speaker:

Vincent Courcelle-Labrousse, Defence Counsel at the ICTR and Special Tribunal for Lebanon

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.

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

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.

Speaker: Susie Orbach
Psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, writer and social critic. Her books include Fat is a Feminist Issue and Bodies. A convenor of Anybody, an organisation that campaigns for body diversity. Co-founder of Antidote which works for the emotional literacy and Co-founder of Psychotherapist and Counsellors for Social Responsibility. Part of the Mansfield Lecture Series, convener Baroness Helena Kennedy QC

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

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

Early cyberspace theorists predicted that the digital world would be a world of plenty. But today’s Internet users are faced with many kinds of artificially scarce virtual markers, from online game items and digital currencies to likes and followers on social media and reward points in question and answer sites. Many such markers are traded online for significant sums of money and have spawned entire cottage industries for their production. Vili Lehdonvirta, author of Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis (MIT Press 2014, with Edward Castronova), argues that these “virtual economies” shape digital media in important ways, and that understanding them is vital for both practitioners and scholars of digital media and entertainment.

In this session, Lehdonvirta will also discuss and debate with economist Greg Taylor about what virtual economies could teach traditional national economies and the economists who run them.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase. The discussion will be followed by book signing and a drinks reception.

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.

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.

Join us for an evening at Corpus Christi College with the composer Robert Saxton, as he discusses his lifetime achievements in music with his fellow composer Thomas Hyde.

Robert Saxton has worked with many experts in the field, composed for the BBC and London Symphony Orchestra, amongst other ventures.

A discussion on the need for more affordable homes in Oxford and what can be done to deliver them. Speakers Ed Turner ( Oxford City Council), Danny Dorling ( Oxford University), Bob Colenutt (Northampton University Charlie Fisher ( Community Land Trust)

Reproducibility is a central principle of scientific research and its importance is now increasingly emphasised. Several fields such as cancer drug discovery, social psychology and computational science are said be undergoing a credibility crisis due to irreproducible results and initiatives to address this are springing up from research communities, funders and other stakeholders.

What does reproducibility mean to your research and how could researchers in Oxford, both individually and as an institution, take steps to promote greater reproducibility of findings? Come along for an evening of discussion and explore this topic with the Oxford Open Science group. We look forward to hearing your views!

Session organisers: Simon Benjamin and Victoria Watson

A public meeting with a short introductory talk followed by questions and discussion.

The end of violence
Thursday 25 September, 7:30pm to 9:00pm
Oxford Town Hall, St Aldates
All welcome

Organised by Oxford Communist Corresponding Society.
This is the last 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

COIN are hosting the launch of international best-seller Naomi Klein’s new book “This Changes Everything”. Tickets for the 8 October event are on sale now.

Christian Fuchs, Professor of Social Media at Westminster University, will lead the discussion of his recently published book Social Media: A Critical Introduction, which navigates the controversies and contradictions of the complex digital media landscape.

Exploring the role of social media in contemporary popular movements including the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring, and drawing on theorists including Marx, Weber, Habermas, and Durkheim, Professor Fuchs asks:

Is Google good or evil?
Is Facebook a surveillance threat to privacy?
Does Twitter enhance democracy?
What did WikiLeaks reveal about political accountability, the transparency of power, and new forms of cultural censorship?

Join Professor Nick Bostrom for a talk on his new book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, and a journey that takes us to the frontiers of thinking about the human condition and the future of intelligent life.

The book talk will be followed by a book signing and drinks reception.

This book talk will be live webcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jupxhH9mE-g

About the book:
The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. Other animals have stronger muscles or sharper claws, but we have cleverer brains.

If machine brains one day come to surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become very powerful. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our species then would come to depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence.

But we have one advantage: we get to make the first move. Will it be possible to construct a seed AI or otherwise to engineer initial conditions so as to make an intelligence explosion survivable? How could one achieve a controlled detonation?