Alan Morrison and Rupert Younger will lead a discussion with Carlo Messina on the future of the financial services industry and the role of major financial institutions in society today.

The discussion will draw out areas where financial innovation is strongest, and the opportunities for young entrepreneurs to create new products and business models that will serve the needs of commercial and private customers alike.

Products and services aimed at the growing third sector will also be discussed, as will a more wide ranging approach to the responsibilities and obligations of businesses in society today.

Carlo Messina is the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Intesa Sanpaolo since 29 September 2013.

He is currently a member of the Executive Committee of ABI (Italian Banking Association) and has been a member of the Bocconi University Board since November 2014. On 1 June 2017, Carlo Messina was knighted for Services to Industry “Cavaliere del Lavoro” by the President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella.

Think Human Festival is proud to host this panel on Writing Working-Class Fiction.
Kerry Hudson, Kit de Waal and Alex Wheatle are celebrated contemporary British novelists who have all written working-class experience into their fiction. At this event, the novelists are hosted by writer and critic Boyd Tonkin.

They will read from their work, and then discuss the problems they have encountered in being working-class writers, the creative responses they have formulated in their writing of working-class experience, and the wider issues of publishing and literary culture in relation to working-class writing and authorship. The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Oxford Brookes has a rich tradition of research into working-class life and culture, across literature, history and the social sciences.

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?

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

This is a joint event between the Oxford Martin School and the Oxford Climate Research Network

Managing the risk to coastal populations, infrastructure, and ecosystems resulting from sea level rise presents unique and daunting challenges. Sea level rise lags behind global warming due to inertia in the ocean-ice system; likewise, the response of sea level to stabilisation of the climate will lag behind the temperature response, making emissions reduction policy relatively ineffective through midcentury in reducing the rate of rise. Consequently, anticipatory adaptive responses are the key to lowering risk in the near term. On a century scale or longer, emissions mitigation can substantially reduce risk but century-scale projections of sea level rise are deeply uncertain due to a lack of knowledge and expert disagreement about the future contribution of the Antarctic ice sheet. On the latter timescale, effective responses would include a mixture of hard protection such as surge barriers and sea walls, flexible measures such as enhancement of natural defences and buildings that can withstand episodic flooding, and permanent, managed withdrawal of populations from many areas.

However, inertia in the policy system arising from perverse incentives, short-term perspectives, and behavioural biases, exacerbated by scientific uncertainty, virtually guarantee a response to this threat which will be far below the optimum. In many countries, including wealthy ones, a large gap between adaptation capacity and implementation is already apparent, putting lives and property continually under threat from temporary flooding and eventually, permanent inundation. Professor Michael Oppenheimer’s, Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs at Princeton University, talk will elucidate the increase in coastal hazard accompanying sea level rise to date, the rapid increase in the threat projected for the future, and means to overcome, at least partially, the dual problem of physical and policy inertia.

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

This talk draws on findings from applying novel empirical approaches to understanding climate change and its impacts in the past, present, and future. The talk will highlight the impact major ‘natural’ changes in global climate have had on the five largest mass extinctions over the last 500 million years, and will explain modelling of recent CO2 emissions and concentrations which confirm the impact of human activity, with a focus on UK CO2 emissions over the period 1860 – 2016. The role of major policy interventions which have reduced the UK’s per capita annual emissions below any level since 1860 when the UK was the ‘workshop of the world’ will be investigated.

Professor Sir David Hendry, INET Oxford and Climate Econometrics, will illustrate how to investigate the costs of ‘mis-forecasting’ extreme climate events by studying the economic impacts of inaccuracies in hurricane forecasts and will discuss empirical evidence on local climate impacts of emissions and what influences climate-change scepticism. Future climate is illustrated by projecting the impacts of 1.5°C versus 2°C on temperature and sea-level rise.

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

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 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.

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

“3.5 million cyber-crimes recorded, true figure could be 20.5 million” – this is just one of the headlines that exemplify how significant cybercrime is today.

Cybercrime has been ruthless, victimising everyone from corporations to charities and the elderly. In this light-hearted talk, Jason examines the topic of cybercrime with a focus on how criminals target individuals and exploit how we think, reason and behave. This touches on the fields of computer science and psychology. Additionally, Jason provides some tips and tricks for how you can protect yourself and your families online.

If you’ve ever wondered about cybercrime, come along tonight – Jason guarantees that fun (honest!) will be had by all!

We are now in the Anthropocene – human activity has become a major influence on the climate and ecosystems of the earth. It has never been more important that the public are aware of the human impact on the environment, and that scientific research about the state of the earth is communicated accurately and truthfully.

Yet we are now in the Post-Truth World where objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. The question we want to address in this panel discussion is: What does the post-truth world mean for the future of our environment?

This seminar is part of the University of Oxford Environmental Research DTP’s Grand Challenge Seminar Series, and is open to all.

We will be releasing speaker announcements in the run up to the seminar.

Please join us for a drinks reception afterward to discuss the topic further and speak with the panel. Drinks will be provided.

Reserve your free ticket on Eventbrite

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.

Come and experience an installation exploring journeys from childhood to adulthood and the hopes, fears and aspirations of young adults. People from around the world – students, teachers, visitors, asylum-seekers, newly arrived or long-established – share imaginings of themselves in the past, present, and future, and explain what these transitions mean to them, using words, images, objects and artefacts. Their stories take us on journeys in time, across landscapes, cultures and languages, through memories and ideas of self.

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”

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.

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.

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/

A fascinating and entertaining look at the ladies of the Marlborough family usually overlooked in favour of the men. This talk redresses the balance as it looks at the loves and achievements of some of the Duchesses and ladies associated with the family and discusses the thwarted talents and potential of others.

The Marlborough family, Estate staff and the Palace itself played a full and energetic part in the war effort. This talk tells the story of how the Palace prepared for the worst, survived the onslaught of 400 boys evacuated to Blenheim Palace and kept the secrets of MI5!

Blenheim Palace has been used as a filming location in a huge variety of TV adverts and programmes, as well as appearing in both Hollywood and Bollywood blockbusters. It has starred in films such as Hamlet, The Young Victoria, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and more recently in Mission Impossible and 007’s Spectre. Have a look at what actually happens at the Palace when Hollywood descends – and what happens behind the scenes!

The private resources of Blenheim Palace are drawn upon to afford a new and refreshing insight into this remarkable man. We examine the breadth of talent, achievement and personality of our “Greatest Briton”: soldier, politician, statesman, painter, writer, orator, family man – and bricklayer!

A look at the clothes, underclothes, shoes and accessories which would have been worn by some of the more colourful characters in the Palace’s 300-year history. This talk considers the part that arsenic, lead, mercury and mousetraps played in the styles of the day and finishes with a look at the on-going special relationship with the fabulous House of Dior.

A presentation on natural history covering kingfishers, butterflies, insects, and many mammals.

The Preeces have been photographing wildlife for about 18 years after taking early retirement and have had their work published in many magazines.

Organised by Oxford Civic Society @oxcivicsoc. Homelessness and in particular rough sleeping appears to be on the increase in Oxford but is a complex issue to address. Simon Bennett, Partnerships Officer at the City Council, will talk about the issues and how the Council, working jointly with other agencies, is attempting to tackle them.. https://www.oxcivicsoc.org.uk/programme/

To commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Inclosure Act, a brief illustrated history will be given of a 4 acre allotment of land north of Oxford from Anglo-Saxon times to the present, together with a description, examples and demonstrations of its flora, fauna and significance today.

This is a joint lecture with The Rockefeller Foundation Economic Council on Planetary Health at the Oxford Martin School

Technological innovation is critical to addressing planetary health challenges. What can be done to ensure that innovation systems and the new “Fourth Industrial Revolution” respond effectively with positive social, environmental and economic consequences? How can we ensure equality of the energy transition?