SSB2020

Belinda Winder on Pedophilia
Social Science Bites
December 1, 2020

Belinda Winder on Pedophilia

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Salma Mousa on Contact Theory (and Football)
Social Science Bites
November 2, 2020

Salma Mousa on Contact Theory (and Football)

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Alondra Nelson on Genetic Testing
Social Science Bites
October 1, 2020

Alondra Nelson on Genetic Testing

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Heidi Larson on Vaccine Skepticism
Social Science Bites
September 7, 2020

Heidi Larson on Vaccine Skepticism

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Sherman James on John Henryism

Sherman James on John Henryism

Epidemiologist Sherman James outlines the hypothesis behind John Henryism – the idea that high-effort coping with expectations of achievement amid poverty or segregation can result in serious damage to the striver’s health.

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Gurminder K. Bhambra on Postcolonial Social Science

Gurminder K. Bhambra on Postcolonial Social Science

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Gurminder K. Bhambra discusses with interviewer David Edmonds why we should speak about the Haitian revolution in the same breath as the contemporaneous American and French revolutions, how former empires conveniently forget the contributions of their colonies now that those empires have downgraded to mere ‘nations,’ and what lessons we should draw from the current iconoclastic impulse toward imperial statuary.

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Ashley Mears on the Global Party Circuit

Ashley Mears on the Global Party Circuit

Ashley Mears describes modern jet-setting club life at the VIP level and the Veblen-esque conspicuous consumption, its “ritualized squandering” in Mears words, that is its hallmark.

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Anne Case on Deaths of Despair

Anne Case on Deaths of Despair

Economist Anne Case didn’t believe her eyes when she first identified the trend of what came to be called ‘deaths of despair’: looking at figures from the 1990s to the most recent data available from 2018, mortality among middle-aged, non-college-educated white Americans rose, stalled, then rose again.

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Hetan Shah on Social Science and the Pandemic

Hetan Shah on Social Science and the Pandemic

“You don’t have to go back many months,” says Hetan Shah, the chief executive of the British Academy, in this Social Science Bites podcast, “for a period when politicians were relatively dismissive of experts – and then suddenly we’ve seen a shift now to where they’ve moved very close to scientists. And generally that’s a very good thing.”

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Ruth Wodak on How to Become a Far-Right Populist

Ruth Wodak on How to Become a Far-Right Populist

Depending on your views, far-right populism can represent a welcome return to the past , or a worrying one. The former, argues sociolinguist Ruth Wodak in this Social Science Bites podcast, is one of the hallmarks of far-right populism – a yearning for an often mythical past where the “true people” were ascendant and comfortable.

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Richard Layard on Happiness Economics

Richard Layard on Happiness Economics

Richard Layard remembers being a history student sitting in Oxford’s Bodleian Library on a misty morning, reading philosopher Jeremy Bentham (he of the famed “It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong”). As he recounts to interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, he thought, “Oh yes, this is what it’s all about.”

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Susan Michie on Behavioral Change

Susan Michie on Behavioral Change

While you might think that the essentials of human behavior are pretty similar, one of the things Michie quickly tells interviewer Dave Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast is that it can be unwise to jump to conclusions when studying behavior (or trying to change it).

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