The emergence of Islamic liberalism in Southeast Asia over the last two decades has been characterized by its highly uneven reception across and within national contexts. In Malaysia, liberalism is a thoroughly negative category in political and religious discourse. In part the mobilization of anti-liberal reaction is the product of two important trends in Malaysian politics: the proliferation and growing power of Malaysia’s Islamic bureaucracy and the increased public activism of a broad array of Islamic NGO’s. These two trends reinforce each other in generating the controversies over Islamic practice or religious diversity that have punctuated Malaysia politics over the last ten years. In spite of these recurring controversies, Malaysia maintains an international reputation among North Atlantic governments as a “moderate Muslim” nation. Prime Minister Najib Razak’s efforts to craft a state Islamic ideology of moderation (wasatiyyah) is viewed by the Malaysian state, however, precisely as a bulwark against the further spread of liberalism within domestic politics. This seminar will examine such ideological inversions at work in Malaysian politics located in the concepts of Islamic liberalism and moderation.

Award-winning composer Jonathan Dove talks to broadcaster Kate Kennedy about music, war and commemoration. Their discussion will be illustrated with excerpts from his compositions.
Dove’s works include In Damascus, To An Unknown Soldier and the TV opera When She Died, a reflection on the death of Princess Diana.

Carrie Gracie grew up mostly in North-East Scotland and set up a restaurant before taking a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford. She spent a year teaching in two Chinese universities and then built a small film business before joining the BBC in 1987 as a trainee producer.

She went back to China as the BBC’s Beijing reporter in the early 1990s and served as China correspondent and Beijing bureau chief until 1999 when she returned to the UK to focus on presenting. For several years she anchored the morning slot on the BBC News Channel and hosted the weekly BBC World Service programme, The Interview. In April 2014, she took up a newly created post as BBC China Editor and has since covered many news stories in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. She has also made documentaries about China for TV and radio, winning prizes including a Peabody and an Emmy.

In January 2018, she left her post as BBC China editor in protest at unequal pay. She published an open letter to BBC audiences on the subject and appeared before a parliamentary select committee. She has since returned to BBC HQ as a news presenter and continues to campaign for an equal, fair and transparent pay structure.

The talk is part of seminar series, ‘India on the World Stage: International Relations of India Seminar Series’, organised by the Indian National Student Association (INSA), with support from the South Asian Studies Programme at the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, and from the Asian Studies Centre of St Antony’s College.

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)

The talk is part of seminar series, ‘India on the World Stage: International Relations of India Seminar Series’, organised by the Indian National Student Association (INSA), with support from the South Asian Studies Programme at the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, and from the Asian Studies Centre of St Antony’s College.

The Race and Resistance Programme at The Oxford Center in the Humanities, is honoured to host the Honorable Peter Gastrow, on the afternoon of the 11th of May, (Friday of 3rd Week).

Gastrow, a former Member of the South African Parliament, South African National Peace Committee, and special adviser to the Minister of Safety and Security, will speak about his personal experiences and insights in negotiating the peace process in South Africa, his public service during the country’s transition into a democratic government and his perspectives on contemporary South African political and racial issues. We are also honored to be joined by Wale Adebanwi, the Rhodes Professor for Race Relations, who will respond to Mr. Gastrow’s lecture with his own insights into South Africa’s history and contemporary challenges. The floor will then be opened to members of the audience for any questions or comments for Mr. Gastrow and Professor Adebanwi.

Speaker: Jacques Rupnik (Sciences Po Paris)

True to our name, we bring opera anywhere! Our latest new Puccini production goes into the woods at Wytham!

Puccini’s Heroines at Wytham Woods! – 12th May

Puccini’s Heroines – 1.30pm to 3.30pm – FREE ENTRY as part of Oxfordshire Art Weeks
Opera Anywhere present performances of some of the greatest Puccini operatic arias by female roles. Performed around the Wytham Studio at Wytham Woods between 1.30pm and 3.30pm – during Oxfordshire Art Weeks. Free of charge to attend and not ticket required.

Sister Angelica – 7pm at the Wytham Woods Chalet – Tickets £15/£10: online or call the box office on 0333 666 3366.
Bar and Refreshments available from 5.30pm at Wytham Woods Chalet, so why not arrive early, park in the usual car park and walk up through the woods – how about bringing a picnic?

Its a chance to visit, walk through and enjoy the woods without requiring the normal Walking Permit.
The staged performance of one of Puccini’s most moving operas, Sister Angelica, will take place in the woods opposite the Wytham Woods Chalet or if wet in the barn adjacent to the Chalet.

https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/date/493969

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

The talk is part of seminar series, ‘India on the World Stage: International Relations of India Seminar Series’, organised by the Indian National Student Association (INSA), with support from the South Asian Studies Programme at the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, and from the Asian Studies Centre of St Antony’s College.

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!

Professor Linda McDowell, CBE, DLitt, FBA (The School of Geography and St John’s College) presents Moving Stories: the working lives of migrant women in post-war Britain. “Migration and employment are central issues in understanding the transformation of Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. I explore the connections between the shift to a service economy and an increasingly diverse workforce through the lens of the life stories of women who moved to Britain between 1946 and 2010.

Join us for live music in the John Henry Brookes Building – Forum before the panel discussion at 18:00 in the Lecture Theatre.
Most political movements are accompanied by protest songs. This Think Human Festival event aims to explore their rich tradition and assess their meaning and impact over time. Peggy Seeger, Andrew Scheps, Dr Angela McShane and Professor John Street will shed light on the historical context of protest songs, their production and sound, their political meaning and power, and their personal performance.

Our panel will examine the historical roots of protest songs, explore their impact on social and political movements, and explain what makes a song effective as protest. They’ll also discuss whether protest music is a dead or thriving art, and ask how far gender plays a role in their creation and performance.

Peggy Seeger is a celebrated singer of traditional Anglo-American songs and activist songmaker whose experience spans 60 years of performing, travel and songwriting. Dr Angela McShane leads the Research Development Team for the Wellcome Collection, an expert on early modern protest songs. Andrew Scheps is a Grammy award winning mix engineer, recording engineer, producer, and record label owner. John Street is Professor of Politics at the University of East Anglia and specialises in the politics of popular music.

Join us for live music in the Forum of the John Henry Brookes Building from 17:00 before the panel discussion in the John Henry Brookes Lecture Theatre at 18:00.

Most political movements are accompanied by protest songs. This Think Human Festival event aims to explore their rich tradition and assess their meaning and impact over time. Peggy Seeger, Andrew Scheps, Dr Angela McShane and Professor John Street will shed light on the historical context of protest songs, their production and sound, their political meaning and power, and their personal performance.

Our panel will examine the historical roots of protest songs, explore their impact on social and political movements, and explain what makes a song effective as protest. They’ll also discuss whether protest music is a dead or thriving art, and ask how far gender plays a role in their creation and performance.

Peggy Seeger is a celebrated singer of traditional Anglo-American songs and activist songmaker whose experience spans 60 years of performing, travel and songwriting. Dr Angela McShane leads the Research Development Team for the Wellcome Collection, an expert on early modern protest songs. Andrew Scheps is a Grammy award winning mix engineer, recording engineer, producer, and record label owner. John Street is Professor of Politics at the University of East Anglia and specialises in the politics of popular music.

Our DNA holds clues to the demographic history of our ancestors. Dr Clare Bycroft presents recent work looking at the genetic history of the Iberian Peninsula.

From palaeolithic shamanism to the politics of classical Rome, interpreting the movements and sounds of birds was highly valued as a way of learning what forces might be influencing the events of our world, whether envisaged as gods, the weather or natural laws.

For the second talk of the series, Geoff Sample will follow this idea and its flow through various Eurasian cultures in our attitudes to, and interpretations of, the sound languages of other species; and on to contemporary scientific research and listening with a bioacoustic ear.

Geoff Sample is a field recordist who has concentrated on wildlife and natural soundscapes for the last 30 years. He’s the author and producer of a series of Collins sound guides, including the best-selling Collins Bird Songs & Calls, contributes sound and discussion to radio & TV (Tweet of the Day, Countryfile, the Verb) and collaborates with contemporary artists on installations, exhibitions and performances (Marcus Coates, Hanna Tuulikki, Mike Collier).

Sound I’m Particular is a Pay What You Decide talk series that aims to provide a forum to discuss and interrogate listening as both subject and object, exploring the various guises of contemporary listening practices with talks and demonstrations by artists and academics from all over the country; ranging from topics such as augury and Nan Shepherd, to Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, to field recording and Twin Peaks.

Talk followed by questions and discussion

Join us for our Blackwell’s Open Mic Night, where there will be performances from an array of talented local performers, across a wide mix of creativity. Everyone is welcome to come along and listen, places for this event are free to register. Information about who will be performing will be updated when the final line-up is confirmed.

If you would like to register to perform, places are still available please email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk. Each performer will have a 10 minute slot to showcase their work.

To allow opportunity and new talent to join the stage, we are not accepting performers from the last session in March as a main headliner. There will be a slot at the end that is open to drop in on the night for shorter pieces such as a poem or a song, and everyone is welcome to come forward.

For all enquiries please email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call 01865 333623.

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.

David Freeman demonstrates how the music business started in Victorian times.

This event is all about how sound waves were first captured on fragile spinning wax cylinders and how this beautiful simple technology evolved into 78 discs and then into 45 rpm vinyl singles and the much loved 33rpm LP.

David will bring along his Edison Phonograph and original cylinders and from that starting point he will explore the entrancing world of analogue sound.

David Freeman is an ex-science teacher who became a broadcaster. He has a passion for music and how it has been recorded and reproduced over the years.

Asylum seekers, refugees, and undocumented migrants often draw attention to the global colonial histories which give context to their present situation. And yet these connections are rarely made by academics. This presentation explores aspects of my recent book ‘Asylum After Empire: Postcolonial Legacies in the Politics of Asylum Seeking’. The aim of the book is to begin theorising asylum policy within the context of such histories; to make sense of contemporary public policy developments on asylum within the context of histories of colonialism. The book is a historical sociology which brings together postcolonial and decolonial theories on the hierarchical ordering of human beings, troubling the supposedly universal category of ‘man’ within the epistemological framework of ‘modernity’, and naming the response of the British state (which acts as the case study) to contemporary asylum seekers as an example of the coloniality of power. It is an attempt to make sense of the dehumanisation of asylum seekers not as racism, but as enmeshed within interconnected histories -of ideas of distinct geographically located ‘races’, of human beings as hierarchy organised in relation to civilization, and of colonial power relations. In this sense, I am taking as my starting point the sophisticated analyses of forced migrants and sans-papiers and elaborating their conclusions with academic study.

In this panel we invite three individuals from different backgrounds, within and outside of the University of Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment, to offer their take on data’s dirty tricks. In an age where fake news is on the rise and data is harvested from social media platforms and beyond, what is the impact upon us all? We ask, what are the landscapes of fake news, harvesting and its contortions to conventional democratic spaces? How is it possible to respond, tie together, and understand new forms of geopolitical strategy? How do democracies respond to big data and what should be done? This panel seeks to explore this from people who take alternative approaches and offer insights into how it has impacted us so far, what is being done to tackle it, and what should be done in the future.

SARU practitioner Harriet Butler will talk about the idea behind a new collaborative residency that she is leading in relation to place, mapping, sound, and ecology, and the work that lead her to this point.

Harriet’s practice, which is increasingly focused on sound installation and experimental performance, has explored storytelling, objects, and otherness. In speaking of the collaborative residency, Harriet will talk about how movement, line and echo form an important part of the creative framework for the ideas being explored.

Joining Harriet in this collaboration are the artists Renzo Spiteri and Helen Frosi. The residency is taking place at Fusion Arts and Ark-T in East Oxford over several months, and the final work will be shown in these spaces as part of the audiograft festival in March 2019.

Harriet is a recent graduate of Oxford Brookes University where she studied for an MA in Music, with a focus on experimental composition and sonic art. She continues to participate with the Sonic Art Research Unit as a Postgraduate Research Assistant. Her work has been shown at audiograft festival in Oxford and the Rising Sun Arts Centre in Reading.

Sunday, 25th November 2018
11am – 6.15pm (Registration starts at 10.30am)
Chakrabarti Lecture Theatre & JHB207,
John Henry Brookes Building, Headington Campus, Oxford Brookes University, Headington Road, Oxford OX3 0BP

“What does it mean to research through creative practice?”

Keynote Speaker: Dr Geof Hill (Birmingham City University)
www.bcu.ac.uk/research/-centres-of-excellence/centre-for-research-in-education/people/geof-hill

To have a look at the schedule and book your ticket, please visit: ars2018.eventbrite.co.uk

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Delegate/Attendance fee: £30 / Early Bird Tickets (£20) are available until 18th November – includes lunch & refreshments

We’ll be posting speaker information leading up to the event so keep an eye out for our Facebook event page: www.facebook.com/events/455606768180452

This event is supported by the School of Arts at Oxford Brookes University and the Oxford City Council.

For a digital copy of the event booklet and more information please contact: info@ca-ru.org

We look forward to seeing you there!

CARU Conference Team
Follow us on social media: @CARUpage

Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin is a master of collage, and has made a treasure trove of films that testify to his profound knowledge and love of cinema, and of re-purposing found footage. Originally commissioned by the Documentary Channel, My Winnipeg tells the story of Maddin’s home city from the point of view of a narrator who is desperate to leave the snow and nostalgia of its clutches. This talk explores the ways in which myth, folklore and urban legend contribute to a portrait of the city that is both true and false. It follows the red herrings, the reconstructions and pathways through Winnipeg as narrated by Darcy Fehr who plays Maddin on screen. It considers the gaps and fissures in the dialogue, and the ways in which voice-over narration enters the realm of fantasy while adhering to documentary conventions. What, we might ask, of the ‘rejected narration’? All will be revealed. Finally the talk will discuss the collage of sound and image in provoking emotional and phenomenological reactions to spaces, both real and imagined.

Featuring a range of speakers and artists, and a showing of the film ‘The Proud Valley’.

– GPES Seminar Series – Oxford Brookes

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

Cooling is critical for many of the sustainable development goals, including those relating to health, shelter, livelihoods, education and nutrition. As the world’s population grows, as disposable incomes grow and as urban areas grow, the need for cooling is booming. However cooling uses super polluting gases and large amounts of energy and is therefore a significant cause of climate change. More efficient, clean cooling has the potential to avoid up to a degree of warming by the end of the century and recently all governments came together to agree action to try to maximize this opportunity. Cooling sits at the intersection of the UNFCCC, the SDGs and the Montreal Protocol, but can these forces ensure success?

Dan Hamza-Goodacre will explain the risks and possibilities in the search for sustainable cooling for all.

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