Now in its seventh year, St Hilda’s College Gender Equality Festival features speakers, workshops, debates, film screenings and a comedy night.

Student, blogger, part-time model and eco-fashion-expert, and winner of the Vogue Talent Contest for Young Writers Rosalind Jana, joins the Festival on 22 February. Rosalind will discuss her forthcoming book ‘Notes on Being Teenage’ and the issues it covers, from the serious to the slightly-less-so.

As a computational social science researcher, Ruth García-Gavilanes interested in understanding online footprints, utilizing/developing computational human behaviour from methods and leveraging big data. In this seminar she will present two case studies in this field: a) a study of how one’s action on Twitter (e.g., deciding when to post messages) is linked to one’s culture (e.g., country’s Pace of Life) and b) a case study of how the impact and locale play a role in the collective attention to articles in Wikipedia related to aircraft incidents and accidents (attention is measured as publication priority, maximum number of views and attention decay).

The introductory talk at the third annual Merton Equality Conversation will be given by Peter Tatchell.

This will be followed by a discussion and Q&A, with a panel including:
Helen Charlesworth, Vice-Chair of the University’s LGBT Advisory Group;
Vivian Holmes, OUSU LGBTQ Campaign Chair; and
Megan Delahunty-Light, Merton JCR LGBTQ Representative

Sarah Boseley, James Randerson and Dr Hannah Devlin write about health, the environment and science for the Guardian. How do you write for the general public without dumbing down?

Sarah Boseley is the health editor of the Guardian. She has won a number of awards for her work on HIV/Aids in Africa, including the One World Media world (twice) and the European section of the Lorenzo Natali prize, awarded by the European commission. She is the author of The Shape We’re In: How Junk Food and Diets Are Shortening Our Lives, published by Guardian Faber.

James Randerson is assistant national news editor for the Guardian. He has particular responsibility for environment, science and technology news. He was previously the paper’s science correspondent.

Dr Hannah Devlin is the Guardian’s science correspondent, having previously been science editor of the Times. She has a PhD in biomedical imaging from Wolfson College, Oxford.

The event will start at 5.45pm and will finish by 7.00pm. To register your interest, please email events@lmh.ox.ac.uk.

An introductory talk of about twenty minutes, followed by Q&As, and an hour or so’s discussion. All welcome. No need to book.

Three high-profile SPC alumni return to their college to discuss the impending EU Referendum in a forum chaired by the Master, Mark Damazer CBE.

Join the Editor of the Sunday Times, Martin Ivens (BA Modern History – 1977), the Deputy Editor of the New Statesman, Helen Lewis (BA English – 2001), and the BBC’s Political Correspondent Ben Wright (BA Modern History – 1996) for a panel discussion in which they will cut through the rhetoric surrounding this most controversial of issues in contemporary British politics, and who will then face your questions.

“Alternative Realities and New Perspectives on Family Violence”

Panel Discussion 2:

Professor Marianne Hester, Centre for Gender and Violence Research, Bristol University – “Intimate Partner Violence in LGBTQ Relationships – What’s Gender Got To Do with It?”

Professor Rachel Condry, Associate Professor of Criminology, Oxford University – “Making Sense of Adolescent to Parent Violence”

Dr Carlene Firmin, Head of the MsUnderstood Partnership and Senior Research Fellow at Bedfordshire University – “Contextual Dimensions of Abuse in Young People’s Relationships”

Welcome to Future Debates, a series of public events supported by the British Science Association.

A genome is an entire set of DNA; all the instructions for making every part of a living thing. Research into our genomes could improve our understanding of diseases, cancers and passing on certain traits. The application of this research through genomic medicine is at the cutting edge of science. There’s large potential for the technology to help us create new treatments and preventative approaches.

Someone’s genome can explain lots of things about them, and we don’t yet understand all of what the genetic code means. Genome data is being collected from a group of patients with rare diseases and cancers across the UK, as part of the Genomics England 100,000 Genomes Project. This information needs to be collected and stored securely, interpreted by experts and viewed in a way that protects the donor’s identity. There have been discussions among scientists about the implications of genomic medicine for privacy and the NHS, and the British Science Association believes that it is vital to open that conversation up to the public.

Come and join our panel of scientists and other experts to discuss who should have access to this data. Should genomic data be used outside medicine? Should private companies share any profits they make from genomic data with participants? Does the right to privacy outweigh the societal benefit of genomic research?

Doors open from 6.00 pm, and the debate will run from 6.30 pm until 8.00 pm.

Future Debates events are part of the British Science Association’s work to make science a fundamental part of British society and culture. We want to empower many more people – not just scientists – to constructively engage in debates over the applications and implications of science in their lives, their local economy and the UK’s future.

Follow us on twitter @LivingWellOx @HumanGeneticsOx @BritSciAssoc and use the event hashtag #FutureDebates

A lively panel discussion exploring women’s ever changing roles and struggle for equality, featuring speakers Professor Ngaire Woods, Dr Dana Mills, Dr Joanna Williams and Helen Pike.

A discussion with photographer Alison Baskerville and curator Brigitte Lardinois that will consider women as photographers and photographic subjects, and the effects of social and technological change on portrait photography over the last 100 years.

Research psychologist Peter Etchells and author of ‘Death by Video Game’, Simon Parker, discuss the positive and negative effects of gaming.

Join Oxford Festival of the Arts at the prestigious and historic Oxford Union for an evening of top class debating that will tackle one of this year’s key issues: the UK’s immigration policy.

Ludo, snakes & ladders and draughts are all popular pastimes, but in the past couple of decades a new generation of board games from designers with backgrounds in maths and science has begun to break the Monopoly monopoly. Perhaps the most successful of these is multi award winning Reiner Knizia, who joins mathematician Katie Steckles and board game lover Quentin Cooper to discuss how you develop a game which is easy to learn, hard to master and fun to play time after time. With a chance to have a go at some of Reiner’s latest creations and other top games afterwards.

Book here: http://www.oxfordshiresciencefestival.com/tuesday.html

‘Gene-editing’ sounds like science fiction, but today it is an emerging reality. This raises hope for treating medical problems, but also opens ethical quandaries about equality, privacy, and personal freedom. Discuss these questions with a panel of experts including geneticist Andy Greenfield, science fiction author Paul McAuley and science policy advisor Elizabeth Bohm. Lisa Melton, Senior News Editor at Nature Biotechnology, will moderate the event, with Ben Davies, Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, presenting technical background.

Book here: http://www.oxfordshiresciencefestival.com/wednesday.html

The question of how to educate the next generation has always been fraught with the anxieties of the age – so what do our current approaches reveal about our own anxieties? Discover the answer to this and more at our lively panel discussion.

Join us for a sensational evening of cabaret – an alchemy of acts delivered by Science Oxford’s network of creative science performers. If you love science, stage and stand up, you’ll be in your element with our periodic table-themed cabaret including science presenter and geek songstress Helen Arney and compered by award-winning science communicator Jamie Gallagher. See the everyday elements that make up the world around us in a new light, watch in disbelief as gold is created before your eyes, and learn about their origins and how they behave inside our bodies. Get your tickets now – once they are gone they argon!

With a bruising new leadership contest underway and member set against member, Labour looks to be on the verge of splitting. Who is to blame? Would British politics benefit from a reconfiguration? And what other reforms does the system need in the wake of the Brexit vote?
John McTernan, commentator and former Political Secretary to Tony Blair
Isabel Hardman, Assistant Editor of The Spectator
Emily Jones, Associate Professor in Public Policy, Blavatnik School of Government (chair)
Tim Bale, Professor of Politics, Queen Mary, University of London
Anthony Barnett, writer and founder of the openDemocracy website

Haydar Zaki is outreach officer for the Quilliam Foundation and works extensively on projects that aim to promote values integral to Quilliam’s ethos, such as universal human rights.

His outreach work primarily involves working with universities and university societies. This includes establishing Quilliam university societies with students dedicated to upholding values of human rights and freedom of speech, through pro-freedom of speech campaigns such as #Right2Debate campaign. All university outreach is conducted with the intended aim of both keeping freedom of speech in universities intact, and challenging extremist narratives through an empowered student community.

He has participated in many outreach events at universities and schools with his main area of expertise being the role ideology plays in influencing the psychological outlook of an individual and their environment. He is also an avid campaigner for global democracy, social justice, secular democracy in Iraq and ending intra-Muslim discrimination.

This talk will discuss the role of identity politics and some of the dangers it poses.

Distinguished Speaker Seminar: Michael Bloomberg
Michael Bloomberg in conversation with Peter Tufano
Thursday 17 November 2016, 5.45 – 6.45pm

Oxford Saïd is excited to announce that Michael R. Bloomberg, Founder of Bloomberg LP and former Mayor of New York City, will be speaking at the School, on Thursday 17 November.
We are extremely fortunate that Mr Bloomberg will be visiting Oxford and anticipate this event will sell out very quickly. Registration is essential so please use the ‘Book now’ link above to confirm your attendance at your earliest convenience.

About the speaker
Michael R. Bloomberg is the founder of Bloomberg LP, philanthropist, UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change, World Health Organization Global Ambassador for Noncommunicable Diseases, and three-term mayor of New York City.
He is an entrepreneur and philanthropist who served as mayor of New York City from 2002-2013 after leading the company he started in 1981 for 20 years. Since leaving City Hall, he has resumed leadership of Bloomberg LP.
A lifelong philanthropist, Bloomberg founded Bloomberg Philanthropies, which focuses on five main areas: public health, education, the environment, the arts, and government innovation. He also leads a number of bi-partisan coalitions on urgent issues, including climate change, illegal guns, immigration reform, and infrastructure investment.

Registration
Please remember that registration is required to attend this event. The seminar is open for anyone to attend and will take place at Saïd Business School followed by a short networking drinks reception until around 7.30pm.

Please note that filming, live streaming and photography will be taking place during this event. By entering and participating you are giving your permission to be recorded and for the School to us the media in future.

Martin Barker (Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at Aberystwyth University, Director of the Global Hobbit Project) will be visiting Oxford to discuss the results of the landmark Global Hobbit Project, a research initiative examining the popular reception of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Film trilogy.

Synopsis:
“Tolkien aficionados may have disagreed somewhat among themselves about the value and achievements of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. But any frustrations – or celebrations – over the 2001-3 films were nothing compared to the overwhelming sense of let-down occasioned by the Hobbit trilogy. But your disappointments are, I am afraid, grist to the mill of an audience researcher like me. In 2014 I led a consortium of researchers in 46 countries across the world, to gather responses to Peter Jackson’s second trilogy. We managed to attract just over 36,000 completions of our questionnaire. Of course, when we conceived and planned the project, we couldn’t know what the films would be like, or what range of responses and debates they might elicit. In this presentation I will (briefly) explain why and how we carried out the research, and offer some of its major findings. These can act, I hope, as a kind of mirror to the depths, and also the significance, of the sense of disappointment experienced by even the most hopeful and forgiving viewers. And they open an important agenda about the changing role of ‘fantasy’ in our contemporary culture.”

For the final event in our series, we’re bringing together a panel of experts to discuss approaches to tackling inequality. Each panellist will draw on their own research and experience to put forward a response to the question of how to tackle inequality and its effects, before we open up to a wider discussion, with questions from the audience.

Speakers:

* Professor Brian Nolan, Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Inequality and Prosperity (Chair)
* Professor Sir Paul Collier, Co-Director, Oxford Institute for Global Economic Development, Oxford Martin School and Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Blavatnik School of Government
* Professor Sandy Fredman, Co-Director, Oxford Martin Programme on Human Rights for Future Generations
* Professor John Goldthorpe, Emeritus Fellow, Nuffield College
* Professor Simonetta Manfredi, Professor in Equality and Diversity Management and Director, Centre for Diversity Policy Research & Practice, Oxford Brookes University

A twenty minute talk to introduce the topic, followed by Q&As and about an hour’s discussion. All welcome.

Following the Brexit vote on 23 June 2016 and the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States of America, there has been a rise in reported hate crime, often racially-orientated, in Britain and the USA.

But what role did identity politics play in the Brexit referendum outcome and how will this relatively new phenomenon shape politics in 2017 and beyond?

Does it signal that Europe and North America are swerving away from multiculturalism, and if so, what does this mean?

On the one hand some commentators argue that almost all political ideas and activity can be viewed through the lens of identity, whereas others posit that the entire topic is a distraction and we should instead focus on core economic and social issues such as jobs and housing.

Join the Oxford Fabian Society to discuss these important issues and to shape what we do about it.

Our panel:

1. Nesrine Malik writes for a number of publications including The Guardian and is a regular broadcaster.

2. Amina Gichinga stood as a candidate in the May 2016 elections in the London Borough of Newham.

3. Ella Whelan is assistant editor at Spiked and co-convenor of spiked’s campaign Invoke Article 50 NOW!

Featuring Professor Glen O’Hara (Oxford Brookes) and more TBC.

Dr John Reader launches his new book, published by Palgrave Macmillan – Theology and New Materialism: Spaces of Faithful Dissent. A panel presentation will preface a wider debate following chapters in the book which include not only issues of human agency and transcendence, but also the search for a New Enlightenment and practical issues of politics, aesthetics and technology.

The first synthetic virus self-replicated in 2002. Its DNA molecules were created in a laboratory, using genetic information copied from nature. In 2016 an international project, the Human Genome Project – Write, was launched to synthesise and recode entire human genomes.
Join a panel to discuss biosecurity and ethics, science fiction, practical limits and
possible futures related to our species.

Marianne Talbot is a bioethicist and Director of Studies in Philosophy at the University
of Oxford Department for Continuing Education.
Piers Millett is a Senior Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, where he
focuses on pandemic and deliberate disease and the implications of biotechnology.
Justina Robson is a science fiction author. Her novel Natural History, was reviewed by The Guardian: “clarity of vision now demonstrates itself as her major asset, making her one of the very best of the new British hard SF writers.”

Join us for the first in Blackwell’s free summer series of lunchtime events, where we will be joined by Greg Garrett author of ‘Living with the Living Dead’.
The zombie apocalypse is one of the most prominent narratives of the post 9/11 West, represented by popular movies, TV shows, games, apps, activities, and material culture. Greg explores why stories about the living dead serve a variety of functions for consumers and explains how representations of Death and the walking dead have appeared in other times of great stress and danger, including the Middle Ages and World War One.
Greg Garrett blogs on books, culture, religion, politics, travel, and food for The Huffington Post. He is the author or co-author of twenty books and one of America’s leading authorities on religion and culture.

Is it time to decolonise the curriculum?

The demand to decolonise education is growing ever louder. From Rhodes Must Fall in South Africa, and here in Oxford, to the “Why is my curriculum so white?” campaign at University College London, there is a call to make school and university curricula more representative and diverse. In January this year, students and academics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London hit the headlines with their campaign to Decolonise Our Minds because of newspaper reports that this would mean dropping Plato, Locke and Kant from the Philosophy syllabus. Meanwhile, the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford announced a major shakeup to its curriculum last month, as undergraduates will now have to sit a compulsory paper on non-British, non-European, history.

Are these sensible steps towards a more inclusive and diverse educational system, or an attempt to rewrite history around contemporary obsessions with identity and culture? Does the focus on recognising excluded voices serve to make a more inclusive educational system, or does the demand to decolonise risk reflecting back to students their own cultural identity rather than taking them beyond their existing cultural and intellectual horizons?

Speakers:

Rekgotsofetse (Kgotsi) Chikane is National President of InkuluFreeHeid, a non-partisan youth-led organisation that seeks to deepen democracy in South Africa. He is a former Mandela Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, and a recent YALI Mandela Washington Fellow, and a founding member of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign in South Africa.

Dr Cheryl Hudson is Lecturer in American History at the University of Liverpool. She was formerly the Academic Programme Director at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford and was an Associate of the Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Kent, 2015-16. She has taught at Oxford, Sheffield, Coventry, Vanderbilt and Sussex. She is the author of, amongst other things, A Century of Academic Freedom (2016).

Professor Pekka Hämäläinen is Rhodes Professor of American History at the University of Oxford, and a fellow of St Catherine’s College, Oxford. He is a historian of early and nineteenth-century North America, specialising in indigenous, colonial, imperial, environmental, and borderlands history. His book, The Comanche Empire (Yale, 2008), received twelve awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the Merle Curti Award, and the Caughey Prize and has been translated into Spanish and French.
Kenan Malik is a writer, lecturer and broadcaster. He has presented Analysis, on BBC Radio 4, and Nightwaves, on BBC Radio 3, and was a regular panelist on BBC Radio 4’s The Moral Maze. Kenan is the author of numerous books, including Multiculturalism and its Discontents (Seagull, 2013), From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and its Legacy (Atlantic, 2009 ), Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate (Oneworld, 2008), and The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society (Palgrave, 1996). His latest book is The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics (2014).

Arts Festival website details: http://www.artsfestivaloxford.org/whats-on/debates-and-discussions/the-education-debate

A limited number of free tickets available – email jpanton@mcsoxford.org to reserve.

What does it mean to be a feminist? Who can be a feminist? And is there a right and wrong way of doing it?

Join us on a unique journey through feminist history, adding your voice as we discuss key moments in literature, art, politics, music, sport, and science to develop our understanding of feminism.

You’ll discover knowledge you didn’t realise you had as we join together the pieces of feminist history and women’s achievements in this fun, interactive workshop.

We will identify different stages and criticisms of feminism and consider intersections with race, LGBTIQ, age, and disability politics. We look for silences and unacknowledged voices, and consider the privileges and biases in our own perspectives.