Public lecture podcasts

Public lecture podcasts collects recorded events from the University of Bath, and in its recent run that means a steady stream of Institute for Policy Research conversations. The shape is consistent. Someone academic introduces themselves, names their department, introduces the guest and their credentials, explains the running order, and then starts asking questions. There is usually a note about the Q&A function, a reminder about the newsletter, and a round of thanks at the end. The interviewer's job here is not to perform. It is to restate the guest's position in plainer language, tighten the definition, and ask for the example that makes the abstraction land. Guests talk at length. They qualify, circle back, and build a case in layers rather than delivering it in one piece. Professor Matt Sleat, a professor of political theory at the University of Sheffield, discusses his book on post-liberalism and makes a sharp move mid-conversation: rather than continuing to correct post-liberal accounts of liberalism, he suggests asking why those accounts are constructed that way at all. James Muldoon, a reader in management at Essex University and a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, turns the AI conversation toward infrastructure and labour, describing data centres that consume the electricity of tens of thousands of households while employing almost nobody, and the contested arguments about their water use. Dr Emily Kenway and Professor Kate Hamblin examine the work of care and the way policymakers reach for technology first and purpose second, leaving care workers and unpaid carers to maintain the devices meant to help them. Rebecca Florisson, principal analyst at the Work Foundation at Lancaster University, walks through low pay, unpredictable hours and weak protections, with the new Employment Rights Act in view. Andrew Wallis OBE, chief executive of the anti-slavery organisation Unseen, talks with Professor Andrew Crane of Bath's School of Management about modern slavery in the UK and what might actually be done about it. Not every episode is policy. A global webinar conversation with Mexican documentary director Everardo González opens with a straightforward question about how he found his way into film. The tone across all of it stays composed and explanatory, occasionally dry, occasionally grave when the subject demands it. Nothing is compressed into a soundbite. For anyone who finds most interview shows too eager to arrive at the point, this one is comfortable spending an hour getting there properly.