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

Join us at Blackwell’s on Broad Street to hear John Dyson in conversation with Ruth Deech on his life and career in a discussion of his new memoir, A Judge’s Journey.

John Dyson is one of the leading lawyers of his generation. After a successful career at the Bar, he rose to become a Justice of the Supreme Court and Master of the Rolls. In this compelling memoir, he describes his life and career with disarming candour and gives real insights into the challenges of judging. He also gives a fascinating account of his immigrant background, the impact of the Holocaust on his family and his journey from the Jewish community in Leeds in the 1950s to the top of his profession. Although he may be perceived as being a member of the Establishment, this arresting story shows how he continues to be influenced by his Jewish and European roots.

Lord John Dyson was a Justice of the UK Supreme Court from 2010 until 2012 and the Master of the Rolls and Head of the Civil Justice System in England and Wales from 2012 until 2016.

Ruth Deech, Baroness Deech, is a British academic, lawyer, bioethicist and politician, and the former Principal of St Anne’s College, Oxford. Deech sits as a Crossbench peer in the House of Lords (2005–) and chaired the Bar Standards Board (2009–2014).

Tickets for this event are £5. Doors will open at 6.45pm at which time there will be a small bar available. For more information, please contact our Customer Service Department on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk.

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.

How do our minds and bodies alter as we age? Can attitudes change from one generation to the next? How have the built and natural environments around us changed in the last 200 years? What are our hopes and fears for the future and how different will it be? Join researchers at the Bodleian’s Weston Library to look into the past, present and future. This event includes hands-on activities all day and a Living Library of researchers and talks in the evening.
The shop and cafe will be open until 9pm.

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.

An elusive breed of criminal entrepreneurs from China known as the Big Circle Boys (BCB) remain an intrigue to organised crime specialists. Apart from anecdotal reporting about their alleged dominance in the Canadian underworld and elsewhere, little is known about who they are or how they work. Confusingly, they have been coined with a number of organizational descriptors ranging from ‘cartel’, ‘black society’, ‘organised criminal group’, ‘mafia group’, ‘gang’, ‘criminal enterprise’, ‘criminal groupings’, and ‘non-entity.’

In this book colloquium, a panel of speakers will discuss Alex Chung’s recent book: Chinese Criminal Entrepreneurs in Canada, Volume I and Volume II and explore the BCB’s criminal undertakings.

Participants:
Alex Chung, Research Fellow in University College London’s Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy

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

Daniel Silverstone, Director, Liverpool Centre for Advanced Policing Studies

Joe Whittle, PhD Candidate, Liverpool John Moores University

Adam Smith is world-famous as a founding father of economics, and well-known to political theorists and philosophers for his Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). His work as a jurist is much less well known. As a notorious perfectionist, he worked for decades on a book that would have spanned the ground between the moral philosophy of TMS and the empirical sociology and economics of Wealth of Nations (WN). He never completed it, and on his deathbed he asked his executors to destroy his manuscripts. Which, sadly for us, they did.

But thanks to two near-miraculous survivals we know a great deal about what Adam Smith’s book on jurisprudence would have said. Two of his Glasgow students kept detailed notes of his lectures there between 1762 and 1764. One set was rediscovered in 1895, the other in 1958. They were taken in successive academic years, and they show that Smith shifted the order in which he presented his topics, but not the essentials of his course. The two independent sources validate each other.

Professor Iain McLean will lay out the principles of Smith’s jurisprudence; show how it forms the bridge between TMS and WN; and try to show Smith’s half-submerged influence on the new republic of the United States, in whose revolution he took a great deal of interest.

The lecture opens a one-day workshop on Tuesday 13 November on the jurisprudence behind the writings and philosophy of Adam Smith.

Iain McLean was born and brought up in Edinburgh. He is Senior Research Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College, Oxford. One of his research interests is the interaction of the Scottish, American, and French Enlightenments of the 18th century. His Adam Smith: Radical and Egalitarian (2006) was written at the instigation of Smith’s fellow Fifer Gordon Brown.

This workshop explores the themes raised in Professor Iain McLean’s lecture of 12 November: Adam Smith as Jurist.

Workshop Programme

09:25 Welcome and introduction

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

09:30–11:00 Session 1

Adam Smith and the Formation of the Scottish Legal Profession

John CAIRNS, Professor of Civil Law, Edinburgh University

Adam Smith, Religious Freedom, and Law

Scot PETERSEN, Bingham Research Fellow in Constitutional Studies, Oxford University

11:00–11:15 Tea and Coffee

11:15–12:45 Session 2

Adam Smith, David Hume, and Edmund Burke: A Common Legal Heritage?

John ADAMS, Chairman, Foundation for Law, Justice and Society and Adjunct Professor in Political Science at Rutgers University

Adam Smith on the Social Foundations of Constitutions

Denis GALLIGAN

12:45–14:00 Lunch

14:00–16:15 Session 3

Justice as Sentiment

Hossein DABBAGH, Philosophy Tutor, Oxford University

Adam Smith: Between Anti-paternalism and Solidarity

Daniel SMILOV, Associate Professor, Political Science, Sofia University

“Pieces upon a Chessboard”: The Man of System in Liberal Constitutionalism

Bogdan IANCU, Associate Professor, Bucharest University

16:15 Concluding Discussion

Are we witnessing a new, more toxic kind of politics around the world? If so, what is the alternative? Should we lament a supposedly lost civility, or is the emergence of more forthright and angry disagreements in fact a good thing? What is the line between passionate disagreement and toxic bile? Who gets to decide what are acceptable and unacceptable forms of discourse? Ultimately, how do we live together when we disagree profoundly on major issues?
Topic: Politics
Format: Debate and Q&A session

Since a change in planning rules in 1990, there has been a huge amount of archaeological work on development sites all over England. This work is required by planning permissions and paid for by the developers. The results have been astonishing. Thousands of important discoveries have been made, and views of England’s past are bring transformed by these. This talk will explain how archaeology on development sites takes place, and highlight some of the most interesting or unusual finds, from the Ebbsfleet prehistoric elephant (400,000 BC) to a Roman chariot-racing arena in Colchester and a Victorian communal toilet in York.

Roger Thomas is a professional archaeologist who has lived in Abingdon for much of his life. He spent many years working for English Heritage (now Historic England), where he was closely involved in many important national archaeological projects. He is a past chairman of AAAHS, and is an Honorary Research Associate in the School of Archaeology, University of Oxford.

Visitors are very welcome to attend meetings at a cost of £3.
If you want to join the AAAHS, there’s a Membership Form on our website.

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’

Organised by Oxford Civic Society @oxcivicsoc. The Society’s Louise Thomas and Ian Green discuss the history of the city centre, emerging trends and their implications and present a vision which seizes opportunities and mitigates threats.. https://www.oxcivicsoc.org.uk/programme/

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

A panel exploring how universities can best support new students as they transition to University

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

6 speakers from 6 countries debate the proposition – chaired by Sir Trevor McDonald. All welcome.

Beacons of the Past is a three and a half year project part funded by National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Chiltern Society, and the National Trust , amongst others. Its purpose is to engage and inspire communities to discover, conserve, and enjoy the Chilterns’ Iron Age hillforts and their prehistoric chalk landscapes. Now at the project’s midpoint, Project Manager Wendy Morrison will present on the some of the results of the UK’s largest bespoke archaeological LiDAR survey, the project’s outreach programmes, and what comes next.

Dr Wendy Morrison currently works for the Chilterns Conservation Board as Project Manager of the HLF funded Beacons of the Past Hillforts project. She also is Senior Associate Tutor for Archaeology at the Oxford University Dept for Continuing Education. Wendy’s research areas are Prehistoric European Archaeology and Landscape Archaeology. She has over a decade’s excavation experience in Southern Britain, the Channel Islands, and India.

The AAAHS organises monthly lectures by acknowledged authorities on topics related to history and archaeology and to those of Abingdon in particular.
Visitors are very welcome to attend meetings at a cost of £3.

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

A talk on underground in the Roman town of Herculaneum

The Scythians were warlike nomadic horsemen who roamed the steppe of Asia in the first millennium BC. Using archaeological finds from burials and texts, Barry Cunliffe reconstructs the lives of the Scythians, exploring their beliefs, burial practices, love of fighting and their flexible attitude to gender.

The Scythians: Nomad Warriors of the Steppe
Wed 18 Mar, 1–2pm
A weekday talk with Barry Cunliffe, Emeritus Professor of European Archaeology, University of Oxford

Booking essential.
Tickets are: £8 (Full Price) / £7 (Concession) / £6 (Members)
https://www.ashmolean.org/event/the-scythians-nomad-warriors-of-the-steppe

The Phoenicians were famously great traders who, from their base in modern-day Lebanon, traded their wares around the Mediterranean and beyond. Learn about their culture, art, achievements, and cities at home in the Levant and abroad, including Byblos, Tyre, Eshmoun and Carthage.

The Phoenicians Phoenicia Part 1: the Land of the Phoenicians
An Afternoon Tea Talk (with tea and biscuits included)
With Linda Farrar, Archaeologist and Lecturer

Thu 19 Mar, 2–4pm
Ashmolean Museum Lecture Theatre

Tickets are: £12 (Full Price) / £11 (Concession) / £10 (Members)
https://www.ashmolean.org/event/the-phoenicians-part-i-the-land-of-phoenicians

Moran’s ‘Autumn Afternoon, the Wissahickon’ pictures 19th-century America at its most bucolic and pastoral. It was painted, however, amidst a conflict that threatened to tear the young country apart. Examine Moran’s landscape as an allegory of contested national identity.

A Nation at a Crossroads: The United States in Thomas Moran’s ‘Autumn Afternoon, The Wissahickon’
A weekend talk with Madeleine Harrison, PhD Candidate, The Courtauld Institute of Art

Sat 21 Mar, 11–12pm
Ashmolean Museum Lecture Theatre

Booking essential.
Tickets are: £8 (Full Price) / £7 (Concession) / £6 (Members)
https://www.ashmolean.org/event/a-nation-at-a-crossroads-the-united-state-in-thomas-morans-autumn-afternoon-the-wissahickon

Learn about the vast trade network of the Phoenicians, the goods traded and their trading partners, who included the Greeks and Etruscans, as well as people in Sardinia and southern Spain.

The Phoenicians Phoenicia Part 2: The Phoenicians in the West
An Afternoon Tea Talk (tea and biscuits included)
With Linda Farrar, Archaeologist and Lecturer

Thu 26 Mar, 2–4pm
Ashmolean Museum Lecture Theatre

Booking essential.
Tickets are: £12 (Full Price) / £11 (Concession) / £10 (Members)
https://www.ashmolean.org/event/the-phoenicians-phoenicia-part-ii-the-phoenicians-in-the-west

The city of Hereford stands a couple of hours from Oxford along one of the most scenic train rides in England. Follow the Medieval Pilgrim trail, discovering a landscape alive with holy wells, sacred shrines, ancient mysteries and miraculous saints.

Become a Medieval Tourist: Herefordshire Pilgrimages
With Tim Porter, Historian

Wed 15 Apr, 2–4pm
Ashmolean Museum Lecture Theatre

Tickets are: £12 (Full Price) / £11 (Concession) / £10 (Members)
Includes a break for tea and biscuits
https://www.ashmolean.org/event/become-a-medieval-tourist-herefordshire-pilgrimages

Just an hour by train, discover one of the great lost buildings of England, an ancient centre of pilgrimage and scholarship. Discover what unique artworks and architectural gems survive within the townscape and further afield.

Become a Medieval Tourist: Evesham Abbey
An Afternoon Tea Talk (including tea and biscuits)
With Tim Porter, Historian

Thu 30 Apr, 2–4pm
Ashmolean Museum Lecture Theatre

Tickets are: £12 (Full Price) / £11 (Concession) / £10 (Members)
https://www.ashmolean.org/event/become-a-medieval-tourist-evesham-abbey

Using images and eye-witness accounts, David Stuttard paints a vivid picture of the classical Greek Games – a thousand years of speed trials, brawn and horsemanship underpinned by religious ritual, lavish feasting, political chicanery and (of course) athletic nudity.

Games for Zeus: The Ancient Greek Olympics
Sat 2 May, 2–3pm
Ashmolean Museum Lecture Theatre
With David Stuttard, Classical Historian and Author

Tickets are: £8 (Full Price) / £7 (Concession) / £6 (Members)
https://www.ashmolean.org/event/games-for-zeus-the-ancient-greek-olympics

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.

____________________________________________________________________

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

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.

Join us on Facebook and find out when and where the magnificent specimen of the Ichthyosaur was discovered in Abingdon. Local Archaeologist Jeff Wallis talks about his find with Palaeobiologist Megan Jacobs.
The find originally classified as Ophthalmosaurus is questioned by Megan in her doctoral paper, join them to see the story develop…
There will be three sessions throughout Saturday 24th July, followed by a Q&A session:

11am Part one – Discovering the Ichthyosaur
12pm Part two – Illustration and colour?
1pm Part three – The classification
These sessions will be streamed on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/abingdonmuseum

2pm – Live Q&A with Megan (Zoom)
Please visit abingdonmuseum.com to get the link to join the Zoom meeting.