In this episode we’re exploring the value of freedom, from the people who found it in the bleakest of circumstances to the ways in which we restrict our own freedom (and the freedom of others) without even realising it. Act 1 - Prof Virginia Mantouvalou The first act is on the freedom to work without abuse. Virginia Mantouvalou is Professor of Human Rights and Labour Law at UCL, Faculty of Laws. She has published extensively on issues of human rights and labour law, including workers’ exploitation, the right to privacy and free speech at work, structural injustice, domestic labour, unfair dismissal and modern slavery. Her most recent book is Philosophical Foundations of Labour Law (co-edited with Hugh Collins and Gillian Lester, OUP, 2018). She is currently working on a monograph on Structural Injustice, Workers’ Rights and Human Rights (forthcoming, OUP, 2022) funded through a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship. She has also worked as specialist advisor to the UK Joint Committee on Human Rights and as consultant for the ILO and the Council of Europe. She is on the management board of Kalayaan, the Equal Rights Trust, and the Institute of Employment Rights and has received the UCL Provost Public Engagement Award for her research with Kalayaan. Act 2 - Dr Sarah J Young On the freedoms and the lack of it at the Shlissl'burg Prison in Russia Sarah J. Young is Associate Professor of Russian at UCL SSEES, where she teaches and researches nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature, culture and thought. She is the author of Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’ and the Ethical Foundations of Narrative (Anthem Press, 2004), and co-editor of Dostoevsky on the Threshold of Other Worlds (Bramcote Press, 2006). Her current research focuses on the Russian tradition of carceral literature, and she has published extensively on the representation of prison, exile and hard labour in works by Dostoevskii, Chekhov, Varlam Shalamov, and others. Her book Writing Resistance: Revolutionary Memoirs of Shlissel’burg Fortress, 1884-1906 is available from UCLPress. Act 3 - Dr Salheli Datta Burton On the dark side of freedom Dr Saheli Datta Burton is a Research Fellow at the Department of Science Technology Engineering and Public Policy (STEaPP), University College London. Saheli is interested in the political-economic and socioethical issues of science and technology with a focus on emerging data-driven and biomedical technologies. She has received research funding awards from the Newton Fund, EPSRC etc. Since the completion of her PhD in late 2018, Saheli has published over 11 peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Social Science and Medicine, Science, Technology and Human Values, Biosocieties and Critical Public Health, book chapters and reports for institutions such as the European Commission and the UK government. Saheli’s work with colleagues at STEaPP on the emerging risks of medical and other IoTs was recently published by the UK Government’s Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and reported widely by media outlets such as The Times, Independent, Daily Telegraph etc. She has co-authored book on global science governance ‘The Elephant and the Dragon of Contemporary Lifesciences’ with the Manchester University Press.
