Sophie Hope recorded this episode in a café in a break from her ongoing picket. (See episode 37 for details of that.) As a result you will hear an interesting variety of background noises and conversations, and feel as though you have sat down at the next table.
You will overhear a conversation with Mike Neary, Emeritus Professor of sociology at the School of Social Sciences at the University of Lincoln, whose most recent work, Students as Producers, Zer0 Books have just published.
Sophie and Mike discuss the current academic strikes across England, the idea behind teach-outs, and the role of education in establishing a post-capitalist society.

As well as podcasting and making art, Sophie Hope lectures at University College, London. The academic staff there have gone on strike to demand that their employer begins negotiations in several related areas: pensions, pay grades, differing pay in terms of gender & race, workload, and the casualisation of the teaching staff.
In this episode she explains why the staff have gone on strike, what they hope to achieve, and the complications of withdrawing your labour when your labour concerns the production of knowledge rather than tangible goods.

Owen Kelly and Irma Sippola have begun two cultural projects in Kerala, south India, in partnership with an NGO called SISP.
In this episode Sophie Hope talks to Owen about the purpose of the projects, their possible long term outcomes, and the practicality of passing on coding skills to teenagers with little or no prior experience of using computers.

In this episode Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly continue talking to Russell Southwood about ideas arising from the 1985 book What a Way to Run a Railroad that he co-authored with Charles Landry, Dave Morley and Patrick Wright.
Chapter 7 of the book looks towards the future, and the discussion looks at the cultural, economic and political issues that linger on from the nineteen eighties; sometimes in almost unchanged forms.

On October 28, 2019, Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope attended a seminar in Newcastle in which every participant had to bring a memento from their community art practice. Sophie brought a copy of What a Way to Run a Railroad, a book published by Comedia in 1985.
This sparked a lengthy discussion which resulted in us talking to Russell Southwood, one of the authors of the book. In this episode we look at how the book came to get written, and what effects it had.

In late November Owen Kelly spent two days at Slush, the annual technology event in Helsinki, aimed primarily at startups and young entrepreneurs. He noticed that the atmosphere had changed noticeably this year, and that the culture which has developed around startups appears to have discovered social responsibility.
In this episode he discusses a few of his experiences at Slush with Sophie Hope, whose scepticism about these kinds of things knows no bounds.

Sofia Bustamante works as a trainer in conflict resolution. She has a black belt in Aikido and bases her many of her workshop exercises and techniques on insights she has gained from this. She grounds her practice in an approach based on living systems, peacework, martial arts, neuroscience and work in therapeutic fields.
Her current work involves developing a systematic Conflict Resolution Pattern Language.
In this episode we talk about the relationships between her work, traditional fears of naming, and General Semantics.

In November 2019, Sophie Hope attended The Age of Cultural Participation seminar at Kultura Nova in Zagreb. Sarah Feinstein and Lucy Wright also attended. After the event ended they sat in a hotel room and discussed what they had learned, including what they had learned about how to organise conferences in keeping with principles of cultural democracy.