Book Launch with Author & Translator: Yan Ge (顏歌)’s The Chilli Bean Paste Clan, translated by Nicky Harman

https://www.facebook.com/events/605485149803274/

2018/May/07 Monday 5-7PM Ho Tim Seminar Room, China Centre, St Hugh’s College, Oxford

Open and free of charge for all

Supported by: Oxford Chinese Studies Society

To welcome everyone back to Oxford in this Trinity Term, we have invited one of the most important writers of China’s post-1980 generation, Yan Ge, to share with us her experiences as a young writer in China and abroad. She will bring her seminal work, The Chilli Bean Paste Clan (《我們家》in Chinese, published in 2013), and discuss issues of family, language, morality, capitalism and more, with the novel’s English translator Nicky Harman. The Chilli Bean Paste Clan the English translation will be published by Balestier Press and available on the market from the 1st of May, 2018, adding a fresh voice in the growing field of literature in translation.

Synopsis of The Chilli Bean Paste Clan:

Set in a fictional town in West China, this is the story of the Duan-Xue family, owners of the lucrative chilli bean paste factory, and their formidable matriarch. As Gran’s eightieth birthday approaches, her middle-aged children get together to make preparations. Family secrets are revealed and long-time sibling rivalries flare up with renewed vigour. As Shengqiang struggles unsuccessfully to juggle the demands of his mistress and his wife, the biggest surprises of all come from Gran herself……

Professor David Der-wei Wang 王德威 of Harvard University has commented on Yan Ge and her work and hinted that she might signal a generational shift in the Chinese literary scene:
“She writes about her hometown. The stories in a small Sichuanese town are greatly done. She has her own worldviews, and frankly speaking, she is of a very fortunate generation. What she may have encountered as she grew up is not as tumultuous or adventurous as the writers that came before her, and therefore the factor of imagination has gradually come to matter more than experiences in reality.
她写她的故乡，四川一个小城的故事，写得很好。她有她的世界观，但坦白地讲，他们都是有幸的一代，在她成长的过程里面，她所遭遇的不如过去那辈作家有那么多的坎坷或者冒险性，所以，想象的成分已经逐渐地凌驾了现实经验的体会。”

This event will be of interest to those of you who work on contemporary China, Chinese literature, translation studies, and publishing. The conversation between Yan Ge and Nicky Harman will last around 30 minutes and we will leave plenty of time for critical dialogues, Q & A and discussions.

Books available for purchase at a discounted rate.

Speaker biography:

Yan Ge was born in Sichuan Province, China in 1984. She is a writer as well as a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature. Publishing since 1994, she is the author of eleven books in Chinese. Her works have been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Hungarian. She was a visiting scholar at Duke University from 2011 to 2012 and a residency writer at the Cross Border Festival in Netherlands in November 2012. Named by People’s Literature magazine as one of twenty future literature masters in China, she is now the chairperson of China Young Writers’ Association and a contract writer of Sichuan Writers’ Association. She recently started writing in English. Her English stories could be seen on Irish Times and Stand Magazine. She lives in Dublin with her husband and son.

Nicky Harman is a British translator of Chinese literature, and one of the most influential figures in the field. She is co-Chair of the Translators Association (Society of Authors) and co-founded Paper Republic 纸托邦, one of the most important online forums for Chinese literatures in translation. She taught on the MSc in Translation at Imperial College until 2011 and now translates full-time from Chinese. The authors she has translated include Jia Pingwa贾平凹，Yan Geling 严歌苓，Chan Koon-chung 陈冠中，Annibaobei 安妮宝贝，Chen Xiwo陈希我，Yan Ge颜歌，and Han Dong韩东, to name just a few. She has won several awards with her translations.

Join St Cross alumna Kristina Lunz (MSc Global Governance and Diplomacy, 2014), co-founder of the Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy, for a panel discussion on diplomacy, feminist foreign policy and social entrepreneurship. Joining her will be CFFP co-founder Marissa Conway, head of CFFP in the UK, and Dr Jennifer Cassidy, Editor of “Gender and Diplomacy” (Routledge, 2017) and Lecturer in International Relations, University of Oxford (St Peter’s College).

This talk is free to attend, all welcome.

About CFFP

The Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy (CFFP) is a research and advocacy organisation promoting a feminist approach to foreign policy. With its vision to challenge the status quo of foreign policy, the CFFP puts people instead of special interest at the core of policy initiatives.

CFFP was founded in 2016 by Marissa in London, where she is heading the UK section of CFFP. Kristina, a St Cross alumna (2014-2015), joined Marissa as a co-founder and also brought the organisation to Germany, where she is heading the German team. Dr Jennifer Cassidy joined CFFP’s Advisory Council recently.

How do we define a sound or a taste for which our language does not have a dedicated word?

Typically, we borrow words from another sensory modality. Wines, for example, are often described by words that belong to other sensory perceptions: a “soft flavour” borrows the adjective soft from the domain of touch, and a “round taste” borrows the adjective round from the domain of sight.

It remains an interesting open issue to what extent these cross-sensory metaphors are universal across languages, and to what extent they are language-specific.

Dr Francesca Strik Lievers will address these questions and provide an overview of the latest scientific discoveries in the field, using examples taken from different languages. Her talk will be followed by an opportunity for questions.

The event is organised and hosted by Creative Multilingualism in collaboration with TORCH. Creative Multilingualism is a research programme led by the University of Oxford and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of the Open World Research Initiative.

Participation is free and open to the public. We provide FREE LUNCH to all participants.

12.30-13.00 – lunch and mingling

13.00-14.00 – talk and discussion

In today’s fast changing, highly interconnected, culturally diverse world our current approaches to policy need to become more responsive to change. Currently the dominant mode of policy making is still based on what we might term ‘intelligent choice’. This retains the premise that problems can be resolved through ‘best practice’ evidence-based approaches using empirical methods. We need to move however to ‘next practice’ a method which seeks to create entirely new propositions and then testing them in context so that we may learn, adapt and actively shape our understanding of the problem-solution space itself.

New methods are at the heart of some of that Lab’s latest projects, including a unique collaboration with the Government’s Office for Science, applying Speculative Design and advanced visualisation in the run up to the Industrial Strategy Ageing Grand Challenge.

As part of Think Human Festival, this one-off pop-up event is a unique opportunity for visitors of all ages to interact with leading academics from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Oxford Brookes University. The academics will act as ‘human books’ from a range of perspectives; historic, literary, political, legal and educational for 15 minutes per ‘book loan’ against the back drop of revolution. ‘RESIST! REMAIN!’ will provide the chance to engage with and access humanities and social science disciplines in a fun, original and inspiring way, and aims to create a lasting impression of how these subjects can help to understand what it is to be human.

Please note that this event is free, open to all ages and there is no need to book ahead. Please come to Bonn Square and start a interesting conversation around revolution!

Lunchtime talk and discussion led by Pete Wallis of Oxfordshire’s Youth Justice Service at the Mint House, Oxford Centre for Restorative Practice. Refreshments from 12.45.

Since 2015 a group of research-active academics from Oxford Brookes School of Law have been investigating how the criminal law can, and should, tackle speech and images on the internet which are dangerous or offensive.

For Think Human Festival Chara Bakalis, Chris Lloyd, and Mark O’Brien will run a workshop with short talks on ‘cyberhate,’ ‘sexting,’ and the ‘dark web’ respectively. These talks aim to engage audiences in intellectual questions about the issues society faces in the internet age and how the law can engage with these pressing topics. This workshop is for anyone interested in issues of criminal law, internet regulation, the affects of social media, and the wider digital world of the 21st century.

Lunch will be provided at this event.

The year is 1964 and ten defendants are on trial for their lives in South Africa in what is widely perceived as a politically motivated proceeding. The defendants include many prominent campaigners against apartheid, notably Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki. Across the world there is widespread condemnation, and criticism of the apartheid regime is frequently aired by states in the United Nations. Multiple resolutions are passed by the General Assembly and Security Council calling for South Africa to end the trial and to release all political prisoners.

On Friday 25 May 2018, members of the Oxford Brookes Model United Nations Society will be staging a re-enactment of a Security Council debate about the Rivonia trial in South Africa.  The Security Council delegates have agreed to meet with interested bystanders, over tea, coffee and cake, between 12 noon and 1pm in Headington Hill Hall and will be available to discuss about what their countries hope to achieve in a resolution about the Rivonia trial.

Please join us for what will be a fun event set in a fascinating time in history with the Cold War, anti-colonial movements and the rise of ideas of racial equality and human rights all playing a role in how apartheid was discussed within the United Nations.

Please register for this event on the Think Human Festival website.

Federica Infantino is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Group for Research on Ethnic Relations, Migration and Equality at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Her project ‘Practicing Immigration Detention and Deportation in the EU. Actors, Organizations and Transnational Policymaking from Below’ is funded by the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS-FRS). In 2015, she was Wiener-Anspach postdoctoral fellow and visiting academic at COMPAS, University of Oxford. Federica holds a PhD in political and social sciences from Université Libre de Bruxelles and a PhD in political science, comparative political sociology, from Sciences Po Paris. Her main research interests focus on the practices of migration and border control in comparative perspective, transnational actors and dynamics of policy change, the involvement of non-state actors in governments’ functions. She is the author of the book Outsourcing Border Control. Politics and Practice of Contracted Visa Policy in Morocco (Palgrave MacMillan), the co-editor of the 2014 Security Dialogue’s special issue ‘Border Security as Practice’ and the author of several articles about the day-to-day filtering work of borders that is achieved via visa issuing.

This lecture explores the global preoccupation with criminality in the early twenty-first century, a preoccupation strikingly disproportionate, in most places and for most people, to the risks posed by lawlessness to the conduct of everyday life. Ours in an epoch in which law-making, law-breaking, and law-enforcement are ever more critical registers in which societies construct, contest, and confront truths about themselves. It argues that, as the result of a tectonic shift in the triangulation of capital, the state, and governance, the meanings attached to crime and, with it, the nature of policing, have undergone significant change; also, that there has been a palpable muddying of the lines between legality and illegality, between corruption and conventional business – even between crime-and-policing, which exist, nowadays, in ever greater, hyphenated complicity.

Founder and co-head of Doughty Street Chambers, Europe’s largest human rights practice. He has argued leading cases in constitutional law, criminal law and media law. Author.

It is generally thought that China and the West have developed historically along different lines, each with its own understanding of society and the ideas and concepts on which society is founded.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the legal and jurisprudential context, where it is conventionally assumed that the two major civilizations proceeded according to wholly different understandings of society, relations among its members, and between the people and government.

The writings of Confucius seem to confirm this sense of separation. While we have all heard of Confucius; have probably at some time quoted from him, nevertheless he epitomizes the Chinese way of thought, which is taken to be a matter of curiosity but of no special interest.

In this lecture, Dr Ying Yu, Research Fellow of Wolfson College Oxford, will challenge these assumptions and offer the basis for a wholly new approach.

Through a close analysis of Confucius’ ideas, based on the original script, Dr Yu will show how similar they are to the jurisprudential foundations of western societies. In doing so, Dr Yu will pay particular attention to understandings of justice, both substantive and procedural.

Dr Ying Yu is a Research Fellow in Law Justice and Society at Wolfson College, Oxford, and a member of the Faculty of Law in the University of Oxford.

Ying’s main research interest is the rights of consumers and their legal protection, building on her former work on international trade, maritime law and private international law.

A History of Food Fraud and Its Detection
Dr Duncan Campbell (DPhil Soil Solution Chemistry, 1986)

Duncan’s talk will cover the long history of food adulteration from medieval Germany to 19th century America, the pioneers who applied scientific methods to its detection in the 19th century and some modern examples from Britain and further afield.

Duncan was a student member of St Cross College from 1982 to 1985. After his time at St Cross and a period of post-doctoral research, he broadened his horizons to apply chemical analysis to public protection and gained the qualification required to act as a Public Analyst in 1994.

Although small in number, Public Analysts play a key role in enforcing many aspects of food legislation in the UK, directing the analysis of food and providing expert opinion on the results. A leading member of the profession, Duncan has contributed to the wider debate on protecting the public’s interests in relation to food, as well as TV programmes including the second episode of Netflix’s documentary series ‘Rotten’ which sets out to expose fraud and corruption in today’s global food industry.

Drinks reception to follow.

Helen Jukes, author of A Honeybee Heart Five Openings, and Caspar Henderson, author of A New Map of Wonders talk about honeybees and nature. All are welcome. 7.30pm on 16 July in the library in the Oxford Hub. More details here https://www.facebook.com/events/222901301824557/

Introducing a pioneering approach to ‘global legal epidemiology’, Prof Steven Hoffman will discuss legal mechanisms available for coordinating international responses to transnational problems, their prospects, and their challenges. Global legal epidemiology is the scientific study of international law as a factor in the cause, distribution, and promotion of outcomes around the world. It involves evaluating the effectiveness of international legal mechanisms on the basis of their quantifiable effects and drawing implications for the development of future treaties.

Prof Hoffman will draw on examples from public health, including tobacco control and antimicrobial resistance, identifying wider lessons for potential international treaties in other domains such as the environment, human rights and trade.

This talk has unfornately been cancelled.  It will be rescheduled for the New Year.

Talk followed by questions and discussion. This is part of a series of eight meetings on Thursday evenings, each one beginning at 7:30 and ending at 9pm.

11 October
The right to say untrue and damaging things
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

18 October
Flat earth: a Marxist critique
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

25 October
Tithe, timber, and the persistence of the ancien régime
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

1 November
The dream of human life: art in the Italian Renaissance
Oxford Town Hall, St Aldates

8 November
Antisemitism: more geese than swans
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

15 November
Marcus Aurelius and the self-help movement
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

22 November
Hegelian contradiction and prime numbers
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

29 November
Aleksandr Bogdanov (1873–1928) and the general science of organization
Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall St

In recent years, several developing countries have adopted regulatory laws to remain relevant in an increasingly globalized world. On the Indian Subcontinent, the entire Indian and Pakistani legal systems – their Constitutions and Codes of Civil and Criminal Procedure – are legal transplants, since they are either modelled on British Laws (Constitutions are modelled on the Government of India Act 1935) or were introduced by the British.

In the run up to joining the World Trade Organization, and as part of World Bank 2nd generation reforms, both India and Pakistan began to update their regulatory infrastructure, including laws regulating financial and capital markets, insurance, telecommunication, and electricity. The majority of these laws were modelled on western regulatory laws, yet the manner and extent to which these laws were adopted – and adapted – in the two countries was remarkably different, and led to very different outcomes. Whilst policymakers in both countries are aware that in order to succeed, adopted laws must be compatible with the context for which they are intended, there is less clarity as to how this compatibility is achieved.

In this workshop, scholars will discuss the experience of India and Pakistan to consider how the interplay of institutions can affect the legitimacy, compatibility, and ultimate success of these transplanted laws in the adopting countries.

Participants include:
Denis Galligan, Emeritus Professor of Socio-Legal Studies and Director of Programmes, Foundation for Law, Justice and Society, Oxford

Amber Darr, Senior fellow, Centre for Law, Economics and Society, University College London

Organised by Oxford Civic Society @oxcivicsoc. Al Bell, Director of Oxford Citizens Advice, talks about the charity’s role in helping Oxford people and influencing decision makers on a range of contemporary social and economic issues including debt, housing, Universal Credit and Brexit.. https://www.oxcivicsoc.org.uk/programme/

Chief Philologist of the Oxford English Dictionary Edmund Weiner will be presenting his talk, “Thew Grew out of their Name” to the Oxford Tolkien Society

Entry free for members, £2 for non-members

“Many words and names in Tolkien’s words seem to have had a complex inner history in his own mind. This talk will look at how Tolkien’s creative philological mind worked. It will be an unhasty ramble around Ent country, looking at names and topics of language construction and language theory, with even a quick visit to Humpty Dumpty!”

Organised by Oxford Civic Society @oxcivicsoc. Wildlife today faces many serious threats and is in general decline. Estelle Bailey, Chief Executive of the largest local wildlife conservation charity in our area, the Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust (BBOWT) will talk about what needs to be done to reverse the trends.. https://www.oxcivicsoc.org.uk/programme/

Chief Arts Correspondent Will Gompertz: “The importance of Art and Museums”

The Global Politics, Economy and Society (GPES) Research Centre at Oxford Brookes will be hosting its first annual lecture, given by the writer and activist George Monbiot. All welcome, but please book via the registration link.

The 5th Annual Oxford Business and Poverty Conference will feature a diverse range of speakers addressing the Paradoxes of Prosperity. Sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/5th-annual-oxford-business-poverty-conference-tickets-57733957822
Hosted at the Sheldonian Theatre, the conference will feature keynotes by:
Lant Pritchett: RISE Research Director at the Blavatnik School of Government, former Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development
Efosa Ojomo: Global Prosperity Lead and Senior Researcher at the Clayton Christensen Institute
John Hoffmire: Director of Center on Business and Poverty and Research Associate at Kellogg Colleges at Center For Mutual and Employee-owned Business at Oxford University
Ananth Pai: Executive Director, Bharath Beedi Works Pvt. Ltd. and Director, Bharath Auto Cars Pvt
Laurel Stanfield: Assistant Professor of Marketing at Bentley College in Massachusetts
Grace Cheng: Greater China’s Country Manager for Russell Reynolds Associates
Madhusudan Jagadish: 2016 Graduate MBA, Said Business School, University of Oxford
Tentative Schedule:
2:15-2:20 Welcome
2:20-2:50 Efosa Ojomo, co-author of The Prosperity Paradox, sets the stage for the need for innovation in development
2:50-3:20 John Hoffmire, Ananth Pai and Mudhusudan Jagadish explain how the Prosperity Paradox can be used in India as a model to create good jobs for poor women
3:20-3:40 Break
3:40-4:10 Laurel Steinfeld speaks to issues of gender, development and business – addressing paradoxes related to prosperity
4:10-4:40 Grace Cheng, speaks about the history of China’s use of disruptive innovations to develop its economy
4:40-5:15 Break
5:15-6 Lant Pritchett talks on Pushing Past Poverty: Paths to Prosperity
6:30-8 Dinner at the Rhodes House – Purchase tickets after signing up for the conference
Sponsors include: Russell Reynolds, Employee Ownership Foundation, Ananth Pai Foundation and others

The high seas are under severe pressure from both direct and indirect human impacts, including the effects of over-fishing, plastic debris and climate change. In this talk, Prof Alex Rogers will present what a network of marine protected areas in the high seas might look like, protecting 30% of known conservation features and taking into account climate change impacts. We will also hear from Dr Gwilym Rowlands, who will consider how such a network of marine protected areas could be enforced and the potential benefits to the ocean.

The question of how far a state should authorise the peacetime collection and use of intelligence gathered by secret agents and by interception of communications has long been a thorny issue of public policy. Today, new ethical and legal questions arise from the ability to access in bulk personal information from social media and from Internet use and to apply artificial intelligence trained algorithms to mine data for intelligence and law enforcement purposes. In his talk Sir David Omand, a former director of GCHQ, will lay out an ethical framework for thinking about these powerful developments in modern digital intelligence.

Speaker: Professor Sir David Omand GCB is a visiting professor in the War Studies Department, King’s College London and at PSIA, Sciences Po, Paris. He was previously UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator, Permanent Secretary of the Home Office and Director, GCHQ. He is the author of Securing the State (Hurst, 2020) and, with Professor Mark Phythian, Principled Spying: the Ethics of Secret Intelligence, (Oxford University Press, 2018).

In this lecture, lawyer Mary Bartkus shares her firsthand experience of the international litigation of multibillion dollar claims against Big Pharma when a medication taken by millions of users worldwide is withdrawn.

She will address the impact of the withdrawal and United States litigation on regulators, legislators, and on cross-border litigation in common law and civil law jurisdictions across six continents.

When Merck & Co., Inc. withdrew the innovative painkiller Vioxx (Rofecoxib) from more than eighty countries following evidence that high-dosage use could cause an increased risk of heart attack and stroke, thousands of US citizens brought personal injury claims.

A Texas jury awarded more than $250 million to one individual claimant. Although that verdict was reduced and later overturned on appeal, and most US juries found for the company, with more than 26,000 US court claims yet to be tried and another 14,100 waiting to be filed, the company agreed to resolve the US personal injury claims for $4.85 billion, a deal said to be “favourable” to the company and “clearly at the low end of general expectations”.

Internationally, claims were brought in waves following developments in the US. These international cases would be heard and decided in jurisdictions with different traditions and conditions for litigants.

In Australia, a justice of the Federal Court dismissed all claims against Merck & Co., Inc. in class litigation, finding “Merck had done everything that might reasonably be expected of it in the discharge of its duty of care”. The Full Court overturned an award of damages to the individual representative claimant for failure to establish causation, and awarded full costs to the company; the High Court denied claimants leave to appeal. Claims of remaining group members then were resolved.

In England, claimants abandoned multi-party actions filed in the High Court. In Scotland, the parties litigated and resolved individual actions. In Canada, the parties litigated and resolved overlapping class and individual actions in ten provinces. Courts regularly dismissed cases in civil law jurisdictions.

The lecture considers this landmark international litigation alongside the challenges companies face when investing billions of dollars to develop innovative medications, and asks: Who won and who lost?

Mary E. Bartkus is Special Counsel at Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP, a member of the Bars of New York and New Jersey; previously Executive Director & Senior Counsel, Merck & Co., Inc.

At this workshop, a roundtable of experts will examine the issue of state capture and the implications for the constitutional order.

Presentations:
How state capture is possible in a competitive democracy

Daniel Smilov, Associate Professor, Political Science Department, University of Sofia; Programme Director, Centre for Liberal Strategies, Sofia

Shortcuts to modernity? Anti-corruption as a panacea for state capture

Bogdan Iancu, Associate Professor, University of Bucharest

Abby Innes, Assistant Professor in Political Economy, European Institute, LSE

State capture or state hegemony? Understanding state-business dynamics in the Gulf Cooperation States

Elham Fahkro, Lecturer of Legal Writing and Research, NYU Abu Dhabi

Capturing the judiciary from the inside

Katarína Šipulová, Senior Researcher, Judicial Studies Institute, Masaryk University, Brno

Accounting for state capture: reflections on the South African Experience

Nick Friedman, Biegun Warburg Junior Research Fellow in Law, Oxford

For centuries, England’s elite have covered up how they got their hands on millions of acres of our land, by constructing walls, burying surveys and more recently, sheltering behind offshore shell companies. But with the dawn of digital mapping and the Freedom of Information Act, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for them to hide.

In June’s House Matters, Open House welcomes Guy Shrubsole, the author of the new book ‘Who Owns England?’. Cat Hobbs, the founder of ‘We Own It’, will be chairing the discussion and we’ll also have the Who Owns Oxford group demoing their new website which intends to visualise contemporary and historic land ownership in the County and tell stories of how it affects us all.

Trespassing through tightly-guarded country estates, ecologically ravaged grouse moors and empty Mayfair mansions, writer and activist Guy Shrubsole has used these 21st century tools to uncover a wealth of never-before-seen information about the people who own our land, to create the most comprehensive map of land ownership in England that has ever been made public.

From secret military islands to tunnels deep beneath London, Shrubsole unearths truths concealed since the Domesday Book about who is really in charge of this country – at a time when Brexit is meant to be returning sovereignty to the people. Melding history, politics and polemic, he vividly demonstrates how taking control of land ownership is key to tackling everything from the housing crisis to climate change – and even halting the erosion of our very democracy.

It’s time to expose the truth about who owns England – and finally take back our green and pleasant land

It is now well-accepted that digital media platforms are not merely information intermediaries, but also central control points of the Internet. They have become the so-called ‘deciders’ and ‘custodians’ of online speech, leading to the privatization of Internet governance.

In China, domestic platforms such as WeChat, Weibo, and Toutiao have become the mediators, gatekeepers, and governors of online news and information. In order to perform this role, platforms have to work closely with the Chinese state in guiding and controlling public opinion.

The aim in this workshop is to advance analysis and understanding of the role platforms play in the governance of online news and information, and their relations with the state. After opening with a close study of the situation in China, the workshop will consider the experience of western nations, which also have to rely on private platforms to tackle issues like online hate speech, disinformation, and political or terrorism propaganda.

The workshop will gather together a number of academics working in related areas to discuss this highly topical and immensely important issue.

Presentations:
Governance regarding public opinion in a platform era: a study of China
Jufang WANG, Center for Cultural and Media Policy Studies, Warwick University

China’s control of digital infrastructure in comparative perspective
Ralph SCHROEDER, Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University

The new governance and freedom of expression
Damian TAMBINI, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics

Algorithmic public sphere: controlling access to knowledge in the digital age
Roxana RADU, PCMLP/CSLS, Oxford University

Participants:
Wang Jufang, PhD candidate in Media and Communication, Warwick University, and former vice-director of news of CRI Online

Denis Galligan, Emeritus Professor of Socio-Legal Studies and Director of Programmes, Foundation for Law, Justice and Society, Oxford

Roxana Radu, Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford’s Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy

Ralph Schroeder, Professor in Social Science of the Internet, Oxford Internet Institute, and director of its MSc programme in Social Science of the Internet

Damian Tambini, Associate Professor, Department of Media and Communications, LSE

Commentators:
Jacob Rowbottam, Associate Professor, University College, Oxford University

Pu Yan, Doctoral Student, Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University