Podcast Interview with Julian Simpson

On today’s podcast, EIC Brandy Schillace speaks to Julian Simpson. Simpson is a freelance historian with research interests in the relevance of history to policy, the history of the NHS, migration (particularly medical migration), mental health, and the use of oral history. Up for discussion today is the responsibility of history, or more generally, how to create a space for history that addresses itself to contemporary concerns including immigration. As Simpson explains, this is about who gets to write history, who gets to make decisions about funding, who recruits, who decides that a discipline has ‘turned’ and doesn’t need to speak to policy concerns any more. Having worked both in the media and academia, Simpson notes that the ‘manufacturing of consensus’ isn’t just about the press, but also about academia. As academics are further conscribed in what they can address by systems, the “history” produced is increasingly narrowed and biased. The stifling of debate and the lack of engagement with social issues is one of the things that is contributing to turning the world into a “political pressure cooker”… Join us at Soundcloud for the interview!