Studying or working in a science or engineering subject? Interested in how to close the gender gap, and want to hear great role models speak about their experiences?

Join Oxford Females in Engineering, Science and Technology (OxFEST), alongside OxWIB and OxWomIn, on Saturday 18th February for our annual conference at the Oxford Maths Institute! We’ll be hosting inspiring women from industry and academia who are breaking boundaries in their fields. The day will involve talks, workshops on diversity, entrepreneurship and communication, and a panel discussion on promoting women in STEM. Breakfast, lunch, refreshments and prosecco will be provided! This is a great opportunity to be inspired, add to your skills, make new connections and get involved.

We are proud to introduce our first speaker: Anne-Marie O. Imafidon MBE. Anne-Marie is a computing, mathematics and language child prodigy who graduated from Oxford aged 20 and was awarded an MBE for championing women in STEM in her organisation Stemettes. You can read about her recent thoughts on the glass ceiling here: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/…/the-glass-ceiling-is-made…

Like our Facebook page for more updates as we reveal our other amazing speakers: https://www.facebook.com/oxwomanempowerment/

Tickets are heavily subsidised and cost just £8 for the whole-day program and food and drink. Get yours here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/breaking-boundaries-shatteri….

We look forward to welcoming you on the day!

Jonathan Metzger (KTH, Sweden) will talk about the necessity of exclusion in environmental planning.

Abstract: A more-than-human sensibility is founded upon an awareness of the fundamentally entangled fates of humans and non-humans, from the individual body to the planetary scale. The purpose of this presentation is to probe some of the implications of such insights on planning theory and methodology, and to explore potential ways of studying the degree to which such insights actually influence existing planning practices.

In the first part of the presentation I briefly review some currently fashionable ‘radical’ planning theories from the angle of how they may contribute to enacting a more-than-human sensibility within planning processes. I suggest that their oft-repeated ambition of producing benefits ‘for all’ are deceitfully misguiding, since such claims effectively serve the function of covering up the ever-present biopolitical dimension of planning practice and the radical exclusions that necessarily must take place.

In the second part of the presentation I sketch the outlines of a research program investigating how urban planning and design professionals relate to the more-than-human biopolitical dimension of planning. I argue that it is necessary to focus not only on the degree of displayed reflectiveness regarding this type of issues, but also if/how this comes to affect their concrete professional practice.

Lord Browne of Madingley is presently Chairman of L1 Energy, the Chairman of Trustees of both the Tate and the QEII Prize for Engineering, and Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University.

Lincoln Leads
In Material Culture

In conversation with
Robert Kerr • Former executive at Burberry •
Dr Joshua Thomas • Fellow in Archaeology •
Sarah Bochicchio • MSt in Modern History – Elizabeth I’s wardrobe

Discussing
‘The Power of the Image’?

Inviting the SCR, MCR, JCR and Alumni to join the conversation

Interdisciplinary Seminars in Psychoanalysis. The seminar is open free of charge to members of Oxford University and to mental health professionals but space is limited. To attend it is helpful (but not essential) to e-mail Paul Tod at paul.tod@sjc.ox.ac.uk

The construct of gratitude is gaining wide attention in the field of positive psychology. Gratitude diaries can be used as a simple, intentional activity to reframe our daily experiences and encourage positive reflection.

The majority of studies have used adult participants and there has been limited research into how gratitude diaries can have a positive impact on children’s well-being. Tara Diebel is an Educational Psychologist working for Hampshire County Council and completed her professional doctorate at Southampton University in 2013. She will talk about her research in primary schools that evaluated whether gratitude diaries could improve a child’s school experience and social well-being.

This talk will outline some of the challenges of mixed methods research and illustrate how they can be addressed in health psychology and other health research. Felicity will critically reflect on mixed methods research that she has conducted and discuss the philosophical and technical challenges of mixed methods, grounding the discussion in a brief review of methodological literature.

Mixed methods research is characterized as having philosophical and technical challenges; the former can be addressed by drawing on pragmatism, the latter by considering formal mixed methods research designs proposed in a number of design typologies. There are important differences among the design typologies which provide diverse examples of designs that health researchers can adapt for their own mixed methods research. There are also similarities; in particular, many typologies explicitly orient to the technical challenges of deciding on the respective timing of qualitative and quantitative methods and the relative emphasis placed on each method. Characteristics, strengths, and limitations of different sequential and concurrent designs are identified by reviewing a series of mixed methods projects each conducted for a different purpose.

Adapting formal mixed methods designs can help health psychologists and other health researchers address the technical challenges of mixed methods research and identify the approach that best fits the research questions and purpose. This does not obfuscate the need to address philosophical challenges of mixing qualitative and quantitative methods.

Dr Felicity Bishop is a health psychologist leading an interdisciplinary programme of mixed methods research around complementary therapies and placebo effects in health care within Psychology at the University of Southampton.

This talk is part of the Mixed Methods in Health Research module, which is part of the MSc in Evidence-Based Health Care.

This is a free event and members of the public are welcome to attend.

Guest Speaker: Professor Charles Spence

We all think that we can taste what is on the plate or in the glass, but a growing body of research suggests otherwise. Chefs and restaurateurs are increasingly focusing on ‘off-the-plate’ dining, and the insights gained there are now being applied to enhance the food and drink we experience in the air, in hospitals, and in the home.

Although it has been almost seventy years since Time declared C.S. Lewis one of the world’s most influential spokespersons for Christianity and fifty years since Lewis’s death, his influence remains just as great if not greater today. While much has been written on Lewis and his work, virtually nothing has been written from a philosophical perspective on his views of happiness, pleasure, pain, and the soul and body. As a result, no one so far has recognized that his views on these matters are deeply interesting and controversial, and perhaps more jarring. No one has yet adequately explained why Lewis never became a Roman Catholic. Stewart Goetz’s careful investigation of Lewis’s philosophical thought reveals oft-overlooked implications and demonstrates that it was, at its root, at odds with that of Thomas Aquinas and, thereby, the Roman Catholic Church.

Eros & Thanatos: Matters of Life and Death.

Medfest @ Oxford

Arrive @ the Harris Lecture Theatre (on the Island Site, map available soon) for 4:15pm

Sponsored by the Royal College of Psychiatrists

FREE EVENT with NIBBLES!

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Past. Present. Future.

Religion. Euthanasia. History. Cryogenics. Philosophy. A Good Death. Transhumanism. Palliative Care. Artificial Intelligence. Grief.

Immortality.

The subject of life and death is one we are constantly faced with in medicine, yet one which is rarely formally discussed. Whether it’s someone in advanced age fearing death knocking on their door, a mother consoling her terminally ill child, or when through good medical care, patients are given a second chance at life. We not only hope our films will stir up some good discussions, but will also encourage you to question your own preconceptions about life and death.
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Read more about the theme here:
http://www.medfest2017.com/what-s-it-all-about

We’ll be watching the films with some discussion with our panelists and you, in the audience in between.

Panellists TBA.

For Dr Kanade, good research derives from solving real-world problems and delivering useful results to society. As a roboticist, he participated in developing a wide range of computer-vision systems and autonomous robots, including human-face recognition, autonomously-driven cars, computer-assisted surgical robots, robot helicopters, biological live cell tracking through a microscope, and EyeVision, a system used for sports broadcast. Dr Kanade will share insights into his projects and discuss how his “Think like an amateur, do as an expert” maxim interacts with problems and people.

Dr Takeo Kanade is the 2016 Kyoto Prize Laureate for Advanced Technology.

Humans reliably respond to insult and injury with moral outrage. Judging and punishing others for wrongdoing can deter future harms and promote group cooperation, but can also exacerbate social divides and escalate into destructive cycles of retaliation. This behaviour evolved in the context of small foraging groups, but is now widespread in massive online communities.

In this talk Professor Molly Crockett, Associate Professor of Experimental Psychology, will explore how digital media changes the costs and benefits of moral outrage and its implications for social cohesion.

This lecture will be followed by a drinks reception, all welcome

This conference will bring together established and emerging philosophical researchers from the US and the UK to discuss philosophical problems about psychological self-knowledge and agency. Each talk will be followed by comments from a local philosopher.
Speakers: Matthew Boyle (Chicago), Lucy Campbell (Oxford), Brie Gertler (Virginia), Richard Moran (Harvard), Matthew Parrott (KCL), Johannes Roessler (Warwick), and Rachael Wiseman (Durham).

In a much-discussed New York Times article, psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett claimed, “Psychology is not in crisis.” She was responding to the results of a large-scale initiative called the Reproducibility Project, published in Science magazine, which appeared to show that the results from over 60% of a sample of 100 psychology studies did not hold up when independent labs attempted to replicate them. In this talk, I address three major issues:

(1) What did the Reproducibility Project really show, and in what specific sense can the follow-up studies meaningfully be described as “failures to replicate” the original findings? I argue that, contrary to what many are suggesting, very little can be learned about the validity of the original studies based upon a single (apparent) failure to replicate: instead, multiple replications (of sufficient quality) of each contested experiment would be needed before any strong conclusions could be drawn about the appropriate degree of confidence to be placed in the original findings. To make this point I draw on debates over falsification in philosophy of science, paying special attention to the role of auxiliary assumptions in falsifying claims or theories.

(2) Is psychology in crisis or not? And if so, what kind of crisis? I tease apart two senses of crisis here. The first sense is “crisis of confidence,” which is a descriptive or sociological claim referring to the notion that many people, within the profession and without, are as a matter of fact experiencing a profound and, in some ways, unprecedented lack of confidence in the validity of the published literature. This is true not only in psychology, but in other fields such as medicine as well. Whether these people are justified in feeling this way is a separate but related question, and the answer depends on a number of factors, to be discussed. The second sense of “crisis” is “crisis of process” – i.e., the notion that (due in large part to apparent failures to replicate a substantial portion of previously published findings), psychological science is “fundamentally broken,” or perhaps not even a “true” science at all. This notion would be based on the assumption that most or perhaps even all of the findings in a professionally published literature should “hold up” when they are replicated, in order for a discipline to be a “true” science, or not to be in a state of “crisis” in this second sense. But this assumption, I will argue, is erroneous: failures of various sorts in science, including bona fide failures to replicate published results, are often the wellspring of important discoveries and other innovations. Therefore, (apparent) replication failure, even on a wide scale, is no evidence that science/psychology is broken, per se. Nevertheless,

(3) This does not mean that there is not substantial room for serious, even radical improvements to be made in the conduct of psychological science. In fact, the opposite is true. Even setting the Reproducibility Project findings aside, there was already substantial–and more direct–evidence that current research and publication practices in psychology and other disciplines were and are systematically flawed, and that the published literature had and has a high likelihood of containing a large proportion of false “findings” and erroneous conclusions. Problems that need urgently to be addressed include: publication bias against “negative” results, the related “file drawer” problem, sloppy statistics and lack of adequate statistical training among many scientists, small sample sizes, inefficient and arbitrary peer review, and so on.

Film screening and panel discussion

Many people have a strong sense that their views are right and couldn’t possibly be wrong. So how do we come to hold an unshakeable conviction and why can it be so difficult to deal with our mistakes?

Through the eyes of people who became convinced of a date for the end of the world, Right Between Your Ears explores how people believe, how we turn beliefs into certainties, and mistake them for the truth.

After the film screening there will be a panel discussion with Revd Professor Martyn Percy, neuroscientist Kris De Meyer (King’s College London) and filmmaker Sheila Marshall. The panel will be chaired by Dr James Painter from the Reuters Institute for the study of Journalism.

Organised by Christ Church Chaplaincy + Aniku

Enter Christ Church College via the main gate on St Aldate’s, then follow the signs to the Sir Michael Dummett Lecture Theatre.

A one-off screening of recent documentary release Citizen Jane: Battle for the City. The film will be followed by a panel discussion featuring four local experts talking about how the themes in the documentary relate to issues for our own city — both past and present.

The panel is made up of four women who will discuss the issues raised in the film from four different perspectives — urban planning, architecture, local history and art.

Dr Sue Brownill, an urban policy expert at Oxford Brookes University, will chair the discussion and will be joined by: Dr Annie Skinner, local historian and author of ‘Cowley Road: a History’; Dr Igea Troiani, Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Oxford Brookes; and Rachel Barbaresi, an artist with interest the social aspects of urban space whose work is currently on show at Modern Art Oxford’s Future Knowledge exhibition.

The transition from milk to complementary feeding requires adult sensitivity to infant signals of hunger and satiety. It is well-known that infants accept foods more willingly at specific times during infancy, called sensitive periods; these periods correspond to a time frame during which infant experiences will influence the development of later food preferences as well as willingness to eat.

Dr Cristina Costantini is a Teaching Fellow in Psychology at Oxford Brookes University. In this talk, Cristina will present her current research on infant complementary feeding, which explores maternal feeding behaviours, mother-infant interactions, and infant food acceptance.

The talk will be held in the function room at the Wig & Pen pub, George Street, which is wheelchair accessible.

Psychologist in the Pub talks are completely free, and open to all; British Psychological Society members and non-members, so please join us for the evening. No booking required.

Numerous free talks, walking tours and workshops over two days in central Oxford. Visit the webpage to find out more and book into sessions.

The ‘Brain and Mind’ series of interdisciplinary workshops looks at brain-related issues from the point of view of neuroscience, psychology, clinical medicine and philosophy. The workshops attract a broad audience, including academics, students, and the general public. Previous workshops have covered topics as diverse as schizophrenia, music, addiction, and bilingualism.

The series continues with an interactive workshop on Perception and the Brain. Three speakers will investigate perception from the point of view of neuroscience, psychology and philosophy. There will be opportunities for questions and discussion.

7:00 – 7:30 Welcome
7:30 – 8:30 Talk
8:30 – 11:00 Open discussion and social

Suggested donation £3
Reserve a place for free using the link

For the first ever speaker event of the Oxford Psychedelic Society, we’re thrilled to be hosting Dr Robin Carhart-Harris. Robin heads the Psychedelic Research Group within the Centre for Psychiatry at Imperial College London, where he has designed a number of functional brain imaging studies with psilocybin (magic mushrooms), LSD, MDMA (ecstasy) and DMT (ayahuasca), plus a clinical trial of psilocybin for treatment resistant depression. He has over 50 published papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Three of his papers scored within the top 100 most impactful science papers of the year, over the last two years (Altmetric.com). Robin’s research has featured in major national and international media, he has been profiled by the Independent, New Scientist and Wired magazine and has given a popular TEDx talk.

This talk will detail our group’s latest thinking on how psychedelic compounds work in the brain to produce their remarkable effects on consciousness. It will also describe latest research on their therapeutic potential, including results of our recent trial of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression.

http://www.imperial.ac.uk/department-of-medicine/research/brain-sciences/psychiatry/psychedelics/

Terezinha Nunes is Emeritus Professor of Educational Studies and a Fellow of Harris-Manchester College. She started her career as a clinical psychologist in Brazil and moved to a research career by obtaining a doctorate in Psychology at City University of New York, where she was supported by a Fulbright Scholarship.

Her work spans the domains of children’s literacy and numeracy, including both hearing and deaf children’s learning, and her focus of analysis covers cognitive and cultural issues, with a special interest in educational applications. Her work on “street mathematics” in Brazil uncovered many features of children’s and adults’ informal knowledge, and her subsequent work in the U.K. investigates how this informal knowledge can be used in education. Her literacy research focuses on the connections between morphological awareness, spelling and vocabulary growth.

Free for OUSS members; £2 for non-members.
Membership can be bought on the door: £10 for a year or £20 for life. Includes membership of Cambridge Uni SciSoc
Refreshments will be served afterwards.
See you there!

Mark Stein, University of Leicester. ‘”Phantasy of Fusion” as a response to trauma: European leaders and the origins of the Eurozone crisis’

We are lucky enough to have the founder of Student Minds, Nicola Byrom coming to talk for PsychSoc next week. Student Minds is the UK’s student mental health charity. It aims to transform the state of student mental health, so that those at University have the opportunity to excel. It should be a really insightful talk so please do come along. We were super busy last week so do make sure to turn up early if you want to guarantee a seat. (Location tbc)

Janet Sayers, University of Kent. ‘Researching mothering psychoanalytically’

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.

In our society, we tend to view motivation, the state of ‘wanting it’ as a prime mover of behaviour. However, research calls this into question both directly and by showing that, even among people with lukewarm motivation, we can enable behaviour change. Using randomised data mainly from randomised trials and other research, we will examine what these forces are and show how they can be harnessed to change behaviour, even when people have seemingly strong preferences.

Professor Paul Aveyard is a Professor of Behavioural Medicine with the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford.

This talk is being held as part of the Introduction to Study Design and Research Methods module which is part of the MSc in Evidence-Based Health Care. This is a free event and members of the public are welcome to attend.

27 Nov. Ian Klinke, St John’s College and University of Oxford. ‘Nuclear war, self-annihilation and West Germany’s compulsion to repeat’

Ruby Wax is a writer and comedian who has recently turned her attention to the study of psychotherapy. She is the author of two best-selling books combining comedy, mindfulness and neuroscience and has toured internationally with her one-woman shows based on them

Change affects us all, through climate, politics, religion, economics and our communities. In fact, all of life is chance but the pace of today is so fast, it can feel like the world is going crazy… and maybe us too. Three highly experienced speakers discuss some practices that help to alleviate stress and rediscover a sense of perspective and wellbeing. There will be music interludes.