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 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

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.

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.

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.

Organised by Oxford Civic Society @oxcivicsoc. In the second of his two talks on Oxford libraries, John Ashdown, former Conservation Officer for the City, talks about the most famous library of them all, the Bodleian. He will reveal some of the stories you may not know about this revered institution.. https://www.oxcivicsoc.org.uk/programme/

The Re-Imagining Cole symposium will examine the background, context and depictions of previously unseen caricatures of Christian Frederick Cole, Oxford University’s first Black African Scholar 1873, and the first Black African to practise Law in the English High Court, 1884. The symposium will explore why Cole and his historic achievements were only portrayed in the form of parodies.

It will also explore Victorian portraits c. 1873 – 1890, examining the broader issues of race and representation in portrait art. Who were the ‘notable’ figures of the day that had portraits commissioned and painted? Did any comparable Black ‘notable’ figures have their portraits painted? Did Cole have a picture commissioned and painted?

Finally, the symposium will pose the following questions: should Cole’s image be re-imagined, if so, why? What should a re-imagined image tell an audience, who decides?
If an image of Cole was to be reimagined, what medium would be the most appropriate
and fitting to communicate Cole’s significant achievements?

With a panel of art historians, artists and academics including:
Dr Temi Odumosu, Malmo University, Africans in English Caricature, 1769-1819: Black Jokes, White Humour.
Dr Robin Darwall-Smith, University College, University of Oxford A History of University College, Oxford.
Robert Taylor, Photographer, Portraits of Achievement
Colin Harris, The Shrimpton Collection, Bodleian Libraries
Pamela Roberts, The Untold Stories of Oxford University’s Black Scholars

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/

Don’t mention the ‘c’ word – Lucy Saunders will be talking about how to advocate for better conditions for cycling by building coalitions around the Healthy Streets Approach.

This is a great opportunity to find out more about the IB Diploma and Pre-IB courses. There will be a presentation to help debunk myths about the IB and why it is an option against A-level.

Dani Linton has coordinated box checks looking for bat roosts rather than bird nests across Wytham Woods for over a decade, amassing a dataset of over 2500 day roosts, containing seven species and c.18,000 bat occupations. This talk will provide an introduction to her research on the social organisation, breeding ecology, and population dynamics, of woodland bats.

Two-thousand and nineteen marks the centenary of the Addison Act, the housing legislation which realised Lloyd-George’s ‘Homes fit for Heroes’ and the start of a nationwide system of state-owned housing that has lasted most of the 20th Century. Half a million homes were promised and a system of open-ended Treasury grants were made available to local councils to build.

One hundred years have now passed since local authorities in the UK where given the responsibility and the resource to provide decent housing for the working person. Whilst the responsibility remains, the conditions under which housing is to be provided have undergone a seismic shift.

Join us from 19.30 – 21.00 on Thursday 21st February as we explore how the cities of London and Oxford are working to meet this responsibility and provide decent housing for working class people.

We’ll be joined by Sian Berry, Co-Leader of the Green Party, Local Councillor for Camden and Chair of the London Assembly’s Housing Committee and Stephen Clarke, Head of Housing and Property Services for Oxford City Council.

Tickets are free but you must register to attend.

We strive to make all events at Open House as accessible as possible. You can read more about the venue on our website. If there is anything we can do to make your visit more comfortable then please do not hesitate to get in touch.

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/