Some face-to-face events are returning. Check carefully for any requirements.

The ability to accurately identify and interpret Track and Sign rests on a body of traditional knowledge that previous generations of naturalists would have regarded as fundamental. Sadly, now it is largely unknown and untaught, but with the upsurge of Citizen Science, it is perhaps more relevant than ever.

A conference exploring how we can get people who used to cycle, or have never cycled, onto bikes, and the role of virtual reality cycling.
Come and join us for a day full of informative talks, interactive workshops, cycle tours, an expert panel and demos and rides on ebikes and adapted bikes!
Ticket price includes lunch and refreshments.Who is this event for?
Council officers, elected councillors, transport and environmental campaign groups (local and national), Cyclox members, community organisations interested in transport, active travel and health, local businesses and educational institutions, academic, other professional experts, and interested members of the public (whether you cycle or don’t cycle).
By the end of the conference you will know how to:
> Create an age friendly locality, as a low traffic neighbourhood
> Share best practice case studies of effective interventions for active travel linking soft and hard measures
> Communicate the benefits of eBikes and how they can get people back cycling
> Convey the opportunities virtual reality can play in increasing activity for people who are housebound
> Contribute to the post-conference guide to promoting uptake of cycling
The conference is organised by Cyclox, the cycle campaign for Oxford, and Oxford Brookes University; it follows on from the University’s cycle BOOM research and current Co-CAFE project (www.cycleboom.org , www.co-cafe.org).

Slime moulds thrive in damp woodlands and normally spread over rotting logs eating bacteria and fungi. They are also unusual in being single giant cells that show remarkably sophisticated behaviour considering their humble form. This talk presents a little vignette of the science behind these curious beasts and how it has led to better understanding of other networked systems, and even the origins of civilisation.

Join Erín Moure for a workshop on translating poetry, part of the QTE Residency and Poets Translating Poets series.
You will learn about the movement of meaning across languages, and how it’s not just dictionaries that determine meaning, but also cadence and structure.
Foreign language knowledge is not essential. Curiosity is the big prerequisite..
Sign up on the Eventbrite page to register!
The talk will provide an overview of dragonflies and their life cycles and habitats as well illustrating a number of species that occur in England including those that are currently colonising from the Continent and increasing in numbers.
The regulation of posture is relevant in a health and clinical context – including falls prevention, healthy ageing, and obesity. Balance and therefore postural control involves attentional processes and the application of internal or external attentional foci that have been linked with accuracy and quality of a movement while executing the skill. Measuring balance accurately and deriving meaningful information from it could aid health professionals to develop and design interventions accordingly. Hence, the topic of this talk is around applying new concepts to understand control mechanisms of balance.
Mindfulness: Ancient Wisdom meets Modern Psychology in the Contemporary World
Willem Kuyken
University of Oxford
Inspiring talk with hot drinks and buffet.
Do you want to improve your digital security? Do you keep putting it off? We’re a group of cybersecurity researchers and activists, and we want to help you access free tools and resources to protect your data. Join us for a *free*, practical, hands-on workshop exploring how digital security affects your life. This project is a form of “action research”—a type of research which combines research with activism to understand a problem and find solutions. In other words, we want cybersecurity to be more open, fair, and inclusive, and we’re “learning by doing.”
No prior experience or knowledge of cybersecurity required! As a feminist organisation, we want to *reconfigure* the assumption that digital security is for technical experts only. While the workshop is open to all, we particularly welcome women and other groups which are underrepresented in cybersecurity discussions.
Pizza and drinks will be provided!

Presenting 101 is an interactive workshop designed to help you flex your presenting muscles. Whether you have been presenting to the public for a long time or have just started, this workshop will help you hone the skills you need to be able to perfect your style and adapt to different situations. Presenting 101 also gives you the opportunity to network with other presenters in your local area, so you can share your best and worst practice. There will also be an opportunity to explore the exhibits in our brand new science centre!
The session will consist of a one hour facilitated workshop followed by a one-hour facilitated group discussion.
PLEASE NOTE: This event is open to members of The Presenter Network only. If you are not a member, but are actively involved in presenting in museums, science and discovery centres, visitor centres, educational institutes, other public spaces and in the media, you can join for FREE here: https://scienceoxford.com/the-presenter-network/

Warburg Memorial Lecture – Joint with BBOWT
Volunteer-based botanical monitoring has been a mainstay of British and Irish botany for decades, but only recently has a recording scheme for plant communities been established. Dr Pescott outlines the history of this new National Plant Monitoring Scheme, with a particular focus on the challenges and rewards that have been associated with establishing this novel approach in the UK.

It’s such a strange experience: you’re in the place you want to be, researching a topic of great interest to you, you have time and space for research that senior academics often envy, and yet for (sometimes long) periods of time, you find yourself able to do almost anything other than your research.
Sound familiar? You’re not alone! Come along to this meet-up to try to put your finger on what’s triggering your procrastination, and to develop and commit to a personalised approach to addressing it.
Series background
As PhD and early career researchers, we all have ups and downs. If and when the downs get very bad, it might become clear to us that we need support. But there’s a world of space between being happy and fulfilled in our work, and that point at which we might, finally, admit there’s a problem and seek help.
Many – perhaps even most – researchers are working in that space. Most of us live with conditions and experiences that can have profound impacts on our capacities as researchers.
Experiences like imposter syndrome and academic anxieties are incredibly common. Common enough that we should be talking about them. A lot. So why the silence?
The Thriving Researcher is a new initiative that creates space and time for researchers to come together and break the silence. We’ll be building an inclusive community, discussing our shared experiences, and learning how to work – and how to thrive – in the face of challenges that can feel overwhelming and isolating.
These are free, informal, supportive events, with a focus on validating your experiences, reflecting on your responses to common challenges, and arming you with practical tips and tools to help you feel better equipped to do what you do best.

How do we write about queer lives? Queer people have always existed, but a combination of censorship, coded language and omission from the historical record has made it difficult for scholars to clearly interpret and represent queer identities. Indeed, only in recent decades has it become less stigmatised (and dangerous) to write about queerness without accompanying condemnation.
In honour of LGBT History Month, OCLW will be hosting a colloquium highlighting work currently being done at Oxford to represent historical and contemporary members of the LGBTQ+ community. We will explore various arenas, including history, classics, literature and the museum sector. One panel will be hosted by the Pitt Rivers Museum’s Beyond the Binary exhibition team, detailing their experience of queering the museum’s collections and representing LGBTQ+ lives through museum objects. Our keynote will be delivered by Dr Jane Traies, the author of The Lives of Older Lesbians (2016), the recent collection of lesbian oral histories Now You See Me (2018), and the joint author of three lesbian historical novels. Jane is also a member of the Centre for Life History and Life Writing at the University of Sussex.

A talk from Homeless Oxfordshire about how they strive to be effective and appropriately challenge perceptions, how they are responsive to need and compassion to fellow human beings, and brave enough not to give up on people that society has left behind. This talk is free and open to all.
This talk is delivered by Mackenzie Aspell. Mackenzie is a Senior Fundraiser at Homeless Oxfordshire who believes advocacy to be the most powerful tool for change. Mackenzie also has a background working with mental health charities.
Talk with finger buffet and hot drinks

We speak of earthquakes, floods, and fires as wild and untameable disasters – natural phenomena that spring unexpectedly from a hostile landscape and challenge our trust in the safety of our homes. But Ilan Kelman states otherwise. Join him as he challenges the inevitability of these disasters, suggesting that human decisions to build on flood plains, deforest territories, and impose upon the environment for social, political or economic reasons create or exacerbate these disasters. And he has some suggestions on how we can and should act to stop people suffering when nature unleashes its powers.
Ilan Kelman is Professor of Disasters and Health at University College London and a Professor at the University of Agder, Kristiansand in Norway. His overall research interest is linking disasters and health, including the integration of climate change into disaster research and health research. Suitable for ages 14+
Twitter @IlanKelman

To enhance our natural environment, we need to put the environment
back into the heart of the economy. Using natural capital as the
guiding principle, we can leave a better environment for future
generations, implementing a bold 25 year environment plan, thereby
restoring rivers, greening agriculture, putting nature back into towns
and cities, and restoring the uplands and our marine ecosystems. We
can put the carbon back into the soils, encourage natural carbon
sequestration, rebuild our biodiversity and improve our mental and
physical health. This is the prize – a Green and Prosperous Land – and
it is much more economically efficient than the dismal proposed of
business-as-usual and allowing the declines of the last century to
continue.

Friday 23 October
Lecture by Advolly Richmond. Thomas Birch was a trained botanist, and
head gardener at Orwell Park, Ipswich, before travelling to the Gold Coast.
He became part of the international network of correspondents and plant
collectors relied upon by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. This talk aims to
reveal the true extent of Birch Freeman’s horticultural and botanical legacy.
Pay at the
door: £5 (members) £8 (guests

We are please to announce this s really important symposium on athlete welfare and the Duty to Care in sport with @oxford_brookes @OBUSportCourses in partnership with
@_UKCoaching
Speakers to include Tanni) Carys Davina Grey-Thompson, Baroness Grey-Thompson
Cath Bishop, rower and Olympic silver medallist and Andy Burns (commonwealth athlete and English Institute of Sport.
This is a free virtual event but booking is essential http://bit.ly/athlete-z

We are pleased to reschedule this talk by Dr Estelle Zinsstag (Edinburgh Napier University/University of Oxford) which was originally planned for March 2020 and postponed due to COVID-19.
Dr Zinsstag will present her research on restorative justice and cases of sexual violence.
This event will be held online via Zoom (link TBA). Please contact joy@minthouseoxford.co.uk for more information.

Amanda Oates (Executive Director of Workforce, Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust) and Dr Kristina Brown (Senior Lecturer, Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University) will be speaking on the story of the Just and Learning Culture at Mersey Care NHS Trust.
In recent years, Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust has undergone a radical shift in workplace culture and organisational procedures. They have gone from a blame culture to a culture where staff feel empowered and supported to learn from incidents. Numbers of disciplinary and suspension cases went down, staff reporting of adverse incidents went up, and there were positive effects on staff retention and levels of sickness absence.
Restorative justice was integral to these changes, termed the ‘Just and Learning Culture’. Amanda Oates and Kristina Brown will reflect on the impact of the restorative just culture at Mersey Care and help us to understand how other organisations can adopt a similar approach.
This event will be held online via Zoom (link TBA). Please contact joy@minthouseoxford.co.uk for more information.
You can register for this this event on Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/restorative-just-culture-the-story-of-mersey-care-nhs-trust-tickets-146564629753