The idea behind this show is pretty simple: A university campus is a destination for all kinds of interesting people, so why not invite some of these folks out to brunch, where we’ll have an informal conversation about their work, and then we’ll turn those brunches into a podcast?

It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it.

Lisa Mueller is an assistant professor of political science at Macalester College who is spending the 2018–19 academic year as a residential fellow at Notre Dame’s Institute for Advanced Study. Several months after Cambridge University Press published her book Political Protest in Contemporary Africa, she talked to host Ted Fox about what protests in different parts of the world—including the U.S.—have in common, and what makes protests in sub-Saharan Africa different. They also discussed how social scientists go about studying something as dynamic as a protest as well as her current project, which aims to answer whether the degree of cohesiveness among the protesters within a movement has any impact on their ultimate effectiveness.