ePODstemology

Regular host Dr Mark Fabian is joined by Dr Jacqui Lau, senior lecturer and discovery early career fellow (DECRA) at James Cook University in Australia. Jacqui is an environmental scientist employing interdisciplinary perspectives and mixed methods to understand how coastal communities in the pacific islands and Australia respond to climate change and environmental transformations. She has worked...

‘Copaganda’ is the name given to media that seeks to portray the police in a favourable, often distorted light. This includes fictional shows like Law and Order, CSI: Crime Scene Investigations, and Miami Vice, as well as reality-TV style shows that follow policy officers around as they go about their business. Emma Rackstraw’s research investigates how these shows affect the behaviour of the poli...

Climate change is the biggest existential threat facing humanity. So why aren’t we doing more about it? This week’s guest is Dr Antonio Valentim, a political scientist and postdoctoral fellow at Yale’s MacMillan Centre. His research seeks to answer two main questions 1) when and why do voters change their opinions and behaviours with respect to climate change? and 2) how do political incentives in...

While Kim Jong Un might disagreed, democracy is widely regarded as a universal value – it is a system of political organisation that enshrines the right to self-determination. Recent centuries have seen a wave of democratisation relative to historical trends, with democracies replacing dictatorships and other autocratic forms of governance in nations across the globe. Yet many of these democracies...

One way to think about what makes *social* science distinct is that it is trying to study subjects, not objects. Subjects have feelings, opinions, and values, which are often hard to observe and even harder to measure. Subjects’ behaviour is also often endogenous to being studied. For example, the ‘shy conservative’ phenomenon refers to the observation that people often lie about their right wing...

Regular host Dr Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick is joined by Dr Malte Dold, assistant professor of economics at Pomona College. Malte is one of the most prominent scholars in the field of behavioural welfare economics, which sits at the intersection of economics, philosophy, and psychology. You might have heard of behavioural economics, which inspired the idea of nudges in public policy...

Raffaella Taylor-Seymour is   an anthropologist and Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University. Her work examines religious transformations in the context of struggles over gender, sexuality, and the environment in contemporary Zimbabwe. This is a context in which colonization violently upended ideas about personhood, spirituality,...

Inequality is a perennial subject of politics, a foundational element of economic welfare analysis, and one of the central subjects of sociology. In this episode, Dr Marco Ranaldi from University College London joins regular host Dr Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick to discuss what's new in inequality research. A central topic is Ranaldi's innovative new concept of compositional...

Workplace wellbeing kicked off in Silicon valley with ping pong tables, bean bags, and on 'campus' Michellin star restaurants. With Google, Facebook, Amazon et al. raking in the dollars, it wasn't long before other companies were exploring the theme themselves. Some of the outcomes seem sinister: employers encouraging you to see the firm as your family, your work as making a differe...

Have you heard of the Panama papers? A giant leak of 11.5 million legal and financial documents exposing a vast system of secretive offshore companies enabling corruption, tax avoidance, and other forms of wrongdoing? Well that system and how to clean it up is what this episode is about. Regular host Dr Mark Fabian is joined by Dr Matthew Colin, Senior Researcher at the EU tax observatory and one...

Before there was the COVID-19 virus there was the 'Woke' mind virus, or at least that's how some reactionary commentators in the US refer to a cluster of strongly progressive cultural tropes, including emphasising racial and gender identity, prioritising equality of outcomes over equality of treatment, and being mindful of language that can be potentially harmful. A woke wave has pa...

One of the oldest and most famous questions in the social sciences is the debate over nature vs nurture in determining characteristics of the individual. Transcending this focus on the micro is a new field within social-psychology sometimes called social-ecological psychology, which explores how psychology brings about societal conditions and vice versa. Research in this vein has become popular as...

Recent political cycles across the OECD have seen the ‘revenge of places that don’t matter’. These ‘left behind places’, where economic prosperity has withered and culture decayed, have made their misery known electorally. The economic consequences, notably assaults on trade and globalism, and the human misery obvious in things like deaths of despair from suicide and opioid overdoses, have provoke...

What is the future of the factory in economic development? That is the subject of a forthcoming book by this episode’s guest, Dr Jostein Hauge from the University of Cambridge. Numerous scholars, Harvard’s Dani Rodrik arguably most prominent among them, have noted that industrialisation among contemporary developing countries is more muted than it was for the Asian Tiger economies and other nation...

Mark is joined by Heather Browning from the London School of Economics and Walter Veit from the University of Sydney who their ideas regarding the nature of consciousness, what we can learn about consciousness from animal studies, and the implications for animal welfare. Should we think of consciousness as some special property unique to human minds, or is it in fact merely a particular high degre...

The advancement of health care is one of the hallmarks of development and a central objective of not for profit, public, and private organisations, especially in the developing countries of Africa. Wiktoria Tafesse is an early career researcher working on a range of topics at the University of York’s Centre for Health Economics. She joins ePODstemology’s regular host Dr Mark Fabian to discuss the...

Through most of human history, we needed more food, cheaper food, and easier to access food, so we built economic systems that could deliver mountains of the stuff. Now that was a noble effort at the time, but we didn’t think much about waste, and so huge quantities of food today ends up in landfill where it turns to greenhouse gases, or rots on the vine, squandering the resources we used to produ...

Regular ePODstemology host Dr Mark Fabian is joined by philosopher of science Dr Riana Betzler from Washington University in St Louis to discuss the nature and study of empathy. In popular culture, empathy is one of these haloed qualities that we generally perceive as good and desirable. Yet in recent years some psychologists, notably Paul Bloom at Yale, have argued that empathy is overrated, inde...

ePODstemology is about popularising the genuinely new ways of thinking emerging from the pathbreaking research of young scholars. There are few fields that represent this agenda more than machine learning, a branch of computer science and statistics that promises to dramatically accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, crack open hard questions that have bedeviled humanity for decades, and eve...

The biggest change in electoral politics in the last decade is without a doubt the advent of social media. The Cambridge Analytica scandal in Brexit, Russian bots in the EU, the zone that Steve Bannon suggests political parties flood with shit, it’s all happening on our favourite doom-scrolling apps. How is political science getting to grips with this new and influential phenomenon? Dr Kevin Munge...

What are the big questions in macroeconomics right now? Well there’s the unprecedented assault on Russia’s financial architecture, that’s quite topical. We usually study how to avoid financial crises, not how to start them. How do a tank a central bank? Just a few weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the big news was the return of inflation. After a decade or so of ‘secular stagnation’ and fe...

How does science, the quintessential secular enterprise, study religion? What can we learn about religion by applying the tools of scientific method, and what can religion teach secularists about how to build thriving societies? In this episode, social psychologist Dr Kitty O'Lone from Cambridge University's Woolf Institute joins ePODstemology host Dr Mark Fabian to discuss these and oth...

Artist, feminist economist and activist Cassie Thornton joins ePODstemology host Mark Fabian to discuss her recent project The Hologram, a social technology for creating peer to peer care networks and unlearning capitalism. Inspired by the community health clinics of post-GFC Greece, The Hologram seeks to cultivate our capacity for caring about others in a collective, non-reciprocal, and holistic...

Long before Donald Trump referred to Mexican migrants as 'bad hombres', migration was a perennially hot topic in economic and social policy. Some of the endlessly debated question in this space include: do migrants hurt the labour market prospects of locals by taking away jobs and depressing wages? Or do they instead create more opportunities by bringing capital and spurring economic act...

The ePODstemology Christmas Special! Popular guest, Bayesian Bae, and all round great person Rachel Meager from the LSE returns to ePODstemology to sit in the host's chair and interview regular host Mark Fabian from Cambridge University. The topic is all things wellbeing. The philosophy of it, the psychology of it, the economics and public policy of it. Why does wellbeing scholarship need to...