Dr Shreeharsh Kelkar from UC Berkeley on to discuss massive online open courses or “MOOCs” and other varieties of education technology. Are they destined to displace the traditional university, or are (were) they just a fad? How do they compare with more general online platforms that host educational content, like YouTube? What sort of people start these ventures? Can they be trusted? Dr Kelkar is extremely well placed to answer these questions, combining a background in electrical engineering and computer science with a PhD in the anthropology of computing, expertise in quantitative and qualitative research methods, and access to some of the leading actors in this space, his research provides a fascinating perspective on one of the oldest sectors in our world – higher education – and the effect technology and commerce is having on it.

Shreeharsh’s website: 

https://shreeharshkelkar.net/writing/ 

Selected publications from Shreeharsh: 

2014. Anthropology in and of MOOCs. American Anthropologist 116 (4): 829–38. [pdf]  [Co-authored with Rachel Flamenbaum, Manduhai Buyandelger, Greg Downey, Orin Starn, Graham Jones, Catalina Laserna, Shreeharsh Kelkar, Carolyn Rouse, and Tom Looser]

2018. On the “neutrality” of platforms: How the platform shapes pedagogy in MOOCs. Anthropology Now 10 (3), 70-83.

Open letter from San Jose State University to Michael Sandel at Harvard:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/695245-san-jose-state-u-open-letter/ 

Simone Schneider is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Cambridge. Her dissertation explores the meanings and experience of infidelity in intimate relationships, combining both long, in-depth interviews with people who have experienced or committed infidelity, and discourse analysis of dating platforms that facilitate this sort of behaviour. It’s a fascinating body of work on one of the oldest, innermost domains of human affairs, one that is changing with the times as dating moves online and young people especially experiment with new forms of partnering and romance. Through the lens of infidelity, Simone’s work engages with wider questions around social norms, morality, and inequality in contemporary society. 

1.      Simone Schneider’s academic profile: 

https://simone-schneider.github.io 

2.      Recent Articles: Schneider, S. (2025). “‘Because like if you feel guilty, then it’s usually a sign’: On the role of emotions in conceptualising infidelity.” Emotions and Society, online first: https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journals/emsoc/aop/articl...

3.      Schneider, S. (2025) “‘Some kind of cheating’: Boundary transgressions and open relationships.” Sexualities, online first: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13634607251330945

This episode’s guest is Dr Maria Bach, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and host of Ceteris Never Paribus: the History of Economic Thought Podcast. She completed her PhD at King’s College in London, now available as a book with Cambridge University Press, Relocating Development Economics: The First Generation of Modern Indian Economists. The book excavates the overlooked history of Indian thinking about progress and growth, showcasing how a generation of thinkers there, unburden by the blinkers of colonialist ideology, reached the insights of today’s development policy a century ago. As you may have guessed from that title and the book’s content, Maria is an economic historian and historian of economic thought with a strong interest in decolonising the discipline and its curriculum. If you want to know what that means and why it’s important, please stay with us.   

Find out more about Maria Bach:

https://rehpere.org/en/maria-bach 

Ceteris Never Paribus: The History of Economic Thought Podcast

https://ceterisneverparibus.net/

Relocating Development Economics: The First Generation of Modern Indian Economists:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/relocating-development-economics/1048AF3FDAF95B3F6B5984CDB92D6D91 

 Mikhail Bakhtin:

(2014). Bakhtinian dialogism. In D. Coghlan, M. Brydon-Miller (Eds.) The SAGE encyclopedia of action research (Vol. 2, pp. 73-75). SAGE Publications Ltd, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446294406.n37

Arvind Panagariya:

https://www.sipa.columbia.edu/communities-connections/faculty/arvind-panagariya 

Arvind Panagariya, & School, E. (2024). The Nehru-Era Economic History and Thought & Their Lasting Impact. Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-nehru-era-economic-history-and-thought-and-their-lasting-impact-9780197774618?

A special issue episode where regular host Dr Mark Fabian is on the other side of the microphone being interviewed by @economeager about his new book -  Beyond Happy: How to rethink happiness and find fulfilment. It is out today in the United Kingdom. Here's a summary of the book: 

A comprehensive guide to cultivating wellbeing, combining cutting edge science and primordial folk wisdom.

Mark Fabian, one of the most exhilarating thinkers working on wellbeing today, presents a revolutionary approach to understanding why there’s more to life than the pursuit of happiness.

Beyond Happy explores how evolution has wired us to keep happiness just out of reach, leaving us perpetually stuck on a happiness treadmill. Instead of striving to escape it, the book argues, we should focus on making the treadmill a place we want to be. Finding this wellbeing begins with listening to our emotions, discovering intrinsic motivation and pursuing our authentic values. Fabian coaches you through this process of self-actualisation. Wellbeing, however, is not solely an individual pursuit – it is something we cultivate together. And so Beyond Happy also provides insights into enhancing your emotional intelligence, building relationships on care, and nurturing a karmic community.

Most profoundly, Beyond Happy shows the way out of nihilism – the pervasive sense that life on the treadmill is purposeless and incoherent. To escape this despair, we must develop a moral compass. To heal the toxicity of our acrimonious politics, we need to rediscover the joy of sharing and celebrating what we love.

Delivered with an entertaining mix of academic precision, a podcaster’s knack for storytelling, and the down-to-earth panache Australians are known for, Beyond Happy is a one-stop shop to everything you need to know about the good life.

Find it on Waterstones, Amazon, or your high street book store in the United Kingdom or Australia from July: 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beyond-Happy-Mark-Fabian/dp/1835010490

Check out Economeager's website:

https://sites.google.com/view/rachaelmeager/home

And especially their blog!

https://rottenandgood.substack.com/

Ian McGilchrist's book on ways to truth

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Matter-Things-Brains-Delusions-Unmaking/dp/1914568060

Ziz and the Zizzians:

https://www.theguardian.com/global/ng-interactive/2025/mar/05/zizians-artificial-intelligence

Showers and Zeigler Hill on multiple selves:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17995462/

Haidt's righteous mind:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0141039167

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Lotus

Anyone on social media these days has encountered a bot. An algorithm-driven fake account that engages in some nefarious activity, whether it’s turning uncontroversial points into debates, repping the Kremlin’s talking points, or directing you to pussy in bio, the bots are enshittifying social media at an alarming rate, especially now that artificial intelligence allows them to be more convincing, more targeted, and faster to set up en masse. But what if we could turn this pernicious technology into a tool for good? Among other things, academics are training bots to talk people down from conspiracy theories and update their views on climate change to be more factually accurate. One of those academics is Yara Kyrychenko, a PhD candidate, lab manager, and Gates Scholar at Cambridge University’s Social Decision-Making Lab. Her research combines psychological theory with big data and behavioural science methods to study how we can make human-technology interactions more constructive. She joins regular host Dr Mark Fabian, Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of Warwick, to talk about socially responsible AI. 

Yara's webpage:

https://www.sdmlab.psychol.cam.ac.uk/staff/yara-kyrychenko

Yara wanted me to issue a correction: Ukrainian is only in the top 20, not top 10 languages spoken on the internet: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_used_on_the_Internet

Chatbots and conspiracy theories:

https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/using-an-ai-powered-street-epistemologist-chatbot-and-reflection-tasks-to-diminish-conspiracy-theory-beliefs/#:~:text=An%20AI%2Dpowered%20chatbot%20instructed,strength%20of%20conspiracy%20theory%20beliefs. 

Trump is back in the White House and as anticipated, his administration is moving fast and breaking things. One of the first aspects of government to get stepped on was USAID, one of the biggest financiers and administrators of global development, including programs like PEPFAR. To understand the implications of this for the wider global philanthropy sector, ePODstemology reached out to Shonali Banerjee, Assistant Professor of International Development at the University of Warwick. She was previously a postdoc at the University of Cambridge’s centre for strategic philanthropy. Her work has been published in Third World Quarterly and Development in Practice, and she has a book, Horizontal Development: Shifting Power and Privilege in Aid, forthcoming with Bristol University Press. We discuss not just Trump’s impact but her work more broadly, especially the rapidly rising momentum of ‘trust-based philanthropy’. 

Shonali’s website

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/banerjee-shonali/

Shonali’s book

https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/horizontal-development

Climate change is the single biggest policy challenge facing the world today. A global political coordination problem of epic proportions, with baggage from colonialism, short election cycles, and a deep pocketed fossil fuel lobby running interference. The stakes couldn’t be higher, with hundreds of millions of human and billions of animal lives in the balance. Who do we need to take action? Parliaments. How do we get them to do it? Here to answer that question is Mitya Pearson, assistant professor in the politics of climate change at the University of Warwick. Dr Pearson was until recently a Leverhulme early career fellow at King’s College London, where he completed his PhD, and was previously a policy analyst focusing on the parliamentary politics of climate change at Policy Connect in Westminster. Mitya has written extensively on the determinants of politicians actions with respect to climate change and how to effectively pressure them into taking decisive action. 

Mitya’s website:

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/pearson/

Citizen’s assemblies and climate action: 

https://ecpr.eu/Events/Event/PaperDetails/76391 

Other topics discussed this episode: 

Broockman, D. and Skovron, C. (2018) ‘Bias in Perceptions of Public Opinion among Political Elites’, American Political Science Review, 112: 542–63

Dellmuth, L. et al.  (2022) ‘The Elite–Citizen Gap in International Organization Legitimacy’, American Political Science Review, 116: 283–300

Mitya Pearson & Alan Wager, 'Not so different: Comparing British MPs' and voters' attitudes to climate change', Parliamentary Affairs, 2024

Falck, R. (2023) ‘How Politicians and the Population Attribute Responsibility for Climate Change Mitigation’, Environmental Politics, 33: 699–726

Rapeli, L. and Koskimaa, V. (2022) ‘Concerned and Willing to Pay?’, Environmental Politics, 31: 542–51.

Sundblad, E., Biel, A. and Gärling, A. (2009) ‘Knowledge and Confidence in Knowledge About Climate Change Among Experts, Journalists, Politicians, and Laypersons’, Environment and Behavior, 41: 281–302

Tranter, B. (1999) ‘Environmentalism in Australia: Elites and the Public’, Journal of Sociology, 35: 331–50

Walgrave, S. et al.  (2023) ‘Inaccurate Politicians: Elected Representatives’ Estimations of Public Opinion in Four Countries’, The Journal of Politics, 85: 209–22

Willis, R. and Westlake, S. (2023) ‘Sustaining the Political Mandate for Climate Action’, Green Alliance. https://green-alliance.org.uk/publication/sustaining-the-political-mandate-for-climate-action/

Paul Lucardie & E. Gene Frankland, Green Parties in Transition: The End of Grass-roots Democracy? (2008)

Democracy is unwell. Trust in politicians, institutions, experts, and other people is steadily falling across the OECD, and even young people seem to be losing faith in the system. What can be done? One idea that has gained traction and demonstrated potential of late is deliberative democracy: bringing together citizens, policymakers, area specialists, and other stakeholders to ponder a policy issue together. Hot off its success in generating a deep, heartfelt and restorative referendum on abortion in Ireland that bridged decades of animosity on the subject, more people are thinking maybe we need to get more deliberative. To explain how, regular host Dr Mark Fabian is joined this episode by deliberative democracy scholar Afsoun Afsahi from the University of British Columbia in Canada. Her research covers the theory and practice and deliberative democracy, and its potential to include often marginalised perspectives in the policymaking process. 

Afsoun’s homepage: https://politics.ubc.ca/profile/afsoun-afsahi/ 

Afsoun’s publications: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=VP6qLF8AAAAJ&hl=en

Final report of the Grandview Woodland citizen’s assembly: https://council.vancouver.ca/20150624/documents/ptec5_AppB.PDF 

Learn more about deliberative democracy around the Irish abortion referendum: https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/the-irish-abortion-referendum-how-a-citizens-assembly-helped-to-break-years-of-political-deadlock/ 

Jenny Mansbridge and Archon Fung on self-interest in deliberative democracy: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/place-self-interest-and-role-power-deliberative-democracy 

Brian Milstein, (2020). Justification crisis: Brexit, Trump, and deliberative breakdown. Political Theory,  https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0090591720968596 

Bohman, James. "" When Water Chokes": Ideology, Communication, and Practical Rationality." Constellations: An International Journal of Critical & Democratic Theory 7.3 (2000).

Matthews, J. Scott. "The political foundations of support for same-sex marriage in Canada." Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique 38.4 (2005): 841-866.

Michael Saward’s many publications on democracy: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=miPAuzoAAAAJ&hl=en 

Michael Neblo, Kevin Easterling, and David Lazer on direct deliberative democracy: https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/jnd260/cab/CAB2018%20-%20Neblo.pdf 

Alexandria Ocasia Cortez cooking Q&A: https://www.facebook.com/NowThisHer/videos/aoc-hosts-cooking-qa-on-instagram-live/481505699487177/ 

In the UK, up to 80% of a social worker’s time can be spent filling out forms rather than helping the desperate people in their care. This is an example of what Dan Honig calls ‘management for compliance’. Honig is associate professor of public policy at University College London, among many other affiliations including Georgetown, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Lahore University of Management Sciences. In his new book, Mission Driven Bureaucrats, he argues that a ‘management for empowerment’ results in more motivated public servants, higher integrity commitment to the values inherent in public service, and ultimately better service delivery. Honig presents a range of empirical evidence, qualitative and quantitative, suggesting that managing people with metrics and reports and emphasising accountability creates a culture of mistrust and shirking, compounding the problems it is designed to solve. In contrast, recruiting people looking for purpose, supporting them to learn, and granting them autonomy to apply their expertise in a way that suits local conditions generates a virtuous cycle. Mission driven bureaucrats feel energised, unmotivated bureaucrats invest more in the mission, and lazy knaves get screened out by their more committed peers. In this episode, Dan joins regular host Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick to discuss the main arguments of his book and the wider context in which it sits. 

Dan’s website: https://danhonig.info/ 

Buy Mission Driven Bureaucrats here.

Moore on British Colonial Management in the Philippines

Christopher Hood on tools for all seasons in public management 

Michael Barber, Deliverology:

Knights, Knaves, or Pawns by LeGrand

Article by Esther Duflo using cameras to improve teacher attendance:

An introduction to self-determination theory:

Elizabeth Linos’ research, including on policing in Knoxville

Andrea Headley’s research on police and other front line responders

One of Nesta’s many reports on mission driven government

Social Finance UK on system change evaluation

“Digital governance” is a term commonly used to refer to the transformative potential of integrating contemporary technological advances into the day-to-day activities of government. Electronic filing of tax returns, text message reminders to get your vaccine booster, medical records that can follow your around as you change doctor’s offices – all are examples of digital governance. Digital governance holds much promise, most obviously in terms of efficiency and convenience, but also many risks such as cybersecurity breeches, creeping paternalism, and the alienation of citizens from the activities of their own political representatives. In this episode, ePODstemology hosts Dr Aaron Maniam from Oxford University to help you understand these issues. Aaron is Fellow of practice and director of digital transformation education at the Blavatnik School of Government. He also co-chairs the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the Future of Technology Policy and is a member of the OECD’s expert group on Artificial Intelligence Futures. He was previously a high-level policymaker in Singapore, most recently Deputy Secretary at the Ministry of Communication and Information. Few are better place to explain how we can make the most of digital governance. 

Aaron’s website:

https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/people/aaron-maniam-0 

Follow Aaron on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-maniam-a86a842/?originalSubdomain=uk 

Episode with Malte Dold on behavioural public policy:

https://epodstemology.buzzsprout.com/1763534/episodes/13401729-can-we-make-the-world-a-better-place-with-behavioural-economics 

Statecraft podcast on Obamacare and policy implementation

https://www.statecraft.pub/p/how-to-actually-implement-a-policy

Clayton Christensen on the Innovator’s Dilemma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma 

Helen Margetts, Peter John, Scott Hale, and Taha Yasseri, Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action. 

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691159225/political-turbulence 

How to run a gold standard deliberative democracy exercise:

https://assemblyguide.demnext.org/#introduction