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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Synopsis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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/

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

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

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

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

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

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.