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Ideas from the Trenches - Why We Obey
Ideas

Ideas from the Trenches - Why We Obey

As part of our continuing series turning a young scholar's work into radio, Tom Howell and Nicola Luksic profile Serbulent Turan, an emerging political scientist at the University of British Columbia. He is asking why people willingly put up with oppression and -- on the flip side -- what's needed to spark a revolution.
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CAIRO, EGYPT - A woman cries in Tahrir Square after it is announced that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was giving up power February 11, 2011. (Chris Hondros/Getty)
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There are 50,000 PhD candidates in Canada, toiling away on things few people  understand. As part of our continuing series turning a young scholar's work into radio, Tom Howell and Nicola Luksic profile Serbulent Turan, an emerging political scientist at the University of British Columbia. He is asking why people willingly put up with oppression and -- on the flip side -- what's needed to spark a revolution. 

**This episode originally aired April 14, 2015
 

"Power becomes obvious when you fight back. When you resist you can see what's working on you. And if you start fighting back, then you can see it at work in its full might."

-- Serbulent Turan, PhD candidate
 

 

Guests: (in order of appearance)​

​Serbulent Turan - PhD Candidate at the University of British Columbia

Steven Lukes - Political and social theorist at New York University. Author of Power: A Radical View (1974)

Afua Cooper - Historian and Chair in Black Canadian Studies at Dalhousie University

Mohamed Abdelfattah -  Freelance video journalist based in Cairo. 

Click here for footage of the original Milgram experiments (Yale University, 1961)


PhD student Serbulent Turan hopes his research will inspire future revolutionaries. The photo he took of himself in the CBC Vancouver studio turned out to be a little fuzzy, so he got his wife to take this snapshot in their home office.

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