This one-day workshop with St Cross College Professional in Residence David Scrymgeour covers the steps towards building a successful organisation, from designing, starting, and growing, to managing, changing, fixing, and evolving. The workshop will be highly practical, and will help you to develop a model for thinking about an organisation and how to apply it in clear practical steps. During the course of the day, you will look at the ‘Three Pillars’ model of organisations: Sales, finance, and operations, and there will be case studies, question and answer sessions, and plenty of time for networking over a working lunch.

About David:

David Scrymgeour has worked as an entrepreneur, consultant, trouble-shooter and community advisor. He is currently Adjunct Professor and Executive-in-Residence at the Rotman School of Management.

Tickets are £5 which covers a working lunch.

A storytelling lecture about how we cope with climate change from the ‘attractively impish’ (The Guardian) Dr Matt Winning. Presented by Oxford Comedy Festival.

As seen as the Environmental Correspondent on ‘Unspun with Matt Forde’ on Dave, BBC Three and BBC Radio2.

‘everything a Fringe show should be: hilarious, personal, inventive, and something that will stay with you for some time to come’ ★★★★★ (EdFestMag)

Travis Jay presents his brand new, emotional roller-coaster of a show. It recounts Travis’s hilarious journey from childhood to fatherhood, and the many hiccups in-between.

Nominated for The Leicester Mercury Comedian of the year in 2016, Travis Jay is a stand-up, actor and radio presenter who has been performing on the comedy circuit since 2009.

Travis also writes and performs spoken word, and has featured on BBC Radio 1’s ‘First words’ poetry series alongside George The Poet. A creative, animated, and intelligent performer, Travis has built a reputation as being an entertaining and sometimes controversial story teller.

Doors at 5.30pm/Show at 6pm

This paper explores the connectivities between violence, memory, personhood, place and human substances after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. It explores the practice of ‘care-taking’ at genocide memorials – the preservation and care of human remains –to reveal how survivors of the genocide re-make their worlds through working with the remnants of their dead loved ones. I argue that ‘care-taking’ is a way to rebuild selves and to retain lost relations to the dead that still interfere in the everyday lives of the living. Survivors project their emotions, sentiments and confusion about an uncertain future onto the remains. Care-taking re-verses time because it gives back dignity to those who died ‘bad deaths’ during the genocide. I further argue that the memorials are a vehicle for what I coin ‘place-bound proximity’ that enables a material space of communication between care-takers and their dead loved ones, provides a last resting place and a ‘home’ for both the living and the dead. Importantly these findings questions mainstream transitional justice approaches to social recovery demonstrating that memory cannot be deployed or harnessed and that reconciliation is better understood as rebuilding a (normal) relationship with the dead rather than as one with perpetrators. Following a ‘victims-approach’ this paper draws on extensive fieldwork conducted in Rwanda between 2011 and 2014.

We cannot end poverty without ending energy poverty. Ever since the world’s first power plants whirred to life in 1882, we have seen how electricity is the lynchpin for development in all of its forms.

Manufacturing and industrial productivity, agriculture and food security, nutrition, hygiene, water, public health, education, even community engagement, in other words, daily life in a modern economy, demand access to reliable energy.

And yet despite significant progress over nearly 140 years, more than 800 million people around the world live without access to electricity, and hundreds of millions more struggle with unreliable or unaffordable service. Families are deprived of the means to labour productively and their quality of life and status in extreme poverty goes unchanged.

We need urgently to fast-track sustainable power solutions, investments, and partnerships across the globe to catalyze an energy transformation and accelerate sustainable, reliable and modern electrification for economic development.

Kajal Odedra has always been passionate about helping other people affect change.
She is Executive Director of Change.Org and author of ‘Do Something: Activism for Everyone’. Change.org is the world’s largest petition platform with 15 million UK users and 200 million globally.

In this book talk the Author, Carl Benedikt Frey, will discuss how the Industrial Revolution was a defining moment in history, but how few grasped its enormous consequences at the time. Now that we are in the midst of another technological revolution how can the lessons of the past can help us to more effectively face the present?

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

The persistence of poverty – in rich and poor countries alike – is one of the most serious problems facing humanity. But what is poverty and how much of it is there around the globe?

John Micklewright will present Professor Sir Tony Atkinson’s new book, Measuring Poverty around the World, which he and Andrea Brandolini edited after Sir Tony’s death.

The book talk will be followed by a discussion

Professor Sabina Alkire, Director, Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI)
Andrea Brandolini, Head, Statistical Analysis Directorate, DG Economics, Statistics and Research, Bank of Italy
Professor John Micklewright, Professor Emeritus, UCL
Professor Brian Nolan, Lead Researcher, Oxford Martin Programme on Inequality and Prosperity
There will be a drinks reception and book sale after the talk, all welcome

Data-driven micro-targeted campaigns have become a main stable of political strategy. As personal and societal data becomes more accessible, we need to understand how it can be used and mis-used in political campaigns and whether it is relevant to regulate political candidates’ access to data.

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

Joris Luyendijk was born in Amsterdam and studied in Kansas, Amsterdam, and Cairo. He is a writer, journalist and anthropologist. He has written about the Middle East, the banking crisis and Brexit.

Is it our social responsibility to vaccinate? Vaccination has eradicated deadly diseases from our world and saved millions of lives; but why do some people refuse to vaccinate? This event, presented in partnership with the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities will explore how medicine, ethics, history and social science can encourage wider debate and a better understanding of the role vaccination plays in improving global human health.
Panelists include Alberto Giubilini (Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities), Samantha Vanderslott (Oxford Vaccine Group), Erica Charters (Associate Professor of Global Medicine and the History of Medicine), and Andrew Pollard (Professor of Paediatric Infection and Immunity).

Migration is present at the dawn of human history – the phenomena of hunting and gathering, seeking seasonal pasture and nomadism being as old as human social organisation itself.

The flight from natural disasters, adverse climatic changes, famine, and territorial aggression by other communities or other species were also common occurrences.

But if migration is as old as the hills, why is it now so politically sensitive? Why do migrants leave? Where do they go, in what numbers and for what reasons? Do migrants represent a threat to the social and political order? Are they none-the-less necessary to provide labour, develop their home countries, increase consumer demand and generate wealth? Can migration be stopped? One of Britain’s leading migration scholars, Robin Cohen, will probe these issues in this talk

Please register via the link provided.

This talk will be followed by a book sale, signing and drinks reception, all welcome. Copies available at half price — £10 — to cash buyers only.

Adam Smith is world-famous as a founding father of economics, and well-known to political theorists and philosophers for his Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). His work as a jurist is much less well known. As a notorious perfectionist, he worked for decades on a book that would have spanned the ground between the moral philosophy of TMS and the empirical sociology and economics of Wealth of Nations (WN). He never completed it, and on his deathbed he asked his executors to destroy his manuscripts. Which, sadly for us, they did.

But thanks to two near-miraculous survivals we know a great deal about what Adam Smith’s book on jurisprudence would have said. Two of his Glasgow students kept detailed notes of his lectures there between 1762 and 1764. One set was rediscovered in 1895, the other in 1958. They were taken in successive academic years, and they show that Smith shifted the order in which he presented his topics, but not the essentials of his course. The two independent sources validate each other.

Professor Iain McLean will lay out the principles of Smith’s jurisprudence; show how it forms the bridge between TMS and WN; and try to show Smith’s half-submerged influence on the new republic of the United States, in whose revolution he took a great deal of interest.

The lecture opens a one-day workshop on Tuesday 13 November on the jurisprudence behind the writings and philosophy of Adam Smith.

Iain McLean was born and brought up in Edinburgh. He is Senior Research Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College, Oxford. One of his research interests is the interaction of the Scottish, American, and French Enlightenments of the 18th century. His Adam Smith: Radical and Egalitarian (2006) was written at the instigation of Smith’s fellow Fifer Gordon Brown.

Hella Pick is one of the trailblazers for the modern female foreign correspondent. She worked across three continents and covered the death of Yugoslavia’s leader, President Tito. Yugoslavia was always the saving grace of covering the Soviet bloc,” she remembers. “While in East Germany you were followed and listened to all the time, but Tito’s regime was a symbol of independent communism. Even the American ambassador was predicting the country would survive beyond Tito. Of course, we were all wrong.” Pick will talk about her incredible career, the stories she has covered and the current challenges facing journalism.
Neal Ascherson went to King’s College, Cambridge, where he read history. The historian Eric Hobsbawm was his tutor and described him as “perhaps the most brilliant student I ever had. I didn’t really teach him much, I just let him get on with it.” After graduating he he chose a career in journalism, first at The Manchester Guardian and then at The Scotsman, The Observer and The Independent on Sunday.He contributed scripts for the documentary series The World at War (1973–74) and the Cold War (1998). He has also been a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. Ascherson has lectured and written extensively about Polish and Eastern Europe affairs.

Inaugural event in our new events series focusing on responsible leadership: Driving Diversity and Inclusion Seminar Series.

Progress on diversity in the UK civil service and why it matters. How the dial only really shifted on gender, and why the focus is now on inclusion and addressing bullying and harassment. What the good leaders are doing?

Dame Sue Owen will give a talk followed by a Q&A with the audience moderated by Sue Dopson, Rhodes Trust Professor of Organisational Behaviour, Fellow of Green Templeton College, Deputy Dean of Saïd Business School.

Event Schedule:
17:15 – Registration opens
17:45 – Event starts
18:45 – Drinks reception
19:45 – Close

When the UK joined the EU in 1973 all previous trade barriers with the EU were abolished, which led to a strong intensification of trade with the European continent.

This situation will soon be a thing of the past, however, as new trade barriers will be erected with the withdrawal. Since the food self-sufficiency rate in the UK is particular low newly invoked trade barriers will significantly affect how food is produced and consumed in the UK.

Please register via the link provided.

New technologies have always provoked panic about workers being replaced by machines.

In the past, such fears have been misplaced, and many economists maintain that they remain so today. Yet in A World Without Work, Daniel Susskind shows why this time really is different. Advances in artificial intelligence mean that all kinds of jobs are increasingly at risk.

Susskind will argue that machines no longer need to reason like us in order to outperform us. Increasingly, tasks that used to be beyond the capability of computers – from diagnosing illnesses to drafting legal contracts – are now within their reach. The threat of technological unemployment is real.

So how can we all thrive in a world with less work? Susskind will remind us that technological progress could bring about unprecedented prosperity, solving one of mankind’s oldest problems: making sure that everyone has enough to live on. The challenge will be to distribute this prosperity fairly, constrain the burgeoning power of Big Tech, and provide meaning in a world where work is no longer the centre of our lives.

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

Come and take a role in a simulation of our world between now and 2030. It’s a challenging time and other people will have different objectives to yours.
How can business and society create the world we all want?
Can the UN Sustainable Development Goals help?

Hear a whole phD in just three minutes!
Can you understand a whole phD in just three minutes? Perhaps you are an Undergraduate or Masters student who is aiming for a future PhD?
Join Humanities and Social Sciences PhD students as we challenge them to boil down their whole PhD to just three minutes and one slide – in a way that makes sense to everyone!

In this book talk, Claas will review central findings of his research on the past 80 years of antibiotic use, resistance, and regulation in food production with introduction by Prof Mark Harrison, Director of Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities.

Mass-introduced after 1945, antibiotics helped revolutionise food production. Farmers and veterinarians used antibiotics to prevent and treat disease, protect plants, preserve food, and promote animals’ growth. Many soon became dependent on routine antibiotic use to sustain and increase production. The resulting growth of antibiotic infrastructures came at a price. Critics blamed antibiotics for leaving dangerous residues in food, enabling bad animal welfare, and selecting for antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in bacteria, which could no longer be treated with antibiotics.

Pyrrhic Progress analyses over 80 years of evolving non-human antibiotic use on both sides of the Atlantic and introduces readers to the historical and current complexities of antibiotic stewardship in a time of rising AMR.

This talk includes a drinks reception and nibbles, all welcome

This book colloquium will discuss Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, her influential account of the challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, specifically, how the commodification of personal information threatens our core values of freedom, democracy, and privacy.

In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behaviour modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.

Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new “behavioural futures markets”, where predictions about our behaviour are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new “means of behavioural modification”.

The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a “Big Other” operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff’s comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled “hive” of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit – at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future.

With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future – if we let it.

Participants include:
Dr Christopher Decker, Economist and Research Fellow, Faculty of Law, Oxford

Denis Galligan, Professor of Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford

Ivan Manokha, Lecturer in Political Economy, Oxford

Praise for The Age of Surveillance Capitalism:
“Easily the most important book to be published this century … this generation’s Das Kapital.”
— Zadie Smith

‘Job insecurity at the end of the 20th century has given way to income insecurity at the start of the 21st.’ – Andy Haldane, July 2019

Join us for a stimulating morning of talks exploring the current challenges of income insecurity, with keynote speaker Andy Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank of England. We will discuss labour market precarity, pay volatility and income insecurity issues in the UK and more widely, and their implications for the labour market and the structure of the social security system.

Programme:

Welcome and introduction by Charles Godfray, Director, Oxford Martin School
Keynote address: Andy Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank of England
‘Pay volatility and income insecurity: what role for social security?’ by Jane Millar, Professor of Social Policy, University of Bath
‘Measuring economic insecurity: Why and How?’ by Matteo Richiardi, Professor of Economics and Director of EUROMOD, University of Essex, INET Associate
Panel discussion and Q&A: chaired by Brian Nolan, Professor of Social Policy at Oxford, with speakers and Fran Bennett, Senior Research and Teaching Fellow, Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford
This event is free, but registration is essential to ensure your place.

You are welcome to bring lunch with you.

This series of talks is organised by the Oxford Martin School, Department of Social Policy and Intervention & Institute for New Economic Thinking, University of Oxford

Professor Sir Adam Roberts, Senior Research Fellow in International Relations, University of Oxford, will deliver a lecture on the contemporary decline of the liberal order, and call for a rethinking of liberal ideas and practices. The Keynote Lecture will open a workshop the following day.

The term ‘liberal international order’ has become widely used – generally to refer to the international system that developed in the years after the end of the Cold War in 1989, or even to the whole period since the end of the Second World War in 1945.

Although the term itself is relatively new, the ideas and practices that comprise it are not. They include multi-party democracy, the growth of international law and institutions, recognition of human rights, freedom of religious belief, the removal of barriers to international trade.

All of the above have been advocated as means of reducing the incidence of war between states. This is not an elegy for a liberal international order that is now under threat, but rather a call for rethinking it, especially in light of its long, diverse, and troubled history.

Adam Roberts is Senior Research Fellow in International Relations at Oxford University and a Fellow of Balliol College. In 2009–13 he was President of the British Academy, the UK national academy for the humanities and social sciences. He was awarded a knighthood in 2002 for services to the study and practice of international relations, and has given expert advice to parliamentary committees, governments and non-governmental bodies in the UK and overseas.

His numerous books include (co-edited.) Civil Resistance in the Arab Spring: Triumphs and Disasters, Oxford University Press, 2016. He is currently working on a book on the history of the idea of liberal international order.

A workshop to scrutinize the transformation of the contemporary international order, encompassing its social, political, legal, economic, and technological dimensions. The workshop will serve as an in-depth examination of the issues outlined in Professor Sir Adam Roberts’ lecture of the previous day.

It is plain that shifts in the organization and structure of the international order, and the social relationships within these, are experiencing stress and strain and being reconceived and redesigned in reaction to deeper forces.

Among the factors driving this change and revision, even transformation, include:

relations among nations;
the rise of social movements in response to changing attitudes to authority and established ideas and institutions;
altered dispositions towards international law and international and regional institutions;
challenges to the liberal order;
scepticism about human rights, universal principles, and the power of the courts to uphold them;
new economic perspectives, revised business and financial relations and practices; and
the rapid development of technology, the dawn of the digital age, and the consequences.
Participants include:
Denis Galligan, Professor of Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford

Mary Bartkus, Special Counsel, Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP

Ralph Schroeder, Professor of Social Science of the Internet, Oxford Internet Institute

David Vines, Professor of Economics, Oxford

1/3: The case for a funded pension with a defined benefit (DB)

I begin by drawing attention to the efficiencies in the pooling of longevity and investment risk that collective funded pension schemes provide over individual defined contribution (IDC) pension pots in guarding against your risk of living too long. I then turn to an analysis of those collective schemes that promise a defined benefit (DB): an inflation-proof income in retirement until death, specified as a fraction of your salary earned during your career. I consider the concepts and principles within and beyond financial economics that underlie the valuation and funding of such a pension promise. I assess the merits of the ‘actuarial approach’ to funding an open, ongoing, enduring DB scheme at a low rate of contributions invested in ‘return-seeking’ equities and property. I also consider the merits of the contrasting ‘financial economics approach’, which calls for a higher rate of contributions set as the cost of bonds that ‘match’ the liabilities. I draw on the real-world case of the UK’s multi-employer Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) to adjudicate between these approaches. The contrasting investment strategy of London’s SAUL pension scheme, the objectives of the Pensions Regulator, the significance of the Pension Protection Fund, and the decision of Trinity College Cambridge to withdraw from USS to protect itself against being the ‘last man standing’, all figure in the discussion.

Lecture 2: The case for collective defined contribution (CDC)
On any sensible approach to the valuation of a DB scheme, ineliminable risk will remain that returns on a portfolio weighted towards return-seeking equities and property will fall significantly short of fully funding the DB pension promise. On the actuarial approach, this risk is deemed sufficiently low that it is reasonable and prudent to take in the case of an open scheme that will be cashflow positive for many decades. But if they deem the risk so low, shouldn’t scheme members who advocate such an approach be willing to put their money where their mouth is, by agreeing to bear at least some of this downside risk through a reduction in their pensions if returns are not good enough to achieve full funding? Some such conditionality would simply involve a return to the practices of DB pension schemes during their heyday three and more decades ago. The subsequent hardening of the pension promise has hastened the demise of DB. The target pensions of collective defined contribution (CDC) might provide a means of preserving the benefits of collective pensions, in a manner that is more cost effective for all than any form of defined benefit promise. In one form of CDC, the risks are collectively pooled across generations. In another form, they are collectively pooled only among the members of each age cohorts.

Lecture 3: The case for an unfunded pay as you go (PAYG) pension

The previous two lectures grappled with various challenges that funded collective pension schemes face. In the final lecture, I ask whether an unfunded ‘pay as you go’ (PAYG) approach might provide a solution. With PAYG, money is directly transferred from those who are currently working to pay the pensions of those who are currently retired. Rather than drawing from a pension fund consisting of a portfolio of financial assets, these pensions are paid out of the Treasury’s coffers. The pension one is entitled to in retirement is often, however, a function of, even though not funded by, the pensions contributions one has made during one’s working life. I explore the extent to which a PAYG pension can be justified as a form of indirect reciprocity that cascades down generations. This contrasts with a redistributive concern to mitigate the inequality between those who are young, healthy, able-bodied, and productive and those who are elderly, infirm, and out of work. I explore claims inspired by Ken Binmore and Joseph Heath that PAYG pensions in which each generation pays the pensions of the previous generation can be justified as in mutually advantageous Nash equilibrium. I also discuss the relevance to the case for PAYG of Thomas Piketty’s claim that r > g, where “r” is the rate of return on capital and “g” is the rate of growth of the economy.

The COVID-19 pandemic is having an unprecedented impact on societies around the world.

As governments mandate social distancing practices and instruct non-essential businesses to close to slow the spread of the outbreak, there is significant uncertainty about the effect such measures will have on lives and livelihoods. While demand for specific sectors such as healthcare has skyrocketed in recent months, other sectors such as air transportation and tourism have seen demand for their services evaporate. At the same time, many sectors are experiencing issues on the supply-side, as governments curtail the activities of non-essential industries.

Which industries will suffer most from demand-side or supply-side shocks resulting from the pandemic? Which workers are most of risk of unemployment or reduced wage income? Who will be the winners and losers?

Professor Doyne Farmer and Maria del Rio-Chanona will talk about their recent paper which estimated these shocks would threaten around 22% of the US economy’s GDP, jeopardise 24% of jobs and reduce total wage income by 17% – while the potential impacts are a multiple of what was experienced during the global financial crisis, and perhaps comparable to the Great Depression. Aggressive fiscal and monetary policies are needed to minimise the impact of these shocks but the avoidance of endangering public health must be the priority.

This talk is in conjunction with The Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford and the Oxford Review of Economic Policy.

To register and watch this talk live and participate in the Q & A: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/supply-and-demand-shocks

To watch later: https://youtu.be/5wtNm6ETuLQ

This unusual online event will see Alberto Guibilini (Research Fellow, Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics) and David Jones (Director, The Anscombe Bioethics Centre) adopting the other’s position on conscientious objection, arguing for the opposing view in an attempt to explore not only the subject, but the very nature of disagreement and discussion. Audience members will be encouraged to explore their views on conscientious objection in the same way.

We welcome questions in advance of the debate. To register on Zoom for the event please use the following link: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_VrOGfqNrQVmw9k2KFz9HOA

This event is co-sponsored by the Anscombe Bioethics Centre in Oxford. It will start promptly at 6pm, and we expect to finish at 7:30pm.

Jointly organised by the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and the Anscombe Bioethics Centre. This unusual online event will see Alberto Guibilini and David Jones adopting the other’s position on conscientious objection, arguing for the opposing view in an attempt to explore not only the subject, but the very nature of disagreement and discussion. Audience members will be encouraged to explore their views on conscientious objection in the same way.