In this episode, we welcome Meredith Whittaker, President of the Signal Foundation and one of the world’s leading tech critics, for a powerful conversation on privacy, surveillance, and the future of technology. Whittaker, who also co-founded the AI Now Institute, shares her insights on how surveillance and AI are deeply intertwined, and how tech giants profit from large-scale data extraction. She highlights Signal as a radical alternative—a privacy-focused, non-profit messaging app that challenges the dominance of surveillance capitalism. Joined by Evelyn Austin of Bits of Freedom, Whittaker discusses how current tech infrastructures shape our lives, the urgent need for oversight in AI deployment, and what it takes to build digital tools that truly serve the public good.

In this episode, we dive into The Big Con, the provocative book by economists Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington, which exposes the deep entanglement between the consulting industry and the modern management of business and government. From McKinsey to PwC, the authors argue that these firms don’t just advise—they shape policy, stifle innovation, and erode accountability. In this lecture by Rosie Colington, followed by a discussion with professor of public administration Martijn van der Steen, we unpack how decades of privatization, financialization, and risk aversion have empowered consultancies to act as unchallenged arbiters of expertise, often to the detriment of the public good. Collington calls for a bold reimagining of how we build capacity within our institutions, shifting from outsourced dependency to collective intelligence—reclaiming the promise of both democracy and innovation.

In this episode, we’re joined by award-winning science journalist Angela Saini to discuss her bold and timely book: The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule. In this interview with historian Marianne Klerk, Saini traces the deep and complex roots of patriarchy — from the world’s earliest known human settlements to modern-day societies. Drawing on cutting-edge research in archaeology, history, and science, she challenges the myth that male dominance is natural or inevitable, revealing it instead as a fragile construct that has been built, contested, and reshaped throughout history. Together, we explore how gendered inequality became entrenched across cultures, how it continues to shape our present, and why rethinking old narratives is crucial to imagining a more equal future.

Across the world, experimental predictive algorithms are being deployed that promise to prevent welfare fraud. Now for the first time, an international team of journalists gained unprecedented access to one of these "suspicion machines" in the city of Rotterdam. An investigation by Lighthouse Reports, WIRED and Vers Beton demonstrates how governments all over Europe - and municipalities like Rotterdam - are deploying AI risk scoring systems in welfare fraud detection, revealing discrimination, wide-scale surveillance, and a trail of lives ruined.  In this podcast investigative journalist Gabriel Geiger (Lighthouse Reports) shares what they uncovered and discusses it with media anthropologist Miriyam Aouragh (Westminster University London) and law Professor Sofia Ranchordas (Tilburg University). Examining Rotterdam’s welfare fraud algorithm they look at the serious flaws and biases it contains, the human impact caused by its decisions, and what it reveals about the future of AI.

In this episode we talk to Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones on her groundbreaking 1619 Project. The 1619 Project is The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning reframing of American history that places slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of the countries’ national narrative. It offers a revealing new origin story for the United States, one that helps explain not only the persistence of anti-Black racism and inequality in American life today, but also the roots of so much of what makes the country unique. The 1619 Project speaks directly to our current moment, contextualizing the systems of race and caste that still define so much of American life today. It reveals the hidden truths around America’s founding and construction—and the way that the legacy of slavery did not end with emancipation, but continues to shape contemporary American life. And it provides important lessons and insights in relation to our own Dutch colonial past.

In this episode we listen to a lecture by and interview with urbanist and historian Davarian L. Baldwin on the occasion of his highly acclaimed book In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities. Urban universities play an important and outsized role in cities. They bring diverse ideas and people together and they generate new innovations. But they also gentrify neighbourhoods and exacerbate housing inequality in an effort to enrich campuses and attract students. They often become the main employers, dictating labour practices and suppressing wages. And they increasingly occupy real estate positions in vulnerable communities. Together with Davarian Baldwin and De Dépendance editor Farid Tabarki we will discuss the relationship between universities and our cities.  What is the role of higher education in shaping our urban environment? And how do we ensure that they actually contribute to a just and vibrant city?

In this podcast we will listen to a lecture by Carolyn Steel, architect and author of the award-winning Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives and Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World. From our foraging hunter-gatherer ancestors to the enormous appetites of modern cities, food has shaped our bodies and homes, our politics and trade, and our climate. Whether it’s the daily decision of what to eat, or the monopoly of industrial food production, food touches every part of our world. But by forgetting its value, we have drifted into a way of life that threatens our planet and ourselves. Yet food remains central to addressing the predicaments and opportunities of our urban, digital age. 

Drawing on insights from philosophy, history, architecture, literature, politics and science, as well as stories of the farmers, designers and economists who are remaking our relationship with food, architect and writer Carolyn Steel offers a provocative and exhilarating vision for change, and how to thrive on our crowded, overheating planet. 

Twelve months. That is the time the world now has for global greenhouse gas emissions to start to fall. If not, we will miss the chance to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis. According to the 2022 report on mitigation by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) the world can still hope to stave off the worst ravages of climate breakdown, but only through a “now or never” dash to a low-carbon economy and society. Greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2025, and should be nearly halved this decade, to give the world a chance of limiting future heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. It is in effect a final warning for governments on the climate. So now what? Together with IPCC Lead Author and Professor of Socio-Technical Innovation and Climate Change Heleen de Coninck we will navigate through the latest climate science and what it should mean for our climate policies. What agency do we still have to turn things around? Could cities be the forerunners in the transformations we need? And as our planet is heating up: why are climate politics still frozen?

In this live episode we talk to Andrea Elliott on the occasion of her Pulitzer Prize winning book 'Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City'. Elliott is an investigative journalist for The New York Times whose work documents the lives of people on the margins of power. Based on nearly a decade of reporting, Invisible Child follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani Coates, whose story has become emblematic of America’s most wicked and growing urban problems: segregation, poverty and systemic inequality. It reveals the reality of child homelesness in New York City, and lays bare a strata of society far too often ignored. So what can we learn from Elliott’s vivid and powerfull narrative? Joined on stage by sociologist Bowen Paulle and urban geographer Cody Hochstenbach we analyse and unpack the power structures and unequal systems within which people become trapped, and its impact upon households and communities. And we look into concrete solutions and policies to tackle the divide. 

In this live edition of De Dépendance Podcast labour economist Guy Standing gives a short lecture on his book ‘The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class’. In it he provides a detailed understanding of how the situation of precarious employment affects the lives of the “Precariat”: the rapidly growing number of people facing lives of insecurity, on zero-hour contracts, moving in and out of jobs that give little meaning to their lives. Standing investigates this growing group, finding a frustrated and angry new underclass who are often ignored by politicians and economists. We have started to work more and more, and get less and less in return. But how did we end up here? And is there a way out?