Ideas

In the 19th-century Pandita Ramabai travelled America delivering lectures on how the caste system and patriarchy shaped the trajectory of women’s lives. When she came back to her home India, the feminist explained America's customs around gender and race relations, and their experiment with democracy. IDEAS explores her rich life and legacy. *This episode originally aired on Sept. 10, 2025.

Guests in this episode:

Radha Vatsal is the author of No. 10 Doyers Street (March 2025), as well as the author of the Kitty Weeks mystery novels. Born and raised in Mumbai, India, she earned her Ph.D. in Film History from Duke University and has worked as a film curator, political speechwriter, and freelance journalist.

Tarini Bhamburkar is a research affiliate at the University of Bristol. Her research explores cross-racial networks and international connections built by British and Indian women's feminist periodical press between 1880 and 1910, which sowed the seeds of the transnational Suffrage movement of the early 20th century.

Sandeep Banerjee is an associate professor of English at McGill University and a scholar of Global Anglophone and World literature, with a focus on the literary and cultural worlds of colonial and postcolonial South Asia.

Readings by Aparita Bhandari and Pete Morey.

If you inherited $120 million dollars, could you give away 75 per cent of your wealth? Abigail Disney did. She's an heiress to the Disney fortune. The philanthropist, filmmaker and activist offers an insider perspective into the twisted perils of extreme wealth — on society and the human psyche.

Part two in a four-part series called The Billionaire Age. Listen to Part One: How did we get here?

Guest in this episode:

Abigail E. Disney is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, philanthropist, and activist. Her films include The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales, the Emmy Award-winning The Armor of Light — both co-directed with Kathleen Hughes — and Pray the Devil Back to Hell. As a philanthropist and activist, she has championed peacebuilding, gender justice, and systemic cultural change.

She is Chair and Co-Founder of Level Forward, an ecosystem of storytellers, entrepreneurs, and social change-makers dedicated to balancing artistic vision, social impact, and stakeholder return. She also founded Peace is Loud, a nonprofit that uses storytelling to advance social movements, and the Daphne Foundation, which supports organizations working for a more equitable, fair, and peaceful New York City.

She is currently working on a book about wealth, power, and privilege.

This podcast is about testing the limits of fairness. It's about taking to heart the meaning behind "Beyond the Pale" — a phrase referring to ideas that are so outrageous it's impossible to deal with them in reasonable terms. Follow IDEAS producer Tom Howell as he covers uncomfortable terrain. When the time for ‘open-mindedness’ stops and prejudices become — possibly — a good thing. *This is the final episode in a series tackling the implications of bias. It originally aired on on June 8, 2022.

Guests in this episode:

Eduardo Mendieta is a philosophy professor at Pennsylvania State University. He edited the final book by Richard Rorty, Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism.

Barbara Kay is a columnist at The National Post and The Epoch Times.

Misha Glouberman is co-author (with Sheila Heti) of The Chairs Are Where the People Go. He runs a negotiation course called How to Talk to People About Things.

Rahim Mohamed is a freelance writer and college instructor at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. His opinion columns are published in the online newsletter, The Line.

Anne-Marie Pham is an executive director of the Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion.

Michael Bacon is a political theorist at Royal Holloway, University of London. His books include Pragmatism: An Introduction.

Martin Zibauer is from the Cosburn Park Lawn Bowling Club in Toronto, Ontario.

All of us are biased. We have individual biases, momentary biases, morning biases and evening biases. Our institutions are biased. Our constitutions are biased. So what to do about it? IDEAS producer Tom Howell explores the art of naming your most important biases — and deciding which to keep, as he continues his investigation into what the field of ‘bias studies’ has to offer us. *This episode is part two of a three-part series exploring the meaning of 'bias.' It originally aired on Feb. 3, 2022.

Guests in this episode:

Olivier Sibony is the author of Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment and You're About to Make a Terrible Mistake.

Jessica Nordell is the author of The End of Bias: A Beginning.

Jimmy Calanchini is assistant professor of psychology at University of California, Riverside.

Jack Nagler was the ombudsman at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Driftpile Cree poet Billy-Ray Belcourt's favourite place in the world is his mother's house. It's marked with a horrible, dark past — built for nuns who ran the local residential school in Northern Alberta. Belcourt grew up in the shadow of that school. But his mom drenched this home with love so powerful it surpassed the haunted context. Belcourt's mother's house provokes questions reconciliation couldn't quite answer: what does it mean to live inside history and how do you imagine your way out? In this lecture for Vancouver Island University’s Indigenous Speaker’s Series, he makes the case for literature as a more honest reckoning.