This year on the Transforming Society podcast, we’ve highlighted the stories behind research that tackles society’s biggest challenges and sparks meaningful change.
Here are our most listened to episodes from 2025:
1. How to be creative with data analysis
Helen Kara, Dawn Mannay, and Alastair Roy, editors of The Handbook of Creative Data Analysis, talk about the role of creativity in research, its benefits for analysis and communication, and the anxieties people might experience around using creative methods.
2. How education is failing young working-class men
In this episode, Alex Blower, author of Lost Boys, speaks to Richard Kemp about how the education system often fails working-class boys.
3. From faultlines to frontlines: Neoliberalism vs. people-powered movements
Peter Beresford, author of The Antidote, speaks about the problem neoliberalism poses, both in politics and in our everyday lives.
4. The myth of the heroic billionaire
In this episode of our Transforming Business podcast series with Martin Parker, Carl Rhodes. author of, author of Stinking Rich, explains the dangerous and deceptive myths which portray billionaires as a ‘force for good’.
5. Social work and social control
Malcolm Carey and Gurnam Singh, guest editors of the Critical and Radical Social Work special issue on social work and social control, speak with Richard Kemp about the social work paradox of care and control.
6. Changemaking and radical hope in times of crisis
In the first episode of our Transforming Business podcast series with Martin Parker, Jane Holgate and John Page, the authors of Changemakers, discuss the power of activism and challenge the belief that change is impossible.
7. The myth of the hormonal female
Jess Miles speaks to Sally King, author of Menstrual Myth Busting, about the myths and sexist tropes that blame the healthy reproductive body for the female-prevalence of emotional distress and physical pain.
8. Challenging the monarchy: Britain after Elizabeth II
George Miller talks to Laura Clancy, author of What Is the Monarchy For?, about the questions she think we should be asking about the monarchy in 21st-century Britain.
9. Is basic income the answer to our age of crisis?
In this episode, Richard Kemp talks with Howard Reed and Elliott Johnson, two of the co-authors of Basic Income: The Policy That Changes Everything, about the reality of basic income.
10. Has racism really changed? From Black Lives Matter to EDI backlash and beyond
In this episode, Richard Kemp speaks with Kalwant Bhopal, author of the second edition of White Privilege: The myth of a post-racial society, about why those from black and minority ethnic communities continue to be marginalised.
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