Pod Academy

Christopher Daley: These days we are used to hearing about the power of banks, GDP percentages, hedge funds, shareholders, stock market reports, house prices, the business cycle, deficits, debts, surpluses – but has it always been this way? Has money and finance always been such a prominent focal point for the popular consciousness? And if so, how has the representation of money changed and what does this tell us about our society?

To try to explore some of these questions, I went to speak with Professor Nicky Marsh from the University of Southampton, who has published widely on the interactions between finance, literature and popular culture. I started by asking how she became interested in this line of research.

Nicky Marsh: It was actually visual culture that looped me into it, although it has taken me a long time to get back to that. So when I think about the moment, I had been working on questions of publics, counterpublics and politics and gender for a long time and I had been working on, in my teaching, British culture in the 1980s and the changes that took place in the 1980s, and I was thinking about the next project, and I was thinking about Gilbert and George and there’s a quote from Gilbert and George where they say, “everything’s just always about money”, and I can remember the moment really, really clearly and thinking, “yes that’s true – I’ll just do that”. And so there was initially two strands that I tried to keep going; one is a political commitment to research. Why do we do research? We do research because it illuminates things in the world that we don’t understand and that need to be illuminated. So then I’m interested in the processes of financialisation; financialisation of the everyday, neo-liberalism, governmentality, of how these politics have made their way into mainstream life. And the second thing I’m interested in is the question of the representation of money, so what actually is money itself as a form, as a phenomena? How do we think about it as an abstract thing, how do we think about it as a material thing? They’re the two strands which I pulled from the Gilbert and George quote.

CD: So that, of course, led into the monograph that was produced in 2007, just at the moment of the financial crisis erupting, and it was entitled Money, Finance and Speculation in Recent British Fiction and you analysed here a wide variety of literary texts ranging from Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger through to Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones novels in the late 1990s. Could you just give us a brief potted history of how British fiction’s representation of money and finance has changed since the second world war, up to the present day?

NM: Sure, so if I think about it in terms of finance in particular, and in terms of the financial class, the way in which that’s represented: the fifties to the seventies were very quiet periods, the questions of financialisation weren’t central, I think because the model of the economy that we were working with was largely Keynesian. So, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a Phillips machine? So a Phillips machine was designed by a maverick economist to imagine the British economy, and we can imagine the British economy as a hydraulic machine where we could pull the levers of monetary control and we could influence consumer spending, taxes, investments and exports. So I think in that period the very way in which the economy was imagined as a finite national thing that government's could control in relationship with capital meant that there wasn't the same interest in speculation, it just wasn't possible, there wasn't a culture for it. And then we know that things began to change in the early seventies, and then in 1979 in Britain we have the Conservative government coming in, and I think it's really then that things begin to appear and this question of financialisation appears in literary texts as a main theme,

"The ethos is the genius of the institution, and Civitas is our ethos..."

"Civitas is something you can do to help someone else ‘s day – big or small.  A small thing you can do is opening the door for someone or telling them there is something on their back, anything, just to help someone and make their day better than it was before."

"We want the pupils to have a deep understanding of what it means to be a good person, a virtuous person, and by having a concept with tangible examples, which we ask them to consider and actually practise, it make it become much more real."

"If only five out of ten people do it, it will make the school better, even that small bit.  But the more people that do it, the better everyone’s day will get, and slowly the whole school will be a positive environment.”

This is a podcast about the role schools can play in developing 'character'.  In it Tess Woodcraft talks to Tim Dainty, Senior Vice Principal - Pupils & Inclusion  at the Ark Academy in Wembley, where they are building, in their words, 'a school of civic pride and social justice' in which the development of character is an intrinsic part.

There’s been a bit of a brouhaha in the British press over the past few days after Richard Walden, chairman of the Independent schools Association claimed that state schools fail to provide their pupils with a ‘moral compass’.  Then the general secretary of the Head Teachers Association responded that those who led us into the financial crash were mostly privately educated.

Actual research by Birmingham University suggests that neither state nor private schools are doing particularly well at engendering morality in their pupils.  In a survey of year 10 children across dozens of private and state schools they found children seemed to be scoring lower on some traditional virtues, such as honesty and courage, than most of us would want to see.

So Tess Woodcraft went to the Ark Academy in North West London, to see what they are doing.

It is an imposing, newly built school, all glass and straight lines, standing almost in the shadow of Wembley Stadium with its iconic white arch.  This is one of the poorest areas in the UK, and most of the pupils come from two estates with tough reputations.

The school calls its approach 'Civitas' – so Tess asked Senior Vice Principal Tim Dainty what exactly is Civitas?

Tim Dainty: We don’t even pronounce it in the way Latin scholars would pronounce it (which would be Kiwitas or Kivitas), we pronounce it Civitas (sivitas)and that speaks volumes because it is very much our own word, our own concept and idea.  It means a lot more than its original meaning of citizenship.  It means kindness, altruism, being kind, being considerate.

Tess Woodcraft:  How did you come up with it?

TD: It was the Principal’s notion.  She was a serving head teacher in East London in a Catholic girls’ school and she developed her own concept of ‘Serviam’ and it was very powerful and she saw, through her own headship, children take ownership and it give real meaning and meat to virtue and character.  We transferred it over and realised how important it was.

Tim Dainty

The pupils have made it their own, they have directed us in how we use it.  Initially it was just a noun, a thing, an idea, a concept, but now it’s an adjective.  They say things like, ‘that was very civitas!’

Jai:  They don’t tell you why you should be civitas, because we all understand. It is not that they are trying to make you be civitas for your own benefit.

TD: That idea was central to our Civitas campaign.  All pupils were asked to write down on whiteboards examples of civitas behaviour and we took photographs and it was included in the Civitas Magazine (which is edited by pupils) and they ...

This podcast was produced by Jo Barratt and first aired on Life in Scents.

Have you ever stepped off a plane and been aware of a different smell in the air - the smell of a country, a city, a terrain?

This podcast is a fascinating exploration of our urban smellscapes.  We are all familiar with landscapes - 'smellscapes' are the smell equivalent.

It is drawn from a lecture by Victoria Henshaw lecturer in Urban Design and Planning at University of Sheffield, whose specialism is smell.   The lecture took place after one of Victoria's 'Smell Walks', organised by Scratch and Sniff events and explores how we live and navigate using our noses, how cities can be mapped by aroma, and how architects and planners might use a consideration of this in their work.

It starts by looking at how we adapt to different smells.  Usually we are smelling so many different things but we don't process them all consciously as it would be overwhelming to do so. Some smells are cultural, some smells we are more tolerant of at certain types of day(such as beer at night), some smells we experience differently depending on our genes (eg Androstenonethe the hormone in body odour - sometimes called the caveman odoour - which 60% of us can smell, but 40% cannot smell.  Of those who can smell it,  90% smell body odour, but 10% smell flowers!)  Have we 'sterilised' our environment, rid it of the smells?

Victoria finishes with a bit of futurology, and she tells us to expect smells for our mobile phones - which will give us different smells for different callers!

If you are interested in further exploration in the world of smell, the absolute go-to podcast platform is Life in Scents, which has lots of podcasts of interviews with people looking at their lives through smell.  Also take a look at Victoria Henshaw's great blog, Smells and the City, and Odette Toilette's olefactory adventure events.

And find our podcast on Anosmia here.

July marks 20 years since the end of the Rwandan genocide. In the summer of 1994 the death of president, Juvenal Habiyaramana sparked brutal violence between the country’s two major ethnic groups. The genocide took place over 100 days but left an estimated one million people dead.

Two decades on,Pod Academy's Alex Burd went to Manchester to speak to Dr Richard Benda, a Rwandan academic and genocide survivor. Their conversation has been split into three podcasts - of which this is the third (the first was about faith and reconciliation;   the second about ethnicity and democracy).

In this episode he recalls the events of the genocide and begins by explaining what it was like growing up in Rwanda as a half Hutu, half Tutsi...

Richard Benda: It made your life uncomfortable and I think that is a good thing – not to be comfortable in either group because the lack of comfort makes you sick. A better way of dealing with things but once you are told that you are Tutsi 100% or Hutu 100% it is as your life is pre-determined to a go certain way so operating on the margin of both groups it wasn’t easy. As a child you take your father’s identity but you can’t deny your mother’s side of the family.

Alex Burd: Which was which in your family?

RB: So the father was Tutsi and the mother was Hutu. But then even on both sides it wasn’t that clear cut so I’ve never been comfortable calling myself a Tutsi or a Hutu because it really doesn’t register. And you try to convey that idea to people who have a certain stability in their ethnic identity and it’s as if the image is that everyone is... you’re either one or the other. But I think that debates are showing that there are quite a lot of people on the margins. You negotiate the reality as it comes, some days are good, some days are bad. You could escape violence or you could die because of that ambiguity of your identity. But given the choice I would still remain in an ambiguous state and you can open your heart and your mind to accepting more people, to accepting distance because you live a state of contradiction within yourself so you accept that contradictions exist in society as well so I developed that mentality at a younger age anyway. I have cousins in one group, I have cousins in another group, I have uncles in one group. You sleep in one house today, then another house. How do you choose?

AB: How did you then negotiate that, almost a tightrope I guess, during 1994, while you were at university?

RB: It wasn’t a good time to start university. We started university in ’93 and it was a bad, bad time. We started university when the president of Burundi had been assassinated, so that was a Hutu president being assassinated and we had quite a few Burundian students in our midst, so tensions were palpable when we started. The war was still going on so there were tensions within Rwanda and there were endless killing of Hutu politicians.

I had a girlfriend in 1993 at university so I suppose I had an outlet for my feelings – I lost her in ’94, but then... what I’m trying to say is that you had someone to share those difficult times with. We had to escape university because before the genocide started the university was on lockdown and the students were on strike. They don’t know if it was a politically engineered strike so even then it was dangerous for people of certain ethnicity to be on campus and we had to be quiet I suppose, to not make yourself more visible the you wanted to be and certainly my girlfriend what you would call a visible Tutsi person so she was even more of a target so we had to find a way of leaving the campus. Some of the friends we left behind were killed and we left our belongings, and I don’t have anything from prior to ’94 that belongs to me. The only item I have from before ’94 is my secondary school diploma, that’s the only thing I have from 1990.

In 2015, the UN's eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) - broad targets for eradicating poverty and disease and improving worldwide rates of primary education, maternal health and gender equality- will be replaced with newly agreed goals.

The MDG approach was a new one for development policy, seeking to focus the attention and efforts of the international community on a clear set of shared targets - but inevitably there were criticisms that some crucial areas had been overlooked. One overlooked area was Higher Education.

Now, as the world discusses what should replace the MDGs, the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU) is campaigning for recognition of the fundamental importance of Higher Education for development.

A vibrant Higher Education sector is crucial for many reasons, as Jay Kuber of the ACU explains in this podcast.  Firstly, universities undertake research that can inform government policy making; secondly, through their teaching, they also produce the educated men and women needed to run businesses, public services, engineering and agriculture; and thirdly, by building partnerships with local communities, they also make a major contribution to sustainable development on a local and regional level.

The ACU campaign - The world beyond 2015: Is Higher Education ready? - poses the following questions:

Why does the Post-2015 agenda matter for higher education?

How are universities already addressing local, national and international issues?

How can universities prepare to respond ot the Post-2015 agenda?

What partnerships should universities establish to achieve their objectives?

How can universities champion thier contributions to wider society?

How relevant and realistic are the Post-2015 goals likely to be?

If you want to know more, or you want to join the ACU's campaign to raise awareness of how higher education can and should respond to global challenges beyond 2015, go to their website:  www.acu.ac.uk/beyond-2015 and follow them on Twitter @HEbeyond2015.

"Why would you choose to keep basing your politics on a concept which is as destructive as ethnicity?.......Twenty years is a landmark. We should rethink Rwandan post-genocide politics and how we start to implement a democracy which is more inclusive".

This is the second of our podcasts to mark the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, in which Rwandan academic and genocide survivor, Dr Richard Benda is in conversation with Pod Academy's Alex Burd.

In this interview Dr Benda explores current issues around ethnicity and the role of the state, and in particular the role of the President Paul Kagame, in developing alternatives to the narrative of Hutu and Tutsi identity in Rwanda

Dr Benda began by explaining the state of ethnicity in Rwanda today.

Richard Benda: I think the issue is still there. The government came out and said outright that ethnicity is abolished. As a political discourse that works; you can’t pretend to be a government and say: ‘Fine, carry on’ But in reality the problem is there. And I don’t think it’s softening just because it is no longer talked about. I see danger in that.

Alex Burd: You think because it’s not talked about?

RB: Because people don’t come to that realisation alone, by a process of rediscovery of another identity, they come to that position because again the state or the government is telling them so. I think it is one of the dangers of successive regimes in Rwanda - that you tell people what to do as if people can’t come to the same conclusion by a process of democratisation, of dialogue. When you listen the words ‘Hutu’ and ‘Tutsi’ are very key to the dialogue so it means that it is in the subconscious of the Rwandan people and they have to come out. If they are constructs you can only expose them and then deconstruct them and show how dangerous they are. Rwandans are smart people. Why would you choose to keep basing your politics on a concept which is as destructive as ethnicity. By opening the debate people can actually challenge themselves and find a better solidarity which is Rwandaness. We don’t know what that it is yet,  but Ndi Umunyarwanda is supposed to help people find out what it is.

AB: For so much of Rwanda’s history it’s been governed along those lines of Hutu and Tutsi, so to all of a sudden decide that there’s no such thing as ethnicity is hard for the people who still remember that time before and change tack.

RB: What I’m trying to say is that Rwandans have never had a healthy relationship with ethnicity because of the way ethnicity appeared, at least as a political component. I believe, as many people do, that the Belgians or the Germans or the missionaries did not coin the words because they are Rwandan concepts. So they are a Kinyarwanda concept and they existed in the culture and in the society. People disagree and agree, and agree to disagree about what it meant to be a Hutu, or a Tutsi before colonialism but certainly they were not as associated with political violence as they became in the 1950s. When they started being imposed on Rwandans in the 1930s Rwandans didn’t really have much of a choice –‘You are a Hutu, you are a Tutsi.’ Sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly. In the 1950s ethnicity was recuperated as a tool to overthrow monarchy and install democracy; democracy was wasn’t a national goal, it was almost the rule of the majority who happened to be Hutu. And then ’73 and ’90 and ’94, which is why I don’t think Rwandan people have had any time to sit and think about what is this thing called ethnicity which seems to govern our lives.

We need to give people time to look ethnicity in the face and say ‘we don’t like what it’s doing to us’ and governments can’t just decide and say you are this today and you are not this tomorrow because people will always subvert those decisions.

July marks 20 years since the end of the Rwandan genocide.  In the summer of 1994 the death of the country’s president, Juvenal Habyarimana, sparked brutal violence between the country’s two major ethnic groups. The genocide took place over a hundred days, but left an estimated one million people dead.

This is the first of a series of three podcasts in which, Rwandan academic and genocide survivor Dr Richard Benda, talks to Alex Burd about the process of reconciliation and the country’s charismatic leader, President Paul Kagame,  as well as his own memories of the genocide.

Richard Benda's research at Manchester University addresses key questions in relation to religious authority and the role of faith in response to the complexity of African identity-based conflicts, of which the Rwandan genocide is an extreme case.  In this podcast he explores the role of religion, and the role of the state, in Rwanda’s healing process.

Richard Benda: After the genocide, there were debates as to which faith community handled the genocide better.  Some said Muslims behaved more rightly than Christians, but I find the difference between the Muslim and Christian response is that the Muslims responded as a group whereas Christians  reacted as individuals.

But after the genocide both groups were interested in developing a reconciliation framework which takes faith seriously or which accepts that faith has capital that can contribute greatly to reconciliation.  So they came together, the initiative was chaired by the Mufti of Rwanda and the Rwandan Archbishop Emanuel Kolini.  The idea was to provide a platform where faith can contribute to building the country after the genocide because they recognised that they did little before the genocide and during the genocide, well, not as much as was expected, anyway.

The interfaith programme is still going on.  It started with work in prison, with prisoners, people who had been convicted of genocide, getting them ready to face their moral responsibility, to confess – the emphasis was on repentance, confession, and facing criminal responsibility with a clear conscience (as much as possible).

Alex Burd: Is this about forgiving themselves?

RB:  Yes, and it is very important.  Theologically it’s another understanding of justice when you deal with people who have been involved in acts of violence, acts of evil as you’d say in religious language.  You want them to face their responsibilities.  First and foremost you want them to discover themselves as humans and the path to doing that is accepting themselves as still God’s children.  Christians believe God’s grace is already there and God forgives.  The problem Is knowing if they can forgive themselves.  So you’re right, it is getting them to accept their own selves, forgive themselves and take steps to ask forgiveness of others.  The first step must be the person – if they aren’t reconciled with themselves it becomes very difficult to be reconciled with others.

It is not as if the people involved in Inter Faith came to the perpetrators first – some perpetrators longed for that experience, that cleansing.

AB:  That spiritual guidance…..

RB : Yes, it’s almost a pastoral care exercise, but also a political exercise.

AB: How do you mean, a political exercise?

RB:  You don’t preach or help them to find their way back just in church, you also want them to become better citizens, to reintegrate into the wider political community because after prison they will have to go out and live back in their villages, in their towns and you can’t just cater for their souls.  They will have to go about community activities, vote, so yes there is a political aspect.  And political too, in that the government encouraged the pastoral care, supported it, gave access to prisoners.

Involving citizens in the governance of public services - education, housing, transport - holds out the promise of more responsive, better run and more democratically accountable services.

But it is a big ask.  Many people won't have the experience, the time or the confidence to get involved.

In this podcast, which was first broadcast on the New Books Network, Heath Brown talks to Daniel Altschuler about the factors that can help ensure successful participatory governance.

This question has long drawn the interest of scholars in political science. The promise of increasing civic engagement through institutions that allow citizens to participate has been studied extensively, but often in urban environments.

Daniel Altschuler and Javier Corrales  build on this literature in their book, The Promise of Participation: Experiments in Participatory Governance in Honduras and Guatemala, but shift to rural parts of Honduras and Guatemala. The book focuses on Community Managed Schools and the participation of parents in school administration.

Their extensive study demonstrated positive impacts on organisational learning and civic engagement for participating parents, but they conclude that it is crucial to offer training and support.

If you enjoyed this podcast, why not check out others on the New Books Network, like  PAUL-BRIAN MCINERNEY's From Social Movement to Moral Market: How the Circuit Riders Sparked an IT Revolution and Created a Technology Market

 

Richard Branson, Tom Cruise, Darcy Bussell and Noel Gallagher are among the celebrity dyslexics mentioned on the website of the British Dyslexia Association.  But what does it mean to be dyslexic?  Pod Academy's Lee Millam went to find out.

A new book, The Dyslexia Debate, says the term dyslexia is a broad and meaningless label.  The book also suggests that children are often labelled dyslexic when exhibiting a range of different reading difficulties.  One of the authors is Prof Julian Elliot from Durham University.

Julian Elliot:  One of the things that happens quite often when a youngster is struggling with their reading is that some well meaning soul will come along and say, ‘ Have you ever though that little Jimmy might be dyslexic? Perhaps you should send him off for dyslexa assessment and see whether he is.  If he is, great!’

There are all sorts of problems with that. Firstly, making a diagnosis of dyslexia is not scientific because the criteria used vary greatly from one person to another.  In other words, what one person thinks is Dyslexia, another person doesn’t.

So firstly you can’t make a decision in a clear , consistent way about whether a child is dyslexic.  Secondly, even if you do determine that a child is dyslexic, having done that there is no educational intervention or treatment which you’d do differently for that child than you would do for any other child who is struggling to learn to read.  There are some weird and whacky interventions but none of those have the support of academic scientific research.’

Lee Millam:  But having a test and a diagnosis for dyslexia can be a positive thing as we hear now from Patricia Simmonds.

Patricia Simmonds: I was diagnosed in, probably, 1997 when I went to college.  It was the first time I was diagnosed with dyslexia.

LM: How old were you at the time?

PS: I was probably 17 or 18.

LM: So you went through the whole school experience being dyslexic but not knowing it?

PS:  Yes, I did.  At primary school they didn’t give me any extra help, but they knew I had difficulties with reading and writing, so maybe the teacher might take more time working with me.  At secondary school I think they realised I wasn’t learning like the other children, I went to an all girls school, and my tutor realised I needed extra help with, again, my reading and writing.  And I believe I’d have been about 12 when I started getting extra support.  At times it would be in the classroom or I’d be taken out of the classroom and sit with a tutor and just go though some reading.

LM: So you were given extra support at school.  Did that help?

PS: Yes it did! It was still a bit difficult because I didn’t know why I needed extra help.  Nobody could explain it to me.  I knew I was struggling but it was as if I was different from the other kids in the class, because I had to be taken out of the classroom to get the extra help (which I really appreciated).

It was good to have someone who could spend one to one time with me, to go through everything, because I felt confused in the classroom when the teacher would talk about something and I’d have to sit down and present a piece of work.  And then I’d always struggle and I couldn’t quite work out why.  So  I found it helpful sitting with a tutor one to one and them going through things with me.

LM: So you were given this extra help.  How were you feeling?

PS: I was really pleased about it. I was thinking ‘fantastic, I can start to understand things or start to do the work a lot easier.  I was really grateful for the extra help, but it did make me feel outside the group.  I’d be taken out of the class for these one to one sessions, on occasion someone would sit in the room, but that was more embarrassing for me – so to be ta...

The Young Lives Project is a unique, long term study of childhood in 4 countries - Peru, Vietnam, India and Ethiopia.  It is exploring the impact of poverty on children's development, and identifying the most effective policy interventions that could enable poor children to reach their full potential.

In this podcast, Amanda Barnes talks to Alan Sanchez, Principal Investigator in the Young Lives Project which is based at Oxford University, about the research he has been doing on child development in Peru. She started by asking him to explain the Young Lives study and what it is trying to achieve.

Alan Sanchez

Alan Sanchez:  The Young Lives study  is an international longitudinal study of childhood poverty.  We started in 2002 and the intention is to track the livelihood of families for basically 15 years.  And we are working in four different countries: in Peru, in Ethiopia, Vietnam, and Andhra Pradesh in India. The study is led by Oxford University and has research partners in each of the countries.

We use a variety of methods: quantitative methods and also qualitative methods. The main objective is to have a better understanding of the causes and consequences of childhood poverty.

Amanda Barnes: So how many children altogether are included in the study?

AS: In total, twelve thousand.  And then we have eight thousand kids that we have been tracking since they were aged between one and two years old ( in the year 2002). We call them the younger cohort.  And then there are another four thousand kids that we are tracking, also since 2002, and they were between seven and eight years old the year when we started with the survey. So by now they are 18 years old.

AB: That’s a lot of kids. So generally, a sample of that kind of size: is that something that’s statistically representative of the population as a whole more or less?

AS:  Well, we do not intend to be nationally representative.  We want our samples to be very informative of each of the countries and to observe children growing up in communities with a variety of living standards and variation in terms of geographical location and ethnic groups. So that even though our intention was not to claim national representativeness, we can certainly say many things about the characteristics in which these children are growing up in each of the countries.

AB: Why were those particular countries chosen?

AS: One important thing was to have diversity. So even within each country we were looking to have diversity in terms of the communities in our sample.  But it was also important to have diversity in terms of the countries that we selected.  So on the one hand we were looking for regularities. So we wanted to be able to say whether certain processes are very similar regardless of the country, which we have found.  But at the same time some policies are very country-specific and if you only focus on one country then it means you are only able to say things about that specific country and the specific policies that take place in that place. But if you have other countries it means you observe a variety of social policies and see their effects on children.

AB:  Yeah, well that makes pretty good sense.

AB: So your research, some of it looked at what the data could tell you about what factors in early childhood had an impact on outcomes for them at later stages – even up to their mid-teens.  Can you tell us what specifically your study was trying to find out?

AS: Yes, well to let you know a bit more about the background.  This study is based on two studies that I did previously.  In one of the studies, using data for Peru for instance, we found that there was a food price crisis a few years ago and we were able to measure that this crisis had consequences on the early nutrition of those kids that...