This episode we’re exploring a very current aspect of social change in how so many societies are fragmenting and polarizing along political fault lines. Even families and sometimes marriages themselves are sadly fracturing due to beliefs and opinions, and these rifts seem insurmountable and ever widening as individuals choose their in and out groups and solidify around their views. My guest today who is Prof. Jennifer McCoy, a Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University and nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her research explores the causes, consequences and solutions to polarized societies around the world, including Venezuela, Turkey, Hungary, Thailand, Hungary, Greece, Bangladesh, Philippines and the United States.

What does it mean for we humans to change our appearance if not our very bodies? As long as humans have been around and in all cultures we can find some version of body modification yet the popularity of forms such as tattooing and piercing  in recent decades is really quite unprecedented. Today's guest Alex Binnie has been collecting tattoos for over 40 years and making them on others for over 30 and has been at the forefront of change in the body art and modification scene in both the USA and the UK. I met Alex in the mid 90’s when by chance I lived above his highly influential shop Into You in Clerkenwell Central London. We explore change through the lens of the body as canvas and what changes in us—artist and canvas—in that process. We discuss Alex’s rather remarkable life as an artist, musician and performer both here in the USA and in Europe, plus we explore how the field of tattooing and body art itself has changed as an industry over that period.

Dr Julia Kolodko is a Behavioral scientist and organizational consultant specializing in change implementation and culture and is one of the leading experts in applied behavioral science in Europe. She offers us a perspective informed by the most current science of human change and perhaps more importantly, how that research is actually implemented both at organizational and individual levels and also what the implications are for broader social change as well. We discuss how neuroscience suggests that we are accessing less than 5% of our cognitive capacities for decision-making, the impact of unconscious biases and more importantly, how we might better negotiate these tricky realities.

How can organizations change and why would they? In today's show Prof Bill Brendel from Penn State University and I explore how change happens in organizational culture, leadership, motives and behaviors and what it might mean for companies and for the wider social fabric. Bill's work focuses on the intersection of ancient practices (in particular mindfulness) and organizational growth and change and he offers us fascinating insights into new paradigms for organizational culture and broader benefits for all society. We explore how these shifts are particularly vital as we collectively face yet more radical disruption from the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

My guest Sarah Chayes has so many feathers in her life cap that it's no easy task to capture them in a simple paragraph: historian, war reporter, NPR Paris correspondent, founding a soap factory in post Taliban Kandahar, special advisor to international commanders in Kabul and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, contributor to leading news journals such as The Atlantic and The Washington Post and leading author. Frankly, this still doesn't do justice to Sarah's breadth of experience, interests and work in the world. Here we explore the nexus of all these themes and even weaving in our mutual fascination with myth.

Today's guest Grant Thompson has been described as an award winning film-maker, a cinematographer, guest lecturer at UC Davis and a Berkeley grad in Celtic philology yet to me these don't do justice to the breadth of Grant's interests and work in the world. We explore the mysterious intersection between land, story, language and identity among so many other fascinating topics, and how these manifest in the through line of Grant's multifaceted work and life story. We've recently been exploring themes of indigenous loss of place and identity and here we explore something of what we Europeans traded and lost in their own rush to colonize far off lands, and the Devil's bargain that change that has wrought on we their descendant's sense of place, belonging and identity.

I'm talking with my colleague and friend Ray Basset about his extraordinary multi-decade career in national broadcasting including how the move from analogue to digital has impacted on broadcast media. Ray is host and producer of Scenic Roots on WUTC following two decades in New York with CBS and the Associated Press, one of which was as executive producer for the late broadcast legend, Charles Osgood.

In the final episode of our Trail of Tears series we now speak with Dr Brad Lieb, Director of Chickasaw Archaeology at the Dept. of Culture and Humanities of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. We hear much about the richness of Chicasaw life and culture prior to European arrival, how the incomers impacted on life, culture and survival and also about the extraordinary capacity of the Chicasaw people to adapt and flourish under such terrible circumstances.

In our next edition of the Trail of Tears series exploring the forced relocation of indigenous people from the US south east we now speak with Jake Tiger, historian with the Historic Preservation Department of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and hear the Seminole perspective on what happened and how the impacts play out to this very day.

As we continue our exploration of the indigenous forced relocation from the south-east, this episode we're hearing from RaeLynn Butler and Melissa Harjo of the Historic and Cultural Preservation Department from the Muscogee Creek nation.