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.”

Three high-profile SPC alumni return to their college to discuss the impending EU Referendum in a forum chaired by the Master, Mark Damazer CBE.

Join the Editor of the Sunday Times, Martin Ivens (BA Modern History – 1977), the Deputy Editor of the New Statesman, Helen Lewis (BA English – 2001), and the BBC’s Political Correspondent Ben Wright (BA Modern History – 1996) for a panel discussion in which they will cut through the rhetoric surrounding this most controversial of issues in contemporary British politics, and who will then face your questions.

Is there anything wrong with putting a price on health, education, citizenship, and the environment? Where do markets serve the public good, and where do they not belong?

Join us for a lively discussion with Professor Michael J. Sandel about money, markets, and the good things in life.

Registration required

“Alternative Realities and New Perspectives on Family Violence”

Panel Discussion 2:

Professor Marianne Hester, Centre for Gender and Violence Research, Bristol University – “Intimate Partner Violence in LGBTQ Relationships – What’s Gender Got To Do with It?”

Professor Rachel Condry, Associate Professor of Criminology, Oxford University – “Making Sense of Adolescent to Parent Violence”

Dr Carlene Firmin, Head of the MsUnderstood Partnership and Senior Research Fellow at Bedfordshire University – “Contextual Dimensions of Abuse in Young People’s Relationships”

Drawing upon sociology of culture and digital rhetoric literature, this talk will illuminate the persuasive function of hashtags in the context of the UK EU membership referendum. What makes a hashtag more influential, or more successful?

The hashtag is not just a category or community marker—it has also become a vehicle through which rhetorical strategies are being used to influence thoughts and feelings. Many scholars have explored hashtag success by examining popularity and longevity. This talk presents an expanded definition of success that takes hashtag hijacking into account. The data that will be presented are being gathered live from the Twitter Streaming API; over two hundred hashtags and usernames relating to the EU referendum are being tracked. The talk will also highlight the challenges and opportunities afforded by big ‘linguistic’ data on social media.

Yin Yin Lu is a DPhil Candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) and Balliol College, as well as a Clarendon Scholar. She is fascinated by the intersection between language and technology, and her research focuses on the hashtag, one of the most notable sociotechnical phenomena of the 21st century. Prior to joining the OII, Yin obtained a Masters in English Language from the University of Oxford (Lincoln College) and a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University. Between these degrees, she worked at Pearson Education and 10 Speed Labs, a digital media agency in Manhattan. She is the founder and co-convenor of the #SocialHumanities network at TORCH, and her ultimate objective is to reinvent the novel—along with the very acts of reading and writing—through new media technologies.

It is difficult to resolve the global warming free-rider externality problem by negotiating many different quantity targets. By contrast, negotiating a single internationally-binding minimum carbon price (the proceeds from which are domestically retained) counters pure self-interest. A uniform price embodies “countervailing force” against free riding by automatically incentivizing parties to internalize the externality via a simple understandable formula that embodies a common climate commitment based on principles of reciprocity, quid-pro-quo and I-will-if-you-will. Professor Martin Weitzman will give a somewhat technical talk centered on a mathematical model. Some implications are discussed.

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.

Welcome to Future Debates, a series of public events supported by the British Science Association.

A genome is an entire set of DNA; all the instructions for making every part of a living thing. Research into our genomes could improve our understanding of diseases, cancers and passing on certain traits. The application of this research through genomic medicine is at the cutting edge of science. There’s large potential for the technology to help us create new treatments and preventative approaches.

Someone’s genome can explain lots of things about them, and we don’t yet understand all of what the genetic code means. Genome data is being collected from a group of patients with rare diseases and cancers across the UK, as part of the Genomics England 100,000 Genomes Project. This information needs to be collected and stored securely, interpreted by experts and viewed in a way that protects the donor’s identity. There have been discussions among scientists about the implications of genomic medicine for privacy and the NHS, and the British Science Association believes that it is vital to open that conversation up to the public.

Come and join our panel of scientists and other experts to discuss who should have access to this data. Should genomic data be used outside medicine? Should private companies share any profits they make from genomic data with participants? Does the right to privacy outweigh the societal benefit of genomic research?

Doors open from 6.00 pm, and the debate will run from 6.30 pm until 8.00 pm.

Future Debates events are part of the British Science Association’s work to make science a fundamental part of British society and culture. We want to empower many more people – not just scientists – to constructively engage in debates over the applications and implications of science in their lives, their local economy and the UK’s future.

Follow us on twitter @LivingWellOx @HumanGeneticsOx @BritSciAssoc and use the event hashtag #FutureDebates

A lively panel discussion exploring women’s ever changing roles and struggle for equality, featuring speakers Professor Ngaire Woods, Dr Dana Mills, Dr Joanna Williams and Helen Pike.

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.

Research psychologist Peter Etchells and author of ‘Death by Video Game’, Simon Parker, discuss the positive and negative effects of gaming.

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.

Join Oxford Festival of the Arts at the prestigious and historic Oxford Union for an evening of top class debating that will tackle one of this year’s key issues: the UK’s immigration policy.

‘Gene-editing’ sounds like science fiction, but today it is an emerging reality. This raises hope for treating medical problems, but also opens ethical quandaries about equality, privacy, and personal freedom. Discuss these questions with a panel of experts including geneticist Andy Greenfield, science fiction author Paul McAuley and science policy advisor Elizabeth Bohm. Lisa Melton, Senior News Editor at Nature Biotechnology, will moderate the event, with Ben Davies, Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, presenting technical background.

Book here: http://www.oxfordshiresciencefestival.com/wednesday.html

The question of how to educate the next generation has always been fraught with the anxieties of the age – so what do our current approaches reveal about our own anxieties? Discover the answer to this and more at our lively panel discussion.

The Las Casas Institute presents a day-long conference on money as a prism through which we often view the world and its challenges. Join theologians, economists, and other experts in discussing what money reveals and conceals about our world.

Reception to follow at Blackfriars Hall at 5:00pm. Registration fee includes lunch and reception.

Speakers:
Professor Philip Goodchild
Sr Margaret Atkins OSA
Sr Helen Alford OP

Panelists:
Barbara Ridpath
Charles Wookey
Peter Róna

The Institute is celebrating the Dominicans’ jubilee with a series of events on the challenges of truth telling in contemporary society.

With a bruising new leadership contest underway and member set against member, Labour looks to be on the verge of splitting. Who is to blame? Would British politics benefit from a reconfiguration? And what other reforms does the system need in the wake of the Brexit vote?
John McTernan, commentator and former Political Secretary to Tony Blair
Isabel Hardman, Assistant Editor of The Spectator
Emily Jones, Associate Professor in Public Policy, Blavatnik School of Government (chair)
Tim Bale, Professor of Politics, Queen Mary, University of London
Anthony Barnett, writer and founder of the openDemocracy website

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)

Jonathon Porritt and Shaun Chamberlin celebrate the launch of the late Trinity alumnus David Fleming’s extraordinary book, ‘Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy’.

This intimate event will be held in the Sutro Room at Trinity College, Oxford University, and will be recorded for a short film. Various themes in Fleming’s wonderfully diverse work – from carnival to climate change, religion to resilience, manners to markets – may be explored in response to the interests of those present.

Interview with Shaun Chamberlin on David Fleming, Brexit and the book: http://www.darkoptimism.org/2016/08/21/interview-on-david-fleming-music-and-hippos/

More information on David Fleming’s books:
http://www.chelseagreen.com/surviving-the-future
http://www.chelseagreen.com/lean-logic

Copies of both books will be on sale on the day.

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“David Fleming was an elder of the UK green movement and a key figure in the early Green Party. Drawing on the heritage of Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful, Fleming’s beautifully written and nourishing vision of a post-growth economics grounded in human-scale culture and community—rather than big finance—is both inspiring and ever more topical.”
~ Caroline Lucas MP, co-leader, Green Party of England and Wales; former Member of the European Parliament

“I would unreservedly go so far as to say that David Fleming was one of the most original, brilliant, urgently-needed, underrated, and ahead-of-his-time thinkers of the last 50 years. History will come to place him alongside Schumacher, Berry, Seymour, Cobbett, and those other brilliant souls who could not just imagine a more resilient world but who could paint a picture of it in such vivid colours. Step into the world of David Fleming; you’ll be so glad you did.”
~ Rob Hopkins, cofounder of the Transition Network

“Why do some of the truly great books only emerge and exact their influence upon us after the death of their authors? Perhaps it takes a lifetime to accrue and refine the necessary wisdom. Or perhaps it simply takes the rest of us too long to catch up. Like Thoreau, Fleming’s masterpiece brims not only with fresh insight into every nook and cranny of our culture and what it means to be human, but with such wit and humour that its challenging ideas and radical perspectives become a refreshing delight. If we’re to have a future worth surviving, this book demands to be read, re-read, and—ultimately—acted upon.”
~ Mark Boyle, author of The Moneyless Manifesto and Drinking Molotov Cocktails with Gandhi

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.

Between 1995 and 2011, remittances to developing world economies, that is, money sent by emigrants to family and friends in their country of origin, grew from US$55 billion to over US$372 billion, to exceed all overseas development assistance to the developing world, and all private debt and portfolio equity flows.
Latin America is a major recipient of remittances. Over 5.2 per cent of the region’s population are migrants and in 2011 alone, US$62 billion was remitted to Latin American households. Despite the scale of these transfers however, we still do not know how remittances might affect political preferences and political behaviour among recipients, what this might mean for policy outcomes, and how these dynamics might shape the political system in countries heavily dependent on this capital.
In this talk, Professor Doyle will outline how the regular receipt of remittances is changing the political preferences of recipients, which will have long-lasting effects on politics and policy in Latin American countries dependent upon remittances, relative to countries that are not.

Professor Doyle is the Tutorial Fellow in the Politics of Latin America and Associate Professor of Comparative Politics Department of Politics and International Relations. He is a member of the Latin American Centre.

Inequality is centre-stage in political debate both globally and in individual countries, being blamed for everything from Brexit to stagnating wages and growth. Professor Brian Nolan, Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Inequality and Prosperity, will seek to tease out why this is so and identify central unanswered questions about the drivers of inequality, and what policy responses to it should be.

Brookes Centre for Global Politics, Economics and Society seminar series

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