Barely Gettin' By

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Barely Gettin' By

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Historians, millennials, and friends Dr Emma Shortis and Dr Chloe Ward spend a lot of time getting angry at the way public discussion about history and politics is dominated by the same voices. So they started a podcast.

With the support of RMIT, Emma and Chloe are hosting the Barely Gettin’ By podcast. In ten episodes, released every fortnight, they will talk about a history of the present, for all the big issues of our time: climate change, Trump’s America, intergenerational warfare, white lady feminism, and what it means to live, in the words of Dolly Parton, in a world where ‘it’s all takin’ and no givin’’.

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Introducing Barely Gettin' By

Barely Gettin’ By isn’t about us telling people what to think. It’s about trying to make sense of a world that is changing in ways Emma and Chloe, as historians, never could have predicted. Why did almost no-one predict Trump and Brexit? What do we do, when the Amazon is on fire and the worst-case scenarios for catastrophic climate change are coming true, in real time? Does history offer us any guide for how to get through, when everything seems to be totally unprecedented?

Listen here

Introducing Barely Gettin' By

Barely Gettin’ By isn’t about us telling people what to think. It’s about trying to make sense of a world that is changing in ways Emma and Chloe, as historians, never could have predicted. Why did almost no-one predict Trump and Brexit? What do we do, when the Amazon is on fire and the worst-case scenarios for catastrophic climate change are coming true, in real time? Does history offer us any guide for how to get through, when everything seems to be totally unprecedented?

Listen here

Meet the presenters

Dr Emma Shortis is a historian who focuses on US and environmental politics. She’s an in-demand media expert who uses history to try and interpret and explain what on earth is happening in the United States today. She’s a regular guest on ABC News radio and television, and programs like Triple RRR’s Common Sense. Emma joined RMIT University in June 2018. In the year before that, she was a Fox-Zucker International Fellow at Yale University. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Melbourne. She’s a mad Collingwood supporter, an expert Twitter stalker, and spends a lot of time being outraged at the state of things.

Dr Chloe Ward is a historian whose research focuses on the relationship between culture and politics in the 20th century. She has won major awards for her research, and is an experienced editor with extensive media training. She continues to work in higher education, as an online education specialist at Pearson Inc. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Melbourne, and, as an Adelaide Crows supporter, bitter memories of the 2017 AFL Grand Final. She is a reformed Twitter addict, very bad Instagrammer, and blames her rage at the state of the world on her star sign (Aries).

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