Some face-to-face events are returning. Check carefully for any requirements.
The Art of Witnessing War
With Dr Sue Malvern, Reading University
Thursday 5 June, 2-3pm, Headley Lecture Theatre
Sue Malvern looks at the role of war artists and photographers as witnesses to conflicts and wars. Starting with WWI, the lecture looks at how the work of artists such as Paul Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson and Stanley Spencer came to be seen as authentic visions of the actuality of the war. It will then consider the iconic status of works such as Picasso’s Guernica (1937), the role of war photographers, and the contemporary issues for artists who give visual witness to war and conflict.
Tickets £5/£4
http://www.ashmolean.org/events/Lectures/?id=132
In the wake of the financial crisis and global shifts in economic power, the Rt Hon Liam Byrne MP, Shadow Minister for Universities, Science and Skills, will speak about how best to foster an inclusive economy for Britain which properly and productively shares the benefits and opportunities of growth, whilst also leveraging the vital role played by universities in building a skills-based, innovation-led econom
A short talk followed by questions and discussion. All welcome, whether you want to take part in the discussion or just listen.
As part of the Oxford University Shakespeare Festival, singers from across the university will present settings of Shakespeare texts for solo voice and choir.
Solo settings by Quilter, Gurney and Finzi will be followed by choral works including Vaughan Williams’ Three Shakespeare Songs – settings from The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream – and his stunning Serenade to Music which sets text from The Merchant of Venice; a piece which has been hailed as one of the most beautiful works ever written!
Tickets: £5 (including refreshments!)
Available here: http://www.wegottickets.com/event/276207
Speaker: Professor Richard Sennett
Professor of Sociology at the LSE & Professor of the Humanities at NYU. His work studies the social ties in cities and the effects of urban living on individuals, and entails ethnography, history and social theory.
Part of the Mansfield Lecture Series, convener Baroness Helena Kennedy QC.
Dr Stephen Backhouse is Lecturer in Social and Political Theology at St. Mellitus college. Stephen studied at the University of Oxford, then McGill, then Oxford again, where he completed his doctorate on Kierkegaard and religious nationalism. Besides teaching at those universities, Stephen has also written on matters of politics, national identity and Christianity. As well as magazine and think tank articles, other publications include ‘The Compact Guide to Christian History’ (Lion, 2011) and ‘Kierkegaard’s Critique of Christian Nationalism’ (OUP, 2011).
Upstairs, in the function room, at the Mitre. 7:30pm with drinks and nibbles served from 7pm.
The Psalms in England
With Prof M J Toswel, University of Western Ontario
Tuesday 10 June, 2-3pm, Headley Lecture Theatre
This lecture introduces the Anglo-Saxon psalter, and especially the interlinear vernacular versions in Latin psalters which were a unique feature in Europe at the time, and asks whether these provide evidence for greater engagement with the psalms in English than has generally been acknowledged.
Tickets £5/£4
http://www.ashmolean.org/events/Lectures/?id=132
‘Syria Speaks’ – Seminar Day
With Venetia Porter, British Museum, and Paul Collins, Ashmolean Museum
Wednesday 11 June, 1.30-4pm, Headley Lecture Theatre
The Art of Syria Past and Present:
This lecture explores modern and contemporary art and its impact in Syria today.
Syria: Crossroads of the Ancient World:
From the earliest farming communities and the world’s first cities to the glories of Palmyra, this talk will provide a survey of some of the greatest archaeological treasures of the Middle East.
Tickets £5/£4
http://www.ashmolean.org/events/SpecialEvents/?id=148
Tour: Joseph Beuys & Jörg Immendorff
With Colin Harrison, Senior Curator of European Art
3–3.45pm on Wednesday 14 May and Wednesday 11 June
Tours are free, no booking is required. Please meet in Gallery 2.
http://www.ashmolean.org/exhibitions/details/?exh=92
This lecture is hosted by the Oxford Martin School and the International Migration Institute, an Oxford Martin School Institute
If Democrats and Republicans in the US Congress can agree that eleven million unauthorized immigrants are proof of a broken immigration system, why does Congress repeatedly fail to enact comprehensive immigration reform that might stand a chance of reducing illegal migration?
One reason offered by Rey Koslowski is that too many members of Congress are fixated on appropriating money for more Border Patrol Agents and fencing to stop people from crossing the US-Mexico border between ports of entry. Koslowski argues that each additional dollar spent at the border is a dollar that may have been spent elsewhere to a much greater effect in reducing illegal migration, for example, on worksite inspections to enforce employer sanctions against hiring unauthorized migrant workers. After President Obama was reelected with 72% of the Latino vote, Senate Republicans eagerly joined Democrats to forge a comprehensive immigration reform bill but it took throwing $44 billion at border fencing and more Border Patrol agents to secure enough Republican votes to pass the bill with a filibuster-proof majority.
Koslowski argues that this border security overkill is not only bad policy; it failed to attract majority support for comprehensive immigration reform among House Republicans as intended, leaving it unlikely that any immigration legislation will become law before the November 2014 elections.
This lecture will be followed by a drinks reception, all welcome
Joseph Reeves, a contributor to Humanitarian OpenStreetMap, will talk about the importance of crowd sourcing and open data in providing information during a humanitarian crisis.
Free, collaborative maps are uniquely valuable to humanitarian work, especially in places where base map data is often scarce, out of date, or rapidly changing. OpenStreetMap is a project to create a free and open map of the entire world, built entirely by volunteers surveying with GPS, digitizing aerial imagery, and collecting and liberating existing public sources of geographic data. The information in OpenStreetMap can fill in the gaps in base map data to assist in responses to disasters and crisis.
‘Syria Speaks’ Lecture:
Palmyra: City of Palms
With Linda Farrar, archaeologist and lecturer
Friday 13 June, 2-4pm, Headley Lecture Theatre
Famed for its hauntingly beautiful architectural remains, the ancient city of Palmyra in central Syria was an oasis and important stop on the caravan route across the Syrian desert. Linda Farrar talks about Palmyra’s tombs and archaeological remains, and the powerful figure who dominated its history, Queen Zenobia.
Tickets £5/£4
http://www.ashmolean.org/events/SpecialEvents/?id=148
‘Syria Speaks’ Series
Evening Finale: Art & Culture from the Frontline
With Malu Halasa and Zaher Omareen, curators and editors
Friday 13 June, 6.30-9.30pm, Headley Lecture Theatre
The Syrian uprising has seen an outpouring of creative expression from all levels of society. Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline is a new anthology of Syrian fiction, poetry, memoir and critical essays, alongside art, cartoons, and photography. Editors from the book will be joined by prominent Syrian authors for a discussion on the role of the writer during conflict, along with visual presentations and short films from Syria.
Organized by: Reel arts
Supported by: The Prince Claus Fund, CKU, and English Pen
Tickets £5/£4
On Friday 13th June, the Oxford Left Review will be launching OLR Issue 13. Come along to get your copy and chat with the writers and editors. This issue was partially themed on ‘Science, Technology and the Left’, and contains articles, interviews, reviews and fiction on topics including fracking, devolution, Wikileaks, the pharmaceuticals industry and Pakistan, as well as many more. Drinks will be provided.
Al Jazeera host Mehdi Hasan will challenge Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Medecins sans Frontieres and former French Foreign Minister, on France’s military interventionism. Are the country’s motives altruistic or do they respond to a neo-colonialist agenda? And is there a tipping point when intervening becomes essential? Syria, Mali, Libya, Kosovo and more.
This debate will be filmed and aired on Al Jazeera English at a later date. Audience members will be invited to participate in a Q&A section during the second half of the conversation.
Order free tickets here: http://bernardkouchner.eventbrite.co.uk
A short talk followed by questions and discussion.
“The Dalai Lama: a study in bourgeois rationality”
All welcome
A new report by the Humanitarian Innovation Project, Refugee Economies: Rethinking Popular Assumptions, will be launched to coincide with World Refugee Day, on Friday 20 June 2014. It is one of the very first studies on the economic life of refugees and fundamentally challenges existing models of refugee assistance.
The report is based on participatory, mixed methods research including about 1,600 surveys in Uganda, one of the few refugee-hosting countries in Africa that allows refugees the right to work and freedom of movement. However, it has wider implications for the emerging refugee crises around the world.
Far from being uniformly dependent, refugees are part of complex and vibrant economic systems. They are often entrepreneurial and, if given the opportunity, can help themselves and their communities, as well as contributing to the host economy. The data in the new report challenges five popular myths about refugees’ economic lives:
that refugees are economically isolated;
that they are a burden on host states;
that they are economically homogenous;
that they are technologically illiterate;
that they are dependent on humanitarian assistance.
Read more about the report: http://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/refugeeeconomies
The Self-Portrait: a Cultural History
With James Hall, author
Saturday 21 June , 2-3pm, Headley Lecture Theatre
Recounting the history of the self-portrait, this lecture offers insights into artists’ psychological and creative worlds. James Hall talks about the medieval ‘mirror craze’, the confessional self-portraits of Titian and Michelangelo, and the multiple selves of contemporary artists such as Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman.
Tickets £5/£4
http://www.ashmolean.org/events/Lectures/?id=132
Speaker: Suhail Ilyas
rs21.org.uk
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The largest election the world has ever seen resulted last month in the election of Hindu chauvinist Narendra Modi as Prime Minister.
Modi was formerly chief minister in Gujarat, where in 2002, over 700 Muslims were murdered in riots after Modi had blamed them for a train disaster.
However, his neoliberal administration in Gujarat is held up as a model by big business, and the leaders of western capitalism, who censored him after 2002 are now falling over themselves to do business with him.
What does this blend of far-right Hindu nationalism and neoliberal capitalism mean for India, and for the rest of the world? What does the repression of anti-rape protests tell us about the new government?
What are the global lessons about the rise of the far right and the continued dominance of neoliberalism beyond India?
Weekend of films screenings, talks and workshops about public health. Kicks off on Friday at 18.00 with a screening of Dallas Buyers Club at the Phoenix Picturehouse in Jericho. All welcome. Please visit our website for further details http://publichealthfilms.org/
Oxford Transitional Justice Research is pleased to invite you to its 2014 Summer Conference ‘Borders and Boundaries in Transitional Justice’.
This year’s conference, hosted with the support of the Planethood Foundation, Law Faculty, and the Centre for Criminology, will explore the issue of how borders and boundaries affect transitional justice processes across the world. The conference is organised around four panels:
The interplay between local, regional, and foreign transnational processes;
The role of diaspora and stateless communities in transitional justice;
The ways in which international law is dealing with cross-border transitional justice concerns; and
How local, national, and global approaches are affecting the theory and practice of transitional justice.
Registration is now open and we encourage all potential participants to register as soon as possible. Spaces are limited. We particularly welcome graduate students and early career researchers working on issues of transitional justice. A small registration fee includes tea and coffee and a light lunch.
What do St. Augustine, Kafka, Samuel Johnson, William James, Susan Sontag, Douglas Adams, Hitler, and Hamlet all have in common? PROCRASTINATION. If it isn’t ‘the quintessential modern problem’ (New Yorker), it is certainly familiar to all who have picked up a pen, both within and outside academia.
Through papers from a variety of disciplines, the speakers will chart the phenomenon of procrastination, and the fraught moral and political claims it provokes. Who procrastinates, how, and why? Is the concept a moral universal, the product of particular contexts, or unique to the anglophone world? What ‘cures’—and what unexpected defences—have various writers proposed?
In 2014 Barnett House is celebrating its centenary. The celebrations culminate with the Reunion Weekend on 12-13 July 2014.
This includes:
– Keynote talk from Magdalena Sepulveda, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.
– The 100th birthday tea party (the V-C Andrew Hamilton will cut the birthday cake!)
– A talk on the history of Barnett House and the launch of the book on the history.
– Open house at the department with displays of historic material and current research.
– Drinks and dinner with an after dinner talk from Prof Jonathan Bradshaw.
– Showing of the film Rich Man, Poor Man based on research carried out by Robert Walker and Elaine Chase with a discussion with the director of the film.
A public meeting with a short introductory talk followed by questions and discussion.
The war to end all wars
Thursday 17 July, 7:30pm to 9:00pm
Oxford Town Hall, St Aldates
All welcome
Organised by Oxford Communist Corresponding Society.
This is the first in a three-part series of public meetings on violence and war. The three meetings of the series are:
Thursday 17 July
The war to end all wars
Thursday 21 August
The anti-war movement
Thursday 25 September
The end of violence
All are from 7:30pm to 9:00pm in the Town Hall
The World Humanist Congress, held every three years, is a unique event bringing together humanists from over forty countries under the auspices of the International Humanist and Ethical Union. The 19th Congress is being organised by the British Humanist Association and will feature three days of plenary sessions in the Sheldonian Theatre, and workshops, talks, and panel discussions in the University of Oxford Examination Schools about Freedom of Thought and Expression: Forging a 21st Century Enlightenment. Confirmed speakers include: Jim Al-Khalili, Joan Bakewell, Richard Dawkins, A C Grayling, PZ Myers, Taslima Nasrin, Phillip Pullman, Wole Soyinka and Peter Tatchell.
Simon Singh will be discussing ‘Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial’.
The World Humanist Congress is taking place from Friday 8th August until Sunday 10th August in Oxford. Held every three years in different locations around the world, this years theme of the meeting is ‘Freedom of Thought and Expression’. We are pleased to announce during the conference period, 10 world-class speakers will be visiting the bookshop for a series of free 20 minute talks taking place in the Norrington Room. You do not need tickets to attend any of the talks but seating is limited, so please arrive early to get a ensure your place.
Sue Bolton and Fiona Ruck, smoking cessation specialists, look at the effects of passive smoking and their campaign for smoke-free homes and cars across Oxfordshire.
The talk will include myth-busting statistics and facts covering the effects of passive smoking on both adults and children, as well as a detailed look into what is in the cigarette smoke that is causing the adverse effects. Sue and Fiona will also look at local and national responses to this public health issue, including the Smoke Free Homes and Cars Pledge project.
Our speakers have worked as registered nurses and health visitors and worked for years in smoking cessation, including as a smoking and pregnancy specialist and as a smoking and young person’s specialist for Oxford Smoking Advice Service.
A public meeting with a short introductory talk followed by questions and discussion.
The anti-war movement
Thursday 21 August, 7:30pm to 9:00pm
Oxford Town Hall, St Aldates
All welcome
Organised by Oxford Communist Corresponding Society.
This is the second in a three-part series of public meetings on violence and war. The three meetings of the series are:
Thursday 17 July
The war to end all wars
Thursday 21 August
The anti-war movement
Thursday 25 September
The end of violence
All are from 7:30pm to 9:00pm in the Town Hall
Maybe an asteroid hit Earth. Perhaps a nuclear war reduced our cities to radioactive rubble. Or avian flu killed most of the population. Whatever the cause, the world as we know it has ended and now the survivors must start again. But how do we set about rebuilding our world from scratch?
Join Astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell in a lively and informative discussion about how we’ve become disconnected from the basic skills on which our lives and our world depend.
Lewis Dartnell will be at the Unicorn Theatre in Abindgon on Thursday 4 September talking about his new book The Knowledge, which explains everything you need to know to reboot our civilisation after a catastrophe.