Blackwell’s are delighted to be hosting a very special event with Tom Kibasi on Prosperity and Justice: A Plan for the New Economy. The Final Report of the IPPR Commission on Economic Justice.

The UK economy is broken. It no longer provides rising living standards for the majority. Young people face an increasingly insecure future. The gap between rich and poor areas is widening. Meanwhile the rise of giant digital companies, the advance of automation, and catastrophic environmental degradation challenge the very foundations of our economic model.

This important book analyses these profound challenges and sets out a bold vision for change. The report of a group of leading figures from across British society, it explains how the deep weaknesses of the UK economy reflect profound imbalances of economic power. Its radical policy agenda for the 2020s includes new missions to drive productivity and innovation, an overhaul of our financial system, and reforms to improve wages, job quality and the redistribution of wealth.

Ten years after the financial crisis, as the UK confronts the challenge of Brexit, this is an urgent and compelling account of the reforms needed to build a new economy of prosperity, justice and environmental sustainability. It will set the terms of political and economic debate for years to come

Tom Kibasi is Director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, Chair of the IPPR Commission on Economic Justice and a principal author and editor of the Commission’s final report, ‘Prosperity and Justice: A Plan for the New Economy’. Under Tom’s leadership, IPPR has had significant impact in areas ranging from the real choices on Brexit, recasting the relationship between tech and society, and the funding and reform of the health and care system. Prior to joining IPPR, Tom spent more than a decade at McKinsey and Company, where he was a partner and held leadership roles in the healthcare practice in both London and New York. Tom helped government institutions with healthcare reform across a dozen countries in five continents and served international institutions, such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, and international foundations including the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Tickets cost £5. The doors will open at 6:45pm where there will be a bar with a selection of drinks to purchase until 7pm. For all enquiries please email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333623.

Professor Ian Goldin, Director of Oxford Martin Programme on Technological and Economic Change, will identify the economic impact of migration and examine how the contribution that migrants make has been overwhelmed by the politics. As Chair of the www.core-econ.org initiative to reform economics, Ian will locate the economics of migration within the broader need to reform economics.

Blackwell’s are delighted to be hosting Roger Riddell for the launch of his latest book and debut novel Tapestries of Difference.

Tapestries of Difference is a gripping love story starting and ending in contemporary London but which journeys to Africa, where it captures the alluring beauty and harshness of today’s Zimbabwe and uncovers deceptions about the past which in all other circumstances ought to be forgotten. It is also a tale of both personal identity and what it means to be British today as the country confronts issues of faith and religion, race and ethnicity as it strives to weave a tapestry of core values to bind people together.

Roger Riddell lived in Zimbabwe for many years, chairing the first Presidential Economic Commission after Independence in 1980. After returning to England, Roger worked at the Overseas Development Institute before becoming a Director of Oxford Policy Management to which he is still affiliated. From 1999 to 2003 he was the International Director of Christian Aid. He has published widely on Zimbabwean and wider development issues. His most recent academic book, Does Foreign Aid Really Work? (Oxford University Press, 2008), has sold in excess of 15,000 copies.

All attendees are entitled to a complimentary glass of wine after which there will be a bar available to purchase drinks.

This event is free to attend, but spaces are limited, so please do register your interest. Doors will open at 6.45pm. For all enquiries please email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333623.

The advent of super-resolution microscopy has created unprecedented opportunities to study the mammalian central nervous system, which is dominated by anatomical structures whose nanoscale dimensions critically influence their biophysical properties. I will present our recent methodological advances 1) to analyze dendritic spines in the hippocampus in vivo and 2) to visualize the extracellular space (ECS) of the brain. Using a two-photon–STED microscope equipped with a long working distance objective and ‘hippocampal window’ to reach this deeply embedded structure, we measured the density and turnover of spines on CA1 pyramidal neurons. Spine density was two times higher than reported by conventional two-photon microscopy; around 40% of all spines turned over within 4 days. A combination of 3D-STED microscopy and fluorescent labeling of the extracellular fluid allows super-resolution shadow imaging (SUSHI) of the ECS in living brain slices. SUSHI enables quantitative analyses of ECS structure and produces sharp negative images of all cellular structures, providing an unbiased view of unlabeled brain cells in live tissue.

Abstract:
This presentation explores two workforces at the bottom of the coercive apparatus of the colonial state in Bengal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These are police constables, and village watchmen, also called chaukidars. The two workforces presented a stark contrast. The colonial constabulary was always a thin presence in Indian society, while a much larger workforce of chaukidars existed throughout the countryside. However, chaukidars were never absorbed as direct employees of the government in the way the constables were. While constables were paid salaries out of the budget of the provincial government, chaukidars were paid salaries out of a locally raised chaukidari tax. Constables had a substantial number of upper caste workers in their ranks. All chaukidars were lower caste workers. In this presentation, I will explore how this segmentation of security work emerged in the apparatus of colonial policing and what it reveals about the nature of the colonial police.

About the Speaker:
Partha Pratim Shil is a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is interested in labour history and state formation in South Asia.

The last decade has seen a surge of interest in economic inequality and widely read books about its social and political consequences by Thomas Piketty, Anthony Atkinson, and Larry Bartels. Yet most scholarship focuses on incomes, neglecting the massive inequalities that exist and are widening in the ownership of assets: from residential to financial wealth.

In this talk, Professor Ben Ansell, building off his ERC project WEALTHPOL, will examine the potential impact of wealth inequality on contemporary politics, from standard economic debates such as taxation to the rise of populist parties.

This lecture series was established in honour of our alumna, Sue Lloyd-Roberts, an award-winning broadcast journalist whose uncompromising and courageous documentaries highlighted humanitarian issues across the world.

We are delighted that our speaker this year will be world-renowned, award-winning Lyse Doucet, Chief International Correspondent and Senior Presenter for BBC World News television and BBC World Service Radio. Lyse was a BBC foreign correspondent with postings in Jerusalem, Amman, Tehran, Islamabad, Kabul and Abidjan for 15 years, before becoming a presenter in 1999. She was paramount in the coverage of the “Arab Spring” across the Middle East and North Africa and, for the past 20 years, has continued to cover all major stories in this area.

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception. Both are free, but please register to attend. Booking deadline: 21 January.

Abstract:
This talk on the economics of religion in India is based on research conducted in India for over a decade. The talk asks why we need an economics of religion for India and discusses contemporary attitudes towards religion in the country. It will discuss how religion relates to growing inequality in India, changes in demography, socio-economic status and religious competition. The talk will present original research findings from a survey of 600 Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jain and Sikh religious organisations across 7 Indian states with respect to their religious and non-religious service provision such as health and education. The talk will also touch briefly on religious education, and the issues around introducing subjects such as mathematics, science and computers into a traditional religious curriculum. Ultimately, the talk presents an economic analysis of religion that hopes to inform social policy in countries such as India that have religiously-pluralistic populations.

About the Speaker:
Sriya Iyer is a Janeway Fellow in Economics and Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge; and a Bibby Fellow and College Lecturer at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge. She researches in the economics of religion, demography, education and development economics. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics and Culture, on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Religion and Demography, is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Labor Economics (IZA), and was awarded a University of Cambridge Pilkington Prize in 2014. She has published two books on Demography and Religion in India (Oxford University Press, 2002) and The Economics of Religion in India (Harvard University Press, 2018). She has also published articles in economics journals including the Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Economic Literature, Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Journal of Development Economics.

Lord Nicholas Stern, IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government, LSE and Director of the LSE India Observatory, will discuss his new book, with Himanshu of JNU, Delhi and Peter Lanjouw of the Free University of Amsterdam, How Lives Change: Palanpur, India, and Development Economics. Using a unique data set consisting of seven full (100%) surveys of one Indian village, one for every decade since Independence, Nick will reflect on the past, present and future, both of India and of development economics, seen through the experience of Palanpur in the years since Independence.

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

Please register at: https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/event/2651

This is a joint event with The Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School and the Blavatnik School of Government

The talk will argue that modern economic theory has led to the confusion between profits and rents, and hence the distinction between value creation and value extraction.

Using case studies – from Silicon Valley to the financial sector to big pharma, Professor Mariana Mazzucato, author of The Value of Everything: making and taking in the global economy, will demonstrate how the current rules of the system reward extractors over creators, and distort the measurements of growth and GDP. In the process, innovation suffers and inequality rises. To move to a different system – with growth that is more inclusive, sustainable and innovation-led – it is critical to rethink public value and public purpose in the economy.

Please register at: www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/events/value-everything-rediscovering-purpose-economy

There seems to be a growing consensus that previous assumptions about the long term consequences of China’s rise have turned out to be misplaced. Rather than China becoming ‘socialised’ into the liberal global order (and democratising at home), a China challenge to that order is instead being identified. This is seen not just as a challenge to the distribution of power within the current system, but to some of the fundamental norms and principles that underpin it, as well as to the theories and concepts that are used to try to understand it and predict future behaviour.  Of course, some always expected it to be this way; however, others now see a Chinese ability and willingness to promote alternatives that they didn’t envisage even a decade ago.
This presentation explores how what were originally designed as defensive norms and theories for China itself have transformed into putative platforms that might have salience and utility for others outside China. The paper suggests that the Chinese position may better be understood as a critique of universalism rather than the basis of an alternative world order. It also asks whether there is more than just an aspirational dimension to new Chinese thinking on international relations built on a form of “Occidentalism”, or if we can identify a real and distinct Chinese approach to both its own international relations and the nature of the world order itself.
—
Shaun Breslin is Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick and a leading British academic expert on Chinese politics and economy, globalization, regionalism, global governance, and International Political Economy. Professor Breslin is also an Associate Fellow of the Asia Research Centre based at Murdoch University and an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the Centre for European Studies, Renmin University. In 2010, he became an Associate Fellow in the Asia Programme of Chatham House. Professor Breslin is Co-Editor of The Pacific Review and sits on the Editorial Committee of the Review of International Studies, China and World Economy, and the Fudan Review of International Relations.

Warburg Memorial Lecture – Joint with BBOWT
Bryophytes in Cambridgeshire have been recorded continuously since 1927 and with increasing intensity in recent decades. A detailed analysis of the records reveals the remarkably dynamic nature of the bryophyte flora of lowland England.

‘Triboreacted materials as functional interfaces in internal combustion engines and medical implants’

Reducing CO2 and particulate emissions to halt global warming and improve the air cleanliness in developed and developing nations is urgent. A similarly large challenge is the provision of medical implants that will serve the ageing population. Both challenges are underpinned by the need to understand important functional interfaces.
This talk will focus on the engine and the hip and will present how an understanding of the interactions between tribology and chemistry/corrosion play a crucial role in the interfacial friction, wear and integrity. The integration of state-of-the-art surface science with engineering simulations in both of these areas enables engineers to create optimised systems with improved performance

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.

The economic case for limiting warming to 1.5°C is unclear, due to manifold uncertainties. However, it cannot be ruled out that the 1.5°C target passes a cost-benefit test. Costs are almost certainly high: the median global carbon price in 1.5°C scenarios implemented by various energy models is more than US$100 per metric ton of CO2 in 2020, for example. Benefits estimates range from much lower than this to much higher. Some of these uncertainties may reduce in the future, raising the question of how to hedge in the near term.

Simon Dietz is an environmental economist with particular interests in climate change and sustainable development. He has published dozens of research articles on a wide range of issues, and he also works with governments, businesses and NGOs on topics of shared interest, such as carbon pricing, insurance and institutional investment.

Abstract:
Current commentary in legal and political philosophy conceptualises political parties either as private organisations, immune from legal regulation in their internal affairs, or as quasi-public institutions, where the state may justifiably mandate certain internal regulations. I argue that, in jurisdictions with anti-defection laws, neither conception accounts for the normative status of the political party. Instead, the party ought to be conceptualised as a legislative actor. This paper then examines how conceptualising the party in this way can affect the way in which we understand the relationship between the law and a party. I explore three possible avenues of legal regulation of parties: the process of candidate selection, the selection of party leaders, and interaction between a party and its parliamentary wing. I argue that conceptualising the party as a legislative entity has the most salient implications for the third of these: the interaction between the extra-parliamentary organisation and the parliamentary party.
About the Speaker:
Udit Bhatia is a Junior Research Fellow in Politics at Jesus College and Lecturer in Political Theory at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. His research interests lie at the intersections of democratic theory, social epistemology and constitutional law. He is currently working on the ethics of partisanship and the regulation of political parties.

In mammals the cell-autonomous circadian clock pivots around a transcriptional/post-translational feedback loop. However, we remain largely ignorant of the critical molecular, cell biological, and circuit-level processes that determine the precision and robustness of circadian rhythms: what keeps them on track, and what determines their period, which varies by less than 5 minutes over 24 hours? The origin of this precision and robustness is the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the basal hypothalamus, the principal circadian pacemaker of the brain. The SCN sits atop a circadian hierarchy that sustains and synchronises the innumerable cell-autonomous clocks of all major organs to solar time (and thereby to each other), by virtue of direct retinal innervation that entrains the transcriptional oscillator of the 20,000 or so component cells of the SCN. I shall describe real-time imaging approaches to monitor circadian cycles of gene expression and cellular function in the SCN, and intersectional genetic and pharmacological explorations of the cell-autonomous and circuit-level mechanisms of circadian timekeeping. A particular focus will be on “translational switching” approaches to controlling clock function and the surprising discovery of a central role for SCN astrocytes in controlling circadian behaviour.

From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, UN agencies, NGOs and the Red Cross / Crescent work to save lives and protect rights in the wake of natural disasters and armed conflict. How effective is the $27Billion sector? And what challenges does it face? The Oxford launch event of the State of the Humanitarian System report, with expert panel and Q and A

Join us at Teddy Hall next week for a fantastic event on the ‘Neuroscience of Dance’ brought to you by the Centre for the Creative Brain!

Science, dance and wine – what more could you want for a Saturday afternoon?

A few (free) tickets are still available, so be quick!

https://www.seh.ox.ac.uk/discover/research/centre-for-the-creative-brain

– GPES Seminar Series, Oxford Brookes University

In the context of migration between Uttar Pradesh, other areas of India, and the Gulf, this paper explores the role of the imagination in shaping subjective experiences of male Muslim migrants from a woodworking industry in the North Indian city of Saharanpur. Through attending to the dreams, aspirations, and hopes of labour migrants, the paper argues that bridging the material and the imagined is critical to understanding not just patterns of migration, but also the subjective experiences of migrants themselves. Through a descriptive ethnographic account, involving journeys with woodworkers over one and a half years, the paper explores the ways in which migration, its effects, and connections are shaped by the imagination, yet are also simultaneously active in shaping the imagination—a process that is self-perpetuating. Emerging from this, the paper gives attention to continuity at the material, personal, and more emotive levels. This runs counter to research that situates migration as rupturing or change-driving within both the social and the subjective. These continuities play out in complex ways, providing comfort and familiarity, but also enabling the imaginations of migrants to be subverted, co-opted, influenced, and structured to meet the demands of labour markets both domestically and abroad.

Automation, AI and robotics are changing our lives quickly – but digital disruption goes much further than we realise.

In this talk, Richard Baldwin, one of the world’s leading globalisation experts, will explain that exponential growth in computing, transmission and storage capacities is also creating a new form of ‘virtual’ globalisation that could undermine the foundations of middle-class prosperity in the West.

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

Currently limited tools exist to accurately forecast the complex nature of disease spread across the globe. Dr Moritz Kraemer will talk about the dynamic global maps being built, at 5km resolution, to predict the invasion of new organisms under climate change conditions and continued unplanned urbanisation.

Dung beetles in the British Isles are a vital part of their associated ecosystems but have been historically rather overlooked probably due to their chosen habitat. Now our native dung beetles are finally beginning to get some of the invertebrate limelight due to an emphasis on ecosystem services and a much more environmentally friendly farming future. However we are lacking on a great deal of base data about these vitally important species and surveying is the one of the best ways to get information. This means getting into dung and discovering these unsung heroes

The Global Politics, Economy and Society (GPES) Research Centre at Oxford Brookes will be hosting its first annual lecture, given by the writer and activist George Monbiot. All welcome, but please book via the registration link.

Carlos Lopes will deliver an overview of the critical development issues facing the African continent today. He will talk about a blueprint of policies to address issues, and an intense, heartfelt meditation on the meaning of economic development in the age of democratic doubts, identity crises, global fears and threatening issues of sustainability.

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

The ecology and history of one of the largest atolls in the world. Aldabra, situated in the South West Indian Ocean, supports the largest population of giant tortoises worldwide. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, it is a stronghold for wildlife in a region that is besieged by threats.

Professor Dave Carter reveals how understanding intercellular communication could improve healthcare.