On Thursday, 9th June, we will welcome Ms. Clara Roquet, one of Spain’s most promising film makers. We will be hosting a conversation with Ms. Roquet before screening her last short film, “El adiós” (The Goodbye), winner of several awards at international film festivals in the U.S. and Spain in 2016.

Ms. Roquet is also known for her work on “10.000 kms” (Long distance), which won a Goya award in 2015, was nominated for the European Academy Awards, and was short-listed as one of the three candidates to represent Spain at the Oscars after a successful run at major international festivals.

The screening of The Goodbye will be in Spanish with subtitles in English. After the screening there will be ample time for questions.

Drawing upon sociology of culture and digital rhetoric literature, this talk will illuminate the persuasive function of hashtags in the context of the UK EU membership referendum. What makes a hashtag more influential, or more successful?

The hashtag is not just a category or community marker—it has also become a vehicle through which rhetorical strategies are being used to influence thoughts and feelings. Many scholars have explored hashtag success by examining popularity and longevity. This talk presents an expanded definition of success that takes hashtag hijacking into account. The data that will be presented are being gathered live from the Twitter Streaming API; over two hundred hashtags and usernames relating to the EU referendum are being tracked. The talk will also highlight the challenges and opportunities afforded by big ‘linguistic’ data on social media.

Yin Yin Lu is a DPhil Candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) and Balliol College, as well as a Clarendon Scholar. She is fascinated by the intersection between language and technology, and her research focuses on the hashtag, one of the most notable sociotechnical phenomena of the 21st century. Prior to joining the OII, Yin obtained a Masters in English Language from the University of Oxford (Lincoln College) and a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University. Between these degrees, she worked at Pearson Education and 10 Speed Labs, a digital media agency in Manhattan. She is the founder and co-convenor of the #SocialHumanities network at TORCH, and her ultimate objective is to reinvent the novel—along with the very acts of reading and writing—through new media technologies.

There is increasing recognition over the last decade that conservation, while conserving biodiversity of global value, can have local costs. Understanding these costs is essential as a first step to delivering conservation projects that do not make some of the poorest people on the planet poorer. Using examples from Madagascar and Bolivia, we explore the challenges of quantifying the impact of conservation on local wellbeing.
Julia Jones is Professor in conservation science at the School of Environment, Natural Resources and Geography, Bangor University. Julia is interested in how people interact with natural resources and how incentives can be best designed to maintain ecosystem services; for example the growing field of Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) and how schemes such as REDD+ can effectively deliver global environmental benefits while also having a positive impact on local livelihoods. She also has a strong interest in the design of robust conservation monitoring using different types of data, and in analysing the evidence underpinning environmental policies and decisions.

Welcome to Future Debates, a series of public events supported by the British Science Association.

A genome is an entire set of DNA; all the instructions for making every part of a living thing. Research into our genomes could improve our understanding of diseases, cancers and passing on certain traits. The application of this research through genomic medicine is at the cutting edge of science. There’s large potential for the technology to help us create new treatments and preventative approaches.

Someone’s genome can explain lots of things about them, and we don’t yet understand all of what the genetic code means. Genome data is being collected from a group of patients with rare diseases and cancers across the UK, as part of the Genomics England 100,000 Genomes Project. This information needs to be collected and stored securely, interpreted by experts and viewed in a way that protects the donor’s identity. There have been discussions among scientists about the implications of genomic medicine for privacy and the NHS, and the British Science Association believes that it is vital to open that conversation up to the public.

Come and join our panel of scientists and other experts to discuss who should have access to this data. Should genomic data be used outside medicine? Should private companies share any profits they make from genomic data with participants? Does the right to privacy outweigh the societal benefit of genomic research?

Doors open from 6.00 pm, and the debate will run from 6.30 pm until 8.00 pm.

Future Debates events are part of the British Science Association’s work to make science a fundamental part of British society and culture. We want to empower many more people – not just scientists – to constructively engage in debates over the applications and implications of science in their lives, their local economy and the UK’s future.

Follow us on twitter @LivingWellOx @HumanGeneticsOx @BritSciAssoc and use the event hashtag #FutureDebates

Telegraph writer Helen Yemm brings her column Thorny Problems to life by answering your gardening conundrums and dispensing invaluable advice in the picturesque setting of the Botanic Garden.

Date/Time: Saturday 25 June, 15:00
Venue: Oxford Town Hall, Long Room
Admissions: £5/£4(conc.)/£16(fam.)
Suitability: 14+
Book here:
http://www.oxfordshiresciencefestival.com/sat-opening-weekend.html

Neural implants, nanomedicine, brain enhancing drugs, genetic engineering…
Many human enhancement technologies are emerging and raise ethical and legal
challenges. This interactive event will present scenarios and take you on a
journey to the edge of technologies and ethics.

In the era of the development of technologies like robotics and artificial intelligence, machines are more and more capable of outperforming human beings at work tasks. What will be the decline of today’s professions? What are the prospects for
employment, and how will professions like doctors, teachers, architects, the clergy, lawyers, and many others adapt to this emerging world? What could be the new models to produce and distribute expertise in society?

Book here: http://www.oxfordshiresciencefestival.com/monday.html

Ludo, snakes & ladders and draughts are all popular pastimes, but in the past couple of decades a new generation of board games from designers with backgrounds in maths and science has begun to break the Monopoly monopoly. Perhaps the most successful of these is multi award winning Reiner Knizia, who joins mathematician Katie Steckles and board game lover Quentin Cooper to discuss how you develop a game which is easy to learn, hard to master and fun to play time after time. With a chance to have a go at some of Reiner’s latest creations and other top games afterwards.

Book here: http://www.oxfordshiresciencefestival.com/tuesday.html

‘Gene-editing’ sounds like science fiction, but today it is an emerging reality. This raises hope for treating medical problems, but also opens ethical quandaries about equality, privacy, and personal freedom. Discuss these questions with a panel of experts including geneticist Andy Greenfield, science fiction author Paul McAuley and science policy advisor Elizabeth Bohm. Lisa Melton, Senior News Editor at Nature Biotechnology, will moderate the event, with Ben Davies, Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, presenting technical background.

Book here: http://www.oxfordshiresciencefestival.com/wednesday.html

Join us for a sensational evening of cabaret – an alchemy of acts delivered by Science Oxford’s network of creative science performers. If you love science, stage and stand up, you’ll be in your element with our periodic table-themed cabaret including science presenter and geek songstress Helen Arney and compered by award-winning science communicator Jamie Gallagher. See the everyday elements that make up the world around us in a new light, watch in disbelief as gold is created before your eyes, and learn about their origins and how they behave inside our bodies. Get your tickets now – once they are gone they argon!

Date/Time: Sunday 3 July, 19:00
Venue: Amey Theatre, Abingdon School, Abingdon-on-Thames
Admissions: £7/£5(conc.)/£22(fam.)
Suitability: 16+
Book here: http://www.oxfordshiresciencefestival.com/grand-finale.html

What are the next steps for human evolution? Natural changes or technologies? Combining gene splicing and trans-humanism, medical advancement and surgical enhancement, biology and ambition, Level Up Human takes a light hearted look at what it means to be human, and what the alternatives might be. Join science writer and TV presenter Simon Watt, and his guests, for the live recording of an exciting podcast series.

Colette Morgan works for SAFE! as the Child on Parent Violence Project Development Manager. Sadly, Child-on-Parent violence is on the rise and this fascinating talk will show us how SAFE! tackles this problem and works with families to cultivate respectful family relationships, for the benefit of all society.

We will even provide you with a free sandwich and a cuppa.

Jonathon Porritt and Shaun Chamberlin celebrate the launch of the late Trinity alumnus David Fleming’s extraordinary book, ‘Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy’.

This intimate event will be held in the Sutro Room at Trinity College, Oxford University, and will be recorded for a short film. Various themes in Fleming’s wonderfully diverse work – from carnival to climate change, religion to resilience, manners to markets – may be explored in response to the interests of those present.

Interview with Shaun Chamberlin on David Fleming, Brexit and the book: http://www.darkoptimism.org/2016/08/21/interview-on-david-fleming-music-and-hippos/

More information on David Fleming’s books:
http://www.chelseagreen.com/surviving-the-future
http://www.chelseagreen.com/lean-logic

Copies of both books will be on sale on the day.

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“David Fleming was an elder of the UK green movement and a key figure in the early Green Party. Drawing on the heritage of Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful, Fleming’s beautifully written and nourishing vision of a post-growth economics grounded in human-scale culture and community—rather than big finance—is both inspiring and ever more topical.”
~ Caroline Lucas MP, co-leader, Green Party of England and Wales; former Member of the European Parliament

“I would unreservedly go so far as to say that David Fleming was one of the most original, brilliant, urgently-needed, underrated, and ahead-of-his-time thinkers of the last 50 years. History will come to place him alongside Schumacher, Berry, Seymour, Cobbett, and those other brilliant souls who could not just imagine a more resilient world but who could paint a picture of it in such vivid colours. Step into the world of David Fleming; you’ll be so glad you did.”
~ Rob Hopkins, cofounder of the Transition Network

“Why do some of the truly great books only emerge and exact their influence upon us after the death of their authors? Perhaps it takes a lifetime to accrue and refine the necessary wisdom. Or perhaps it simply takes the rest of us too long to catch up. Like Thoreau, Fleming’s masterpiece brims not only with fresh insight into every nook and cranny of our culture and what it means to be human, but with such wit and humour that its challenging ideas and radical perspectives become a refreshing delight. If we’re to have a future worth surviving, this book demands to be read, re-read, and—ultimately—acted upon.”
~ Mark Boyle, author of The Moneyless Manifesto and Drinking Molotov Cocktails with Gandhi

Join Cyclox and the Broken Spoke Bike Co-op along with Happy Cakes, Jimbobs Baguettes, I Scream Oxford, Pedal and Post, Oxford Mobile Cycle Repairs, Quarry Cycle Services, and Stig to discuss how they got started with cargo bikes and the future of intra urban transport in Oxford.

The Symposium focuses on drought and water scarcity in the UK and globally. A range of expert speakers give their perspectives from an academic and practisers view on the impact of drought and how to manage drought risk in the Up and beyond.

This event is organised and subsidised by the MaRIUS project, and so has a very low price of either £25 for the conference incl. lunch and a drinks reception; or £35 for conference, lunch, drinks reception and dinner!

More information on the event can be found here: http://www.mariusdroughtproject.org/news/

Country: USA

Year: 2015

Director: Michael Moore

Producers: Michael Moore, Carl Deal, Tia Lessin

Runtime: 120 mins

Language: English

BBFC: 15 A

Click here for trailer and Official Website

Overview /Sypnosis

To show what the USA can learn from rest of the world, director Michael Moore playfully visits various nations in Europe and Africa as a one-man “invader” to take their ideas and practices for America. Whether it is Italy with its generous vacation time allotments, France with its gourmet school lunches, German with its industrial policy, Norway and its prison system, Tunisia and its strongly progressive women’s policy and Iceland and its strong female presence in government and business among others, Michael Moore discovers there is much that American should emulate.

SCREENING AND Q&A WITH EUROPEAN DIRECTOR OF MUSIC

&MEMORY

Country: USA

Year: 2014

Director: Michael Rossato-Bennett;

Producers: Michael Rossato-Bennett, Alexandra McDougald

Runtime: 78 mins

Language: English

BBFC: n/a

Click here for trailer and Official Website

Overview /Sypnosis

The documentary follows social worker Dan Cohen, founder of the nonprofit organization Music & Memory, as he fights against a broken health-care system to demonstrate music’s ability to combat memory loss and restore a deep sense of self to those suffering from it. Rossato-Bennett visits family members who have witnessed the miraculous effects of personalized music on their loved ones, and offers illuminating interviews with experts including renowned neurologist and best-selling author Oliver Sacks (Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain) and musician Bobby McFerrin (“Don’t Worry, Be Happy”).

Followed by a Q&A session with Manon Bruinsma – European Director of Music & Memory and Music Therapist.

Geoffrey Davison, the great nephew of Emily Wilding Davison, will open the seminar with a personal insight into Emily’s life and the Suffrage movement. He will be joined by panel members who will include Professor Senia Paseta, Anneliese Dodds MEP & Lyndsey Jenkins who is researching the Women’s Social & Political Union (WSPU) who will discuss the history of the Suffrage movement and its importance for today and the future.
Part of the series, A Festival of Anniversaries

Between 1995 and 2011, remittances to developing world economies, that is, money sent by emigrants to family and friends in their country of origin, grew from US$55 billion to over US$372 billion, to exceed all overseas development assistance to the developing world, and all private debt and portfolio equity flows.
Latin America is a major recipient of remittances. Over 5.2 per cent of the region’s population are migrants and in 2011 alone, US$62 billion was remitted to Latin American households. Despite the scale of these transfers however, we still do not know how remittances might affect political preferences and political behaviour among recipients, what this might mean for policy outcomes, and how these dynamics might shape the political system in countries heavily dependent on this capital.
In this talk, Professor Doyle will outline how the regular receipt of remittances is changing the political preferences of recipients, which will have long-lasting effects on politics and policy in Latin American countries dependent upon remittances, relative to countries that are not.

Professor Doyle is the Tutorial Fellow in the Politics of Latin America and Associate Professor of Comparative Politics Department of Politics and International Relations. He is a member of the Latin American Centre.

The First Amendment has had a mixed pedigree and a difficult birth. In this lecture, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy Dan Robinson will demonstrate that, in offering protection of the basic liberties — freedom of religion, speech, press, petition, and assembly — the clear language of the First Amendment’s final form has been no bar to diverse and conflicting interpretations. This leaves unsettled the question of just what constitutes ‘speech’ and the grounds on which it loses the Amendment’s protection.

Professor Robinson will chart the development of philosophical thought on these freedoms from John Locke to the present day, and address the question of how courts navigate these conflicting interpretations. Operating as they do within the wider cultural climate of the day, he will assess whether the courts do, and should, remain immune to its fluctuating pressures.

This lecture forms part of a series on Free Speech convened by Professor Sir Richard Sorabji.

Professor Dan Robinson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Georgetown University and a Fellow of the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford.

Elain Harwood will look at David Roberts’s work in Cambridge and Oxford, and will place it in the context of the growth of higher education in the 1950s and 1960s, and the development of a modern style for university buildings.

Elain Harwood is Historic England’s specialist on post-war architecture and an acknowledged expert on and champion for Modernist architecture.

This event is part of the series A Festival of Anniversaries.

Recollection Lecture: The Rev’d Dr Mark Clavier (St Stephen’s House, Oxford)
To churches struggling to challenge both the excesses and the underlying potency of consumerism, Augustine offers a God whose Eloquent Wisdom can supersede all worldly rhetoric. By reading consumer culture through the lens of his rhetorical theology, Christians can be awakened to the true destiny of their restless hearts.

Event starts with tea and coffee at 3.30

Julian Savulescu has argued for the duty to create the best children one can. Jeff McMahan has written of the benefits of prenatal diagnosis and selective termination. I suspect that neither has an adequately understanding of what disability is, and whether or not it is compatible with a good life. In this talk, I will outline the empirical evidence about what goes well, and what goes less well, in the lives of disabled people, and which barriers impact on their chance of flourishing. I will accept the right of prospective parents to have prenatal diagnosis, and to terminate affected pregnancies. But I also suggest that there can be no duty to use these technologies, at least in the majority of disability cases, and that the priority is for society to accept and support disabled children.

Please join us for two insightful talks, followed by informal discussion and afternoon snack. Everyone is welcome!

The talks will be given by:
– Professor Lyn Parker (The University of Western Australia, Perth)
Topic: “Intersections of Gender, Multiculturalism and Religion: Young, Muslim Minority Women in Contemporary Bali”

– Irfan L. Sarhindi (The UCL Institute of Education, London)
Topic: “Islam Nusantara: Indonesian Muslims’ Proposal to Curb Radicalism”

Across the developing world, poverty has been decreasing, but unevenly, and inequality is increasingly identified as a serious burden on development. In recent years, leading economists have contributed to big picture views on what is behind development and poverty reduction: influential popular books have been produced by thinkers such as Amartya Sen, Bill Easterly, Paul Collier, Jeffrey Sachs, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Joseph Stiglitz, Angus Deaton and others.

In this lecture, Stefan Dercon will reflect on these contrasting views: how they view the causes of poverty, what to do about it and how inequality fits into these views. In particular, he will explore the role of inequality as a cause of poverty persistence, and how to overcome this. The implications for development thinking and policy will be discussed too.

Distinguished Speaker Seminar: Michael Bloomberg
Michael Bloomberg in conversation with Peter Tufano
Thursday 17 November 2016, 5.45 – 6.45pm

Oxford Saïd is excited to announce that Michael R. Bloomberg, Founder of Bloomberg LP and former Mayor of New York City, will be speaking at the School, on Thursday 17 November.
We are extremely fortunate that Mr Bloomberg will be visiting Oxford and anticipate this event will sell out very quickly. Registration is essential so please use the ‘Book now’ link above to confirm your attendance at your earliest convenience.

About the speaker
Michael R. Bloomberg is the founder of Bloomberg LP, philanthropist, UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change, World Health Organization Global Ambassador for Noncommunicable Diseases, and three-term mayor of New York City.
He is an entrepreneur and philanthropist who served as mayor of New York City from 2002-2013 after leading the company he started in 1981 for 20 years. Since leaving City Hall, he has resumed leadership of Bloomberg LP.
A lifelong philanthropist, Bloomberg founded Bloomberg Philanthropies, which focuses on five main areas: public health, education, the environment, the arts, and government innovation. He also leads a number of bi-partisan coalitions on urgent issues, including climate change, illegal guns, immigration reform, and infrastructure investment.

Registration
Please remember that registration is required to attend this event. The seminar is open for anyone to attend and will take place at Saïd Business School followed by a short networking drinks reception until around 7.30pm.

Please note that filming, live streaming and photography will be taking place during this event. By entering and participating you are giving your permission to be recorded and for the School to us the media in future.

Martin Barker (Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at Aberystwyth University, Director of the Global Hobbit Project) will be visiting Oxford to discuss the results of the landmark Global Hobbit Project, a research initiative examining the popular reception of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Film trilogy.

Synopsis:
“Tolkien aficionados may have disagreed somewhat among themselves about the value and achievements of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. But any frustrations – or celebrations – over the 2001-3 films were nothing compared to the overwhelming sense of let-down occasioned by the Hobbit trilogy. But your disappointments are, I am afraid, grist to the mill of an audience researcher like me. In 2014 I led a consortium of researchers in 46 countries across the world, to gather responses to Peter Jackson’s second trilogy. We managed to attract just over 36,000 completions of our questionnaire. Of course, when we conceived and planned the project, we couldn’t know what the films would be like, or what range of responses and debates they might elicit. In this presentation I will (briefly) explain why and how we carried out the research, and offer some of its major findings. These can act, I hope, as a kind of mirror to the depths, and also the significance, of the sense of disappointment experienced by even the most hopeful and forgiving viewers. And they open an important agenda about the changing role of ‘fantasy’ in our contemporary culture.”

OCDEM opens up its doors to the public for the afternoon!
Come and help celebrate World Diabetes Day by visiting OCDEM. Our clinicians and scientists are working on ground-breaking research that we hope will change patient care in the future. Meet the people running trials of new treatments and see how the results of research are adopted into clinical practice. Find out about the new ways we are working to improve diabetes care.
What’s on:
Lecture scheduled for 4pm.
Hear Professor Fredrik Karpe talk about body fat (as featured on BBCs Trust Me I’m a Doctor).
Are some kinds of fat better than others?
Are you an Apple or a Pear?
What’s the best way to reduce your waistline?

From the team behind Riversimple (http://www.riversimple.com/), the UK Based Hydrogen Fuel Cell Eco Car Company, comes a brand new Eco business venture. They are about to launch a company that uses alternate approaches to energy, materials and production which governed by a truly unique approach will come to market in such a way that it cannot be ignored. Where great ideas are either buried or ignored they are taking great ideas through a different approach to business; truly suitable to the new ways of getting things done to bring cars to electrified bikes all the way to food to people across the world in a way that will enhance the sustainability not only of the planet but of us.

Join Lisa McKenzie (LSE), Danny Dorling (University of Oxford), Jeremy Gilbert (University of East London), Ruth Ibegbuna (CEO, RECLAIM Manchester) and Dawn Foster (The Guardian) to discuss how class is presented within the media.

It is well known that journalism is a profession dominated by the middle classes. 54% of leading print journalists hail from just two universities – Oxford and Cambridge. With the decline of local news, the rise of the unpaid internship and the ending of specialist reporting on labour and industrial politics, it is harder and harder for people from working class background to gain a career in the media. From the lack of working class voices in the media, to the negative sterotypes of people from working class backgrounds it is clear that class is an issue which urgently needs discussing in relation to the media.

How do the class backgrounds of journalists affect the agenda presented by the media? Is class an overlooked topic in discussions of problems with the mainstream media? What can alternative media platforms do to change the debate?