Loughborough Institute of Advanced Studies Podcast

As part of the IAS 10th Anniversary Celebrations, we invite former IAS Fellow Professor Aldo Musacchio and Loughborough Host Professor Anna Grosman to discuss how their research collaboration was supported by the IAS, and continues today.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias 

As part of the IAS 10th Anniversary Celebrations, we invite former IAS Fellow Professor Sonja de Groot and Loughborough Host Professor Vicky Tolfrey to discuss how their research collaboration was supported by the IAS, and continues today.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias 

IAS Residential Fellow Wangui Maina delivers a workshop for Postgraduate Researchers (PGRs) -
This workshop invites doctoral researchers to engage with the methodological and epistemological challenges of conducting interdisciplinary research that moves between community practice and academic theory. Using Finding Me Community as a live case study, it explores how practitioner-researchers can generate rigorous knowledge from programme data, navigating questions of positionality, ethics, and analytical framework when the researcher is also the architect of the intervention being studied. Participants will work through concrete challenges in discourse analysis, community-based research design, and the translation of findings into policy and practice. The workshop is particularly relevant to researchers working across global health, communication studies, social psychology, education, and African studies, and to anyone grappling with how to build scholarship that is simultaneously academically rigorous and community accountable.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias

Please note - The audio distortion in this recording is intentional and was part of the performance.
IAS Residential Fellow Dr Pedro Oliveira delivers a seminar on their research -
For my IAS Seminar I will present my work around Postura through my collaboration with Dr. Courtney Reed on the politics and poetics of breath. Conceived as a rehearsal for a performance-lecture, my contribution focuses on how breath composes the body with but also beyond the articulation of voice alone. I start from a personal experience of losing control of my breathing during a visa interview in Germany, and in which I felt my sense of self dissolve through. From there I will discuss how my understanding of Postura does not require regaining control but coming up with a sense of direction, an intention to arrive without colliding, and a desire not to be fully composed. Rather, through Postura the body is perceived as a site for micro and macro collaboration, for fragile alliances and collective shape-shifting, the vector for an ethics of expansion without the need for synthesis or resolution.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias

Join the Cool Down - Sport for Climate Action Network and the Climate and Environment Community at Loughborough University’s Institute of Advanced Studies for an afternoon putting sport under the lens of the climate crisis - how is sport at threat, how does it make the problem worse, how can it make things better?
Panel: ‘Can sport stop promoting pollution?’ with speakers including Etienne Stott (Olympic Gold Medalist and co-founder of Champions for Earth), Katie Cross (CEO and founder of Pledgeball), Theo Frixou (Doctoral Researcher on fossil fuel sponsorship in sport), Anna Jonsson (Save Our Snow and co-director New Weather Sweden), Matt Rendell (Cycling author and broadcaster), Björn Sandström (former Swedish professional cross country and sustainability consultant to elite winter sports events), Niall Couper (Football Action Network), Andrew Simms (Director of New Weather Institute and founder of the Cold Down Network and Badvertising campaign.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias
 

IAS Residential Fellow Wangui Maina delivers a seminar on their research -
This seminar presents findings from an interdisciplinary investigation into how peer-led mental health interventions function as sites of discursive norm change among university students in Kenya. Drawing on discourse analysis of structured group sessions facilitated by trained student champions across 33 public universities, it examines how participants co-construct, and actively contest, the social meanings of distress, help-seeking, and wellbeing. Central to the analysis is the role of Ubuntu philosophy as a communicative resource: how a collective wellbeing framework operates not merely as cultural backdrop but as a practical discursive tool for displacing stigmatising, individualising mental health language. The seminar will share early analytical findings, invite critical dialogue on methodology, and explore implications for global mental health communication and peer intervention design.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias
 

IAS Visiting Fellow Assistant Professor Amit Kumar Singh delivers a seminar on their research, fully titled "Additively Manufactured Antennas and Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for Adaptive Next-Generation Wireless Networks" -
Additive manufacturing and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) are emerging as enabling technologies for highly adaptive, lightweight, and multifunctional wireless systems. This talk will present recent advances in additively manufactured antennas, metasurfaces, and RIS technologies for next-generation wireless networks, with emphasis on millimetre-wave, sub-THz, and 6G applications. The discussion will cover novel 3D-printed and hybrid-material antenna architectures, phase-engineered metasurfaces, beam steering, polarization control, and dynamically reconfigurable electromagnetic environments. Particular attention will be given to the integration of RIS with intelligent control, sensing, and communication platforms to overcome propagation limitations and enhance coverage, capacity, and connectivity. The talk will also highlight practical fabrication approaches, experimental demonstrations, and future opportunities for AI-enabled, conformal, low-cost, and scalable electromagnetic systems for terrestrial, aerial, satellite, and integrated sensing-and-communication applications.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias
 

IAS Residential Fellow Dr Alice Ojwang delivers a workshop for Postgraduate Researchers (PGRs) -#
This interactive workshop equips postgraduate researchers with practical skills to design interdisciplinary lifestyle medicine research and translate findings into real-world interventions. Using the Diabesity Total Lifestyle Change (DTLC) program as a case study, the session covers intervention design, behaviour change strategies, success stories, lessons learned, and implementation challenges specific to low-resource settings. Participants will work in small groups to adapt one behaviour change technique from the DTLC program to a hypothetical low-resource context of their choice, using a provided template. By the end of the session, each group will produce a one-page implementation logic model — a tangible output they can apply to their own research.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias

A discussion panel featuring IAS Fellows Dr Marcelitte Failla and Associate Professor Margaretha Haughwout on witchcraft and magic as practice, epistemology, ontology for anthropocentric, colonialist, and capitalist outcasts. Questions raised at the panel will inform the call for papers in a special issue journal and create potential new relationships/collaborations with staff across campuses.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias
 

Featuring IAS Visiting Fellows from across two overlapping IAS Research Spotlights, Queer Ecology and The Supernatural (Callum Angus & Professor Catriona Sandilands) and Witchcraft as more-than-human Ontology and Decolonial Practice (Dr Marcelitte Failla & Associate Professor Margaretha Haughwout).
Fellows from both Queer Ecology and Witchcraft will meet in International house and be joined by organisers and invited academics working in the connected fields and identified above for a longer discussion and debate of how the two spheres interconnect to produce creative dialogue into the ongoing importance of ecology and the more than human, and the points at which ongoing engagements with the supernatural and folkloric and contemporary witch and shamanic practices can continue making these ideas pertinent in our climate crisis and ecological fall out.
A key question pertinent to all fellows is the ongoing role of creativity, arts and humanities in times of crisis?
The event will be primarily aimed at a specific group of academics but the workshop will be open for anyone to attend online, and there will be a limited number of in-person spaces. The focus of the event will be to workshop and map ideas around the two showcases and discover how they might feed into each other. We will have visual documents, photographs and drawing and mapping, utilising spell making as method, that will be compiled into a map of the day which will be available to be published in the IAS website. The event will set the foundation for legacy building into these themes and will establish Loughborough and the IAS as a key home for these debates.
For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias