Getting To Better Together
For the vast majority of us, the future has to be better than it is right now, and the only way that will happen is for as many of us as possible to contribute to the direction that it develops. Join Richard Bawden and his guests in the fortnightly episodes as they explore ideas, opinions, provide facts and evidence in support of the aim of getting to better together. If you are among the many who seek to involve themselves in developing a better future, please come and join the conversation. The Mission of this podcast miniseries is to actively contribute to critical public discussions about how the most pressing issues of the day might be more responsibly, effectively, and communally addressed within the context of the continuing development of states of sustainable and inclusive well-being in an ever-changing world.
Episodes
![Infrastructure at the Roof of the World](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/image-logo/10246414/GettingToBetterTogetherCover_300x300.jpg)
Friday Jun 30, 2023
Infrastructure at the Roof of the World
Friday Jun 30, 2023
Friday Jun 30, 2023
The merest mention of Nepal evokes immediate images of the majestic grandeur of the Himalayan mountains, of precipitous gorges and mountain passes, and of course, of Mount Everest herself, the highest mountain on the planet, standing some 8.8 thousand metres above sea level. Yet tragically, this country is no paradise on Earth. Literally sandwiched between the two most highly populated and rapidly developing mega-nations, of India to the south and China to the north and east, Nepal, with some 30 million people, is one of the least economically developed nations on the planet. It is estimated that one in four Nepalis live below the poverty line while the nation’s economic growth continues to be adversely affected by political uncertainty, multi-factorial social conflict and, most significantly, by a host of natural disasters. It certainly experiences much more than its fair share of such natural disasters as earthquakes, floods, fire, drought, and landslides leading to its status as one of the most disaster-prone nations on earth.
One can only begin to imagine the scope of the challenges that these circumstances present to those in Nepal who assume responsibilities for the design, development, investment in, and maintenance of infrastructures that facilitate crucial economic development such as roads, power, information technologies, water and sanitation.
Where does one even start?
This was the question with which our host Richard Bawden, opened his conversation in this episode with someone who is intimately involved with precisely these matters in Nepal and who was a recent participant in a CIDSEL international short course on infrastructure development. Saumitra Neupane is a political economist specialising in policies, institutions, and markets of water and energy resources. For the past decade, he has been engaged in several research and reform initiatives in Nepal’s water, energy, agriculture, and infrastructure sectors. At present, he serves as the Executive Director at Policy Entrepreneurs Inc. and is leading PEI’s strategic initiative on infrastructure diplomacy.
![The Sacrificial Valley](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/image-logo/10246414/GettingToBetterTogetherCover_300x300.jpg)
Friday Jun 16, 2023
The Sacrificial Valley
Friday Jun 16, 2023
Friday Jun 16, 2023
All too often it seems, the pressing issues of the day that demand the attention of us all, are just too vast, too remote, too mind-bogglingly complex, that that attention is left wanting. We leave it to ‘them’ – to governments, corporations, our formal institutions, and so on - to fix the changing climate, the threats to world peace, the instabilities of financial systems, the loss of biodiversity and the quality of the environment. We feel overwhelmed not just by the immensity of the challenges but also by the sheer volume of the noise of information, knowledge, attitudes, opinions, mindsets and biases that fills the air of the ecosystems of the media upon which we increasingly rely for the basis of our decisions about how we should be better living our lives.
But then, on the rarest of occasions, come individuals and community groups that challenge that status quo: Inspired and inspiring people who shift the focus from the global to the local in taking informed actions that illustrate what can and should be done to right systemic wrongs.
Richard’s guest in this episode provides just such an inspiration. For many years, Dr John Drinan, scientist, writer, environmentalist, farmer, and genuinely concerned citizen, has, with others, been actively highlighting the many environmental, social and economic impacts of coal mining on the Hunter Valley region of New South Wales. John is the author of a recently published outstanding book, The Sacrificial Valley, in which he eloquently and passionately describes the complexities of the changes that the open mining of coal has brought to his ‘homeland’ and the role that corporations and governments have played in contributing to the circumstances where: “Once-grand landscapes are gone, replaced by featureless ridges and mountainous piles of spoil, interrupted by man-made drainage lines and huge empty hole in the ground. Streams above and below ground are broken and contaminated. The air is filthy”.
![Some Further Sole Reflections](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/image-logo/10246414/GettingToBetterTogetherCover_300x300.jpg)
Friday May 19, 2023
Some Further Sole Reflections
Friday May 19, 2023
Friday May 19, 2023
In this episode, as a solo presentation, the host of our podcasts, Emeritus Professor Richard Bawden, reflects on the Mission of the mini-series and discusses some of the key challenges that have been highlighted over the past two years and 40 plus episodes of the initiative. The basic purpose of the endeavour, he argues, has been to contribute to critical public discussions about how the most pressing and complex issues of our times might be more responsibly, effectively and collectively addressed from the perspective of the continuing quest for the development of states of sustainable and inclusive well-being in an ever-changing, volatile, uncertain and complex world.
A key issue that arises in this context relates to where we can seek the trustworthy evidence that we need to support what we need to know. How do we inform ourselves at a time in human history when in addition to the extraordinary amount of information available to us through so many different channels of media, we are also prey to so much confusing jargon, to disinformation, misinformation, fake news and alternative facts, to denialism, and plain lies and deceit?
Richard is an adjunct professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast with a long and varied history of life as an academic, mostly elsewhere, starting ‘way-back-when’ as an agricultural scientist in England. Subsequently he has followed an often tortuous and turbulent path, literally across five continents, pursuing questions about how we come to know what we know, and why that is important to the way that we live our lives – or better put, how we ought to live our lives as responsible citizens of what is clearly emerging to be an all-too-vulnerable planet.
![Five Women and a Podcast](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/image-logo/10246414/GettingToBetterTogetherCover_300x300.jpg)
Friday Apr 14, 2023
Five Women and a Podcast
Friday Apr 14, 2023
Friday Apr 14, 2023
In this episode, the general manager of CIDSEL and special guest for Richard Bawden, Tami Harriott, facilitates a conversation with four highly successful women from South Asia.
![Where are our Elders?](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/image-logo/10246414/GettingToBetterTogetherCover_300x300.jpg)
Friday Mar 31, 2023
Where are our Elders?
Friday Mar 31, 2023
Friday Mar 31, 2023
An elder in Aboriginal civilisation has been defined as someone who has gained recognition as a custodian of knowledge and lore – the customs, legends and myths that have been held for millennia. Whilst there are differences within different communities, one common trait among indigenous elders is a deep spirituality – a commitment to a worldview that, at base, means that there is more to life, and indeed to the entire universe, than ‘meets the eye’, so to speak. Some meaningful connection between oneself and something much greater, that calls for a deep appreciation of oneness or wholeness and which demands the fusion or synthesis of the self with the other, of parts with wholes, of the material with the spiritual, of facts with values, of knowledge with wisdom, of actions with ethics.
Do we, non-Aboriginal Australians have, within our industrial society, any equivalent role models with similar intellectual, moral and spiritual competencies?
In this episode, our host Richard Bawden talks with someone who has many of the very characteristics of the sort of contemporary eldership that we should perhaps be seeking to seriously explore. David Chittelborough is a professor of pedology and biogeochemistry at the University of the Sunshine Coast and an adjunct Professor of the University of Adelaide. He is also a Baha’i, a congregant of a religion founded in the 19th century that teaches the essential worth of all religions and the unity of all people and where the essential quest is to find a unifying vision of the future of society and of nature, and the purpose of life.
![Storytelling as a Way of Knowing](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/image-logo/10246414/GettingToBetterTogetherCover_300x300.jpg)
Friday Mar 17, 2023
Storytelling as a Way of Knowing
Friday Mar 17, 2023
Friday Mar 17, 2023
In a recent solo episode in this mini-series, our host, Richard Bawden, talked of the significance of three different ways of knowing and their associated bodies of knowledge that he believes are foundational to addressing the pressing issues of this modern industrial era - ecological, economic, and ethical. These, he submitted, are critical foundations for responsible judgements in the face of current and potential challenges to our current ways of behaving in the world about us. Ecology reveals the nature and significance of inter-relationships within nature and between living systems and their dynamic environments. Economics helps us understand costs and benefits, optimal resource uses, and consumer choices, while ethics allows us to adjudge our actions from the perspective of moral concerns for the good, the just, the fair, the equitable, and the responsible.
What does all of this mean in practice? Can we provide examples of where these three ways of knowing help us to at least clarify the issues, that we need to address? In this episode, Richard explores some of these matters with his guest, Dr Jane Palmer who has a very special interest in storytelling as a research methodology – an approach which revealed some profoundly disturbing issues from people living in traumatic circumstances, when she adopted it as a research methodology in Aceh in Indonesia following a catastrophic tsunami.
Jane is an Adjunct Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney. Her research interests include the use of storytelling methods in post-conflict or marginalized communities to explore the processes of
trauma, grief, resilience and adaptation. She has undertaken fieldwork in Indonesia and in regional and remote Australia, and has published in the areas of ethics, fieldwork methodologies, Indigenous studies and futures studies.
![International Women’s Day](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/image-logo/10246414/GettingToBetterTogetherCover_300x300.jpg)
Friday Mar 03, 2023
International Women’s Day
Friday Mar 03, 2023
Friday Mar 03, 2023
On March 8th we celebrate the International Woman’s Day [IWD] in Australia - although it would be more accurate to state that this celebration is somewhat conditional, for there remain issues that we need to still address in this country with respect to reaching gender parity. Furthermore, as Australians, with respect to our global responsibilities as citizens of the world, we also need to contribute to the acceleration of the quest for women’s equality across the entire world. There are still far too many situations which are not cause for celebration in this regard: far too many circumstances where women are far from equal in the scheme of things. And this is although International Women’s Day is marked worldwide on March 8th, every year, as it has been since it started as a global event way back in the early 1900s.
At CIDSEL this global responsibility is taken very seriously particularly given that the central focus of the Centre is international development – the perpetual quest for inclusive betterment within a global context. There is an explicit commitment to Embrace Equity which happens to be the specific theme for the IWD for 2023. Conceptual frameworks and specific activities for addressing what are referred to as GEDSI matters – Gender Equity, Disability, and Social Inclusion – are incorporated in every development project or program and accepted as moral duties.
Richard’s guest in this episode, Tami Harriott, assumes special responsibilities for GEDSI issues and has a deep commitment to GEDSI principles and practices within CIDSEL. The fact that she also the General Manager of this Centre, with profound commitments to gender issues consolidated through extensive international experience, further emphasises the importance of these dimensions to the Centre’s initiatives - which of course include this podcast miniseries.
![Making Sense of the World About Us](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/image-logo/10246414/GettingToBetterTogetherCover_300x300.jpg)
Friday Feb 24, 2023
Making Sense of the World About Us
Friday Feb 24, 2023
Friday Feb 24, 2023
In essence, what we each ‘do’ in, and to the world about us, is overwhelmingly influenced by how we each ‘see’ that world: how each of us attempts to make sense of what is happening about us as a prelude for doing something in response. We refer to our ‘way of seeing’ in this context, as our worldviews. These reflect complex sets of beliefs and value assumptions that we hold (but which mostly remain in our sub-consciousness). In the process of growing up, and without appreciating the details, we each discover that not everybody has same view of the world as we do. Indeed, we find out, pretty early in life as it happens, that profound differences in worldviews between us often leads to disagreements about events and ideas and opinions: just think politics and polarisation.
The nature and significance of these worldviews are the topics of the conversation in this episode between our host Richard Bawden and Melanie Williams who has conducted significant research into these matters. Melanie is an Associate Professor at the William Angliss Institute in Melbourne where she is the Associate Dean with special responsibilities for Scholarship. Her primary role is to support vocational education teachers as they seek to improve their teaching and learning practice: Getting to Better Together in action!
![Social Entrepreneurship in Action](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/image-logo/10246414/GettingToBetterTogetherCover_300x300.jpg)
Friday Feb 10, 2023
Social Entrepreneurship in Action
Friday Feb 10, 2023
Friday Feb 10, 2023
When we hear the word ‘entrepreneurship’, the image that all too often springs to mind is less than flattering, to say the least. “The Wolves of Wall Street at work using someone else’s money to make money for themselves”. “Private gain is the go and Greed is Good”. In reality of course, an entrepreneur is anyone who sets up a business - typically, an innovator and risk taker who is essentially seeking to make honest money through private, personal enterprise. There is, however, a special brand of entrepreneurship for which the objective is not private gain but public good. Social entrepreneurs seek to serve communities which are characteristically un- or underserved. The focus is on those who are typically excluded in society, the disadvantaged, the invisibles, the strugglers and so on who could, given the opportunity, be more commercially successful.
Richard’s guest in this episode, Martha Joylyne Raka, is an inspirational living example of one such community-oriented social entrepreneur. Martha is from Papua New Guinea where she works with groups of small farmers establishing collaborative partnerships and co-operatives that have the function of helping all involved to Get to Better through working Together.
![What’s in a Word?](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/image-logo/10246414/GettingToBetterTogetherCover_300x300.jpg)
Friday Jan 13, 2023
What’s in a Word?
Friday Jan 13, 2023
Friday Jan 13, 2023
Effective communication is an essential aspect of Getting to Better Together. How could we ever achieve anything if we were unable to understand each other: if we fail to agree about the meaning of anything? Yet, at the same time, communication would be virtually impossible if we paused to reflect on matters of meaning and language and understanding every time we said something to someone else. Somehow or another, we seem to muddle through conversations with relative ease once we have reached a certain level of language proficiency. To reflect on these matters might seem to be all too academic to have any consequence in our everyday worlds: yet, it is anything but, as anyone who has tried to learn a second language will most certainly have discovered. Dr Levi Durbridge, Richard’s guest in this episode, has given these matters very serious consideration. Levi, who is fluent in Japanese as a second language, is Lecturer in World Languages at the University of the Sunshine Coast. He has been involved in language education across the secondary and tertiary sectors for more than 18 years in both Australia and Japan. His research explores how international mobility, language contact and technology use, all intersect with each other.
![Image](https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/qrn78t/pexels-cottonbro-4738073.gif)
Contact us
Thank you for being a part of our podcast family.
Have a story to share or a unique perspective you'd like to discuss? We would love to feature you as a guest on upcoming episodes!
Feel free to reach out via cidsel@usc.edu.au.