Kate Roll
Welcome to Valuable Conversations with the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. In our first episode, MPA students Elisa Cadelli and Justin Beirold talk to Professor Kate Roll. Kate is the instructor for the MPA module “Grand Challenges and Systems Change”. We talk about her adventures conducting PhD field research on a motorcycle in Timor-Leste, how she got interested in the politics of innovation, and some of her recent work on the gig economy.
Guest Bio: Dr Kate Roll is a political scientist who currently serves as an Assistant Professor in Innovation, Development and Purpose and Head of Teaching at UCL IIPP, and the Bartlett's Faculty Lead for Public Policy. Prior to joining IIPP, she was based at the University of Oxford, where she is a faculty member at the Saïd Business School, contributing to the strategy and innovation curriculum, and ran the Mutuality in Business Project, a large multi-year research partnership on responsible business.
Her multi-disciplinary work brings together politics and policy, business ethics, and development studies. One stream of research focuses on power and vulnerability with a particular interest on how people in poverty and following conflict gain greater social and economic security. Within this stream, she wrote her doctoral thesis on the politics of benefits programmes for former combatants in Timor-Leste. Dr Roll’s second research focus critically engages with private sector approaches to development, particularly ‘base of the pyramid’ route-to-market programmes. As part of this work, she co-leads a randomised control trial investigating the impact of greater risk-sharing in micro-finance contracts in Kenya. She is currently developing a new stream of research, which will extend her work on private sector approaches to development by critically examining the emergent field of social innovation and 'technology for good.’
We hope you enjoy this conversation!
- Read Kate’s recent article: “Gig work at the base of the pyramid: considering dependence and control”: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2020/jul/gig-work-base-pyramid-considering-dependence-and-control
Our student hosts: Elisa Cadelli and Justin Beirold
Follow IIPP on Twitter: @IIPP_UCL
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/
Production and music by Justin Beirold
Valuable Conversations with UCL IIPP
Welcome to Valuable Conversations, a student-produced podcast from UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP). In this series, students sit down with leading thinkers in economics, political economy, public administration, and technology for candid and unfiltered conversations about their life and work. Valuable Conversations is an opportunity to meet the people behind IIPP's leading research into rethinking the state, innovation, capitalism, and public policy.
- No. of episodes: 11
- Latest episode: 2023-11-16
- Science Social Sciences
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