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EXPeditions

The EXPeditions podcasts take you into the worlds of leading thinkers, scholars and scientists. Lively, accessible, reliable, these audio journeys guide you through key terrain in science and society, history, art and all the humanities.

  1. 4D AGO

    The resurgence of civic duties | Simon Reid-Henry

    Civic duties are essentially the ways in which citizens agree to abide by the rules and to contribute to the life of a national society. About Simon Reid-Henry "I am a research professor at the Peace Research Institute, Oslo, an honorary professor of historical and political geography at Queen Mary, University of London, a civil society advocate and a writer. I am a 2011 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. My research applies an interdisciplinary focus to the making and application of political, economic, technical and legal forms of knowledge and their consequences for political thought and practice. My work has been recognized for its methodological innovation, conceptual rigour, and empirical breadth via a number of academic fellowships and awards." Key Points • The pandemic revived the language of civic duty as governments asked citizens to act for the common good, offering a lens to study how collective action is mobilised. • Comparative research in France, Norway and the UK shows that civic duty is culturally framed and shaped citizens’ compliance. • Lockdowns exposed the constant negotiation in liberal democracies between collective needs and individual freedoms, demonstrating that obedience relies on persuasion more than coercion. • Global disparities in vaccine access highlighted how duties operate at multiple scales, underscoring the need for shared responsibility to tackle future crises such as climate change.

    14 min

  2. MAR 12

    What is "prejudice" ? | Jessie Munton

    I think prejudice is best conceptualized as a phenomenon that can be supported by a whole range of mental states that will include beliefs, habits, emotions, and also attentional dispositions. About Jessie Munton "​​I'm an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. I'm also a fellow at St John's College, and Director of Studies for Philosophy there. My core areas of research are philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of psychology. I also enjoy thinking and writing about philosophy of psychiatry. I am a 2023 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. I've become increasingly interested in what I think of as negative epistemology: how do we evaluate ignorance, forgetting, or the failure to undertake inquiry or collect evidence? Some of my other research is in philosophy of perception." Key Points • Prejudice is sustained not only by beliefs and emotions but also by entrenched habits of attention that filter what we notice or ignore. • Because those attentional patterns are conditioned by media, spaces and other people, prejudice is simultaneously individual and societal. • We can still be held responsible for unconscious biases, since we choose many of the influences that shape our habitual focus. • Lasting change depends on shifting shared cues through inclusive education, diverse personal relationships and similar interventions so that different people and evidence become salient to us all.

    17 min

  3. MAR 9

    Global Public Investment | Simon Reid-Henry

    The world today is overburdened with challenges that supersede the boundaries of nation states, and therefore of national governments, to address on their own. About Simon Reid-Henry "I am a research professor at the Peace Research Institute, Oslo, an honorary professor of historical and political geography at Queen Mary, University of London, a civil society advocate and a writer. I am a 2011 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. My research applies an interdisciplinary focus to the making and application of political, economic, technical and legal forms of knowledge and their consequences for political thought and practice. My work has been recognized for its methodological innovation, conceptual rigour, and empirical breadth via a number of academic fellowships and awards." Key Points • The post-war aid framework is outdated and too top-down to tackle border-spanning crises like climate change and pandemics. • Global Public Investment offers a universal, rules-sharing model where every country contributes according to capacity and gains an equal voice in decisions. • Financing should rely on robust sources such as environmental levies and national budget lines, rather than the seldom-met 0.7% target. • International support must move from a charity narrative to one of mutual interest, recognising shared responsibility for global public goods.

    19 min

  4. MAR 5

    On ignorance and forgetting | Jessie Munton

    I'm interested in the beliefs that we're not forming, the evidence that we're not attending to or using, the belief states that perhaps we form. What I think of as negative epistemology is the project of coming up with resources that let us say a bit more about that. About Jessie Munton "​​I'm an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. I'm also a fellow at St John's College, and Director of Studies for Philosophy there. My core areas of research are philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of psychology. I also enjoy thinking and writing about philosophy of psychiatry. I am a 2023 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. I've become increasingly interested in what I think of as negative epistemology: how do we evaluate ignorance, forgetting, or the failure to undertake inquiry or collect evidence? Some of my other research is in philosophy of perception." Key Points • Negative epistemology shows that the beliefs we never form and the evidence we ignore can be as significant as the beliefs we hold. • Attention shapes knowledge, and sustained inattention to accessible evidence turns ignorance into an epistemic fault. • Ignorance is permissible only when the missing information is either irrelevant or out of reach; neglecting obvious, important questions makes it illegitimate. • Forgetting and structured ignorance actively manage cognitive load but can also reinforce social power by keeping certain knowledge unseen.

    19 min

  5. MAR 2

    The empire of democracy | Simon Reid-Henry

    "How do we understand, as it were, our era of democracy, which I argue began really as recently as the 1970s from previous eras, and what is it that is fundamentally at the core of the democracy we live in today?" About Simon Reid-Henry "I am a research professor at the Peace Research Institute, Oslo, an honorary professor of historical and political geography at Queen Mary, University of London, a civil society advocate and a writer. I am a 2011 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. My research applies an interdisciplinary focus to the making and application of political, economic, technical and legal forms of knowledge and their consequences for political thought and practice. My work has been recognized for its methodological innovation, conceptual rigour, and empirical breadth via a number of academic fellowships and awards." Key Points • Democracy is not a fixed inheritance but a continually reinvented system shaped by each era’s social and institutional needs. • The economic and political upheavals of the late 1960s and 1970s, including the collapse of Bretton Woods, set the conditions for today’s globalised democratic order. • Modern democracy must constantly balance freedom with equality, a tension that becomes acute when growth falters or institutions erode. • Democracy’s survival depends on active stewardship; assuming it will always muddle through risks its gradual decay.

    19 min

  6. FEB 26

    The life of the mind | Jessie Munton

    On the one hand, we have that sense of really close identification with our minds. On the other hand, we're often surprised at the ways in which they operate. About Jessie Munton "​​I'm an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. I'm also a fellow at St John's College, and Director of Studies for Philosophy there. My core areas of research are philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of psychology. I also enjoy thinking and writing about philosophy of psychiatry. I am a 2023 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. I've become increasingly interested in what I think of as negative epistemology: how do we evaluate ignorance, forgetting, or the failure to undertake inquiry or collect evidence? Some of my other research is in philosophy of perception." Key Points • The mind feels deeply personal yet can generate beliefs and behaviors that escape rational control. • Perception justifies belief, but belief systems can fragment, allowing inconsistent or implicitly biased attitudes. • Selection of what we attend to, guided by both salience and goals, determines the evidence we gather and thus which beliefs count as justified. • Epistemology must assess attentional priorities as well as belief content, since information ordering shapes reasoning and moral outcomes.

    19 min

  7. FEB 23

    Volcanoes and the origins of life | Tamsin Mather

    We don't really understand how life got going on this planet. There are various candidates for where the first molecules of life might have evolved, and some of those candidates are deeply volcanic. About Tamsin Mather "I am a professor of Volcanology. My work brings together expertise in volcanology/magmatism, atmospheric chemistry and paleoclimatology/stratigraphy. This combination allows me to tackle problems ranging from acute volcanic hazards and air pollution events in the present-day to the role of volcanism in the long-term evolution of our planet’s environment over its geological history and much in between. I am a 2010 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. My main research interests centre on the science behind volcanoes and volcanic behaviour. My motivation is to understand volcanoes as (a) a key planetary scale process throughout geological time, vital for maintaining habitability as well as driving environmental change, (b) natural hazards and (c) resources (e.g., geothermal power and the development of ore deposits)." Key Points • If you look at the Moon in the night sky, you are seeing more basalt with the naked eye than you'd ever get to see from looking at a view anywhere on the planet Earth. The Moon’s dark maria supplied the first hand-collected extraterrestrial rocks, anchoring our understanding of planetary volcanism. • Mars’s fixed crust allowed Olympus Mons to grow to the Solar System’s largest volcano, illustrating how the absence of plate tectonics can magnify volcanic scale. Io’s intense tidal squeezing by Jupiter drives constant eruptions, proving that gravitational flexing can power volcanism without significant internal heat. • Volcanoes are a planetary-scale process. There are lots of different ways that volcanoes change a planet. They move elements around from different parts of the solid planet, but they are also really instrumental in building an atmosphere, which is incredibly important in terms of the surface environment. • Volcanoes might have the potential to be instrumental in directly kicking life off, but they're certainly instrumental in building the sort of environment we need to be able to evolve life – and certainly to be able to evolve complex life such as ourselves.

    19 min

  8. FEB 19

    The origin myth of the modern West | Naoíse Mac Sweeney

    We in the modern West still look back to ancient Greece as our imagined origin. We're still obsessed with ancient Greece. About Naoise Mac Sweeney  "I'm Professor of Greek Archaeology at the University of Vienna. My research focuses on the construction of identity and cultural interaction. I am especially interested in the making of communities – not only their physical formation through landscape and architecture but also their social formation through cultural practice and conceptual formation through the construction of identity. I am a 2015 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. My work to date has focused on these topics from the Iron Age to Classical periods in the ancient Greek world and Anatolia, in particular on Greek cities Ionia and Cilicia but also on Troy and myths of the Trojan War. My current project expands the geographical frame, considering migration and mobility around the Mediterranean in the Iron Age. I am also interested in wider engagement with antiquity and the politics of reception and heritage. I passionately believe that those of us who study the past also have a responsibility to the present." Key Points • The Western origin story that begins in classical Greece oversimplifies history and inflates a singular inheritance. • Ancient Greece spanned Europe, Asia and Africa, and its legacy dispersed across Byzantium, medieval Islam, Central Asia and beyond. • Western Europe’s embrace of Greek heritage intensified after the Renaissance amid Habsburg-Ottoman rivalry, hardening Europe versus Asia boundaries and feeding early racial ideologies. • The origin myth of the modern West no longer serves us in the present. A better origin myth centers on diversity, cultural interconnection and active choice rather than linear descent.

    15 min
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The EXPeditions podcasts take you into the worlds of leading thinkers, scholars and scientists. Lively, accessible, reliable, these audio journeys guide you through key terrain in science and society, history, art and all the humanities.

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