All That We Touch

What would it take to keep hold of what makes us human, when the machines around us are doing so much of what only humans could once do? All That We Touch returns with a conversation recorded live at Gleebooks, where pianist, educator and writer Anna Goldsworthy joins Princeton scholar Sophie Gee discuss some of the ideas explored in Goldsworthy's new Quarterly Essay, The God We Made: the threat a...

Welcome to the party! In this episode, recorded live at in Chippendale, at the Abercrombie Hotel, we officially launch All That We Touch. You'll hear two lively conversations. In the first, Monica Attard from UTS's Centre for Media Transition speaks with researcher Heather Ford and writer Richard Cooke about the ins and outs, the highs and lows, of having your own Wikipedia page. In the second, St...

What would it actually take to build a functioning circular economy in nutrients, starting with recycling human urine? That's the question driving this bonus episode of Liquid Gold , recorded live at South by Southwest Sydney 2025. UTS researcher Dana Cordell chairs a panel that pushes past the novelty of "wee as fertiliser" into the harder territory: phosphorus scarcity, wastewater emissions, con...

Every time we flush, we send a valuable resource down the drain: phosphorus, one of the essential building blocks of life and a key ingredient in the fertiliser that grows the world's food, along with nitrogen and potassium. Meanwhile, we mine phosphate rock and potash, and generate climate pollution to manufacture ammonia (rich in nitrogen) to produce industrial fertiliser - essential for growing...

How can Wikipedia editors work with Indigenous content in a responsible way? Hear a panel discussion with Indigenous lawyers Dr Terri Janke, Shavonne Wright, and Matilda Langford on the new Wikimedia Australia guide to respectful, accurate engagement with Indigenous knowledge. Oral knowledge can't be referenced under Wikipedia's own rules, and that hits Indigenous knowledge hardest. Most Australia...

Every student uses Wikipedia. Some schools and teachers still tell them not to. This episode asks why, and explains how to teach Wikipedia literacy to primary and secondary school students, instead of banning it outright. Researchers Heather Ford and Simon Knight answer questions and hear advice from teachers Ben Lawless, Marty Douglas and David Boon, and librarian Michelle Sadler. Hear what good,...

Five questions. Two hosts. One deceptively simple quiz. Can Wikipedia articles really be edited by anyone? Does the site rely on your $5 donations, or is there more to the story? Host Heather Ford goes head-to-head with guest Simon Knight in a true-or-false showdown about Wikipedia. Almost nothing is as straightforward as it sounds. This is All That We Touch: Wikipedia, a documentary podcast serie...

In the future, will Wikipedia still be written by humans? This episode asks what happens to that promise as two very different futures close in. Co-host and author Richard Cooke calls Wikipedia ‘the last best place on the internet’ - one of the only things still standing from the early web's promise of a civic, collaborative internet. This episode traces two futures already taking shape. The first...

Wikipedia promised to be the sum of all human knowledge. Then the fighting started. Host Heather Ford and writer Richard Cooke walk through three of Wikipedia's biggest fight. Not the daily edit wars over the spelling of yoghurt, but the fights over what Wikipedia is, and whose knowledge gets to be part of it. There are more than 300 language versions of Wikipedia. So why does everyone treat the E...

Wikipedia doesn't set out to play favourites. But when a made-up Melbourne suburb has more history than real Australian places, something is shaping what gets written. Who - or what - decides which Australian places matter on Wikipedia? Hosts Heather Ford and Francesca Sidoti go looking, through a map of 35,000 places, a street corner in Penrith, and a fight over one island's name. How is Wikipedi...

It started as a joke. An encyclopedia anyone could edit? Now it’s one of the ten most visited websites in the world. Even when you think you're not using it, you probably are. It's feeding your search results, your voice assistant, your AI chatbot. But if Wikipedia shapes how we understand the world, what shapes Wikipedia? Host Heather Ford, researcher Francesca Sidoti, and author Richard Cooke in...

Are we really separate from the things we make? Do we really control our own tools? And where do we end, and they begin? All That We Touch explores the relationship between technology and society, and how the things we make shape and reshape us in turn. Host Matt Ryan speaks with Tamson Pietsch about the podcast's central questions and its sources of inspiration. In a changing climate, the powerfu...