Susan Robertson & Mario Novelli • FreshEd

Susan Robertson & Mario Novelli
2024 in Review

The FreshEd Podcast · FreshEd #381 – 2024 in Review (Susan Robertson and Mario Novelli)

Overview

As we near the end of 2024, it’s time to take stock of the year. What were the big events in 2024 and how might they impact the field of CIE? What new ideas emerged? And where is our field headed in 2025? Continuing this FreshEd tradition, Susan Robertson and Mario Novelli join me for the last episode of the year. We’ll also discuss the future of FreshEd as we near our 10th anniversary.

Mario Novelli is professor in the political economy of education at the University of Sussex. Susan Robertson is a professor of education at Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge as well as at the University of Manchester. They co-edit the journal Globalisation, Societies and Education.

Citation: Robertson, Susan, Novelli, Mario with Will Brehm, FreshEd, 381, podcast audio, December 23, 2024. https://freshedpodcast.com/2024inreview/

Transcript

Will Brehm 0:45
Susan Robertson and Mario Novelli, welcome back to FreshEd.

Susan Robertson 1:17
It’s so wonderful to be here, and just let me log on. We’re just one year short of 10 years, Will. So, year nine, and hoping to also see you next year.

Mario Novelli 1:26
Yeah. Welcome and great to be here.

Will Brehm 1:28
And thank you again, as always, for joining the end of year show. I think this is number nine in a row that we’ve been doing. It’s been an incredible run, really. And I guess you know, thinking back on 2024, it really has been an interesting year. I always hate using that term, because it doesn’t really mean much, but to me, one of the big things about 2024 was how much war and conflict there has been from Ukraine, to Gaza, to Myanmar, to Syria, to Sudan, among countless other places. It’s like conflict has raged and just raged continuously. And so, I guess Mario, you know, you have studied education in emergencies for a long time. How are you making sense of education and conflict in 2024?

Mario Novelli 2:09
Yeah, that’s a good question. I think 2024 -I think the Global Peace Index produced its annual report last year and said that we have the most conflicts now since 1948. So, clearly, we are in the midst of rising conflict around the world. I think Palestine still going on. Much to the surprise of many people, the situation in Gaza seems to have no limits. 14 months into the genocide, officially 45,000 deaths, majority of those women and children, systematic bombing of schools, all universities have been destroyed in Gaza. Scholasticide has become a normalized phrase to describe something that we wouldn’t normally comprehend, drones AI-controlled floating around the Gaza Strip randomly assassinating women and children and yeah, the silence of many of our institutions on this is deafening. And of course, it’s not just Palestine, it’s not just Gaza, but we can see a growing expansion of conflicts around the world that the Global Peace Index talks about now, internationalized internal conflicts. So, basically, a recognition that civil wars are really not about internal phenomena, but they’re all about external actors. And I think that in that we can start to see what I would say is the contours of a third world war that we’re inside. It’s the early stages, the beginning, that is likely to spread and move in different directions and unpredictable directions. And I think that in so many ways, education is linked up to that. Linked up in the sense that the kind of liberal education order is coming under threat at the same time. So, probably, if we kind of look thinking, kind of long durée of different periods, this kind of neoliberal period, post-cold war, liberal order from Education for All, let’s say in Jomtien in 1990, which for many of us, we teach as a reference point, and the kind of optimism of free markets, freedom, freedom of speech, I think in 2024 we end up with scholasticide in Gaza. So, kind of from EFA to scholasticide in Gaza is about where we’re at. And I think we could, you know, extrapolate to that to look at, you know, shifts in the liberal order, more generally, but definitely with a focus on education. I think that is a good starting point to start to reflect about how did we get here.

Will Brehm 4:49
Susan, how would you reflect on how we got to this scholasticide?

Susan Robertson 4:55
My thinking, sociologically about this, is that -and I wouldn’t want to put it all down to, let’s say, neoliberalism, but for the last four decades, beginning in the 1980s you know, particularly into the 1990s and onwards, breaking down of social bonds are so evident, it’s almost generate a set of circumstances ideologically underpinned that basically says that you’re on your own, you’re responsible for yourself, you’re in competition with each other. Writers talk about this as a kind of cruel optimism that essentially sharp elbows and so on, are actually fine and okay, and it’s the fittest that actually survives. And I think there’s something important about that. You get heightened anxiety. It’s obvious that there is high levels of poor health, wellbeing and so on around the world. We started off by talking about Gaza and Lebanon and so on. But not long after the British prime minister was elected -so the elections were in July here- there was an astonishing and ricocheting attack on different communities here in the UK on the basis of no particular knowledge. So, the far-right became incredibly active, are still active at the moment. You know, the far-right’s being backed here by people like Elon Musk. So, it’s almost a war of all against all in that sense. And this is kind of in the heart of places where we would like to think that, you know, you think about the other, your neighbor, so the state of the world, and education is deeply involved in it. It is involved in the business of social reproduction. And what we’ve been reproducing is a lack of care of the other.

Will Brehm 6:38
And you know, to go back to Mario’s point about this long durée -I like this idea from EFA to scholasticide. You know, what I find interesting this year is I’ve really noticed sort of an uptick in the number of scholars doing this sort of historical look, right? I think of Gita Steiner-Khamsi has been writing about sort of historicizing SAWA as Toni Verger and his colleagues call the school autonomy with accountability, sort of framework, and sort of saying, Okay, we’re moving into a new period, so now we can actually look historically at this past period. You see it with Yanis Varoufakis’ technofeudalism. So, it’s sort of saying we’re entering a new stage of capitalism, and we can sort of look at what used to be to compare it to where we’re moving into. Or you look at things like, you know, there’s been so much work by people like Keita Takayama and Arathi Sriprakash, sort of colonial foundations of the field, but sort of thinking historically, and that has generated all these debates. And it just seems to me we’re just at this moment where we’re seeing this rupture, this change, and it’s allowing us to think historically about what we more recently have gone through.

Mario Novelli 7:49
Yeah. I think that that’s precisely why there is a great interest now in geopolitics, a kind of an attempt in order to understand educational changes around the world, and the way that politics, not just economic, is driving the transformation. So, you know, if you think about the kind of 90s and 2000s it was about the spread of educational capitalism, education as commodity. We’re seeing now also the relationship between geopolitics return into education, and I think that’s leading not only to new analysis of the education sphere, but also a recognition and internalization, a reflection amongst ourselves about the way that we are implicated. I did a paper that came out this year in a special issue that we ran in the journal around the idea of the implicated subject. And within that, it was this kind of reflection of the way that we become implicated in processes, not necessarily by directly intervening in those but those situations could not arise without our engagement. And I think that you know, our fields, our professional fields, whether through collaborations with powerful corporations, or powerful states, or involvement with UN organizations, we are also often at arm’s length, engaged in those very processes that we are studying. I think that is what’s dividing societies. And I’m not talking about just our own societies, our countries, but also our professional associations. Yeah, lots of tensions emerging. The silences over Palestine, willingness to speak out on Ukraine, but not on Palestine. Those kinds of things are starting to, in a sense, divide us in different ways, and also make us realize that some of our friends that we thought were colleagues also have taken different sides in this process. So, there are lots of tensions, I think, that are going on in our institutions, in our societies at the moment, and it’s a real challenge, I think, for the field to overcome those processes and to find ways forward.

Susan Robertson 10:05
I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading going back to the first Cold War, and trying to get a bit of a sense looking back into that period as to how we might read the current moment, for example. And it is different -it’s not the same. You know, essentially the United States comes out of the Second World War, but it comes out, you know, feeling very entitled to being the hegemon. And for the moment, it’s got a declining position in relation to the rise of China, for instance. And that’s really interesting, because you see the same kind of policing that took place in the 1950s in the schools and the universities. The National Defense Education Act, for example, in the United States. Chomsky, for example, and many of his colleagues write in quite a lot of detail around ways in which all of them -because they’re on basically funds coming out of the military. And I think the thing that’s been really interesting for me and some of our listeners might be also intrigued by this; I hadn’t realized -I’ve been following, for example, the OECD’s turn to wellbeing and its interest in happiness and things like that. But it links it to a particular theory of personality. That theory of personality comes out of cybernetics, the 1950s and 60s, or the war in the 40s, and then moves it out. So, it’s also really quite interesting, the way in which there’s continuities. Even though we don’t see them explicitly, but if you dig around, you begin to see actually the kind of deeply buried in the sand of the old Cold War now emerging to manage the current moment. Certainly, if we look at both UNESCO and the OECD, you know, and they turn to happiness indexes and so on. But they are anchored in ideational projects that have a much longer time frame than the current moment.

Will Brehm 12:05
Yeah, I think that’s right. I think you look historically, and you can find these sorts of through line that connect long periods of time. But you also can, you know -I don’t know, I keep thinking of Foucault’s archeology, and you can see these sorts of ruptures and disjunctures. And then it’s those moments that are sort of the important thing to study. And I just keep wondering, are we, for instance, living through this now? Was 2024 one of these moments, or maybe a continuation of a few years where this disjuncture really became apparent, and things like globalization as we know it need to sort of be rethought, even if we can see some, you know, historical trends that still play out today? So, in other words, did 2024 force us to rethink the very idea of globalization, do you think?

Mario Novelli 12:51
I mean I don’t know whether it’s 2024, but the last few years, certainly, we’ve seen a retrenchment of the idea that all of those countries that trade with each other and will never go to war with each other. No, the idea of two countries with McDonald’s never have conflict. That was the optimistic view of the post-Cold War period. That integration would lead to peace. And we’ve seen the West that was driving that process in the post 1990 era, withdrawing from those processes, no? I can feel on the tip of my lips the phrase trade war, tariffs, you know, all of those kinds of things, these arguments, which you know were the antithesis of the free market, freedom discourse, no? So, certainly we’re in that period but clearly, it’s not as easy as kicking China out or kicking Russia out of these, because we are entangled in multiple ways, so it’s complicated. So, you can see the UK, on the one hand, following the whims of the US in everywhere, but also at the same time, heading off to China and trying to make -because it realizes that it’s really embedded in that. The pipelines, the gas issues, the supplies, there are so many ways that we are already entangled. So, it’s just as we in the 1990s said, hold on with this global bubble, that everything is being globalized, and we’re heading towards a super state. I think we should also take a pause now and not say everything’s over and we’re in a kind of state-to-state princely system, because technologies are integrated around the world. Lots of connections. It’s not as easy as that but definitely it’s a time for analysis. It’s a time to challenge things, to raise questions, to think through these things and to recognize there are not easy answers. A couple of weeks ago, we were saying it’s the end of the US-led empire and there are new configurations, and the West just has to start recognizing that. And then in the last week, suddenly people are saying, yeah, the old is dying, but the new is not necessarily being born. We need to rethink that. So, it’s an unpredictable period, and it’s unpredictable in multiple ways.

Will Brehm 15:12
So, I mean Mario, I mean I think you’re right. It’s like globalization -it’s not over, but it is sort of being reconfigured. Or we need to think about it slightly differently, analytically speaking. And that example you said earlier about civil wars being driven by different international actors is clearly a moment of globalization, just not necessarily the one we might have imagined in 1990. Susan, are you thinking of globalization today, sort of in different or in new ways?

Susan Robertson 15:40
I think we’ve always thought of it as a much more complicated phenomenon. Globalisation, Societies and Education actually coming up for its 25th birthday in a couple of years’ time. So, we’ve been in here for -it’s a condition as James Mittelman would say. It’s a scale, a global scale. Manfred Steger, who’s just got a new book out is also reflecting on these issues, and he’s been a long-time commentator on global processes. More recently, we’ve written a book on the great unsettling and reflecting on things like populism and so on. But essentially, if you break it down and you look at different elements of global processes -for instance, maybe actors, but also processes- then what you see is incredible integration on what he would describe as the disembodied front. You know, media and our use of social media across a whole range of different indicators. He’ll show, in fact, actually, we’re way more global now than we have been in the past. So, I guess for me, always then thinking, I think Boaventura de Sousa Santos for me always had a really useful way of thinking about globalization, and that is something that starts in a particular location and kind of moves itself out into another space and declares other things essentially as local in particular. So, that kind of movement out. And here you might then see the dominance, for example, the US as hegemon. You might then see particular ways of thinking about education as a human right was globalized and so on. So, globalization is a much more complicated process. Always has been, and it’s got a history that goes back, you know, several centuries, at least. It just takes different forms.

Will Brehm 17:27
So, maybe we can turn to higher education, because I think this will pick up on some of the things we’ve been talking about previously. Because many universities, you know, in the English-speaking world, and, you know, I think Mario was telling me stories about this at Sussex, and I was telling stories about this in Canberra, where just countless universities are facing budget cuts, international student caps, hiring freezes, restructuring, redundancies, all sorts of dehumanizing words. Your position is disestablished, is a term I’ve heard more often than I have wanted to this year. So, I guess, you know, to what extent are we seeing, sort of the reconfiguration or the restructuring of universities, particularly in the sort of Global North or in the Western world, particularly this year?

Mario Novelli 18:15
Yeah. I mean, if I can begin with the UK, the Office for Students, which is our regulatory body, produced a report a few weeks ago where it suggested that by 2526, 72% of UK universities will be in deficit. I think 40% are in deficit at the moment. So, we clearly have a structural problem in higher education linked to all of these processes that we’ve been talking about. So, in a sense, the crisis of public funding has led to a range of mechanisms to try to control the cost of higher education by a range of means in different places. And in the UK, we set up a process of fees, student loans, and there is pressure not to increase those. So, we take a lot of UK based students, but we deliver our teaching under the cost. And how was that cost filled? How was that gap filled? It was filled by international students. International students requires open borders and open minds, and that’s exactly what we don’t have in the UK at the moment. Yeah, we have very close minds, pressure to control our borders. So, in a sense, its markets, the pressure to expand has also produced its antithesis, the fear of integration, the fear of engagement. So, the UK governments and the last but also the current, realized that one mechanism to control the number of people coming in was to start to hit the universities, but it could precisely attack that one area that was making the UK money. The higher education system is one of our greatest exports, and so suddenly we’re hitting this crisis, which is, yeah, really shaking the foundations of the institution and institutions across the country. And at the same time, I think the pressures of what does the university do. Issues around freedom of speech, both from the right and the left, are also, you know, being caught up in the culture war. So, there are multiple kind of challenges for higher education institutions in the UK, but also around the world that I think we’re seeing now.

Will Brehm 20:20
Do you see it as well Susan?

Susan Robertson 20:22
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And in many senses, it’s quite frightening. I mean, I would reflect though Scotland; how is it that Scotland can deliver free higher education to their Scottish nationals, as it were? And because actually, if you take a closer look at the level of indebtedness then the state has to underwrite that debt. It tried to sell off the student loan book, which meant that you’d have companies buying those loans that is more likely the students are actually going to get a job and pay those loans back. But if you basically look at to a large extent, and Phil Brown writes a lot on this, jobs disappearing, then essentially, we’ve got quite indebted students not likely to get jobs, and certainly not well-paid jobs that enable the payment back. So, now the state has got a very significant debt burden. So, my sense is it’s a model that really doesn’t work either, at least as a way of funding higher education. And I think we have to rethink that. I’ve certainly spoken in Portugal on some of those issues where they’re having a major rethink in Portugal, for instance, as to what the future for Portuguese higher education looks like? What does it look like if, for example, the state was to assume a significant part of the funding rather than make it available through, you know, market forces and so on. Then I think, for me, this is really important, is that notions like, you know, public versus private good and higher education, I actually think that we need a different way of thinking about education, as it being a societal good. It’s not about the making of the market subject person to get ahead and so on. Our education systems need to be, in some way, dedicated to the making of better societies. And that’s a huge shift in how we should be thinking about the role of education.

Will Brehm 22:11
I remember writing a paper for Globalisation, Societies and Education -I don’t know was it five, six years ago- and I called it Education’s Big Short, and it was all about this sort of, you know, the financialization of higher education. And it was quite amazing to find out that there were financial investors shorting the investments in student loans. And, you know, expecting the student loan companies that were selling off student debt on the market. There was a secondary market happening where people were literally betting that that market would fail, and trying to earn money on it. And to me, it was so perverse, and it was so clear that this was problematic. And it just seems like it’s just really coming to a head. And 2024 was just another one of those years. And I think it’s bringing together this ethnonationalism that we see on the rise, the fear of the other, the intensification of, you know, these conflicts that we see, interstate conflicts. And universities and higher education systems are sort of reacting in this way to what they think is right, but ultimately, sort of crumbling this sector that they created. And I don’t see a good way out. I mean, maybe Susan, I agree. I think sort of thinking less about the individual and more about a group of individuals or society would be a really nice way to do that. I’m skeptical if that’s going to work anytime soon, you know, I don’t really see how some of these entrenched structures are going to change.

Mario Novelli 23:23
I think that this process of the commodification of higher education, the marketization of the process, you know, really has its own kind of perverse incentives. And I remember, I was a member of the University Council here in the University of Sussex several years ago, and I remember the vice chancellor at that time, Adam Tickell, a well-known critic of neoliberalism who became neoliberalism personified over the years. He justified the massive investments in student housing that we undertook at that time as “go big or go bust”. Now pass forward and again, the relationship to Tickell’s literature and his writing partner, Jamie Peck and later on, is prevalent here. So, for example, Jamie Peck wrote about failing forward, the way that neoliberalism can move forward whilst failing. Well, Adam presided over our decline in financial situation, but moved on to a new job. Meanwhile, we are left picking up the pieces of the decisions that were made at that time, which is a huge building site outside my window, massive, tied debt. We have 200 million of reserves at this institution, but we can’t use them. And the reason that we can’t use them is because a covenant was signed with investments to ensure that we have to deliver a surplus every year or we default on that covenant. Now, they’ve now allowed us to dip in around 10 to 15 million. We don’t know exactly the figures, and what’s that 10 to 15 million used for, to get rid of staff, to pay them off, to leave. They’re happy for us to dip into our funds, to destroy our human capital and to protect our physical capital, but not to invest in the future. So, I mean, the contradictions of the system are so evidently painful, because you know this is your institution, and you see that they’re now trying to get rid of 300 staff -12% of the workforce. And again, we’re hearing the old 1990s acronyms, TINA, there is no alternative to what we’re doing, yeah. And I do think that there are many alternatives. Yeah, many alternatives.

Will Brehm 25:27
This rings true to me. I’ve been asking for alternatives in a lot of meetings lately, and there seem to be none. Let me move on a little bit further with higher education, because, you know, beyond some of these contradictions, we can see something shifting and changing with the structures of education, higher education as a business, these contradictions are now coming so plain and clear, and with devastating consequences. Also, 2024 seems to really have been the year where generative AI, just artificial intelligence, more generally, you know, it’s sort of taken over the imaginary of what education, and in particular, I would say higher education is and will be into the future. So, you know, Susan, how are you understanding generative AI in education in 2024?

Susan Robertson 26:10
It’s certainly -was it November 2022 when Chat GPT got launched, and then other products are out there on the market. And certainly, what you see at the moment too, is a kind of what I call AI nationalism. It’s a big kind of head-to-head kind of battle going on between China and certainly the United States of America at that bigger kind of level. Just let me also flag, you know, China’s very active in that area, and is very active in UNESCO, actually trying to use UNESCO to generate a norm setting through the UNESCO kind of mechanisms. But it’s a really interesting technology. It’s certainly been a technology that, let’s say, Pro Vice Chancellors or anyone that’s got the education portfolio in a university has to be thinking about, because very good versions of, you know, probably ones that you might need to pay for, the way in which, quite rapidly you can ask a question, it might get the answer wrong, but nevertheless, it’s astonishing the extent to which it produced something you know, back at you and so on. We’ve been doing a lot of thinking at the University of Manchester, in the group that I’m in -colleagues like Mark Carrigan, who’s a well-known digital sociologist- and we’ve come to the conclusion that pedagogically, too, you know, the art and the skill of prompting. So, this is a very different way of thinking, also about pedagogy. It becomes very clear that this is quite a middle-class skill as well. There’s evidence we can see students do use -I used, let’s say, for example, Claude, Chat GPT and so on to, you know, maybe see what’s out there. What does it want to tell me about Margaret Archer’s main kind of sociological claims and so on. What we’ve got to do is, I think, understand that boosterism is going to be in there. Because boosterism generates investors. And also, we shouldn’t get seduced by the fact that when it appears to talk to you -for example, I asked it to do something recently, and then it stopped at the end of 1,000 words. And I said, Oh, do you need more words? And it said to me, Oh, are you going to give me some more words? Oh, fine. Thank you, Susan. And then it kept on going on. But this is an algorithm. It’s a mathematical string that has been constructed. It will always as any sort of algorithm will be skewed by us. So, I think a bit like we would have seen all those years ago, you know, the teaching machine, then much later, we’ve got the World Wide Web television. All of these technologies got to understand the technologies. We’ve got to also be mindful of the fact that they are technologies. They might do some things fast, but they’ll also be dipping down into, and everyone knows this essentially, you know, it’ll dip down and pull up at times, you know, misinformation, biased knowledges and so on. But it’s crucial that we try and understand it. It’s crucial that we try and maybe build it into our teaching and modes of assessment and so on, in ways in which we can gather something of the affordances of the technology without being dazzled, essentially, by the fact that it’s black boxed up quite tightly for the moment. And that is our job as educators; to try and understand what it does and what it can’t do, who’s got interests in it, and so on. And where the complete silence is -what about language communities don’t kind of sit in these big reservoirs of large language models. One final thing I do want to say on this, and it’s really important, the work that we’re doing at Manchester is really asking big questions about sustainability. These are heavy, heavy, heavy uses of water and power. What we can see in certain communities is setting up great big data centers, and this is displacing communities. Using water supplies that would have been used for other purposes, and so on. So, there’s a very material part of this that we need to make visible to ourselves, as well as a more immaterial and black boxed world of AI.

Will Brehm 30:12
Yeah. Just on that last point. I mean, Microsoft, Google, Apple, all the big players have basically quietly walked back their sustainability goals in 2024 and they’re no longer going to be met because of these massive server farms that they have to create around the world so we can ask Chat GPT to, you know, draw us a cat or something. It’s all pretty pressing in my mind. Mario, what’s your usage of generative AI?

Mario Novelli 30:37
Well, I mean, I don’t claim to have delved as deep as Susan and her new engagement at Manchester University into the implications, but I kind of thought about it, or reflected about it, in a sense, drawing on the inner Luddite -the fear this new technology is going to take away our jobs. And you know, increasingly, you’re both simultaneously amazed by the capacity of AI to do things, and also terrified that those things may replace you. So, there’s that kind of thing. And you know, you see it in the university. You worry -and it’s both the positive sign of labor as well as its negative. The positive sign is you see students who maybe take shortcuts now. They don’t do their reading, they don’t engage as much, because they’ve got shortcuts to escape that. And then, you know, on the other side this question of the way that these technologies start to reduce the need for skilled academics and perhaps be replaced in marking. I think that in our conversation last year, I normally listen to last year’s podcast before we go on to this one, so that I don’t repeat myself in case I’m standing still for a year. And one of the things that you said was your kind of dystopian nightmare of having students who get their essays written by Chat GPT and then Chat GPT marks them. Wow. One year later, we’re closer than that. We’re closer to that dystopian nightmare.

Will Brehm 32:05
Yeah. I’m dazzled but also, I don’t imagine that this new technology is going to move us closer to, like, a four-day work week. I don’t think that’s what’s happening here.

Susan Robertson 32:17
I mean, one the books -maybe I’ll just put this on the table- that I’ve read this year, which I have really enjoyed, and that’s Saito’s’ book on Marx in the Anthropocene. It’s a really powerful account, essentially, of what he describes as the metabolic rift. You know, on the one hand, we find our ourselves, you know, severed from our relationship with nature. And the good example being, you know, these server farms, we don’t even see them. They’re not even on our radar to see, and yet, they’re the degradation of the environment. And on the other, the other metabolic rift for Sato, is the severing of the bonds between human beings. You know that, essentially, we are deeply dependent upon each other, and yet, particularly under conditions of capitalism. We are put in competition with each other, you know, it’s increasingly for scarce jobs or the capitalist with each other, whichever way you want to kind of cut that. I want to kind of put on the table a third rift, actually, and it’s what I’m calling a knowledge rift. Certainly, as the universities get in schooling, you know, commodified, capitalized and so on, we find ourselves further away from the kinds of knowledges that we need to both live well in the world, but to read the world. And I think one of the jobs, you know, going forward is to come back, actually, to maybe a reading of capitalism. There’s a lot of wonderful young scholars out there, some of them very young. Again, going back to some of the original texts from Marx, the Notebooks, for example, that have now been made available. Many, many, many rereading those, for instance, in the sense that Engels actually overrode and put his own account. Marx’s account, toward the end of his life, was deeply interested in issues of sustainability. So, I think there’s a huge job of work for us to do. You know, Wolfgang Streeck, for example, coming back to where are we all heading, he basically says, you know, capitalism is on its last legs. You know, this is where the techno feudal kind of argument emerges. I guess his book, Taking Back Control, to some extent amongst the Marxists he’s basically saying it’s falling under the weight of their own contradictions. And you might say, you know, for example, if Elon Musk takes charge, and you know, basically 70% of the state apparatus in the United States, you know, people lose their jobs; how does it work? Capitalism actually needs consumers.

Will Brehm 34:39
Yeah. That Saito’s book, Marx in the Anthropocene, is really quite amazing, and it sort of links back to what we were saying earlier about taking these historical perspectives, because Saito basically re reads the Marx archive to reinterpret Marx for today. And I mean, it’s an amazing sort of feat that he did in that book. And I think maybe you know that is something that scholars could do more of going forward. And maybe thinking about going forward, you know, what are you looking forward to in 2025 now that hopefully 2024 can end as soon as possible, and we can get into 2025; what are you looking forward to? Mario, maybe we’ll start with you.

Mario Novelli 35:16
Well, I mean, hope. Definitely that there is some resolution to the conflicts in Palestine and in Ukraine, Sudan, there is so many conflicts going on. I’m hoping that there is some resolution to those issues. That’s one thing. I don’t know whether I’m looking forward to that, but certainly I think we should have our eyes focused on those things. You know, just reflecting on your discussion around reading. I mean, I found myself kind of rather than going forward, going backwards, and thinking and looking at if we’re in a period of transition. So, what were the debates going on before neoliberalism took the lead in the 1970s? So, I’ve been going back and having a look at the, you know, calls for a new international economic order, the Brandt report, the non-aligned movement, and some of that kind of discussions around the suggestions or the alternatives that were on offer around the 1970s. And one person that I found particularly interesting this year looking at is Jason Hickel, who is based in Barcelona, who has precisely kind of gone back and revisited dependency theory, and he’s also worked a lot on degrowth, the arguments around degrowth, the necessity of that. And I found that his work, papers, books, are really important in showing the relevance of dependency theory to thinking about some of these geopolitical issues that we’re talking about. So, I guess that’s one of the things I’m looking forward to is, in a sense, a return to some of those ideas from the 1970s and inclusive in solidarity issues. I feel like Palestine is our Vietnam. You know, many of the great solidarity processes that took place during the Vietnam War are hopefully also emerging in solidarity with Palestine, and that we can see new connections, new ideas, new solutions to the terrible, terrible challenges that we face in this world at the moment.

Will Brehm 37:13
And just for those listeners who might want to pick up on Jason Hickel, you can actually listen to him on FreshEd. I interviewed him a few years ago about his book on degrowth, Less is More. Susan, what are you looking forward to in 2025?

Susan Robertson 37:27
Yeah, I was thinking about Syria and the astonishing speed of the collapse. We don’t know how things are going to play out at all. But I’m often reminded of Daniel Chernilo, who’s a Chilean sociologist, and he would often write about the way in which the state would project power, but get close up to the state, and it’s a much more fragile institution. And I guess, you know, I’m preparing for the CIES keynote. I have to give a presidential address in March in Chicago, and it’ll broadly, of course, be around the power of protest. But if we look across the world, you’ll see an astonishing number of protests going on and regularly, constantly, you know. And then if you think of what has been called a kind of a poly alignment, countries, governments, for example, not necessarily aligning with one particular kind of hegemon. My sense is though that has to be, at one level, a good thing, because essentially, what you then don’t do is allow a kind of an oversized giant to dictate the terms of all kinds of things -politics, economics and so on. So, yeah, I guess I’m looking forward. I mean, this turbulence, the so-called great unsettling, to paraphrase a Manfred Steger, kind of term, has to at least enable the possibilities of us coming up for air in slightly different ways. And I like what you’re saying about the different readings of the world, Mario. How to also shake off some orthodox readings. And again, I’d go back to some wonderful young scholars around at the moment that gives me hope. It really does. David Harvey would always talk about spaces of hope. We need that. It’s important, you know. A kind of set of paths forward. We might not get it right, but let’s not be too timid as well.

Will Brehm 39:15
So, to sort of bring this year to a close, you know, this is our ninth year doing this end of year show. I’ve been lucky enough to do this with Susan for all of those years and Mario for many of those years. But as listeners probably know that, you know, FreshEd this year is sort of struggling financially, and our future is uncertain, let’s say at this point, and we definitely need all the support we can get going forward. But I guess to end, I sort of want to reflect on why FreshEd might be important to our little niche community that we call home intellectually. And I guess, you know, maybe to put the two of you on the spot and ask, you know, why do you keep coming on the show to do these year-end reviews? What’s so valuable about FreshEd to you?

Mario Novelli 40:01
I was just going to say that I think that, you know, 10 years ago, you were very brave and insightful to kind of catch a zeitgeist of the importance of podcasts, which now we take as obvious. But it wasn’t so obvious when you began -think teaching master students, teaching PhD students, teaching undergraduate students. What an amazing resource we have with all of that archive that you have created to deal with so many varied topics that are accessible, that students enjoy listening to, colleagues enjoy listening to, that can provide them to insights into things that they may not have the time to go and read and to deeply go into. So, you know, I think that it’s been a remarkable contribution to the field, which, you know, clearly, you’ve invested a large part of your life into that. And so, you know, for me, it’s been a privilege to be able to look forward to this annual event where we get a chance to reflect a little bit on the year that’s been, the year that’s coming, to grumble a little, but also to kind of retain that collective hope that Susan referenced, and to think that things can possibly change for the better as well as for the worse.

Susan Robertson 41:17
I couldn’t have said it better than that, Mario and what a great tribute to you, Will. I mean, this is obligatory on student reading lists. It’s a major resource in lots of different spaces. Not because I know you people or mention FreshEd. It’s incredibly highly regarded. It fits with our lifestyles in many senses, doesn’t it? You know, you could be out for a walk with a podcast on. I know lots of people do that. They’ll tell me that they’ve just put you on for the annual roundup and so on. So, it would be painful if we didn’t have a way for FreshEd to continue. It is such a fabulous -it’s thoughtful, it’s thought provoking. It isn’t a tiny little kind of moment, you know, where we just kind of get a gobbet of something. It’s in depth, it engages you, it engages lots of different people, it’s in multiple languages now. And what a great tribute to you, your team, and a privilege for me over the last nine years to annually meet with you. So, I really want to say, can we think creatively together in our community to enable FreshEd to not only just become a teenager, but find its way into adult life.

Will Brehm 42:27
Well, Mario Novelli and Susan Robertson, thank you so much for joining. Have a great end of 2024 and a happy 2025. And just thank you so much for those kind words about FreshEd.

Susan Robertson 42:38
You’re incredibly welcome.

Mario Novelli 42:39
Thanks.

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