The private resources of Blenheim Palace are drawn upon to afford a new and refreshing insight into this remarkable man. We examine the breadth of talent, achievement and personality of our “Greatest Briton”: soldier, politician, statesman, painter, writer, orator, family man – and bricklayer!

Blackwell’s are delighted to be joined by William Davies, who will be discussing his new book, ‘Nervous States’.

Why do we no longer trust experts, facts and statistics?

Why has politics become so fractious and warlike?

What caused the populist political upheavals of recent years?

How can the history of ideas help us understand our present?

In this bold and far-reaching exploration of our new political landscape, William Davies reveals how feelings have come to reshape our world. Drawing deep on history, philosophy, psychology and economics, he shows how some of the fundamental assumptions that defined the modern world have dissolved. With advances in science and medicine, the division between mind and body is no longer so clear-cut. The spread of digital and military technology has left us not quite at war nor exactly at peace. In the murky new space between mind and body, between war and peace, lie nervous states: with all of us relying increasingly on feeling rather than fact.

In a book of profound insight and astonishing breadth, William Davies reveals the origins of this new political reality. Nervous States is a compelling and essential guide to the turbulent times we are living through.

William Davies is a Reader in Political Economy at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is also Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Centre. His work focuses on the history of ideas and how expert knowledge shapes politics and society today. William has also written for The Guardian, The New Statesman, London Review of Books, New Left Review, openDemocracy, The New York Times and The Atlantic.

Tickets cost £5. Doors will open at 6:45pm, when there will be a bar selling a range of drinks until 7pm. For all enquiries please email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333623.

Fake news spread online is a clear danger to democratic politics. One aspect of that danger is obvious: it spreads misinformation. But other aspects, less often discussed, is that it also spreads confusion, undermines trust and encourages us to live in a kind of epistemic bad faith. In this talk, I will argue that it is this last aspect that captures the most pernicious effect of fake news and related propaganda. In particular, I’ll argue that its effectiveness is due in part to a curious blindness on the part of many users of social media: a kind of semantic blindness to the function of their online communicative acts. This blindness makes us not only vulnerable to manipulation to those with a better understanding of the semantic character of online communication, it indirectly undermines the political value of truth—or more exactly, the pursuit of truth, by diminishing confidence in the institutions that protect and encourage that value.

Blackwell’s are delighted to be joined by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown who will be discussing her latest book ‘In Defence of Political Correctness’.

Individual rights cannot always take precedence over collective, social responsibility. Without self-moderation, parks, streets, school yards, public transport, waiting rooms, shops and restaurants would turn into bear pits. Most citizens understand that. Some, however, seem determined to cause disorder in the name of free speech. This book traces the history of political correctness in the US and UK and forcefully argues that, in spite of many failures, this movement has made both countries more civilised and equal.

About the speaker:
Georgia Cole is the Margaret Anstee Research Fellow at the Margaret Anstee Centre for Global Studies, Newnham College, University of Cambridge. Until September 2018 she was the Joyce Pearce Junior Research Fellow in Development Studies at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford having completed her DPhil in International Development at the Oxford Department of International Development in 2016 on the topic of ‘Beyond the Politics of Labelling: Exploring the Cessation Clauses for Rwandan and Eritrean Refugees through Semiotics’.

Her research during the Joyce Pearce Junior Research Fellowship explored the role and value of refugee status according to displaced communities themselves. In response to the observation that refugee status is continually evolving to suit States, rather than refugees, it asked what the continuing ‘value’ of refugee status is for those individuals seeking protection, and durable solutions in particular. It involved ethnographic, multi-sited fieldwork, primarily with displaced Eritreans, to explore their expectations and experiences of refugee status and alternative pathways to protection.

She taught on courses at the Refugee Studies Centre and previously taught at the Department of Geography at the University of Oxford and as a Research and Teaching Fellow at the College of Arts and Social Sciences in Eritrea. She was a co-convener of the Oxford Central Africa Forum, and previously served as Co-Editor in Chief of the Oxford Monitor of Forced Migration. She is currently the Book Review Editor of the Journal of Refugee Studies.

She holds an MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from Oxford, and a BA (Hons) in Geography from Trinity College, Cambridge.

Talk followed by questions and discussion. This is part of a series of eight meetings on Thursday evenings, each one beginning at 7:30 and ending at 9pm.

11 October
The right to say untrue and damaging things
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

18 October
Flat earth: a Marxist critique
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

25 October
Tithe, timber, and the persistence of the ancien régime
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

1 November
The dream of human life: art in the Italian Renaissance
Oxford Town Hall, St Aldates

8 November
Antisemitism: more geese than swans
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

15 November
Marcus Aurelius and the self-help movement
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

22 November
Hegelian contradiction and prime numbers
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

29 November
Aleksandr Bogdanov (1873–1928) and the general science of organization
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

Join us at Magdalen College for an enlightening evening where we challenge the more prevalent motives behind entrepreneurship to understand how business can be used to empower women around the world. We will explore the journeys 3 brave women have taken to make a social impact through their work and improve the lives of women in Tunisia, Rwanda and India.

Register using the following link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/women-in-social-entrepreneurship-tickets-51255935884

This is a joint lecture with The Rockefeller Foundation Economic Council on Planetary Health at the Oxford Martin School

Under the Paris Agreement, adopted in December 2015, 197 countries agreed to limit the rise in global average temperature to “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C. On 8 October the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will present its special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C and strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Professor Myles Allen, one of the report’s lead authors and Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Climate Pollutants, will discuss the findings of the paper and the implication this has on the implementation of the Paris Agreement.

About the speaker:
Appointed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Pierre Krähenbühl became Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) on 30 March 2014. As Commissioner-General, he serves at the level of Under-Secretary-General, based in East-Jerusalem. He was confirmed for a second three-year term, from April 2017.

A Swiss national born in 1966, Mr. Krähenbühl has 27 years of experience in humanitarian, human rights and development work. He has led UNRWA and its 30,000 staff, at a time of great pressure on the Palestine refugee community resulting from unresolved conflicts and acute needs, particularly in the West Bank, Gaza and Syria: “I have discovered in UNRWA one of the most outstanding and innovative humanitarian organizations, able to deliver education, health-care, emergency and other services to millions of people in some of the most polarized environments of the Middle East,” said Mr. Krähenbühl.

Prior to joining UNRWA, he served as Director of Operations at the International Committee of the Red Cross from July 2002 to January 2014, responsible for the conduct, management and supervision of 12,000 ICRC staff working in 80 countries.

Feeling in Seeing : Embodiment, Affect & Visual Politics (when News are Fake)
Manos Tsakiris, Lab of Action & Body, Dep of Psychology, Royal Holloway & The Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, University of London

Photography mediates our experience of the world, especially in a culture powered by images at an unprecedented level. Social media, alternative facts, debates about post-truth and fake news make our negotiation between what is real or fake challenging. Beyond or perhaps before our cognitive judgments about images, we respond and relate to visual culture in visceral, embodied ways. We ran a series of experiments to understand how our visceral responses, as the basis of subjective feelings, influence our relation and response to photojournalistic images. First, participants saw a series of photojournalistic images, while we measured their neurophysiological (heartrate acceleration and heartbeat-evoked potentials) and affective arousal. Next, they were informed they would see the same images again and judge whether the images were real (i.e. photos capturing an event as it happened depicting genuine emotions) or fake. Thereby we were able to assess the relation between levels of neurophysiological and affective arousal and the participants’ cognitive judgements of realness. Our findings over several experiments highlight the crucial role that ‘feeling in seeing’ plays as in determining our beliefs about realness in a political culture powered by images. The multidisciplinary approach that we propose compliments the visual turn in global politics and the emotional turn in history as we are trying to figure out who we are when we look at and being moved by images.

The esteemed ceramicist Claudia Clare is an artist who uses this traditionally domestic medium to present social commentary, often on issues of trauma, sexuality, and revolution. Having been subjected to censorship by public art institutions, Claudia joins us to speak not only about her work but also about the fight against bureaucracy and institutional politics. www.claudiaclare.co.uk

This talk is part of the FAR (Fine Art Research) Guest Lecture series, supported by the School of Arts at Oxford Brookes University. All talks are free to attend, and everyone is welcome to join us. Booking is essential: www.eventbrite.com/e/artists-talk-claudia-clare-subversive-ceramics-tickets-50921796464

Asylum seekers, refugees, and undocumented migrants often draw attention to the global colonial histories which give context to their present situation. And yet these connections are rarely made by academics. This presentation explores aspects of my recent book ‘Asylum After Empire: Postcolonial Legacies in the Politics of Asylum Seeking’. The aim of the book is to begin theorising asylum policy within the context of such histories; to make sense of contemporary public policy developments on asylum within the context of histories of colonialism. The book is a historical sociology which brings together postcolonial and decolonial theories on the hierarchical ordering of human beings, troubling the supposedly universal category of ‘man’ within the epistemological framework of ‘modernity’, and naming the response of the British state (which acts as the case study) to contemporary asylum seekers as an example of the coloniality of power. It is an attempt to make sense of the dehumanisation of asylum seekers not as racism, but as enmeshed within interconnected histories -of ideas of distinct geographically located ‘races’, of human beings as hierarchy organised in relation to civilization, and of colonial power relations. In this sense, I am taking as my starting point the sophisticated analyses of forced migrants and sans-papiers and elaborating their conclusions with academic study.

The Paris Agreement, adopted in December 2015, was a seminal moment in the world’s struggle to fight climate change. 197 countries agreed to limit the rise in global average temperature to “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C. But Christiana, who led those global climate negotiations as Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, says the climate agreement was just a staging post in what remains a long, hard process. So what are the next steps?

This talk is co-hosted by the Oxford Martin School, University College & Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, and is a continuation of the Trinity Term ‘Series Science and Populism: from evidence to narrative’

National governments may have less immediate power than they used to but, in matters large and small, someone somewhere often has to make a decision that will affect many lives. The Ministers making those decisions are human too, and what we know about how science works in government can tell us a lot about its place in wider public debates. Making decisions today, based on evidence from the past, in order to change the future: what could possibly go wrong?

Professor Denis Galligan, Emeritus Professor of Socio-Legal Studies, will deliver the fourth Max Watson Annual Lecture on the constitutional consequences of the rise in populist movements around the world.

The following day a workshop will be held to further explore the themes raised.

The Lady English Lecture Series has been exploring different aspects of equality since 2013. As our 125th Anniversary year draws to a close, we will be hosting a panel discussion on ‘The Future of Equality: Global Perspectives’. Helping us to assess the global challenges to equality and consider possible solutions, our distinguished panellists are Professor Ian Goldin, director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Technological and Economic Change; Professor Sudhir Anand, Emeritus Professor of Economics at Oxford and Research Director of the Global Equity Initiative at Harvard University; and Lucy Lake, CEO of Camfed (Campaign for the Education of Women).

Talk followed by questions and discussion. This is part of a series of eight meetings on Thursday evenings, each one beginning at 7:30 and ending at 9pm.

11 October
The right to say untrue and damaging things
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

18 October
Flat earth: a Marxist critique
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

25 October
Tithe, timber, and the persistence of the ancien régime
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

1 November
The dream of human life: art in the Italian Renaissance
Oxford Town Hall, St Aldates

8 November
Antisemitism: more geese than swans
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

15 November
Marcus Aurelius and the self-help movement
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

22 November
Hegelian contradiction and prime numbers
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

29 November
Aleksandr Bogdanov (1873–1928) and the general science of organization
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

As part of the Surgical Grand Rounds lecture series hosted by the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, Professor Giles Toogood (Professor of Hepatobiliary Surgery at Leeds University) will talk about combining sport and surgery, and the advances in hepatobiliary surgery.

First World War stories rarely appeared in British war comics published after the Second World War. This was not the case during the war and interwar period, though: story papers, precursors to comics, engaged with the war in detail. Dr. David Budgen (University of Kent) tracks comic book engagement with the conflict from these first ventures through to recent centenary commemorations.

In recent years, several developing countries have adopted regulatory laws to remain relevant in an increasingly globalized world. On the Indian Subcontinent, the entire Indian and Pakistani legal systems – their Constitutions and Codes of Civil and Criminal Procedure – are legal transplants, since they are either modelled on British Laws (Constitutions are modelled on the Government of India Act 1935) or were introduced by the British.

In the run up to joining the World Trade Organization, and as part of World Bank 2nd generation reforms, both India and Pakistan began to update their regulatory infrastructure, including laws regulating financial and capital markets, insurance, telecommunication, and electricity. The majority of these laws were modelled on western regulatory laws, yet the manner and extent to which these laws were adopted – and adapted – in the two countries was remarkably different, and led to very different outcomes. Whilst policymakers in both countries are aware that in order to succeed, adopted laws must be compatible with the context for which they are intended, there is less clarity as to how this compatibility is achieved.

In this workshop, scholars will discuss the experience of India and Pakistan to consider how the interplay of institutions can affect the legitimacy, compatibility, and ultimate success of these transplanted laws in the adopting countries.

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

Amber Darr, Senior fellow, Centre for Law, Economics and Society, University College London

This talk is co-hosted by the Oxford Martin School, University College & Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, and is a continuation of the Trinity Term Series ‘Science and Populism: from evidence to narrative’.

Dr Patrick Vallance FRS FMedSci FRCP is Government Chief Scientific Adviser (GCSA) and Head of the Government Science and Engineering (GSE) profession.

Oxford Kurdish Association invite you to a panel discussion about the current situation in the Kurdish Syrian region of Afrin.

A panel of speakers will discuss the background of the occupation of the Kurdish city of Afrin in Syria and the plight of Kurdish civilians under the rule of the Turkey-backed militants.

Speakers:
Margaret Owen OBE: International human rights lawyer
Seevan Saeed: Associate Professor, Shaanxi Normal University
Sait Keskin: PhD Candidate, Exeter University

All are welcome to attend but registration is required.

Sunday, 25th November 2018
11am – 6.15pm (Registration starts at 10.30am)
Chakrabarti Lecture Theatre & JHB207,
John Henry Brookes Building, Headington Campus, Oxford Brookes University, Headington Road, Oxford OX3 0BP

“What does it mean to research through creative practice?”

Keynote Speaker: Dr Geof Hill (Birmingham City University)
www.bcu.ac.uk/research/-centres-of-excellence/centre-for-research-in-education/people/geof-hill

To have a look at the schedule and book your ticket, please visit: ars2018.eventbrite.co.uk

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Delegate/Attendance fee: £30 / Early Bird Tickets (£20) are available until 18th November – includes lunch & refreshments

We’ll be posting speaker information leading up to the event so keep an eye out for our Facebook event page: www.facebook.com/events/455606768180452

This event is supported by the School of Arts at Oxford Brookes University and the Oxford City Council.

For a digital copy of the event booklet and more information please contact: info@ca-ru.org

We look forward to seeing you there!

CARU Conference Team
Follow us on social media: @CARUpage

Featuring a range of speakers and artists, and a showing of the film ‘The Proud Valley’.

Blackwell’s are delighted to be hosting a very special event with Tom Kibasi on Prosperity and Justice: A Plan for the New Economy. The Final Report of the IPPR Commission on Economic Justice.

The UK economy is broken. It no longer provides rising living standards for the majority. Young people face an increasingly insecure future. The gap between rich and poor areas is widening. Meanwhile the rise of giant digital companies, the advance of automation, and catastrophic environmental degradation challenge the very foundations of our economic model.

This important book analyses these profound challenges and sets out a bold vision for change. The report of a group of leading figures from across British society, it explains how the deep weaknesses of the UK economy reflect profound imbalances of economic power. Its radical policy agenda for the 2020s includes new missions to drive productivity and innovation, an overhaul of our financial system, and reforms to improve wages, job quality and the redistribution of wealth.

Ten years after the financial crisis, as the UK confronts the challenge of Brexit, this is an urgent and compelling account of the reforms needed to build a new economy of prosperity, justice and environmental sustainability. It will set the terms of political and economic debate for years to come

Tom Kibasi is Director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, Chair of the IPPR Commission on Economic Justice and a principal author and editor of the Commission’s final report, ‘Prosperity and Justice: A Plan for the New Economy’. Under Tom’s leadership, IPPR has had significant impact in areas ranging from the real choices on Brexit, recasting the relationship between tech and society, and the funding and reform of the health and care system. Prior to joining IPPR, Tom spent more than a decade at McKinsey and Company, where he was a partner and held leadership roles in the healthcare practice in both London and New York. Tom helped government institutions with healthcare reform across a dozen countries in five continents and served international institutions, such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, and international foundations including the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Tickets cost £5. The doors will open at 6:45pm where there will be a bar with a selection of drinks to purchase until 7pm. For all enquiries please email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333623.

Professor Ian Goldin, Director of Oxford Martin Programme on Technological and Economic Change, will identify the economic impact of migration and examine how the contribution that migrants make has been overwhelmed by the politics. As Chair of the www.core-econ.org initiative to reform economics, Ian will locate the economics of migration within the broader need to reform economics.

Talk followed by questions and discussion. All welcome.

This is the first of a series of weekly talks. The full list is:

Brexit: archaic techniques of ecstasy
Thursday 17 January: 7:30pm–9:00pm
Wesley Memorial Church (New Inn Hall St)

Shamanism: taking back control
Thursday 24 January: 7:30pm–9:00pm
Wesley Memorial Church (New Inn Hall St)

Tithe, timber, and the persistence of the ancien régime
Thursday 31 January: 7:30pm–9:00pm
Oxford Town Hall (St Aldates)

Hegelian dialectics and the prime numbers (part 2)
Thursday 7 February: 7:30pm–9:00pm
Wesley Memorial Church (New Inn Hall St)

Christopher Caudwell (1907–1937) and ‘the sources of poetry’
Thursday 14 February: 7:30pm–9:00pm
Wesley Memorial Church (New Inn Hall St)

Television: remote control
Thursday 21 February: 7:30pm–9:00pm
Wesley Memorial Church (New Inn Hall St)

Fascism and populism: can you spot the difference?
Thursday 28 February: 7:30pm–9:00pm
Wesley Memorial Church (New Inn Hall St)

The epos of everyday life
Thursday 7 March: 7:30pm–9:00pm
Wesley Memorial Church (New Inn Hall St)

Blackwell’s are delighted to be hosting Roger Riddell for the launch of his latest book and debut novel Tapestries of Difference.

Tapestries of Difference is a gripping love story starting and ending in contemporary London but which journeys to Africa, where it captures the alluring beauty and harshness of today’s Zimbabwe and uncovers deceptions about the past which in all other circumstances ought to be forgotten. It is also a tale of both personal identity and what it means to be British today as the country confronts issues of faith and religion, race and ethnicity as it strives to weave a tapestry of core values to bind people together.

Roger Riddell lived in Zimbabwe for many years, chairing the first Presidential Economic Commission after Independence in 1980. After returning to England, Roger worked at the Overseas Development Institute before becoming a Director of Oxford Policy Management to which he is still affiliated. From 1999 to 2003 he was the International Director of Christian Aid. He has published widely on Zimbabwean and wider development issues. His most recent academic book, Does Foreign Aid Really Work? (Oxford University Press, 2008), has sold in excess of 15,000 copies.

All attendees are entitled to a complimentary glass of wine after which there will be a bar available to purchase drinks.

This event is free to attend, but spaces are limited, so please do register your interest. Doors will open at 6.45pm. For all enquiries please email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333623.

Abstract:
This presentation explores two workforces at the bottom of the coercive apparatus of the colonial state in Bengal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These are police constables, and village watchmen, also called chaukidars. The two workforces presented a stark contrast. The colonial constabulary was always a thin presence in Indian society, while a much larger workforce of chaukidars existed throughout the countryside. However, chaukidars were never absorbed as direct employees of the government in the way the constables were. While constables were paid salaries out of the budget of the provincial government, chaukidars were paid salaries out of a locally raised chaukidari tax. Constables had a substantial number of upper caste workers in their ranks. All chaukidars were lower caste workers. In this presentation, I will explore how this segmentation of security work emerged in the apparatus of colonial policing and what it reveals about the nature of the colonial police.

About the Speaker:
Partha Pratim Shil is a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is interested in labour history and state formation in South Asia.

This lecture series was established in honour of our alumna, Sue Lloyd-Roberts, an award-winning broadcast journalist whose uncompromising and courageous documentaries highlighted humanitarian issues across the world.

We are delighted that our speaker this year will be world-renowned, award-winning Lyse Doucet, Chief International Correspondent and Senior Presenter for BBC World News television and BBC World Service Radio. Lyse was a BBC foreign correspondent with postings in Jerusalem, Amman, Tehran, Islamabad, Kabul and Abidjan for 15 years, before becoming a presenter in 1999. She was paramount in the coverage of the “Arab Spring” across the Middle East and North Africa and, for the past 20 years, has continued to cover all major stories in this area.

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception. Both are free, but please register to attend. Booking deadline: 21 January.