Dr Aleksei Turobov is an Assistant Professor at the Bennett School of Public Policy. His research examines the critical gap between the global ambitions of AI policy and the practical realities of its implementation.

He leads research for the AIxGeo project, using a mixed-methods approach that combines AI-driven thematic analysis with network analysis to map the emergent coalitions and narratives shaping international AI policy and governance. Dr Turobov argues that the success of global governance hinges on the granular details of AI institutional capacity. This conviction drives his work on the adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) within the UK civil service, where he evaluates the ‘expectation-capability gap’ and develops frameworks for responsible implementation.

By connecting global strategy to institutional practice, his work generates an evidence-based understanding of how institutions can adapt in the age of AI, informing his ongoing work on evaluating institutional AI adaptation using machine learning. He holds a PhD in Political Science and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow in Cybersecurity and Technology Policy at Northumbria University.

Aleks’ webpage:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleksei-turobov-phd-8232a2153

11:10

Using ChatGPT for Thematic analysis by A Turobov, D Coyle, V Harding (2024)

https://www.bennettschool.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Using-ChatGPT-for-analytics-WP.pdf  

16:20

Flexible coding using teams of reseachers: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/16094069241289279#tab-contributors 

36:00

The militarisation of Artificial Intelligence UN Office for Disarmament Affairs (2007)

https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/3972613?ln=en&v=pdf

Paul Behrens is British Academy Global Professor at the University of Oxford and Reapra Senior Research Fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre there. He is an industrial ecologist examining how the ways we produce our lives and the things we consume in them are related to environment stress, especially climate change. In this episode, we discuss the role of demand management in averting ecological disaster - demand management here referring to reducing or changing unsustainable consumption practices. We talk especially about diets and food systems, but also energy, transport, plastics, and the political implications of greening all of the above. Did you know that the UK population reduced its meat consumption to around twice a week we could recover an area of land the size of Scotland? Tune in to find out why.

Find out more about Paul:

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/find-an-expert/professor-paul-behrens

17:45

Planetary Boundaries Framework: 

https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html 

20:00

Changing food systems towards plants > beef could rewild an area the size of Scotland: 

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-021-00431-5 

44:00

Intra-Elite Competition: A Key Concept for Understanding the Dynamics of Complex Societies (Peter Turchin, 2016)

https://peterturchin.com/intra-elite-competition-a-key-concept-for-understanding-the-dynamics-of-complex-societies/ 

50:30

Danish Action Plan for Plant-Based Foods (2023)

https://en.fvm.dk/Media/638484294982868221/Danish-Action-Plan-for-Plant-based-Foods.pdf 

Dr Stephen Mallory is assistant professor of game design at Lawrence Technical University in Southfield, Michigan. After a career in the video game industry, Stephen turned his considerable intellect to analysing games as an aspect of digimodernism - the contemporary cultural phenomenon where much of our lived experience, indeed, our reality and even sense of self, is mediated through digital technologies, artifacts, and environments. His research is especially concerned with the intersection of digimodernism and digi-fascism, and how these cultural forces relate to things like the economics of the games industry. If you want to know more about how the largest and fasting growing media industry in the world - that's video games - affects you whether you interact with it or not, tune in to this episode. 

08:30

Developer’s Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators, Casey O’Donnell (2014) 

https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/4469/Developer-s-DilemmaThe-Secret-World-of-Videogame 

10:45

The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond, Alan Kirby (2006) 

https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase26?openform&fp=philnow&id=philnow_2006_0058_0000_0034_0037 

13:15

Jesper Juul’s “Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds”

https://half-real.net/ 

14:30

Homo Ludens: a study of the play element in culture, Johan Huizinga (1950)

https://radioparasita.org/sites/default/files/Gong/052013/johan_huizinga_homo_ludens_1949_pdf_17266.pdf 

20:30

Disco Elysium (2019)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/632470/Disco_Elysium__The_Final_Cut/ 

23:45

Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and reconfigure Our Culture, Alan Kirby (2009) 

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/digimodernism-9781441175281/ 

Timotheus Vermeulen is a full professor of media, culture and society at the University of Oslo in Norway. Together with Robin Van Den Akker, he coined the term metamodernism and kick started scholarship of this new idea, co-founding the webzine Notes on Metamodernity and co-editing the book series Studies in Metamodernism. Metamodernism refers to the culture or structure of feeling that comes after postmodernism - it's what we are living through right now. It's character is contested. One the one hand you have people advocating for sincerity, earnestness, pluralism, and kindness, on the other hand you have reactionaries and cancel culture enthusiasts seeking to impose their preferred grand story against the cynicism of postmodernity. How is metamodernism manifesting in art, politics, and popular culture? Tune in to find out. 

00:45 

Notes on Metamodernism E-zine https://www.metamodernism.com/ 

Vermeulen, T., & van den Akker, R. (2010). Notes on metamodernism. Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 2(1). Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3402/jac.v2i0.5677

4:40

Plastic Time: Gesture on Screen (Book) T Vermeulen (2026)

14:40

Notes on by Camp Susan Sontag (1964), Available at:

https://monoskop.org/images/5/59/Sontag_Susan_1964_Notes_on_Camp.pdf 

22:40

Slavoj Žižek - Kinder Surprise Egg: https://youtu.be/4zHnJWN8YEA?si=vKzdpSXqX_vu53JR 

26:57

The Postmodern Condition (1979) Jean-François Lyotard Available at:

https://monoskop.org/images/e/e0/Lyotard_Jean-Francois_The_Postmodern_Condition_A_Report_on_Knowledge.pdf 

40:30

Doughnut Economics (2017) Kate Raworth

40:45

Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us (2023) Jon Alexandar

45:00

Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (2015) McKenzie Wark 

Available at: https://monoskop.org/images/7/70/Wark_McKenzie_ed_Molecular_Red_Reader.pdf 

50:30

Doughnut Economics Tools page: https://doughnuteconomics.org/tools 

 Innovation is crucial for improving quality of life and clearing away ossified and unhelpful ways of doing and being, like fossil fuel capitalism. So how do we get it moving? The innovation ecosystem of a nation, a region, or even the world is a complex network of physical infrastructure, human capital, industrial policy, and R&D centres among other things. If any part of the network grows weak, it can drag down the whole system. Here to help us navigate this environment is Halima Jibril, Assistant Professor in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Warwick Business School. She is Co-Investigator on the £7million Innovation and Research Caucus funded by United Kingdom Research and Innovation. We could not have a better guide. 

• Halima's website:

https://www.wbs.ac.uk/about/person/halima-jibril/    

• H Jibril, A Kaltenbrunner, E Kesidou (2018), Financialisation and innovation in emerging economies: Evidence from Brazil.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/181485/1/fmm-imk-wp-27-2018.pdf 

• Ivan Vendrov Podcast: Robin Hansen on Cultural Evolution and Cultural Drift (2026)

https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/robin-hanson-on-cultural-evolution 

• Help to Grow: Digital, Department for Business and Trade (2024)

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/help-to-grow-digital-evaluation-report 

• AI Upskilling fund, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (2024

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/flexible-ai-upskilling-fund  

• Mazzucato on governments taking equity stake in R&D firms is in her book:

https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-entrepreneurial-state/ 

• French government R&D incentives:

https://www.abgi-uk.com/news-resources/innovation-funding-incentives-france/ 

• Halima Jibril, Carol Stanfield, Stephen Roper (2020), What drives productivity growth behind the frontier? A mixed-methods investigation into UK SMEs

https://www.enterpriseresearch.ac.uk/publications/what-drives-productivity-growth-behind-the-frontier-a-mixed-methods-investigation-into-uk-smes-research-paper-no-89/ 

• The Lupe Vacuum cleaner is sadly discontinued: 

https://vacuumwars.com/lupe-technology-closes-a-loss-to-the-vacuum-industry/ 

It seems these days that we are awash in data. Indeed, in their recent book The Ordinal Society, Marion Foucard and Kieran Healy argue persuasively that the passive data collection facilitated by the internet, digital technologies, wearables, and social media allows us for the first time to map the deep substrate of the social. Is that true though? In all this data, is there signal? Valeria Ramirez from Cambridge University has made a career out of tracking the advent of digital metrics and their revolutionary impact on the way organisations operate, first in journalism's shift to digital media, and now in university knowledge exchanges. She has identified key characteristics that distinguish meaningful from meaningless metrics, and developed a framework for developing the former within any contextualised organisation. If you've ever wondered whether the Netflix algorithm isn't collecting the best data to understand your video preferences, this episode is for you.  

www.valeriaramirez.org 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/valeriaramirezphd

Ramirez, V. (2025). Meaningful Metrics for Knowledge Exchange: Rethinking Social Value Metrics for University–Business and Community Interactions. Policy Evidence Unit for University Commercialisation and Innovation. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.121347 

Metamodernism is the cultural mode that is emerging after postmodernism, and boy do we need it. Postmodernism was a period of deconstruction. A necessary deconstruction, I hasten to say, one that shook the foundations of many obsolete structures that kept people oppressed like homophobia, patriarchy, colonialism, and opinions masquerading as expertise. But as there was only deconstruction, we find our culture mired in a nihilistic swamp. How can we reconstruct shared values, shared perspectives on the world, shared culture? How can we escape our meaning crisis? Brendan Graham Dempsey is at the forefront of the both science and humanities aspects of metamodernism, blending complex systems theory, theology, neuroscience, existentialism and gardening in his efforts to articulate a new way to do old things. He has written an edited a series of books on metamodern spirituality, and is now publishing a second series specifically on meaning-making.

Brendan's website:

https://www.brendangrahamdempsey.com/

Vermeulen and Van Den Akker's original metamodernism website:

https://www.metamodernism.com/

And one of their early papers:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3402/jac.v2i0.5677

An analysis of Nihilistic themes in Ric & Morty and Bojack Horseman:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsotfzGpby8

An analysis of metamodern tropes in Everything Everywhere All At Once:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xEi8qg266g

Lyotard on The Postmodern Condition:

https://monoskop.org/images/e/e0/Lyotard_Jean-Francois_The_Postmodern_Condition_A_Report_on_Knowledge.pdf

Brendan's book Emergentism:

https://www.brendangrahamdempsey.com/emergentism

Kolchinsky and Wolpert on Meaning making in information theory:

https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/new-definition-returns-meaning-information

Brendan's new book on the evolution of meaning - free with his substack!

https://brendangrahamdempsey.substack.com/p/publishing-my-new-book-on-substack

John Vervaeke on metamodernism:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De6ZIHThONI 

In one of his Letters Provinciales, the French philosopher and Theologian Blaise Pascal apologises that “I have made this letter longer than usual because I have not had the time to make it shorter”. This is an aphoristic statement that could form one part of the definition of an aphorism: a pithy observation that contains a general truth. There are thousands of well-known aphorisms coming in all manner of media, like the old proverb “a rolling stone gathers no moss”, or the quite recent lyrics from the Rolling Stones: “you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you’ll find you get what you need”. My guest this episode is an expert in aphorisms, James Geary, adjunct lecturer in writing for public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He is the author of the New York Times Bestseller The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism, original published way back in 2005 but recently reprinted in its 2nd edition on account of all the new aphoristic content coming out of social media. What’s the difference between a twitter hot take or a tiktok sketch and an aphorism, well you’ll just have to stay with us to find out.  

James Website

https://jamesgeary.com/

The book!

https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-world-in-a-phrase-a-brief-history-of-the-aphorism-second-edition-james-geary/7852688

The so-called “replication crisis” engulfed psychology over the last 10 years, with numerous failures to reproduce canonical studies from the biggest names in the discipline like Dweck’s growth mindset, Baumeister’s willpower as a muscle, and around half of Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. Interrogation of this failure of replicate led to discoveries of p-hacking, publication bias, a huge disconnect between the theories psychologists were supposedly testing and the cute little studies they were using for that purpose. Eventually there was even evidence of outright fraud, notably in the case of Harvard’s Francesca Gino, Duke’s Dan Arielly, and others. Hearing all this in the news, you might wonder: why is replication so crucial to the progress of science? Is there anything we can do improve the credibility of scientific practice? Does preregistering our intended analysis and expected results have an effect?  Here to answer all these questions and more is Patrick Vu, Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of New South Wales in my hometown of Sydney, Australia. Fresh off a PhD from Brown investigating the statistical side of replication and publication bias, Patrick is at the bleeding edge of these issues. 

Patrick’s website:

https://www.patrickhvu.com/

Study where multiple research teams use the same data to test the same hypothesis: 

https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/117278/1/pnas.2203150119.pdf 

The paper that launched the replication crisis – Why most published research findings are false:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1182327/ 

Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery:

https://philotextes.info/spip/IMG/pdf/popper-logic-scientific-discovery.pdf 

My favourite paper from Andrew Gelman:

https://sites.stat.columbia.edu/gelman/research/published/gelman_hennig_full_discussion.pdf 

Open Science Collaboration - Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aac4716 

Nancy Cartwright insights:

https://personal.lse.ac.uk/robert49/teaching/ph201/Week09_Hoefer.pdf

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/