// Archives

Summer Reading

Summer is here! The opportunities for travel might not be as extensive this year, so we wanted to suggest a few books from the Liberal Arts Team that we’ve read and are planning to read that you might enjoy. Feel free to suggest some yourselves. Reading will be our adventure this summer! We’re using these …

Ruins and the Making of Us

The topic of this podcast is ruins and the impact they have on us. We live amongst the remains of previous decades, the structures of preceding centuries and the remains of previous civilisations. These ruins have moved us in different ways. Sometimes, we view these structures as romantic visions of historical eras. We can also …

Future Thinking and the Random Nature of the World

In this podcast we explore what it means to embrace the random nature of the world. If we look around us today, we see crises. We are living with the impact of Covid-19. But there are social, cultural, economic, political and environmental crises, too. To address these, we need to think about the future. But …

Empathy and Engagement

Over the last few weeks we’ve seen random acts of kindness which have made our world better during the impact of Covid-19. People have reached out to others to help and assist. Empathy has become far more of a focus of concern because of the pandemic. We investigate this in our latest podcast. We look …

Connectivity and Culture

This podcast looks at how we have developed a culture of connectivity. It has been so important to stay in touch over the last few months. We have all been talking with people over devices far more as the lockdown has reduced social interaction. This has been made possible by the technology that has come …

Coding as a Language Skill

In this episode of The Things That Made Us we discuss the ways that learning coding can be like learning a new language. We examine the development of Hypertext Markup Language (or, HTML). This formed the basic structure for the internet and remains a popular way to get into coding. Learning how to code can …

The importance of being interdisciplinary

We are focusing today on the importance of being interdisciplinary. This episode of the The Things That Made Us looks at why it is so important that we study across subjects. We are committed to this type of work in Liberal Arts. We want you to work across disciplines because we think it gives you …

Cultivating and Learning

The latest episode of The Things that Made Us take a look at what it means to grow, specifically what it means to have access to a plot of land to cultivate. We look at allotment gardens. Now, this might not seem like a fascinating area of discussion, but allotments perfectly present issues of politics, …

Memory and Culture

How do we remember the past? How do the events of the last century impact us? How do we remember as a society? In the latest episode of The Things That Made Us, we look at these issues in relationship to the First World War. From this work, we can understand how ‘social memory’ functions …

Dinosaurs and Extinction in the Age of the Anthropocene

In the latest episode of The Things That Made Us we look at dinosaurs. It might seem like an odd thing to say about a animals that last live on the planet 65 million years ago but dinosaurs are a very modern phenomenon. The discovery of fossils by humans crystallised into a distinct study in …