmi Aina, PhD candidate at King's College London in the UK, Mady Ibrahim Kanté, lecturer at the University of Legal and Political Sciences of Bamako in Mali and Thierry Vircoulon, a researcher at the University of Paris in France.
And, we talk to researcher looking for ways to alleviate discrimination faced by people who speak English with a foreign accent. Shiri Lev-Ari, a lecturer in psychology at Royal Holloway University of London in the UK, explains why people might discriminate against non-native speakers even if they are not prejudiced – and what to do about it. (From 31m40s)
And Jack Marley, an environment editor for The Conversation in Newcastle, England, recommends some recent articles on the ethical questions raised by eating meat. (From 43m40s)
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading
Mapping the contours of Jihadist groups in the Sahel
In the Sahel, France is being pushed out (in French)
France has started withdrawing its troops from Mali: what is it leaving behind?
Here’s why people might discriminate against foreign accents – new research
Cow documentary shows the need for fundamental legal rights for animals
The meat paradox: how your brain wrestles with the ethics of eating animals
As frantic diplomatic efforts continue to avert a Russian invasion of Ukraine, Europe’s reliance on Russian gas supplies – and what would happen to them in the case of a war – remains an ever-present threat.
We speak to two experts on the geopolitics of natural gas about the history of the energy relationship between Russia and Europe, and the role gas supplies play in the current diplomatic efforts to avoid war. Featuring Michael Bradshaw, professor of global Energy at Warwick Business School at University of Warwick in the UK and Anastasiya Shapochkina politics lecturer at Sciences Po in France.
And, the Beijing winter Olympics are the first games to use 100% artificial snow. We talk to a Madeleine Orr, lecturer in sport ecology at Loughborough University in the UK about what that might mean for the athletes – and for the environment around the Olympic sites. (Listen from 30m30)
Plus, Haley Lewis for The Conversation in the Canadian capital Ottawa recommends some recent analysis of protests by truckers against COVID-19 restrictions that continue to block the city's streets. (Listen from 42m50)
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading:
What is it like to discover a new COVID-19 variant? We hear the inside story from Jinal Bhiman at South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Diseases, one of the scientists who first alerted the world to the omicron variant. And Shabir A Madhi, professor of vaccinology at the University of Witwatersrand, explains what lessons South Africa's experience can offer the rest of the world about future coronavirus variants. We’re joined by Ozayr Patel, digital editor for The Conversation based in Johannesburg for this story.
And new research finds a person’s emotional reaction to music has a lot to do with their cultural background – we speak to George Athanasopoulos, a musicologist at Durham University in the UK. (From 34m15s)
Plus, Laura Hood, politics editor for The Conversation based in London, recommends some recent analysis on the political pressures facing the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, over parties held during coronavirus lockdowns. (From 47m10s)
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode available here. A transcript of this episode is available here.
Further reading:
When the Beijing Winter Olympics open on February 4, diplomats from a number of countries, including the US, UK, Canada and Australia, will not be there to watch. Their diplomatic boycott hinges on concerns about human rights abuses in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. We talk to three experts about China’s long-term vision for Xinjiang, and what its strategy there means for the region’s persecuted Uyghurs.
Featuring Darren Byler, assistant professor of international studies at Simon Fraser University in Canada; David Tobin, lecturer in east Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield in the UK; and Anna Hayes, senior lecturer in politics and international relations at James Cook University in Australia.
And what toxic heavy metals are lingering in houses around the world? Cynthia Faye Isley, postdoctoral research fellow in environmental science at Macquarie University in Australia, explains what she's found analysing vacuum cleaner dust from around the world.
Plus, Matt Williams, breaking news editor at The Conversation in New York, recommends his picks of recent analysis on the build-up of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode available here. A transcript is available here.
Further reading:
What are the evolutionary origins of sugar cravings? What makes something taste sweet? And what does too much sugar do to the brain? This week we talk to three experts and go on a deep dive into the science of sugar.
Featuring Stephen Wooding, assistant professor of anthropology and heritage studies at the University of California, Merced; Lina Begdache, assistant professor of nutrition at the Binghamton University, State University of New York and Kristine Nolin, associate professor of chemistry at the University of Richmond.
And after the Canadian government agreed in principle to pay CAN$40bn (US$32bn) over discrimination against First Nations children by the country’s child welfare system, we talk to Anne Levesque, assistant professor at the faculty of law at the University of Ottawa in Canada, about the long fight for justice. (From 29m20)
Plus, Veronika Meduna, science and health editor at The Conversation in New Zealand, recommends analysis of the recent Tonga volcano eruption. (From 45m45)
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Full credits for this episode available here. A transcript is available here.
Further reading:
We dive into the world of crypto and digital currencies in this episode to take a close look at two countries approaching them in very different ways. In 2021, El Salvador made the cryptocurrency bitcoin legal tender, while Nigeria launched its own central bank digital currency. Experts talk us through why they've taken such radically different paths.
Featuring Iwa Salami, Reader (Associate Professor) in Law at the University of East London in the UK and Erica Pimentel, Assistant Professor at the Smith School of Business at Queen's University, Ontario in Canada.
And if the latest Matrix film has left you wondering whether we are really living in a simulation, we talk to Benjamin Curtis, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Ethics at the Nottingham Trent University in the UK, on the long history of that idea. (At 30m20)
Plus, Rob Reddick, COVID-19 editor at The Conversation in the UK, picks out some recent coverage of the wave of omicron cases sweeping the world. (At 42m10)
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this episode available here. And a transcript is available here.
Further reading:
From new mRNA vaccines, to space mission and developments in robotic automation, in this episode we talk to three experts about some of the scientific advances they’re watching out for in 2022.
Featuring Deborah Fuller, professor of microbiology at the School of Medicine at University of Washington in the US and an expert on mRNA and DNA vaccines; Monica Grady, professor of planetary and space sciences at The Open University in the UK; Teresa Vidal-Calleja, associate professor at the Robotics Institute at University of Technology Sydney.
We also speak about what 2022 holds in store for global inequality with economist Carlos Gradín, research fellow at United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research in Helsinki in Finland.
And Naomi Schalit, senior politics and society editor at The Conversation in Boston in the US, recommends some reading to mark the one year anniversary of the attack on the Capitol in Washington D.C.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading:
In this episode we bring you three stories from Australia and the UK exploring the role of art in helping people deal with the challenges life throws at them.
We talk to Cherine Fahd, associate professor at the School of Design at the University of Technology Sydney about Being Together: Parramatta Yearbook, a photography project in a suburb of Sydney bringing people back together again as COVID-19 restrictions lift.
Angelina Hurley, PhD candidate at Griffith University in Brisbane tell us how art is used to process the trauma of colonisation for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia, and about the work of her father, the late artist Ron Hurley. And Kirsty Sedgman, a lecturer in theatre at the University of Bristol in England, explains why the second world war led to the birth of public funding for arts buildings in Britain – and how the Bristol Old Vic theatre became the first recipient.
And Gregory Rayko, international editor for The Conversation in Paris, France give us his recommended reading.
This episode of the The Conversation Weekly is supported by the UK/Australia Season Patrons Board, the British Council and the Australian Government as part of the UK/Australia Season, which centres on the theme Who Are We Now? The season's programme reflects on the two countries’ shared history, explores their current relationship, and imagines their future together.
This episode was produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with reporting by Rhianna Patrick and Olivia Rosenman and sound design by Eloise Stevens. You can sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading
With a mirror six and half metres in diameter, a sun shield the size of a tennis court and an instrument compartment bigger than a phone booth, the James Webb Space Telescope is enormous. After years of delays, it's now set for launch on December 22. We speak to two astronomers about the telescope and the questions they hope it will answer about the beginning of the universe and the conditions on exoplanets orbiting far-away stars.
Featuring Martin Barstow, professor of astrophysics and space science at the University of Leicester in the UK and chair of the Space Telescope Science Institute Council; and Marcia Rieke, Regents professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona in the US and principal investigator on the near-infrared camera onboard the James Webb Space Telescope.
In our second story, Edwin Kwong, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne in Australia, explains his recent research into the tactics used by the food industry to boost sales of ultra-processed foods in middle-income countries.
And Luthfi Dzulfikar, an editor for The Conversation in Jakarta, Indonesia recommends some analysis on the recent volcanic eruption on the island of Java.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading:
After nearly two years of COVID, how is the pharmaceutical industry faring? In this episode, we explore where drug companies were before the arrival of COVID and how they performed financially during the pandemic. And we hear about the ongoing tensions between profits and equitable access to vaccines.
Featuring, Ray Moynihan, assistant professor at the Institute for Evidence-Based Healthcare at Bond University in Australia; Jérôme Caby, professor of corporate finance at Sorbonne Business School in Paris, France; Ana Santos Rutschman, assistant professor of law at Saint Louis University in the US; and Nicole Hassoun, professor of philosophy at Binghamton University, State University of New York in the US.
And Ozayr Patel, digital editor at The Conversation in Johannesburg, South Africa, recommends some reading on the emergence of the Omicron variant of COVID-19.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading:
Justices on the US Supreme Court are considering two challenges to abortion restrictions that could have wide-reaching implications for access to abortion across the country. In this episode, we look at what's at stake, and how else abortion laws are changing around the world.
Featuring Amanda Jean Stevenson, assistant professor of sociology, University of Colorado Boulder; Sydney Calkin, lecturer in political geography, Queen Mary University of London and Jane Marcus Delgado, professor of political science, College of Staten Island, CUNY.
We talk to a forensic scientist, Patrick Randolph-Quinney, Associate Professor of Forensic Science, Northumbria University, Newcastle in England. He explains how he studied bones to help solve the mystery of how to tell if a person was killed by a lightning strike.
And Wale Fatade, commissioning editor at The Conversation in Lagos, gives us some recommended reading.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading
What did the Glasgow COP26 climate change summit actually achieve? In this episode, we're joined by Jack Marley, energy and environment editor for The Conversation in the UK, as we speak to researchers from around the world to get their views on the negotiations and what needs to happen now.
Featuring Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate and Development at the Independent University Bangladesh; Richard Beardsworth, professor of international relations at the University of Leeds in England; Rachel Kyte, dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University in the US; Anna Malos, country lead for Australia at ClimateWorks, part of Monash University in Australia; and Intan Suchi Nurhati, a senior scientist at the National Research and Innovation Agency in Indonesia.
And Stephen Khan, global executive editor for The Conversation, based in London, gives us some recommended reading.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading:
We speak to a climate scientist who just updated a clock he created that counts down the seconds until the world reaches 1.5°C of global warming. And we hear from experts about the latest research evidence on climate anxiety – what it is, how common it is around the world and what to do about it.
Featuring Damon Matthews, professor and Concordia University research chair in climate science and sustainability at Concordia University in Canada, Caroline Hickman, lecturer in the department of social and policy sciences at the University of Bath in England, Charles Ogunbode, assistant professor in applied psychology at the University of Nottingham in England and Teaghan Hogg, PhD candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Canberra in Australia.
And Fabrice Rousselot, editor at The Conversation in Paris, gives us some recommended reading from the team in France.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading
A year since war broke out in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, conflict in the country is intensifying. In this episode, we talk to two experts about the worsening humanitarian situation in Tigray and the international community’s response to the conflict.
Featuring Emnet Negash, a PhD candidate at Ghent University in Belgium who is tracking the food situation in Tigray, and Mukesh Kapila, professor emeritus of global health and humanitarian affairs at the University of Manchester in England and a former UN official.
In our second story, we hear from Alejandro Gallego Schmid, senior lecturer in circular economy and life cycle sustainability assessment at the University of Manchester, about his findings that reusable food containers aren’t always better for the environment than disposable ones. (Listen at 32m25)
And Nicole Hasham, environment and energy editor at The Conversation in Australia, recommends some analysis tied to the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow. (Listen at 43m30)
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading
Some economists have long argued that to really save the planet – and ourselves – from the climate crisis, we need a fundamental overhaul of the way our economies work. In this episode, we explore the ideas of the degrowth movement and their calls for a contraction in the world’s consumption of energy and resources. We also compare degrowth to other post-growth proposals for governments to reduce their fixation on economic growth.
Featuring Samuel Alexander, research fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute at the University of Melbourne in Australia, Lorenzo Fioramonti, full professor of political economy at the University of Pretoria in South Africa and also a serving Italian MP, and Beth Stratford PhD candidate at the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds in the UK.
And Veronika Meduna, science, health and environment editor at The Conversation in Wellington, gives us some recommended reading about the coronavirus situation in New Zealand.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading
As military tensions run high once again across the Taiwan Strait, we talk to two experts about China’s longer-term reunification strategy – and what that means for Taiwan. Featuring Wen-Ti Sung, sessional lecturer in Taiwan Studies at the Australian National University and Olivia Cheung, research fellow at the SOAS China Institute at SOAS University of London.
Plus, we’re joined by Vinita Srivastava, host of the Don’t Call Me Resilient podcast from The Conversation in Canada. We feature part of their recent episode on the phenomenon of white – or mostly white people – in North America who pretend to be Indigenous. The conversation features two Indigenous scholars: Veldon Coburn, assistant professor in the Institute of Indigenous Research and Studies at the University of Ottawa and Celeste Pedri-Spade an associate professor in Indigenous Studies at Queen’s University. Listen to the full episode here.
And Luthfi Dzulfikar, education and young people’s editor at The Conversation in Jakarta, gives us some recommended reads from Indonesia.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl and music in the Don't Call Me Resilient section is by Jahmal Padmore. You can sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading
Six prize announcements later, 12 men and one woman from 11 countries are now settling down to their new lives as Nobel laureates. In this episode, we delve into the scientific discoveries around touch and organic catalysts awarded the 2021 prizes in medicine and chemistry. And we talk to a friend and collaborator of Abdulrazak Gurnah, the Tanzanian writer awarded the Nobel prize for literature.
Featuring Kate Poole, associate professor in physiology, at the University of New South Wales in Australia, David Nagib, associate professor of chemistry at the Ohio State University and Susheila Nasta, emeritus professor of modern and contemporary literatures at Queen Mary University of London.
Plus, Ina Skosana, health editor at The Conversation in Johannesburg, recommends some recent analysis on a huge breakthrough for the African continent: the approval of a malaria vaccine. (At 41m30)
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading
What’s happening in our brains to create consciousness? In this episode we hear from two scientists uncovering clues to where dopamine fits into this mystery. It could help the recovery of people with severe brain injuries.
Featuring Emmanual Stamatakis, who leads the cognition and consciousness imaging group at the Division of Anaesthesia, University of Cambridge in the UK and Leandro Sanz, a medical doctor and PhD candidate in medical sciences at the Coma Science Group at the University of Liège in Belgium.
Plus, the story of how artificial intelligence – and its human helpers – completed Beethoven’s unfinished 10th symphony. Ahmed Elgammal, a professor of computer science and director of the Art and AI lab at Rutgers University in New Jersey, who led the artificial intelligence side of the project, tells us how they did it.
And Holly Squire, arts and culture editor at The Conversation in Brighton gives us some of her recommended reading from this week.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading
After Germany’s recent election, coalition talks are now underway to determine the composition of the next government and who will succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor. We speak to three experts about what the results tell us about German voters’ priorities – and dig into the history of the Greens, now one of the kingmakers in coalition negotiations.
Featuring Jasmin Riedl, professor of political science at Bundeswehr University Munich in Germany, Niko Switek, visiting professor for German studies at University of Washington in the US and Chantal Sullivan-Thomsett, PhD candidate in German and politics at the University of Leeds in the UK.
In our second story, we talk to Charles James Steward, PhD candidate at the Centre for Sport, Exercise and Life Sciences at Coventry University in the UK, on his research looking at the health benefits of saunas and hot baths, particularly after exercise.
Plus, Lucía Caballero, environment and energy editor at The Conversation in Madrid gives us some of her recommended reading.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading
For decades, scientists have warned that unchecked global warming could bring climate extremes such as severe droughts, flash floods and rising sea levels. We talk to three climate change experts on how predictions of a changing world are holding up against the reality we’re living through.
Featuring Christopher White, head of the Centre for Water, Environment, Sustainability and Public Health at the University of Strathclyde in the UK, Victor Ongoma Assistant Professor, at Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique in Morocco, and Kewei Lyu a postdoctoral researcher in ocean and climate at CSIRO in Australia.
And Justin Bergman, deputy politics editor at The Conversation in Melbourne, Australia, recommends some recent analysis of the fallout from the recent AUKUS defence pact.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading
Ahead of Canadian elections on September 20, two experts in Canadian politics profile the current prime minister, Justin Trudeau. They explore why he's so much more popular abroad than at home and assess what his real foreign policy record has been beyond being a celebrity.
Featuring Alex Marland, professor of political science at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Jeremy Wildeman, Research Fellow at the Human Rights Research and Education Centre, University of Ottawa and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Queen's University, Ontario.
In our second story (at 28m55), we hear about research providing new clues on why mosquitoes bite some people more than others. Madelien Wooding, a researcher at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pretoria, explains how her team pinpointed some of the chemical compounds that make our skin more attractive to mosquitoes.
We also hear (25m50) from Clea Chakraverty, politics editor at The Conversation in France about their new podcast series on what it takes to be president of France, Moi président·e, and Moina Spooner, assistant editor at The Conversation in Nairobi, recommends some reading on two concerning recent events in Guinea (39m38).
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading
From earthquakes, to hurricanes, disease and drug violence, the Caribbean island of Haiti has faced a decade of cascading crises. In this week’s episode of The Conversation Weekly we talk to experts about what Haiti’s history tells us about its political fragility, and what that means for the country’s ability to recover from disasters.
Featuring disaster management expert Louise Comfort, professor of public and international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh and Haitian American historian Jean Eddy Saint Paul, professor of sociology at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
In our second story (at 27m40s), we talk to historian Susan Kamei, lecturer in history at the University of Southern California Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences about her new research chronicling the experiences of Japanese Americans interned by the US government during the second world war.
And Kalpana Jain, senior religion and ethics editor at The Conversation in the US, recommends some reading from our coverage marking the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks (at 41m).
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading:
As many children head back to school, in this episode we look at what really works to help stop COVID-19 transmission in the classroom. And for those countries where masks remain mandatory in schools, we hear some tips for teachers and students on how to communicate.
Featuring, Brandon Guthrie, an associate professor of global health an epidemiology at the University of Washington in the US and Laura Abou Haidar, a professor of linguistics at the Université Grenoble Alpes in France.
In our second story, we dig into the science behind daydreaming. Thomas Andrillon, research fellow at the Paris Brain Institute in France and an adjunct research fellow at Monash University in Australia, explains his new research on what's happening in our brains when our mind wanders.
And Heather Kroeker, a health editor at The Conversation in London, recommends some recent health stories.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading:
Twenty years after they were ousted from Kabul, the Taliban are now back in control of most of Afghanistan. In this episode, two Afghan experts trace the origins of the Taliban back to the late 1970s, and explain what's happened to the group over the past two decades.
Featuring Ali A Olomi, assistant professor of history at Penn State Abington in the US and Niamatullah Ibrahimi, lecturer in international relations at La Trobe University in Australia.
And Lee-Anne Goodman, politics editor at The Conversation in Toronto, commends some further reading on what the Taliban takeover means for Afghans.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading
The Conversation Weekly podcast is taking a short break in August. In the meantime, we're bringing you extended versions of some of our favourite interviews from the past few months.
This week, how researchers discovered a biological switch that could turn on and off neuroplasticity in the brain – the ability of neurons to change their structure. We speak to Sarah Ackerman, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Neuroscience and Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Oregon, about what she and her team have found and why it matters.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly features an extended version of an interview first published on April 29. The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading:
The Conversation Weekly podcast is taking a short break in August. For the next few weeks we'll be bringing you extended versions of a few of our favourite interviews from the past few months.
This week, we speak to Fathima Azmiya Badurdeen, lecturer in the department of social sciences at the Technical University of Mombasa, who interviewed Kenyan women about why they joined the militant Islamist group Al-Shabaab. She explains how she gained the trust of these women and their families, and what her findings mean for their rehabilitation.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly features an extended version of an interview first published on April 22. The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading:
The Conversation Weekly podcast is taking a short break in August. For the next few weeks we'll be bringing you extended versions of some our favourite interviews from the past few months.
This week, the story of researchers who invented an ingenious new conservation technique to protect endangered birds. Catherine Price, postdoctoral researcher in conservation biology at the University of Sydney, is part of a team of researchers who’ve found a better way. They use misinformation – in the form of fake smells – to fool predators into leaving bird nests alone.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly features an extended version of an interview first published on April 9. The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading:
How close is a four-day working week? Over the last few years, companies and governments in a number of countries have begun to experiment with the idea of a four-day work week – and some of the results are in. We talk to experts about these recent trials, explore how they fit into the long history of ever-shrinking work hours, and wonder what this all might mean for the future of work.
Featuring Anthony Veal, adjunct professor a the Business School, University of Technology Sydney, Jana Javornik, associate professor of work and employment relations at Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds and José-Ignacio Antón associate professor at the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Salamanca in Spain.
In our second story, historian Melissa Wanjiru-Mwita from the Technical University of Kenya explains her research on the history and politics of how informal settlements in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, got their names.
And Catesby Holmes, international editor at The Conversation in New York, recommends two recent stories about immigration in the US.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading:
Are there limits to how much faster, higher or stronger humans can get? We talk to researchers in biomechanics, sports technology and psychology, to find out.
Featuring Nicole Forrester, a former Canadian Olympic high jumper and now assistant professor in the school of media at Ryerson University in Toronto, Anthony Blazevich, professor of biomechanics at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia, and Jonathan Taylor, lecturer in sport and exercise at Teesside University in the UK.
In our second story, we hear the story of the troubled 1920 Antwerp Olympics, held in the wake of the first world war and the Spanish flu pandemic from Keith Rathbone, senior lecturer in modern European history and sports history at Macquarie University in Sydney.
And Thabo Leshilo, politics editor at The Conversation in Johannesburg, recommends some analysis on the recent unrest in South Africa following the imprisonment of former president, Jacob Zuma.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further Reading
How do you mimic meat? We take a look at the science behind plant-based and cultured meat in this episode, where it might lead and how ready people are to eat meat grown in a lab.
Mariana Lamas, a research associate at the Centre for Culinary Innovation at Northern Alberta Institute of Technology in Edmonton, Canada, talks us through some of the key elements that make a plant-based meat mimic successful. Andrew Stout, PhD candidate in biomedical engineering at Tufts University in Massachusetts, US, explains how he grows meat in a petri dish, and where he sees the future of the field. And Matti Wilks, postdoctoral research associate in psychology at Yale University in Connecticut, tells us what she's found by asking people about their readiness to eat cultured meat.
In our second story (25m30), we hear about new research on cigarette advertising and how it lures in children in Indonesia – ranked in the top 10 countries in the world for the number of adults who smoke. Nurjanah, senior lecturer in health promotion at Universitas Dian Nuswantoro in Semarang City, explains what she and her colleagues found when they mapped the proximity of cigarette advertising to schools.
And Hannah Hoag, deputy editor at The Conversation in Canada, gives us some of her recommended environment stories to dip into this week (34m40).
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can find us on Twitter @TC_Audio, on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via email on [email protected]. You can also sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this episode available here.
Further reading
Why is it so difficult to prosecute militaries for alleged war crimes? In this episode of The Conversation Weekly, we speak to experts about the legal hurdles.
By hanging around military bases in the US and Israel, Craig Jones managed to meet a usually very secretive group of people: military lawyers. Jones, a lecturer in political geography at Newcastle University in the UK, explains what he learnt from these conversations – including the way different militaries interpret international law to suit their own purposes. And why victims and their families have such little recourse to justice.
And Amy Maguire, associate professor at the University of Newcastle Law School in Australia, tells us the history of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and how its investigations into alleged war crimes work. She explains the context of a newly opened ICC investigation into alleged war crimes in the Palestinian territories.
In our second story we look at why sarcasm is so difficult for children to understand. Penny Pexman, professor of psychology at the University of Calgary in Canada, talks about her new research aimed at making it easier for them to learn.
And Megan Clement, a commissioning editor at The Conversation in Paris, gives us some of her recommended reading.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can find us on Twitter @TC_Audio, on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via email on [email protected]. You can also sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this article available here.
Further reading
After the US government released its long-awaited report on unidentified aerial phenomena, we explore the cultural history and scientific taboo around UFOs. And three months after rebels killed the president of Chad in central Africa, we talk to experts about the balance of power there. Welcome to The Conversation Weekly.
In the end, when it finally dropped on June 25, the US government's report on unidentified aerial phenomena didn’t mention the word extraterrestrial once. And nobody had expected it to. We talk to Chris Impey, university distinguished professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, about what it did actually say and why doing serious research into UFOs has been such a taboo for scientists. And Greg Eghigian, professor of history at Penn State University, gives us a cultural history of UFOs and how what started as an American obsession spread around the world.
And in our second story, we head to Chad in central Africa where the country's long-serving president, Idriss Déby was killed suddenly by rebels in April. Line Engbo Gissel, associate professor of global political sociology at Roskilde University in Denmark and Troels Burchall Henningsen, assistant professor at the Royal Danish Defence College, talk us about Chad's 'gatekeeper politics' and why its legacy will live on beyond Déby.
And Naomi Joseph, arts and culture editor at The Conversation in London, gives us some recommended reading.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can find us on Twitter @TC_Audio, on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via email on [email protected]. You can also sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this article available here.
Further reading
Pentagon UFO report: No aliens, but government transparency and desire for better data might bring science to the UFO world, by Chris Impey, University of Arizona
The truth is still out there: why the current UFO craze may be a problem of intelligence failings, by Kyle Cunliffe, University of Salford
Pentagon report says UFOs can’t be explained, and this admission is a big deal , by Adam Dodd, The University of Queensland
UFOs: how to calculate the odds that an alien spaceship has been spotted, by Anders Sandberg, University of Oxford
Legacy of Chad’s gatekeeper politics lives on beyond Déby – and carries grave risks, by Line Engbo Gissel, Roskilde University and Troels Burchall Henningsen, Royal Danish Defence College
France’s decision to pull troops out of the Sahel invites a less military approach, by Folahanmi Aina, King's College London
China is using mythology and sci-fi to sell its space programme to the world, by Molly Silk, University of Manchester
Why this Rodin scholar would gladly see the back of The Thinker, by Natasha Ruiz-Gómez, University of Essex
When catastrophes like a pandemic strike, how do we make sure societies learn – and implement – lessons from disaster? We talk to three researchers coming at this question in different ways.
First, a story from northern Australia about how Indigenous knowledge that can help to prevent natural disasters has been with us for thousands of years. We speak to Kamaljit Sangha, senior ecological economist at the Darwin Centre for Bushfire Research at Charles Darwin University in northern Australia.
Second, what happens when a country with a long history of preparing for disasters, faces something it didn't predict. With Elizabeth Maly, associate professor of international research at the Institute of Disaster Science at Japan's Tohoku University.
And third, use the recovery from a disaster like the pandemic as a catalyst for change. We speak to Ian Goldin, professor of globalisation and development at the University of Oxford in the UK.
And Julius Maina, East Africa editor at The Conversation in Nairobi, recommends some analysis of this week's crucial election in Ethiopia.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can find us on Twitter @TC_Audio, on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via email on [email protected]. You can also sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this article available here.
The stories in this episode are tied to two series on The Conversation. Resilient recovery looks at how to recover from the pandemic in a way that makes societies more resilient and able to deal with future challenges. It’s supported by a grant from PreventionWeb, a platform from the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. And a second series called Disaster and Resilience focused on the nexus between disaster, disadvantage and resilience, supported by a grant form the Paul Ramsay foundation.
Further reading:
Jair Bolsonaro is openly nostalgic for the era of Brazil’s military dictatorship, which ended in 1985. Since the former army captain was elected president in 2018, he’s packed his government full of military men and maintained a close relationship with the armed forces. But in recent months it’s not always been straightforward. With Brazil heading towards presidential elections in 2022, and Bolsonaro slumping in the polls, some of those military officers who’ve tasted political power may be assessing their options.
We speak to two experts about the history of relations between politics and the military in Brazil – and what’s at stake. Maud Chirio is a lecturer in history at Université Gustave Eiffel in Paris, is a specialist in Brazil's military dictatorship. And Vinicius Mariano de Carvalho is director of King’s Brazil Institute at King's College London and former member of the army, who studies civilian-military relations.
And in our second story (24m20s), we travel back to 12th century Islamic Iberia with the help of zooarchaeologist Marcos García García, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of York in the UK. By sifting through ancient household waste at an archaeological dig outside Córdoba in Spain, he’s revealing clues about the people left out of history.
And Nick Lehr, arts and culture editor at The Conversation in the US, tells us about a new series of articles on transgender young people (34m15s). To go alongside it, The Conversation has put together an email newsletter course to help shed light on the issues that transgender young people and their families face. Anyone of any age, gender or sexuality that is interested in learning about the latest research on transgender youth can sign up here to receive the mini-course in the form of four emails over about a week.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Mau Loseto. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can find us on Twitter @TC_Audio, on Instagram at theconversationdotcom. or via email on [email protected]. You can also sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. Full credits for this article available here.
Further reading
Iranians are about to get the chance to vote for a new president on June 18. Hassan Rouhani, president since 2013, is stepping down after serving two terms in office. The frontrunner to succeed him is Ebrahim Raisi, an ultra-conservative and head of the judiciary. Getting information about how Iranians view their society and its political leaders is notoriously difficult. In this episode we speak to two academics in The Netherlands who take a different approach – anonymous online surveys. And they’re getting tens of thousands of people to participate.
Ammar Maleki, assistant professor in public law and governance at Tilburg University, and Pooyan Tamimi Arab, assistant professor of religious studies at Utrecht University recently carried out a new survey about voting intentions via the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran, a non-profit, independent research organisation. They found there's been a dramatic decline in those who intend to vote – and we talk to them about why, and what message this will send to the rulers of the Islamic Republic.
Our second story provides advice on how to ensure future generations continue to enjoy one of nature’s greatest wonders: fireflies. We talk to Avalon Owens, a PhD candidate in biology at Tufts University, about her new research into why fireflies need the dark in their search for love.
And Haley Lewis, culture and society editor at The Conversation in Ottawa, gives us some recommended reading about the 215 First Nations children found in a mass unmarked grave in British Columbia, Canada.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.
If you'd like to sign up for The Conversation's free daily newsletter, please subscribe here. To get in touch, find us on Twitter @TC_Audio or on Instagram at theconversationdotcom. Or you can email us on [email protected]. Full credits for this episode can be found here.
Further reading:
In this episode, who is making money from our oceans and is it sustainable? And why Brazilian women who lived through Zika are avoiding getting pregnant during the COVID-19 pandemic. Listen to episode 18 of The Conversation Weekly.
From deep-sea mining, to fishing, to oil and gas exploration, the ocean economy is booming. A key question is what the economic exploitation of our oceans is doing to the ocean environment. It's important to balance economic growth both with preservation of ocean habitats and the livelihoods of the people who’ve depended on the ocean for generations.
In this episode, we speak to three experts about the scale of the problem, and what's being done to make the exploitation of the oceans more sustainable. Jean-Baptise Jouffray, post-doctoral researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University, explains the size of the ocean economy and how it’d dominated by 100 large corporations. Anna Metaxas, professor of oceanography at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, tells us what mining of the deep sea floor for precious metals could do the environment. And Ifesinachi Okafor-Yarwood, lecturer in sustainable development at St Andrew's University in Scotland, explains how the pressure on marine resources in West Africa is pushing fishing communities to criminality to survive.
In our second story, we're heading to Brazil, which remains a global epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic -- just a few years after another devastating epidemic, Zika. Catesby Holmes speaks to Letícia Marteleto, professor of sociology at the The University of Texas at Austin College of Liberal Arts, about her new research into how Zika and COVID-19 have had a double effect on women’s attitudes about getting pregnant.
And Françoise Marmouyet, editorial coordinator for The Conversation in Paris, tells us about a new podcast series about the state of democracy in France, the US and China.
On World Ocean’s Day, June 8, The Conversation will be holding a webinar about the next ocean decade. Find out more here.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.
If you'd like to sign up for The Conversation's free daily newsletter, please subscribe here. To get in touch, find us on Twitter @TC_Audio or on Instagram at theconversationdotcom. Or you can email us on [email protected]. Full credits for this episode can be found here.
Further reading:
You can read more stories from our Oceans 21 series here, examining the history and future of the world’s oceans.
Blue economy: how a handful of companies reap most of the benefits in multi-billion ocean industries, by John Virdin, Duke University; Henrik Österblom and Jean-Baptiste Jouffray, Stockholm University
Getting to the bottom of things: Can mining the deep sea be sustainable?, by Anna Metaxas, Dalhousie University and Verena Tunnicliffe, University of Victoria
Women are a mainstay of fishing in West Africa. But they get a raw deal, by Ifesinachi Okafor-Yarwood and Sayra van den Berg Bhagwandas, University of St Andrews
New mangrove forest mapping tool puts conservation in reach of coastal communities, by Trevor Gareth Jones, University of British Columbia
Scarred by Zika and fearing new COVID-19 variants, Brazilian women say no to another pandemic pregnancy, by Letícia Marteleto, The University of Texas at Austin College of Liberal Arts
Quelle démocratie ? (1 / 3) : “La démocratie française est-elle en crise ?” (Podcast in French)
New scientific guidelines have been released this week on embryo research and the use of stem cells. We talk to experts about what’s changed – including a recommendation to relax the 14-day time limit for human embryo research. And we hear about a wave of romantic comedy films emerging from South Africa that are re-imagining the city of Johannesburg. Welcome to episode 17 of The Conversation Weekly.
It's been five years since the last set of guidelines from the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) were published. Since then, scientists have made significant developments in stem cell and embryo research. Now, new ISSCR guidelines have just been published. In this episode, we look at what's changing in this field of research, and what the new guidelines say. One of the most significant shifts concerns what's called the 14-day rule, a time limit for how long human embryos can be grown in the lab. While these aren't law, they guide the regulations about this kind of research in countries around the world.
We hear from Megan Munsie, deputy director for the Centre for Stem Cell Systems at the University of Melbourne and one of the scientists who sat on the panel that reviewed the guidelines about what's changed. Jun Wu, assistant professor in molecular biology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre, explains his new research on human embryo models and why it provides an alternative to using human embryos. And César Palacios-González, senior research fellow in practical ethics at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, talks through some of the questions philosophers consider about the ethics of human embryo research.
In our second story (at 25m20), we head to South Africa, where a wave of romantic comedies have hit the big screen in recent years. Many of them are based in Johannesburg. Pier Paolo Frassinelli, professor of communication and media studies at the University of Johannesburg, talks to us about his research into these films and how they are reimagining the city.
And Wale Fatade, commissioning editor at The Conversation in Lagos, Nigeria, gives us his recommended reading.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Special thanks for this episode go to Matt Williams in New York. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. If you'd like to sign up for The Conversation's free daily newsletter, please subscribe here. To get in touch, find us on Twitter @TC_Audio or on Instagram at theconversationdotcom. Or you can email us on [email protected]. Full credits for this episode can be found here.
Further reading:
New global guidelines for stem cell research aim to drive discussions, not lay down the law, by Megan Munsie, The University of Melbourne and Melissa Little, Murdoch Children's Research Institute
Researchers have grown ‘human embryos’ from skin cells. What does that mean, and is it ethical? by Megan Munsie, The University of Melbourne and Helen Abud, Monash University
First human-monkey embryos created – a small step towards a huge ethical problem, by Julian Savulescu, University of Oxford and César Palacios-González, University of Oxford
South Africa’s romcom revolution and how it reimagines Joburg, by Pier Paolo Frassinelli, University of Johannesburg
Ethiopia’s blockchain deal is a watershed moment – for the technology, and for Africa, by Iwa Salami, University of East London
Why young Nigerians are returning to masquerade rituals, even in a Christian community, by Kingsley Ikechukwu Uwaegbute, University of Nigeria
In this episode, we look at why millions of Americans are struggling to feed themselves. We explore some of the reasons behind racial disparities in U.S. food insecurity, and hear from experts with their suggested solutions. And the discovery of the bones of a small child, carefully buried in Kenya 78,000 years ago, provide a peek into the minds of ancient humans. Listen to episode 16 of The Conversation Weekly podcast.
Before the pandemic hit, official food insecurity rates in the U.S. were at an all time low. But there was a big racial divide. In 2019, the official food insecurity rate for Black people was 19% – more than twice as high as it was for white people at just under 8%. It was just under 16% for Hispanic people. To find out why, and what’s been going on during the pandemic, we’ve talked to three experts who study food insecurity and food justice. Caitlin Caspi, associate professor in the Department of Allied Health Sciences at the University of Connecticut, explains what happened at a local level during the pandemic, and the role food pantries play in helping people put food on the table. Craig Gundersen, professor of agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, talks us through what has happened to food insecurity rates, and where the racial disparities are. And Julian Agyeman, professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, explains what the legacy of racist urban planning policies has meant for access to food in American cities.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Special thanks for this episode go to Matt Williams in New York. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. If you'd like to sign up for The Conversation's free daily newsletter, please subscribe here. To get in touch, find us on Twitter @TC_Audio or on Instagram at theconversationdotcom. Or you can email us on [email protected]. Full credits for this episode can be found here. A transcript is available here.
In our second story, we talk to Maria Martinón-Torres, director of the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana in Spain, about a landmark archaeological find in a cave in south-eastern Kenya that turned out to be the oldest burial ever discovered in Africa.
And Jonathan Este, international affairs editor at The Conversation in the UK, recommends some recent analysis by experts about the conflict in Israel-Palestine.
Further reading:
All the articles in our ongoing series on food and poverty in the US are available here.
As India’s COVID-19 crisis continues, we look at what’s holding back the country's vaccination rollout and how a shift in distribution and pricing strategy is causing concern. And we speak to a researcher who went hunting for fungi in the world's largest seed bank. Listen to episode 15 of The Conversation Weekly podcast.
The Conversation is a non-profit organisation. If you're able to support what we do, please consider donating here. Thank you.
India's catastrophic COVID-19 crisis shows little sign of improving. By early May, just over 2% of India's population had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. In this episode, we look at why it's currently so hard to get a vaccine in India and speak to three experts about the situation. Rajib Dasgupta, professor and chairperson at the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, tells us that the decision to open up vaccine eligibility to all adults from May 1 had been held back by a shortage of supply. R Ramakumar, professor of economics at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, raises concerns about a shift in pricing and distribution that happened at the same time. And Gagandeep Kang, professor of microbiology at the Christian Medical College in Vellore, explains what we know so far about the vaccines and the variants currently circulating in the country.
In our second story, Rowena Hill, a PhD candidate at Kew Gardens and Queen Mary University of London, explains how she found a hidden world of microscopic fungi living inside the seeds of the world's largest seed bank.
And Carissa Lee, Indigenous and public policy editor at The Conversation in Australia gives some recommended reading on a recent series marking 30 years since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Special thanks for this episode go to Namita Kohli in New Delhi. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. If you'd like to sign up for The Conversation's free daily newsletter, please subscribe here. To get in touch, find us on Twitter @TC_Audio or on Instagram at theconversationdotcom. Or you can email us on [email protected]. Full credits for this episode can be found here. And a transcript is available here.
Further reading:
In this episode, how Cuba is pushing ahead with the development of its own coronavirus vaccines – and could be nearing vaccine sovereignty. And we hear from a researcher about what he learnt from asking hundreds of people about the biggest decisions of their lives. You’re listening to episode 14 of The Conversation Weekly podcast.
Throughout 2020, the small island nation of Cuba was able to limit the spread of COVID-19. By early May, 675 people had died from the disease. But case numbers have been increasing in 2021 and there are currently around 1,000 new cases being recorded each day. That makes Cuba’s race to make its own coronavirus vaccine even more urgent.
This week we speak to three experts to help explain how Cuba’s race for a coronavirus vaccine is going – and where it fits into the wider picture of global vaccine diplomacy: Amilcar Pérez Riverol, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of São Paulo State in Brazil, Jennifer Hosek, professor of languages, literatures and cultures at Queen's University, Ontario in Canada, and Peter Hotez, professor of paediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor College of Medicine in the US.
In our second story, we speak to Adrian Camilleri about his research asking people about the big decisions they've taken in their lives. He tells us that the process of making a big decision can have an impact on how you think about it later in your life.
And Finlay Macdonald, senior editor at The Conversation in New Zealand, gives us his recommended reads for the week.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. If you'd like to sign up for The Conversation's free daily newsletter, please subscribe here. To get in touch, find us on Twitter @TC_Audio or on Instagram at theconversationdotcom. Or you can email us on [email protected]. Full credits for this episode can be found here. A transcript of the episode is available here.
Further reading
In this episode, as Scotland prepares to vote in landmark parliamentary elections on May 6, we explore why the question of independence from the UK is dominating the debate. And a team of researchers working with fruit flies, has discovered a biological switch that can turn neuroplasticity on and off in the brain. What might that mean? Welcome to episode 13 of The Conversation Weekly.
It's been seven years since Scotland voted to remain the UK in the 2014 independence referendum. Now, as Scotland prepares to vote in elections for the Scottish Parliament on May 6, all eyes are on first minister Nicola Sturgeon and her pro-independence Scottish National Party. If pro-independence parties win a majority in the Scottish parliament – Sturgeon will ask the UK government in Westminster, led by prime minister, Boris Johnson, for a second referendum on Scottish independence. But he's highly unlikely to agree. To find out more about what’s at stake in these upcoming elections, we speak to three experts, including one high-profile politician turned academic, to explain the situation.
Kezia Dugdale, is director of the John Smith Centre and a lecturer in public policy at the University of Glasgow, and a former leaders of the Scottish Labour Party. She describes the political landscape going into the elections. Darren Nyatanga, a PhD candidate at the University of Liverpool, talks us through the constitutional questions at the heart of the independence debate. And economist Graeme Roy, dean of external engagement at the School of Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow, explains Scotland's economic circumstances, and the economic arguments being used by nationalists and unionists.
For our second story, we hear about some new research into neuroplasticity – the brain's ability to change its structure. Sarah Ackerman, postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Neuroscience and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Oregon, explains what her team has found about what controls these changes.
And Moina Spooner, commissioning editor at The Conversation in Nairobi, Kenya, gives us her recommended reads for the week.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.
If you'd like to sign up for The Conversation's free daily newsletter, please subscribe here. To get in touch, find us on Twitter @TC_Audio or on Instagram at theconversationdotcom. Or you can email us on [email protected]. Full credits for this episode can be found here. A transcript of this episode is available here.
Further reading
In this episode, insurgent groups in northern Nigeria continue to kidnap schoolchildren as the government struggles to protect communities against militants such as Boko Haram. And we speak to a researcher who has interviewed Kenyan women about why they joined the jihadist group Al-Shabaab. Welcome to episode 12 of The Conversation Weekly.
Schoolchildren in northern Nigeria continue to be abducted by insurgents, including the jihadist group Boko Haram, whose name means ‘Western education is forbidden’. In this episode, Wale Fatade from The Conversation in Lagos speaks to two experts to find out why children are still at such risk. Hakeem Onapajo, senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Nile University in Nigeria, explains that Boko Haram targets children for us as slaves in its camps, including girls as sex slaves. And Samuel Okunade, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pretoria, laments that the government’s failure to improve the security situation has left communities to fend for themselves.
In our second story, we cross the continent to Kenya to hear about women who joined the jihadist group, Al-Shabaab. Fathima Azmiya Badurdeen, lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences at the Technical University of Mombasa in Kenya, has been interviewing women who have since left Al-Shabaab about their experiences and why they joined the group. She explains that while some joined willingly, others were forcibly recruited, and the line between voluntary and involuntary is often blurred.
And Bryan Keogh, business editor at The Conversation in New York, gives us his recommended reads.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.
If you'd like to sign up for The Conversation's free daily newsletter, please subscribe here. To get in touch, find us on Twitter @TC_Audio or on Instagram at theconversationdotcom. Or you can email us on [email protected]. Full credits for this episode can be found here. And a transcript is available here.
Further reading
In this episode, how new discoveries continue to change our understanding of what dinosaurs looked like – and are helping to shed light on bigger questions about evolution. And after Israel’s fourth election in two years ended in another political stalemate, a foreign policy expert explains what this could mean for the Middle East. Welcome to episode 11 of The Conversation Weekly, the world explained by experts.
Ever since palaeontologists started classifying fossils and bones as dinosaurs in the early 19th century, artists have been using them to try and imagine what dinosaurs looked like. But, however much Hollywood may have instilled a certain vision of dinosaurs into our minds in recent decades, we’re still a long way off having all the answers about what dinosaurs actually looked like.
We speak to two palaeontologists about what new evidence is emerging and how our dinosaur imaginings have changed. Maria McNamara, professor of palaeobiology at University College Cork in Ireland, explains about the, at times controversial, history of feathered dinosaurs – and what new information is starting to emerge about dinosaur colour. And Nicolas Campione, senior lecturer in palaeobiology at the University of New England in Australia, tells us the two main techniques palaeontologists have used for estimating the size of dinosaurs.
In our second story, we head to Israel, where coalition negotiations are continuing following elections on March 23. Whatever happens next will have ramifications for Israel’s foreign policy, which is closely tied with domestic politics. Amnon Aran, senior lecturer in international politics of the Middle East, at City, University of London, talks us through how history could inform what happens next, and what the foreign policy stakes are for whoever takes the reins of the next Israeli government.
And Eva Catalán, associate editor at The Conversation in Spain, gives us her recommended reads.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.
If you'd like to sign up for The Conversation's free daily newsletter, please subscribe here. To get in touch, find us on Twitter @TC_Audio or on Instagram at theconversationdotcom. Or you can email us on [email protected]. Full credits for this episode can be found here. A transcript of this episode is available here.
Further reading:
In this episode, why some economists are worried about a growing army of "zombie companies" with lots of debts – and what this could mean for the shape of our economies. And the researchers who've found a new way to prevent predators from eating the eggs of endangered birds – via a form of biological, psychological warfare. Welcome to episode 10 of The Conversation Weekly, the world explained by experts.
With interest rates at record lows, many companies have been able to borrow money at very little cost. This cheap cash, which was flooding financial markets before the pandemic began, led some companies to rack up big debts. Economists call these “zombie companies” – firms that may struggle to pay the interest on their large debts. It’s a problem that’s been exacerbated by the pandemic, as revenues dried up in many sectors of the economy. Karl Schmedders, professor of finance at the International Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland, explains how zombie companies are born, why the pandemic could have made the problem worse and what might happen next. And Sandy Brian Hager, senior lecturer in international political economy at City, University of London, explains his research about why the size of a company has a bearing on the shape of the recovery ahead.
In our second story, we hear about a new technique to protect endangered birds whose nests are often attacked by invasive predators. Scientists used fake smells to trick predators such as ferrets and hedgehogs into ignoring the birds' eggs. Catherine Price, postdoctoral researcher in conservation biology at the University of Sydney, tells us what happened when they tested the idea in the Mackenzie Basin on New Zealand's South Island.
And Luthfi Dzulfikar, associate editor at The Conversation in Indonesia, gives us his recommended reads.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.
If you'd like to sign up for The Conversation's free daily newsletter, please subscribe here. To get in touch, find us on Twitter @TC_Audio or on Instagram at theconversationdotcom. Or you can email us on [email protected]. Full credits for this episode can be found here.
Further reading
This week, the inside story of how scientists working at Cern’s Large Hadron Collider found tantalising new evidence which could mean we have to rethink what we know about the universe. And an update on the situation for Rohingya refugees from Myanmar living in Bangladesh after a deadly fire swept through a refugee camp there. Welcome to episode 9 of The Conversation Weekly, the world explained by experts.
In late March, particle physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a massive particle accelerator at Cern in Geneva, announced, tentatively, that they’d had a bit of a breakthrough. If what they think they’ve seen is proven correct, it could mean evidence for brand new physics – perhaps even a new force of nature. We get the inside story from Harry Cliff, a particle physicist at the University of Cambridge who works on the LHCb, one of Cern's four giant experiments. And Celine Boehm, professor and head of physics at the University of Sydney, explains the bigger picture of where this all fits into the world of theoretical physics, including the ongoing hunt for dark matter.
In our second story, Rubayat Jesmin, a PhD candidate at Binghamton University in New York explains why the situation got even more precarious situation for hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, after a fire ripped through one of the camps where many were living in Bangladesh.
And Nehal El-Hadi, science and technology editor at The Conversation in Toronto, gives us some recommended reading.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.
If you'd like to sign up for The Conversation's free daily newsletter, please subscribe here. To get in touch, find us on Twitter @TC_Audio or on Instagram at theconversationdotcom. Or you can email us on [email protected]. Full credits for this episode can be found here. And a transcript is available here.
Further reading
In this episode of The Conversation Weekly, four experts dissect the impact a year of working from home has had on employees and the companies they work for — and what a more hybrid future might look like. And we talk to a researcher who asked people to sit in bath tubs full of ice cold water to find out why some of us are able to stand the cold better than others.
For many people who can do their job from home, the pandemic meant a sudden shift from office-based to remote working. But a year of working from home, has taken its toll on some. We hear from Marie-Colombe Afota, assistant professor in leadership, IÉSEG School of Management in France on her new research into remote working during the pandemic, and Dave Cook, PhD candidate in anthropology at University College London, explains why burnout has become a public health issue. Jean-Nicolas Reyt, assistant professor at McGill University in Montreal, tells us how the view of chief executives towards remote working shifted over the past year and why. And Ruchi Sinha gives us a view of the conversations going on in Australia where hybrid working is already becoming a reality.
In our second story, we talk to Victoria Wyckelsma, postdoctoral research fellow in muscle physiology at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, about her new study which revealed how our genes influence how resistant we are to cold temperatures.
And Sunanda Creagh from The Conversation in Australia gives us some recommended reading about the recent floods in Sydney.
The Conversation Weekly is produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.
If you'd like to sign up for The Conversation's free daily newsletter, please subscribe here. To get in touch, find us on Twitter @TC_Audio or on Instagram at theconversationdotcom. Or you can email us on [email protected]. Full credits for this episode can be found here.
Further reading
In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast we drill down into the impact coronavirus lockdowns had on global carbon emissions – and ask what this means for the fight against climate change as governments turn their focus on the recovery. And we hear how the pandemic exacerbated the hardships faced by migrant workers in Canada.
Corinne Le Quéré, Professor of Climate Change Science at the University of East Anglia, tells globla carbon emissions dropped 7% in 2020 – by 2.6 billion tonnes. While this was the biggest drop ever, everything is relative. She puts the figures into perspective for us about what was happening before the pandemic, and what needs to happen now for the world to reach its targets under the Paris Agreement. Click here to explore a graphic she's made with her team, exploring this history of emissions around the world.
And we also talk to Steve Westlake, a PhD researcher at Cardiff University, about his research into what influences our behaviour when it comes to reducing carbon emissions -- and why he thinks individual actions still matter.
We’re also joined in this episode by The Conversation’s Vinita Srivastava, host of Don’t Call Me Resilient, a new podcast about race. She introduces a conversation she had with Min Sook Lee, Assistant Professor in Documentary Film at OCAD University in Toronto, on the harsh conditions, isolation and precarious working conditions faced by migrant farm workers in Canada.
And Wale Fatade from The Conversation in Lagos, Nigeria, gives us some recommended reading.
The Conversation Weekly is hosted by Gemma Ware and Dan Merino. The show is co-produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Visit The Conversation for full credits. A transcript of this episode is available here.
If you'd like to sign up for The Conversation's free daily newsletter, please subscribe here. To get in touch, find us on Twitter @TC_Audio or on Instagram at theconversationdotcom. Or you can email us on [email protected]
Further reading
In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, three experts in global health explain why COVID-19 has been a moment of reckoning for the World Health Organization (WHO), and where it goes from here. And to mark one year since the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, we hear from Conversation editors around the world on the situation where they live right now.
The WHO had a torrid 2020. Although it declared COVID-19 a public health emergency of international concern in late January, much of the world was slow to react. And it wasn’t until March 11, when the WHO’s director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described it as a pandemic, that countries began to take the virus seriously and began locking down.
In this episode, we talk to three experts about where the WHO goes from here. Peter Gluckman, former scientific advisor to the prime minister of New Zealand and Director of Koi Tū, the Center for Informed Futures at the University of Auckland, says world leaders should use this moment as a catalyst for reform. Ana Amaya, Assistant Professor at Pace University and an Associate Research Fellow at the United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration studies, tells us the current global health system is no longer acceptable to many developing countries in the global south. And Andrew Lakoff, Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California, explains what process of inquiry the WHO went through after the H1N1 and Ebola epidemics, and why apportioning responsibility for failures is crucial in planning for the future.
The Conversation Weekly is hosted by Gemma Ware and Dan Merino. The show is co-produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Visit The Conversation for full credits. If you'd like to sign up for The Conversation's free daily newsletter, please subscribe here.
Further reading
You can read a series of articles on The Conversation marking the one-year anniversary of WHO declaring COVID-19 a pandemic here. Meanwhile, here are some of the articles we've mentioned in this episode, plus a few more:
This week, two experts explain how melting ice in the far north is bringing more light to the Arctic Ocean and what this means for the species that live there. And we hear from a team of archaeologists on their new research in Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge that found evidence of just how adaptable early humans were to the changing environment.
Every summer, the sea ice in the Arctic melts -– but it's melting more and more each year. This dramatic loss is because the Arctic is warming two to three times faster than the rest of the planet. Different scientists are studying what climate change means for the various species that live in the Arctic Ocean. One of the things they’re looking at is light: as the sea ice shrinks, that means more light can get down to the depths, but also more ships can venture into the far north, bringing with them more artificial light.
We speak to two researchers who study what this increase in light means for the species that live in the Arctic: Karen Filbee-Dexter, Research Fellow in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Western Australia and Jørgen Berge, Vice Dean for Research, Arctic and Marine Biology at the University of Tromsø in Norway.
In our second story, we head to the warmer climes of the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, known as the birthplace of humanity. We speak to a team of researchers, Julio Mercader, Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Calgary in Canada, and Pastory Bushozi, Director of Humanities Research Centre and Makarius Peter Itambu, Lecturer in the College of Humanities, both at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, about their recent discoveries in the gorge. They found new evidence of just how adaptable early humans were to the changing environment around them around 2 million years ago.
And Laura Hood, politics editor at The Conversation in London, recommends a couple of recent stories by academics in the UK.
The Conversation Weekly is hosted by Gemma Ware and Dan Merino. The show is co-produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Visit The Conversation for full credits. If you'd like to sign up for The Conversation's free daily newsletter, please subscribe here.
Further reading
This week three experts explain why more people are thinking about leaving Hong Kong after China's clampdown on dissent – and the choices they face about where to go. And we hear about a new way to speed up the hunt for one of the universe's most elusive enigmas: dark matter. Welcome to episode 4 of The Conversation Weekly, the world explained by experts.
Since China imposed a new National Security Law on Hong Kong in mid-2020, the situation for protesters has become much more dangerous. Many of those involved in recent pro-democracy protests are being rounded up and arrested. Some Hong Kongers are now thinking about leaving – and in this episode we hear from experts researching what is influencing these decisions. Sui Ting Kong, assistant professor in sociology at Durham University, tells us what her interviews with Hong Kongers is revealing about the different ways they describe their decision to leave. Peter William Walsh, a researcher at the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, explains the details of a new visa route the UK government has opened up those Hong Kongers who hold British National Overseas status. And Tsungyi Michelle Huang, professor of geography at National Taiwan University, talks about her research on migration from Hong Kong to Taiwan, and how Taiwan has become a more attractive destination.
In our second story, we're joined by Benjamin Brubaker, a physicist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who is on the hunt for dark matter. Dark matter is invisible – but it accounts for 85% of the matter in the universe. He explains how he and his colleagues used technology from the quantum computing world to speed up the search.
And Luthfi Dzulfikar, associate editor at The Conversation in Jakarta, recommends a couple of recent stories by academics in Indonesia.
The Conversation Weekly is hosted by Gemma Ware and Dan Merino. The show is co-produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Visit The Conversation for full credits.
Further reading:
This week we’re talking to researchers about how COVID-19 vaccines are manufactured – and a battle over the intellectual property rights surrounding them. And we hear from a researcher looking into why China is closing down coal-fired power stations faster in some places than others. Welcome to episode 3 of a new podcast from The Conversation, the world explained by experts.
While some of the world’s richest countries are racing ahead with large-scale programmes to vaccinate their populations, for much of the developing world, the first doses of the vaccines remain a long way off. For the past few months, a group of countries has been pushing for the intellectual property rules around coronavirus vaccines to be temporarily waived temporarily, arguing this would help expand supply and push down costs. Ronald Labonté, Distinguished Research Chair in Globalization and Health Equity at the School of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Ottawa, talks us through the detail. Meanwhile, Mosoka Fallah, Lecturer at the School of Public Health, College of Health Sciences at the University of Liberia tells us what the vaccine situation is like on the ground in West Africa, and Anne Moore, Senior Lecturer in Biochemistry and Cell Biology, at University College Cork in Ireland, explains some of the processes behind making coronavirus vaccines.
In our second story, we talk to Hao Tan, Associate Professor at the University of Newcastle in Australia, on his new research on why – and where – China is decommissioning coal-fired power stations. He explains what this shift means for the wider region, and those countries which export coal to China.
And Clea Chakraverty, politics and society editor at The Conversation in France, gives us some recommended reading on a historic child sex abuse scandal shaking France.
The Conversation Weekly is hosted by Gemma Ware and Dan Merino. The show is co-produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Visit The Conversation for full credits.
Further reading:
Welcome to episode 2 of a new podcast from The Conversation, the world explained by experts. This week we’re talking to researchers about Myanmar – and what it's like looking for COVID-19 in wild animals.
Protests have rocked Myanmar in recent days as people took to the streets demanding the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, the country's de factor leader who was arrested during a military coup on February 1.
We speak to two academics who study Myanmar, Adam Simpson, Senior Lecturer in International Studies in Justice and Society at the University of South Australia, and DB Subedi, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of New England in Australia. They explain how the country has changed in the past decade, what events led up to the coup, and what the military's options are now.
In our second story, we talk to Kaitlin Sawatzki, a virologist at Tufts University who is part of a research project that is searching for the coronavirus in wild animals in the US. She explains how viruses can jump back from humans into wild animals, the times this has happened in the past and the risks – to both people and animals – when it does.
And Catesby Holmes, international editor at The Conversation in New York gives us some recommended reading on the impeachment trial.
The Conversation Weekly is hosted by Gemma Ware and Dan Merino. The show is co-produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Visit The Conversation for full credits.
Further reading:
Welcome to the first episode of a new podcast from The Conversation, the world explained by experts. This week we’re talking to researchers about Mars – and Belarus.
For the past six months, three different space missions have been on their way to Mars. Now, all three – from the United Arab Emirates, China and the US – are due to arrive at the red planet in February within a few weeks of each other. We talk to three experts, Jim Bell, Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, Stefania Paladini, Reader in Economics and Global Security at Birmingham City University and Nidhal Guessoum, Professor of Astrophysics at the American University of Sharjah. They explain what these probes and rovers are looking for on Mars – including signs of ancient life – and the politics and symbolism behind the three missions.
In our second story we turn to Belarus, where protests continue more than six months after a disputed election. Félix Krawatzek, Senior Researcher at the Centre for East European and International Studies and Associate Member of Nuffield College, University of Oxford, talks through the initial findings from a recent public opinion survey in Belarus – and why he sees similarities between what's happening in Belarus and the protests currently rocking Russia following the detention of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
And Ina Skosana, health and medicine editor at The Conversation in Johannesburg, South Africa, gives us her story recommendations.
The Conversation Weekly is hosted by Gemma Ware and Dan Merino. The show is co-produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Visit The Conversation for full credits.
Further reading:
Introducing The Conversation Weekly, the world explained by experts. Made by the team at The Conversation. Each week we talk to academics to help unpack the context behind the headlines – and hear from scholars carrying out brand new research about how the world works. Hosted by Gemma Ware in London and Dan Merino in San Francisco.
Produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with sound design by Eloise Stevens and music by Neeta Sarl.
En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.