Should universities take positions on political issues or try to be impartial fora for open, evidence-based debate and deliberation? Constance and Darian discuss that universities cannot escape having a political role no matter how hard they might try. But this realization then raises the question of who should decide what issues or controversies the university should have a voice on, and who decides what the university should say? In advanced knowledge societies where universities play important political roles, should they become more democratic?

Everybody seems to want solidarity, solidarity with Gaza, with Ukraine, with local marginalised communities... But what is solidarity actually, and why is it such a good thing? As director of the UM Diversity Office Constance is often asked to be in solidarity with many people, groups and causes, but what does this mean in practice, what are the demands that solidarity places on us? As individuals but also as institutions? We spoke to Francesco Tava, one of Europe's most exciting solidarity researchers and tried to figure out what is this thing that everyone wants more of? How do we get it, and can we have too much of a good thing?

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT seem to be awash in ethical problems like bias, hidden labour, lack of transparency, energy use…but since when did they become too Woke? When Constance and Darian enlisted ChatGPT to expand their horizons into conservative and far-right ideas they ended up in the same liberal bubble as always, what gives? Thankfully, data scientist Jerry Spanakis was on hand to try to explain what’s going on and how both training data and tweaking by socially liberal engineers can lead to a liberal status quo being reproduced by some models. Is this such a bad thing? Listen and find out.

Sometime this Spring (2024), Maastricht University will have to submit a plan to the Dutch government explaining how we will “considerably decrease” the amount of English Language programmes. Why is this happening? What’s the problem with studying in English? According to researchers René Gabriëls and Bob Wilkinson, it’s got a lot to do with feelings of linguistic injustice. We were not so easily convinced and invited them for a talk.

Woke as Science is back for Season 2!

Find out about some of the topics we are going to discuss this season.

Trying to ‘decolonize’ a curriculum? Better speak to postcolonial Marxist scholar Faisal Hamadah first. That's what we did and we learned a lot.

Speaking up, voicing concerns, calling out – there are many ways to give a less threatening spin to the term ‘complaining’. However we want to call this act, it is necessary in any organisation to be able to alert people to and discuss biases, blind spots and injustices. While there are often (complaint) structures present to facilitate such processes, speaking up is not easy. It comes with anger and frustrations and is often met with anger and frustrations. We invited BA student Sophia Longwe who has done her fair share of speaking up to give some insights and tips for finding the courage and dealing with the repercussions of putting yourself out there as a complainer.

Ok, let’s all sit down for a moment. Everyone seems to think that they are the real progressives while the others simply are not. The Others are either too conservative, too ‘woke’, too blinded by the system, too unreasonable, against academic freedom or not really interested in addressing questions of social injustice. In this episode, we try to make some sense of these claims to ‘real’ progressivism.