In the summer of 2019 as the UK was in the midst of heated Brexit debates and Theresa May’s minority government clung on to power, Professor Louise Ryan interviewed Professor Nira Yuval-Davis about her recent book Bordering (Yuval-Davis, Wemyss and Cassidy 2019). Although things have changed in some significant ways since that interview, for example Boris Johnson has now replaced Theresa May as Prime Minister, and won a landslide election victory in December, 2019, and the controversial Brexit Bill was passed by the British Parliament, many of the issues about borders and bordering remain extremely relevant today. The current pandemic has not only revealed Britain’s dependence on migrant workers, especially in health and social care, but also exposed health inequalities among migrants and ethnic minorities. As the post-Brexit immigration landscape begins to emerge, the analysis of Nira Yuval Davis remains as pertinent as ever.

We talk to Dr. Katarzyna Błachowiak-Samołyk, professor at the Department of Marine Ecology at the PAS Institute of Oceanology in Sopot, about the impact of human activity on life in the oceans.

Is it possible to revitalize Europe without external interference and a shift in the geopolitical situation outside the Continent? An answer to this question is here offered by Prof. Jan Zielonka, a political scientist analyzing change in Central and Eastern Europe and a lecturer at the European Studies Centre, St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford.

Prof. Anna Członkowska from the 2nd Department of Neurology at the Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology, a corresponding member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, discusses the definition of a stroke, new ways to help post-stroke patients recover, and reasons why time is of the essence.

Dr. Artur Binda, a bariatric surgeon from the Orłowski Independent Public Teaching Hospital in Warsaw, discusses bariatric surgery procedures, frequently the only treatment for patients with life-threatening obesity.

The Polish Academy of Sciences’ newly-created Bureau for Scientific Excellence will be focusing on helping researchers file ERC grant applications. The Academy has a big role to play here, because we pursue fundamental research and have certain advantages that other institutions do not – says Prof. Paweł Rowiński, Vice-President of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

“We can see that all the recent predictions of a better future for the world are largely misguided. It is no longer certain even that the Cold War is definitively a thing of the past,” says Jerzy Szacki, a historian of ideas and sociologist, a professor emeritus of the University of Warsaw, and an ordinary member of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

We talk to Professor Andrzej Trautman, Full Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Emeritus Professor at the University of Warsaw, about the consequences of the general theory of relativity, the theoretical foundations of gravitational waves and the difficulties in proving their existence.

Mateusz Banaszkiewicz, from the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw, talks about the effects of thinking and acting automatically, and how to fight destructive habits.