EXPeditions - The living library of knowlegde

Civic duties are essentially the ways in which citizens agree to abide by the rules and to contribute to the life of a national society. About Simon Reid-Henry "I am a research professor at the Peace Research Institute, Oslo, an honorary professor of historical and political geography at Queen Mary, University of London, a civil society advocate and a writer. I am a 2011 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. My research applies an interdisciplinary focus to the making and application of political, economic, technical and legal forms of knowledge and their consequences for political thought and practice. My work has been recognized for its methodological innovation, conceptual rigour, and empirical breadth via a number of academic fellowships and awards." Key Points • The pandemic revived the language of civic duty as governments asked citizens to act for the common good, offering a lens to study how collective action is mobilised. • Comparative research in France, Norway and the UK shows that civic duty is culturally framed and shaped citizens’ compliance. • Lockdowns exposed the constant negotiation in liberal democracies between collective needs and individual freedoms, demonstrating that obedience relies on persuasion more than coercion. • Global disparities in vaccine access highlighted how duties operate at multiple scales, underscoring the need for shared responsibility to tackle future crises such as climate change.

I think prejudice is best conceptualized as a phenomenon that can be supported by a whole range of mental states that will include beliefs, habits, emotions, and also attentional dispositions. About Jessie Munton "​​I'm an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. I'm also a fellow at St John's College, and Director of Studies for Philosophy there. My core areas of research are philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of psychology. I also enjoy thinking and writing about philosophy of psychiatry. I am a 2023 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. I've become increasingly interested in what I think of as negative epistemology: how do we evaluate ignorance, forgetting, or the failure to undertake inquiry or collect evidence? Some of my other research is in philosophy of perception." Key Points • Prejudice is sustained not only by beliefs and emotions but also by entrenched habits of attention that filter what we notice or ignore. • Because those attentional patterns are conditioned by media, spaces and other people, prejudice is simultaneously individual and societal. • We can still be held responsible for unconscious biases, since we choose many of the influences that shape our habitual focus. • Lasting change depends on shifting shared cues through inclusive education, diverse personal relationships and similar interventions so that different people and evidence become salient to us all.

The world today is overburdened with challenges that supersede the boundaries of nation states, and therefore of national governments, to address on their own. About Simon Reid-Henry "I am a research professor at the Peace Research Institute, Oslo, an honorary professor of historical and political geography at Queen Mary, University of London, a civil society advocate and a writer. I am a 2011 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. My research applies an interdisciplinary focus to the making and application of political, economic, technical and legal forms of knowledge and their consequences for political thought and practice. My work has been recognized for its methodological innovation, conceptual rigour, and empirical breadth via a number of academic fellowships and awards." Key Points • The post-war aid framework is outdated and too top-down to tackle border-spanning crises like climate change and pandemics. • Global Public Investment offers a universal, rules-sharing model where every country contributes according to capacity and gains an equal voice in decisions. • Financing should rely on robust sources such as environmental levies and national budget lines, rather than the seldom-met 0.7% target. • International support must move from a charity narrative to one of mutual interest, recognising shared responsibility for global public goods.

I'm interested in the beliefs that we're not forming, the evidence that we're not attending to or using, the belief states that perhaps we form. What I think of as negative epistemology is the project of coming up with resources that let us say a bit more about that. About Jessie Munton "​​I'm an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. I'm also a fellow at St John's College, and Director of Studies for Philosophy there. My core areas of research are philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of psychology. I also enjoy thinking and writing about philosophy of psychiatry. I am a 2023 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. I've become increasingly interested in what I think of as negative epistemology: how do we evaluate ignorance, forgetting, or the failure to undertake inquiry or collect evidence? Some of my other research is in philosophy of perception." Key Points • Negative epistemology shows that the beliefs we never form and the evidence we ignore can be as significant as the beliefs we hold. • Attention shapes knowledge, and sustained inattention to accessible evidence turns ignorance into an epistemic fault. • Ignorance is permissible only when the missing information is either irrelevant or out of reach; neglecting obvious, important questions makes it illegitimate. • Forgetting and structured ignorance actively manage cognitive load but can also reinforce social power by keeping certain knowledge unseen.

"How do we understand, as it were, our era of democracy, which I argue began really as recently as the 1970s from previous eras, and what is it that is fundamentally at the core of the democracy we live in today?" About Simon Reid-Henry "I am a research professor at the Peace Research Institute, Oslo, an honorary professor of historical and political geography at Queen Mary, University of London, a civil society advocate and a writer. I am a 2011 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. My research applies an interdisciplinary focus to the making and application of political, economic, technical and legal forms of knowledge and their consequences for political thought and practice. My work has been recognized for its methodological innovation, conceptual rigour, and empirical breadth via a number of academic fellowships and awards." Key Points • Democracy is not a fixed inheritance but a continually reinvented system shaped by each era’s social and institutional needs. • The economic and political upheavals of the late 1960s and 1970s, including the collapse of Bretton Woods, set the conditions for today’s globalised democratic order. • Modern democracy must constantly balance freedom with equality, a tension that becomes acute when growth falters or institutions erode. • Democracy’s survival depends on active stewardship; assuming it will always muddle through risks its gradual decay.

On the one hand, we have that sense of really close identification with our minds. On the other hand, we're often surprised at the ways in which they operate. About Jessie Munton "​​I'm an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. I'm also a fellow at St John's College, and Director of Studies for Philosophy there. My core areas of research are philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of psychology. I also enjoy thinking and writing about philosophy of psychiatry. I am a 2023 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. I've become increasingly interested in what I think of as negative epistemology: how do we evaluate ignorance, forgetting, or the failure to undertake inquiry or collect evidence? Some of my other research is in philosophy of perception." Key Points • The mind feels deeply personal yet can generate beliefs and behaviors that escape rational control. • Perception justifies belief, but belief systems can fragment, allowing inconsistent or implicitly biased attitudes. • Selection of what we attend to, guided by both salience and goals, determines the evidence we gather and thus which beliefs count as justified. • Epistemology must assess attentional priorities as well as belief content, since information ordering shapes reasoning and moral outcomes.

We don't really understand how life got going on this planet. There are various candidates for where the first molecules of life might have evolved, and some of those candidates are deeply volcanic. About Tamsin Mather "I am a professor of Volcanology. My work brings together expertise in volcanology/magmatism, atmospheric chemistry and paleoclimatology/stratigraphy. This combination allows me to tackle problems ranging from acute volcanic hazards and air pollution events in the present-day to the role of volcanism in the long-term evolution of our planet’s environment over its geological history and much in between. I am a 2010 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. My main research interests centre on the science behind volcanoes and volcanic behaviour. My motivation is to understand volcanoes as (a) a key planetary scale process throughout geological time, vital for maintaining habitability as well as driving environmental change, (b) natural hazards and (c) resources (e.g., geothermal power and the development of ore deposits)." Key Points • If you look at the Moon in the night sky, you are seeing more basalt with the naked eye than you'd ever get to see from looking at a view anywhere on the planet Earth. The Moon’s dark maria supplied the first hand-collected extraterrestrial rocks, anchoring our understanding of planetary volcanism. • Mars’s fixed crust allowed Olympus Mons to grow to the Solar System’s largest volcano, illustrating how the absence of plate tectonics can magnify volcanic scale. Io’s intense tidal squeezing by Jupiter drives constant eruptions, proving that gravitational flexing can power volcanism without significant internal heat. • Volcanoes are a planetary-scale process. There are lots of different ways that volcanoes change a planet. They move elements around from different parts of the solid planet, but they are also really instrumental in building an atmosphere, which is incredibly important in terms of the surface environment. • Volcanoes might have the potential to be instrumental in directly kicking life off, but they're certainly instrumental in building the sort of environment we need to be able to evolve life – and certainly to be able to evolve complex life such as ourselves.

We in the modern West still look back to ancient Greece as our imagined origin. We're still obsessed with ancient Greece. About Naoise Mac Sweeney  "I'm Professor of Greek Archaeology at the University of Vienna. My research focuses on the construction of identity and cultural interaction. I am especially interested in the making of communities – not only their physical formation through landscape and architecture but also their social formation through cultural practice and conceptual formation through the construction of identity. I am a 2015 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. My work to date has focused on these topics from the Iron Age to Classical periods in the ancient Greek world and Anatolia, in particular on Greek cities Ionia and Cilicia but also on Troy and myths of the Trojan War. My current project expands the geographical frame, considering migration and mobility around the Mediterranean in the Iron Age. I am also interested in wider engagement with antiquity and the politics of reception and heritage. I passionately believe that those of us who study the past also have a responsibility to the present." Key Points • The Western origin story that begins in classical Greece oversimplifies history and inflates a singular inheritance. • Ancient Greece spanned Europe, Asia and Africa, and its legacy dispersed across Byzantium, medieval Islam, Central Asia and beyond. • Western Europe’s embrace of Greek heritage intensified after the Renaissance amid Habsburg-Ottoman rivalry, hardening Europe versus Asia boundaries and feeding early racial ideologies. • The origin myth of the modern West no longer serves us in the present. A better origin myth centers on diversity, cultural interconnection and active choice rather than linear descent.

There is a sense of looking to volcanoes and their power and recognising our own power as well, and with that power comes a great sense of responsibility. About Tamsin Mather "I am a professor of Volcanology. My work brings together expertise in volcanology/magmatism, atmospheric chemistry and paleoclimatology/stratigraphy. This combination allows me to tackle problems ranging from acute volcanic hazards and air pollution events in the present-day to the role of volcanism in the long-term evolution of our planet’s environment over its geological history and much in between. I am a 2010 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. My main research interests centre on the science behind volcanoes and volcanic behaviour. My motivation is to understand volcanoes as (a) a key planetary scale process throughout geological time, vital for maintaining habitability as well as driving environmental change, (b) natural hazards and (c) resources (e.g., geothermal power and the development of ore deposits)." Key Points • Krakatoa’s 1883 blast is supposed to be the loudest bang ever heard by humans. It showed how explosive eruptions can generate lethal pyroclastic flows and tsunamis that devastate distant coastal communities. • The 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption demonstrated that even moderate ash clouds can shut down international aviation and disrupt global economies for weeks. • Seismic swarms, ground inflation, gas emissions and satellite radar provide advance warnings, yet limited monitoring and uncertain timing still impede precise short-term eruption forecasts. • Geological records tie giant volcanic provinces to multiple mass extinctions, underscoring how Earth’s largest eruptions can trigger planetary environmental collapse. But the greatest contender for the sixth mass extinction event is really the global change triggered by mankind's activities.

How Greekness could coexist alongside and be interconnected with other types of identities and other kinds of cultural traits is a central question. About Naoise Mac Sweeney  "I'm Professor of Greek Archaeology at the University of Vienna. My research focuses on the construction of identity and cultural interaction. I am especially interested in the making of communities – not only their physical formation through landscape and architecture but also their social formation through cultural practice and conceptual formation through the construction of identity. I am a 2015 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. My work to date has focused on these topics from the Iron Age to Classical periods in the ancient Greek world and Anatolia, in particular on Greek cities Ionia and Cilicia but also on Troy and myths of the Trojan War. My current project expands the geographical frame, considering migration and mobility around the Mediterranean in the Iron Age. I am also interested in wider engagement with antiquity and the politics of reception and heritage. I passionately believe that those of us who study the past also have a responsibility to the present." Key Points • The case of Cilicia really helps us to understand that identities can change, and they can change quite rapidly in response to specific historical contexts. • Cilicia sat at a strategic crossroads linking Anatolia, the Near East and Mediterranean sea routes, which made it a long-standing melting pot of peoples and traditions. • Archaeology shows mixed assemblages and blended crafts, with Aegean Greek, Anatolian, Phoenician and Persian elements coexisting and intertwining.. • As Persian rule intensified, some cities adopted Greek language, coinage, art and civic practices as a self-driven stance against imperial power

Understanding volcanoes has been woven together with our understanding of the structure of the Earth. About Tamsin Mather "I am a professor of Volcanology. My work brings together expertise in volcanology/magmatism, atmospheric chemistry and paleoclimatology/stratigraphy. This combination allows me to tackle problems ranging from acute volcanic hazards and air pollution events in the present-day to the role of volcanism in the long-term evolution of our planet’s environment over its geological history and much in between. I am a 2010 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. My main research interests centre on the science behind volcanoes and volcanic behaviour. My motivation is to understand volcanoes as (a) a key planetary scale process throughout geological time, vital for maintaining habitability as well as driving environmental change, (b) natural hazards and (c) resources (e.g., geothermal power and the development of ore deposits)." Key Points • The word ‘volcano’ derives from Italy’s Vulcano island, near Sicily, whose ancient eruptions branded the word across Europe. • Understanding volcanoes has been woven together with our understanding of the structure of the Earth. There's lots and lots of heat and energy inside our planet, and volcanoes are the manifestation of that. • Volcanoes were thought to be the chimneys through which the Earth's internal fires vented. Plinian eruptions, named after Vesuvius AD 79, shoot ash-gas columns skyward before they mushroom out like umbrellas. • Massive volcanic eruptions have the ability to blast enormous quantities of material up into the stratosphere. Tambora and Krakatoa lofted sulfur that cooled the climate and reddened sunsets, yet humans now emit CO₂ about 60 times faster than all volcanoes combined.

Migration is a crucial part of what made the ancient Greek world. It must have been crucial in the way this world came together, but it also must have been crucial in keeping this world linked and connected. About Naoise Mac Sweeney  "I'm Professor of Greek Archaeology at the University of Vienna. My research focuses on the construction of identity and cultural interaction. I am especially interested in the making of communities – not only their physical formation through landscape and architecture but also their social formation through cultural practice and conceptual formation through the construction of identity. I am a 2015 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. My work to date has focused on these topics from the Iron Age to Classical periods in the ancient Greek world and Anatolia, in particular on Greek cities Ionia and Cilicia but also on Troy and myths of the Trojan War. My current project expands the geographical frame, considering migration and mobility around the Mediterranean in the Iron Age. I am also interested in wider engagement with antiquity and the politics of reception and heritage. I passionately believe that those of us who study the past also have a responsibility to the present." Key Points • The ancient Greek world was vast and geographically fragmented, and migration was essential to its formation and cohesion. • Mobility was continuous and often circular rather than a single outward diaspora, culminating in cultural convergence that created a shared Greekness. • Greek communities were bound more by shared language, ritual and everyday practices than by common laws or institutions. What archaeology shows us is that culture comes first and identity follows after. • Migration is not new, people have always moved around and mobility is a fundamental part of the human condition.

Astronomers have long thought that other stars likely had their own planets around them, but they just didn't know whether they were there, because planets are incredibly hard to see. About Jo Dunkley "​​​​​​I am the Joseph Henry Professor of Physics ​and Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University. I am a 2015 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. ​My research is in cosmology, studying the origins and evolution of the Universe. My major projects are the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the Simons Observatory.  I have been the analysis leader for ACT for the past few years, and am currently the Spokesperson of the Simons Observatory. I am a Fellow of the Royal Society." Key Points • Most exoplanets are detected through a star’s slight wobble or brief dimming during transit, yielding thousands of confirmed worlds. • Citizen scientists have helped uncover additional planets by analyzing publicly released telescope data. • The Milky Way’s immense population of stars, each potentially hosting a plethora planets, makes extraterrestrial life statistically plausible, even if unlikely. • Dark energy currently drives faster cosmic expansion, yet its unknown nature means a future collapse cannot be dismissed.

The witch comes out of a deeply misogynistic, deeply anti-feminist ideology of the Middle Ages and is very much connected to violence against women and the erasure of women. About Anthony Bale "I am Professor of Medieval & Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. I research later medieval English literature and culture. Throughout my work I've been concerned with the relationship between margins and peripheries in medieval culture, and with recovering neglected sources and voices from the medieval past. I am a 2011 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. My early work focussed on Christian-Jewish relations, popular religion, and the history of antisemitism, followed by studies of the poetry of John Lydgate, the cult of St Edmund of East Anglia, and medieval histories of emotion. This then led me into pilgrimage studies, the history of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and editing and translating The Book of Marvels and Travels (Oxford UP, 2012) by John Mandeville and The Book of Margery Kempe (Oxford UP, 2016). In 2023 I published A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: the World through Medieval Eyes (Penguin, 2023; Norton 2024). From 2023-26 I hold a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to support my research on the Ottoman Siege of Rhodes (1480) and the development of late medieval news media." Key Points • The story of Alice Kyteler and the witchcraft allegation of 1324 helped crystallize the church's new view that magic was heresy, and it shaped the later stereotype of the witch. • The trial is not simply a story set in Ireland but one about how the church at a particular place and time invented its enemies. • The record alleges secret gatherings, diabolical pacts and harmful magic; Alice escaped, but one of her co-accused was burned at a period that coincides with the festival of Halloween. • Witchcraft accusations flourish in stressed communities and spread through rumor or gossip, causing real harm. Modern portrayals often sanitize the witch, despite misogynist origins connected to violence against women and their erasure.

If dark matter is a new kind of particle, it can travel through our body, through anything. It doesn't interact with the regular atoms we know of. It does obey the law of gravity. About Jo Dunkley "​​​​​​I am the Joseph Henry Professor of Physics ​and Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University. I am a 2015 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. ​My research is in cosmology, studying the origins and evolution of the Universe. My major projects are the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the Simons Observatory.  I have been the analysis leader for ACT for the past few years, and am currently the Spokesperson of the Simons Observatory. I am a Fellow of the Royal Society." Key Points • Dark matter makes up roughly five times more mass than visible matter, influencing cosmic structures through gravity while remaining invisible to light. • Astronomer Vera Rubin’s measurements of unexpectedly fast star rotations in spiral galaxies provided decisive evidence that massive dark matter halos surround galaxies. • Modern projects like the Atacama Cosmology Telescope map dark matter by tracking how it bends the cosmic microwave background, turning long-duration sky scans into detailed mass maps. • The new maps match the standard cosmological model, confirming dark matter’s gravitational behavior, but scientists still do not know the particle’s identity or the nature of dark energy.

The story of a 15th century bourgeois woman opens an absolutely unique window onto the medieval past, onto details of everyday life – domesticity, embarrassment, caring for one's husband, food – these really important parts of being alive. About Anthony Bale "I am Professor of Medieval & Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. I research later medieval English literature and culture. Throughout my work I've been concerned with the relationship between margins and peripheries in medieval culture, and with recovering neglected sources and voices from the medieval past. I am a 2011 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. My early work focussed on Christian-Jewish relations, popular religion, and the history of antisemitism, followed by studies of the poetry of John Lydgate, the cult of St Edmund of East Anglia, and medieval histories of emotion. This then led me into pilgrimage studies, the history of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and editing and translating The Book of Marvels and Travels (Oxford UP, 2012) by John Mandeville and The Book of Margery Kempe (Oxford UP, 2016). In 2023 I published A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: the World through Medieval Eyes (Penguin, 2023; Norton 2024). From 2023-26 I hold a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to support my research on the Ottoman Siege of Rhodes (1480) and the development of late medieval news media." Key Points • The Book of Margery Kempe is among the earliest named English life narratives and offers a rare female voice on domestic life, spirituality and pilgrimage. • The sole surviving manuscript vanished for centuries. It was rediscovered in the 1930s in a Derbyshire country house during a ping pong game, which sparked modern study and the recovery of women's voices from the Middle Ages. • Kempe carefully shared her visions within church limits during fierce anti-heresy campaigns, facing real threats of being burnt yet presenting her work as divinely ordained. • Her candid descriptions of mental distress, erotic devotion and caregiving make the book pivotal for the history of emotions and relatable today.

If we're to go back to the Big Bang, or as close to that as we can get, we think we would find ourselves at a moment a fraction of a second after the beginning of time. About Jo Dunkley "​​​​​​I am the Joseph Henry Professor of Physics ​and Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University. I am a 2015 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. ​My research is in cosmology, studying the origins and evolution of the Universe. My major projects are the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the Simons Observatory.  I have been the analysis leader for ACT for the past few years, and am currently the Spokesperson of the Simons Observatory. I am a Fellow of the Royal Society." Key Points • The universe is roughly 14 billion years old, with just 5% ordinary matter and the rest dark components we still don’t understand. • General relativity shows how mass curves space-time, letting gravity shape galaxies, stars and planets. • When atoms formed 380,000 years after the Big Bang, light finally streamed freely, leaving the cosmic microwave background whose tiny ripples became today’s structures. • The Big Bang was uniform expansion everywhere, not an explosion from a point, so the universe has no center.

With the 1480 Siege of Rhodes, we start to see the first use of the word ‘news’ in English to mean reports of recent events. You can reconstruct in quite a lot of detail who has the interest in the news, who has the means to produce the news, and you can locate that in particular moments in time, in cities, in political contexts. About Anthony Bale "I am Professor of Medieval & Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. I research later medieval English literature and culture. Throughout my work I've been concerned with the relationship between margins and peripheries in medieval culture, and with recovering neglected sources and voices from the medieval past. I am a 2011 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. My early work focussed on Christian-Jewish relations, popular religion, and the history of antisemitism, followed by studies of the poetry of John Lydgate, the cult of St Edmund of East Anglia, and medieval histories of emotion. This then led me into pilgrimage studies, the history of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and editing and translating The Book of Marvels and Travels (Oxford UP, 2012) by John Mandeville and The Book of Margery Kempe (Oxford UP, 2016). In 2023 I published A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: the World through Medieval Eyes (Penguin, 2023; Norton 2024). From 2023-26 I hold a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to support my research on the Ottoman Siege of Rhodes (1480) and the development of late medieval news media." Key Points • Rhodes was a crossroads of East and West under the Knights Hospitaller, a Western crusading order that protected and cared for pilgrims to Jerusalem. • After 1453, rapid Ottoman expansion turned Western Christendom into what was perceived as a shrinking world and tightened Ottoman control over vital trade and pilgrimage routes. • The 1480 siege of Rhodes sparked Europe-wide panic over Ottoman advances. John Kay’s Middle English account may have recorded the first English use of “news” for reports of recent events. • News and propaganda spread through eyewitness reports, translations, images and compilations like Fasciculus temporum, which blurred history with current events. These sources reveal how power and omission shape narratives and modern fake news.

I started my research on science fiction in the early 20th century in China, Japan and the Soviet Union because I was interested in why their stories were so different. How do we explain this difference of attitude towards the future? About Aaron William Moore "I am the Handa Chair of Japanese-Chinese Relations at the University of Edinburgh and a modern historian of China and Japan. I also work in modern literature. I am a 2014 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. I am a comparative and transnational historian working with documents in Japanese, Chinese and Russian. I predominantly teach modern history of East Asia. My work includes studies of war diaries, the history of childhood and youth and speculative science writing and science fiction." Key Points • North Asian writers of the early 20th century often saw disruptive technology as a potential path to utopia rather than doom, contrasting with the predominantly dystopian Western outlook. • Their visions of future warfare centered on single, decisive technologies, like death rays, engineered plagues or mechanized armies, that would render conventional military strength irrelevant and directly threaten civilian populations. • Hirabayashi Katsunosuke argued that modern culture is shaped by engineers and technology, anticipating Walter Benjamin’s ideas and insisting that new media would expand rather than exhaust human imagination. • The pragmatic, largely non-theological response to radical technologies in the Soviet Union, China and Japan helps explain their quick adoption of innovations and willingness to reshape society around them.

The best reason to turn our attention to civilians when studying World War II is that, quite frankly, they are the ones who are most like ourselves. About Aaron William Moore "I am the Handa Chair of Japanese-Chinese Relations at the University of Edinburgh and a modern historian of China and Japan. I also work in modern literature. I am a 2014 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. I am a comparative and transnational historian working with documents in Japanese, Chinese and Russian. I predominantly teach modern history of East Asia. My work includes studies of war diaries, the history of childhood and youth and speculative science writing and science fiction." Key Points • Civilians were indispensable to the WWII war effort, and their experiences best reveal the true impact of modern conflict. • Total war erased the boundary between front line and home front, making every aspect of society both essential to victory and a legitimate enemy target. • Diaries and memoirs show a grinding daily misery, from hunger to family separation, that most people today might struggle to endure. • Despite the vast civilian suffering recorded, present-day discourse still treats attacks on non-combatants as acceptable collateral, suggesting the war’s moral lessons remain largely unlearned.

One of the reasons why it's useful to look at the diaries and overall life writings of ordinary soldiers is it helps us understand how people like us got involved in supporting modern warfare.  About Aaron William Moore "I am the Handa Chair of Japanese-Chinese Relations at the University of Edinburgh and a modern historian of China and Japan. I also work in modern literature. I am a 2014 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. I am a comparative and transnational historian working with documents in Japanese, Chinese and Russian. I predominantly teach modern history of East Asia. My work includes studies of war diaries, the history of childhood and youth and speculative science writing and science fiction." Key Points • Soldiers’ diaries are valuable not because they reveal inner truths, but because they show the linguistic tools people used to make sense of war and survive it. • These writings help us see how individuals absorb, reinterpret, or resist state and media messaging, revealing the limits and possibilities of personal agency. • Diaries can be dangerous because they can convince the writer to take harmful actions, and later become a painful or inescapable record of the self. • The act of diary writing was shaped by education and institutional practices, and became a way for ordinary people to participate in larger political and cultural processes.

Climate change will affect the lives of everyone and the most effective way to be fighting against climate change requires what, in political science, we call public buy-in, that the public is on board with the issue. About Federica Genovese "I am a Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Oxford. I specialize in studying the politics of crisis and specifically climate change. I am a 2011 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. My research focuses on international and comparative political economy, with particular attention to climate politics and policy, globalisation, redistribution and the politics of crises in Europe, but not exclusively." Key Points • Climate action can only succeed if ordinary citizens feel included and see a role for themselves, because the transition rewires whole economies. • Once climate change became a mainstream political issue, leaders began exploiting its costs to rally supporters, deepening partisan divides. • Most voters are worried about climate change but will back ambitious policies only when they see tangible compensation and fair burden-sharing. • Clear, hopeful storytelling, especially by the media, helps counter misinformation and keeps public attention on the opportunities of the energy transition.

The only way to deal with climate change effectively and credibly requires some type of international agreement, some level of international cooperation. There is no way in which only one country can solve the problem. About Federica Genovese "I am a Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Oxford. I specialize in studying the politics of crisis and specifically climate change. I am a 2011 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. My research focuses on international and comparative political economy, with particular attention to climate politics and policy, globalisation, redistribution and the politics of crises in Europe, but not exclusively." Key Points • Climate change demands cooperative international agreements because no single nation, however powerful, can address its causes or impacts alone. • Annual COP meetings, while slow, are indispensable for focusing global attention and compelling governments and citizens to confront climate issues. • The old "north-south" responsibility divide is giving way to a “strong-weak" state dynamic as emerging economies gain capacity and emissions influence. • Transfers of climate finance from the global North to the South could deliver large returns but face political resistance.

Only by tackling climate change through regulation – and by monitoring and maintaining a stable climate – can we effectively address the problems it causes. About Federica Genovese "I am a Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Oxford. I specialize in studying the politics of crisis and specifically climate change. I am a 2011 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. My research focuses on international and comparative political economy, with particular attention to climate politics and policy, globalisation, redistribution and the politics of crises in Europe, but not exclusively." Key Points • Mitigation and adaptation are complementary pillars of climate action and both must be advanced at the same time to manage existing impacts while cutting future emissions. • Carbon taxes and cap-and-trade dominate mitigation debates; both can curb emissions effectively yet provoke political resistance, the former over taxation and the latter over rising allowance costs. • A “just transition” requires climate policies to confront social inequities so that women, racial minorities, and other vulnerable groups gain real opportunities in the emerging green economy.

A misconception in relation to citizenship, I think, is this idea of citizenship as a closed status that divides people, in terms of status in increasingly cosmopolitan societies. About Ana Aliverti I am a Professor of criminal law and criminal justice. My research work looks at the intersections between criminal law and criminal justice, on the one hand, and border regimes, on the other, and explores the impact of such intertwining on the national criminal justice institutions and on those subject to the resulting set of controls. I am a 2017 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. My research examines questions of citizenship and belonging in criminal justice, and law's instrumental and symbolic power for boundary drawing, as well as the place of morality and affects in state power. I concluded a project on the policing of migration which investigated the growing cooperation between immigration enforcement and the police, and explores the new contours of law enforcement in the context of globalization Key Points • State power isn't just punitive; it also involves humanitarian impulses that shape law and policy. • Migration controls today originate in colonial practices aimed at restricting black and brown populations, embedding race into modern migration policies. • Citizenship increasingly functions as a privilege rather than a right, marked by restrictive criteria that reinforce racial and social boundaries. • Communities globally, especially in the Global South, demonstrate ways of including migrants without relying on formal citizenship, emphasizing coexistence and local inclusion strategies.

Border workers face significant moral challenges in terms of the work that they do, particularly in terms of the exercise of violence. About Ana Aliverti I am a Professor of criminal law and criminal justice. My research work looks at the intersections between criminal law and criminal justice, on the one hand, and border regimes, on the other, and explores the impact of such intertwining on the national criminal justice institutions and on those subject to the resulting set of controls. I am a 2017 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. My research examines questions of citizenship and belonging in criminal justice, and law's instrumental and symbolic power for boundary drawing, as well as the place of morality and affects in state power. I concluded a project on the policing of migration which investigated the growing cooperation between immigration enforcement and the police, and explores the new contours of law enforcement in the context of globalization Key Points • Border workers face profound moral dilemmas due to conflicts between enforcing strict migration policies and providing humanitarian assistance to vulnerable individuals. • We need to remember that the central Mediterranean is the most lethal point in the world. • Immigration enforcement is seen by police as a "magic" or "dark art" due to its unpredictability, arbitrariness, and effectiveness in resolving recurrent criminal issues. • Humanitarianism from below emphasizes the ethical reflections and moral agency of individual border workers navigating contradictions in border policies.

Crimmigration describes the merging of criminal and immigration law, creating a punitive system for migrants that lacks criminal justice safeguards and protections. About Ana Aliverti I am a Professor of criminal law and criminal justice. My research work looks at the intersections between criminal law and criminal justice, on the one hand, and border regimes, on the other, and explores the impact of such intertwining on the national criminal justice institutions and on those subject to the resulting set of controls. I am a 2017 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. My research examines questions of citizenship and belonging in criminal justice, and law's instrumental and symbolic power for boundary drawing, as well as the place of morality and affects in state power. I concluded a project on the policing of migration which investigated the growing cooperation between immigration enforcement and the police, and explores the new contours of law enforcement in the context of globalization Key Points • Crimmigration describes the merging of criminal and immigration law, creating a punitive system for migrants that lacks criminal justice safeguards and protections. • Public discourse increasingly frames migration as a criminal threat, normalizing policies initially justified as emergency measures post-9/11. • Criminalizing migration relies heavily on symbolic deterrence rather than active enforcement, indirectly leading migrants into riskier and more dangerous migration routes. • Citizenship status significantly influences treatment within criminal justice systems, disproportionately disadvantaging non-citizens through harsher penalties, difficulties accessing bail, and poorer legal representation.

The realm of DNA-based materials combines the way DNA is manipulated and handled inside our cells with innovative ways of thinking about material science outside, for industrial purposes. About Davide Michieletto  "I am a Professor of Biomaterials at the University of Edinburgh working on Topological Problems in Soft Matter and Biology. I am a 2024 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. I am the group leader of the Topological Active Polymers Lab. We aim to discover new DNA-based topological soft materials and complex fluids that can change properties in time. The group's expertise is rooted in polymer and statistical physics and employs both simulations and experiments to answer our questions. We believe boundaries between disciplines were made to be broken, and we do our best to shatter them every day." Key Points • DNA can be used to create programmable materials with highly specific interactions, thanks to its unique sequence-based binding properties. • Viscoelastic materials, which behave as both liquids and solids, are common in biology. Cells and tissues are examples of biological objects that can behave as both solid and liquid. • Proteins that naturally manipulate DNA in cells can be repurposed to control the behavior of DNA-based materials in biotechnology. • DNA hydrogels offer promising applications, including tissue regeneration and bio-batteries, but large-scale production remains limited by the cost of DNA synthesis.

DNA topology, more specifically, is the study of the topological properties of DNA. And it's really fascinating. About Davide Michieletto  "I am a Professor of Biomaterials at the University of Edinburgh working on Topological Problems in Soft Matter and Biology. I am a 2024 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. I am the group leader of the Topological Active Polymers Lab. We aim to discover new DNA-based topological soft materials and complex fluids that can change properties in time. The group's expertise is rooted in polymer and statistical physics and employs both simulations and experiments to answer our questions. We believe boundaries between disciplines were made to be broken, and we do our best to shatter them every day." Key Points • DNA topology refers to the structural features of DNA – supercoiling, knotting, and linking – that affect its function and are preserved under continuous deformation. • Topoisomerases are essential enzymes that cut, rearrange and reseal DNA strands to manage topological problems, making them critical for processes like gene expression and cell division. • Drugs that target DNA topology, such as antibiotics and cancer therapies, work by inhibiting topoisomerases, but they often affect both healthy and diseased cells. • DNA topology is not inherently harmful; complex structures like knots and links may offer evolutionary or functional advantages in packaging or preserving genetic material.

DNA is the blueprint of life. It contains all the genetic information required for complex organisms to be alive and to sustain life. About Davide Michieletto  "I am a Professor of Biomaterials at the University of Edinburgh working on Topological Problems in Soft Matter and Biology. I am a 2024 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. I am the group leader of the Topological Active Polymers Lab. We aim to discover new DNA-based topological soft materials and complex fluids that can change properties in time. The group's expertise is rooted in polymer and statistical physics and employs both simulations and experiments to answer our questions. We believe boundaries between disciplines were made to be broken, and we do our best to shatter them every day." Key Points • DNA is not only the blueprint of life, but from a physical perspective it is a long string that needs to be packaged in the cell. The way DNA is packaged and folded influences how genes are expressed. • The shape and folding of chromatin in the cell nucleus play a crucial role in determining which genes are active, impacting cell function and identity. • Genome organization is dynamic and responds to environmental cues, such as pathogens, allowing cells to adapt by altering gene expression. • The discovery of DNA’s structure was a competitive and interdisciplinary effort, highlighting both the collaborative and ego-driven sides of scientific research.

Trust is absolutely essential for our ability to cooperate with other people, to get anything done, to move around in the world at all. About Tiffany Watt Smith I am an author and historian of emotions. I write about the cultural and historical forces that shape our most intimate worlds. I have won multiple awards for my research and writing, including grants from Wellcome Trust, the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I am the 2018 Philip Leverhulme Prize winner. I am Reader (emerita) at the School of Arts, Queen Mary University of London, where I taught for fifteen years and directed its Centre for the History of Emotions. In 2024, I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Key Points •Trust is often misunderstood as a purely rational process, but it is fundamentally emotional, involving vulnerability and uncertainty. • Its meaning has evolved historically – from religious faith to interpersonal reliance – especially with the rise of modern urban life and complex societies. • Cultural and gender norms shape how trust is built and expressed, with contrasting expectations for men and women and across different societies. • In some cultures, like Korea, trust is cultivated not through evidence but through ongoing acts of care and mutual attentiveness.

Female friendship is a powerful, evolving force that has long been overlooked, yet reveals deep emotional, cultural, and social significance across history About Tiffany Watt Smith I am an author and historian of emotions. I write about the cultural and historical forces that shape our most intimate worlds. I have won multiple awards for my research and writing, including grants from Wellcome Trust, the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I am the 2018 Philip Leverhulme Prize winner. I am Reader (emerita) at the School of Arts, Queen Mary University of London, where I taught for fifteen years and directed its Centre for the History of Emotions. In 2024, I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Key Points • Female friendships have historically been overlooked but were deeply supportive and practical, often forming vital networks among unmarried or working women. • In the 19th century, female friendship became idealized as morally and emotionally superior, especially within the expectations of Victorian womanhood. • The 20th century saw increasing scrutiny of close female bonds, with fears around lesbianism and social nonconformity influencing how friendships were policed and expressed. • Modern ideas like the “toxic friend” reflect cultural shifts toward individualism, often placing unrealistic expectations on friendships.

It's sometimes counterintuitive to think that emotions might have a history, because surely everyone across the world and everyone across time has always felt fear and anger and sorrow and joy in the same kind of way. About Tiffany Watt Smith I am an author and historian of emotions. I write about the cultural and historical forces that shape our most intimate worlds. I have won multiple awards for my research and writing, including grants from Wellcome Trust, the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I am the 2018 Philip Leverhulme Prize winner. I am Reader (emerita) at the School of Arts, Queen Mary University of London, where I taught for fifteen years and directed its Centre for the History of Emotions. In 2024, I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Key Points • Emotions aren't fixed; how we express and understand them changes across time and cultures. • Some emotions, like boredom or nostalgia, were named and defined in specific historical moments. • Societies have unspoken rules about which emotions are acceptable and when. • Some of the emotions that are going to become more spoken about are emotions to do with our response to the climate crisis.

Foucault thinks that territory was much more of a focus of politics in the medieval period, but this has been supplanted by this interest of government over population in a more modern period. Shakespeare also offers a lot of material that can help us to think about those kinds of questions. About Stuart Elden "I’m a Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick. My research is at the intersection of politics, philosophy and geography. I undertake my work predominantly through approaches from the history of ideas. My work over the past decade or so has been in two main areas - the history, concept and practice of territory; and the history of twentieth-century French thought. I've been writing a multivolume intellectual history of the entire career of Michel Foucault. I’m the author of books on Henri Lefebvre, Martin Heidegger and the question of territory." Key Points • Foucault makes the claim that in the 17th century there is a shift from the object of government being over territory to government becoming the population. • What I suggest, however, is that the modern notion of territory is produced around the same time as the modern notion of population. • Shakespeare offers a lot of material that can help us to think about questions regarding economic, political and legal aspects of territory.   “Historically misleading” When I was doing my work on the history of the concept and practice of territory, I was very influenced by the way that Foucault had done some of his historical work. I was interested in exploring the relation between a word, a concept and a practice of territory. Foucault, along with some other thinkers, was really powerful for me in terms of how we might do a history of a concept through these different times, these different places. I could never have written The Birth of Territory without having done the work on Foucault and being inspired by the approach that he suggests. And yet, in that book, I suggest that almost everything that Foucault says about the question of territory is, at best, historically misleading. Foucault: territory and population Foucault makes the claim, in some of his lecture courses, that what we’ve seen around the 17th century is a shift from a concentration of the object of government being over territory to the object of government becoming the population. Foucault suggests that you can see this in a whole range of ways in which the population becomes the object, the thing to which governmental practices are directed. Foucault claims you can see that in the development of statistics. You can see it in things like birth and death rates, the health of the population, crop yields – these kinds of questions. He thinks that population then becomes the focus of politics. Foucault thinks that territory was much more of a focus of politics in the medieval period, but this has been supplanted by this interest of government over population in a more modern period.

Greetings and partings are mini rituals that frame every encounter and condense emotional intensity into gestures and words. About David Hillman "I lecture on Shakespeare and Renaissance culture at the University of Cambridge and direct studies at King’s College in Cambridge. I'm the author of Shakespeare's Entrails, which is my first monograph. I've also written about Shakespeare and Freud; the history of the body in relation to Shakespeare in particular; Shakespeare and philosophy and epistemological issues around Shakespeare. I am currently completing a monograph, Greetings and Partings in Shakespeare and early modern England, which addresses the rich topic of salutary acts in Shakespeare and early modernity." Key Points • Greetings and partings are mini rituals that frame every encounter and condense emotional intensity into gestures and words. • The ways in which Shakespeare’s characters greet and part from one another are sometimes peculiarly resonant. • Moments of parting are when one is most aware of the potential for solitude, and therefore when one longs for connection.   Hellos and goodbyes are my current topic of main research, and it turns out that this is a remarkably apt topic for our times. We’re all changing the way we greet and part from each other; we are all dying to hug each other but aware that a hug can lead to our dying. We’re at a very interesting moment in relation to greetings and partings. This is a topic that people have not written much about. There’s a certain amount of writing in psychoanalytic literature about partings, especially about endings. Anthropologists are more interested in greetings, gestures and rituals of encounter; however, almost nobody has written about both of them together. Mini rituals that frame encounters The way we greet and the way we part are essentially the same. We shake hands, we kiss, we hug, we wave. At least we used to do these things; we have elbow bumps now. But the same gestures and, often, the same words – “ciao”, “shalom” – are used at greeting and at parting. Even “adieu” is used as a greeting in France. So there must be an inherent relationship between the things that we are dealing with when greeting and when parting. These are mini rituals that frame an encounter. It is all too easy to move beyond them, to start thinking about the meat of the encounter, and to forget that this has been framed by a greeting and by a parting. A lot goes on at these moments. They condense a huge amount into tiny gestures and the choice of words that are used. Shakespeare knew this. His art involved constantly having people encounter one another – beginning scenes, ending scenes, sometimes entering scenes in medias res – but all the time, actors have to come into and move out of relation to each other. What a director does with those moments is quite important to a production. When we greet or part from the other, when we encounter the other, the first decision takes place in almost no time at all. We have to decide: friend or foe? There’s a spectrum. Do we want to embrace the other, or do we want to kill the other? At the extreme ends, there’s a sex or death choice at that moment. We’re not aware of this most of the time; these moments are precisely designed as rituals to keep at bay the enormous emotional intensity of meeting another human being.

My life in relation to Shakespeare has always been torn between the stage and the page, thinking about Shakespeare as a literary text that one can pore over. About David Hillman "I lecture on Shakespeare and Renaissance culture at the University of Cambridge and direct studies at King’s College in Cambridge. I'm the author of Shakespeare's Entrails, which is my first monograph. I've also written about Shakespeare and Freud; the history of the body in relation to Shakespeare in particular; Shakespeare and philosophy and epistemological issues around Shakespeare. I am currently completing a monograph, Greetings and Partings in Shakespeare and early modern England, which addresses the rich topic of salutary acts in Shakespeare and early modernity." Key Points • Shakespeare’s rich, metaphorical language can make his plays difficult to understand at first. • By approaching Shakespeare’s plays with what psychoanalysts call a “third ear”, one can discover patterns and access deeper layers of meaning. • Shakespeare’s plays address the relationship between dreams and reality in a way that speaks to a Freudian understanding of the psyche.   The Plays of William Shakespeare, circa 1849 by John Gilbert. wikimedia Commons. Public domain. My interest in Shakespeare started when I was a teenager, and it was always a perplexed interest in Shakespeare. I immediately fell in love with his plays when I first read them, and my first encounter with Shakespeare was reading, but I felt like I really didn’t understand them. I didn’t understand the language; I didn’t understand the subterranean text; I didn’t know what I was loving. Then I saw some Shakespeare on stage. Othello was the first play I saw, and it moved me to tears. I didn’t understand that, either. My life in relation to Shakespeare has always been torn between the stage and the page, thinking about Shakespeare as a literary text that one can pore over. Many of the plays I’ve now read 40 times or more. Each time I find more layers, more hidden marvels that are simply astonishing. The Shakespearean text is so rich and full of interconnections between different parts of the text, and different texts.

Islam Issa, Professor of Literature and History at Birmingham City University, looks at the influence of Shakespeare in popular culture. About Islam Issa "I am a professor of Literature and History at Birmingham City University. I’m most interested in cultural history and literary criticism, but particularly reception studies: how and why we read literature, and why that matters." Key Points • Education systems and cultural hierarchy are factors that have contributed to Shakespeare’s status as a global phenomenon. • Shakespeare’s plays have a certain simplicity in structure and language, which also facilitates their translation. • Representations of the Other reveal perceptions of the so-called Other during Shakespeare’s time, while offering an opportunity to understand the reactions of different communities today to those texts. A global phenomenon There are many ways to approach Shakespeare’s presence. We can start by saying that Shakespeare’s a phenomenon. We don’t quite know why. For decades, many of us have been trying to understand: why Shakespeare? Certain things come to mind. The education system, one could say, imposes Shakespeare. Cultural hierarchy, in some ways, imposes Shakespeare. For example, think of Romeo and Juliet. Many people have called Layla and Majnun, which is a similar story, the Romeo and Juliet of the East. Yet this story was written hundreds of years before Romeo and Juliet. So there’s no doubt that a cultural hierarchy exists. Shakespeare has a special status. Shakespeare is one of the most popular and respected writers around the world.

Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, Professor of International Politics of Africa at the University of Oxford, examines the extractive industries in Africa. About Ricardo Soares de Oliveira "I’m a Professor of International Politics of Africa at the University of Oxford, and co-editor of the journal African Affairs. My research interests include the workings of the extractive industries (oil, gas and mining) in sub-Saharan Africa; the relationships that African states have established with Asian countries, especially in the last two decades; and, more recently, the politics of global finance and its impact on Africa." Key Points • One impact of prioritising the extractive industries is under-development in other areas of the economy. • While Africa only has around 12% of the world’s oil, its welcoming of foreign companies makes it central to the global corporate oil economy. • Building a sustainable future involves not just moving beyond extraction in the long term but also managing dependence in the short term. Extractive industries and African governments The extractive industries – oil, gas and mining – are absolutely crucial for Africa. In fact, they are the biggest source of exports from Africa into the world economy. For all but a handful of States, the revenues of African governments tend to come from these sectors. This impacts on everything from how these governments deal with the outside world to the way they deal with their own populations. In terms of international relations, governments that possess oil and natural resources tend to be more empowered in their relations with other States as well as oil and mining companies. Internally, this also makes a difference. African governments with revenues from the extractive industries face less pressure to tax their own populations. They have their own alternative sources of revenue. Because they have this ready source of revenue, they have been less concerned with the development of other sectors. There’s very little incentive for them to develop industrial sectors or agricultural sectors, which in the long term further consolidates their dependence on oil, gas and mining.

Eugene Rogan, Director of St. Antony’s College Middle East Centre, examines recent Muslim movements throughout the Arab world. About Eugene Rogan "I am Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Oxford, and Director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College. My field is the modern history of the Arab world. I focus primarily on the 19th and 20th centuries, and my real interests have always been in the end of the Ottoman Empire, the emergence of modern States in the Middle East, and the way that has shaped the modern reality of the Arab world today." Key Points • Suppression of Muslim movements, especially in Egypt, breeded resentment and a view of regional governments as un-Islamic and unaligned with Muslim interests. • The successful Iranian revolution galvanised militant movements in the Arab world. Organisations like the Muslim Brotherhood were thereby emboldened to challenge autocratic regimes and further their political agenda. • The 2003 invasion of Iraq resulted in a Sunni-Shia divide. This division increased violence in the region and allowed for hypercharged movements like ISIS to gain influence. A rising challenge For the Arab world, the experience of total defeat in 1967 was a seismic moment. It forced a rethink of politics across the board. As always, with plate tectonics, such movements take time. Nevertheless, one could argue that between 1967 and 1979, the politics of Arab nationalism had been tremendously undermined by the failure of the Arab States to realise numerous goals. These included the liberation of Palestine, the development of modern institutions and industry and the establishment of a dignified position for the Arab world among world powers. The reality of the Arab world in the 1970s stood in stark contrast to these ambitions. The region was fragmented, divided and weak. There were States coming under the control of autocrats who would suppress their citizens. Only a handful of movements had the courage of conviction needed. Indeed, only organisations inspired by the Islamic discourse were regularly challenging these autocratic States.

Faisal Devji, Professor of Indian History at the University of Oxford, discusses the rise of global Islam. About Faisal Devji "I’m Professor of Indian History at the University of Oxford. My interest is in the intellectual history of India and Pakistan, as well as in political thought, specifically the political thought of modern Islam." Key Points • Islam historically referred to a set of actions and attitudes, not faith. Today, the term has evolved into a proper noun for a global religion. • The humanisation of the prophet Muhammad makes him a target for insult, which can trigger violence. • Global Islam derives its strength from numbers, but not necessarily from faith or theology. Islam as a set of actions or attitudes Islam seems to be an old name and word because you find it in the Koran, although it’s mentioned only a few times. However, I argue that it was created in the 19th century because this term, Islam, only came to be deployed frequently as a proper name from the second half of the 19th century. Before, Islam referred to a set of actions or attitudes. The term Islam is not a noun, but a kind of adjectival, semi-verbal construction. It's an adjectival verb. Therefore, it has to do with practice, doing something, and was rarely used as a name. It was used alongside other terms like Iman or Faith, and Deen, which is normally translated as religion. Often, that was the word used for the true religion instead of Islam. The moment Islam becomes a proper name, interestingly, it becomes particular. It is no longer the true religion. It is simply a religion among other religions. Islam as a proper name is the product of a 19th century project to create what scholars have called world religions. There is Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and so on. The thing about Islam as a proper name, is what does it name? It names a whole set of beliefs and practices organised systematically. It is no longer possible for these beliefs and practices to be tied to specific forms of authority, as they once were.

Charles Tripp, Professor Emeritus of Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, discusses Middle Eastern and North African revolutions. About Charles Tripp "I'm Professor Emeritus of Politics of Middle East and North Africa at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. My work has been mainly in the area of the examination of power and the abuses of power across the Middle East and North Africa: how in different forms it's been used, abused and mediated by people who are both in control of States and people who try to resist the power of states." Key Points • In the 19th century, many of the countries of the Middle East and North Africa were undergoing revolutionary changes, which were disrupted by European intervention. • After the withdrawal of European powers in the 20th century, revolutions with popular backing overthrew monarchies and republics; however, the rise of military power led to disappointment. • Various forms of resistance against authoritarian rule emerged across the region. Contrary to common assumptions, the Arab Spring follows a long history of rebellion and resistance. A forgotten history When people think about revolutions across Middle Eastern and North African history, they often forget that many of these countries were undergoing revolutionary changes in the beginning and middle of the 19th century. In many ways, European colonial intervention at the end of the 19th century disrupted that process of indigenous revolutionary change, where autocrats were being questioned and revolutions were beginning to simmer throughout the educated and middle classes – and indeed in many rural areas as well – in Egypt, Tunisia and Iran. When the Europeans intervened, often on the pretext of suppressing the disorder associated with these revolutions, it was a case of arrested development. The Europeans intervened to prop up the old, creaking dynastic ruling families of these countries. In doing so, they froze political development and then imposed their own pace upon it rather unjustly, therefore accusing the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa of being unready for political development. Of course, they had been very ready for political development, but this had been disrupted by European intervention.

Kehinde Andrews, Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University, discusses race and the global economy. About Kehinde Andrews "I am Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University and the Chair of the Harambee Organisation of Black Unity. My research focuses on understanding race and racism and, really importantly, on how the community is mobilised to combat the problems that we face." Key Points • The West is rich because the rest are poor. From slavery, through empire to economic colonialism, Western countries have always found ways to extract resources from the underdeveloped world. • Post-war institutions like the IMF and the World Bank represent what Malcolm X called “benevolent imperialism”. They enable the continuation of exploitation under the guise of development and investment. • The only way underdeveloped countries can develop is to take themselves out of the system that is oppressing them. Exploiting Africa The only way to understand what is happening now is to put it in its historical context. Africa is a perfect place to start. Walter Rodney wrote an excellent book called How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Today Africa, and particularly so-called Sub-Saharan Africa, is the poorest part of the world. Why? People often point to corruption or a lack of advanced technology. But again: why? You need a historical understanding to answer these questions. Africa was first underdeveloped by slavery, which took out or murdered tens of millions of people. The lower estimate is 40 million; the higher estimate is 100 million. This draining of resources completely shattered Africa’s political economy, which was ahead of Europe’s political economy when Europeans arrived. Things weren’t much better after slavery because Africa was so depleted. This is why Europe could take over. Europe’s major powers carved up the continent among themselves, draining its resources. After independence, the focus shifted to economic colonialism. From chocolate companies like Cadbury’s to tire companies in Congo, the major corporations operating in Africa are still foreign-owned, still draining out all of the resources. You can’t understand poverty in Africa without understanding the historical forces that created it.

Catherine Hall, Emeritus Professor at University College London, argues that the legacy of slavery is more relevant than ever. About Catherine Hall "I'm the chair of the Center for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership and Emerita Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History at University College London. My research has been concerned with questions of Britain and its Empire. In particular, I focused on both the connected histories of Britain and Jamaica, and on the history of writing as central to the ways in which the story of Empire is told. In general, I've been preoccupied with trying to write a different story of the history of Empire." Key Points • The 2007 bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade sparked a new conversation in Britain about the legacies of slavery. • A ‘reparatory’ history is required if we are to properly understand the wrongs of the past and take responsibility for them in the present. • Race politics today cannot be understood outside the legacies of slavery and the legacies of Empire. A new conversation about slavery The 2007 bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade marked the whole question of the legacies of slavery and the importance of thinking about new ways of understanding that history. In the context of that bicentenary, Black activists, historians, writers and documentary makers, who had been thinking for a long time about the forgotten histories of slavery and the way in which the story of abolition had displaced the history of the violence, coercion and destruction associated with slavery and the British Empire, started what I think of as a national conversation about the slave trade and how it should be remembered. Re-evaluating Britain’s role in abolition Should we be thankful and remember proudly how Britain had supposedly led the way (which, of course, it didn’t) with the abolition of the slave trade in 1807? Or is it more important to remember the whole history of slavery, and to try and bring that history back into view? The way in which the history had been written from the time of the abolition of the slave trade onwards was in terms of abolition and emancipation, being part of the history of progress and the way in which Britain had led the world. There was the notion of the civilising humanitarian route that was Britain’s task in the world: to improve the rest of the world in the image of itself. That’s how history has been understood. To unpick that history became a major task and has been taken up in so many different ways by writers, artists, historians, people making television and radio programmes and so on.

Decolonisation, as a process, has more or less run its course, but not entirely. There is a small number of colonies that exist. About Philippe Sands "I’m Professor of Law at University College London, Director of the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals in the Faculty, and a key member of staff in the Centre for Law and the Environment. I am a Barrister at Matrix Chambers and a writer. Everything that I do – teaching, research, writing, litigating cases – revolves around my great passion, which is international law, the settlement of international disputes (including arbitration), and environmental and natural resources law." Key Points • In 1945, as the United Nations Charter was being negotiated, the countries of the world decided that it was time to bring colonialism to an end. • There are still a small number of colonies that exist. Britain’s last colony in Africa is called the Chagos Archipelago, where the United Kingdom is an unlawful occupier. • The devastating irony is that the United States and the United Kingdom created the rules that are premised around the United Nations Charter, but they have now upended those rules.   A commitment to decolonise We all know that in the 18th and 19th centuries, European countries went around the world picking up bits of territory and colonising them. It was known as colonialism in Africa, in South America and in Asia. Spain, France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Holland and various other countries were rather expert in this practice, which proceeded until the 20th century. Then, in 1945, as the United Nations Charter was being negotiated, the countries of the world decided that it was time to bring colonialism to an end. They negotiated a Charter, which contained two new rules: one rule articulated the proposition that every human being had minimum rights under international law. It coined the phrase “human rights” in modern parlance. The second new rule was a commitment of every country in the world to decolonise – for the colonial powers to leave their colonies and to allow the inhabitants of those colonies to exercise something that is known as “the right of self-determination”: being in charge of their own futures, deciding for themselves how they wish to be governed, and not being governed by outsiders or by others. That is the principle of decolonisation.

In Shakespeare’s work, the relationship between acknowledgment of the other and knowledge of the other often plays out through the body. About David Hillman "I lecture on Shakespeare and Renaissance culture at the University of Cambridge and direct studies at King’s College in Cambridge. I'm the author of Shakespeare's Entrails, which is my first monograph. I've also written about Shakespeare and Freud; the history of the body in relation to Shakespeare in particular; Shakespeare and philosophy and epistemological issues around Shakespeare. I am currently completing a monograph, Greetings and Partings in Shakespeare and early modern England, which addresses the rich topic of salutary acts in Shakespeare and early modernity." Key Points • Shakespeare was interested in the relationship between what can be performed externally and what is internal. • In Shakespeare’s work, the relationship between acknowledgment of the other and knowledge of the other often plays out through the body. • Shakespeare thinks of the sceptical attitude as primarily masculine, and the addressee of this attitude as primarily feminine. My work began with thinking about the insides of the body. I wrote my first book, Shakespeare’s Entrails, while I was working as a doctoral student at Harvard, and I was pretty isolated. The one thing that got me out of isolation was playing lots of basketball, and the relation between being very embodied on the basketball court and being rather disembodied in the library, working with books, gnawed at me. I wanted to bring the body back into the text. Shakespeare was interested in a fantasy of the body, of what is inside the body. Hamlet imagines that there is something inside the body that is beyond access to anyone else but him. He says: ‘But I have that within which passeth show, / These but the trappings and the suits of woe.’ In other words, wearing black, shedding tears and so on are ‘actions that a man might play’, as Hamlet says; they are external ways of mourning a father. But that ‘within which passeth show’ is what is inaccessible to knowledge, especially to knowledge of other people. There is a relationship between knowledge and embodiment which is paradigmatic. Scepticism and the body Scepticism about others, about who they really are, is a scepticism about what is going on inside them. People can reveal all sorts of things on the outside, but there can be no proof that those things are the same on the inside. One’s gestures of love or admiration or disgust can be performed; they are ‘actions that a man might play’. Shakespeare was clearly interested in the relationship between what can be performed – what can be simply external – and what is internal, partly because he was a man of the stage. Actors can have one thing going on inside and a different thing going on outside. And yet, can they really? There’s a relationship between acknowledgment of the other and knowledge of the other, which plays out through the body. Hamlet is a character who is very sceptical and constantly trying to prove things about others. He puts on the play about Claudius to catch the conscience of the king. Hamlet says, ‘I’ll tent him to the quick’, meaning he will probe him. A tent is a surgical instrument; to the quick means to the centre of the body, to the heart of him. Hamlet idealises the inside of the body, and this is part of his problem. He doesn’t trust. This leads us into the psychoanalytic areas of trust, autonomy and relationship to otherness.

In my discipline, we tend to look at body-based problems as being expressions of psychological distress. About Susie Orbach "I am a psychoanalyst, psychotherapist and writer, and the co-founder of the Women’s Therapy Centre in London and New York. I look at how the issues of society are structured into the individual, and constitute how we become who we are, but holding on to the notion that we live in a society and that every relation that exists is imbued with the power relations, the unconscious desires, the longings, and the struggle for subjectivity that exists between people." Key Points • We tend to look at body-based problems as being expressions of psychological distress, but it’s worth exploring the whole question of how a body comes into being and what body distress might express in its own terms. • Almost everything that occurs in the mother-baby interaction is expressed as a psychological relation. However, it’s also, and primarily, a body-to-body relation. Today, many mothers come to parenting with very troubled bodies, full of upset or anxiety. • There are various societal forces that are impacting on the body. There is demand that we have a body that’s camera-ready the whole time, a body that can seduce, a body ready for display. There are enormous industries which are impacting on the body. • If you look at any of the disembodied bodies in AI, they are all shown in plastic versions of women. That seems to me preparation for accepting lots and lots more AI. Look how attractive it is. I think the long-term notion is that we will be bodiless. I’ve been interested in the question of how we get a body, partly because over the last 40 years, as a psychoanalyst, I’ve seen a huge increase in body-based problems. There are many theories contested and agreed upon about how we get a mind but, somehow, the whole question of the body has been left out of the story. It’s useful to paraphrase both Simone de Beauvoir – “Women are made, not born” – and Winnicott, the British psychoanalyst and paediatrician, who said, “There is no such thing as a baby. Wherever you see a baby, you see a mother-baby unit.” I’ve been applying those two ideas to the body, arguing that wherever you see a body, you see a body that has been made, not simply born. Bodies are an outcome of the body-to-body relations around them. Expressions of a distressed mind? In my discipline, we tend to look at body-based problems as being expressions of psychological distress: a paralysed arm, speaking in tongues, or believing that you are pregnant – pseudocyesis. There is a psychological motivation behind these, but there’s also a sense of the body itself as being troubled, and it’s worth exploring the whole question of how a body comes into being and what body distress might express in its own terms. If you take something very simple, like eczema, a skin disease, it would be discussed in general as the weeping of a mind. The mind hurts so much that feelings can’t be expressed: the person can’t cry, they can’t tolerate the irritation that they’re feeling inside of them. I think that’s perfectly valid, but I also want to look at the fact that perhaps it’s an expression of a body that’s never been accepted easily, partly because of the way it’s been introduced to itself, and therefore it’s an expression also of bodily distress, that it’s a body saying I need attention, I need comfort and soothing for myself.

The commercialisation of the body hides the amount of work that we put into producing our bodies. About Susie Orbach "I am a psychoanalyst, psychotherapist and writer, and the co-founder of the Women’s Therapy Centre in London and New York. I look at how the issues of society are structured into the individual, and constitute how we become who we are, but holding on to the notion that we live in a society and that every relation that exists is imbued with the power relations, the unconscious desires, the longings, and the struggle for subjectivity that exists between people." Key Points • Today, beauty labour is accepted as part of what we need to be engaged with. The commercialisation of the body hides the amount of work that we put into producing our bodies. This beauty labour is presented to us as pampering, as self-care, as pleasure. • Cosmetics and fashion press on our bodies in ways that are extremely disturbing, especially for girls. Their anxieties about their bodies are stoked by commercial exploitation, which creates the sense that the body they live in is not OK. • Pre-adolescent boys are being introduced to sex as something that has to do with performance. What sex is for girls and women is less brutal, it’s just very different. I think there’s a terrible mismatch what porn is and what sex is. • We’ve brought up a generation that requires confirmation of all their acts and all their physical being through the camera and through the sharing and the acknowledgement that what they’re sharing is acceptable. Today, beauty labour is accepted as part of what we need to be engaged with. When you take a selfie, whether you’re in England or China, you can have an app that will give you seven different degrees of beauty to enhance yourself by. The commercialisation of the body hides the amount of work that we put into producing our bodies. Ingeniously, this beauty labour is presented to us as pampering, as self-care, as pleasure. We find ourselves enjoying the act of producing a self that is OK in the world. We often think of the industries that are involved in the production of beauty labour, health and fitness and the fashion industry as being small industries. When it comes to fashion, the richest people in Europe are producers of fashion and cosmetics. The diet wellness industry is an absolutely enormous industry that does very well because it’s based on a 95% failure rate, a recidivism rate. Every time you go on a diet, or a wellness regime, you’re mucking around with the most basic of mechanisms that tell you when to eat and when to stop, and if you do that repeatedly, you will mess up that mechanism; but, more importantly, after you come off a diet, you will feel success for a very short time, and a few months later, you will feel you need to go on another one. Companies like Weight Watchers rely on repeat customers. They don’t want customers who are successful. In fact, under questioning at the British Parliament, Weight Watchers could only show results of a weight loss of about five kilogrammes, which is absolutely nothing when you think about the amount of budgets going from our health systems into their coffers.

The expression “being in one’s own company” captures the idea that, internally, we are more than one. About Josh Cohen "I’m a psychoanalyst in private practice in London and Professor of Modern Literary Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. My research is at the borders of psychoanalysis, literature and cultural theory. I’ve written a number of books, including one on Sigmund Freud, on privacy, on our aversion to work and, most recently, on the relationship between literature and life." Key Points • The expression “being in one’s own company” captures the idea that, internally, we are more than one. • Solitude is possible when we have a rich relationship with our inner companion; loneliness is when that companion is somebody we’d rather not be with. • Rousseau describes an experience of total, perfect happiness that is only possible in solitude, because it is a closing of the gap between one’s self and one’s inner companion.   "Liking one’s own company" There are many different kinds of loneliness. It’s a state that allows for all kinds of variegation. The expression “being in one’s own company”, or “liking one’s own company”, captures what’s at stake in the whole idea of loneliness and being alone; it puts into ordinary language the sense that, internally, we are more than one. We’re the person who moves through the world, but there is also someone in our minds, in ourselves, who moves alongside us, providing a kind of companionship as well as a running commentary on the state of our lives. That companion can be somebody that we find congenial; somebody that helps us to be curious about ourselves and interested in the world. When we feel lonely, that companion can be somebody that we’d rather not be with; somebody that seems to offer no solace or interest of any kind. That’s when the experience of the world starts to feel empty and sad.

Foucault says we need to think about power in a different way. It’s not that power doesn’t work in those ways, but that power doesn’t only work in those ways. About Stuart Elden "I’m a Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick. My research is at the intersection of politics, philosophy and geography. I undertake my work predominantly through approaches from the history of ideas. My work over the past decade or so has been in two main areas - the history, concept and practice of territory; and the history of twentieth-century French thought. I've been writing a multivolume intellectual history of the entire career of Michel Foucault. I’m the author of books on Henri Lefebvre, Martin Heidegger and the question of territory." Key Points • Foucault says that we’re still thinking about power as being centralised in society. • Power can be understood as power relations: an exchange that goes on within society that is dispersed throughout its institutions. • In `Discipline and Punish', Foucault tries to understand how we moved from a spectacular display of sovereign power, to the regulation of time and space in prisons. Foucault’s work was often historical in terms of how he approached his topics. His books include histories of madness, of clinical medicine and of the human sciences, of the history of the prison and the punitive society more generally. Then there is his last great project, the unfinished The History of Sexuality, which he was working on at the time of his death.

Novelist and biographer Peter Salmon, discusses deconstruction – the question the philosopher Jacques Derrida never wanted to answer. About Peter Salmon  "I’m a novelist and biographer. I recently wrote a biography of Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher, called An Event, Perhaps. One of the great things about writing about Derrida was, like me, there were two things he was incredibly passionate about: literature and philosophy. In spending time with someone like Derrida, you learn to think more clearly, more deeply, about many things. Being able to write his biography was thrilling for that reason. I now have ways of looking at the world which I didn’t have before. Hopefully, the biography will help people get into those ways of looking at the world." Key Points • Deconstruction is not destruction; it’s investigating how something was constructed, whether it be a chair, religion, justice system or truth. • Derrida was a charismatic figure who had a reputation for being a relativist – someone who believes there’s no truth – but he argued against this position his entire life. He believed an absolute truth can’t be proven. • Derrida’s ideas were important in challenging unexamined assumptions of philosophy that defined humans, such as the white, heterosexual, middle-class male. In fact, deconstruction has no opinion about whether truth ultimately exists. What it can say, like with God, is we can have faith in truth or we can have faith that there’s no truth, but we can’t prove it. Until then, we have to work with what we’ve got. We have to explore the way that the word ‘truth’ is used, what it does. We deconstruct it. Now, all of us in our general lives actually do this. If I read a poem, I can say, how true it is. If a friend tells me that their boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife is terrible, I can say, that’s very true. If I do some sums, quadratic equations, I come up with an answer and say they’re true. I move between these registers of truth very easily. I don’t even think about it, unless perhaps I’m reading Derrida. So, that’s what Derrida’s trying to capture: the way that these terms are used, the way that we move between these registers. Derrida’s always trying to capture what it’s actually like to be alive. He thinks philosophers have got it wrong by trying to pin the butterfly, but he thinks they’re valid questions to ask and questions we should be asking. What we can’t come up with is a definitive answer to that.