This event is organised by Oxford City Amnesty International and Oxford Against Cutting, and is open to everyone.

Oxford Against Cutting (OAC) is a local charity set up by members of Oxford Amnesty International. Both groups are rooted in human rights and are taking steps to tackle female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C). OAC tackles FGM/C of girls and women living in Oxfordshire and their speakers will explain the harm, the law, local action and what you can do to help end the practice.

Speakers: Kaddy Touray, Survivor and Director, OAC and Kate Agha, Co-founder and Executive Director, OAC.

At a time of heightened political tension and policy confusion about the refugee crisis, this lecture will explore why record numbers of people are fleeing their homes; what conditions they are living in; and what should be done to help them.

Rt Hon David Miliband will make the case that support for refugees is a global public good, which requires reform of international policy. It will also argue that winning the argument for supporting refugees is vital to the moral standing of western societies which constructed the international order after World War 2.

Our societies are increasingly dependent on, and shaped by, our information technologies. We read, watch, communicate, interact, and monitor digitally, both as individuals and in our institutions.

As we document and store every conceivable facet of our lives we expose tensions between the availability of information and the freedoms that we enjoy. We rightly expect a level of personal privacy and freedom of expression while, equally justifiably, expecting transparency from our governments and businesses. In practice, we all too often see the reverse.

In this talk Dr Joss Wright, Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, will examine technologies that seek to assert, resist, or subvert control over information, and assess the balance of the information we share as individuals and as a society. We will look at technologies such as the ‘dark web’ and Bitcoin, that seek to resist traditional observation and control, and the new forms of control introduced by broad-scale gathering of personal data and the algorithms used to act on it.

By understanding the consequences of hiding and sharing information, and the technologies and policies that we use to do so, we take a necessary step towards consciously guiding the shape of the future societies that we wish to see.

Leading campaigner for human rights and LGBT freedom since 1967; member of OutRage! Through the Peter Tatchell Foundation he campaigns for human rights in Britain and internationally; author of six books, including “The Battle for Bermondsey” (1983) and “We Don’t Want to March Straight – Masculinity, Queers & The Military” (1995)

Director and adaptor, Wayne Jordan will be in conversation with Fiona Macintosh, discussing his acclaimed version of Sophocles’ ‘Oedipus’ at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 2015. At 2.15pm on Monday 27 Feb. 2017.

Followed by Q&A and refreshments.
Free, all welcome, no booking required.

An APGRD Public Lecture, in the Ioannou Centre at 66 St Giles’, Oxford, OX1 3LU.

Professor Vlatko Vedral, Co-Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Bio-Inspired Quantum Technologies will explore the possibility of basing quantum technologies on organic molecules, namely using natural systems to support quantum bit for quantum computation.

Member of the House of Commons from 1979-97 and Independent Crossbench Peer since 1997. Chair and a founder of the All Party Group on Freedom of Religion or Belief who has authored reports on North Korea, Sudan, Tibet and Pakistan; a founder of the Jubilee Campaign; author of twelve books including “Building Bridges: Is there Hope for North Korea?” with Rob Chidley (2013)

2017 marks the 22nd anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide- the worst atrocity committed on European soil since the Second World War. As part of a host of commemorative events, Remembering Srebrenica are proud to be holding an international academic conference, the only one of its kind in the UK, titled:

‘22nd Anniversary of the Srebrenica Genocide: Justice, Education and Commemoration’.

By investigating ideas surrounding justice, education and commemoration, our panels, comprised of global experts in their field, will probe how the UK and the wider international community can learn the lessons from Srebrenica. Now more than ever, it is vital that as a society we understand the corrosive effects of hatred and its horrific consequences if left unchecked. Through academic endeavour, we can ensure that the victims and survivors of Srebrenica are never erased from history.

Keynote Speech by Professor Tariq Ramadan, Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford University

Speakers will include:

Ed Vulliamy, Award winning journalist with The Guardian and The Observer, and author on Bosnia

H.E Edward Ferguson, the British Ambassador to Bosnia-Herzegovina

Allan Little, BBC special correspondent who reported extensively from Bosnia during the conflict.

They will be joined by other guest speakers from academia, education, the media and law, who will share their ideas over the course of three panels.

By 2050, a quarter of humanity will be African. The continent is in profound transition, the scale of which matters not just for the citizens of Africa’s 54 nations, but for the world. It is the fastest urbanising continent, and experiencing rapid industrialisation.

Its economic growth has outperformed Latin America and most developed economies over recent years, yet 55% of Africa’s labour force today is still employed in agriculture, and the challenges of peace and security continue to occupy the headlines about the continent. Six hundred million of its citizens live without access to electricity, yet by 2014 more than 80% of the population had a mobile phone.

The facts about Africa’s growth and development leave no doubt about its unique trajectory, but how will the continent navigate these changes, and how will the world engage with this unprecedented scale and pace of change?

In Oxford, new approaches are being forged to studying and understanding Africa, including the Africa-Oxford Initiative and the inclusion of Africa within Oxford Martin School’s new research theme ‘Great Transitions’. Join us on 7 March to hear from Winnie Byanyima, the Executive Director of Oxfam International, Dr Carlos Lopes, former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and current Oxford Martin Visiting Fellow, and Achim Steiner, Director of the Oxford Martin School, and be part of the debate as they discuss the range of African futures that could emerge over the coming decades.

This panel discussion will be followed by a drinks reception, all welcome

The fifth annual Ockenden International Prize for excellence in self-reliance projects among refugees and displaced people will be presented by Lord Alfred Dubs, Labour peer, on Tuesday 7th March 2017. Projects in Uganda, Egypt and Nepal will compete for the $100,000 prize. The two runners-up will each receive $25,000.

Africa currently has the highest disease burden of any region of the world and the least resources in terms of health personnel and health systems. But things are changing rapidly, many countries are in the process of major epidemiologic transitions with falling childhood mortality and the prospects of controlling many of the traditional infectious causes of ill health. At the same time the combined effects of economic development and rapid demographic expansion against a background of increasing urbanisation will pose enormous new challenges for the health of African populations.

In this talk Kevin Marsh, Professor of Tropical Medicine at the University of Oxford, will examine the possible trends for the health of the continent.

​With unchecked emissions of climate pollutants, there is a 50% probability for the planetary warming to cross the so-called dangerous threshold of 20C by 2050; and there is at least a 5% probability the warming can exceed a catastrophic 60C in about 80+ years.
For the bottom three billion in rural areas, 20C would be enough to pose existential threats. With a 60C warming accompanied by 10 billion population, loss of bio diversity and species extinction, we should ask: whether civilization as we know it can be extended beyond this century?
Is there still time to avoid such catastrophes? The answer is Yes. But, we need to reinforce the technological and the market-based solutions with societal transformation. An alliance between scientists, policy makers, religious institutions and health care providers has a good chance to bring the needed transformation.

Sue Lloyd Roberts CBE, pioneering video-journalist and reporter, died of leukaemia in October 2015. Her daughter, Sarah Morris, completed her mother’s last book and discusses it here with Sue’s husband, BBC producer Nick Guthrie.
Sue Saville (Broadcast & Medical Journalist; former ITV News Medical Correspondent) chairs the discussion.

Saïd Business School is proud to welcome Kailash Satyarthi to speak at the School on Tuesday 25 April.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Kailash Satyarthi will speak about the fight against modern slavery, sharing his experiences rescuing over 84,000 child slaves and labourers, the Global March that secured the first ever ILO definition on child labour and education campaigning in over 100 countries to ensure all children in the world get to go to school.

Mr Satyarthi will also introduce the new 100 million for 100 million campaign that was launched with 5,000 students and the President of India in December. It aims to be the biggest mobilisation in history and help globalise compassion at this increasing time of nationalism. Mr Satyarthi will also explain how individuals can make a difference and ensure all children are safe, free and educated.

Mr Satyarthi has been a tireless advocate of children’s rights for over three decades and is the founding president of the Global Campaign for Education, an exemplar civil society movement working to end the global education crisis.

The seminar will take place at Saïd Business School and is open for anyone to attend. Please remember that registration is required.

The Oxford Human Rights Hub is pleased to announce its third workshop for human rights MPhil and DPhil students at Oxford University. This half-day workshop will bring together and foster a network of graduate students and academics in various disciplines working in human rights at Oxford. The aim is to come together as a community to explore current developments, to analyse existing weakness and to attempt to point towards future improvements in the way in which human rights can address current legal and social problems.

MPhil and DPhil students wil be presenting on their current research in progress. This is an invaluable opportunity to enrich student’s doctoral research and to gain feedback from peers and academics specialising in human rights.

Hart Publishing will also be attending to provide advice on publication.

St Catherine’s College is delighted to welcome Ambassador Peter Galbraithback this April to give a lecture on the current situation in the Middle East. Drawing on his first-hand expertise of the region he will consider the question: How does it all end? Syria, Iraq and Kurdistan.

Peter was appointed as the first United States Ambassador to Croatia by President Bill Clinton in 1993, where he was actively involved in the peace processes in Croatia and Bosnia. He has a wealth of professional experience in international relations, with particular expertise on Iraq and its Kurdish region. Peter travelled to Iraq during the Kurdish uprising, exposing Saddam Hussein’s atrocities and contributing to the decision to create a safe haven in the north of the country. From 2003 to 2005, he was an advisor to the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq. He is the author of two books: The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War without End (2006) and Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened America’s Enemies (2008).

Human rights – does anyone out there care? Lord Hall of Birkenhead (Director General of the BBC) gives the first lecture in a new series, which has been established to celebrate the memory of St Hilda’s College alumna, Sue Lloyd-Roberts CBE and MBE, a fearless, award-winning BBC journalist whose uncompromising and courageous documentaries highlighted humanitarian issues across the world.

Saïd Business School is pleased to welcome Lubomira Rochet, Global Chief Digital Officer of the L’Oréal Group, to speak at the School on Wednesday 26 April.

Leading digital transformation at L’Oréal

L’Oréal is the world’s number one beauty company with leading brands such as Maybelline New York, L’Oréal Paris, Garnier, Lancome, Kiehl’s, and Kerastase. The group was also named by Adweek as 2017’s hottest digital marketer. How did one of the world’s oldest consumer goods companies get to this position? Lubomira Rochet, the Chief Digital Officer for L’Oréal globally and member of the group’s executive committee, will talk about the digital transformation of L’Oréal’s businesses that she and her team have enacted since she joined the company in 2014.

The seminar is open for anyone to attend and will take place at Saïd Business School on Wednesday 26 April followed by a short networking drinks reception until around 7.30pm. Please remember that registration is required to attend this event.

“Diamonds are a rebel’s best friend” is one striking way to sum up the belief that valuable minerals spur violent conflict. The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme and the US Dodd Frank Act Section 1502, now on the chopping block under the Trump administration, are meant to counteract this: they aim to prevent trade in minerals unless it can be proven that revenues from these do not support armed groups.

Research however, suggests that the relationship between minerals and violent conflict may be more complex than this quote presumes. Valuable minerals may indeed fund or motivate rebel movements. But they may also provide a livelihood to millions of people, making them better off and less vulnerable to be recruited into armed groups. And revenue from minerals can also flows to countries’ governments and their armies.

In this lecture Dr Anouk S. Rigterink, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government, Department of Economics’ Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies, will address the contradictory faces of ‘conflict minerals’ and their implications for how effective we think current policies to tackle them can be.

This is a joint event between the Oxford Martin School and the Oxford Centre for Tropical Forests

One of our biggest technological innovations is that of time keeping. From the atomic to the astronomical scales, our technology has enabled us to precisely measure time. Our timekeeping uses clocks that all tick along the same time scale – a time scale that is also relative to how we perceive the passage of time.

For biology, the passage of time, however, is not only different but reveals deep truths about life. Across the diversity of life, the passage of time from bacteria to humans to giant Redwood trees is perceived differently. Instead of a constant ticking of a clock – the pace of life is reflected in scaling laws that characterise the variation in the cycles of heartbeats, metabolism, growth and reproduction.

In this lecture Professor Brian J. Enquist, Oxford Martin Visiting Fellow, will introduce a second concept of time – physiological time. Physiological time enables us to better understand why we age, the emergence of disease and cancer, the functioning of ecosystems, and the diversity of life. Physiological time is one of the most significant characteristics of life and helps unite the study of biology. A deeper question is what ultimately sets the pace of life.

As will be discussed, the search for a universal biological clock that unites life’s cycles is the most intriguing Holy Grail of biology.

This event will be followed by a drinks reception, all welcome

For Dr Kanade, good research derives from solving real-world problems and delivering useful results to society. As a roboticist, he participated in developing a wide range of computer-vision systems and autonomous robots, including human-face recognition, autonomously-driven cars, computer-assisted surgical robots, robot helicopters, biological live cell tracking through a microscope, and EyeVision, a system used for sports broadcast. Dr Kanade will share insights into his projects and discuss how his “Think like an amateur, do as an expert” maxim interacts with problems and people.

Dr Takeo Kanade is the 2016 Kyoto Prize Laureate for Advanced Technology.

Recent research purports that climate change is creating conflict, and leads to unchecked migration. But three distinct flaws characterise such research efforts; they often ask the wrong questions, present poor evidence, and remove references to other, more likely factors that cause conflict. It often gets translated into a perception that poor people act violently for ‘natural’ reasons, or are spurred by physical hazards. We all know that high climate vulnerability and conflict co-occur in the same general regions, but we know far less about what does shape the power and competition dynamics at the local level. Basically, who are the winners and losers of environmental change?

The reality from local research is that far more cooperation is occurring at the local level to mitigate and adapt to environmental challenges; and that a tremendous amount of development money is being directed towards adaptation and risk management. This changes the local calculus for violence. As a result, conflict, when and where it does occur, is often between the ‘winners’ from climate change, development and transitions to democracy.

A number of developments such as the Arab Spring and on-going famines in Somalia and South Sudan have led to renewed interest among both scholars and policymakers in the role of food insecurity and food-price related grievances as catalysts of conflict. In this lecture Prof Gunnar Sørbø, Senior Researcher at Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI), will address such linkages, using case material mainly from Sudan and Somalia, with a particular focus on food insecurity as a risk multiplier and the implications for choice of interventions.

Abstract: What is the historical meaning of “ordinary means” to sustain human life? And what has been the understanding for over 500 years of Catholic moral analysis of the obligation to sustain life?
Is it, as Pope John Paul II insisted in an allocution to a meeting of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life in March, 2000 that food and water must always be provided for patients in a persistent vegetative condition (PVS). Artificial nutrition and fluids, he writes, are not medical measure, but “natural” and therefor are “ordinary means” that are always morally required.”
PVS is a state of permanent unconsciousness. The record for maintaining a patient in that condition is 37 years, 111 days.
Speaker: JOHN J. PARIS, S.J., PhD is the Michael P. Walsh Professor of Bioethics at Boston College. He has also been Professor of Religious Studies, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA (1970-1990), Adjunct Professor of Medicine, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA (1982-1994) and Clinical Professor of Family and Community Health, Tufts University, Boston, MA 1985-1998) and has been a visiting scholar at Yale Law School, The Kennedy Institute of Ethics, The University of Chicago Medical School, Georgetown University School of Medicine, The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and a visiting professor at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University’s School of Medicine.
Fr. Paris served as consultant to the President’s Commission for the Study of Ethics in Medicine, the United States Senate Committee on Aging, and the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. He has published over 190 articles on the area of law, medicine and ethics in publications as The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, The Journal of Intensive Care Medicine, Pediatrics, Archives of Diseases of Childhood, The American Journal of Bioethics (AJOB), The Cambridge Quarterly of Health Care Ethics (CQ) and The Wall Street Journal. He is the Ethics Section Editor of The Journal of Perinatology.
Fr. Paris served as a consultant and expert witness in many of the landmark biomedical cases including Quinlan, Baby L, Brophy, Jobes, Baby K and Gilgunn.

Competition over resources and territory is not just a feature of modern or historical times, but a recurrent theme in the natural world, and a phenomenon that reaches far back in human evolutionary history. While modern conflict has many unique qualities, common patterns across species and time suggest important fundamental insights about human nature and social organisation that may help to address modern problems, especially those which are hard to resolve.

Launch and discussion of Mari Mikkola’s new book, ‘The Wrong of Injustice: Dehumanization and its Role in Feminist Philosophy’

Oil suppliers have more unsellable than unburnable oil: they are more at risk from competition than from climate regulation. Electricity suppliers too, face a swarm of disruptors that will transform their business beyond recognition. As these two vast industries merge and as insurgents in both challenge incumbents, almost everything we thought we knew about energy is ripe for rapid and profound change. In this lecture, physicist and innovator Amory Lovins will consider the changing face of the energy market.

A quirky theatrical evening of drama, discussion and disease.
Killer germs, superbugs, pestilent plagues and global pandemics have fascinated writers, musicians and thinkers for centuries. As diseases spread through a population, likewise myths and ideas travel virally through film, literature, theatre and social media.
Join a cast of actors, scientists and literary researchers for an inventive illustration of
infectious extracts from plays and music, past and present.

Sally Shuttleworth is Professor of English Literature looking at the inter-relations between
literature and science, including the project Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century
Perspectives.
Kirsten Shepherd-Barr is Professor of English and Theatre Studies, interested in the relationship between modernism, science and theatrical performance.
John Terry is Artistic Director of Chipping Norton Theatre known for ambitious and adventurous theatre work, usually script based but with a strong visual and physical tilt.

Isabelle Torrance (Associate Professor at Aarhus University) delivers an APGRD Public Lecture on Tom Paulin’s adaptation of Aeschylus’s Prometheus. Free, all welcome. No booking required.

This lecture is at the conclusion of day one of the annual APGRD/RHUL postgraduate symposium on the theory and performance of ancient drama. Attendance at the symposium is not necessary – but you are quite welcome to join us: http://www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk/events/2017/02/postgraduate-symposium-2017

Baroness Helena Kennedy is one of Britain’s most distinguished lawyers and active public figures. She has spent her professional life giving voice to those who have least power within the system, championing civil liberties and promoting human rights. We are honoured to have her as a guest speaker for the CEDAW for Change Programme hosted by IGS/LMH. The Programme brings together over 30 feminist scholars and activists from 20 countries around the globe and is facilitated by Women’s Human Rights Education Institute (co-founders: Alda Facio and Angela Lytle) and Women’s Solidarity Fund (co-founder: Anna Arutshyan). The public event is chaired by Dr Maria Jaschok (Director of IGS).