UCL Uncovering Politics

Outdoor Learning And The Politics Of Hope

Episode Summary

This week we’re talking about the politics of hope, the climate crisis, and the importance of learning outdoors.

Episode Notes

In this episode, host Dr Emily McTernan is joined by Professor Cathy Elliot from UCL’s Department of Political Science to explore the politics of hope in the face of the climate crisis and the role of outdoor learning in cultivating that hope. Amidst growing climate anxiety, especially among younger generations, Prof. Elliot offers a hopeful perspective on how educators can inspire action without falling into despair.

This episode delves into the emotional landscape of politics and education, challenging the assumption that critical thinking and emotional engagement are at odds. They discuss the nature of hope, its importance in driving social and political change, and the emotional balance between hope and anger. They also explore the benefits of outdoor learning in higher education, where students engage with nature and develop a more profound sense of purpose and agency in addressing environmental issues. Prof. Elliot shares insights from her own outdoor teaching practices and provides tips for incorporating nature into the classroom to foster hope and resilience in students.

 

Mentioned in this episode:

Episode Transcription

Emily McTernan: [00:00:00] Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics, and this week we're talking about the politics of hope, the climate crisis and the importance of learning outdoors. 

Hello, my name is Emily McTernan and welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.

Sometimes it might seem like despair is the right response to the climate crisis. You might feel a sense of hopelessness about the possibility of fixing or even ameliorating its looming consequences. How much more so, though, for those coming to adulthood after years of being told about climate change and its harms?

My six year old has already been taught at school about climate change, the warming of the oceans, and species going extinct. And the thing he can do about it, he's told, is to recycle and [00:01:00] turn out lights. Strategies even he doesn't think are going to be enough. But today's guest offers us instead a politics of hope, and of how to cultivate that hope amongst our students, even in the face of their climate anxiety and grief.

So I'm delighted to be joined this week by Professor Cathy Elliott, Professor in the Department of Political Science and Vice Dean of Education in the Faculty of Social and Historical Science to talk about hope and outdoor learning. Cathy is an expert in education and higher education on time and storytelling and democracy and on nature writing. So welcome back, Kathy, to Uncovering Politics.

It's great to have you on the show today. 

Cathy Elliott: Thanks so much for having me. 

Emily McTernan: Let's start by talking about hope. What is it to feel hope and why is hope important? 

Cathy Elliott: Yeah, so, hope is an emotion, and I think Rebecca Solnit argues, I think quite usefully, actually drawing on Vaclav Havel that hope has two kind of opposites.

And so, one of the opposites of hope is optimism. So, optimism is you think everything's going to be okay, you don't really worry too much about it [00:02:00] you just sort of get on with your life, look to the future, feel optimistic, that's fine. And then the other opposite to hope is despair. Yeah. And again, that's, that's an emotion where you don't, you don't have to do very much, right?

You're just in despair, there's nothing you can do, you're hopeless, it's apathetic. And hope's somewhere in the middle, so hope isn't The expectation that things are going to be okay. It's not even saying that things are probably going to be okay, right? Rather, it's the possibility that they might.

And therefore, the responsibility on you to do something about it. So to be involved in the possibility every moment that things could go in different directions and that you could be part of making things better. 

Do you think there's a risk that hope might remove our sense of urgency about problems?

So we think things might get better, we think we can do something towards it, and we stop there. Or is that something you think is more a vice of optimism or something like that? 

Yeah, so I think that's probably more a vice of optimism. So I think both optimism and despair sort of take away urgency because they take away our sense of agency at that sense that we can, [00:03:00] we can do anything, uh, to, to ameliorate climate crisis, extinction, species loss, all of these things that your six year old is already so worried about. And so that anxiety can be very paralyzing, I think. Whereas hope asks something from us, hope requires us to do things.

And I mean, I, I worry a bit about urgency. Because part of the whole narrative of climate crisis is things are speeding up, things are out of control, things are so chaotic. And I think that, that leads into this narrative of despair. Because if things are going so fast and there's very little you can do, and often the work of politics is slow work.

It takes time, it takes effort. Things will not change overnight. We can't expect that they will. And yet sometimes when change happens, it happens fast, but it happens in ways that, you know, we weren't necessarily expecting. So, yeah, I don't worry so much about urgency. I think the urgency might might take care of itself if we all act hopefully, if we engage in this politics of hope.

Emily McTernan: And one [00:04:00] of the interesting things I found in your work on the politics of hope is how strongly you tied hope with a sense of belonging and community. So I wonder if you want to talk to us a bit about that, because I guess some some listeners might be thinking, hope, that's something you feel kind of inside you, right, I feel a bit hopeful about the future.

But you're seeing it as much more of a politically and socially engaged emotion, I think, is that correct? 

Cathy Elliott: Absolutely. So, and I think this is true of all the emotions. So, I think it's very tempting to think of emotion, any emotion, as this kind of interior cognitive state, right? And it's tempting to feel that way because it feels very personal and very individual.

Because it's embodied, you're like, I am feeling this thing. And sometimes you can feel as if you're all alone feeling it. Actually, all emotions sort of exist in communities, in societies, right? So, William Connolly, the political theorist, he does really good work on sort of the latest neuroscience and trying to bring that into conversation with people who think about politics.

And trying to think about the ways that our, our mirror neurons in our brain are all sort of wired up with [00:05:00] each other's. So actually all the emotions that we feel are kind of communal though, that we, we feel them together. And I think when we think about politics, politics is all about us. It's all about doing things with other people.

You can't have politics on your own. Politics is not an individual pursuit. It's a team sport, right? You work with other people. And what emotions do is they bring you together with other people into political action. 

Emily McTernan: So, so they bring you into this kind of political action together. I guess the emotion that I think about when I think about us being brought into action together is not the emotion of hope so much as the emotion of anger. So lots of people think that anger is politically motivating. It gets us to do things that might be rioting, but it also might be voting for a candidate where we're moved by our anger about how things are to really bother going out and vote, to really bother protesting and you've gone for hope not anger.

So that's interesting I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about why that did that choice. 

Cathy Elliott: Yeah. So I think anyone that's ever been swept along by a sort of tide of emotion kind of understands instinctively that politics [00:06:00] and emotion have a lot to do with each other. And you know, that, that we are motivated politically by emotions.

And yeah, I think a lot, it's quite uncommon for my students to write about feeling angry, which is quite interesting. And I think I, I mean, I have a lot of women students. I wonder if that's part of LGBTQ students because of, I think because of the way my module is advertised as being about gender and queer politics and I think, you know, People in the queer community, and women in particular, are taught from a very, very early age that it's quite dangerous to feel anger, that anger can expose you to all sorts of unpleasant consequences, and that it's also maybe not, for women, it's not sort of feminine, it's not kind of the done thing.

So it's, it is quite unusual for me to see anger from my students. But when I do, I think it comes out in quite interesting ways. So, I asked my students to just sort of, they have a, a lot of choice over what they write about. But we do go to Kew Gardens and one of the students wrote about wanting to decolonize Kew Gardens.

And she [00:07:00] was a student from a Bangladeshi background. She was from East London. She said she lives near Kew. Nobody had ever taken her to Kew Gardens. She knew nothing about it. She went there. She thought it was wonderful. But then we learned about the colonial history of Kew as part of the class.

And she wrote a very angry letter as part of her assessment to the director of Kew Gardens. So, you know, you must decolonize. This isn't right. And I sat down with her and we sort of talked about how that anger was totally legitimate, totally fine to feel that way. And You know, I feel that way too, honestly, sometimes I get very angry about these things, but if you're writing a letter to him, there is then a question, and this is a question about skills, right, of what, what do you want that letter to achieve?

What do you want to happen as, as a consequence? And if she'd said to me, I just want to pour it all out, I just want to feel better, I would have said, okay. Right, send it then. Fine. But she didn't say that. She said, I want something to change as a result. And I said, right, okay, and so how do we get people to change?

Like, let's think, let's game it through. Like, when he opens this letter, how is he going to feel? And, [00:08:00] so we had a go at rewriting this letter in a way that starts off with a kind of, positive story of how much she'd appreciated going to Kew Gardens, what a great experience it had been how it was wonderful for someone like her to see plants from Bangladesh and to see how they were there and to learn about the history of Kew Gardens and Bangladesh.

And then she did the angry bit, like, I didn't see anyone else that looked like me. I didn't see any signage explaining that, you know, a lot of people in my country really suffered as a result of Kew Gardens and other colonial gardens and plant hunters and the Victorians and their actions in botany.

And I, and, I, you know, I think people from my community would like to come to Kew Gardens and learn about that, I think that could be a revenue stream for you, I think it could be a source of visitors, I think you'd get a lot of political capital from it, and I really recommend that you do this, and I'd be very happy to help, you know, I've got lots of suggestions about what you could do as a consequence.

So I kind of taught her to write a shit sandwich really so she starts off, she starts off with the kind of it was great and then she did the kind of fierce critique in the middle and then she did the kind of positive [00:09:00] optimistic here's what we could do for the future at the end. And I do think that's more likely to make to make a change, right, I think she felt better about that letter at the end as well because it wasn't just a case of pouring out all her anger.

And then walking away thinking, well, I feel angry now. Nothing's changed. Actually, she had a sense of agency and efficacy because she felt that perhaps as a result of lots of people making similar recommendations, something would change and could change. And it's not it's not a massive thing to ask, really.

Emily McTernan: Great. So there's a kind of constructive version of anger. A repairing version of anger as opposed to a sort of sheer rage, feeling version of anger. 

Cathy Elliott: Yeah, and hope has to be sort of part of the hope that something could be different as a result. 

Emily McTernan: The belief that we could repair these relations perhaps.

Perhaps we can focus a bit more then on the connection between hope and climate change in particular. Yeah. Which is the theme that you're pursuing in the piece that we're talking about today. Is the climate crisis a place where we're in special, particular need of feeling hope?

Cathy Elliott: Yeah, so people, people do argue that.

So people argue that. the anthropocene, right, this, this moment in human history where it [00:10:00] seems like everything we believed is sort of falling apart. People believe that, that's also the end of kind of this narrative of progress and development, right? So all the things that we thought were giving us progress and prosperity and economic development, you know, higher wages, better quality of life, antibiotics, all of that, it all turns out to have been contributing to this kind of catastrophic use of fossil fuels, which is destroying the very planet that we live on.

And so, people, people think about that as a kind of, moment where all our faith in these narratives of hope and progress are kind of coming apart. And so Anna Singh has said, you know, there is no, there is no happy ending to this . There is, there is no arc of the moral universe bending towards progress.

None of that, right. This is just, this is just, just terrible, and therefore we have to learn to live in the here and now, we have to learn to live in the present, because that's all we, that's all we've really got at this point and because of the delayed impacts of climate change, we're kind of, we've already set in motion what's going to happen, and it will be bad.

So yeah, so some people certainly think that. 

Emily McTernan: And [00:11:00] is hope possible do you think in the face of climate change? Your students found some, so I guess it is, but you might think that the sheer scale of what we're facing makes hope particularly tricky in this case.

Cathy Elliott: Yeah, and. Particularly tricky and therefore perhaps particularly necessary, right?

Because we have to find a way of living. We're not just, you know, we're not going to tell our children and our grandchildren that we're just, we're just giving up, right? So we have to do something. And there are different ways of thinking about hope. And so I get my students to read a reading by Rebecca Solnit and then a reading by Jonathan Lear.

And the Rebecca Solnit reading is great, and they really enjoy it. And she talks about how, you know, things can change, and they have changed. And you can look at the whole sweep of human history, all the things that seemed impossible, like, you know, rights for women, rights for gay people, and so on, seemed impossible until the day it happened, right?

The Berlin Wall, all these things that seemed impossible until the very moment that, that the world as we knew it came crumbling down. And students take a lot of heart from that, because there are all these examples of ways in which people, often in very unpromising [00:12:00] circumstances. have made a difference.

But then the Jonathan Lear reading is much more provocative than that, and I think I prefer it for that reason. So he draws on the experience of the Crow people indigenous people in North America, who just watch their world being completely destroyed, right? Everything is destroyed. And other indigenous people, such as the Sioux people, kind of cling to the world as it was before, try and, try and keep it, try and resurrect it, and that's, you know, we can understand why.

But the Crow people, through leadership, they decide that what is needed in this situation is a kind of radical hope, where you don't even know what it is you're hoping for because you can't imagine what the world is going to be like. The world has changed so much that all you can do is become the sort of person who is able to live in conditions of complete uncertainty and where you have no idea what will be required of you and therefore what will be required of you is courage, and to be able to go on living [00:13:00] in a world where your whole world, everything you knew, everything you believed has gone.

I think that might be more where we are. So I think the Rebecca Solnit version is, is nice, is comforting in ways, but it's also not obvious that that narrative of progress is really helping us. Whereas this moment of saying, yeah, you know, we don't know what's coming. It might be very serious. Therefore, we're going to need to be the sort of people that can cope with very serious situations where it's beyond our capacity to imagine.

And therefore we need to do that work together and in community. 

Emily McTernan: That's a fantastic vision of hope and what it might look like, really powerful. Thank you for offering that to us. Are there emotions other than hope that you think we might need for climate change? We've got courage, which isn't quite an emotion, it's sort of virtue.

Is there anything else that you think is a very powerful emotion in this space, or is hope your central focus here? 

Cathy Elliott: Yeah, so I also think a lot about joy, so I think joy can be a really radical strategy, yeah, and so I think our students are, they're so kind of ground down in ways, partly through anxiety and despair, partly through, you know, these stories [00:14:00] about climate that they've been working with since they were very little and through this sense that the world for them will be harder than the world was for their parents, that they're going to have difficult lives, that it's hard scrabble, that they're in competition with each other, everything, everything that they, that they care about, right?

That all their self worth is tied up with. getting a particular grade, but by the way, only 10 percent of you can have that grade, all of that, right? The sense that, you know, you don't show your friends your work because they, then they might copy all of these, all of these kinds of worries and anxiety.

And I think actually what that does is quell political action and quell the possibility for doing something about it, right? Because you're just so sort of tied up in yourself and your, and your own worries when you, when you feel like that. And so actually opening up a bit and saying, you know, there is, there are things still about this world that are beautiful, right?

We can still feel joy in this world. We can still have great fun in each other's company. We can make each other [00:15:00] laugh. We can be in awe of the beauty of the natural world. We can love, so love's another one, right? Love's a big emotion that, that I have, I want to make a lot of space for in my class. We can love this tree.

Right. We can love being together. And I think those sorts of emotions, which again are often very, they're about belonging and community are really, really important to motivating political action, where again, all politics is about working together and being able to feel part of something which is bigger than yourself.

Emily McTernan: So you've offered us a very rich picture of the role of emotions facing education and in politics. But of course, some people are very sceptical about that role of emotion in politics and in education. So I guess if I could put the opposite side to you, I think we might already be able to guess as listeners where you're going to say, what you're going to say in response.

But let me just offer it to you. You might think that the role of the educator is to teach critical thinking and not how to feel. And perhaps you might think that it would be better if our emotion was, if our politics was a bit less emotion driven and a bit more [00:16:00] reasonable. What would you say to these critics?

Cathy Elliott: Yeah, so, and I've, I've I tell the story in the book in the book chapter about a conference where I was presenting this paper. Somebody sort of rather sharply said to me it's not our job as educators to engage in the emotions. You know, we're not qualified for it. We don't want to be sitting there in the classroom with everybody crying.

That's not our job. And I don't, I, I don't know. I don't think that's right, and I think there are, there are various reasons why that's not right, and the first is that it implies that you can separate the reason and the emotions, and I just don't think that's right, so often if you're arguing for something, if you're using your critical thinking, it's because you have this kind of emotional sense that this is the right answer.

So I mean, I think you've written about this, haven't you? I'm on your side. Here I am playing the critic, but yes, indeed. I know, I love it, yeah. But then secondly, I think classrooms are places where we learn our emotions. And situations where we're being There are all sorts of situations where we're being taught our emotions.

And so if as educators, we're not noticing that, then it means we're not reflecting on our practice because we're not noticing which emotions we're teaching and which emotions we're not [00:17:00] teaching. So just to give you like really sort of small example, I noticed with my niece, not so much with my nephew, but with my niece, when she's racing about outside, my, my mum, so her granny will be saying, be careful, don't hurt yourself.

And then my sister. So my niece's mum will say, no, no, like let her play. And it's really interesting because it reminded me that my sister and I were taught to be quite fearful of hurting ourselves as little girls often are. And boys aren't. And I think that has actually had quite an impact on my life.

So, you know, I suspect this is why I'm not very good at sports, for example. And so teaching somebody fear. is part of what we do as educators, right? So every time we say, oh, if you don't do this, you won't get a good grade, right? You're teaching your students to be fearful whether you know it or not.

And if you're not thoughtful and mindful about that, then you don't know you're doing it. And then therefore you can't adapt your practice and make sure that you are doing the things you want to do and teach the things that you want to teach. 

Emily McTernan: And that's a great moment at which we can [00:18:00] turn then to think a bit about teaching practice.

So one of the interesting things about this chapter, which I strongly recommend to readers, and we'll have the full details at the end of this discussion, one of the things you are writing about is how we cultivate hope in the context of the climate crisis. So can you tell us a bit about your practice of teaching outside of the classroom. What's so good about getting outside and what spaces did you visit? 

Cathy Elliott: Yeah, so I mean getting outside is always brilliant. So we visited three spaces. We visited the Chelsea Physic Garden where we learned about queer ecology, and we visited Kew Gardens where we learned about Kew's colonial history, and then we visited the Royal College of Physicians Garden.

Ah no. And then we, and in the year that the book chapter is based on, we visited the Institute of Education garden, and that was on an absolutely freezing cold day. And the idea of that was, we were doing hope that week, and the idea of that was we were going to plant some bulbs, and that would be a kind of, an act of faith in the future, because you know when you plant a bulb, it's cold, it's winter, but then [00:19:00] you go back in spring and then you've got a tulip, or a daffodil or something.

But nature had other ideas that day because the ground was absolutely rock solid. There was no way that we were planting any bulbs. So instead, we propagated some spider plants, which was also good fun. And actually, generations of those spider plants have now been handed out to students. So, the spider plants are still living as a kind of act of faith in the future.

And I suppose, so I did, I obviously was thinking very much about hope when I went into those spaces, but I didn't quite know how it was going to play out. So I definitely had some sense that there would be content knowledge. So if you're teaching a module about nature, of course you're going to try and go outside.

That, that makes sense. If you're talking about queer nature, you might want to show the students a yew tree and talk about the way that it's different branches change gender all the time and that sort of thing. Like that's kind of, so I thought about the, the, the, the subject knowledge of it and I thought a little bit about how it would be fun and students would like it and that that might be joyful.

But I think what I wasn't expecting to happen, but all the students wrote about this, is how being outside changed the [00:20:00] relationships in the classroom, really changed them. So there was something about being together in an outdoor space, something about the way you move rather than you sit still. You're not sitting in rows facing the teacher, but you're actually moving around.

There's a kind of democracy that takes away that hierarchy. Different students were sort of chatting to me and then moving on and then chatting to each other. We went, we went there together. We went back to UCL together, so we were sort of on public transport. We were walking quite a lot. And there was just something about that that really deepened the relationships that we had with each other.

And almost all the students in their final portfolios wrote about that experience of being in the garden, their experiences of making a friend. One student said that was the first time she'd made a friend in higher education, a third year undergraduate student. I know. Uh, so, that was really important.

And then they also wrote about how it deepened their relationships with other people. So, like, one student wrote about her granny and how her granny was a keen gardener and she'd never asked her about it before. Uh, but now they were having all these conversations about gardening. And another [00:21:00] student's mum was texting her saying, When will you be home?

I want to learn about the garden. Yeah. So, there's a famous quote by Wendell Berry which says, We will never save a world that we don't love. And I think being together. In those gardens, learning to love the natural world, learning the names of plants and, uh, plants and trees and small animals and insects and things sort of enabled us to be part of a community and have a relationship with the natural world and a relationship with each other, which I think is really, really political because now we're a group of people who can do things together because we've got that relationship.

We've got that community together. 

Emily McTernan: It seems like a very important thing. That's something we often overlook in teaching because of our focus on the content of the course and on teaching skills rather than thinking about these relational goods.

Cathy Elliott: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it is a skill, right? Being able to make a friend is a skill. 

Emily McTernan: Absolutely. Yeah. 

Cathy Elliott: And a political skill as well. Being able to think together in a group, being able to ask the right question, being able to keep a conversation going. Absolutely. All of these are absolutely crucial skills that we're going to, you know, [00:22:00] our students are going to need, that we need.

And so yeah, so I mean my top tip for any teacher for what it's worth is take some content out and make space for these relationships because that's actually a really big part of what we're doing in education. In some sense that's 

Emily McTernan: So then I guess this was one of the questions I was going to ask you was the tips for the rest of us.

If we're not running courses on nature, you're saying still get outside or at least try and somehow get outside the seminar room in order to enable these kinds of changes. 

Cathy Elliott: Absolutely. Yeah. So I don't think it really matters what you're teaching. You can almost always find a reason to get outside. Right.

So, where in London undoubtedly there will be a sort of a, an educational walk on your topic that you can sort of think of, whether it's a walk about, you know, Marx or economists that have lived in London or, you know, whatever it might be. There's almost always a way of getting outside. And, uh, you know, with smaller groups, you can do walking seminars and things like that.

That makes a really big difference to the way the energy flows, the way the conversation flows. So yeah, you know, I, it's definitely worth doing. Public spaces like Chelsea Physic Garden and Kew [00:23:00] Gardens, often they will let you in for free, or at a discounted rate, you just have to ask them. Often they've got their own educational programme that they can help you with, so they can give you some ideas about what you might do with your students there, or they might even give you some of their time with an educator that will work with your students.

All public spaces and gardens have to be compliant with the Disability Discrimination Act, so by and large they're very accessible you can so my view is it's good to either do something close enough, so for us the Institute of Education, Garden and the Royal College of Physicians, students could get there by walking, you could get there really, really easily from UCL, no more, no further than one of our far flung classrooms of which we have many, and so, so that was, so that was really, really easy for them, and so yeah, make it easy for the students.

Or else pay their fare. And yeah, our director of education very, very kindly gave me the money to, to pay the fares of the students to get to Chelsea and Kew, which was terrific. And then make sure that students know what they're doing. So be really, really clear. This is where we're [00:24:00] meeting. This is what you need to bring with you.

We will be doing it even if it's raining. So bring your umbrella. If you're gardening, make sure you bring your rubber gloves. You know, those sorts of things, because they might, they might not know, especially students in London, like, you don't want your students turning up in high heels or something, like, be really, really clear what it is they need to do, so they feel confident.

You probably will have to do a risk assessment. It's like, not that bad, people, you can do it, it's fine. You probably have to do a risk assessment, it will help you think through the things that can go wrong. But, The thing that does go wrong won't be the thing that you wrote down in the risk assessment, but that's fine, you can put it in for next year.

Emily McTernan: At least you've preempted all the other things that didn't happen. 

Cathy Elliott: But I was joking with my students that I really didn't think one of them falling in the pond would be something that I needed to do . Oh goodness. Spell tones next year perhaps. 

Emily McTernan: And I guess as the final question, I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about some of the work that the students produce.

We've heard about the letter, but are there any other pieces, maybe you could offer us a piece that 

Cathy Elliott: Yeah, so there was one in particular that I write about in the chapter, which I just thought was wonderful. Where a student from Cypriot background, who I'm quoting [00:25:00] with permission, he had proposed, or he'd written a kind of policy memo for the idea of having a kind of outdoor education project from Greek, for Greek and Turkish young people in Cyprus to work together, both to preserve the natural world and also to form relationships among themselves as a kind of peace building project.

And there were, the thing I thought was really interesting about that is there is a literature on people in conflict situations working together on conservation projects and nature projects in order to build those relationships and reconciliation and peace building.

So, I just recently read a PhD thesis about some of that work in Northern Ireland, for example, like that, that's, that's quite common, but what we hadn't done was discuss that in the class. So he just had this sense from the kind of very non conflictual relationships that we had in our class. It was something about working together in a garden that makes it possible to build really trusting deep relationships, really political relationships that will enable you then to overcome difference.

And [00:26:00] so it's a kind of prefigurative politics that he was, that he was advocating for. And it was a really, really beautiful piece of work and absolutely full of hope for the future to overcome conflict and also to develop relationships with each other and with the natural world. 

Emily McTernan: Thank you so much, Kathy, for that rich and joyful and hopeful portrayal of how we can all teach a bit better and how we can maybe confront the climate crisis in a more hopeful vein.

We've been discussing a recent publication by Cathy Elliott, Hope in the Garden, Outdoor Learning as Politics, a chapter in a book that came out this summer called Outdoor Learning in Higher Education, Educating Beyond the Seminar Room. Full details, as ever, will be in the show notes. Next week, we'll be talking about French social democracy with Philippe Maler.

As ever, to make sure that you don't miss out on this future episode of UCL Uncovering Politics and others, all you need to do is subscribe. You can do so on Apple, Google Podcasts, or whichever podcast provider you use. And while you're there, we would [00:27:00] love it if you could take a moment of time to rate or review us too.

I'm Emily McTernan. This episode was produced by Eleanor Kingwell Banham. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann. This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.