“My grandchildren are so busy with all their extra classes that I seem to spend most our time together acting as a taxi service.”

“When the children come to stay I’m constantly worried about keeping them safe.”

“ I’d love to have fun with them, but my daughter expects me to supervise their homework and test them on their spelling.”

Are today’s grandmothers too protective and anxious? Benedetta Cappelini, Professor of Marketing at the University of Durham, certainly thinks so. She talks to Sally Feldman, who is currently writing a book of advice for new grannies, about the effects of the new trend in intensive parenting.

'Intensiveparenting', with its emphasis on extra curricular activities, supervised 'playdates' and conversations about thoughts and feelings is fast becoming the norm for this generation of parents, requiring the investment of significant amounts of time, money and energy in raising children. What are the implications for grandparents who did not raise their own children in this way, but who regularly look after their grandchildren?

“My grandchildren are so busy with all their extra classes that I seem to spend most our time together acting as a taxi service.”

“When the children come to stay I’m constantly worried about keeping them safe.”

“ I’d love to have fun with them, but my daughter expects me to supervise their homework and test them on their spelling.”

Are today’s grandmothers too protective and anxious? Benedetta Cappelini, Professor of Marketing at the University of Durham, certainly thinks so. She talks to Sally Feldman, who is currently writing a book of advice for new grannies, about the effects of the new trend in intensive parenting.

'Intensiveparenting', with its emphasis on extra curricular activities, supervised 'playdates' and conversations about thoughts and feelings is fast becoming the norm for this generation of parents, requiring the investment of significant amounts of time, money and energy in raising children. What are the implications for grandparents who did not raise their own children in this way, but who regularly look after their grandchildren?

What are grandmothers for? That’s what Sally Feldman wondered when she first learned that her daughter was pregnant. As a former editor of BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour she was familiar with so many aspects of female experiences. But faced with the prospect of a grandchild, she realised she was clueless. So now she’s writing a book of advice for new grandmothers. This podcast is a conversation with four grandmothers. Their discussion is a taster of the forthcoming book, featuring some of the joys and challenges of this most precious role.

Sally would love to hear from other grandmothers, so do send your comments here, or else contact her at: [email protected]

With Covid rates remaining stubbornly high and a huge pent-up demand for hospital care, the UK's National Health Service faces a tough winter. Intensive care wards are the canary in the mine, reports Rachael Jolley.

Mark Toshner: We can make beds, but what we can't make are specialised staff to run those beds. The accident and emergency department needs a very specific skill set. And once you run out of their capacity, you don't really have anywhere to turn.

The winter is going to be tough. I think that nobody's envisaging anything other than a really difficult winter and how difficult that is, I think we don't know, but it's going to be difficult.

If you hear people from intensive care,  telling you things are tough, that's a really important canary down the mine, because these people are the SAS of clinical staff. And if they are telling you it's tough, you should be listening.

Andrew Conway Morris: My unit is about a third full of COVID. We have spilled out into our higher independency area and we are ventilating patients in the high dependency area.

Rachael Jolley: Welcome to Pod Academy. My name is Rachael Jolley. I'm a journalist and podcast producer. In this episode, we look at the challenges for the National Health Service as it faces COVID in winter 2021.

With Welsh hospitals reporting some of the longest waiting times ever and the Scottish government calling in the army to help drive ambulances are we as prepared as we can be for the winter ahead?

And what does it feel like inside one of the UKs most famous hospitals right now? In September Prime Minister Boris Johnson said further restrictions could be put in place if the NHS is threatened this winter. By the end of the month COVID hospitalisations were already at a high level. To find out more and see how different this winter might be from the last one I spoke with two doctors who work at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge.

We talked about how they'd coped so far and how they're preparing for this winter and what their biggest worries were. I spoke with Mark Toshner, an academic at Cambridge University, who is also a pulmonary physician, a specialist in illnesses relating to the lungs, at Addenbrooke's. While Mark doesn't normally work in intensive care last year, he was called into help out during the worst of the emergency. And Pod Academy also heard from Andrew Conway Morris, a clinical scientist at Cambridge University and a consultant working in intensive care at Addenbrookes.

First we heard from Mark Toshner.

Mark, if I were the Secretary of State for Health, what would you be asking me to do right now?

Mark Toshner:  The first thing I would be asking is for our really honest acknowledgement that we're in a difficult place and that we have just under, I think we might even have topped 8000 people in hospital now and we've had that for weeks now, between about 7000 and 8,000 and that this was supposed to be our period of rest, or quiet time, during the summer. In actual fact we've seen almost historic highs of healthcare utilisation.

That's a really tough start to then go into winter for, and, so we're in a really vulnerable position.

Rachael Jolley: And Andy, what is it like in intensive care right now?

Andrew Conway Morris: My unit is about a third full of COVID. We have spilled out into our higher independency area and we are ventilating patients in the high dependency area

Mark Toshner: I've got plenty of colleagues who've essentially just been the coal face now for the better part of a year and a half or longer, and you can see the toll that it's taken on some of them. And it has a pretty heavy toll. And so the winter is going to be tough. I think that nobody's envisaging anything other than a really difficult winter and how diff...

It's not about individual countries. It's not about individual regions. It's not even about blocks. This doesn't work unless we vaccinate everybody. But is geopolitics getting in the way of good public health policy as we strive to overcome COVID-19?

 

 

In this podcast, Rachael Jolley, former editor-in-chief of Index on Censorship and research fellow at the Centre for Freedom of the Media at the University of Sheffield considers how geopolitics is affecting government decisions around vaccines and distribution, with guests from the US, UK and the Philippines.

 

Mark Toshner: It's not about individual countries. It's not about individual regions. It's not even about blocks. This doesn't work unless we vaccinate everybody.

John Nery:  The survey shows that something like 68% of Filipino adults have doubts about whether they should take the COVID-19 vaccine or not. Then that's just really worrying.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom:   So we can think of it as soft power sort of related to having a space program, to have this idea that Beijing is one of the world capitals that's at the forefront of various technologies.

Michael Jennings:  And if you look at many African countries, they've responded extremely effectively. They've made use of technology.  Rwanda has been making use of drones to get messaging to very remote communities.

Rachael Jolley:  Hello, my name is Rachael Jolley and welcome to this episode of a series of podcasts I've hosted for Pod Academy on the global politics of the pandemic. In this episode, I talk to academics in the UK, USA and the Philippines about how national agendas are affecting decision-making, how the virus has to be tackled internationally and how history can sometimes get in the way.

We also talk about misinformation around the disease and why, if we don't think globally, then in the end, the virus wins. Geopolitics is increasingly a major factor in the discussions around COVID whether about access to PPE or access to the vaccine. Delivery of stocks or stopping vaccine supply arriving over a border often gets tied up with the politics and economics between countries.

As some nations trumpet how well they've done, they rank themselves against others. There's something of a global competition to see which national leader can take the most glory. In the midst of this, there are countries trying to win friends and influence people by delivering stocks of vaccine to those that don't have any. Economic alliances are being built or improved while others are being undermined.

With us on the podcast are Mark Toshner, a lecturer at the University of Cambridge and a pulmonary vascular physician who spends a lot of time on Twitter answering the public's queries about vaccines when he's not looking at the impact of long COVID. We also hear from John Nery, who's based in Manila in the Philippines and teaches media and politics, and is the chair of the journalism centre at the Ateneo de Manila University. Also joining the conversation are Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor in the history of China at the University of California at Irvine, and Michael Jennings, Michael is a reader in international development in the department of development studies at SOAS, University of London, and researches global health and development.

I started by talking to Mark Toshner. Mark, are you worried about geopolitics getting in the way of people's acceptance of vaccines?

Mark Toshner: [00:03:09] The short answer to that is yes. I usually deal on social media with individual concerns about vaccines. And so I spend a lot of my time just addressing people and what their concerns are and, and I think they're complex and they vary from region to region.

They vary from place to place,

Cautiously, museums across the world are opening their doors. But there's one place where, even during the pandemic, you always get to be up close - the virtual museum. In the digital environment, the museum can take on a new role, less a place of authority, more an agora of ideas. But we have to think outside the box to solve curatorial issues in the digital space.  Zara Karschay takes us on a tour......

.

To see each and every brushstroke. To handle priceless objects. A place where figures in famous works of art turn to look back at you. A place where you can stay as long as you like in front of the Mona Lisa. Virtual collections aren't new. But for much of last year, our only option to see museum was online. And 2020 had many more cultural institutions racing to develop their virtual collections and tours. As we enter the promised ‘new normal’, or perhaps even a ‘virtual-first’ era, where we might come to see a collection and objects online before going in person, we wonder, what can virtual collections give us that physical collections cannot? How can we turn the novelty of technology into something more meaningful, something that introduces us to new stories that helps us change our minds? Or maybe, that even changes the perspective the museum has of itself?

 

ME: We are definitely rethinking how we're using digital in our collection.

 

ZK: This is Maria Economou, Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Glasgow.

 

ME: The digital is not just the technology that underpins it, but also affects the way the museum is seen. It affects its identity, the way we see ourselves. I think the first few years of digital heritage and digital activity, the digital, unfortunately, was the strong partner, and the cultural heritage was the weakest relative. It's improved a lot, but you see even today that sometimes the whistles and bells and the graphics the tech was really the main driving engine rather than, “Who are we doing this for?” “Who are the users?” “What do these collections require?” and being focused more that way.

 

ZK: In the digital environment, the museum can take on a new role, less as a place of authority and more, an agora of ideas, which also reforms the way that visitors see their role in the museum.

 

ME:  To think of themselves not just as end-users and consumers and producers of this material, but to put themselves in the position of being critically engaged with this. How do we make sense of personal memories? What do we feel are common memories to be shared? What gives us and helps us define ourselves? It's a shift in your position, in your role, and much more active one.

 

ZK: In 2018 Professor Economou produced the Digital Heritage Strategy for the university's museum, the Hunterian. One of its themes was to find ways to engage a broader public by building and sharing knowledge. From the digital agora to the ancient Roman marketplace, the Hunterian can tell stories about associated but disparate collections, well beyond the walls of the museum.

 

ME: The actual act and art of storytelling has been taking place for so long. And all good cultural institutions are doing some form of storytelling. Even if it's just by putting objects together, even the juxtaposition and placement in space is telling a story and a narrative. We have, for example, in the Hunterian an important part of the Antonine world collections, which is from Roman Scotland. So, one of the parts of the Roman Empire’s most northern frontier, then it goes all over Europe, and then the rest goes south to Africa. So, it's a great big scheme for UNESCO to connect all the sites that relates to the frontiers of the Roman Empire. We were looking at how digital storytelling can support emotional e...

The death of writer and activist Nawal el Saadawi has just been announced.  In 2011 Tess Woodcraft interviewed her at a conference organised by the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Right Organisation for Pod Academy. We reproduce it here.

Typically, and at 80 years old, she had stopped off at the Occupy encampment around St Paul's Cathedral on her way from the airport, before coming on to the conference.

Note: there is also an Italian translation of this podcast, by Federica di Lascio, below.

Nawal el Saadawi is one of the foremost Egyptian writers. A doctor by profession, she has written over 40 books of fiction and non-fiction, which have been translated into 30 languages. Since her very first novel, written in her twenties, she has taken on some of the most difficult, challenging, controversial subjects, including: female genital mutilation, domestic violence, child marriage, prostitution, the impact of war on women and children, so-called ‘honour killing’ and the laws that maintain women’s status as minors.

It is not surprising perhaps that this has made her many powerful enemies. She has been forced out of employment, she was imprisoned by the Egyptian authorities in the 1980s and in the 1990s she lived under serious death threats from religious fundamentalists. Indeed, she was forced into exile. But now she is back in Egypt where, although now in her eighties, she took an active role in the demonstrations in Tahrir Square last Spring and continues to fight to ensure that women’s rights are part of the political settlement in Egypt. Her writing and activism are seen by women around the world as a beacon of light and she has received many awards, literary and academic.

This interview was recorded at a conference in London organised by IKWRO, the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation, which works to end honour killing and sexual violence against women.

Tess Woodcraft:   What did you mean when you wrote in your autobiography: ‘writing is my sole refuge, it’s like breathing’?

Nawal el Saadawi:  My work is my love and when you love your work you can do it well.  Since childhood I was forced to study medicine, to become a doctor. But I didn’t dream of being a physician – I dreamt of art, music, poetry, dancing, writing novels.

Of course there is no separation of creativity in science and art, but when I was a child I loved to move my body, to dance and this is natural.  But in Egypt at that time it was a taboo to be a dancer or a film actress, and it was very respectable to be a doctor. So I accepted the advice of my parents and went into the medical profession.  But all the time I felt that my writing was my life, and all the time I kept a secret diary under my pillow, and I have never stopped writing from then till now. It is more than oxygen, it is my life. It is more than breathing

TW:  How do you see the relationship between your writing and your political activism?

N el S: They are inseparable.  Writing and fighting are inseparable.  Why do we write?  Because it gives us pleasure.  Creativity gives us pleasure.  The pleasure of creativity is above everything – it can cure us of all our pains.  But of course creativity can also lead to you to prison and to exile because you challenge the system.  But the pleasure of creativity is more than the pain

Nawal el Saadawi at the IKWRO conference

TW: You’ve tackled some of the most difficult issues, – one of these is female genital mutilation.  Despite efforts to outlaw it, it is still practised in many countries.  Is it possible to change this?

N el S: Of course, but there are many sexual problems in the lives of women – female genital mutilation, rape, honour killing, forced marriages.  They are usually tackled separately,

Journalism has sometimes been a dangerous profession during the pandemic, but there has been real innovation, too.  In this, the third part of our series on Journalism in the Pandemic, Rachael Jolley, former editor-in-chief of Index on Censorship and research fellow at the Centre for Freedom of the Media at the University of Sheffield  considers how Covid 19 has influenced the future of  journalism.

 

Rachael Jolley: Welcome to Pod Academy and our third podcast in this series on journalism during the pandemic. In this episode we look at the challenges that reporters were just not prepared for. And what are the innovations and changes that come out of the crisis that will be significant for the years ahead.

As the pandemic kicked off, the big challenge for many news organisations was to move their reporting teams to work completely remotely, so there was a massive shifting of equipment to people's homes. Suddenly all sorts of questions were being asked about filing stories in different ways and how to cover stories while reducing risks of infection.

Very few had experience covering a pandemic before. And so there was no obvious formula to follow. Then there were the technical challenges of using new equipment or older equipment differently. At the same time, staff were off sick or on furlough or newsrooms were cut back because of financial pressures.

So what were the toughest obstacles and what are the innovations that might make a difference to how journalism is done in the future? We talked to experts around the world to find out.  First, we went to Milan, the epicenter of the pandemic in Italy, and  talked to Laura Silvia Battaglia, the coordinator, and soon to be director of the Catholic University of Milan's journalism school and a journalist herself.   We kicked off by talking about the challenges for the journalism school and its students.

Laura Silvia Battaglia: Here in Milan, we started in February thinking about how could it be possible to cover the pandemic. But we weren't really conscious about the challenges for our profession and also about the risks at the beginning. No one knew exactly what COVID-19 was.

We started thinking about the safety for our students and the risks related to  covering these areas. So the challenges were very significant because we used to send our students around like every reporter does. But at the same time they are students. We told them immediately, to try to keep a distance, the safety distance, how to cover yourself using masks, using face shields.  So we provided all this stuff to our students and we decided  only the people that really wanted to go out for reporting (of course, covering themselves and trying to avoid  any risk and following the rules). So only the people that wanted to they did it and the others who didn't want to go reporting, they would not, they would work at a desk for our publications.

Rachael Jolley: Here is Richard Sambrook, a former director of global news at the BBC and now director of the centre for journalism at Cardiff University on why it was difficult for news organisations to know where to start....

Richard Sambrook: Nobody has had direct experience of reporting a pandemic like this before. So I think it took quite a while for people to understand how to use the statistics, how to use the figures, what to expect from the science and so on as well. That took quite a lot of catching up with even for some of the health specialists. There's the whole question of being remote from the community they serve. Because actually, if anything that we've learned over the last few years is journalism has been too remote needs to get closer to the community. But now the pandemic's come in and now got in the way of that as well. So trying to report the impact, you know, in ways that are still COVID compliant is difficult and chal...

Authoritarian restrictions on the press, attacks on journalists in the streets and more accusations of 'fake news' - it's like a war zone out there.  Rachael Jolley looks at the dangers of reporting during the Covid -19 pandemic.

Jolley (@londoninsider) has developed a series of podcasts for Pod Academy on News in the Pandemic, this is the second in the series.

William Horsley: They say that the first casualty of war is truth, but pandemic is in the same category

Jean-Paul Marthoz:  Today being a journalist, you don't show necessarily that you are press. It's like going to a war zone

Lada Price:  In Bulgaria, there are several reports of journalists being attacked, despite clearly identifying themselves as members of the press.

Kirstin McCudden: We started keeping track of journalists who were harassed for covering the protests (which would be part of a normal news gathering routine, of course)

Donald Trump: They are the fake, fake, disgusting news

Rachael Jolley: My name is Rachael Jolley and welcome to Pod Academy. This the second in our series on journalism during the pandemic. Worryingly, we're seeing the escalation of violence and aggression during this global pandemic as journalists literally battle to report on vital and public interest stories. From physical attacks to attacks on journalists' reputations to governments introducing new legislation, putting limits on reporting, those that don't want journalists to report an issue will try all sorts of measures to try and stop them even threatening to try and infect them. These are terrifying trends. The pandemic appears to have allowed the powerful to gain more tools in their armoury when it comes to squeezing media freedom.

William Horsley is co-founder and international director of the Centre for Freedom of the Media at the University of Sheffield's department of journalism. William is also a former television and radio journalist at the  BBC.

William Horsley: They say that the first casualty of war is truth. It turns out that pandemic is in the same category because what it does is it increases physical risk in many ways for journalists as they go about their business, particularly for example, reporting on the lockdowns.

But also it gives governments the reason to assume much more executive power. And this happened against the background, of course, of a shift towards a much more authoritarian style, particularly assaults against the free and independent media.

 Rachael Jolley:  Lada  Price, a senior lecturer in journalism from Sheffield Hallam University, talks about the way that this kind of emergency legislation brought in during the pandemic has been used in Eastern Europe to restrict what journalists can do.

Lada Price:If you look at reports that have been issued by organisations such as Freedom House, Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders they have all raised the alarm about emergency measures that have restricted media freedom severely. Let's take, for example, Eastern European countries, such as Hungary, where at the onset of the pandemic, the government introduced laws, or rule by decree, indefinitely bypassing parliament. And that is known as the Authorisation Act. And that included actually prison terms from one to five years for those, and that could include journalists, that spread misinformation and false hope.

Rachael Jolley: It's not just in Eastern Europe that governments have used COVID-19 to pass laws to restrict freedom of the press

William Horsley: By June of 2020, Reporters Without Borders was reporting that half the UN member states had already enacted emergency laws, which were endangering free speech. At the end of the year, the UN Secretary General himself said that there was a pandemic of misinformation and th...

Local newspapers have been in decline for years, but the decline has been massively exacerbated by the Covid pandemic.  Can a new type of hyper-local journalism be the answer for local news and local democracy? And how will it be funded?

Rachael Jolley (@londoninsider), research fellow @sheffjournalism and former Editor-in-Chief of Index on Censorship, has developed a series of podcasts for Pod Academy on News in the Pandemic.  This one, on local journalism, is the first in the series.

Intro excerpts...

Rachael Jolley: My name is Rachael Jolley. Welcome to Pod Academy and  our series of three podcasts, exploring journalism during the pandemic.

In the first of the series, we talk about local journalism. it's economics and job losses, the hurdles and the technical challenges and find out about pink slime sites.

Our, first guest is Damian Radcliffe, professor of journalism at the University of Oregon. We started off by talking about how journalists have responded to the challenges of working during the pandemic.

Damian, what do you  think have been the biggest challenges for local journalists in the US and elsewhere during this period?

Damian Radcliffe: [00:00:21] Well, I think there's been a lot of different challenges that local news outlets have faced. Some of those are sort of long-term structural issues in terms of trust. It access to, to read as an audience is advertising revenues and so forth. And then we've also seen a whole bunch of pandemic-era, issues that have suddenly emerged, such as reporting safely and from a distance, the emergence of culture wars around mask wearing, which has been very pronounced, , here in the United States and massive uncertainty about the future of the profession as [00:01:00] a result of both.

Large-scale job losses that we have seen, you know, they're not unique to local journalism. We've seen that over the course of the last 10, 15 years, but have really, really accelerated over the course of the last nine to 10 months and a real reckoning about the sort of future of local journalism against a new civil rights movement and kind of racial backdrop, which is rightly making a lot of newsrooms ask if they are still fit for purpose.

Rachael Jolley: [00:01:28] Interestingly, we have seen quite a surge in readership for some local news sites. Why does that happen do you think?

Damian Radcliffe: [00:01:36] I think the biggest reason why we've seen that surge is that there was so much, and there continues to be so much, uncertainty about the implications of the pandemic and what it means for you and your family, for your work, for your community and so forth.

And you just can't get the level of granularity that you might need to make informed decisions about your life. And what you do day to day if [00:02:00] you're accessing national news. So in that environment, local news really comes into its own in terms of being able to take that bigger picture and being able to unpack it for audiences at a local level.

So I think that's been a key reason why we've seen, particularly in the early stages of the pandemic, a lot of growth of, of interest in, in local journalism, because it's answering questions that other outlets are just not answering.

Rachael Jolley: [00:02:26] You've mentioned in some of the work that you've done, that local news sites such as the San Francisco Chronicle and the Seattle Times have seen a spike in readership. But that's not true of the readership of some more directly partisan sites. What do you think is happening here?

Damian Radcliffe: [00:02:43] It's a great question. I think to be honest part of it, we just don't know, but I wonder if some of the reasons for that are around trust and kind of going to sort of more neutral sources and kind of more non-partisan sour...