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Thinking Allowed Episodes

  1.

    Boxing and Kickboxing

    Boxing and Kickboxing: Laurie Taylor explores their potential for transforming lives.

  2. The Petite Bourgeoisie

    Laurie Taylor explores the unstoppable rise of the lower middle class.

  3. High Finance

    Laurie Taylor considers the impact of the asset management industry on our everyday lives.

  4. Fashion Re-imagined

    Fashion Re-imagined: how might we create a more equitable industry?

  5. Digital intimacy

    How are algorithms transforming our relationships?

  6. Prison Abolition

    Laurie Taylor considers the radical case for ending imprisonment.

  7. Taste and Lifestyle

    Taste and Lifestyle: how consumer culture remade taste and the West Indian front room.

  8. Dance Culture

    Laurie Taylor takes a journey through the dancefloor, from the electric slide to the tango

  9. Democracy

    Democracy - what threatens or promotes it?

  10. Poverty

    Laurie Taylor explores the causes and consequences of poverty in the UK and US.

  11. Elite Universities - Working Class Students

    Elite universities and the lives of working class academics.

  12. Asylum and 'ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ'

    Asylum and 'home' - the impact of asylum dispersal and Syrian refugees' quest for home.

  13. Museums

    Museums: Then and now.

  14. Religion of Work and Welfare

    The religion of work and welfare.

  15. Parenting

    Parenting - a cultural history.

  16. Dirty Work

    Dirty work - the invisible labour we choose not to see.

  17. Self-improvement

    Self-improvement: are 'wellness' and 'confidence' cultures enhancing our lives?

  18. The football pools - mass investment

    Betting and investment - what are the connections and the differences?

  19. The Internet - how it shapes the past and the future

    The Internet - how it shapes our understanding of the past and the future.

  20. The NHS

    The NHS and the 'sick note'.

  21. Protests

    Protests: from Occupy to MeToo and Iran.

  22. Gender and Alcohol

    Gender and alcohol - the craft drink scene and what constitutes a 'proper night out'?

  23. Futilitarianism - Extreme Pessimists

    Laurie Taylor talks to Neil Vallelly about current feelings of futility and uselessness.

  24. Rules and Order

    Are we are more orderly society than in the past?

  25. Gentrification revisited

    Exploring the myth and reality six decades after the term gentrification was coined.

  26. The Sea

    The Sea - the privatisation of our oceans and the threat of plastic pollution.

  27. Survival of the city

    Survival of the city: how do cities manage to thrive and re-invent in the face of threats?

  28. Package holidays and 'authentic' travel

    Package holidays and β€˜authentic’ travel: Laurie Taylor on the origins of budget tourism.

  29. Shopping

    The history of the high street. Also, dreams of consumption.

  30. Ballroom dancing

    Ballroom dancing: its social history and sexual politics.

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