When did we forget how to talk to each other properly? And how to think difficult things through, together? Or has this always been controversial, fraught, and sometimes even deadly? The importance of honest, frank, respectful dialogue among citizens was a belief that Socrates lived and died for back in Ancient Greece. And for Dr Frisbee Sheffield – Associate Professor of Classics at Cambridge and Fellow of Downing College – it is a belief that needs to be re-examined and promoted today. Her recent fellowship at CRASSH saw her bring Socrates and Plato alongside 20th century philosopher Hannah ..read more

In this episode we talk tech, power, and the endless hell of phone storage with sociologist Professor Gina Neff. As the Executive Director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at Cambridge, and the Professor of Technology and Society at Oxford, she briskly rejects the mythology of a ‘lone genius’ in Silicon Valley coding every aspect of our daily lives. Instead, she champions those she calls the ‘unsung heroes’ of innovation – essentially everyone struggling to make a “better, faster, new way of working” actually … work. Her academic research spans industries as diverse as fashi ..read more

In this first episode of our second season of Thoughtlines we talk about how culture fights back with historian Professor Kenneth Marcus. As a visiting fellow at CRASSH he’s been exploring what happens when music ‘goes there’ and tackles the horror and heartbreak of war. The ongoing conflict in Ukraine and its musical resistance, rapidly going viral on social media, is effectively his project in real time. But his focus on the epic pacifist works of Arnold Schoenberg, Hanns Eisler, and Benjamin Britten reminds us that music was shaping the global human rights imagination well before now. Not o ..read more

In this final episode of the CRASSH 20th anniversary year, we ask the centre’s Director, and Grace 2 Professor of English at Cambridge, Steven Connor, whether what we do for a living can ever, or should ever, be anything other than drudgery? Thousands of column inches in the past year have been devoted to ‘The Great Resignation’, or ‘The Big Quit’ – a mass rebellion by millions of disgruntled employees worldwide who decided their current work just isn’t working for them any longer.  Employment, then, is yet another thing to be re-worked by the COVID-19 pandemic, but less examined is why w ..read more

In this episode we answer a $100,000 question. Writer and journalist Trish Lorenz won the global essay competition, The Nine Dots Prize, by turning anxiety about the world’s ageing population on its head and celebrating the game-changing power of Africa’s ‘youthquake’. Part of the prize is the chance to spend a term at CRASSH, and turn that initial 3,000 word entry into a book published by Cambridge University Press. But Trish took the long way round from her home in Berlin – arriving in Cambridge via Lagos and Abuja where she found and interviewed the young Africans who best represent the ene ..read more

In this episode we discover how words move us. Literally. Dr Charlotte Lee is a Senior Lecturer in German at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at the University of Cambridge, but just lately she’s stepped beyond her academic boundaries to ask everyone from neuroscientists, to dancers, to tiny children, more about the transporting power of poetry. Working in three languages, and across disciplines, her current research tries to discover how writers make us physically feel things that we only read about, and how our brain dances along to textual rhythms even when our bodies remain sit ..read more

In this episode we ask an expert on expertise what she knows for sure. Dr Anna Alexandrova is a Reader in the Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, and the principal investigator for the ‘Expertise Under Pressure’ group at CRASSH. Her latest research is co-authored with people currently in severe financial hardship, and combines their insights and lived experiences with conventional academic approaches to articulate a more authentic, democratic understanding of what it means to truly ‘flourish’ – work which could have significant impact on the government’s current wellbeing age ..read more

In this episode we take a long look at what the New York Times believes might be “the dominant emotion of 2021.” But what is languishing? And did we really just invent it? Dr Emma Claussen, a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in French at the University of Cambridge and research associate at Peterhouse College, thinks we certainly did not, and that writers and thinkers have been battling with how to ‘beat the blah’ (or at least learn to live with it) for centuries. So, what can voices from the Early Modern period tell us about living a ‘good’ life in uncertain times? How do the acts of readi ..read more

In this episode we talk inequality, life chances, and the daily struggle to balance household budgets with Dr Niamh Mulcahy, economic sociologist at CRASSH and Alice Tong Sze Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. The financial crash of 2008, followed by the UK government's decade of austerity, and the Covid-19 pandemic has left millions of people in Britain facing a very uncertain future and holding increasingly unmanageable levels of personal debt. What set us on such a precarious path? How can we return to what Dr Mulcahy terms "steadiness"? And how is her college addressing these cha ..read more

In this episode we join the dots on the global story of abolition with Dr Bronwen Everill, 1973 lecturer in History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Why was the Cambridge connection so central to those campaigning to end the slave trade in Britain? What did these abolitionists have in common with those in West Africa and in the United States? What was the product that both drove slavery and helped early ethical consumers do their bit for the abolitionist cause? And how do we acknowledge the different types of ‘labour’ that make an academic l ..read more