ePODstemology

Dr Aleksei Turobov is an Assistant Professor at the Bennett School of Public Policy. His research examines the critical gap between the global ambitions of AI policy and the practical realities of its implementation. He leads research for the AIxGeo project, using a mixed-methods approach that combines AI-driven thematic analysis with network analysis to map the emergent coalitions and narratives...

Paul Behrens is British Academy Global Professor at the University of Oxford and Reapra Senior Research Fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre there. He is an industrial ecologist examining how the ways we produce our lives and the things we consume in them are related to environment stress, especially climate change. In this episode, we discuss the role of demand management in averting ecologica...

Dr Stephen Mallory is assistant professor of game design at Lawrence Technical University in Southfield, Michigan. After a career in the video game industry, Stephen turned his considerable intellect to analysing games as an aspect of digimodernism - the contemporary cultural phenomenon where much of our lived experience, indeed, our reality and even sense of self, is mediated through digital tech...

Timotheus Vermeulen is a full professor of media, culture and society at the University of Oslo in Norway. Together with Robin Van Den Akker, he coined the term metamodernism and kick started scholarship of this new idea, co-founding the webzine Notes on Metamodernity and co-editing the book series Studies in Metamodernism. Metamodernism refers to the culture or structure of feeling that comes aft...

  Innovation is crucial for improving quality of life and clearing away ossified and unhelpful ways of doing and being, like fossil fuel capitalism. So how do we get it moving? The innovation ecosystem of a nation, a region, or even the world is a complex network of physical infrastructure, human capital, industrial policy, and R&D centres among other things. If any part of the network grows w...

It seems these days that we are awash in data. Indeed, in their recent book The Ordinal Society, Marion Foucard and Kieran Healy argue persuasively that the passive data collection facilitated by the internet, digital technologies, wearables, and social media allows us for the first time to map the deep substrate of the social. Is that true though? In all this data, is there signal ? Valeria Ramir...

Metamodernism is the cultural mode that is emerging after postmodernism, and boy do we need it. Postmodernism was a period of deconstruction. A necessary deconstruction, I hasten to say, one that shook the foundations of many obsolete structures that kept people oppressed like homophobia, patriarchy, colonialism, and opinions masquerading as expertise. But as there was only deconstruction, we find...

In one of his Letters Provinciales , the French philosopher and Theologian Blaise Pascal apologises that “I have made this letter longer than usual because I have not had the time to make it shorter”. This is an aphoristic statement that could form one part of the definition of an aphorism: a pithy observation that contains a general truth. There are thousands of well-known aphorisms coming in all...

The so-called “replication crisis” engulfed psychology over the last 10 years, with numerous failures to reproduce canonical studies from the biggest names in the discipline like Dweck’s growth mindset, Baumeister’s willpower as a muscle, and around half of Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. Interrogation of this failure of replicate led to discoveries of p-hacking, publication bias, a huge discon...

Dr Shreeharsh Kelkar from UC Berkeley on to discuss massive online open courses or “MOOCs” and other varieties of education technology. Are they destined to displace the traditional university, or are (were) they just a fad? How do they compare with more general online platforms that host educational content, like YouTube? What sort of people start these ventures? Can they be trusted? Dr Kelkar is...

Simone Schneider is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Cambridge. Her dissertation explores the meanings and experience of infidelity in intimate relationships, combining both long, in-depth interviews with people who have experienced or committed infidelity, and discourse analysis of dating platforms that facilitate this sort of behaviour. It’s a fascinating body of work on one of...

This episode’s guest is Dr Maria Bach, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and host of Ceteris Never Paribus: the History of Economic Thought Podcast . She completed her PhD at King’s College in London, now available as a book with Cambridge University Press, Relocating Development Economics: The First Generation of Modern Indian Economists. The book excavates the over...

A special issue episode where regular host Dr Mark Fabian is on the other side of the microphone being interviewed by @economeager about his new book -  Beyond Happy: How to rethink happiness and find fulfilment. It is out today in the United Kingdom. Here's a summary of the book:  A comprehensive guide to cultivating wellbeing, combining cutting edge science and primordial folk wisdom. Mark...

Anyone on social media these days has encountered a bot. An algorithm-driven fake account that engages in some nefarious activity, whether it’s turning uncontroversial points into debates, repping the Kremlin’s talking points, or directing you to pussy in bio, the bots are enshittifying social media at an alarming rate, especially now that artificial intelligence allows them to be more convincing,...

Trump is back in the White House and as anticipated, his administration is moving fast and breaking things. One of the first aspects of government to get stepped on was USAID, one of the biggest financiers and administrators of global development, including programs like PEPFAR. To understand the implications of this for the wider global philanthropy sector, ePODstemology reached out to Shonali Ba...

Climate change is the single biggest policy challenge facing the world today. A global political coordination problem of epic proportions, with baggage from colonialism, short election cycles, and a deep pocketed fossil fuel lobby running interference. The stakes couldn’t be higher, with hundreds of millions of human and billions of animal lives in the balance. Who do we need to take action? Parli...

Democracy is unwell. Trust in politicians, institutions, experts, and other people is steadily falling across the OECD, and even young people seem to be losing faith in the system. What can be done? One idea that has gained traction and demonstrated potential of late is deliberative democracy: bringing together citizens, policymakers, area specialists, and other stakeholders to ponder a policy iss...

In the UK, up to 80% of a social worker’s time can be spent filling out forms rather than helping the desperate people in their care. This is an example of what Dan Honig calls ‘management for compliance’. Honig is associate professor of public policy at University College London, among many other affiliations including Georgetown, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Lahore University of Management Scienc...

“Digital governance” is a term commonly used to refer to the transformative potential of integrating contemporary technological advances into the day-to-day activities of government. Electronic filing of tax returns, text message reminders to get your vaccine booster, medical records that can follow your around as you change doctor’s offices – all are examples of digital governance. Digital govern...

Dr Jaclyn Siegel from NORC at the University of Chicago joins regular ePODstemology host Dr Mark Fabian to discuss the psychological science of eating disorders and body image, especially her own qualitative research on eating disorders in the workplace and romantic relationships. The conversation also covers the relationship between social media and eating disorders, gluttonous eating, the pros a...

ePODstemology brings you cutting edge insights and analysis from early career researchers to help you cut through 21st century complexity. A major driver of that complexity is Algorithms - an increasingly ubiquitous yet remarkably opaque aspect of modern life, directing what you watch on television, who drives your taxi, what products you see when online shopping, and, increasingly who purchases y...

Some of you may have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area of the Pacific Ocean roughly 1.6 million square kilometres in size that contains between 45 000 to 129 000 metrics tonnes of plastic waste, mostly in the form of microplastics – fingernail sized or smaller bits of the material. The patch has increased 10-fold in size each decade since 1945, and has a twin in the North Atlantic...

This podcast strives to bring forward new insights and innovative frameworks for understanding the world of the 21st century. Few things underscore just how radically different things are today from the 20th century than recent advances in artificial intelligence, where an AI ‘copilot’ on your smartphone can now perform myriad tasks for you in a few seconds. This episode’s guest is one of the peop...

James Steele is Associate Professor of Sport and Exercise Science at Solent University. He has extensive research and consultancy experience working with elite athletes across a range of sports, the general population across the lifespan, and both those who are healthy and diseased. He was a member of the Expert Working Group revising the CMO Physical Activity Guidelines for the United Kingdom and...

Regular host Dr Mark Fabian is joined by episode guest Dr Stefania Fiorentino, senior teaching associate in planning, growth, and urban regeneration at Cambridge university’s department of land economy. Dr Fiorentino’s research is at the intersection of urban planning and local economic development, specifically how to innovate with respect to the inclusivity and effectiveness of urban regeneratio...