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IDEAS is a place for people who like to think. If you value deep conversation and unexpected reveals, this show is for you. From the roots and rise of authoritarianism to near-death experiences to the history of toilets, no topic is off-limits. Hosted by Nahlah Ayed, we’re home to immersive documentaries and fascinating interviews with some of the most consequential thinkers of our time.

With an award-winning team, our podcast has proud roots in its 60-year history with CBC Radio, exploring the IDEAS that make us who we are. 

New episodes drop Monday through Friday at 5pm ET.

Ideas

For Afghans, listening to a traditional song can bring them back "home." In 2021, when the Taliban seized power again in Afghanistan, orchestras disbanded and musicians fled for their lives. They brought with them their distinctive and storied music, embedded with notes hailing from classical music from Iran and India. IDEAS takes a journey to Afghanistan with members of the Afghan diaspora, and asks how the idea of home is encapsulated in music and how conflict has played a role in reshaping Afghan music.

*This is the final episode in a five-part series called The Idea of Home exploring the multiple and contested meanings of home. This episode originally aired on June 16, 2022.

Guests in this episode:

Mir Mahdavi is a poet, a writer, and a researcher in the area of art, literature and poetry, originally from Afghanistan. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario and holds a Ph.D. in cultural studies from Trent University and a MA of cultural studies from McMaster University. He was the publisher and the editor in chief of Atab, a weekly newspaper published during 2002-2003 in Kabul.

Hangama is one of the most renowned female Afghan singers of her generation. Born in 1962 in Kabul, Hangama's stage name was chosen by her mother when she decided to pursue a career in music. She left Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation and now lives in the Greater Toronto Area.

Sara Soroor is an Afghan-Canadian singer-songwriter and childhood educator in the Greater Toronto Area. She is Hangama's daughter and started singing and playing the piano at age four.

Wares Fazelyar was born and raised in Toronto, and plays the rubab. He is an advisory board member for the Afghan Youth Engagement and Development Initiative. He and his brother Haris perform Afghan folk music in the Greater Toronto Area.

Wolayat Tabasum Niroo is a researcher and Fulbright scholar currently based in the United States. She has a PhD in Education from Old Dominion University and a MPhil in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford. She grew up in Afghanistan and has studied how Afghan women's folk music creates an alternative space for political expression, grief and imagining other possibilities.

How music transports the Afghan diaspora to their homeland

In 2022, IDEAS explored how the brutal strategy called "urbicide" — the intentional killing of a city — is used in war to destroy residents' sense of home and belonging. This podcast revisits the original story and includes a brief update from architect Ammar Azzouz. Since the collapse of the Assad regime last year, he has returned to Homs, Syria, twice. He tells IDEAS he has mixed emotions being home again.

*This episode is part of our series, The Idea of Home.It originally aired on June 16, 2022.

Guests in this podcast:

Ammar Azzouz is an architectural critic and analyst at Arup, as well as a research associate at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Domicide: Architecture, War and the Destruction of Home in Syria. 

Nasser Rabbat is a professor and the director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. He has published numerous articles and several books on topics ranging from Mamluk architecture to Antique Syria, 19th century Cairo, Orientalism, and urbicide.

Marwa Al-Sabouni is a Syrian architect based in Homs and the author of The Battle for Home: The Vision of a Young Architect in Syria and Building for Hope: Towards an Architecture of Belonging.

Hiba Bou Akar is an assistant professor in the Urban Planning program at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. She is the author of For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut's Frontiers.

Nada Moumtaz is an assistant professor in the Department of Study of Religion and Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. She trained and worked as an architect in Beirut, Lebanon, and is the author of God's Property: Islam, Charity, and the Modern State.

Why cities are targeted in wartime (updated)

Hospitality — and hospitals. Two words that share a root, but whose meanings often seem at odds with each other. IDEAS traces the historical roots of hospitals, the tension between hospitality and discipline that has defined hospitals throughout their history, and what it means to create a hospitable hospital in the 21st century. 

*This is the third episode in our series, The Idea of Home, which originally aired on June 15, 2022.

People you will hear in this podcast:

 

Rachel Kowalsky is a pediatric emergency physician at New York—Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City. She co-created a website called Our Break Room to share poems and stories for healthcare workers. 

Joshna Maharaj is a Toronto-based chef and activist, and the author of Take Back the Tray: Revolutionizing Food in Hospitals, Schools and Other Institutions.

Kathy Loon is executive lead for Indigenous collaboration & relations at Sioux Lookout Meno Ya Win Health Centre (SLMHC) and a member of Slate Falls First Nation. 

Carole Rawcliffe is professor emerita of medieval history at the University of East Anglia. She specializes in the history of medieval medicine and early hospitals. 

Kevin Siena is a professor of history at Trent University. He specializes in the history of medicine and the history of hospitals in England in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. 

David Goldstein is an associate professor of English at York University, where he is also the coordinator of the creative writing program. He is the co-editor of Early Modern Hospitality. 

This episode also includes a clip from a 2016 CBC Radio interview with Maureen Lux, professor of history at Brock University and the author of Separate Beds: A History of Indian Hospitals in Canada. ﻿

Why hospitals stopped being hospitable

In ancient Greece, hospitality (or xenia) was seen as a sacred moral imperative. Someone who defied the obligations placed on both host and guest risked the wrath of the gods, or even outright war. Today, the word xenia has largely fallen out of use, but its opposite, xenophobia, has been a driving factor in contemporary politics for years. IDEAS explores ancient traditions of hospitality in this second episode of our five-part series, The Idea of Home. *This episode originally aired on June 14, 2022.

How guest-host power dynamics shape migration

At age 11, writer Andrew Lam fled Vietnam during the Fall of Saigon. Nearly 45 years later, he returned to a radically different city. He believes "you will be cursed with longing" if you continue to search for the feeling of home you had in the past.

At a time when more people have been forcibly displaced from their homes than at any other time in history, IDEAS explores what it means to return home years — or decades — later. *This is the first episode in our five-part series, The Idea of Home, which originally aired on June 13, 2022.

Can you ever truly return home again?

In more than 40 years on the front lines of international human rights Alex Neve has heard Canada described as ‘the land of human rights’ — and seen the profound ways Canada has failed to uphold universal human rights, both at home and abroad. In his final Massey Lecture, he lays out his vision for a way forward.

Massey Lecture Part 5 | A human rights agenda for Canada

Eleanor Roosevelt once said that universal human rights begin in “small places, close to home — so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world.” In his fourth Massey Lecture, Alex Neve reflects on moments when people power won the day.

*Read this article to learn about the "most powerful" moment in Alex Neve's 40-year-career.

Massey Lecture Part 4 | How people power makes human rights real

Our inherent human rights belong to us from the moment we are born. There is nothing we need to do to earn them, and they are supposed to apply to us until the day we die. But in his third Massey Lecture, Alex Neve argues the powerful have made human rights a ‘club.’ Visit cbc.ca/masseys for more on this lecture series.

Massey Lecture Part 3 | Human rights don’t have to be earned

The ideals behind the concept of human rights — such as the sacredness of life, reciprocity, justice and fairness — have millennia-old histories. After the carnage of the Second World War and the Holocaust, these ideas took a new legal form. In his second Massey Lecture, Alex Neve considers six dizzying years that laid out a blueprint for a new world. Visit cbc.ca/masseys for more on the series.

Massey Lecture Part 2 | The six years that remade human rights

Universality is the core promise of human rights: these rights extend to everyone, everywhere. But above all else, this is where we have failed. In his first CBC Massey Lecture, Alex Neve explores how to ensure the “lifeboat” of human rights is seaworthy for everyone. Visit cbc.ca/masseys for more details about this lecture series.

Massey Lecture Part 1 | Renewing the promise of human rights

More than half of working satellites are now owned by a single company, Elon Musk's Space X company. Astrophysicist Aaron Boley says Space X satellites are built for rapid development and obsolescence. He discusses the impact of this on humanity and astronomy and asks how we can be better stewards of outer space. *This episode originally aired on Jan. 21, 2025.

Who owns Outer Space?

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