Is international governance facing a pivotal moment? Seventy years on from the creation of the UN, the list of issues requiring international co-operation is lengthy and complex, ranging from the conflict in Syria to infectious disease outbreaks, and from nuclear weapons threats to food security. Even where concord has been achieved, as with the recent COP21 climate agreement, the road ahead will be long, hard and fraught with conflicting needs and desires.

With considerable humanitarian and environmental challenges facing the world, Baroness Amos, Director of SOAS, will draw on her distinguished career in development to look at how the international community can work together, what the UN could and can do, and at the likely obstacles to overcome on the road to helping secure global peace and security.

Registration required.

Professor Ian Goldin, Director of the Oxford Martin School, looks at what we mean by development and what citizens, governments and the international community can do to encourage it.

Goldin explains how the notion of development has expanded from the original focus on incomes and economic growth to a much broader interpretation. He considers the contributions made by education, health, gender and equity, and argues that it is also necessary take into account the rule of law, the role of institutions, and sustainability and environmental concerns.

There will be a book signing and drinks reception after the talk, all welcome.

Registration required.

The Technology and Management Centre for Development at the Oxford Department of International Development invites you to our upcoming research seminars.
These research seminars are intended to connect active researchers and students on the topics of innovation, technology and management for development. This is a chance to exchange ideas, learn and connect not just with TMCD staff, researchers and fellows but also the innovation research community at large at Oxford. These afternoons are a great opportunity to seek feedback and learn new viewpoints on our research interests.
Sandwiches and refreshments will be provided.
Open to students, lecturers, practitioners and researchers.

Professor Ian Goldin, Director of the Oxford Martin School, and fellow author Chris Kutarna preview their forthcoming book about the risks and rewards of a new Renaissance taking place in our modern world. They will show how we can achieve our own golden age, given the will. But many of the factors that undid the first Renaissance are rising once again: warring ideologies, fundamentalism, climate change, pandemics. Can we weather the crises and seize the moment to leave the world a legacy it will still celebrate, 500 years later?

There will be a book signing and drinks reception after the talk, all welcome.

Registration required.

Many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are characterised by an acute shortage of trained doctors and nurses, and a strong reliance on community health workers. In this talk, drawing on recent research in urban and rural Kenya, we explore whether mobile technologies can help overcome barriers to health care training, leading to improved provision and delivery of health care services for marginalised populations. Analysing the barriers to care experienced by mothers of children with disabilities, we ask how technology can contribute to the more equitable provision of health care, the challenges of integrating mobiles into existing health care structures and implications for future research agendas.

Professor Maria Jaschok, International Gender Studies Centre at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University: “Hui Muslim Women in Central China – Bargaining with Patriarchies”

Dr Kerrie Thornhill, Academic Mentor for MST Women’s Studies Programme, Oxford University: “Indigenous Feminisms, Indigenous Sovereignties, and Development in Canada and Liberia”

Professor Abosede George, Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University: “#BBOG and Histories of Feminist Activism in Neoliberal Nigeria”

Hamsa Rajan, DPhil candidate, Dept of Social Policy and Intervention, Oxford University: “Struggling for Ethnic Unity and Resilience: Tibetan Activism for Women’s Empowerment”

In the fourth and final lecture of the Trinity Term Annual Lecture Series on ‘Global Education’, Prof Stefan Dercon will discuss ‘Education and jobs as a response to the Syrian refugee crisis’.
Speaker
Prof Stefan Dercon is Professor of Economic Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and the Economics Department, Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economics and Chief Economist at the UK Department of International Development. His research at Oxford University relates to the application of microeconomics and statistics to problems of development.

The Technology and Management Centre for Development at the Department of International Development will be hosting two research seminars in the coming weeks – The afternoons of May 19 and June 1st.

We invite researchers currently researching topics relating to our centre’s work to present and stir discussion. These research seminars are intended to connect active researchers and students on the topics of innovation, technology and management for development. This is a chance to exchange ideas, learn and connect not just with TMCD staff, researchers and fellows but also the innovation research community at large at Oxford. These afternoons are a great opportunity to seek feedback from our peers and gain new perspective on our own work.

Light food and beverages will be provided given the lunch time start.

Presentations for June 1st

Guillermo Casasnovas “How is ambiguity resolved in the early stages of market formation? Insights from the UK social investment market.”
Kaihua Chen “How can we measure innovation systems? From sciento-metrics to inno-metrics.”
Yawen Li “When do firms undertake international open innovation?”
Hao Xu “Social network and knowledge transfer in MNEs.”

There is increasing recognition over the last decade that conservation, while conserving biodiversity of global value, can have local costs. Understanding these costs is essential as a first step to delivering conservation projects that do not make some of the poorest people on the planet poorer. Using examples from Madagascar and Bolivia, we explore the challenges of quantifying the impact of conservation on local wellbeing.
Julia Jones is Professor in conservation science at the School of Environment, Natural Resources and Geography, Bangor University. Julia is interested in how people interact with natural resources and how incentives can be best designed to maintain ecosystem services; for example the growing field of Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) and how schemes such as REDD+ can effectively deliver global environmental benefits while also having a positive impact on local livelihoods. She also has a strong interest in the design of robust conservation monitoring using different types of data, and in analysing the evidence underpinning environmental policies and decisions.

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.

A special postcolonial seminar with Professor Brinda Bose and Professor Prasanta Chakravarty (University of Delhi). This event is CHCI funded and supported by TORCH, the English Faculty Postcolonial Seminar, and Rhodes House.

Leopold Eyharts flew on the Atlantis Shuttle to the International Space Station in 2008. Part of his mission included the installation of the Colombus Space Laboratory, the main contribution of Europe to the International Space Station. In 1998, Leopold flew
on a Soyouz Space Shuttle to the Russian MIR station. Engage in a conversation about his adventures and the future of manned exploration of space. Chaired by Valerie Jamieson, Editorial Content Director, New Scientist.

Visualise the world in the 21st century in seven new maps! Geographers Ben Hennig and Danny Dorling present some of the key challenges and questions relating to the future of people across the world, using a series of seven thought-provoking maps about our lives on the planet.

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

Speakers:
-Jonathan Scheele (Senior Member, St Antony’s College and Head of Representation at the European Commission Representation in the UK, 2010-12)

-Michael Weatherburn (Imperial College and Foundation for European Progressive Studies)

-Lise Butler (Pembroke College and Vice-Chair, Oxford Fabian Society)

Join Photograph Collections curatorial staff for a ‘behind the scenes’ tour of the Pitt Rivers Museum’s dedicated research area. A special opportunity to receive a guided tour of the climate-controlled storerooms and to view collections highlights, including albums by Wilfred Thesiger. An Oxford Open Doors event. Free but booking essential. Two tours: 11.00-12.00 & 14.00-15.00

RSC Public Seminar Series, Michaelmas Term

‘Emergency Shelter and Forced Migration’

Series convened by Tom Scott-Smith and Mark E. Breeze

This interdisciplinary seminar series examines the nature and challenges of emergency shelter in the context of forced migration. What are the key issues in the design and provision of shelters? What does better shelter mean and how can we get there? How can political dynamics be managed in the organization of camps and urban areas? What lessons emerge from over forty years practical work in the shelter sector? The speakers in this series include academics and practitioners from the fields of architecture, planning, anthropology, humanitarianism, and design.

About the speaker
Tom Scott-Smith is Associate Professor of Refugee Studies and Forced Migration, fellow of St. Cross College Oxford, and Course Director for the MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration. He holds an MPhil and DPhil from the University of Oxford, an MSc from the University of London, and an MA from the University of Edinburgh. He was previously Lecturer at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol and Senior Scholar at Lincoln College, Oxford. Before coming to academia, Tom worked as a development practitioner concerned with the education sector in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Our present laws attacking conflict of interest and corruption came into existence during years of blistering financial and political corruption scandals in early Hanoverian England, notably the 1720 South Sea Bubble. But there was also a lot corruption surrounding war finance and the buying of offices and elections. Were the anti-corruption laws made in the 1720s a clean-up effort in the wake of breakdown and crisis? If political-legal change worked like that today, we would by now have a highly regulated financial industry in the United Kingdom and highly honest and ethical politicians and political media. In the early 18th century, and perhaps in all times in British legal history, crisis might be a trigger for legal reform, but the reform process was always played out on a wider canvas of domestic politics, religious conflict, international affairs, and personal rivalries within an elite. In this lecture I tell the story of conflicts in the realm of politics, finance and family life in the early reign of the Hanoverians, looking at a colourful caste of characters including many miscreants from Oxford.

Professor Joshua Getzler is Professor of Law and Legal History at St Hugh’s College. His book A History of Water Rights at Common Law (Oxford, 2004) won the Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship in 2005. He is interested in modern property and commercial law, and the interconnections of legal, financial, political, religious and economic history.

Delivering reliable drinking water to millions of rural people in Africa and Asia is an elusive and enduring global goal. A systematic information deficit on the performance of and demand for infrastructure investments limits policy design and development outcomes.

Since 2010, the ‘Smart Handpump’ project has been exploring new technologies, methods and models to understand and respond to this challenge. A mobile-enabled data transmitter provides foundational data on hourly water usage and failure events which has enabled the establishment of performance-based maintenance companies in Kenya that are improving handpump reliability by an order of magnitude.

The research is a collaboration between the School of Geography and the Environment and the Department of Engineering Science with a range of partners including government, international bodies such as UNICEF and the private sector. New research involves modelling the accelerometry data from the handpumps to predict aquifer depth. We invite you to test the Smart Handpump in the car park and debate how the ‘accidental infrastructure’ of rural handpumps can spark bolder initiatives to deliver water security for millions of poor people in Africa and Asia.

Noeleen Heyzer, Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, will give the Devaki Jain Lecture on the topic of ‘At the Frontlines of Change: Feminist Leadership Transforming Lives’.

Noeleen Heyzer holds the rank of Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations. Born in Singapore, she received a BA and an MA from the University of Singapore and a doctorate in social sciences from Cambridge University. Noeleen Heyzer is an active member of the women’s movement in her region and has carried that passion into the UN.

All are warmly invited to attend.

RSC Public Seminar Series
Emergency Shelter and Forced Migration
Michaelmas Term 2016
Convened by Tom Scott-Smith and Mark E. Breeze

This interdisciplinary seminar series examines the nature and challenges of emergency shelter in the context of forced migration. What are the key issues in the design and provision of shelters? What does better shelter mean and how can we get there? How can political dynamics be managed in the organization of camps and urban areas? What lessons emerge from over forty years practical work in the shelter sector? The speakers in this series include academics and practitioners from the fields of architecture, planning, anthropology, humanitarianism, and design. The seminar series complements the forthcoming issue of Forced Migration Review Emergency Shelter, to be published in 2017.

About the speaker: Grainne Hassett

Grainne Hassett is a practising architect, Senior Lecturer and member of the Advisory Board at the new School of Architecture, University of Limerick (SAUL). She regularly reviews work in other Irish Architecture Schools and has reviewed work at Yokohama, Turin, Stockholm and Strathclyde Schools of Architecture.

Her practice, Hassett Ducatez Architects is committed to a close connection between architecture and its own research. As architectural thinking advances through its negotiation of the architectural project within society, with technology, art, law, financial instruments and other myriad strategies, this practice is the field of her research. The work has received the Downes Medal for Architectural Excellence, 11 prestigious architectural awards in Ireland, been nominated for the Mies Van Der Rohe prize and the UK YAYA prize, and has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale amongst other featured, lectured, published, or exhibited scenarios nationally and internationally.

An unwinnable battle?

Zika and Ebola. Two viruses that are emerging as huge global threats to human health.

What can we learn from the past? How must we approach the future? Some of Oxford’s leading scientists host an exciting day of lectures, seminars and films providing insight into how the world should respond to these threats.

Join the Richard Doll Society for our annual conference! For ticket reservations, timetable information and poster abstract submissions, please visit the registration site.

The deadline for poster abstarct submission is Friday, 14th October: https://goo.gl/forms/YBDDVO7bIFS3l2F82

The Tim Hetherington Society and the Oxford PPE Society present: 7 Days in Syria, an evening with Janine di Giovanni.

Join us for free in the Simpkins Lee Theatre at Lady Margaret Hall for a talk by Janine di Giovanni and a film screening of Robert Rippberger’s feature length documentary ‘7 Days in Syria’. After the screening, there will be a free drinks reception in the adjoining Monson Room.

RSC Public Seminar Series
Emergency Shelter and Forced Migration
Michaelmas Term 2016
Convened by Tom Scott-Smith and Mark E. Breeze

This interdisciplinary seminar series examines the nature and challenges of emergency shelter in the context of forced migration. What are the key issues in the design and provision of shelters? What does better shelter mean and how can we get there? How can political dynamics be managed in the organization of camps and urban areas? What lessons emerge from over forty years practical work in the shelter sector? The speakers in this series include academics and practitioners from the fields of architecture, planning, anthropology, humanitarianism, and design. The seminar series complements the forthcoming issue of Forced Migration Review Emergency Shelter, to be published in 2017.

About the speaker: Irit Katz

Dr Irit Katz is an architect and a researcher. She recently completed her PhD at the Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge as a Girton College Scholar, affiliated to the Centre for Urban Conflicts Research. Her PhD research examines camps in Israel-Palestine as a spatio-political instrument used in order to achieve political objectives, and she currently studies the camps created along Europe’s migration routes.

Irit obtained her BArch degree (Cum Laude) in Architecture from Bezalel Academy for Art and Design, Jerusalem, and her MA (Magna Cum Laude) in Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies from Bar Ilan University. She has worked as an architect in Tel Aviv from 2002-2006 and in London from 2006-2011, specializing in urban planning and housing schemes.

Irit’s research centres on the spatial, geopolitical and social aspects of camps, from their emergence in the 19th century to their current global proliferation. She examines how camps, whether employed by colonial, national and global powers as instruments of control, or constructed ad hoc by displaced populations as makeshift spaces of refuge, are used as versatile mechanisms by which modern societies and territories are administered, negotiated and reorganised.

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.

‘In 2012, the International Labour Organisation estimates that there were 5.5 million children in slavery’. From the cotton industry in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan to shrimp fishing in SE Asia, Aidan McQuade, Director of the charity Anti-Slavery International will be looking at the persistence of slavery among children and adults worldwide, the conditions which currently allow it, and what we can do to to bring it to an end.

During his tenure as Director of Anti-Slavery International, Dr. Aidan McQuade’s achievements have included holding the state of Niger to account in an international court for failing to protect its citizens from slavery, ensuring the inclusion of a target to end modern slavery in the Sustainable Development Goals, obtaining a new statute in British law proscribing forced labour and mounting a series of investigations identifying where forced labour is used in the developing world for the production of goods for western markets as well as exposing human trafficking activity in the UK.
In 2010, Aidan was awarded a doctorate for his thesis entitled, “Doing the right thing: human agency and ethical choice-making in professional practice.”

RSC Public Seminar Series
Emergency Shelter and Forced Migration
Michaelmas Term 2016
Convened by Tom Scott-Smith and Mark E. Breeze

This interdisciplinary seminar series examines the nature and challenges of emergency shelter in the context of forced migration. What are the key issues in the design and provision of shelters? What does better shelter mean and how can we get there? How can political dynamics be managed in the organization of camps and urban areas? What lessons emerge from over forty years practical work in the shelter sector? The speakers in this series include academics and practitioners from the fields of architecture, planning, anthropology, humanitarianism, and design. The seminar series complements the forthcoming issue of Forced Migration Review Emergency Shelter, to be published in 2017.

About the speaker: Tom Corsellis

Dr Tom Corsellis is the Executive Director of Shelter Centre, an NGO dedicated to supporting the global shelter and settlement community in developing and maintaining consensus resources, guidance and tools. Hosted initially by the University of Cambridge from its foundation in 2004, Shelter Centre developed from an earlier initiative, ShelterProject.org, which undertook research and development on sector standards, equipment and technical guidance, including Transitional Settlement: Displaced Populations.

Tom Corsellis was a founding member of both initiatives. He has been developing and delivering training and blended learning in the humanitarian sector for over 20 years, mainly on shelter and settlements, and Camp Coordination & Camp Management (CCCM), for agencies including RedR, DFID, ECHO, IFRC and UNHCR, as well as IASC clusters. Tom has worked operationally for many agencies, including CARE, DFID, IOM, MSF, Oxfam, UNHCR and the World Bank, in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Middle East.

RSC Public Seminar Series
Emergency Shelter and Forced Migration
Michaelmas Term 2016
Convened by Tom Scott-Smith and Mark E. Breeze

This interdisciplinary seminar series examines the nature and challenges of emergency shelter in the context of forced migration. What are the key issues in the design and provision of shelters? What does better shelter mean and how can we get there? How can political dynamics be managed in the organization of camps and urban areas? What lessons emerge from over forty years practical work in the shelter sector? The speakers in this series include academics and practitioners from the fields of architecture, planning, anthropology, humanitarianism, and design. The seminar series complements the forthcoming issue of Forced Migration Review Emergency Shelter, to be published in 2017.

About the speaker: Dr Camillo Boano

Dr Camillo Boano is an architect, urbanist and educator. He is Senior Lecturer at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London (UCL), where he directs the MSc in Building and Urban Design in Development. He is also co-director of the UCL Urban Laboratory. Camillo has over 20 years of experience in research, design consultancies and development work in South America, Middle East, Eastern Europe and South East Asia.

As an academic interested in practice, he combines interests in critical architecture, spatial production, transformations, urbanism with the exceptional circumstances of disasters, conflicts and informality. His interest in investigating the material and dialectical production of spaces emerged out of experiences of being a development practitioner in South America in the early 1990s and in war ravaged Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Dr Boano’s research and consultancy roles have included work in Nicaragua, Ecuador, Venezuela, El Salvador, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Bolivia, Occupied Palestinian Territories, Lebanon, Jordan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Kosovo, Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia, Turkey, Malaysia, Cambodia and Thailand. This involved collaborations with numerous institutions, including UNHCR, UNDP, Refugee Study Centre, EU, Oxfam GB, Italian Civil Protection, World Bank and several architectural practices.

RSC Public Seminar Series
Emergency Shelter and Forced Migration
Michaelmas Term 2016
Convened by Tom Scott-Smith and Mark E. Breeze

This interdisciplinary seminar series examines the nature and challenges of emergency shelter in the context of forced migration. What are the key issues in the design and provision of shelters? What does better shelter mean and how can we get there? How can political dynamics be managed in the organization of camps and urban areas? What lessons emerge from over forty years practical work in the shelter sector? The speakers in this series include academics and practitioners from the fields of architecture, planning, anthropology, humanitarianism, and design. The seminar series complements the forthcoming issue of Forced Migration Review Emergency Shelter, to be published in 2017.

About the speaker: Tom Newby (CARE International)

Tom Newby was appointed Head of Humanitarian at CARE International UK in 2016. He previously led CARE International’s Emergency Shelter Team, which is based at CARE International UK, since December 2013. He is a chartered structural engineer with significant private sector experience in the UK and USA, and worked in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake, managing shelter programmes for two different organisations. He has been a trustee of Engineers Without Borders UK for many years and led the organisation early in its history.