Settee Seminars

We live on an even more urban planet, what does this mean for climate change and a sustainable future? Drawing on recent research, Andrew Sudmant explores how cities can solve the sustainability challenges of the 21st century. Drawing on examples from leading cities in the UK and internationally, this podcast offers an opportunity to think about what we’re doing right in cities, what we’re doing wrong, and what needs to happen next to achieve a net-zero future.

Consider all the available technologies, all the actions that individuals, businesses or governments could take to stabilise the Earth’s climate, to make the world greener, cleaner and safer for our children. What stops us?

In this podcast, Viktoria Spaiser, Associate Professor in Sustainability Research and Computational Social Science, and Nicole Nisbett, Research Fellow in Climate Politics, both at the University of Leeds, discuss the importance of social dynamics in finding solutions to the climate crisis, in getting out of the business-as-usual inertia.

Together, they emphasise the importance of public support for rapid and deep decarbonisation and how such public support could be reached using insights from social science research. They end their conversation with some encouraging words in how each single one of us can participate in positive climate action.

Join researcher Kylie Harris as she discusses her work on a rewilding project in Tasmania, where she joined together with the aboriginal community to harness their ecological and spiritual wisdom to help prevent destructive forest fires such as those seen in Australia in the summer of 2019-2020.

As well as a writer and an activist, she is an academic and will discuss her rewilding project along with the psychological tools we can use to become part of the solution to issues such as climate change and biodiversity loss.

What do Western states, such as the UK, owe to refugees? When politicians, policy-makers and publics recognise that they have responsibilities to refugees, they tend to view these responsibilities in terms of a humanitarian act of charity towards suffering outsiders. In this podcast, Dr James Souter argues that we should rethink this picture of our responsibilities to refugees, and recognise that Western states sometimes have a stronger obligation to offer asylum as a form of reparation for refugees whom they have uprooted as a result of their foreign policies.

Dr James Souter is a lecturer in the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds, and author of Asylum as Reparation: Refuge and Responsibility for the Harms of Displacement.

What does it mean to work in UK farming today? The image of farming was revitalised during the Covid-19 pandemic as essential for ensuring supply of a diverse array of food on our plates, from fresh fruit and vegetables to sugar. Yet the people involved in farming tend to be less diverse and many farms are facing a shortage in workers. After all, 84% of farm holders in England are men (DEFRA, 2016) and it is estimated that 98% of workers in seasonal agriculture are migrants (NFU, 2018). In this podcast, Dr Bethany Robertson will talk about where these patterns stem from and what the future of the sector looks like.

Elena Ferrante is one of the most critically acclaimed and popular novelists on the global stage today. Her works offer reflections on the nature of good and evil, explore issues of poverty and sexual violence and contemplate the role of the writer. These concerns are common in the works of the 19th century Russian author Dostoevsky, a writer to whom Ferrante herself has acknowledged a debt. 

This podcast brings together in conversation Dr Sarah Hudspith, a scholar of Dostoevsky, and Dr Olivia Santovetti, an expert on Ferrante, both members of the University of Leeds Centre for World Literature. They discuss the resonances between Ferrante’s and Dostoevsky’s novels, read and comment on selected passages.

When Tim Berners Lee was thinking of a name for his new hypertext system he thought of a dusty volume that used to be on his parents' bookshelves. That volume was Enquire Within (1856), a miscellany of domestic advice now forgotten, but went through 97 editions before the end of the nineteenth century. Berners Lee named his system ENQUIRE, the next version of which would become the World Wide Web. But what was it about this book that made Berners Lee think of it? Why was it so popular in the period? And why has it become forgotten today?

Further reading:

Tim Berners-Lee and Mark Fischetti, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor (New York: HarperBusiness, 2000).

The global climate crisis is becoming ever more pressing. At the same time, international political actors are seriously struggling to deal with this crisis. What are the obstacles to effective global and planetary problem-solving? And which responses have global governance actors come up with to confront these challenges? This podcast looks at the example of deforestation and forest protection to find answers to these questions.

Further Reading:

Why is Charles Dickens one of the most enduring writers of all time? Why does he crop up so often, not only in screen adaptations, but in video games, newspapers, and pop culture, 150 years after his death? And what role can the author and his works play today, against a backdrop of changing attitudes to race, colonialism, gender and history? 

This episode will navigate through 200 years of Dickens, considering how the author's attempts to shape his own celebrity status continue to resonate two centuries later.

Further reading:

Join Lecturer Anne Buckley and Professor Frank Finlay as they discuss Skipton's First World War prisoner-of-war camp and Anne’s latest book. The book contains the first full English translation of a 330-page German book (published in 1920) written by the German prisoners about their life in the camp, as well as a section based on Anne's research into the camp and the German soldiers who were held there.

Anne and Frank will discuss day-to-day life in the camp and reveal some of the fascinating stories of the men themselves, who included naval captains, U-boat officers and airmen as well as foot soldiers. The talk will finish by considering the significance of the account locally, nationally and internationally and whether the book dispels the myth that Germans do not have a sense of humour.

Further reading:

In November 1859, while Charles Darwin was staying in Ilkley, he published one of the most famous scientific books of all time: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.  It’s well known that Darwin named his theory “natural selection” in order to call attention to an analogy with stockbreeding or “artificial selection.”  But how, exactly, did he think the analogy worked?  And why did he set such store by it?  In our day, after all, analogies in science don’t seem all that serious.  We think of the UK’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Jonathan Van‒Tam, livening up press briefings about coronavirus by bringing in football matches, train rides and yoghurt.  In this talk Professor Greg Radick will preview a new analysis of Darwin’s analogy, from a book co-authored with Leeds colleagues Roger White and Jonathan Hodge, and due to be published this summer by Cambridge University Press.

Further Reading: 

What does it mean to ‘decolonise’ the studies carried out at university, whether in English Studies or in the history of the Eastern and Western worlds? In this informal conversation, Dr Alaric Hall and Dr Fozia Bora reflect on the meanings and application of the term ‘decolonise’ for their respective areas of teaching and research in medieval studies and history. While this word encapsulates a range of understandings, there are key principles at stake, which promise to bring more nuance, inclusivity and vital contextualisation into discussions about how knowledge is created and shared in university spaces. Spoiler alert: the decolonisation of academia is not a smooth or straightforward journey, but it can be exhilarating!

Further reading:

Geraldine Heng, England and the Jews: How Religion and Violence Created the First Racial State in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)

Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land (London: Granta, 1992)

Francois-Xavier Fauvelle, The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018)

Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts, ed. by Brian C. Keene (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2019)

Dr Emily Zobel Marshall will take you on journey through black history and across continents, guided by a most captivating character, the trickster spider Anansi. Marshall will reveal the roots of the Anansi folktales in Ghana and demonstrate Anansi inspired both psychological and physical resistance to enslavement on the Jamaican plantations. She will show us the vital role the trickster plays in our lives by testing and exposing abuses of power.

Further reading:

For Anansi story collections in Jamaica see, among others: Beckwith, Martha Warren (1924) Jamaica Anansi Stories. New York: American Folk-lore Society. Bennett, Louise (1979) Anancy and Miss Lou. Kingston: Sangster' s Book Stores. Jekyll, W. (1966) Jamaican Song and Story: Annancy Stories, Digging Sings, Dancing Tunes and Ring Tunes. New York: Dover Publications, and Tanna, Laura (1984) Jamaican Folktales and Oral Histories. Kingston: Institute of Jamaica Publications.

After forty years researching and teaching eighteenth-century literature, Emeritus Professor David Fairer is now attempting to bring the age alive in a series of novels, the Chocolate House Mysteries. Centred on a Covent Garden chocolate house, these books combine historical fact and fiction, with their plots built around the actual events of 1708.

Writing a historical ‘whodunit’ raises particular challenges and questions. How did men and women in 1708 conceive of such things as evidence, clues, blackmail, bribery, interrogation and teamwork? How did they conceive of the notion of ‘detection’ itself, when there were no policemen and no detectives, no experts, no teams, no concept of crime scenes or forensics?

Have a listen to ‘Wigs, Swords and Poison’ to find the answers to these questions!

Further reading:

Dr Des McLernon takes us on a journey from the Ancient Greeks via the first cellular phone in 1979 to today’s fifth generation (5G) cellular technology. McLernon discusses why 5G wireless technology (unlike previous generations of cellular radio) will be both transformative and disruptive, enabling what is called the fourth industrial revolution of the Internet of Things and cyber physical systems.

McLernon also examines how 5G technology is much more than just a phone on which you can download videos faster. It will drive the Internet of Things and industrial robotics to smart cities & healthcare, driverless cars to immersive reality, online gaming to robotic surgery, and the tactile internet to advanced manufacturing.

Further reading:

Professor of Modern History Simon Hall delves into the events of September 1960 when Cuba’s communist leader Fidel Castro arrived in New York for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly.

After storming out of his plush mid-town hotel following a row about money, Fidel relocated to the Hotel Theresa, the so-called ‘Waldorf of Harlem’. Greeted enthusiastically by the local African American community, he proceeded to hold court with a succession of world leaders, black freedom fighters and counter-cultural luminaries, and promoted the politics of anti-imperialism with a fervour, and an audacity, that made him an icon of the 1960s.

Entertaining and wildly unpredictable, Fidel’s trip to New York proved to be a foundational moment in the trajectory of the Cold War, a turning point in the history of anti-colonial struggle, and a launching pad for the social, cultural and political tumult of the decade that followed. Have a listen to ‘Ten Days in Harlem’ to find out more about this historic event.

Further reading: 

[Content warning: This talk includes discussion of topics which may be upsetting to some listeners including suicide, anxiety, depression, loneliness and self-harm]

Loneliness, self-isolation, social distancing and what the COVID-19 pandemic tells us about social influences on mental health.

Professor of Liaison Psychiatry Allan House outlines why physical illness is stressful and how one particular aspect of the COVID pandemic – social isolation – can harm our mental health. Focussing on the topic of self-harm and suicide during the pandemic, House explores how we can better protect ourselves against the risks posed by social isolation and how to approach those who insist that they know the answers to many COVID-related questions.

Further reading:

Allan House, Understanding and responding to self-harm: the One Stop Guide, Profile Books 2019.

Thomas Joiner, Why People Die By Suicide, Harvard University Press 2007.