The Oxford constituency of the Spanish Researchers in the United Kingdom (SRUK) is holding a discussion panel entitled “Women in science and the glass ceiling” where three invited speakers will give a short talk about the topic, followed by a discussion where the attendees can actively participate.

The invited experts will highlight how the world of science needs to become accessible for everyone, women and girls. The discussion will cover the earlier stages of education, where children become interested in science, to the later stages of the scientific career, where excellent science and innovation require the talents of both women and men. We will evaluate why women’s progress in research is slow and why there are too few female scientists occupying top positions in scientific decision-making, limiting the important potential of highly skilled human capital.

The event will take place on the 18th of November at the The Jam Factory (Hollybush Row, Oxford, OX1 1HU) and it will start at 10:30AM.

This is a free event and open to the public, but registration is needed via Eventbrite.

Models of Obesity: From Ecology to Complexity in Science and Policy, Stanley Ulijaszek, St Cross Fellow

Taking a comparative approach, this book investigates the ways in which obesity and its susceptibilities are framed in science and policy and how they might work better. Providing a clear, authoritative voice on the debate, the author builds on early work to engage further in ecological and complexity thinking in obesity. Many of the models that have emerged since obesity became a population-level issue are examined, including the energy balance model, and models used to examine human body fatness from a range of perspectives including evolutionary, anthropological, environmental, and political viewpoints. The book is ideal for those working on, or interested in, obesity science, health policy, health economics, evolutionary medicine, medical sociology, nutrition and public health who want to understand the shifts that have taken place in obesity science, policy and intervention in the past 40 years.

All welcome. No booking required.

Women in Africa are congregated in poorly paid and precarious work (ILO, 2016) and have very high rates of school dropout, mortality and childhood morbidity. This is crucially linked to their role in childbirth and child-care. Women and girls still perform the bulk of unpaid domestic and care work, severely limiting their access to work with fair working conditions. Empowering women and achieving decent work is a vital element in developing a dynamic economy that includes the full political and social citizenship of African women, while supporting their care-giving roles.

This lecture focuses on young women (aged 15-24), who are at the cusp of reproduction and production. Drawing on the rich data sets collected by Young Lives, Professor Jo Boyden, Director of Young Lives, & Professor Sandra Fredman, Director of the Oxford Human Rights Hub, examine transitions of adolescent girls and boys from education to labour markets and how their opportunities are shaped by other intersecting transitions (family formation, marriage and parenthood). On the basis of this evidence, they will consider the role of legal frameworks in obstructing or facilitating women’s access to decent working conditions, the social support for care-giving roles, and ways of interrupting intergenerational transmission of poverty.

CARU | Arts re Search Annual Conference 2017

“What does it mean to research art / to research through art?”

CARU brings together artists and researchers for yet another day of cross-disciplinary exploration into arts research! The event will consist of an exciting mixture of talks and performances from a variety of creative and academic disciplines, including Fine Art, Live Art, Social Practice, Art History, Anthropology, Education, Science and Technology, to question and debate various areas of arts research, such as themes, material/form, documentation and practice methodology.

Keynote talk: ‘Resonances and Discords’
Speaker: Prof. Kerstin Mey
PVC and Dean, Westminster School of Media, Arts and Design, University of Westminster
“The presentation will explore research in art at the interface to other epistemological systems and approaches. Drawing on case studies, it will explore key strategies and tactical manoeuvres of knowledge making in order to explore the hermeneutics of practice led inquiry in the space of art.”

Presentations include:

“The artist in the boardroom: Action research within decision-making spaces”

“Exploring the Art space as fluid cultural site through the immediacy of the performance and its inherent collaborative ethos”

“Chapter 1 (draft): Using text in performance: a range of strategies”

“Memory and identity within Bosnia’s Mass Graves”

“Fermenting conversations”

“Arcade Interface Art Research”

“Making sounds happen is more important than careful listening (with cups)”

“Shadow:Other:myself / photographic research from 2010”

“Un-knowing unknowing in painting as research”

“Developing an artistic epistemology”

Register at: www.ars2017.eventbrite.co.uk

Ina Zharkevich, Research Fellow at Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology discusses shamans, the limits of human volition and the power of the ‘invisible’ realm among the Kham Magars of Nepal.

How does one become a shaman, against one’s own will, in a world of today? Based on a series of encounters with novice Kham Magar shamans in Nepal, Dr Ina Zharkevich (Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford) explores the limits of human volition and the power of the ‘invisible’ realm in making people follow a career of a shaman – a predicament one cannot escape when one is called by the spirit of the deceased ancestral shaman.

To offer Oxford students the warmest welcome back to Hilary Term, we have invited Director Jenny Lu盧謹明, to show her feature film The Receptionist接線員 (2017) (bilingual subtitles).

This bilingual film is the first UK-Taiwanese film collaboration of its kind, and it tells the story of Tina, a literature graduate living in London, who takes up work as a receptionist in an illegal massage parlour. Through Tina’s eyes, viewers are not exposed to the dark underworld of London’s illegal sex industry, but are also shown a rare glimpse into the lives of those caught up in this world, and the harsh realities they face as Asian migrant women struggling to survive in London.

The film features the famous Taiwanese actress Chen Shiang-Chyi陳湘琪 and was nominated for the Golden Horse Awards. Director Jenny Lu wrote the film script based on a real story she witnessed when she was studying video art in London. After the screening, she will share with us the inspirations behind the story and her experiences as a transnational filmmaker in the UK and Taiwan.

This event will be of interest to those of you who work on contemporary Britain, Asian diaspora, Chinese and Taiwanese culture, film studies, gender studies, translation studies, and race and racism. The film is approximately 100 minutes long, and the director will talk for around 10 minutes with the host, followed by audience Q & A and discussions.

Tickets are 5£ and can be bought in advance
More information can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/events/331762997290657/

Our Marriages: When Lesbians Marry Gay Men 奇缘一生 —Documentary Screening and Talk with Director He Xiaopei and Dr Bao Hongwei

The Oxford Chinese Studies Society welcomes all to an exclusive screening and discussion of “Our Marriage: When Lesbians Marry Gay Men” with Director He Xiaopei and Dr Bao Hongwei.

How do gays and lesbians negotiate their social identities in postsocialist China? Are the so-called “fake marriages 形式婚姻” between them a pragmatic choice made out of social pressure or a queering act of subversion against the traditional institution of marriage? How do these phenomena tie into China’s revolutionary past and connect to Asia’s current wave of gay marriage legalisation and rising pink economy? These are the questions provoked by Dr. He Xiaopei’s documentary Our Marriage.

“The film, Our Marriage, is an exploration of the lives of four lesbians who decided to marry gay men in order to secretly pursue their relationships with their girlfriends and at the same time fulfil their families’ deep-seated desire that they get married. The sense of respect and responsibility that the marriage partners feel towards their parents, and the avoidance of social ridicule and tricky questions about their child’s sexuality, also play a large role in their decision to stage elaborate and glamorous sham ceremonies…In China, as one of the women in the documentary explained, nobody is allowed to be single. Whilst a burgeoning lesbian social scene is becoming more visible in large cities, heteronormative attitudes force people, heterosexual and homosexual alike, into marriages which they would rather avoid. Marriage can provide social acceptance, but it also gives you certain economic benefits such as access to social housing. Whilst homosexuality is not illegal in China there are no plans to introduce same sex marriage. Activists like He have argued against campaigns for same sex marriage suggesting that the institution of marriage itself should be challenged as it supports patriarchal norms and is detrimental to all people, whether they are gay, straight or bisexual.” — Kate Hawkins, Sexuality and Development Programme International Advisory Group

This event will be of interest to those of you who work on Chinese society, queer studies, film studies, as well as gender studies. The documentary is 45 minutes long, followed a brief talk on queer filmmaking and LGBT activism in China by Dr Bao Hongwei from the University of Nottingham, and then both of them will engage in audience Q & A and discussions.

Speaker biography:
Dr He Xiaopei completed a PhD at the University of Westminster in 2006, titled ‘I am AIDS: Living with the Epidemic in China’. She co-founded an NGO called the Pink Space Sexuality Research Centre in Beijing to promote sexual rights and sexual pleasure among people who are oppressed.

Dr Hongwei Bao is Assistant Professor in Media Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. He holds a PhD in Gender Studies and Cultural Studies from the University of Sydney, Australia. His research primarily focuses on gay identity and queer politics in contemporary China. He is author of Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, forthcoming in 2018).

Talk by Stephen Barker, an independent Heritage Advisor. Oxfordshire on the Home Front will explain about the impact of the war in the towns and countryside. It will focus upon fundraising, charitable events, munitions production, recruitment and the effects on women and children.The talk is fully illustrated and uses testimony from those who were there. Hall is open for tea/coffee from 7.15p.m. with books & Cd’s to browse, and chat to other members.

A free lecture by Robert O. Ritchie of Lawrence Berkeley (USA). Free pre-lecture drinks and nibbles and free post-lecture buffet and drinks (please email lorraine.laird@materials.ox.ac.uk to reserve a place). Abstract:
The ability of a material to undergo limited deformation is a critical aspect of conferring toughness as this feature enables the local dissipation of high stresses which would otherwise cause fracture. The mechanisms of such deformation can be widely diverse. Although plasticity from dislocation motion in crystalline materials is most documented, inelastic deformation can also occur via in situ phase transformations in certain metals and ceramics, sliding of mineralized collagen fibrils in tooth dentin and bone, rotation of such fibrils in skin, frictional motion between mineral “platelets” in seashells, and even by mechanisms that also lead to fracture such as shear banding in glasses and microcracking in geological materials and bone. Resistance to fracture (toughness) is thus a compromise – a combination of two, often mutually exclusive, properties of strength and deformability. It can also be considered as a mutual competition between intrinsic damage processes that operate ahead of the tip of a crack to promote its advance and extrinsic crack-tip shielding mechanisms that act mostly behind the crack tip to locally diminish crack-tip stresses and strains. Here we examine the interplay between strength and ductility and between intrinsic and extrinsic mechanisms in developing toughness in a range of biological and natural materials, including bone, skin and fish scales, and in certain advanced metallic alloys, including bulk-metallic glasses and high-entropy alloys.

It seems like everywhere we look computers are running more and more of the world around us. In healthcare, we have seen an astounding level of hype surrounding the use of artificial intelligence in image recognition, personalised treatment, form filling in and diagnostic technologies. What are the potential applications for AI in health and life sciences, but also the barriers to its adoption and practical implementation?

Further information and registration: https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/event/2521

Dr. Michael Foale CBE is a British/American astronaut, veteran of six space missions, and the only NASA astronaut to have flown extended missions aboard both the Russian Mir and International Space Stations. He was the first Briton to perform a space walk, and until 17 April 2008, he held the record for most time spent in space by a US citizen: 374 days, 11 hours, 19 minutes. He still holds the cumulative-time-in-space record for a UK citizen. In 1997 Mike was on board Mir with two other cosmonauts when it was hit by a supply craft – the worst collision in the history of spaceflight. It sent the space station tumbling out of control and left the team without power and contact with Earth. Come and hear the story of how events unfolded at this unique event and how Mike used his unique skills to save Mir from disaster.

Rediscovered Taiwanese Film Screening with Prof. Chris Berry: Dangerous Youth 危險的青春 (1966)

2018/Feb/07 Wednesday 7-9:30PM Lecture Theatre, Lecture Theatre, China Centre, St Hugh’s College, Oxford

Supported by: Oxford Chinese Studies Society

For our third film screening event in Hilary Term, we have invited renowned Chinese film scholar, Professor Chris Berry from King’s College London, to screen one of Taiwan’s lost commercial films from the Martial Law period and discuss the relevant issues of language politics and cultural censorships with us. This event is part of the project, Taiwan’s Lost Commercial Cinema: Recovered and Restored, directed by Prof. Chris Berry and Dr. Ming-yeh Rawnsley, which includes a symposium (7 Oct 2017) and a film screening tour of old Taiwanese cinema in the UK and Europe throughout October and November 2017.

Synopsis
Shi Ying is a deliveryman for a cosmetics company. He is a womaniser and dreams of making a quick buck. He meets a romantic 20-year-old girl, Qingmei (Zheng Xiaofen), who feels trapped by her mother’s small restaurant and is eager to escape. Kueiyuan earns a commission fee by introducing Qingmei to a cabaret, run by Yuchan (Gao Xingzhi). Qingmei falls in love with Kueiyuan and sleeps with him. However, under pressure from Kueiyuan and Yuchan, Qingmei agrees to become a mistress to an old millionaire. Meanwhile, Yuchan seduces Kueiyuan and controls him with money and sex. When Qingmei discovers that she is pregnant by Kueiyuan, the latter demands an abortion. Qingmei runs away and hides. When Kueiyuan proposes marriage to Yuchan and is rejected by her, he finally realises that he is in love with Qingmei and goes out to look for her.

Commentary
‘The stark, dark social realism of this film is rendered through a modernist, even avant garde form, reminding audiences of French New Wave or early Nagisa Oshima (in particular Cruel Story of Youth, 1960): a long take of an angry young man on his motorcycle circling, its engine howling; a variety of pop songs raging on soundtrack; a montage of neon lights at urban night; composition-in-depth in conflict scenes; a daunting shot overlooking a sex act done on the floor; an open ending. Dangerous Youthremains a classic of Taiwanese cinema.’

This event will be of interest to those of you who work on Taiwanese history, Sinophone studies, translation studies, and film studies. The film is 95 minutes long and Prof. Berry will talk for around 10 minutes afterwards and we will leave plenty of time for critical dialogues, Q & A and discussions. There will be information handouts designed by Prof. Berry available on the day for all participants.

Speaker biography:

Prof Chris Berry is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London, and his academic research is grounded in work on Chinese-language cinemas. Prof. Berry has recently served as a judge for the Golden Horse Awards 金馬獎 2017 in Taiwan. Primary publications include: (with Mary Farquhar) Cinema and the National: China on Screen (Columbia University Press and Hong Kong University Press, 2006); Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: the Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2004); (co-edited with Luke Robinson) Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); (co-edited with Koichi Iwabuchi and Eva Tsai) Routledge Handbook of East Asian Popular Culture (Routledge, 2016); (edited with Nicola Liscutin and Jonathan D. Mackintosh), Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia: What a Difference a Region Makes (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009); and (co-edited with Feii Lu) Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005).

Event open to all postgraduate students. Advanced Booking essential.

7.00 pm Drinks reception, 7.40 Private view of the ‘Imagining the Divine’ exhibition, Panel discussion

Each of our speakers will respond to an object in the exhibition from the perspective of their Christian faith and will explore wider questions, including: Does all religious art ‘imagine’ the same divinity? How do Christians respond to art from diverse religions? Are works of art beneficial or prejudicial to Christian faith?

7.00 pm Drinks reception
7.40 pm Private view of the ‘Imagining the Divine’ exhibition
8.15 pm Panel discussion

Cover image used with permission of Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

Hugh Kennedy, Professor of Arabic at SOAS, chronicles the rich history of the caliphate, from the death of Muhammad to the present, drawing on his recently published book.

In conjunction with Oxford International Women’s Festival , Oxford Community-led Housing* research project and Transition by Design is organising a session on “Taking Control of our Housing: Women Leading the Charge”, to celebrate the efforts of a number of women pioneering community-led housing in various forms in Oxfordshire. In line with the festival’s broader theme of “Winning the Vote: Women’s Suffrage 100 Years On”, the session aims to raise awareness around community-led housing and an opportunity to gain fresh interest and broaden the movement.

Join us in the much needed discussion to highlight that affordable, safe and secure housing is a basic human right. The session will champion the idea that women can and are taking action to tackle the housing crisis in Oxford, and to generate discussion that homes and housing shape our identity as women and as human beings. We’re also very keen to find out more about the challenges you’re facing with the housing market. And to top it up, let’s celebrate the efforts of women in community-led housing.

Event format:

Interactive panel discussion

Panel speakers from Kindling Housing Coop, Edge Housing, Dragonfly Housing Coop, Oxford Fairer Housing Network, Oxford Housing Crisis Group and many more!

For more info or queries, please contact katie@transitionbydesign.org

*Oxford Community-Led Housing research project is a new partnership project by Oxford Community Foundation, Community First Oxfordshire and Oxford Community Land Trust. We have been commissioned by Oxford City Council to conduct a research project on how community-led housing could be delivered sustainably in Oxford. Community Led Housing (CLH) is about local people playing a leading and lasting role in solving local housing problems, creating genuinely affordable homes and strong communities in ways that are difficult to achieve through mainstream housing.

A day of talks examining four very different aspects of communication, both ancient and modern in four different world cultures.
Dr Martin Dittus, Data Scientist at the Oxford Internet Institute, will talk about the Geography of Internet groups.
Lizzie Ogle, Researcher at the Department of Music, King’s College, London will talk on Repercussions: Ethnographic inquiries into rhythm and spirit in northeastern Brazil.
Dr Andrea Janku, Senior Lecturer in the History of China at SOAS, will talk on Tong: Reflections on a Key Concept in China’s Political Culture.
Dr Chloe Colchester of the Oxford University Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents will talk about the Art of Wayfinding in the Pacific.
Cut off for bookings 1st March Dietary requirements or disabled access enquiries shahinbekhradnia@hotmail.com

In conjunction with the 16th Annual Oxford Human Rights Festival, Oxford Community-led Housing* research project is organising a session on “Identity and [Affordable] Housing”, with a focus on self-build housing. The session will screen the BBC documentary ‘The House that Mum and Dad Built’ (1982), that captures the stories of families involved in the first Walter Segal self-build project, Segal Close. The project, a collaboration between local authority, self-builders and local community, highlights a strong theme that promotes self-empowerment through building one’s own home, and alleviating poverty through the process.

The film screening will be followed by a diverse and interactive panel discussion session with experienced speakers including Professor Nabeel Hamdi, one of the pioneers in participatory planning and author of “Small Change”, Lesley Dewhurst, CEO of Restore Oxford and former Cheif Executive of Oxford Homeless Pathways, and others.

Join us in the much needed discussion to highlight that affordable, self and secure housing is a basic human right. The session will also highlight the role of community-led housing in alleviating poverty, promoting self-empowerment, and hopefully together, we can gain a deeper understanding of how alternative options to Oxford’s unaffordable rents, poor housing conditions and lack of control in one’s living condition can make significant changes.

*Oxford Community-Led Housing research project is a new partnership project by Oxford Community Foundation, Community First Oxfordshire and Oxford Community Land Trust. We have been commissioned by Oxford City Council to conduct a research project on how community-led housing could be delivered sustainably in Oxford. Community Led Housing (CLH) is about local people playing a leading and lasting role in solving local housing problems, creating genuinely affordable homes and strong communities in ways that are difficult to achieve through mainstream housing.​​​​

Kirsty Norman, Principal Consultant at the Centre of Applied Archaeology, UCL, will talk about the hundreds of ‘Diaoliu’ in southern Guangdong, describing their history and future. ‘Diaoliu’ are flamboyant, western-influenced houses and towers built by émigrés in the 19th and early 20th centuries as protection against bandits. Four Diaoliu groups have been designated by UNESCO as World Heritage Sites.

To celebrate the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018, Master of St Cross Carole Souter and Alfredo Pérez de Armiñán, President of Patrimonio Nacional, will be talking about the challenges faced by the preservation of heritage, both in Spain and in England.

Patrimonio Nacional is the Spanish entity that manages 19 palaces – among them the Royal Palace of Madrid – and royal foundation monasteries, as well as 135,000 works of art and 21,000 hectares of parks, mountains and gardens. One of the greatest challenges entrusted to its president has been the new Museum of Royal Collections, considered the most important State museum project in recent decades in Spain.

Alfredo Pérez de Armiñán has been president of the Patrimonio Nacional Board since 2015. Before that, he was Deputy General Director of Culture of UNESCO and has held different public positions in the field of Spanish cultural heritage.

Carole Souter is the current Master of St Cross College, and has also held important positions in the field of cultural heritage, as Chief Executive of the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Heritage Lottery Fund, and is currently a Trustee of Historic Royal Palaces and Chair of the Board of Visitors of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

The hall is open from 19.15 for help and computer advice on searching for family history, free tea/coffee, new books avaiable to browse, cd’s to browse.

After a short introduction to the session’s four sub-topics; custom-splitting, Oxford Community-Led Housing’s research project, co-housing and Homemaker Oxford; an interactive discussion will involve participants in the discussion of how we can work with housing providers to enable delivery of alternative housing models like community-led housing in and around Oxford.

The session is designed to engage with those who are housing providers (both small and large scale), or have the potential to provide housing, in and around the city of Oxford. What barriers, if any, do these groups and individuals experience when thinking about or actively engaging in community-led housing projects? Further, what can Oxford Community-Led Housing and similar groups do to break down these barriers and engage with housing deliverers to provide alternative housing models like community-led housing as a viable, sustainable and affordable housing model in Oxford?

Professor Li Ruru: The Cultural Revolution and Me
Tuesday, May 1, 5-7PM Lecture Theatre, China Centre, St Hugh’s College, Oxford

Open and free of charge for all

Supported by: Oxford Chinese Studies Society

2016 witnessed the 50th anniversary of the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution. BBC Chinese invited Professor Li Ruru to write about her own life during that time. Having considered the invitation for a long time, Li finally wrote, from a point of view why she decided to teach a module at Leeds: ‘The Post-Cultural Revolution Literature.’ Based on the BBC article, the talk tells stories about her own experience and people’s lives around her. It also attempts to tease out what the Cultural Revolution meant to the young people at that time and what impact it has had on her generation, a large group of teenagers.

The English translation of the article is available at:
Why I teach ‘Post-Cultural Revolution Chinese Literature’ at a British university by Li Ruru, Translated by Thomas Markham

This event will be of interest to those of you who work on Chinese history, Chinese literature, politics, and education. Professor Li’s talk will last around 40 minutes and we will leave plenty of time for critical dialogues, Q & A and discussions.

About the speaker
Li Ruru is Professor of Chinese Theatre Studies in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds, UK. She has written extensively on Shakespeare performance in China (including a monograph Shashibiya: Staging Shakespeare in China (2003)) and on Chinese theatre (modern/traditional). Her recent work includes Staging China: New Theatres in the Twenty-First Century (ed. 2016), The Soul of Beijing Opera: Theatrical Creativity and Continuity in the Changing World (2010), Translucent Jade: Li Yuru on Stage and in Life ([in Chinese] 2nd edition 2015), and a photographic exhibition Cao Yu (1910-1996): Pioneer of Modern Chinese Drama (2011-16). Li runs traditional song-dance theatre workshops for both students and theatre professionals because she regards regular contact with the theatre as essential to her academic work.

https://www.facebook.com/events/367687450399248/?ti=icl

Geoengineering, the practice of artificially altering the climate, has long been a contentious topic. Its attractiveness to scientists and policy makers who aim to engineer alternative solutions to mitigate the dangers of climate change is often met with economic, social and even ethical concerns.

This seminar looks to explore arguments for and against the implementation of geoengineering. What are the economic, social and environmental implications of proposed schemes? Can we afford not to employ them? Is geoengineering ethical? Does it work and if so, is it possible to reach the targets set out in the Paris agreement without it? These are just some of the topics we hope to investigate.

The talk will he chaired by Professor Rosalind Rickaby. The panel consists of Mr Tim Kruger, James Martin Fellow and Dr Phil Renforth, Lecturer in Engineering Geology at Cardiff University. A further two panellists will be released shortly.
https://www.facebook.com/events/1987490278167428/

Speaker: Carlo van de Weijer

Digitisation has entered the mobility arena. The car has evolved from a mechanical device into a “data producing embedded software platform”, and the internet is quickly linking the supply and demand to effectively fulfil our transport needs. And just like every industry that is confronted with digitisation, the changes come faster than most traditional players can prepare for. Yet, with all unpredictability that comes along with disruption there are some fixed rules that one can prepare for. This makes mobility a real example of an industry in the midst of disruption. Carlo van de Weijer will highlight the most important future trends within mobility, from uberization to self driving vehicles, electrification and the impact on cities and society.

The Hall will be open from 19.15 for refreshments, help and comouter advice for family history searches, new books to browse, cd’s to browse.

阴道之道l 牛津·女权话剧

Our Vaginas, Ourselves l Chinese Vagina Monologues at Oxford
The play will be performed in Chinese with English subtitles.

The Vagina Monologues is an episodic play written by Eve Ensler based on interviews with more than 200 women from different social-cultural backgrounds. Ensler wrote the piece to “celebrate the vagina”.

In 1996, The Vagina Monologues premiered at HERE Arts Center, Off-Off-Broadway in New York, and it was awarded the Obie Award for ‘Best New Play’ that same year. Ensler’s play has since been translated to more than 40 languages, and performed on the stages of over 140 countries.

In 2012, a drama-focused group, BCome, inspired by the Vagina Monologues, created an original episodic play, Our Vagina, Ourselves, based on interviews with Chinese women. The play is around an hour and a half in length, and the scripts .draw from interviews as well as the personal experiences and opinions that BCome members have on social issues.

In Our Vagina, Ourselves, women are not treated as victims, but as active subjects who have autonomy and agency. It therefore proposes an alternative reading of gender violence and integrates anger and grief with joy, satire and humour. It also challenges the marginalization of “the others” and brings forward the rights of LGBTs, and it cares deeply about intersectionality, especially among gender, sexuality and class.

On March 20, 2018, Our Vagina, Ourselves was performed in the lecture theatre of SOAS by a group of performers consisting mainly of oversea Chinese students.

On June 12, 2018, it will be performed again at Oxford!
See you then, when we will tell you all about Our Vaginas, Ourselves.

Organizing bodies：VaChina, OCSS (Oxford Chinese Studies Society), and BPCS (British Postgraduate Network for Chinese Studies)

Acting Crew: VaChina
VaChina, established in September 2017, is a UK-based Chinese feminist network officially registered at SOAS with members from various higher education institutions including in SOAS，LSE，Oxford，Cambridge，UCL，UAL, and Essex. VaChina aims to create a supportive and friendly environment for all gender and sexualities, advocates for justice within the field of gender, and promotes gender equality via different means, including theatre.

Scripts ：BCome
Founded in 2012, BCome is a feminist group based in Beijing. Led by the youth, the BCome group initiates campaigns for women’s rights and against gender-based violences.

Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/358499304639795/
Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/our-vagina-ourselves-at-oxford-tickets-45627591354?aff=efbeventtix

Humans have been creating figurative art for at least 40,000 years. Professor Gillian Morriss-Kay, Chairman of the Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, will present ideas about the evolutionary changes in perception that led to the origin and flowering of this aspect of human behaviour and will consider its practical significance.

St Cross Special Ethics Seminar. The standard view in evolutionary anthropology is that human morality originated as an adaptation for solving problems of social living that early humans faced in the Pleistocene. This descriptive claim has been invoked to support the normative thesis of Ethical Pluralism (EP): the view that there is more than one valid morality. The logic is that if the justifiability of a moral system depends on how well it performs certain social functions, and if different human cultural ecologies call for different functional moralities, then at least a moderate version of EP may be true. In this paper, we show that this simple evolutionary defense of EP fails because there is a yawning gap between a morality’s validity and its success in “solving problems of social living,” even if these functional solutions are not tied to effects on reproductive fitness. Although morality originated as an adaptation to solve certain problems of social living, it has since come to encompass features that are not explainable in any functionalist terms. We go on to construct a richer evolutionary argument for EP, one that draws upon two non-adaptive concepts from evolutionary biology: (1) the dynamic of plasticity paired with later rigidity in individual moral development, and (2) path-dependent constraints on the evolution of moral systems in which individual moral development occurs. Taken together, these two phenomena suggest that there is more than one way of flourishing for human beings—and if conduciveness to flourishing or wellbeing is one plausible criterion for evaluating moralities, then it is likely that there is more than one valid morality. Finally, we examine the implications of this discussion for ideal moral theory. We conclude that even if there were only one uniquely valid moral theory, this would still be compatible with EP, given path-dependent constraints on the evolution of moralities.