Will Brehm 1:02
Susan Robertson and Roger Dale, welcome back to FreshEd.

Susan Robertson 1:05
Thank you, Will. It’s great to be here in 2019. And actually, we’re poised on the eve of an election that I do somehow remember recording a FreshEd broadcast with you almost immediately after the Brexit vote.

Will Brehm 1:20
It was days after the Brexit vote. And maybe in a few more days, we’ll know the end of what’s actually going to happen with Brexit. And Roger, welcome back to FreshEd as well.

Roger Dale 1:28
No, we’ll never know what the end of this is.

Will Brehm 1:31
Well, I’m excited to say that this is our fourth year in a row doing this end of the year show. It’s always great to have you both on to reflect back on the year. And I must say 2019 seemed to be a really intense and, in many ways, crazy year with so many things that have happened both in and outside of education. And I think there’s a lot of intellectual work that has to happen now to think through what on earth we just lived through. But I guess the big thing for me is populism. You know, there’s protests in Hong Kong and in Chile. There is right wing populist governments in many parts of the world, and perhaps increasingly so. How on earth do we make sense of populism? And what would it mean for, say, your journal, ‘Globalization, Societies and Education,’ and just education generally speaking?

Susan Robertson 2:22
Well, I think you’re absolutely right that populism, almost I mean, it’s been a debate, it seems to me in academic circles since Trump, Brexit, Bolsonaro, for example, in Brazil more recently, and so on. And we’ve got its opposite. We’ve actually got, interestingly, a kind of mobilization of a youth group. But if we take populism, across many conferences, there’s lively debates on populism. Is it ideology? Is it discourse? Is it strategy? Or what? And so on. But what I think hasn’t really grabbed the attention of the education world much is – and I say that on the basis of almost no panels on populism at the CIES conference this year, in San Francisco, which I found incredibly surprising, having been in other conferences, let’s say politics, where there were many, many panels. And we could either say, “Well, in fact, education has got nothing to do with this.” Or we can actually say, “Are we not asking the right questions?” And my own view … In fact, our journal has just got a special issue that will be coming through, so ‘Globalization, Societies and Education’ coming through, where we’re actually posing some questions around the stalling of social mobility. Because populism is feeding off, it seems to me, a sense of having been left behind in the stakes in society. And one of the key means, at least a promise, a sense of meritocracy was always there to encourage you along to think that it was possible to have degrees of social mobility. But we have, you know, concentrations of … here in the UK, they call them “hot spots”, degrees of social mobility. People doing well, good jobs and so on. And others that they’ve described as “cold spots”. So, you get these concentrations of disadvantage, poor quality schooling, sense of hopelessness, intergenerational poverty, jobs and that kind of stuff. And we see the Brexit vote map onto that. A book that came out in 2017, by Bovis and Willie, and they actually talked about, you can see this pattern of this “great divide”. What they call the education segmentalism or segmentation that’s happening between those who seem to have done well out of neoliberalism, managed to get ahead, and those who’ve actually been completely left behind. And we can see this in the OECD statistics. They begin in 2007-8 pointing to the fact that we can see these divides opening up. I think the global competences that the OECD has developed is an effort to think about how you might close those big divides between populations left behind and those. But it’s the left behinds who feel resentful of the loss in status, loss in terms of their material circumstances, because we can see that there’ve been very significant losses in terms of their incomes. And it’s the kind of thing that Piketty was actually picking up on. So, it feeds populism. It feeds the Trump’s of this world who say, “You are the left behind and me.” You know “us”. We know who the culprit is. And they would actually point to the educated classes, in the cities and in the university cities, and so on.

Will Brehm 6:24
This liberal elite that believes in meritocracy, even though it might not exist in reality. Roger, what do you say to this rise of populism and what it might mean for globalization, and what it might mean for education research?

Roger Dale 6:42
Well actually, I think it changes largely because Trump is perceived to be driving it, or enabling it, or pushing it. And if we compare back, not very far back … we can compare back to what happened in Seattle. What was that? That was a big populist demonstration but didn’t eventually get very far. The same with Occupy. Occupy really is probably the best/worst example. Because when we’re talking about, as it were, “Trump-driven populism”, it’s a different kind of thing. It is not, as the earlier ones were, and probably student rebellion type ones were, it is not driven from below by Occupy, for instance. It is actually driven by Trump indulging the previously forgotten, etc. Though he’s not very good at describing who they are. But I think that there is that, and it is also, in the Trump version, it is cocking a snook at the elite and especially the intellectual. “We don’t want these bloody clever people around.” “I’m cleverer than you are.”  “I’m the cleverest man in the world.” We don’t want those. So, I think it takes a different sort of form. But I suspect it takes a different sort of form in different places. For instance, just the mass entry into the British Labour Party following the election of Corbyn, making it the biggest political party in the world, I think. You don’t hear very much of that now. That may be because of the British press, but you don’t hear very much of that as some kind of populist movement.

Susan Robertson 8:20
Coming back to the education question, I mean we shouldn’t be surprised, it seems to me, that the way education systems have been driven global competitiveness up and down the system from the top to the bottom, channeling it into the individual that you’ve got to be the competitive individual here. The obvious outcome of that is that you have to have losers. That kind of way of organizing, what I’ve described as “vertical vision”. You know, we see the world vertically. And across the piece, everything that happens, in schools and the way it’s organized. You know, who’s the best teacher or not, top to the bottom, and it’s almost in the air that we breathe this kind of vertical vision of the world. But pull it open and look at it exactly what it is. And it’s about generating winners and losers. And losers at some point are going to feel resentful, particularly when there’s degrees of materiality around that. They feel looked down upon, and that in fact, making ends meet. Living from food banks in the UK, this is a significant population of families having to do that. That has to be an outcome. At least education is partly, it’s not fully to blame for this, but it’s a culprit in the production of these inequalities.

Will Brehm 9:53
What’s quite amazing when I look back on 2019, a lot of the sort of books on economic thinking have really challenged a lot of these taken for granted notions of neoclassical economics, which underpin a lot of what you’re saying, Susan. And so, I think of books like The Economist’s Last Hour, or Bullshit Jobs written by David Graeber, or even Thomas Piketty has a new book that came out in French this year called Capital and Ideology and I think it’ll be translated into English early next year. And it just seems like there’s this intellectual movement that really has come to a fore this year to challenge a lot of the way we think of economies and people in those economies.

Susan Robertson 10:34
You’re absolutely right. And I’ve also been in conferences where people are doing corpus analyses of journals, where many of the economic journals they’re very into modeling – neoclassical economics modeling and so on – that have a very kind of tight hold on what can get produced and so on, that they’ve been movements along the edges. I noted, for example, the Nobel award winners this year, whose work on, to some extent, it’s behavioral economics, I think there’s a new kind of economics out there. Behavioral economics, we see this in, let’s say, nudge units here in the UK. If you want things to happen, what you do is you nudge. Now, there are some interesting interventions into these debates that over time, economists might have described the free hand of the market organizing societies. And some interesting articles coming out at the moment, journals like Economy and Society, talking about the economists now being designers of society. Now, I think that’s an interesting one to watch, because it seems to me that the Nobel award winners …

Will Brehm 12:01
Duflo and Kremer and Banerjee. The random control trials.

Susan Robertson 12:07
That’s right. And who are actually doing what they would describe as a new kind of development economics experiments. Now, we might have all kinds of reservations around these experiments, and, in fact, many of them were in the area of education, raising questions about, is it the case that, in fact, children don’t learn because you’ve got poor teachers and so on. So, they’re working with certain kinds of assumptions there. So, economics, it seems to me is, in part reacted to some accusations about that they really did both produced the 2008 crisis, in a sense, because of the policies that were being driven. But they also couldn’t and didn’t predict it, either. And so, economics is shifting off in the direction of, I’d say, this new kind of experimental economics. But behavioral economics is absolutely in there. The problem I would think, though, with that is an economist is actually got a focus on economy still. And they maybe are taking into account worlds that are potentially perhaps more social than they might have in the past, but I would probably, as a sociologist, want to push them a lot further on that. For me, it’s not okay still to describe unfortunate social facts as “spillovers”, which is typically what economists are actually doing. Because, in fact, they do actually want to think about economics as somehow having its very separate set of dynamics to the societies in which they’re embedded.

Roger Dale 13:48
I think there is a different kind of populism. There is a popular economics texts, which are both accessible and critical of the economics profession. There are a lot of them around in the bookshops, and they are extremely well reviewed. And I would think they represent some kind of threat to the economics profession, but how they will, how the economics profession, in the shape of OECD, will respond to this is quite different. I can’t see them doing that. When you look at the PISA reports and so on.

Will Brehm 14:28
This brings up an interesting issue. There is a lot of intellectual work going on in really interesting and fascinating areas, such as, challenging a lot of neoclassical economy, thinking about populism, or whatever it is, in new ways. But does it actually get into organizations like the OECD or the World Bank? Where are the intellectual spaces in the world of education today, where you’re seeing this live debate around ideas? Or does that just not happen anymore?

Susan Robertson 14:58
We could do a bit more re-reading of some of the archives, let’s say of the OECD. I was very taken with the fact that in some of the preliminary framings and reports and things like that that were going into the development of the OECD’s global competence framework, which eventually emerged in its final form in 2018, and was part of the PISA data collection. In the very early versions and coming out of really a naming from some of the divisions within the OECD. Big concerns around social inequalities, big concerns around growth and has growth, GDPism, and so on reached its limits. Could there not be a discussion around degrowth, etc.? Funnily enough, by the time it made its final cut, degrowth had kind of disappeared from there. But what the degrowth work has done is connect that with some very long-standing debates that have been had in the OECD. Alexander King and others, whose work on the development of the Club of Rome report, for example. The development model for the West is exhausting itself, and one would need to look at a different way of organizing the economy. I feel that, in fact, and that’s thinking forward and setting agendas, we’ve allowed ourselves as education researchers to be kind of slightly distracted by PISA and some easy readings and so on. And our journal has actually commissioned a special issue asking for re-readings: Can we go back and look at the historical archives, and maybe uncover some of the struggles between the degrowth movement inside? Or the GDPism kind of questions. And how did they, where did they sit? Some more recent interviews, for example, have begun to uncover those, and you can see them actually in the archives to kind of make more visible the contestation inside the institutions and not the critiques that emerge when they produce their reports.

Will Brehm 17:13
So obviously, another topic that I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up is this issue of the climate crisis. It seems like 2019 was the year of discursive change from climate change to climate crisis, or climate rebellion, extinction, crisis, chaos, whatever it is. People like Greta Thunberg have propelled this issue on the national and international stage. And it’s almost like nature has come back. And it’s been the year of nature taking over humanity in many ways. From the various weather patterns that we experienced all over the world, and just the changing climate generally. So how do we make sense of the climate crisis, which links into some of these big protest movements like Extinction Rebellion? How do we make sense of this, and how does it relate to education?

Roger Dale 18:11
I think, very interesting that I’ve been reading about this political ecology stuff for two or three years now. And it’s very interesting to operate. It’s largely neo-Marxist anthropologists who are doing this, and brilliant stuff. A marvelous book by a man called Malm, which is selling very well. But I think, because the upsurge is a populist upsurge. Thunberg, etc, this is a populist upsurge; she’s picked up by this, and she’s driving it from there. And that’s not where, necessarily, the Marxist anthropologists and so on are starting it from. They go back. They are doing economic anthropology on, for instance, the history of coal, if you like. This is the start for them. This is the start. This is global, and what happens to coal, and it goes on and on. And it’s very interesting stuff. And I think it’s important to try to expand that stuff, because we get no commentary on this. We get no commentary in education at all, on ecology. Oh, no. Well, there are always green teachers who are doing this, but there’s no systematic addressing.

Will Brehm 19:30
Yeah. So, thinking of it in terms of the way in which education, and maybe schooling in particular, has, historically speaking, been and contributed to what we now today call the climate crisis, in a way, and how that sort of worked from a political economic perspective. Is that what you’re sort of, that’s what might be needed, or is missing currently, Roger?

Roger Dale 19:53
There does seem to be a gap, quite a big gap, between the political ecologists, if you like, and anthropologists, and practitioners in schools who are still doing the same kind of “doing good” type thing.

Susan Robertson 20:09
Yeah, I think Roger’s right. I mean, the responses at one level are somewhat a liberal guilt. You know, can you perhaps use plastics differently or those kinds of things. And maybe that’s important. But in a way, it doesn’t really radically disrupt the sets of assumptions that we constantly are making every day, or the things that we take for granted about the way in which our lives can and should work. One of the things that I’ve been doing, because I’ve been focused on the global competences is looking across, let’s say, what are schools think that they’re doing when they’re looking at things like globalization, global competences, digitalization and so on. You’ll find that they’ll do things under environmentalism, sustainability, those kinds of issues. But Roger is correct, what we’re not linking it to are the bigger kind of development models. That “GDPism” as it were. You know, growth at any cost. That’s a construction. That’s a way of thinking about an economic development model that we don’t actually have to have at all. So, schools are doing, it seems to me, a little bit, but not much.

Will Brehm 21:28
Yeah, right. I was in Tokyo for one of the climate crisis protests. And I saw a lot of signs that said, “Get rid of plastics,” “No plastic bags,” and it seemed very superficial in a way. Yes, that’s an issue, but it’s not really this underlying issue. And I think I saw one sign that just said, “End capitalism”. And I thought to myself, “that’s probably more the issue that needs to be talked about.”

Susan Robertson 21:57
This is a good start. I wouldn’t want to knock it too much. I would want to say I think the thing that’s extraordinary is the extent to which young people have come out and put the next generation on notice. “How dare you?” says Greta Thunberg about our future. So, in a sense, perhaps what we could and should be doing is thinking about the way in which young people are actively looking to take charge of their future. Chile was the first example in 2006, or thereabouts, where the “penguins”, the description of them as penguins because they were in their uniforms, black and white uniforms and so on, out there and marching. And they have been the generation through the universities that have driven political campaigns, have ended up in the parliament, as well. And there’s an effort to try and unpick globalization or privatization at the current time within Chile. Not easy because there are large, vested interests, corporations, and so on. Some of them actually owned by key people, as part of the state infrastructures, who are not going to let go of, you know, those things easily and lightly. So perhaps we can be cynical about superficiality, but maybe it’s a starting point that educators need to work with.

Roger Dale 23:26
Yeah, I mean, I think we also need to recognize that there is an element, we shouldn’t mock it, but there is a quite a strong element of virtue signaling, through the plastics and so on. And I don’t think we should knock it but recognize it for probably what it is.

Will Brehm 23:42
Yeah, right. It did seem like 2019 was, in a way, the year of the youth as well. It almost seems like this generational struggle became very, very clear and sort of upfront. And everyone was talking about it. And you know, why should policymakers of a certain age be dictating the policies for children who are going to have to live through a world that is completely different, in now 30 years, is what they’re saying.

Roger Dale 24:08
There’s a lovely contrast there between all the Greta stuff and the PISA report.

Will Brehm 24:15
What’s the difference?

Roger Dale 24:16
Just in the present world, the OECD imagines a quite different world. It imagines a world that hasn’t actually changed very much for 20, 30 years.

Susan Robertson 24:24
I actually disagree with Roger. You can read that report, and they are flagging the digital, they are flagging. They don’t say much about it. The idea that we need to come together, work together, to understand each other. Not just within our communities, but more broadly and globally and so on. But now, here’s the problem for, let’s say organizations like the OECD, that see like a global institution. It more or less has a one size fits all. And it’s got to govern from a very long distance. And one of the issues around something like, you know, Living Better Together, or something like that, is that it puts on the table a very specific understanding of what would it mean to be a global citizen and so on. And that takes a very singular form. It’s slightly at odds, then. It’s going to be the assessor of the global competences for the SDG 4.7 that is also then as part of the UNESCO’s responsibility, UNESCO is trying to open out some wider discussions around culture, for example. Things about this culture, if we looked at liberty, equality and fraternity, could we see this popping up in similar ways in other countries? However, the problem here is that, in fact, it still uses the West as the benchmark. ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity,’ the French phrase, and it’s some very recent work that it’s put out. It says, well we can recognize those similar ideas in anywhere from big parts of Africa into the Latin American world, and China, etc. But that’s still not an open-minded understanding of different worldviews in my view. And if there’s anything that we should, in the education research world be kind of working with, it would be to try and open out a wider understanding of the possibilities for education as simply not just a kind of Western only construction. Maybe that’s part of the problem, because the idea of progress and development and its forward movement. We had a lovely paper come out in our journal, looking at … Noah De Lissovoy who is looking at a Peruvian thinker, and could that be the basis for a different way of thinking about our relationship to each other, and the world of nature. Not an accumulation forward-driven model, but one that maybe sits with nature. And so, you can see there are resources in the rest of the parts of the world, deeply culturally anchored, that might be resources that would be incredibly important to think our way forward into a different kind of future.

Will Brehm 27:26
It does seem like future is an issue that has come up in 2019. And debates over it: “What is this future that we are perhaps moving towards or into?” And obviously, not everyone agrees on what that looks like.

Roger Dale 27:41
I think there’s a lot of different answers, because there’s a lot of different “we”s. Distinctly. It’s so interesting, again. Having just read the OECD report, the gap between that, and the other things we’re suggesting. And I think that this will extend. Formal education for everybody is actually losing ground and will be acceleratedly losing ground to social media. It is not the only institution anymore. There is an alternative institution. And that alternative is an alternative institution to lots of others, like news. So, this fake educational news.

Will Brehm 28:25
Right. So, this is going to be a major challenge going forward for formal education, I would imagine. And what states end up doing in their formal education sector.

Roger Dale 28:34
Yeah, and especially, in probably, in its measurement. Because you’re going to be able to learn on social media and get diplomas, like you saw with MOOCs.

Susan Robertson 28:46
Well, there is actually a language that goes with all of this. They’re called “nano credentials”. And the idea that you could actually get, let’s say, a massive open online course that you took. Blockchain, for example, has been put up as the possible kind of encrypting passport. So that you could have your learning credentials being logged on via blockchain. And some universities are playing around with this. I guess that takes us to an interesting research agenda for education and thinking about the Abidjan Principles that are an effort to get the principles all established for private sector actors, or private actors in the education world, along with states and so on. But I do wonder about whether those principles would actually be sufficiently able to grasp the quite complex ways in which venture capital money has come into, you know, funding and extracting value on all different kinds of platforms that let’s say university or school sets. We don’t see them; I think we just think in older styled ways about, “Where’s the commercial interests?”, but huge amounts of venture capital money is flowed into these infrastructures that basically structure the possibilities of what to think or who comes together, and so on. And that’s quite important research agenda going forward.

Will Brehm 30:23
I agree. I mean, when I read those Abidjan Principles on, you know, regulating the private sector, in education, from a human rights point of view, for me, it’s a very black and white reading of what public and private is. And they don’t have a nuanced understanding of how private interests can actually be, you know, very diverse. And it’s not just a private school. And some of the work I’ve done years ago, on private tutoring, for instance, doesn’t fit within these principles in any meaningful way. And so, I just wonder what their utility will be for governments that are obviously facing very different challenges on the ground.

Susan Robertson 31:01
I completely agree. And I think what we have to be completely aware of is, you know, bottom line interests. Okay. So, if you’re a commercial enterprise corporation, and you’re chasing the bottom line, it seems to me that that sets up a particular set of logics that undermine a series of things. Undermine, you know, let’s say your infrastructures, because you’re always looking to shave off the edges, your humans, called your teachers, actually, you know, looking to pay them less, all those kinds of things. So, I think we’d be better off in this public/private debate, naming the bit of the private that is problematic, and it’s about commercial interests. Significant commercial interests.

Will Brehm 31:46
So, let’s look ahead now. 2020 is just around the corner. By the time this show airs next week, we in Britain might have a new prime minister, or the same prime minister; we don’t know what will happen. And a few weeks later, we will be entering 2020. What are you looking forward to in 2020?

Susan Robertson 32:07
Going forward into 2020, I guess I do take some heart in the other end of that continuum. You know, populism here, but a politicization. Roger has called it populism. Often people working on populism aren’t including those kinds of groups, because they’re not doing it in quite the same way. But we could call it a progressive populism as Mouffe and others want to talk about it. Nancy Fraser has also talked about … in fact, that they’re trying to think of what would a progressive populism begin to look like. But as educators, we’ve got to really begin to think of thinking in much more systematic ways about how we might unpick what I think become a very unhealthy education system: an excess of competition. The consequences of that shouldn’t surprise me. Almost a kind of epidemic of wellbeing that actually, people are distinctly unwell. And we shouldn’t be surprised by that. Austerity, anxiety about being responsible for yourself, getting ahead, more challenged material conditions. So can we think about maybe setting some agendas through our journals, which is one of the things that our journals should be trying to do, that really go off in the direction that Roger suggesting. Not just we thinking about sustainability and so on. Can we actually be pushing for some deeper conversations that are absolutely engaged with our biosphere, our ecology, the conditions for this particular kind of market capitalism to flourish? Could we be thinking, actually now, about the way we organize our education systems? We’ve complex, more radical experiments to do with, coming back to Dewey: how could we use our schools as laboratories for creating different kinds of societies? Now that means that we’re going to have to be really brave along with people who feel as if they have to constantly be open to scrutiny because of Ofsted inspections and these kinds of things. It’s going to take a big and very concerted effort to unpick what we’ve got at the current time. But I think that’s the responsibility of academics, like myself and yourself and Roger. Through the journals, through the platforms that we have access to …

Roger Dale 34:53
In terms of the journal, it would be nice to see some shift in in the kind of genres we get, which tend to be I mean – it’s inevitable they’re going to be – but they tend to be reports on research. They tend to be, to some degree, PhD chapters. And we don’t have a way. But what bothers me is so many submissions have practically no theoretical content at all. I have just read a few …

Susan Robertson 35:30
I’m not as pessimistic yet. But actually, over this last year, our journal did carry some really interesting re-readings, fallism, decolonizing, and so on. And so that was wonderful to see. And so, perhaps, I’m just going to say, I feel that we can set agendas, and that we should be absolutely encouraging some imaginative special issue calls. So that’s maybe where we would want.

Will Brehm 36:08
And pushing for more theory, right. I mean it seems like that is a critique of the broader education field where it is. I often find, as well, that there’s a limited use of theory, just the application of theory, but also the generation of new theories, extending theories and new directions. And these are, I think, intellectually, this is perhaps where we should be going, I mean if I could use that word “should”. But Roger, any other things are you thinking about in terms of the next decade?

Roger Dale 36:40
I think one thing we can think about, I do not know if we can do anything about it, is to try to slightly finesse the idea of globalization. Because the way it’s used now, it is used as in the sense as globalization, everything, but it’s also used as a synonym for “world”. It’s also used as a synonym for “planetary”. And these things have to be distinguished. They’re not the same. And it’s very difficult to write a response – no not a response, a report – on some of this, because it would take you forever. But it would be a failure, I think in you mentioned, comparative education, that for some remains a model. And unfortunately, as far as we’re concerned, that’s one of the reasons we wanted to set the journal up, because we didn’t want to be one of them, because you couldn’t get that. And as Susan says, there’s some fantastic stuff we get that you wouldn’t get anywhere else. But sometimes, there’s stuff that it’s actually very difficult not to accept, but very easy not to be excited by.

Will Brehm 37:52
So, I know that the next year also marks a slightly new beginning for the journal. So, it’s an announcement I think you want to make on the show. So, I’m going to turn it over to the two of you to make the announcement of a big change that’s going to happen at the journal.

Susan Robertson 38:10
So, the announcement is that Roger in the founding coeditor along with me of the journal ‘Globalization, Societies, and Education’. I think that we’ve been going around 17 years, which is quite an achievement. So, Roger is going to stand down from being the coeditor along with me, and Mario Novelli is going to come forward. He’s going to remain very active; I have no doubt that in fact, I’ll be putting work his way in terms of finding reviewers and this, that, and the other. But I just want to say as a colleague of Roger’s, it’s been just a great pleasure to work with Roger. But it’s also a chance for to bring a new generation through. Mario Novelli, who’s at University of Sussex, a slightly different area, kind of political economy of development and so on. But I think that, and what we are planning to do, is to also bring a bunch of new young scholars and so on, on to as consulting editors and so on. Because I think it’s time also to use that energy to drive forward the next decade of the journal.

Roger Dale 39:23
To use it better than we have used it so far, given that the editorial board now is the same as the editorial board was in Volume One, Number One.

Will Brehm 39:32
Well, I must say, as a younger scholar, it is really quite amazing for the two of you to recognize those generational issues. But also, to say thank you for all the work that you’ve done pioneering this journal and moving it forward over time; I can’t believe it’s 17 years. It’s one of the main journals in the field. And so, you should be very proud of what you’ve created, and it’s very exciting to think about the next phase here, and the next decade to come. So, from everyone that’s a reader of ‘Globalization, Societies and Education’. Thank you, Roger, for all of your work and your editing. And like Susan says, you’re not yet allowed to retire just quite yet. You’re going to be working a little bit here and there.

Roger Dale 40:16
Is it worth me just say something on how it started?

Will Brehm 40:18
Sure.

Roger Dale 40:19
It started in a taxi ride from Washington airport to the hotel with Graham Hobbs, who I knew before from Palmer as it was then, and I said, “What about a new journal?” And he said, “Oh, yeah, I’ll take it to … “. He came back very quickly, he said, “I’ve put this idea up to my boss, and he wants to start it straight away.” He said his son has just started learning about globalization at school, so he thinks it will be a winner.

Will Brehm 40:51
Well, it certainly was. So, Susan Robertson and Roger Dale, thank you so much for joining again to end the year and to think ahead about next year. Happy holidays. Happy New Year. And I look forward to seeing you sometime in the new year. So, thank you again.

Susan Robertson 41:06
Thanks so much, Will.

Roger Dale 41:07
Thank you.

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