Paul Mason

Paul Mason
Medical Anthropologist
Biography:

Associate Lecturer, Macquarie University, Australia

Learn more about Paul's work:
Paul's Book: "Tuberculosis and Ethics" http://paul.sobriquet.net globalyoungacademy.net/paul-mason paul.sobriquet.net/publications culturematters.wordpress.com
Connect with Paul:
twitter.com/sociocerebral
Why does tuberculosis still kill?

Tuberculosis is a slow killer, and a hugely neglected disease. The programmes we currently have are not sufficient to stop TB. So, what are we doing wrong?
Paul Mason shares his vision of how we should address tuberculosis, and what approach we need to take in order to cure it.

Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Paul Mason's Video here ◂

Paul: Hi, my name is Paul Mason. I am medical anthropologist based in Sydney, Australia. I work for the Woolcock Institute for medical research and also the Center for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney.

Nerina: How did you get into this field?

Paul: Okay, so my background is in biomedical science. I actually started off working in neuroscience on the brain and I was doing laboratory research in neuroimaging and then I moved into neurogenetics and then I moved to circadian rhythm research actually. And what I started to realize is that if we want to understand how organisms work, we have to understand them in context. This drew me increasingly towards anthropology because the basic premise of anthropology is to understand matters in context because it is the context that confers meaning. So after my biomedical science degree and after working in a few laboratories doing a honors in psychophysics, I then drifted into anthropology and eventually did a PhD in anthropology because I saw that the social and cultural dimensions of human behavior are so important to understanding how biological and physiological dimensions about being come into life and how they come into being.

Nerina: What has an anthropologist to do with tuberculosis actually?

Paul: As an anthropologist, I spent a year in Vietnam interviewing TB patients. So I interviewed 75 tuberculosis patients, conducted focus group discussions in rural villages in the southernmost province of Vietnam and also performed what is called Participant Observation Research in diagnostic laboratories and district health center. That means I took part in the lives of the people around me, I became involved in the activities of the health center and the diagnostic laboratory and mapped up and documented the activities in order to analyze it from a qualitative perspective.

Nerina: And what picked your interest for tuberculosis?

Paul: Tuberculosis is an infectious disease. It outranks HIV/AIDS as the world’s biggest infectious killer. So, sadly over 1.5 million people die from tuberculosis disease each year and this really shouldn’t be the case. There is an effective treatment for tuberculosis, so there are antimicrobials that patients can take to get rid of this disease and become healthy again. Sadly, however, too many of these patients are not accessing the proper diagnosis and treatment for tuberculosis.

It’s a very slow killer, so it takes a long time to kill someone which means that it has lots of opportunities to transmit to other people. The most likely scenario to get tuberculosis is sharing a house with someone who has tuberculosis and having a high microbial load in the environment.

Tuberculosis is a hugely neglected disease. There is funding available to conduct tuberculosis research, to fund tuberculosis control and care and prevention program, but it’s not sufficient. And so, as the biggest infectious disease but one that we can actually cure, I felt that this was an area where I could channel my skills and that would pay off, because we do have a cure for this disease. It’s just a matter of making sure that the cure is getting to the patients.

Nerina: What do we do wrong actually when we have a cure but we don’t cure the patients?

Paul: I think actually it comes down to this as an answer. We tend to invest all available life in the cure of tuberculosis in the tablets that we give to patients. So donor agencies around the world and foreign aid organizations work hard to make sure that those pills are offered for free to tuberculosis patients around the world. But what we forget of course with that is the care and support services that need to accompany those pills in order to make sure those patients can fulfill their complete treatment and treatments for tuberculosis are long.

At a minimum, they take six months, at their worst they can take up to five years and so this isn’t a very easy disease to treat. In the sense that it requires a big investment on behalf of the patients who have to access services, who have to find ways of making money when they can’t go to work, finding ways of meeting the ancillary costs of treatment, having proper nutrition, looking after the side effects that the drugs you are taking etc. So there are a lot of peripheral dimensions to treatment that we forget if we focus too much on the pills and don’t think enough about the quality of life and the patient important outcomes.

Nerina: How important is context for tuberculosis?

Paul: Oh, context is almost everything. I might be overstating it but allow me to explain. Not everyone who gets tuberculosis falls sick with tuberculosis. In fact, they estimate that around only 10% of people who are infected with the organism actually become sick with tuberculosis.

So, this says something. It says something about one people suspected genetic predisposition but secondly, it also tells us about the conditions in which someone is living. If someone is living in an overcrowded living arrangement, if someone is malnourished, if someone is living in poverty, these are the biggest risk factors for tuberculosis. Even before they discovered the organism Mycobacterium tuberculosis researchers and medical clinicians saw a relationship between poverty and tuberculosis. So, in fact, if we want to address tuberculosis then we have to address the conditions that foster the transmission of the disease and the activation of the disease in vulnerable bodies.

Nerina: But do we have a problem with resistance?

Paul: We have a very big problem with resistance. So sadly the globally standardized models of treatment that we’ve been using for tuberculosis have been focusing on drugs susceptible tuberculosis. Drug resistant tuberculosis in some locations around the world may, in fact, replace drug susceptible strains of tuberculosis.

Nerina: Why do we not speak about this danger or why do we not speak about tuberculosis that much?

Paul: This is a really interesting question because and I think a very superficial answer. Not an inaccurate answer but a superficial answer is it doesn’t affect us. In high-income countries tuberculosis is something that we can get treated, so if we get tuberculosis we go get treated and then we forget about it, which is unlike HIV/AIDS for example. If someone has HIV/AIDS that’s a chronic condition. At the moment we don’t have a way of getting rid of this disease, someone has it for the rest of their life. So this generates advocacy groups around HIV and AIDs, we don’t see the same culture of advocacy around tuberculosis.

So not only is it not happening much in high-income countries, it also is a surmountable problem in high income countries. People in low and middle-income countries don’t have the facilities to create this advocacy groups, don’t have the resources to create a community around this disease and really foster and support each other through what is a very lengthy treatment process. So because it doesn’t happen before eyes because it isn’t problematic for us, I think it’s very easy to forget how challenging this disease can be for people in the developing world.

Nerina: How can we beat this illness?

Paul: To really stop the devastation that tuberculosis is causing on human populations, then we really need to think about the complexity of this disease. We really need to be thinking about a holistic integrative approach that looks at the disease, not in terms of just a pharmaceutical treatment but also in terms of human races, in terms of food security, in terms political mobility behind the disease, economic capacity building, as well as stigma reduction strategies. So, there’s no simple answer to that question but there’s a very exciting answer in the sense of looking at these integrative holistic solutions.

Nerina: You wrote a book for children about tuberculosis. Could you tell me more about it?

Paul: I did, yeah. This is really exciting. I wrote a book about tuberculosis based on my work in Vietnam and the book has got this lovely message about supporting someone who is on treatment: sending them an SMS, sending them a letter, letting them know that you’re thinking about them, supporting their families as well. So it’s a very simple book, it’s got a very simple message and it talks about the diagnosis, the treatment, the symptoms of tuberculosis. What’s been really exciting for me is that I’ve been contacted by people from Tanzania, people from Malaysia, people from Indonesia, from Romania, from so many different countries to do translations themselves. That’s been really fun and almost weekly now I am putting the book into a new translation and making it available for free on the Internet.

Nerina: What motivates you?

Paul: It’s the opportunity to do something to someone else. It’s the opportunity to contribute. The sense of fulfillment that you get from doing that.

Nerina: And what is the most important lesson that you have learned from your research?

Paul: The most important lesson I’ve learned is perseverance. A tuberculosis patient I’ve worked with in 2014. He surmounted incredible challenges to: in the first instance to get a diagnosis, in second instance to complete his treatment. And when I realized how the small tokens of effort that came from me how much they transformed his life that’s when I realized that if we are willing to step outside our box, if we’re willing to really persevere and make those small tokens of effort possible then we can engage in some wonderful acts of reciprocity that build really unlikely friendships and transform lives around the world.

Nerina: What kind of society do you dream of?

Paul: Well, for one, I dream of a society that is free from the conditions of hostile diseases like tuberculosis that’s free from poverty. I dream of a society where we think about sustainability not just in terms of rhetoric but in terms of the practices that we bring into everyday life. I dream of an integrated society, you know a society that is free from conflict on a mass scale and mistrust. I think it’s really possible to engage in cross-cultural communication in ways that are fruitful and creative and constructive. I want to live in a world that isn’t as destructive as it currently is. I’d really like to live in a world where people learn how to get along and I just don’t know whether we’re quite there yet but we have the skills out there. I just want to make sure that those skills in some sort of way are getting to the greatest number of people possible.

Nerina: Thank you Paul.

Paul: Well thank you very much, Nerina. I appreciate that.

#followup with Paul Mason

Last year, we spoke to the medical anthropologist Paul Mason who told up about his research on tuberculosis. On the occasion of the World Tuberculosis Day, 24 March 2018, we spoke with him again. Listen to Paul and learn more about TB and Daru Island.

Watch the video:
Biography:

Associate Lecturer, Macquarie University, Australia

Learn more about Paul's work:
Paul's Book: "Tuberculosis and Ethics" http://paul.sobriquet.net globalyoungacademy.net/paul-mason paul.sobriquet.net/publications culturematters.wordpress.com
Connect with Paul:
twitter.com/sociocerebral

Martin Clauss

Martin Clauss
Professor of Medieval History
Biography:

University of Chemnitz, Germany

Learn more about Martin's work:
tu-chemnitz.de/phil/geschichte/gdma/ de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Clauss Book: "Ritter und Raufbolde" "Ludwig IV - der Bayer" "Die Salier"
The Middle Ages, war, and perspectives

Is our picture of the Middle Ages correct? Was it all about knights in shining armour? Was it the time of kings and heroes or was it the most brutal period in human history? Martin Clauss discusses why our understanding of the Middle Ages is a modern construction, what our society will look like to our ancestors, and why we need history.

Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Martin Clauss's Video here ◂

Martin: My name is Martin Clauss. I am a professor of Medieval History at the University of Chemnitz, in Saxony, in Germany.

Nerina: And what are your main research topics?

Martin: The medieval history of Europe and within the medieval period, I specialize in the history of war and warfare.

Nerina: Why are you so interested in war?

Martin: The middle ages are a period full of warfare. There’s basically in each year, in every country there’s war and so you would have to study war and warfare to understand the medieval period as a whole and this is why it is important for me as a medievalist and then I think it is an important topic for the public. I mean, we have a certain image about the Middle Ages and warfare is always part of this image. We all have a picture of knights in our heads with shining armor, fighting brave battles and I think as a professional medievalist this is my duty to say something against this picture and to correct it to some extent and to make clear that war in the Middle Ages as every war is a brutal and bloody thing in the first place and there’s nothing to do with heroism but with manslaughter and a lot of suffering.

Nerina: What kind of sources do you use? 

Martin: The interesting thing is that studying warfare and war you can basically use all kind of source material. War is a topic in basically everything we have from the Middle Ages. You have written source like historiography, chronicles talking about war all the time. Then you have what we call medieval literature like the big romances and everything, there’s war all over the place. Then you have pictures, you have legislation, you have laws of war, laws of warfare. Then you have archeological remains – castles, city walls and everything.  So it’s a very wide range of topics. I am specializing on historiography, so people who write history in the Middle Ages and the way they talk about war, the way they use language to describe or better to narrate war in the Middle Ages.

Nerina: You wrote that war is a matter of perspective. Could you tell me more about it? 

Martin: Yeah, that’s a very interesting thing. One big research topic I made a couple of years ago is about defeat, about the question how defeat is seen and judged in medieval historiography and here we can see very clearly that it is always a matter of perspective. I mean, the losing side and the winning side, they tell totally different stories about war. It is a bit the same as we can see today. I mean if you look at contemporary warfare, the Americans have a different perspective on their war in Afghanistan or Iraq than the Iraqi people have and this is pretty much the same in the Middle Ages.

The loser tells the story about bad fate, about bad luck, and the winner tells the story about God helping the right side and bringing justice to the good cause and so we have very different stories here. And I think in history basically everything is a matter of perspective but with warfare, it comes much more clear than in many other topics.

Nerina: How did the normal person experience war? 

Martin: This is a question we would like to know more about but for the middle ages we don’t know much about that. That’s one thing we have to admit. Contemporary history: First World War, Second World War and so on, we have a lot of sources about the normal man, like the average people writing diaries, or something, or writing letters. We don’t have these things for the middle ages. In the Middle Ages the sources are very much concentrated on the higher end of society: kings, queens, noble men, and so, to find out how the normal citizen, for example, experienced warfare, is very, very difficult. We can only make some assumptions, we can look at the descriptions, we can see the extent of destruction, of the devastation and we can conclude that the people suffered a lot, but it’s very difficult to pinpoint it exactly.

We obviously have to take it into account that the story is the one thing and the real history, the real war is another thing. Sometimes, very rarely, we get a glimpse of the real war when there are people complaining about the cold, the suffering, the hunger. For example, there’s one poem in there soldier described that they have always been hungry on the campaign because there was not enough food, and it was terribly cold under the armor and it was raining. So sometimes, we get this kind of real picture of warfare but normally we have this disconnection. The people who waged war see it as a privilege and this is why they write about heroism.

And this is only true for a very small proportion of the people actually fighting because in medieval war there were peasants fighting as well but nobody writes about them, they don’t have a voice basically, so they just kind of disappear in the chronicles.  And the chronicles focus only on the heroes, on the bright side of war if you want to say that.

Nerina: Why do we have this connection between war and hero?

Martin: Yeah, in the Middle Ages we can clearly see that there’s connection between the stories that are told about war and heroes. So, it’s the story that makes the hero and this is why…Why is that? The stories are written for the aristocracy and the aristocracy is in power, aristocracy has its social function is to protect the people, to protect the people by waging war. This is the ideal of the middle ages. And so, being able to fight in war is a presumption to be part of the aristocracy, to be part of the leading class. And the other explanation is perhaps in terms of gender that it’s in the ancient times and the middle ages as well, that there’s a connection between manhood and warfare and violence. So, the real man is able to execute violence in war and this makes him a great hero and so these two come to the end that there’s a strong connection between warfare and heroism and in some parts of society war is the only way to be a hero.

You can, for example, this is a very recent research topic, we look at the connection between kingship and war and here we got the impression that when a man becomes king, so he’s a young king so to speak, then the tendency that he wages war is higher because he has to prove himself as king, obviously by waging war. So let’s say he becomes king and then he goes on a campaign two or three times and then he proves himself as a warrior king and then he can stop doing that. So when he’s older, an older king then he doesn’t go to warfare that much.

Nerina: What kind of lesson did you learn from your research?

Martin: Yeah, the first lesson is that our picture of the Middle Ages, we have to be very careful with it. You know, we look at the movies we see the bright shining armor knight things, this is not how the medieval times really were. So it’s important to really understand that the middle ages are a construction. A construction of modern thinkers. So what we have now is the Middle Age’s that are our Middle Ages. The Middle Ages we produce by researching, by writing books, by making films, everything. So I think it’s interesting and important to understand this character of construction that the Middle Ages have.

So this is the first lesson for me as a medievalist, this is an important thing. But on a broader scale, I’d say thinking about warfare in terms of heroism is not only a medieval phenomenon. I mean we see it today. If you look at modern movies about modern warfare, you always got this hero plot. It’s like, you know, the one brave soldier ignoring the command and then fighting bravely against the laws. And I think this can be quite dangerous if you think about war only in terms of heroism. You should take the broader picture and you should try to understand how these narratives about heroism, how they work.

Nerina: And Martin what do you think that a historian, let’s say in 500 years, will think about us? 

Martin: Yeah, this is an interesting mind experiment and obviously I do that a lot with my students; to tell them you know when we look at what we produce as sources for example. If you sit in a seminar and we write our notes and then somebody finds these notes in 500 years or 3,000 years’ time what will he think or she thinks about this seminar. When our society is going to be looked at in the future I think they will be the impression that it is a very complex and to some extent very irrational society and I think historians will consider our time as very individualistic. So people tend to look at their own lives, the lives of their families and they stopped caring about the bigger picture to some extent. So it’s a society based on individualism and it’s a…how to say that… it’s a dissatisfied society.

Nerina: What kind of society do you dream of? 

Martin: Well, first of all, a society where men and women are treated equally. This is some – I have two daughters myself and so I got the impression that we still live in a society where the gender gap is very, very big, much bigger than it should be. And when I look around, for example, the Germans University system it’s totally male dominated, there are very, very few women. Well, on the other hand, I would like a society where the respect for nature and the respect for the environment is something like you don’t have to argue about. It should be like everybody should think about that like automatically. So these are the two things that in my dream society would be different.

Nerina: Why do we need history?

Martin: So I think you have to look into history to understand how society is working and to understand that some things that people think as granted you know it’s like old they are not as old as people think and if you look back in history a bit further you’ll find totally different setting and that makes understand that the times we’re living and this is not like world it can’t be changed. There can be changes all the time and this is why history is important and it’s good fun of course. I really enjoy doing it.

Nerina: Thank you so much, Martin. 

Martin: Thank you very much. That was a great pleasure.

Biography:

University of Chemnitz, Germany

Learn more about Martin's work:
tu-chemnitz.de/phil/geschichte/gdma/ de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Clauss Book: "Ritter und Raufbolde" "Ludwig IV - der Bayer" "Die Salier"

Dolores Bueno López

Dolores Bueno López
PhD in chemistry
Biography:

Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain
Dolores Bueno López works at Nanomol group which is part of ICMAB-CSIC and CIBER-BBN.
Using compressed fluids they work with nanocapsules made of lipids that can encapsulate proteins, trying to help in some rare diseases like Fabry disease and Sanfilippo syndrome.
Both diseases are associated with a metabolic disorder, causing the storage of certain metabolites in the body. You can have a look at their last paper in the matter of Fabry disease HERE.

Learn more about Dolores's work:
Blog: worlderlenmeyer.blogspot.es
Connect with Dolores:
twitter.com/Ununcuadio
Nanotechnology, rare diseases, and dreams

Modern medicine saves millions of lives around the world every year. But not all diseases get the same attention from medical research. There are some rare diseases which are not investigated properly, and the reason for this is a lack of resources. Nevertheless, there are still researchers who are passionate about their work. Dolores Bueno Lopez is one of them.

Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Dolores Bueno López's Video here ◂

Dolores: My name is Dolores Bueno López; I am doing my PhD thesis in science material at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Nerina: What is the topic of your dissertation?

Dolores: The topic of my dissertation is: we’re studying capsules – liposomes, which are made of lipidic materials and we try to encapsulate different proteins or molecules in order to treat some diseases.

Nerina: What is the purpose of your dissertation?

Dolores: The purpose of my dissertation is to study the chemical and physical properties of our liposomes because we are changing little things like the composition of the ratio between the components. We are also changing the final properties of our Nano carriers and the nanomedicine. My topic is not nanomedicine but science material; in the end we want the application to be in nanomedicine but we are studying the properties at a very basic level.

We want to reduce the doses, to reduce the side effects of the treatment and to functionalize the superficiality of our Nano drug in order for it to go to the target specifically. We are studying the chemical and physical properties of these capsules but our aim is that it can be used in rare diseases for nanomedicine.

Nerina: What kind of diseases are we speaking about?

Dolores: They are rare diseases so they have a low incidence in the population. They don’t have a lot of resources to investigate such diseases so I am proud and happy that in my group we are dedicated to investigating that. Those diseases that I speak of, Fabry disease and Sanfilippo syndrome are both about the lack of an enzyme, a protein inside our cells that is in charge of degrading some metabolites that are a waste of the cell. If this protein lacks, these residues and metabolites start accumulating in the cells causing several symptoms thus leading to these diseases.

Nerina: Why is it that difficult to find a treatment or to put this enzyme into the patient? What is the challenge?

Dolores: The challenge is to avoid the degradation of the enzyme and to really focus the treatment in the zones in the body that have to make the action.

Nerina: Why did you want to become a researcher?

Dolores: Well, I think that when I was little, when I was a teenager, I was impacted by some diseases like Alzheimer’s that existed in my home. My great grandmother had it, and also my grandmother now has this disease, so it impacts me how a person can lose all her memories and become a child, kind of. I feel that science can change that and science is the solution to improve the life of people that are suffering. So, I think that that influences my way of thinking.

Nerina: Why are you so passionate about science? What is so fascinating for you?

Dolores: That it can really explain the world we live in and give us answers and also that with these answers we can change the world because we can apply these answers to create technology. I really hope that science will make us better humans.

Nerina: In what way?

Dolores: In a way that we are going to have more knowledge and I expect that this makes us really wise so that we can avoid wars and all this kind of things because we are at a higher level. This is a very long futuristic hope but I would like to see that science can really change our lives for better. Not only in curing illnesses but also in making us better people.

Nerina: What would you like to change in science? 

Dolores: Well, I have a kind of romantic way of thinking about science. I think that science is an accumulative knowledge that we all make so there should be an open source and free access for all the people in the world.

Nerina: What do you like doing when you are not working on research?

Dolores: I really like speaking about my research but speaking in a way that my mother or my grandmother can understand what I am talking about. Because I really like my job, I want people to understand the joy and the passion I have for what I am doing. So in my spare time I have a blog or I collaborate in different blogs or platforms.

Nerina: Where do you see yourself in ten years?

Dolores: I would love to see myself in Africa working maybe in a small lab; but working in soil chemistry in order to improve agriculture in this zone, that’s my dream.

Nerina: Thank you very much, Dolores.

Dolores: Thank you. I liked this conversation a lot.

Biography:

Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain
Dolores Bueno López works at Nanomol group which is part of ICMAB-CSIC and CIBER-BBN.
Using compressed fluids they work with nanocapsules made of lipids that can encapsulate proteins, trying to help in some rare diseases like Fabry disease and Sanfilippo syndrome.
Both diseases are associated with a metabolic disorder, causing the storage of certain metabolites in the body. You can have a look at their last paper in the matter of Fabry disease HERE.

Learn more about Dolores's work:
Blog: worlderlenmeyer.blogspot.es
Connect with Dolores:
twitter.com/Ununcuadio

Maria de Lourdes Peréz Cruz

Maria de Lourdes Peréz-Cruz
Professor of communication
Biography:

Escuela de Humanidades Universidad Modelo,
Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico.

Learn more about Maria's work:
www.lamariadetodas.com El mito del Héroe en Gears of War 2 La Maria de Todas
Connect with Maria:
twitter/lamariadetoda
I love hypertext

People love telling stories, and we do it all the time. New technology has opened new ways of storytelling.

Speech evolved into text and text evolved into hypertext, which brings with it a whole new approach to storytelling.

In this new kind of interactive narrative, the author wants to challenge you to play with all of that structure – the kind of structure you can find on digital media – thanks to the capabilities of hypertext. Maria de Lourdes Perez Cruz wants to rewrite old stories using new media technologies.

Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Maria de Lourdes Peréz-Cruz's Video here ◂

Maria: My name is Maria de Lourdes Perez Cruz. I am a professor in the Humanities Department of Universidad Modelo here in Mérida, Mexico.

Nerina: What are your main research topics?

Maria: Well, I’m interested in interactive narratives. I study the relationship between hypertext as a narrative structure in every kind of digital media like video games, websites, internet videos or even apps.

Nerina: What is actually a hypertext? 

Maria: Well, the hypertext is an informatics technology; it’s the base of the web. It changes the way we read stuff. It’s a non-sequel structure which links information with electronic hyper-wrinkles. You have all the parts of history in a big space so you can choose the one you want in the order you want. You jump between text, image, music, a piece of audio or even a photo, in the order you want. You choose the path you want as you have many options which the author can give you. You make your personal version of the story. That’s very interesting because it’s a very democratic way that we can make sense of the stories that other people share with us.

Nerina: Why are you so passionate about it? Why is it important to know about hypertext, in your opinion?

Maria: Because it helps you to understand how narratives work. For example, I love video games. I think that video games are new ways of more complex narratives. The interesting thing is, it’s a kind of fight between the team of the authors and you as a reader because they choose how interactive they want to make the structure, how open or how close, how much control they’re going to have, and how interactive they’re going to be. And you have the freedom to change all that you are seeing or all you are interacting with.

The history of hypertext begins in 1945 after the Second World War, a bunch of academic scientists; one of them was Vannevar Bush. He wrote a paper titled “As we may think”. He imagined that maybe the work of all the academics in the world can be in one space. So the hypertext is kind of new but I think we don’t look at that with the attention it deserves because it was a little effort that created all the new ways on intermedia. The new way is so that we can have access to new ways of telling stories.

Nerina: How do you think that these new ways of telling stories are changing the relationship between the author and the reader or the author and the player?

Maria: I think it’s changing in a democratic way. I’d like to think that in this new kind of interactive narratives that the author wants to challenge you to play with all that structure, the kind of structure you can find on digital media, thanks to the hypertext. So it absolutely changes the way you now see the author as another player that is playing with you or is giving you some pieces of information that you can find or you can use whenever you want and change the experience because you are taking the information he gives you. At the end, all you are doing is reading in your own way and making your experience with the story, a personal version of what you want to do with that information that the author provides.

Nerina: What is the most important lesson that you have learned from your research?

Maria: Well, I think the most important thing is the narratives, the stories are the most human experience, and you can design them in many ways. Stories of human kind are very few, but you can make many versions of the histories or stories of the human kind, thanks to all the technological or medium development. So I think it’s the most interesting thing that you can create a new version of that story that has been told from the Greeks, for example.

Nerina: Do you have a dream for the future?

Maria: I don’t dream about the future, I have to confess. I don’t make plans for coming years. I live for the moment; I live each day one by one. I try to do my best, it’s like the hypertext structure – I’m living this moment and I have many possibilities. I don’t know what I’m going to choose because there are different contexts and situations. I also experience different feelings at that very moment that can make me choose something. So I don’t make plans, I’m not good at making plans. I just live day by day.

Nerina: Do you have a favorite story?

Maria: Well, I have many favorite stories. I love the stories of Jorge Luis Borges. I love all his stories, as well as some of the stories of Julio Cortazar. But I have to confess that my favorite story is ‘100 years of solitude’ by Garcia Marquez. That was one of the big books that my father gave me when I was a child and I really love the story of the whole family in that book.

Nerina: What is the most important moment in the book for you? What kind of feeling do you remember?

Maria: The interesting thing with ‘100 Years of Solitude’ is that it’s an archetypal story from all the Latin American families. So in my personal history of my family, I recognize some moments of fantasy of some characters that are from both sides of my family, from my father and my mother.  I think that my favorite moment of the story is when ‘Remedios the beauty’ flies to the sky, surrounded by the blank sheets from the house.  That is my favorite part of the book. Sometimes I think that I am going to do the same, I’m going to fly to the sky and disappear!

Nerina: Thank you very much, Maria.

Maria: Thank you!

#followup with Maria de Lourdes Peréz Cruz | Music and identity

Last year, we spoke to Professor Maria de Lourdes Peréz Cruz about her work on hypertext and interactive narratives, and the implications of new technologies on traditional storytelling structures. Recently we interviewed her again, to discover more about her new project on independent music in Yucatán, and how such music is allowing local communities to share their identities.

Watch the video:
Biography:

Escuela de Humanidades Universidad Modelo,
Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico.

Learn more about Maria's work:
www.lamariadetodas.com El mito del Héroe en Gears of War 2 La Maria de Todas
Connect with Maria:
twitter/lamariadetoda

Thomas Arnold

Thomas Arnold
Research Associate, Human-Robot Interaction
Biography:

Laboratory, Tufts University, USA

Learn more about Thomas's work:
"Moral Competence (..) for Robots" List of Publications
Connect with Thomas:
twitter.com/Thomas_Arnold
What is robot ethics?

Recently, there have been many discussions around the ethical issues that a self-driving car would raise. How would it know if a toddler ran out onto the road, and would it react? Would it keep going to preserve the safety of the passenger? Or would it swerve and perhaps risk the life of the person inside the car, in order to save the child on the road? This question is one of many problems which Thomas Arnold tries to solve every day.

Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Thomas Arnold's Video here ◂

Thomas: I’m Thomas Arnold; a research associate at Tufts University, Human-Robot Interaction Laboratory, in the USA.

Nerina: What are you working on right now?

Thomas: Right now I’m working on ethics and social robots. My Master’s and Doctoral work is in philosophy of religion. I still consider myself a scholar working in those fields; I just have a very specific context for it now: to test and apply it.

Nerina: What are robotic ethics actually?

Thomas: Part of robotic ethics is really asking about the specific contexts where robots seem to be coming onto the market and being designed, and really trying to think through carefully what the robots should be doing and how they’re going to be able to do it. Whether that’s elder care, tutoring a child, public safety or repairing something; anything where interacting with human beings is going to happen, that’s what I’m interested in trying to think through.

Nerina: Why do we have to think about this?

Thomas: Recently, there have been many discussions around the ethical issues that a self-driving car could have. How do we know if a toddler runs out on the road, how the car will react? Will it keep going to preserve the safety of the passenger? Will it swerve and perhaps risk the life of the person inside in order to save the child on the road?

That’s a limited case, but none-the-less it’s a case where we have to think about what we want the system to do and why. And the reason we need to think about it is because people have different views about that.

Nerina: What is your approach?

Thomas: We are interested in taking the problem from two directions. On one case, we are interested in how people will react to robots, and how they will expect things from the robots, so we’re interested in how we as human beings will react and what our expectations naturally are in some ways. Then from the other direction, we try to use a combination of approaches, one of them being a rule-based approach. But it’s not simply a matter of rules because we also try to build-in context. We try to represent in the code, in our computational system, different contexts so that the system is able to recognize that if you’re in a kitchen and there’s a knife in the kitchen it means something different, there’s a different set of rules for handing over a knife, what a knife would be, than there would be in a subway where if someone was holding a knife you would draw a different conclusion.

Nerina: Is this a way to try to make robots more human?

Thomas: That’s a really good question. That is I think one of the struggles in our field because I feel the answer is always yes and no. Yes in that, in order to interact with a person well you need to understand when they are responding, when they are in pain, or when something wrong has happened. On the other hand, you have to be careful not to encourage a relationship or expectations that are unrealistic and end up being maybe manipulative.

If a robot intentionally looks or sounds a certain way that a person might think they are actually able to reciprocate or return some type of affection, or that they are hurt or feel pain in the same way that a person does, then that starts to be a problem. We know that already robots being used in different cases are creating bonds with people. In the US military, for US soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, there are robots that are kind of called dogs. They are shaped a little bit like dogs that detect IEDs; they detect these minds on the ground. The soldiers bond with those robots. They give them funerals when they are damaged beyond functioning, medals, and consider them colleagues in some way.

You can say, well maybe that’s a very difficult environment so maybe the soldiers are in a state of mind where they vulnerable enough to do that. But I really think that’s something that will extend beyond that context. I think people will be drawn to that, and I think it’s a serious ethical issue how we prevent those relationships from being bad for human beings, from being hurtful and deceptive. And maybe this will be the struggle but I really want robotic action to always come back to human beings as being the ones that are responsible. So that when a robot performs something well and is responsive, I would like us not to say, “That robot is human, or that robot is moral”; I would rather say the robot performed a moral action that human beings are responsible for, that our design allowed that moral action to occur.

So ultimately it comes back to us. It comes back to our ethics and our relationships with one another because I think it’s our responsibility to keep ourselves accountable for what the robots do. It will be very tricky and hard. Lawyers and legal professors are already arguing about what happens when a robot does something wrong. Is that just a malfunction? Is the designer responsible? Is the owner responsible? Those questions will be difficult but I really would want to keep as a principle that we are still always accountable in some respect for the systems that are designed.

Nerina: In the end is it a question about what is a human being? Is it a question of who we are?

Thomas: I think part of what makes us human is imagining, how do we recreate ourselves. Not just biologically, but if through craft and technologically. That’s part of what it means to be human. The downside to that are all the shortcomings we are prone to when we try to do that. I think that’s the other side of that part of what makes us human, it’s that we are also flawed in how we imagine. Sometimes our imagination lets us do wonderful things, and sometimes our imagination deceives us as to how things will actually unfold.

I think robots are just another chapter in that story. In the press you have people that want to write headlines, “Will the robots take over?” Will they take over our civilization? I think those are not very helpful because it’s another way to avoid responsibility here and now and the fact that we need to pay attention to how we are treating one another. Robots and artificial intelligence is a reflection of what we think about one another, and how we treat each other as human beings. I think it will be an ongoing debate; your question is still on the table to figure out what we are doing.

Nerina: Do you have a wish for the future?

Thomas: My wish would be that we find a way to live sustainably on our planet.

Nerina: What is life about?

Thomas: I think life is about exploring, learning from one another, struggling, and continuously asking that question of what life’s about.

Nerina: Thank you very much, Thomas.

Thomas: Thank you Nerina.

#follow-up with Thomas Arnold | AI, Robots and Humans

Thomas is Research Associate in the Human-Robot Interaction Laboratory, at Tufts University in USA and tells us about the last ideas and trends from his lab. Have a watch!

Watch the trailer:
Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Biography:

Laboratory, Tufts University, USA

Learn more about Thomas's work:
"Moral Competence (..) for Robots" List of Publications
Connect with Thomas:
twitter.com/Thomas_Arnold

Abdeslam Badre

Abdeslam Badre
Social Scientist
Biography:

Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco

Learn more about Abdeslam's work:
unc.academia.edu/AbdeslamBadre globalyoungacademy/abdeslambadre/ Social Science in Africa
Connect with Abdeslam:
twitter.com/abdeslambadre linkedin.com/abdeslam-badre-phd
Let youth and women express their needs

Youth, women, and immigration are three categories which are the backbone of any society. Therefore, it is important to involve young people and women in the political debate. Can sociological research help us to make our society better? How can sociological research be translated into policies, not only on paper, but in real life? Abdeslam Badre will answer these questions in this interview.

Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Abdeslam Badre's Video here ◂

Badre: My name is Abdeslam Badre, I was born in Casablanca – Morocco; I work at Mohammed V University and I’m a social scientist.

Nerina: What are your main research topics?

Badre: Currently, I’m working on women, youth, migration, and policy developments.

Nerina: Why are you so passionate about these topics?

Badre: Why not?

Nerina: Yes, for example.

Badre: Why? Because well, I think these are the three main categories that are the backbone of any society. When we talk about youth, we are talking about a very important group within the community or society especially in our region where the youth bulk is bigger than any other age groups. We talk about women because I think women are about half of the society. Migrants as you can see, all the political and economic changes and challenges around the world nowadays between Europe and the Middle East are because of the influx of migration and refugees, and that would destabilize the region. It could also contribute to prevailing peace if the question of migration is managed in a human, fair and beneficial manner, I guess.

Nerina: What are the big issues that you want to address?

Badre: There are various issues; I’d like to see how for example research-based and fact-based finding could be translated into policies that would target directly the livelihood of women, youth, and migrants, not only on paper but in real life.

Nerina: How could we help this become a reality?

Badre: This is a very complex question in the sense that it entails different stakeholders. It’s not a question that researchers are going to solve by themselves, and it’s not something that only politicians can solve by themselves. Of course, they can use it as a slogan for political campaigns and editorial campaigns, but trust me, by themselves, they would not be able to solve it because it’s complex and challenging. It needs the synchronizing of the efforts of policy makers, researchers, civil society, media, school, education system, and the people themselves.

Nerina: Perhaps it’s a difficult question, but is there one idea that you would suggest to change the situation of women, youth, or migration? 

Badre: For each group, there are different challenges. At some point, they intersect, they cross-cut along the spectrum, but for each group, they have their different problems, and for each region of each group, there are specific and general problems. For example, if we talk about the youth in the Arab region, one of the very simple solutions I suggest is to involve them. Because right now in the MENA region, we are talking about building up democracy or democratizing institutions and the society, like when you talk to politicians they tell you, okay, we are in a democratization process.

So that’s one suggestion, including young people in the debate over the democratization of institutions, democratization of the society and public sphere. Women in my region, in the Middle East and North Africa, when you look at papers and documents, of course, all documents are talking about empowering women: going to work and an egalitarian kind of approach to women in economy and politics, but reality says something totally different.

One of the things we can do, a very simple thing to bring some of the taken rights to women, is to involve them in these debates, because the debate itself, when we talk about “women should be given their right, women should be empowered”, the people talking about these things or making those claims are men. Let women express their needs and what they need, what they want, and what they don’t want. Also, it’s a question of integration, a question of inclusion. Migrant development for example, in Morocco in the past, Morocco used to be an exporter of Migrants to Europe. It was a country from which a lot of Moroccans would migrate to Europe and North America legally, or illegally. And then Morocco became a transit country for sub-Saharan migrants. Nowadays, we’re talking about Morocco as a host of sub-Saharan migrants. The three phrases Morocco has been through: it moved from exporting migrants to transiting migrants, and now to hosting migrants.

The people working in the field of migrant management in Morocco are not well trained. So maybe, if we could provide some capacity building for these people who are working on the issue of migration, let’s provide them with some capacity building training whether in Europe or we can bring some European expats or American expats to train these people on how to deal with migration crisis management in Morocco.

Nerina: Is there a country that you can look at for migration for example that you believe is a good example of how to deal with migration? 

Badre: Canada. I think in the world nowadays, the best model of migration integration is Canada. It proved to be more efficient, based on respect and win-win situation.

Nerina: How important is inter-disciplinarity? Think of the international research communities. What do we need more of?

Badre: It’s as important as the internationalization of science. I always talk about this issue of inter-disciplinarity and cross-continental collaboration. Cross-continental collaboration which is a horizontal dimension and then inter-disciplinarity which is a vertical dimension, so I think if we bring these two dimensions together, we will be able to get better results than if we’re just analyzing phenomena independently from the context or from society.

If we’re looking at immigration for example, and we try to just solve the problem of immigration from within the lenses of migration studies, I think we will stay there, we’ll not come with any tangible results or solutions that could be duplicated in any migration crises in any part of the world. That’s why, if we go through inter-disciplinary analysis or research, we’ll be able to look at phenomena or problems from different angles. We’ll look at it from the perspective of social scientists, psychologists, politicians, economists, media specialists, and these would give us a better idea, not only a better idea on how to understand the problem, but also how to solve it, and maybe how to prevent it from happening again.

Nerina: Did your research change you in some way?

Badre: Yes, of course. It changes my perception of the world and it changed how I see myself, how I see the relationship between the elements in the world, how I see the relationship between society and the environment within which we live in. It helped me understand a lot of things, and it also helped me question many things some of which I still don’t understand. The more research you do, the better understanding about how ignorant you’ve become, you understand how much, because each time you discover something, you just discover how much you still don’t know. So doing research is just a quest for the size of your ignorance, I guess.

Nerina: What kind of society do you dream of?

Badre: A less violent society.

Nerina: What is life about?

Badre: Life. I think, well, that’s a big question. I mean in my very humble perspective, life is a path, a walkway. It’s a road people can take. Some people take it silently and leave it. They don’t leave any sign that they were there. Some people leave a sign but a very destructive sign – a sign that shows destruction, ruins, and catastrophes. Some people leave signs of hope, of good things. So I hope that while walking through that road I will leave some good signs.

Nerina: Thank you very much for a great interview!

#followup with Abdeslam Badre | Science & leadership for a better African future

Abdeslam Badre is a social scientist with a strong research interest in Policy Development in the fields of Gender, Youth, Higher Education, Professional Leadership and Migration, Transformational Political Economy and the Media, especially in the context of Africa and the EU-Southern Mediterranean Cooperation. Listen to our #followup conversation with Badre last September.

Watch the video:
Biography:

Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco

Learn more about Abdeslam's work:
unc.academia.edu/AbdeslamBadre globalyoungacademy/abdeslambadre/ Social Science in Africa
Connect with Abdeslam:
twitter.com/abdeslambadre linkedin.com/abdeslam-badre-phd

Alice Krozer

Alice Krozer
PhD Candidate, Univ. of Cambridge
Biography:

Main research field: Development Economics (Inequality)

Learn more about Alice's work:
devstudies.uk/alicekrozer "For Richer Or Poorer" (Publication) "A Regional Basic Income ..." (Publication) "Inequality We Want" (Publication) "Inequality in Mexico" (Publication)
Connect with Alice:
Econ. Inequality: Theory & Evidence twitter.com/alicekrozer http://inequality.stanford.edu
Shall we care about inequality?

Do we all have the same opportunities? And if we don’t, what should we do about it? Do we have the right perception of equality? How can we change the social landscape and decrease inequality? Is it possible to create equal income distribution? Alice Krozer from the University of Cambridge decided to seek out the answers to these questions during her research on inequality.

Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Alice Krozer's Video here ◂

Alice: My name is Alice Krozer. I’m a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cambridge in the UK. I’m currently at Stanford University for some months researching the topic of economic inequality.

Nerina: How did this topic get your attention?

Alice: I’ve been interested in inequality since I started researching, I suppose. I did my master’s in development studies then went to Latin America for research and a study period. I think that because the region is so unequal, it became a lot more obvious that that was the topic that I was going to research for my actual investigation.

Nerina: And now you are studying Mexico?

Alice: Well Mexico is one of the countries with extremely high inequality, so it’s a very good context to study if you want to know something about inequality.

I have been investigating the poor groups in society for some time, and I think that it’s very important and worthwhile. I also think that rich groups are equally important to study inequality. If we want to understand the patterns of inequality, it’s not enough to study poverty; we also have to study extreme wealth. Especially considering that power relations are not equal throughout society, and there is a chance that this very small rich group actually has significantly more power to change patterns. So if we understand the way very extreme wealth works, in the same way as we understand something about extreme poverty, we might be closer to discovering how to deal with inequality.

Nerina: You wrote a paper; “How Much is Too Much? The Inequality We Want.” Could you please tell me a little bit about it? 

Alice: It is a paper looking at the empirical income distribution across countries throughout the world. So we use income distribution data for 116 countries, and we find empirical patterns throughout these countries that are very interesting in terms of inequality studies. The first thing is that the share that the bottom 40% of the income distribution holds is very small, and the share that the top 10 or top 5% of the income distribution hold in terms of total income is very large.

The second thing we find relatedly is that the middle shares of the upper middle class is 50% to 95% of the income distribution. They hold a fairly constant share across countries and that is roughly 55% or 60% of total income. This has very strong implications because it means that relatively speaking, this is not absolute inequality, it is relative inequality. Relatively speaking, the middle groups have about the same share of total income throughout the world in every country, roughly. However, the very large differences in inequality across countries stem from the different share that the very rich, about 5% of the income distribution, hold. So in some countries, that share is about the same as the bottom 40%; in some countries, it’s more, and in some countries, it’s a little bit less, but not much less.

Nerina: When we speak about wealth inequality, how is the situation? 

Alice: Wealth inequality in the world is a lot more unequal, it’s a lot worse than income inequality in all countries. Even countries that are fairly equal in income terms are very unequal in wealth terms, like Sweden for example. There have been studies recently by Oxfam and I’ve participated in some of them, that show that the top 1,000 people in terms of wealth in the world own as much wealth as the bottom half. Wealth inequality is a lot larger than income inequality.

Nerina: Do we perpetuate inequality?

Alice: Yes we do. There is a very strong inheritance of inequality which has something to do with the fact that there is not so much social mobility as we sometimes like to think there is, in actually most countries of the world. It is a little bit easier in some countries than in others. Interestingly, those countries that put social mobility very high up on their agenda,  are usually more unequal or currently more unequal and that is, for example, the US. So there is this curve that’s called the Great Gatsby Curve where a very good scholar put some countries listed or lined up according to their social mobility and he says that; if you want to live in a country with equality for opportunity, you have to go to Denmark or Scandinavia rather than to the US.

Nerina: Do we have the right perception of inequality?

Alice: I think very often, we don’t and that depends. There is some overestimation of inequality in some context but there’s actually a lot of underestimation in different contexts, which is something that my work addresses with the measurement of inequality. That very often, if we don’t actually know what the actual level of inequality is, we might feel that it is unequal, but we don’t know how very unequal income is actually ours. So we have some companies for example where CEOs earn 4 to 600 times the average salary of their workers. That’s a very, very big disparity and most people are not aware that the disparities are so big.

Nerina: Why should everybody care about inequality?

Alice: Inequality affects everybody in the sense that it’s something very good to care about because there are very strong, negative effects in highly-segregated societies.

There has been a lot of research on how inequality can be helping our incentives or motivating people, but actually many people are not motivated by competition or punishment. They are actually motivated by having others around them being good as well and that does not happen in a very unequal society.

The consequences in terms of health, educational differences, social exclusion, and economic stagnation are very large. And not only for the poor or the middle classes that might lose out, but also for the rich. There have been studies that show very precisely that the stress level for rich and poor people is higher in highly-segregated societies than in more equal societies.

The effects range from very large migration patterns for example which we can witness in Europe currently, and have been witnessing for a long time in Latin America and countries where people want to come to Australia; Malaysia for example, and many other places in the world. So migration patterns are very important as they can be addressed through a decrease in inequality.

Nerina: What should we do in order to reduce inequality?

Alice: I think if we are aware that inequalities exist, are harmful and it is socially and individually desirable to live in more equal societies; then we can start thinking about what should be done about it in more technical terms. There are a couple of things that are known to be fostering more inequality, and we can look at countries where income distribution is more equal, thus use them as an example for policies, for example.

Social policies – policies of social inclusion are important. Universal and unconditional policies like public free education and health care are incredibly important to equalize starting points for everybody so that’s more about equality for opportunity. If we want to have less income inequality we have to address the income distribution, so, for example, minimum salaries play a huge role there.

Depending a little bit on the different aspects of inequality that we want to address, there are different policies that we can use. Everybody should support these kinds of policies if they want to live in a more equal world.

Nerina: What motivates you?

Alice: The idea that I can help improve circumstances for somebody. I would like to improve the well-being of people that are disadvantaged, disenfranchised, or whose voice is heard less. In a world where some people have a lot of power and other people have very little power to voice their interest, I feel it is a social obligation for the position of the privileged to help those that don’t have that.

Nerina: What is the most important lesson you have learned from your research?

Alice: Humility and understanding are good lessons. Currently, I am investigating the elite so I’ve become very humble about assuming things about other people that I don’t actually know. Mostly, there are reasons why people act a specific way, and trying to understand what these reasons are, is more helpful than judging beforehand. So that is an important lesson, for example.

Nerina: Do you have a dream or a wish for the future?

Alice: That we would take better care of our environment and each other.

Nerina: Thank you very much, Alice.

Alice: Thank you Nerina.

#followup with Alice Krozer | How do Mexican elites think about inequality?

Alice Krozer tells us about her work on the perceptions of inequality among Mexican elites. Have a watch!

Watch the video:
Biography:

Main research field: Development Economics (Inequality)

Learn more about Alice's work:
devstudies.uk/alicekrozer "For Richer Or Poorer" (Publication) "A Regional Basic Income ..." (Publication) "Inequality We Want" (Publication) "Inequality in Mexico" (Publication)
Connect with Alice:
Econ. Inequality: Theory & Evidence twitter.com/alicekrozer http://inequality.stanford.edu

Francesco Carollo

Francesco Carollo
Innovation Strategist
Biography:

Innovation Researcher, London, UK

Learn more about Francesco's work:
slideshare.net/cabopolonio medium.com/@Innovandiamo
Connect with Francesco:
twitter.com/Innovandiamo linkedin.com/innovandiamo facebook.com/innovandiamo
Do we innovate?

What is innovation? Innovation is not polishing something old, adding a bigger screen or making a smaller battery. According to Francesco Carollo, real innovation transforms the way that people engage with each other. That’s what really makes a difference. If you really want to make a change you have to change the basic cultural rules of society. So, he argues, innovation is a social thing, and we all can – and should – contribute.

Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Francesco Carollo's Video here ◂

Francesco: My name is Francesco Carollo, I’m based in London. I am a researcher in innovation, most notably on the implication of collaborative sharing economy on society, innovation methodologies and innovation in cities. And I also consult with different types of organizations, and I am a co-design facilitator.

Nerina: What is your research area? 

Francesco: Basically, my main research fields are how to apply design, I would say, service design to public sector and how social innovation can be enabled by ICT, which means basically how tech innovation can have a good and social impact.

To give you an example that is both from a research and consulting side, I’m helping a few startups, promising early-stage startups that I believe they have the capabilities and potential to have an impact on society. And one of these basically helps visually-impaired people to navigate through cities or indoor and outdoor environments by availing the smartphone technology. So instead of using the classical cane, the stick, they use the smartphone. So they use technology to help a marginalized category of citizens so that ultimately, this will lighten up the welfare burden for the city and for the government if you improve the life of those who are in need.

Nerina: What is innovation, in your opinion?

Francesco: To me, the real innovation is transformative and it’s cultural. So it transforms the way that people engage with each other. If it doesn’t change this, to me, it’s not real, true innovation. It’s just old rules, new output and you’re just polishing something up and making it more pretty. But the substance is the same.

Why is culture  important? Because culture is about the rules of engagement, how do you engage with other people and what you want out of those interactions. If you want to keep it as it is, you just keep the same rules. If you want to make an improvement, you need to change those rules. And you need to drive new behaviors, you need to create the opportunities for people to do things in a different way, but more meaningful.

Nerina: Why do we talk about innovation so much?

Francesco: Innovation at this moment, it’s part of the so-called hype, everything is about innovation. We need innovation but at this moment, it’s very tech-driven innovation. The problem is that the average user of technology, the average citizen, at this very stage, cannot cope with the implications of the mass adoption of technology, which means, in very practical terms, that we do things but we don’t think of the implications of what we do just because we are shaped by the tools that we use.

You know, if I want to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, he was saying that we shape our tools, then after the tools shape us. If we consider a smartphone, it’s basically shaping our behaviors on a daily basis. And we live in a society in a hurry basically and we don’t have a moment to think about what we are doing. There are those people that they think that every type of technology is good. And they call this the disruptive chaos that is brought by technology innovation. So whatever happened is fine, then there will be a new order. Somehow it’s going to be fixed on its own.

Then on the other hand, you have those pessimistic like Evgeny Morozov and other people, other scholars. And I think I’m in between in the sense that I’m not supporting one of these parts. But I think that critical thinking because it’s not mainstream, it’s urgently needed, more critical thinking.

Nerina: Is innovation top-down or bottom-up? 

Francesco: Personally, both. During my research, I found out that – and this can have an impact on policy analysis, activities and policy-making – you need both levels. You need to find an intersection point, a breakeven point between applying top-down activities, so decision-making for those who are supposed to decide, and also tapping into the diversity of the crowd. So you need to have both. You cannot rely on only one of these. If you rely on bottom-up, there will be a point where you need to take decisions. And the crowd does not want to take decisions. The crowd, at a certain point, wants to delegate somebody or at least somebody will emerge, some leader will emerge and will take decisions because nobody wants to take those decisions. But we need a new breed of leaders, we don’t need any more one-man-show leaders and basically the new leaders, they need to see themselves as enabling platforms. They need to help others to fulfill their potential. So there’s a lot of unlocked potential around, within and outside the organizations. The leader’s duty is just to unlock this potential to create as much value as well as impact for all the community they are serving.

Nerina: And the biggest challenges for business?

Francesco: Well, they need strategic tools because they need to think in a strategic way, in a more holistic, organic way. They need to break silos, so they need to break their silo thinking. So, you know, Silo thinking is basically “I work in finance, I don’t want to know what the people in sales do, and I don’t want to know what marketing does”. While nowadays, it’s more cross-sectorial type of activities and learning. Those organizations, those businesses, they need to become learning organizations, which means that on a daily basis, they need to learn from users, from their own colleagues what works, what doesn’t, and they need to adapt.

Nerina: Why are you so passionate about innovation?

Francesco: Because I am an activist and I believe that the people that are in innovation ecosystem, most of them, they are activists as well. Even more, they do politics. They want to shape society. They have a vision of what type of society they want to build. I’m part of this fabulous global community on collaborative economy, OuiShare. We embrace change and we adapt constantly and we constantly challenge ourselves and our beliefs. And we always ask ourselves the tough questions. Where are we heading to? Are we happy with this? What makes us unhappy? How can we change this?

So we are pretty constant that especially in a community and you have people from everywhere and everybody can contribute and society is moving fast. And we don’t want to be, as I said before, we don’t want to be driven by technology. We want to drive our behaviors and we want to, you know, ride the wave of technology in a way that stays meaningful to our lives because we are looking for meanings and the meaning is the most important thing.

Nerina: Thank you so much.

Francesco: Thank you very much for inviting me. It was a pleasure.

Biography:

Innovation Researcher, London, UK

Learn more about Francesco's work:
slideshare.net/cabopolonio medium.com/@Innovandiamo
Connect with Francesco:
twitter.com/Innovandiamo linkedin.com/innovandiamo facebook.com/innovandiamo

Hans Grönlund

Hans Grönlund
Associate professor of immunology
Biography:

Therapeutic immune design, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden

Learn more about Hans's work:
medi-tec.se/medi-tec/historik medi-tec.se/medi-tec/historik cmm.ki.se/en/group
Connect with Hans:
ki.se/hans-gronlunds-research-group
Allergies: therapeutic immune design

Allergy is a social disease, and we all know at least one person who has some kind of allergy. There is a medicine which can help us to reduce the symptoms, but what if we could cure it completely? Well, the good news is that thanks to researchers like Hans Grönlund, we already have the vaccine which can cure people of all kinds of allergies. But before it can be used, funding bodies and authorities have to realise that people need to be cured.

Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Hans Grönlund's Video here ◂

Hans: My name is Hans Grönlund; I work as a scientist at Karolinska Institutet at the department of Clinical Neuroscience.

Nerina: What is your main research topic?

Hans: My main research topic is allergy. I have been working with allergy for the last 35 years, lately mostly pet halogens; how to diagnose and how to treat patients with a pet allergy. My role is to be a group leader; I have about 10 people who are doing research in a translational way. My research group is called therapeutic immune design. So I design therapeutics, bio-molecular molecules that will play with the immune system in such a way that you can cure patients. Whether it’s cancer, or multiple sclerosis or allergy.

Nerina: Why are you so passionate about allergies? What is so special?

Hans: The thing with pet allergy is that it’s a very social disease. You cannot just say that it is something that is out there in the society. It will affect your neighbors, it will affect your classmates, it will affect your mother and father and also who you meet.

Nerina: And what are the biggest issues you wanted to address in your research?

Hans: I want to cure the population. And I actually want to cure them from not getting allergies at all.

Nerina: Is this possible?

Hans: Yes.

Nerina: And how?

Hans: Well, this is what we have learned lately, that by introduction very early on in life, in a smart way, you can skew the immune system in such a way that you will not encounter or react to the allergy later on in life.

Nerina: How do you see the future of allergy treatments?

Hans: For me, the ideal would be to treat children very early on so that they would not get allergies at all. That would be the main topic. Otherwise, we have devised together with other groups, a way to introduce allergens in small amounts to induce tolerance. So that is in a way a better way that has been today but we’re refining that at the moment.

Nerina: What is new in this treatment?

Hans: We are trying to make a treatment with 3 to 4 injections; these 3 to 4 injections should not be felt by the patient but they should still be very effective. There is very great hope as we have shown that this is in principle possible.

Nerina: What do we need actually?

Hans: We need resources, we need funding. We know how to do it, we have the vaccine on the shelf, but we will also need someone to finance this. This first trip is about 4 million euros, and then all the way to the patient we need perhaps double of that sum. In Sweden, it is a very small amount per person actually.

Nerina: What would you change tomorrow?

Hans: I would like the funding bodies and the authorities to realize that the need of the people is to be cured. This is both for the sake of jobs and health where we try to struggle, as this death value march is something prohibitive for scientists. If you go there, you’re very likely to be dried out and not come back to research again. So you should help those scientists who really want to contribute to society.

Good research needs resources and it needs know-how. It depends on what you want to do with research. If you want to just add information about how biological body functions, then that is fine and we should know more about that. If you want, on the other hand, to make life better for health care in society, then you need a set of steps and rules that will help you create jobs, to make a better living quality of life, and that is a funding possibility. So in my mind, you should try to focus also resources into this translational research. That would make my life completely different.

Nerina: What does good research need?

Hans: I do not necessarily think that we need more ideas. What we need is ideas that are put into reality, they should be tried. And that is the problem; a good researcher needs the help to bring his research to the patient – to be translational. This is the really big difficulty. How do you take a curative treatment all the way through good manufacturing practise, toxicology, IMPD, ethical permissions, medical product agency; that is a very expensive trip and as a scientist, you cannot do that without help.

Nerina: What motivates you?

Hans: What motivates me is to leave a better world after me, this is my great motivation. Also, I enjoy this life tremendously! I come to work every day full of energy, I have so many good collaborators, they are all there and we work together, it is such a fun way of living.

Nerina: Is there a day in your research life that you remember in a special way?

Hans: In a special way, well yes when I get funding to do a new project that really made it. You know the thing is it is so incremental. It is always a little step ahead, so these huge moments are sort of like a continuum, each day is a huge moment.

Nerina: Great.

Hans: It is!

Nerina: What is the most important lesson you have learned from your research, or from being a researcher?

Hans: To be a researcher, is to be able to communicate with people from all over the world. And you realise that people are basically the same. There is no difference between people.

Nerina: What kind of society do you dream of?

Hans: Honestly, I think that I dream of a society where money is not the driving force, but actually, love between people. You should be able to help other people, you should be able to be compassionate about other people, and see how they are as people. It is not a matter of how you are acting, but how you hug people, this is sort of a very passionate thing, people should enjoy each other.

Nerina:  Thank you very much, Hans.

Hans: Thank you!

#Follow-up with Hans Grönlund | Therapeutic immune design and new drugs

Hans is an Associate professor of immunology at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. His research is promising in the fields of allergies, multiple sclerosis and cancer.

Watch the trailer:
Watch the video:
Biography:

Therapeutic immune design, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden

Learn more about Hans's work:
medi-tec.se/medi-tec/historik medi-tec.se/medi-tec/historik cmm.ki.se/en/group
Connect with Hans:
ki.se/hans-gronlunds-research-group

Marco Trentini

Marco Trentini
Professor of sociology
Biography:

University of Bologna, Italy

Learn more about Marco's work:
unibo.it/marco.trentini Sociologia economica (2006) Rischio e società (2006) Il governo dell'economia da Keynes
Connect with Marco:
twitter.com/MaTrentini facebook.com/marco.trentini
Economics versus economic sociology

In times of world crises we see the importance of understanding Economics. According to Marco Trentini from the University of Bologna, Italy, if we want to understand Economics it is of crucial importance to look at it in a different way. Marco’s area of study is in Economic Sociology. Economic sociology is a field inside sociology, which analyses the economic phenomena according to sociological perspectives.

Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Marco Trentini's Video here ◂

Marco: I am Marco Trentini, an Italian sociologist, and I work at the department of education, University of Bologna.

Nerina: What are you working on right now?

Marco: I just finished writing a book about economic sociology. It’s a book aimed at students of economic sociology, a sort of hand book. I hope to provide critical thinking, not just revision of theory. I met a student studying economic sociology and economics; there’s a big debate about how economics is taught in University. After the recent crisis there’s some disappointment about how economics is studied in the economics faculty or school. There is a certain movement mainly from students that it is assumed that there are necessary multi-perspectives to study economics and I think economic sociology could be one of these perspectives.

Nerina: What is the book about?

Marco: The book is an overview about economic sociology, and economic sociology is a field of sociology which analyses the economic phenomena according to the sociological perspective.

Nerina: What is the difference between economic sociology and economics?

Marco: The difference is the approach you use to study economics. In the beginning economics and sociology are not very distinctive; they’ve become distinctive during the last century. Since the end of 19th century economists used a particular language to describe economics in the economic phenomena and the language was math – they used a lot of modelling and so on. Economic sociology used a different approach, and not necessarily based on math and modelling. So economic sociologists can use quantitative data in a different way. What I mean is that when you use formal modelling, you have to simplify the reality but of course you cannot describe the exact reality. You have to choose some variables to include in the model and put out some other variable. Of course economists know that the model simplifies their reality and think that the model is able to grasp their reality.

Economic sociology uses a completely different perspective because some variables that in economic analysis are out are included in the analysis. It is rather common especially after new economic sociology in an approach introduced mainly in the USA starting from the 70s of the last century. It is quite common in economic sociology to use the concept of embeddedness. Does it mean that economic action happens in a social context? If you have to grasp and understand how economy works, you have to analyse also the social context. I don’t think that there’s just one perspective to look at society. I think a good point of sociology is to think of sociology as not a paradigm, it has plenty of perspectives. This gives a wider perspective, you have a different perspective to look at the phenomena, maybe you don’t have a strong theory but it’s not a weak point because sometimes strong theory constrains your perspective or your way to understand phenomena.

Nerina: How do these theoretical approaches we are speaking about influence our reality, or can they influence our reality? Why are they important to us?

Marco: Economics affects our reality because usually economics is used to develop political economies. We have seen in the last era the great debate on how to respond to an economic crisis: austerity or no austerity. This debate is based on theory, but some of these theories are not totally right. I mean if you look at austerity, the politics of austerity is not based on good understanding of economics.

Nerina: Do you think that we need the different perspectives in order to understand our society more?

Marco: If you want to understand economics I think it’s useful to have a different perspective. The recent events show that just one perspective does not help. If you look at for instance education, of course I am interested in education. It’s quite common to think of education as sort of a human capital investment. What does it mean? You pay in order to get a return, and the return of education is in income. I don’t think it’s a good perspective to look at education because I can say in my case for instance, my return is a total failure because I have studied, I have a degree, a PhD and so on, and my return is good, but not as good as it should be after all the time I have spent studying. Anyway I don’t feel my investment in education was a failure, but if you just look at the economic return it’s a sort of failure. I didn’t maximize.

Nerina: And why didn’t you maximize it?

Marco: I prefer to be a researcher, as it doesn’t matter how much my income is.

Nerina: Tell me, what do you like doing when you’re not working on research?

Marco: I do different things; sociology is not all my work. I read the news, I listen to jazz, and I watch sports – football.

Nerina: What makes music so special for you?

Marco: Music is important to me because it fills the silence, and I think it’s something that gives meaning to life to some extent. It gives you emotion, expresses sentiments, and so it’s really important.

Biography:

University of Bologna, Italy

Learn more about Marco's work:
unibo.it/marco.trentini Sociologia economica (2006) Rischio e società (2006) Il governo dell'economia da Keynes
Connect with Marco:
twitter.com/MaTrentini facebook.com/marco.trentini

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