If the state is taken out of the equation, how and where should we identify laws and legal systems? Do all communities have laws, as the basis for maintaining order and resolving conflict, or is law a distinct technique for doing these things? In this presentation I argue for a focus on legalism, that is, the simple yet powerful technique of creating explicit and general rules, which can be applied to whole classes of people and events. This distinguishes the legal from the non-legal, in a way that allows us to compare widely across time and space. We can trace the origins of law to three separate developments in Mesopotamia, India, and China, where different people were pursuing quite different objectives. Comparisons amongst them highlight the different social dynamics made possible by the use of such laws and legalistic techniques and the goals of justice, duty, and discipline pursued by the early lawmakers. It is the achievement of the modern state and its law, I suggest, to have combined these dynamics into powerful and effective systems, but these forms of law are neither inevitable nor perfect. - Professor Fernanda Pirie **Please email comms@sociology.ox.ac.uk to be sent a link to join the online seminar via Teams.**
InSIS is hosting a virtual seminar “A regional view on climate action and carbon removal in Latin America” with the partnership of the University of Oxford Latin American Centre, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and Climate Works. The event will allow participants to discuss the implications of the outcomes of the Climate conference in Glasgow (UNFCCC COP26) and build a regional perspective on the current situation regarding climate policy, enhancing carbon sinks, and developing new approaches for removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). The four hours event will cover both national cases and regional perspectives. The event is hosted as part of the project GGR: Governance and Standards for Carbon Neutrality (GASCON). Presenters include researchers from the University of Oxford, the University of Sao Paulo, Ceds-ReLab in Brazil, the University Diego Portales and University Alberto Urtado in Chile, SwP Berlin, the Foundation Torcuato Di Tella in Argentina, in addition to experts from WWF and ECLAC. For event programme please see: https://insis.web.ox.ac.uk/event/regional-view-climate-action-and-carbon-removal-latin-america
An online briefing on open access publishing and Oxford's position including guidance on how to comply with the Open Access requirements for the REF and mandates from key funding bodies whilst respecting your publisher's rights and policies. The session will cover: An explanation of Open Access; Green route and how to deposit in ORA; Gold route and how to claim for Article Processing Charges; How to find out about research council or funder requirements; How to find out what your publisher will allow; Where to get more information & help; Act on Acceptance and OA policy for REF 2021; University policy for the Open Access block grants including RCUK/UKRI and Wellcome Trust. Intended Audience: Current Oxford researchers and academics, research support staff and librarians.
This talk will introduce some letters between Newton and his college roommate, John Wickins, that were previously unknown to scholarship. They shed light on what Newton’s greatest biographer, Richard Westfall, called the ‘mystery wrapped in an enigma’ of Newton’s relationship with Wickins. Beyond that, they provide precious new evidence for the chronology and nature of Newton’s first interest in theology and for his hands-on collaboration with London artisans.
This talk will discuss salient features of authoritarian rule in Pakistan. First, the permanent state of emergency that shapes political life in the country fuels arbitrary and whimsical forms of governance. The perpetual violation of the constitution by the ruling classes tells us that rather than viewing the Pakistani state as theocratic, it might be better to suggest that the country's crisis results from the fact that it lacks any political theology or sacred document. Second, the case of missing persons is emblematic of the nature of power in the country as it is the invisible ink through which sovereign power simultaneously reveals and veils itself. Such disavowed forms of violence show that "erasure" remains a central, yet under examined aspect of the exercise of modern power. Finally, the controlled nature of democracy in Pakistan results in a tense dynamic between the form and content of authoritarian rule. For historical reasons, democracy is the necessary form through which authoritarian rule is justified in the country, a contradiction that also opens up important space for oppositional politics. Carefully considering these themes makes it possible to intervene in debates on the global itinerary of democracy and resistance in the time of global authoritarianism. Dr Ammar Ali Jan is an academic and left-wing political activist based in Lahore, Pakistan. Dr Jan has a Doctorate in History from the University of Cambridge, where he worked on the encounter between anti-colonial thought and Marxism in colonial India. His book, Rule by Fear: Eight Theses on Authoritarianism in Pakistan (Folio Books, 2021), explains the political, economic and social roots of authoritarianism in the country, focusing on the structural features propelling the rising militarisation of society. He is a regular contributor to a number of leading publications, including The News International, Al-Jazeera, EPW and The Jacobin. At present, Dr. Jan is a member of the Haqooq-e-Khalq (People’s Rights) Movement, an anti-capitalist organisation that is working among workers, farmers, students and women to build an alternative political project. He is also a Cabinet Member of the Progressive International and does a weekly show on Naya Daur. Dr Jan was recently fired from his teaching post and charged with sedition as part of a crackdown against dissenting voices. For Zoom link, and to be added to the mailing list, please email saih@history.ox.ac.uk. Follow us on Twitter (OxfordSAIH) and Facebook (OxfordSAIHSeminar).
This seminar series is about economics aspects of rivalry between religious organizations and how they interact with other dimensions of religious rivalry – theological, scientific, political. The first two seminars will be online and will propose a framework for thinking about the question. The remaining six seminars, most of which will be hybrid, will be organized as structured dialogues. I will talk to leading researchers whose knowledge of particular historical, political, anthropological and geographical contexts of religious rivalry can help us to assess the value of such an approach. All members of the University are welcome to attend. No prior knowledge will be presumed (and in particular, no familiarity with economics).
Please note that some seminars will be held online and some in person at the Rothermere American Institute. To receive Zoom links and pre-circulated readings, please join the ALRS mailing list by sending a blank email to: alrs-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk.
The War and Peace at Oxford Seminar The event is expected to increase awareness about the need for the UN to refocus its mission and retool itself to address increased incidence of intra-State conflict. The discussion is also expected to bring forward new tools and ideas for the Council in designing mandates, and for the Secretariat in designing peace operations. This is a joint CRIC-CCW-WAPO event.
Part A: Setting the scene Click here to join the meeting: https://teams.microsoft.com/dl/launcher/launcher.html?url=%2F_%23%2Fl%2Fmeetup-join%2F19%3Ameeting_MTM3ZmJmMTQtMjQxMS00ZWQ1LWE4ZDktZjFmZTFkZmY4NjVj%40thread.v2%2F0%3Fcontext%3D%257b%2522Tid%2522%253a%2522cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%2522%252c%2522Oid%2522%253a%25226cfc1a9d-4d4a-4cbe-b726-6ec476a74653%2522%257d%26anon%3Dtrue&type=meetup-join&deeplinkId=93d28a2a-4946-46ea-b26e-998703b49e4e&directDl=true&msLaunch=true&enableMobilePage=true&suppressPrompt=true
The rise of China has become one of the most significant geopolitical development and issue of our time. To some, the Middle kingdom symbolises opportunity and growth; to others, it represents oppression and the return of an anti-liberal, anti-democratic world order. With the Beijing Winter Olympics fast approaching, the world's spotlight is once again on China, its political system, its economic performance, its pandemic response, and perhaps the most controversial of all, its human rights record. This raises several questions: What is the China under President Xi? Is its ascent inevitable? Is its rise a net postive to the world? And what will the West do about it? In the first of our series of talks on 'the Rise of China', our speakers will try to answer these questions. We will explore the historical, political and social factors that have led the country to where it is today, and discuss the implications of Xi's domestic and international policies to the people of China and to the world. We are excited to welcome: •Mr. Ryan Hass - senior fellow and the Michael H. Armacost Chair in the Foreign Policy programme at the Brookings Institute •Ambassador Kurt Tong - Former Consul General of the United State to Hong Kong and Macau, and Partner at the Asia Group LLC •Prof. Rana Mitter - Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China and former Director of the University of Oxford China Centre
Dr Katharina Schmack, Francis Crick Institute 18 January: ‘Hallucinating mice, dopamine and immunity – towards mechanistic treatments for psychotic disorders’ Chair: Paul Harrison
I fully characterize the outcomes of a wide class of model-free reinforcement learning algorithms in a prisoner’s dilemma. The behavior is studied in the limit as players explore their options sufficiently and eventually stop experimenting. Whether the players learn to cooperate or defect can be determined in a closed form from the relationship between the learning rate and the payoffs of the game. The results generalize to asymmetric learners and many experimentation rules with implications for the issue of algorithmic collusion. Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83496520603 18 January 2022, 12:00-12:45pm (Tuesday) To sign up for a 30-minute meeting with the speaker, please add your name at this link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ux9g5nXtbFmqIA3DWZYUljZthkvRd-Qg/edit#gid=1190663177
Does fathers’ leave, a policy intervention that disrupts traditional gender roles, promote more gender-equitable attitudes? We examine this question by studying a policy reform in Estonia that tripled the length of fathers’ leave for children born on or after July 1, 2020. The reform promoted fathers as care givers – it offered both parents the opportunity to conceive of their social roles in a less traditional fashion and to thereby reassess traditional beliefs about the appropriate roles and essential traits of men and women. Using an innovative design, we combine this natural experiment with a unique survey of new parents whose children were born in the six months before (N = 614) and after (N = 748) the reform. The reform led to a sizeable rise in gender-egalitarian views in the economic, social, and political domains among both mothers and fathers. Support for positive action policies, which promote women at the expense of men, only increased among mothers but not fathers. We also examine the response of the general public to the reform, based on an informational, indirect treatment (in contrast to direct exposure of new parents) and find no effects. These results show that direct exposure to progressive social policy has the power to weaken patriarchal attitudes, a finding that is of considerable practical relevance given the continued prevalence of attitudinal gender bias even in developed democracies.
Join this free one-hour practical, interactive workshop from the UK EQUATOR Centre. In our Lightning Workshops series, our methodology, writing, and communication experts cover all of the essential aspects of writing and publishing your academic research. These sessions are designed for early-career biomedical and clinical researchers. Extend the life and reach of your article after publication by disseminating widely, working with your communications team, and engaging with potential readers through social media. Patricia Logullo is a scientific editor with a background in scientific journalism and evidence-based health. She has extensive experience helping biomedical researchers to communicate their findings and journals to publish health research articles. She conducts research into best practices, tools, and guidelines for scientific communication, in her role as website and research officer at the UK EQUATOR Centre in the Centre for Statistics in Medicine. This free workshop is open to University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes staff and students, but we do ask you to book a spot. To hear about other EQUATOR courses in Oxford, please join our mailing list by sending a blank email to equator-oxford-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk.
Biography Andrew Horne, PhD, FRCOG, FRCP Edin, FRCSEd, FRSE Professor of Gynaecology and Reproductive Sciences, MRC Centre for Reproductive Health, University of Edinburgh, UK Professor Horne’s research interests include understanding the causes of ectopic pregnancy and investigating novel methods for treatment, as well as investigating the aetiology, and researching novel treatment approaches, of persistent pelvic pain and endometriosis. Abstract Is there a new treatment option for ectopic pregnancy on the horizon? Ectopic pregnancies are a serious gynaecological emergency that can be fatal. As such, prompt diagnosis and safe timely treatment is essential. In this lecture, I will present preclinical studies and clinical trials of a new molecularly targeted therapeutic approach for ectopic pregnancy: the use of combination gefitinib (orally available epidermal growth factor receptor inhibitor) and methotrexate. Our preclinical studies suggest that combination gefitinib and methotrexate is highly effective in inducing placental cell death, and is significantly more effective than methotrexate alone. In our early human trials, encouraging preliminary efficacy data have shown that combination gefitinib and methotrexate can rapidly resolve tubal ectopic pregnancies, and large extra-tubal ectopic pregnancies. If our large multicentre randomized controlled trial confirms these findings, combination gefitinib and methotrexate could become a new medical treatment option for ectopic pregnancy.
Malign manipulation of the information environment is an urgent security threat facing western democracies. This talk examines why and how state and nonstate actors have harnessed emerging technologies – social media platforms in particular – to shape the information environment for strategic ends. Weaponization of disinformation is neither new nor warfare in the traditional sense, but digital aspects in particular have confounded western efforts to manage it. This talk is based on interdisciplinary British Academy project that applies intelligence history, strategic studies, and technological perspectives to evaluate and counter influence operations that seek to advance strategic aims in an asymmetric manner short of war. Dr. David V. Gioe is a British Academy Global Professor and Visiting Professor of Intelligence and International Security in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London (KCL). Prior to joining KCL David was Associate Professor of History at the US Military Academy at West Point and History Fellow for the Army Cyber Institute. David is Director of Studies for the Cambridge Security Initiative and is co-convener of its International Security and Intelligence program. He is a former CIA analyst and operations officer; he remains a senior officer in the US Navy Reserve.
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When information frictions prevent consumers from discerning the quality of products, they may prefer to buy from firms with an established reputation. This can hinder the growth of small or new firms with high-quality goods, negatively contributing to the aggregate output growth. This paper investigates how uncertainty about product quality differentially affects domestic and international firms in Mexico, where the latter firms tend to be larger in size. In the Mexican consumer goods industry, there exist concerns about product quality and consumers pay a high price for goods carrying global brands. Leveraging barcode-level consumption data, I document the following novel facts about this industry: 1) domestic firm growth is driven by surviving goods rather than new goods; 2) domestic goods have slower and longer lifecycles than foreign goods; 3) the extensive customer margin is key to growth for both types of firms; 4) domestic firms, however, depend relatively more on the intensive margin for growth; and 5) new customers of older goods are poorer than those of new goods, only in the case of domestic firms. I rationalize these findings by developing a model of product choice under quality uncertainty. The possibility of learning from others makes the most price-sensitive customers delay purchasing new domestic products, driving down domestic firm profits. I provide empirical evidence consistent with the model’s mechanisms, which highlight the importance of individual learning, product quality uncertainty, and price-sensitivity. Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83496520603 18 January 2022, 13:30 - 14:15 (Tuesday) To sign up for a 30-minute meeting with the speaker, please add your name at this link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ux9g5nXtbFmqIA3DWZYUljZthkvRd-Qg/edit#gid=1190663177
Please try to read these articles in advance of the session: • Burger, Glenn, and Steven F. Kruger. “INTRODUCTION.” In Queering the Middle Ages, edited by Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger • Reeser, Todd W. "How to do Early Modern Queer History." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 26, no. 1 (2020): 183-196.
While changing on many timescales, the world around us looks rather still at any point in time because how our perception works. To be successful, however, living organisms should be able to adapt their behavioural responses according to timescales of regularities and changes in the environment. Identifying these timescales can be beneficial in at least two ways: (1) to adopt a proper response; for example, foraging at the right time of the day; (2) to use deviation from what is predicted to detect drastic environmental changes to adjust response, for example, by moving to a new location when the environment is no longer rewarding. Importantly, the brain possesses multiple mechanisms for responding to and processing information at different timescales, allowing us to learn and predict regularities of the environment and to detect its changes. But is it possible to benefit from both unboundedly? In this talk, I argue that this is not possible due to a general tradeoff in learning: precision in learning regularities of the environment limits flexibility in adjusting what is learned and vice versa. On a brighter note, I will share some of our findings about different sources of flexibility in learning and choice behaviour. Specifically, I will use computational methods and experimental data across multiple species to address: (1) how is the amount or speed of learning determined and adjusted? (2) how are learning strategies determined and adjusted? (3) how are different sources of information combined to allow flexibility? and (4) how are such adjustments reflected in timescales of neural responses? Addressing these questions is more important than ever when facing multiple global challenges, because adaptability is what made us a successful species and can save us too.
Policymakers routinely make high-stakes decisions of which programs to fund. Assessing the value of a program is difficult and may be affected by bounded rationality. In an experiment with policymakers in the U.S. government, we find that respondents' valuations of programs are inelastic with respect to the program's impact. A complementary experiment among a representative sample of the general public reveals even more pronounced inelasticity in a population less familiar with making program funding decisions. We design and test two portable decision aids, one which presents two alternative programs side-by-side rather than in isolation and another which translates total program cost into an annual cost per person impacted. The decision aids increase elasticity by 0.20 on a base of 0.33 among policymakers and by 0.21 on a base of 0.21 among the general public. We provide evidence that cognitive noise---noisy assessments of complex inputs---is a mechanism that can help explain the observed inelasticity of program valuation with respect to impact. Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83496520603 18 January 2022, 14:20-15:05 (Tuesday) To sign up for a 30-minute meeting with the speaker, please add your name at this link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ux9g5nXtbFmqIA3DWZYUljZthkvRd-Qg/edit#gid=1190663177
Alzheimer's disease is the leading cause of dementia. The long progression period in Alzheimer's disease provides a possibility for patients to get early treatment by having routine screenings. However, current clinical diagnostic imaging tools do not meet the specific requirements for screening procedures due to high cost and limited availability. In this work, we took the initiative to evaluate the retina, especially the retinal vasculature, as an alternative for conducting screenings for dementia patients caused by Alzheimer's disease. Highly modular machine learning techniques were employed throughout the whole pipeline. Utilizing data from the UK Biobank, the pipeline achieved an average classification accuracy of 82.44%. Besides the high classification accuracy, we also added a saliency analysis to strengthen this pipeline's interpretability. The saliency analysis indicated that within retinal images, small vessels carry more information for diagnosing Alzheimer's diseases, which aligns with related studies.
India's Freight Equalization Scheme (FES) aimed to promote even industrial development by subsidizing long-distance transport of key inputs such as iron and steel. Many observers speculate that FES actually exacerbated inequality by allowing rich manufacturing centers on the coast to cheaply source raw materials from poor eastern regions. We exploit state-by-industry variation in the effects of FES on input costs, in order to show how it affected the geography of production. We find, first, that over the long-run FES contributed to the decline of industry in eastern India, pushing iron and steel using industries toward more prosperous states. This effect sinks in gradually, however, with the time needed to construct new plants serving as a friction to industry relocation. Finally, we test for the stickiness of these effects, by studying the repeal of FES. Contrary to popular opinions of the policy and to agglomeration-based reasons for hypothesizing stickiness, we find that the effects of repealing FES are equal and opposite to those of its implementation. Still, due to changing locations of the processing of basic iron and steel materials, the resource-rich states suffering under FES never fully recover. Zoom link: us02web.zoom.us/j/83496520603 18 January 2022, 15:10-15:55 (Tuesday) To sign up for a 30-minute meeting with the speaker, please add your name at this link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ux9g5nXtbFmqIA3DWZYUljZthkvRd-Qg/edit#gid=1190663177
Private sector innovation is critical to mitigating and adapting to climate change. This paper studies innovation in solar energy technology, a key source of clean energy that has experienced rapid price declines over the past decade. To understand the causes and effects of innovation, I estimate a dynamic structural model of competition among solar panel manufacturers. The model captures important features of the industry, including the role of government subsidies for solar adoption, and I employ a unique measure of technological progress that is observable and verifiable. The results produce two main insights. First, ignoring innovation by firms can generate biased estimates of the effects of government policy. Second, decentralized government intervention in a global market generates spillovers: a subsidy in one country causes international firms to innovate more, leading to lower prices and increased adoption elsewhere. This spillover underscores the need for international coordination by governments and the private sector to address climate change.
The ability to remember familiar conspecifics, termed social memory, is critical for an animal’s behaviour in its social environment. In recent years, extensive evidence supports the importance of distinct hippocampal subregions, dorsal CA2 (dCA2) and ventral CA1 (vCA1) in the regulation of social memory. However, little is known about the relevant input regions. Here, we present evidence that the medial septum (MS), sends inputs to the hippocampus that are required for social memory. Furthermore, we find that 5-HT modulation of the MS bi-directionally influences social memory formation. Using TRAP2;Ai14 mice as an unbiased approach for identifying dCA2 and vCA1 input regions that are activated during social encounters, we identified elevated activity in the MS. Inhibition of the MS→dCA2 projection, but not the MS→vCA1 projection impaired social memory. Strikingly, excitation of the MS can prolong social memory. Moreover, we show elevated MS cell activity during social interactions, which is modulated by 5-HT1b receptors (R) and 5-HT release from the median raphe. This elevated activity in turn plays a role in establishing plasticity in the downstream dCA2 pyramidal neurons, a process crucial for social memory formation. Surprisingly, a 5-HT1bR agonist infused into the MS can prolong social memory in wild-type mice and rescue social memory deficits in an autism-associated mouse model with social memory deficits. This finding may prove therapeutically beneficial since social memory is commonly impaired in autism. Together these findings reveal a 5-HT modulated MS→dCA2 circuit that is required for the regulation of social memory.
Does power corrupt, or are corrupt people drawn to power? Are entrepreneurs who embezzle and cops who kill the outgrowths of bad systems or are they just bad people? Are tyrants made or born? If you were thrust into a position of power, would new temptations to line your pockets or torture your enemies gnaw away at you until you gave in? To answer these questions, Brian Klaas’ new book Corruptible draws on over 500 interviews with some of the world's noblest and dirtiest leaders, from presidents and philanthropists to rebels, cultists, and dictators. It also makes use of a wealth of counter-intuitive examples from history and social science. Dr. Brian Klaas is an Associate Professor in Global Politics at University College London and a columnist for The Washington Post. Klaas is also a frequent television commentator and political consultant. He was previously based at the London School of Economics and the University of Oxford. Klaas has advised governments, US political campaigns, NATO, the European Union, multi-billion dollar investors, international NGOs, and international politicians. He has extensive research experience working in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the United States. Dr. Klaas has conducted field research in six different countries, interviewing prime ministers, presidents, ministers, rebels, coup plotters, dissidents, and torture victims in an array of countries, including Madagascar, Thailand, Tunisia, Belarus, Côte d'Ivoire, and Zambia.
This paper offers a comprehensive account of the intergenerational transmission of education across religious groups in Africa, home to some of the world’s largest Christian and Muslim communities. First, we use census data from 20 countries to construct new upward and downward religion-specific intergenerational mobility (IM) statistics. Christian boys and girls have much higher upward and lower downward mobility than Muslims and Animists. Muslims perform well only in a handful of countries where they are small minorities. Second, we trace the roots of these disparities. Although family structures differ across faiths, this variation explains only a small fraction of the observed IM inequities (roughly 12%). Inter-religious differences in occupational specialization and urban residence do not play any role. In contrast, regional features explain nearly half of the imbalances in educational mobility. Third, we isolate the causal impact of regions from spatial sorting exploiting information on children whose households moved when they were at different ages during childhood. Irrespective of the religious identity, regional exposure effects are present for all children moving before 12. Fourth, we map and characterize the religious IM gaps across thousands of African regions. Among numerous regional geographic, economic, and historical features, the district's Muslim share is the most important correlate. Children adhering to Islam underperform Christians in areas with substantial Muslim communities. Fifth, survey data reveal that Muslims display stronger in-group preferences and place a lower valuation on education. Our findings call for more research on the origins of religious segregation and the role of religion-specific, institutional, and social conventions on education and opportunity.
Tom Sykes (Portsmouth) in conversation with Ann Ang (Oxford) about his book Imagining Manila (Bloomsbury) and Filipino world literature. Register in advance for this webinar: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_byGbEl3nQvKfR1JPTBGKvQ The aim of the seminar is to foster a dynamic and interdisciplinary postcolonial research culture supportive of individual scholarship. Finalists, M.St. and D.Phil. students, lecturers, fellows, scholars from across the university community – all are welcome. If you’d like to appear on the seminar mailing list, please email gavin.herbertson@stcatz.ox.ac.uk OR ann.ang@wadham.ox.ac.uk.
Andrew Smallbone will present a summary of the major technical challenges we face in delivering decarbonised heat in the UK. Using a series of case studies, he will then describe the opportunities for future net-zero compatible energy systems which can support scaled-up hydrogen and electrified heating technology.
Wolfson College and the English Faculty are delighted to announce the award event for this year's poetry competition for Oxford University postgraduate students. Please join us for the online award ceremony to hear readings of the shortlisted poems and the comments of the Poetry Prize judges, Oxford University’s Professor of Poetry Alice Oswald, and Professor Bernard O’Donoghue. The link is: https://youtu.be/imlR8FmtHg4 The Poetry Prize was set up in memory of the late Professor Jon Stallworthy (1935-2014), poet and Fellow of Wolfson College. The 2022 prize, worth £1000, will be awarded for the best poem on the subject of 'Sleep-cycles' submitted by last December’s deadline.
The Career Design and Development workshop programme aims to open the space for creative thinking and equip you with insights and tools for developing – with confidence – your career. We will combine individual and small group activities to stimulate thinking, explore new areas and practice new ways of self-expression on work-related topics. Amongst other tools relevant to researchers, the course applies Stanford’s ‘design-thinking’ approach to integrating your life aspirations with your career thinking; see https://designingyour.life/ for an introduction to this material. This is an integrated programme consisting of three workshops, of which you need to attend all three; registration for Workshop 1 commits you to participation in all three workshops. Wednesday 19th January, 10:00 – 12:30: online Wednesday 9th February, 10:30 – 12:30: online Wednesday 2nd March, 10:30 – 12:30: online Course content: The first workshop focuses on learning from your professional experiences to date, and exploring relevant intersections between your skills, values, sources of joy and what the world will pay you for. It then explores the role of narrative in making sense of our own career journeys and in talking about them with others. In the second workshop we will deepen the focus on ways to construct a working life to suit you and on identifying any assumptions that may be restricting your thinking. You will be supported to be more creative in your thinking than traditional career planning allows, and to consider a variety of options that emerge. We will also take a fresh look at ‘networking’ as something that can be rewarding and comfortable (even fun!) for all. The final workshop builds on learning from the first two, and your exploratory activities between these, to give you a ‘road map’ for your next steps. You will reflect on potential career routes with input from your peers and the facilitators, spot opportunities for developing your professional network and for gaining practical experience towards these goals, before working together to find solutions to any dilemmas and fill information gaps. To maximise your learning, registered participants will be sent a couple of pre-course exercises. Each workshop has a follow-on set of tasks (reading, development exercises and other scoping activities): some of these are individual tasks and others will be done in small online groups. Course objectives: Learn how a design approach can be used to develop and progress a personal career plan Use visual methods to explore career options for the coming five years Understand the generative potential of networking Feel confident to consider, and try out, different career directions (within or beyond academia) Learn strategies for narrowing down your options and making decisions Define personal action points for developing your career, plus indicators for evaluating your learning. All workshops will be delivered online. All research staff and research students (DPhils and students on postgraduate research courses) are welcome. Please register via CareerConnect by 17 January 2022, then make sure you diarise and attend all three workshops.
This series is an opportunity for DPIR DPhils to present their work in progress and gather feedback. Our first presenter this term is Javier Pérez Sandoval. Javier defended his dissertation in Michaelmas and is currently on the job market. His talk is titled "The Origins of Subnational Democracy." The project tackles the following question: What explains subnational democratic variation across Latin America? In other words, why is it that some provinces within countries are more democratic than others? I contend that economic development is at the core of the puzzle. More specifically, building on the work of Mahoney (2010) and Collier and Collier (1991), I articulate a two-step argument contending that, across the region, the subnational unevenness observed today was configured by territorially distinct development trajectories which were triggered during colonization and that, once set, conditioned the timing of local labour incorporation. https://zoom.us/j/97023514597?pwd=c01kNms5b1JJQlR4c21zTitOOFhjZz09#success
Elina Alem Kent was a video and audio producer for the now-shuttered Kyiv Post in Ukraine and is currently producing a podcast, Media in Progress, about the Post journalists' decision to defy the shutdown and start their own independent outlet.
We will have a plenary session, “How do we ensure this medical school remains No 1” from Professor Chas Bountra (Pro-Vice Chancellor for Innovation & Professor of Translational Medicine). This will be followed by talks from OUCAGS trainees on their research. We will also be hosting some networking sessions during the Forum.
Neighborhood disorder is highly correlated with crime rates, which has led to a significant controversy in the social sciences over the proper interpretation of the correlation. Does social and physical disorder increase the likelihood of norm violations and crime, as broken windows theory suggests? Or does this reflect a spurious relationship, which disappears when controlling for neighborhood informal social control, as collective efficacy theory suggests? The answer to this question has important theoretical and policy implications. This project uses an experimental approach to examine the effects of disorder and informal social control on prosocial and antisocial behavior. We build on experimental work in social psychology, specifically the work of Keizer, Lindenberg, and Steg (2008), which found strong support for the broken windows thesis. We first replicated the results of Milgram's (1965) classic lost letter experiment in 121 Seattle neighborhoods and used this as an updated measure of collective efficacy and prosocial behavior. We then conducted experiments in 20 Seattle neighborhoods varying by collective efficacy, disadvantage, and crime. In each experiment, we examined the treatment effect of litter and graffiti on norm violation and prosocial behavior. Our mailbox experiment failed to replicate Keizer et al.: Disorder—litter and graffiti—had no effect on theft, but a negative effect on prosocial behavior. Collective efficacy was associated with fewer norm violations but not with prosocial behavior. Finally, a littering experiment found that disorder exhibited no effect on sanctioning a confederate who litters. Sanctions, however, varied by the race and gender of the confederate.
TBA
I’m a post-doc at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience, working with David Fitzpatrick on the tree shrew visual system. I want to understand how the visual system becomes perfectly suited to an animal’s specific visual experience. A lot of factors influence visual experience across an animal’s life-time, like the structure of the retina, the environment, and how the animal moves around in its environment. I’ve studied the visual system of mice, cats, and tree shrews, trying to determine how neural connections transform visual inputs. More recently, I’ve started to think about how these transformations are shaped by, and shape, an animal’s specific movement patterns. I think the most clever, and interesting, path towards understanding the brain includes multiple animals, and leveraging the quirks each one comes with. Over the past couple of years, I’ve worked on establishing the tree shrew as a model of the extrastriate visual system. I found a unique map of the retina in the secondary visual cortex (V2) of tree shrews that overturned a lot of working assumptions about cortical representations of ego-centric visual space. This data helped to make sense of similar strange-looking patterns in ferrets and squirrels and setup some exciting guesses for primates.
Seminar 1 in a series on 'Race, Borders, and Global (Im)mobility', convened by Dr Hanno Brankamp Seminar abstract: The aim of this paper is to show how race, gender, class, sexuality, marital and migration status intersect to oppress, control and discipline poor and illegalised single migrant mothers and pregnant individuals from the Global South. Drawing upon evidence from three ethnographic studies conducted over a ten-year period, the article sheds light on the predicaments of women excluded from the welfare safety-net, who were flying under the radar due to the fear of deportation. It shows the ways in which the immigration and crime controls in Britain render them vulnerable to victimisation and harms. The major part of the article addresses the issues of imprisonment and punishment, treatment by the criminal justice system, and separation from children (who were put in foster care). The evidence strongly suggests that these controls disrupts the core principles of reproductive justice. This includes, reproductive autonomy and health, the right to have a child, to not have a child, and to parent the child in safe and healthy environment without fear. This amounts to racialised-gendered state violence. Details at: https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/events/immigration-controls-captivity-and-reproductive-injustice-in-britain
Grand strategy is back en vogue. Policy makers and scholars alike insist that grand strategy is important, and that states need to have one to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Yet defining precisely what it is – or what it entails - has proven extremely difficult. Numerous academics have spilt much ink trying to pin down a usable definition for grand strategy, however we appear no closer to a consensus than we are to a clear definition of ‘strategy’ itself. What a series of influential thinkers – from Paul Kennedy to Colin Gray – do agree upon, is that humans have pursued grand strategies throughout history. As Kennedy has claimed, ‘all states have a grand strategy, whether they know it or not’. According to them, grand strategy has a long history, and has been practiced for millennia. In this talk, Dr Morgan-Owen will question this assumption, and show how and why the idea of grand strategy evolved in a particular place at a particular time. Moreover, he’ll argue that there are significant dangers in assuming that all states and groups have a grand strategy – namely, the risk of painting the history of strategy in terms of continuity and similarity. The reality is almost the opposite – grand strategy is a practical endeavour, shaped by context, and which undergoes ongoing change. History has a vital role to play in illustrating this fact, and we risk omitting it from the study of strategy at our peril. David Morgan-Owen is Senior Lecturer in the School of Security Studies at King's College London. He is author of The Fear of Invasion: Strategy, Politics, and British War Planning, 1880-1914. Aspects of this talk have been published as “History and the Perils of Grand Strategy” in the Journal of Modern History in June 2020.
REES welcomes Timothy Frye to discuss Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia.
Angiosperm reproductive structures (anthers and ovules/seeds) are complex assemblies containing highly specialized, metabolically diverse, and in some cases genetically distinct compartments. Their successful development depends both on strict inter-tissue coordination, and upon selectively gated inter-tissue communication, particularly at the metabolic level. For these two requirements to be met, dynamic, extensive, and precise remodelling of tissue interfaces, affecting both symplastic (direct cytoplasm-cytoplasm) and apoplastic (involving diffusion through the extracellular matrix) connectivity, is a prerequisite. In the first part of my talk I will concentrate on apoplastic modifications occurring between key compartments in the developing seeds and anthers of Arabidopsis thaliana. I will use both published and unpublished work to illustrate how peptide-mediated inter-tissue dialogues are used in both systems to ensure the timely deposition of intact apoplastic filters (barriers). In the second part of my presentation I will present recent unpublished work on the functional and compositional characterisation of a novel apoplastic filter (barrier) present within the maternal tissues of the developing anther.
This new film installation created by Sarah Dobai (the daughter of Holocaust survivor John Dobai) is based on an account of events in Budapest in 1944, and focuses on the impact of discrimination, persecution, and displacement on a child. The work builds on the links between an antisemitic attack on the child on a piece of common land known locally as “the donkey field” and the story of the persecution of Balthazar the donkey’ in the acclaimed film Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966). Seen from the point of view of the artist’s family member, a boy who was ten at the time, the film portrays the boy’s experience of the traumatic events of that year when he and his mother are forced to move into a Yellow Star House and their attempt to escape by going into hiding fails. At this event, Sarah Dobai will speak briefly about her film before a screening, followed by a Q&A with her and her father.
Professor De Camilli earned his M.D. from the University of Milano and was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale. After a brief return to Italy, he moved back to Yale in 1988 where he is Professor of Cell Biology and of Neuroscience. He served as Chair of the Department of Cell Biology (1997-2000) and of the Department of Neuroscience (2015-2021) and in 2005 co-founded the Yale Program in Cellular Neuroscience, Neurodegeneration and Repair. Since 1992 he has been an Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He is member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), the National Academy of Medicine (USA) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The De Camilli lab is interested in the mechanisms underlying the dynamics of cell membranes with emphasis on the role of these mechanisms in neuronal physiology. His studies on synaptic vesicle dynamics have contributed to the general fields of exocytosis and endocytosis. His discovery and characterization of the role of phosphoinositide metabolism in the control of the endocytic pathway have broad implications in the fields of phospholipid signaling and of membrane traffic. More recently he helped advance the field of organelles cross-talk at membrane contact sites.
While a vast body of work has documented the importance of face-to-face interactions in science and innovation, the share of distributed teams in scientific research has steadily risen since ICT revolution of the 1990s. Building on the simple intuition that some ideas are more important than others, we explore how the upsurge of remote collaboration has shaped innovation in scientific discovery. To distinguish between breakthroughs and incremental improvements, we implement a new method of classifying scientific publications according to their novelty or disruptiveness. Using a difference-in-difference design, we exploit instances in which colocated teams become distributed and compare the disruptiveness of their publications before and after the split, controlling for the characteristics of their research field. We document a robust and significant negative impact of switching to a distributed model on breakthrough innovation. However, beginning in the 2010s, the negative impact tapers off and even becomes positive. We hypothesize that this reversal relates to improvements in key technologies needed for effective remote collaboration, including video conferencing and the cloud. Consistent with this view, we provide evidence that colocation matters less when the split involves team members in places with better broadband infrastructure.
Discussant: Amiad Haran Diman
Link to MS Teams channel (includes readings): https://teams.microsoft.com/l/team/19%3a51bb501c36f14b4c9f2c0bd9f152f605%40thread.tacv2/conversations?groupId=f4c0f545-f21d-4e58-af42-c2ed0e91355b&tenantId=cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91 Link to seminar meeting: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3a51bb501c36f14b4c9f2c0bd9f152f605%40thread.tacv2/1641819090466?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%223eaa6534-462c-4297-b7ed-a93e8053acdc%22%7d
The emergence of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as independent states was one of the least expected outcomes of the Great War. It required both the surrender of the Central Powers and the collapse of the Russian Empire as preconditions. Even then, this power vacuum alone was not sufficient for Baltic statehood to emerge. For the Baltic, the war did not end in November 1918. The Baltic region became a theatre of war, both conventional and ideological, involving two kinds of Russians (Whites and Soviets), two kinds of Germans (the remains of the regular army and the Freikorps), a mixture between Germans and Russians (the so called Bermontians), Poles, the nascent armies of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the British Navy, as well as volunteers from different countries. Economically, the nascent Baltic states were in dire need of capital and manufactured goods. In 1919-1920, collapse of any of the Baltic states, whether militarily or economically, was a constant possibility. Dominant narratives in the historiography of the emergence of the Baltic states so far tended to emphasize the role of those nations themselves, telling the story from the inside. Little is known, however, about the role of the external factors that made Baltic states’ independence possible. The contribution of the German state loans, German Freikorps, the British Navy, the American Relief Administration, the American Red Cross, the League of Nations, various Western capital institutions and other actors, to the survival of the new Baltic states cannot be underestimated. This online symposium will bring together leading historians in the field to discuss these external influences on the Baltic state-building after the Great War. The event will start with three short papers, followed by a discussion. Panelists and papers: Dr. Tomas Balkelis (Lithuanian Institute of History), 'The forgotten constitution of the Lithuanian monarchy, 1918' Prof. Ēriks Jēkabsons (University of Latvia), 'American governmental and non-governmental relief in Latvia, 1919-1922: an overview' Dr. Mart Kuldkepp (University College London), 'The League of Nations and the security policies of small states in the Baltic Sea region after the First World War' The discussion will be chaired by Dr. Donatas Kupčiūnas (University of Cambridge)
The link to join will be circulated closed to the date.
In a story that dawns with the Industrial Revolution and culminates in the Great Depression, Distant Shores reveals how the migration of Chinese laborers and merchants across a far-flung maritime world linked their homeland to an ever-expanding frontier of settlement and economic extraction. At home and abroad, they reaped many of the benefits of an overseas colonial system without establishing formal governing authority. Their power was sustained instead through a mosaic of familial, brotherhood, and commercial relationships spread across the ports of Bangkok, Singapore, Saigon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Swatow. The picture that emerges is not one of Chinese divergence from European modernity but rather of a convergence in colonial sites that were critical to modern development and accelerating levels of capital accumulation. With a focus on the Chaozhouese (Teochew) native place group of Chinese, this talk will address these claims while discussing the methodological challenges of writing translocal history. Melissa Macauley is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University. She specializes in late imperial and modern Chinese history, 1500 to 1958.
Suggested preparatory reading: ‘Why the History of Parliament Has Not Been Written’, Parliamentary History, 40 (2021), 5-24 Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, The Emperor’s Old Clothes: Constitutional History and the Symbolic Language of the Holy Roman Empire, trans. Thomas Dunlap (2015), Introduction ‘Recovering Europe’s Parliamentary Culture, 1500-1700’ and other blogs in the series, https://intellectualhistory.web.ox.ac.uk/article/recovering-europes-parliamentary-culture-1500-1700#/
Suggested preparatory reading: Dorota Pietrzyk-Reeves, and Paul Seaward, ‘Recovering Europe’s Parliamentary Culture, 1500-1700’ and other blogs in the series, https://intellectualhistory.web.ox.ac.uk/article/recovering-europes-parliamentary-culture-1500-1700#/
In this online lecture, Dr Nathan will analyse how and why the COVID crisis has managed to galvanise us, as a species, into immediate and sometimes radical action. He will argue that this difference is related to human conceptualisations of the future. By exploring resources from the theological tradition, as well as recent philosophical work on themes such as memory and forgetting, Dr Nathan will present a radical new interpretation of the shift that has been wrought by the global pandemic.
Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend.
This event will take place on Zoom; sign up to the Seminar mailing list for the Zoom link at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSehoD13cFQgnv1NQAO_T-mJTfog9pZii4DC9wm2FWn-x_zJsg/viewform?usp=sf_link
In my role as an ENT surgeon with a specialist interest in laryngology and airway surgery I regularly see patients referred with tracheostomy problems or failure to decannulate. The neuro and spinal patients are some of the more challenging cases and the impact of long-term tracheostomy is life changing for the patient. I work closely with a multi-disciplinary team in both a neurosurgical and spinal injuries unit to diagnose laryngo-tracheal pathologies early to achieve decannulation. I will present some of the recent cases and demonstrate the importance of early intervention in these patients.
The prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays an important role in regulating social functions in mammals, and impairments in this region have been linked with social dysfunction in psychiatric disorders. The PFC plays a part in multiple brain-wide networks regulating behavior, and its long-range connections to different cortical and subcortical targets are thought to be involved in distinct behavioral functions. How is information about the multitude of cognitive/behavioral processes routed into and out of the PFC circuit? We are interested in understanding how PFC microcircuits process behavioral information, and how distinct PFC output neuron populations regulate learning, decision-making and social behavior. I will first describe a set of experiments aimed at understanding the structure of synaptic connectivity among amygdala-projecting neurons in the mPFC. Using single-neuron two-photon optogenetic stimulation and imaging, we demonstrated that these neurons form unique connectivity modules in the deep and superficial layers of the mPFC. I will then describe our efforts to engineer new optogenetic tools for silencing of long-range axonal projections between brain regions. To efficiently suppress synaptic transmission, we engineered a new set of rhodopsin-based optogenetic tools that selectively couple to the Gi/o signaling pathway and strongly suppress synaptic release in vitro and in vivo.
Gastrulation is a critical event in vertebrate morphogenesis, characterized by coordinated large-scale multi-cellular movements. One grand challenge in modern biology is understanding how spatio-temporal morphological structures emerge from cellular processes in a developing organism and vary across vertebrates. We derive a theoretical framework that couples tissue flows, stress-dependent myosin activity, and actomyosin cable orientation. Our model, consisting of a set of nonlinear coupled PDEs, predicts the onset and development of observed experimental patterns of wild-type and perturbations of chick gastrulation as a spontaneous instability of a uniform state. We use analysis and numerics to show how our model recapitulates the phase space of gastrulation morphologies seen across vertebrates, consistent with experiments. Altogether, this suggests that early embryonic self-organization follows from a minimal predictive theory of active mechano-sensitive flows. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.03.462928v2
The talk is based on a chapter discussing the links between pre-communist social structure and post-communist voting patterns among the middle class from her forthcoming book The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia: From Imperial Bourgeoisie to Post-Communist Middle-Class (coming out with Cambridge University Press in 2022). The book departs from classic accounts in historical political economy and comparative politics that analyze the significance of the bourgeoisie from the perspective of coalitional dynamics and role in genesis of particular orders—democracy or autocracy. Instead, it regards the bourgeoisie as an intergenerational social category that is best analyzed within the context of the transition of late feudal societies into modern knowledge economies where human capital acquires centre stage as a social marker and as a driver of autonomy of groups and individuals; the long reach of this transition in turn has implications for social positioning in present-day illiberal regimes and democracies under threat. Discussant: Nicholas James (Oxford)
OCTF online seminar (via Zoom) followed by Q&A - all welcome Despite a growth in global conservation and restoration commitments, tropical forests are disappearing faster than ever. The goal of this research is to advance our understanding of the conditions under which forest-focused supply chain policies (FSPs), a form of voluntary environmental governance, can lead to improved conservation and livelihoods in the tropics. Dr Garrett will present work examining how differences in supply chain structure and public governance context influence the effectiveness and equity of supply chain policies focused on the 4 major forest-risk commodities: beef cattle, oil palm, soybeans, and cocoa. The research draws on replicated methods across Brazil, Indonesia, and West Africa to lend new insights into the contextual reasons why supply chain standards succeed or fail in their conservation goals. It finds that company-led supply chain policies face numerous implementation paradoxes (i.e. persistent contradictions between interdependent goals). Environmental effectiveness is often prioritized, but the exclusion of vulnerable actors is a common outcome. This tension can result in political backlash and support subversive narratives and behaviors by companies that source deforestation-risk products. There are no clear solutions to these problems from an individual supply chain stand point. However, pre-competitive collaboration across companies and local governments through jurisdictional approaches to zero-deforestation and sustainable development policy could help address many of the challenges uncovered by the research. Rachael Garrett is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy at ETH Zürich (Switzerland). Dr. Garrett's research examines interactions between land use, ecosystem services, and economic development at multiple spatial and temporal scales to better understand the drivers and impacts of land change and the effectiveness of existing conservation policies and practices. She is particularly interested in how commodity supply chains interact with environmental institutions to shape land use processes, resource distribution, and trade. Her research has largely focused on land change processes in agriculture-forest frontiers and sustainable intensification of pastures in the tropics. More recently she is leading a pan-tropical analysis of the effectiveness and equity of forest-focused supply chain policies with funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation and an ERC Starting Grant (https://zerodeforestationimpacts.com/). This work involves coordinated research in Brazil, Ghana, Indonesia, and Ivory Coast on beef cattle, cocoa, oil palm, and soybean supply chains. Dr. Garrett received her doctorate at Stanford University and did her post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University. Prior to working at ETH Zürich she was an Assistant Professor at Boston University.
Abstract: The Arab revolutions of 2011 were a transformative moment in the modern history of the Middle East, as people rose up against long-standing autocrats throughout the region to call for ‘bread, freedom and dignity’. With the passage of time, results have been decidedly mixed, with abortive success stories like Tunisia contrasting with the emergence of even more repressive dictatorships in places like Egypt, with the backing of several Gulf states. Focusing primarily on Egypt, this book considers a relatively understudied dimension of these revolutions: the role of prominent religious scholars. While pro-revolutionary ulama have justified activism against authoritarian regimes, counter-revolutionary scholars have provided religious backing for repression, and in some cases the mass murder of unarmed protestors. Usaama al-Azami traces the public engagements and religious pronouncements of several prominent ulama in the region, including Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Ali Gomaa and Abdallah bin Bayyah, to explore their role in either championing the Arab revolutions or supporting their repression. He concludes that while a minority of noted scholars have enthusiastically endorsed the counter-revolutions, their approach is attributable less to premodern theology and more to their distinctly modern commitment to the authoritarian state. Biography: Usaama al-Azami read his BA in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford, and his MA and PhD in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Alongside his university career, he also pursued Islamic studies in seminarial settings in which he has also subsequently taught. He has travelled extensively throughout the Middle East, living for five years in the region. He is also an enthusiastic teacher who is very eager to support the formation of research scholars, and always welcomes students with such aspirations to get in touch with him. Usaama al-Azami is primarily interested in the interaction between Islam and modernity with a special interest in modern developments in Islamic political philosophy. His first book, Islam and the Arab Revolutions looks at the way in which influential Islamic scholars responded to the Arab uprisings of 2011 through 2013. His PhD, which is a separate project which he hopes to develop into a monograph in the near future, is entitled "Modern Islamic Political Thought: Islamism in the Arab World from the Late Twentieth to the Early Twenty-first Centuries". In it, he explores how Arab ulama of a mainstream "Islamist" orientation have engaged Western political concepts such as democracy, secularism and the nation-state, selectively adapting and assimilating aspects of these ideas into their understanding of Islam. His broader interests extend to a range of disciplines from the Islamic scholarly tradition from the earliest period of Islam down to the present.
Aside from a few notable exceptions, the British history written by historians begins not with the Roman period, but with the early Middle Ages. This lecture poses a series of problems and questions in order to argue that this is a period with which historians should engage, and it suggests methods we might use to write not just the period’s political history, but its social and cultural history as well, by embracing Roman Britain’s more-than-human past. The links to the talks will be posted here: https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/james-ford-lectures-british-history
Metal-Induced Energy Transfer (MIET) Imaging is a recently developed method that allows for nanometre resolution along the optical axis. It is based on the fact that, when placing a fluorescent molecule close to a metal, its fluorescence properties change dramatically, due to electromagnetic coupling of its excited state to surface plasmons in the metal. This is very similar to Förster Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET) where the fluorescence properties of a donor are changed by the proximity of an acceptor that can resonantly absorb energy emitted by the donor. In particular, one observes a strongly modified lifetime of its excited state. This coupling between an excited emitter and a metal film is strongly dependent on the emitter’s distance from the metal. We have used this effect for mapping the basal membrane of live cells with an axial accuracy of ~3 nm. The method is easy to implement and does not require any change to a conventional fluorescence lifetime microscope; it can be applied to any biological system of interest, and is compatible with most other super-resolution microscopy techniques that enhance the lateral resolution of imaging. Moreover, it is even applicable to localizing individual molecules, thus offering the prospect of three-dimensional single-molecule localization microscopy with nanometre isotropic resolution for structural biology. I will also present latest developments of MIET where we use a single layer of graphene instead of a metal film that allows for increasing the spatial resolution down to few Ångströms (Graphene-Induced Energy Transfer or GIET). In combination with single-molecule localization microscopy methods such as dSTORM or PAINT, MIET/GIET imaging offers nanometric isotropic resolution for bioimaging of molecular complexes and cellular structures.
Come along to one of our monthly virtual drop-in sessions where a member of our team will be available to answer your questions on collaborating with industry. Monthly virtual drop-in sessions are for medical science researchers, staff and students across the University of Oxford. A member of the BPO team will be available to answer questions relating to forming collaborations with the pharmaceutical / biotech industry, including AI and digital health.
The EQUATOR Network is an international initiative that aims to improve the reliability and value of medical research literature by promoting full, transparent, accurate reporting of research studies. The UK EQUATOR Centre, based in the Centre for Statistics in Medicine, is EQUATOR HQ. This month we are excited to launch the EQUATOR Patient Public Involvement group. The group will connect members of the public interested in meta-research and methodology research with new research projects from our team. How do you feel when you read about health science? Do you understand? Do you think it could be communicated more clearly? We invite you to join Paula and Patricia in this conversation! This free talk is aimed at patients and public members, University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes staff, and students. You do not need any specialist knowledge to join the talk, but we do ask you to book a spot. We would love for you to join us. To hear about other OPEN ARMS talks, news, and involvement opportunities, please join our mailing list using the following link https://ndorms.us5.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=0a8e0892ab1f3f60569a63e3b&id=878b7c53f7
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centres globally. They have millions of customers—including the fastest-growing start-ups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—that are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster. At this session, Jude Sheeran, AWS Lead for Education, will be talking about his views on the future of higher education from an AWS perspective.
Email Lisbeth Soederberg to book in person attendance or join via MS Teams link (no booking required): https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_MmM5MGQ5NTYtYjY5Ny00NWYwLTgwYWUtZGU5Nzk2MDc5NmFj%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%225f90ce21-6b3d-4640-823b-611a41f0a921%22%7d
One of the main aims of the new Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre was establishing a Brain Health Clinic as a translational interface between research and clinical service. The service was launched in August 2020 and Professor Mackay will present preliminary evidence about the direct benefits to patients while improving access, representativeness and quality of research. To join on the day https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85271259124?pwd=UTNpcksyN01YV09Tc09BVWJQYmQ3UT09 Meeting ID: 852 7125 9124 Passcode: 880549
In this interactive workshop, Prof Aaron Berkowitz will discuss how decision analysis can be used to tackle clinical dilemmas in neurology in resource-limited settings. This is an open session for policy makers, academics and clinicians organised by the World Health Organisation (WHO) Neurology & COVID-19 Global Forum and The Global Health Network. Prof Aaron Berkowitz: Professor and Director of Global Health, Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine (USA); Health and Policy Advisor, Partners In Health; Senior Specialist Consultant, Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders Chairs Dr Kiran Thakur: Neurologist, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, USA Consultant, World Health Organisation: Brain Health Unit Dr. Biniyam A. Ayele: Department of Neurology, Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Post-Doctoral Neuroinfectious Fellow, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, NY, USA
Young word learners are faced with the immensely difficult task of determining the meaning of thousands of new words based on ambiguous input. How do children learn word meanings given limited and incomplete information? One way that children might confront this task is by intervening in their environment in ways that support learning. Throughout development, children are more than simply passive absorbers of information – they actively construct their own learning environment. This ability could have important consequences for how children simplify the problem of learning new word meanings. I will present the results from 3 studies investigating how infants and children seek out new information during word learning. In part 1, I will present evidence from children (3-8 years of age) and adults that learners will systematically seek to reduce ambiguity about novel object-label associations. In part 2, I will discuss experimental results demonstrating that children (3-5 years of age) are motivated to sample more informative object-label associations and make selections that are tuned to their past experience. In the final part of the talk, I will present the results from two lines of work asking whether even infants (aged 17 to 21 months) systematically sample information about novel words. In order to study infants’ sampling behaviour during word learning, we developed novel gaze-contingent eye-tracking methods that allowed infants to trigger labelling events on a screen. Preliminary findings from these studies provide mixed or inconclusive evidence regarding infants' early information-seeking strategies. Overall, we find evidence that children systematically sample words that support gaining new information, and that the tendency to reduce ambiguity during word learning becomes more robust over development. I will end the talk by highlighting some ongoing projects that take a large-scale, collaborative approach to understanding questions about infants' early information-seeking preferences and children's developing word knowledge.
The British Agricultural Revolution fed an urban population without a proportionate expansion in arable acres due to the combining of many technologies. Yet historians have traditionally focused on the introduction and disbursal of individual technologies while struggling to piece together the evolution of the whole agronomic system. I return to the often neglected yet versatile alternative fodders to explore the uses of a bright yellow oilseed that still goes by the unfortunate common name of “rapeseed” (Brassica napus). Though B napus may have been planted at a smaller scale than turnips and clover, its environmental impacts include the diversification and extension of rotation, convertible husbandry, seed drilling, Tullian horse-hoeing and many other defining technologies of the Agricultural Revolution. The plant was a lucrative oilseed cash crop as well as a drought-hardy fodder, and the cakes left from the oil press were used as a manure to kill pests. I combine GIS, text mining, and paleography to reconstruct localized integrated designs as they were modified for different soils and climates. From this, I offer a counter narrative of a more continuous and less progressive Agricultural Revolution rooted in planting design as much as mechanization. To develop reference points for contemporary sustainable farming and the preservation of vernacular landscapes, I use cradle-to-cradle and integrative-adaptive design theories to trace nutrients and biproducts through historical systems. This provides important context for recent USDA studies that elucidate the mechanisms of soil pathogen suppression from B napus and test Brassica meals against plots treated with Methyl Bromide and Chloropicrin.
The modern concept of ‘dynasty’ is a politically-motivated modern intellectual invention. For many advocates of a strong sovereign nation-state across the nineteenth and early twentieth century, in France, Germany, and Japan, the concept helped in visualizing the nation-state as a primordial entity sealed by the continuity of birth and blood, indeed by the perpetuity of sovereignty. Hegel’s references to ‘dynasty’, read with Marx’s critique, further show how ‘dynasty’ encoded the intersection of sovereignty and big property, indeed the coming into self-consciousness of their mutual identification-in-difference in the age of capitalism. Imaginaries about ‘dynasty’ also connected national sovereignty with patriarchal authority. European colonialism helped globalize the concept in the non-European world; British India offers an exemplar of ensuing debates. The globalization of the abstraction of ‘dynasty’ was ultimately bound to the globalization of capitalist-colonial infrastructures of production, circulation, violence, and exploitation. Simultaneously, colonized actors, like Indian peasant/‘tribal’ populations, brought to play alternate precolonial Indian-origin concepts of collective regality, expressed through terms like ‘rajavamshi’ and ‘Kshatriya’. These concepts nourished new forms of democracy in modern India. Global intellectual histories can thus expand political thought today by provincializing and deconstructing Eurocentric political vocabularies and by recuperating subaltern models of collective and polyarchic power. Dr Milinda Banerjee is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, United Kingdom. He specializes in History of Modern Political Thought and Political Theory, and is Programme Director for the MLitt in Global Social and Political Thought. He is the author of The Mortal God: Imagining the Sovereign in Colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2018). He has co-edited the volume, Transnational Histories of the ‘Royal Nation’ (Palgrave, 2017); the forum ‘Law, Empire, and Global Intellectual History’, in the journal Modern Intellectual History (Cambridge University Press, 2020); the special issue ‘The Modern Invention of ‘Dynasty’: A Global Intellectual History, 1500-2000’, in the journal Global Intellectual History (Routledge, 2020); and the special issue ‘Forced Migration and Refugee Resettlement in the Long 1940s: A Connected and Global History’, in the journal Itinerario: Journal of Imperial and Global Interactions (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Banerjee has published two other monographs and several articles on the intersections of Indian and global intellectual history and political theory. He is a founder-editor of a new series ‘South Asian Intellectual History’ with Cambridge University Press, a founder-editor of two series with De Gruyter, ‘Critical Readings in Global Intellectual History’, and ‘Transregional Practices of Power’, and Special Projects Editor of the journal Political Theology (Routledge). He is Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. For Zoom link, and to be added to the mailing list, please email saih@history.ox.ac.uk. Follow us on Twitter (OxfordSAIH) and Facebook (OxfordSAIHSeminar).
This seminar series is about economics aspects of rivalry between religious organizations and how they interact with other dimensions of religious rivalry – theological, scientific, political. The first two seminars will be online and will propose a framework for thinking about the question. The remaining six seminars, most of which will be hybrid, will be organized as structured dialogues. I will talk to leading researchers whose knowledge of particular historical, political, anthropological and geographical contexts of religious rivalry can help us to assess the value of such an approach. All members of the University are welcome to attend. No prior knowledge will be presumed (and in particular, no familiarity with economics).
In this event, Minister Daves and Governor Massano will be discussing, with Professor Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, the state of Angola’s economy, relations with the International Monetary Fund, and the economic and financial sector policies pursued under the current administration. This talk is in conjunction with the Oxford Martin Programme on African Governance.
Part A: Setting the scene Click here to join the meeting: https://teams.microsoft.com/dl/launcher/launcher.html?url=%2F_%23%2Fl%2Fmeetup-join%2F19%3Ameeting_YzUyMjZmMzUtYjZiMy00ZTFiLWJkNTYtMmE0YmZmYjc4ZTRi%40thread.v2%2F0%3Fcontext%3D%257b%2522Tid%2522%253a%2522cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%2522%252c%2522Oid%2522%253a%25223019e29f-d6d5-45c1-95d4-3afda851fc26%2522%257d%26anon%3Dtrue&type=meetup-join&deeplinkId=8e3fb33b-2823-449a-b55f-e253b67c80c8&directDl=true&msLaunch=true&enableMobilePage=true&suppressPrompt=true
Students tell us that they would like more formative and interactive opportunities in Canvas. This term, the Centre for Teaching and Learning is offering four 30-min lunchtime webinars for staff on how to use specific Canvas tools to enhance interactivity and enable formative assessment and feedback. 1. Canvas: Using H5P to create interactive content – Tue 25 Jan, 12:30-13:00 2. Canvas: Using the Assignments Tool – Thu 10 Feb, 12:30-13:00 3. Canvas: Using the Quiz tools – Tue 22 Feb, 12:30-13:00 4. Canvas: Using the Oxford Manage Courses (Rollover) Tool – Thu 10 Mar, 12:30-13:00 All sessions are free of charge and booking is required. Visit https://ctl.web.ox.ac.uk/training-webinars#/
This session is primarily aimed at PhD and post-doctoral researchers preparing applications for teaching or research positions in higher education. Masters students and undergraduates may also find it helpful for preparing PhD applications and are also welcome. We will cover understanding what matters in the academic job and further study market and the principles of writing effective CVs. This is an online event via Microsoft Teams.
In most eukaryotic cells, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is uniparentally transmitted and present in multiple copies derived from the clonal expansion of maternally inherited mtDNA; all copies are therefore near-identical, or homoplasmic. Heteroplasmy, the presence of more than one mtDNA variant in the same cytoplasm, can arise naturally or result from new medical technologies aimed at preventing mitochondrial genetic diseases or improving fertility that can generate heteroplasmy between divergent non-pathological mtDNAs (DNPH). We performed the characterization of engineered heteroplasmic mice throughout their lifespan through transcriptomic, metabolomic, biochemical, physiological and phenotyping studies. Using in vivo imaging techniques for non-invasive assessment of cardiac and pulmonary energy metabolism we demostrate that DNPH impairs mitochondrial function, with profound consequences in critical tissues that cannot resolve heteroplasmy, particularly cardiac and skeletal muscle. Progressive metabolic stress in these tissues leads to severe pathology in adulthood, including pulmonary hypertension and heart failure, skeletal muscle wasting, frailty, and premature death. Short Bio: Ana Victoria completed her PhD at the Spanish National Centre for Cardiovascular Research in Madrid (CNIC), with particular focus on mitochondrial transfer from mothers to their offspring and the mechanisms that regulate mitochondrial DNA segregation in mitochondrial diseases. Biotechnologist and biochemist with a keen interest in immunology and mitochondrial quality control, she contributed during her first postdoctoral position to the elucidation of how resident cardiac macrophages contribute to global tissue homeostasis by active local elimination of cardiomyocyte-derived mitochondria. In 2020, she moved into the group of Prof. Vincenzo Cerundolo at Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine (University of Oxford) with a Fundación Alfonso Martin Escudero Postdoctoral Fellowship to study the role and identification of immunogenic neo-epitopes derived from mitochondrial-derived peptides that are expressed during the tumoral metabolic switch. After securing an EMBO Long Term Postdoctoral Fellowship, Ana Victoria joined in 2021 the lab of Prof. Katja Simon at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology (University of Oxford) to pursue her interest in immunometabolism. She will study how the mitochondrial genetics and different mitochondrial metabolic signatures impacts in the selective removal of the organelle during T cell reprogramming and senescence.
Europe’s security landscape has changed dramatically in the past decade amid Russia’s resurgence, mounting European doubts about the long-term reliability of the U.S. security commitment, and Europe’s growing aspiration for strategic autonomy. Could Europeans develop an autonomous defense capacity if the United States withdrew completely from Europe? If the United States were to do so, any European effort to develop an autonomous defense capacity would be fundamentally hampered by profoundly diverging threat perceptions and severe military capacity shortfalls that would be very costly and time-consuming to close. Hugo Meijer is CNRS Research Fellow at Sciences Po, Center for International Studies (CERI, Paris) and the Founding Director of The European Initiative for Security Studies (EISS), a multidisciplinary network of scholars that share the goal of consolidating security studies in Europe. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy (CSDS), in Brussels, and an Honorary Researcher at the Centre for War and Diplomacy, Lancaster University. His research interests lie at the intersection of foreign policy analysis and security studies. In particular, he is currently working on several research projects on: the reconfiguration of American hegemony through the prism of the US-led regional alliance systems in Europe and in the Asia-Pacific since the end of World War II; national defense and security policies in Europe; and European foreign and security policies in the face of a rising China in the post-Cold War period. Recent and forthcoming publications: Awakening to China’s Rise. European Foreign and Security Policies toward the People’s Republic of China (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2022); The Handbook of European Defence Policies and Armed Forces (Oxford University Press, 2018), co-edited with Marco Wyss; Trading with the Enemy: the Making of US Export Control Policy toward the People’s Republic of China (Oxford University Press, 2016). He has also published in such journals as International Security, Journal of Strategic Studies, Cooperation and Conflict, Survival, European Journal of International Security and the Journal of Cold War Studies. For more details, see: https://www.hugomeijer.com/
John Hajdu MBE is a survivor of the Holocaust in Hungary and lived under the subsequent socialist regime in Budapest. Having lived in the UK since 1957, John’s experiences of life after the Holocaust and as a refugee tell of the turmoil of post-World War Two Europe. Organised in association with the Oxford University Hungarian Society, John will share his experience of the Holocaust and his life since.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) capture complex relationships among variables, however, because they require copious samples, their potential has yet to be fully tapped for understanding relationships between gene expression and human phenotypes. Here we introduce an analysis framework, namely MD-AD (Multi-task Deep learning for Alzheimer’s Disease neuropathology), which leverages an unexpected synergy between DNNs and multi-cohort settings. In these settings, true joint analysis can be stymied using conventional statistical methods, which require “harmonized” phenotypes and tend to capture cohort-level variations, obscuring subtler true disease signals. Instead, MD-AD incorporates related phenotypes sparsely measured across cohorts and learns interactions between genes and phenotypes not discovered using linear models, identifying subtler signals than cohort-level variations which can be uniquely recapitulated in animal models and across tissues. We show that MD-AD exploits sex-specific relationships between microglial immune response and neuropathology, providing a nuanced context for the association between inflammatory genes and Alzheimer’s Disease.
There is a common assumption in scientific and policy discourse that, for greatest effect, interventions need to be applied early in life, when children's brain function and behaviour are thought to be more malleable. Surprisingly, very few studies have tested directly whether common interventions for child development, mental health and behaviour are more effective when delivered earlier, rather than later in childhood. We assess this question using data from multiple trials of parenting interventions in Europe, and updated reviews from around the world, drawing on both individual participant (IPD) and aggregate level meta-analytic approaches. Implications for other fields of child development, and for policy will be discussed.
Matt will give an overview of how a ground source heat pump works and how they have been used in the UK. He will then discuss the cutting edge of how they are being used right now - including the shared ground array approach and the smart controls that are being demonstrated via the Energy Superhub Oxford project. He will then go on to describe Kensa's vision for the mass decarbonisation of existing properties using the concept of "split ownership".
We study mechanisms and consequences of an institutional capture using novel hand-collected data from the Florentine Republic. In the 14th-15th centuries, political offices were assigned in Florence by a system combining elections and lottery, which ensured for several decades a substantial alternation of power. During the 1420s, after a fiscal crisis, the Medici’s family became the first lender of the Republic, obtained a leading position in the city, and de facto captured the office allocation mechanism, while leaving the political institutions formally unchanged. Employing individual level information on wealth, political participation, and party affiliation, we document how the Medici manipulated office assignment and we show that, under their regime, participation into politics predicted individual wealth. By comparing results for the periods before and after the institutional capture and using complementary data sources on voluntary loans to the Republic, we provide several pieces of evidence that explain our findings in terms of patronage and rent-extraction.
Dame Monica Mason (Royal Ballet; Honorary Fellow, St Hilda's; Patron, DANSOX) and Jane Pritchard (Curator of Dance, V&A) present 'The Sleeping Princess and The Sleeping Beauty'. Audiences familiar with Charles Perrault's fairy-tale, or with Disney's classic animation, will not want to miss these sparkling lectures on the history of dance's universally famous narrative. Dame Monica Mason and Jane Pritchard will give two illustrated presentations to celebrate the centenary (1921-2021) of performances in Britain of the iconic Tchaikovsky ballet. As dance archivist of the V&A and internationally renowned historian of dance, Jane will reveal the history of the great Russian classic. She will focus on the first performance in London (1921) of The Sleeping Princess, which followed the nineteenth-century choreography of Marius Petipa, sets by Leon Bakst. Danced by the famous Diaghilev Ballets Russes, this was a lavish production that nearly bankrupted the great impresario. Dame Monica will discuss subsequent productions of The Sleeping Beauty, which again followed the original music and choreography, and became the signature work of the Royal Ballet, establishing the national company as one based on classical traditions. Dame Monica's involvement in the work over her long career with the Royal Ballet as Principal Dancer and Director will include her experiences of coaching today's dancers and give us insight into her own stunning interpretation of the role of the 'outsider' - the wicked fairy, Carabosse.
Known to most people as a TV judge, Robert Rinder MBE shared his history of the Holocaust on TV in a series of programmes including Who Do You Think You Are? and My Family, The Holocaust, and Me, where he took the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors to retrace their relatives' footsteps and discover their full stories. In conversation with activist and advocate Kirsty Robson, Rob will discuss his experience of discovering his family’s connection to the Holocaust and sharing it with the public - and the role that telling these stories has in tackling racism and intolerance today.
Ros Atkins is a BBC news presenter, host of Outside Source and founder of the 50:50 Project. In December, his explainer about the alleged No 10 Downing Street Christmas Party went viral.
This paper assesses whether a mental health literacy intervention close the gap in the demand for mental health support among university students. Firstly, we develop a self-signalling model to derive testable implications about the students' investments in mental health. Secondly, we test the model's predictions in an incentivized survey experiment with 2,978 university students from one of the largest Dutch universities, which is broadly representative of the student body in the Netherlands. We document that the mental health literacy intervention does not significantly increase the WTP for a therapy app on average, but the effect is highly heterogeneous. The mental health literacy intervention increases the WTP for the app among the male students, and marginally for the international students. The effect is mostly driven by the fact that the intervention has increased the perceived effectiveness of the app among the male students. We show that the mental health literacy intervention affects how the students acquire information about the support services at the university. In particular, the students are more prone to acquire information about coaching services at the university than to acquire information about the university psychologist. The effect is mostly driven by the female students and by the international students.
Those funding and engaging in global health research and practice are increasingly embracing digital and mobile phone solutions to public health and health system challenges, particularly across low- and middle-income countries. Given that much of the world is now connected via mobile and digital devices, many such interventions can be delivered by anyone, from anywhere at any time. Platforms and data can often be used interchangeably to advance health research, health care delivery and disease surveillance, potentially making it harder to delineate boundaries between these terrains. While offering important benefits, our digital connectedness has also posed challenges for achieving better population health, not least of which during the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, various commercial entities are involved not only in developing digital health capabilities, but also in establishing their terms and conditions of use. This raises important questions about whether ethics standards for global digital health are adequately established, at present, to meet the needs of our complex interconnected digital world. This talk will begin to engage with this question, inviting discussion to advance specification of values, principles and approaches that can guide ethical global digital health practice. This seminar will be held on Zoom, please register here: https://medsci.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMpc-mtpz4sGtSLsiPPbM0rjhHHiFVE5ovB
Seminar 2 - Religion Madawi al-Rasheed (LSE) speaking on ‘Islamic Reform in Saudi Arabia between “the Violence of the Minority and the Apathy of the Majority”’ Pascal Menoret (Brandeis University) speaking on ‘Graveyard of Clerics’ Convenors: Dr Faisal Devji (St Antony's College) and Dr Usaama al-Azami (St Antony's College)
This seminar is part of the "Rupture and Reconciliation in Contexts of Displacement" series hosted by Campion Hall and the Refugee Studies Centre.
Seminar series: Rupture and Reconciliation in Contexts of Displacement Convened by Cory Rodgers (Oxford University) and Elias Lopez (Comillas Pontifical University). Campion Hall and the Refugee Studies Centre present a seven-part seminar series on reconciliation in the contexts of displacement This event approaches displacement through the theme of ‘rupture’. Policy definitions of ‘displacement’ often focus on physical dislocation and geographical journeys, and the term is used interchangeably with ‘forced migration’. Yet displacement is often characterised less by mobility than immobilization, with many stuck behind borders or in camps and detention centres. Rather than taking movement as the defining feature of displacement, this event focuses on ‘rupture’ of the relations that constitute a sense of place and belonging: between self and community, citizen and state, inhabitant and home. People are dispossessed of their lands, cut off from their livelihoods, and deprived of a sense of security and order. In the face of such rupture, many organisations are implementing programmes focused on reconciliation. While reconciliation has long been recognized as a crucial aspect of voluntary return and repatriation for refugees, it has more recently become a priority in contexts of protracted displacement, where xenophobia and the politicization of migration can rupture the norms of hospitality and tolerance that make asylum possible. This seminar series, hosted by Campion Hall and the Refugee Studies Centre, is proposed as an opportunity to discuss the possibilities for and challenges to ‘reconciliation’ in contexts of displacement. It will bring together academics as well as practitioners working in diverse contexts and according to different traditions to exchange insights and engage critically with the conceptual and practical dimensions of reconciliation. We intend to interrogate the historical roots of reconciliation interventions; to consider the different roles played by international, national, local, faith-based and refugee-run institutions, and to spotlight some of the unintended consequences of reconciliation work. The seminars take place every Wednesday at 3pm - 4.30pm from 26 January to 9 March 2022. Details: https://www.campion.ox.ac.uk/events/rupture-and-reconciliation-contexts-displacement
Join Alex Beard, Senior Director of the Global Learning Lab at Teach for All and author of Natural Born Learners; Jonathan Black, Director of the Careers Service at Oxford University and chair Dr Helen Carasso, Honorary Norham Fellow at the Department of Education, University of Oxford, as they discuss the question, ‘Does education matter and if so, what do we need to learn to make a difference?’ (A third speaker will be confirmed shortly). The discussion will be followed by a Q & A session. Hosted both in-person and online, this event is free and open to all. Booking is required. Booking deadline: 12 noon, Tuesday 25 January 2022 Please note, this event will be recorded. ABOUT THE SPEAKERS Alex Beard Alex started out as a teacher in London, before joining Teach For All, a growing network of organizations working in sixty countries worldwide to ensure all children fulfil their potential, where he now heads the Global Learning Lab. He’s fortunate to spend his time travelling the world in search of the future of learning, and has written about his experiences for the Guardian, Financial Times, and Wired. He presented The Learning Revolution, a three part series on the future of education for BBC Radio 4, and is the author of Natural Born Learners, a guide to transforming learning in the twenty-first century. Jonathan Black Jonathan Black has been Director of the Careers Service at Oxford University since 2008 after a broad career including in blue-chip management consultancy, international academic publishing, and co-founding a successful medical publishing start-up. Jonathan coaches students one-to-one, runs workshops and seminars for groups of undergraduates and postgraduates, trains colleagues, and devises new and innovative programmes that provide hands-on experiences for students. He works with senior academics to explore how the Careers Service can support academic work, presents at seminars and conferences in the UK, Europe, Australia, South Africa, and the USA, and runs research programmes on what is required in order to secure a graduate-level job. Jonathan writes the fortnightly, ‘Dear Jonathan’ column for readers’ careers questions in the Financial Times, and produced three short careers videos for the FT in July 2018 and anchored six 10-minute FT/YouTube careers videos launched in April 2019. His recent book, ‘How to find the Career you’ve always wanted’ was described by Baroness Gillian Shephard as, ‘One of the most practical and comprehensible career guides ever produced.’ Outside the Careers Service, Jonathan is a Fellow and Tutor for Welfare at New College, Oxford, Chair of the Oxford University spin-out, Skylark Works, and member of the Oxford Alumni Society Board. Dr Helen Carasso Helen’s academic interest in higher education policy developed from more than 20 years of professional experience of university administration – in public relations and admissions. She gained her doctorate from Oxford in 2010 (a study of the market created by the introduction of £3000 fees for Home/EU undergraduates at English universities in 2006); since then, she has conducted research into the impacts of student fees and funding on institutions, students, graduates and applicants within the higher education sector in England. She also works as a consultant to higher education institutions. Helen was Pathway Convenor for the MSc Education (HE) for two years and has taught on this course since completing her DPhil. As an inspector for the British Accreditation Council, Helen has the opportunity to gain insights into the operation of higher education providers globally. She is also an Associate of the SKOPE, the department’s research centre for Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance. From 2012-17, Helen was a member of the governing council of the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE), serving as Vice-Chair from 2014-17.
In the decisive shift from imperial-states to nation-states after World War Two, two, arguably related, processes took place. First, there was a wide scale effort to delegitimize racist ideologies. Academics wrote reports, including for UNESCO, that showed that 'race' was socially and historically constructed and in no way reflected actual differences between human beings. From the 1950s onward, racism, a concept first developed in the 1930s to understand Nazi ideological practices, was increasingly considered unacceptable in mainstream politics. Those continuing to declare themselves racists were regarded as extremists while a popular understanding of what constituted racism also associated it with only extreme acts of denigration and/or violence. Secondly, and at the same time, as state sovereignty was near-universally nationalized, the association of colonialism with foreignness was retained. Ideological practices grounded in nationalism were regarded not only as legitimate but as practically mandatory in politics. This talk charts this history in order to understand how racism is organized, practiced, and resisted in an era of postcolonialism (i.e. an era when national sovereignty is the hegemonic state form and when the distinction between 'national' and 'migrant' is institutionalized in national laws). In particular, I examine the growing autochthonization of politics. I show that nationalisms the world over are increasingly reconfiguring the 'national' as an autochthon, i.e. a 'native' to the national 'soil'. Through a discussion of various autochthonous movements in very different contexts and with very different political registers (i.e. White supremacist movements in the Rich World; anti-colonial movements of 'indigenous' people in the historic British White settler colonies; distinctions between 'natives' and 'migrants' in the 'national liberation states', etc). I analyze the double move wherein historic colonizers are re-termed 'migrants” and today's 'migrants' are re-imagined as 'colonizers'. This move, I argue, is made possible by postcolonial racisms: the historic articulation between ideas of 'race' and 'nation' wherein ideas of national soil are racialized and racist ideas of blood are territorialized. Seminar 2 in a series on 'Race, Borders, and Global (Im)mobility', convened by Dr Hanno Brankamp Details: https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/events/postcolonial-racisms-national-sovereignty-and-the-making-of-new-global-apartheids
Dorit Oliver-Wolff is a survivor of the Holocaust in Hungary who became an international pop star after the war. In this event, Dorit shares her incredible life story. Aged just six, she was forced into hiding as Jews were rounded up and deported to Auschwitz from Hungary. Her story is one of danger and narrow escapes during the Holocaust, followed by a remarkable jounrey through post-war Europe as her music career began. Author of the book ‘From Yellow Star to Pop Star’, Dorit’s incredible character shines through in everything she does; aged 83 in 2019, she appeared on the TV show ‘First Dates Hotel’.
Professor Hayes will present new research, undertaken during the pandemic, showing that care safety and job quality in care settings are inseparable. The findings point to failures in the regulation of care provision. Job quality indicators, highly relevant to the objective of care safety, were being ignored or marginalised by providers and inspectors. Professor Hayes will make the case that existing regulatory law provides the social care sector with a framework of sector-specific employment standards. Better understanding of the potential of regulatory law could help organisations that represent either employers or workers to improve terms and conditions of work as an inseparable element of the quality of care.
In this talk, Paul Salkovskis will explain how Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) works and what needs to happen to overcome it. OCD is marked by the occurrence of intrusive and unacceptable thoughts, images, impulses or doubts which the person tries to deal with through compulsive behaviours such as washing, checking, saying prayers and so on. For some it can become a life-sapping problem which dominates every waking hour. Other people manage it with difficulty, but feel constantly under siege from it. There are many faces of OCD. We now know that intrusive thoughts of the type which torment people suffering from OCD are universal, and that the problem lies in how people react to such intrusions. OCD latches on to our worst fears, typically about being responsible for harm, which feels entirely unacceptable to the person. Their efforts to prevent harm have the effect of increasing their fears as a kind of lose-lose trap. Those who have a tendency towards experiencing OCD also struggle with telling anyone, and sometimes experience unjustified feelings of shame and guilt that prevent them from seeking help. A Q&A will follow, chaired by Cathy Creswell.
REES welcomes Dina Fainberg to discuss Cold War Correspondent.
Online workshop with interactive Q&A and certificate of attendance. Join us as Dr Toryn Poolman discusses the science and reasoning behind each stage of the ChIP workflow, with expert optimisation and troubleshooting tips. Followed by an interactive Q&A. Workshop contents in more detail: - Detailed breakdown of each stage of the ChIP workflow with the science and reasoning behind each part. - Troubleshooting tips and explanation of key areas for optimisation. - Interactive Q+A with Dr Poolman at the end. - Personalised certificate of attendance.
Link to MS Teams channel (includes readings): https://teams.microsoft.com/l/team/19%3a51bb501c36f14b4c9f2c0bd9f152f605%40thread.tacv2/conversations?groupId=f4c0f545-f21d-4e58-af42-c2ed0e91355b&tenantId=cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91 Link to seminar meeting: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3a51bb501c36f14b4c9f2c0bd9f152f605%40thread.tacv2/1641819090466?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%223eaa6534-462c-4297-b7ed-a93e8053acdc%22%7d
Mountainous landscapes often contain sediment-filled valleys that control ecosystem diversity, flood hazard, and the distribution of human populations. Various mechanisms have been proposed to control the spatial distribution and width of valley floors, including climatic, tectonic and lithologic drivers. Attributing one of these drivers to observed valley floor widths has been hindered by a lack of reproducible, automated valley extraction methods that allow continuous measurements of valley floor width at regional scales. We have developed a new method for measuring valley floor width in mountain landscapes from digital elevation models (DEMs). This results in continuous measurement of valley floor width at every pixel along the valley, allowing us to constrain how valley floor width changes downstream. We demonstrate the ability of our method to accurately extract valley floor widths by comparing with independent Quaternary fluvial deposit maps from sites in the UK and the USA. We find that our method extracts similar downstream patterns of valley floor width to the independent datasets in each site. The method works best in confined valley settings and will not work in unconfined valleys where the valley walls are not easily distinguished from the valley floor. We then test current models of lateral erosion by exploring the relationship between valley floor width and drainage area in the Appalachian Plateau, USA. We find that the relationship between width and drainage area is remarkably similar across the region and across spatial scales, suggesting that valley floor width evolution is driven by a combination of both valley wall undercutting and wall erosion in the Appalachian Plateau. Finally, we suggest that, similar to common metrics used to explore vertical incision across mountain regions, continuous observations of valley width have the potential to act as a network-scale fingerprint of lateral response to tectonic and climate drivers.
Suggested preparatory reading: A.H. Dodd, ‘Wales and Ireland from reformation to revolution’, in Studies in Stuart Wales (1952), 76-109 Paul Hammer, ‘A Welshman Abroad: Captain Peter Wynn of Jamestown’, Parergon, 16 (1998), 59–92.
Joint Event with the Ethics in AI Institute at Oxford - book discussion of System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How to Reboot with authors Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, and Jeremy Weinstein. Comments by Vincent Conitzer, Bryce Goodman, and Helene Landemore. Accompanying the colloquium will be an Oxford PLP Seminar for students during which the paper and any other relevant material to the colloquium will be discussed. The seminar will take place on Zoom at 14:00-15:30. Email oxfordPLPevents@gmail.com if you wish to register for the seminar.
The lecture will be followed by a Q&A discussion. **ABOUT THE SPEAKER** Norbert Frei is Chair of Modern and Contemporary History at Friedrich Schiller University Jena and heads the Jena Center 20th Century History. He has been a full member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig since 2011. His numerous publications primarily address the history and aftermath of the so-called Third Reich, memory of the Holocaust, the history of human rights, as well as media history of the 20th century. At the request of the Office of the Federal President of Germany, he is currently researching how the federal presidents from Theodor Heuss to Richard von Weizsäcker dealt with the country’s National Socialist past. **ABOUT THE LECTURE** The Alfred Landecker Memorial Lecture, held each year on 27 January to coincide with the United Nations Holocaust Remembrance Day, is delivered in partnership with the Alfred Landecker Foundation. The lecture is an integral part of the Alfred Landecker Programme at the Blavatnik School of Government, which investigates the rights and interests of minorities and vulnerable groups, exploring, in particular, the values and institutions that underpin democratic society. For further info and booking: https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/events/germany-holocaust-and-postcolonial-challenge
Many observers from abroad have long regarded Germany’s confrontation with its Nazi past as exemplary. For some months, however, this assessment has been massively questioned. The understanding of the Holocaust as a "breach of civilisation" is seen by some as a politically convenient dogma that hinders confrontation with Germany's colonial crimes. Norbert Frei, Chair of Modern and Contemporary History at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, contradicts this thesis by describing the complex history of Germany’s handling of the Nazi past as a project of societal self-enlightenment. The lecture will be followed by a Q&A discussion. ABOUT THE SPEAKER Norbert Frei is Chair of Modern and Contemporary History at Friedrich Schiller University Jena and heads the Jena Center 20th Century History. He has been a full member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig since 2011. His numerous publications primarily address the history and aftermath of the so-called Third Reich, memory of the Holocaust, the history of human rights, as well as media history of the 20th century. At the request of the Office of the Federal President of Germany, he is currently researching how the federal presidents from Theodor Heuss to Richard von Weizsäcker dealt with the country’s National Socialist past. ABOUT THE LECTURE The Alfred Landecker Memorial Lecture, held each year on 27 January to coincide with the United Nations Holocaust Remembrance Day, is delivered in partnership with the Alfred Landecker Foundation. The lecture is an integral part of the Alfred Landecker Programme at the Blavatnik School of Government, which investigates the rights and interests of minorities and vulnerable groups, exploring, in particular, the values and institutions that underpin democratic society.
Led by the Oxford Interfaith Forum, Dame Stephanie Shirley, who came to the UK on the Kindertransport, will speak about her experiences of building a new life in the UK after the Holocaust and the impact that it had on her family. The talk will be followed by a Q&A led by Barnabas Balint.
The Oxford Syria Society invites you to a conversation with Ibrahim Olabi, the Syrian British qualified lawyer, about lobbying for justice in Syria and his recent speech in the United Nations Security Council. Ibrahim is a barrister at Guernica 37, working on international and domestic cases linked to crimes in Syria. He is part of a legal team advising The Netherlands on the first case which may end up before the International Court of Justice against Syria for torture. Ibrahim is the founder of the Syrian Legal Development Programme (SLDP), an NGO working on human rights in Syria. Now a team of 12, SLDP's work received support from the Swiss, Canadian and Dutch ministries of foreign affairs as well as the EU. Ibrahim has advocated for human rights near the frontlines in Syria, and met several heads of states and policy makers on Syria justice policies. He has also consulted for the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) and for the International Bar Association. He is currently on the board of the Syrian British Council, where he engages with UK ministers, shadow ministers, and other policymakers. Ibrahim has been interviewed by and appeared on several media outlets, including the BBC, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Financial Times, Aljazeera, and others on Syria-related matters. He completed his university studies in the UK, and was awarded the Undergraduate Student of the Year and Postgraduate Student of the Year.
Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend.
An opportunity for our current MSc students to network with alumni of their respective courses.
Dr Nicol Harper: "Prediction and the sensory brain" Sensory neurons are tuned to diverse but distinct features of the sensory input, for example a particular auditory neuron might respond most strongly to a low-frequency sound that sweeps upwards in frequency, while another might prefer a steady mid-frequency sound. What general principles might explain the diverse tuning properties of neurons in sensory systems? One potential principle is temporal prediction, which proposes that the sensory brain is optimised to represent features that best predict immediate future inputs. This may help find underlying variables, discard irrelevant information, and better enable future actions. We found that computational model networks optimised for this principle for natural stimuli went on to develop tuning properties that resembled those of cortical neurons. This included the oriented spatial tuning of primary visual cortex, the frequency selectivity of primary auditory cortex and, notably, appropriate temporal tuning properties. Furthermore, when such networks were applied to unprocessed audio or video, the resulting tuning properties resembled those found in the cochlea or retina. These networks can be extended hierarchically or made recurrent, which produced network units with properties consistent with various complex features of neural tuning and synaptic connectivity found in primary sensory cortical areas and downstream non-primary cortical areas. Finally, these models use prediction and prediction error to learn, and we have evidence from electrophysiology of an unusual form of neural representation of such signals in cortex. These results together suggest that many aspects of sensory processing may be optimised to extract those features with the most capacity to predict future input. Nicol Harper Biography: Nicol Harper completed his PhD in optimal coding in the auditory system at University College London with David McAlpine, with some time in the lab of Shihab Shamma at the University of Maryland, College Park. After this he secured a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship, splitting his time between the Redwood Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience lead by Bruno Olshausen at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Auditory Neuroscience Group lead by Andrew King at the University of Oxford. He is now a University Research Lecturer in the Auditory Neuroscience Group where he researches normative principles and stimulus encoding in sensory neural systems. Dr Joaquim Vieira: "Elucidating regulatory pathways underlying epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition in the developing and adult heart to enable cardiovascular repair and regeneration" My group uses mouse genetics, human embryonic stem cells, and cutting-edge molecular and imaging approaches to gain mechanistic insight into normal heart development. We are particularly interested in understanding cell and molecular interactions at the epicardium-myocardium interface that support growth and maturation of cardiac muscle, as well as development of the coronary vasculature, formation of the cardiac lymphatic network, and patterning of the cardiac autonomic nervous system in the subepicardial space. Epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) of cells from the epicardium (outermost layer of the heart) is essential for these processes to take place in the embryo and, therefore, holds great therapeutic potential in the context of heart disease where new muscle and vessels are warranted. Yet, the molecular underpinnings of epicardial EMT and subepicardial cell-cell crosstalk remain poorly understood. Here, we discuss our current research exploring the functional requirements for cis-regulatory sequences in the Wilms’ tumour 1 (Wt1) locus which encodes for the key EMT regulator WT1 and elusive antisense long noncoding transcripts (Wt1as lncRNA) during heart development and disease (myocardial infarction). In addition, we discuss ongoing unbiased screens integrating CUT&RUN, scRNA- and ATAC-sequencing to identify WT1-downstream targets, as well as further regulators of epicardial EMT. Taken together, a better understanding of the cellular and molecular mechanisms supporting mammalian heart development is poised to identify molecular targets to effect (adult) heart repair and regeneration. Research funded by the British Heart Foundation (Intermediate Basic Science Research Fellowship, Oxford BHF Centre of Research Excellence) and John Fell Fund. Joaquim Vieira Biography: Joaquim Vieira studied Biochemistry as an undergraduate at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, and researched developmental angiogenesis for his PhD in Professor Christiana Ruhrberg's laboratory at University College London (UCL). After successful postdoctoral studies at UCL and University of Oxford with Professor Paul Riley investigating the epigenetic regulation of the epicardium and role of cardiac lymphatics during heart development and disease, he was awarded a British Heart Foundation (BHF) Intermediate Basic Science Research Fellowship to start his research group in Oxford. His group studies the role of long noncoding RNAs and enhancers during epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition in the developing and diseased heart; and retains an interest in understanding cell-cell interactions in the developing heart supporting coronary and lymphatic vasculature expansion, as well as patterning of the cardiac autonomic system. A better understanding of the cellular and molecular mechanisms supporting organ development is poised to identify molecular targets to effect (adult) heart repair.
As the US gears up for the 'great power competition' with China, accurate translation of Chinese sources is increasingly important. Different translations can lead to different inferences about intentions, which in turn can affect policy analysis. In this talk Professor Johnston looks at a key inference in recent US policy documents about China’s long-term intentions, an inference that is based, in part, on a problematic translation and decontextualization of key phrases in a speech by China’s leader, Xi Jinping. This same translation has also been invoked by analysts and pundits to argue that there is no more need to debate China’s long-term intensions. A more contextualized reading of these key phrases suggests that they do not support any particular inference about long-term goals. The takeaway ‒ given the issues at stake in the 'great power competition', analysts should think about setting up a translation review process where potentially analytically significant and policy-relevant translations are subject to double blind peer review, something akin to an academic product. Alastair Iain Johnston is a professor in the Government Department at Harvard University. He is the author of Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) and Social States: China in International Institutions, 1980‒2000 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), as well as articles on identity, strategic culture, and socialization theory, mostly with application to China's international relations.
The Insights for Action seminar series explores how researchers and practitioners within and beyond Oxford are using research insights for action. Join us to hear conversations between researchers and practitioners who are working across disciplines, sectors, and media to understand and create more equitable and just social, economic, environmental, and health systems. In this seminar, Dr Aoife Brophy, Kaya Axelsson, and Charmian Love will discuss the leadership practices required of business and others to achieve Net Zero targets, within and between organisations.
Ethnic minorities make contemporary Europe increasingly diverse. The prevailing wisdom in research on ethnic politics is that ethnicity is a trouble-maker disrupting programmatic politics -- it tends to prioritize group identity over ideology, polity or policy, principle over compromise. In short, ethnicity is expected to be a source of particularistic tension. This talk takes a theoretical step back. Approaching ethnic politics as a component of normal politics, it investigates the ideological potential of ethnicity, and examines the conditions that determine the formation of diverse preferences and behavior among ethnic groups and their representatives. The talk seeks to answer central questions: What are the political preferences of ethnic minority groups and their representatives? How are ethnic preferences translated into political representation, how does this representation shape political competition, and with what systemic effects? Discussant: Nico Buettner (Oxford)
Dogs’ bodies and dogs’ lives were dramatically transformed after the Roman conquest, and this, in turn, altered the lives of humans. New-style tiny dogs and monstrous brutes provided people in Britain with novel opportunities to reconceptualize canines and their duties and to use them to make statements about themselves. At the same time, large populations of uncontrolled, self-feeding dogs were established, and their presence changed the texture and feel of daily life in Britain. The links to the talks will be posted here: www.history.ox.ac.uk/james-ford-lectures-british-history
Registration essential
Oxford Mathematics in partnership with Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment Bach, the Universe & Everything Schooled by Randomness Sunday 30 January 2022, 5:30-6.30pm Mathematical Institute, Woodstock Road, OX2 6GG The Science: Tim Harford There’s been a mistake. The venue has provided the wrong piano. The black notes are sticking, the white notes are out of tune, the pedals don’t work and the instrument itself is just too small. What do you do? Tim Harford talks about how random obstacles and frustrations can inspire us to be more creative. The Music: J.S. Bach BWV 81 Jesus schläft, was soll ich hoffen? (Jesus sleeps, what shall I hope for?) Today’s cantata draws upon those moments in life when confusing and random obstacles in our path make us fear for the future and we need to be shown a way out. Bach, the Universe & Everything is a collaborative music and maths event between Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Oxford Mathematics. Through a series of thought-provoking Bach cantatas, readings and talks from leading Oxford thinkers, we seek to create a community similar to the one that Bach enjoyed in Leipzig until 1750.
: In mammals, hybrids are often infertile, and this is thought to be a key driver of species formation – but how does this happen? In mammals, only a single speciation gene has so far been identified, in mice. In this talk I will talk about how this sterility is deeply connected to recombination, which shuffles mutations into new combinations, and to the pairing of chromosomes, essential to ensure one of each pair is passed on to offspring, two fundamental processes which are very incompletely understood. I will describe our collaborative work that has revealed how specific DNA sequences, which differ between all species so far examined, “code” for possible recombination sites, and identified key genes involved. Remarkably, simply modifying this code fully reverses hybrid sterility, in several cases. Evolution of this code occurs extraordinarily rapidly both in cis and in trans, driving diverse phenomena: it explains hybrid sterility in mice, the origins of many human diseases, and why different human populations have differing recombination landscapes. The study of hybrid mice has led to an improved understanding of an enduring biological mystery: how do homologous chromosomes precisely align, finding their exact partners among billions of genetic bases of DNA within the cell? We speculate that this explains why, in most studied species, recombination occurs in only a tiny fraction of the genome, in “hotspots”, and discuss a range of evolutionary implications.
Manu Samnotra is an Associate Professor in political theory at the University of South Florida. He is the author of Worldly Shame: Ethos in Action. Worldly Shame examines shame’s worldly possibilities through the lens of Hannah Arendt’s political writings. Samnotra makes a case both for shame’s capacity to orient us towards a shared political world, and for reading Arendt as an anti-colonial thinker. Operating broadly within the frame of Comparative Political Theory, his next project brings Gandhian thought into conversation with liberal and republican conceptions of political dignity. For Zoom link, and to be added to the mailing list, please email saih@history.ox.ac.uk. Follow us on Twitter (OxfordSAIH) and Facebook (OxfordSAIHSeminar).
As part of my new book project, Drift: Dislodging the Insane from Colonial Hong Kong, I explore how ‘lunatics’ emerged and how they were managed beyond the capacity of institutionalization in colonial Hong Kong in the second half of 19th Century and the first half of 20th Century. The story contests the conventional historiography about madmen that predominantly focuses on institutions. Unlike in Britain or in other empires’ colonies, inpatients stayed at the asylum in Hong Kong only for very short periods. Instead of psychiatric admission, they were transported via waterways either to Canton or London for further care until after World War II. While Hong Kong has long been an arena of international great powers, this story also attests the role of the former Britain’s crown colony being a nexus of the world’s commercial and political interests. I explain how such a measure was taken to maintain a ‘clean’ cityscape, as well as an instrument to ensure the smooth operation of the entrepôt.
This seminar series is about economics aspects of rivalry between religious organizations and how they interact with other dimensions of religious rivalry – theological, scientific, political. The first two seminars will be online and will propose a framework for thinking about the question. The remaining six seminars, most of which will be hybrid, will be organized as structured dialogues. I will talk to leading researchers whose knowledge of particular historical, political, anthropological and geographical contexts of religious rivalry can help us to assess the value of such an approach. All members of the University are welcome to attend. No prior knowledge will be presumed (and in particular, no familiarity with economics). For those attending in person, these lectures will take place in the Old Library, All Souls College, OX1 4AL (enter via the Lodge). Registrations close at 12 noon on the day of the lecture.
Part B: Dialogues with researchers
Please note that some seminars will be held online and some in person at the Rothermere American Institute. To receive Zoom links and pre-circulated readings, please join the ALRS mailing list by sending a blank email to: alrs-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk.
Professor Jane Barlow, University of Oxford 01 February: ‘The impact of parental mental health problems on parenting in the first two years, and what works to improve outcomes’ Chair: Mina Fazel
BridgeBio is a pharmaceutical company that finds, develops and delivers breakthrough medicines for genetic diseases. Founded in 2015 by a team of industry veterans, the company has built a portfolio of over 30 development programs ranging from discovery to Phase 3 clinical trials with two approved products. The company’s therapeutic areas include genetic dermatology, oncology, cardiology, neurology and endocrinology. BridgeBio continues to search for new innovations originating in academia that can be translated into breakthrough therapies for genetic diseases and cancers with clear genetic drivers. BridgeBio is excited to introduce their partnering model to researchers at the University of Oxford as part of this seminar series. Please join us for a brief presentation, which will provide additional information regarding the company’s areas of interest, showcase some of their success stories and answer questions about how the company collaborates with its academic partners.
On topics ranging from the climate crisis to labour market discrimination, Oxford economists are working with governments and businesses around the world to improve policy and make the economy work better for everyone. Find out how economics can be used to shed light on some of the biggest issues facing society today in this new public webinar series. These events are open to all. They will be held online and are free of charge. Register in advance for this meeting: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEpcOurpz0uGdEXJrhA2gQ15B4yMT79tRn_ After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Joining link: https://bit.ly/3FJGHDe
In the early nineteenth century, at height of the Napoleonic Wars, Britain twice inflicted preventive violence on a small and ostensibly neutral European state, Denmark. On the first occasion, in 1801, it did so to break up the League of Armed Neutrality. On the second occasion, in 1807, Britain sought to pre-empt the possible seizure of the Danish fleet by Napoleon. Both operations were controversial at home and abroad, especially the latter, which involved the destruction of parts of the city of Copenhagen and considerable loss of civilian life. After a short setting of the scene in its broader international context, this lecture will look more closely how the British attack on Copenhagen in 1807 was conceived. It will locate the event within contemporary discussions on international law (the ‘low of nations’), in respect to both ius ad belllum and ius in bello. The author will show how these discussions were embedded in the larger framework of the contest between Napoleonic hegemony and those who supported the ‘balance of power’. London argued, self-interestedly but also persuasively, that the defence of the international freedoms of states, and the whole body of the law of nations itself, rested on Britain’s maritime dominance. This notion was furiously resisted by some but grudgingly recognised by others which explains the ambivalence with which many regarded the events at Copenhagen in 1807. Brendan Simms is Professor of the History of European International Relations and Director of the Forum on Geopolitics at the University of Cambridge. His publications, which have been translated into many languages, European and non-European, include Europe, the struggle for supremacy, 1453 to the present day (Penguin Press, 2013), Britain’s Europe. A thousand years of conflict and cooperation (Penguin Press, 2016) and Hitler. Only the world was enough (Penguin Press, 2019).
Transition to psychosis is among the most adverse outcomes of clinical high-risk (CHR) syndromes encompassing ultra-high risk (UHR) and basic symptom states. Clinical risk calculators may facilitate an early and individualized interception of psychosis, but their real-world implementation requires thorough validation across diverse risk populations, including young patients with depressive syndromes.
This paper studies the economic consequences of the West’s foray into China after the Opium War (1839-42), when Western colonial influence was introduced in dozens of so-called treaty ports. We document a turnaround during the 19th century in the nature of China’s capital markets. Whereas before the Opium War, coastal cities were of relatively minor importance, the treaty port system of the West transformed China into an economy focused on coastal areas and on international trade that aligned with the trading interests of the West. We show, first, that the West had a positive impact on China’s economy during the 19th century. It brought down local interest rates, and regions under Western influence exhibited both higher rates of industry growth and technology adoption. Second, the geographic scope of influence went far beyond the ports, impacting most of China. Interest rates fell by more than a quarter in the immediate vicinity of the ports and still by almost ten percent at distances of 450 kilometers from treaty ports. The development of China was not simply propelled by its own pre-1800 history, or by post-1978 reforms. The nearly 100 years of semi-colonization have shaped China’s economy today as one focused on the coastal areas.
Large neuroimaging efforts in human populations have potentiated discoveries about the brain and its disorders. Yet, preclinical research in animal models remains a central experimental tool to establish causal mechanisms behind these discoveries. Functional imaging experiments in rodents are marked by large qualitative differences, despite using similar imaging systems and animals with common genetical backgrounds. In this talk, I will present the advances in our multi-center collaborative projects to improve and standardize functional imaging in rodents.
Kemal Goktas is a Turkish legal scholar, author and award-winning journalist who has written for Radikal, Sabah, Vatan, Milliyet, Cumhuriyet. Kemal is a former Journalist Fellow of the Reuters Institute. In 2018 he published this paper on reporting human rights violations in Turkey.
How does the goal of small-group deliberation – to facilitate discussion ("discussion based") or to reach a collective decision ("voting based") – affect its performance? Small-group deliberation has been lauded as a valuable means to both ends, but few research have looked at the effect of different goal definition on the deliberative process itself. This study plans to investigate this issue by focusing on two key aspects of the process: (1) sincerity of revealed preferences by individual participants and (2) quality of the final decision reached by the group (if any). It will hypothesise that discussion-based deliberation is more apt at encouraging sincere revelation, while voting-based deliberation is better at reaching a better group decision. Such relationship is conditioned by the interaction of the size of the decisive coalition and the level of self-interest. The study will use an online experiment with a 3x3 factorial design to empirically examine the hypothesised relationships.
Bringing together writers, academics and students across disciplines, this panel event will seek to bridge the different paths to Holocaust education. Led by Fiona Zeka (Hertford College)
Seminar series: Rupture and Reconciliation in Contexts of Displacement Convened by Cory Rodgers (Oxford University) and Elias Lopez (Comillas Pontifical University). Campion Hall and the Refugee Studies Centre present a seven-part seminar series on reconciliation in the contexts of displacement This event approaches displacement through the theme of ‘rupture’. Policy definitions of ‘displacement’ often focus on physical dislocation and geographical journeys, and the term is used interchangeably with ‘forced migration’. Yet displacement is often characterised less by mobility than immobilization, with many stuck behind borders or in camps and detention centres. Rather than taking movement as the defining feature of displacement, this event focuses on ‘rupture’ of the relations that constitute a sense of place and belonging: between self and community, citizen and state, inhabitant and home. People are dispossessed of their lands, cut off from their livelihoods, and deprived of a sense of security and order. In the face of such rupture, many organisations are implementing programmes focused on reconciliation. While reconciliation has long been recognized as a crucial aspect of voluntary return and repatriation for refugees, it has more recently become a priority in contexts of protracted displacement, where xenophobia and the politicization of migration can rupture the norms of hospitality and tolerance that make asylum possible. This seminar series, hosted by Campion Hall and the Refugee Studies Centre, is proposed as an opportunity to discuss the possibilities for and challenges to ‘reconciliation’ in contexts of displacement. It will bring together academics as well as practitioners working in diverse contexts and according to different traditions to exchange insights and engage critically with the conceptual and practical dimensions of reconciliation. We intend to interrogate the historical roots of reconciliation interventions; to consider the different roles played by international, national, local, faith-based and refugee-run institutions, and to spotlight some of the unintended consequences of reconciliation work. The seminars take place every Wednesday at 3pm - 4.30pm from 26 January to 9 March 2022. Details: https://www.campion.ox.ac.uk/events/rupture-and-reconciliation-contexts-displacement
This seminar is part of the "Rupture and Reconciliation in Contexts of Displacement " series, hosted by Campion Hall and the Refugee Studies Centre.
Seminar 3 in a series on 'Race, Borders, and Global (Im)mobility', convened by Dr Hanno Brankamp Seminar abstract: Centralized biometric systems have become ubiquitous in the humanitarian and refugee aid sectors in recent years, but are also facing increasing scrutiny. This talk will discuss a particularly poignant example of exclusion caused by the introduction of biometric refugee registration in Kenya. Considered neither citizens nor refugees, tens of thousands of citizens cannot obtain national IDs because their fingerprints are in refugee databases. The ongoing dilemma of those caught between the national and refugee systems is more than just a case of techno-solutionism gone wrong. The problem of double registration in Kenya also exposes key institutional tensions at the heart of the refugee sector and raises fundamental challenges for those who see in digital identity technologies the prospect for a ‘post-social’ politics of inclusion and redistribution.
Biography: Janet Afary holds the Mellichamp Chair in Global Religion and Modernity at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is a Professor of Religious Studies. Afary is a historian of modern Iran and has a PhD in History and Near East Studies from the University of Michigan, where her dissertation received the Distinguished Rackham Dissertation Award. Previously she taught at the Department of History and the Program in Women’s Studies at Purdue University, where she was appointed a University Faculty Scholar. Her books include: Sexual Politics in Modern Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2009, winner of the British Society for Middle East Studies Annual Book Prize); The Iranian Constitutional Revolution: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, and the Origins of Feminism (Columbia University Press, 1996, winner of Dehkhoda Institute Book Awardj; and (with Kevin B. Anderson) Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (University of Chicago Press, 2005, winner of the Latifeh Yarshater Book Award for Iranian Women’s Studies); (with John R. Perry) Charand-o Parand: Revolutionary Satire in Iran (Yale University Press, 2016, Honorable Mention Lois Roth Persian Translation Prize), and more recently the edited volume (with Jesilyn Faust) Iranian Romance in the Digital Age: From Arranged Marriage to White Marriage (Bloomsbury Press, 2021). Abstract of talk: Informal marriage, a form of common law marriage, has long been an acceptable social practice in some parts of the Muslim world. These unions come under different names and are subject to different set of practices compared to formal marriage (nekah daem). They have historically taken place between an older man of means and a much younger impoverished woman, and were thus closer to legal concubinage. In recent decades the nature of these informal unions has changed in both the Shi’i and Sunni world. The unions are now more loving relationships between people of similar age, with college education, who for a variety of reasons are not ready or able to enter into formal marriages. Our Facebook survey of more than 10,000 Muslim respondents allowed us to examine the nature of over four hundred such informal marriages. Our findings suggest that among a certain segment of the population who are connected to the internet, the traditional gendered order of matrimony is breaking down. Non-formal marriage, long taken as a marker of female subordination is being modernized in the interests of women and men. Impoverished engaged couples who want to marry but whose families cannot afford the expenses of a formal wedding resort to informal unions. For women – particularly those who were married before, this is a way to legitimately cohabitate without the asymmetrical order of formal marriage and having to face the possibility of another divorce. For men who have never been married, this is a way to avoid the extensive financial obligations of a formal marriage and the cost of potential divorce. Overall, we are witnessing the growth of more fragile marital relations and a weakening of the parent’s role in arranging the marriage of their children.
As both commander in chief and holder of the highest elected office in the United States, presidents must inevitably balance competing objectives of the national interest and political survival when assessing alternative military strategies in war. Yet while we all have some intuitive sense that elections “matter” in some way, exactly how, why or when they do so is not well understood. This talk will explore the ways in which electoral pressures push and pull presidents away from courses action they otherwise deem strategically optimal during an ongoing war. Drawing on recently declassified documents and interviews with former administration officials and senior military leaders, it will demonstrate how the nature and timing of the Iraq surge of 2007, as well as the pace and finality of the subsequent drawdown, were shaped by considerations related to the domestic political calendar. Dr Andrew Payne is the Hedley Bull Research Fellow in International Relations at the University of Oxford and a Junior William Golding Research Fellow at Brasenose College. His research explores the impact of domestic politics on US foreign policy, with a particular geographical focus on the Middle East. He is currently working on a book manuscript examining the influence of electoral cycle in shaping wartime presidential decision-making, and has wider interests in civil-military relations, diplomatic history, and domestic constraints on US grand strategy. His writing has been published in International Security, Politics, International Affairs, the Conversation and the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage series. In addition to his academic work, Andrew serves on the board of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London.
We are delighted that Dr Heidi Rehm will give the 2022 CPM Dr Stanley Ho Memorial Lecture.
Never before has our understanding of systematic botany been more crucial for tackling the huge and interlinked challenges of biodiversity loss and climate change. In this talk I will highlight how the understanding of plant diversity, distribution, threats and uses are paramount to providing real-world solutions that benefit nature and people. I will exemplify these points through work carried out at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in strong collaboration with partners worldwide. Specific projects include: i) advice on habitat restoration projects, including tree-planting initiatives, that take into account context-specific and evidence-based guidelines around species and genetic diversity, monitoring and stakeholder engagement; ii) the identification of Important Plant Areas, which now offer the potential of incorporating real-time, remote-sensed and citizen-science gathered data, within artificial intelligence platforms; and iii) the identification and equitable exploration of useful plant traits, such as new sources of food from orphan and neglected crops and crop wild relatives, which hold the potential of supporting transitions towards socio-environmentally sustainable livelihoods in the world’s poorest nations. A critical theme running through all these projects, and one that is crucial to their success, is the integration of systematic botany into wider societal contexts.
REES welcomes Elizabeth White to discuss A Modern History of Russian Childhood.
Discussant: Giuseppe Spatafora
Forthcoming
Link to MS Teams channel (includes readings): https://teams.microsoft.com/l/team/19%3a51bb501c36f14b4c9f2c0bd9f152f605%40thread.tacv2/conversations?groupId=f4c0f545-f21d-4e58-af42-c2ed0e91355b&tenantId=cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91 Link to seminar meeting: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3a51bb501c36f14b4c9f2c0bd9f152f605%40thread.tacv2/1641819090466?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%223eaa6534-462c-4297-b7ed-a93e8053acdc%22%7d
https://www.medawar.ox.ac.uk/team/philipp-hackstein Meeting Details:- https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_NzUwMGZiMGEtY2Q2ZC00ZDE0LWEwODgtZTkwM2U1ZGQyYjIz%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22bad99c7f-66a2-4137-a080-7c4dc45c6d55%22%7d
Whereas the contemporary era in China is often depicted in terms of rampant, ideologically vacuous commodification, the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) is typically cast as a time of ubiquitous politics and scarce goods. Indeed, the media and material culture of the Cultural Revolution are often characterized as a void, out of which the postsocialist world of commodity consumption somehow sprang fully formed. By contrast, this talk argues that the Cultural Revolution media environment and the ways in which its constituent elements engaged contemporaneous discourses of materiality and political economy anticipated the widespread commodification now so closely associated with the Reform Period (1978-present). Laurence Coderre is an assistant professor of East Asian Studies at New York University.
Suggested preparatory reading: TBA
Suggested preparatory reading: J. Twigg, The University of Cambridge and the English Revolution, 1625-1688 (1990), 103-205; W.A.L. Vincent, The State and School Education, 1640-1660, in England and Wales: a survey based on printed sources (London, 1950) B. Worden, ‘Politics, Piety, and Learning: Cromwellian Oxford’, in his God’s Instruments, Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell (2012), 91-193
Commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day has become a significant part in the UK’s calendar, with civic, religious, political, and community leaders coming together every year in remembrance and thousands of events happening in local areas across the country. The launch of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation and the building of a UK Holocaust Memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens seeks to embed Holocaust remembrance and education at the heart of UK civic life. In this event, we hear Holocaust Educational Trust Regional Ambassador Eloise Bishop in conversation with the project historian for the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation, Martin Winstone, about the challenges and opportunities facing Holocaust remembrance in the UK.
Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend.
Associate Professor Lisa Heather: "Targeting metabolite-driven signalling pathways in the type 2 diabetic heart" Type 2 diabetes is a metabolic disorder that causes complications for many organs throughout the body. The leading cause of mortality in type 2 diabetes is cardiovascular disease, however, the mechanisms linking diabetes to heart failure remain unclear. The heart becomes metabolically abnormal early on in the progression of type 2 diabetes, and our work focuses on understanding the consequences of this deranged metabolism. We investigate the different roles metabolites play within the cell, and how changing the concentrations of metabolites in diseases such as diabetes can influence diverse processes via regulation of metabolite-sensitive signalling pathways. Ultimately, by understanding the processes metabolism controls we can start to unravel the pathophysiology of diabetes, and identify new metabolic targets for therapy. Lisa Heather Biography: Lisa Heather is an Associate Professor and British Heart Foundation Fellow at the University of Oxford. She completed an undergraduate degree in Medical Biochemistry at the University of Surrey. She studied for her DPhil at the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics at the University of Oxford, investigating the effects of heart failure on cardiac substrate metabolism. Lisa was awarded a RD Lawrence Early Career Fellowship by Diabetes UK in 2011, followed by a British Heart Foundation Basic Science Intermediate Fellowship in 2018. Her research group studies cardiac metabolic dysfunction in type 2 diabetes. Her current research focuses on the signalling roles metabolites play within the heart, and how these signalling pathways become dysfunction in type 2 diabetic heart. She was the recipient of the Innovators in Diabetes Award in 2012, Lilly Diabetes Award in 2013 and the Bayliss-Starling Award from the Physiological Society in 2016. Dr Mootaz Salman: "Defining mechanisms of blood-brain barrier dysfunction in dementia using advanced organ-on-a-chip models" Dementia is a multifactorial and heterogeneous condition and leading cause of morbidity and mortality. My work aims to answer the question: how does inflammation-mediated blood-brain barrier (BBB) dysfunction lead to the development of dementia? Increasing evidence supports the involvement of BBB dysfunction in neurodegenerative disorders including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer's; it is evident that this dysfunction happens even before the onset of dementia. In-depth understanding of the cell-cell interactions and signalling pathways between the core elements of the BBB will help in defining therapeutic targets for the prevention of dementia. In my previous work, I identified a number of molecular targets that contribute to barrier integrity function in astrocytes and pericytes and developed microfluidic BBB-on-a-chip models. I will build on this expertise and establish advanced models using patient-derived iPSC lines in order to investigate the role of glymphatic system under mechanobiological factors and determine how biophysical factors such as blood pressure, flow rate and heartbeat control brain waste clearance. My work will provide new tools to understand lifelong brain health, describe the basis of BBB dysfunction in the occurrence and development of dementia, and provide a platform to develop new treatments for neurodegeneration. Mootaz Salman Biography: Mootaz graduated as a Clinical Pharmacist before winning two international scholarships for his UK-based MSc and PhD studies investigating the mechanisms of brain water transport where he discovered a novel pharmacological framework for developing drugs to treat traumatic CNS injuries and stroke. This project was a success and one of its exciting outcomes is a drug candidate that will start phase I/II human clinical trial for traumatic brain injury this year. Mootaz then secured his first postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital working with Professor Tom Kirchhausen. In this work, he applied microfluidic engineering, advanced imaging and cell biology to develop the world-first in vitro 3D microvessel-on-a-chip platform that can be used for multiple high-resolution dynamic and microscopic imaging modalities. He used this platform to identify the transport mechanism of the recently FDA-approved drug aducanumab in collaboration with Biogen. (Aducanumab is the first approved drug that attempts to treat a possible cause of Alzheimer’s disease in 20 years). Mootaz has joined DPAG in late 2020. As part of the Wade-Martins group, he is working on developing novel therapeutic targets and new treatments for Parkinson’s using CRISPR/Cas9 of physiologically-relevant human patient-derived iPSC lines. Mootaz have published 20 articles in 7 years,13 as sole/joint first author and 6 as corresponding author. He holds 2 grants as PI, and awarded another as Co-PI during his time in Boston, won 3 major prizes and established significant industrial collaborations (Biogen, GSK and Mimetas). He’s an Associate Editor for 4 journals and ad hoc reviewer for more than 50 others. Within DPAG, he is appointed as a senior doctoral training advisor (SDTA) and a member of graduate studies, and outreach and public engagement committees. In recognition of his outstanding work at a critical stage of his career, Mootaz has recently been awarded the prestigious Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship to establish his own independent program of research in close collaboration with the Wade-Martins group where he will be investigating the mechanisms of BBB dysfunction in dementia using advanced 3D mechanobiologial organ-on-a-chip models (which is the title of his talk today where he will present some of his unpublished data and discuss future plans).
Despite heightened awareness of the detrimental impact of hate speech on social media platforms on affected communities and public discourse, there is little consensus on approaches to mitigate it. While content moderation---either by governments or social media companies---can curb online hostility, such policies may suppress valuable as well as illicit speech and might disperse rather than reduce hate speech. As an alternative strategy, an increasing number of international and non-governmental organizations (I/NGO) are employing counterspeech to confront and reduce online hate speech. Despite their growing popularity, there is scant experimental evidence on the effectiveness and design of counterspeech strategies (in the public domain). Modeling our interventions on current I/NGO practice, we conduct a series of experiments which randomly assign Twitter users who have sent messages containing hate speech to different counter speech treatments. Preliminary results point to the central role of empathy in reducing exclusionary behavior and inform the design of future counterspeech interventions. Discussant: Arun Frey (Oxford)
In the absence of a well-developed social history for Roman Britain, little has been written on the lived experience of the bottom eighty-five percent of its population, but looking at dogs and humans together helps us recuperate something of both species’ experience under Rome. This lecture considers, on the one hand, the lives of pampered and self-feeding dogs; and on the other, low-status and enslaved humans. A shared constellation of images, prejudices, and metaphors emerged in the period which explained the moral shortcomings of both canines and the poor and justified their terrible treatment. The links to the talks will be posted here: www.history.ox.ac.uk/james-ford-lectures-british-history
When Holocaust survivor Lily Ebert showed her great grandson Dov Forman a bank note she was given after liberation, he started an online search via social media and successfully tracked down the soldier who gave it to her. Their reunion 75 years later captured imaginations across the country and was widely covered in television, newspapers and radio. They have since written a book together, published by Macmillan in 2021, sharing both Lily’s memories and Dov’s journey of discovery. Here, we hear from them about their book and their experiences.
Whether you're an undergraduate, masters or DPhil student, or Staff at the University of Oxford, it is important to understand your rights and responsibilities when it comes to intellectual property (IP). This session will help you to understand what IP actually is, who "owns" it, and the things to think about when you think you have created IP. Case studies will also be presented to help explain the University's policy. Come prepared to ask any IP related questions in the second half of the session, where our expert presenters will give you the official University answers to any of your queries. In collaboration with Research Services, Oxford University Innovation, and The Careers Service.
To register, please contact the organiser at james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk. Please note that there is no need to register if you have previously subscribed to the seminar mailing list.
Come along to one of our monthly virtual drop-in sessions where a member of our team will be available to answer your questions on collaborating with industry. Monthly virtual drop-in sessions are for medical science researchers, staff and students across the University of Oxford. A member of the BPO team will be available to answer questions relating to forming collaborations with the pharmaceutical / biotech industry, including AI and digital health.
Executive functions are the set of high level cognitive skills underpinning goal-directed behaviour. They develop rapidly in childhood and predict school readiness and academic achievement. A large and robust literature is emerging documenting social gradients in children’s executive functions. Specifically, children from lower socioeconomic homes tend to score lower on measures of executive function compared to their higher socioeconomic peers. In this talk, I’ll present my research examining associations between socioeconomic status and executive functions in early childhood, the knock on effect this has on children’s school readiness and mathematical skills, and I’ll discuss ideas for what we can do to narrow inequalities in executive function development. I will argue that in order for us to best support children, we need to build better models of why the association between socioeconomic status and executive function emerges in the first place.
Dr Mishka Sinha is a Research Associate at St. John’s College, Oxford, and co-director of the project on St. John’s and the Colonial Past with Professor William Whyte. She is a cultural and intellectual historian of the modern period. Her research interests focus on the history of orientalism and the transcultural history of knowledge in the context of colonialism and empire, in particular, the transfer of knowledge from Asia to Europe. Dr Sinha's wider research and teaching interests include the history of books, institutions and disciplinary formations, conflict and collaborations between scholarly traditions, histories of language, translation and text circulations, across Europe, Asia and the United States, and particularly in light of the influence of inequalities of power on knowledge production and consumption, and vice versa. She is also interested in transcultural, oriental and occult influences on literary modernism, and has a long-standing involvement in contemporary Indian art, and art heritage, having worked in the field first as an administrator, and then a performer since 1998. Dr Sinha was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence, a Zukunftsphilologie Fellow at the Freie Universität, Berlin, and, most recently, a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of History, Cambridge which she held in conjunction with a Research Associateship at St. John’s College, Cambridge. For Zoom link, and to be added to the mailing list, please email saih@history.ox.ac.uk. Follow us on Twitter (OxfordSAIH) and Facebook (OxfordSAIHSeminar).
Part B: Dialogues with researchers
This seminar series is about economics aspects of rivalry between religious organizations and how they interact with other dimensions of religious rivalry – theological, scientific, political. The first two seminars will be online and will propose a framework for thinking about the question. The remaining six seminars, most of which will be hybrid, will be organized as structured dialogues. I will talk to leading researchers whose knowledge of particular historical, political, anthropological and geographical contexts of religious rivalry can help us to assess the value of such an approach. All members of the University are welcome to attend. No prior knowledge will be presumed (and in particular, no familiarity with economics).
Abstract will be posted in due course.
Please email **barnabas.balint@magd.ox.ac.uk** if you wish to be added to the circulation list. In 1978, the four part miniseries The Holocaust aired to some 120 million people in the United States, and the following year to some 20 million people in West Germany, a third of its population. Public interest and debate on the Holocaust’s place in collective memory skyrocketed, speaking to the power of film and television in representing the Holocaust. The use of film to tell Holocaust stories continues in a variety of forms, from Oscar winning drama Schindler’s List (1993) to Amazon Prime’s dark comedy HUNTERS (2020). But how exactly should the Holocaust be represented on film, if it even should be at all? This week, we will discuss the complexities of Holocaust representation on screen by viewing László Nemes’s 2015 Son of Saul and reading an article by Barry Langford on representations of the Sonderkommando in Son of Saul and The Grey Zone (2001). Son of Saul, directed by László Nemes, 2015. (Available in the Taylor Library for free or can be viewed online). Barry Langford, “'We Did Something': Framing Resistance in Cinematic Depictions of the Sonderkommando” in Testimonies of Resistance: Representations of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando, edited by Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams, (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2019), p. 287-306.
Parkinson's disease is heterogeneous in symptom presentation and progression. Increased understanding of both aspects can enable better patient management and improve clinical trial design. Previous approaches to modelling Parkinson's disease progression assumed static progression trajectories within subgroups and have not adequately accounted for complex medication effects. Our objective was to develop a statistical progression model of Parkinson's disease that accounts for intra-individual and inter-individual variability and medication effects. In this longitudinal data study, data were collected for up to 7-years on 423 patients with early Parkinson's disease and 196 healthy controls from the Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI) longitudinal observational study. A contrastive latent variable model was applied followed by a novel personalised input-output hidden Markov model to define disease states. Clinical significance of the states was assessed using statistical tests on seven key motor or cognitive outcomes (mild cognitive impairment, dementia, dyskinesia, presence of motor fluctuations, functional impairment from motor fluctuations, Hoehn and Yahr score, and death) not used in the learning phase. The results were validated in an independent sample of 610 patients with Parkinson's disease from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke Parkinson's Disease Biomarker Program (PDBP). We developed a statistical progression model of early Parkinson's disease that accounts for intra-individual and inter-individual variability and medication effects. Our predictive model discovered non-sequential, overlapping disease progression trajectories, supporting the use of non-deterministic disease progression models, and suggesting static subtype assignment might be ineffective at capturing the full spectrum of Parkinson's disease progression.
Summary: Citizens Advice's Market Meltdown report outlines how the regulator failed to take meaningful action against unfit and unsustainable energy suppliers, with the subsequent failures due to costs households over £2.6 billion as well as the billions of taxpayer funding set aside for Bulb. Household finances are also set to be under increasing strain from huge rises in energy bills in 2022. The presentation will outline the market failures that have had a direct impact on the current gas market crisis, the challenges of supporting households in the short and medium term, and how to continue to develop the policy frameworks needed to support the net zero transition.
Professor Peter Davidson, Senior Research Fellow in Renaissance and Baroque Studies at Campion Hall, will be delivering the first Campion Lecture of the 2021-22 academic year, entitled: “St Robert Southwell and His Readers." The Jesuit priest, poet, and martyr, St Robert Southwell (1561–1595) was one of the most innovative and accomplished poets of the sixteenth century. In the years after his death, his devotional poetry circulated in secret amongst the Recusant Catholic Community and became one of the best selling printed books in England. Yet Southwell has to some degree, to this day, been written out of the history of English Literature, and he is still conspicuous by his absence. In this online lecture, Professor Peter Davidson makes an attempt to solve this puzzle through examining Southwell’s cross-confessional readership in the years after his death and his profound influence on subsequent devotional writers such as Donne and Herbert.
Darkhan is a former fellow who is Digital Editor at RFE/RL's Kazakh service. He was arrested for his coverage of the protests earlier this year, and will talk to us about the current situation for journalists.
This seminar is part of the "Rupture and Reconciliation in Contexts of Displacement " series, hosted by Campion Hall and the Refugee Studies Centre.
Seminar series: Rupture and Reconciliation in Contexts of Displacement Convened by Cory Rodgers (Oxford University) and Elias Lopez (Comillas Pontifical University). Campion Hall and the Refugee Studies Centre present a seven-part seminar series on reconciliation in the contexts of displacement This event approaches displacement through the theme of ‘rupture’. Policy definitions of ‘displacement’ often focus on physical dislocation and geographical journeys, and the term is used interchangeably with ‘forced migration’. Yet displacement is often characterised less by mobility than immobilization, with many stuck behind borders or in camps and detention centres. Rather than taking movement as the defining feature of displacement, this event focuses on ‘rupture’ of the relations that constitute a sense of place and belonging: between self and community, citizen and state, inhabitant and home. People are dispossessed of their lands, cut off from their livelihoods, and deprived of a sense of security and order. In the face of such rupture, many organisations are implementing programmes focused on reconciliation. While reconciliation has long been recognized as a crucial aspect of voluntary return and repatriation for refugees, it has more recently become a priority in contexts of protracted displacement, where xenophobia and the politicization of migration can rupture the norms of hospitality and tolerance that make asylum possible. This seminar series, hosted by Campion Hall and the Refugee Studies Centre, is proposed as an opportunity to discuss the possibilities for and challenges to ‘reconciliation’ in contexts of displacement. It will bring together academics as well as practitioners working in diverse contexts and according to different traditions to exchange insights and engage critically with the conceptual and practical dimensions of reconciliation. We intend to interrogate the historical roots of reconciliation interventions; to consider the different roles played by international, national, local, faith-based and refugee-run institutions, and to spotlight some of the unintended consequences of reconciliation work. The seminars take place every Wednesday at 3pm - 4.30pm from 26 January to 9 March 2022. Details: https://www.campion.ox.ac.uk/events/rupture-and-reconciliation-contexts-displacement
Seminar 3 - Sovereignty Neguin Yavari (University of Leipzig) speaking on ‘Islamic imperatives and Islamic rulers’ Samy Ayoub (University of Texas-Austin) speaking on ‘Law and the Exercise of Power: Debates on Political Legitimacy and Authority in the 19th - 20th centuries Egypt’ Convenors: Dr Faisal Devji (St Antony's College) and Dr Usaama al-Azami (St Antony's College)
Seminar 4 in a series on 'Race, Borders, and Global (Im)mobility', convened by Dr Hanno Brankamp Seminar abstract: Militarized global apartheid is a loosely integrated effort by countries in the global north to protect themselves against the mobility of people from the global south while consolidating racialized labor hierarchies. Militarized security empires are emerging from and shoring up global apartheid, based in the identification and containment of ‘risky’ bodies throughout the globe in concert with the expansion of securitized spaces produced through material, affective, and ontological expressions of militarism by the global north. These emergent imperial formations are spatial and technological rather than territorial, and they are taking shape through imperial projects that racialize and incarcerate people while securing cosmopolitan class privilege and capitalist extraction across borders.
Reform is a common theme in Greek political discourse. However, its content remains vague and controversial. Our interventions will discuss reforms in Greece from the point of view of “significant departures from the status quo”. Such a perspective refers to the extent to which reforms address deeper policy issues and challenge existing institutional arrangements in a substantial way. Examples of reforms changing Greece are presented in the fields of public administration, and the business environment. We further discuss some of the reform challenges that lie ahead.
Sophy Roberts is a writer based in West Dorset. An alumni of the Kellogg College Centre for Creative Writing, she is also a graduate of Oxford University and the Columbia School of Journalism. Sophy is a regular contributor on travel conservation issues to The Financial Times, among other titles. Sophy’s writing focuses on remote places, from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Chad, to Tajikistan and Russia. Her critically acclaimed first book, The Lost Pianos of Siberia, was published in 2020. This seminar is open to all, no booking necessary. Refreshments will be served from 17:00, the seminar will begin at 17:30.
In association with the British Association for Holocaust Studies, we welcome Holocaust historians – including Cristopher Browning – to discuss perpetrator motivations, exploring some of the latest research. This event aims to bring together different approaches and analytical categories. Chaired by Barnabas Balint and Charlie Knight, BAHS Postgraduate Representatives.
Get insight from Oxford researchers as they unveil new policy briefs and discuss how to make electric vehicle charging more accessible About this event As the UK Government committed to end the sale of solely fossil-fuelled cars by 2030, the uptake of electric vehicles (EVs) is accelerating, and with it the demand for charging infrastructure. Meeting this demand among households who can’t charge at home is one of the biggest challenges for local policy-makers across the country. It is not only a question of capacity, but also location and service. What do residents want from local EV charging infrastructure and services? And how can their local authorities support them? Join us at this webinar designed for transport practitioners and policy-makers, particularly those working in UK local governments, for the launch of three policy briefs by University of Oxford researchers: Enabling the Acceleration of EV Adoption - discusses regional forecasting of EV uptake and the release of GECCO: the Geospatial Evaluator for EV Charging in Car parks Overnight. Preferences for public EV charging - shares findings on consumer preferences for public charging in residential areas. Charging when parking – a social change of routine - highlights the implications of adding EV charging to existing parking routines. The webinar will also include a panel discussion with policy-makers from Oxfordshire County Council and OZEV sharing their first-hand experience of the challenges they’ve encountered and their successes in implementing public EV charging infrastructure. Speakers Chair: Professor Tim Schwanen, Director of the Transport Studies Unit Presenting: Dr Katherine Collett, Senior Postdoctoral Researcher in the Energy and Power Group Dr Hannah Budnitz, Research Associate in Urban Mobility in the Transport Studies Unit Panel : Professor Malcolm McCulloch, Head of the Energy and Power Group Paul Gambrell, Oxfordshire County Council, Team Leader - EV Integration Harry Duguid, Policy Advisor, Local EV Infrastructure, Office for Zero Emissions Vehicles (OZEV) Q&A Professor Malcolm McCulloch, Head of the Energy and Power Group Paul Gambrell, Oxfordshire County Council, Team Leader - EV Integration Representative from Office for Zero Emissions Vehicles (OZEV) Dr Katherine Collett, Senior Postdoctoral Researcher in the Energy and Power Group Dr Hannah Budnitz, Research Associate in Urban Mobility in the Transport Studies Unit
In June 2020, numerous companies that advertise on social media platforms withdrew their business, citing failures of the platforms (especially Facebook) to address the proliferation of harmful content. Many were inspired by the #StopHateForProfit campaign initiated by the Anti-Defamation League. These events invite reflection on an understudied topic: the ethics of boycotting by corporations. Under what conditions is corporate boycotting permissible, required, supererogatory, or forbidden? Although value-driven consumerism has generated significant recent discussion in applied ethics, that discussion has focused almost exclusively on the consumption choices of individuals. As this paper underscores, value-driven consumerism by business corporations complicates these issues and invites further research. The paper argues that corporate boycotts represent extra-democratic tactics and, as such, should be undertaken only in exceptional circumstances and with specific constraints. However, there are at least certain cases where corporate boycotts appear to be morally required. These conclusions put pressure on prominent theories of corporate social responsibility, which either make no space for corporate boycotts or fail to demarcate that space. The paper also contributes to debates over how to hold social media platforms accountable.
Students tell us that they would like more formative and interactive opportunities in Canvas. This term, the Centre for Teaching and Learning is offering four 30-min lunchtime webinars for staff on how to use specific Canvas tools to enhance interactivity and enable formative assessment and feedback. 1. Canvas: Using H5P to create interactive content – Tue 25 Jan, 12:30-13:00 2. Canvas: Using the Assignments Tool – Thu 10 Feb, 12:30-13:00 3. Canvas: Using the Quiz tools – Tue 22 Feb, 12:30-13:00 4. Canvas: Using the Oxford Manage Courses (Rollover) Tool – Thu 10 Mar, 12:30-13:00 All sessions are free of charge and booking is required. Visit ctl.web.ox.ac.uk/training-webinars#
REES welcomes Dimitar Bechev, Nicu Popescu and Stanislav Secrieru to discuss Russia Rising: Putin's Foreign Policy in the Middle East and North Africa.
Many Oxford researchers who aspire to an academic career are interested in pursuing opportunities in countries around the globe, and there is much to be gained from gathering international experience in your field. This seminar aims to provide a light-touch overview of key similarities/differences between some of the key destination countries, a set of points to consider when deciding whether to follow opportunities overseas, and signposting to the best resources to help you make your decisions. This is an online event via Microsoft Teams.
Discussant: Jan Eijking
Link to MS Teams channel (includes readings): https://teams.microsoft.com/l/team/19%3a51bb501c36f14b4c9f2c0bd9f152f605%40thread.tacv2/conversations?groupId=f4c0f545-f21d-4e58-af42-c2ed0e91355b&tenantId=cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91 Link to seminar meeting: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3a51bb501c36f14b4c9f2c0bd9f152f605%40thread.tacv2/1641819090466?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%223eaa6534-462c-4297-b7ed-a93e8053acdc%22%7d
Suggested preparatory reading: TBA
Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend.
What is the relationship between Chinese International Relations (IR) scholars and China’s foreign policy? How do we study China’s foreign policy through the eyes of Chinese IR scholars? Although Chinese scholars are normally quoted as valuable sources in the study of Chinese foreign policy in general, there is no systematic study of China’s IR scholars per se. This talk will examine an emerging research program focusing on the study of Chinese international relations (IR) scholars, especially their internal debates, as a new venue to understand China’s foreign policy. In addition, researchers need to pursue theoretical innovations on the relationship between different types of IR scholars and foreign policy inquiries, advance multi-method research designs across the different methods of field interviews, textual analysis, and opinion surveys, as well as encourage international collaboration between Chinese scholars and non-Chinese scholars. Kai He is Professor of International Relations and Director of the Centre for Governance and Public Policy, Griffith University, Australia.
Associate Professor Victoria Bajo Lorenzana: "Descending Cortical Loops for Auditory Plasticity" The ability to modify the neural activity evoked by sensory experience is the basis of learning. Descending projections from cortical areas are among the most prominent pathways in any sensory system, suggesting their role in modulating subcortical processing. In this seminar, I will provide details and examples about how corticofugal connections contribute to auditory perception and multisensory integration. One of the main neural loops connects the primary auditory areas with the core auditory thalamus. Removing layer VI pyramidal neurons that project to the ventral division of the medial geniculate body affects pitch perception that is essential to identify auditory objects by impairing the ability of ferrets to discriminate mistuning tones. Another descending loop connects the auditory cortex with the inferior colliculus in the midbrain. Silencing optogenetically ArchT-expressing neurons in adult ferrets, we show that within-trial activity in the auditory cortex is required for training-dependent recovery in sound-localization accuracy following monaural deprivation. This learning-induced auditory plasticity requires the functional integrity of the cortico-collicular pathway. The selective elimination of the large coticocollicular pyramidal cells in layer V impairs the ability of animals to adapt to changes in the binaural cue values produced by unilateral ear occlusion. Beyond their role in unisensory processing, descending cortical loops mediate communication between primary sensory cortical areas. In mice, whiskers stimulation causes suppression of sound-evoked activity in the primary auditory cortex. This suppression is implemented through a descending circuit that links the primary somatosensory cortex, via the auditory midbrain, with thalamic neurons that project to primary auditory cortex. Those same neural circuits responsible for auditory plasticity in the adult brain are likely to be involved in the generation of tinnitus, a phantom auditory perception. Using optogenetic methods for manipulating brain activity, I am exploring the changes that occur within the auditory cortex when tinnitus is experienced to find out whether those changes can be reversed to alleviate this condition in a clinical context. Victoria Bajo Lorenzana Biography: Victoria Bajo Lorenzana was educated at the University of Salamanca in Spain, where she obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Medicine and Surgery and a doctorate (MD PhD) in Neuroscience. She worked as postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and back at the University of Salamanca with a Spanish Early Career Award and an EU Human Capital and Mobility Grant. After a brief step in a junior tenured position in Spain, she moved to Oxford with the Millennium when she was awarded a Marie Curie fellowship to work in the Department of Physiology. She works in the Auditory Neuroscience Group mentored by Andy King since 2003. In 2009, the University of Oxford conferred on her the title of University Research Lecturer and in 2014 the title of Associate Professor. She has been approved as Principal Investigator by DPAG Executive Committee in 2015 and she is also Lecturer in Neuroscience at Balliol. The focus of Victoria’s career from start is auditory plasticity with a robust reputation in the field endorsed by more than 50 papers published and research projects funded, including three times in a row by Deafness Research UK. Her wok has been seminal establishing the role of specific neural circuits, particularly corticofugal connections in sensory perception and learning-induced auditory plasticity. Using a combination of anatomical tracing techniques including gene expression, optogenetics, electrophysiology in vitro and in vivo in awake animal, and operant conditioning behavioural paradigms she has elucidated the essential role of the auditory cortex in perceptual learning. Currently she is investigating the neural circuits responsible for auditory plasticity in the adult brain involved in the generation of tinnitus, a phantom auditory perception. One of her interests is to identify and be able to manipulate neural circuits in the adult brain that contribute to tinnitus and to find out how the condition is affected by sleep. Dr Richard Tyser: "Form and function in the developing heart" The heart is the first organ to form and function during development, essential in providing the embryo with oxygen and nutrients. The first morphologically recognisable heart structure in the developing embryo is the cardiac crescent, which forms due to the coordinated addition of cells from multiple different progenitor sources at around embryonic day 8.0 in the mouse. To date, our research has assessed the onset of function and, more recently, focused on mapping the anatomical and transcriptional profile of cardiac progenitors during cardiac crescent formation. This work identified a previously unknown cardiac progenitor population which we termed the Juxta cardiac field (JCF). We found that the JCF could give rise to at least two cardiac-related lineages: cardiomyocytes and the epicardium, providing a paradigm for how the heart forms. We have begun to translate these findings into the human by performing the first transcriptional characterisation of human gastrulation at around 17 days of development, as well as spatially resolving the transcriptional profile of cells in the 3-week-old human heart. Exploring how the heart develops not only addresses questions of fundamental biological significance, but also aids in our understanding of disease; by establishing the underlying causes of disease as well as providing a blueprint for strategies on how best to treat them. Richard Tyser Biography: Richard Tyser's work is focused on understanding how the heart forms and starts to function during embryonic development. To study this he uses a number of different techniques including live time-lapse imaging and single-cell transcriptomics. He was awarded a BSc degree in Biomedical Science with Industrial Experience from the University of Manchester. During his degree he undertook a placement year at the University of Nevada, Reno (USA) investigating cAMP signalling in cardiomyocytes with Professor Robert Harvey as well as a summer placement studying cardiomyocyte calcium handling with Professor David Eisner. He then moved to London and completed a British Heart Foundation funded PhD in Cardiovascular Medicine at University College London working with Professor Paul Riley. His PhD studies looked at functional calcium handling during early heart formation and its role in subsequent heart development. On completion of his PhD, he started postdoctoral studies with Professor Shankar Srinivas at the University of Oxford, working as part of a Wellcome Trust funded consortium to investigate early mammalian lineage decisions. During this time his work focused on using single cell sequencing and imaging to characterise the different cell types that are present in the forming heart. In 2018, he was awarded a British Heart Foundation Immediate Basic Research Fellowship to study how the first heartbeat is initiated. Overall his hope is that this research will improve our understanding of congenital heart defects and will suggest new strategies to help treat heart disease and arrhythmias.
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Dogs were not only good to think with in the Roman period or to deploy when meditating on, performing, or normalizing Roman society’s stark inequalities. They were also central participants in acts undertaken to mediate between the everyday and the uncanny. In this lecture we explore their roles in engaging with the divine at temples, shrines, and in cemeteries. The links to the talks will be posted here: www.history.ox.ac.uk/james-ford-lectures-british-history
Local landed elites are expected to oppose private property rights out of fear of losing traditional privileges in land tenure. In this paper, I advance a theory of property rights formation in contexts of low infrastructural power and relative land abundance. I contend that the exogenous abolition of labor-repressive arrangements encourages landed elites to adopt private property rights as a legal means to prevent free rural workers from having access to land and thus reduce the cost of labor. I test this argument in Imperial Brazil, where an external ban on the Altantic slave trade pushed planters to endorse the 1850 Land Law. Using novel archival data, I show that planter parliamentarians were more likely to vote in favor of the new law. I also show that planters in parishes with greater shares of slave population were more likely to voluntarily formalize their plantations as private freeholds to subsidize immigrant labor. Land formalization in turn facilitated the introduction of indentured labor and evictions. These findings reveal how landed elites strategically exploited one of the linchpins of private property to keep labor cheap: the right to exclude others. Discussant: Andres Guiot-Isaac (Oxford)
Most bacteria on this planet are found within macroscopic, surface-attached, multi-cellular communities known as biofilms. Biofilms represent a key developmental state of prokaryotic existence, and understanding the fundamental molecular and cell biology of how biofilms are formed is an outstanding problem, relevant to understanding several important natural processes including human infections and the maintenance of microbiomes. My laboratory uses structural biology techniques, coupled with high-resolution imaging to study general principles governing bacterial biofilm formation. We use electron cryomicroscopy (cryo-EM) and tomography (cryo-ET) to resolve structures of molecules that mediate biofilm formation. Correlated light and electron microscopy (CLEM) and mass spectrometry are used to support our investigations. We combine in vitro reconstitution of key molecules with in situ imaging to understand how pathogenic bacteria such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa form biofilms. One of the central techniques used in the laboratory is cryo-ET, and we are heavily involved in developing methods for in situ macromolecular structure determination using cryo-ET. We have developed several imaging and image-processing techniques, which we have used to solve structures of macromolecules in situ directly in their cellular context. Method development efforts in the laboratory are driven by, and are highly complementary to the biological focus on understanding biofilm formation. In this seminar, I will provide an update of recent results in the laboratory in studying bacterial biofilms.
To register, please contact the organiser at james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk. Please note that there is no need to register if you have previously subscribed to the seminar mailing list.
Dr. Nazmul S. Sultan is George Kingsley Roth Research Fellow in Politics and International Studies at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge. Dr. Sultan is a political theorist with particular interests in the history of political thought, empire and anticolonial thought, popular sovereignty, and modern conceptions of the global. His current book project explores the question of popular sovereignty in modern Indian political thought and offers a new interpretation of the anticolonial democratic project. His research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Economic and Political Weekly, among others. Before joining Cambridge, he completed his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Chicago. He also received an MA in Political Science from the University of Chicago and a BA in Philosophy and Politics from the City University of New York. Dr. Sultan will be joining the University of British Columbia as an Assistant Professor of Political Theory in fall 2022. For Zoom link, and to be added to the mailing list, please email saih@history.ox.ac.uk. Follow us on Twitter (OxfordSAIH) and Facebook (OxfordSAIHSeminar).
Over the past decade, the US National Institutes of Health has made a series of reforms aimed at increasing the rigor and reproducibility of the research it funds. These changes happened with surprising speed—the NIH Office of the Director announced its plans for reforms in 2014, and by early 2016 these changes had been rolled out across all institutes and centers. What were the historical circumstances that laid the groundwork for these rapid policy changes? This talk argues that the evidence-based medicine movement and declining productivity in the pharmaceutical industry created the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a crisis in preclinical research. For most of the 2000s, the received wisdom was that slowdowns in drug development were the result of a lack of translational research infrastructure that could move knowledge from bench to bedside. A series of papers in late 2011 and early 2012 flipped this narrative, arguing that the true problem was the quality of the knowledge being produced at the bench. What seemed to many to be an implausible argument found support from researchers who had been applying EMB techniques to preclinical data, collecting evidence of bias in bench research. Identifying these origins of this contemporary crisis is helpful for thinking about who is most likely to benefit from reproducibility reforms.
This seminar series is about economics aspects of rivalry between religious organizations and how they interact with other dimensions of religious rivalry – theological, scientific, political. The first two seminars will be online and will propose a framework for thinking about the question. The remaining six seminars, most of which will be hybrid, will be organized as structured dialogues. I will talk to leading researchers whose knowledge of particular historical, political, anthropological and geographical contexts of religious rivalry can help us to assess the value of such an approach. All members of the University are welcome to attend. No prior knowledge will be presumed (and in particular, no familiarity with economics). For those attending in person, these lectures will take place in the Old Library, All Souls College, OX1 4AL (enter via the Lodge). Registrations close at 12 noon on the day of the lecture.
Part B: Dialogues with researchers
Please note that some seminars will be held online and some in person at the Rothermere American Institute. To receive Zoom links and pre-circulated readings, please join the ALRS mailing list by sending a blank email to: alrs-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk.
Dr Gemma Lewis, University College London 15 February: ‘Maintenance or Discontinuation of Antidepressants in Primary Care’ Chair: Catherine Harmer
The Developmental Pathway Funding Scheme (DPFS) is one of the main translational funding scheme from the Medical Research Council (MRC). The scheme supports: early development and design; pre-clinical testing of novel interventions; early-phase clinical studies and trials of novel interventions (phases 1 and 2a). The University of Oxford Translational Research Office supports all applicants from the University of Oxford in the development and management of translational grants. In this drop-in session, you will be able to discuss your translational research ideas and plans to develop a compelling application for the next MRC DPSF application deadline on the 23rd of Mars 2022. Join the meeting: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_ZDQ0ZjhmZDQtODRkZi00NjBlLWJjYmYtOTMxZmY0YjRhYmYz%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%223f573382-7e9e-445e-ba86-da7485e6f410%22%7d
Joining link: https://bit.ly/3CU0QEQ
This winter, Russia massed more than 100,000 troops along Ukraine’s borders, sparking fears of a wider war with repercussions for the entire European continent. A ground invasion of Ukraine is a war that Russia would likely win — but at a very high cost in blood and treasure. Since 2014, the Ukrainian government has rebuilt its regular military into a formidable fighting force. With a core cadre of officers and enlisted personnel who have been hardened by eight years of constant combat in the Donbas, Ukraine’s military is rapidly modernizing its equipment and professionalizing its personnel. Moreover, Ukrainian civil society has already demonstrated its resolve to mount a nationwide resistance campaign against a large-scale Russian incursion. After nearly eight years, the war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region is far from over. Along a fortified front line, Ukraine’s military continues to fight against a combined force of Russian regulars and conscripts drawn from the occupied Donbas territories. The February 2015 Minsk II cease-fire froze the Donbas conflict along its current boundaries and generally limited its intensity by banning certain heavy weapons. But combat never ended. And with two of Europe’s largest land armies trading fire every day in the Donbas, there’s always the chance that this static, stalemated conflict will escalate into a far bigger and deadlier disaster. Peterson will discuss the current conditions on the front lines in eastern Ukraine, the evolution of Ukraine’s military since 2014, and the potential for a nationwide irregular resistance campaign should Russia embark on a full-scale invasion. Nolan Peterson is a war correspondent who has reported extensively from the front lines in eastern Ukraine since August 2014. A former US Air Force special operations pilot with combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, Peterson’s observations from Ukraine’s battlefields have influenced policymakers at the highest levels of US government. A 2004 graduate of the US Air Force Academy, Peterson speaks French and Russian and holds multiple master’s degrees. He resides in Kyiv and is currently senior editor for Coffee or Die Magazine. Peterson’s military memoir, Why Soldiers Miss War, was published by Casemate Publishers in 2019.
There are limited availabilities of disease course-altering drugs for early-stage Alzheimer’s disease at this time. One probable reason may be the difficulties of stratifying and recruiting the cohort with those who are healthy and/or with prodromal stages of Alzheimer’s dementia to effectively test the drug with. It can be hypothesized that the traditional biomarkers may be more surrogate markers-like when it comes to cognitive functionalities, rather indicating the correlations of notable disease characteristics to the cognitive symptoms but not direct quantification of cognitive functions for evaluation. Cognitive functionalities are also fluid and can be easily impacted by environment and other contributing factors. Thus, specific physiological markers and their ranges may not explain the drug’s cognitive endpoints in full. While there are some gold standard cognitive tests, their sensitivity in detecting and evaluating prodromal stages of dementia is relatively low. It is crucial to establish easy-to-use and self-administered digital biomarkers which are capable of quantifying and measuring actual cognitive functionalities for successful stratification of the testing cohort, evaluating treatment response and monitor changes over long term. Ipsilon System is a gamified cognitive screening and monitoring tablet application targeted for prodromal stages of dementia, utilizing simplified music notes as visuospatial stimuli to elicit motor responses. It collects time-stamped finger tapping response and its accuracy to generate parameters for assessment. Single cognitive task of visuospatial-motor encoding effectively activates the cortico-basal ganglia- thalamo-cortical circuit which has close relationship with motor control and cognition and can generate valuable data over cognitive domains often impacted among early dementia patients. We will discuss about the feasibility of music playing as cognitive task, validations of Ipsilon System as digital biomarker candidate thus far and potential computational model establishment for better understanding of dementia and predictive markers development in the future.
An international panel discussion with: Elleke Boehmer, Ankhi Mukherjee, Rob Nixon (Princeton), Ato Quayson (Stanford), Poulomi Saha (Berkeley), Jennifer Wenzel (Columbia), and Robert Young (NYU). Register in advance for this webinar: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_JEU7Q5_HQ92jfCesITGZ9A The aim of the seminar is to foster a dynamic and interdisciplinary postcolonial research culture supportive of individual scholarship. Finalists, M.St. and D.Phil. students, lecturers, fellows, scholars from across the university community – all are welcome. If you’d like to appear on the seminar mailing list, please email gavin.herbertson@stcatz.ox.ac.uk OR ann.ang@wadham.ox.ac.uk.
I study the impact of industrial policy on industrial development by considering a canonical intervention. Following a political crisis, South Korea dramatically altered its development strategy with a sector-specific industrial policy: the Heavy and Chemical Industry (HCI) drive, 1973-1979. With newly assembled data, I use the sharp introduction and withdrawal of industrial policies to study the impacts of industrial policy---during and after the intervention period. I show (1) HCI promoted the expansion and dynamic comparative advantage of directly targeted industries. (2) Using variation in exposure to policies through the input-output network, I show HCI indirectly benefited downstream users of targeted intermediates. (3) I find direct and indirect benefits of HCI persisted even after the end of HCI, following the 1979 assassination of the president. These effects include the eventual development of directly targeted exporters and their downstream counterparts. Together, my findings suggest that the temporary drive shifted Korean manufacturing into more advanced markets and created durable industrial change. These findings clarify lessons drawn from South Korea and the East Asian growth miracle.
Europe is inseparable from its history. That history has been extensively studied in terms of its political history, its economic history, its religious history, its literary and cultural history, and so on. In this talk Simon Glendinning will explore the idea of pursuing a distinctively philosophical history of Europe. At issue is a history of Europe that focuses on what, in Europe’s history and identity, ties it to philosophy. Here we are concerned not with a distinctive history of philosophy in Europe, but the significance in Europe of a distinctive philosophy of history.
Join Zoom Meeting: https://zoom.us/j/98775002179?pwd=Y2tYUVZmWW5kQ2QzVnNXRVRDWVRwQT09 Meeting ID: 987 7500 2179 Passcode: 032874
Ryan Walker, DPhil student at The Global Health Network, will speak about identifying priorities for pharmacovigilance in LMICs during the pandemic. Konnie Bellingham, researcher at the Infectious Diseases Data Observatory and based in LOMWRU, Lao PDR, will present her work on the quality of antibiotics.
The drivers of environment and development challenges are complex and cross-cutting in nature, requiring the collaboration of different disciplines and sectors, often across geographies, to understand and address them. However, the increasing disciplinary specialization has led to a corresponding fragmentation of knowledge. Approaches are needed deliver tailored knowledge for policy and practice. However, there is a lack of institutional memory, driven by lack of reporting, around how to effectively produce such knowledge for impact in the context of diverse research partnerships. Understanding this is key to increase the effectiveness of research funds and deliver impact in both practice and policy. Alexandre will present research from the Sentinel research partnership on capacities for knowledge production in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teams. The research partnership brings together academic and development organizations across the UK, Zambia, Ethiopia, and Ghana to produce research on impacts, risks, and trade-offs between the social, economic and environmental dimensions of agricultural development pathways to inform policy in Ghana, Zambia, and Ethiopia. Learning lessons will focus on individual competencies, and research team characteristics and processes, including internal communication.
In this paper we consider whether it is possible to improve women’s welfare and make progress towards gender equity despite prevailing restrictive gender norms or whether real change requires a shift in norms and how they are enforced. We leverage a randomized experiment in rural Rajasthan, a highly conservative part of India, to compare two approaches to improving the outcomes of adolescent girls. The first targets only the adolescent girls (in a way that is similar to many existing programs) encouraging them to stay in education and be aware of costs of early marriage. The second additionally targets the prevailing norm structures by engaging with the wider community and community leaders. We find that while there was a significant reduction is school dropout and rates of early marriage amongst older girls in both groups, the overall well-being of the girls (captured by mental health measures) only improved with the addition of community engagement activities; we also find that this positive well-being effect may have arisen through a reduction in the threat of violence that girls’ perceived they would face for breaking gender norms. Our results suggest that in settings with restrictive norms, wider norm change is key to improving women’s welfare and that while interventions that target women only may be effective at improving some outcomes, they may risk jeopardising overall well-being through exposing women to greater risk of sanctions. Written with Alison Andrew (UCL and IFS), Abhishek Gautam (ICRW), Gabriela Smarrelli (Oxford), and Hemlata Verma (ICRW)
Dominic Young is co-founder and CEO of Axate, which allows readers to access articles beyond a paywall for pence. The digital wallet for news beyond paywalls recently raised over £500,000 in crowdfunding with a pre-money valuation of over £11 million.
Myositis is an umbrella term for inflammatory muscle diseases which, however may have diverse pathogenic mechanisms. Identification, understanding and modulating those underpinnings may be crucial for therapeutic approaches. There has been a paradigm shift from relatively simple concepts of B cell- (dermatomyositis) or T cell pathology (polymyositis) and additionally, amyloid deposition in IBM towards a more detailed and sub-entity-specific understanding of certain molecular dysregulations. In this talk I will address the molecular and corresponding morphological features that we have identified and studied recently and discuss their relevance for possible therapeutic approaches in the future.
Seminar series: Rupture and Reconciliation in Contexts of Displacement Convened by Cory Rodgers (Oxford University) and Elias Lopez (Comillas Pontifical University). Campion Hall and the Refugee Studies Centre present a seven-part seminar series on reconciliation in the contexts of displacement This event approaches displacement through the theme of ‘rupture’. Policy definitions of ‘displacement’ often focus on physical dislocation and geographical journeys, and the term is used interchangeably with ‘forced migration’. Yet displacement is often characterised less by mobility than immobilization, with many stuck behind borders or in camps and detention centres. Rather than taking movement as the defining feature of displacement, this event focuses on ‘rupture’ of the relations that constitute a sense of place and belonging: between self and community, citizen and state, inhabitant and home. People are dispossessed of their lands, cut off from their livelihoods, and deprived of a sense of security and order. In the face of such rupture, many organisations are implementing programmes focused on reconciliation. While reconciliation has long been recognized as a crucial aspect of voluntary return and repatriation for refugees, it has more recently become a priority in contexts of protracted displacement, where xenophobia and the politicization of migration can rupture the norms of hospitality and tolerance that make asylum possible. This seminar series, hosted by Campion Hall and the Refugee Studies Centre, is proposed as an opportunity to discuss the possibilities for and challenges to ‘reconciliation’ in contexts of displacement. It will bring together academics as well as practitioners working in diverse contexts and according to different traditions to exchange insights and engage critically with the conceptual and practical dimensions of reconciliation. We intend to interrogate the historical roots of reconciliation interventions; to consider the different roles played by international, national, local, faith-based and refugee-run institutions, and to spotlight some of the unintended consequences of reconciliation work. The seminars take place every Wednesday at 3pm - 4.30pm from 26 January to 9 March 2022. Details: https://www.campion.ox.ac.uk/events/rupture-and-reconciliation-contexts-displacement
TBA
Seminar 5 in a series on 'Race, Borders, and Global (Im)mobility', convened by Dr Hanno Brankamp Details: https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/events/borders-militarism-and-inequality-in-global-capitalism-reflections-on-strategies-for-freedom
On the occasion of the publication of Venizelos: The Making of a Greek Statesman 1864-1914 (Hurst & Co 2021), and the re-issue of Ionian Vision: Greece in Asia Minor 1919 - 1922 (Hurst & Co new edition 2022). Discussants: Othon Anastasakis (St Antony’s College, Oxford) and Marilena Anastasopoulou (Worcester College, Oxford)
Sally Walker spent 25 years in the national security community, laterally as Director Cyber at GCHQ. She had joint responsibility for running the National Offensive Cyber Programme and led the stand up and design of the National Cyber Force. Since leaving government, Sally advises at board level on decision making in big data environments, and supports boards in leadership development. She retains an interest in the role of cyber capability in conflict, particularly as it affects the civilian population and governmental attitude to risk.
We are delighted to welcome Dame Stephanie Shirley CH to give the Principal’s Special Lecture for Hilary Term 2022 under the title ‘My Family in Exile’. Dame Stephanie (Steve) Shirley CH, age 87, is a workplace revolutionary and successful IT entrepreneur turned ardent philanthropist and successful author. Her talk will focus on her family’s escape from Nazi Europe to Britain in 1939. She and her elder sister, Renate Buchthal, came to the UK on the Kindertransport as part of the effort to rescue children from Nazi-occupied territories in the nine months prior to the outbreak of World War II. About 10,000 Jewish children reached the UK as unaccompanied refugees in this way, among them Lord Alf Dubs and Sir Eric Reich. All transports to Britain stopped on 3 September 1939. In an astonishing twist, both sisters attended the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, a war crimes tribunal in which many prominent members of the Nazi regime were prosecuted. Renate went on study English at St Hilda’s (Exhibitioner, 1948-1951) while, in 1962, Dame Stephanie started a software house, Freelance Programmers. The company pioneered new work practices and changed the position of professional women, especially in hi-tech. Since retiring in 1993, Dame Stephanie’s focus has been increasingly on philanthropy based on her strong belief in giving back to society. She served as the UK’s first national Ambassador for Philanthropy in 2009/10. Dame Stephanie has published two books, her memoir, Let it Go, in 2012, and So To Speak, a collection of 29 of her speeches given over the last 40 years, in 2020. Dame Stephanie has received much recognition for her achievements. In 2013, she was named by Woman’s Hour as one of the 100 most powerful women in Britain. In 2014, the Science Council listed her as one of the Top 100 practising scientists in the UK. In 2015, Dame Stephanie received the Women of the Year Special Award and in 2017, she received a Companion of Honour, one of only 65 people worldwide to receive such a recognition. We will hear more about Dame Stephanie’s experiences and those of her family in her talk. Anyone with an interest in social history and in learning about the experiences of those who lived through World War II should attend this fascinating lecture. The event is free to attend but booking is essential.
An online briefing on open access publishing and Oxford's position including guidance on how to comply with the Open Access requirements for the REF and mandates from key funding bodies whilst respecting your publisher's rights and policies. The session will cover: An explanation of Open Access; Green route and how to deposit in ORA; Gold route and how to claim for Article Processing Charges; How to find out about research council or funder requirements; How to find out what your publisher will allow; Where to get more information & help; Act on Acceptance and OA policy for REF 2021; University policy for the Open Access block grants including RCUK/UKRI and Wellcome Trust. Intended Audience: Current Oxford researchers and academics, research support staff and librarians.
Join this free one-hour practical, interactive workshop from the UK EQUATOR Centre. In our Lightning Workshops series, our methodology, writing, and communication experts cover all of the essential aspects of writing and publishing your academic research. These sessions are designed for early-career biomedical and clinical researchers. What do you and your coauthors need to decide before you start to write? Get your message, audience, and target journal sorted now to ensure a smooth publication process! Jennifer de Beyer is CSM’s science writing, dissemination, and publication specialist. She’s here to help your research reach its full potential through clear, complete writing that targets the right audience. She develops resources on how to write fantastic health research articles and teaches academic writing skills through the UK EQUATOR Centre. Paula Dhiman is a medical statistician working on meta-research at the UK EQUATOR Centre in the Centre for Statistics in Medicine. She focuses on the methodological conduct and reporting of non-randomised research, aiming to help improve the quality and integrity of future research. She is passionate about statistical methodology and observational research and is particularly interested in prognostic/risk modelling. She is also the Associate Editor for the Journal of Intellectual Disability Development. This free workshop is open to University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes staff and students, but we do ask you to book a spot. To hear about other EQUATOR courses in Oxford, please join our mailing list by sending a blank email to equator-oxford-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk.
REES welcomes Balihar Sanghera and Elmira Satybaldieva to discuss Rentier Capitalism and Its Discontents. Power, Morality and Resistance in Central Asia.
Link to MS Teams channel (includes readings): https://teams.microsoft.com/l/team/19%3a51bb501c36f14b4c9f2c0bd9f152f605%40thread.tacv2/conversations?groupId=f4c0f545-f21d-4e58-af42-c2ed0e91355b&tenantId=cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91 Link to seminar meeting: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3a51bb501c36f14b4c9f2c0bd9f152f605%40thread.tacv2/1641819090466?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%223eaa6534-462c-4297-b7ed-a93e8053acdc%22%7d
Suggested preparatory reading: TBA
Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend.
In this lecture, we investigate how everyday religion happened materially in Roman Britain. Religion for most people on most days was about doing rather than philosophizing and about deploying materials of religion in ways that protected, cured, cursed, or communicated with otherworldly powers and entities. Fortunately, some of the period’s materials of religion, including the remains of over 1,500 dogs, survive. This evidence opens up a window into the less discursive, more experiential religion that was so much a part of everyday life, enacted and experienced not only at temples, shrines, and cemeteries, but in farmyards, kitchens, and alongside property boundaries, where people participating in ritual activities often reached––with knife in hand––for a dog. The links to the talks will be posted here: www.history.ox.ac.uk/james-ford-lectures-british-history
Between 1850 and 1918, many first wave democracies adopted electoral reforms that reduced the incidence of various forms of electoral malfeasance. These reforms imposed harsher punishments for bribing or the politicization of state resources during campaigns. They improved electoral secrecy, providing a better protection of voters’ autonomy. By mandating the presence of candidate representatives supervising electoral operations, reforms adopted at this time also reduced the incidence of electoral fraud. Drawing on analysis of parliamentary deliberations and roll call votes in France, Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom, I examine the adoption of these reforms in first-wave democracies. I document how elite splits modified the calculations about the desirability of the status quo among legislators who could access resources to produce various forms of malfeasance, facilitating the formation of parliamentary majorities in support of electoral reforms. Discussant: Marcin Walecki (Oxford)
Come along to one of our monthly virtual drop-in sessions where a member of our team will be available to answer your questions on collaborating with industry. Monthly virtual drop-in sessions are for medical science researchers, staff and students across the University of Oxford. A member of the BPO team will be available to answer questions relating to forming collaborations with the pharmaceutical / biotech industry, including AI and digital health.
To register, please contact the organiser at james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk. Please note that there is no need to register if you have previously subscribed to the seminar mailing list.
Across development, children continually encounter new words and incorporate these words into their vocabulary. This ability to learn new words in turn influences how children process spoken language, which subsequently lays a critical foundation for reading development. A key area in which these relationships are observed is the extent to which children are sensitive to phonological similarity, or overlap in sound information between words (e.g., rhyming words such as cake and lake). In the first part of the talk, I will review two studies which have revealed that children with reading and language challenges experience difficulties learning, remembering, and processing phonologically similar spoken words. Following this, I will discuss a new study our group is conducting that uses repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to test a causal model of word learning and processing in the brain. By performing these studies, our aim is to contribute to the development of brain-informed approaches for promoting optimal language and reading acquisition in individuals with learning challenges.
This article explores imperial Japan’s response towards an influenza pandemic from 1918-1921 and details the establishment of public health policies in imperial Japan by tracing the evolution of preventive measures in its colonies, especially in the colonial Korea, where the influenza pandemic was prevalent to a degree similar to Japan. In contrast to other Western countries, Japan identified that influenza had been continuously prevalent over the course of three years and implemented preventive measures in the Japanese metropole and its colonies until 1921. In colonial Korea, preventive measures were initially aimed at protecting the throat through gargling, and later included vaccinations in addition to measures related to improving personal hygiene, education around the risks of influenza, and mask wearing. Also, the authorities tried to implement measures equivalent to those for notifiable diseases. However, these preventive measures may have had only a limited effect because the policy lacked enforcement, it was difficult to determine the cause of disease, and the vaccine efficacy had not been sufficiently proven. However, one significant change over previous responses to influenza prevalence was that the authorities were now able to directly engage with personal hygiene measures over a sustained period of three years in the name of protecting and improving public health. This in turn, led to the development of a set of detailed guidelines for public health controls. This, in turn may have influenced subsequent revisions of the Infectious Disease Prevention Act in Japan in 1922.
For Zoom link, and to be added to the mailing list, please email saih@history.ox.ac.uk. Follow us on Twitter (OxfordSAIH) and Facebook (OxfordSAIHSeminar).
This seminar series is about economics aspects of rivalry between religious organizations and how they interact with other dimensions of religious rivalry – theological, scientific, political. The first two seminars will be online and will propose a framework for thinking about the question. The remaining six seminars, most of which will be hybrid, will be organized as structured dialogues. I will talk to leading researchers whose knowledge of particular historical, political, anthropological and geographical contexts of religious rivalry can help us to assess the value of such an approach. All members of the University are welcome to attend. No prior knowledge will be presumed (and in particular, no familiarity with economics). For those attending in person, these lectures will take place in the Old Library, All Souls College, OX1 4AL (enter via the Lodge). Registrations close at 12 noon on the day of the lecture.
Part B: Dialogues with researchers
Oxford DPhil students are required to deposit a copy of their thesis in the Oxford University Research Archive (ORA). This session will focus on the relevant rights and permissions and other issues that DPhil students need to take into account when preparing their thesis for upload to ORA. It will also cover how to actually deposit one's thesis in ORA, and how to access help with this process. For all doctoral research students. All doctoral research students
Students tell us that they would like more formative and interactive opportunities in Canvas. This term we are offering 30-min lunchtime webinars for staff on how to use specific Canvas tools to enhance interactivity and enable formative assessment and feedback: 1. Canvas: Using H5P to create interactive content – Tue 25 Jan, 12:30-13:00 2. Canvas: Using the Assignments Tool – Thu 10 Feb, 12:30-13:00 3. Canvas: Using the Quiz tools – Tue 22 Feb, 12:30-13:00 4. Canvas: Using the Oxford Manage Courses (Rollover) Tool – Thu 10 Mar, 12:30-13:00 All sessions are free of charge and booking is required. Visit https://ctl.web.ox.ac.uk/training-webinars#/
Abstract will be posted in due course. Meia Nouwens is a Senior Fellow for Chinese Defense Policy and Military Modernization at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Her expertise lies in China’s international relations, regional strategic affairs, and cross-service defense analysis. Previously, Ms. Nouwens worked for the European Union’s representative offices in New Zealand and Taiwan, and has worked in the public and private sector focusing on security analysis. She holds a BA Honors in International Relations and Political Science from Macquarie University, a Masters of International Relations and Diplomacy from Leiden University in conjunction with the Clingendael Institute, and an MPhil in Modern Chinese Studies from the University of Oxford and Peking University. Meia is bilingual in Dutch and English, and proficient in Mandarin, French and Spanish.
Please email **barnabas.balint@magd.ox.ac.uk** if you wish to be added to the circulation list. In an increasingly digital world, conversations about the Holocaust and digital spaces have largely centred around morally polarizing debates regarding Holocaust selfies at memorial sites, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau. Yet, as the Holocaust fades from living memory and we approach a post-witness world, critical attention should be afforded to the role that digital technologies play in shaping public memory, education, and research about the Holocaust. From social media posts to virtual reality tours of Auschwitz I and digitally rendered archival objects, there can be no doubt that the Holocaust is permeating all forms of digital spaces, often in radically innovative ways. This week, we will explore the process and potential consequences of digitally rendered landscapes of the Holocaust by reading “Visualising Evidence and Landscapes of Atrocities: An Ethical Perspective”, an examination of the digital heritage project for Lager Sylt Concentration Camp, formerly in the Channel Islands. Kerti J., Sturdy Colls C., Swetnam R. (2021) Visualising Evidence and Landscapes of Atrocities: An Ethical Perspective. In: Walden V.G. (eds) Digital Holocaust Memory, Education and Research. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83496-8_6
Sustainable biomass supply has been highly debated, both at the scientific and at the political levels, for almost two decades with controversial arguments. Some stakeholders strongly support the development of biomass value chains to deliver renewable raw materials, boost economic growth and rural development and increase farm income. Others however express overwhelming concerns about the risks that unsustainable practices for producing and using biomass can cause to the already vulnerable planetary boundaries and finite natural resources such as land and water. This presentation discusses the availability of sustainable biomass in Europe and presents recent projections for 2030 and 2050. The work includes an analysis of conditions and assumptions under which the biomass potential can be sustainably optimised and contribute to human capital and welfare within safe planetary boundaries, without causing any other negative impacts (e.g. preserving high nature value areas, maintaining and improving biodiversity, reducing the use of arable land as well as the use of fertilisers and other chemical inputs).
Award-winning cartoonist Maddo has produced social and political commentary in the form of visual art for the past three decades at Kenya's The Standard newspaper.
Seminar 4 - Violence Nesrine Badawi (American University in Cairo) speaking on ‘Debating Militancy in the Modern World’ Murad Idris (University of Michigan) speaking on ‘Theorizing Colonialism, Capitalism, and Violence in an Islamist Key’ Convenors: Dr Faisal Devji (St Antony's College) and Dr Usaama al-Azami (St Antony's College)
Seminar series: Rupture and Reconciliation in Contexts of Displacement Convened by Cory Rodgers (Oxford University) and Elias Lopez (Comillas Pontifical University). Campion Hall and the Refugee Studies Centre present a seven-part seminar series on reconciliation in the contexts of displacement This event approaches displacement through the theme of ‘rupture’. Policy definitions of ‘displacement’ often focus on physical dislocation and geographical journeys, and the term is used interchangeably with ‘forced migration’. Yet displacement is often characterised less by mobility than immobilization, with many stuck behind borders or in camps and detention centres. Rather than taking movement as the defining feature of displacement, this event focuses on ‘rupture’ of the relations that constitute a sense of place and belonging: between self and community, citizen and state, inhabitant and home. People are dispossessed of their lands, cut off from their livelihoods, and deprived of a sense of security and order. In the face of such rupture, many organisations are implementing programmes focused on reconciliation. While reconciliation has long been recognized as a crucial aspect of voluntary return and repatriation for refugees, it has more recently become a priority in contexts of protracted displacement, where xenophobia and the politicization of migration can rupture the norms of hospitality and tolerance that make asylum possible. This seminar series, hosted by Campion Hall and the Refugee Studies Centre, is proposed as an opportunity to discuss the possibilities for and challenges to ‘reconciliation’ in contexts of displacement. It will bring together academics as well as practitioners working in diverse contexts and according to different traditions to exchange insights and engage critically with the conceptual and practical dimensions of reconciliation. We intend to interrogate the historical roots of reconciliation interventions; to consider the different roles played by international, national, local, faith-based and refugee-run institutions, and to spotlight some of the unintended consequences of reconciliation work. The seminars take place every Wednesday at 3pm - 4.30pm from 26 January to 9 March 2022. Details: https://www.campion.ox.ac.uk/events/rupture-and-reconciliation-contexts-displacement
Registration required
This talk will situate the EU border externalisation process within the regional history and social dynamics of the Senegal River Valley. It draws from fieldwork data gathered in the Mauritanian border town of Rosso, a crucial node within the architecture of the EU border regime in West Africa. By exploring the dynamics of the border crossing, as well as the experiences of illegalised migrant workers in Rosso, the presentation will show how the externalisation process is conditioned by the histories and social dynamics of the regions in which it unfolds. In Rosso, migrants who are elsewhere illegalised by the border regime are also caught up in a regional history of racialised displacement and accumulation by dispossession. As regards the Rosso border, the infrastructure of externalisation upholds the colonial conversion of the Senegal River into a territorial dividing line. At the same time, however, the situated socio-spatial dynamics of this locale force compromises on this infrastructure, thereby acting upon and transforming the externalisation process in its unfolding. Seminar 6 in a series on 'Race, Borders, and Global (Im)mobility', convened by Dr Hanno Brankamp Details: https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/events/the-constitutive-exterior-eu-border-externalisation-and-the-social-dynamics-of-the-senegal-river-valley
An innovative skills programme for RAs and postdocs The purpose of the Researcher Strategy Consultancy programme is to provide early career researchers* with an opportunity to develop the core employability skills required for a transition into analytical, business, or policy roles in a range of sectors. The next programme will run 28 Feb - 10 June. Applications close 24 February. Particular emphasis is given to business awareness, teamwork, communication and leadership to complement other training available to research staff. This programme enables participants to build on skills that typically develop in designing, planning and conducting complex research projects. Whatever their career plans, including further research and academia, participants can benefit significantly from the programme. Participants volunteer some of their own time to work in teams, over a 3 month period, to address a strategic issue or business opportunity for a client organisation. We are particularly interested in attracting applicants from across the University to form cross-disciplinary teams to work on our client challenges. More information can be found on the Careers Service website https://www.careers.ox.ac.uk/the-researcher-strategy-consultancy/ * Research staff grades 6-8. Staff who already hold a PhD and are currently on teaching-only contracts at the University of Oxford or its colleges may also be accepted.
REES welcomes Jan Matti Dollbaum, Morvan Lallouet and Ben Noble to discuss Navalny: Putin’s Nemesis, Russia’s Future?
Plants and their diverse specialized metabolites have been used by humans for centuries in traditional and modern medicine. They remain an important source for the discovery of new pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals. Montbretin A (MbA) is a complex flavonoid metabolite; a highly potent and selective inhibitor of the human pancreatic α-amylase (HPA); and a potential new treatment option for Type-II diabetes and obesity. The only known source for MbA are the below-ground storage organs of montbretia (Crocosmia) species, which are native to the grasslands of southern and eastern Africa and commonly grown in gardens around the world. Due to the low abundance of MbA in montbretia and due its complex chemical structure, natural product extraction and chemical synthesis are insufficient for scalable MbA production. Our goal is to develop an improved bio-production system for MbA using genes, enzymes and regulating factors of MbA biosynthesis in montbretia. In recent work, we discovered the complete biosynthetic pathway of MbA using an approach that combined knowledge of montbretia biology, metabolite profiling, differential transcriptome analysis, cDNA cloning, heterologous gene expression, and enzyme biochemistry. This includes the discovery of genes encoding UDP-sugar dependent glycosyltransferase and acyltransferase enzymes, which catalyze the assembly of MbA from its different building blocks. We are using these genes to bioengineer the production of MbA in yeast and plants. This presentation will discuss challenges and opportunities of exploring plant biosynthetic systems for the development of new drugs, and bioproducts in general.
Discussant: Samuel Ritholtz
Link to MS Teams channel (includes readings): https://teams.microsoft.com/l/team/19%3a51bb501c36f14b4c9f2c0bd9f152f605%40thread.tacv2/conversations?groupId=f4c0f545-f21d-4e58-af42-c2ed0e91355b&tenantId=cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91 Link to seminar meeting: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3a51bb501c36f14b4c9f2c0bd9f152f605%40thread.tacv2/1641819090466?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%223eaa6534-462c-4297-b7ed-a93e8053acdc%22%7d
Suggested preparatory reading: A. Milton, England’s Second Reformation, The Battle for the Church of England, 1625-1662 (2021)
Accompanying the colloquium will be an Oxford PLP Seminar for students during which the paper and any other relevant material to the colloquium will be discussed. The seminar will take place on Zoom at 14:00-15:30. Email oxfordPLPevents@gmail.com if you wish to register for the seminar.
Suggested preparatory reading: TBA
Unlike haematological diseases where the gene (haemoglobin), cell (red blood cell) and clinical features (anaemia) map well onto each other, the cellular basis for most inflammatory diseases remains enigmatic. The Human Cell Atlas (HCA) was established to construct a map of the different cell types involved in forming human organs using single cell analysis with spatial analysis to locate their position in tissue. Using the principles of the HCA in an Arthritis Therapy Acceleration Programme (A-TAP) we have assessed how the cellular composition of tissue is affected following treatment with biologics such as anti TNF across a range of IMIDs including RA and IBD. This therapeutic cell atlas can be used to instruct and power experimental medicine studies where a common cell-based marker is used in Bayesian driven basket trials as a common outcome measure in the study.
In collective navigation a population travels as a group from an origin to a destination. Famous examples include the migrations of birds and whales, between winter and summer grounds, but collective movements also extend down to microorganisms and cell populations. Collective navigation is believed to improve the efficiency of migration, for example through the presence of more knowledgeable individuals that guide naive members ("leader-follower behaviour") or through the averaging out of individual uncertainty ("many wrongs"). In this talk I will describe both individual and continuous approaches for modelling collective navigation. We investigate the point at which group information becomes beneficial to migration and how it can help a population navigate through areas with poor guidance information. We also explore the effectiveness of different modes through which a leader can herd a group of naïve followers. As an application we will consider the impact of noise pollution on the migration of whales through the North Sea.
China's open ambition to become a global AI superpower has attracted considerable policy, media and academic attention. This talk will focus on national strategy, security and governance aspects of China's AI approach. It will discuss why China's AI approach is sophisticated and multifaced, and how it has brought about both considerable benefits and challenges to China. Jinghan Zeng is Professor of China and International Studies at Lancaster University. Previously he was a Senior Lecturer of International Relations and Director of Centre for Politics in Africa, Asia and the Middle East at Royal Holloway, University of London. Before his academic career, he worked for the United Nations' Department of Economic and Social Affairs in New York City.
In armed conflicts across the globe, the loci of violence change over time, including across state borders. Nonetheless, both academic and policy analyses are typically still guided by static units of analysis and hence fail to capture spatial change in conflict. What explains change in the territorial scope and location of violent events in a single setting of armed conflict? We argue that shifts in two factors contribute to patterns in spatial change across conflicts: the relative strength of the state actor and whether there is a change in the conflict’s dominant actors. To demonstrate our argument, we build a typology of spatial change in armed conflict based on conceptualising conflict as a fluid multi-actor phenomenon. Using the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset, we construct a “conflict shape” in the form of a yearly changing polygon as a dynamic spatial unit of analysis. We apply the typology to five cases to show the validity of these factors: the conflict in the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands, the conflict in the Horn of Africa, the Islamist insurgency in Nigeria, the conflict in Colombia, and the conflict in Iraq/Syria. The analysis demonstrates the typology’s utility for analysing conflict geographies, conducting within-case and cross-case comparisons of conflicts, and explaining common patterns across various conflicts. Discussant: Maria Gargiulo
The St Cross Centre for the History and Philosophy of Physics (HAPP) will be holding a lecture by bestselling author and astrophysicist Dr Mario Livio (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) entitled "Brilliant Blunders - Mistakes by Great Physicists that Changed Our Understanding of the Universe". William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Albert Einstein and Fred Hoyle are amongst the greatest physicists in history and some of the mistakes that these towering figures made led to major scientific advances. Dr Mario Livio will analyse these errors and the psychology which made such "brilliant blunders" part of these celebrated scientists' genius and part of the scientific process whereby science thrives on error and advances when erroneous ideas are disproven. Zoom details for the event will be sent to registered attendees after the registration deadline has closed at 12:00 (GMT) on Thursday 24 February.
Climate change has both direct and indirect effects on agricultural productivity, effects that are predicted to increase significantly after 2050 if no mitigating measure is taken with immediate effect. Agriculture, on the other hand, could play a key role in lowering greenhouse gas emissions by 40 to 50% in the next decade, the target agreed under the 2015 Paris Agreement. This talk will examine the implications for countries in the global South of climate science and international policy on agriculture, food security, and rural policy by focusing on the Indian farmers’ movement. In late 2020, hundreds of thousands of farmers all over India went out on strike to oppose new legislation that had been rushed through their parliament. They shut down large parts of the country’s transport, shops and markets. The government claim the legislation is necessary to modernise agriculture, whereas farmers – who make up 50% of the Indian workforce – argue it will leave them at the mercy of corporations buying their products. This talk will aim to explore the global significance of this ongoing struggle; how the strikes are a defence of small farming everywhere, how they unite different political tendencies across the farmers' movement and ultimately, how the Indian farmers' strikes are a defence of democracy.
To register, please contact the organiser at james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk. Please note that there is no need to register if you have previously subscribed to the seminar mailing list.
Professor J. Daniel Elam is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics (Fordham University Press, 2020), and Impossible and Necessary (Orient BlackSwan, 2021), and two co-edited volumes on revolutionary anticolonial writing, Reading Revolutionaries (with Kama Maclean, 2014) and Writing Revolution (with Kama Maclean and Chris Moffat, 2017). His current projects include an anthology of political theory from the Global South, a book about revolutionary sociology, and a biography of his great-uncle. For Zoom link, and to be added to the mailing list, please email saih@history.ox.ac.uk. Follow us on Twitter (OxfordSAIH) and Facebook (OxfordSAIHSeminar).
I use the historiographical notion of “Latin race science” to examine early 20th century Post-Revolutionary projects aimed at homogenising and improving a racially diverse populations in Mexico. In seeking to unearth the tensions within Mexican early 20th century biopolitics with the question of traditional Latin and Hispanic traditions, I contrast the international Latin Eugenics scene with locally produced Mexican Indigenismo and “mestizophilia” during the first Revolutionary decades. Two trends emerge from such analysis: 1) the existence of not one, but a plurality of “mestizophilias”, and 2) the weakening of Latinity and Hispanophilia as a necessary counterpoint with which to assess rising State sponsored Indigenismo. These distinctions help to flesh out the tensions and convergences between coexisting biopolitical projects, and modulate the contributions of the Latin Eugenics framework to the context of early 20th century Mexico. The softness and relative marginality of the Eugenic movement in Mexico is thus explained by the occupation of the field of Population biopolitics by nationalist Indigenismo.
Part B: Dialogues with researchers
This seminar series is about economics aspects of rivalry between religious organizations and how they interact with other dimensions of religious rivalry – theological, scientific, political. The first two seminars will be online and will propose a framework for thinking about the question. The remaining six seminars, most of which will be hybrid, will be organized as structured dialogues. I will talk to leading researchers whose knowledge of particular historical, political, anthropological and geographical contexts of religious rivalry can help us to assess the value of such an approach. All members of the University are welcome to attend. No prior knowledge will be presumed (and in particular, no familiarity with economics). For those attending in person, these lectures will take place in the Old Library, All Souls College, OX1 4AL (enter via the Lodge). Registrations close at 12 noon on the day of the lecture.
Professor Gráinne McAlonan, King’s College London 01 March: ‘Typical and Divergent Neurodevelopment from Birth to Adulthood’
Drug discovery is a series of decision-making steps, driven by data. Arctoris developed Ulysses, a unique platform that brings together robotics, AI, and blockchain to generate data of unprecedented quality, depth and context, at scale. With Ulysses, Arctoris enables the right decisions at the right time, reducing cycle times, decreasing attrition rates, and making drug discovery success more likely. The Ulysses platform powers Arctoris' internal discovery work, and is also accessible to select partners, enabling them to accelerate their programs from idea to IND, bringing new medicines to patients faster.
Includes lunch
This talk will consider issues surrounding the UK’s ‘Indo-Pacific Tilt’ as set out in the Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy. Namely, why the ‘Indo-Pacific Tilt’ is required, what are its aims, where it is occurring and what form it has taken to date. The extent to which international law is relevant to the ‘Indo-Pacific Tilt’ will also be addressed as well as the principal geopolitical issues that arise. Finally, the likely challenges in delivering the ‘Indo-Pacific Tilt’ will also be considered. Captain Ian Park is a logistics officer and barrister in the Royal Navy and has served in seven ships and deployed worldwide in support of the Royal Navy’s contribution to defence. He has also deployed as a legal adviser on operations to Afghanistan and, on many occasions, to the Middle East. Ian is, or has been, a Hudson Fellow at Oxford University, a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School, a First Sea Lord’s Fellow and a Freeman of the City of London. He is a graduate of St. John’s College, Cambridge, has a doctorate in law from Balliol College, Oxford and has lectured at Harvard Law School, Cambridge University, Oxford University, The Academy of Military Sciences, Beijing, Hanoi University, USSH Hanoi, The National University of Singapore, and Freiburg University amongst other institutions. Ian is the author of, inter alia, ‘The Right to Life in Armed Conflict’ (Oxford University Press, 2018) and in 2018 was the winner of the outstanding performance by an HM Forces barrister at the UK Bar Awards.
TBA
On the occasion of the publication of Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation Coordinated by Paul Betts and James Mark This collectively written monograph is the first work to provide a broad history of the relationship between Eastern Europe and the decolonising world. It ranges from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, but at its core is the dynamic of the post-1945 period, when socialism's importance as a globalising force accelerated and drew together what contemporaries called the 'Second' and 'Third Worlds'. At the centre of this history is the encounter between the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe on one hand, and a wider world casting off European empires or struggling against western imperialism on the other. The origins of these connections are traced back to new forms of internationalism enabled by the Russian Revolution; the interplay between the first 'decolonisation' of the twentieth century in Eastern Europe and rising anti-colonial movements; and the global rise of fascism, which created new connections between East and South. The heart of the study, however, lies in the Cold War, when these contacts and relationships dramatically intensified. A common embrace of socialist modernisation and anti-imperial culture opened up possibilities for a new and meaningful exchange between the peripheries of Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Such linkages are examined across many different fields - from health to archaeology, economic development to the arts - and through many people - from students to experts to labour migrants - who all helped to shape a different form and meaning of globalisation.
Join Zoom Meeting: https://zoom.us/j/98775002179?pwd=Y2tYUVZmWW5kQ2QzVnNXRVRDWVRwQT09 Meeting ID: 987 7500 2179 Passcode: 032874
Ann M. Simmons is Moscow bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. She has spent over 25 years reporting from Europe, Africa, the Middle East and North America. Prior to WSJ, Ann covered global development for the LA Times, worked as bureau chief in Nairobi and Johannesburg and served in Moscow for Time magazine. This seminar was initially scheduled for November 2021 and cancelled when Ann was sent to cover the crisis in the border between Belarus and Poland.
Seminar series: Rupture and Reconciliation in Contexts of Displacement Convened by Cory Rodgers (Oxford University) and Elias Lopez (Comillas Pontifical University). Campion Hall and the Refugee Studies Centre present a seven-part seminar series on reconciliation in the contexts of displacement This event approaches displacement through the theme of ‘rupture’. Policy definitions of ‘displacement’ often focus on physical dislocation and geographical journeys, and the term is used interchangeably with ‘forced migration’. Yet displacement is often characterised less by mobility than immobilization, with many stuck behind borders or in camps and detention centres. Rather than taking movement as the defining feature of displacement, this event focuses on ‘rupture’ of the relations that constitute a sense of place and belonging: between self and community, citizen and state, inhabitant and home. People are dispossessed of their lands, cut off from their livelihoods, and deprived of a sense of security and order. In the face of such rupture, many organisations are implementing programmes focused on reconciliation. While reconciliation has long been recognized as a crucial aspect of voluntary return and repatriation for refugees, it has more recently become a priority in contexts of protracted displacement, where xenophobia and the politicization of migration can rupture the norms of hospitality and tolerance that make asylum possible. This seminar series, hosted by Campion Hall and the Refugee Studies Centre, is proposed as an opportunity to discuss the possibilities for and challenges to ‘reconciliation’ in contexts of displacement. It will bring together academics as well as practitioners working in diverse contexts and according to different traditions to exchange insights and engage critically with the conceptual and practical dimensions of reconciliation. We intend to interrogate the historical roots of reconciliation interventions; to consider the different roles played by international, national, local, faith-based and refugee-run institutions, and to spotlight some of the unintended consequences of reconciliation work. The seminars take place every Wednesday at 3pm - 4.30pm from 26 January to 9 March 2022. Details: https://www.campion.ox.ac.uk/events/rupture-and-reconciliation-contexts-displacement
Seminar 7 in a series on 'Race, Borders, and Global (Im)mobility', convened by Dr Hanno Brankamp Seminar abstract: This talk aims to centre refugee survival in global capitalism between the camp and the city. Drawing on fieldwork data from Paris and Nairobi between 2017-2019, I examine refugee survival on three prongs: shelter, income, and political belonging. With the ever-increasing presence of refugees in major urban centres due to the dismantling of certain camps, trafficking, economically motivated migration and other conflict-related causes, the interconnections between camps and cities like Paris and Nairobi have become more apparent in recent years. In placing refugees in global capitalism, I argue that refugees comprise a disposable population in the global economy along the lines of Kanyal Sanyal and Gargi Bhattacharya’s conception of the ‘edge’. With this in mind, I speak to the material and ideological dimensions of disposability and pay attention to the urban dimensions of racial exclusion amidst logics of capital accumulation. Details: https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/events/governing-the-displaced-in-global-capitalism-refugee-survival-from-the-camp-to-the-city
Abstract to be posted in due course.
REES welcomes Agnieszka Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk to discuss Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment.
Discussant: Ebenezer Azamati
Link to MS Teams channel (includes readings): https://teams.microsoft.com/l/team/19%3a51bb501c36f14b4c9f2c0bd9f152f605%40thread.tacv2/conversations?groupId=f4c0f545-f21d-4e58-af42-c2ed0e91355b&tenantId=cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91 Link to seminar meeting: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3a51bb501c36f14b4c9f2c0bd9f152f605%40thread.tacv2/1641819090466?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%223eaa6534-462c-4297-b7ed-a93e8053acdc%22%7d
Suggested preparatory reading: Peter Lake and Michael Questier, ‘Prisons, Priests and People’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), England’s Long Reformation, 1500-1800 (London, 1998), pp. 195-233 John H. Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Régime (Chicago, 1977)
Suggested preparatory reading: B. Supple, Commercial crisis and change in England 1600-1624 (1959), chs. 3-4 T. Leng, Fellowship and freedom: the Merchant Adventurers and the restructuring of English commerce, 1582-1700 (2020), ch. 6
Fibonacci numbers in plants, such as in sunflower spiral counts, have long fascinated mathematicians. For the last thirty years, most analyses have been variants of a Standard Model in which plant organs are treated as point nodes successively placed on a cylinder according to a given function of the previous node positions, not too close or too far away from the existing nodes. These models usually lead to lattice solutions. As a parameter of the model, like the diameter of the cylinder, is changed, the lattice can transition to another, more complex lattice, with a different spiral count. It can typically be proved that these transitions move lattice counts to higher Fibonacci numbers. While mathematically compelling, empirical validation of this Standard Model is as yet weak, even though the underlying molecular mechanisms are increasingly well characterised. In this talk I'll show a gallery of Fibonacci patterning and give a brief history of mathematical approaches, including a partially successful attempt by Alan Turing. I'll describe how the classification of lattices on cylinders connects both to a representation of $SL(2,Z)$ and to applications through defining the constraint that any model must satisfy to show Fibonacci structure. I'll discuss a range of such models, how they might be used to make testable predictions, and why this matters. From 2011 to 2017 Jonathan Swinton was a visiting professor to MPLS in Oxford in Computational Systems Biology. His new textbook Mathematical Phyllotaxis will be published soon, and his Alan Turing's Manchester will be republished by The History Press in May 2022.
The talk presents theoretical and empirical research on the challenges to the core features of representative democracy as an attempt to combine the broad inclusion of citizens in the democratic process with efficiency of policy making and problem solving. It addresses the critique mounted by technocratic claims and highlights the tension between the holistic technocratic, and populist, conceptions of representation and pluralist representative democracy. Theoretical expectations are illustrated in a historical perspective that inserts the current challenge in the long-term development of the nation-state and tested empirically through a novel survey battery on technocratic attitudes fielded in fifteen Western democracies. The talk concludes with the normative question of the challenge being a threat or possibly a corrective to the shortcomings of representative democracy and with a discussion of the possible politicization by political entrepreneur for citizens' demands for expertise and competence. Discussant: Zack Grant (Oxford)
Registration essential
To register, please contact the organiser at james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk. Please note that there is no need to register if you have previously subscribed to the seminar mailing list.
Come along to one of our monthly virtual drop-in sessions where a member of our team will be available to answer your questions on collaborating with industry. Monthly virtual drop-in sessions are for medical science researchers, staff and students across the University of Oxford. A member of the BPO team will be available to answer questions relating to forming collaborations with the pharmaceutical / biotech industry, including AI and digital health.
Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are at increased risk of mental health difficulties. I will discuss evidence that this may be partly because language supports development of emotion recognition and regulation skills, which in turn support mental health. Data are from the Surrey Communication and Language in Education Study (SCALES); a 7-year prospective study of children’s language development. We found that language ability at the start of primary school (age 5-6 years) was related to objective measures of emotion recognition and regulation at the end of primary school (age 10-12 years). I will discuss the implications of these findings for promoting mental health in children and young people with neurodevelopmental conditions that affect language development.
Akeel Bilgrami got a B.A in English Literature from Elphinstone College, Bombay University and went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar where he read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Chicago. He is the Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, where he is also a Professor on the Committee on Global Thought. He has been the Director of the Heyman Centre for the Humanities as well as the South Asian Institute at Columbia. His publications include the books Belief and Meaning (1992), Self-Knowledge and Resentment (2006), and Secularism, Identity and Enchantment (2014). He is due to publish two books in the near future: What is a Muslim? (Princeton University Press) and Gandhi's Integrity (Columbia University Press) and is currently writing a book on the relations between politics, agency, value, and practical reason. For Zoom link, and to be added to the mailing list, please email saih@history.ox.ac.uk. Follow us on Twitter (OxfordSAIH) and Facebook (OxfordSAIHSeminar).
Part B: Dialogues with researchers
This seminar series is about economics aspects of rivalry between religious organizations and how they interact with other dimensions of religious rivalry – theological, scientific, political. The first two seminars will be online and will propose a framework for thinking about the question. The remaining six seminars, most of which will be hybrid, will be organized as structured dialogues. I will talk to leading researchers whose knowledge of particular historical, political, anthropological and geographical contexts of religious rivalry can help us to assess the value of such an approach. All members of the University are welcome to attend. No prior knowledge will be presumed (and in particular, no familiarity with economics). For those attending in person, these lectures will take place in the Old Library, All Souls College, OX1 4AL (enter via the Lodge). Registrations close at 12 noon on the day of the lecture.
Professor Jenny Taylor, University of Oxford 08 March: ‘Role of polygenic risk scores in psychiatric disease’ Chair: John Geddes
Joining link: https://bit.ly/3pcWt49
On topics ranging from the climate crisis to labour market discrimination, Oxford economists are working with governments and businesses around the world to improve policy and make the economy work better for everyone. Find out how economics can be used to shed light on some of the biggest issues facing society today in this new public webinar series. These events are open to all. They will be held online and are free of charge. Register in advance for this meeting: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEpcOurpz0uGdEXJrhA2gQ15B4yMT79tRn_ After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Discussion of Russian notions of future warfare tend, for understandable reasons, to focus on the debates within the military, which are then embodied in doctrine, tactics and procurement decisions. These debates are important, but also much more accessible, given the degree to which they are played out and arbitrated within the military press. However, there is an intertwined, if much less accessible debate within the civilian national security establishment – notably the intelligence services and the Security Council secretariat – which is at least of equal importance. While informed by the defence establishment’s debate and sharing many of its assumptions, it is different, not least in its greater willingness to think in terms of open-ended and non-military conflicts, in which over warfighting may play a limited, episodic or essentially theatrical role. In this presentation, Dr Galeotti will address both sets of perceptions and consider the practical and political implications of this divide within Kremlin thinking on warfare. Dr Mark Galeotti is CEO of the consultancy Mayak Intelligence as well as an Honorary Professor at University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies. He is also a senior research associate with RUSI, the Council on Geostrategy and the Institute of International Relations Prague. A widely published specialist on Russian security issues, Dr Galeotti has taught, researched, and written in the United Kingdom, the United States, Russia, the Czech Republic and Italy. Educated at Cambridge University and the London School of Economics, he has been a senior research fellow at the FCO, head of the history department at Keele University, professor of global affairs at New York University, head of the IIR Prague’s Centre for European Security, and a visiting faculty member at Rutgers-Newark (USA), MGIMO (Russia), and Charles University (Czech Republic). His most recent books include The Weaponisation of Everything (Yale, 2022), Russian Political War (Routledge, 2020) and The Vory (Yale, 2018).
To close the term’s reading group, we will hear presentations from members about their research ideas this term and encourage questions and discussion afterwards. Cailee Davis (DPhil Oriental Studies, St Anne’s) – [Metareferentiality, Trauma Theory, and Transgenerational Memory in Holocaust Representations in the New Millennium]
The lack of biomarkers to inform antidepressant selection is a key challenge in personalized depression treatment. This work identifies candidate biomarkers by building deep learning predictors of individual treatment outcomes using reward processing measures from functional magnetic resonance imaging, clinical assessments, and demographics. Participants in the EMBARC (Establishing Moderators and Biosignatures of Antidepressant Response in Clinical Care) study (n = 222) underwent reward processing task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging at baseline and were randomized to 8 weeks of sertraline (n = 106) or placebo (n = 116). Subsequently, sertraline nonresponders (n = 37) switched to 8 weeks of bupropion. The change in Hamilton Depression Rating Scale was measured after treatment. Reward processing, clinical measurements, and demographics were used to train treatment-specific deep learning models. These findings demonstrate the utility of reward processing measurements and deep learning to predict antidepressant outcomes and to form multimodal treatment biomarkers.
The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected children's educational experiences around the globe. Turkey was one of the countries that kept schools closed more than 200 days listed to be one of the longest closures across OECD countries (OECD, 2021). Many students had limited access to internet or technological devices, which led to major educational losses for children across the country (Ergun & Arik, 2020). Given these circumstances, policymakers and researchers expect the educational repercussions of the pandemic to be the most detrimental for children, who are at risk for low school achievement. This seminar will present the factors linked with learning losses during the pandemic, demonstrate the estimates of educational outcomes for disadvantaged children in relation to their home learning environments, and evaluate the educational policies and programmes implemented in Turkey. Speakers will also outline what future policies might look like to support children during their return to school. Micro-simulation analyses of existing datasets on pupil outcomes and family predictors from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS), and interviews with national stakeholders will inform the findings of the study. The study has been commissioned by the UNICEF Turkey Office and is carried out by Development Analytics. References OECD. (2021). The State of Global Education: 18 Months into the Pandemic. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/the-state-of-global-education_1a23bb23-en Ergün, M. ve Arık, B. M. (2020). Eğitim izleme raporu 2020: Öğrenciler ve eğitime erişim. Eğitim Reformu Girişimi. Haziran 2021, https://www. egitimreformugirisimi.org/egitim-izleme-raporu2020-ogrenciler-ve-egitime-erisim/
Register in advance for this webinar: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_RClG3OvLSf-guf8WbzGPtA The aim of the seminar is to foster a dynamic and interdisciplinary postcolonial research culture supportive of individual scholarship. Finalists, M.St. and D.Phil. students, lecturers, fellows, scholars from across the university community – all are welcome. If you’d like to appear on the seminar mailing list, please email gavin.herbertson@stcatz.ox.ac.uk OR ann.ang@wadham.ox.ac.uk.
Sign-up instructions on Twitter @EngFac18thC
Former Journalist Fellow Christine Franciska is managing editor at Glance, where she programmes the latest stories to appear on the lock screens of 150 million Android users in India and Indonesia. She explored this topic during her time in Oxford as a Journalist Fellow.
Seminar 5 - Law Mohammad Fadel (University of Toronto) speaking on ‘The Protean Sovereign of Sunni Law’ Lena Salaymeh (University of Oxford) speaking on ‘Reconsidering the Political in Premodern Islam' Convenors: Dr Faisal Devji (St Antony's College) and Dr Usaama al-Azami (St Antony's College)
On the occasion of the publication of Turkey Under Erdogan: How a Country Turned from Democracy and the West Since coming to power in 2002 Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has overseen a radical transformation of Turkey. Once a pillar of the Western alliance, the country has embarked on a militaristic foreign policy, intervening in regional flashpoints from Nagorno-Karabakh to Libya. And its democracy, sustained by the aspiration to join the European Union, has given way to one-man rule. Dimitar Bechev traces the political trajectory of Erdoğan’s populist regime, from the era of reform and prosperity in the 2000s to the effects of the war in neighboring Syria. In a tale of missed opportunities, Bechev explores how Turkey parted ways with the United States and Europe, embraced Putin’s Russia and other revisionist powers, and replaced a frail democratic regime with an authoritarian one. Despite this, he argues that Turkey’s democratic instincts are resilient, its economic ties to Europe are as strong as ever, and Erdoğan will fail to achieve a fully autocratic regime.
Seminar 8 in a series on 'Race, Borders, and Global (Im)mobility', convened by Dr Hanno Brankamp Details: https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/events/carceral-geographies-racial-violence-the-contested-mediterranean-borderzone
Students tell us that they would like more formative and interactive opportunities in Canvas. This term we are offering 30-min lunchtime webinars for staff on how to use specific Canvas tools to enhance interactivity and enable formative assessment and feedback: 1. Canvas: Using H5P to create interactive content – Tue 25 Jan, 12:30-13:00 2. Canvas: Using the Assignments Tool – Thu 10 Feb, 12:30-13:00 3. Canvas: Using the Quiz tools – Tue 22 Feb, 12:30-13:00 4. Canvas: Using the Oxford Manage Courses (Rollover) Tool – Thu 10 Mar, 12:30-13:00 All sessions are free of charge and booking is required. Visit https://ctl.web.ox.ac.uk/training-webinars#/
Plants, which make thousands of complex natural products, are outstanding chemists. Through the concerted action of enzymes that are assembled into metabolic pathways, nature creates enormous chemical complexity from simple starting materials. This talk will highlight the discovery process for enzymes that catalyze unusual or unprecedented enzymatic transformations, mechanistic and structural characterization of these enzymes, and methods by which these enzymes can be harnessed for metabolic engineering to generate pharmacological important compounds. A variety of different plants and molecules are used for these studies, most notably the monoterpene indole alkaloids and the monoterpenes known as iridoids.
REES welcomes Alexander Baturo and Jos Elkink to discuss The New Kremlinology: Understanding Regime Personalization in Russia.
Using evidence from the acceleration of change over the past two decades, Transforming Energy Systems: Economics, Policies and Change (Elgar 2021) examines the market developments and policies that advance and guide innovation and deployment of low-carbon alternatives to present fossil fuel use. It makes a compelling case for heterodox energy reform strategies—including market-creating industrial policies sequenced with emissions pricing differentiated by sector—to address key market imperfections that can hold back the advance of low-carbon alternatives. These imperfections include knowledge spillovers from innovation and cost/profit spillovers from early deployment, as well distributional impacts and risk of time-inconsistent policies. The book also examines the infrastructure, institutional and regulatory reforms needed to accelerate change and bring within reach societal net-zero-emission goals to stabilize the climate.
Link to MS Teams channel (includes readings): https://teams.microsoft.com/l/team/19%3a51bb501c36f14b4c9f2c0bd9f152f605%40thread.tacv2/conversations?groupId=f4c0f545-f21d-4e58-af42-c2ed0e91355b&tenantId=cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91 Link to seminar meeting: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3a51bb501c36f14b4c9f2c0bd9f152f605%40thread.tacv2/1641819090466?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%223eaa6534-462c-4297-b7ed-a93e8053acdc%22%7d
A showcase of recent innovations in surgical practice and policy in a hybrid in-person/online format. Targeted at surgically inclined students, trainees and consultants. We are accepting abstract submissions from medical students and trainees to be selected for poster or podium presentations. Deadline for abstract submission is 31 January 2022. Please join us for a full day of fantastic plenaries hosted by leaders in their respective fields, workshops in surgical innovation, and presentations from the best student and trainee abstract submissions.
Heart is the first functional organ in a developing embryo. One critical step during vertebrate heart development is trabeculation, which is crucial for heart function. During trabeculation, the myocardial wall transforms from a single-layered epithelium into a complex topological structure consisting of two distinct cell fates – outer compact layer and inner trabecular layer cardiomyocytes. We have recently shown that local differences in the mechanical properties of CMs trigger this morphological symmetry breaking. CMs with higher mechanical tension delaminate stochastically to seed the trabecular layer and this spatial segregation is also sufficient to induce their differential fate. Eventually, these single trabecular cells undergo complex morphological transformations to generate higher-order multicellular structures called trabecular ridges, which fill the ventricular lumen. How a developing heart acquires these crucial anatomical structures remains unknown. My lab aims to resolve the underlying mechanical, molecular and geometric interactions that transforms the myocardial wall from a simple epithelium into a 3D intricate functional tissue. In this seminar, I will be discussing some of our previous and current findings explaining how trabecular cardiomyocytes are specified and how a single trabecular cardiomyocyte build the multicellular ridge.
TBA
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the newly gained dominance of liberal democracy as a political regime was accompanied by a new dominance of liberal democracy as a descriptive language. Concepts of political science, sociology, and economics that had been developed for the analysis of Western-type polities were applied to the various phenomena in the newly liberated countries. But the language of liberal democracies blurs the understanding of the current state of post-communism as it leads to conceptual stretching and brings in a host of hidden presumptions. Discussant: Eli Gateva (Oxford)
OxPeace invites applications for its three-day intensive Training Workshop on ‘Negotiating and mediating successfully in international and grassroots conflict resolution’, in person, in Oxford. Course summary: This workshop will give you an overview of the fundamentals as well as real-life practice of Peace Negotiation and Mediation. It will allow you to immediately apply what you have learned in a series of increasingly complex simulations and to exchange with practitioners about lessons learned from the field. The first day of the course is devoted to the core principles of negotiating successfully, that is moving beyond the basic concept of claiming value to strategies that create satisfying outcomes for all sides. We will also look at the importance of mindsets and psychological factors in negotiations. Several roleplays and short simulations allow participants to apply and finetune these techniques. On the second day we will explore fundamental concepts and best practices in conflict mediation on the international, national and grassroots level (tracks I, II and III). Drawing on lessons learned from mediation efforts in recent conflicts, in particular in Africa and the Middle East, we will identify current trends and challenges in the increasingly professionalised field of peace mediation. The third day of the course will give participants the opportunity to apply the concepts of successful negotiation and mediation previously acquired to a comprehensive capstone exercise. Drawing closely on real-life cases, this multi-party role play simulates international mediation of peace negotiations in a protracted crisis in a fragile state. This interactive workshop draws heavily on real-life examples from the lecturers’ experience in supporting peace mediations as well as their latest research on political negotiations. Participants are encouraged to contribute lessons learned from their own cases and peer-to-peer learning will be facilitated. Fees: This workshop is heavily subsidised by an independent charity, the Oxford Peace Research Trust (OPRT). This allows the fee to be just £50 for students (Note for GGD students: the first 15 GGD Masters students will receive a £30 bursary). The basic fee for non-students is £100, with the option instead to help subsidise the student fee by paying a supporting fee of £150. Please note! The fee includes teas, coffees and a sandwich lunch but does NOT include accommodation. The course organisers are not able to help participants to find accommodation, which is expensive in Oxford and needs to be booked well in advance. The course runs from 9.30am to 5pm each day, possibly with additional optional evening activities. Applications: To apply please send a brief statement saying why you would like to participate, and a brief CV (including your current course if you are a student) and contact details (email, phone, and postal address) to the Assistant Organiser, Megan McDowell at Megan.mcdowell@hotmail.co.uk
We’re excited to announce that the call for papers for the CSAE Conference 2022 is now open! This year, we are taking the conference online again for a fully virtual event from 14-18 March 2022. Keep up to date with all things CSAE Conference via #OxCSAE2022.
To register, please contact the organiser at james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk. Please note that there is no need to register if you have previously subscribed to the seminar mailing list.
TBA
A provision of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 offered tax incentives for investing in certain low income areas in the United States called Opportunity Zones (OZs). The goal of this provision was to spur private investment in OZs in order to improve the economic well-being of their residents. This paper uses a regression discontinuity design to evaluate the impact of OZs on commercial investment and economic activity, outcomes that are precursors to downstream effects on the well-being of OZ residents. Unlike difference in differences designs used by the existing literature to evaluate OZs, our regression discontinuity approach does not require unverifiable assumptions that OZs and non-OZs were affected similarly by unobserved factors post-implementation. Using data on the universe of all significant commercial investments in the United States, we find that OZ designation led to little or no increase in the total amount of investment or the number of investments in OZs. These findings are supported by additional data from Mastercard that also show no evidence of increased business activity nor consumer spending. Overall, our findings suggest that the impact of OZs on economic improvement has thus far been limited. (Naomi Feldman and Kevin Corinth)
TBA
Antisense oligonucleotides (ASO) hold promise for therapeutic splice-switching correction in many genetic diseases; however, despite advances in chemistry and design, systemic use of ASOs is still limited due to poor tissue/cellular uptake. This talk will describe the therapeutic potential of ASOs made of tricyclo-DNA (tcDNA), which displays unique pharmacological properties and unprecedented uptake in many tissues after systemic administration. These outstanding properties have been demonstrated in different mouse models of genetic diseases such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) and Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). DMD is a neurogenetic disease typically caused by frame-shifting deletions or nonsense mutations in the gene encoding dystrophin and characterized by progressive muscle weakness, cardiomyopathy, respiratory failure and neurocognitive impairment. While current naked ASOs do not significantly enter the heart or cross the blood brain barrier, systemic delivery of tcDNA-ASOs allow high levels of dystrophin rescue in skeletal muscles as well as in heart and to a lower extent in the brain. Our results have demonstrated physiological improvement of the cardio-respiratory functions and correction of behavioural features linked to the emotional/cognitive deficiency associated with the lack of dystrophin. Although initial results indicated an encouraging safety profile for tcDNA-ASOs in mice, we showed a clear impact of phosphorothioate bonds (PS) on their biodistribution, efficacy but also toxicity. Moreover our work on the human DMD exon 51 revealed a sequence-dependent toxicity of some PS-tcDNA-ASO candidates, which we characterized and eliminated using a new detoxification method. Altogether, these findings led us to develop a new generation of PS-free tcDNA-ASO, conjugated to a lipid, displaying a much higher therapeutic index and safer toxicological profile. A clinical trial evaluating this new generation of conjugated tcDNA-ASO is currently being prepared.
https://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/XDB/DMS/GC%202022%20workshop%20abstract%20only(1).pdf
Come along to one of our monthly virtual drop-in sessions where a member of our team will be available to answer your questions on collaborating with industry. Monthly virtual drop-in sessions are for medical science researchers, staff and students across the University of Oxford. A member of the BPO team will be available to answer questions relating to forming collaborations with the pharmaceutical / biotech industry, including AI and digital health.
To register, please contact the organiser at james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk. Please note that there is no need to register if you have previously subscribed to the seminar mailing list.
The University of Oxford is hosting an AIMday in Women’s Health industry event on Tuesday 22 March 2022. This event will bring together industry with academia to discuss key challenges in women’s health. The AIMday format allows industry to propose challenges for one-hour roundtable discussions with groups of relevant academics and clinicians from Oxford. For academics, this is a great chance to see how your research can be applied in industry and to meet potential future collaborators. Participating companies include: Ferring Pharmaceuticals, Fertility Circle, Natural Cycles, Gynica, MirZyme Therapeutics, Syrona Health, Altus Life Sciences, Cambridge Digital Health, OCON Healthcare & Endodiag. *Registration for Oxford-affiliated researchers is now open and will close on Tuesday 1st March 2022*
https://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/XDB/DMS/GC%202022%20workshop%20abstract%20only(1).pdf
https://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/XDB/DMS/GC%202022%20workshop%20abstract%20only(1).pdf
An online briefing on open access publishing and Oxford's position including guidance on how to comply with the Open Access requirements for the REF and mandates from key funding bodies whilst respecting your publisher's rights and policies. The session will cover: An explanation of Open Access; Green route and how to deposit in ORA; Gold route and how to claim for Article Processing Charges; How to find out about research council or funder requirements; How to find out what your publisher will allow; Where to get more information & help; Act on Acceptance and OA policy for REF 2021; University policy for the Open Access block grants including RCUK/UKRI and Wellcome Trust. Intended Audience: Current Oxford researchers and academics, research support staff and librarians.
To register, please contact the organiser at james.cogbill@worc.ox.ac.uk. Please note that there is no need to register if you have previously subscribed to the seminar mailing list.
Oxford Biomedica is a leading, fully integrated, cell and gene therapy group. They have built a sector leading lentiviral vector delivery system, LentiVector® platform, which is leveraged to develop in vivo and ex vivo products both in-house and with partners. They have also created a valuable proprietary portfolio of cell and gene therapy product candidates in the areas of oncology, ophthalmology, CNS disorders and liver diseases. They have a three-year master supply and development agreement with AstraZeneca for large-scale manufacturing of the adenoviral based COVID-19 vaccine. Oxford Biomedica is based across several locations in Oxfordshire, UK and employs more than 740 people.
We are excited to participate again in this University-wide alumni event. Booking opens in mid-February.
The European Mechanics of Materials Conferences (EMMC) is a series of biyearly meetings organised under the auspices of the European Mechanics Society, Euromech, that has taken place during the last 25 years in cities across Europe, including Nantes, Brussels and Gothenburg. The 18th edition, EMMC18, will be held in Oxford from 4th to 6th April 2022, organised by the University of Oxford’s Department of Engineering Science. The conference will be located in the Examination Schools, in the heart of Oxford. Whilst we endeavour to hold the event in person, the format is constantly under review, and may change to hybrid or online depending on the pandemic evolution and community feedback. The conference aims to gather researchers who share a common interest in the field of mechanics of materials, yet working in a variety of application domains: material science, mechanical and civil engineering, but also biomechanics, geophysics etc. Contributions which provide a better understanding of complex phenomena associated with the mechanical response of materials at all scales, from atomistic to structural sizes, will be welcome. The scope of the conference will cover experimental, and analytical and computational modelling approaches, and contributions combining several approaches from different disciplines will be particularly encouraged.
Forthcoming
An online briefing on open access publishing and Oxford's position including guidance on how to comply with the Open Access requirements for the REF and mandates from key funding bodies whilst respecting your publisher's rights and policies. The session will cover: An explanation of Open Access; Green route and how to deposit in ORA; Gold route and how to claim for Article Processing Charges; How to find out about research council or funder requirements; How to find out what your publisher will allow; Where to get more information & help; Act on Acceptance and OA policy for REF 2021; University policy for the Open Access block grants including RCUK/UKRI and Wellcome Trust. Intended Audience: Current Oxford researchers and academics, research support staff and librarians.
The UK EQUATOR Centre’s Publication School is designed for early-career researchers and students. It aims to give you a smooth writing process that results in a published article that is fit for purpose. You will experience four afternoons of learning led by methodological and writing experts from the UK EQUATOR Centre and the Centre for Statistics in Medicine. Through group work, discussion, and practical exercises, we cover everything you need to know to plan, write, and publish your health-related research study. Content: Planning your message and audience Negotiating authorship Choosing a journal and avoiding predators Good writing style and habits What to write where: recipes for a successful introduction, methods, results, and discussion Using reporting guidelines Revising your work for simplicity, clarity and completeness Summarising your article in an effective title and abstract Submission and dealing with peer review Disseminating your article after publication The course will be held live over Zoom. Participants will need to have Zoom downloaded, rather than using the browser version, as we will be using registrations. We will teach using shared slides, webcam, and audio. We’re excited to maintain the highly interactive nature of Publication School in this online format, with all-group discussion and small-group exercises and discussion. Participants will be welcome to use text chat, mic, and/or webcam in the main room, but will need at least a mic for small-group work in breakout rooms. Sessions will run 12:30-17:00 GMT, with regular comfort breaks. We will not record the sessions, but participants will receive the electronic course workbook with all notes and exercises. We are offering 5 free places to CR-UK funded applicants. Places are limited and will be allocated in order of application. Email us (equator@csm.ox.ac.uk) or visit our web page for more information: www.ndorms.ox.ac.uk/graduate-courses/courses/equator-publication-school
TBC
Followed by a drinks reception
This talk will be delivered by Hannah Murray. A Q&A will follow, chaired by Cathy Creswell. More information to follow.
An online briefing on open access publishing and Oxford's position including guidance on how to comply with the Open Access requirements for the REF and mandates from key funding bodies whilst respecting your publisher's rights and policies. The session will cover: An explanation of Open Access; Green route and how to deposit in ORA; Gold route and how to claim for Article Processing Charges; How to find out about research council or funder requirements; How to find out what your publisher will allow; Where to get more information & help; Act on Acceptance and OA policy for REF 2021; University policy for the Open Access block grants including RCUK/UKRI and Wellcome Trust. Intended Audience: Current Oxford researchers and academics, research support staff and librarians.
For this 5th and final annual lecture of the Gandhara Connections project, we are delighted to host the distinguished scholar of ancient art, Vidya Dehejia (Barbara Stoler Miller Professor of Indian and South Asian Art at Columbia University). Professor Dehejia will put Gandharan imagery into the broader context of ancient Indian visual narratives. The lecture will be held online via the Crowdcast platform, at 2pm BST on Friday 20th May 2022 and a recording of the lecture will be available on our website after the event. There will be an opportunity for the audience to submit questions after the lecture. For details and registration see our website - https://www.carc.ox.ac.uk/GandharaConnections/events
In mammals, hybrids are often infertile, and this is thought to be a key driver of species formation – but how does this happen? In mammals, only a single speciation gene has so far been identified, in mice. In this talk I will talk about how this sterility is deeply connected to recombination, which shuffles mutations into new combinations, and to the pairing of chromosomes, essential to ensure one of each pair is passed on to offspring, two fundamental processes which are very incompletely understood. I will describe our collaborative work that has revealed how specific DNA sequences, which differ between all species so far examined, “code” for possible recombination sites, and identified key genes involved. Remarkably, simply modifying this code fully reverses hybrid sterility, in several cases. Evolution of this code occurs extraordinarily rapidly both in cis and in trans, driving diverse phenomena: it explains hybrid sterility in mice, the origins of many human diseases, and why different human populations have differing recombination landscapes. The study of hybrid mice has led to an improved understanding of an enduring biological mystery: how do homologous chromosomes precisely align, finding their exact partners among billions of genetic bases of DNA within the cell? We speculate that this explains why, in most studied species, recombination occurs in only a tiny fraction of the genome, in “hotspots”, and discuss a range of evolutionary implications. Professor Simon Myers is a member of the Department of Statistics, the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics and St John’s College, in Oxford. He has spent much of his career in Oxford, as well as several years spent at Harvard and the Broad Institute of MIT/Harvard. Although his original degree is in mathematics, his labs’ research has gradually broadened to combine the development of novel statistical techniques to investigate genetic data with experimental work. His research is diverse but centers around the study of genetic variation, its drivers and its impacts, for example revealing the timing and impacts on our DNA of many human migration events such as the Mongol empire, and Anglo-Saxon migrations. Another key research strand is the study of meiosis and its key defining features, namely recombination and the pairing of homologous chromosomes, and their connections to speciation in mammals. This has discovered a number of the key genes involved in the earliest steps of these processes, including some of the most rapidly evolving genes in the human genome. For his work, Professor Myers has been awarded the Genetics Society Balfour prize, and the Royal Society Francis Crick medal and lecture.
NMAs are often complex and challenging projects, this 3-day interactive course will focus on the tools needed to understand, write and critically appraise a network meta-analysis. A selected group of expert clinicians, researchers and scientists, with a strong track record in the field of NMA, will guide you through the course, bringing you lectures, group work, hands-on tutorials and supervised statistical sessions. The course is aimed at clinicians, researchers and policy makers in the health care field, but others are welcome. COURSE OBJECTIVES -Become familiar with the different ways of presenting results in NMA -Identify clinical questions to be addressed in the context of an NMA -Understand the key features of an NMA protocol -Practical sessions using statistical software for NMA (R, STATA) -Critically appraise NMAs -Learn important tips on how to write a manuscript and reply to peer reviewers’ comments.
Our annual get-together for all alumni, students and staff of the Environmental Change Institute. Booking will open in July 2022.
Unfortunately, due to the Coronavirus Pandemic we have decided to postpone the Oxford MasterClass 2021 and reschedule for September 2022 NEW DATES: 12 & 13 SEPTEMBER 2022, AT THE EXAMINATIONS SCHOOLS, OXFORD, UK Oxford IBD MasterClass 2022 Organising Committee : Jack Satsangi, Paul Klenerman, Simon Travis, Holm Uhlig, Simon Leedham, Alessandra Geremia, Denise O’Donnell. The Oxford IBD MasterClass 2022 will be held on 12th & 13th September at the Examination Schools in Oxford. The focus of the meeting will be the innovations in IBD from the field of immunology. As always, the meeting will be delivered by a distinguished faculty of expert speakers. In addition to the main Oxford IBD MasterClass we are delighted to announce that we will be running a forum for specialist IBD Nurses entitled IBD Nursing; On the Move. This will be a half day meeting on Monday morning. Those attending the forum are welcome to join the main Oxford MasterClass sessions on Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning. Both meetings will be held in the Examination Schools, which captures the essence of Oxford. There is also the opportunity to join us for the course dinner at New College on Monday evening to continue the discussions around the science and best clinical practice with the faculty, your peers and colleagues. ACCREDITATION Oxford IBD Masterclass 2022 has applied for CPD points/credits from The Federation of the Royal College of Physicians of the United Kingdom. Further details about the number of points allocated will be shared in due course. We do hope you will ‘Save the Dates’ and join us next year in Oxford, for what will be a stimulating and enlightening 2-day event. Registration will open later in the new year. For those that registered for 2020, or expressed an interest in attending this year, we will contact you when registration is open. If you have not registered and would like notification of the opening date then please send us an email to OMC2022@ndm.ox.ac.uk.
A networking event and dinner to celebrate 20 years of our MSc course in Nature, Society and Environmental Policy/Governance. Booking will open in July.
