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.

Seminars open to all academics and clinicians, examining what it is to lost contact with reality, the meaningfulness of dreams and psychotic experience, the nature of transference, and other themes. Details available on the website.

We see ghosts. And they are drawn to us.

Blackwells Broad Street is delighted to host Costa Award-winning author Frances Hardinge for a unique event to celebrate the paperback publication of ‘A Skinful of Shadows’ – the haunting and atmospheric story of a young girl’s quest to shape her own destiny.

Sometimes, when a person dies, their spirit goes looking for somewhere to hide. Some people have space within them, perfect for hiding. Twelve-year-old Makepeace has learned to defend herself from the ghosts, which try to possess her in the night, desperate for refuge, but one day a dreadful event causes her to drop her guard. And now there’s a spirit inside her. The spirit is wild, brutish and strong, and it may be her only defence when she is sent to live with her father’s rich and powerful family. There is talk of civil war, and they are going to need her to protect their dark and terrible family secret. But as she plans her escape and heads out into a country torn apart by war, Makepeace must decide which is worse: possession – or death.

When the final customers leave at the end of the day and the booksellers are alone, ghostly sightings have been witnessed within the historic Blackwell’s Bookshop Broad Street. Hear first hand statements whilst exploring the bookshop, spending the evening encountering the dark side of Blackwells Broad Street with Frances Hardinge, and learn her inspirations for the ghosts of Grizehayes that haunt ‘A Skinful of Shadows’.

Tickets cost £9 and include a signed copy of ‘A Skinful of Shadows’.

For all enquiries, please email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333623.

Seminars open to all academics and clinicians, examining what it is to lost contact with reality, the meaningfulness of dreams and psychotic experience, the nature of transference, and other themes. Details available on the website.

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

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!

Seminars open to all academics and clinicians, examining what it is to lost contact with reality, the meaningfulness of dreams and psychotic experience, the nature of transference, and other themes. Details available on the website.

Our world is driven by technology and while it offers a variety of benefits to society, it also exposes us to a series of new and complex cybersecurity risks. These can relate to how we conduct business, how we engage with colleagues, family and friends, or even how organisations and individuals interact with new platforms such as social media and the internet-of-things.

In this talk, Dr Jason Nurse will explore these issues from the perspective of Cybersecurity. His talk begins with a brief discussion of what cybersecurity is, and then moves on to a detailed presentation of some of the significant challenges facing cybersecurity practice and research. Topics that will be covered include: the challenge of social engineering and why it is one of the most popular attacks today; the internet-of-things and its security and privacy implications; and how criminals use social media as a key platform for intelligence gathering on potential targets. These are all topics that will become critical in the future as society grows and technology becomes even more embedded into our daily lives.

If you’d like to find out more or reach Jason online, check out Twitter @jasonnurse!

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.

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.

Seminars open to all academics and clinicians, examining what it is to lost contact with reality, the meaningfulness of dreams and psychotic experience, the nature of transference, and other themes. Details available on the website.

The mental health and wellbeing of children and young people is increasingly recognised as a national priority, as issues related to behavioural and emotional disorders within society have escalated over recent years. Particular focus has been on how the education system, schools and colleges could better support mental health and wellbeing, including the suggestion that every school and college should have a designated lead in mental health by 2025*.

This raises important questions: How can educational settings best support the mental health and wellbeing of children and young people? How can professionals be trained to do this? How can they work effectively with other professionals? How can they work with families and communities and what are the challenges? How can they foster emotional resilience for all children and young people in their settings?

As part of Think Human Festival a panel of distinguished experts from the education and allied professional sectors will consider and debate the opportunities for, and the challenges to, effective practice to strengthen emotional resilience and support positive mental health and wellbeing amongst our children and young people.

*gov.uk 2017: Transforming children and young people’s mental health provision: a green paper

Talk followed by questions and discussion

The international Psychiatry film festival, Medfest, is back again for another year. This time, through three bespoke short films, we hope to challenge your ideas and perceptions on the concept of ‘silence’. After each showing, the film will be discussed by a panel of distinguished experts, before the floor is opened to the audience.

All are welcome to join us for this FREE event.
The showing will be followed by a complimentary wine and nibbles reception.

Our confirmed panellists include:
Professor Matthew Broome: Chair in Psychiatry and Youth Mental Health, Director of the Institute for Mental Healthin Birmingham. He has also previously been the Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Warwick and Senior Clinical Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. His interests include the philosophy and ethics of mental health and neuroscience, early psychosis, delusions and cognitive instability.
Dr Maria Grazia Turri: A psychiatrist and theatre scholar. As a lecturer of MSc Creative Arts and Mental Health she teaches on psychoanalysis, theatre history and theories, and the intersection between psychiatry and the arts. She also works part-time as a Consultant Psychiatrist in Medical Psychotherapy in the NHS.
Dr Gerti Stegen: Director of Medical Education for the Oxford School of Psychiatry. She is also a consultant Psychiatrist in Psychotherapy.

For more information on our panellists and the films being shown visit our facebook event page https://www.facebook.com/events/2061930723857857/

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.

The evening will start with the film Mad to be Normal, This concerns RD Laing’s unconventional approach to psychotherapy and also his equally unconventional life. It stars David Tennant, Elisabeth Moss, Michael Gambon and Gabriel Byrne and raises many important questions: What is the nature of madness? What challenges confront psychoanalysts? Are psychoactive drugs ever effective? These topics will be discussed immediately after the film by a panel of experts which will include:
Roland Littlewood ( Professor of Anthropology and Psychiatry at UCL)
Richard Bentall (Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Liverpool)
Robert Mullan (Director of Mad to be Normal)
Farnaz Arshid (GP and prison doctor who has worked with refugees/victims of torture in Sierra Leone)
Athar Yawar (has been psychiatrist for Helen Bamber’s Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture and a Senior Editor at the Lancet)
Tickets (£5) will be sold at the door.

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.

Blackwell’s are delighted to be joined by William Davies, who will be discussing his new book, ‘Nervous States’.

Why do we no longer trust experts, facts and statistics?

Why has politics become so fractious and warlike?

What caused the populist political upheavals of recent years?

How can the history of ideas help us understand our present?

In this bold and far-reaching exploration of our new political landscape, William Davies reveals how feelings have come to reshape our world. Drawing deep on history, philosophy, psychology and economics, he shows how some of the fundamental assumptions that defined the modern world have dissolved. With advances in science and medicine, the division between mind and body is no longer so clear-cut. The spread of digital and military technology has left us not quite at war nor exactly at peace. In the murky new space between mind and body, between war and peace, lie nervous states: with all of us relying increasingly on feeling rather than fact.

In a book of profound insight and astonishing breadth, William Davies reveals the origins of this new political reality. Nervous States is a compelling and essential guide to the turbulent times we are living through.

William Davies is a Reader in Political Economy at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is also Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Centre. His work focuses on the history of ideas and how expert knowledge shapes politics and society today. William has also written for The Guardian, The New Statesman, London Review of Books, New Left Review, openDemocracy, The New York Times and The Atlantic.

Tickets cost £5. Doors will open at 6:45pm, when there will be a bar selling a range of drinks until 7pm. For all enquiries please email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333623.

Fake news spread online is a clear danger to democratic politics. One aspect of that danger is obvious: it spreads misinformation. But other aspects, less often discussed, is that it also spreads confusion, undermines trust and encourages us to live in a kind of epistemic bad faith. In this talk, I will argue that it is this last aspect that captures the most pernicious effect of fake news and related propaganda. In particular, I’ll argue that its effectiveness is due in part to a curious blindness on the part of many users of social media: a kind of semantic blindness to the function of their online communicative acts. This blindness makes us not only vulnerable to manipulation to those with a better understanding of the semantic character of online communication, it indirectly undermines the political value of truth—or more exactly, the pursuit of truth, by diminishing confidence in the institutions that protect and encourage that value.

This term’s topic of the popular St Hilda’s ‘Brain and Mind – from concrete to abstract’ series of workshops is “Risk Taking and the Brain”, with particular emphasis on risk taking in adolescence. Dr Mark Walton (University of Oxford), Dr Kathrin Cohen Kadosh (University of Surrey) and Professor Hilary Greaves (University of Oxford) will address this topic from the point of views of neuroscience, psychology and philosophy, respectively. There will be a break with refreshments.

Feeling in Seeing : Embodiment, Affect & Visual Politics (when News are Fake)
Manos Tsakiris, Lab of Action & Body, Dep of Psychology, Royal Holloway & The Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, University of London

Photography mediates our experience of the world, especially in a culture powered by images at an unprecedented level. Social media, alternative facts, debates about post-truth and fake news make our negotiation between what is real or fake challenging. Beyond or perhaps before our cognitive judgments about images, we respond and relate to visual culture in visceral, embodied ways. We ran a series of experiments to understand how our visceral responses, as the basis of subjective feelings, influence our relation and response to photojournalistic images. First, participants saw a series of photojournalistic images, while we measured their neurophysiological (heartrate acceleration and heartbeat-evoked potentials) and affective arousal. Next, they were informed they would see the same images again and judge whether the images were real (i.e. photos capturing an event as it happened depicting genuine emotions) or fake. Thereby we were able to assess the relation between levels of neurophysiological and affective arousal and the participants’ cognitive judgements of realness. Our findings over several experiments highlight the crucial role that ‘feeling in seeing’ plays as in determining our beliefs about realness in a political culture powered by images. The multidisciplinary approach that we propose compliments the visual turn in global politics and the emotional turn in history as we are trying to figure out who we are when we look at and being moved by images.

Prof. Chris Fairburn has two research interests: the nature and treatment of eating disorders, and the development and evaluation of psychological interventions. The result has been the development of specific psychological treatments for the eating disorders (anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and allied states). He and his colleagues developed one of the leading evidence-based treatments for bulimia nervosa (a form of cognitive behavioral therapy) and, more recently, an “enhanced” version (CBT-E) for any type of eating disorder and for all age groups.

He has been supported by Wellcome since 1984, allowing him to pursue a programme of work directed at the treatment of eating disorders. This has resulted in the development of the most effective interventions for these illnesses, all of which are strongly endorsed by NICE and in use worldwide. In addition, he has pioneered the use of the Internet to disseminate psychological treatments. In this presentation, Prof Fairburn will highlight the challenges he has faced and how he addressed them.

Talk Venue: Stocker room, Brasenose College, Radcliffe Sq, Oxford OX1 4AJ

Talks are free for OUSS members and £2 for non-members. Membership is £10 for a year, or £20 for lifetime!

The multi-talented Nick Lee is a Lecturer in Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London, a researcher at the House of Lords, and co-founder of the radical south-London project space, the Peckham Pelican.

Nick, an academic with a reputation as a revolutionary nonconformist, will be joining us for the final FAR (Fine Art Research) guest lecture of 2018.

This discussion at Oxford Brookes will present a series of painted images ordered to demonstrate the development of perspectiva artificialis (artificial perspective).

The following question will be posed: what exactly is developing in these images and what subsequent forms of image-making does artificial perspective make possible?
(Progress here, as elsewhere, is uncertain; a way of seeing is produced which structures in turn how we see the world.) The extent to which computer-generated images replicate and further systematise this way of seeing will be considered…

FREE & ALL WELCOME

Booking is essential:
www.eventbrite.com/e/radical-art-history-nick-lee-uncertain-progress-tickets-52493195561

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’.

Daniel Whiting (University of Oxford), Dr Lucy Bowes (University of Oxford), and Dr Peter Hacker (University of Oxford) will address the topic of criminality and the brain from the point of views of psychiatry, psychology, and philosophy, respectively. Val McDermid, the crime writer, will be a guest speaker.

Newspapers often feature studies that sound too good to be true and often they aren’t – they are myths.

Some myths may be harmless but the phenomenon affects most kinds of research within evidence-based science. The good news is that there’s a new movement tackling misleading and unreliable research and instead trying to give us results that we can trust.

Using his research in to human pheromones as an example, Tristram will discuss how and why popular myths, including power-posing, are created and how efforts have been made to address the ‘reproducibility crisis’.

Tristram Wyatt is an emeritus fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford and formerly Director of Studies in Biology at OUDCE. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford. He’s interested in how animals of all kinds use pheromones to communicate by smell. His Cambridge University Press book on pheromones and animal behaviour won the Royal Society of Biology’s prize for the Best Postgraduate Textbook in 2014. His TED talk on human pheromones has been viewed over a million times. His book Animal behaviour: A Very Short Introduction was published by Oxford University Press in 2017.

Open to all. The talk is designed for researchers from all disciplines and is open to the public.