Will Brehm 1:07
Susan Robertson and Mario Novelli, welcome back to FreshEd.

Susan Robertson 1:10
So, thank you, Will. It’s lovely to be here, end of 2020, and I’m sure we’ve got lots to talk today with you about.

Mario Novelli 1:17
Yeah. Thanks very much, Will, for the invitation. Very much looking forward to the conversation.

Will Brehm 1:21
And Mario, thank you so much for agreeing to join. This is your first time joining this end-of-year show. And for Susan, it’s actually our fifth time doing this together. So, quite an amazing achievement, and what a year to be thinking about. I mean, obviously, COVID-19 has just completely upended our world. And so, I want to start Susan, with sort of a large question: has COVID-19 actually upended the very meaning of globalization?

Susan Robertson 1:46
For sure, it has Will. And perhaps before I get started and thinking about the journal that Roger Dale and myself had edited for the last 19 years, actually welcoming Mario Novelli to join me as the co-editor for the journal issue 20 coming around the corner for 2021 feels like a great achievement. And then reflecting on what this year and looking forward has meant for our journal and thinking about globalization perhaps it’s tempting to think that somehow, we’re all -you know, the national is kind of big in our sights and globalization isn’t significant or important anymore. But of course, it is and perhaps that’s where some of the earlier thinking when globalization loomed large in the 1980s and 90s. And suddenly the national had disappeared completely. Well, that hadn’t happened, essentially, the national had transformed itself. So, I think our job is to really try and understand what’s going on with those global processes? You know, for sure we’ve seen nationalisms writ large, even in relation to the pandemic, you know, nationalism has to do with the vaccine, who is got there first. But the big global tech firms, the global pharmaceutical firms, the fact that globally, education is in crisis. I think there’s something in the order of 850 million children out of school at the current time, COVID across 102 countries, at least, and schools closed. So, there’s something profoundly global about that.

Mario Novelli 3:26
I think that’s right, Susan. And, you know, if we do go back to that early literature, I remember an interview you did very early on in the journal with Boaventura de Sousa Santos. When we talk about globalization, we should always do it in the plural and recognize that there are multiple processes of globalization. And over the years, I think we’ve seen different globalizations being dominant. Neoliberalism being one of the main but often conflated as the only form of globalization. And I think recently, we’ve seen a new set of processes of globalization. The rise of the right across the world, Modi in India, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Trump, Johnson, and a whole wave, which, although appearing as nationalisms are also a global project with global funding and global backing. So, I do think that it’s about having the sophisticated understanding of globalization allows us to open up and engage with these conversations. Globalization hasn’t gone away.

Will Brehm 4:29
What’s so interesting is that in 2019, when we did this show with Susan and Roger, Roger was making a point about how we need to begin thinking about planetary as another level of analysis, rather than just local, national, and global. And I thought he made a pretty good case on this. You know, this was mostly about climate change in many ways. But 2020 seems to have gone the complete opposite way where all of a sudden, we need to really say, you know, there’s this globalizing force that might be microscopic or, you know, genetic. And to me, it just sort of revealed a different, as you said Mario, globalizations. A different type of globalization that’s happening, perhaps didn’t give enough focus on or credit to in 2019. But now in 2020, we can’t take our eyes off it.

Susan Robertson 5:18
I had the opportunity to be on a panel recently and to introduce Boaventura de Sousa Santos. And his definition of globalization, I’ve always found incredibly helpful. And it does speak to what Mario was then just talking about. Things start in particular places, they have to. And they spread out, and they decide and define any local as both rival and as potentially kind of insignificant. The pandemic hasn’t been insignificant at all. The virus essentially tells you something about how these things spread. Everything to do with globalization, global cities, movements, cosmopolitan classes, those are the interesting kind of elements, it seems to me, that have actually meant that the virus has actually rapidly moved around global space. Can I just comment on the planetary because possibly here to what we see is, you know, projects, China’s, for example, trying to put things up onto the moon, you know, pushing into deep outer space. You see efforts to privatize space travel. So, maybe that’s some of the element of what Roger is perhaps talking about. But some of these things feel to me to be either vanity projects, in the case of Bezos or, in other cases to do with, you know, China and outer space and so on, you know, kind of an assertion of a certain kind of superpower nationalism. I noted, for instance, Russia has actually named their vaccine for COVID-19 Sputnik V. So, you know, now this resurgence of a certain kind of nationalism that actually does have planetary consequences. Not just climate change, but actually a rush to outer space.

Mario Novelli 7:19
Yeah, and, you know, thinking about, again, kind of, when we were discussing these definitional issues, one of the things that kept cropping up in the globalization literature was about this issue of those problems that could not be addressed at the national scale. You know, HIV being one, clearly climate change, and, you know, itself, the pandemic. Although we’ve got all of these kind of vaccine nationalism, as you called it, ultimately, if everybody is not vaccinated, nobody is safe. So, there will be this process of kind of returning to these issues around the tension between nationalism and collectivism and responsibilities. So, that will be an interesting, again, debate to be followed over the coming period.

Will Brehm 8:10
Yeah. And I wonder how it’s going to play out, particularly with these vaccines that have been overwhelmingly bought by rich countries, and the Global South has basically been excluded from a large percentage of vaccines that will be available both this year and particularly in 2021. So, I think, this issue of, you know, how do you get over the issue of vaccine nationalism? How do you actually build consensus? How do you address this global problem on a global scale is sort of yet to be seen? I haven’t seen much evidence that it’s possible in 2020, sadly.

Susan Robertson 8:46
I noticed this morning, just listening to the radio, though, that there is a big campaign going around vaccines and to redistribute vaccines to the low-income countries, and maybe what we could learn from what’s happened over the course of this year. There have been amazing solidarities, community initiatives around even the streets that I live, trying to care for people who might not see anyone, who needs something, and so on. Now, if we could take what we’ve done quite well in many neighborhoods, and extend that out, not just to your neighborhood but to the neighborhoods of the world. If we’ve learned anything, that we’re all in it together, and unless we learn to work together, and perhaps, you know, even schools working in bubbles, for example, and I’d love to know what the word for bubble is in different languages around the world. But it seems to be a dominant metaphor to describe keeping you safe in an institutional space where we still are keeping buildings open and learning happening and, and so on. But we’ve got to be able to take something from this year. Not just the pain and the anguish but actually all the things that we have managed to do and to ensure that there is an element of responsibility and inclusion.

Will Brehm 10:11
So, Mario, I want to bring you in here and ask about COVID-19. And did it reveal anything to you related to global capitalism? I mean, we’ve talked a little bit about these big pharmaceutical companies making a lot of profit and tech companies, but has it revealed anything else to you about this globalizing phenomenon of capitalism?

Mario Novelli 10:30
Well, I think it’s revealed a lot. I think that what COVID has done is it kind of intensifies or sharpens the focus on already existing inequalities and issues. You know, going back to the early days in March, I think that there was a few movie stars that contracted COVID early on, and I think in the press it was saying, you know, COVID doesn’t determine itself by social class or geography, it goes everywhere. So, it was almost like COVID was a great leveler. And actually, I think what we’ve seen over the last months is that COVID is actually an intensifier of the stratification that exists. We’ve already talked about the unequal distribution of vaccines, but it’s also revealed racism, and the police violence in the US that led to a massive rise of the Black Lives Matter movement that continues to this day, which I think the COVID phenomena intensified. And, you know, another thing that I think it’s revealed -and, you know, we lost David Graeber, this summer. A very good, critical anthropologist, and one of his last books was a book called Bullshit Jobs, which talked about the way capitalism has the capacity to create a lot of useless jobs, which many people are complicit in pretending are not useless. And I think that during this period, what was revealed was what is important and what is superfluous. And a lot of the stuff that’s been commoditized around, you know clapping the NHS and supporting key workers, nevertheless reflected the fact that we do appreciate, and teachers included in that, you know, a recognition of what’s important, and others that are not important. And I also think that during this period, unlike other recessions, it hits much more the poorest and most marginalized communities in terms of income. So, for example, universities. We moved online, and for a large part, we’ve retained our salaries, we’re working from home, and we can carry on forward, right? But if you’re in casualized positions, casualized jobs, it’s very much more difficult to lock yourself away. So, there is an uneven expression of that. And, you know, it’s manifests itself in a range of ways in terms of like unions defending their members to stay at home, while others were going out. And I think tensions within the kind of left movements around that, you know, the kind of locked-down left versus those that argued that we should have a more kind of balanced understanding of the responses to COVID. And, you know, another contradiction, which I continually reflect on, is the fact that for decades, our Vice-Chancellors have been pushing online learning, digital technologies, and our unions have resisted that. Now, during this period, we’ve had a total 360-degree turn. We’ve got Vice-Chancellors talking about the value of face-to-face learning and emotional support for our students. And we’ve got unions that say you can do everything online perfectly well, and we should carry on until the pandemic is over. And I think that what you’ll see when the vaccines come through in the summer is a total 360 turn once again, where unions will return to a position of skepticism, quite rightly. And VCs will be starting to push all the learning that we’ve had from the COVID crisis, and we need to expand our online learning. So, I think there are many of those funny kind of contradictions that have emerged during this period.

Will Brehm 14:21
But do you think it’s going to result in a move towards the owners of capital towards the standpoint of the vice-chancellors? Now that we’re all online and capable of having meetings and teaching online, even if the Union switches 180 degrees in their position, we still probably will see a lot of online work, particularly in university sectors going forward, which puts us closer to this sort of interests of the VCs.

Mario Novelli 14:49
Yeah, I absolutely agree. And I think that it’s been a strategic error on the part of the Union movement to focus too much on lockdown and stay at home, and not enough on the medium- and long-term strategy of the Union to defend jobs, to defend public education, to challenge the big tech companies, and I think we’re going to be paying the price over the next years.

Susan Robertson 15:15
Can I come in here because elements, I think, of our activity in education institutions? For example, meetings, which you can easily run them on Zoom. You don’t have to hop in a car, for example, in my case, you know, go across the city. And it’s both traffic and time and that kind of thing. So, I think that one of the jobs I think we should be doing is, you know, looking at, what is it -you know, and for, let’s say, climate change kind of purposes- what is it that we could actually do well using technologies? And it might be meetings, and so on. What bits of our teaching could we do, and perhaps online, and which bits might we not do online, and so on? So that what we do is we actually look at the ways in which we’re not just, you know, it’s all or nothing. So, that’s my kind of first thought. But the same time, just coming back to the issue of people working online, and so on, did reveal really interesting overlapping challenges. For example, trying to run your class but you’re at home, you’ve got children. So, the ways in which schools, workplaces, childcare, and so on, all of those overlapping sectors, which almost depended upon each other to have their own sort of economy, political economy, or cultural political economy. And when they all imploded in on each other, it really just did actually show the complications that can begin to emerge in that regard.

Will Brehm 16:51
What about in terms of sort of racial and ethnic inequalities that COVID has revealed? Not just simply some of these class issues that we’ve been talking about. And potentially, I think, in what Susan just said, there is quite a lot of gender issues that sort of come out of there as well, in terms of who is caring. But what about racial, ethnic minority sort of inequalities that exist in society and have been made worse because of COVID?

Mario Novelli 17:16
I think clearly, what we’re seeing is a high percentages of infections amongst Black and ethnic minority communities, which, at least in part, is rooted in the fact that they are doing precisely those face-to-face jobs that occupy the most difficult working conditions, the cleaners, the people that get up in the mornings and clean offices before everybody gets up. That is precisely the kind of phenomena that this virus has revealed.

Susan Robertson 17:47
Because it’s an issue, isn’t it? I mean, we can’t think about 2020 and not think about that comes on the back of quite a number of years of austerity. And it’s odd, isn’t it really having gone through those years and the government saying there’s actually no money there, when suddenly, you know, billions can be put on the table, and some of it badly spent I might add and quite a lot of it actually not going where it ought to actually go. Too quickly, it seems to me, you know, your mates were in their contracts, were not being properly put out to tender, and so on. So, degrees of corruption in there. But the consequences for those social groups who have borne the brunt of those years of austerity and in poor jobs and so on, and that’s racialized. It’s both class and race absolutely, definitely.

Mario Novelli 18:39
I’m just reflecting a bit. I realize I’m becoming a bit pessimistic these days. So, I was just thinking about Susan’s reflection on some of the positives. So, in the middle of this lockdown, the first lockdown in June, I decided to do some interviews with comrades in Turkey and or are active in the Turkish movement and also in Colombia. And I interviewed a very prominent leader, Ertugrul Kurkcu, a Turkish social movement leader who is in exile in Germany. And he was saying that the lockdown has just been wonderful for him. Because suddenly everything went online. And as an exile, suddenly, he could go back to meetings with his old friends that would normally take face-to-face. You know, they would normally be going on face to face in Istanbul or Ankara or at the headquarters, but they all moved online. And you know, I found myself doing stuff in different geographies and entering either watching or participating that I hadn’t done before. So, for example, next week, I’m on a panel on 20 years of education in emergencies with the Center for Lebanese Studies based in Lebanon, I’ve attended Pro-Palestinian workshops led in South Africa, and I’ve been running political economy lecture series online since September every week with a range of speakers from around the world. And what’s really amazing is that we organize these breakout rooms. And you know, I pop into them and see who is in there. And you see people from India to Canada, you know, some for eight o’clock in the morning, some nine o’clock at night attending these things. So, I definitely feel like, you know, as Susan was saying, that there are really some positives that we have to hold onto from this and to reproduce. But we also have to be wary of some of the negatives that are going to penetrate our working lives and our culture in many years to come that might have a more punitive nature. So, you know, I’m all for taking the best out of crisis. But you know, having read Naomi Klein’s book, we also have to remember that crisis is often an opportunity for powerful, powerful actors to impose a lot of pretty nasty things on society from privatization to authoritarian rule, and the ingredients in COVID are all there for those things, aren’t they?

Will Brehm 21:11
Yeah, I mean, “disaster capitalism” is definitely happening before our eyes. But I think you’re right that, you know, being able to work online and connect with people all over the world, and particularly for me the benefit or the value is that there’s no travel and then that is going to potentially have a big impact on the changing climate and the climate crisis. Because we obviously do need to cut back on our travel as academics and don’t need to travel to Lebanon to chair one panel, when you can do that from your home on Zoom. But I do wonder, and maybe this is where I’m a bit pessimistic and skeptical is when the vaccine is widely available, and people begin to travel more, will academics, for instance, go back to traveling around the world to give keynotes and attend conferences on a monthly basis all over the world, so they can have a nice holiday potentially? I mean, that’s where I’m a bit skeptical of what these long-term changes. Will they actually stick?

Susan Robertson 22:10
I hope not. I hope we find a different kind of balance. We ran a conference -my colleague here Mark Kerrigan- called the post-pandemic University. We put a lot of thought into, not just going online, but if we ran a different kind of format. So, in this case, it was posting blog posts, which were extended commentaries, which were basically your paper, everyone was encouraged to read them. And when we had the conference, it was fabulous. And like Mario said, people came in from all over the world often, let’s say colleagues, India, Pakistan, negotiating access, visa access, and things like that. So, it could, to some extent, democratize, who participated. But more importantly, it seems to me, it pushed us to rethink a format. So, you know, and I would say, you know, often we get 15 to 20 minutes, a very long flight, very expensive. If you’re a junior academic, for instance, or even indeed a teacher, you don’t get to go to these things easily. Or if you do, it’s very, very expensive. So, my sense is what we should be kind of doing really, and this would go to schools, what are the kind of things that we played around with and experimented with to actually rethink formats even. Now, we’re in the education business. And we should be actually thinking about what are the new kinds of pedagogical practices that we could begin to explore, experiment with, reflect on, and so on, and carry those into the future. So, if we do have, let’s say, CIES conference, and so on, which is where many of us might have met, what kinds of formats might go forward and into the future, but in ways in which we’re simply not just going from almost the metaphor I’m going to use is the blackboard to the Blackboard, which we worked on to -you know, Blackboard, which was the VLE space and so on. It just tended to reflect each other. And I think this is really, really important for education. How can we actually use the technology to engage in very different ways in which we learned together?

Mario Novelli 24:32
You know, reflecting on that a little. I mean, there’s certainly a lot of travel that I was doing that I realized was totally unnecessary. So, for example, meetings in London for editorial boards and association meetings and stuff, which we’ve moved online and they’re perfectly unproblematic. I do kind of feel like I don’t want to give up on face-to-face human contact. And you know, having been one of the few in my school that has been coming in every day to work since August, I realized that my mental health is a lot better than some precisely for that reason that I’m able to engage with people and have those kind of more day-to-day conversations, this kind of thing. So, I think that, you know, clearly there is a value of international conferences, and there is a value of international engagement. But maybe we need to reflect on what we do, and the ethics of that. And, you know, there’s a friend of mine, Professor Aziz Choudry, who has always been very conscious about the environment much better than many of us. And what I was always impressed by him is that, you know, he was in Montreal, and he would come to the UK. And when he did come for ten days, he would start in Scotland and finish in Brighton and do virtually a session almost every single day. So, if he did travel, he made use of it. And he put in a range of things. And I think that’s why the idea that we turn up, travel halfway across the world to do a presentation for 20 minutes is unfair and totally unjust. But if we’re going somewhere, and we’re doing sessions for junior scholars, we’re supporting workshops, we’re presenting, we’re doing a lot of the community work that our field requires, then I think there is some justification in that. So, I think we just need to kind of reflect on that. But certainly, you know, I don’t want to move my whole life online because I actually find it very difficult to do everything through Zoom. I just don’t think that it can convey and build up the trust, and the friendships and the networks that our community requires in order to flourish. And hopefully, to produce social change.

Will Brehm 26:45
I think COVID has really made us stop and think about a lot of our own practices, and reflection is a big thing. And hopefully, we do have a more complex understanding of what we’re doing and make changes that are environmentally just, socially just, and figuring out why it is we like this social interaction and in what way. But it made me think a lot about this idea of rethinking our own practices, it also made me start rethinking some of the ideas in our field of, say, comparative and international education. And one of the ideas is about policy borrowing and how you always need to contextualize particular policy when it sort of moves around the globe and then reenter some local context. And I mean, this idea was, of course, started by, or perhaps best articulated by Michael Sadler, in the early 1900s, where he says you can’t take a plant in one country and then put it in another country and expect it to grow. But I guess COVID made me start rethinking this very idea of context and how important it is. And something that I teach all of my students is that you always have to start with context in history. Because it seems like with COVID, there is a very clear policy and approach to control the virus or to get to zero, more or less. You know to not have the virus around, you have to control people’s traveling, you have to control communities. And yet, we see over and over again, many countries that try and manage it without doing those specific policies, and it’s just impossible. And it’s just going from one peak to the next. And it made me start thinking, you know, am I too hard on a contextual policy borrowing? You know, and I just wonder, what does COVID in this sense say about our field and policy borrowing?

Susan Robertson 28:35
I think in this case, it says some interesting things about context. And that context are perhaps ideationally driven. And the example I’m going to use here is Sweden. So, Sweden took a view right at the beginning that they wouldn’t impose anything on the Swedes. And in fact, it was one of the worst countries in these, certainly in Europe and amongst the Scandinavian countries. And so, in this moment, context was kind of mobilized to matter. Just as we see in England, the idea of, you know, well, liberalism has to flourish, doesn’t it? You know, my rights, and certainly in the United States, my rights are more important than perhaps the rights of the collective. But I agree with you, Will. I mean, I think -perhaps I’m turning it on its head but mobilizing context matters in this particular case. In fact, actually can generate outcomes. If we look at the rates of death in the United States. I mean, this is unconscionable, you know. If you think of going into Vietnam, and the body counts and so on, I mean, on the scale of what’s going on in the United States at the moment, because the view is that your individual rights and so on trump everything else ends up it seems to me generating the outcomes that we don’t actually want to see. So, I guess the question is, it seems to me that we might want to generalize some things across all nations: dignity, respect, the right to the vaccine would be a good example. And now I know some people don’t want to, they feel that, in fact, the vaccine is actually being pushed by the pharmaceutical companies, and it’s simply another dodgy bug in some way. But I guess these are all conversations, aren’t they? I mean, they’re not absolutes. You can’t always say context always matters. It’ll matter in relation to what’s going on. But there might be elements of that context that we might want to think don’t trump everything else.

Mario Novelli 30:50
Yeah, I think I agree with you. I think that’s a really interesting reflection. I mean, I do think context, history, demography have mattered in this. The two countries that I’m closest to, Italy and the UK, have been particularly badly affected and continue to be particularly badly affected. And, you know, there are other countries that have done much better. And there must be something about that, that is also to do with the particularity. But I do agree that maybe there is something about holding on to generalizations. There are commonalities, but it’s the question of whose commonality? You know, it’s always been about that. Whose human rights, yeah? Whose social justice? Who gets to define these? I’ve never wanted to give up on universalisms. I always think that there are some common values and principles that we should hold on to and nurture and not give up on these big ideas of social transformation. So, I’m all for a return to some of those debates. And, you know, and some of the materialities of those issues as well.

Will Brehm 32:06
So, Mario, I want to ask you a little bit about education aid. You know, in some ways, I’ve heard in the past that people have complained about all the negative things that education aid does to low- and middle-income countries. It makes them dependent on Global North countries, former colonial countries. There’s been great books written about it. And now we see some countries in the Global North cutting their aid budgets. So, for example, the United Kingdom has done so lately. And so, I wonder, you know, to rethink some of the truths that we might have in our field, could these reductions actually be good? Could COVID be producing a good outcome here because aid is being reduced, or am I being a bit too cynical?

Mario Novelli 32:51
Let’s start with where this is coming from, yeah. And I think that what we’ve seen over the last year is an intensification of a process that’s been going on for some time in the UK. We’ve seen the absorption of Department for International Development, the UK’s aid wing into the Foreign Office, and a massive reduction in international development assistance, right? Now, I don’t think we should be under any illusions that this is not in the advantage and under the direction of the right in this country. It’s being pushed by the Daily Mail, it’s being pushed by, you know, this is Nigel Farage’s wet dream. It has been something they’ve pushed. So, we have to be clear that where that is coming from. On the other hand, I think that it’s not only about volume, it’s also about the quality of that aid. And we have seen over that same period from the same actors, albeit that they might have been coming from the right-wing of the Labour Party, during the Blair era, have attempted to redefine what constitutes international development assistance so that it was palatable for economic development of our own country, not the Global South, and for our own security. And when we talk about security, it’s about our security. Not the security of poor, marginalized communities elsewhere. So, there has been that battle. So, you know, in the field that I work in on international development and education in conflict-affected contexts, there has been that kind of binary, you know, we need more money, we need more money! And I’ve always asked the question of, well, money for what? You know, where is that money going? So, I don’t think that the design is to make things better. But it may be that it forces a rethink of the way that aid is used. And, you know, I think that debates around taxation and national responsibility, they’re all good, but I don’t think we should say, or think that there is a progressive process going on in the UK around the reduction of aid. And in the end, it’s going to strengthen the independence and national liberation of Southern countries because that’s not what it’s about, yeah. It’s about very different things. It’s about post-Brexit reorganization of the British state, it’s about using development assistance to support trade, to support new trade agreements, and to support a resurgence of UK military activity around the world, just in the middle of this pandemic, when we’re talking about how we’ve just announced massive increases of military spending. Yeah, it’s just crazy.

Susan Robertson 35:39
Yeah, I agree with Mario on that one. I think the aid industry has actually also propped up a big research agenda, hasn’t it, Mario? And some of that research agenda, I think, is sort of a bit suspect as well around the so-called big global challenges. And I’m not convinced that, in fact, if we looked at how much money has gone in through some of those projects that we really see anything very much different in terms of social justice, education justice, and so on.

Mario Novelli 36:11
Yeah, that absolutely, absolutely.

Will Brehm 36:14
So, you know, 2020 obviously was the year of COVID. Maybe 2021 will also be the year of COVID. I don’t really know at this point. But Mario, what are you thinking 2021 is going to bring in terms of research and ideas on education and international development, globalization? You know, what might 2021 bring?

Mario Novelli 36:37
Well, I guess the first thing is, we’re going to see what the “new normal” represents, and there’s going to be a battle over the new normal. You know, there are going to be questions thrown up about who is going to pay for the crisis. And, you know, there’s definitely going to be battle over that. You know, as we talked about earlier, I think there’s going to be a real issue around who is getting vaccinated and who isn’t and how that whole process is managed. So, we’re going to have a lot of kind of coming out of the crisis, but the legacies of those. And there, I think, you know, real battle of social forces in the classic kind of Robert Coxian idea, we’ll see how those forces balance out and manifest themselves in different places. I mean, you know, things move in different directions. So, you know, we have seen a shift to the authoritarian right over recent years, but there are glimmers of hope in different places. And, you know, the return of Evo Morales to Bolivia, the failure of the attempted coup there, you know, there are kind of things that make me optimistic. The defeat of Trump, albeit kind of, you know, I don’t know whether we should have a great deal of faith in Joe Biden and the Democrats. But I think the defeat of Trump in that election meant something to a lot of people, which was beyond actually the materiality of where the changes come, which I think was important. Who knows?

Susan Robertson 38:17
Mario, I could add in across Brazil, São Paulo has just voted to, and it is gone to the left. I agree with Mario, and maybe it’s a very nice way to kind of square where we started, and particularly to do with the journal. Because we did interview Robert Cox, as the journal started, and who’s died more recently, but an absolute giant in terms of thinking about IR because fundamentally thinking about globalization, societies, and education, international relations is quite an important kind of element in there. The bits of the social forces that Cox kind of talked about, and the Gramscian kind of analysis that he advanced. Nancy Fraser has often talked about a triple movement. The Polanyian double movement, state to market, and so on. And she’s proposed the third leg of it, which has to do with civil society and social movements and so on. And there will be a struggle. There’ll be arguments around artificial intelligence, technology, children learning, all of those kinds of elements. Why do we need teachers? Why do we need to pay them so much, and so on? But, you know, perhaps I do have some hope, some faith. In fact, societies don’t go forward in a linear way. They’re much more spiky and bumpy and conflictual and so on. And it seems to me that we almost need an alternative to notions of artificial intelligence, you know. Perhaps authentic intelligence. Thinking about ways in which we can use what is we’ve learned over the last -and I’m not going to say this last year. What have we actually learned since 2008 and the rise of authoritarian populism? Some of it sort of being defeated, potentially, but not everywhere. And it’s not going to go quietly at all. Some of the big EdTech firms are bigger than governments and their budgets. And that’s going to be really, really interesting to see whether in fact that governments can actually push those EdTech firms into taxation systems, and so on. So, I think government has got to also learn how to govern in ways in which some governments, it seems to me, have lost the art of governing wisely. So, let’s see if we can actually look at examples around the world where we’re seeing degrees of wisdom around governing and the social contract. And whether, in fact, that might also set up different agendas for education. Can we get children talking in classrooms around democracy? Can we get children in classrooms talking around climate change? Can we get children in classrooms talking about solidarity and what kinds of curriculum and pedagogies in our classrooms? And I mean, classrooms, all over, schools to universities, where we try and bring and breathe some life into the third leg of Fraser’s triple movement.

Will Brehm 41:25
Well, Susan Robertson and Mario Novelli, thank you so much for joining the end-of-the year show, the year in review. Please stay safe and have a wonderful new year. And I look forward to talking to you in 2021.

Susan Robertson 41:37
Thank you, Will.

Mario Novelli 41:37
Thank you.

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