Undercurrents

We interviewed Manish Jain at Shikshantar, The People's Institute for Re-thinking Education and Development in the ancient city of Udaipur in India. Although born and brought up in India, Manish worked in the US for Morgan Stanley, received a Master's at Harvard University, and worked for UNESCO. He returned to India twenty-five years ago to look after his illiterate grandmother, which began a deep process of Un-learning. In the interview we talk about his discovery of the gift culture in India, its abundance versus scarcity culture, forgiveness, how working with your hands is not extracurricular, and the significance of cow dung.

In this episode, Steve Brett talks with the author Tomiwa Owolade, about his book This is Not America - Why Being Black and British Matters. Tom argues that racial identity is not an abstraction, but is contextual and based on different geographical and historical factors. He writes that many of the ideas we have about what it means to be black have been adopted from America, when in fact what it means to be black and British is different from what it means to be black and American.

Leadership Developer and social entrepreneur Dave Pendle, in conversation with Steve Brett about Eldership. They discuss the value of eldership, and if it is something that can be both restored and developed in modern culture.

In this episode, Mary Adams explores the embodied intelligence of Contact Dance Improvisation with the leading dance teacher/performer Kirstie Simson. Described as a “force of nature” by the New York Times, Simson shares her experience and insights into the relevance of our relationship to the body, and how this can transform the deep cultural attitudes of separation and dissociation which underlie the global meta crisis.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos is a distinguished legal scholar and Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. He is one of the founders of the World Social Forum. He has written and published widely on issues of global justice and its relationship to the necessity for an ecology of knowledge systems. As well as being a brilliant scholar he has worked for social justice in social movements around the world, including amongst the favelas of Brazil and with indigenous and peasant communities in different parts of the world.

An interview with the British/Chinese writer, diarist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo. From her upbringing in a small fishing village on the East China Sea to becoming the celebrated writer and filmmaker she is living in Britain today, we explore the extraordinary life and work of an east/west cultural pioneer.

Gabriel Meyer Halevy is a musician and storyteller from Argentina. His book, “On the Verge of the Verb” is shortly to be published in the US. Gabriel is a cross-cultural bridge builder—even across enemy lines—through music, humour and story. We met up with Gabriel at Brave Earth earlier this year, a community founded by Alnoor Ladha in the jungle of Costa Rica. In this podcast Gabriel talks about his travels and meetings with extraordinary people, his celebration of the prophetic nature of his spiritual lineage, and his love of the human spirit.

In this episode recorded at Alnoor Ladha's home in the jungle of Costa Rica, Steve Brett talks with Alnoor about how we should be responding to the Climate Emergency and the possibility that we might be one of the last generations of human life on earth. For Alnoor, it’s not just about social and political action.  We need to understand and dis-identify from the dominant culture, and make an ontological shift that is in deep relationality to the living planet.

In this episode of Undercurrents, Mary Adams speaks with Esther Stanford-Xosei about her work with inter-generational movements to repair the damage of colonial legacies and create a new holistic paradigm.

In this episode, Steve Brett talks with Irish artist Patrick Bryson about art, meditation and freedom. The conversation follows Patrick's own journey as an artist - a journey he says, that never ends.

Jamie Bristow is the director of the Mindfulness Initiative, a think tank which has been instrumental in bringing Mindfulness into the political mainstream and affecting public policy. Last year the Mindfulness Initiative took the step of examining the evidence for the positive effects of mindfulness beyond its familiar Wellness application, by producing a paper called, “Mindfulness: Developing Agency in Urgent Times” which looks at qualities that can be cultivated through mindfulness, that might be foundational toward creating social and societal change. In this podcast I'll be speaking with Jamie about his new paper, and how our understanding of Mindfulness is developing.

In this episode of Undercurrents, Steve Brett discusses awareness, journalism, and activism with Anthea Lawson.