Will Brehm  0:53
Susan Robertson and Mario Novelli, welcome back to FreshEd.

Susan Robertson  0:56
Thank you so much, Will. It is wonderful to be back here. 2021 just about to turn into 2022.

Mario Novelli  1:02
Thanks very much, Will, for the invitation and it seems like the year has passed very quickly. And looking forward to reflecting on it.

Will Brehm  1:09
It has passed rather quickly. And to be honest, I’m rather happy that it’s coming to an end, in a way. You know, last year when we came together around this time, we talked mostly about Coronavirus and COVID-19 being the dominant story of 2020. Thinking back on 2021. Has anything changed in terms of COVID and education? I mean, how do we see what happened in 2021 with COVID and education?

Susan Robertson  1:34
Actually, Will, the big thing that happened was that they discovered, in huge kind of strides very quickly, a vaccine and really have kind of rushed that out to different populations working from the oldest downward and so on. So, that seems to me to be one of the biggest achievements and an achievement, not just in the UK or the United States, but different scientists, different groups of scientists, and different parts of the world. But we did reflect also last time, Will, on vaccine nationalisms, and so on and it kind of plays also into kind of this very virulent strain of populism that’s still with us. So, that hasn’t changed.

Mario Novelli  2:18
For me, I think the last time we were talking, there was still some kind of open debate around the pros and cons of school closures. And I do think that over the last year, we’ve really recognized the importance of keeping schools closed and the negative effects of lockdowns if you go to the schools, and I do think that that’s an important dimension. And you know, I think more generally, there is a reflection now on the negative effects of precautionary measures for COVID. And I’m not talking the whole kind of anti-vax and things but a recognition that there are pros and cons of everything. And how is this not only about COVID, but more broadly in society and the negative effects of lockdowns on poorer sections, most vulnerable groups, has been clear. And I think a more kind of nuanced debate now around how we handle these kinds of crises. So, I just came back from South Africa and Kazakhstan a month away. And one of the things that really hit home to me was, we are all in the same sea here but we’re not in the same boat. And you know, one colleague in South Africa in Cape Town has lost more than 75 people that he would consider close associates during that period, no. And I think that reflects the fact of this uneven experience of COVID. And so, yeah, there is a lot to reflect on and I think we’ll be doing this for the coming years but you know, education definitely is at the heart of that.

Will Brehm  3:51
Right. Nearly five and a half million people have died from COVID since it came on. And it certainly is not impacting people equally. And I think that’s a really important insight. I think people were recognizing that in 2020. But like you said, Mario, it’s perhaps now becoming more common knowledge. It’s being accepted. I don’t know if government then responds in ways that acknowledges that inequality but at least maybe in the public discourse, it is acknowledged.

Susan Robertson  4:17
So, Will, can I also come in? I see COVID stories in many of our student’s research, for example. And as a school governor, it’s been very interesting to actually look at the kinds of statistics that we’re presented with. So, they’re making assessments of how much learning loss there is, and it’s been quite interesting. Children’s writing was one area that showed a kind of huge kind of loss right across the board. And they notice actually, children coming into the very early years. The comment is that they are different, they present themselves as different. Their well-being is kind of noticeably different. So, it’s going to be quite important that we monitor those kinds of losses and different modes of development as well.

Will Brehm  4:59
What should we make of this idea of the learning loss? There seems to be this notion that it’s deeply connected to, like the World Bank, and it sort of implies particular understandings of education. And I just wonder, how should we begin to make sense of this notion that also has become quite commonplace in the discourse around COVID and education. This idea of learning loss is becoming more and more commonplace, but I wonder if we should be a bit critical of it.

Susan Robertson  5:24
You could probably use Freire here and say, well, it’s almost reminiscent of not as much got put it the “bank” is a loss in that regard. But of course, clearly, children learn other things. They learned how to manage, perhaps if they were in a household with many people, siblings’ attention, learning actually, that houses themselves don’t often have enough space for lots of different activity in the household, and so on. So, I think you’re right, Will. There’s that kind of standardized testing kind of statement or banking kind of version. But they will have learned lots of other things that include the world is actually a very uncertain, if not rather scary place. To actually know that you can’t meet your grandparents apart from let’s say, in a cold park in December. You know, that feels very unnatural. And children will process those things. It’s not that they don’t.

Mario Novelli  6:15
I think that when we think about learning loss, for me, it becomes quite reductionist, in terms of the curriculum. And I think, if anything that we’ve seen over the last couple of years is that the school closures, the loss was not just about the curriculum, which could be delivered through technologies or through telephones or through paper. But the whole things around the school, what happens in schools, the interactions, all the kinds of socialization processes. That’s what lots of people, lots of children missed out on. And that makes me think that, thinking about the social role of the school, the protective role of the school, the way that the school can also compensate for societies and try to create better relationships, those kinds of things. I think that that’s often missed out when we just talk about this kind of learning loss in a very technical way. As if the only reason to go to school is the delivery of that curriculum, which as a result, has led to the creation of these online schools in developing countries that are emerging over the last few months. University of Cape Town has just set up one. A range of others saying, basically, we can deliver everything online, which I think I alluded to last year, when I was saying that the danger of our unions, calling for more lockdowns and saying we could deliver it is that somebody would hear that and start delivering everything online.

Will Brehm  7:39
It’s like, we need to shift some of the narrative from learning loss to schooling loss, right? Something broader than just what you can learn on a test and be measured to identify what was lost and what was gained. What about I mean, more broadly, has the last year said anything about how we can conceptualize the nation-state because COVID seems to have -you know, different countries are responding in different ways, which then might allude to ways of conceptualizing and thinking about the nation-state and its role in public life. So, what reflections have you seen or had over the year about the nation state?

Susan Robertson  8:16
I think it’s certainly boosted the idea of nation and entitlements. So, could you be on a repatriation flight or not, for instance. So, even that idea of repatriation kind of speaks very, very directly to a notion of, you belong to a nation or not, in that regard. Being able to just draw up the kind of draw bridges around a big island called Australia, for instance, and nothing’s in and nothing’s out in that regard. And you can see, most recently, you know, with the latest variant, instantly going to closing off the borders. And so, what that has done in the academic literature has, it seems to me, also now got a very kind of lively conversation going around borders and new kinds of ordering and bordering and so on. So, in the academic kind of literature, it seems to me it’s kind of given a boost to a certain range of conversations and writing in that area too.

Mario Novelli  9:12
My reflections on that are a bit more particular, because I really got into the work of Mahmood Mamdani this year, and his recent book, Neither Natives nor Settlers, which was really around the tension between the nation and the state and starting to reflect on the way a particular nation in every country has dominated the state. And it’s used that state as a vehicle to push forward. And then other nations struggle to take power of that state. And then when they get there, they precisely repeat the same and then he argues for this kind of need for a post national state that’s pluralist and open. And I do think during this whole COVID period, the intensification of inequalities is also around those, you know, who’s paying the price for this crisis? Which nation? And social class as well. But definitely, the whole kind of understanding of nation is coming to the fore at the same time that we’ve got this extreme nationalism that is emerging in many parts of the world and a tension between the kind of democracy and authoritarian rule, no. And I think that the special issue that the journal has coming on populism, really important debates around that I think, are making us really reflect a bit on relationships between democracy and capitalism, nation and state. You know, big questions. And then of course, there is that other dimension, which is, you know, the state-like activities of capitalist corporations and the emergence of all of these kinds of actors sending people to the moon, and transformatory times, we really are in.

Will Brehm  10:51
It’s quite interesting to sort of think about. You know, there’s the recognition of the borders that Susan is bringing up and a re-emphasis on those borders. And potentially, as Mario was bringing up the differences between certain groups within a border struggling for power within the state. And there’s this re-emphasis, in a sense on borders, and you see the vaccine nationalism. But then at the same time as Mario, you were just sort of saying that these corporations seem to be beyond those borders in some ways and able to almost manipulate the state for their interests, right? And I’m thinking of, there’s this new idea called the de-risking state. I don’t know if -maybe, it’s not that new. But it definitely has come up quite a lot in 2021 where the state is basically taking all the risk for different financial products for these big financial companies to then sort of invest potentially in social issues like climate change. But also, I think, we’re beginning to see some of this in education with things like the development impact bonds. So, it’s this really strange moment of tension, where there’s both this recognition of borders and this doubling down of borders and the very clear notion of the state. But then at the same time, this sort of transcending of state borders and manipulating of states for financial ends.

I think Facebook is a good example of that. But coming back to the whole risk. That is a product that has actually come out of the financial sector and sold at great cost to, for example, universities at the beginning of the 2000s. You know, so we all fill out our risk registers, don’t we, and they get sent up to a school and into the main university. But of course, by definition, risk is something that’s going to happen in the future. And by definition, we don’t know the future. And in fact, we might have guesses and so on, but there’s high degrees of unpredictability, about by definition risk in that regard. My sense, actually, about the state and massive amounts of money that has actually been borrowed and so on, is that it’s set up kind of potentially a high level of indebtedness, because there was almost a kind of freewheeling style as to who those contracts went to. You know, often typically lack of any kind of oversight, expertise, nepotism, and all of this kind of thing. So, we could talk about a de-risking state, but in fact, there’s kind of high potentials for corruption, that it seems to me, we can actually evidence over the last 12-18 months to do with the redistribution of monies and outlays of large amounts of money for, let’s say, gear to protect you but never gets used, that kind of thing. It feels actually very sad in many senses because at the same time, what we’ve got is a bigger gap, actually, between those who are ahead and those are actually now even further behind.

Mario Novelli  13:39
Do you think the critique of China was always that it wasn’t really a capitalist state, that it was a state capitalism has kind of gone full circle and previously capitalist states have become state capitalists. You know, the state is central to that capitalist development. And I know that we’re always taught the neoliberal state was always a capitalist state, in a sense that it was always there as the engine to facilitate market capitalism. But it seems to me that the state has really taken on new extensive roles that we never really comprehended. I mean, if Jeremy Corbyn had won that election a few years ago and suggested the expanded role of the state that we currently have under this conservative government, they would have been destroyed. And yet, you know, we see it and absolutely right in the hands of this current Conservative government, it means passing on all that money to their friends in different companies, no. Crazy, crazy stories.

Will Brehm  14:37
Yeah, totally. And crazy corruption, as Susan was saying. I think that’s a great way to think about it. I mean, I know David Harvey in his podcast, the Anti-Capitalist Chronicles, he for the last few months, I should say, he’s been really going into the issue of China and authoritarian capitalism and basically trying to tell people that the future of capitalism is in China, and you have to actually analyze the state in China to understand where capitalism is going. So, I think Mario, you’re spot on?

Susan Robertson  15:07
One of the questions that you kind of posed for us to think about today’s discussion, or conversation was, transformations of the state and what’s new. I mean, the rise and the rise of China. And it seems to me, there’s a kind of a standoff, we could actually add Russia in there at the moment and around the Ukraine border, lots of troops being assembled, and so on. And actually, the national security laws in Hong Kong, which have actually cast a deep and long shadow over education institutions. Lots of people have lost their jobs. China, actually, been very clear that it wants to take Taiwan back, for instance. It’s a lot that’s going on. And it has big implications for education because it does matter what conversations in education institutions you can and you can’t have. It has mattered in Hong Kong, for example, amongst academics who’s lost their job and who hasn’t, and so on. And I don’t see that changing in the near future, actually, in that regard.

Mario Novelli  16:06
I, kind of think, that part of the issue here is that the West post 9/11 lost its moral authority because essentially, up to that point, there was always these arguments in the previous two decades around the role of democracy, human rights but that all seemed to have been put on the shelf post 9/11. Black site prisons, torture, Abu Ghraib, creating the conditions under which laws could be abolished in order to justify the common good. All of those things were put out there by the West. And then how do you expect other nations to follow that? They basically said, look, it’s fine to chop up your political opponents in Istanbul in the Saudi Embassy, it’s fine to do these things because you’re doing them too, you know. So, in a sense, that kind of, we don’t have a kind of moral high ground on these issues. And you know, it irritates me that on the news, we talk about China’s lack of human rights, and don’t ask how many people the West has killed over the last 20 years. Let’s talk about that, too. Let’s put them on the level playing field and start raising those questions about what happened over the last two decades. There is a reason why Trump, there is a reason why Bolsonaro, there’s a reason why Erdoğan are in power now, because we created the conditions under which these people could flourish.

Will Brehm  17:25
Yeah. And then it becomes just so hypocritical to watch the US or Australia say they’re going to boycott the next Olympics in Beijing because of human rights issues. It’s just unbelievable that they’re not recognizing, in Australia, for instance, Manus Island and the absolute horrible condition of refugees over the last few years. Yeah, I mean, I agree with you, Mario. I mean, at the same time, one of the things that did happen in 2021, that maybe we should be, I don’t know, think about and reflect on -and we’re beginning to- is the end of the Afghan war. The war in Afghanistan that has been going on for 20 years has come to an end. So, how do we understand, or begin to understand what has happened over these 20 years? How do we begin to reflect on it? What do we make of the Taliban controlling Afghanistan and the future of education in that country?

Susan Robertson  18:14
I just want to remind us all that going into Afghanistan was justified at one level on September 11. But of course, they were already ready. It was kind of the strategy for the 21st century to target Afghanistan prior to September 11. I think there’s some inconvenient facts or accounts that are actually out there that slightly distort our understanding of the US’ kind of part in Afghanistan. But yet, Mario, I mean, this is your kind of patch. The rapid withdrawal and the prioritizing of animals over people. So, I’d be interested in your thoughts, Mario, on that one.

Mario Novelli  18:56
I think that, you know, what it shows is 20 years of failure, no? I mean, we talked already of the kind of moral bankruptcy of the West, but also political, military, geopolitical strategy. It’s been a disaster. But I do want to reflect a little bit on the entanglement that our field of education has had with this whole two-decade period because it’s absolutely right, what Susan was saying about the justifications. And the justifications were to hunt down Osama bin Laden, but they were also about girls’ education. And there was a strong discursive justification around the West being in there for the right reasons to try to support. And many of us, and many of our colleagues, many practitioners in our field entered into that discussion uncritically with open arms. And you know, when the withdrawal happened, it was this kind of great betrayal. But you know, the signs were on the cards years ago, and people like myself who were writing about that were bad-mouthed and seen as unsympathetic to gender issues and a whole range of other areas.

And, you know, Jeffrey Sachs, who has recently given testimony on some of this stuff, he’s recently reviewed the amount of money that was spent by the US specifically but I’m sure it kind of pans out in other areas. And he talks about how there was over $1 trillion spent, but around $900 billion of that 1 trillion was spent on military, and just a tiny fraction of that was on the humanitarian side. So, the idea that somehow, we could separate what was going on in the development sector, from that military mission to me is absolutely absurd, yeah. And so, I don’t want to say this but it’s crocodile tears around these issues, yeah. But how many people died during that occupation? How many lives were lost? And we can’t put that in a separate box to the right of girls to have education? No, you have to understand it. And so, it’s a classic kind of counter-insurgency, carrots and sticks strategy there that during the day, we provide education and at night, we go down and hunt your parents out and shoot them. You know, that was what was going on. And so, I think that that should push us in this field to think about our entanglements with power. It happened during the Cold War. It’s happened during the War on Terror. And after two decades of the War on Terror, it’s a good time now to sit back and think, okay, how did our field relate to this, and you know, the deradicalization stuff is part of that. That big industry of deradicalizing, which pathologizes youth, is part of that story. But there is a lot more and I’m working on a couple of papers at the moment related to some of that stuff that I hope will push that issue forward.

Will Brehm  21:48
Do you really think things are going to change in our field? The entrenched interests in our field, the amount of money people make from consultancies in our fields? Is it really going to change? I mean, it hasn’t changed after the Cold War, right? I mean, this is stuff that’s been going on since the 1950’s. So, why now would it change?

Susan Robertson  22:05
There is a lovely series going on, right at the moment around decolonizing education in emergencies. And some of the Cambridge students and colleagues have been involved in that but it’s a much bigger and broader effort. And I’ve been in some of those conversations and spaces, and they are very difficult because to some extent, you’ve got people who are well-meaning. But it’s not about whether you’re well-meaning or not, it’s there’s a kind of structural relationship between education in emergencies and let’s say, kind of predatory states in that regard. So, they are very, very difficult conversations to actually have. They’ve talked about “kicking away the ladder”, and people are kind of horrified, you know? What if you actually didn’t have aid and you actually allowed degrees of greater determination, and so on for particular populations? What does that world begin to look like? What does the world look like when essentially you don’t have these kind of symbiotic but almost to some extent, parasitic on each other sets of relationships? Not easy conversations at all?

Mario Novelli  23:12
I think you’re right. And, you know, in response to Will’s suggestion that nothing changes, I think that -you know, I’ve been in that field of education in emergencies now, since the early 2000’s. I’m reflecting back on some of that in writing that I’m doing now. And, you know, I think when I started writing it, it was really a kind of resignation letter that, you know, that’s enough. That’s enough. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t listen to those panels and those arguments about how the West is trying to do its best. And you know, the South is this savage, wild space that needs to be tamed. But as Susan says, there are so many more critical voices in that area now emerging that actually, I realize that it’s about pulling those people together. It’s working with them, supporting more critical colleagues, broadening out, diversifying the field, and then okay, maybe you don’t change completely, that whole field, but you create a significant obstacle to prevent all of the bullshit that goes on within that, yeah. And it is structural as well. And Susan is absolutely right there that, you know, my arguments around working with different partners require that you get your own money, because the people that you need to be working with don’t have resources. And so of course, it’s those powerful organizations, institutions: DFID, USAID, they’re the ones with the resources, and they’ve got, of course, their own agendas. But there are ways around that. Yeah, there are ways around that. And then I do think that change is coming and it’s coming in different ways. But it’s not necessarily coming from academia, no. We’re often an echo chamber for struggles that are going on in the ground, in the Global South, in the South, in the North, that are really changing things.

Will Brehm  24:58
We should definitely celebrate the sort of growth of decolonization movements inside higher education this year. I mean, everyone has seen them. And it’s become commonplace in a way. And I think that’s a hugely important step. Hopefully, those struggles and the reading groups, etc. can actually make those structural changes. Hopefully they can be connected, as Mario was saying to all of these struggles that are happening in people’s lives outside of higher education. And I think at least in 2021, or I heard of, there was something called The Alternatives Project that sort of came about. And it’s a group of academics trying to actually recognize all of these alternative ways of organizing education that currently exists, even if we don’t necessarily recognize it that often inside the academy. So, there are these spaces of hope. And I think it is valuable to point to them and say that they probably grew in 2021.

Susan Robertson  25:51
I mean, I think you’re right, but I think the decolonizing agenda, or Mignolo talks about the decolonial orientation. And he’s deliberately choosing that term as a way of not just having kind of that binary of you’re the colonizer versus the decolonizer and it’s, you know, “the West, the rest”, that kind of stuff. The orientation essentially for Mignolo is to invite us to always think of the other kind of possibilities. And I think that’s where Santos’ ecology of knowledges, being always very attentive to the way in which absences are actually being produced. But even including well-meaning, kind of, decolonial kind of discourses. Mario mentioned the Mamdani book, which I’ve also read, and people should put it on their Christmas list. It’s a fabulous book because actually, the thing that he’s reflecting on too, is essentially, in the Westphalian state, for example, you can’t actually ever have a two-state solution on the table. It’s one nation. And in the case, he’s reflecting on in the United States, the indigenous population don’t actually ever get to present their case. So, decolonization, to some extent, doesn’t necessarily grasp hold of the indigenization debate that takes on a slightly different kind of color. And in that sense, there are different kinds of relationships to land that perhaps aren’t easily kind of recognized in the decolonizing. Important conversations. I’m not saying that they’re not. But I think the idea of the orientation is important. What I’m also aware of is Boaventura de Sousa Santos really pushing us to think about different resources and cultural resources that we might, spiritual resources, even that we might think. And maybe that takes us to, let’s say, the launch of the UNESCO Futures of Education pushing us to have a global conversation. Although perhaps I would want to challenge UNESCO not just about launching a conversation, essentially. But actually, what does our world look like in practice? What are the things that we will actually do? Not just say, but actually do? What are our commitments, our practices in that kind of regard? You know, and these would be challenging conversations, really, for indigenous populations, for instance, who’ve lost land and identity and everything. And this is right around the world, actually.

Will Brehm  28:17
Yeah. Like, what social contract are some oppressed indigenous communities really a part of, that UNESCO is imagining in some future, right?

Susan Robertson  28:24
Yeah. I mean, the problem of the idea of the social contract is that it is absolutely tied to a notion of the Westphalian state and giving up your sovereignty. But if you’re not assigned any sovereignty, if you have no sovereignty, how can you give that up? In other words, indigenous populations actually were not regarded as sovereign subjects in that regard. And if we went to Australia, the indigenous population, you know, shame on Australia, you know, only get citizenship in late 60s, early 1970s. In the case of the United States, it’s not in a constitutional right for the First Nations peoples. Yeah so, there’s an awful lot of work to be done on the decolonizing agenda there.

Mario Novelli  29:11
When you were talking now, I was thinking about how if you remember, like 20 odd years ago, Susan, where we talked about Boaventura about how you should always talk about globalization in the plural -globalizations? I think the similar thing has to be said about decolonization. That you should be talking about in the plural. There are many different agendas, and some of them are to tame the decolonization agenda, no? To institutionalize it, to create a tick box, and to make it safe for capitalism, safe for universities, no? So, that’s why it’s been taken up there. But of course, there are other decolonization processes that really have strong material roots and are emerging out of social movements, trying to rethink futures, you know, the Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir Latin America. The kind of different ways of conceptualizing alternative futures. And then, you know, there is a whole kind of intellectualized decolonization movement that emerges out of post-structuralism and postmodern theory that’s much more rooted in the discourse. And each one has its kind of different dynamics though. And my own sense is that I wish that people could reconnect a little bit with a long history of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, decolonial kind of thread and go back a little bit to understanding the links between those struggles. Because sometimes I feel like people inside the decolonial movement think that anti-imperialism was created in the late 1990’s, or the late 1980’s. And actually, it elides all that history because it’s modernist, and whatever. But that’s part of the story that we can learn from Steve Biko and the Black consciousness movement, Walter Rodney, you know, all of that critique is very rich, no? And, you know, if anything, Fanon’s decolonization of the mind emerged out of that literature and provides the bridge to this current one. So, at least in the university, I hope that we can revisit some of those things and recognize the kind of positive role of anti-imperialist struggles, anti-colonial struggles and link them up together, because sometimes I feel that gets lost a bit.

Susan Robertson  31:25
Satnam Virdee’s book is really good on that, erasing racism and he traces it right back to -he’s in conversation to some extent with Gurminder Bhambra, a sociologist up at the University of Glasgow. But when the labor movement is at its best, it engages with an international agenda as opposed to a nation state agenda and actually provides a really important account of the way in which the Irish, for example, kind of go back historically 100 years or more ago. The Jewish populations and so on, were actually the target and the object of huge amounts of race. I mean, Australia gets born out of those kinds of practices, doesn’t it? You know, the clearings, anti-Irish and that kind of thing. A really quite important book actually and worth engaging with.

Will Brehm  32:13
And I’ll just add, I mean, one book that did come out in 2021, was that book by David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, which actually does this sort of historical analysis with archaeology all the way back in prehistory, and really does show a lot of the sort of indigenous groups critiques of different sort of colonizing powers and imperial powers. And it’s a really nice recognition of that long history and puts us in a particular place in a way. And shows how state formation and sovereignty was a form of domination. And it didn’t always exist that way. And there were groups of people, societies of people that sort of gave up sovereignty to some power, and then actually realized, “Wait a second! That was a really bad idea”. And then they move back to some different way of organizing their social relations. And I think it’s just a really wonderful book to see how human society is not this linear, sort of progressive -we’re moving towards the nation state from hunter gatherers. But actually, societies have gone in all different directions for all different reasons. And I think that it’s actually quite hopeful because you end up realizing the structures that exist today don’t have to be. There is a different way to organize our social relations. And so, in a way, that was quite a hopeful 800 page read, but it was pretty good in the end. One thing I feel like I have to bring up before we draw to a close is the issue of climate change and the climate crisis. I mean, I would be remiss to end this conversation without reflecting about climate and what happened over 2021. I mean, anything stand out to you as being important, hopeful, pessimistic, more pessimistic now than ever from climate change and what happened in 2021?

Mario Novelli  33:59
There are two things for me. One is that I do think the pandemic itself has made us realize the fragility of our relationship with the environment. And you know, our increasing pressure on the environment is producing the conditions under which viruses, pandemics emerge. And then the second thing I think we saw for this year, is that the challenges of our world are not matched by the capacities of our leadership. No better exemplified than in the UK. No better exemplified than a Prime Minister who talks at the COP (UN Climate Change Conference) and then takes a private jet back to go to a party in London afterwards. The hypocrisy, the lies. All of these things, it just makes you think, okay. So, we’ve got all these global challenges related to the environment, and who are the ones that are going to push this through Johnson, Macron, Bolsonaro, Erdoğan? you know, I could go on with the list -Modi- uh, you know, we have these huge challenges, and we have a paucity of leadership which I think reflects an extreme crisis that really needs radical transformation.

Susan Robertson  35:05
On the other hand, Mario, I mean, it’s useful to remind ourselves that actually, it’s that young generation where we do see leadership, you know. A kind of very explicit, very public set of concerns that are put out there by young people. And it’s just very politically acute in terms of how they read the world, how they read the future, and so on. And so, to some extent, that’s a space of hope. It’s just a pity that kind of energy and that capacity to challenge isn’t actually engaged with, as Mario said, by those who are in political power and can actually make a difference. It does kind of matter what the political leadership is able to do, and say, and act on our behalf. Yeah. So yeah, a bit of a mixed bag, Will, probably not driving hard enough at the kind of decisions that would need to be actually made in order to meet the kind of targets that everyone agrees actually have to be out there and met.

Mario Novelli  36:03
You reminded me of that. And I do agree with you, Susan, that I think probably the most interesting things that happened during the COP happened outside of the COP. The mobilizations, the demonstrations, the meetings. Not powerful enough to force themselves to transform the decisions of those leaders but nevertheless, knocking on the door. And there was a very nice meeting on the fringes and the Indian scholar and activist, Vijay Prashad was talking, and he said, “you in the West. You’ve got to get your act together. You’ve got to realize that your discourse around the future does not hold for us in the Global South. Because it’s not about our future. It’s about our present. Our present is being destroyed by climate change. People can’t get enough food, they can’t get enough water, they can’t get enough access to basic things. So, this is a crisis, but the crisis is manifesting itself in the Global South. And we can’t talk about it in our commodified terms about transformational energy in the future and it’s going to be okay for us, when the majority of the world’s population are already living through that crisis.” So, I think that’s why I kind of despair a little in terms of the failure to address the real challenge that’s out there.

Will Brehm  37:18
I think despair is a good way to think about it. 2021, in a sense, was depressing on the climate front. But it was also depressing for some people we’ve lost in our field. And in particular, there were two people that came on the show, previously on FreshEd, who passed away this year. So, Girindre Beeharry and Aziz Choudry both died in 2021. It’s just terrible. Two really great people leave us basically and I just want to acknowledge how much they meant to FreshEd. But I also think they, in particular, Aziz meant a lot to Mario. I think you had a very close relationship with him.

Mario Novelli  37:56
I mean, a terrible, terrible blow. Such a young person. Aziz was just 55. Prolific author, activist, and in a sense our life histories have coincided. You know, he was active in the anti-globalization movement, the Global Justice Movement, committed to workers education, popular movements, and just a fantastic person. I mentioned him, I was listening back to last year’s interview, and I mentioned him in that by saying that whenever he used to come and visit me, he used to start in Scotland and end in Brighton and make sure that in two weeks, he did events every evening, because he was so conscious. If you give him a bottle of water in the meeting, he would say “Why are you giving me a bottle of water? Don’t waste the plastic”. He was absolutely ethically 100% unmatchable. And for that, I always say that he was the best of us. He really was the best of us. And it’s a terrible blow. I was in South Africa where he had just taken up a professorship last month and met so many people that had been influenced by him. And now the abstracts have just closed for a special issue that we’re doing for the journal on Aziz. We’ve got 28 or 24 sets of papers. But beautiful emails that have come in saying how much Aziz meant to them. You know, people that hadn’t met him necessarily but because of his work on migrant workers, because of his work -so I really think that we owe it to Aziz to honor his memory and to carry on with many of the things and take those forward. And our small grain of sand in the journal is precisely to do that. To carry his intellectual ideas forward.

Susan Robertson  39:34
And Will, could I just finish off also by just mentioning Paulo Freire. So, this idea of, we might lose the person, but we don’t actually lose symbolically what individuals like Aziz, or in the case of Freire, kind of stand for. So, in Cambridge, but it involved many institutions that include the Global South, organized- students here the Latin American collective- a recognition of 100 years of the importance of Freire’s work to education. And it was just an extraordinary two weeks, and a sculpture has actually been donated to our faculty at the University of Cambridge here and it’s the only one outside of Brazil. And in a way, it’s a very wonderful kind of symbol to acknowledge the importance for Freire. It’s about tolerance, dialogue, a way in which you engage with landless movements, workers, tackle major issues of literacy, and so on. So, I’m so looking forward to the special issue coming out in Globalization, Societies, and Education that Mario is the Special Issue editor of but also, for this journal, actually. We are going to have a special issue on Paulo Freire, a global educator, and it seems to me those things are really important as well.

Will Brehm  40:54
It’s a really great way to think about, you know, we might have lost Aziz and Girindre Beeharry, but like Paulo Freire, the ideas can live on. And I think that’s a really nice way to think about their lives, and their work, and their impact. It’s not over just because they might have passed away. So, to finalize, what are we looking forward to in 2022 now that the year is just coming to an end?

Susan Robertson  41:16
Well, Will, my life next year, by the time you talk to me next year, assuming we’ll talk again, I’ll be in a different part of the world taking up a really exciting position at the University of Monash as a new school that’s been created within the Faculty of Education, Culture, and Society, and really, really looking forward to kind of an opportunity to kind of think creatively imaginatively around what a new school could begin to look like. What kind of energy, what kind of critique, what kind of intellectual resources, conversations and so on, we might get going?

Will Brehm  41:52
Congratulations. That’s fantastic to hear. And what about you, Mario?

Mario Novelli  41:56
Well, nothing so amazing as that. I mean, it’s a sad loss, actually, for the UK that Susan is leaving.

Susan Robertson  42:03
But I’m not really leaving. I’m part of -like this conversation now. Part of a global conversation and a community. And if anything, Will, what you’ve done through FreshEd is build a sense of a global conversation. So, I do want to say congratulations to you on that front. What a wonderful achievement.

Mario Novelli  42:21
No, but it’s true, Susan. Although having given a lecture in Monash at 6am a few weeks ago, sometimes the logistics of geography do affect our sense of presence. But I should say that I’ve known Susan since I was a political activist in Colombia. I came to the UK to Bristol when Susan had just recently been appointed at the University of Bristol. And so, I’ve been very close to Susan and yesterday, when Viv Ellis, the Dean of the Faculty of Education, tweeted out that Susan had been appointed as the head of the new school, I laughed because about four months ago, I was appointed as an honorary distinguished fellow of Monash. And so, the idea is that I visit in the near future. And you know, the idea of seeing Susan, seeing Roger, visiting them and maintaining that relationship is of course, really important. So, I hope a trip to visit Susan is on the horizon. Congratulations, Susan. That’s wonderful news for all of us. As you said, great job Will, as always raising the profile of our field and really acting as a role model, actually, for many innovations in the field. I think that podcast’s become a big thing in our field. And I don’t think it’s any small measure, that your role in that process.

Will Brehm  43:43
Well, here’s to 2022. Susan Robertson, Mario Novelli, thank you so much for joining the show. As always, 2021 is coming to a close and we look forward to 2022.

Susan Robertson  43:54
Thanks so much, Will.

Mario Novelli  43:55
Thanks a lot.

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