Dust.

It’s really too small a thing to worry about, isn’t it? When we think about the environmental challenges we are facing in the 21st century, we tend to think big – global warming, the ozone hole, mega volcanoes, earth quakes, or perhaps the devastation brought by large scale conflicts - even, at the very worst, a nuclear explosion.

We tend not to think about the small things, the very smallest things, like dust.

This is perhaps because we usually imagine the modern world to be shiny and clean; dusty things are old.  But in this episode I will be talking with Jay Owens, who shows us how central dust is to the modern world, from the dust in our homes to the dust from nuclear fall out.

Jay's recent book, Dust: the world in a trillion particles, was published in 2023

Women are told to look after themselves in the city a night, not to walk home alone, not to walk through dark parks.  Cities are seen as dangerous places for women. They are taught from childhood that it’s their responsibility to look after themselves when out and about, and yet all the statistics tell us that women are much more likely to face violence in their own homes than out in the streets.

What does this understanding of urban landscapes mean for the way we think about men and women?  How has the way we design cities made some kinds of people feel welcome and some excluded? How might we design cities differently?

In this podcast we will explore the ways in which the urban landscape, and our very ideas of the urban, shape the lives and identities of city residents. I am joined by Dr Leslie Kern, a feminist urban scholar from Toronto, Canada. We will be talking about Leslie’s book, Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World.

As consumers we now expect, or perhaps are willing to pay a premium for, goods and services with green credentials – recycled paper and plastics, no single use plastics, less packaging, carbon-neutral delivery and so on. It makes us feel good; it makes us feel like we are doing out bit.  The UK government celebrates the country's reduction in carbon emissions - we are moving towards cleaner more environmentally-friendly future.

And yet, global emissions are growing. Levels of carbon released into the atmosphere are increasing. What is going on?

I am joined by Dr Laurie Parsons who has grappled with this challenge in his  book Carbon Colonialism: How rich countries explore climate breakdown (Manchester University Press, 2023).

I was a teenager in the 1980s and so almost all the images I saw of Africa were through news and Band Aid coverage of the famine in Ethiopia.  For me then, international development was what we did for African women and children.  

In the 21st century, with the rise of new powers like China and India, and the increasing prominence of investment and markets, the nature of international development has changed.  But, in many ways, the way that Africa is imagined has not.

In this podcast I will be speaking with Professor Emma Mawdsley about the power of geographical images, the rise of new agents, and what the future might hold for how international development is done.

2023 seemed to be the year of wild fires, and it is increasingly clear that we are moving away from a planet whose geology is shaped by ice ages to one shaped by burning.  

"Firepower" also has military connotations, and my guest today, Professor SImon Dalby, argues that this is not co-incidental.  I will be talking to Simon about the new geopolitics of the fire age.

Simon's most recent book is: Pyromania: fire and geopolitics in a climate disrupted world  (Agenda Publishing, 2023).