Some face-to-face events are returning. Check carefully for any requirements.

Unleash your inner witch or wizard as you venture into H-ox-warts – a magical place filled with fantastic beasts, ingenious puzzles and creative workshops. Create lumos wands with some simple circuitry and elec-trickery, magic up some musical code, and dissect owl pellets. Alohomora – or unlock – the Exploration Zone, where our house elves are on-hand to help as you complete the challenges – listen to music through your teeth, turn temperature into colour, and play Guess What with dragon poo. If you dare, venture into the forbidden woodlands in search of the Quidditch pitch and elusive golden snitch… and don’t forget to accio – or summon – a free colour-changing cocktail at the bar!
A great science-themed evening for grown-up muggles and mudbloods everywhere. Wizarding outfits are encouraged. Held in celebration of Harry Potter Book Night on (7th February).
Lord Sumption will discuss the impact on our constitution and political system of the referendum of 2016 and its aftermath.
Part of the Oxford Martin Lecture Series: ‘Shaping the future’
This term’s topic of the popular St Hilda’s ‘Brain and Mind – from concrete to abstract’ series of workshops is ‘Art and the Brain’.
Professor Chrystalina Antoniades (Oxford University), Dr Richard Jolley (University of Staffordshire), and Dr James Grant (Oxford University) will address this topic from the points of view of neuroscience, psychology and philosophy respectively.
There will be an interval with refreshments.

In this book colloquium, a panel discussion will assess British judge and historian Lord Sumption’s provocative bestseller Trials of the State: Law and the Decline of Politics, which expands on arguments first laid out in his 2019 Reith Lectures.
In the past few decades, legislatures throughout the world have suffered from gridlock. In democracies, laws and policies are just as soon unpicked as made. It seems that Congress and Parliaments cannot forge progress or consensus. Moreover, courts often overturn decisions made by elected representatives.
In the absence of effective politicians, many turn to the courts to solve political and moral questions. Rulings from the Supreme Courts in the United States and United Kingdom, or the European court in Strasbourg may seem to end the debate but the division and debate does not subside. In fact, the absence of democratic accountability leads to radicalisation.
Judicial overreach cannot make up for the shortcomings of politicians. This is especially acute in the field of human rights. For instance, who should decide on abortion or prisoners’ rights to vote, elected politicians or appointed judges? Jonathan Sumption argues that the time has come to return some problems to the politicians.
Panellists:
Denis Galligan, Professor of Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford
Ezequiel Gonzalez Ocantos, Associate Professor in Politics & International Relations, Oxford

Overdiagnosis is the diagnosis of “disease” that will never cause symptoms or death during a patient’s lifetime.
Recent results of the NELSON Lung Cancer Screening Trial reports reductions in lung-cancer survival but not overall survival – The desire to detect disease even earlier means Overdiagnosis is on the rise, however, the interpretation of screening trial results is problematic and often gives rise to significant uncertainties that go unanswered.
Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine, employs evidence-based methods to research diagnostic reasoning, test accuracy and communicating diagnostic results to a wider audience.
This talk is being held as part of the Evidence-Based Diagnosis & Screening module which is part of the MSc in Evidence-Based Health Care and the MSc in EBHC Medical Statistics. Members of the public are welcome to attend.

All the lab’s a stage, and nowhere more so than at the heats of FameLab Oxford 2020! Each contestant has just three minutes to explain a concept on science, mathematics or engineering without the use of Powerpoint – armed only with their wit and a few props. If you are interested in science and looking for a fun night out, this is for you! Previous FameLabbers have included astrophysicists, teachers, magician-turned-psychologist and a toga-wearing mathematician. As always, the 2020 heats will bring together the brave and the bold, the hilarious and awe-inspiring to charm and astonish you and battle each other for entry through to the FameLab Regional Final in March.
FameLab is an international competition to find the new voices of science and engineering. The regional final will take place at the Science Oxford Centre, Stansfeld Park, Headington on the 6th March 2020.
In this book talk, Claas will review central findings of his research on the past 80 years of antibiotic use, resistance, and regulation in food production with introduction by Prof Mark Harrison, Director of Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities.
Mass-introduced after 1945, antibiotics helped revolutionise food production. Farmers and veterinarians used antibiotics to prevent and treat disease, protect plants, preserve food, and promote animals’ growth. Many soon became dependent on routine antibiotic use to sustain and increase production. The resulting growth of antibiotic infrastructures came at a price. Critics blamed antibiotics for leaving dangerous residues in food, enabling bad animal welfare, and selecting for antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in bacteria, which could no longer be treated with antibiotics.
Pyrrhic Progress analyses over 80 years of evolving non-human antibiotic use on both sides of the Atlantic and introduces readers to the historical and current complexities of antibiotic stewardship in a time of rising AMR.
This talk includes a drinks reception and nibbles, all welcome

All the lab’s a stage, and nowhere more so than at the heats of FameLab Oxford 2020! Each contestant has just three minutes to explain a concept on science, mathematics or engineering without the use of Powerpoint – armed only with their wit and a few props. If you are interested in science and looking for a fun night out, this is for you! Previous FameLabbers have included astrophysicists, teachers, a magician-turned-psychologist and a toga-wearing mathematician. As always, the 2020 heats will bring together the brave and the bold, the hilarious and awe-inspiring to charm and astonish you and battle each other for entry through to the FameLab Regional Final in March.
FameLab is an international competition to find the new voices of science and engineering.
The regional final will take place at the Science Oxford Centre, Stansfeld Park, Headington on the 6th March 2020.

This seminar is part of our public seminar series on ‘Exclusion from School and its Consequences’, led by the Department of Education and convened by Harry Daniels (Professor of Education) and Ian Thompson (Associate Professor of English Education & Director of PGCE).
Speaker: Lucinda Ferguson (University of Oxford)
Seminar Abstract: The House of Commons’ Education Committee (2019) criticised the education system’s treatment of children with disabilities on the following terms:
“[C]hildren and parents are not ‘in the know’ and for some the law may not even appear to exist. Parents currently need a combination of special knowledge and social capital to navigate the system, and even then are left exhausted by the experience. Those without significant social or personal capital therefore face significant disadvantage. For some, Parliament might as well not have bothered to legislate.”
In this presentation, I combine legal analysis, theory, and evidence from practice to argue that the law is ill-equipped to support children at risk of permanent exclusion from school, particularly children with disabilities or other additional needs. I focus on the English experience, which is quite distinctive from that of other nations in the UK. I first outline the reality of permanent exclusion and introduce the legal framework.
I then consider the extent to which children’s rights arguments might support improvements in practice for these vulnerable children. I proceed to argue that much of the difficulty lies in our current conceptions of the nature of childhood, how we regard children compared to other ‘minority’ groups, and the implications of this for the legal regulation of their lives. I consider whether an intersectional perspective might assist here, and offer some concluding thoughts on how to bring about the necessary cultural shift and make the law work for vulnerable children at risk of exclusion from school.
Open to all and free to attend. Registration required at: http://www.education.ox.ac.uk/events/law-and-exclusion-from-school/
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

This book colloquium will discuss Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, her influential account of the challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, specifically, how the commodification of personal information threatens our core values of freedom, democracy, and privacy.
In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behaviour modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.
Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new “behavioural futures markets”, where predictions about our behaviour are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new “means of behavioural modification”.
The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a “Big Other” operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff’s comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled “hive” of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit – at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future.
With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future – if we let it.
Participants include:
Dr Christopher Decker, Economist and Research Fellow, Faculty of Law, Oxford
Denis Galligan, Professor of Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford
Ivan Manokha, Lecturer in Political Economy, Oxford
Praise for The Age of Surveillance Capitalism:
“Easily the most important book to be published this century … this generation’s Das Kapital.”
— Zadie Smith
With the UK population predicted to grow nearly 20% by 2050 (circa 77 million people), over 65s making up around 25% of the population and more and more demands being put on the healthcare system what does the future hold?
Professor Chris Whitty, England’s Chief Medical Officer, will discuss predictions for the future advancement of healthcare in the UK and how these advancements will monitor, diagnose and treat us and how this will change our healthcare system.
Part of the Oxford Martin School Lecture Series: ‘Shaping the future’
Blackwell’s are delighted to announce that we will be joined by award-winning science writer and broadcaster, Marcus Chown, who will be talking about his new book, The Magicians:The Visionaries Who Demonstrated the Miraculous Predictive Power of Science.
How does it feel to know something about the universe that no one has ever known before? And why is mathematics so magically good at revealing nature’s secrets?
This is the story of the magicians: the scientists who predicted the existence of unknown planets, black holes, invisible force fields, ripples in the fabric of space– time, unsuspected subatomic particles, and even antimatter.
The journey from prediction to proof transports us from seats of learning in Paris and Cambridge to the war-torn Russian front, to bunkers beneath nuclear reactors, observatories in Berlin and California, and huge tunnels under the Swiss– French border. From electromagnetism to Einstein’s gravitational waves to the elusive neutrino, Marcus Chown takes us on a breathtaking, mind-altering tour of the major breakthroughs of modern physics and highlights science’s central mystery: its astonishing predictive power.
Marcus Chown is an award-winning science writer and broadcaster. Formerly a radio astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, he is now cosmology consultant for the New Scientist. He is the author of Solar System for iPad, which won a Bookseller Award for Digital Innovation. His acclaimed books include What a Wonderful World, Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You, We Need to Talk about Kelvin and The Ascent of Gravity, which was a Sunday Times Science Book of the Year.
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 accessible via a small flight of stairs. Seating is unallocated, so please arrive early if you would like a chair. For more information, please contact our Customer Service Department on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk
Join us as we hear from Prof Martin Bureau (University of Oxford) about his research on Supermassive black holes.
‘Supermassive black holes are now known to lurk at the centre of most
galaxies. They are also believed to play a key role in the evolution
of galaxies, by regulating the supply of the gas necessary to form
stars. Here, I will present key results from the mm-Wave
Interferometric Survey of Dark Object Masses (WISDOM), a high
resolution survey of molecular gas in galaxy nuclei. I will first show
that carbon monoxide (CO) can be used to easily and accurately measure
the mass of these supermassive black holes. I will then discuss
substantial ongoing efforts to do this, and present many new
spectacular measurements from the Atacama Large
Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA), the largest ground-based
telescope project. This effort opens the way to literally hundreds of
measurements across galaxies of all morphological types, both active
and non-active, with a unique method. It thus promises to
revolutionise our understanding of the co-evolution of galaxies and
black holes.’
FREE entry
Drinks and snacks provided. (Non-alcoholic and vegetarian/vegan dietary requirements provided for. For other diets please get in touch in advance)
For more information email emil.ostergaard@stcatz.ox.ac.uk. There is wheelchair access. There is padded seating, and an accessible toilet. There is blue badge parking by request at the event.

Elevating science from the lab to the stage, we bring you the FameLab Regional Final. Our brave and brilliant finalists tread the boards to electrify us with their scientific stagecraft: they have just three minutes to explain a scientific concept or idea without the use of Powerpoint – armed only with their wit and a few props. Previous topics have included climate change, neuroscience and particle physics. There’s not a moment to be missed at the FameLab Oxfordshire Regional Final as our challengers aim for the performance of their lives and compete to represent Oxford at the UK final.
Famelab is an international science communication competition designed to find the talented new voices of science and engineering.
Snakebite is arguably the world’s biggest hidden health crisis. It kills some 120,000 people every year, mostly from the world’s poorest communities in rural Africa, Asia and South America. The burden of death and disability is equivalent to that of prostate cancer or cervical cancer and greater than that of any other neglected tropical disease. Yet the problem is solvable – we need to bring snakebite treatment into the 21st century; we need innovative approaches to discovering and developing next generation snakebite treatments; and we need to build and importantly, sustain snakebite as a global health priority.
Dr Nick Cammack was appointed to the Wellcome Trust in September 2019 to lead an ambitious new £80 million programme aimed at driving a step-change in snakebite treatment around the world. The goal is to achieve a 50% reduction in mortality by 2030. In addition there is a pressing need to modernise the production of anti-venoms and improve their means of delivery.
Adults make choices regarding the technology they use to self-manage their health and wellbeing, and these technologies are often adopted, used and abused in ways that researchers, manufacturers, and clinicians have not accounted for. This talk will give an overview of human-computer interaction qualitative research on the real world use of mobile technologies in people’s everyday lives. Accounting for individual health and wellbeing choices adults make with technology, supporting choices through end user customisation, and the emerging trend towards Do-It-Yourself open-source health and wellbeing technology will be discussed. Examples of pragmatic qualitative studies will be given from research on wearables, apps, and standalone devices used for Type 1 diabetes, hearing loss, baby monitoring, and physical fitness.
Dr Aisling O’Kane is a Senior Lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction for Health and Deputy Director of the EPSRC CDT in Digital Health and Care at the University of Bristol. As a member of the Bristol Interaction Group and the Digital Health Engineering Group, she uses a pragmatic approach to qualitative research of health, wellbeing and care technologies. Dr O’Kane is currently PI of Innovate UK Machine Learning for Diabetes, co-designing AI to support diabetes self-management and Co-I of EPSRC SPHERE Next Steps, co-designing smart home technology to support health at home.
This talk is being held as part of the Advanced Qualitative Research Methods course which is part of the Evidence-Based Health Care Programme. This is a free event and members of the public are welcome to attend.

Leadership in Extraordinary Times: SmartSpace: the new frontier
How will the commercialisation of space impact our everyday lives?
The world faces many challenges, climate change, racism and the pandemic. There are also many great opportunities that will benefit us all. How can business harness the enormous potential the commercialisation of space offers, and what will it deliver in terms of benefits here on earth?
We have brought together experts in the field to share their experience where business, innovation and entrepreneurship meet. They will look at what the future holds for those who work in this area or are about to embark on a career in it.
The event will be hosted by Marc Ventresca, Associate Professor of Strategic Management and the panel will be moderated by Lucas Kello, Associate Professor of International Relations at Oxford and an expert in space, and cyber governance.
Panel
Eamonn Molloy, Associate Fellow Oxford, expert in major programs
Renee Rottner, Assistant Professor UC Santa Barbara, expert in NASA innovation
Dan Sola, Space entrepreneur and Oxford Said alumni
Lucy Edge, Chief Operating Officer of Satellite Applications Catapult
Greg Autry, Vice President of Space Development, and Board member at the National Space Society
Visit https://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/oxford-answers/smartspace-new-frontier at the specified time to watch the live stream. A recording will be posted on the website when the broadcast finishes.

Parliamentary sovereignty is a fundamental principle shared by democracies around the world, based on the belief that political power should be subject to scrutiny by elected representatives accountable to the people they serve.
Yet in recent years, this reciprocal democratic settlement between politicians and citizens has been under attack from nationalist authoritarian regimes, anti-liberal populist movements, and disinformation wars – so-called ‘fake news’ – designed to divide and mislead electorates.
The UK Parliament, widely seen as the model for parliamentary systems worldwide, has been the centre of competing claims around national sovereignty generated by both the Brexit debate and the devolution of power to the constituent nations of the United Kingdom.
The longue durée of the COVID-19 lockdown and the contested prorogation of Parliament prior to that have called into question just how sovereign parliament really is.
Join us for this year’s Oxford Putney Debates, as we examine The Sovereignty of Parliament to determine who really wields ultimate power – and expose the shifting power dynamics at work under the fault lines of post-Brexit Britain.
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For the first time ever, we will be staging the Putney Debates as a free, interactive, online-only series of debates, open to all and accessible from the comfort of your own home.
The 2020 Oxford Putney Debates will be chaired by the renowned legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg and the founder of the Oxford Putney Debates Professor Denis Galligan.
Our expert panellists include Court of Appeal judges, legal and political commentators, philosophers and campaigners, and constitutional experts, who will set out their vision over a unique series of video commentaries and live webinar debates, staged online throughout October and November.
The Debates will be launched on 21 October with a livestreamed Keynote Lecture on The Future of Parliamentary Sovereignty and the video release of the opening presentations for the first debate.
Each week thereafter, we will release a new video package of expert commentaries from our panellists, culminating in a final debate on 18 November.
In the week prior to each debate, you can watch the video to get an expert primer on the issues at hand, before joining the debate and putting your question to the panel.
Register at: www.OxfordPutneyDebates.com
Join Professor Chas Bountra, Professor of Translational Medicine and Professor Sir Charles Godfray as they discuss how the healthcare system has had to adapt due to the Covid-19 pandemic and what this means in the future.
With COVID-19 vaccines on the horizon, attention again returns to the contentious topic of whether vaccination should be made mandatory.
Recent polling has resulted in worrying headlines about a lack of willingness to have a COVID-19 vaccine if it were available.
Are mandates the answer to ensure vaccine high uptake to end the pandemic? While still a hypothetical scenario, without yet having a safe and effective vaccine approved for use, this could change in the coming months. The question of introducing mandatory vaccination spans considerations of personal liberty, health decision-making, public health and policy, as well as the relationship between the state and its citizens. Join Professor Julian Savulescu and Dr Samantha Vanderslott to debate the ethical and public policy arguments for and against mandatory COVID-19 vaccination.
On the 30th November it was announced that the Artificial Intelligence computer programme AlphaFold had made a decisive breakthrough in the determination of the 3-D structures of proteins.
The announcement was immediately hailed as one of the major scientific advances of the decade.
Why is it important to understand the 3-D structures of protein, why are they difficult to construct, and what is the nature of AlphaFold’s advance? Why is this so exciting and what further advances in medicine and the other biosciences may result? To find out, join a conversation between Yvonne Jones, Director, Cancer Research UK Receptor Structure Research Group and Charles Godfray, Director, Oxford Martin School, who will explore these fascinating issues.

‘Microscopy and Magnetic Materials: Exploring Energy Landscapes at the Nanoscale’ by Professor Amanda Petford-Long FREng (Argonne National Laboratory and Northwestern University.
The Department of Materials is delighted to host this virtual event by our alumna, Professor Petford-Long. Please email communications@materials.ox.ac.uk to register, and to receive the Team Live link to log-on to this free event.
The first discussion in the Oxford Net Zero Series, hosted by the Oxford Martin School, hones in on the fundamental motivation of the research programme: ‘Why net zero?’.
Join the Oxford Net Zero Initiative’s Research Director, Professor Sam Fankhauser; Director, Professor Myles Allen; Net Zero Policy Engagement Fellow, Kaya Axelsson as they discuss with the Chair, Executive Director. Dr Steve Smith, the meaning of the word ‘net’ in net zero, reviewing what is needed to mitigate global warming, as and before we fully phase out activities that generate greenhouse gas emissions.
The discussion will explore the framing opportunities and challenges that the term ‘net-zero’ offers for science, policy, and advocacy informing effective climate action, as well as the innovation required at scale to achieve the global goal.
To register and watch this talk live: www.crowdcast.io/e/net-zero-when-and-how
The talk will also be streamed via YouTube here: https://youtu.be/z6049wR0tfE, but please note you will not be able to take part in the interactive Q&A session unless you join the talk on CrowdCast.
Covid-19 killed around two million people in 2020. At the same time, the social and economic impact of the pandemic led to an 8% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, the biggest one-year decline on record.
As the pandemic is brought under control from 2021 onwards, by supplementing current control methods with vaccination, there are big opportunities to sustain the benefits of lower emissions for health and well-being. The direct benefits are fewer droughts, floods, heatwaves, storms and wildfires, and cleaner air. Indirect health benefits are expected from better nutrition, safe sanitation, energy-efficient health services, and jobs in the green economy, among others.
In this conversation, Sir Andy Haines (Professor of Environmental Change and Public Health, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine) and Chris Dye (Professor of Epidemiology, University of Oxford) consider how better health and well-being are an both argument for, and a consequence of, making progress towards “net zero” carbon emissions.
To register and watch this talk live: www.crowdcast.io/e/building-back-healthier
The talk will also be streamed via YouTube here: https://youtu.be/xy3xkB9q8Ds, but please note you will not be able to take part in the interactive Q&A session unless you join the talk on CrowdCast.
The failure to stem the tide of biodiversity loss, or to address the deeply related issue of climate change, demands we quickly find more ambitious and more coherent approaches to tackling these challenges.
Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are one such family of approaches that has recently gained prominence in international policy and business discourse. Broadly defined as actions that involve working with nature to address societal goals, NbS are being widely hailed as a win-win for addressing biodiversity loss and climate change. However, this win-win scenario is not guaranteed.
Some NbS – particularly those involving planting trees in naturally treeless habitats – can have negative outcomes for climate change mitigation, biodiversity and local peoples’ livelihoods. There are also critical questions around the timeframes over which NbS can help tackle the biodiversity and climate crises given the negative impacts of warming on the health of the biosphere.
In the second discussion in the Oxford Net Zero Series, hosted by the Oxford Martin School, Professor Nathalie Seddon, will bring together interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners to explore the value and limits of working with nature to address climate change and why NbS must both support biodiversity and be implemented with, by and for people, if they are to provide benefits over the longterm.
To register and watch this talk live: www.crowdcast.io/e/nature-climate-change
The talk will also be streamed via YouTube here: https://youtu.be/Ka7Sc5d1v3k, but please note you will not be able to take part in the interactive Q&A session unless you join the talk on CrowdCast.

We are pleased to reschedule this talk by Dr Estelle Zinsstag (Edinburgh Napier University/University of Oxford) which was originally planned for March 2020 and postponed due to COVID-19.
Dr Zinsstag will present her research on restorative justice and cases of sexual violence.
This event will be held online via Zoom (link TBA). Please contact joy@minthouseoxford.co.uk for more information.