Pod Academy

Did you know that jellyfish can sink boats, compromise fisheries by destroying captive breeding pens, and enter industrial sites that use seawater intake for cooling – including desalination plants, nuclear plants and nuclear aircraft carriers.

Yes, they have all fallen victim to jellyfish.

A poorly understood member of “the other 99%” as the invertebrates are known, jellyfish are simple creatures, floating, stinging, eating, and breeding en masse, in immense 'blooms', that can be 1,000km in length. Blooms occur worldwide and to some it seems they are becoming more prevalent, or perhaps they are now being monitored more closely.

A 'Bloom'

So....how big, how bad and why? Take a listen to this podcast to find out.

Michael Schubert talks with Lisa Gershwin.

This is our first podcast from Sound Minds a brand new podcast platform set up by three academic broadcasters from Australia, who met during a digital content diploma programme and were teamed up serendipitously for a project, which has now turned into a podcast series.  We will certainly be featuring more of their great podcasts - watch this space!

FEATURED

Current Oriented Swimming by Jellyfish

Dr Lisa Gershwin

MUSIC

Koop – Jellyfishes

Deya Dova – Jellyfish

PICTURES

Main picture of jellyfish: Mark Morgan

Jellyfish bloom by JR

Wilfred Bion (1897 – 1979) was an influential (if at times 'gnomic') psychoanalyst who spent much of his working life at the Tavistock clinic in London.  He is perhaps best known for Experiences in Groups (London:Tavistock 1961), a key text in the emerging group psychotherapy and encounter group movements of the 1960s,and for Learning from Experience (1962)

Podcast produced and presented by Naomi Wynter-Vincent.

Naomi writes: The title of this podcast, Making the best of a bad job.'  refers to an essay written by Wilfred Bion in his final year (in 1979, when he was 81. Both the essay and its title are classic Bion: wryly self-deprecating, yet devastating in its emotional impact, the essay describes the way that 'when two personalities meet, an emotional storm is created' and the way that psychotherapy can only ever aim to 'make the best of a bad job' by turning that storm between the two people in the room to good account. I chose it as a title not least as an ironic reference to the progress of my own PhD.

Naomi Wynter-Vincent is a PhD student at Sussex University, writing her thesis to demonstrate the many ways in which Bion's work can help us to think about writing. The writers she is looking at in detail include: JG Ballard, BS Johnson, Stevie Smith, Jean Rhys, Mary Butts, Sigmund Freud, and Nicholas Royle. As she says in the podcast, she thinks Bion is an interesting writer in his own right: he experiments with form and theory to 'dream' and 're-dream' the traumas of his own life, which include his experiences during the First World War.

 

Production:  This podcast was first developed as part of the Critical Waves project at Birbeck, University of London, and aired on ResonanceFM.   The male vocal part of Wilfred Bion is spoken by Dan Smith; thanks are due to him also for help with recording and sound engineering.'

 

 

"We know the jockey wants to win the race, and it is beguiling to imagine the horse knows what the challenge is, knows somehow the significance of the finishing post and therefore is a willing participant in this endeavour.

If you buy into that framework you can imagine the horse views the whip strikes purely as a form of encouragement.  'Thanks for the encouragement, I needed that....'"

The use of the whip in horse racing is an issue.  It is banned in some countries and there are regulations governing its use in others. It is widely used and as Dr Paul McGreevy explains in this podcast, it can be misused.

This is our second podcast on animal welfare and horse racing in collaboration with Knowing Animals, a podcast show from Australia which looks at academic research in the field of animal rights and animal welfare.

In this podcast, vet Dr. Paul McGreevy from the University of Sydney talks about his paper Whip use by jockeys in a sample of Australian thoroughbred races – an observational study ( authors: Paul D. McGreevy, Robert A. Corken, Hannah Salvin, Celeste M. Black PLOS ONE i2012) with Dr Siobhan O'Sullivan of Knowing Animals.  He also explains his policy work trying to create policy change around the use of whips on racehorses in Australia.

The goal of the study was to explore the use of the whip in horse racing and to characterise the area struck and the visual impact of whip use at the level of the horse. Dr McGreevy and his colleagues measured the ways in which both padded and unpadded sections of the whip made impact. There was evidence of at least 28 examples, in 9 horses, of breaches of the whip rules (one seam contact, 13 contacts with the head, and 14 arm actions that rose above the height of the shoulder). The whip caused a visible indentation on 83% of impacts. The unpadded section of the whip made contact on 64% of impacts. The results call into question the ability of Stewards to effectively police the rules concerning whip use and, more importantly, challenge the notion that padding the distal section of whips completely safeguards horses from any possible whip-related pain.

Photo: Corinne

You may also be interested in our podcast on horse deaths in jump racing - another collaboration between Knowing Animals and Pod Academy

New Zealand is an important place for thoroughbred breeding and racing. Most races are on the flat, but jumps racing is conducted in the cooler months. At the 2013 National Jumps Day at Te Rapa, Hamilton, two horses were put down after bad falls over the jumps.  In this conversation Dr Siobhan O'Sullivan of the podcast show, Knowing Animals talks to Professor Phil McManus of Sydney University about what happened that day and how these horse deaths were then represented on social media.

The discussion revolves around Prof McManus's recent paper, The construction of human–animal relations: National Jumps Day 2013 at Te Rapa, Hamilton, New Zealand (Phil McManus, Raewyn Graham and Karen Ruse, New Zealand Geographer Journal) which explores competing narratives of the horses' deaths that day at Te Rapa and demonstrates how animals, people, activities and places are constructed, including making animal deaths unrecognisable to perpetuate activities that are questioned by contemporary animal geographies

This podcast was first aired on Knowing Animals, a great podcast show which features conversations with animal studies scholars about animal welfare and animal rights, and in particular the construction of human–animal relations.

We will also be featuring a second podcast from Knowing Animals on the use of the whip in horse racing.

Picture by Paul

You may also be interested in our other podcast on animal welfare in horse racing - the use of the whip in horse racing - another collaboration with Knowing Animals.

Journalism is changing, and so is the way we consume journalism.  On the eve of the 2015 Future of Journalism Conference, Tess Woodcraft talks to Angela Phillips, Professor of Journalism at Goldsmiths, University of London and author of Journalism in Context (Routhledge 2015) about how strong news journalism is crucial for informed citizenship, and how our increasing reliance on Facebook and YouTube for news may have serious implications for democracy.

 

Prof Angela Phillips:  I’m interested in the way in which news journalism is changing, and in particular how news audiences are changing in relation to changes in the industry.  So I have looked at audiences in my book, Journalism in Context, but I have also been looking at young news audiences in an international context to see how young people are accessing news.

Tess Woodcraft: What’s been happening in journalism?

AP: News journalism is changing and so is the way we consume it.  Facebook is now a major source of news for young people.

TW: What are the implications?

AP: Since the rise of the internet, there have been big changes, not only in how journalism is produced, but how it is consumed.  These two things are in lockstep.  At the end of the last century and the beginning of this one, a lot of people were very enthusiastic about the kind of changes.  They saw the internet as a means of democratising news.  They saw audiences being  much more involved in news production and they talked about journalism being less elitist, more involved with audiences, that journalism would become a much more collaborative process.

TW:  To a certain extent that has happened, hasn’t it?  For example, at Shoreham Airshow (August 2015) ordinary people’s videos  of the air crash were all over the news.

AP: In very marginal ways this ‘pro-sumer’ revolution – the idea that the consumer also produces – has come to pass, but not in anything like the way those web enthusiasts imagined it would.  What we have today is bystanders with cameras.  Whereas before journalists would have gone and interviewed people about what they saw, and it would have been secondhand information, now if there is a big event like an aircrash or bombing, there will always be people in the vicinity who have camera phones and will very often put that information into social media where journalists can access it. But this does not make them journalists, they are still sources.  And although all that information moves around – via Facebook, or Twitter or YouTube, for example – most of what happens is that it is curated by journalists who bring it together and construct a narrative around the information and repackage it in a different way.  So it is not collaborative.

We are seeing journalists with more and more power than they used to have – the power to find their way into places where they never otherwise have managed to be.  The likelihood of a journalist being in the right place at the right time when a bomb goes off are miniscule.  So the difference is that we now have access (to pictures particularly) where we didn’t have access before, but it doesn’t really fundamentally change the job of journalist or the relationship between journalist and audience in any way.

Certainly if you are on social media and you are on social media and you are interested in news, the chances are that you’ll get some of this information via social media.  But what is interesting to me is looking at who gets what information and just how democratic this process is.  Because when you look at the overall statistics not very much has changed in any fundamental way.  You still find the major traditional news sources – the biggest newspapers (NY Times, Daily Mail, The Guardian), the BBC and in America the major broadcasters are all in the top 10 of the rankings for what people are looking a...

We have a lifetime's association with our bodies, but for many of us they remain uncharted territory. In Adventures in Human Being, Gavin Francis leads the reader on a journey through health and illness, offering insights on everything from the ribbed surface of the brain to the secret workings of the heart and the womb; from the pulse of life at the wrist to the unique engineering of the foot.

This podcast is produced and presented by Craig Barfoot, and first appeared on Ideas Books.

Drawing on his own experiences as a doctor and GP, Gavin Francis blends first-hand case studies with reflections on the way the body has been imagined and portrayed over the millennia. If the body is a foreign country, then to practise medicine is to explore new territory: Francis leads the reader on an adventure through what it means to be human.

Both a user's guide to the body and a celebration of its elegance, this book will transform the way you think about being alive, whether in sickness or in health.

Published in association with Wellcome Collection.

In this podcast Dr Sonja Schillings explores how the use of the Latin term Hostis Humani Generis (the enemy of all mankind), which was originally applied to pirates, now creates an extralegal space which is being used to legitimise the assassination of international terrorists all over the world.

This is just part of her forthcoming book, Hostis Humani Generis and the Narrative Construction of Legitimate Violence.

Podcast presented and produced by Tatiana Prorokova.

Tatiana Prorokova: Hello and welcome to Pod Academy. My name is Tatiana Prorokova and I am glad to have here Dr. Sonja Schillings to discuss her forthcoming book based on her dissertation titled Hostis Humani Generis and the Narrative Construction of Legitimate Violence.

Before we proceed, however, I’d like to say a couple of words about Dr. Schillings’ academic career. She wrote her dissertation at the graduate school of North-American Studies at Freie-Universität Berlin in Germany, where she also held a position of a substitute junior professor for North-American Literature in summer semester 2014. And since October 2014, she is a post-doctoral researcher at the International Graduate Center for the Study of Culture at Giessen University in Germany.

So, Sonja, in your dissertation, your main concern is the relationship between two criminal groups - pirates and terrorists. You argue that both have one thing in common and that is they can be characterized as Hostis Humani Generis.

Could you elaborate on that and maybe explain your choice of these particular groups?

Sonja Schillings:  My basic concern is about Hostis Humani Generis.  It is a legal term of arts,  a Latin term, which means “enemy of all human kind”,. It is, quite generally, a legal fiction that is assigned to perpetrators who are considered not just enemies but enemies of the law, of the normative order.  They are enemies so hostile and so extreme that you can  commit legitimate violence against them, just because you commit it against them. And it’s a term that was traditionally,  in legal history, equivalent or synonymous with the crime of piracy. And “the enemy of all” means that everybody, without distinction, is being attacked by them. This is why violence against them is said to be representative of the entire human race.  Or rather it’s claimed to be. The claims I look at are only ever in text. So much for that.

So, pirates and terrorists. As I’ve been saying, Hostis Humani Generis was originally designated to describe pirates only, until the early nineteenth century when Hostis Humani Generis and the crime of piracy separated and Hostis Humani Generis was also used to describe slave traders – international slave traders. And then later, in the twentieth century, it was also used about perpetrators of crimes against humanity - the torturer is the most established example here.

And now, what we see since the 1980s, is the political initiative to describe international terrorists as pirates. It is this link that originally spurred my interest in the topic of Hostis Humani Generis because other than the fiction itself, other than , the legal description of Hostis Humani Generis, and other than the characterization of what they do to society (i.e. the orders they attack), pirates and terrorists have very little in common.  Even so, they were constantly combined or associated with each other, despite the grave reservations of the entire maritime securities community. This is what the “pirate-terrorist nexus” refers to.

T.P: So, you provide a brief historical overview of this “pirates-terrorists nexus”. But can you actually spot any difference between pirates and terrorists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Was there any shift after 2000/2001?

S.S.: Well, yes and no. There was certainly a shift of it being more do-able – fi...

This podcast is about how a group of women campaigners and academics worked together and achieved a change in the law - making the possession of rape pornography illegal.

It features author and former barrister Elizabeth Woodcraft in conversation with Professor Erica Rackley, University of Birmingham, Dr Fiona Vera Gray of Rape Crisis South London and Sarah Green Acting Director & Campaigns Manager of End Violence Against Women Campaign (EVAW).

Rape pornography has been widely available, including on free porn sites, in the UK - ensuring that boys and men can freely access porn that eroticises rape and violence against women.  In 2006 the government began a consultation process to see whether the laws on pornography should be updated to reflect the growth of pornography via the internet.  This resulted in legislation in 2008 which outlawed some 'extreme' pornography, but excluded images of rape.

The Scottish Parliament however, enacted separate legislation, which did include rape pornography.

So, in England and Wales, though not in Scotland, websites with domain names such as 'Brutal Rape', 'Cruel Rape'  were still lawful in 2012, when a number of  women's organisations working with women who have been the victims of sexual violence were appalled to discover the ubiquity of these sites.  And shocked to find that they were not illegal.

Feminist academics, too, had for some time been concerned at the framing of the legislation in England and Wales and that the concept of 'harm' was absent.

The two groups came together in 2012 and launched a high profile campaign for a change in the law.  This podcast explores how they went about it.

The Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015 which makes illegal the possession of extreme pornography showing images depicting rape, came into force on 13 April 2015.

In the ‘old game’, the analogue world of centralised knowledge institutions, knowledge was power.  But now that knowledge is everywhere, the rules of the game have changed.

In his essay “Digital tailspin: 10 rules for the internet after Snowden” writer and activist Michael Seemann  (@mspro) examines how we’ve lost our ability to control the way information is spread online.

Discussing everything from flashmobs to whistle-blowers, twitter to email encryption. Michael takes us from the ‘old game’  into the ‘new game’ – where information is no longer easily controlled.

Anyone who has been the victim of revenge porn, or found themselves the star of a viral video is acutely aware of how helpless we are to fight the spread of information in the ‘new game’.

What’s more, with sites like Wikileaks even governments and large corporations have found themselves similarly powerless.

In his essay, Michael calls this idea the ‘kontrolverlust’ (‘loss of control’ – German) or ‘digital tailspin’, and lays out ten strategies for how to deal with it, including:

You can’t fight the digital tailspin

Knowledge is asking the right questions

You are the freedom of the other

Data control creates hegemony

How we – users, scholars, journalists or politicians – understand the digital tailspin can alter how we interpret and ultimately use the internet. In effect our understanding ends up shaping governmental and institutional policies, crafting our social interactions and creating a wide range of networked based phenomena.

In this podcast Michael Seemann and Adriene Lilly discuss the significance of the Kontrolverlust; some of the factors causing the loss of control; the role of social media platforms in policing our online interactions; and how to be hospitable online.

One key part of their conversation centres on privacy – how the concept of privacy has been fundamentally altered. As Michael says, we used to have walls and distances – in the ‘old game’ privacy was not just a right, it was the default setting.  It took a lot of effort to bring information to someone outside the room in which you were speaking.  Now things have changed dramatically and it is the other way around - you have to make a great effort NOT to distribute information all over the world.

We have to understand the new order, he says,  assume it.  We have to adapt to the new situation, but not surrender to it. Traditional institutions and concepts of freedom are threatened by the digital tailspin. But that doesn’t mean we are lost. A new game emerges, where a different set of rules applies.

 

Photo: Olivia Bennett

………………………………….

Michael Seemann is a cultural theorist based in Berlin. He blogs and hosts a German language podcast on digital policy (in German) which can be found online at mspr0.de. The Digital Tailspin can be accessed and downloaded (in English) for free at the Institute of Network Cultures.

 

You may also be interested to know about Netzpolitik,one of the voices in Germany on privacy and internet policy –  demonstrations have been in held in Germany in solidarity with two of it’s journalists who are under investigation for a piece they published. A detailed article on the journalists under investigation can be found at The Intercept. Here is an RT post about the demonstrations that have taken place July/August 2015.

14th January 1795

ANN HAWKINS was indicted for feloniously stealing, on the 7th of January , a feather bed, value 20s. a flock and feather bolster, value 10d. two woollen blankets, value 3s. a linen sheet, value 2s. a linen counterpane, value 12d. a looking glass in a walnut-tree frame, value 4s. a pair of tongs, value 6d. a brass candlestick, value 6d. a wooden pail, value 6d. and a tin kettle, value 4d. the goods of Thomas Norwood , in a lodging room .

 

How can we discover whether it was changing tastes and fashion that drove consumption during the industrial revolution or if it was falling prices (as goods were increasingly mass produced)?

One place we can look for evidence is the court reports of the time.

The records of the Old Bailey give a good idea of what ordinary people owned, because they record what was stolen!

In this podcast Dr Sara Horrell, Senior Lecturer in the Economics Department of Cambridge University, and Fellow of Murray Edwards College, discusses with Scarlett MccGwire how she and her colleagues, Jane Humphries and Ken Sneath, unravelled the consumption conundrums of the industrial revolution(Consumption Conundrums Unravelled, History Review Dec 2014) by looking at the Old Bailey records, which are now online.

We know that during the period of the industrial revolution (the late 18th and early 19th centuries)  ordinary people owned and consumed more - coffee, tea, nice china, for example.  And many historians have asked whether people were willing to work harder and longer to purchase these goods because they were fashionable, or whether it was just the fact that with mass production they got a lot more affordable.

However, since ordinary people rarely appear in the historical record,  it has been difficult to trace their acquisitions and consumption.

So the researchers turned to look at the Old Bailey records to discover the trends. Specifically, they looked at thefts – what was being stolen, what did people have in their houses that thieves wanted to steal?

And fashions are there in the data – clothing , for example,  accounts for about half the thefts. Sleeves and buckles, appear in the earlier records, but they stop being stolen as they go out of fashion, - then it is underwear and umbrellas which begin to be stolen.  Clearly it was easy to sell on fashionable items, and some thieves were even apprehended wearing the fashionable items themselves.

Thieves stole anything and everything – sometimes whole houses were ransacked – large heavy good like mirrors and beds, as well as smaller items linen, clothing etc are to be found in the court records.

Sara and her colleagues looked at things that, over time, moved down the social scale, such as watches which became cheaper with the advent of silver plating.

Table linen was taken, because there was a good resale market, and as time wore on, more of such items were taken from those down the social scale – but at the same time the goods stolen from richer people became better quality (eg damask).  The rich are differentiating what they own, it is elite consumption.

Stockings are a good example – they were often stolen – initially the rich had silk stockings, and worsted stockings were worn by poorer people. Then cotton stockings became fashionable (as cotton began to be imported), and they were bought by everyone, i.e. we see the democratisation of fashion.  However, differentiation remains important and the rich continue to be the only people with silk stockings , which become even more expensive.

The Old Bailey records reflect consumption in London - but Is it only London where we see these trends?  The metropolis is the centre of consumption,people are  wealthier.  However, fashion trends usually move from the metropolis to the regions and he res...