Join Revd Mpho Tutu, daughter of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, as she discusses The Book of Forgiving, written jointly with her father.
In the book, Desmond and Mpho Tutu offer guidance from their own lives and all they have witnessed along the four-fold path of forgiveness. The Book of Forgiving is an inspiring, personal and practical guide to forgiveness and to creating a more united world by learning to let go of resentment and realise that we can forgive and still pursue justice.

Mpho will be in discussion with Broadcaster and University Challenge host Jeremy Paxman.

For tickets email: Sophia@childrensradiofoundation.org

Dress code: Lounge suits or blazer and shirt (no jeans and for ladies no above the knee)

speaker:

Vincent Courcelle-Labrousse, Defence Counsel at the ICTR and Special Tribunal for Lebanon

Speaker: Dr Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen (The Danish Institute for Human Rights)

Part of the Refugee Studies Centre Trinity term Public Seminar Series

Why have we become obsessed with squeezing the most out of every minute? What’s wrong with wasting time?

Fr. Timothy Radcliffe OP, Dominican Friar and international writer and speaker, explores the delights and trials of sitting in silence, waiting for God to speak. Timothy Radcliffe was Master of the Order of Preachers from 1992-2001.

This talk forms part of the University Church’s Trinity term series for students and 20-somethings. Wine, cheese and juice will be in ample supply.

experimentsandethics.wordpress.com

experimentsandethics.wordpress.com

OxTET is happy to welcome Riva-Melissa Tez – lecturer at the DAB university in Berlin, founder of the Berlin Singularity, Associate Director of Longevity Intelligence Communications, and co-runner of Kardashev Communications. Riva will be speaking on obstacles that emerging technology businesses face, analysing factors causing shortfalls in funding, social mistrust, and political dysfunction, and offering recommendations for dealing with these obstacles.

Speaker: Susie Orbach
Psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, writer and social critic. Her books include Fat is a Feminist Issue and Bodies. A convenor of Anybody, an organisation that campaigns for body diversity. Co-founder of Antidote which works for the emotional literacy and Co-founder of Psychotherapist and Counsellors for Social Responsibility. Part of the Mansfield Lecture Series, convener Baroness Helena Kennedy QC

Al Jazeera host Mehdi Hasan will challenge Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Medecins sans Frontieres and former French Foreign Minister, on France’s military interventionism. Are the country’s motives altruistic or do they respond to a neo-colonialist agenda? And is there a tipping point when intervening becomes essential? Syria, Mali, Libya, Kosovo and more.

This debate will be filmed and aired on Al Jazeera English at a later date. Audience members will be invited to participate in a Q&A section during the second half of the conversation.

Order free tickets here: http://bernardkouchner.eventbrite.co.uk

RANDY RETTBERG, President of iGEM
Randy Rettberg is the man behind iGEM, the global competition for undergraduates and high school students in designing brand new biological parts, or “genetically engineered machines”. An engineer by trade he is the President of the iGEM Foundation, which operates the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, a continuously growing library of genetic parts that can be mixed and matched to enable easier construction of synthetic biology devices.

Dr. RICHARD KELWICK, Researcher at CSynBI, Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation (Imperial College)
Richard has been scientific advisor and project manager of three successful iGEM teams, 2011-2013. Most recently, he was the lead advisor for the iGEM team Plasticity, at Imperial College London, which came third out of over 200 teams at the world final, held at MIT.

Dr. JAREK BRYK, National Centre for Biotechnology Education University of Reading
Jarek works at the National Centre for Biotechnology Education on a project to facilitate teaching of synthetic biology on an undergraduate level. He develops experimental kits that will be incorporated in synthetic biology curricula.He currently mentors the iGEM Reading team.

Dr Jonathan Jong, a researcher at the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford, explores how time is all “in the mind”. Philosophers disagree about the nature of time: does it really flow from the past to the future through the present? There is a good chance that it doesn’t, and that our perception of time is illusory. But why do we experience time as we do?

This talk is part of the University Church’s Trinity term discussion series for students and 20-somethings, ‘A Waste of Time’, critiquing our cultural fetishizing of efficiency. As well as a guest speaker, there will be Q&A and group discussion over wine and cheese.

This event is free and open to all in the students and 20-somethings bracket.

A new report by the Humanitarian Innovation Project, Refugee Economies: Rethinking Popular Assumptions, will be launched to coincide with World Refugee Day, on Friday 20 June 2014. It is one of the very first studies on the economic life of refugees and fundamentally challenges existing models of refugee assistance.

The report is based on participatory, mixed methods research including about 1,600 surveys in Uganda, one of the few refugee-hosting countries in Africa that allows refugees the right to work and freedom of movement. However, it has wider implications for the emerging refugee crises around the world.

Far from being uniformly dependent, refugees are part of complex and vibrant economic systems. They are often entrepreneurial and, if given the opportunity, can help themselves and their communities, as well as contributing to the host economy. The data in the new report challenges five popular myths about refugees’ economic lives:

that refugees are economically isolated;
that they are a burden on host states;
that they are economically homogenous;
that they are technologically illiterate;
that they are dependent on humanitarian assistance.

Read more about the report: http://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/refugeeeconomies

Oxford Transitional Justice Research is pleased to invite you to its 2014 Summer Conference ‘Borders and Boundaries in Transitional Justice’.

This year’s conference, hosted with the support of the Planethood Foundation, Law Faculty, and the Centre for Criminology, will explore the issue of how borders and boundaries affect transitional justice processes across the world. The conference is organised around four panels:

The interplay between local, regional, and foreign transnational processes;
The role of diaspora and stateless communities in transitional justice;
The ways in which international law is dealing with cross-border transitional justice concerns; and
How local, national, and global approaches are affecting the theory and practice of transitional justice.

Registration is now open and we encourage all potential participants to register as soon as possible. Spaces are limited. We particularly welcome graduate students and early career researchers working on issues of transitional justice. A small registration fee includes tea and coffee and a light lunch.

In 2014 Barnett House is celebrating its centenary. The celebrations culminate with the Reunion Weekend on 12-13 July 2014.

This includes:
– Keynote talk from Magdalena Sepulveda, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.
– The 100th birthday tea party (the V-C Andrew Hamilton will cut the birthday cake!)
– A talk on the history of Barnett House and the launch of the book on the history.
– Open house at the department with displays of historic material and current research.
– Drinks and dinner with an after dinner talk from Prof Jonathan Bradshaw.
– Showing of the film Rich Man, Poor Man based on research carried out by Robert Walker and Elaine Chase with a discussion with the director of the film.

How do you find your own inner peace whilst living your own busy life?

How do you become the person who you truly are and honour your responsibilities?

How do you integrate and refine your soul’s purpose into your life?

An evening with Leon arts; Modern Day Alchemist, Dad, Visionary, Author, Social Innovator, Top Chef, Philanthopreneur, Traveller and Explorer of Consciousness.

To find the way to your own true self it helps to have a guide, it can be challenging to do it on your own. As the transformation of a cocoon into the butterfly is challenging and can feel like a struggle, it is easier in to do in the presence of another person with experience of the struggle.

When you change your inside world, the outside reality will follow suit: “As Within, So Without”.

Speaker: Martin Roth, Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum was founded during the tumult of the Industrial Revolution; a period of intense technological and social change. Today brings another such turning point, as we grapple with the consequences of the digital revolution. How are advances in digital design and media changing museum practice? And what curatorial principles remain the same, little changed from 19th century? The V&A holds a rich collection of ‘Ukiyo-e’ – popular representations of everyday Japanese life from the 18th-19th centuries. Radical changes and fundamental continuities are both in evidence when, today, curators consider collecting ‘emojis’, emoticons with distinctive features reflecting contemporary Japanese culture. Martin Roth, Director of the V&A and, formerly, Director General of Dresden State Museums, will consider these questions and more in a lecture mapping the future of museums in the digital age.

The lecture will be followed by audience questions and a drinks reception.

Free to attend, all welcome.

Kenan Malik will be discussing ‘What can the history of morality tell us about the nature of morality’.

The World Humanist Congress is taking place from Friday 8th August until Sunday 10th August in Oxford. Held every three years in different locations around the world, this years theme of the meeting is ‘Freedom of Thought and Expression’. We are pleased to announce during the conference period, 10 world-class speakers will be visiting the bookshop for a series of free 20 minute talks taking place in the Norrington Room. You do not need tickets to attend any of the talks but seating is limited, so please arrive early to get a ensure your place.

There are currently more than 2.8 million registered refugees from Syria. Ninety-six percent of these refugees are hosted by neighbouring countries – Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt. With the exception of Germany and a few other limited initiatives, the primary aim of the European response has been to contain the crisis in the Syrian region and to reinforce Europe’s borders.

This event marks the launch of a new RSC Policy Briefing, ‘Protection in Europe for refugees from Syria’. Report authors, Cynthia Orchard and Andrew Miller, will provide an overview of the European reaction generally, as well as brief summaries of selected countries’ responses. They argue that containment of the refugee crisis to the Syrian region is unsustainable and advocate for European countries to open their doors to refugees from the region and to expand safe and legal routes of entry.

Also being launched at this event is issue 47 of Forced Migration Review on ‘The Syria crisis, displacement and protection’. Professor Roger Zetter, co-author (with Héloïse Ruaudel) of a major article in the issue entitled ‘Development and protection challenges of the Syrian refugee crisis’, will look at early recovery and social cohesion interventions and the transition from assistance to development-led interventions in Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan. FMR47 is funded by the Regional Development and Protection Programme, a Denmark-led initiative with contributions from the EU, Denmark, Ireland, Netherlands, UK and Czech Republic, for whose inception report Professor Zetter was the lead author.

The event will be followed by a reception at 4pm. If you are unable to attend in person, you can watch live via a video link. For more information, please visit: www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/syrialaunch

A public meeting with a short introductory talk followed by questions and discussion.

The end of violence
Thursday 25 September, 7:30pm to 9:00pm
Oxford Town Hall, St Aldates
All welcome

Organised by Oxford Communist Corresponding Society.
This is the last in a three-part series of public meetings on violence and war. The three meetings of the series are:

Thursday 17 July
The war to end all wars

Thursday 21 August
The anti-war movement

Thursday 25 September
The end of violence

All are from 7:30pm to 9:00pm in the Town Hall

Speakers: Professor Deborah E Anker (Harvard University), Professor Efrat A Arbel (University of British Columbia)

Based on a recent report published by the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic (HIRC), entitled Bordering on Failure: Canada–U.S. Border Policy and the Politics of Refugee Exclusion, this talk will examine the Canada–US Safe Third Country Agreement, a ‘refugee sharing’ agreement implemented by Canada and the United States to exercise more control over their shared border. Drawing on interview data collected along the Canada–US border, it will evaluate how the Agreement has altered the Canada–US border landscape, and the effects it has had on asylum seekers.

The HIRC report concludes that the Safe Third Country Agreement not only closes Canada’s borders to asylum seekers, but also diminishes the legal protections available to them under domestic and international law. It further concludes that the Agreement has failed in its goal of enhancing the integrity of the Canada–US border, and has in fact prompted a rise in human smuggling and unauthorised border crossings, making the border more dangerous and disorderly, and placing the lives and safety of asylum seekers at risk. The talk will highlight these central findings, and, situating the Agreement in its global context, also examine the broader effects of its implementation.

About the speakers:

Deborah E Anker

Deborah Anker is Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Harvard Law School Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program (HIRC). She has taught law students at Harvard for over 25 years. Author of a leading treatise, Law of Asylum in the United States, Anker has co-drafted ground-breaking gender asylum guidelines and amicus curiae briefs. Professor Anker is one of the most widely known asylum scholars and practitioners in the United States; she is cited frequently by international and domestic courts and tribunals, including the United States Supreme Court. Professor Anker is a pioneer in the development of clinical legal education in the immigration field, training students in direct representation of refugees and creating a foundation for clinics at law schools around the country.

Efrat A Arbel

Efrat Arbel is Assistant Professor of Law at the University of British Columbia. She completed her masters and doctoral studies at Harvard Law School, during which time she was actively involved with the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Law Clinic. Dr Arbel researches in the areas of constitutional law, refugee law, Aboriginal law, and prison law, in Canada and the United States. She has published widely in these fields, and is co-author (with Alletta Brenner) of Bordering on Failure: Canada–U.S. Border Policy and the Politics of Refugee Exclusion. Combining her scholarly work with legal practice, Dr Arbel is also engaged in advocacy and litigation involving refugee and prisoner rights, and is an executive member of the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers.

Christian Fuchs, Professor of Social Media at Westminster University, will lead the discussion of his recently published book Social Media: A Critical Introduction, which navigates the controversies and contradictions of the complex digital media landscape.

Exploring the role of social media in contemporary popular movements including the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring, and drawing on theorists including Marx, Weber, Habermas, and Durkheim, Professor Fuchs asks:

Is Google good or evil?
Is Facebook a surveillance threat to privacy?
Does Twitter enhance democracy?
What did WikiLeaks reveal about political accountability, the transparency of power, and new forms of cultural censorship?

Speakers: Dr Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (University College London) and Professor Gil Loescher (Refugee Studies Centre)

Refugee and Forced Migration Studies has grown from being a concern of a relatively small number of scholars and policy researchers in the 1980s to a global field of interest with thousands of students worldwide studying displacement either from traditional disciplinary perspectives or as a core component of newer programmes across the Humanities and Social and Political Sciences. Today the field encompasses both rigorous academic research which may or may not ultimately inform policy and practice, as well as action-research focused on advocating in favour of refugees’ needs and rights. This authoritative Handbook critically evaluates the birth and development of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, and analyses the key contemporary and future challenges faced by academics and practitioners working with and for forcibly displaced populations around the world.

In this talk, Dr Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Professor Gil Loescher, two of the Handbook’s editors, will discuss how the book provides a comprehensive and cutting-edge overview of the key intellectual, political, social and institutional challenges arising from mass displacement in the world today. Laying out the thinking behind the Handbook, they will examine how it addresses these challenges and attempts to unify a diverse, evolving and crucial field.

Professor Loescher and Dr Fiddian-Qasmiyeh will be joined by a number of the Handbook’s authors, who will reflect on their own contributions to the volume and highlight some of cutting-edge approaches and challenges emerging in their respective areas of expertise.

Order your copy of the Handbook online from Oxford University Press by 30 December 2014 and receive a 30% discount. Click here for details.

Light refreshments will be provided after the event.

In this lecture, Rory O. Millson, Partner at Cravath, Swaine and Moore LLP, will explore the legality and ethics of the increasingly common use of military drones to kill ‘enemy combatants’ in the ongoing fight against terrorist groups in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

Professor Peter Piot, Director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine; Professor of Global Health; and Commissioner on the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations, will provide his perspective on the key long-term challenges in global health, addressing the burden of both communicable and non-communicable disease.

This seminar will be followed by a drinks reception, all welcome.

Join in on twitter with #c21health

This seminar will be live webcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEwlBU7bNrA

About the speaker:
Professor Peter Piot is the Director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and a Professor of Global Health. Professor Piot is also a Commissioner on the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations. In 2009-2010 he was the Director of the Institute for Global Health at Imperial College for Science, Technology and Medicine, London. He was the founding Executive Director of UNAIDS and Under Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1995 until 2008, and was an Associate Director of the Global Programme on AIDS of WHO. Under his leadership UNAIDS became the chief advocate for worldwide action against AIDS, also spear heading UN reform by bringing together 10 UN system organizations.

Professor Piot has a medical degree from the University of Ghent (1974) and a PhD in Microbiology from the University of Antwerp (1980). In 1976 he co-discovered the Ebola virus in Zaire while working at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium. He was a professor of microbiology, and of public health at the Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, the Free University of Brussels, and the University of Nairobi, was a Senior Fellow at the University of Washington, a Scholar in Residence at the Ford Foundation, and a Senior Fellow at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He held the chair 2009/2010 “Knowledge against poverty” at the College de France in Paris, and is a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and was elected a foreign member of the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academy of Sciences, and is also an elected member of the Académie Nationale de Médicine of France, and of the Royal Academy of Medicine of his native Belgium, and a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.

He was knighted as a baron in 1995 and has published over 550 scientific articles and 16 books, including his memior No Time to Lose. In 2013 he was the laureate of the Hideyo Noguchi Africa Prize for Medical Research and in 2014 he received the Prince Mahidol Award for Public Health.

We have yet to discover other life in our Galaxy, but we have a good idea where it might be! Join the astrophysicists Chris Lintott (BBC’s Sky at Night) and Grant Miller from Zooniverse, the largest, most successful online citizen science project, discuss exoplanets and their potential habitability.

A public meeting with a short introductory talk followed by questions and discussion.

The difficulty of imagining a free society
Thursday 16 October, 7:30pm to 9:00pm
The Mitre, corner of High St and Turl St (upstairs function room)
All welcome

Organised by Oxford Communist Corresponding Society.

Part of the Oxford Internet Institute’s Bellwether Lectures series.

Speaker: Caroline Haythornthwaite
Learning has left the classroom. It is being re-constituted across distance, discipline, workplace, and media as the social and technical interconnectivity of the Internet challenges existing structures for learning and education. The new ‘e-learning’ is more than a learning management system – it is a transformation in how, where, and with whom we learn that supports formal, informal and non-formal learning, life-long learning, just-in-time learning, and in ‘as much time as I have’ learning. But to do so, e-learning depends on the power of crowds and the support of communities engaged in the participatory practices of the Internet. We are networked in our learning, but also in our joint construction of knowledge and its legitimation, and in the social and technical practices that support knowledge co-construction, learning and education. This talk explores the emerging trends and forces that are radically reshaping learning and knowledge practices. The talk further explores the changing landscape of learning and knowledge practices with attention to motivations for contributing and valuing knowledge in crowds and communities, and the implications for future knowledge practices.

Speaker: Lina Molokotos-Liederman (Uppsala University)
The first part of the seminar will look at the Orthodox Christian approach of addressing social issues of poverty, injustice and inequality, and the concept of Orthodox diakonia. The second part will focus on Greece as a case study, discussing the response of the Church to the social costs of the economic crisis (its charitable social welfare activities), but also the impact of this crisis on the Church itself.

As the dust settles after the Scottish referendum and the UK gears up for the next general election, the Oxford Martin School and the Department of Politics and International Relations bring constitutional experts together to debate what next for the United Kingdom?

Panel:

Professor Iain McLean, Professor of Politics, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford and specialist in devolution
Dr Scot Peterson, Bingham Research Fellow in Constitutional Studies and Junior Research Fellow in the Social Sciences, University of Oxford
Chair: Mure Dickie, Financial Times Scotland Correspondent

There will be a drinks reception after the debate, all welcome

About the speakers

Professor Iain McLean was born in Edinburgh and went to school there. He came to England for the first time as a student at Oxford where he obtained his MA, M.Phil and D.Phil. He was a college tutor in an undergraduate college for 13 years, during which the college scaled the heights of PPE. He has worked at the Universities of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Warwick, and Oxford, and has held visiting professorships at Washington & Lee, Stanford, Yale, and the Australian National University.

He has been an elected councillor on Tyne & Wear County Council (committee chair) and Oxford City Council (group leader). In recent years he has principally worked on UK public policy, and started the Department of Politics and International Relations Public Policy Unit in 2005.

His research areas and insterests are:

Public policy, especially UK. Specialisms in devolution; spatial issues in taxation and public expenditure; electoral systems; constitutional reform; church and state.
The Union (of the United Kingdom) since 1707. Rational-choice approaches to political history
Dr Scot Peterson primarily in Colorado, in the United States, where he did his undergraduate work in Political Science and Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He earned a Master of Arts degree from the University of Chicago in Political Science, and attended law school at the University of California (Boalt Hall) in Berkeley. After practicing law for fifteen years in Colorado he came to Oxford, where he earned his doctoral degree.

He is interested in the constitutional history of the United Kingdom and of the United States, focusing particularly on matters arising from the relationship between church and state. His D.Phil. thesis was about the religious establishments, or the lack of them, in the three nations that make up Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland) in the early twentieth century. He is concerned with questions of why those relationships have been maintained in recent history, despite the supposed ‘secularization’ inherent in modern Western democracies. He analyzes them as political and historical phenomena, engaging in archive research and applying rational choice methodology.