Thomas Kador, "Object-Based Learning: Exploring Museums and Collections in Education" (UCL Press, 2025)

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1. 

   E21 · 20 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 12 min

   Alena Ledeneva, "Russian Pendulum: Paradoxes, Practices and Patterns" (UCL Press, 2026)

   Alena Ledeneva is Professor of Politics and Society at the University College London and a founder of the Global Informality Project. Her research focuses on informal practices, and she has written several Russia-focused books, including Russia’s Economy of Favours, How Russia Really Works and Can Russia Modernise. The Global Informality has also published 3 volumes of its Global Encyclopaedia of Informality. Alena is here today to talk about her new book Russian Pendulum: Paradoxes, Practices and Patterns (UCL Press, 2026), which has been shortlisted for the 2026 Pushkin House Book Prize.…

2. 

   E20 · 6 Jun 2026 · 36 min

   Ashok Malhotra, "Imperial Science, the Organic Movement and the Path to Shangri La, 1900-1969" (UCL Press, 2026)

   Imperial Science, the Organic Movement and the Path to Shangri La, 1900-1969 (UCL Press, 2026) is a global history project that examines the diffusion of scientific and environmental discourses from India to Britain and the US. Ashok Malhotra examines how imperial agendas and colonial stereotyping shaped dietary and agricultural research carried out in the 1920s in British India, from soil protection initiatives to studies of diet and healthy living. It also discusses how a selective interpretation of this research, which focused on the supposed vigor of one community, the Hunzas, influenced…

3. 

   E19 · 16 Jan 2026 · 46 min

   Helen Graham, "Deconstituting Museums: Participation’s Affective Work" (UCL Press, 2024)

   What is the future of museums? In Deconstituting Museums: Participation’s Affective Work Helen Graham, an Associate Professor in School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds, considers the current state of the sector and stresses the need for significant change. Drawing on both professional reflections and academic analysis, the book introduces the concept of the museum constitution as a key site for struggle within the institution. It shows the challenge of making participation meaningful, and the scale of transformation needed to reframe museums’…

4. 

   E18 · 4 Dec 2025 · 42 min

   Anna Shadrina, "The Babushka Phenomenon: Older Women and the Political Sociology of Ageing in Russia" (UCL Press, 2025)

   The Babushka Phenomenon: Older Women and the Political Sociology of Ageing in Russia (UCL Press, 2025) by Dr. Anna Shadrina examines the social production of ageing in post-Soviet Russia, highlighting the role of grandmothers as primary caregivers due to men’s traditional estrangement from family life. This expectation places grandmothers, or babushkas, in a position where they prioritise childcare and housework over their careers, making them unpaid family carers reliant on the state and their children. Dr. Shadrina situates older Russian women’s experiences within the post-Soviet…

5. 

   E55 · 23 Nov 2025 · 41 min

   Ilan Kelman, "Antarcticness: Inspirations and Imaginaries" (UCL Press, 2022)

   Antarcticness: Inspirations and Imaginaries (UCL Press, 2022) edited by Ilan Kelman Antarcticness joins disciplines, communication approaches, and ideas to explore meanings and depictions of Antarctica. Personal and professional words in poetry and prose, plus images, present and represent Antarctica, as presumed and as imagined, alongside what is experienced around the continent and by those watching from afar. These understandings explain how the Antarctic is viewed and managed while identifying aspects that should be more prominent in policy and practice. The authors and artists place…

6. 

   E15 · 10 Sep 2025 · 51 min

   Jovana Diković, "The Laissez-Faire Peasant: Post-Socialist Rural Development in Serbia" (UCL Press, 2025)

   What if rural progress isn’t about government intervention but about the self-reliance and ingenuity of peasants themselves?  The Laissez-Faire Peasant: Post-Socialist Rural Development in Serbia (UCL Press, 2025) subverts conventional wisdom on rural development by shifting the focus from state-led planning to the agency of peasants themselves. Rejecting the notion that rural populations are passive victims of top-down policies, Jovana Dikovic presents a compelling ethnographic study of three Serbian villages, where autonomy and local cooperation drive economic and social resilience. She…

7. 

   E215 · 14 Jul 2025 · 1 hr 44 min

   John Nott, "Between Feast Famine: Food, Health, and the History of Ghana's Long Twentieth Century" (UCL Press, 2025)

   Ghana’s twentieth century was one of dramatic political, economic, and environmental change. Sparked initially by the impositions of colonial rule, these transformations had significant, if rarely uniform, repercussions for the determinants of good and bad nutrition. All across this new and uneven polity, food production, domestic reproduction, gender relations, and food cultures underwent radical and rapid change. This volatile national history was matched only by the scientific instability of nutritional medicine during these same years. Moving between the dry Northern savannah, the…

8. 

   E79 · 6 Jan 2025 · 54 min

   Alastair Gornall, "Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270" (UCL Press, 2020)

   Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270 (UCL Press, 2020) is the first intellectual history of premodern Sri Lanka’s most culturally productive period. This era of reform (1157–1270) shaped the nature of Theravada Buddhism both in Sri Lanka and also Southeast Asia and even today continues to define monastic intellectual life in the region. Alastair Gornall argues that the long century’s literary productivity was not born of political stability, as is often thought, but rather of the social, economic and political chaos brought about by invasions and…

9. 

   E37 · 2 Aug 2024 · 53 min

   Elena Borisova, "Paradoxes of Migration in Tajikistan: Locating the Good Life" (UCL Press, 2024)

   Paradoxes of Migration in Tajikistan: Locating the Good Life (UCL Press, 2024) by Dr. Elena Borisova is the first ethnographic monograph on migration in Tajikistan, one of the most remittance-dependent countries in the world. Moving beyond economistic push-pull narratives about post-Soviet migration, it foregrounds the experiences of those who ‘stay put’ in the sending society and struggle to reproduce their moral communities. Dr. Borisova examines the role of mobility in historical and cultural ideas about the good life and how it becomes entwined with people’s efforts to become good, moral…

10. 

    E274 · 24 Jul 2024 · 57 min

    Alexander Sasha Kondakov, "Violent Affections: Queer Sexuality, Techniques of Power, and Law in Russia" (UCL Press, 2022)

    Violent Affections: Queer Sexuality, Techniques of Power, and Law in Russia (UCL Press, 2022) by Alexander Sasha Kondakov uncovers techniques of power that work to translate emotions into violence against queer people. Based on analysis of over 300 criminal cases of anti-queer violence in Russia before and after the introduction of ‘gay propaganda’ law, the book shows how violent acts are framed in emotional language by perpetrators during their criminal trials. It then utilises an original methodology of studying ‘legal memes’ and argues that these individual affective states are directly…