Belarus has been rocked by protests and police crackdown following the contested presidential election in Belarus. We examine the history of Belarus and the likelihood of the continuation of the Lukashenko dictatorship. Hosted by Doug Becker [ dur: 43mins. ]

• Professor Margarita Balmaceda is Professor of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University. She is also an Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and of the Ukranian Research Institute at Harvard University. She is the author of Living the High Life in Minsk: Russian Energy Rents, Domestic Populism and Belarus’ Impending Crisis and The Politics of Energy Dependency: Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania Between Domestic Oligarchs and Russian Pressure.
• Tatsiana Kulakevich is lecturer at the University of South Florida and research fellow at USF Institute on Russia. She is the co-author of the book chapter Belarusian Political Parties: Organizational Structures and Practices. and Twenty Years in the Making: Understanding the Difficulty for Change in Belarus. Her analyses appeared in media and academic journals, including The Monkey Cage, The Conversation, The Globe Post and Belarus Digest.

Then, hormones change our brain according to neuroscientists. What might these changes be? What does this mean for women taking birth control pills over the course of their child bearing years? [ dur: 14 mins. ]

• Belinda Pletzer is a researcher at the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Salzburg, Austria. She is the co-author of many publications including, Sex and menstrual cycle influences on three aspects of attention, 50 years of hormonal contraception. Time to find out what it does to our brain and Subcortical structural changes along the menstrual cycle: beyond the hippocampus.

This program is produced by the following team members: Ankine Aghassian, Melissa Chiprin, Tim Page, Mike Hurst and Sudd Dongre.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS