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Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best In Common episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to In Common for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite In Common episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
08/09/22 • 56 min
In this episode Michael speaks with Priya Shyamsundar, lead economist at the Nature Conservancy. Priya speaks about her career trajectory that led her to the Nature Conservancy, and about her current position. They discuss the history of economics and social science at the Nature Conservancy and in Conservation more broadly, and Priya describes the increasing appreciation for the role that humans play in conservation that has occurred across many conservation organizations, but also that there remains a dominance of natural sciences simply in terms of how many natural scientists vs. social scientists are employed at the Nature Conservancy.
Michael and Priya also talk about a specific project that Priya has been involved in called the Prana (“breath”) project, dealing with agricultural residue management in rural India. There, the massive burning of residues after harvest each fall has created large-scale smoke and air pollution problems. Priya, along with a previous guest of the podcast, JT Erbaugh, have been working with local partners in India to conduct focus groups and a baseline survey to understand the preferences of local farmers for how best to address this issue. The interview concludes with a discussion of the factors that make it more or less likely for farmers to adopt new farming strategies, and Priya mentions a finding that the most significant factor in affecting whether or not a farmer adopts a new technique is whether people in their social network have adopted it as well. Just like many social behaviors, adoption can be contagious.
References:
Cool green science website that Priya mentions: https://blog.nature.org/science/
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07/29/24 • 67 min
In this episode, Michael speaks with Alex Smalley, an expert in Environmental Psychology and researcher at the University of Exeter. Alex’s research program explores, in his words, “the cognitive and emotional impacts of virtual encounters with the natural world”. He has collaborated extensively with the BBC in the UK, including in the creation of a wonderful podcast entitled “The Healing Power of Nature”.
An important take-away from Alex’s work is that virtual experiences with nature can have a positive impact on our well-being, and that this effect is stronger for those with previous experiences with the natural environment itself. This undelies another important lesson, that virtual experiences in nature should be seen as an important complement of but not a substitute for the real world. But with many of us spending most of our time indoors, such a complement can prove to be very important, as Alex explains during the interview.
References:
Alex’s website: https://medicine.exeter.ac.uk/people/profile/index.php?web_id=Alexander_Smalley
Audible podcast: https://www.audible.com/podcast/The-Healing-Power-of-Nature/B0CLW481KM
Smalley, Alexander J., Mathew P. White, Rebecca Ripley, Timothy X. Atack, Eliza Lomas, Mike Sharples, Peter A. Coates, et al. 2022. “Forest 404: Using a BBC Drama Series to Explore the Impact of Nature’s Changing Soundscapes on Human Wellbeing and Behavior.” Global Environmental Change: Human and Policy Dimensions 74 (May): 102497. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2022.102497.
Smalley, Alexander J., Mathew P. White, Rebecca Sandiford, Nainita Desai, Chris Watson, Nick Smalley, Janet Tuppen, Laura Sakka, and Lora E. Fleming. 2023. “Soundscapes, Music, and Memories: Exploring the Factors That Influence Emotional Responses to Virtual Nature Content.” Journal of Environmental Psychology 89 (August): 102060. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.102060.
05/10/21 • 47 min
In today’s episode, Courtney and Stefan are speaking with Kimberley Peters.
Kim is a Professor Marine Governance at the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB), a research organisation in collaboration with the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) and University of Oldenburg (UOL), in Germany.
As a human geographer, she is interested in the social, cultural and political workings of the world around us. Her research group seeks to explore how governance does not just happen anywhere, but somewhere, and is shaped by spatial processes. Her work investigates how the geography of what we seek to govern, or do govern, is shaped by location, the character and qualities of place and relations with surrounding spaces.
In the episode, she reflects on how geography has dealt with and is influenced by its historical legacy, and how much of the current perspectives in human geography are critical because of that history. We also discuss her relationship to teaching and her students, working in an interdisciplinary institute, leaving your disciplinary comfort zone, and the research topics she is currently pursuing.
Kim has provided a list of references below regarding the history of geography for further information, as she notes that her perspectives are only one of many and not fully comprehensive. She encourages listeners to read the pieces below:
For a good overview of the history and 'turns' of geography see: Cresswell T (2013) Geographic Thought: A Critical Introduction. Wiley Blackwell: Oxford
On geography's relation with colonial and imperial practice: Driver F (1993) Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire. Wiley Blackwell: Oxford.
On geography's relation with 20th Century German geopolitics: Klinke, I., & Bassin, M. (2018). Introduction: Lebensraum and its discontents. Journal of Historical Geography, 61, 53-58.
On closing Geography departments: Sacks B (2015) What happened to the American geography department? Geography Directions (online): https://blog.geographydirections.com/2015/04/08/what-happened-to-the-american-geography-department/
On decolonialism and geography: Esson, J., Noxolo, P., Baxter, R., Daley, P., & Byron, M. (2017). The 2017 RGS‐IBG chair's theme: Decolonising geographical knowledges, or reproducing coloniality?. Area, 49(3), 384-388
Your Human Geography Dissertation:
https://study.sagepub.com/yourhumangeography
Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity:
Kim's Twitter
12/20/21 • 93 min
In this episode, Divya spoke with Aparajita Datta, a senior scientist at the Nature Conservation Foundation, a non-governmental research organization based in Bangalore, India. Aparajita is known for her work on community-based hornbill conservation in the northeastern part of India. Her main research interests include plant-animal interactions in rainforests, understanding anthropogenic effects on wildlife, and engaging with the tribal communities in conservation. In this episode, she shares her experience of trying to carry out inclusive conservation and the roles that partnerships with multiple stakeholders play in the process. Aparajita’s work is a bit unusual; she is one of those rare scholars who have been striving to translate her research on the ground. But conducting action-oriented research comes at a cost, and it is evident from Aparajita’s narrative as she shares her experience of getting emotionally attached to the tribal community she has been working with, while facing skepticism from some, and yet having the grit to keep persevering as she goes back and forth through the complex emotions of feeling both disheartened and inspired in her work. She now believes after 20 years, that doing research is more satisfying and easy than on-ground conservation, and that reconciliation between wildlife and people is not always possible.
Aparajita’s bio: https://www.ncf-india.org/author/646436/aparajita-datta
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/find-explorers/aparajita-datta
Selected References:
Borawake, N., Datta, A., & Naniwadekar, R. (2021). Tropical Forest Restoration in the Eastern Himalaya: Evaluating Early Survival and Growth of Native Tree Species. Ecological Restoration, 39(3), 52-63.
Sheth, C., Datta, A., and Parashuram, D. (2020). Persistent loss of biologically-rich tropical forests in the Indian Eastern Himalaya. Silva Fennica 54(3). https://doi.org/10.14214/sf.10373
Naniwadekar, R., Mishra, C., Isvaran, K., & Datta, A. (2021). Gardeners of the forest: hornbills govern the spatial distribution of large seeds. Journal of Avian Biology.
Datta, A., Naniwadekar, R., Rao, M., Sreenivasan, R., & Hiresavi, V. (2018). Hornbill Watch: A citizen science initiative for Indian hornbills. Indian Birds, 14(3), 65-70.
Teegalapalli, K., & Datta, A. (2016). Field to a forest: Patterns of forest recovery following shifting cultivation in the Eastern Himalaya. Forest Ecology and Management, 364, 173-182.
Rane, A., & Datta, A. (2015). Protecting a hornbill haven: a community-based conservation initiative in Arunachal Pradesh, northeast India. Malayan Nature Journal, 67(2), 203-218.
Datta, A. (2007). Protecting with people in Namdapha: threatened forests, forgotten people. In: Shahabuddin, G., Rangarajan, M. (Eds.), Making Conservation Work: securing biodiversity in this new century. Permanent Black, New Delhi. pp. 165 – 209.
02/26/24 • 49 min
This is the third episode in our Future Fisheries Management series, which we are running in collaboration with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and the Center for Governance and Markets at the University of Pittsburgh.
In this episode, Michael speaks with Paige Roberts, a fisheries ecologist and geographic information systems, or GIS, expert who is currently an independent consultant after working for nine years for the One Earth Future Foundation, an organization that specializes in finding sustainable solutions in fragile and conflict-affected settings. During her time with One Earth, Paige was closely involved with Project Badweyn in the country of Somalia. Through this project Paige and her colleagues created a free online tool to map out Somali coastal resources and fishing activities to help a range af actors better understand interactions between human activities and the environment. Michael and Paige discuss this project as well as efforts of of the One Earth Future Foundation to promote the sustainability of coastal fisheries through a co-management approach. The conversation concludes with a discussion of Paige’s next steps since leaving the One Earth Foundation.
References:
A summary of Project Badweyn: https://oneearthfuture.org/en/secure-fisheries/project-badweyn-mapping-somali-coastal-resources-0
Paige describing Project Badweyn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UU2fCo6Y1JU
GIS resources that Paige shared after the interview:
Esri makes some of the most popular GIS software. It's a subscription service, but you can get a personal license for around $100 for a year, which gives you access to ArcGIS Pro Software, ArcGIS Online, and the self-paced online training which has a slew of training modules from beginner to advanced. The ArcGIS Pro software is fairly intuitive once you learn the basics of GIS.
For a free option, QGIS is an open-source GIS software with all the same capabilities as ArcGIS but in a slightly less intuitive interface. It's widely used so there are ample resources online including its own Training Manual. There are many other free resources online and a quick Google search can get you anything you need, from blogs to videos on beginning to advanced techniques and troubleshooting.
03/11/22 • 29 min
Frank van Laerhoven is speaking with Maurice Paulissen.
Is it a historian? Is it an ecologist? No, it is a landscape historian! Maurice is one of the many commons scholars that cannot be easily categorized by means of a disciplinary label. He is also an exponent of a long tradition within our domain of researchers for whom “going to the field” means “going to an archive” and that manage to reconstruct commons governance 500 or more years back.
Maurice co-authored an IJC publication entitled ‘Dire Necessity or Mere Opportunity? Recurrent Peat Commercialisation from Raised Bog Commons in the Early Modern Low Countries’ together with Roy van Beek, Serge Nekrassoff, Edward Huijbens, and Theo Spek.
The episode starts with an half-hearted attempt to pin down Maurice in terms of academic disciplines (an attempt that partly fails). It then continues with a reflection on the article that served as an excuse for the conversation. That article contests the simplistic notion that in early modern Europe, shared resource management solutions offered by markets or governments were not sufficiently reliable, and therefore fell into the lap of autonomous communities. It is convincingly shown that markets (both local and regional), governments (at various levels, in various forms) and more or less autonomous communities play competing and complementary roles in the governance of peat land – roles that vary over time and place. The conversation ends with a reflection on whether a study of commons governance 500 years ago can be useful for commoners, today.
For more analyses of historical commons, also check out the following IJC titles:
- Laborda-Pemán, M., & De Moor, T. (2016). History and the commons: a necessary conversation. International Journal of the Commons, 10(2).
- Farjam, M., De Moor, T., van Weeren, R., Forsman, A., Dehkordi, M. A. E., Ghorbani, A., & Bravo, G. (2020). Shared patterns in long-term dynamics of commons as institutions for collective action. International Journal of the Commons, 14(1).
- Takahashi, T., Matsushita, K., Yoshida, Y., & Senda, T. (2019). Impacts of 150 years of modernization policies on the management of common forests in Japan: a statistical analysis of micro census data. International Journal of the Commons, 13(2).
- Echegaray, E. P. (2011). Communities and sustainability in medieval and early modern Aragon, 1200-1600. International Journal of the Commons, 5(2).
- Chanda, S., Patnaik, A., & Chatterjee, S. C. (2021). The Courtesan Project and the Tawa’ifs’ Cultural Commons. International Journal of the Commons, 15(1).
- Castro, Á. C. (2021). Early Medieval Commons? Or How the History of Early Medieval Europe Could Benefit from a Necessary Conversation: The Case From NW Iberia. International Journal of the Commons, 15(1).
12/11/23 • 61 min
In this episode, Michael speaks with Billie Turner II, Regents Professor at the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. Billie holds other positions as well, including Distinguished Global Futures Scientist at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, also at Arizona State, member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and Associate Editor of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Billie is a geographer and human-environmental scientist who studies land use and land cover change from prehistory to the present, and he has also contributed to our understanding of the determinants of social vulnerability and resilience. He works on deforestation, primarily in Mexico and Central America, and urban design in arid environments, especially the American Southwest.
Michael and Billie talk about two topics that Billie has written on, one being the reasons for the decline of a lowland Maya population around the years 800 to 1000, and the other being a long-standing debate between Thomas Malthus, who predicted that exponential population growth would inevitably outstrip linear growth in resources, and Esther Boserup, who argued that population-induced scarcity would motivate the necessary innovations to avoid systematic decline.
The interview concludes with a discussion of the book that Billie recently wrote, entitled: The Anthropocene, 101 Questions and Answers for Understanding the Human Impact on the Global Environment.
References:
Turner, B. L., and Jeremy A. Sabloff. 2012. “Classic Period Collapse of the Central Maya Lowlands: Insights about Human–environment Relationships for Sustainability.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (35): 13908–14. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1210106109.
Turner, B. L., and A. M. Ali. 1996. “Induced Intensification: Agricultural Change in Bangladesh with Implications for Malthus and Boserup.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 93 (25): 14984–91. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.93.25.14984.
Turner, B. L. 2022. The Anthropocene: 101 Questions and Answers for Understanding the Human Impact on the Global Environment. Agenda Publishing.
10/21/19 • 53 min
María José Barragán is the Science Director for the Charles Darwin Foundation on the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador. She oversees the organization's 20 marine and terrestrial research projects, and is helping to make many of them interdisciplinary and inclusive of local stakeholder needs and knowledge.
https://www.darwinfoundation.org/en/
María José received a PhD in Human Geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s, Canada. Her undergraduate degree was in the Biological Sciences at the Pontifical Catholic University, Ecuador, and Master’s degree from the Technical University of Munich, Germany (TUM) focusing on coastal marine ecosystems and marine protected areas (MPAs).
Her PhD research was inspired by the interactive governance framework, and was applied to better understand the governability of MPAs (with a case study developed in the Galapagos Marine Reserve). After graduation she collaborated with research clusters of the Too Big To Ignore (TBTI) Global Research Partnership for Small-Scale Fisheries Research, conducting research and publishing on small-scale fisheries. Later on, she had a postdoctoral research position at the “Development and Knowledge Sociology” Working Group at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) in Bremen, Germany. During that time, she conceptualized and co-developed new research agendas, by integrating the development and knowledge sociology approach into small-scale fisheries sustainability, fishing communities’ viability, food security from the marine perspective and marine resource governance.
https://www.darwinfoundation.org/en/component/contact/contact/14-staff/118-maria-jose-barragan
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10/24/22 • 63 min
In this episode Hita speaks with her colleague, Prof. AbdouMaliq Simone, a Senior Professorial fellow at the Urban Institute of The University of Sheffield. They speak of Maliq’s early life in pre-independence Sierra Leone and its influence on his thinking and his subsequent move from Freetown to Chicago, alongside his shift from pursuing psychology to engaging in developmental practice. Maliq mentions in the interview that his focus on the urban was an organic one and which stemmed from his work in psychology, the developmental sector, as well as what he describes as a long foray into radical politics. They discuss how his interpretation of the urban seeks to explain gaps in conventional definitions of what the urban means, particularly from the perspective of African cities where he noticed that there was a way in which urban economies were being elaborated to address a population that was being urbanized through their own efforts to provide for each other – and oftentimes in situations that were new to them.
They speak about Blackness and Black thought, of the field known as Black studies and its slight parallels with African Studies. As an urbanist, Maliq has been particularly influenced by black notions of locality – the extended idea of the locality – rooted within particular histories of the predominantly US based plantation system. He speaks about how black inhabitants of a plantation had to within the contexts of their own subjugation, develop tools and techniques to realize a sense of locality that extended beyond the immediate physical space, and how this notion of an extended locality helped the emergence of processes sustaining a black collective life. They then discuss the limits of using black thought as a methodological approach –focusing on the caution one has to exercise so that the usage of these knowledge systems does not reinforce the horrific forms of subjugation that it emerged from.
They next discuss Maliq’s latest book The Surrounds, which refers to those relational, improvised and interstitial spaces which accompany the formal urban as we know it. We discussed the idea of the surrounds in the context of changing and reconfigured relationships people build with ecological commons – especially in contexts where their access to formerly important spaces becomes restricted because of other urban agendas. They discuss how the book contrasts ideas of home and work, especially from the perspective of marginalized communities for whom the home is not a place of settlement – rather it is a place of transient thinking; for whom work may not represent stability, but rather a confinement that restricts their ability to engage with the city.
References
- Simone A.M. 2022. The Surrounds: Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture. Duke University Press.
- Schmid C. and Brenner N. 2011. Planetary urbanization. Urban Constellations, 1st ed., Gandy, M. Eds. Jovis-Verl: Berlin, Germany, pp.10-13.
- McKittrick K. 2020. Dear science and other stories. Duke University Press.
11/13/23 • 79 min
In this episode, Michael speaks with Eric Klopfer, the chair of the department of Comparative Media Studies and Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT. At MIT Eric is also the director of the Scheller Teacher Education program as well as the Education Arcade.
Eric is a leader in the space of game design for education. He recently co-authored a book on the subject: Resonant Games, Design Principles for Learning Games that Connect Hearts, Minds and the Everyday. During the conversation, Eric discusses games as an example of experiential learning and emphasizes the importance of combining a game exercise with reflection, which is where the real learning happens through what Eric calls an action-reflection cycle.
Eric and Michael also discuss the game that originally led Michael to speak to Eric: a simulation of the tragedy of the commons in a fishery, which Eric led the development of. In addition to this episode, Michael discusses his implementations of this game in a recent blog post on the In Common website. You can find more about this game and Eric's work at this web address:
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FAQ
How many episodes does In Common have?
In Common currently has 229 episodes available.
What topics does In Common cover?
The podcast is about Podcasts, Social Sciences and Science.
What is the most popular episode on In Common?
The episode title '102: Environmental economics and conservation with Priya Shyamsundar' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on In Common?
The average episode length on In Common is 51 minutes.
How often are episodes of In Common released?
Episodes of In Common are typically released every 6 days, 22 hours.
When was the first episode of In Common?
The first episode of In Common was released on Apr 14, 2019.
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