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

The high seas are under severe pressure from both direct and indirect human impacts, including the effects of over-fishing, plastic debris and climate change. In this talk, Prof Alex Rogers will present what a network of marine protected areas in the high seas might look like, protecting 30% of known conservation features and taking into account climate change impacts. We will also hear from Dr Gwilym Rowlands, who will consider how such a network of marine protected areas could be enforced and the potential benefits to the ocean.

The question of how far a state should authorise the peacetime collection and use of intelligence gathered by secret agents and by interception of communications has long been a thorny issue of public policy. Today, new ethical and legal questions arise from the ability to access in bulk personal information from social media and from Internet use and to apply artificial intelligence trained algorithms to mine data for intelligence and law enforcement purposes. In his talk Sir David Omand, a former director of GCHQ, will lay out an ethical framework for thinking about these powerful developments in modern digital intelligence.

Speaker: Professor Sir David Omand GCB is a visiting professor in the War Studies Department, King’s College London and at PSIA, Sciences Po, Paris. He was previously UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator, Permanent Secretary of the Home Office and Director, GCHQ. He is the author of Securing the State (Hurst, 2020) and, with Professor Mark Phythian, Principled Spying: the Ethics of Secret Intelligence, (Oxford University Press, 2018).

In this lecture, lawyer Mary Bartkus shares her firsthand experience of the international litigation of multibillion dollar claims against Big Pharma when a medication taken by millions of users worldwide is withdrawn.

She will address the impact of the withdrawal and United States litigation on regulators, legislators, and on cross-border litigation in common law and civil law jurisdictions across six continents.

When Merck & Co., Inc. withdrew the innovative painkiller Vioxx (Rofecoxib) from more than eighty countries following evidence that high-dosage use could cause an increased risk of heart attack and stroke, thousands of US citizens brought personal injury claims.

A Texas jury awarded more than $250 million to one individual claimant. Although that verdict was reduced and later overturned on appeal, and most US juries found for the company, with more than 26,000 US court claims yet to be tried and another 14,100 waiting to be filed, the company agreed to resolve the US personal injury claims for $4.85 billion, a deal said to be “favourable” to the company and “clearly at the low end of general expectations”.

Internationally, claims were brought in waves following developments in the US. These international cases would be heard and decided in jurisdictions with different traditions and conditions for litigants.

In Australia, a justice of the Federal Court dismissed all claims against Merck & Co., Inc. in class litigation, finding “Merck had done everything that might reasonably be expected of it in the discharge of its duty of care”. The Full Court overturned an award of damages to the individual representative claimant for failure to establish causation, and awarded full costs to the company; the High Court denied claimants leave to appeal. Claims of remaining group members then were resolved.

In England, claimants abandoned multi-party actions filed in the High Court. In Scotland, the parties litigated and resolved individual actions. In Canada, the parties litigated and resolved overlapping class and individual actions in ten provinces. Courts regularly dismissed cases in civil law jurisdictions.

The lecture considers this landmark international litigation alongside the challenges companies face when investing billions of dollars to develop innovative medications, and asks: Who won and who lost?

Mary E. Bartkus is Special Counsel at Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP, a member of the Bars of New York and New Jersey; previously Executive Director & Senior Counsel, Merck & Co., Inc.

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

Architectural designer and TV presenter Charlie Luxton joins Oxford based architecture and design cooperative Transition by Design for a talk on sustainable architecture and how Oxford can meet the need for affordable housing whilst limiting the impact on the natural environment.

Following the talk, there will be a panel discussion and Q&A.

This event is for anyone who is interested in or currently building, renovating, converting or extending their home. The panel will include experts on architecture, housing and low-energy design in discussion on low-carbon materials and energy efficiency as well as co-housing, community-led design and other models of housing.

This event is part of Oxford Green Week 2019

For centuries, England’s elite have covered up how they got their hands on millions of acres of our land, by constructing walls, burying surveys and more recently, sheltering behind offshore shell companies. But with the dawn of digital mapping and the Freedom of Information Act, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for them to hide.

In June’s House Matters, Open House welcomes Guy Shrubsole, the author of the new book ‘Who Owns England?’. Cat Hobbs, the founder of ‘We Own It’, will be chairing the discussion and we’ll also have the Who Owns Oxford group demoing their new website which intends to visualise contemporary and historic land ownership in the County and tell stories of how it affects us all.

Trespassing through tightly-guarded country estates, ecologically ravaged grouse moors and empty Mayfair mansions, writer and activist Guy Shrubsole has used these 21st century tools to uncover a wealth of never-before-seen information about the people who own our land, to create the most comprehensive map of land ownership in England that has ever been made public.

From secret military islands to tunnels deep beneath London, Shrubsole unearths truths concealed since the Domesday Book about who is really in charge of this country – at a time when Brexit is meant to be returning sovereignty to the people. Melding history, politics and polemic, he vividly demonstrates how taking control of land ownership is key to tackling everything from the housing crisis to climate change – and even halting the erosion of our very democracy.

It’s time to expose the truth about who owns England – and finally take back our green and pleasant land

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

For this event, 12 artists from all over the country will be presenting work that they have been making as part of the Sound Diaries open call.

The presenting artists are:

Richard Bentley, Hannah Dargavel-Leafe, Aisling Davis, Atilio Doreste, Marlo De Lara, Beth Shearsby, Kathryn Tovey, Jacek Smolicki, James Green, Lucia Hinojosa, Sena Karahan, Fi.Ona

Sound Diaries expands awareness of the roles of sound and listening in daily life. The project explores the cultural and communal significance of sounds and forms a research base for projects executed both locally and Internationally, in Beijing, Brussels, Tallinn, Cumbria and rural Oxfordshire.

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.

St Peter’s College welcomes you to a talk about Lord Nuffield, a leading figure in St Peter’s early history.

William Morris, Lord Nuffield, probably did more than any other individual to transform Oxford in the twentieth century, physically, economically and socially. His success as an industrialist allowed him to become one of Britain’s most generous benefactors; he gave away the equivalent of £1.5 billion in today’s money, to causes including health, education and academic research. This talk looks specifically at Lord Nuffield’s vital support to various Oxford colleges, including the saving of St Peter’s from closure, andhttps://interestingtalks.in/Oxford/# the founding of the college which bears his name, Nuffield College. It also explores his complex and sometimes difficult relationship with the university.

St Peter’s College Chapel
Free to attend
All welcome

Badger expert Tanesha Allen, with some help from local school children, has been studying our badgers to understand more about how smell affects their behaviour. Join Tanesha to learn more about her research and have a go at the ‘smelly shirt test’ to see how you measure up against a badger. She is currently collaborating with the Abingdon Science Partnership and Science Oxford on a badger-based citizen science project being funded by the Royal Society.

The badger is one of the UK’s iconic species and our largest land predator. It is just as common as the fox but much more elusive – we have only ever seen our resident population at Stansfeld Park on camera traps! Badgers live in large family groups and have a highly developed sense of smell. With just a sniff, they can recognise each other as well as knowing the sex, age and social group membership. However, little is known about how they react to the scents of other species – including humans.

Tanesha Allen is a third year PhD student at the University of Oxford. As part of the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit’s (WildCRU) ongoing European badger project, her research focuses on olfactory mate choice via specialised glandular secretions and metabolic by-products. She previously studied Animal Sciences at Washington State University (BSc.) and Zoology at the University of Cambridge (MPhil).

Join us for the next event in our Science on Your Doorstep series, where we shine a spotlight on fascinating people living and working in Headington. The event is free to attend, but you are invited to make a donation towards a special fund we’re setting up to support disadvantaged schools across the region. The fund will help these schools with their travel costs, to enable them to come and enjoy the new Science Oxford Centre.

Bernard Tucker Memorial Lecture – Joint with Oxford Ornithological Society

Join Oxford University Press for a special science-themed “speed dating” event. Mingle with a range of topics, including reptiles, psychopathy, environmental law, synaesthesia and circadian rhythms with expert authors from the Very Short Introductions series. Make an impression and get your questions in before the bell rings!

IF Oxford is operating a Pay What You Decide (PWYD) ticketing system. This works by enabling you to pre-book events without paying for a ticket beforehand. Afterwards, you have the opportunity to pay what you decide you want to, or can afford. If you prefer, you can make a donation to IF Oxford when you book. All funds raised go towards next year’s Festival.

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

Sarah Weir OBE, Chief Executive, Design Council, will lecture on ‘Designing the Future: Who is doing it?’ She will consider the question of what design is – a mindset and skillset; critical thinking and creativity combined; much more than aesthetics.

The Lady English Lecture Series marks the College’s continuing commitment to the education and advancement of women and promotes the contributions made by women to the University and to public life more generally.

Chris Powles will describe the extraordinary behaviour of elephants in Kenya’s Mount Elgon National Park, where they excavate 150m into the mountain to mine for salt.
Almost equally remarkable is the crucial role that Chris and his family have played in ensuring the survival of this unique population.

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

We are entering the fourth revolution of healthcare.

The first revolution was Public Health with sanitation, cleaner air and better housing. The second is medical healthcare with the advancement of diagnostics and treatment with a focus on disease cure. The third is personalised health, through individual knowledge, technology, behaviour change and precision medicine.

However, these revolutions have left three major problems unresolved; unsustainable healthcare, rising health inequalities and climate change driven by unsustainable living.

So, we enter the fourth revolution in healthcare which builds on the previous three. This is based on communities rather than individuals, supporting a sustainable active lifestyle, eating local produce and using culture, art and contact with nature to create purpose and connections to each other, leading to greater resilience and wellbeing. It is a revolution when Smart Cities become central to the delivery of health and when advanced technology becomes almost invisible encouraging a lifestyle closer rather than further from nature.

In this talk Dr Bird will explain how we are already delivering this future and how biological changes such as chronic inflammation, epigenetics, mitochondrial dysfunction and telomere shortening can provide the scientific link between wellbeing and disease.

Tara Pirie recalls her three years living in a tent, while tracking and gathering data on these elusive, but beautiful big cats. She is now one of the world’s leading experts on Leopard ecology and conservation.

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’

What’s it like to be haunted? Writer Jay Bernard’s augmented reality installation explores this question – unpicking how we can be haunted by our histories and our everyday lives.

Listen to a reading while exploring alternative realities in an AR experience that looks at how the past and present are closely linked.

The installation is based on their debut collection, ‘Surge’, which considered the aftermath of the 1981 New Cross Fire. Jay Bernard is the winner of the Ted Hughes Award for New Work Poetry and has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize.

Part of The Think Human Festival
Everyone welcome

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

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/

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

Organised by Oxford Civic Society @oxcivicsoc. Ellie Mayhew from the Freshwater Habitats Trust will explain why our area has such rich biodiversity and what the charity has been doing to improve and monitor these valuable freshwater areas to protect the species they support.. https://www.oxcivicsoc.org.uk/programme/

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

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.