Economic and Social Research Council

We'll be bringing together IFS experts to discuss the big tax and spending choices facing the Chancellor and what they could mean for households, businesses, and the wider economy.

Tickets are, of course, free, and the event will be hosted at the British Library as part of the ESRC's Festival of Social Sciences.

You can find full details and a link to book in the episode description.

I hope we will see lots of you there.

For season seven, we're bringing you a mini edition of the podcast to focus on our biennial photography ethics symposium.

Back in June, the 2026 symposium was hosted at Queen's University Belfast and produced in partnership with the academic journal Photographies, with funding from the ESRC.

This event brought together photographers, curators, archivists, and researchers to critically consider the messy endeavor of photography ethics.

So I think this research is really important because I don't think you can really understand what photographic ethics mean today without having gone backwards to look at where it's come from and how ethics has changed over the last almost 200 years.

So that's what I did.

I got an ESRC grant.

I was very fortunate with that and spent three years at Newcastle, three and a half, studying.

It started out about environmental policy, but then became about urban regeneration and how does the government tackle that? And as I came to the end of that, having started that thinking, oh, I would love to be an academic, realizing I did not want to be an academic at all.

I don't know how long it's going to take.

But the outcome of this review I'm doing, if I can pull together the support needed from the backers of my review and of the government, because it's funded for the private sector and the government's research council, the ESRC, If we can pull together the funding for some pathfinders, the very precise purpose of those pathfinders is that catalytic effect.

Let's see what happens if we gather in three different places, and I propose three pathfinders, one of which should be an established mayoral authority, one of which might be somewhere that's polycentric with all the problems that that means, a West Yorkshire, a North East Tyne or a county area, and another should be a new county area.

Three very different areas,

Just take a step back, say a little bit about the review, and then what you're trying to do.

I was approached by the UK Dynamism Fund, which is a new philanthropic body funded to do stuff that's going to make Britain grow.

and the ESRC to do a fellowship and so funded.

So I said, well, that's interesting.

Um, but let me stop there and say that if you want to know a bit more about any of this, um, I really recommend checking out either Madeleine's book, um, or our Green Budget, uh, report.

That report is the first chapter of our annual Green Budget, for which we thank the Nuffield Foundation, ESRC, and Barclays for helping to fund.

And there will be loads more analysis coming out.

Max and I have been editing, uh, madly in recent weeks, so watch this space for lots, uh, lots of that.

So positive development specifically for emotions, but the overall landscape is not looking good.

If you look into the budgets of funding agencies, the ESRC and so on, you see what is going on, that it's not promising right now.

at all.

So we are at a competitive disadvantage this way relative to our East Asian colleagues.

I worked with my former supervisor on a project called Conflict in Cities, and I worked on Jerusalem.

So a very large multidisciplinary research project funded by the ESRC.

And essentially, I looked at the politics of heritage from the late 19th century into the present.

So it looked at religious sites again, but very much from a social and political vantage point and its sort of urban impact, the urban impact of the politics of heritage.