This public event brings global leaders in ethnographic museums together to consider how to reinvigorate museums with ethnographic collections, foreground indigenous knowledges and curatorial practices, and rethink assumptions about museums.
Participants include: João Pacheco de Oliveira (Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil); Joe Horse Capture (Minnesota Historical Society, USA); Damion Thomas (National Museum of African American History & Culture, Smithsonian Institution, USA); Wayne Modest (Museum of World Cultures, The Netherlands).
Delegate biographies:
Joe Horse Capture (A’aninin, USA): Now Director of Native American Initiatives at the Minnesota Historical Society, Joe was formerly Curator at the National Museum of the American Indian. He consults widely on issues regarding museum representation of Indigenous people in the USA.
https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/horse-capture-native-people-have-a-story-to-tell-their-own-cbrUU5jgNU2keWg71W5B_g/
Wayne Modest (National Museum of World Cultures, The Netherlands): His research interests include issues of belonging and displacement; material mobilities; histories of (ethnographic) collecting and exhibitionary practices; difficult/contested heritage (with a special focus on slavery, colonialism and post-colonialism); Caribbean Thought. More recently Modest has been researching and publishing on heritage and citizenship in Europe with special attention for urban life, and on ethnographic museums and questions of redress/repair.
https://www.materialculture.nl/en/about/wayne-modest

João Pacheco de Oliveira (Federal University of and Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil): de Oliveira isan anthropologist who works with the Tikuna people of Amazonia. With Indigenous leaders, he was one of the founders of the Maguta Documentation and Research Centre, later the Maguta Museum which is now administered by a local Indigenous group. He is curator of the ethnological collections at the Museu Nacional, which suffered a devastating fire in 2018.
https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1467-8322.12485
Damion Thomas (Curator of Sports, National Museum of African American History & Culture, Smithsonian Institution, USA): Damion explores the role of sport in linking African American people with the American nation as a whole.
https://smithsoniancampaign.org/inyourcity/speaker-damion-thomas.php
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/smithsonian-sports-curator-explains-how-athletes-turn-social-and-political-issues-national-conversations-180970778/

Natalie Triebwasser, Head of Production at Oxford based production company Quicksilver Media, makers of “Unreported World” – the UK’s longest running foreign current affairs series on Channel 4, and “Killer Ratings” – a documentary series currently streaming on Netflix, talks to award winning journalists Jenny Kleeman and Ramita Navai about their respective careers and the unique challenges that documentary makers face.

This paper explores the connectivities between violence, memory, personhood, place and human substances after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. It explores the practice of ‘care-taking’ at genocide memorials – the preservation and care of human remains –to reveal how survivors of the genocide re-make their worlds through working with the remnants of their dead loved ones. I argue that ‘care-taking’ is a way to rebuild selves and to retain lost relations to the dead that still interfere in the everyday lives of the living. Survivors project their emotions, sentiments and confusion about an uncertain future onto the remains. Care-taking re-verses time because it gives back dignity to those who died ‘bad deaths’ during the genocide. I further argue that the memorials are a vehicle for what I coin ‘place-bound proximity’ that enables a material space of communication between care-takers and their dead loved ones, provides a last resting place and a ‘home’ for both the living and the dead. Importantly these findings questions mainstream transitional justice approaches to social recovery demonstrating that memory cannot be deployed or harnessed and that reconciliation is better understood as rebuilding a (normal) relationship with the dead rather than as one with perpetrators. Following a ‘victims-approach’ this paper draws on extensive fieldwork conducted in Rwanda between 2011 and 2014.

Kajal Odedra has always been passionate about helping other people affect change.
She is Executive Director of Change.Org and author of ‘Do Something: Activism for Everyone’. Change.org is the world’s largest petition platform with 15 million UK users and 200 million globally.

This two-day conference will explore the evolving relationship between conflict and identity, with a specific interest in the role of history education in pre-conflict, at-conflict, and post-conflict societies. It will focus on how teachers and lecturers present history; how such choices shape identity; and how history education can be used for the purposes of promoting or undermining peaceful societies.

FLJS Films opens its 2019-20 programme with acclaimed director Mike Leigh’s latest film Peterloo, which, by bringing to light a little-known atrocity in Manchester 200 years ago, makes a timely comment on the repercussions and resonances of public protest.

The film depicts the nascent labour movement of the nineteenth century, as the hunger and poverty brought about by the Corn Laws (which barred imports of cheap grain from the continent) drove 60,000 peaceful protesters to Manchester’s St Peter’s Field to demand the reform of parliamentary representation.

When the demonstration was brutally put down by the cavalry, leaving 18 people dead and hundreds injured, the government moved to suppress reporting by a nascent free press, and the event has since been largely forgotten.

On the bicentenary year of the massacre, and with the current resurgence of popular demonstrations and civil disobedience over Brexit and the climate crisis, Peterloo offers an invaluable reminder of the power of political resistance.

Historian of protest Dr Katrina Navickas will give a short introductory talk on her involvement in the historical research for Peterloo and the film’s political and contemporary resonances.

Praise for Peterloo
“A full-bore assault on the amnesia of British establishment history”
Sight and Sound

“Shattering in its cumulative effect, and its relevance to these turbulent times”
Wall Street Journal

What happens when you excavate the image archives of the Institute of Archaeology and other departments of the University of Oxford? The answer: you find amazing pictures that tell unexpected stories. Most of the pictures are black and white and 70 or more years old. Discover Oxford through a new lens with Janice Kinory to explore the Historic Environment Image Resource Project digital image archive where the images are stored and how you can access them.

Joris Luyendijk was born in Amsterdam and studied in Kansas, Amsterdam, and Cairo. He is a writer, journalist and anthropologist. He has written about the Middle East, the banking crisis and Brexit.

Blackwell’s are delighted to announce that we will be joined by comedian, director and writer, Richard Ayoade, who will be signing his new book, Ayoade on Top.

Synopsis

At last, the definitive book about perhaps the best cabin crew dramedy ever filmed: View From the Top starring Gwyneth Paltrow.

In Ayoade on Top, Richard Ayoade, perhaps one of the most ‘insubstantial’ people of our age, takes us on a journey from Peckham to Paris by way of Nevada and other places we don’t care about. It’s a journey deep within, in a way that’s respectful and non-invasive; a journey for which we will all pay a heavy price, even if you’ve waited for the smaller paperback edition.

Ayoade argues for the canonisation of this brutal masterpiece, a film that celebrates capitalism in all its victimless glory; one we might imagine Donald Trump himself half-watching on his private jet’s gold-plated flat screen while his other puffy eye scans the cabin for fresh, young prey.”

Richard Ayoade is a writer and director. In addition to directing and co-writing Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, he has adapted and directed Joe Dunthorne’s novel Submarine for the screen, and is the co-writer (with Avi Korine) and director of the film, The Double. As an actor he is best known for his roles as Dean Learner in Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and Maurice Moss in the Emmy Award-winning The IT Crowd, for which we was awarded a BAFTA as Best Performance in a Comedy.

This signing is free, but please do register if you plan on attending. Please note, Richard Ayoade will be only be signing his books. For more information, please call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk.

Pompeii Rediscovered
A talk with Massimo Osanna, Director General, Parco Archeologico di Pompei
Mon 11 Nov, 6.30–7.30pm

This event will be followed by drinks in the museum and a private view of the Last Supper in Pompeii exhibition.

In 2018, two-hundred and seventy years after excavations at Pompeii began, Director General of Pompeii, Professor Massimo Osanna, launched new excavations for conservation and research. Find out more about the amazing discoveries made in this project – from mysterious mosaics to shrines to the gods and even taverns– and learn what they reveal about daily life in Pompeii.

This event was originally scheduled for 31 October but has been moved to this new date.

Booking is essential. Tickets are £25/£22/£20 Full/Concession/Members

Migration is present at the dawn of human history – the phenomena of hunting and gathering, seeking seasonal pasture and nomadism being as old as human social organisation itself.

The flight from natural disasters, adverse climatic changes, famine, and territorial aggression by other communities or other species were also common occurrences.

But if migration is as old as the hills, why is it now so politically sensitive? Why do migrants leave? Where do they go, in what numbers and for what reasons? Do migrants represent a threat to the social and political order? Are they none-the-less necessary to provide labour, develop their home countries, increase consumer demand and generate wealth? Can migration be stopped? One of Britain’s leading migration scholars, Robin Cohen, will probe these issues in this talk

Please register via the link provided.

This talk will be followed by a book sale, signing and drinks reception, all welcome. Copies available at half price — £10 — to cash buyers only.

Some 45,000 years ago, a group of around 1500 humans who were genetically similar left Africa for Asia. Successive generations of their descendants were the first members of H.sapiens to explore the earth, apart from Australia – the ancestors of today’s indigenous population left Africa around 10,000 years earlier. The talk will discuss how that original group became the genetically diverse mix of peoples who now inhabit our world. Perhaps surprisingly, some of the key evidence on the limitations of our differences today is to be found in the Pitt Rivers Museum.

Hella Pick is one of the trailblazers for the modern female foreign correspondent. She worked across three continents and covered the death of Yugoslavia’s leader, President Tito. Yugoslavia was always the saving grace of covering the Soviet bloc,” she remembers. “While in East Germany you were followed and listened to all the time, but Tito’s regime was a symbol of independent communism. Even the American ambassador was predicting the country would survive beyond Tito. Of course, we were all wrong.” Pick will talk about her incredible career, the stories she has covered and the current challenges facing journalism.
Neal Ascherson went to King’s College, Cambridge, where he read history. The historian Eric Hobsbawm was his tutor and described him as “perhaps the most brilliant student I ever had. I didn’t really teach him much, I just let him get on with it.” After graduating he he chose a career in journalism, first at The Manchester Guardian and then at The Scotsman, The Observer and The Independent on Sunday.He contributed scripts for the documentary series The World at War (1973–74) and the Cold War (1998). He has also been a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. Ascherson has lectured and written extensively about Polish and Eastern Europe affairs.

Inaugural event in our new events series focusing on responsible leadership: Driving Diversity and Inclusion Seminar Series.

Progress on diversity in the UK civil service and why it matters. How the dial only really shifted on gender, and why the focus is now on inclusion and addressing bullying and harassment. What the good leaders are doing?

Dame Sue Owen will give a talk followed by a Q&A with the audience moderated by Sue Dopson, Rhodes Trust Professor of Organisational Behaviour, Fellow of Green Templeton College, Deputy Dean of Saïd Business School.

Event Schedule:
17:15 – Registration opens
17:45 – Event starts
18:45 – Drinks reception
19:45 – Close

Mobile phone filmmaking. It’s the camera of choice for some.
Is the best camera the one you have with you?
We will welcome expert interactive filmmaker and thriller writer Nihal Tharoor (Electric Noir Studios) and former BBC Trainer Bob Walters (MediaInk TV, iphone-filmmaking).
This session will look at the potential of mobile phone cameras for low budget reasons and for those starting out, but also for more experienced filmmakers interested in producing gritty styled thrillers or entertainment for younger audiences who use the platform most. Whether you are using mobile phones for short films, pilots, showreels, documentary filmmaking or features this event offers great value – we’ll be looking at expert output, hearing from passionate speakers and offering some bonus technical tips.

Opportunities to network with local film and TV professionals after main talk

Join us for a screening of The Fly, the classic 1958 sci-fi horror movie produced and directed by Kurt Neumann and starring Vincent Price, Al Hedison and Patricia Owens. A scientist invents a teleportation device, but fate has other plans after an accident leads to a gruesome, life-changing injury. This brilliant 1950s sci-fi, famously remade by David Cronenberg in the 80s, treads a fine line between shlocky fun and an unnerving nature parable.

The screening will be preceded by an introductory with Dr Roderick Bailey, Medical Historian at the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities. Rod specialises in the study of modern war and conflict, the history of medicine, and the spaces in which those worlds overlap.

David Cronenberg’s ‘body horror’ film ‘The Fly’ is more than science fiction. The movie was based on an original story, published in Playboy magazine in 1957, whose author had been a spy in World War II. Dr Roderick Bailey of Oxford’s Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, works on the history of human enhancement. In the Q&A Roderick will discuss how secret procedures carried out in wartime London may have shaped this disturbing creation.

‘Funny, horrible and inventive — in its own deranged way this is a classic of 1950s horror.’ Film4

‘One strong factor of the picture is its unusual believability.’ Variety

Dir. Kurt Neumann. USA, 1958. 1h 34m. Vincent Price, Al Hedison (1927 – 2019) Patricia Owens, Herbert Marshall, Kathleen Freeman, Betty Lou Gerson.

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!

As part of the Think Human Festival held by Oxford Brookes University, a film showing of ‘Life is Wonderful: Mandela’s Unsung Heroes’ is being held. Following the showing there will be a Q&A with a panel that includes the director of the film, Sir Nick Stadlen.

Screening of “Streetscapes” (winner of the 2017 German Critics Award) followed by Q&A.
Dr Zohar Rubinstein, clinical and organizational psychologist, specialist in mental health in emergency situations, and one of the founding members of The Interdisciplinary Master Program for Emergency and Disaster Management at the Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University, will be answering questions.

Speaker: Dr Neil Armstrong (Stipendiary Lecturer in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Magdalen College)

This paper uses ethnographic material of NHS mental healthcare to raise some questions about autonomy, risk and personal and institutional responsibility.

My research investigates mental health. I am particularly interested in how the institutional setting shapes so much of mental healthcare. My research aims to find ways that we might improve healthcare institutions rather than just focussing on developing new healthcare interventions. I am also concerned with methodological questions: how anthropological work can be of clinical value, and how best to produce anthropological knowledge in an inclusive way.

The Oath tells the fateful story of two men, whose loyalty to an ideal in a world of disintegrating legal, moral, and constitutional norms tests their beliefs and threatens their liberty.

Acclaimed director Laura Poitras has created a riveting documentary about Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver and the first man to face the controversial US military commissions that were established in response to his earlier exoneration by the Supreme Court. At the heart of the film is Hamdan’s charismatic brother-in-law, whose struggles with his conscience for having introduced him to bin Laden provide a gripping psychological portrait of guilt and the redemptive role of society.

A decade since its release, and with fault lines reopening between the Muslim world and the West, the film leads the viewer on a jihadist’s journey through Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, all the way to the US Supreme Court. Here, the complexities and contradictions of the war on terror are laid bare, epitomized in the devastating revelation behind the double meaning of the film’s title.

Praise for The Oath
“The most essential and revelatory documentary of the year”
New York Magazine

“Compelling, emotionally and intellectually complex, The Oath is an important film that raises questions we must all ask”
Film Comment

Professor Sir Adam Roberts, Senior Research Fellow in International Relations, University of Oxford, will deliver a lecture on the contemporary decline of the liberal order, and call for a rethinking of liberal ideas and practices. The Keynote Lecture will open a workshop the following day.

The term ‘liberal international order’ has become widely used – generally to refer to the international system that developed in the years after the end of the Cold War in 1989, or even to the whole period since the end of the Second World War in 1945.

Although the term itself is relatively new, the ideas and practices that comprise it are not. They include multi-party democracy, the growth of international law and institutions, recognition of human rights, freedom of religious belief, the removal of barriers to international trade.

All of the above have been advocated as means of reducing the incidence of war between states. This is not an elegy for a liberal international order that is now under threat, but rather a call for rethinking it, especially in light of its long, diverse, and troubled history.

Adam Roberts is Senior Research Fellow in International Relations at Oxford University and a Fellow of Balliol College. In 2009–13 he was President of the British Academy, the UK national academy for the humanities and social sciences. He was awarded a knighthood in 2002 for services to the study and practice of international relations, and has given expert advice to parliamentary committees, governments and non-governmental bodies in the UK and overseas.

His numerous books include (co-edited.) Civil Resistance in the Arab Spring: Triumphs and Disasters, Oxford University Press, 2016. He is currently working on a book on the history of the idea of liberal international order.

A workshop to scrutinize the transformation of the contemporary international order, encompassing its social, political, legal, economic, and technological dimensions. The workshop will serve as an in-depth examination of the issues outlined in Professor Sir Adam Roberts’ lecture of the previous day.

It is plain that shifts in the organization and structure of the international order, and the social relationships within these, are experiencing stress and strain and being reconceived and redesigned in reaction to deeper forces.

Among the factors driving this change and revision, even transformation, include:

relations among nations;
the rise of social movements in response to changing attitudes to authority and established ideas and institutions;
altered dispositions towards international law and international and regional institutions;
challenges to the liberal order;
scepticism about human rights, universal principles, and the power of the courts to uphold them;
new economic perspectives, revised business and financial relations and practices; and
the rapid development of technology, the dawn of the digital age, and the consequences.
Participants include:
Denis Galligan, Professor of Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford

Mary Bartkus, Special Counsel, Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP

Ralph Schroeder, Professor of Social Science of the Internet, Oxford Internet Institute

David Vines, Professor of Economics, Oxford

We are delighted to welcome Shakespearean actor, director, academy award nominee and anti-Apartheid campaigner, Dame Janet Suzman, to St Peter’s College.

Janet Suzman remains one of the most respected classical stage actresses of her time, having portrayed most of Shakespeare’s heroines, including Cleopatra, during her career. She has also worked alongside some of stage and screen’s most legendary stars, including Marlon Brando, Sir Laurence Olivier, Ava Gardner and Sir Derek Jacobi.

She was nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of Czarina Alexandra in Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), a sweeping historical epic about the fall of the Romanovs.

Suzman also starred alongside Donald Sutherland and Susan Sarandon in A Dry White Season (1989), a provocative drama that centres on a white schoolmaster’s gradual awakening to the horrors of government-sanctioned racism in South Africa during the 1970s.

St Peter’s College, Hannington Hall
Free to attend
All welcome

This year’s Kenneth Kirkwood Memorial Lecture Day focuses on the always fascinating subject of death and last rites in different cultures. The day will consist of four very varied talks from a panel of eminent speakers, and will include a buffet lunch.

The talks are:

The Funeral Pyre: the Archetypal Death Rite from Ancient Greece to India Today, Dr Felix Padel, School of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford

Funeral Options: From Celebration to Ash Delivery, Professor Douglas Davies, Director of The Centre for Death and Life Studies at Durham University

Accra Coffins: Artefact, Art or Expensive Tourist Tat?, Professor Malcolm McLeod, Professor of African Studies at Glasgow University and former Keeper of Ethnography at the British Museum

Of Vultures, Dogs & Fire: A Zoroastrian End, Shahin Bekhradnia, Religious Affairs Spokesperson for the World Zoroastrian Organisation

Friends and students £25/ non-Friends £35 (Includes buffet lunch).

All the profits from this event will be added to the Kenneth Kirkwood Memorial Fund. The primary purpose of this fund is to support staff of the Pitt Rivers Museum to undertake travel associated with their work.

Artist, writer and activist Jess Thom has Tourettes syndrome, a neurological condition that means she makes movements and noises she can’t control, called tics. In 2010 she co-founded Touretteshero as a creative response to her experiences, and toured the world with her multi-award-winning stage show, Backstage in Biscuit Land.

Join us for a screening of the 2018 documentary, Me, My Mouth and I, part of BBC Two’s Performance Live strand. Exploring Jess Thom’s funny and unpredictable journey of discovery into one of Samuel Beckett’s most complex plays, Not I, the film asks us to reconsider issues of representation and social exclusion as she prepares to perform the role of ‘Mouth’ in front of a live theatre audience. The screening with be followed by a Q & A with Jess herself.

Touretteshero presents Not I at The North Wall from 18 – 21 March.

About Inspiring People
The Inspiring People series is a joint venture between The North Wall and our principal sponsor, St Edward’s School. Our organisation both have a mission to educate and inspire and our hope is that this series will do just that: half of all tickets are offered free to local schools

The FinCEN Files investigation, coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, exposed more than $2 trillion in suspicious deals.

Criminals, politicians and others sent money through the world’s major banks, which initially ignored red flags or reported the money as potentially dirty after weeks, months or years of delay. Billions of dollars in suspicious deals moved from Africa into Europe, the United States, the Middle East and secretive tax havens, including payments to and from politicians and family members, state-owned oil and gas companies, arms companies and many others.

Join William Fitzgibbon and Augustin Armendariz, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and Taiwo Hassan Adebayo, Premium Times Nigeria, as they discuss with Professor Ricardo Soares de Oliveira what the FinCEN Files investigation has uncovered and the implications.

This is the first in a series of conversations that engage with the concept of Radical Hope and recent critical changes related to decoloniality at the Pitt Rivers Museum and in the wider sector.

This online conversation will address what it means for museums like the Pitt Rivers Museum to engage with the legacy of coloniality that lies at the root of its collecting and display practices. We will explore what possibilities might occur from thinking through the philosophical concept of Radical Hope together with local and global stakeholders, as a means for redress and a more pluriversal re-imagining of the future relevance of these museums. In this first conversation, staff at the Pitt Rivers Museum will reflect on recent changes to our permanent displays resulting from an ethical review at the Museum in recent years. We will focus on the recent removal of the Shuar tsantsa (shrunken heads) as part of our ongoing collaboration with colleagues from the Universidad de San Francisco in Quito. We will share new video material of the removal process and newly curated installations, and there will be opportunities for audience questions.

Speakers: Laura Van Broekhoven, Pitt Rivers Museum Director; Marina Patricia Ordoñez, Curator and researcher; Marina de Alarcon, Head of Collections; Jeremy Uden, Head of Conservation.

The ethnographic museum is full. Clothes, objects and tools fill the walls and floors. But where is the love?
The three speakers take the exhibition ‘Losing Venus’ as their starting point to discuss how emotion, intimacy, care and love can be brought back into the ethnographic museum and radiate out from its collections.

This event will run on Zoom, and will be available to view after the event. A link to the event will be emailed to you via Eventbrite within 48 hours of the event starting.

An online discussion about Zimbabwean objects in the Pitt Rivers & their links with archaeology, music & heritage