A pioneering project to teach university students alongside prisoners, so that they learn from each other, has proved remarkably successful. The creators of Learning Together, Drs Ruth Armstrong and Amy Ludlow, are now expanding the scheme and seeking to widen participation across university departments.
As Europe expanded its overseas colonies, fixed ideas of racial differences took hold. Historian Dr Mélanie Lamotte, whose forebears include a slave, is researching a brief period when European notions of ethnicity were relatively fluid. Early French settlers believed that non-white inhabitants of the colonies could be ‘civilised’ and ‘improved’.
New study identifies four strategies and two key methods for scaling up social businesses in developing countries in order to meet the unmet needs of more than four billion people.
Andy Martin (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages) discusses existentialism and the EU referendum.
Marcus Tomalin (Department of Engineering) discusses the role of translation in social inequality and social justice.
Today, we commence a month-long focus on the future of cities. To begin, Doug Crawford-Brown, Robert Mair and Koen Steemers describe the challenges our future cities will face and how mitigation depends on the innovations we create and put in place today.
Thomas Robert Malthus, who was born 250 years ago, became notorious for his ‘principle of population’. He argued that, because poverty was inevitable, some people would not find a seat at ‘nature’s table’ and would perish. In a new book, historians at Cambridge and Harvard set the life and work of this contentious thinker within a wider context – and look in particular at his engagement with the world beyond Europe.
Thomas Burgoine and Pablo Monsivais (Centre for Diet and Activity Research) discuss how takeaways can make social inequality worse.
Anthony Pickles (Division of Social Anthropology) discusses why gambling is a relatively modern invention.
Julian Hargreaves (Centre of Islamic Studies) discusses the forms of discrimination faced by Muslim women in Britain.
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