Time was when museums were staid, dusty institutions. Those days are long gone. Now the focus is on making visiting a museum a positive, inclusive, meaningful experience for everyone who comes through the door – or visits online. It sounds good in principle, but how to do it in practice?

That question is at the heart of the latest title to join the What Is It For series, 'What are Museums for?' by Jon Sleigh. Jon is an arts and heritage engagement consultant who specialises in connecting audiences with artworks and collections, and in this episode of the podcast, he tells George Miller why he structured the book around conversations with museum professionals about specific exhibits in a wide range of institutions. He also talks about his childhood fascination with a museum tyrannosaurus …

Jon Sleigh is a freelance arts and heritage Learning Curator, working nationally connecting audiences with artworks and collections for their advocacy. Follow him on Twitter: @jon_sleigh

Find out more about the book at: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/what-are-museums-for

The full transcript of the podcast is available here: https://www.transformingsociety.co.uk/2024/07/19/podcast-museums-without-visitors-are-just-elaborate-storage/

Timestamps:

2:18 - What were your first encounters with museums like?

9:45 - In what terms and for what reason did you come back to the world of the museum?

13:11 - If we were in a museum today how might we encounter you?

15:47 - Why is the question of 'who is the museum is for?' so central to addressing the question in your title?

19:53 - How did you decide where to go and who to talk to?

25:14 - How difficult was it to choose the actual objects?

35:29 - What things in your conversations pointed to a bright future for museums?

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In this episode, Rebecca Megson-Smith speaks with Jen Shang, co-author of ‘Meaningful Philanthropy: The Person Behind the Giving’, about the high net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals behind philanthropic giving.

Having had unparalleled access to some of the world’s most reflective and thoughtful philanthropists, Jen explains how philanthropists experience what they do and the psychological challenges they need to overcome.

Jen Shang is Professor of Philanthropic Psychology and Co-Director of the Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy. Jen Shang is the world’s only philanthropic psychologist.

Find out more about the book at: https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/meaningful-philanthropy

The full transcript of the podcast is available here: https://www.transformingsociety.co.uk/2024/07/10/podcast-the-psychology-behind-philanthropy/

Timestamps:

1:24 - How did you get these philanthropists to talk to you?

2:32 - What is meaningful philanthropy?

4:36 - What is identity ceding and why is it important?

10:05 - What is the connection between philanthropy and entrepreneurs?

11:57 - Can philanthropy be meaningless?

14:01 - Why are philanthropists important to study and understand?

21:50 - What impact do you hope your book has?

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With the UK General Election on Thursday, Academics Stand Against Poverty have audited the manifestos to establish which parties are most likely to address poverty and enable British society to flourish.

In this episode, Jess Miles speaks with Lee Gregory and Cat Tully about how the audit has been produced and why it matters. They discuss how the manifestos stack up, what all political parties can learn from the audit and what we should all be considering before voting.

Cat Zuzarte Tully leads the School of International Futures (SOIF), a global non-profit transforming futures for current and next generations. SOIF also supports a growing network of Next Generation Foresight Practitioners. Previously, Cat served as Strategy Project Director at the UK Foreign Office and Policy Advisor in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. She is on the board of Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP) global and in the UK, and has been visiting professor in Malaysia, UK and Russia.

Lee Gregory is an Associate Professor in Social Policy at the University of Nottingham, School of Sociology and Social Policy and is Chair of Trustees for ASAP UK. He has been involved in previous manifesto audits as an auditor and oversaw the development of the 2024 Audit and associated blog series.

Find out more about the audit at: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/asap-manifesto-audit-2024

The full transcript of the podcast is available here: https://www.transformingsociety.co.uk/2024/07/01/podcast-scoring-the-general-election-promises-on-poverty/

Timestamps:

0:01:09 - Audit and Academic Stand Against Poverty

0:07:31 - Improving well-being and opportunities

0:15:32 - Assessing political Parties' fiscal policies

0:22:35 - Petition for Future Generations

0:30:05 - Future plans for ASAP UK

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If the way we eat now is bad for our health, bad for animal welfare and bad for the planet, is veganism the answer? That’s the key question that Catherine Oliver of Lancaster University pursues in the latest addition to the What is it for? series.

In this episode of the podcast, Catherine tells George Miller why she hopes 'What is Veganism For?' helps reframe the often-polarized debate around veganism by showing the role it plays in wider justice movements, talks about how veganism has gone from fringe to mainstream in the past decade, and describes how vegan eating (including banana blossom fritters) can be a joyful experience.

Catherine Oliver is a lecturer in the Sociology of Climate Change at Lancaster University. A geographer interested in research beyond the human, she works on historical and contemporary veganism, the ethics and politics of interspecies friendship through human-chicken relationships, and multispecies ethnographic research, most recently with seabirds. Follow her on Twitter: @katiecmoliver.

Find out more about the book: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/what-is-veganism-for

The full transcript of the podcast is available here: https://www.transformingsociety.co.uk/2024/06/25/podcast-veganism-imagining-a-world-beyond-contemporary-food-systems/

Timestamps:

01:10 - Why did the seemingly straightforward question, what is veganism for, appeal enough to write a book?

04:51 - Broadening the perspective on what led to contemporary veganism

07:00 - An invitation to take the idea of change on board in a serious way

09:51 - How do you see the aim of the book?

13:05 - Looking outward into the ways in which veganism can be practised and the various other things with which veganism can fruitfully intersect

15:00 - Can you say something about your own particular trajectory that led to you writing this book?

17:51 - Is it becoming easier to become vegan?

21:48 - Should the emphasis be on eating a bit less meat and leaving veganism for later?

26:00 - The complications of big corporations

29:32 - Beyond the binary of vegan or not

33:30 - In what ways is vegan eating potentially joyous?

Intro music:

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Danny Dorling and Jess Miles talk about his concept of peak injustice - that injustice and inequality are now so bad in the UK that it might just be that they can't get worse.

In advance of 4 July, they talk about Keir Starmer and what the Labour party may offer, why higher taxes aren't a burden, how fear wrecks societies and the data that gives us hope that getting down from the top of the mountain of injustice might be possible.

Danny Dorling is Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Peter’s College. He is a patron of RoadPeace, Comprehensive Future and Heeley City Farm. He has published over 50 books, including the best-selling Peak Inequality: Britain’s Ticking Timebomb (2018) and Injustice: Why Social Inequality Still Persists (2014). Follow him on Twitter: @dannydorling.

Find out more about the book: https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/peak-injustice

The full transcript of the podcast is available here: https://www.transformingsociety.co.uk/2024/06/21/podcast-danny-dorling-on-the-uk-election-and-hope-for-change/

Timestamps:

01:39 - What are the signs things might be getting less unequal?

5:33 - How far are the parties going to tackle injustice, and are there any standout policies?

9:59 - Why are people afraid of tax rises?

13:01 - What are individuals going to have to accept in order to move away from this peak injustice?

20:57 - When discussing what the next government have to do to move us away from peak injustice you said they have to want to do it. What did you mean by that?

28:40 - What is the important role the left have to play in this election?

33:09 - What do you want people, including the new government, to take from your book, 'Peak Injustice'?

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Convict’s voices have traditionally been ignored and marginalised in scholarship and policy debates, but how can we improve if we don’t learn from these lived experiences?

Richard Kemp speaks with Jeffrey Ian Ross, author of ‘Introduction to Convict Criminology’, about why listening to convicts is essential to positively impacting corrections, criminology, criminal justice, and policy making.

They discuss the origins of convict criminology as a discipline, the importance, and difficulty, of receiving higher education during incarceration, and the policy decisions that are necessary to improve our criminal justice systems.

Jeffrey Ian Ross is Professor in the School of Criminal Justice and Research Fellow with the Center for International and Comparative Law and the Schaefer Center for Public Policy at the University of Baltimore. Follow him on Twitter: @jeffreyianross.

Find out more about the book: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/introduction-to-convict-criminology

The full transcript of the podcast is available here: https://www.transformingsociety.co.uk/2024/06/14/podcast-how-listening-to-convicts-can-transform-justice/

Timestamps:

1:41 - What was the literature on prisons before convict criminology, and what does convict criminology do differently?

4:08 - What is prison life like and why is it important for us to understand it?

7:08 - Was convict criminology 'rocking the boat' when it came to be?

9:31 - Education in prisons is important, so how did it end up in the state it's in?

15:56 - What's the financial support for inmates doing education?

18:56 - How achievable is it for educated inmates to write academically about their experiences?

25:30 - What do you say to people who disagree with inmates being educated?

28:35 - What are the impacts of race, gender and class, and what are the dangers of activism?

32:22 - How does convict criminology want to influence policy?

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Lurking, or reading the comments in an online group without writing a comment, is a common practice. But what does it mean to be a lurker?

In this podcast host Jess Miles speaks with Gina Sipley, Associate Professor of English at SUNY Nassau Community College and author of Just Here for the Comments. Gina challenges our assumptions about lurking, revealing it to be a complex and valuable form of online engagement.

They talk about the psychology of online behaviour, how lurking can be a form of resistance and social activism and the surprising value lurking brings to the world.

Gina Sipley is Associate Professor of English at SUNY Nassau Community College. Sipley is a first-generation college graduate. Follow her on Twitter: @GSipley.

Find out more about the book: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/just-here-for-the-comments

The full transcript of the podcast is available here: https://www.transformingsociety.co.uk/2024/05/22/podcast-how-lurkers-influence-the-online-world/

Timestamps:

1:09 - Where did the title, 'Just Here for the Comments', come from?

2:19 - Who did you study, and on what platforms?

8:30 - Why does lurking have such a bad rep?

11:35 - What grassroot actions are lurkers taking, and how does it challenge traditional ideas of online participation and activism?

17:56 - Lurking as a privileged act

20:11 - What value does lurking bring?

23:36 - Who would you like to read the book, and what impact do you hope it will have?

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History is a key battleground in our increasingly bitter contemporary culture wars. In the polarized debates over who we are, the cry of ‘You can’t rewrite history’ regularly goes up. And is regularly met with the counterclaim that history needs to be rewritten.

Virtually the only thing both sides can agree on is that the past matters. But why, and in what ways? And is there a route out of our current impasse? These are some of the questions tackled in this episode of the podcast, in which George Miller talks to Robert Gildea, emeritus professor of modern history at Oxford University, about his new book, What is History For?

Along the way, Robert also reflects on his own career as a historian and what it has taught him about the role of history in our present political reality.

Robert Gildea is Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the University of Oxford, and a specialist on French and European history in the 19th and 20th centuries. In 2003 he won the Wolfson Prize for History. Follow him on Twitter: @RobertGildea.

Find out more about the book: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/what-is-history-for

The full transcript of the podcast is available here: https://www.transformingsociety.co.uk/2024/05/16/podcast-why-history-needs-to-be-rewritten/

Timestamps:

1:51 - Robert's attempts to convince his father that he was cut out for a career as a historian

6:18 - What drew you to history?

13:37 - What do historians actually do?

18:38 - What is the trajectory that historians normally follow?

22:40 - Why is history more complicated than a settled body of knowledge?

30:55 - Why history matters, and is still significant in the world today

42:17 - Is it possible to have a truly successful reckoning with the past?

Intro music:

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Follow the Transforming Society blog to be told when new articles and podcasts publish: https://www.transformingsociety.co.uk/follow-the-blog/

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