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Step into the minds of leading academics with UCL Press Play: a podcast and documentary series featuring groundbreaking voices and cutting edge ideas.
Join UCL academics as they uncover ground-breaking new ideas and fresh insights on diverse topics such as queer histories, neurodiversity, and climate justice.
Season 4: A Cup of Tea With… is your chance to share a tea break with inspiring academics from UCL (University College London). Join Professor Judy Stephenson, Professor of Economic History of the Built Environment, to learn how they got into their field and hear insights from their research. Plus, find out how they like their tea!
Website and transcripts: https://uclpress.co.uk/ucl-press-play/
Judy Stephenson: Hello, I'm Professor Judy Stephenson, Professor of Economic History at UCL. Welcome to A Cup of Tea where we want to know how academic research can change the world. I'm going to put ten questions to Ilan Kelman about what drives him and what the challenges ahead are. A cup of tea is a global commodity, but it's also a British tradition. With that in mind, Ilan Kelman, Professor of Disasters and Health. Welcome to A Cup of tea.
Ilan Kelman: Thank you very much for having me.
Judy Stephenson: And cheers. What have you got on there? And why have you chosen it?
Ilan Kelman: It's just decaffeinated tea. I'm interested, really, in trying anything which hasn't got caffeine in it. And so I sort of tasked our supporters to be creative, and I'll see what this is like.
Judy Stephenson: Great. Okay. Cheers, as they say. Getting straight to the nitty gritty, if a funding body- UCL was to give you 1 million pounds tomorrow to research something that you really wanted to look at, what would you look at and why?
Ilan Kelman: My interest is very much trying to help people, humanity, the world, deal with the most difficult problems. They understand them, and typically they know the challenges. So, as you said, my title is disasters and health, that tends to be my specialty. A lot of it is trying to avoid disasters, prevent disasters, ensure that lives, livelihoods, lifestyles, communities are healthy. So for 1 million pounds, that may be a bit ambitious. You're trying to solve the issue of no disasters and better health. How would I do it? Talk to people.
Judy Stephenson: About how you would prevent certain outcomes or about how outcomes could be sort of mopped up or solved when they've helped, you know? Is it prevention rather than-
Ilan Kelman: As with health, when it comes to disasters, prevention is better than cure. And we really try and instill this idea that if you are responding, it's absolutely needed because people are experiencing the worst times of their lives. But it's also too late.
Judy Stephenson: So give me an example of a disaster that you would like to research in that manner by going to talk to people.
Ilan Kelman: The key is to ask them. And I don't know, for me, the one which should still be in our consciousness - although many people have forgotten, we often don't change our behaviour - is quite naturally, the Covid-19 pandemic. It affected us all, and people are going to be with this for life.
Judy Stephenson: Well, there's so many outcomes, particularly for education. I mean, this is we're in freshers week and, you know, there's people coming into the university who didn't sit, their GCSEs and missed, you know, huge swathes of schooling, and have gaps in their understanding of the world as a result. So what would you expect if you were asking the new cohort about prevention?
Ilan Kelman: It's really what do they want? What do they need? But also what are they willing to contribute? And that sort of the balance between not always going after the disaster that hits the headlines, but recognising that far too many people experience disaster as an everyday experience. It can be as simple as it rains a bit, the river rises; they cannot cross it to get to school. And then we see these parallels between the global catastrophe of Covid-19 with the educational impacts, exactly as you've eloquently articulated, compared to the people in that rural place who deal with this on a weekly or monthly basis.
Judy Stephenson: There is a kind of perennial-
Ilan Kelman: Yeah. So that's why it's just about asking people. And to be fair, some people say, 'well, I can manage Covid-19, so what's the big issue?' Because other things concern them. And that's where my research for this, hopefully not mythical million pounds, would be to find out from some people's perspectives what's useful for them and how the research process, how doing and publishing science could serve them, which of course includes open science.
Judy Stephenson: This is what I was going to say. This is interesting. So I wanted to ask you a little bit about methodology before we answer that, because you're saying you're going out to ask people what they need, what they want, what they think. So how do you gather that sort of, you know, how do you put that into, data, I suppose, that you can then utilise? What's your kind of process?
Ilan Kelman: The first step is actually research ethics. So there are very fortunately UCL requirements as well as national laws to ensure that we're not causing harm. Part of the challenge is we want to collect the data on the terms of the people who are giving the data. People are different. Which also means, if we're going to publish it - and of course being brilliant academics, it goes under our name as authors - but it's their knowledge. Can we co-author? How do we do that? Do we score their music? Do we write down the choreography of their dance? Do we simply record their conversation and put it online? It's up to them.
Judy Stephenson: So tell us a bit more about your field and how you got into it.
Ilan Kelman: As I say, when we look at disasters, but just more widely the risk in this every day-ism, it really affects us 90% of the time. We don't think about it because how often does a pandemic happen? Well, ironically, actually three this millennium. When we think about just crossing the street, breathing in second hand smoke, or not being able to get across the river or the street to school, it's 90% of our lives. Same with health. Everything we do. Caffeinated tea, non caffeinated tea. What do you eat? How much exercise? Does work stress you out? Actually don't answer that because it's UCL. It's every day. It's all our lives. And so although we talk about disasters and health, and we talk about risks and being healthy and safe, it's really about what worries people, what makes them happy. How do you live? How do they want to live?
Judy Stephenson: What a great way of defining the field.
Ilan Kelman: We certainly try. And the way I entered it was that you see the media and it's always bad news. We see the disasters which hit the headlines. So I started thinking, how can we capture what people are doing day to day, how they live day to day, and how to avoid health problems or disaster problems which never hit the headlines? When I try to pitch this to journalists and media, they say, well, you know if it bleeds, it leads. Which instills despondency and negativity. It does capture attention, so we deal with that. But I'm really looking at trying to turn around and say, well, look, they avoided the disaster, or we know buildings collapse there, but this place experienced a similar earthquake and buildings did not collapse. So how do we communicate that? How do we grab that attention? How do we get people's stories, understandings and wisdoms to say we'd love to have that million pounds or much more, but here's what we can do within our constraints, and we've succeeded.
Judy Stephenson: What did you train as?
Ilan Kelman: My degrees? Can you guess?
Judy Stephenson: I'm just trying to guess because there's so much going on here, like, so there's, you know, statistics. There is, there's a lot of kind of social work, political science, social science generally, behavioral science, environmental science. I'm going- Which science did you study?
Ilan Kelman: So this is why I need collaborators. This is why I work together- Me personally, my degrees don't really reflect what I'm doing at the moment. My three degrees are engineering. And then my PhD was with the structural engineer and earthquake engineer. We were based in a Department of Architecture and Art History in a joint project with Geography.
Judy Stephenson: Sounds familiar under the Bartlett Science-
Ilan Kelman: Yeah. It's like your mixed background. So why worry about disciplines.
Judy Stephenson: So what is the most common misconception about your field and how would you dispel it?
Ilan Kelman: The worst phrase we hear is 'natural disasters'. It has this connotation that disasters are just a natural state of affairs or it's nature. We're in a battle with nature. We have to win, and nature bats last. That, of course, is completely the antithesis of how we live and how we should live. Living disasters are made by human decisions. Who we make poor. Who we marginalise, who we don't listen to. We know how to construct buildings that don't fall down in tornadoes and earthquakes. Yet we still see people dying in tornadoes and earthquakes. So as is generally said, earthquakes don't kill people. Collapsing infrastructure does. Simply put, disasters are not natural. They come from us. So the misconception? Just don't use the phrase natural disaster.
Judy Stephenson: Don't use the phrase natural disasters. So, what are you currently working on? And what are the sort of barriers that you're facing in doing it?
Ilan Kelman: We work on whatever is funded. The main barrier is how do we get funding at such a level that it covers the overheads which are obviously required to run UCL as a world class institution? Right now one of the funded projects we have is funded by the European Union but underwritten by the United Kingdom Research councils. It's trying to improve warning systems. We're working with ten places across Europe, which includes Dorset in England- in southern England. The idea is who are the practitioners, who are the government workers, who are the ones who are working directly with the public to say 'there's weather coming; here's what you need to do'? And trying to improve that communication. And this to me is such actionable and important research funded by public money. We're serving the public.
Judy Stephenson: So I'm fascinated by this because there was a very famous, horrible incident in Texas at the beginning of the summer. And I then spent the summer in Dorset and Devon where every 15 minutes for a week, I got a notification to say there was heavy weather on the way. You know, the question, I guess, is about calibration- getting that right. How difficult is that?
Ilan Kelman: It's extremely difficult because people have different needs. And even on the 7th of September, this country did a national mobile test in order to determine- could mobile phones be reached with this alert. And so many issues came out. The sounds? The symbols? The fact that people had to be warned in advance that if you're driving, don't look at your mobile phone for the alert? Conversely, if you're in tornado country and you're driving along and there's a tornado there, of course you want to see it. So how are you meant to balance that? It's in English. Not everyone reads English well. They may be using an automated translation. Many languages don't have the words that we commonly use in English, such as hazard. It's a surprisingly simple problem to describe and disappointingly difficult to do that calibration so that it serves people. But as part of this, actually, we're so privileged that one of the UK research councils, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, has just funded us to work with the Royal College of Art to improve the sounds of warnings. How can we ensure that we do have a national system or an international system but it's serving every individual on their own terms?
Judy Stephenson: That's a big ask. So that's your current work.
Ilan Kelman: So those are two examples of funded projects. We also are working on Disasters Avoided. So the website, disastersavoided.com, we're compiling one-pagers of examples where people took action and a disaster did not happen.
Judy Stephenson: Wow. So, an example off the top of your head?
Ilan Kelman: Toronto, Canada, 1954. Hurricane Hazel ripped through the city around Ontario. Killed over 80 people. One third of them on a single street, called Raymore Drive. When they rebuilt, they said, well, people died in this floodplain. Why don't we keep it as a floodplain? Which sounds eminently sensible. So you go to Raymore Drive today and it's a park along the beautiful Humber River. And so when Hurricane Sandy ripped through Toronto in 2012, the Humber River and the Dawn River, they rose and they broke their banks. And there were torrents across the grass and across the paths and across the bridges. There was no disaster because no one lived there to die. Disaster avoided.
Judy Stephenson: So the disasters that are avoided are the things that you don't notice.
Ilan Kelman: We hope. Yeah. And it's always long-term. This does not happen overnight.
Judy Stephenson: But yeah, there was some bad weather around here as well for that.
Ilan Kelman: Well, that was 1953. That was the 1st January- sorry, 31st January to 1st February storm surge. Which killed around just- over 300 people on land in England. A couple of dozen around the Scotland coast, and it sunk a ferry in the Irish Sea, killing about 150 people. So tell me, which piece of London infrastructure was built out of the 1953 storms?
Judy Stephenson: Is it not the Thames Barrier?
Ilan Kelman: Exactly.
Judy Stephenson: But that wasn't in place until the 1980s, am I right?
Ilan Kelman: It takes a long time in this country.
Judy Stephenson: Exactly. What is the scariest thing you've had to do as a researcher?
Ilan Kelman: Well, actually, the converse, which comes directly from that, as people say 'well, now we have the Thames barriers, so we're flood-free'.
Judy Stephenson: Complacency. Okay.
Ilan Kelman: Complacency. And you walk down Greenwich, and that absolutely wonderful Thames path, and you see these huge high rises with million pound flats in the floodplain. And this isn't fair, because how do you communicate that? So we tell people we shouldn't have done it- it's too late, they're in the floodplain.
Judy Stephenson: Well, you've seen what they've done at Wandsworth. It's called the River Wandle. It's a river. Oh, you can't have a building on a river. Okay, yeah, it's okay. So, complacency.
Ilan Kelman: So, it's scary seeing this, but also recognising the ethics- if you don't communicate it, you're causing a problem. If you do communicate it, you're causing a problem.
Judy Stephenson: I guess that's what we've got to do, is we've got to be difficult sometimes, right?
Ilan Kelman: In such a way that's constructive, so it's tough. And it's the same- I mean, the whole open science ethos, it may be unsettling for us to admit this, and for people to hear this, we're human beings, and we make mistakes. We don't know everything, and that mistake is out there, and it is frightening from a selfish personal perspective, but it's also frightening if someone takes it up and uses it in good faith or explicitly misuses it and abuses it.
Judy Stephenson: So the context is everything. You can say, 'I've researched this, I've taken this methodology to this question, you know, and used these hypotheses, and so the context for my findings is this', but somebody is going to take it in a different context and apply it in a different way, and that that is the risk with well, anything but with, particularly with this model of open science. Yeah, yeah.
Ilan Kelman: And this is scary. It's just how we work in the public, how we should be working with open science. But people need to understand, apart from the AIs and the bots, that we are all humans. And there's nothing wrong with questioning us, but then the more you question and the more you cross check and the more you try and corroborate, the longer it takes. And then we get a Thames barrier needed in 1953, not opened until a generation later.
Judy Stephenson: Thinking about public health more generally, then, about, you know, things that we know are going to be problems, like antibiotic resistance, misinformation, so we know it's a thing. Prevention is what you want to do. How scary is it that that's difficult?
Ilan Kelman: It's challenging, particularly the terror of how much as scientists, how much as academics, should we go out there and contradict and try and undermine the democratically elected people. Of course, there are issues with democracy, of course, there are issues with manipulating the system and who owns the media, but it's still a form, a modicum of democracy, and it is hard. I don't think we have that balance. What we do find again, thinking of history, we looked at public health disinformation and public health misinformation. This goes back millennia. There are issues again regarding AI, regarding bots, regarding social media, regarding the speed of the spread, and the ability for anyone to become credible. If it's open science, shouldn't anyone have the ability to?
Judy Stephenson: This is the problem when you think about the first cholera epidemic, came to London in the late 1820s, early 1830s, and people thought it was the air,. They thought that, you know, you needed wonderful- We have a lot to be thankful for, because they insisted on building big, broad, wide villas with tall, you know, actually, this is this is of the era, beautiful big windows, wonderful ventilation space, high ceilings, great architecture, but that's not what cholera- was causing cholera. It was a huge public misinformation campaign.
Ilan Kelman: Yeah, and the way I'm sitting here, I can actually see what's called the Chadwick Building at UCL. Named after a public health expert who wrote a load of- a lot of very influential reports to try and improve the health conditions of people in England in the mid 19th century. One of those was about public health measures for cleanliness, based on the work of John Snow to try to avert cholera. And The Times, in an editorial, said 'How dare people like Chadwick and others bully us into health?' Public health, misinformation, disinformation, media abusing their power to undermine the best of knowledge, is not new.
Judy Stephenson: Not new. Okay. Do you have a favorite author or researcher, somebody you go to to read?
Ilan Kelman: There's so many. So much of what I do is nowhere new, nowhere near new. Yeah, the fundamentals we've known for a long time, and I can absolutely point to scientists. We also know the cultural and linguistic and gender biases of science, so absolutely I can name people. There are also so many who we do not know, who we will never know, because their works have been lost, or they've been subsumed within what we presume to be science, but I also speak to taxi drivers You turn up in a new place, a country you've never been, ou want to learn something? Talk to the taxi driver.
Judy Stephenson: Okay, but is there a bit of- Is there something you've read recently that you think I should read? You know, like sometimes you go 'read this paper, it's new, it's different'.
Ilan Kelman: To me, it's about using open science. Now, any member of the public with access to the web can download everything, at least we're publishing at UCL, and most things around the world. Do it. And if you don't understand it, let us know. These maybe we have a blog on it, or take the time and actually look up words and try and learn and work through it. So it's about learning from each other and recognising that even if members of the public don't have a PhD- how scary, right? But they still have so much to contribute, and we can learn from them. So, who do I admire? Who do I read? I read a white source. I definitely continue to read academic works, but I do read books to see what people are saying, and to try and learn the viewpoints and yeah, talk to taxi drivers.
Judy Stephenson: Talk to taxi drivers, that's a great tip. What are the significant problems in the world - political, cultural, social, economic, environmental - that your field can do something about, and how can it make a contribution to that?
Ilan Kelman: To me, the number one problem is how the ideology has emerged and taken hold that certain individuals can acquire far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far more than others. No one is saying that we should all have the same income and the same assets, but when we look at the numbers of the top point zero 1% when we look at the numbers of the richest 10 and 50 people, that gap is unconscionable. And it's quite worrying how people will latch onto a symptom like human-caused climate change and say everything is about that symptom, when it's one symptom among many. And if we tackle that fundament of the ideology of wealth misdistribution, by definition, we would stop human-caused climate change and deal with the impacts, as well as all the other consequences. So that sort of two unfolded problems, number one is focusing on the symptom rather than the cause, but number two is that cause.
Judy Stephenson: So, applying what you've told me already, there's a prevention thing. If we could, we can prevent that distribution.
Ilan Kelman: It's up to us. If we want to, we can.
Judy Stephenson: So, will AI transform your job or will AI take your job?
Ilan Kelman: Whether or not it takes my job is up to the powers above me at this institution. I would certainly hope not, because what we found through the decades, if not centuries, of presuming forms of non-human intelligence, which we're creating, they really struggle to think, and they really struggle to critique. To me, that's what we need, and it sort of gets back to, well, that's two problems I've mentioned. What's the third one? And a lot of it is really, how do we come together to accept and resolve the struggles that we face as a species, so I would hope my job will not be taken away, that people still want to learn how to think and learn how to critique. It can be a positive force for change. Artificial intelligence is not new. When the generative AI suddenly hit the headlines and everyone was saying, 'what we're going to do about it?', I just did what a scientist does. I did a quick search of material. I discovered that artificial intelligence for stopping disasters was being worked on and worked with in the 1980s. So, yes, there are certain accelerations. There are certain steps, like generative AI being available on your phone to write a university essay. The baselines, the ethical questions are not new. Do I use AI? Well, we've all been using this since we were born, because I use spell checkers. I use internet search engines. They've long been powered by AI. It's how we use it. If I'm going to ask you to saw or to cut a piece of wood, and you try and use a hammer, you're not going to do very well. That does not mean we should ban hammers.
Judy Stephenson: So, what practical tips, or what practical ways are you encouraging students to either use or not use it, for instance?
Ilan Kelman: I tell my students, in the assessments, I've actually said 'please do not use generative AI'. And the reason I set them that way is to protect them, because in the topics I teach, there's so many myths, and there's so much misinformation, and there's so many problems with the populism of topics on climate change and disasters in health that they are very likely to fail if they get any generative AI to write their essay, because generative AI collates the sum of human intelligence online, which means it collates the sum of human stupidity online. And there's amazing work now being written, published, which shows how culturally biased and historically biased and ethically biased and linguistically biased AI is. And it's getting worse because it's simply that cycle of building on what went before.
Judy Stephenson: What you're saying is it's never been more important to be a human researcher. So, what are your hopes and your fears for researching in universities for the next few decades, for this century?
Ilan Kelman: The worries are the challenges to accepted knowledge. The President and Provost of UCL has come out with this brilliant, inspiring phrase, 'disagreeing well'. We have to accept that we are different, that we make mistakes, and by having these conversations with a cup of tea or otherwise, we learn and we do better, we self-critique, we realise and admit our mistakes, and then we become better as educators, but we're now in a position where everyone should have the same access to university. We know it doesn't happen, but we're trying to improve, and so, given that we are in this position, we need to grab that privilege and ensure that everyone does have that access, that we are educating them equitably, and that they are educating us equitably.
Judy Stephenson: Because there's opportunities to go both ways.
Ilan Kelman: It has to be. The more we call on each other, the more we call out each other under disagreeing well, so respectfully, evidence-informed and appropriately, but to change for the better, the more hope there is for society. We do recognise we are being undermined, we're being challenged by money, we're being challenged by many elected leaders, we're being challenged by forces which are very difficult for us to engage with, let alone overcome. The more we do it, the more responsive our students and the public are in a constructive disagreeing well manner, the better we are doing, and that very much brings me hope. We have huge problems, we've also solved many, we've come from a long way. We have what we need, the fear is we're not using it. The hope and inspiration is, if we choose, we can, and we will
Judy Stephenson: Agree. I'd love to disagree with you well, but I'll agree with you well now. Thank you very, very much for a great cup of tea.
Ilan Kelman: Thank you for the opportunity.