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.

In this alternative Valentine’s Day event Dr María del Pilar Blanco (University of Oxford) discusses the art of geriatrics and degeneration in Spanish America at the end of the 1800s, and how it entered the cultural imagination.

Abingdon Area Archaeological & Historical Society members will give FREE talks at Abingdon County Hall Museum every third Saturday of the month starting in February 2019. Each will last 30 minutes and be about a different subject or object in the museum collection.

Talks Schedule:

11am: ‘The Crossley Engine’, by Ruth Weinberg.
This talk will take you back in time to the first half of the twentieth century when Abingdon’s water supply relied on two gas engines and a pump situated in the basement of the County Hall, now Abingdon County Hall Museum. After the refurbishment of the County Hall in 2012, the pump and the water inlet are still in their exact original places and today part of the Museum’s displays.

1pm: The Abingdon Monks’ Map’, by Manfred Brod
The “Monks’ Map” as an example of early English map-making is probably the most important single artefact in the museum. Its origin has long been obscure, but recent work has shown when and why it was made, and by whom.
This talk will discuss the evidence, and consider what the map teaches us about local affairs at the time of its production.

3pm: THE ABINGDON OPHTHALMOSAUR: The Discovery of a Jurassic Sea Beast’ by Jeff Wallis.
Why do archaeologist spend cold and wet winter afternoons trudging around muddy gravel pits? On one particular visit to a quarry near Abingdon just before Christmas 1982 pale grey tell tale signs of weathered rib bones from a 155 million year old marine reptile led to the excavation of a two thirds complete skeleton.
We will describe the process of how this wonderful fossil from the age of Dinosaurs arrived into its current home in Abingdon Museum. We may then proceed to the archaeology showcases downstairs crossing 155 million years ago into the ages of Ice and the first visits by early Humans to what is now Abingdon.
We can look at some of the earliest stone tools to be found in the UK and view a unique flint tool made by some of the last surviving Neanderthal hunters or one of the first modern human groups to range across the Upper Thames Valley.

FREE TALKS
No booking required

Stories for Our Times: Retelling the Norse Myths

The Norse Myths, published by Quercus in 2018, is the latest in a long line of retellings of the myths and legends of medieval Scandinavia; tales that, as the publisher’s blurb rightly points out, ‘have captured the imagination of storytellers and artists for centuries’. Reworking the Norse myths for a commercial press offered an opportunity to reflect on both the longstanding creative appeal of the myths and also the extraordinary resurgence of interest in recent years: what exactly is it about the Vikings and the stories of the Norse gods that resonates with our current cultural climate? This talk will draw out some of the points of connection, and fracture, that a popular retelling rests upon, and suggest some of the ways that a reworking of traditional material can be used to speak to contemporary concerns – including environmental change, gender politics, and the resurgence of the far-right – whilst also seeking to remain faithful to the medieval sources and to the contradictions and plurality of the myths that have come down to us.

About Dr Tom Birkett

Tom Birkett is a graduate of Oxford and St Cross College, where he completed his MA in 2008 and PhD in 2011. He has held a lectureship in Old English at University College Cork since 2012, where he has also introduced Old Norse to the curriculum. He publishes on Old English and medieval Icelandic textual and literary culture, and has recently led two IRC-funded projects in Cork on the translation of medieval poetry, and on the popular perception of the Vikings (the World-Tree Project). His illustrated retelling of the Norse myths was published by Quercus in December.

Talk followed by questions and discussion

All welcome

This is the latest in a series of eight weekly talks. The full list is:

Brexit: archaic techniques of ecstasy
Thursday 17 January: 7:30pm–9:00pm
Wesley Memorial Church (New Inn Hall St)

Shamanism: taking back control
Thursday 24 January: 7:30pm–9:00pm
Wesley Memorial Church (New Inn Hall St)

Tithe, timber, and the persistence of the ancien régime
Thursday 31 January: 7:30pm–9:00pm
Oxford Town Hall (St Aldates)

Hegelian dialectics and the prime numbers (part 2)
Thursday 7 February: 7:30pm–9:00pm
Wesley Memorial Church (New Inn Hall St)

Christopher Caudwell (1907–1937) and ‘the sources of poetry’
Thursday 14 February: 7:30pm–9:00pm
Wesley Memorial Church (New Inn Hall St)

Television: remote control
Thursday 21 February: 7:30pm–9:00pm
Wesley Memorial Church (New Inn Hall St)

Fascism and populism: can you spot the difference?
Thursday 28 February: 7:30pm–9:00pm
Wesley Memorial Church (New Inn Hall St)

The epos of everyday life
Thursday 7 March: 7:30pm–9:00pm
Wesley Memorial Church (New Inn Hall St)

– GPES Seminar Series, Oxford Brookes University

The beginnings of a celebrity or star culture in the theatre of Shakespeare’s time.
How many women went to Shakespeare’s plays? This talk explores the evidence and significance of female theatre going in the early modern period.

Professor Smith will discuss the beginnings of a celebrity or star culture in the theatre of Shakespeare’s time, discussing notable actors and, in particular, their appeal to women spectators. She’ll look at the evidence, often negative and satirical, about how women at the theatre were perceived, and trace their changing place in audiences as theatre went upmarket in the seventeenth century. Drawing on histories of consumerism and of celebrity, Smith will identify women theatregoers as crucial to the development of the playhouses within the early modern experience economy.

Professor Smith has been a Fellow of Hertford College and Lecturer in the Faculty of English since 1997. She teaches part of the first year paper ‘Introduction to Literary Studies’, the Renaissance paper to second years and Shakespeare. She lectures in the English Faculty on these topics with some of these lectures available as free podcasts from iTunesU. She also teaches on the English Faculty MSt course 1550-1700 and supervises research students on early modern topics.

Schedule:
12:15 – On-site registration & buffet lunch
12:30 – Talk commences
13:30 – Event close

The seminar is open for anyone to attend, registration is essential so please use the register button to confirm your attendance.

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.

Talk followed by questions and discussion

ScreenTalk Oxfordshire proudly presents an evening with British Producer Jeremy Thomas. Jeremy has worked with renowned directors including Bertolucci, Nicolas Roeg, Jonathan Glazer and Ben Wheatley producing such great films as ‘The Last Emperor’, ‘Crash’, ‘Sexy Beast’ and ‘High-Rise’.

On Tuesday 5th March at the Lounge Bar, Curzon, Westgate Centre in Oxford, local producer Carl Schoenfeld will be talking to Jeremy Thomas about Directors, Actors, Crews as well as films he has produced and what he has learnt throughout his career.

Join us from 18:15 for a drink and chat in the bar, then at 19:00 with Carl Schoenfeld (ScreenTalk Co-Founder and Steering Group Member) in conversation with Jeremy Thomas (Recorded Picture Company).

There will be a Card/Cash Bar so join us after the talk to catch up and network.

ScreenTalk events are an opportunity to forge and strengthen contacts in Film, TV and Associated Media. For further information and to sign up to our mailing list please email screentalkoxfordshire@gmail.com

We expect this event to be popular and can only take pre-booked (free) tickets for entry.
Tickets: http://bit.ly/2GnlZhi

The Oxford Women’s Leadership Alliance is honoured to welcome two internationally acclaimed filmmakers who are using film as a tool to shape public conversations and ignite lasting change.

Dawn Porter’s Trapped, which won both a Peabody and Sundance Film Festival award, explores laws regulating abortion clinics in the American South and has been used to help propel reproductive rights conversations in countries across the globe.

Lindsey Dryden, a veteran of BBC, Channel 4, and The History Channel, produced 2017’s Unrest, which highlights the power of human connection in the face of a life-altering, debilitating illness.

To commemorate this year’s International Women’s Day, please join Dawn and Lindsey for clips and conversation and learn how they use the power of film to give voice to the voiceless.

Schedule:
18:30 – On-site registration
19:00 – Talk commences
20:00 – Networking reception
21:00 – Event close

DANSOX presents a one-day conference on the life and work of the great 20th-century choreographer, Sir Kenneth MacMillan (1929-1992). MacMillan stands among the great innovators of his time in theatre, film, art, and music. The conference will discuss his work, the challenges of preserving the record, explore little known early work, his literary and musical choices, design, and choreographic method.

Guest speakers include: the artist and widow of Sir Kenneth, Lady MacMillan; the former Principal and Director of the Royal Ballet, Dame Monica Mason; the music expert, Natalie Wheen; and choreologist, Anna Trevien. Dancers, artists, and filmmakers who worked with Kenneth will join the conversation. A performance/lecture of the reconstruction of ‘Playground’ with Yorke Dance will be held in the JdP at the end of the conference.

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.

St Hilda’s Writers’ Day 2019 marks its 10th year as the only College to hold its own day of lectures at the Oxford Literary Festival. All authors are College members or alumnae.

CLAIRE HARMAN – Murder By The Book: A Sensational Chapter In Victorian Crime. chaired by Claire Armitstead (The Guardian and the Observer)
When the accused murderer of Lord William Russell blamed the crime on his reading, he fueled an ongoing debate about the appalling damage ‘low’ books could do. This fascinating study details the controversy around William Harrison Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard, the murder of Russell and the way it affected many of the leading writers of the day, including Dickens and Thackeray. Harman unpacks the evidence, reveals the gossip and the surprisingly literary background to this gory crime.

Chair: Claire Armitstead (The Guardian and the Observer)

What role does the imagination play in science? Do our notions of scientific genius rest on ideas about the creative imagination? How do we know when the imagination has overreached itself and entered the realm of fanciful speculation — of science fiction?
Professor Rob Iliffe explores these questions, and how ideas about imagination have shaped science and scientists.

Rob will be available to sign copies of his book ‘Newton: a very short introduction’ after the talk. The Museum’s shop will stock copies of the book.

Emily Wilson will be at Blackwell’s to discuss her best selling translation of Homer’s The Odyssey.

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.

Past Times, Blackwell’s series of free history talks, continues with Mark Honigsbaum discussing his new book The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria and Hubris.

Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have dreamed of preventing catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet, despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. From pneumonic plague in LA and ‘parrot fever’ in Argentina to the more recent AIDS, SARS and Ebola epidemics, the last 100 years have been marked by a succession of unanticipated outbreaks and scares. Like man-eating sharks, predatory pathogens are always present in nature, waiting to strike; when one is seemingly vanquished, others appear in its place. The Pandemic Century exposes the limits of science against nature, and how these crises are shaped by humans as much as microbes.

A presentation by Professor Irad Malkin of Tel-Aviv University: What does it mean to be “fair” in circumstances of taking possession of land, often by conquest, and settling it? And how did Archaic city-states (ca 750-500 BCE) apply the lot as the means of implementing what they understood to be equality and fairness? There will be discussion and drinks after the presentation.

We are delighted to invite to a documentary film-screening of the film Dreamland, followed by a Skype Q&A with one of the film-makers, Professor Britt Kramvig.

The film: Viewed through the camera lens of a philosopher, it is inspired by a line from “Dreamland” by romantic poet Edgar Allan Poe “…by a route obscure and lonely, haunted by ill angels only…” A journey through people-places in Arctic landscapes is made by the figure of a native anthropologist. She follows in the footsteps of many others, recounting experience. Viewers glimpse moments of a sublime, the subject of Poe’s poem. The movie gives form to hopes for futures different than pasts. An essayistic documentary in the form of a twenty-first century Arctic road-movie by professor Britt Kramvig (UiT) and filmmaker Rachel Gomez (Tromsø). Trailer: https://vimeo.com/163989818

Following the Palm D’or winning success of his latest film Shoplifters, FLJS Films is pleased to present master director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s previous film, The Third Murder, his elliptical reworking of Kurosawa’s Rashomon for modern times.

The Third Murder is an existential crime drama through which Kore-eda takes up his trademark themes of unconventional parent–child relations, while subjecting to his forensic gaze the gap that emerges between the letter of the law and justice truly served.

From the arresting opening scenes of a factory worker’s cold-blooded murder of his boss, the film employs an intriguing and expertly woven narrative of shifting stories to carry us into a profound essay on the subjectivity of truth. In doing so, The Third Murder stands as an understated yet powerful indictment of the death penalty that continues to cast a long shadow over modern-day Japan.

Sir Tim Hitchens, Wolfson College President and former UK Ambassador to Tokyo, will introduce a pre-screening talk by Tony Rayns, BFI film critic for Sight&Sound magazine and expert in East Asian cinema.

Tony is the author of books on Seijun Suzuki, Wong Kar-wai and Rainer Werner Fassbinder; a television presenter for a series on Chinese cinema; a screenwriter; film festival programmer; and commentator on DVD releases.

Praise for The Third Murder:
“Sleek and suspenseful, deceptive and profound”
Sight and Sound

“A captivating and unknowable puzzle … Kore-eda’s homage to Kurosawa’s Rashomon”
The Guardian

Economics is in crisis. On one hand, behavioural economics is now well-established, but on the other hand, most economics models are still based on rational expectations with constraints, called “frictions”. The standard program adds more and more constraints to rationality in hopes that this will approximate real behaviour, but this may never work. It is increasingly clear that heterogeneity (the fact that people and institutions are diverse) is essential to understand problems such as inequality. There is a major effort to address this challenge, but the models that do this are technically complicated and rapidly become intractable as they become more realistic. Finally, there is a fundamental challenge due to the fact that we have very little historical data available to fit models for a complicated and evolving economy.

Complexity economics offers solutions to these problems. It advocates modelling behaviour in terms of heuristics and myopic reasoning, as observed in behavioural experiments. It advocates the use of simulations, making it much easier to incorporate heterogeneity in a tractable manner. Finally, it advocates using highly granular data, that accurately captures heterogeneity, to fit the models. Professor Doyne Farmer will present examples where this approach has had success, including applications to technology forecasting, economic growth and climate change, and present a vision of what it can do in the future.

In our first of two seminars on the future of work after automation Dr Brendan Burchell will investigate the potential for a five-day weekend society.

Machine-learning and robotics technologies promise to be able to replace some tasks or jobs that have traditionally been performed by humans. Like previous technologies introduced in the past couple of centuries, this possibility has been met with either optimism that will permit liberation from the tyranny of employment, or pessimism that it will lead to mass precarity and unemployment.

This presentation will draw upon both qualitative and quantitative evidence to explore the possible societal consequences of a radical reduction in the length of the normal working week. Drawing upon the evidence for the psychological benefits of employment, we look at the evidence for the minimum effective dose of employment. The paper also considers why the historical increases in productivity have not been matched with proportionate reductions in working time.

About Brendan Burchell:

Dr Brendan Burchell is a Reader in the Social Sciences in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Dr Burchell is director of graduate education for the Department of Sociology and director of the Cambridge Undergraduate Quantitative Research Centre. He was recently Head of Department for Sociology, as well as a Director of Studies and a Tutor at Magdalene College.

Dr Burchell’s main research interests centre on the effects of labour market conditions on wellbeing. Recent publications have focussed on unemployment, job insecurity, work intensity, part-time work, zero-hours contracts, debt, occupational gender segregation and self-employment. Most of his work concentrates on employment in Europe, but current projects also include an analysis of job quality, the future of work and youth self-employment in developing countries. He works in interdisciplinary environments with psychologists, sociologists, economists, lawyers and other social scientists.

Dr Burchell’s undergraduate degree was in Psychology, followed by a PhD in Social Psychology. His first post in Cambridge was a joint appointment between the social sciences and economics in 1985, and he has been in a permanent teaching post in at Cambridge since 1990.

Register:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/future-of-work-after-automation-towards-a-five-day-weekend-society-tickets-61028132788

The 11th Annual Human Welfare Conference is entitled ‘Innovate: Balancing Interests in Resource-Constrained Settings’. The conference will focus on solutions being developed at various scales to improve human wellbeing in areas as diverse as poverty alleviation, education, health, and social welfare. The goal is to offer diverse, interdisciplinary perspectives on tackling the most pertinent issues facing our society today. Invited speakers include academics and practitioners, with experience working in government, NGOs and the commercial sector in fields as diverse as health, food, investment and education.

Every third Saturday of the month come and listen to local experts talk about interesting topics around the museum galleries. Each talk will last 30 minutes and will be about different subjects about Abingdon’s history or chosen objects in the museum collection.

Talks schedule:

11:30 am – ‘The Spinney Dig: Uncovering a Lost Cottage in Sunningwell’ by Robert Evans.

A few years ago we rediscovered the remains of a substantial old cottage in the grounds of Sunningwell School. Since then we have been excavating the site, trying to find out what the place looked like, and how the people who occupied it would have lived. So far that work has yielded lots of evidence for the past 150 years or so; more and older items may still be hidden below the ground. It’s not rare stuff – no precious coins, or ship-burials, or oriental glassware; just bric-a-brac that tells us about the world of ordinary villagers.
I’ll bring along some of our finds to show, and present an illustrated report on the project.

1 pm – ‘Abingdon in the Second World War’ by Bob Frampton.

During the war years 1939 to 1945, the small town of Abingdon, like so many of England’s rural settlements, experienced the conflict in a way quite different from the major cities. While the town escaped the attention of concentrated heavy bombing raids, it still made a major contribution to the war, making tanks, aircraft engines and wing-parts. It sent 1,000 of its people to the war. The local RAF station trained bomber crews.
This short talk will highlight some of the events of those difficult years, the struggles and the sacrifices and some of the personal stories of the town in this harrowing episode in its recent history.

FREE talks, no booking required.
All donations welcome.

Is competition in the digital economy desirable? Does it currently exist? Is it possible? Is there anything policy can do?

This talk addresses all of these questions and presents the recommendations of the Digital Competition Expert Panel which was chaired by Jason Furman and recently presented its recommendations to the government.

On Wednesday 22 May, ScreenTalk Oxfordshire proudly presents Harnessing the Power of Video in Business Communications.
An evening with Tim May, MD of Strange Films and Music, talking with Toby Low – MD of MerchantCantos an international agency specialising in bringing creativity to critical business communications; Scott Shillum – CEO of Vismedia, Winner of the 2018 Digital Impact Awards and a pioneer in creating interactive, immersive content fused with cutting edge technology; Clare Holt – Founder of Nice Tree Films in Oxford and a member of ScreenTalk provides videos for businesses, public sector organisations, charities and education; Nicky Woodhouse – Founder of Woodhouse Video Production, award-winning female director of branded content and TVCs for online and broadcast.

Join us on Wednesday 22 May from 18:15 for a drink in the downstairs Lounge Bar, Curzon, Westgate Centre in Oxford, and why not try the Curzon’s excellent Pizza – great quality! At 19:00 Tim May will be talking to Toby Low, Scott Shillum, Clare Holt and Nicky Woodhouse. Afterwards there will be Shout Outs from ScreenTalk members and facilitated networking. At ScreenTalk events we run a Card/Cash Bar so please join us and take advantage of the opportunity to catch up and network.

We expect this event to be popular and can only take pre-booked (free) tickets for entry.

Join the conversation! ScreenTalk events are an opportunity to forge and strengthen contacts in Film, TV and Associated Media.
For further information and to sign up to our mailing list please email screentalkoxfordshire@gmail.com

Like the wind, knowledge can be difficult to see or grasp, but if well-harnessed, it can help us do extraordinary things. In this talk, Dr Penny Mealy will discuss how novel analytical tools are providing new insights into the use of knowledge in society, and highlight implications for economic development, inequality and the transition to the green economy.

The 5th Annual Oxford Business and Poverty Conference will feature a diverse range of speakers addressing the Paradoxes of Prosperity. Sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/5th-annual-oxford-business-poverty-conference-tickets-57733957822
Hosted at the Sheldonian Theatre, the conference will feature keynotes by:
Lant Pritchett: RISE Research Director at the Blavatnik School of Government, former Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development
Efosa Ojomo: Global Prosperity Lead and Senior Researcher at the Clayton Christensen Institute
John Hoffmire: Director of Center on Business and Poverty and Research Associate at Kellogg Colleges at Center For Mutual and Employee-owned Business at Oxford University
Ananth Pai: Executive Director, Bharath Beedi Works Pvt. Ltd. and Director, Bharath Auto Cars Pvt
Laurel Stanfield: Assistant Professor of Marketing at Bentley College in Massachusetts
Grace Cheng: Greater China’s Country Manager for Russell Reynolds Associates
Madhusudan Jagadish: 2016 Graduate MBA, Said Business School, University of Oxford
Tentative Schedule:
2:15-2:20 Welcome
2:20-2:50 Efosa Ojomo, co-author of The Prosperity Paradox, sets the stage for the need for innovation in development
2:50-3:20 John Hoffmire, Ananth Pai and Mudhusudan Jagadish explain how the Prosperity Paradox can be used in India as a model to create good jobs for poor women
3:20-3:40 Break
3:40-4:10 Laurel Steinfeld speaks to issues of gender, development and business – addressing paradoxes related to prosperity
4:10-4:40 Grace Cheng, speaks about the history of China’s use of disruptive innovations to develop its economy
4:40-5:15 Break
5:15-6 Lant Pritchett talks on Pushing Past Poverty: Paths to Prosperity
6:30-8 Dinner at the Rhodes House – Purchase tickets after signing up for the conference
Sponsors include: Russell Reynolds, Employee Ownership Foundation, Ananth Pai Foundation and others

In Origin of Species, Charles Darwin described how a population explosion occurs and called the time of population explosion “ favourable seasons”, he was not to know it, but such circumstances arose for his own species at around the time of his own birth. However, the favourable seasons for human population growth were not experienced favourably, with times of great social dislocation from small scale enclosure to global colonisation. Now those seasons are over, we have experienced the first ever sustained slowdown in the rate of global human population growth. This has been the case for at least one human generation. However, we are not just slowing down in terms of how many children we have, but in almost everything else we do, other than in the rise in global temperatures that we are recording and that we have to live with. It can be argued that there is even a slowdown in such unexpected areas as debt, publishing, and in the total amount useful information being produced.

If this is true – that humanity is slowing down in almost everything that we do – what does this mean? What measurements suggest that slowdown is true? And if so much is still rising, albeit at slower and slower rates – is that such a great change? Finally how might the slowdown impact on economic thought. In many ways economics was the science of the great acceleration; a science that makes most sense when markets are expanding and demand is rising. What kind of an economics is needed in a world where enormous and accelerating growth has stopped being the normality?