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.

While qualitative research has received greater acceptance in a great variety of disciplines, including health and medicine, the true potential of qualitative analysis seems not to have been realised in such areas. Hence, the critique for presenting anecdotal evidence is often quite fair. With the basis in two examples, this talk will demonstrate how the potential of qualitative analysis is developed by maintaining a strong inductive strategy of concept development. Rather than summarising endless amounts of nuanced data, the qualitative researcher may apply a detailed coding approach to hunt for empirical insight that triggers curiosity and development of novel ideas. On basis of two examples presented, we will develop what are good qualitative research questions and hence good qualitative research.

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

Date/Time: Friday 1 July 13:00
Venue: Holywell Cemetery, St Cross Road, Oxford
Admissions: Free, Drop-In
Suitability: 14+
Find out more: http://www.oxfordshiresciencefestival.com/friday.html

The wide range of rock types used for gravestones means that cemeteries can be geological treasure-troves – and provide a wonderful introduction to geology and other sciences. Social history comes into it too. Join geologists Nina Morgan and Philip Powell on a geological walk through Holywell Cemetery, one of the cemeteries described in their book, The Geology of Oxford Gravestones. You’ll never look at cemeteries in the same way again!

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.

We’ve all heard the saying to ‘Never Judge a Book by its Cover’, and our Human Library event is all about creating understanding through dialogue with a ‘human book’. A human book is a person you get to talk to for 10 minutes about what it’s like to be them.

A conversation with Restorative Justice participants in cases of grave crime, followed by questions and discussion. (Bring your own sandwich). Tea, coffee & soft drinks provided.

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.

Dr Duncan Green of Oxfam will launch his new book on global problems ‘How Change Happens’ at Oxford Brookes.This book bridges the gap between academia and practice, bringing together the best research from a range of academic disciplines and the evolving practical understanding of activists to explore the topic of social and political change. Drawing on many first-hand examples from the global experience of Oxfam, one of the world’s largest social justice NGOs, as well as the author’s insights from studying and working on international development, it tests ideas on How Change Happens and offers the latest thinking on what works to achieve progressive change.

‘An indispensable guide for activists and change-makers everywhere’ Francis Fukuyama
‘A landmark, a must-read book to return to again and again to inform and inspire reflection and action. I know no other book like it.’ Robert Chambers
A splendid treatise on how to change the actual world – in reality, not just in our dreams’ Amartya Sen

Dr Duncan Green, a Brookes PhD alumnus, is Senior Strategic Adviser at Oxfam GB and author of From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States can Change the World. He also authors the From Poverty to Power blog.

Copies of the book will be on sale for £10.00 after the event

Refreshments will be available after the book launch.

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.

Delivering reliable drinking water to millions of rural people in Africa and Asia is an elusive and enduring global goal. A systematic information deficit on the performance of and demand for infrastructure investments limits policy design and development outcomes.

Since 2010, the ‘Smart Handpump’ project has been exploring new technologies, methods and models to understand and respond to this challenge. A mobile-enabled data transmitter provides foundational data on hourly water usage and failure events which has enabled the establishment of performance-based maintenance companies in Kenya that are improving handpump reliability by an order of magnitude.

The research is a collaboration between the School of Geography and the Environment and the Department of Engineering Science with a range of partners including government, international bodies such as UNICEF and the private sector. New research involves modelling the accelerometry data from the handpumps to predict aquifer depth. We invite you to test the Smart Handpump in the car park and debate how the ‘accidental infrastructure’ of rural handpumps can spark bolder initiatives to deliver water security for millions of poor people in Africa and Asia.

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.

As the UK emerges from its own bruising referendum campaign, we present a screening of NO — the Oscar nominated dramatization of the 1988 referendum in Chile to decide the future of the country’s military dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Rather than focusing on the negative legacy of sixteen years of brutal dictatorship, the ‘No’ campaign enlisted the services of a young advertising executive to present a message filled with the promise of hope and happiness on offer under a new democratic system.

Interweaving documentary footage of the surreally optimistic actual advertising campaign, the film uses a now obsolete video format to seamlessly blend documentary and drama. In doing so, it raises probing questions about both the line between truth and fiction, and the possibilities and pitfalls of direct democracy.

Nominated for Best Foreign Language Oscar and starring Gael García Bernal, NO is a funny and inspiring account of a referendum campaign, and may offer a much-needed lesson from history in light of recent campaigns in the UK, Colombia, and Hungary.

Alan Angell, author of Democracy after Pinochet and Emeritus Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, will give an introductory talk to accompany the screening. He was an observer at the 1988 referendum in Chile and ran a programme for academic refugees from Chile to study in the UK. He is an Associate Member of the Latin America Centre, Oxford, and has written on many aspects of Chilean democracy and on the left in Latin America.

Praise for NO
Funny and rousing, both intellectually and emotionally
The New York Times

Uniquely and unexpectedly beautiful. A snapshot of a society renewed
Slant Magazine