One of my more enjoyable projects during lockdown has been finding out what my LSE colleagues do all day. We have recorded a series of 15 minute podcasts called ‘Zooming in With ….’ (catchy, eh?). Each interview is roughly divided up between their lives, an area of their research, and what insights it provides onto the current pandemic and response.

Really liked this diagram that came through my twitter feed recently, and the accompanying text, from Ricardo Levins Morales. ‘A moment of rebellion can give rise to sustained movement growth & expanding people power (Stonewall, Ferguson); peak & quickly fade away (2006 immigrant rights marches); or create a burst of growth followed by steady decline (response to assassinations of BPP

I’m still reeling from my first serious zoomarathon – 12 hours on zoom over 3 days (plus prep), with 50 researchers around the world from the Action for Empowerment and Accountability (A4EA) consortium. I can report back that unfortunately, my mood swings are much the same as in conferences (but with added anxiety/grumpiness from struggling to manage combo of four

BLM continues to inspire reflection and rethinking: ‘Racism is very costly to its victims but also to racists—everyone is worse off in a double defeat. Ethnicism carries big opportunity costs and causes psychological damage (post-colonialism stress disorder.) Celestine Monga on the economy of prejudices. How (not) to write about global health Revisiting the Brixton struggle [i.e. the 1981 riots]. Interview

Might be time for the Avon and Somerset Police to consider using a different media spokesman, or at least calling him Robert…. Ht James Herring ‘8 big food & drink companies paid out over $18bn to shareholders since January – ten times more than has been requested in the UN COVID-19 appeal to stop people going hungry.’ New Oxfam report

My last round up before heading off for holiday for a week. Walking in the English rain – what’s not to like?

Things I hate. This oldie-but-goodie has had me grinning to myself for the last 24 hours, on and off – can’t be bad. CGD is publishing some really excellent thinking around the pandemic. Here’s an example: Beyond Lockdown⁠—Sustainable COVID Control for Low-Income Countries. As is Oxfam. ‘Care work must be at the heart of a feminist COVID-19 recovery.’ New research

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I recently skyped Deepak Nayyar, Professor of Economics at India’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) to discuss his new book, Resurgent Asia You start with an economist called Gunnar Myrdal, who 50 years ago wrote a book saying that Asia was doomed! Myrdal had a European perspective of Asia, with almost no history. For him, Asia began really at the end of

The UK government’s decision to merge DFID and the Foreign Office may be depressing, as I wrote last week, but it has triggered some interesting responses. These include an excellent political obituary from DFID lifer Phil Mason; some straw clutchism from Malcolm Chalmers at RUSI (who thinks DFID will swallow FCO, not the other way round, because its budget is

This post is co-authored with Irene Guijt If we agree that evidence-informed policy and practice are good things, we need to think about what kind of research gets commissioned. Some kinds of research are definitely more useful than others.  We’ve been discussing the urgent needs in Covid research with Heather Marquette (after her great April FP2P posts on this) and