Urgent History

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.

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?

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?

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?