To what extent what we perceive is real? How does experience affect our perception of the world? Dr Matthew Parrott, Prof Brian Rogers and Dr Kerry Walker are ready to take you for a captivating journey through perception, from philosophy to neuroscience! Come find out whether we are or not just a brain in a jar!

Blackwell’s Bookshop Oxford Broad Street is delighted to welcome to the bookshop Afua Hirsch, who will be discussing her extraordinary book ‘Brit(ish)’. Voted by our booksellers as our championed Book of the Month on it’s publication, ‘Brit(ish)’ explores race, identity and belonging in Britain.

Brit (ish)

Where are you really from?

You’re British. Your parents are British. You were raised in Britain. Your partner, your children and most of your friends are British.

So why do people keep asking you where you are from?

‘Brit(ish)’ is about a search for identity. It is about the everyday racism that plagues British society. It is about our awkward, troubled relationship with our history. It is about why liberal attempts to be ‘colour-blind’ have caused more problems than they have solved. It is about why we continue to avoid talking about race.

In this personal and provocative investigation, Afua Hirsch explores a very British crisis of identity. We are a nation in denial about our past and our present. We believe we are the nation of abolition, but forget we are the nation of slavery. We are convinced that fairness is one of our values, but that immigration is one of our problems. ‘Brit(ish)’ is the story of how and why this came to be, and an urgent call for change.

Afua Hirsch is a writer and broadcaster. She has worked as a barrister, as the West Africa correspondent for the Guardian, and as social affairs editor for Sky News. ‘Brit(ish)’ is her first book and was awarded a RSL Jerwood Prize for Non-Fiction.

Entry to the event is at 6:45pm, a selection of drinks will be available to purchase at our till point before the talk starts at 7pm. Tickets cost £5. For all enquiries, please email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk .

The Blackwell’s Every Woman Series

From February 2018, Blackwell’s Broad Street will launch a year-long series of events in conjunction with the Centenary of Women’s Suffrage in the UK.

The 1918 Representation of the People Act gave women of property over the age of 30 the right to vote – not all women, therefore, could vote. It was a step, but it was not the whole journey. And many would argue that we are still a long way from stepping the journey’s full distance towards gender equality in this country and worldwide. Blackwell’s Centenary events programme will focus around the following questions:

1) How much does the vote mean today?

2) How far are we still from achieving gender equality?

3) How can we recognise intersectional privilege and oppression, and platform those demographics of women who weren’t acknowledged by this achievement 100 years ago, and are still under-represented and undervalued today?

Do you want to learn about artificial intelligence? Have you been put off by technical jargon or fears of terminator robots?

Come along to this evening course for beginners run by the AI consultancy Oxford Insights.

No previous experience or knowledge of AI is required.

The course will cover important definitions, developments and debates in AI today, to help you answer three questions:

what is AI?

who is doing what?

why should we care?

Our teachers are AI experts and great communicators who will bring technical discussions to life.

This will be a small group to leave space for lots of discussion. We are charging the very low introductory price of £15 for this evening only!

http://hertfordfestival.strikingly.com/
It is a weekend which has something for everyone: Hertford alumni will give talks on a range of topics including tech and cryptocurrencies, literature, history, current affairs and entrepreneurship, while children can enjoy fun activities for all ages. With meals in Hall and music in the Chapel, we look forward to welcoming you, your family and friends to college.

Based on their first hand experiences as election watchers and their hundreds of interviews with presidents, prime ministers, diplomats, election officials, and conspirators, Cheeseman and Klaas document instances of election rigging from Argentina to Zimbabwe, including notable examples from Brazil, Kenya, India, Nigeria, and Russia. This eye-opening study offers a sobering overview of corrupted professional politics, while providing fertile intellectual ground for the development of new solutions for protecting democracy from authoritarian subversion.

The esteemed ceramicist Claudia Clare is an artist who uses this traditionally domestic medium to present social commentary, often on issues of trauma, sexuality, and revolution. Having been subjected to censorship by public art institutions, Claudia joins us to speak not only about her work but also about the fight against bureaucracy and institutional politics. www.claudiaclare.co.uk

This talk is part of the FAR (Fine Art Research) Guest Lecture series, supported by the School of Arts at Oxford Brookes University. All talks are free to attend, and everyone is welcome to join us. Booking is essential: www.eventbrite.com/e/artists-talk-claudia-clare-subversive-ceramics-tickets-50921796464

New movements for social justice from the 1970s delivered searching critiques of the discipline and practice of social policy and the welfare state. But how far have such perspectives since influenced social policy as a discipline and practice?

Join Fiona Williams as she explores how contemporary social movements – especially those around gender, race, migration, disability, austerity and the environment – pose material, political and ethical questions as to how we are to live our lives. These questions are crucial to imagining what form an alternative, transformational social policy might take.

Anna Milon, Education Secretary of the Tolkien Society will be joining us to give her talk, Neurodivergent Middle-earth:

Existing scholarship on Tolkien and mental health has largely focused on the aftermath of trauma or the idea that the characters in question are terribly ill and need either curing or isolating from society. In this talk, Anna Milon invites you to challenge this reductive view of mental health and explore possible neuro-divergence that does not hamper the adventures of our favourite LotR characters.

Talk followed by questions and discussion. This is part of a series of eight meetings on Thursday evenings, each one beginning at 7:30 and ending at 9pm.

11 October
The right to say untrue and damaging things
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

18 October
Flat earth: a Marxist critique
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

25 October
Tithe, timber, and the persistence of the ancien régime
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

1 November
The dream of human life: art in the Italian Renaissance
Oxford Town Hall, St Aldates

8 November
Antisemitism: more geese than swans
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

15 November
Marcus Aurelius and the self-help movement
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

22 November
Hegelian contradiction and prime numbers
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

29 November
Aleksandr Bogdanov (1873–1928) and the general science of organization
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

Newspapers often feature studies that sound too good to be true and often they aren’t – they are myths.

Some myths may be harmless but the phenomenon affects most kinds of research within evidence-based science. The good news is that there’s a new movement tackling misleading and unreliable research and instead trying to give us results that we can trust.

Using his research in to human pheromones as an example, Tristram will discuss how and why popular myths, including power-posing, are created and how efforts have been made to address the ‘reproducibility crisis’.

Tristram Wyatt is an emeritus fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford and formerly Director of Studies in Biology at OUDCE. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford. He’s interested in how animals of all kinds use pheromones to communicate by smell. His Cambridge University Press book on pheromones and animal behaviour won the Royal Society of Biology’s prize for the Best Postgraduate Textbook in 2014. His TED talk on human pheromones has been viewed over a million times. His book Animal behaviour: A Very Short Introduction was published by Oxford University Press in 2017.

Open to all. The talk is designed for researchers from all disciplines and is open to the public.

Maddie Breeze is a sociologist and Chancellor’s Fellow in the School of Education, University of Strathclyde. Her book Seriousness in Women’s Roller Derby was awarded the 2016 Philip Abram’s Memorial Prize by the British Sociological Association and she has researched and published on: imposter syndrome as a public feeling, feminist collaborations across academic career stages, widening participation, gender and sport, and young people’s political participation.

In this talk I begin by considering imposter syndrome as a ‘public feeling’ (Cvetkovich 2007, 2012) in higher education. Feeling like an imposter is anecdotally ubiquitous among academics, and is commonly understood to involve sensations of not belonging, of out-of-place-ness, and the conviction that one’s professional competence, is fundamentally fraudulent, that it is only a matter of time before this is discovered, before being found out. Feeling like an imposter involves the suspicion that signifiers of professional success have somehow been awarded by mistake or achieved through a convincing performance, a kind of deception. Drawing on Cvetkovich’s work on depression, I argue that thinking of imposter syndrome as a public feeling involves three steps. Firstly, putting it in social and political context, mapping imposter syndrome according to the intersectional inequality regimes that characterise contemporary UK HE. Secondly, asking what feeling like an imposter can tell us about shifts in the structure and governance of UK HE including the oft-diagnosed new managerialism and neoliberalisation, primarily marketization, casualization, and cultures of audit and measurement. Thirdly, re-thinking imposter syndrome, not as an individual deficiency or private problem of faulty self-esteem to be overcome, but instead as a resource for action and site of agency in contemporary UK HE. I explore these three steps by presenting a short story about feeling like an imposter; a piece of semi-fictional auto-ethnography, which draws on precedents for using personal narrative to analyse academic labour, as well as those for writing fiction as a mode of inquiry. The talk concludes by considering the implication of making ‘imposter syndrome’ public, in particular by asking how claims to ambivalent insider/outside positions circulate in everyday academic talk.

The Global Politics, Economy and Society (GPES) Research Centre at Oxford Brookes will be hosting its first annual lecture, given by the writer and activist George Monbiot. All welcome, but please book via the registration link.

Jennifer Eberhardt, associate professor at Stanford University, joins us for the next in our Let’s Discuss series. She will be discussing unconscious racial bias in the context of her new book Biased. The talk will be followed by an extended time for audience Q&A so that you can really become part of the debate.

From one of the world’s leading experts on unconscious racial bias comes a landmark examination of one of the most culturally powerful issues of our time.

We might think that we treat all people equally, but we don’t. Every day, unconscious biases affect our visual perception, attention, memory and behaviour in ways that are subtle and very difficult to recognise without in-depth scientific studies.

Unconscious biases can be small and insignificant, but they affect every sector of society, leading to enormous disparities, from the classroom to the courtroom to the boardroom.

But unconscious bias is not a sin to be cured, but a universal human condition, and one that can be overcome.

In Biased, pioneering social psychologist Professor Jennifer Eberhardt explains how.

We are delighted to invite to a documentary film-screening of the film Dreamland, followed by a Skype Q&A with one of the film-makers, Professor Britt Kramvig.

The film: Viewed through the camera lens of a philosopher, it is inspired by a line from “Dreamland” by romantic poet Edgar Allan Poe “…by a route obscure and lonely, haunted by ill angels only…” A journey through people-places in Arctic landscapes is made by the figure of a native anthropologist. She follows in the footsteps of many others, recounting experience. Viewers glimpse moments of a sublime, the subject of Poe’s poem. The movie gives form to hopes for futures different than pasts. An essayistic documentary in the form of a twenty-first century Arctic road-movie by professor Britt Kramvig (UiT) and filmmaker Rachel Gomez (Tromsø). Trailer: https://vimeo.com/163989818

Professor Eudine Barriteau will give a talk on: ‘Coming into our own? Women and Power in the Caribbean’.

Professor Eudine Barriteau is a Grenadian born Caribbean feminist, scholar and activist with considerable experience in research, senior administration and coordination of regional projects. She has been awarded several academic scholarships and awards from universities and organisations. Professor Barriteau was the first Head of the Centre for Gender and Development Studies at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Cave Hill Campus. She was appointed Deputy Principal of the Cave Hill Campus in 2008 and Principal in 2015. Her research interests encompass transformational educational leadership, feminist theorizing, gender and public policy and investigations of the Caribbean political economy.

The 5th Annual Oxford Business and Poverty Conference will feature a diverse range of speakers addressing the Paradoxes of Prosperity. Sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/5th-annual-oxford-business-poverty-conference-tickets-57733957822
Hosted at the Sheldonian Theatre, the conference will feature keynotes by:
Lant Pritchett: RISE Research Director at the Blavatnik School of Government, former Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development
Efosa Ojomo: Global Prosperity Lead and Senior Researcher at the Clayton Christensen Institute
John Hoffmire: Director of Center on Business and Poverty and Research Associate at Kellogg Colleges at Center For Mutual and Employee-owned Business at Oxford University
Ananth Pai: Executive Director, Bharath Beedi Works Pvt. Ltd. and Director, Bharath Auto Cars Pvt
Laurel Stanfield: Assistant Professor of Marketing at Bentley College in Massachusetts
Grace Cheng: Greater China’s Country Manager for Russell Reynolds Associates
Madhusudan Jagadish: 2016 Graduate MBA, Said Business School, University of Oxford
Tentative Schedule:
2:15-2:20 Welcome
2:20-2:50 Efosa Ojomo, co-author of The Prosperity Paradox, sets the stage for the need for innovation in development
2:50-3:20 John Hoffmire, Ananth Pai and Mudhusudan Jagadish explain how the Prosperity Paradox can be used in India as a model to create good jobs for poor women
3:20-3:40 Break
3:40-4:10 Laurel Steinfeld speaks to issues of gender, development and business – addressing paradoxes related to prosperity
4:10-4:40 Grace Cheng, speaks about the history of China’s use of disruptive innovations to develop its economy
4:40-5:15 Break
5:15-6 Lant Pritchett talks on Pushing Past Poverty: Paths to Prosperity
6:30-8 Dinner at the Rhodes House – Purchase tickets after signing up for the conference
Sponsors include: Russell Reynolds, Employee Ownership Foundation, Ananth Pai Foundation and others

At this workshop, a roundtable of experts will examine the issue of state capture and the implications for the constitutional order.

Presentations:
How state capture is possible in a competitive democracy

Daniel Smilov, Associate Professor, Political Science Department, University of Sofia; Programme Director, Centre for Liberal Strategies, Sofia

Shortcuts to modernity? Anti-corruption as a panacea for state capture

Bogdan Iancu, Associate Professor, University of Bucharest

Abby Innes, Assistant Professor in Political Economy, European Institute, LSE

State capture or state hegemony? Understanding state-business dynamics in the Gulf Cooperation States

Elham Fahkro, Lecturer of Legal Writing and Research, NYU Abu Dhabi

Capturing the judiciary from the inside

Katarína Šipulová, Senior Researcher, Judicial Studies Institute, Masaryk University, Brno

Accounting for state capture: reflections on the South African Experience

Nick Friedman, Biegun Warburg Junior Research Fellow in Law, Oxford

It is now well-accepted that digital media platforms are not merely information intermediaries, but also central control points of the Internet. They have become the so-called ‘deciders’ and ‘custodians’ of online speech, leading to the privatization of Internet governance.

In China, domestic platforms such as WeChat, Weibo, and Toutiao have become the mediators, gatekeepers, and governors of online news and information. In order to perform this role, platforms have to work closely with the Chinese state in guiding and controlling public opinion.

The aim in this workshop is to advance analysis and understanding of the role platforms play in the governance of online news and information, and their relations with the state. After opening with a close study of the situation in China, the workshop will consider the experience of western nations, which also have to rely on private platforms to tackle issues like online hate speech, disinformation, and political or terrorism propaganda.

The workshop will gather together a number of academics working in related areas to discuss this highly topical and immensely important issue.

Presentations:
Governance regarding public opinion in a platform era: a study of China
Jufang WANG, Center for Cultural and Media Policy Studies, Warwick University

China’s control of digital infrastructure in comparative perspective
Ralph SCHROEDER, Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University

The new governance and freedom of expression
Damian TAMBINI, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics

Algorithmic public sphere: controlling access to knowledge in the digital age
Roxana RADU, PCMLP/CSLS, Oxford University

Participants:
Wang Jufang, PhD candidate in Media and Communication, Warwick University, and former vice-director of news of CRI Online

Denis Galligan, Emeritus Professor of Socio-Legal Studies and Director of Programmes, Foundation for Law, Justice and Society, Oxford

Roxana Radu, Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford’s Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy

Ralph Schroeder, Professor in Social Science of the Internet, Oxford Internet Institute, and director of its MSc programme in Social Science of the Internet

Damian Tambini, Associate Professor, Department of Media and Communications, LSE

Commentators:
Jacob Rowbottam, Associate Professor, University College, Oxford University

Pu Yan, Doctoral Student, Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University

The biosphere and econosphere are deeply interlinked and both are in crisis. Industrial, fossil-fuel based capitalism delivered major increases in living standards from the mid-18th through late-20th centuries, but at the cost of widespread ecosystem destruction, planetary climate change, and a variety of economic injustices. Furthermore, over the past 40 years, the gains of growth have flowed almost exclusively to the top 10%, fuelling populist anger across many countries, endangering both democracy and global action on climate change.

This talk will argue that underlying the current dominant model of capitalism are a set of theories and ideologies that are outdated, unscientific, and morally unsound. New foundations can be built from modern understandings of human behaviour, complex systems science, and broad moral principles. By changing the ideologies, narratives, and memes that govern our economic system, we can create the political space required for the policies and actions required to rapidly transform to a sustainable and just economic system.

A storytelling lecture about how we cope with climate change from the ‘attractively impish’ (The Guardian) Dr Matt Winning. Presented by Oxford Comedy Festival.

As seen as the Environmental Correspondent on ‘Unspun with Matt Forde’ on Dave, BBC Three and BBC Radio2.

‘everything a Fringe show should be: hilarious, personal, inventive, and something that will stay with you for some time to come’ ★★★★★ (EdFestMag)

Quickly approaching 50, Daphna Baram believes she is having a midlife crisis, though her GP thinks that’s highly optimistic. She looks back with no regrets but some remorse, and cracks up some insightful ideas about mass and time, AKA weight and age, tossed up with some political wisdom.

Is an Israeli comedian/journalist/human rights lawyer, and spent a year in Oxford writing her book Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel. See: https://www.theguardian.com/global/2007/jun/04/daphna.baram

* * * * * “Masterful” (Bunbury Magazine)
* * * * “Wonderful and Hilarious” (Broadway Baby)
“Poignant and illuminating” (The List)

Doors at 8:30/Show at 9pm

We are delighted to be joined by writer and musician, Catrina Davies, who will be in conversation with George Monbiot on her new book, Homesick and the current housing crisis.

Aged thirty-one, Catrina Davies was renting a box-room in a house in Bristol, which she shared with four other adults and a child. Working several jobs and never knowing if she could make the rent, she felt like she was breaking apart.

Homesick for the landscape of her childhood, in the far west of Cornwall, Catrina decides to give up the box-room and face her demons. As a child, she saw her family and their security torn apart; now, she resolves to make a tiny, dilapidated shed a home of her own.

With the freedom to write, surf and make music, Catrina rebuilds the shed and, piece by piece, her own sense of self. On the border of civilisation and wilderness, between the woods and the sea, she discovers the true value of home, while trying to find her place in a fragile natural world.

This is the story of a personal housing crisis and a country-wide one, grappling with class, economics, mental health and nature. It shows how housing can trap us or set us free, and what it means to feel at home.

Catrina Davies is a writer, singer-songwriter and DJ based in Cornwall, where she lives and works in a tin shed. Her first book The Ribbons Are For Fearlessness is a memoir about busking from Norway to Portugal with her cello. Her story has been featured in Vogue, Red, Daily Express, Surfer’s Path, and numerous other publications and her songs have been played on NTS and the BBC.

This event will be chaired by author and activist, George Monbiot. Along with writing books such as How Did We Get into this Mess, and Out of the Wreckage, George is the editor of the recent independent report to the Labour Party, Land for the Many: Changing the way our fundamental asset is used, owned and governed, which aims to put land at the very heart of politcal debate and discussion.

This is a free event, but please do register if you plan on attending. This event will be held in our Philosophy Department which is only accessible by a small flight of stairs. Seating will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis. For more information please contact out Customer Service Desk on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk.

Data-driven micro-targeted campaigns have become a main stable of political strategy. As personal and societal data becomes more accessible, we need to understand how it can be used and mis-used in political campaigns and whether it is relevant to regulate political candidates’ access to data.

This book talk will be followed by a drinks reception and book sale, all welcome

A Taste of Pompeii, with Sally Grainger
Evening Talk and Tasting
Tue 29 Oct, 6.30–9.30pm

Join author of The Classical Cookbook Sally Grainger as she shares her knowledge of classical Roman recipes adapted for the contemporary cook, painting a vibrant picture of wining and dining in the ancient world. Having whetted your appetite, enjoy a tasting array of dipping sauces in the ‘Taberna Ashmolean’.

Tickets are £35 each.

Entry is via the Front Door. Doors open 6pm, lecture at 6.30 pm.

A growing middle class in the developing world, as well as increasing concerns about the healthfulness, environmental footprint and inhumaneness of conventional livestock production have given rise to neo-Malthusian concerns about how to address what seems insatiable demand for protein.

While some have doubled down on calls for reducing meat consumption, so far the most visible response has been a huge wave of innovation in a variety of what are now being called “alternative proteins.” Designed to capture the “flexitarian” market, these include insect-based foods, protein-rich “superfoods,” simulated plant-based meat and dairy substitutes, and cellular/bioengineered meat.

Their rapid development begs two crucial questions, however. How did protein become the macronutrient of concern to begin? Will protein’s new substantiations be any more nutritious and ecological than that which it substitutes? In this talk, Guthman will elaborate on what is being done in the name of protein and provide provisional answers to these questions.

Please register via the link provided.

What can dance tell us about human rights? What can hip hop say about equality and human dignity? Join an evening of dance and discussion to find out.

We’ll watch live dance that explores the theme of human rights, with performances from Blakely White-McGuire, Eliot Smith and Body Politic Dance. We’ll celebrate art’s power to challenge the social and political turmoil we face around the world today.

Hear a whole phD in just three minutes!
Can you understand a whole phD in just three minutes? Perhaps you are an Undergraduate or Masters student who is aiming for a future PhD?
Join Humanities and Social Sciences PhD students as we challenge them to boil down their whole PhD to just three minutes and one slide – in a way that makes sense to everyone!

In modern high-tech health care, patients appear to be the stumbling block.

Uninformed, anxious, noncompliant individuals with unhealthy lifestyles who demand treatments advertised by celebrities and insist on unnecessary but expensive diagnostics may eventually turn into plaintiffs. But what about their physicians? About ten years ago, Muir Gray and Gerd Gigerenzer published a book with the subtitle “Envisioning health care 2020”. They listed “seven sins” of health care systems then, one of which was health professionals’ stunning lack of risk literacy. Many were not exactly sure what a false-positive rate was, or what overdiagnosis and survival rates mean, and they were unable to evaluate articles in their own field. As a consequence, the ideals of informed consent and shared decision-making remain a pipedream – both doctors and patients are habitually misled by biased information in health brochures and advertisements. At the same time, the risk literacy problem is one of the few in health care that actually have a known solution. A quick cure is to teach efficient risk communication that fosters transparency as opposed to confusion, both in medical school and in CME. It can be done with 4th graders, so it should work with doctors, too.

Now, in 2020, can every doctor understand health statistics? In this talk, Gerd Gigerenzer will describe the efforts towards this goal, a few successes, but also the steadfast forces that undermine doctors’ ability to understand and act on evidence. Moreover, the last decade has seen two new forces that distract from solving the problem. The first is the promise of digital technology, from diagnostic AI systems to big data analytics, which consumes much of the attention. Digital technology is of little help if doctors do not understand it. Second, our efforts to make patients competent and to encourage them to articulate their values are now in conflict with the new paternalistic view that patients just need to be nudged into better behaviour.

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

Joint event with: The Oxford–Berlin Research Partnership