Urgent History

What on earth is going on with Australian universities?

In this podcast, we discuss the crisis in higher education. Massive staff layoffs, the closure of entire departments, mostly in the Humanities across Australian universities, puncture the news cycle. The cost of getting a degree has skyrocket while the quality and value of one may be heading in the other direction, with deep implications for our democracy and social mobility. We ask where this crisis came from and how we can fix it. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

What happened to climate activism?

In this podcast, we ask ‘where are we now with climate change politics?’ You may have noticed that in the recent Australian election and other elections in the West, there was far less discussion about climate change in the broader debates about energy policy than in previous elections. Are the politics of climate change, which had dominated the environmental movement for forty years, reaching a naturally nadir, at least in the effectiveness of mass activism to effect political change? What happens to us either way? ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Getting out of our cost-of-living crisis

In this podcast we examine the historical roots of the contemporary cost-of-living crisis, particularly in Australia, but also more broadly in the West. We ask where the decline in real living standards of Australian workers and the corresponding growth of poverty and inequality in Australia came from. Was it only from COVID? What about the last financial crisis in 2008? Or later developments? Are these things connected and how doe get out of this crisis? ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

The Roots of Political Populism

In this podcast we ask how the philosophers of the 18th century got it so wrong, that is how their hopes of the Enlightenment leading to peace and prosperity, instead, led to fanaticism and bloodshed. Can we trace the roots of today’s political extremism among western democracies, from Trump’s America to Orban’s Hungary, to this juncture? ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Who needs History anyway?

In this podcast, we try to make sense of some universities’ attempts to do away with face-to-face lectures – the most ancient and enduring form of teaching. We explore how this trend might impact humanities courses, history especially, in tertiary education, and what it means for the value of education in our time. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.