From 19.15 the hall is open for help with computer advice on searching for relatives’ documentation, free tea/coffee, new books available to browse. Talks begin in the big hall at 20.00.

Butterflies and moths are suffering impacts from changes in climate, habitats and plant communities, alongside wider challenges to nature. The talk will describe these challenges, some of the actions being taken to tackle them, locally and internationally, and where we are able to demonstrate success.
Dr Asher is butterfly recorder for Berks, Bucks and Oxon, author/co-author of several books on butterflies and national chair of Butterfly Conservation, the world’s largest insect conservation charity.

After a short introduction to the session’s four sub-topics; custom-splitting, Oxford Community-Led Housing’s research project, co-housing and Homemaker Oxford; an interactive discussion will involve participants in the discussion of how we can work with housing providers to enable delivery of alternative housing models like community-led housing in and around Oxford.

The session is designed to engage with those who are housing providers (both small and large scale), or have the potential to provide housing, in and around the city of Oxford. What barriers, if any, do these groups and individuals experience when thinking about or actively engaging in community-led housing projects? Further, what can Oxford Community-Led Housing and similar groups do to break down these barriers and engage with housing deliverers to provide alternative housing models like community-led housing as a viable, sustainable and affordable housing model in Oxford?

JOHN KAY, CBE, FBA, Fellow of St John’s College, is a former Financial Times columnist andauthor of several books including ‘Other People’s Money’.

John Kay explains why he fell in love with economics, what big banks and taxi drivers have in common, where modern finance has gone wrong, why economists should admit there are somethings you cannot predict, and previews the new book he is working on with his old colleague Mervyn King.

Sir Muir Gray and Lucy Abel debate: Is value-based health care nothing more than health econimics re-packaged or is health economics nothing more than only one of the six contributors to value-based healthcare?

Health economics is concerned with how to allocate resources in healthcare to optimise outcomes. Health economists have developed a variety of methods to evaluate whether the cost of providing healthcare interventions is worth the benefits. In other words, whether they are good value. These are based on preferences expressed by wider society relating to the value of increasing the length and quality of life. These values can be applied to an intervention by linking them via clinical outcomes.

Value-based healthcare’s concern with technical, personal, and allocative value are defined as, respectively, whether an intervention improves clinical outcomes; whether those clinical outcomes are meaningful for patients; and whether those improved outcomes are worth the costs. In this way it covers the same core principles as health economics, while ignoring over 50 years of research in this field.

Recent attempts to implement value-based healthcare have ignored issues such as interaction between interventions and fully considering opportunity cost. As a result, value-based healthcare adds little to the existing body of research, and diverts investment from proven methods, which risks reducing the value achievable in the NHS.

Sir Muir Gray is now working with both NHS England and Public Health England to bring about a transformation of care with the aim of increasing value for both populations and individuals and published a series of How To Handbooks for example, How to Get Better Value Healthcare, How To Build Healthcare Systems and How To Create the Right Healthcare Culture.

His hobby is ageing and how to cope with it and he has published books for publish a book for people aged seventy called Sod 70! one for the younger decade called Sod 60! This with Dr Claire Parker, and his book for people aged 40-60, titled Midlife, appeared in January 2017. Other books in series on Sod Ageing are Sod it, Eat Well, with Anita Bean and Sod Sitting, Get Moving with Diana Moran, the Green Goddess. For people of all ages Dr Gray’s Walking Cure summarises the evidence on this wonderful means of feeling well, reducing the risk of disease and minimising disability should disease strike.

Lucy Abel is a health economist working within the field of primary care and is part of the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford. She collaborates with research groups to bring the tools of economic evaluation to primary care health science research.

This talk is being held as part of the Practice of Evidence-Based Health Care course which is part of the Evidence-Based Health Care Programme. This is a free event and members of the public are welcome to attend.

Liberal Democrat candidates for the St. Margaret’s and North wards on 3 May 2018

This presentation covers the highlights of almost half a century of observing local wildlife. It includes dormice, reptiles, rare orchids, rare butterflies, moths and other insects, great-crested newts and other amphibians, moths and wildlife observed in Mr Brownsword’s garden.
Mr Brownsword is a retired chemist whose interests include horticulture, natural history and photography.

There is mounting evidence that the planet’s capacity to sustain a growing human population, expected to be over 8 billion by 2030, is declining. The degradation of the planet’s air, water and land, combined with significant loss in biodiversity, is also resulting in substantial health impacts, including the reduction of food security and nutrition, and the spread of disease. Will our planetary boundaries be surpassed if current trends continue?

In this talk, Professor Yadvinder Malhi, Co-Director, Oxford Martin TNC Climate Partnership, will discuss the metabolism of a human – dominated planet, while Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics, will ask if it is possible – as she puts it – “to live well without trashing the planet”.

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

Kumar Iyer, visiting academic at Hertford College and partner with consultants Oliver Wyman, will present findings from a study examining the potential impacts of Brexit on business. The talks will be followed by a brief discussion. All are welcome: please pre-register using the Eventbrite link.
Please note that unfortunately there is no disabled access to the Baring Room.

There are over 30,000 students living and studying at the universities in Oxford. Options for accommodation are usually university accommodation or renting from private landlords with very few being able to afford their own home. Shared living is a popular option but is often expensive, of poor quality and lacks any shared living space at all. Oxford is one of the most expensive places to live in the UK with cost of living often matching that of London; however wages and student loans are not equivalent to London ones.

This session offers an insight into alternative solutions for student housing as we hear from a student housing cooperative in the UK; their journey and lived experience and how their principles might work in Oxford. Their presentation will be followed by an interactive panel discussion from an Oxford housing cooperative, student housing cooperative and others.

Join us in the discussion to learn more about student-led housing that is more affordable, sustainable, community orientated and of better quality as alternatives options to Oxford’s unaffordable rents and poor housing conditions. The session will also provide a platform for you to express your interest in other housing options, ask questions and to understand better what options are available to you so you can take control of your own living conditions.

Talk followed by questions and discussion

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.

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

The Making of the Indonesian Migrant Labour Movement
Junko Asano (St Antony’s, International Development)

The Bold and Brave of Burma:
A Micro-Level Study of the first Movers of Dissent between 1988-2011
Jieun Baek (Hertford, Blavatnik School of Government)

The Politics of Language and Rodrigo Duterte’s Populism
Adrian Calo (School of Oriental and African Languages, London)

The Making of the Indonesian Migrant Labour Movement
Junko Asano (St Antony’s, International Development)

The Bold and Brave of Burma:
A Micro-Level Study of the first Movers of Dissent between 1988-2011
Jieun Baek (Hertford, Blavatnik School of Government)

The Politics of Language and Rodrigo Duterte’s Populism
Adrian Calo (School of Oriental and African Languages, London)

Professor Glen O’Hara will examine why governments get things so wrong, so often. He will ask how history can be used to improve public policy making.

Britain’s exit from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992 and the Second Iraq War in 2003 are two infamous examples of disastrous policy, but governments blunder all the time – whatever party is in power. Infrastructure projects overrun. The aims and techniques of different departments clash. Scandals erupt among officials and politicians. Controversies stymie attempts at agreement and consensus. But why exactly do these failures happen? Are they more or less widespread than in the private sector? And can studying British governments’ decision-making across the twentieth century improve it in the future?

Glen will recommend a slow, deliberative, transparent, democratic and above all humble and sensitive approach in order to avoid another Black Wednesday or ruinous war.

Bill Browder, CEO and Founder of Hermitage Capital Management, Head of Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign and author of “Red Notice, How I Became Putin’s Number One Enemy”

Speaker: Jacques Rupnik (Sciences Po Paris)

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!

This workshop, facilitated by journalist Shaista Aziz, will introduce and explore the notions of ‘intersectional’ identities. Intersectionality may be defined as the way in which people’s experiences are shaped by their ethnicity, class, sex, gender, and sexuality all at the same time and to varying degrees. For example, if being middle-class brings with it a set of shared experiences and expectations, how might those experiences and expectations become altered by being a member of the black middle-classes? Intersectionality is a way in which such terms as class or ‘race’ can retain some usefulness without oversimplification or stereotype.

As a city, Oxford is also prey to stereotype: white, scholarly, privileged, elite even. But Oxford is also the product of its intersectional histories, cultures and inhabitants and we perhaps need to do more to recognise and understand the complex inter-relations that have always defined it and continue to shape it. Understanding Intersectional Oxford is a session devoted to opening up and exploring the experiences that make up intersectional Oxford.

Shaista Aziz is a freelance journalist and writer specialising in identity, race, gender and Muslim women. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Globe and Mail, New York Times, BBC and Huffington Post. She’s a broadcaster and political commentator and the founder of The Everyday Bigotry Project seeking to disrupt narratives around race, Islamophobia and bigotry. She’s a former Oxfam and MSF aid worker and has spent more than fifteen years working across the Middle East, East and West Africa and across Pakistan with marginalised women impacted by conflict and emergencies. Most recently she was working in Borno state, North East Nigeria. She is also a member of the Fabian Women’s Network Executive Committee.

Oxfam CEO Mark Goldring CBE, one of the most high profile figures in the world of charity and NGO’s, will be speaking in a very topical and well timed event to The Oxford Guild, Oxford PPE Society and UNICEF on Campus on Tuesday 22nd May from 6.15pm in the Dorfman Centre of St Peter’s College. As CEO of Oxfam GB, one of the most famous and high profile charitable organisations in the world (which has recently been in the news a huge amount), Mark Goldring brings the needs of the world’s poorest people to a global stage – working with high level government and business leaders and influencing them to act decisively against the causes of poverty. Goldring is chair of the British Overseas Aid Group (BOAG), an umbrella agency representing the 5 biggest NGOs in the UK: Oxfam, ActionAid, CAFOD, Christian Aid and Save the Children. He also manages Oxfam’s programmes in 55 countries; the organisation’s annual income of nearly £400m and thousands of staff and volunteers. He will be talking about the important issue of ‘Reducing Inequality, Ending Poverty: Politics, Philosophy or Economics?’ This will undoubtedly be one of the most TOPICAL AND FASCINATING EVENTS OF THE YEAR and a truly unique opportunity to hear from such a high profile speaker who will be sharing his vast range of experiences and insights over an extensive career. The event is 100% FREE AND OPEN TO ALL and is NOT TO BE MISSED! PLEASE REGISTER YOUR INTEREST HERE: https://goo.gl/forms/J87DUDnXVMY8vJqW2

Goldring’s considerable services to tackling poverty and disadvantage were recognised in 2008 with a CBE.Under his leadership, Oxfam, the international NGO reached more than 13 million people direct last year – and through its influence, improved the lives of many more. This involved responding to emergencies, developing long-term projects for poor communities and campaigning for lasting change. Goldring has decades of experience in international development. He was chief executive of VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) and worked in the field for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), and Oxfam too, as Bangladesh country director in the 90s. Before joining Oxfam, Goldring was chief executive of Mencap, the UK’s leading disability charity. In his five years there, he led the continued growth of the charity’s support services and positioned it as a leading influencer on national disability and social care policy. In recent years, he has also served as vice-chair of AMREF UK, the African health charity; as a board member of Accenture Development Partnerships; chair of the board of charity Revolving Doors and trustee of BRAC – the Bangladesh-based development agency. Goldring read law at Oxford and has a Masters in social policy and planning in developing countries from the London School of Economics.

The digital revolution marks a profound transformation of society, on par with the great general purpose technologies of the past two centuries: the steam engine, internal combustion engine, and electrification. Each reshaped the economy, nature of work, geography of human settlements, and politics. So too is the digital revolution reshaping 21st century society. Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs’ talk will focus on the basic economics of the digital revolution and the implications for jobs and the distribution of income. Professor Sachs will discuss several key economic policy implications of the digital era.

Professor Andy Orchard is the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, Fellow of Pembroke College and Emeritus Fellow of Trinity College, University of Toronto. Author of “The Critical Companion to Beowulf , Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf – Manuscript” and “The Poetic Edda: a Book of Viking Lore”

Reserve your free ticket here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/devouring-the-earth-how-to-feed-10-billion-in-the-face-of-climate-change-tickets-42786532671

“Food is the new oil and land is the new gold” Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute

The planet’s poorest 2 billion people spend over 50% percent of their income on food. Global food prices have doubled in the past decade. Rising temperatures, changing rainfall, eroding soils and shrinking water reserves are threatening the world’s largest food production regions. Climate change is set to hit 2.5 degrees by 2100. Population is on course to reach 10 billion by 2050. With governments in the Middle East and Africa teetering as a result of price spikes, and expanding markets sustaining one climate shock after another, food is quickly becoming the hidden driver of world politics.

Yet food-related Armageddon has been predicted before. And Malthus’ prophesies have not yet come to pass. In the past, industrialisation and the Green Revolution have staved off mass famine. What will it be today? Laboratory-grown protein? GM crops? Sustainable agriculture? Edible insects?

Join us for our panel discussion on “Devouring the Earth. How to feed 10 billion in the face of climate change”. Leading figures from the world of politics, business, science and activism will join together to discuss the challenges and solutions of managing our food systems in the 21st century. Book tickets for what promises to be a lively debate and the opportunity to put your questions to the panel!

William Smith is best known for his great geological map of 1815. Less well appreciated is his lasting legacy in crafting and defining the sub-disciplines of stratigraphy (the correlation and ordering of stratified rocks) and bio-stratigraphy (the correlation of rocks by the use of their fossil content). Smith’s work allowed the locations of coal formations to be predicted, fuelling the Industrial Revolution and giving birth to applied geology.

Owen Green has worked in the Department of Earth Sciences, Oxford, since 1989. Initially helping to establish the Palaeobiology Laboratories, and for the past 10 years as Manager of the Geo-facilities laboratories. Research contributions include re-examining the world’s oldest putative microfossils. He is author of ‘A manual of Practical Laboratory and Field Techniques in Palaeobiology’, and is currently writing a book for the Royal Microscopical Society. He is Chair of the Oxfordshire Geology Trust.

One of the biggest failings of European governments over the past 25 years has been their unwillingness to explain to their electorates the profoundly changing dynamics of the global economy and the pressures this will place on their economic future. European welfare systems and other aspects of the socio-economic contract have become increasingly unsustainable in this international context. Yet governments have tended to underplay the extent of the challenge, avoided or postponed necessary structural responses, and constructed fair-weather institutions to disguise the gaps between policy choices and needed reforms. The result has been deep popular resentment to the halting reform process, which is seen as helping preserve the riches of the few rather than creating fair opportunities in the future, and an erosion in public trust in established parties.

Can parties, politicians and governments recover in the coming years, and what will they need to do? What is the balance of responsibilities at the national and EU institutional levels? What risks might throw them off course?

Talk followed by questions and discussion

Solar energy, once a niche application for a limited market, has become the cheapest and fastest-growing power source on earth. What’s more, its potential is nearly limitless – every hour the sun beams down more energy than the world uses in a year. But Varun Sivaram, Fellow for science and technology at the Council on Foreign Relations, former Oxford researcher, and author of a new book, Taming the Sun, warns that the world is not yet equipped to harness erratic sunshine to meet most of its energy needs. And if solar’s current surge peters out, prospects for replacing fossil fuels and averting catastrophic climate change will dim.

Innovation can brighten those prospects, Sivaram will argue. Financial innovation is already enticing deep-pocketed investors to fund solar projects around the world, from the sunniest deserts to the poorest villages. Technological innovation could replace today’s solar panels with coatings as cheap as paint and employ artificial photosynthesis to store intermittent sunshine as convenient fuels. And systemic innovation could add flexibility to the world’s power grids and other energy systems so they can dependably channel the sun’s unreliable energy. Unleashing all this innovation will require visionary public policy: funding researchers developing next-generation solar technologies, refashioning energy systems and economic markets, and putting together a diverse clean energy portfolio.

This talk will be followed by a drinks reception and book signing, all welcome.

In this book colloquium, a panel will discuss the concluding volume of economist and historian Deirdre McCloskey’s trilogy celebrating the oft-derided virtues of the bourgeoisie — Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World.

There’s little doubt that most humans today are better off than their forebears. The poorest of humanity, McCloskey shows, will soon be joining the comparative riches of Japan and Sweden and Botswana.

Why? Most economists — from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to Thomas Piketty — say the Great Enrichment since 1800 came from accumulated capital. McCloskey disagrees, fiercely. “Our riches,” she argues, “were made not by piling brick on brick, bank balance on bank balance, but by piling idea on idea.” Capital was necessary, but it was ideas, not matter, that drove “trade-tested betterment.” Nor were institutions the drivers. The World Bank orthodoxy of “add institutions and stir” doesn’t work, and didn’t.

McCloskey builds a powerful case for the initiating role of ideas — ideas for electric motors and free elections, of course, but more deeply the bizarre and liberal ideas of equal liberty and dignity for ordinary folk. Liberalism arose from theological and political revolutions in northwest Europe, yielding a unique respect for betterment and its practitioners, and upending ancient hierarchies. Commoners were encouraged to have a go, and the bourgeoisie took up the Bourgeois Deal, and we were all enriched.

Few economists or historians write like McCloskey — her ability to invest the facts of economic history with the urgency of a novel, or of a leading case at law, is unmatched. She summarizes modern economics and modern economic history with verve and lucidity, yet sees through to the really big scientific conclusion. Not matter, but ideas.

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

Dr Christopher Decker, Economist and Research Fellow, Faculty of Law, Oxford

Praise for Bourgeois Equality
Bourgeois Equality is richly detailed and erudite, and it will join its companion volumes as essential reading
— Diane Coyle, The Financial Times

A sparkling book. . . . McCloskey makes a convincing case
— Martin Wolf, The Financial Times, Best Books of Early 2016

First elected MP for Twickenham in 1997 and now leader of the Liberal Democrats, Sir Vince Cable is a high profile political heavyweight. He is joined in conversation by BBC World Service UK Political Correspondent Rob Watson OW. They will discuss Sir Vince’s career, both as a parliamentarian and more recently as a novelist of a political thriller.