Simone Schneider is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Cambridge. Her dissertation explores the meanings and experience of infidelity in intimate relationships, combining both long, in-depth interviews with people who have experienced or committed infidelity, and discourse analysis of dating platforms that facilitate this sort of behaviour. It’s a fascinating body of work on one of the oldest, innermost domains of human affairs, one that is changing with the times as dating moves ...
May 19, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Season 6Ep. 6
This episode’s guest is Dr Maria Bach, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and host of Ceteris Never Paribus: the History of Economic Thought Podcast . She completed her PhD at King’s College in London, now available as a book with Cambridge University Press, Relocating Development Economics: The First Generation of Modern Indian Economists. The book excavates the overlooked history of Indian thinking about progress and growth, showcasing how a generation of thinkers...
Apr 28, 2025•59 min•Season 6Ep. 5
A special issue episode where regular host Dr Mark Fabian is on the other side of the microphone being interviewed by @economeager about his new book - Beyond Happy: How to rethink happiness and find fulfilment. It is out today in the United Kingdom. Here's a summary of the book: A comprehensive guide to cultivating wellbeing, combining cutting edge science and primordial folk wisdom. Mark Fabian, one of the most exhilarating thinkers working on wellbeing today, presents a revolutionary app...
Apr 09, 2025•1 hr 31 min•Season 6Ep. 4
Anyone on social media these days has encountered a bot. An algorithm-driven fake account that engages in some nefarious activity, whether it’s turning uncontroversial points into debates, repping the Kremlin’s talking points, or directing you to pussy in bio, the bots are enshittifying social media at an alarming rate, especially now that artificial intelligence allows them to be more convincing, more targeted, and faster to set up en masse. But what if we could turn this pernicious technology ...
Mar 26, 2025•54 min•Season 6Ep. 3
Trump is back in the White House and as anticipated, his administration is moving fast and breaking things. One of the first aspects of government to get stepped on was USAID, one of the biggest financiers and administrators of global development, including programs like PEPFAR. To understand the implications of this for the wider global philanthropy sector, ePODstemology reached out to Shonali Banerjee, Assistant Professor of International Development at the University of Warwick. She was previ...
Feb 14, 2025•59 min•Season 6Ep. 2
Climate change is the single biggest policy challenge facing the world today. A global political coordination problem of epic proportions, with baggage from colonialism, short election cycles, and a deep pocketed fossil fuel lobby running interference. The stakes couldn’t be higher, with hundreds of millions of human and billions of animal lives in the balance. Who do we need to take action? Parliaments. How do we get them to do it? Here to answer that question is Mitya Pearson, assistant profes...
Jan 16, 2025•57 min•Season 6Ep. 1
Democracy is unwell. Trust in politicians, institutions, experts, and other people is steadily falling across the OECD, and even young people seem to be losing faith in the system. What can be done? One idea that has gained traction and demonstrated potential of late is deliberative democracy: bringing together citizens, policymakers, area specialists, and other stakeholders to ponder a policy issue together. Hot off its success in generating a deep, heartfelt and restorative referendum on abort...
Nov 14, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Season 5Ep. 10
In the UK, up to 80% of a social worker’s time can be spent filling out forms rather than helping the desperate people in their care. This is an example of what Dan Honig calls ‘management for compliance’. Honig is associate professor of public policy at University College London, among many other affiliations including Georgetown, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Lahore University of Management Sciences. In his new book, Mission Driven Bureaucrats , he argues that a ‘management for empowerment’ resu...
Oct 17, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 5Ep. 9
“Digital governance” is a term commonly used to refer to the transformative potential of integrating contemporary technological advances into the day-to-day activities of government. Electronic filing of tax returns, text message reminders to get your vaccine booster, medical records that can follow your around as you change doctor’s offices – all are examples of digital governance. Digital governance holds much promise, most obviously in terms of efficiency and convenience, but also many risks ...
Sep 11, 2024•58 min•Season 5Ep. 8
Dr Jaclyn Siegel from NORC at the University of Chicago joins regular ePODstemology host Dr Mark Fabian to discuss the psychological science of eating disorders and body image, especially her own qualitative research on eating disorders in the workplace and romantic relationships. The conversation also covers the relationship between social media and eating disorders, gluttonous eating, the pros and cons of the Kardashian physique and other pseudo-body positivity trends, the value of grounded th...
Aug 21, 2024•57 min•Season 5Ep. 7
ePODstemology brings you cutting edge insights and analysis from early career researchers to help you cut through 21st century complexity. A major driver of that complexity is Algorithms - an increasingly ubiquitous yet remarkably opaque aspect of modern life, directing what you watch on television, who drives your taxi, what products you see when online shopping, and, increasingly who purchases your labour. This episode, regular host Dr Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick is joined by Dr...
Jul 15, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Season 5Ep. 6
Some of you may have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area of the Pacific Ocean roughly 1.6 million square kilometres in size that contains between 45 000 to 129 000 metrics tonnes of plastic waste, mostly in the form of microplastics – fingernail sized or smaller bits of the material. The patch has increased 10-fold in size each decade since 1945, and has a twin in the North Atlantic Garbage patch. Growing awareness of the patch and other environmental consequences of plastic waste,...
May 10, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 5Ep. 5
This podcast strives to bring forward new insights and innovative frameworks for understanding the world of the 21st century. Few things underscore just how radically different things are today from the 20th century than recent advances in artificial intelligence, where an AI ‘copilot’ on your smartphone can now perform myriad tasks for you in a few seconds. This episode’s guest is one of the people best placed globally to help us understand the implications of this new technology. He’s Ash Font...
Apr 18, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Season 5Ep. 4
James Steele is Associate Professor of Sport and Exercise Science at Solent University. He has extensive research and consultancy experience working with elite athletes across a range of sports, the general population across the lifespan, and both those who are healthy and diseased. He was a member of the Expert Working Group revising the CMO Physical Activity Guidelines for the United Kingdom and is a founding member of both the Strength and Conditioning Society, and the Society for Transparenc...
Mar 19, 2024•58 min•Season 5Ep. 3
Regular host Dr Mark Fabian is joined by episode guest Dr Stefania Fiorentino, senior teaching associate in planning, growth, and urban regeneration at Cambridge university’s department of land economy. Dr Fiorentino’s research is at the intersection of urban planning and local economic development, specifically how to innovate with respect to the inclusivity and effectiveness of urban regeneration strategies. Her research is extremely impact-oriented and is typically conducted in partnership wi...
Jan 31, 2024•56 min•Season 5Ep. 2
Regular host Dr Mark Fabian is joined by Dr Jacqui Lau, senior lecturer and discovery early career fellow (DECRA) at James Cook University in Australia. Jacqui is an environmental scientist employing interdisciplinary perspectives and mixed methods to understand how coastal communities in the pacific islands and Australia respond to climate change and environmental transformations. She has worked collaboratively in the Pacific, East and West Africa to examine ecosystem services, the impact of sh...
Jan 09, 2024•55 min•Season 5Ep. 1
‘Copaganda’ is the name given to media that seeks to portray the police in a favourable, often distorted light. This includes fictional shows like Law and Order, CSI: Crime Scene Investigations, and Miami Vice, as well as reality-TV style shows that follow policy officers around as they go about their business. Emma Rackstraw’s research investigates how these shows affect the behaviour of the police, perceptions of the police among viewers, and attitudes towards the police in the communities whe...
Nov 22, 2023•59 min•Season 4Ep. 11
Climate change is the biggest existential threat facing humanity. So why aren’t we doing more about it? This week’s guest is Dr Antonio Valentim, a political scientist and postdoctoral fellow at Yale’s MacMillan Centre. His research seeks to answer two main questions 1) when and why do voters change their opinions and behaviours with respect to climate change? and 2) how do political incentives influence political elites’ behaviour on climate change? Who better to help us get some answer on how ...
Oct 05, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Season 4Ep. 10
While Kim Jong Un might disagreed, democracy is widely regarded as a universal value – it is a system of political organisation that enshrines the right to self-determination. Recent centuries have seen a wave of democratisation relative to historical trends, with democracies replacing dictatorships and other autocratic forms of governance in nations across the globe. Yet many of these democracies have also struggled to put down strong roots. Backsliding is common and consolidation arduous. A fe...
Sep 21, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Season 4Ep. 9
One way to think about what makes *social* science distinct is that it is trying to study subjects, not objects. Subjects have feelings, opinions, and values, which are often hard to observe and even harder to measure. Subjects’ behaviour is also often endogenous to being studied. For example, the ‘shy conservative’ phenomenon refers to the observation that people often lie about their right wing and traditionalist beliefs when responding to political polling. Finally, subjects are embedded in s...
Aug 29, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Season 4Ep. 8
Regular host Dr Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick is joined by Dr Malte Dold, assistant professor of economics at Pomona College. Malte is one of the most prominent scholars in the field of behavioural welfare economics, which sits at the intersection of economics, philosophy, and psychology. You might have heard of behavioural economics, which inspired the idea of nudges in public policy – little tweaks to the choice environment citizens face as they navigate the world that can help th...
Aug 14, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Season 4Ep. 7
Raffaella Taylor-Seymour is an anthropologist and Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University. Her work examines religious transformations in the context of struggles over gender, sexuality, and the environment in contemporary Zimbabwe. This is a context in which colonization violently upended ideas about personhood, spirituality, and ties between people and place. Raffaella’s work explores how young people navigate a religious lan...
Jul 21, 2023•1 hr•Season 4Ep. 6
Inequality is a perennial subject of politics, a foundational element of economic welfare analysis, and one of the central subjects of sociology. In this episode, Dr Marco Ranaldi from University College London joins regular host Dr Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick to discuss what's new in inequality research. A central topic is Ranaldi's innovative new concept of compositional inequality, which compares the income of the top and bottom of the distribution in terms of whether...
Jul 06, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Season 4Ep. 5
Workplace wellbeing kicked off in Silicon valley with ping pong tables, bean bags, and on 'campus' Michellin star restaurants. With Google, Facebook, Amazon et al. raking in the dollars, it wasn't long before other companies were exploring the theme themselves. Some of the outcomes seem sinister: employers encouraging you to see the firm as your family, your work as making a difference to the world, and you mental health as something to make resilient, but mostly so that they can ...
May 08, 2023•1 hr 37 min•Season 4Ep. 4
Have you heard of the Panama papers? A giant leak of 11.5 million legal and financial documents exposing a vast system of secretive offshore companies enabling corruption, tax avoidance, and other forms of wrongdoing? Well that system and how to clean it up is what this episode is about. Regular host Dr Mark Fabian is joined by Dr Matthew Colin, Senior Researcher at the EU tax observatory and one of the most innovative scholars working on elicit finance and how to combat it. The conversation beg...
May 07, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Season 4Ep. 3
Before there was the COVID-19 virus there was the 'Woke' mind virus, or at least that's how some reactionary commentators in the US refer to a cluster of strongly progressive cultural tropes, including emphasising racial and gender identity, prioritising equality of outcomes over equality of treatment, and being mindful of language that can be potentially harmful. A woke wave has passed through the culture in the past decade, exploding especially on some university campuses and no...
Mar 27, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Season 4Ep. 2
One of the oldest and most famous questions in the social sciences is the debate over nature vs nurture in determining characteristics of the individual. Transcending this focus on the micro is a new field within social-psychology sometimes called social-ecological psychology, which explores how psychology brings about societal conditions and vice versa. Research in this vein has become popular as western psychologists have realised how distorted their view is by their tendency to only sample &a...
Mar 07, 2023•38 min•Season 4Ep. 1
Recent political cycles across the OECD have seen the ‘revenge of places that don’t matter’. These ‘left behind places’, where economic prosperity has withered and culture decayed, have made their misery known electorally. The economic consequences, notably assaults on trade and globalism, and the human misery obvious in things like deaths of despair from suicide and opioid overdoses, have provoked a flurry of activity concerned with how to revive left behind places and dampen their rage. A larg...
Aug 01, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Season 3Ep. 12
What is the future of the factory in economic development? That is the subject of a forthcoming book by this episode’s guest, Dr Jostein Hauge from the University of Cambridge. Numerous scholars, Harvard’s Dani Rodrik arguably most prominent among them, have noted that industrialisation among contemporary developing countries is more muted than it was for the Asian Tiger economies and other nations that rose in the second half of the 20th century. In place of industrialisation and associated exp...
Jul 13, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Season 3Ep. 11
Mark is joined by Heather Browning from the London School of Economics and Walter Veit from the University of Sydney who their ideas regarding the nature of consciousness, what we can learn about consciousness from animal studies, and the implications for animal welfare. Should we think of consciousness as some special property unique to human minds, or is it in fact merely a particular high degree of sentience? If it's the later, then cephalopods seem curious, honeybees are capable of solv...
Jun 18, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 3Ep. 10
