Some face-to-face events are returning. Check carefully for any requirements.
Artist, writer and activist Jess Thom has Tourettes syndrome, a neurological condition that means she makes movements and noises she can’t control, called tics. In 2010 she co-founded Touretteshero as a creative response to her experiences, and toured the world with her multi-award-winning stage show, Backstage in Biscuit Land.
Join us for a screening of the 2018 documentary, Me, My Mouth and I, part of BBC Two’s Performance Live strand. Exploring Jess Thom’s funny and unpredictable journey of discovery into one of Samuel Beckett’s most complex plays, Not I, the film asks us to reconsider issues of representation and social exclusion as she prepares to perform the role of ‘Mouth’ in front of a live theatre audience. The screening with be followed by a Q & A with Jess herself.
Touretteshero presents Not I at The North Wall from 18 – 21 March.
About Inspiring People
The Inspiring People series is a joint venture between The North Wall and our principal sponsor, St Edward’s School. Our organisation both have a mission to educate and inspire and our hope is that this series will do just that: half of all tickets are offered free to local schools
Leadership in Extraordinary Times: SmartSpace: the new frontier
How will the commercialisation of space impact our everyday lives?
The world faces many challenges, climate change, racism and the pandemic. There are also many great opportunities that will benefit us all. How can business harness the enormous potential the commercialisation of space offers, and what will it deliver in terms of benefits here on earth?
We have brought together experts in the field to share their experience where business, innovation and entrepreneurship meet. They will look at what the future holds for those who work in this area or are about to embark on a career in it.
The event will be hosted by Marc Ventresca, Associate Professor of Strategic Management and the panel will be moderated by Lucas Kello, Associate Professor of International Relations at Oxford and an expert in space, and cyber governance.
Panel
Eamonn Molloy, Associate Fellow Oxford, expert in major programs
Renee Rottner, Assistant Professor UC Santa Barbara, expert in NASA innovation
Dan Sola, Space entrepreneur and Oxford Said alumni
Lucy Edge, Chief Operating Officer of Satellite Applications Catapult
Greg Autry, Vice President of Space Development, and Board member at the National Space Society
Visit https://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/oxford-answers/smartspace-new-frontier at the specified time to watch the live stream. A recording will be posted on the website when the broadcast finishes.
This is the Weinrebe Lecture in Life-Writing for Michaelmas Term 2020.
Hermione Lee, whose biography of Tom Stoppard is published by Faber on 1 October, talks about his life and work, and the challenges for a biographer in writing the life of a living subject.
With unprecedented access to private papers, diaries, letters, and countless interviews with figures ranging from Felicity Kendal to John Boorman and Trevor Nunn to Steven Spielberg, Hermione Lee has built a meticulously researched portrait of one of our greatest playwrights. Drawing on several years of long, exploratory conversations with Stoppard himself, it tracks his Czech origins and childhood in India to every school and home he’s ever lived in, every piece of writing he’s ever done, and every play and film he’s ever worked on. This is the revealing story of a very public and very private man.
Hermione Lee was the President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017, and is the founder and advisory director of OCLW. She held the Goldsmiths’ Chair of English Literature at Oxford from 1998 to 2008, and before that taught at the Universities of Liverpool and York. Her work includes acclaimed biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2007) and Penelope Fitzgerald (2013, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography). She has also published books on Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather and Philip Roth, and she has written about life-writing, in Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing (2005), Biography: A Very Short Introduction (2009), and, co-edited with Kate Kennedy, in a collection based on an OCLW conference, called Lives of Houses (2020). Her biography of Tom Stoppard is published by Faber in October 2020. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Royal Society of Literature (where she serves on the Council) and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2013 she was made a Dame for services to literature.
The video of this Weinrebe Lecture in Life-Writing will be available for 24 hours only.
Daniel Burt presents the board games created — and played with the public — during the Literary History of Medicine project, looks at the wider process of creating games, and reveals how they can be used to engage everyone with what we discover through academic research.
What can we call a science? And what makes it science? Dr Taha Yasin Arslan of Medeniyet University, Istanbul challenges us to rethink the history of science, proposing new definitions for the term “science”.
Join us — and share your ideas.
‘Microscopy and Magnetic Materials: Exploring Energy Landscapes at the Nanoscale’ by Professor Amanda Petford-Long FREng (Argonne National Laboratory and Northwestern University.
The Department of Materials is delighted to host this virtual event by our alumna, Professor Petford-Long. Please email communications@materials.ox.ac.uk to register, and to receive the Team Live link to log-on to this free event.
The first discussion in the Oxford Net Zero Series, hosted by the Oxford Martin School, hones in on the fundamental motivation of the research programme: ‘Why net zero?’.
Join the Oxford Net Zero Initiative’s Research Director, Professor Sam Fankhauser; Director, Professor Myles Allen; Net Zero Policy Engagement Fellow, Kaya Axelsson as they discuss with the Chair, Executive Director. Dr Steve Smith, the meaning of the word ‘net’ in net zero, reviewing what is needed to mitigate global warming, as and before we fully phase out activities that generate greenhouse gas emissions.
The discussion will explore the framing opportunities and challenges that the term ‘net-zero’ offers for science, policy, and advocacy informing effective climate action, as well as the innovation required at scale to achieve the global goal.
To register and watch this talk live: www.crowdcast.io/e/net-zero-when-and-how
The talk will also be streamed via YouTube here: https://youtu.be/z6049wR0tfE, but please note you will not be able to take part in the interactive Q&A session unless you join the talk on CrowdCast.
Covid-19 killed around two million people in 2020. At the same time, the social and economic impact of the pandemic led to an 8% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, the biggest one-year decline on record.
As the pandemic is brought under control from 2021 onwards, by supplementing current control methods with vaccination, there are big opportunities to sustain the benefits of lower emissions for health and well-being. The direct benefits are fewer droughts, floods, heatwaves, storms and wildfires, and cleaner air. Indirect health benefits are expected from better nutrition, safe sanitation, energy-efficient health services, and jobs in the green economy, among others.
In this conversation, Sir Andy Haines (Professor of Environmental Change and Public Health, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine) and Chris Dye (Professor of Epidemiology, University of Oxford) consider how better health and well-being are an both argument for, and a consequence of, making progress towards “net zero” carbon emissions.
To register and watch this talk live: www.crowdcast.io/e/building-back-healthier
The talk will also be streamed via YouTube here: https://youtu.be/xy3xkB9q8Ds, but please note you will not be able to take part in the interactive Q&A session unless you join the talk on CrowdCast.
The failure to stem the tide of biodiversity loss, or to address the deeply related issue of climate change, demands we quickly find more ambitious and more coherent approaches to tackling these challenges.
Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are one such family of approaches that has recently gained prominence in international policy and business discourse. Broadly defined as actions that involve working with nature to address societal goals, NbS are being widely hailed as a win-win for addressing biodiversity loss and climate change. However, this win-win scenario is not guaranteed.
Some NbS – particularly those involving planting trees in naturally treeless habitats – can have negative outcomes for climate change mitigation, biodiversity and local peoples’ livelihoods. There are also critical questions around the timeframes over which NbS can help tackle the biodiversity and climate crises given the negative impacts of warming on the health of the biosphere.
In the second discussion in the Oxford Net Zero Series, hosted by the Oxford Martin School, Professor Nathalie Seddon, will bring together interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners to explore the value and limits of working with nature to address climate change and why NbS must both support biodiversity and be implemented with, by and for people, if they are to provide benefits over the longterm.
To register and watch this talk live: www.crowdcast.io/e/nature-climate-change
The talk will also be streamed via YouTube here: https://youtu.be/Ka7Sc5d1v3k, but please note you will not be able to take part in the interactive Q&A session unless you join the talk on CrowdCast.