Scam Factories | The Conversation Documentaries

A few weeks after Ben Yeo travelled to Cambodia for what he thought was a job in a casino, he found himself locked up in a padded room. “It’s a combination between a prison and a madhouse,” he remembers. He was being punished for refusing to conduct online scams.

Scam Factories is a podcast and multimedia series taking you inside Southeast Asia's brutal fraud compounds. The Conversation collaborated for this series with three resear...

Scam factories is a special three-part series taking you inside Southeast Asia's brutal fraud compounds. Hundreds of thousands of people are estimated to work in these scam factories. Many were trafficked there and forced into criminality by defrauding people around the world.

The Conversation collaborated for this series with three researchers: Ivan Franceschini, a lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Melbourne, Ling Li...

The neglect of working-class voters in the past few decades has had profound consequences for British political life. Disillusioned with the two main parties, many have turned to Nigel Farage’s Reform and others are simply not voting at all. With the next election likely to be a tight race in many key constituencies, something must be done to win these voters back.

But as we find out in this fifth and final part of Know Your Pla...

After the 2024 election, the British parliament looks very different, with a large Labour majority for the first time in more than a decade. Several cabinet ministers come from working-class backgrounds, including the prime minister, deputy prime minister and foreign secretary. What impact will the upbringing of this new parliament have on the way Britain is governed?

In the fourth part of Know Your Place: what happened to class...

In the third part of Know Your Place: what happened to class in British politics, we explore how class is defined and measured, and how the UK’s changing class identity interacts with identity politics. 

Featuring Daniel Evans, lecturer in criminology, sociology and social policy at Swansea University, Gillian Prior, deputy chief executive of the National Centre for Social Research, John Curtice, senior research fellow at t...

In the second episode of Know Your Place: what happened to class in British politics, host Laura Hood, senior politics editor at The Conversation, looks back at a century of class in British politics to understand why Tony Blair's decision to move Labour away from the working class was such a watershed moment. 

Featuring Mark Garnett, senior lecturer in politics at Lancaster University, Martin Farr, senior lecturer in conte...

In the first episode of our new podcast series Know Your Place: what happened to class in British politics, host Laura Hood, senior politics editor at The Conversation, explores when the relationship between class and voting broke down and why. 

Featuring John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde and senior research fellow at the National Centre for Social Research, Paula Surridge, professor of po...

The relationship between class and political preference in Britain used to be clear cut – Labour for the working class, the Conservatives for the middle class. But not any more.

In a new five-part series, Know your place: what happened to class in British politics, Laura Hood, senior politics editor at The Conversation, explores what fractured the relationship between class and voting in the UK, and why no politicians can take ...

We’re changing our name, from The Anthill, to The Conversation Documentaries! 

Over the last few years we’ve used The Anthill podcast to run in-depth series on a range of issues. And that’s exactly what we’ll keep on doing. But we’re changing our name to better reflect that what you’re listening to are documentaries from The Conversation. We’re a not-for-profit independent news website and our editors work with academics to...

The quest for a theory of everything – explaining all the forces and particles in the universe – is arguably the holy grail of physics. While each of our main theories of physics works extraordinarily well, they also clash with each other. But do we really need a theory of everything? And are we anywhere near achieving one?

Featuring Vlatko Vedral, a professor of physics at the University of Oxford and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, ...

What’s the difference between a living collection of matter, such as a tortoise, and an inanimate lump of it, such as a rock? They are, after all, both just made up of non-living atoms. The truth is, we don’t really know yet. Life seems to just somehow emerge from non-living parts.

Featuring Jim Al-Khalili, professor of physics at the University of Surrey, and Sara Imari Walker, professor of physics at Arizona State University.

It is hard to shake the intuition that there's a real and objective physical world out there. If I see an umbrella on top of a shelf, I assume you do too. And if I don't look at the umbrella, I expect it to remain there as long as nobody steals it. But the theory of quantum mechanics, which governs the micro-world of atoms and particles, threatens this commonsense view.

Featuring Chiara Marletto, Research Fellow of Physics, and ...

Interest in the multiverse theory, suggesting that our universe is just one of many, has spiked since the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once was released. The film follows Evelyn Wang on her journey to connect with versions of herself in parallel universes to stop the destruction of the multiverse. The multiverse idea has long been an inspiration for science fiction writers. But does it have any basis in science? And if so, is...

Imagine a universe with extremely strong gravity. Stars would be able to form from very little material. They would be smaller than in our universe and live for a much shorter amount of time. But could life evolve there? It after all took human life billions of years to evolve on Earth under the pleasantly warm rays from the Sun. 

Now imagine a universe with extremely weak gravity. Its matter would struggle to clump togethe...

Without a sense of time, leading us from cradle to grave, our lives would make little sense. But on the most fundamental level, physicists aren't sure whether the sort of time we experience exists at all. We talk to three experts and find out if time could potentially be moving backwards as well as forwards.

Featuring Sean Carroll, Homewood professor of natural philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, Emily Adlam, postdoctoral ...

There are many competing theories about what causes Alzheimer's disease. For more than 30 years, Ruth Itzhaki has been accumulating evidence that viruses are involved in its development in the brain. We investigate this evidence in the third and final episode of Uncharted Brain: Decoding Dementia, hosted by Paul Keaveny and Gemma Ware from The Conversation.

Featuring interviews with Ruth Itzhaki, professor emeritus of molecular ...

Dementia doesn’t just affect older people. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a form of dementia that athletes from a whole range of sports can develop. It’s now at the centre of a number of legal challenges involving sports from rugby to American football. In the second episode of Uncharted Brain: Decoding Dementia, hosts Gemma Ware and Paul Keaveny from The Conversation find out about the toll this type of dementia can tak...

Scientists have been doing an array of regular health checks on the same group of people since they were born in 1946 – the world's longest running cohort study. Now the brains of some of its participants are revealing new insights into the risk factors for Alzheimer's disease. 

We find out more in the first episode of Uncharted Brain: Decoding Dementia, a new series from The Anthill hosted by Paul Keaveny and Gemma Ware fr...

Uncharted Brain: decoding dementia is a new series from The Conversation exploring new research unlocking clues to the ongoing mystery of how dementia works in the brain.

In this three-part series, hosted by journalists Paul Keaveny and Gemma Ware from The Conversation, we'll delve into some of the findings from the world's longest continuously running cohort study, hear about the trauma of families effected by dementia and expl...