Vision Zero is a campaign committed to making your journey safe and sustainable, emphasising sustainable commuting for cyclists, scooter users and pedestrians. This year, the University is collaborating with Oxfordshire County Council to organise the Vision Zero road safety event. It’s taking place in Broad Street on Monday 4 November from 10:00 – 16:00 with Oxfordshire Fire and Rescue’s “Be Bright Be Seen” campaign continuing until 19:00. There’ll be information and guidance on safe cycling in the city, and many free items including light reflectors, puncture repair kits and seat covers. Thames Valley Police will register your bike to help prevent theft and offer free D-locks to those who register and promote the Be Bright Be Seen campaign. You can trade places with a lorry driver and climb aboard an HGV to see the blind spots firsthand. A mobile mechanic will be in attendance to carry out bicycle safety checks and minor repairs and is available for University staff and students on a first come first served basis (make sure to bring your University card). Find out more about all the great deals and times of activities online.
Puzzled by PICO? Daunted by databases? Baffled by Boolean? This one-hour online introductory class will offer top tips and advice on how to find literature to answer a research question. No prior experience necessary! Together, we will break down a question into the PICO format, put together a structured search, and try it out in PubMed. By the end of this session, you will be able to: explain what structured searching is, and when to use it; break your research question down into searchable concepts; and make use of Boolean operators (ANDs/ORs) in your structured searches. Intended audience: students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
For online access, Microsoft Teams links will be sent to the email list in advance or email "$":mailto:sian.pooley@magd.ox.ac.uk for a link.
When naïve T cells are activated and clonally expand, the progeny differentiates into functionally distinct states or ‘subsets’. The differentiation state of a T cells is indicative of its functional and migratory properties, and T cell differentiation states are linked to clinical outcome, for example, after infection, adoptive T cell therapy or transplantation. It has, however, been difficult to translate T cell behavior across species. I will be presenting a practical strategy to facilitate two-way crosstalk between human and mouse settings, and propose a new conceptual framework to study T cell diversification.
Join us for a lunchtime event hosted by Oxford Science Enterprises (OSE) and Oxford University Innovation (OUI) to learn how these two critical organisations support Oxford’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. Whether you’re interested in launching a start-up, exploring IP, or making industry connections, this session will offer insights on how OUI and OSE complement each other and help you navigate the Oxford innovation journey.
The OCCT Discussion Group’s co-convenors Georgie Fooks and Alyssa Ollivier-Tabukashvili invite you to join them in this unique session focused on conceptualising the role of activism in translation, and translation in activism. Translation scholarship in the twenty-first century has seen a sociological and activist turn, most notably through the work of Mona Baker, leading to numerous special issues, conferences and collected editions on varieties of approaches to the role of translation in activism, and being an activist in the act of translation. In this session we will survey a range of approaches and ideas on the position of activism in translation, and specifically its meaning to us as individuals with different relationships to ‘translation’ and ‘activism’. ‘Translation’ includes a number of multilingual exchanges such as literary translation, volunteer translation, interpreting (legal, community, humanitarian), and the quotidian translation of conversation or social media. Whether we are practising translators, readers of published translations, or consuming global content via various online platforms, the possibility of activism may come our way, whether we are taking action or receiving the results of another’s activism. The hope is that attendees come away from this session having reflected on how translation and activism might be meaningful for them, regardless of their individual role in either practice.
Please join either in person or online. For in-person attendees, the talk will be preceded by a light lunch at 12.15pm. Please email comms@sociology.ox.ac.uk with any questions or to receive the Microsoft Teams link.
The definition of achievement emotions poses that psychophysiological processes constitute one component of the emotional experience in situations of learning and assessment. Therefore, research increasingly employs physiological measures in addition so self-report in the assessment of achievement emotions (Pekrun et al., 2023). Despite this increasing use, however, we are still lacking an in-depth understanding of how physiological measures relate to the individual’s subjective experience of achievement emotions and how such information can be used to supplement self-report in research and practice. The present research therefore explores the relation between psychophysiological measures (electrodermal activity and heart rate) and subjectively experienced, self-reported achievement emotions on both an inter- and an intraindividual level using a psychometric network approach (e.g. Epskamp, 2020). In a laboratory study, we obtained repeated physiological and self-report measures from N = 159 participants during an achievement task. The results underline the importance of a distinction between inter- and intraindividual relations and provide food for thought on how physiological processes constitute a “component” of achievement emotions and their application in research and practice. Teams link to join online: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_YjMxMTY5MWItMWYzMC00MjM1LTk1NDEtMjMyZTg3ZWZlNjU1%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22b33f55d8-6202-46f8-a141-737715faff88%22%7d
The ancestral tubulin homologue FtsZ is essential for cell division in almost all bacteria. FtsZ localises to the mid-cell as a dense band, known as the Z-ring, where it recruits and directs the cell wall synthesis proteins that build a mid-cell crosswall (septum). Several years ago, we and others discovered that FtsZ filaments move around the cell surface by a type of motion known as treadmilling. This is where cytoskeleton filaments - actin being the best known example - move by plus end polymerization and minus end depolymerization. I will discuss our progress towards understanding the functional role of FtsZ dynamics in bacterial cell division in the Gram-positive model organism Bacillus subtilis. Biography is here: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/lifesci/people/sholden/
The introduction of antiretroviral therapy has transformed HIV from a fatal disease to a chronic condition, with suppression of the virus and restoration of immune function that leads to improvement of ongoing infections and decreased susceptibility to new ones. When people start therapy with low CD4 counts (more damaged immune system) about 10–20% of them develop an aberrant inflammatory response (IRIS=immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome) that is typically directed against an underlying infection, for example tuberculosis. The main risk factors for IRIS include severe CD4 lymphopenia and opportunistic infections and it can be associated with high morbidity and even mortality. My group has been studying both the incidence and clinical presentations of IRIS in the clinic and its pathogenesis in the laboratory, with the goal to discover better biomarkers and targeted preventive or therapeutic interventions. Biography: Dr Sereti is the Branch Chief of the Laboratory of Immunoregulation at NIAID. After her Internal Medicine training and Chief residency at Northwestern University in Chicago, she completed an infectious disease fellowship at NIAID/NIH and joined the Laboratory of Immunoregulation, initially as a staff clinician, and starting in 2009 as a tenure track investigator. She received tenure in 2015. Her group studies the acute (IRIS) and long-term inflammatory complications of treated HIV and the etiology, prognosis, and management of idiopathic CD4 lymphopenia, a rare disorder of low CD4 counts in the absence of HIV. She is a member of the executive committees of the NIH-Oxford and Cambridge PhD program, and of the Women Scientists Advisors group at NIH. She is an associate editor at the Journal of Infectious Diseases and a member of the panels of the Human and Health Services HIV treatment guidelines and the Infectious Disease Society of America immunomodulatory guidance. Dr Sereti is a physician-scientist with a strong commitment to diversity, excellence in clinical care and mentorship.
This workshop will showcase collaborations between the University of Oxford’s Visual Geometry Group (VGG) and museum and library collections in the field of Visual AI. VGG has collaborated with the majority of the Oxford GLAM institutions, addressing tasks such as visual search, image deduplication, object detection, image classification and video tracking.
Are you planning to present a poster at an upcoming conference, meeting or symposium? This introductory session will provide you with some top tips on how to create a poster presentation which will help you to communicate your research project and data effectively. There will be guidance on formatting, layout, content, use of text, references and images, as well as advice on printing and presenting your poster. This session will also provide help with locating resources such as templates, free-to-use images and poster guidelines. By the end of this session you will be able to: evaluate the effectiveness of templates, formatting, text and images; and plan, prepare and present your poster. Intended audience: students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
HDRUK Oxford Monthly Community Meeting, Monday 4 November 2024, 2:00pm - 3:00pm Speaker - Professor Philip Awadalla; Title - Using Machine Learning, Population Cohorts and Healthcare Data to Capture the Earliest Determinants of Disease and Aging Venue - Big Data Institute, Seminar room 0 Bio: Philip Awadalla is the Professor of Molecular Genetics at the Nuffield Department of Population Health, as well as the Big Data Institute at the University of Oxford. Philip also serves as the National Scientific Director of CanPath (Canadian Partnership for Tomorrow’s Health). Previously, he was a Professor at the University of Toronto, and the University of Montreal Ste Justine Children’s Hospital where he was Director of the CARTaGENE cohort in Quebec. Philip and his team have expertise in population genomics, computational biology, and epidemiology. The research focus of his team is on healthy aging, early cancer detection, and the evolution of somatic mutations. Abstract: The integration of machine learning with deeply characterized population cohorts has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of disease onset and the aging process. By leveraging multi-omic datasets, health records, and longitudinal population studies, we can identify novel biomarkers and early determinants of chronic diseases, cancer, and age-related conditions. This presentation will outline a framework that combines AI and machine learning with data from large cohort studies to model the earliest molecular and environmental factors influencing disease and healthy aging trajectories. I will discuss how these models enable the identification of at-risk individuals and potential interventions long before clinical manifestations, paving the way for early detection and prevention strategies. Hybrid Option : Please respect our speakers and do not share the link with anyone outside of the University. The purpose of these seminars is to foster more communication among employees working on Data sciences throughout the University and outside, so we strongly advise in-person attendance whenever feasible. If you wish to attend online, please email hdroxford@bdi.ox.ac.uk
Our food systems account for 15% of global fossil fuel use. It's hard to imagine our food system without coal, gas, and oil, but the science tells us that we have to not only imagine it--we have to build it. But how? A recent podcast series collaboration between TABLE, IPES-Food, and the Global Alliance for the Future of Food explores this transition. In "Fuel to Fork", host Matthew Kessler interviews experts in food systems about the challenges they see at different levels of the food supply chain and what visions they have for a more sustainable future. We'll be exploring the policy side of this with an online panel discussion on the critical intersection of fossil fuels and food systems, exploring the policy implications and pathways for reducing fossil fuel dependence throughout the food value chain. This includes everything from farm inputs and energy use on farms to processing, packaging, transportation, and retail. The session will highlight the urgent need for policy changes to address both climate goals and food security. Moderator: Jack Thompson (Freelance Journalist) Panel: Errol Schweizer (Grocery Expert, IPES-Food) Ruchi Tripathi (Climate & Nature Director, Global Alliance for the Future of Food) Lili Fuhr (Deputy Director of Climate & Energy, Center for International Environmental Law) Learn more about the podcast series Fuel to Fork (www.fueltofork.com).
Currently, climate finance is directed predominantly toward larger, fast-growing developing nations, while low-income and vulnerable countries remain underserved due to high risk levels, limited investment suitability, and path dependency effects. This talk will address the unique investment challenges faced by developing economies, focusing on the complex landscape of macro risks that shape the investment environment for mitigation projects. It will highlight critical risk factors that define an "investible space" and examine how these risks - both individually and in combination - impact investment viability. The discussion will further investigate how macro risks, such as foreign exchange volatility, interest rate fluctuations, and sovereign credit risks, interact to create complex, non-linear effects on investment decisions. For example, elevated levels of one type of such risk may be manageable only if other risks, such as those related to political stability or economic cycles, are kept relatively low. Thus, designing effective de-risking strategies demands a nuanced understanding of these risk interactions to develop more efficient, cost-effective solutions that can foster a broader, more equitable distribution of climate finance.
During the 14th to the 16th centuries CE, a succession of Indian scholars, collectively referred to as the Kerala school, made remarkable contributions in the fields of mathematics and astronomy. Mādhava of Saṅgamagrāma, a gifted mathematician and astronomer, is considered the founder of this school, and is perhaps best known for discovering an infinite series for pi, among other achievements. Subsequently, Mādhava's lineage of disciples, consisting of illustrious names such as Parameśvara, Dāmodara, Nīlakaṇṭha, Jyeṣṭhadeva, Śaṅkara Vāriyar, Citrabhānu, Acyuta Piṣaraṭi etc., made numerous important contributions of their own in the fields of mathematics and astronomy. Later scholars of the Kerala school flourished up to the 19th century. This talk will provide a historical overview of the Kerala school and highlight its important contributions.
Algorithms and Bureaucrats: Evidence from Tax Audit Selection in Senegal Can algorithms enhance the work of bureaucrats in developing countries? Developing economies are often data-poor environments, where individual bureaucrats have substantial discretion to take key decisions, such as selecting taxpayers for audits. Exploiting a trove of newly digitized microdata, we conduct a field experiment across tax offices in Senegal, whereby half of the annual audit program is selected by inspectors and the other half is selected by a risk-scoring algorithm. We document three sets of results. First, inspector-selected audits are 18 ppt more likely to be conducted and detect higher amounts of evasion. Second, algorithm-selected audits are less cost-effective and do not generate less corruption. Third, even an ex-post optimized algorithm, trained on outcome data, would have increased detected evasion by only 5% compared to the inspector selection. This is consistent with the inspectors’ high skill level and the imperfection of the available data. (with Pierre Bachas, Alipio Ferreira and Bassirou Sarr)
In a new Future of the Humanities Project event series — Cultural Encounters: Books that Have Made a Difference — we embrace the other at a time when we have heard much about the ways in which national, religious, and cultural lines divide us as humans. In this series, we invite leading scholars across disciplines to explore themes of cultural encounters both in classic literary works and in contemporary cultural debates. In this event Dr Ian Finlay, Oxford, gives a talk on The Book of Mormon.
Eurasia Oxford Lecture Series All welcome. Convenors: Prof. Jieun Kiaer & Dr. Hark-Joon Lee November 4,TBA, 5-6pm Title: K-Pop & Entrepreneurship Speaker K. Marty Ro Bio: K. Marty Ro is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Sound Republica Inc., a global music distribution company, and a former cardiovascular surgeon. With a unique blend of experience in medicine and music, he has played a pivotal role in bringing K-pop to the world stage while fostering innovation and entrepreneurship in the industry.
In (supercritical) Bernoulli bond percolation on $\mathbb{Z}^d$, the proportion of vertices in the largest cluster restricted to a volume-$n$ box converges to $\theta$: the probability that the origin lies in an infinite cluster. The probability that this proportion is smaller than $\theta-\varepsilon$ decays stretched exponentially with exponent strictly smaller than one. The probability that the largest cluster is much larger than expected decays exponentially. Thus, the upper tail decays much faster than the lower tail. In this talk, we will see that the discrepancy between the tails is reversed in supercritical spatial random graph models in which the degrees have heavy tails. In particular, we will focus on the soft heavy-tailed Poisson-Boolean model. The lower tail decays stretched exponentially, with an exponent that is determined by the strongest of three competing effects. In contrast, the upper tail decays now polynomially, and thus decays much slower than the lower tail. We will give intuition for the exponent of this polynomial, which is determined by the generating function of the finite cluster-size distribution. Joint work with Júlia Komjáthy and Dieter Mitsche.
The Napoleonic Wars at the beginning of the 19th century precipitated a series of political and financial crises in the central European states. These crises ultimately gave rise to the establishment of constitutional monarchies within a couple of years. The Prussian state collapsed after the military defeat of 1806, yet despite the sustained efforts of the Prussian reform movement, it was one of the last German states to receive a constitution in 1848. It is therefore intriguing to observe that the financing of the court and the royal dynasty underwent a radical transformation in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. A new system of royal financing emerged that anticipated constitutional elements in Prussia for over two decades. In my talk, I will focus on the introduction of the Prussian pseudo-civil list and its relationship to the constitutional process, examining its rationale, structure, and implications for the monarchy’s self-perception.
This student-led reading group is an opportunity for graduate students and early career researchers to join us to discuss all aspects of memory studies and life-writing, from the personal to the political, the local to the transnational, within disciplines and without, the ordinary to the extraordinary. Ars Memoriae aims to promote and generate awareness about the growing discipline of memory studies while also recognising the pressing need to synthesise memory studies scholarship with purposeful cultural analysis. In association with TORCH. Find more details here: www.torch.ox.ac.uk/ars-memoriae-reading-group
Kellogg College and the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship are delighted to welcome acclaimed economist, Sir John Kay, for a conversation about his new book, The Corporation in the Twenty-First Century: Why (Almost) Everything We Are Told About Business Is Wrong (Profile Books, 2024). The book surveys the vast economic transformations that have occurred since the days of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, when capitalists built and controlled mills and factories. In contrast, both products and production today are increasingly dematerialized: the goods and services provided by the leading companies of the twenty-first century appear on your screen, fit in your pocket, or occupy your head. As Sir John argues, the consequences of this shift are upending classic ideas about the means of production, capital, and corporate power.
This session will guide you through the initial steps of market testing to understand customer needs and develop strong value propositions. You will explore various market research methods to uncover customer pains and gains. Successfully identifying your target customer or users allows a venture to develop products or services that directly address the needs of your desired target market. This increases the likelihood of achieving product-market fit, where the product or service satisfies a significant demand. Additionally, you’ll develop a strategic plan to gather valuable user and customer feedback for your identified ideas. Join us to enhance your market understanding and refine your value propositions.
One of the signal moments in the biblical narrative about Abraham – ‘a father of many nations’ is his insistent and enthusiastic reception of three strangers, a starting point of inspiration for all three Abrahamic traditions as they evolve and develop the details of their respective teachings. Welcoming the stranger by remembering ‘that you were strangers in the land of Egypt’ is enjoined upon the ancient Israelites, and oppressing the stranger is condemned by their prophets throughout the Hebrew Bible. These sentiments are repeated in the New Testament and the Qur’an and elaborated in the interpretive literatures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Such notions resonate obliquely within the history of India and its Dharmic traditions. However, contrary to the scriptural commandments and ethical aspirations, marginalized religious and ethnic groups around the globe are deemed unwelcome and unwanted. Beginning with the story of Abraham’s hospitality to the three strangers described in Genesis 18, the essays in Welcoming the Stranger explore these issues from historical, theoretical, theological, and practical perspectives, offering an enlightening and compelling discussion of what the Abrahamic traditions teach us regarding the principle of ‘welcoming the stranger’, and its on-the-ground applications from India to Germany in the past to the present. Its contents could hardly be more relevant today.
One of the signal moments in the biblical narrative about Abraham – ‘a father of many nations’ is his insistent and enthusiastic reception of three strangers, a starting point of inspiration for all three Abrahamic traditions as they evolve and develop the details of their respective teachings. Welcoming the stranger by remembering ‘that you were strangers in the land of Egypt’ is enjoined upon the ancient Israelites, and oppressing the stranger is condemned by their prophets throughout the Hebrew Bible. These sentiments are repeated in the New Testament and the Qur’an and elaborated in the interpretive literatures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Such notions resonate obliquely within the history of India and its Dharmic traditions. However, contrary to the scriptural commandments and ethical aspirations, marginalized religious and ethnic groups around the globe are deemed unwelcome and unwanted. Beginning with the story of Abraham’s hospitality to the three strangers described in Genesis 18, the essays in Welcoming the Stranger explore these issues from historical, theoretical, theological, and practical perspectives, offering an enlightening and compelling discussion of what the Abrahamic traditions teach us regarding the principle of ‘welcoming the stranger’, and its on-the-ground applications from India to Germany in the past to the present. Its contents could hardly be more relevant today.
The Management in Medicine (MiM) Shadowing Programme provides medical students, doctors in training, postgraduate students and others with an interest in healthcare management, with an opportunity to shadow a senior manager in healthcare, or social services for approximately two half-days. The purpose of the shadowing is to give those working or interested in healthcare an insight into the activities of managers, how they go about those activities, and the issues on which they work. During this event, Dr Nicholas Hicks will explain what is expected of you if you apply to the programme and are successful. You will also have the opportunity to hear from previous shadows about their experience of the programme. The programme is competitive and priority will be given to those who attend the launch on 6 November.
An evening with Professor Alpa Shah, where she will explore the themes of democracy, social justice and religious freedom in India under Narendra Modi. These issues are central to her latest book, The Incarcerations, which looks at a group of jailed human rights' activists. Alpa's talk will be followed by a Q+A session. Light refreshments will be provided and copies of the book will be available to purchase. (source: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-incarcerations-alpa-shah-at-the-oxford-chaplaincy-tickets-1043538390417) ----- Professor Alpa Shah is the Statutory Professor in Social Anthropology and Fellow of All Souls College
Human flourishing through meditation, music and psychedelics – a unique, experiential journey into consciousness and the brain. Led by Professor Morten Kringelbach, the day will include a dawn chorus meditation, guided walks, music ranging from classical to hip hop, and an exploration of how controlled psychedelics are growing as a treatment option.
Insomnia is common in the general population and even more so in patients we see in psychiatry. Cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) is the first-line treatment for insomnia disorder. I will tell you how I got to know and became fascinated with CBT-I before reporting the new findings from, but not limited to, our research. The first set of findings are from our component network meta-analysis which elucidated its effective ingredients. The second one is from our network meta-analysis that showed starting with CBT-I is more effective than starting with pharmacotherapy to treat chronic insomnia disorder. The third set of evidence will show you how broadly CBT-I can be applied. Lastly, I will show you how we are trying to disseminate CBT-I. Zoom Details: https://zoom.us/j/98643323773?pwd=bL0TW4vweAlQzIlL5VEFHKYiEaVYPl.1 Meeting ID: 986 4332 3773 Passcode: 758174
Oliver completed his PhD with Professor Douglas Fearon at the University of Cambridge in 2009, investigating the developmental pathway of memory CD8+ T cells. Following this, he joined the laboratory of Professor Jason Cyster at The University of California San Francisco (UCSF) as a postdoctoral fellow, where his focus turned to B cells. Oliver returned to the UK in 2015 to start his independent group at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine (WIMM), University of Oxford, where he has been based every since. The Bannard group aims to the mechanisms shaping humoral immune responses, with a particular interest in germinal centres.
COURSE DETAILS The key factors in developing successful proposals will be identified as will the requirements of specific research councils. LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this session you will understand more about: • The significance of winning research grants for your academic career. • The technical aspects of how to submit a research funding application. • The key issues when writing a research proposal, and the pitfalls to avoid. • What to look for when reviewing a research proposal.
Who do you need to engage with in the policy world to achieve impact? In this workshop, we will help answer this and other questions by equipping researchers, professional services staff and DPhil students to identify and map the people and groups who influence or are impacted by their research, when it comes to policy engagement. Using stakeholder analysis frameworks and interactive exercises, participants will learn to identify and categorise their relevant audiences across government agencies and other pertinent policy actors. Learning outcomes: A greater ability to identify, evaluate and prioritise those in the policymaking community who may have an interest in policy-relevant research A better understanding of the value of a systematic stakeholder analysis The guidance and resources available to support a stakeholder analysis
5th November 2024 at 10:00 am -11:00am Speaker: Professor Aziz Sheikh-Professor of Primary Care Health Sciences and Head of Department Title: Leveraging electronic ealth records to advance applied health research: opportunities, challenges and reflections on key lessons learnt. Venue: Reuben College- Lecture theatre https://reuben.ox.ac.uk/about-our-building-project
5th November 2024 at 10:00 am -11:00am Speaker: Professor Aziz Sheikh-Professor of Primary Care Health Sciences and Head of Department Title: Leveraging electronic ealth records to advance applied health research: opportunities, challenges and reflections on key lessons learnt. Venue: Reuben College- Lecture theatre https://reuben.ox.ac.uk/about-our-building-project
So, you’ve got a great idea for a research study – but what approvals do you need before you can start? Who do you apply to? And how do you go about doing this? Join an online presentation through Microsoft Teams for an overview of: • how research is governed in the UK • which approval bodies are involved • a step-by-step guide on how to apply for approval • handling amendments to your study
To celebrate the launch of the letters of Charles Ignatius Sancho in _Electronic Enlightenment_, the Centre for Digital Scholarship and Electronic Enlightenment team are hosting a half-day, in-person, academic symposium exploring the life and legacy of a man who, born into slavery, became a composer, shopkeeper, and man-of-letters. While Sancho scholars benefit from his extensive epistolary documentation of his life and the circles he moved in, from the back rooms of elite manors, to the theatrical and commercial spheres of London, his wife Anne and his children remain comparatively silent presences in the archive. This symposium brings together generations of editors of Sancho's letters, with creative and critical practitioners, to explore how Ignatius, Anne, and Elizabeth Sancho come to us today. Lunch and refreshments will be provided.
To celebrate the launch of the letters of Charles Ignatius Sancho, edited by Professor Vincent Carretta, in Electronic Enlightenment, the Centre for Digital Scholarship and Electronic Enlightenment team are hosting a half-day academic symposium exploring the life and legacy of a man who, born into slavery, became a composer, shopkeeper, and man-of-letters. While Sancho scholars benefit from his extensive epistolary documentation of his life and the circles he moved in, from the back rooms of elite manors, to the theatrical and commercial spheres of London, his wife Anne and his children remain comparatively silent presences in the archive. This symposium brings together generations of editors of Sancho's letters, with creative and critical practitioners, to explore how Ignatius, Anne, and Elizabeth Sancho come to us today. This free in-person event is open to University of Oxford staff and students only. Registration is required. Registration closes at 17:00 UK time on 29 October 2024.
*Postponed to Trinity Term 2025*
Emotion understanding (EU) describes the ability to identify, interpret, and communicate about emotions, and is often targeted by social-emotional learning (SEL) programs. Still, the theoretical framing of SEL programs and their impact on specific areas of social-emotional development, such as EU, for different age bands is not always transparent. This systematic review synthesized emotion-focused content in SEL programs used in quantitative outcome studies in middle childhood to identify which EU components are targeted and examine content congruence with an integrated EU development model drawing on the Pons EU developmental model and the Crick and Dodge social-information processing (SIP) model that posits emotion identification as fundamental to social decision-making in childhood. A total of 38 programs for Grades 3 to 5 across 54 studies in 20 countries were reviewed. Program aims, lesson topics, and activities were extracted and mapped to a 10-component EU framework integrating the nine Pons model components (‘recognition, external cause, reminder, desire, belief, hiding, regulation, mixed, morality’) with one based on the SIP model (‘decision/action’). At least 87% of emotion-focused SEL content targeted EU components of recognition, regulation, and social decision-making. Findings indicate a good level of congruence between emotion-focused SEL program content and prevailing EU development models. Many programs emphasized the external causes of emotions, underscoring the importance of scenarios to explain emotions—discussed further in light of cross-cultural variation in emotion socialization. We encourage SEL intervention research to be more transparent in reporting SEL program content and activities to move toward causal explanations of program impact. Teams link: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3aH7IoYwBLlY_nR8d0DFzqC4yXRigyhbzyOceuytRk4g01%40thread.tacv2/1728553869256?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22be558437-bc8f-4f3b-801c-af85d95b70ea%22%7d
How does auction design affect the division of surplus among buyers? We propose a parsimonious measure for equity and apply it to multi-unit auctions, in which unit demand buyers with private-common values pay mixtures of uniform and pay-as-bid pricing. We show that uniform pricing is equity-optimal if and only if buyers have a pure common value. Surprisingly, however, with pure private values, pay-as-bid pricing may not be optimal, and uniform pricing can achieve higher surplus equity. For the class of log-concave signal distributions, we provide prior-free bounds on the equity-optimal pricing rule.
Coastal flood model predictions are undeniably important for informing coastal management, but contain considerable uncertainty related to model structure, parameterisation, and input data. With these predictions becoming increasingly available through online flood maps, the uncertainty in these predictions presents considerable risks related to property devaluation. Such risks relate to real estate demand, measured by location preferences and willingness-to-pay (WTP) to buy and rent properties, based on access to flood predictions. Here, we evaluate the impact of flood predictions on coastal real estate demand in the UK by adopting an interdisciplinary approach, involving coastal flood modelling, a novel experimental WTP real estate survey of UK residents in response to flood model outputs, statistical modelling, and geospatial analysis. Our findings show that access to flood predictions dominates coastal real estate demand decisions in relation to personal preferences for location aesthetics, reflecting a shift in demand towards risk-averse locations. We also find that people do not consider flood prediction uncertainty in their real estate decisions, possibly due to an inability to perceive such uncertainty. Therefore, we argue that caution is needed when communicating flood predictions and using these predictions to inform coastal management. We advocate for the need to get flood models ‘right’ but recognise that this is a contentious issue as it implies having an error-free model, which is near impossible. Hence, we place greater emphasis on effectively communicating coastal flood predictions and their uncertainty to minimise real estate risks.
Bio: Sam Mathewlynn is a DPhil student in the placental imaging research group, University of Oxford, under the supervision of Prof. Sally Collins. His research focuses on novel first trimester three-dimensional placental ultrasound markers for the prediction of fetal growth restriction and pre-eclampsia. Sam is also a consultant obstetrician at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, and the medical informatics lead for maternity at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Abstract: In this talk, Sam will explore the use of first trimester 3D placental ultrasound markers for predicting fetal growth restriction and pre-eclampsia, with a focus on placental volume and 3D fractional moving blood volume. The challenge of placental image segmentation will be discussed, as well as the use of machine learning to enhance this process. Preliminary findings from the FirstPLUS and OxPLUS studies will be presented, and a strategy for the development of novel placental vascular markers will be explored.
Join via MS Teams: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_MTEyNTg5NTgtYTQzMy00NzljLTk1ZmMtNWQzYmFiZTNmN2Nm%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22b84f47ee-130a-4bdd-bb79-3b10ca433ee7%22%7d
When do positive news about future technological advancements have the greatest economic impact: during recessions or economic booms? Recessions may represent opportune times for investment in relatively cheaper, productivity-enhancing activities. However, tighter financial constraints during recessions may limit the ability to secure funding for such investments. We explore this dichotomy by exploiting patent-based innovation shocks, defined by changes in stock market valuations of firms receiving patent grants. Our results show that aggregate patent-based innovation shocks have a greater impact on the economy during recessions, leading to a more significant rise in private investment. Firm-level data further reveals that firms tend to increase capital investment and R&D expenditures in response to these innovation shocks, especially during recessions. Financial constraints play a crucial role, with the larger impact during recessions driven by firms with low default risk.
Convened by Tamarin Norwood and Loralie Rodrigues Birth and death may be the only certainties in life. Yet in life writing, the task of representing birth and death is an uncertain one. They are fundamental events but are also, in many ways, quite untellable. This is no less true of the mid-life event of giving birth. This research symposium accompanies a forthcoming special issue of Life Writing journal, edited by Dr Tamarin Norwood, which asks how life writing attends to the challenges presented by writing the edges of life. For the symposium, we are bringing life writing into dialogue with health humanities, by further narrowing our focus onto two specific questions: 1. How might we define 'practices' of life writing as distinct from its processes (techniques) and its products (texts)? A written text might provide factual or affective insight into birth, birthing or death, or perhaps offer a sense of community or catharsis. Writing techniques might provide guidelines for individuals navigating birth, birthing or death in scholarship or in life, including for historical, auto/biographical or therapeutic reasons. But there is a third thing: practice. Writers are making decisions, finding ways to think and ways to know, being interested and not interested in things, and developing a craft and a style and a drawerful of drafts even when there is not really any writing going on. A writer's practice is the thing that shapes and allows for all the processes and products of their craft, and yet this third but very central thing seldom makes the transition into health humanities because it is ephemeral, difficult even for the writer themself to grasp, and still more difficult to put into words and into the service of healthcare. And so: 2. In applied health humanities including arts in hospitals, palliative narrative therapy, arts in bereavement care and literature in medical education, how might the concept of writing 'practice' help practitioners to more effectively achieve their aims? Focusing on these two questions, this symposium aims to build bridges between scholarship and practice in life writing and health humanities and better understand what the practice of life writing can contribute to the ways we navigate birth, birthing, and death in healthcare practice. This event is free and open to all. Reservation is required. This is an informal working group conversation with invited contributors. We have a handful of in-person spaces available. If you are interested in contributing to the conversation, you can request a space here, indicating the reason for your interest, and we will confirm by 25 October. If you are unable to attend the event, please inform Events Manager, Dr Eleri Watson (events.oclw@wolfson.ox.ac.uk) as soon as possible-- any returned tickets will be assigned to those on the waiting list. Alternatively, you are welcome to listen to the conversation online as an audience member. Online audience members will be sent the Zoom link the day before the event This event is funded by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship Grant
Hamas surprised Israel by launching a large-scale attack on October 7, 2023. Israel, after losing more than 1,100 people in one day, responded with a massive offensive in the Gaza Strip. Israel inflicted a major blow to Hamas but did not manage to destroy this group. The cost of the war, to the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip, has been enormous. Israel also has been paying heavily in blood and treasure. Overall, Israel carried out its offensive based on a half-baked strategy, neglecting key military, political, and economic factors. Israel avoided alternatives, including a more defensive strategy. Israel’s flawed strategy in the war in Gaza has serious implications on other fronts as well, mainly the attrition war between Israel and Hezbollah. Israel might also conduct preemptive actions, such as against Iran’s nuclear sites. Dr Ehud Eilam has been dealing and studying Israel’s national security in the last 35 years. He served in the Israeli military and later worked as a researcher for the Israeli Ministry of Defense. He has a Ph.D. in his field, and he has published nine books in the U.S / U.K . His latest book is: Israel’s new wars - The conflicts between Israel and Iran, Hezbollah and the Palestinians since the 1990s (Peter Lang, 2024). He can be reached at Ehudmh2014@gmail.com Join Teams Meeting: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_ZDRjZTc5MjItOGEzMy00YjdkLWEwMmEtMjViOWZlNTBmYzhi%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%2283ae5aa7-e7b2-46f3-82c1-8e8a0d3b778e%22%7d
In recent years, we have observed growing activism by municipalities and local civil society actors calling for “sanctuary” or “solidarity cities” and the inclusion of migrants without legal status in public service provision for formal rights protections and democratic participation. A multiplicity of studies have shown that these policies and practices vary greatly, depending on place-specific and path-dependent legal, political, and financial conditions and the interactions between governments and civil society actors. These policies and practices are products of complex policy-formulation processes. To develop a nuanced and comprehensive understanding of these dynamics, we will examine the processes of negotiating and contesting the implementation of municipal identification cards (City Cards) in Bern and Zurich. We adopt a process-oriented and relational perspective in which the different policies, practices and actors are analysed in their complex (cooperative/conflictive) interplay. City Cards have not yet been implemented in either city (as of autumn 2024), but both are developing context-specific policy approaches.
A workshop outlining some of the key principles to bear in mind when working with sensitive or restricted research; whether collected yourself or obtained from a third-party source such as a data archive. Issues of confidentiality, informed consent, cybersecurity and data management will be covered. Examples of scenarios or concerns drawn from the research of participants are particularly welcome. The role of support services at Oxford will also be outlined and in particular the role of the Bodleian Data Librarian who will lead the session. Follow up consultations with the Data librarian or other subject consultants are also offered. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
Maintaining well-organised data is essential for researchers to keep accurate records of fieldwork data and make informed decisions. The techniques and strategies for securely managing data may differ depending on the field sites, types and amount of data, and the system or database used for data collection and analysis. Some may find online data storage to be the best option, while it may not be ideal for those working in remote areas. In this workshop, post-fieldworkers will be sharing their experience and knowledge on managing data in the field. The discussion will cover various topics, such as effective methods and strategic planning for storing, organising, and updating data on both online and offline platforms, as well as some potential challenges and drawbacks that may arise. We will also delve into practical tools and techniques for backing up data and enhancing security measures to safeguard the confidentiality of the data during and after data collection in the field. Refreshments will be provided. Chair Keiko Kanno (University of Oxford) Panellists Dr Marilou Polymeropoulou (Research Affiliate, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford) Abril Ríos-Rivera (DPhil, Migration Studies, University of Oxford/Migration Oxford Co-Convenor) Yaoyao Ruan (DPhil, Education, University of Oxford)
Abstract With growing utilisation of digital health technologies for the prevention and management of dementia, this presentation will delve into the ethics of using voice assistants powered by large language models (LLMs), within dementia care. The first part of the presentation will introduce value sensitive designs, complemented by the Ethics by Design for AI framework, to discuss the key principles and ethical considerations for development of such technologies. Secondly, I will introduce our prototype, GRACE, an LLM-based voice assistant that leverages elements of cognitive stimulation therapy to provide cognitive interventions. The aim of GRACE is to help individuals with dementia maintain independence and enable aging-in-place, and thus also improve their quality of life. To conclude, I will present results from two pilot studies conducted with GRACE, among (a) healthy younger adults, and (b) healthy older adults. These pilot studies provide an insight to perceived ethical values and considerations by study participants, and a use-case of how ethical frameworks can be applied to new technologies. Joining link: https://medsci.zoom.us/j/91784291038
This talk is based on my recent book, The Political Lives of Information: Information and the Production of Development in India, which examines the history of the idea of “information” and its political implications for poverty alleviation in India. We live in a world that sees information as empowering and democratising. But how does information work in practice and who does it work for? The book examined three cases in India—the circulation of price information on mobile phones in a fish market in Kerala, government information in computer kiosks operated by a non-profit in Puducherry, and a political campaign demanding a right to information in Rajasthan—to explore their divergent uses of information to support goals of social change. Drawing on the book and these cases, the talk will challenge claims that treat information as naturally empowering for everyone. It will use the alternative construct of an “information order” to refocus attention on how caste, class, and gender shaped who got to define information and benefit from it in the cases it considers. Janaki’s research and writing has examined the politics of informational and digital exclusion in initiatives spanning varied digital technologies and parts of India. Her current interests include privacy and the algorithmic control of labour. For the past 5 years, as co-investigator on the Fairwork India team, she has been involved in researching and advocating for change in the precarious working conditions of digital platform-based gig workers in India. Prior to joining the University of Oxford as Associate Professor in Digital South Asian Studies In October 2024, Janaki was on the faculty at the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Bangalore and convenor of its Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy. She has a PhD in Information Management and Systems from the University of California Berkeley and Masters degrees in Physics and in Information Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and IIIT Bangalore.
The Zionist claim to Palestine was based on a very old story; so old that it became a myth. And since the distance between the Jewish present and the Jewish past was vast, the wish to make Palestine a home for a modern Jewish nation called for creating that nation anew. It was an immense claim that required an equally immense innovation. The lecture reexamines this well-known story by looking at some of the cultural innovations of Zionists - body culture, space, art, music - and considering their fraught legacy a century later.
Speakers from four Oxford immunology companies will discuss their careers, their companies' technology, opportunities for collaboration with Oxford researchers, and possible career routes within their company, followed by a panel discussion session with audience questions. There will then be an opportunity for drinks/networking in the atrium.
Despite the availability of effective treatments, most depressive disorders remain undetected and untreated. Internet-based depression screening combined with automated feedback of screening results could reach people with depression and lead to evidence-based care. DISCOVER was an observer-masked, three-armed, randomised controlled trial in Germany. We aimed to test the efficacy of two versions of automated feedback after internet-based screening on depression severity compared with no feedback.
In this 60-minute online workshop you will be introduced to the methodologies and principles underpinning the conduct of literature searches for systematic reviews, scoping reviews and other evidence reviews. The session will cover: formulating a focused research question; preparing a protocol; developing a search strategy to address that research question; choosing appropriate databases and search engines; searching for grey literature and ongoing studies; storing and managing references; and documenting and reporting your search. Intended audience: students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
The impeachment of Dr HenrySacheverell in 1710 was more than just the prosecution of a firebrand HighChurch preacher for an incendiary sermon. The senior Whigs who pushed for theimpeachment saw it as an opportunity to put the entire Tory Party and itspolitical principles on trial. In the short-term, it backfired spectacularly.It proved the decisive moment in Robert Harley’s backstairs coup against theWhigs, but also gave rise to a national upsurge of pro-Church sentiment whichpropelled the Tories to landslide victory in the 1710 General Election. Thislecture will show how the trial ultimately illustrated the inescapable dilemmasof a Tory Party that could neither fully accept nor bring itself to fullyoppose the revolutionary settlement of 1689. Dr Sacheverell became, in truth,the figurehead not of Tory victory, but of the fatal ambiguities ofpost-Revolutionary Toryism.
Two days in the life of Horst, an elderly man whose life has been upended by dementia. The filmmaker’s father, Horst, has almost lost his senses of sight and hearing as a result of a decline that is also chipping away at his memory. Once a loquacious professor, he has withdrawn into the semi-seclusion of his diminished mind. Booking is not required for in-person attendance by to join online please visit: https://www.gtc.ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/event/up-the-river-with-acid-2024/?_gl=1*wktne3*_up*MQ..*_ga*MTA0MDM4MDY2LjE3Mjk2ODExNjU.*_ga_1VFN1VJQDG*MTcyOTY4MTE2NC4xLjAuMTcyOTY4MTE2NC4wLjAuMA..
In the second half of the 2010s more than 100 countries—including all large offshore financial centers—started to automatically exchange bank information with foreign tax authorities. This informational big-bang marks a break with the situation of offshore bank secrecy that prevailed before. We study its effects on tax compliance by analyzing the universe of information reports sent by foreign banks to Danish authorities, matched to population-wide micro-data on income, wealth, and cross-border bank transfers. In response to the automatic exchange of bank information, tax evaders may repatriate previously undeclared offshore wealth, they may start to self-report offshore income to the tax authorities, or the tax authorities may detect their evasion in audits that use the new information reports. Using a variety of research designs, we find large compliance effects along all these margins, with the largest response coming from repatriation of wealth. Overall we estimate that the automatic exchange of bank information has closed about 70% of the offshore tax gap. These results highlight the power of international cooperation to improve tax compliance: tax evasion is not a law of nature in a globalized world.
Join us in person (refreshments provided) or online (register for webinar link: bit.ly/4dOcNP4) This article builds on an extensive literature overview of plausible dimensions and indicators that are desirable from a theoretical perspective to measure multidimensional poverty. Methodologically, it draws upon the dual cut-off counting approach for poverty measurement developed by Alkire & Foster (2011), which is also the methodological underpinning of the global and national MPIs. Conceiving the MPI-MIC is not an easy task. One fundamental issue is the existence of strictly comparable micro data sources. The proposed measure aims to be an internationally comparable measure, so ideally, it needs to build solely on a set of harmonized indicators available for all the countries that will be studied. Thus, available data satisfying this criterion is a crucial determining factor. In the spirit of the SDGs and the acceptance of the multidimensional nature of poverty, we do not wish to select countries based solely on aggregate income. We supplement the traditional monetary classification of countries with other non-monetary aspects of development. We used data from Brazil, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Mexico and Colombia to estimate the MPI-MIC and compare the results across countries.
What would a “decolonized” literature curriculum look like, and has one ever existed? This talk locates the contemporary drive to “decolonize” curricula in the historical era of decolonization itself by sketching a conceptual framework for literary “decolonization” rooted in historical campaigns to reform English Literature examinations for 14–18-year-olds in Kenya, Jamaica and Britain. It concludes that calls to “decolonize” curricula have long been contentious – now, and in the past – because they involve writers, teachers and students challenging the political authority of governments as guardians of culture. Asha Rogers is Associate Professor of Contemporary Postcolonial Literature at the University of Birmingham and the author of State Sponsored Literature: Britain and Cultural Diversity after 1945 (OUP, 2020).
_Please note that this paper will be pre-circulated._ This seminar is taking place *in person only*. For AHRS updates and pre-circulated papers, please join the mailing list by sending a blank email to "$":mailto:ahrs-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk.
Dr Henry Sacheverell described byone recent scholar as '_a high-flying, hard-drinking and otherwiseintellectually undistinguished clergyman_', was Britain's first mediacelebrity. Whilst students of political history and the public sphere havefocused attention on the constitutional issues debated during his greatshowpiece trial in 1710, with its remarkable associated proliferation of materialephemera, current scholarship has been less assured when attempting to engagewith the theological context within which 'The Doctor's' reputation wasestablished long before 5 November 1709, when he entered the pulpit in StPaul's Cathedral to deliver his most famous sermon: _The Perils of FalseBrethren, Both in Church and State_. With this background in mind,the talk will go on to discuss the various categories of High Churchmanship asseen by contemporary observers during the rest of the 'long' eighteenthcentury, before briefly considering what that inheritance meant for the Tractarians.
We explore medieval poetry across regions and languages, with the guidance of an expert. Texts in the original language and their translation are shared in handouts, read aloud, explained, and discussed. The aim is to gain a global vision of medieval literature through poetry. Since we are driven by curiosity, the reading group evolves according to participants’ interests and interaction. We warmly welcome academics and students of any level and with any background. Coffee, tea, and biscuits are offered to participants.
Sabrina Hogan (Christ Church): States of attention in Du Bartas’ La Sepmaine and Scève’s Délie: This paper will consider the themes of attention and distraction in Guillaume Du Bartas’ La Sepmaine (1578) and Maurice Scève’s Délie (1544), two texts which form part of the corpus in my wider poetic project on states of attention in sixteenth-century French poetry. The theme of attention in its various forms permeates a wide spectrum of poetic genres of period, notably devotional poetry, love poetry and creation poetry. A sustained form of attentiveness, vigilance, has a special place in the sixteenth century, a time of poetic vigils and devotional culture privileging the contemplative life, and an age when apocalyptic and prophetic discourses acquired renewed vigour amid the Wars of Religion. I will consider how in his epic creation poem, La Sepmaine (1578), Du Bartas reflects upon the reach and limitations of his ability to recreate the wonder of divine creation revealed in Genesis 1-2. The poet’s depiction of his own attentive state as writer probes the rhetorical figure of copia – popularised in the sixteenth century, notably by Erasmus’ De copia (1512). Scève’s Délie is hailed as the first French canzoniere, displaying the impact of Petrarch's Rime in France in a series of 449 love poems (dizains) addressed to the poet's mysterious object of desire, Délie. States of attentiveness and wakefulness are central to exploring Scève’s evocative sensorial depictions and the staging of the poet’s innamoramento. Beverly Adrian (Wadham): Charles Nodier and the eternal recurrence of the merveilleux: This paper explores how Charles Nodier’s 1830 essay ‘Du fantastique en littérature’ makes the case for a renewed interest in supernatural fiction in the early half of the nineteenth century. Nodier’s essay will be examined in light of Louis de Bonald’s remarks in ‘Du Style et de la littérature’ (1806), in which the latter suggests that ‘la littérature est l’expression de la société’, establishing a hierarchy of literary forms, and traces the development and perceived decadence of French letters up until the revolution, when literature took a philosophical turn. Almost twenty-five years after Bonald, Nodier observes that the merveilleux or rather its offshoot, the fantastique, fulfills society’s aching need for transcendence in a decadent age of scepticism and positivism. Nodier suggests that emphasis on imagination in storytelling should supplant literary classicism, in order to rejuvenate the human spirit, thereby paving the way for a newfound age of innocence which favors illusion over doubt. My paper will consider the tensions between the merveilleux and the fantastique, as envisaged by Nodier, alongside questions of genre and canonicity. I will highlight the ways in which Nodier’s propositions correspond with an upsurge in ideas of spiritual regeneration in the aftermath of the French Revolution.
In the future, the ESO will become NESO, the National Energy System Operator, an independent public corporation with new planning and advisory responsibilities across the whole energy system. The drive toward decarbonisation and net zero has never felt more acute, a responsibility ESO take seriously. The energy sector continues to evolve at pace, developing new technologies and solutions to manage the network sustainably, securely, and affordably, and with these come new challenges. Innovation plays a critical role in accelerating the progress toward ESO's ambitions decarbonisation goals, in meeting the challenges of this transition and shaping the energy system of the future. This seminar will highlight ESO's innovation strategy priorities, describe funding routes, and illustrate a number of the innovation projects in their portfolio.
The European Union is facing multiple internal and external challenges, who will lead the EU over the next five years will have profound implications for the nature and the future of the European project. Over the last two decades Central and Eastern Europeans member states have been underrepresented in EU top jobs and have had limited impact on EU policy-making. As the EU is starting a new institutional cycle, the seminar will explore the allocation of top jobs in the EU and their implications for leadership and the balance of power in the EU. The discussion will also reflect on whether Central and Eastern Europeans can play a more prominent role in shaping EU politics and policy-making.
COURSE DETAILS This session looks at the way in which we can have useful conversations in career development reviews. It examines the blockages to such conversations and how we can overcome them using active listening and coaching techniques. There will be an opportunity to discuss the policy and process surrounding CDRS. LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this session you will have an understanding of: The Career context and support for CDRs. How coaching and active listening can enable positive CDR conversations. An opportunity to practice relevant skills.
Join Chris Morrison (Copyright & Licensing Specialist) and Georgina Kiddy (Digital Services Librarian) to play Copyright the Card Game. This interactive, games-based session introduces you to the key concepts of copyright law and allows you to apply them in practice. No prior knowledge is required, and the session caters for all whatever their level of experience with copyright. At the end of the session participants will be able to: explore how copyright really works in practice; interpret the legislation and apply the relevant legal concepts to their own work; practice using the exceptions and licences in sector-specific examples; and discuss the role of risk management in making decisions about the ethical creation and use of copyright material. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
All university students need to become skilled in identifying, evaluating and referencing academic sources. These are often essential steps in completing course and tutorial assignments successfully. Unfamiliar sources like peer-reviewed scientific journals and understanding how and why to reference correctly can challenge new undergraduates. In this session we explore the different types of academic sources you may encounter, tools to evaluate a source for academic quality and how to demystify referencing. Intended audience: Oxford undergraduate students from MPLS and MSD.
Early estimation of disease risk from magnetic resonance images (MRIs) can help to reduce the clinical burden of incurable neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD). Traditionally, researchers' attempts to identify early biomarkers of future ADRD have relied on neuroanatomic measures defined a priori, including brain volume loss and cortical thinning. Such measures have limited utility due to their modest sensitivity and specificity for the prognostication of ADRD. Recent progress in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) leverages the ability of deep neural networks to find complex patterns of abnormal neuroanatomic aging that are not apparent to humans and that can better predict ADRD morbidity. Because brain aging is lifelong, such abnormal aging trajectories have the advantage of being detectable relatively early in adulthood to mitigate ADRD risk. Our patient-tailored anatomic maps of brain aging highlight differences in neurosenescence according to sex, decadal age group, biometrics, demographics, and cognitive status. These XAI-empowered findings identify, for the first time, the anatomic substrates of complex endophenotypes whose structural bases were previously thought to be undetectable by MRI. In conclusion, XAI holds considerable potential to assist translational neuroscience, to advance basic studies of brain structure/function, and to develop early biomarkers of ADRD risk in aging adults with normal cognition. SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY Andrei Irimia, PhD is a visiting associate professor at King's College London, currently on sabbatical from the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California. Dr. Irimia is a biogerontologist and computational neurobiologist studying how (epi)genetic and environmental factors constrain brain aging in health and disease. In collaboration with the ENIGMA Consortium and with other researchers across the world, his team uses explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), omics, and neuroimaging to characterize risk factors for Alzheimer's disease (AD). These methods are synergized with biometrics, demographics and with large-scale research on pre-industrial populations to build XAI models that forecast AD conversion in aging adults. Such approaches relate AD risk to accelerated aging, neurovascular calcification, industrialization, urbanization, lifestyle and traumatic brain injury.
Supported by the Maison Française d’Oxford
One of the benefits for teacher educators of cross-national conversations is that they throw into relief things about your own teacher education experience and policy environment that are shared by an international community, validating understanding. These conversations also shed light on things that seem normal and go unquestioned in one’s own national or institutional context, but which deserve interrogation and challenge understanding. They invite examination of how teacher education is shaped through policy and done in practice, and possibilities for how it might be done. In this seminar I consider policy shifts (real and potential) that are impacting teacher education and teacher educators in Aotearoa New Zealand. In particular, I focus on teacher education accreditation requirements, secondary school curriculum and assessment changes, and a shift towards flexible learning spaces and curriculum integration. How are teacher educators navigating these spaces? How might they influence the direction of travel – such as through accommodation, adaption, and subversion (Brooks et al., 2024)? In the spirit of ako (a Māori and Pacific concept that means ‘to teach’ or ‘to learn’, depending on context, and emphasises the reciprocal nature of learning as a two-way process [Stewart and Buntting, in press]), participants are invited to share their experiences in the English context, as I share mine of the Aotearoa New Zealand context. A central question that animates my research is: What supports quality teaching? I have applied this question to curriculum-based teaching and learning in schools, my own teaching within initial teacher education, and more broadly to teaching in the academy. I am deeply interested in the scholarship of teaching. My research coalesces around the practice of teaching and lived experiences of teachers and learners. I have published in relation to teacher development and teacher preparation programmes and systems, practice-focused research in initial teacher education, pre-service teacher identity development as culturally responsive and sustaining teachers, twenty-first century education and development of critical information literacy, curriculum issues and development (with a particular focus on social sciences education), gender relations and ICT. Teams link to join online: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_MWNhNTc1MzMtNGJhZC00ODU3LTkyNjUtY2VhNWZlYTA4OWQ5%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%2220c48e67-b666-49ae-a9b1-d31d1be325ec%22%7d
As the United States heads into a high-stakes presidential election, this seminar series explores the structural problems and political challenges behind the headlines. We examine why American politics is so polarised and ask: what is at stake in the 2024 elections? The seminars will open with a short presentation by an expert, followed by questions and discussion. Everyone with an interest in US politics is welcome. Lunch will be available. Week 4: Election Debrief On the day after the election, we convene to discuss the results we know about, and speculate about those we don’t.
COURSE DETAILS In this session we introduce RDM and the practical skill of developing Data Management Plans to manage your own data successfully. The Research Data Management (RDM) course answers these questions and more: How often do you consider how you’re managing this vital resource? Is your data secure and backed up? How can you demonstrate its integrity if challenged? Could your research make a greater impact by sharing data? What happens to your hard-won data when your project ends? LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this session you will: Have an appreciation of the importance of RDM and understand the research data management lifecycle. Confidently approach preparing a data management plan and apply the principles to your own research. Be able to locate sources of support and expertise around the University to help with different aspects of RDM.
Moral machines are designed to make decisions that involve ethical or moral considerations, guided by certain ethical principles. While debates continue about what these ethical considerations should be and how best to clarify them, moral machines for children are even less understood. The principles become particularly complex when choices must be made between respecting children’s preferences or values and upholding their best interests. In this talk, I will draw on our various design and qualitative research experiences with children and families and discuss our research roadmap towards fostering children’s autonomy and agency in the age of AI – a key aspect of moral machines for children. I hope this talk will inspire discussions about what moral machines for children should entail and the challenges of implementing such systems in practice.
If you are new to the University of Oxford and want to find out more about the University’s network of libraries or have been at the University a while and would like a refresher, join us for this online introduction to understanding and accessing the libraries, their services and resources. By the end of the session, you will: be familiar with the network of Oxford libraries; know the logins needed to access Bodleian Libraries services; be able to conduct a search in SOLO (the University’s resource discovery tool), filter results and access online and print resources; and know how to manage your library account including loans and requests. Intended audience: All Oxford library users.
Kevin Noles (Independent Scholar), “A question of loyalty: Indian Prisoners-of-War and Australian war-crimes trials of Japanese military personnel after World War Two” Following World War Two, Australian authorities conducted almost a hundred war-crimes trials of Japanese personnel where the victims had been Indian Prisoners-of-War. These prisoners were members of the British Indian Army who had been captured primarily at the surrender of Singapore in February 1942, and who had subsequently been transported to the Southwest Pacific area during the war to act as labourers for Japanese forces. Reviewing the trial records reveals a depressing litany of neglect, abuse, and general cruelty, up to and including execution. A typical defence argument put forward on behalf of Japanese accused in these trials, was that the Indian prisoners had renounced their previous allegiance to the British Indian Army and had agreed to serve with Japanese forces, thereby losing their status as prisoners. Such claims were invariably rejected during the Australian trials. This study reassesses these Japanese claims by utilising British military intelligence information on the conduct of Indian prisoners in captivity, thereby applying this material to the study of the trials for the first time. It focusses on the evidence of the most prominent Indian witness from the Australian trials: Jemadar Chint Singh. One of the few Indian survivors of the appalling conditions that developed in northern New Guinea during the war, Chint Singh subsequently contributed evidence to several trials, including one related to the killing of a Captain Nirpal Chand by several Japanese officers in 1944. It will be argued that the new perspective on the Australian war-crimes trials provided by the British intelligence assessments, suggests that some of the guilty verdicts reached on Japanese defendants were problematic. This outcome resulted from the active suppression of knowledge regarding the behaviour of Indian troops in captivity by British colonial authorities. Hendrik Willem Nelis (University of Oxford), “A Precursor to Post-War Special Forces Counter-Gangs? A Comparison of Orde Wingate’s Special Night Squads and British Post-War Special Forces Counter-Gang Conduct in Colonial Irregular Warfare and Counterinsurgency” This paper focuses on British counter-gangs and special forces units, particularly considering the Special Night Squads (SNS) of Orde Wingate in the interwar Mandate of Palestine during the Arab Revolt (1936-1939). The SNS were a combined Anglo-Jewish irregular unit used to ambush and pursue Arab guerrillas during the Revolt. This paper examines the extent to which the SNS can be considered a precursor, as is sometimes asserted, to later British counter-gang and special forces units in Kenya and Cyprus in the 1950s and Borneo and Oman in the 1960s and 1970s respectively. Counter-gangs are irregular counterinsurgent units incorporating local auxiliaries and former rebels used to pursue guerrillas through irregular means. A closer examination reveals the connection and similarities between the SNS and its supposed post-war successors to be overstated. Through comparing Wingate’s SNS to these later units from the perspectives of their varying tactical and organisational approaches, use of intelligence, cultural and linguistic knowledge, and varying attitudes to the doctrines of ‘minimum force’ and winning hearts and minds, one can understand the extent to which Wingate’s SNS can be seen as a forerunner for later special forces counter-gangs. On closer examination, despite certain tactical and organisational similarities between the SNS and its post-war counterparts, it becomes increasingly evident that Wingate’s Special Night Squads cannot be seen as a forerunner or a blueprint to post-war British special forces counter-gangs. This seems to debunk the notion of a unique, consistent, unchanging British model of counterinsurgency and, in turn, undermine the notion of static strategic cultures or ways of war. These conclusions also have implications for how we view British imperialism and its methods of colonial control.
Are you an early career researcher, fixed-term lecturer, or doctoral student trying to get some writing done? Do you research on a topic related to health, medicine, the body, or mind using Humanities or Social Sciences approaches? The Medical Humanities Writing Group is an inclusive, interdisciplinary and casual gathering, encouraging writing as well as meeting others: all are welcome. We have timed writing blocks and coffee/tea/light refreshments, and are focused on setting writing goals and getting work done in a positive and supportive environment. Attendance is free and you are welcome to join us for anything from a single session, to a few, or even the whole term. If you have any queries, please email gordon.barrett@history.ox.ac.uk.
This project examines how public exposure to judicial non-compliance by state and non-state actors influences citizens’ willingness to mobilize and their attitudes toward the non-compliant parties. Recognizing courts’ limited enforcement powers, it explores the role of public opinion as a compliance mechanism and the potential mobilization through pro-compliance networks, such as NGOs and media. Through two survey experiments, the study assesses responses to varying levels of observed non-compliance and vagueness in judicial rulings. Hypotheses include that visible non-compliance increases public pressure for adherence, particularly when prior expectations are exceeded. This work provides insights into how judicial transparency and public scrutiny may bolster judicial compliance in new democracies, where institutional weaknesses can otherwise limit the enforceability of court decisions.
Bank of England is one of the policy institutions at the frontier of exploring agent-based models (ABM) to address some of the policy questions that it is facing. In this talk, we will take you through how researchers at the Bank have been using this modelling approach to simulate complex interactions between different agents in the economy to assess the potential impact of prudential policies. The talk will mainly focus on the results from: (i) an agent-based model of the UK housing market, investigating the impact of loan-to-value and loan-to-income limits on key housing market indicators; and (ii) a macroeconomic agent-based model, studying the joint impact of borrower and lender-based prudential policies on the housing and credit markets and the economy more widely. About the speaker: Arzu Uluc is Research Coordinator in the Financial Stability Strategy and Risk Directorate at the Bank of England. Please note this event will be in hybrid format but will not be recorded.
Spatially structured cell heterogeneity within tissues is essential for healthy organ function. This heterogeneity arises from a tightly regulated interplay of cell proliferation, cell differentiation, and spatial organization during development. To study these diverse processes, developmental biology has become a data-intensive science through the use of high-throughput imaging and multi-omics technologies. To take advantage of this wealth of data, we have developed several inference and machine learning methods that aim to bridge the study of morphogenesis with genome-wide gene expression patterns. We will illustrate our approaches using several model systems including the mouse, C. elegans development, and Drosophila oocytes. In particular, we will focus on Spatial Principal Component Analysis as a relevant method to analyse multivariate spatial patterns in epithelial tissues and to compare different conditions, at different time points and with different genetic perturbations. Taken together, our results show that integrating insights from cell-scale feature patterning and mechanical stress provides new insights into morphogenesis.
About the Event The law has been the target of staunch criticisms from feminist scholars, with both legislators and parliament critiqued as weak actors and inhospitable fora when it comes to accounting for women’s interests. By contrast, this presentation argues that law is a fundamental instrument to advance and achieve gender justice. The presentation begins with an introduction to the Gender Legislative Index (GLI), a tool that uses human evaluators and machine-learning to measure the gender-responsiveness of legislation against international norms. It then explores examples of laws evaluated using the GLI from three jurisdictions that reflect how such evaluations against international principles bring to life three key feminist principles: a) identifying blindness of law to gendered interests; b) challenging women’s marginalisation in international law; c) and an expansion of the purview of what counts as “good-practice” legislation to include the global South. The presentation concludes with a discussion about legislative scrutiny and an insight into a new evolution in the project that will examine the effectiveness of parliamentary gender audit committees that assess legislation for gendered impacts. Recommended Readings (not a pre-requisite to attend): Ramona Vijeyarasa, Quantifying CEDAW: Concrete tools for enhancing accountability for women’s human rights, Harvard Human Rights Journal, vol. 34 (2021), pp. 37-80. See here Ramona Vijeyarasa, Comparing Whose Laws? Interrogating Biases in Comparative Law and Scholarship Through the Lens of Domestic Violence Workplace Leave, International Journal of Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations, 40(2) (2024), pp. 249-274. See here Ramona Vijeyarasa, Making the law work for women: Standard-setting through a new Gender Legislative Index, Alternative Law Journal, 44(4) (2019), pp. 275-280. See here The event will be hybrid - if you cannot join us in person for the cookies and tea/coffee, here are the details to join via Teams: Join the meeting now Meeting ID: 338 504 742 372 Passcode: hJ5iaV About the Speaker Dr Ramona Vijeyarasa, Associate Professor and Director of the Juris Doctor Program in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney, is a scholar, advocate and practitioner of international women’s rights law. She is the architect behind the Gender Legislative Index (GLI), an online tool that uses human evaluators and machine learning to assess whether domestic laws meet global women's rights standards; the author of three monographs on gender issues (Routledge 2015, OUP 2022, UCP forthcoming 2025); and a prolific author, with prizes for her women's rights work and scholarship from the American Society of International Law (2023), the Australia New Zealand Association of International Law (2023), the Australian and New Zealand Woman in Artificial Intelligence Awards (2022) and the Letten Foundation and Young Academy of Norway (2021). She has been chief investigator for gender-equality projects in Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Indonesia (Australia DFAT funding). Since 2021, Ramona has been a Women’s Leadership Institute Australia (WLIA) Research Fellow. From 2007 to 2016 Ramona contributed or led work on gender issues at the Centre for Reproductive Rights (New York), the International Center for Transitional Justice (New York) International Organization for Migration (Hanoi and Kiev) and Action Aid International (Accra, Brussels, Managua). About the Discussant Barbara Havelková holds degrees from Charles University in Prague (Mgr - Master in Law; summa cum laude), Europa-Institut of Saarland University (LLM) and the University of Oxford (Mst in Legal Research, DPhil). Barbara is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law and a Tutorial Fellow at St Hilda's College. She was previously the Shaw Foundation Fellow at Lincoln College and held other posts at the University of Cambridge (Emmanuel College) and Oxford (Balliol). She worked for Clifford Chance Prague, trained at the Legal Service of the European Commission and in the Chambers of AG Poiares Maduro at the Court of Justice of the European Union. She was an academic visitor at several law schools, including Harvard University and University of Michigan as a Fulbright scholar and the Jean Monnet Center of NYU Law School as an Emile Noël Fellow. Barbara’s research and teaching interests include gender legal studies and feminist jurisprudence, equality and anti-discrimination law, constitutional law, EU law and law in post-socialist transitions. She is a senior member of the Law Faculty's Feminist Jurisprudence Discussion Group. Barbara teaches Constitutional Law, EU Law and Feminist Jurisprudence to undergraduates and Comparative Equality Law on the BCL/MJur programme. She also convenes the undergraduate third year option Feminist Perspectives on the Law.
(co-authored with Richard Breen) Abstract: Do schools reduce or amplify learning gaps by socioeconomic background? In this paper, we contribute to this longstanding sociological debate in three ways. First, we develop a formal model that clarifies relevant theoretical estimands and counterfactuals. Second, our theoretical model synthesizes previously contradictory findings in the literature on schools and inequality by distinguishing between quantitative and qualitative school effects. Third, we empirically test a central hypothesis from our model: that the positive returns to improvements in school quality are concentrated among children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. To test this hypothesis, we use administrative register data from Denmark and a natural experiment design that relies on variation in school quality induced by unanticipated changes in school district boundaries over time. We show that children redistricted to higher-quality schools substantially improve their test score performance in reading, and, crucially, these effects are strongest among children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. These findings suggest that equalizing school quality can be an effective means of reducing learning inequalities.
Samurai in Siam: Miyazaki Tōten’s Utopian Farming Community (1895-96) Joel Littler, Harvard University
Refugee Afterlives: Home, Hauntings, and Hunger examines the cultural production of two generations of Vietnamese refugee(s’) children: the 1.5 generation (those who were children when they arrived in the host country) and the second generation (those who were born to refugees in the host country). Analysing a broad range of non-fiction and fiction writing by these two generations in France, Canada and the USA, this book discusses how they grapple with their positionality as refugee(s’) children and the attendant problematics of loss. How they recuperate this loss by deploying notions such as home, hauntings and hunger is central to this analysis. Refugee Afterlives identifies the tools deployed by the 1.5 and second generation, tests their limits while understanding that these writers’ creations are constantly changing and shifting paradigms and will continue to be so over the next decades. Each writer is finding their own voice and pathway(s) and while these may sometimes overlap and contain commonalities, afterlives by default imply plurality and differences. This book offers ways of examining these texts, juxtaposing them, contrasting them, putting them in dialogue with each other, underlining their differences, but ultimately demonstrating that there is much to be gained in seeing how 1.5ers and the so-called second generation Vietnamese refugee writers contribute to a wider discussion of Vietnamese refugee(s’) children and what happens to them after resettlement.
Join us for an engaging online academic discussion exploring the literary imagination of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. The speakers — Dr Michael Ward and Dr Eduardo Gutiérrez González — will delve into the ways Lewis presents themes of polity, leadership, freedom, slavery, war, and peace, drawing connections between the fantastical worlds of Narnia and profound questions about human conflict and cultural transformation. The conversation will focus on the cultural role our narratives and social imaginaries play; it will aim to provide insights into the intersection of literature, philosophy, and theology, offering fresh perspectives on how these themes resonate with peace-building, politics, and reconciliation in contemporary society. All are welcome!
Haifa, 1979. After repeated disputes, the extended Ohayon family tries to mediate between Viviane (Ronit Elkabetz) and Eliahou (Simon Abkarian) – two people with nothing in common except for their religious-cultural background and their four children. Over the course of several days, the couple quarrels over tradition, love, fears, and progress. Siblings, Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz’s debut film which kicks off the trilogy that also includes Seven Days (2008) and Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem (2014), introduces viewers to an Arab-Jewish Israeli family in the late 1970s. This moving drama won two awards at the Venice Film Festival and the Best Actress award at the Jerusalem Film Festival.
This participative workshop provides doctoral students in the third year and above with information about the viva, guidance on planning a proactive approach to it, and opportunities to practise. COURSE DETAILS The course will look at the rules and expectations of the viva exam and identify and practise practical ways to prepare. LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of the session participants will be able to: Develop their awareness and understanding of the rules and expectations of the viva exam. Use tools and strategies to prepare for the exam. Develop an awareness of the examiner's perspective. Know what to expect of the exam.
Create content for your teaching or research with greater confidence by attending our session on Creative Commons (CC) licences. Learn how they work, how they interact with copyright and how to use them to best effect. The session will make special reference to images but is applicable to all media, including written works. The workshop is classroom-based. In this playful, interactive face-to-face session we will cover: what Creative Commons Licences are; where to find Creative Commons material; how to apply Creative Commons to your own work; and how to reuse Creative Commons materials. We’ll finish the session with a Creative Commons card game. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
This free one-day conference will explore a number of aspects of Digital Theology. Spearkers are: Beth Singler, Jonas Kurlberg, Calida Chu, Victoria Turner, Steve Holmes, Tim Hutchings, Chirs Goswami and Nathan McGuire
The community was the defining condition of Ottoman belonging. Being a legitimate subject required abiding by the imperially prescribed collective identities of either Muslim or legally recognized and accommodated – but unequal – non-Muslims. Beyond inequality, this juridico-political necessity also produced a socio-political context that was inimical to individuation and subjectivity. One’s selfhood was existentially bound to the Empire’s communalist dictates. Historiography has tended to shy away from chronicling the dynamics and effects of this tension. And where available, existing histories have struggled either with the scarcity or viability of available archives. Yet, in the late 19th century, leaders of Ottoman-Armenian print culture – which is to say, also of Armenian social and political life – began to identify this tension as a significant psycho-social challenge to Armenian sociality. As migrants, emigres, and refugees, they brought a de-communalized perspective to Armenian subjectivity. Focusing on three such individuals – the self-taught son of a migrant laborer, a cosmopolitan émigré feminist, and a self-proclaimed stateless “ex-arménien” –, this presentation will discuss their meta- or trans-communal challenges to Ottoman and Armenian communalism. To that end, it will draw on their social, cultural, and political involvements; autobiographical texts, including memoirs; and underexamined or previously unknown literary works.
The global COVID19 pandemic has highlighted the lethality and morbidity associated with infectious respiratory diseases. These diseases can lead to devastating syndrome known as the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) where bacterial/viral infections cause excessive lung inflammation, pulmonary edema, and severe hypoxemia (shortness of breath). Although ARDS patients require artificial mechanical ventilation, the complex biofluid and biomechanical forces generated by the ventilator exacerbates lung injury leading to high mortality. My group has used mathematical and computational modeling to both characterize the complex mechanics of lung injury during ventilation and to identify novel ways to prevent injury at the cellular level. We have used in-vitro and in-vivo studies to validate our mathematical predictions and have used engineering tools to understand the biological consequences of the mechanical forces generated during ventilation. In this talk I will specifically describe how our mathematical/computational approach has led to novel cytoskeletal based therapies and how coupling mathematics and molecular biology has led to the discovery of a gene regulatory mechanisms that can minimize ventilation induced lung injury. I will also describe how we are currently using nanotechnology and gene/drug delivery systems to enhance the lung’s native regulatory responses and thereby prevent lung injury during ARDS.
Noreen Masud has always loved flat landscapes - their stark beauty, their formidable calm, their refusal to cooperate with the human gaze. They reflect her inner world: the 'flat place' she carries inside herself, as a symptom of childhood trauma. But as much as Britain's landscapes provide solace for suffering, they are also uneasy places for a ScottishPakistani woman, representing both an inheritance and a dispossession. A Flat Place is a startlingly strange, vivid and intimate account of a posttraumatic, post-colonial landscape - a seemingly flat and motionless place which is nevertheless defiantly alive. Noreen Masud is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. Her academic monograph, Stevie Smith and the Aphorism: Hard Language won the MSA First Book Award and the University English Prize; her memoir-travelogue, A Flat Place was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Trust Young Writer of the Year Award, the halak Prize, and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Co-sponsored by the Climate Crisis Thinking Network.
Sandwiches will be provided. Teams Meeting: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_ZmI0ZDk0NDctY2E4MS00N2IyLTlhN2ItNzAwMWJmMWVlZGRj%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22e4520599-3ea5-40ac-a428-ce7de3b6504d%22%7d Meeting ID: 327 214 356 230 Passcode: mgbgBi
One hundred years after the Galápagos was made famous by Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the islands were declared a National Park of Ecuador and subsequently added to the list of UNESCO Natural World Heritage Sites in 1978 both actions drawing more international attention to the unique flora and fauna of the enchanted isles. But, in addition to a plethora of intriguing species in the non-human natural world, the islands are also home to ~25,000 human residents, and within that number, ~7,500 school aged children, who live in close proximity to nature. This population was recently established and as such is not indigenous to Galapagos. Because of the gravity of human impact on the islands, I am keenly interested in how residents, particularly young children, construct Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK). As there is currently a paucity of research on the education system within the Galápagos, and no published research on children’s Environmental Learning or LEK, I believe that such research will benefit the local Galápagos school system, local conservation groups, and the broader international community. In order to obtain a holistic understanding of how Galápagos children construct LEK, I designed a study which involved conducting fieldwork with fifth grade children using a mixed methods approach including a survey, semi-structured interviews, focus groups and observational field notes. These data collected from these methods help to explore the following research questions: 1) What is the state of Local Ecological Knowledge of children living in the Galápagos Islands? 2) How do children describe the processes through which they learn about their Galápagos environment? 3) Where do children perceive that they learn about the environment? 4) What content do children describe learning about their Galápagos environment? Findings illuminate how young children interact with and learn from and about their local environment by engaging in various modes of interaction with sources for learning. Teams link: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_Njc0N2EyZWMtMGQ5ZC00YmVjLTgzODEtZjdiYjg2ZmNmM2M1%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%225f581465-1def-4d51-8d4c-45a3b26b5b58%22%7d
In 1954 the first two volumes of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings were published (The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers). To celebrate this event, and following on from last year’s Tolkien seminars, Exeter College – Tolkien’s undergraduate college – is proud to host a series of free lunchtime talks organised by the Faculty of English on The Lord of the Rings. Open to the public these talks are aimed at going deeper in some key aspects of the novel, Tolkien as a writer, and some of the spin-offs it has generated. Please note that all seminars will take place at the Fitzhugh Auditorium, Cohen Quad (Exeter College), Walton Street, Oxford, OX1 2HG: Week 1(17/10/2024) - Holly Ordway: 'Tolkien as Interpreter and Transformer of Culture: The Making of The Lord of the Rings as a Modern Book'. Week 2 (24/10/2024) - John Garth: 'Quisling and Prisoner: How the Second World War shaped the treason of Isengard'. Week 3 (31/10/2024) - HALF-TERM NO TALK Week 4 (7/11/2024) - Mark Williams: 'A Harmless Vice: Tolkien’s Invented Languages'. Week 5 (14/11/2024) - Giuseppe Pezzini: 'The authors and styles of The Lord of the Rings'. Week 6 (21/11/2024) - Grace Khuri: 'Medievalism in the Margins: Echoes of Anglo-Saxon England in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings – From Page to Screen'. Week 7 (28/11/2024) - Michael Ward: 'C.S. Lewis’s Influence on The Lord of the Rings'. Week 8 (05/12/2024) - Stuart Lee: 'The ‘Key-spring’ of The Lord of the Rings?'.
Uncover the art of facilitating interactive science demonstrations that captivate and educate. Learn the pivotal elements of event design and planning specifically tailored for public engagement activities. By the end of this course, you'll not only have a repertoire of engaging activities at your disposal, but you'll also possess the skills to thoughtfully design, execute, and adapt events that leave lasting impressions.
Martin Taylor, M.D., Ph.D., Instructor Dr Taylor received his M.D. and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University where he studied the role of ghrelin acylation in control of metabolism and its potential as a therapeutic target. He then went on to study the interactions between the LINE-1 transposon and host and the role of LINE-1 in cancer in Boeke and Burns labs. He completed residency in Anatomic Pathology (AP) at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he served as Chief Resident and completed subspecialty training in gastrointestinal (GI) pathology. Thereafter, he began postdoctoral training at the Whitehead Institute / MIT. He joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School as Instructor in Pathology in 2021 and practices clinically as a GI pathologist. Marty has just set up his lab in Brown - Martin S. Taylor, MD, PhD | Pathology and Laboratory Medicine | Medical School | Brown University Current research: Marty is studying the structure and function of the LINE-1 ORF2 protein, and the potential utility of LINE-1 ORF1p as a cancer biomarker in tissue and plasma. Marty's career development and research on mTORC2 activation and substrate recognition in growth factor signaling are supported by a K08 award from NIH.
Lesson of the week, clinical cases and research. All clinical and academic staff and students welcome. Coffee, Tea and Cake will be served.
Entrapment neuropathies are caused by compression or irritation of nerves as they travel through narrow anatomical spaces. Common conditions include carpal tunnel syndrome and sciatica. Entrapment neuropathies represent the most common nerve injury and cause for nerve-related (neuropathic) pain. For science, entrapment neuropathy is also a unique model system as we can have access to injured human nerves in the context of neuropathic pain. In this talk, I will highlight how studying people with entrapment neuropathies in detail has helped us advance our understanding of mechanisms involved in nerve injury and neuropathic pain.
Ed Roberts completed his PhD on cancer cachexia in Cambridge with Doug Fearon and then studied tumour dendritic cells during a postdoc at UCSF with Max Krummel. He is now a Junior Group Leader at the CRUK Scotland Institute where his lab investigates how the T cell responses initiate in the tumor draining lymph node
The seminar will cover theoretical and empirical research on the relation between economic and social prosperity. Economic prosperity is primarily about goods and services produced and consumed by economic agents. Social prosperity, by contrast, is about collaborative relationships among agents. These relationships may induce individuals to make decisions beyond enlightened self-interest in order to address collective challenges. In the process, agency becomes distributed across individual and group levels. The relations between these two types of prosperity is discussed. Then we explore consistent measures of social and economic prosperity across G20 member states through time and examine the associated empirical regularities. Finally, policy implications are discussed. About the speaker The seminar will cover theoretical and empirical research on the relation between economic and social prosperity. Economic prosperity is primarily about goods and services produced and consumed by economic agents. Social prosperity, by contrast, is about collaborative relationships among agents. These relationships may induce individuals to make decisions beyond enlightened self-interest in order to address collective challenges. In the process, agency becomes distributed across individual and group levels. The relations between these two types of prosperity is discussed. Then we explore consistent measures of social and economic prosperity across G20 member states through time and examine the associated empirical regularities. Finally, policy implications are discussed.
In today's increasingly complex world, decision-makers are tasked with solving problems that demand deep understanding and carefully considered solutions. Scientific research is essential in this process, offering evidence-based insights that help leaders grasp key issues and evaluate the implications of their choices. But how can researchers ensure their work effectively informs policy? What strategies have been successful in bridging the gap between research and policymaking, and what should researchers keep in mind when engaging with government officials? Join us for a thought-provoking masterclass with Professor Robin May, Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government’s Food Standards Agency, and Professor Charles Godfray, Director of the Oxford Martin School. Drawing on their extensive experience at the intersection of science and policy, they will share practical insights, real-world examples, and lessons learned for researchers to engage with policymakers and enhance their impact on policy.
Are you looking for a streamlined approach to gathering, managing and citing your references? Join us for this interactive online session in which we introduce RefWorks, a subscription reference management tool that University of Oxford members can use for free during their time at the university and as alumni. RefWorks is web-based and helps you to collect and manage references and insert them into your word-processed document as in-text citations or footnotes, and you can generate bibliographies. Being web-based, RefWorks can be used with any operating system and, to cite your references in a document, provides a plugin for Microsoft Word on Windows or Mac computers. By the end of the session, you will understand: how RefWorks can help you; how to add references to RefWorks from a range of sources; how to manage your references; how to add in-text citations and/or footnotes to your documents; how to create bibliographies; and where to get help with RefWorks. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
Do you need help managing your references? Do you need help citing references in your documents? This online session will introduce you to Endnote, a subscription software programme which can help you to store, organise and retrieve your references and PDFs, as well as cite references in documents and create bibliographies quickly and easily. On completing the workshop you will be able to: understand the main features and benefits of EndNote; set up an EndNote account; import references from different sources into EndNote; organise your references in EndNote; insert citations into documents; and create a bibliography/reference list. Intended audience: students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
Postgraduate students, fellows, staff and faculty from any discipline are welcome. This group aims to foster frequent interdisciplinary critical dialogue across Oxford and beyond about the political impacts of emerging technologies. Please contact Elisabeth Siegel at elisabeth.siegel@politics.ox.ac.uk in advance to participate or with any questions. Remote attendance is possible, but in-person attendance is prioritized (and provided refreshment). Discussion topics will be finalized and optional readings will be sent out a week in advance. You do not currently have to be affiliated with the University of Oxford to attend and participate in discussions. About the speaker: Diyi Liu's work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals including International Journal of Communication, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Frontiers in Psychology, and news outlets such as The Diplomat. Previously, she worked with UNESCO’s Communication and Information Unit, substantially contributing to pilot research applying the Internet Universality Indicators framework in Thailand, and has recently been communicating around current initiatives regarding the Guidelines for the Governance of Digital Platforms.
A Film by Lucy Kaye. Lucy Kaye's one-hour documentary and deep dive into the life and times of residents of three post-industrial towns in the North of England is at once moving, visually haunting, and (in parts) disturbingly raw. It is part of Northern Exposure, a 4-year project run at the University of Leeds. It took a sociological look at political disaffection -- and issues of austerity, deprivation, race and nation -- in the North of England after Brexit and during COVID. The film premiered at the Leeds International Film Festival in November 2023.
Steady and significant improvements in life expectancy have been a bright spot for human progress for the last century or more. Recently, this success has shown signs of faltering in some high-income countries such as the US and UK, where mortality improvements have slowed or even reversed since the early 2010s. Combined with the large mortality shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, guaranteed forward progress feels less certain. In this talk, I review recent trends and discuss prospects for the future of mortality in high-income countries, including lingering impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, challenges and opportunities related to the obesity epidemic, and emerging reasons for both optimism and pessimism. Booking is required for people outside of the Department of Social Policy and Intervention (DSPI). DSPI Members do not need to register. This talk is part of the DSPI Michaelmas Term Seminar Series 2024
Emotional expressions are ubiquitous and powerful signals. We rapidly recognize the joy and anguish of others by merely glancing at their faces. Or do we? For decades, the field of emotion perception has studied the expressive face by utilizing lab-produced, highly recognizable sets of standardized posed expressions. But results in vitro can differ from those in vivo. I will argue that real-life expressions, especially when intense, are often far more ambiguous than previously assumed. Consequently, efficient emotion perception relies heavily on contextual information which is read-in to the face. Perceivers are often unaware of this contextual process, experiencing a compelling illusion that clear emotions were recognized directly from the face itself. These findings challenge past work and raise intriguing questions about the role of facial expressions in social communication.
The presence of Al in Fe-Mn-C based multi-component steels induces precipitate formation whose size, number density and distribution can be varied depending on the thermomechanical processing conditions. Further alloying of such steels with Ni promotes the formation of Ni-Al type B2 precipitates depending on the Mn content. This work therefore attempts to analyse correlatively the structure of nano-scale precipitates formed in a duplex (i.e. FCC matrix and embedded BCC precipitates) steel along with their precise local chemical composition in a high statistical manner. To achieve the above, a custom designed correlative microscopy platform was utilised in a Scanning Electron Microscope enabling imaging in transmission geometry combined with transmission Kikuchi diffraction for structure analysis while the precise local chemical composition at near atomic-resolution was obtained from the same investigated volume using Atom Probe Tomography. This correlative methodology applied to hot rolled and annealed conditions, provided deeper insights into the role of starting microstructures on the precipitation kinetics and hence on the final mechanical properties of the steel. Further, alloying of Boron on the improvement in grain boundary cohesion of these steels will be highlighted.
In this talk I will summarise our recent work mapping the activated B cell protein landscape. Using high resolution quantitative mass spectrometry we have explored how immune activation and the metabolic checkpoint kinase mTORC1 (mammalian target of rapamycin complex 1) regulate the proteome of B lymphocytes to control B cell differentiation. Triggering the B cell receptor in combination with co-stimulatory signals and cytokines induces considerable proteome re-modelling and our data reveals the metabolic and protein synthesis machinery and environmental sensors that shape B cell fate. We show that mTORC1 activity is critical for the expression of transcription factors that regulate B cell differentiation and metabolism, including aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR) and MYC. Inhibiting mTORC1 activity also impairs the expression of nutrient and amino acid transporters. This work provides a detailed map of naïve and immune activated B cell proteomes, and a resource for exploring and understanding the cellular machinery that direct B cell phenotypes.
Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC) is the third most common cause of cancer death worldwide. Unlike most other cancers, mortality from HCC is on the rise. The majority of HCC develops on the background of chronic liver disease providing a well-defined population to screen. The current standard of care for screening is hindered by complex logistics of bi-annual hospital visits for ultrasound scanning of the liver and blood testing for the protein biomarker Alpha Fetoprotein. Both of which provide a detection sensitivity of about 60% for HCC within a curable stage. Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) studies have demonstrated that copy number alterations (CNAs) are frequent and early features in hepatocarcinogenesis. NGS is relatively costly and not available in every diagnostic lab therefore its potential translation as a population screening tool in the current NHS economic context is challenging. In this talk, we will describe the potential to screen for CNAs using a PCR-based technique called the Paralogue Ratio Test.
At the end of the nineteenth century, public health was in a state of internal conflict across the Anglophone world. With the introduction of water carriage systems, improved drainage, and increased attention to household sanitary practices, major urban centers reported lower childhood mortality, lower infectious disease mortality, and longer lifespans. Beneath this triumphalist narrative, however, lurked a far more deadly reality for residents of many imperial cities. In Bombay, India, thousands of residents died monthly of plague, as a debate raged on among imperial official as to whether rats were vectors for the deadly disease; in Melbourne, Australia, Dr. William Thompson argued publicly that tuberculosis rates in the “salubrious” city were in fact, higher than anywhere else in the British Empire; meanwhile closer to home, Belfast, Northern Ireland was defying trends towards decreasing typhoid incidence and mortality in the United Kingdom with persistent annual epidemics that could not be traced to water nor milk. These epidemics challenged the narrative of improved urban health in the second half of the nineteenth century. The structures and systems that were intended to improve quality of life in these cities ushered in a series of stubborn, deadly epidemics that continued well into the twentieth century. Understanding these epidemics, this talk argues, requires thinking of epidemics as complex ecological events, and of urban spaces as a collision of global and local biocultural forces; and that the use of both biological and historical evidence is necessary to render these events visible. I argue that the structures of imperialism – in these examples, British imperialism – created ecological niches for a variety of infectious diseases. Looking not only at dramatic, highly-visible epidemics, but the smaller, quotidian diseases that killed thousands of people on local scales, I assert that the unique interactions of imperial political, economic, and social systems of power with agentive, specific, and overlapping ecosystems created ecological and evolutionary opportunities for microbial diseases to thrive in novel places and populations. Furthermore, I argue that in order to truly understand the emergence of these microbes, we must think of these systems as interconnected and biologically consequential. Examining the multi-scalar relationships that drove these epidemics using both biological and historical methods allows for new insights into these sometimes mundane, sometimes spectacular events – and shows why, despite countless medical innovations, the epoch of epidemics is far from over. *Emily Webster* is Assistant Professor in the History and Philosophy of Health and Medicine in the Department of Philosophy at Durham University. Her research focuses on the ecology of historical epidemics, drawing on contemporary biology and ecology alongside traditional historical methods to tell multi-species, multi-scalar histories of infectious disease that ground humans in their physical environments, past and present. She is currently working on her book project, _Infectious Ecologies: A Biological History of Epidemics in the British Empire_, and has just opened a co-created, three-part museum exhibition on typhoid fever in Ireland through the AHRC-IRC funded digital history project, “Typhoid, Cockles, and Terrorism.” Emily also serves as a review editor for Environmental History Now and a co-director of the Durham University Centre for the History of Medicine and Disease. She received her PhD in History and MSc in Public Health Sciences from the University of Chicago in 2021, and her BA in History at Ohio State University in 2015.
Booking essential - for further details, please contact: "$":mailto:nick.millea@bodleian.ox.ac.uk or 01865 287119.
Join us in person or online at 5pm UK time (12 noon EST) for expert discussion of what happened in the 2024 US elections.
Talismans—messages to deities or demons inscribed, often with esoteric graphs, on paper, cloth, wood, metal, or in the air—have been ubiquitous in Daoist liturgical practice since it arose in the late second century CE. This talk asks what makes talismanic writing efficacious in Daoist practice these days in south China. What makes the strange script of talismanic writing do what it purports to do—compel deities and demons to obey the will of a Daoist master to heed summons and carry out liturgical tasks such as apotropaic protection or healing exorcism? This talk invites the audience into the liturgical world of talisman-making in living Daoist practice in Hunan province while exploring foundational ideas about talismans and their efficacy in the major liturgical movements of the Song–Yuan period (c. 960–1368), ideas which are still informing Daoist practice in south China today. And the talk puts those Chinese ideas in conversation with current debates about material culture in the study of religion. David J. Mozina (PhD Harvard) is an Affiliated Researcher in the Faculty of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge. He studies living Daoist and Buddhist ritual traditions in rural south China, and their roots in the liturgical vibrancy of the eleventh through early fifteenth centuries. He is the author of Knotting the Banner: Ritual and Relationship in Daoist Practice (University of Hawai‘i Press, Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2021), which was named a finalist for the 2022 Best First Book in the History of Religions by the American Academy of Religion. David has authored articles that have appeared in venues such as the Journal of Chinese Religions, Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie, and Daoism: Religion, History, and Society. He has received research grants from the American Philosophical Society, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Association for Asian Studies, and has been active in various professional organizations, including the American Academy of Religion, the Society for the Study of Chinese Religions, the Global Daoist Studies Forum, and the Center for the Study of Religions at Southwest Jiaotong University in the PRC.
_This event will also be recorded and made available online after the event._ Few scholars have so far studied the intersection of Enlightenment debates over suicide, on the one hand, and the transatlantic slave trade and colonial slavery, on the other, despite the importance of slave suicides during the Middle Passage or on American plantations. Recent studies have shown that British abolitionists made slave suicides one of their major arguments for prohibiting the “infamous commerce,” but without making the connection with more general discussions of suicide. Moreover, we do not know what happened on the French side. This lecture will analyse the relationship between suicide and slavery in Enlightenment thought, particularly in France and Britain. It will address the sources on slave suicides available to Enlightenment writers and the place given to Africa and African slavery in universal histories of suicide; the way in which the themes of suicide and slavery intersected in the literary works of major Enlightenment authors, from Montesquieu to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and the role played by voluntary death in the construction of the figure of the black hero; and, finally, the importance of slave suicides in both the _Encyclopédie_ and the _Histoire des deux Indes_, as well as in the writings of British and French abolitionists. *Cécile Vidal* is a social historian of colonial empires, the slave trade, and slavery in the 17th-to the 19th-century Atlantic world. She is the author of the prize-winning _Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society_ (2019), and the editor or co-editor of a dozen of edited volumes, including, with Paulin Ismard and Benedetta Rossi, _Les mondes de l’esclavage. Une histoire comparée_ (_The Worlds of Slavery: A Comparative History_, 2021).
Bio: Talfan Evans is a research scientist at Google Deepmind working. His work is focused on developing scalable data curation strategies for compute efficient large-scale pretraining. He has a MEng from Keble College and did his PhD at UCL in Cognitive Neuroscience, where he worked on adapting message-passing algorithms from the autonomous driving literature to explain neural activity during spatial exploration. As a postdoc with Andrew Davison at Imperial, he worked on real-time computer vision systems before moving to Deepmind. Blurb: Large foundation model scaling laws tell us that to continue to make additive improvements to performance, we should expect to need to pay orders of magnitude more in compute costs and data. In this talk, I'll present work that paints a more optimistic picture - actively choosing which data to train on can shift these curves in our favour, producing significantly more performant models for the same compute budget. Teams link: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_M2UyYTVlYzEtNTc5NS00Yjc1LWJjNDItODM0MjgyMjg1ODlj%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22e44820d7-5edb-4030-9763-4c8cdc3aafd6%22%7d
To join online, please register in advance here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUrdOyrpjotH9fLe4MPfgdU07ypRhiJBaI1
Chris Brooks, _Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth: the Lower Branch of the Legal Profession in Early Modern England_ (Cambridge, 1986), 19-27, 139-43 Molly Murray, ‘Measured Sentences: Forming Literature in the early modern Prison’, _Huntington Library Quarterly_, 7:2 (2009), 147-67
British visual artist Eva Gold will talk on several of her projects from the last few years, with a focus on the role of cinema and the cinematic. Eva Gold (b. 1994) works in a range of media, including sculpture, drawing and moving image. Taking a directorial approach to imagined scenes, she hints at hidden narratives and the possibility of an unknown threat. Power and violence recur as themes in Eva's work, exploring the current social, political and economic environment, and specifically systems or structures that are based on a concept of hierarchy. She approaches the subject matter by stepping between the intimate and the vast, tuning her attention to the dimensions of the everyday, and the lingering resonance of passing events.
Join us for one of WGIQ's popular researcher speed dating workshops. This event is an excellent opportunity to meet other academics and learn more about the work of other researchers in a relaxed setting. Drinks and refreshments provided!
The Celtic Seminar is held jointly by Oxford and the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies (CAWCS), Aberystwyth. All Oxford seminars will be at 5.15 pm on Thursdays in a hybrid (online and in person) format. You will be able to join virtually via Microsoft Teams. Please contact david.willis@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk if you need a link to join online. In person, we will be in [TBC]. All CAWCS seminars will be held online at 5.00 pm on Thursdays via Zoom, and, for hybrid seminars, in person at the National Library of Wales. Please contact a.elias@wales.ac.uk for the link.
This term’s Fiction and Other Minds seminar will be hosting Prof Karin Kukkonen to discuss the topic of Contingent Minds: Companions, Proxies and Nobodies in Literary Writing Encounters between writers and their characters are often mentioned in remarks on the creative process: characters demand a happy ending for their stories, and voices arise as perspectives multiply. These “other minds” often arise contingently in writing, and knowing when and how to use them appears to be an essential part of the expertise of literary writers. The strategies are as diverse as writers’ works: Elsa Morante deploys one of her characters as a proxy for poetry writing in the manuscripts of La Storia. Anne Weber explores the ethics of providing a novelistic inside-view to the mind of a real person in Annette: Ein Heldinnenepos. Marina Warner creates an empty centre in The Leto Bundle, and Gwenaëlle Aubry engages in a dynamics of personalisation and de-personalisation while composing Personne. In this talk, I will propose a conceptual model for thinking about the different roles that such contingent minds play in the creative process systematically along the terms practice, form and contingency. My discussion draws on interviews with literary writers, creative criticism, as well as the analysis of writers’ manuscripts as traces of their material practice, in order to show how literary writers profoundly remodel psychological phenomena such as imaginary companions and auditory mental imagery in the creative process. Karin Kukkonen is Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo. She is Director of LCE – Centre for Literature, Cognition and Emotions, and PI for the ERC-funded project JEUX – Literary Games, Poetics and the Early Modern Novel (2024-2028). Kukkonen has published extensively on embodied and extended approaches to literature, including How the Novel Found its Feet (OUP, 2019) and With Bodies: Embodied Cognition and Narrative Theory (with Marco Caracciolo, Ohio UP, 2021). This talk is based on her forthcoming book Creativity and Contingency in Literary Writing (Bloomsbury). The seminar is convened by Professor Ben Morgan (ben.morgan@worc.ox.ac.uk) and Dr Naomi Rokotnitz (naomi.rokotnitz@worc.ox.ac.uk). As always, the talk will be followed by drinks for all attendees.
Belinda Lennox is Professor of Psychiatry and Head of Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford and Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist in the Early Intervention in Psychosis service for Oxford Health NHS FT. Her interests are in discovering the causes of and developing more effective treatments for those with severe mental illness and in implementing those discoveries into clinical practice. She has led research on the autoimmune basis of severe mental illness.
The International Criminal Court seeks to hold to account those guilty of some of the world’s worst crimes. Champions of the court say it deters would-be war criminals, bolsters the rule of law, and offers justice to victims of atrocities. But major governments including the USA, China and Russia are not ICC parties, and the ICC’s ongoing investigations of alleged crimes including arrest warrants in the Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars represent a critical test for the court’s power. The ICC’s Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan will discuss the role of the court and the challenges it faces in ongoing conflicts such as those in Ukraine and Israel / Gaza. He will be joined in conversation by GCHQ Director of Legal Affairs and Mission Policy Shehzad Charania MBE.
St. Augustine’s approach to the psalms is the most thoroughly and rigorously Christological hermeneutic we have from the early church. Other Christian interpreters apply such a hermeneutic occasionally, most often to “rescue” a psalm from theological trouble. Augustine always sees the psalm through the lens of the totus Christus, the whole Christ, head and members. In some psalms, Christ speaks in his “own” voice—especially in psalms that offer praise and adoration. In others he speaks in “ours,” especially those that confess sins. The hermeneutic can have a dramatic impact—as when he reads imprecatory psalms as prayers to turn enemies into friends. What does he do with the psalms that would become the church’s seven great psalms of penitence? These should read simply enough as expressions of “our” distance from God and need for forgiveness, and suit his latter-career polemic against the Donatists and Pelagians quite well. But the literal, for Augustine, is not simply the literal as we or other ages in interpretive history would have it. The letter often refers, without allegorical embellishment, to Christ. What then does he make of a letter that needs no hard correction?
For more a century, Northeast Asia has been one of the world's most dangerous places, where wars have repeatedly broken out between Japan, Russia, the United States, the two Koreas, and several regimes in China. What, then, should we expect from Biden's successor coming into office in 2025? Join Oxford International Relations Society for fascinating panel discussion featuring John Everard, the UK's ambassador to North Korea from 2006 to 2008, Dr Edward Howell (Oxford), and Prof John Nilsson-Wright (Cambridge) focusing on tensions and crises in Northeast Asia after the 2024 US Presidential Election. Will the "hermit kingdom" of North Korea intensify its delinquent nuclear behavior? How will US regional allies such as South Korea and Japan deal with challenges posed by increasingly assertive authoritarian states such as Russia and China? Finally, how do human rights abuses fit into the picture? Organised by Oxford International Relations Society, this event is supported by the generousity of the Ministry of Unification, an executive department of the South Korean government aimed at promoting Korean reunification.
Professor Frances Platt is the Head of the Department of Pharmacology, University of Oxford, and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2021. Plants are a rich source of therapeutic molecules and, for most of her career, Fran has worked on a drug that was originally derived from mulberry and other natural sources. The drug was known to have anti-viral properties and while working on its mechanism of action, Fran's research found it had another activity that in principle would make it a treatment for a group of severe inherited rare diseases. Fran will give the background to this drug and take you on a scientific journey from basic science to clinical translation, discussing the many factors that influenced her path along the way.
Maria Kaisar will speak on ‘The role of AI in Organ Donation and Transplantation’. The Chief Medical Officer has confirmed that attendance at the Surgical Grand Rounds can count toward internal CPD, with 1 point awarded per hour. Please note that in-person attendance is required, and you will need to sign the attendance register. Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend online.
In this 60-minute online workshop you will be introduced to the methodologies and principles underpinning the conduct of literature searches for systematic reviews, scoping reviews and other evidence reviews. The session will cover: formulating a focused research question; preparing a protocol; developing a search strategy to address that research question; choosing appropriate databases and search engines; searching for grey literature and ongoing studies; storing and managing references; and documenting and reporting your search. Intended audience: students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
The Environmental Humanities Hub is co-hosting a collaborative session of the reading group series from our colleagues at The Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network. We will discuss world-making and world-taking. We will be discussing the following texts, news items and images: Wenzel, Jennifer, ‘Reading for the Planet INTRODUCTION,’ in The Disposition of Nature, Fordham Univ Press, (2020). Melisa Hobson, ‘This isn’t a starfish0 it’s a rare sand found only in Japan,‘ National Geographic, Science (2024). Chris Jordan, ‘Midway, Message from the Gyre (2009-2013)’. https://www.chrisjordan.com/Midway/1/thumbs-caption Please contact Dr Martha Swift (martha.swift@ell.ox.ac.uk) for details of the Zoom call or if you having trouble accessing any of the resources. The session should run for approximately one hour.
No biological system involves a single cell functioning in isolation. Almost all consist of highly connected networks of interacting individuals, which respond and adapt differently to signals and conditions within their local microenvironment. For example, human tissues and their cancers contain mosaics of genetic clones, and the transcriptomic and metabolic profiles from genetically identical cells are also highly heterogeneous. As the full extent of multi-cellular heterogeneity is revealed by recent experimental advances, computational and mathematical modelling can begin to provide a quantitative framework for understanding its biological implications. In this talk, I will describe some functional aspects of multi-cellular heterogeneity and explore the consequences for human health and disease.
Digital surveillance is a daily and all-encompassing reality of life in China. This book explores how Chinese citizens make sense of digital surveillance and live with it. It investigates their imaginaries about surveillance and privacy from within the Chinese socio-political system. Based on in-depth qualitative research interviews, detailed diary notes, and extensive documentation, Ariane Ollier-Malaterre strives to ‘de-Westernize’ the internet and surveillance literature. She shows how the research participants weave a cohesive system of anguishing narratives on China’s moral shortcomings and redeeming narratives on the government and technology as civilizing forces. Although many participants cast digital surveillance as indispensable in China, their misgivings, objections, and the mental tactics they employ to dissociate themselves from surveillance convey the mental and emotional weight associated with such surveillance exposure. The author also reflects on fieldwork in China as a foreign researcher. She discusses the choices she has made to reduce her Eurocentric biases and what she has learned about interviewing in a context of political censorship. Ariane Ollier-Malaterre, Ph.D., is a Management Professor and the Canada Research Chair in Digital Regulation at Work at the University of Quebec in Montreal (ESG-UQAM). Her research examines digital technologies and the boundaries between work and life across different national contexts. She has co-authored over 75 chapters and articles in management, sociology, psychology, and information systems journals. She co-chairs the Technology, Work and Family research community of the Work and Family Researchers Network and has received the Kanter Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research.
Massive scale atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Removal is required if we are to keep globally averaged temperature increases to below 1.5 degrees or even 2.0 degrees by the end of the century. The ocean offers a range of potential ways to deliver Carbon Dioxide Removal, and its chemistry and size present the opportunity for large scale and essentially permanent removal. Removal of atmospheric CO2 into or via the ocean however presents challenges that range from technical and scientific to environmental and regulatory. In this talk I will present the view from a small industrial scale pilot plant we are building to strip CO2 from seawater. I will discuss the science and scientific challenges behind this approach and its application, and will explore where it fits within the landscape of possible Carbon Dioxide Removal solutions. I will finish by reflecting on opportunity and barriers to marine Carbon Dioxide Removal contributing at scale to our efforts to stabilise and potentially reduce atmospheric CO2 concentrations and therefore global temperatures.
We study vote splitting in elections, in which the participation of candidates with little chances of winning has the effect of splitting votes away from more popular candidates. We develop a model of an electoral game with two parties, each consisting of one strong candidate and some weak candidates. We analyze strong candidates’ incentives to give side transfers to weak candidates to manipulate their election participation decisions. We also derive each strong candidate’s winning probability in equilibrium.
This talk will focus on the critical role played by claudin-5 at the blood-brain barrier (BBB). Claudin-5 is the most enriched tight junction component at the BBB and its dysregulation has been implicated in a range of neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. Here, the focus will be on understanding how and why claudin-5 becomes disrupted at the BBB. The talk will bring in both pre-clinical and clinical research based approaches to understanding regulation of the BBB in health and disease.
Join Peter Mandelson and leading figures in the sciences at Oxford, for a panel discussion on the future of science, research and innovation at the university. We will be discussing what the Government and university can do to keep Oxford's cutting-edge research globally relevant in the coming decades.
Zotero is a reference management tool that helps you build libraries of references and add citations and bibliographies to word processed documents using your chosen citation style. This classroom-based introduction covers the main features of Zotero with the opportunity for practical exercises. The learning outcomes are to: create a Zotero library and add references to it; edit and organise references in your Zotero library; add in-text citations and/or footnotes to your word-processed document; create bibliographies; understand how to sync your Zotero library across multiple computers; and understand how to share your Zotero library of references. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
We study the design of a tax rule to redistribute income across heterogeneous workers optimally. The social planner faces uncertainty about the possible income choices available to each type of worker, and, therefore, cannot perfectly predict the income distribution induced by a given tax rule. In the face of this uncertainty, the planner maximizes her worst-case expected payoff. We show that using a progressive tax rule is optimal regardless of the planner's preference for redistribution and that it is uniquely so under an additional richness assumption on the set of income choices that the social planner knows is available to workers. This result stands in contrast to the familiar zero-taxation-at-the-top result that arises generally (absent specific distributional assumptions) in the Bayesian optimal taxation model of Mirrlees (1971). To that extent, our robust approach to uncertainty about workers' income possibilities provides a new foundation for progressive income taxation---a feature that is prevalent in most existing tax systems---that does not rely on parametric assumptions on the distribution of workers' productivity, or on the social planner's attitude toward income inequality.
We use recent results from the theory of random matrices to improve instrumental variables estimation with many instruments. In settings where the first-stage parameters are dense, we show that Ridge lowers the implicit price of a bias adjustment. This comes along with improved (finite-sample) properties in the second stage regression. Our theoretical results nest existing results on bias approximation and bias adjustment. Moreover, it extends them to settings with more instruments than observations.
There is general scientific agreement on the need for transformative change in order to address the systemic poly-crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and growing inequalities globally. However, what this transformative change is and what the future looks like if we are able to achieve it remains opaque. It is important to recognise that there is a plurality of desirable futures that could emerge from transformative interventions; these aspirational futures will look different in different contexts and from different people’s perspectives and knowledge systems. When it comes to detailing how to achieve these outcomes, there is a dearth of scenarios detailing preferable futures for people and nature. In this talk, I will unpack some of the thinking that has gone into trying to address this gap through the development of the Nature Futures Framework. I will also outline some of the capacities that are needed in order to expand and further develop the framework, especially in the context of modelling how to achieve a safe and just future for all life on Earth- a task currently being undertaken by the Transformation Pathways workstream of the Earth Commission. Laura Pereira is a Professor in Sustainability Transformations and Futures at the Global Change Institute, Wits University and a researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University. She is an interdisciplinary sustainability scientist, having been trained in ecology, law, zoology and human geography. She completed her DPhil in Geography at St Hilda’s College, Oxford in 2012, before working internationally at various institutions including the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, the University of Cape Town, Stellenbosch University, City University of London and Utrecht University. She is interested in the role of futures thinking in enabling transformative change and in developing innovative methods for knowledge co-production in Global South contexts, especially around issues of equity and justice in the construction of pathways to live within Earth System Boundaries. Laura is currently an Earth Commissioner and an expert in the IPBES Task Force on scenarios and models. The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and Biodiversity Network are interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners. The views, opinions and positions expressed within this lecture are those of the author alone, they do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery/Biodiversity Network, or its researchers.
Ms Egian’s presentation will explore the role played by Arab States on the UN Security Council during their terms as non-permanent Council members, and what impact they may have had on issues related to the Middle East. Rabbani will examine the extent to which regional dynamics played a role in the 7 October 2023 attacks, the position of Hamas within the coalition known as the Axis of Resistance, and how the Gaza crisis has influenced the region's politics during the past year.
We are excited to announce three upcoming Rakugo events taking place in Oxford and London (with some events streaming online, TBC). A master Rakugo performer will be travelling from Japan to perform, and there will also be Kobanashi performances from learners of Japanese all over the country and lectures from experts. Why not join us to discover a unique aspect of Japanese culture, gain new Japanese knowledge, and – most importantly – to laugh at some great stories. This event is free but advance booking is required. There will be English translation provided for each performance, so everyone is welcome! Ryūtei Saryū – Rakugo Performer Ryūtei Saryū (stage name) is a Rakugo Master from Chiba Prefecture. He became an apprentice of Yanagiya Sankyō and began performing Rakugo in 1993. He was promoted to Shin’Uchi Rakugo MasterStoryteller status in 2006. He is the recipient of awards, including the Hanagata Engei Taisho* for three consecutive years: 2009 (silver), 2010 (gold), 2011 (gold). He has performed Rakugo all over the world. Since 2013 he has been working as a part-time lecturer and became a visiting associate professor in 2024 at Tokyo Woman’s Christian University.
Violence reduction features prominently in the 2015-2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). By 2030, they ask the world community to eliminate all violence against women and girls (SDG 5.2), to end all forms of violence against children (SDG 16.2), and to significantly reduce all other forms of violence worldwide (SDG 16.1). Is the world on track to achieve these goals? In what world regions and for what types of violence can we see significant reductions? And to what extent has international programming based on scientific evidence contributed to reductions in violence? In this lecture I will critically review the relevant evidence, and outline a global research and policy framework for effective violence reduction beyond the 2015-2030 SDG period.
K. Rudy, ‘Introduction’, _Touching Parchment: How Medieval Users Rubbed, Handled, and Kissed Their Manuscripts_ (vol. 2, 2024) E. Duffy, ‘Ch. 1. A Book for Lay People’, _Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers, 1240-1570_ (2008)
This 90-minute session will cover some more advanced techniques for finding medical literature to answer a research question. We will recap some basics, then demonstrate searching in several medical databases, including using subject headings (MeSH) and the differences between different platforms. After the main workshop, one of the Bodleian Health Care Libraries Outreach Librarians will be available for another 30 minutes to answer questions about your own searches, so feel free to bring along what you are working on. By the end of this session, you will be able to: explain what subject headings are, and how to use them; search for words that appear near to other words; take a search from one database into another; and save a search and document it. Intended audience: students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
Are you looking to learn about the ways in which to transmit scientific ideas and make your research accessible to a non-specialist audience through a variety of mediums? This session will serve as an introduction to science communication and how it can be successfully incorporated into our roles. By the end of this session you will be able to: define science communication and provide a list of examples; explain why science communication is important for both our CPD and the public; list ways in which we can all get involved in science communication. Intended audience: students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
The talk is about the research within SWECOV, a large research pogram on the COVID-19 pandemic. The program is built on a rich set of medical, social and economic microdata from Sweden and was started when I served on the Swedish Corona Commission. In the seminar, I will give three examples of concrete projects. The first escribes the inequaltites, along different social gradients, in the medical, social and economic outfalls of the pandemic. The second project analyzes how pandemic shocks affected outputs across individual firms in exposed sectors, and the earnings across individual workers in those sectors. The third project will gauge the real-world vaccine effectiveness estimated from a set of natural experiments associated with the roll-out of the vaccine -- as opposed to the vaccine efficacy estimated from RCTs before vaccine approval.
Coral reefs are highly diverse ecosystems that thrive in nutrient-poor seas, a phenomenon frequently referred to as the “Darwin Paradox”. Nonetheless, even in nutrient-poor ocean basins, reefs can be replenished regularly with dissolved inorganic N and P from deeper, nutrient-rich water through upwelling, internal waves and vertical mixing. Substantial amounts of nutrients in their inorganic form are also released by filter feeders in the intimate vicinity of the corals or enter the reef from land-based sources. These inorganic forms of N and P constitute a key nutrient pool, which is, however, primarily accessible to the photosynthetic symbionts and not to the coral host. Accordingly, it is unclear to which extent dissolved inorganic nutrients contribute directly to the success of symbiotic corals. We demonstrate that symbiotic coral animals can satisfy a substantial amount of their N and P demand through ‘farming’ and digestion of excess symbiont cells. Thus, we show that both the symbionts and the host gain growth-related benefits through the efficient, reciprocal exchange of the essential cellular nutrients. Since both organic and inorganic sources of N and P are overall scarce in oligotrophic tropical waters, the symbiotic lifestyle offers corals a truly competitive edge over exclusively heterotrophic animals that rely solely on N and P in organic forms, or exclusively autotrophic plants such as macroalgae that are restricted to N and P in dissolved inorganic form. The fully closed cycle of reciprocal N and P exchange between the symbiotic partners can explain the evolutionary and ecological success of symbiotic corals in well-lit, nutrient-limited warm water habitats. It also underpins the vulnerability of symbiotic corals to disturbances of their nutrient environment.
Modern microscopy generates imaging data across a vast range of spatio-temporal scales and at various resolutions, broadening the extent of observable morphological features in biological systems. Acknowledging that morphology information is present in most types of microscopy data, the Uhlmann group at EMBL-EBI develop general-purpose, modality-agnostic methods for bioimage quantification. In this talk, I will first present some of our efforts in automating the extraction of data-driven morphology descriptors from a range of microscopy images, and towards proposing novel data analysis techniques to mine collections of such measurements. I will then give an overview of the BioVisionCenter, a new initiative for FAIR bioimage analysis at the University of Zurich that I am leading since the beginning of the year. There, we aim at bridging the gap between novel computer vision method development and their broader application at scale on microscopy data, to ultimately allow bioimage analysis methods to become widely usable tools.
Please join either in person or online. For in-person attendees, the talk will be preceded by a light lunch at 12.15pm. Please email comms@sociology.ox.ac.uk with any questions or to receive the Microsoft Teams link. Dr William Fleming is the Unilever Research Fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford. William’s research area is work and wellbeing: how work is better or worse for us, and how it might be improved. He especially focuses on workplace interventions, what works, what doesn’t work and why.
Social-emotional skills, the skills about managing relationships, emotions, and tasks, have been highlighted in the research and practices. Given its broad scope, multiple frameworks and indicators have been proposed, causing inconsistency in findings. In this talk, I will introduce a series of studies we conducted in order to find out the key social-emotional skills for students’ learning and wellbeing. Throughout those studies, we have used relative weights analysis, dominance analysis, machine learning approaches, cross-cultural/county comparisons, with OECD social-emotional skill survey data. The findings suggested that persistence, curiosity, self-control tends to be the most important skill for achievement, whereas optimism, energy, stress resistance for wellbeing. The implications of the findings (e.g., targeted intervention) and our future directions will be discussed, particularly on utilizing the power of Generative Artificial Intelligence tools. Teams link to join online: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_MmZjZDIzNzMtMmFjNS00NDIzLWE3MTQtMmVjZjMzYjRjMDJj%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22b33f55d8-6202-46f8-a141-737715faff88%22%7d
Much like a viral contagion, misinformation can spread rapidly from one mind to another. Moreover, once lodged in memory, falsehoods are difficult to correct. Inoculation theory offers a natural basis for developing a psychological ‘vaccine’ against the spread of fake news and misinformation. Specifically, in a series of lab and field studies, I’ll show that it is possible to pre-emptively “immunize” people against disinformation about a wide range of topics by pre-exposing them to severely weakened doses of the techniques that underlie its production. This process of ‘prebunking’ helps people cultivate cognitive antibodies in both simulated and real social media environments. I’ll showcase several interventions we developed and evaluated—with public health authorities and social media companies—to help citizens around the world recognize and resist unwanted attempts to influence and mislead. To join the seminar on zoom: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82164277645?pwd=tDmkAfWvIm7WhRWw0gDG7Mbbca54ZT.1 Meeting ID :821 6427 7645 Passcode: 862722
Market mechanisms aim to deliver environmental services at low cost. However, this objective is undermined by participants whose conservation actions are not marginal to the incentive — or “additional” — as the lowest cost providers of environmental services may not be the highest social value. We investigate this potential market failure in the world’s largest auction mechanism for ecosystem services, the Conserva- tion Reserve Program, with a dataset linking bids in the program’s scoring auction to satellite-derived land use. We use a regression discontinuity design to show that three of four marginal winners of the auction are not additional. Moreover, we find that the heterogeneity in counterfactual land use introduces adverse selection in the market. We then develop and estimate a joint model of multi-dimensional bidding and land use to quantify the implications of this market failure for the performance of environmental procurement mechanisms and competitive offset markets. We design alternative auc- tions with scoring rules that incorporate the expected impact of the auction on bidders’ land use. These auctions increase efficiency by using bids and observed characteristics to select participants based on both costs and expected additionality.
To (mis)quote Jawaharlal Nehru, at the stroke of the midnight hour on August 14/15, 1947, the Indian subcontinent was not just awakening to life and freedom; it was also being ravaged by ultranationalist and fascistic paramilitary movements who viewed freedom as the freedom to dominate as an ethnonational majority. In this paper, I trace the emergence of these movements and their ideologues from the 1920s through to the immediate aftermath of decolonization. In doing so, I offer a broad account of paramilitary movements, their entanglements with global fascism, their role in shaping the violent outcome of decolonization, and their participation in state-making and nation-building in South Asia.
In a new Future of the Humanities Project event series — Cultural Encounters: Books that Have Made a Difference — we embrace the other at a time when we have heard much about the ways in which national, religious, and cultural lines divide us as humans. In this series, we invite leading scholars across disciplines to explore themes of cultural encounters both in classic literary works and in contemporary cultural debates. In this event Dr Clare Broome Saunders, Oxford, gives a talk on George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
To (mis)quote Jawaharlal Nehru, at the stroke of the midnight hour on August 14/15, 1947, the Indian subcontinent was not just awakening to life and freedom; it was also being ravaged by ultranationalist and fascistic paramilitary movements who viewed freedom as the freedom to dominate as an ethnonational majority. In this paper, I trace the emergence of these movements and their ideologues from the 1920s through to the immediate aftermath of decolonization. In doing so, I offer a broad account of paramilitary movements, their entanglements with global fascism, their role in shaping the violent outcome of decolonization, and their participation in state-making and nation-building in South Asia.
By the end of the 1960s, public planning had seemingly failed in the United Kingdom. But that did not mean an end to public prediction. Instead, throughout the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, ministers and senior civil servants set up various units and programmes that brought the sciences of prediction to bear on national and global problems: energy crises, technological change, public health. This paper starts by exploring the prediction units of the 1970s and early 1980s, such as the Cabinet Office’s “Committee on Future World Trends”, the Ministry of Technology and Department of Industry’s “Programmes Analysis Unit”, and the Advisory Council on Applied Research and Development’s “Foresight” project. All these projects either failed or met with limited success and were not institutionalised in any lasting form. This paper then moves onto the 1990s and 2000s, when prediction was successfully re-institutionalised in British government. In 1993, the Government Office for Science and Technology began the Foresight programme, which runs to the present day – making it the most enduring institution of UK science policy in the post-war era. In 2001, the Cabinet Office’s Strategic Futures Team published _A Futurist’s Toolbox: Methodologies in Futures Work_, a futures handbook for UK government departments, the latest edition of which was published by the Government Office for Science this year. The paper thus concludes by reflecting on the historical changes that finally led to the successful institutionalisation of prediction in UK government in the 1990s.
I will describe the open problems of singularity formation in incompressible fluids. I will discuss a list of related models, some results, and some more open problems.
Monday 11 November 2024 (Week 5 MT) Title tbc Nelson Landry (University of Hamburg)
This event celebrates the launch of David Jackman’s new book, Syndicates and Societies: Criminal Politics in Dhaka (Cambridge University Press). Based on years of research, the book reveals how syndicates shape life in Kawran Bazar, the largest marketplace in Bangladesh, and offers a new approach to understanding the nexus of crime and politics. The book traces the bazar's history from a heartland of gangsters to being dominated by ruling party leaders and state officials. It follows a group of labourers as they seek a place in this world, aligning themselves to leaders, orchestrating bombings and fighting off rivals. Syndicates and Societies thus explores the relationship between crime and order, revealing a world of extortionists and informers, political muscle and union leaders. David Jackman will discuss the book’s findings with Barbara Harriss-White (Professor Emeritus of Development Studies). To be followed by a drinks reception.
This session emphasises the critical role of a strong team, including co-founders, mentors, and advisors, in your entrepreneurial success. You’ll explore how to effectively share responsibilities and motivate yourself and others in value-creating activities. Learn to develop a strategic plan for leveraging various sources of support such as peers, mentors, student societies and university resources. Join us to strengthen your entrepreneurial network, harness collective expertise and drive your idea forward.
Prof Sabic-El-Rayess was awarded a 2021 Finalist Medal for Excellence in Young Adult Nonfiction by the American Library Association and Best Book recognition by School Library Journal, Malala Fund, Capitol Choices, and Children’s Center for Literature for her memoir, The Cat I Never Named — a defining text on resilience to hate and empowerment through education. Dr. Sabic-El-Rayess released her second nonfiction contribution, Three Summers to critical acclaim. Three Summers is a story of resilience, belonging, and sisterhood in the three years leading up to the Bosnian Genocide. In this session, Dr. Sabic-El-Rayess will spotlight the power of storytelling in nurturing interfaith solidarity and belonging and offer insights on why she chooses – among her scholarly, research, and pedagogical endeavors – to continue writing stories as a way to sustainably build resilience to hate.
The policy vision of remote consultations is of an efficient, safe and accessible remote service delivered through state-of-the art digital technologies and implemented via rational allocation criteria. The reality is less glamorous. Research reveals that in the real world, remote services involve multiple contradictions and tensions—for example, between quality and efficiency, or between infection control and patient choice—leading to ethical dilemmas for managers, support staff and clinicians. These dilemmas cannot be resolved by rigid standard operating procedures or algorithms: they require contextual judgement.
Shavez Cheema is the founder of a conservation group on Borneo called 1StopBorneo Wildlife. He leads the Reforestation projects of the group and develops wildlife tourism projects for the local community so they can have a sustainable future to save the wildlife. His research was on the favorite food of Mammals by working on the ficus fruits. He leads specialised mammal watching trips on Borneo to sustain the organization's efforts to save the flora & fauna. He has authored many field guides notably the Field Guide to Tawau Hills Park, Pocket Guide to Mammals of Borneo and the reason for his visit to London to launch the Borneo Nature Travel Guide.
https://ludvigsinander.net/mini-courses.html
For our next talk, in the BDI/CHG (gen)omics Seminar series, we will be hearing from Dr Robert Beagrie, Group Leader, Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics. We’re delighted to host Rob in what promises to be a great talk! Date: Tuesday 12 November Time: 9:30 – 10:30 Location: BDI/OxPop Seminar Room 0 Title: Chromatin organisation and human disease Abstract: Chromatin organisation in the nucleus is a key mediator of transcriptional regulation. DNA regulatory elements that control transcription rates are carefully packaged with specific histone proteins, accumulate characteristic epigenetic modifications and are folded in ways that either facilitate or repress production of mature mRNA. The pathways that establish proper chromatin organisation are frequently affected by de novo mutations in patients with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) or congenital heart defects (CHDs). I will summarise the current state of our understanding on the mechanisms at play in chromatin syndromes, technologies that will further that understanding and the potential for therapeutic intervention. Bio: Rob studied biochemistry at the University of Cambridge before moving to Imperial College to work on DNA structure. During his doctoral studies, he developed "Genome Architecture Mapping", a technique for mapping the folding of chromatin in the nucleus which has particular advantages for disease applications. He then moved to Oxford and worked on epigenetics regulation of gene expression in red blood cell progenitors as a postdoctoral researcher at the Weatherall Institute. He then moved to the Centre for Human Genetics to start the "Chromatin and Disease" lab in 2022. His group apply a range of cutting-edge molecular biology techniques to understand the consequences of chromatin disruption in brain and heart development. ————————————————————— All members of the University are welcome to join. We also now have a mailing list – To be added, ping genomics_bdi_whg-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk (with any message), you should get a bounce-back with three options to confirm your subscription. Follow any of those options, and with a bit of luck you should be signed up! As a reminder, the (gen)omics seminar series runs every other Tuesday morning and is intended to increase interaction between individuals working in genomics across Oxford. We encourage in-person attendance where possible. There is time for discussion over, tea, coffee and pastries after the talks. Hybrid Option: Please note that these meetings are closed meetings and only open to members of the University of Oxford to encourage sharing of new and unpublished data. Please respect our speakers and do not share the link with anyone outside of the university. Microsoft Teams meeting – Join the meeting now Meeting ID: 342 458 973 000 Passcode: FWacuV ——————————————————————————————————— If you wish to know more or receive information related to trainings and events at BDI, please subscribe by emailing bdi-announce-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk. You’ll then receive an email from SYMPA and once you reply you’ll be on the list!
COURSE DETAILS The course will include: Critique of readability in relevant papers. Use of tenses in academic papers. Writing with impact. Concise writing. Grammar and proof reading. Scientific table and chart technique. LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of the session participants will be able to: Develop understanding of the characteristics of scientific writing; write in simple, clear and concise scientific English. Develop knowledge of how to write grammatically correct English. Improve proof reading skills; organise the sections of a scientific paper effectively. Develop a scientific argument with appropriate language that conveys the message effectively. Make effective use of charts and tables.
There is increasing evidence that the immune system is involved in multiple psychiatric disorders, at least in a subset of patients. I will outline our work using functional enrichment analyses to prioritise the immune cell subsets involved in cross-disorder genetic risk, highlighting a causal role for adaptive immunity (B and T cells) across multiple disorders. Activated T cells were particularly implicated, suggesting a potential mechanism by which environmental risks (e.g. stress or infection) might stimulate T cells to unmask the effects of psychiatric risk variants. I will also discuss our previous and ongoing work using peripheral blood immunophenotyping (cytometry, bulk transcriptomics and single cell sequencing) to characterise the immune landscape in depression and psychosis, and future directions. I will consider the convergence and divergence of signals from genetic and biomarker studies, and discuss the implications of these two strands of work for pathogenesis and precision treatment in psychiatry. To attend via Zoom, please use the joining details below: https://zoom.us/j/98643323773?pwd=bL0TW4vweAlQzIlL5VEFHKYiEaVYPl.1 Meeting ID: 986 4332 3773 Passcode: 758174
In this online interactive workshop, you will learn how to create an effective search query and have the opportunity to try out a range of tools that you can use to search for scholarly materials to support your research. You will: learn how to find books and other scholarly items in Oxford libraries using SOLO; search for journal articles using subject databases and scholarly search engines; and be signposted towards learning materials you can use if you are interested in searching for conference proceedings, theses and dissertations. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
Globally, there is a growing recognition that dying, and death have become medicalized events in healthcare. At the same time, the lack of pediatric palliative care access is a Global Health problem. However, the meaning of dying and death have not gained significant attention in care contexts. This is particularly true for dying children and all infants who are dependent on inter-personal relationships for life decisions that affect their well-being. To start to address the pediatric palliative care access and care gaps, the meaning of dying and death for children needs to be appreciated. In this presentation, I will outline how to start addressing these gaps by discussing the concepts of interpersonal relationality and dependency which are necessary for generating ethically meaningful care for dying children. To that end, I will also provide an overview of my research highlighting how care for dying children needs a unique solution and outlining a science-engaged humanities approach in which to do so.
When one looks at the sheer size of China and the size of its population in relation to the Caribbean as a region, and the small size and small population of individual Caribbean islands, any relationship between China and the Caribbean, hardly seems worth considering at all. But a closer examination of the China–Caribbean relationship would reveal that it is an important relationship, not just for the Caribbean and China; not just for resources and markets or for trade, investment and development; but for the geopolitics of the western hemisphere and the world at large. China–Caribbean relations have become especially poignant under the leadership of Xi Jinping in our contemporary period. A 2008 position paper sets the framework for China’s thrust into Latin America and the Caribbean but Xi Jinping and his global ambitions for China, sets the tone. The presentation also explores four major considerations that are important to Xi Jinping: 1) the middle income country trap 2) avoidance of war with the United States of America 3) China as a Developing country 4) a multi polar world with a more acceptable balance of power This talk will examine the growing relations between the Caribbean and China and how it fits into China’s broader strategy and Caribbean needs. But it will also look at China’s growing engagement with Latin America and western hemisphere countries and how that might complicate the geopolitics of the hemisphere. Dr Bhoendradatt Tewarie is a multifaceted intellectual with achievements spanning academia, politics, parliament and government. Dr Tewarie has authored, on his own and with collaborators, seven books including the latest published Economic Implications of Venezuelan migration on Trinidad and Tobago and the Caribbean (Palgrave Macmillan 2022). Two others, Sixty Years of Trinidad and Tobago Independence (UWI Press) and China in the Caribbean: Trade, Investment and Geopolitical Influence (Palgrave Macmillan) are in process for publication in early 2025. Dr Tewarie is a graduate of Northwestern University, completed his Masters as an International House Fellow at the University of Chicago, and his PhD at the Pennsylvania State University on a Fulbright-LASPAU scholarship. He also completed a Leadership programme at the Saïd School of Business, University of Oxford and one on Foresighting at the University of Houston. Dr Tewarie pursued a dual track career with outstanding contributions in both education on the one hand, and Politics, Parliament and Government on the other. He served as lecturer at the University of the West Indies, from where he later retired as Principal of the Trinidad and Tobago campus. He also served as Pro Vice Chancellor for Planning and Development at UWI. He was a Senior Lecturer at Arthur Lock Jack School of Business and served that institution as Executive Director for eight years. He has served for fifteen years in the Parliament of Trinidad and Tobago in both House of Representatives and the Senate. He has twice been a Cabinet Minister responsible for Trade, Enterprise and Tourism and Planning and Sustainable Development respectively. He published a book on Sustainable Development in 2015. Dr Tewarie currently writes a weekly column for the Trinidad Guardian on national regional and international issues and has written several articles about development issues in the region.
To join online, please email oxchildpsych@psych.ox.ac.uk to request the Zoom link.
Under what conditions do positive price shocks facilitate cycles of crime and violence? While extant literature posits that positive shocks in licit industries will decrease crime and violence, evidence for this outcome is often taken from contexts with at least nominal levels of state capacity. I challenge these expectations using evidence from Madagascar, which is characterized by extremely low state capacity, and the rapid increase in vanilla prices following an abrupt shift away from synthetic vanilla by several multinational companies. Using a new dataset detailing regional crime rates, I implement a synthetic control model which shows, contrary to most of the existing literature, that price shocks can produce dramatic increases in crime. To explain this result, I draw on interviews with local vanilla farmers, police, and politicians. This qualitative evidence provides support for the quantitative findings by emphasizing how the deficiencies of state institutions contribute to regional insecurity. The paper has implications for the price shock, vigilante, and state capacity literatures along with unique data and methodological contributions.
The impact of near-occlusion on stroke risk in patients with asymptomatic carotid disease Presented by: Dr Tom Evans, Oxford University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust Regional carotid referrals and factors influencing decision to intervene and outcome Presented by: Dr Kamran Gaba, Oxford University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
In this session we will cover how to locate and interpret journal level metrics such as the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). We will examine the tools you can use to locate journal level metrics, such as Journal Citation Reports and Scopus Sources. We will also consider the uses, limitations and pitfalls inherent in these metrics and how they can be used responsibly. By the end of the session, you will be familiar with: the major journal metrics and how these are calculated; accessing journal citation data using Journal Citation Reports and Scopus Sources; using JIF, CiteScore and SJR journal metrics to rank journals; limitations of different metrics, including how journal metrics may be skewed or distorted. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
By all accounts and analyses, the upcoming elections in the US will be one of the most consequential in generations, with profound implications not only for domestic policy but with the potential to reshape America’s role in the world order. Celebrating its 16th year, the NYU Brademas Center’s “Inside American Politics” series will bring together a group of political insiders – campaign strategists, political and communications consultants, leading political journalists – to assess current political dynamics, identify emerging trends and share their perspectives on how domestic and international events influence public opinion and, in turn, how public attitudes influence election outcomes. The Brademas Center was very pleased to bring this year’s insider’s view of U.S. politics and the 2024 election to Oxford University and its Rothermere American Institute. The two-day convening will take place Tuesday, November 12 and Wednesday, November 13, 2024. Students and the public are invited to join this exciting conversation in person at the Rhodes House Conference Center and virtually via Zoom.
We examine how to reconcile, quantitatively, the high volatility of market valuations of U.S. corporations with the relative stability of macroeconomic quantities over the period 1929-present. We use a stochastic growth model extended to incorporate factorless income as a measurement framework to investigate this apparent tension. Macroeconomic and financial variables are measured in a consistent fashion using the Integrated Macroeconomic Accounts of the United States, which offer a unified data set for the income statement, cash flows, and balance sheet of the U.S. Corporate Sector. We argue that fluctuations in expected cash flows to firm owners have been the dominant driver of fluctuations in the market value of U.S. corporation. We show that relatively modest shocks to expected future cash flows can account for the history of corporate valuations from 1929 to 2023, without appealing to fluctuations in discount rates. Further evidence in support of this hypothesis is that payout-price ratios in our data do in fact forecast growth of future cash flows to owners of firms. In particular, they forecast changes in the fraction of corporate output flowing to owners of firms. The time path for the after-tax return to investment in capital that we infer from our model tracks the risk free interest rate fairly closely, at least in the period after World War II. In this sense, our model offers a reconciliation of volatile market valuations and stable capital output ratios.
For those who wish to join online: Join Zoom Meeting https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85285531740?pwd=SEFBa0%C3%975V21SOFo1dk85dm5TWEhSdz09 Meeting ID: 852 8553 1740 Passcode: 911647
Lower caste assertion in colonial India has been a topic of critical interest for several researchers in the recent past. The Satyashodhak Movement (Truth-Seeking movement) spearheaded by Jotirao Phule in 1873 is one such important movement. However, this movement has largely been studied in a teleological manner, from its birth as a social movement in 1873, to its culmination into a political party in 1920. In this presentation, I will argue that the ideological currents of the Satyashodhak variant of non-Brahmanism underwent seismic shifts after 1890. After exploring Jotirao Phule’s capacious philosophical moorings on different facets of everyday life, my attempt will be to show how the Satyashodhak ideology post Phule shifted from espousing a radical ‘anti-casteist’ polemic to a sophisticated ‘anti-Brahmin’ critique of Hinduism. I will introduce Krishnarao Bhalekar, one of Phule’s close colleagues, to juxtapose his musings on dharma and identity with Phule’s philosophical enquiries. In the process, I will explore the shifting paradigms of ‘non-Brahmin Hinduism’ of Satyashodhak thought in the post-Phule era. I will argue that with the advent of print modernity, the hitherto overwhelming focus on caste got subsumed into an anti-Brahminism couched in distinctly Hindu idioms and concepts. By exploring the nascent alternative religiosity of the post-Phule and pre-Ambedkar period, I will show how this ideological turn of non-Brahminism in Western India concretely reformulated the lower-caste discourse around caste, dharma, and identity. Dr Surajkumar Thube has recently completed his DPhil from the Faculty of History, University of Oxford. The title of his thesis was ‘Towards a Non-Brahmin Hinduism: Caste, Dharma, and the Marathi Public Sphere, circa 1890 – 1930’. His thesis focused on the non-Brahmin print and performative spheres by analyzing the content of their texts and writing styles. It sought to critically explore both the radical and conservative streaks within non-Brahmin writers amidst their contestation of the hegemonic Brahmin writerly discourse. He has contributed articles and book reviews to journals and online forums which include Revolutionary Papers, Nidān: International Journal for Indian Studies (Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing), Chakra: A Nordic Journal of South Asia Studies, Scroll, Fifty-Two, The Book Review Magazine, South Asia: History and Culture, Pacific Affairs and Soccer & Society.
Who do you need to engage with in the policy world to achieve impact? In this workshop, we will help answer this and other questions by equipping researchers, professional services staff and DPhil students to identify and map the people and groups who influence or are impacted by their research, when it comes to policy engagement. Using stakeholder analysis frameworks and interactive exercises, participants will learn to identify and categorise their relevant audiences across government agencies and other pertinent policy actors. Learning outcomes: - A greater ability to identify, evaluate and prioritise those in the policymaking community who may have an interest in policy-relevant research - A better understanding of the value of a systematic stakeholder analysis - The guidance and resources available to support a stakeholder analysis
Newspapers are a valuable resource for researching not only news but also many other aspects of political, economic, social and cultural life. In this session we will introduce key online sources of news and how to make best use of them. The focus will be on historical and contemporary newspapers from the 17th century across most countries of the world. After the session participants will understand: the value of newspapers in research; the difficulties of using newspapers in research and effective search techniques, and be able to use a range of sources for searching and reading. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
This paper will focus on synagogues in the urban internal frontier in Israel following the 1948 war and the Nakba. Following the 1948 war and the collapse of Palestinian urbanity, several administrative initiatives were held by the authorities to demonstrate sovereignty in these urban ethnocracies. Among these initiatives were the establishment of new synagogues. Two significant features were highlighted in these newly constructed Israeli synagogues – their architectural design and location within urban space. Synagogues were built in monumental dimensions and were located in locations where they would overshadow other religious buildings and extract Israeli surveillance over the surviving Palestinians in the urban sphere. Thus, the synagogues, as well as the communities that gathered around them, were harnessed into the Zionist colonial policy in the urban sphere and served as national-sovereign agents. This phenomenon is demonstrated through close analysis of archival documents in several urban frontiers in the State of Israel and point out the implications of this shift in various contexts by illustrating five examples of synagogues in Haifa, Jaffa, Ramla, and Natzrat-Illit. These examples demonstrate the shift in synagogues role within Jewish society and theology – from places of worship and longevity to the destroyed Temple to symbols of Jewish sovereignty. Moreover, these synagogues demonstrate a shift in the role of religion in Jewish society following the establishment of the state of Israel.
Surface water (or pluvial) flooding occurs when intense rainfall overwhelms drainage systems before entering rivers. With climate change and growing urban populations increasing the risk of such events, improving resilience to surface water flooding (SWF) is crucial. It is not possible to prevent all SWF therefore reliable and timely warnings are essential to support preparedness and recovery. SWF presents a unique challenge due to the high uncertainties around predicting and communicating the location, timing, and impact of localised events. In the UK responsible organisations are currently seeking to take bolder leadership in developing SWF forecasting and warning capabilities resulting in a number of recent initiatives. This talk will report on two of them: 1. Priority areas for research and development in SWF warning as identified during a workshop co-convened with the Environment Agency in January 2024 and attended by forecasters, responders, academics, and consultants. 2. Experiences from collaboration with the UK Met Office, Flood Forecasting Centre and University of Leeds to develop and test new approaches to SWF forecasting.
The United States has long been associated with liberal principles, but the nation has also nurtured deep pockets of authoritarianism. With a broad angle of vision across the past century, McGirr teases out the leaders, movements, and regional strong-holds of an American authoritarian tradition. She excavates the historical conditions that have fueled these movements, arguing that the growing power of authoritarianism within the Republican Party poses an urgent peril to the United States as a pluralist and multiracial democracy.
Gregory M. Thaler is an Associate Professor of Environmental Geography and Latin American Studies in the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies and the School of Geography and the Environment. His research examines the political ecology and political economy of development, global environmental governance, and agrarian politics. His new book draws on six years of research on agrarian frontiers in Indonesia, Brazil, and Bolivia to reveal the ecological destruction behind global attempts to reconcile industrial agriculture with forest conservation.
Turkey constitutes a unique example of external differentiated integration with the European Union, characterized by extensive legal instruments, drivers of interdependence, and voluntary compliance with EU rules. Turkey's relations with the EU date back to the 1963 Association Agreement, with a customs union for industrial products established in 1995. Turkey’s accession negotiations, which began in 2005, were frozen in 2018 due to political backsliding in the country. Despite the current stall in Turkey’s accession process, there is a high degree of asymmetric interdependence between Turkey and the EU. Turkey acts as a rule-taker in its relations with the EU, shaped by its alignment with the EU acquis and adoption of EU rules, without full membership. This paper aims to assess whether the current state of Turkey’s fragile relations with the EU is feasible as a functional model of external differentiated integration. Turkey’s EDI provides an innovative framework for keeping the country anchored to the European order, where neither full membership nor a complete break seems plausible.
Intelligent machines present us every day with urgent ethical challenges. Is the facial recognition software used by an agency fair? When algorithms determine questions of justice, finance, health, and defense, are the decisions proportionate, equitable, transparent, and accountable? How do we harness this extraordinary technology to empower rather than oppress? Despite increasingly sophisticated programming, artificial intelligences share none of our essential human characteristics - sentience, physical sensation, emotional responsiveness, versatile general intelligence. Join author of As If Human: Ethics and Artificial Intelligence, Nigel Shadbolt, as he discusses with Charles Godfray, that if we assess AI decisions, our interactions with AI systems, and the actions they recommend, as if they came from a human being, we can avert a disastrous and amoral future. Nigel will go beyond the headlines about rampant robots to apply established moral principles to shaping our AI future. The new framework constitutes basic design principles for building moral machines. This talk will be followed by a drinks reception and book sale and signing, all welcome. This event is a collaboration between the Cheng Kar Shun Digital Hub programme at Jesus College and the Oxford Martin School
The presentation aims to discuss the methodology of collective reasoning (ijtihad) activity in the face of contemporary jurisprudential issues in the Islamic world. It will first provide theoretical information on collective ijtihad, and contemporary fiqh problems, before moving on to examine the decisions of 'The International Islamic Fiqh Academy' (IIFA), which is considered the most influential institution of collective ijtihad in the Islamic world.
Sensational adventure stories were all the rage in Shanghai in the early 20th century and Murder in the Maloo: A Tale of Old Shanghai represents an excellent example of this most popular of popular fiction categories. The book was written in the early 1920s by two authors, Qi Fanniu and Zhu Dagong and is set in the years 1878 and 1879. Translated into English and published here for the first time, this historical novel tells of the exploits of Ma Yongzhen, a martial artist and gangster who was ruthlessly murdered by rival gangs. The story takes the reader into the world of the Shanghai gangster and the opium dens, courtesan houses, and teashops they frequented. It is very loosely based on a true story, as Ma Yongzhen was in fact an historical figure, who rode the horses of his native Shandong province and walked the streets of Shanghai in late Qing dyansty China. The book follows Ma’s rivalry with local gangland bosses, the unscrupulous Scrofulous Bai and the ruthless opium fiend and murderous mastermind, Cheng Zimin. For much of the story, Ma Yongzhen appears to be unstoppable in his quest to dominate the Shanghai underworld, until a dastardly plan is laid to attack him unawares. In addition to translating the novel, Paul Bevan has written an illuminating introduction and an essay that vividly describes the city of Shanghai as Ma Yongzhen would have known it. Paul Bevan is a Sinologist, historian, researcher and literary translator. From 2020 to 2023 he worked as Departmental Lecturer in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. Before that, from 2018 to 2020, he was Christensen Fellow in Chinese Painting at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. His research focuses equally on the visual arts and literature, and concerns the impact of Western art and literature on China during the Republican Era and the late Qing dynasty, particularly with regard to periodicals and magazines. Paul’s first book, A Modern Miscellany – Shanghai Cartoon Artists, Shao Xunmei’s Circle and the Travels of Jack Chen, 1926-1938, Leiden: Brill, 2015, was hailed as 'a major contribution to modern Chinese studies'; his second, ‘Intoxicating Shanghai’: Modern Art and Literature in Pictorial Magazines during Shanghai’s Jazz Age was published by Brill in 2020. John A. Crespi’s review calls attention to the translations imbedded in the book: 'Featured within the book’s densely informative analyses are translations of four modernist short stories. [These] in themselves contribute significantly to modern Chinese literary studies…'.
Description: Social movements and interest groups of a variety of types increasingly engage in direct contestation, mobilizing to influence the activities of firms and making unmediated claims for the redistribution of the gains from economic activity. Such direct contestation between societal actors and firms unleashes distributive and regulatory politics that shape local development. Why does pressure sometimes result in expanded access to essential public goods, services, and economic opportunities and sometimes does not? This book develops a theory of direct contestation that explains the varying distributive consequences of the conflicts that entangle many firms. The theory is grounded in case studies of mining conflicts in Bolivia and Peru. By tracing the processes that pushed firms to take different types of distributive actions in detail, the book reveals the central roles of social structures and firm strategies in shaping the consequences of direct contestation.
The United States has long been associated with liberal principles, but the nation has also nurtured deep pockets of authoritarianism. With a broad angle of vision across the past century, McGirr teases out the leaders, movements, and regional strong-holds of an American authoritarian tradition. She excavates the historical conditions that have fueled these movements, arguing that the growing power of authoritarianism within the Republican Party poses an urgent peril to the United States as a pluralist and multiracial democracy. *Lisa McGirr MA MPhil PhD Columbia*, Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University, has been appointed Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History in the Faculty of History and Rothermere American Institute, in association with The Queen's College, Oxford, for one year from 1 October 2024.
Princess Akiko of Mikasa received her doctorate from the University of Oxford in 2010. Her research interest is on Western collections of Japanese art, Anglo-Japanese cultural exchange and the understanding of reproduction in Japan and the West. She serves as a Professor of the Institute of Japanese Culture, Kyoto Sangyo University, Special Guest Professor of Kokugakuin University, Guest Professor of Kyoto City University of Arts and holds various other official positions. She is also engaged herself in handing over Japanese traditions to future generations, so she organises many workshops and lectures on Japanese culture for children with her organisation Shinyūsha.
Current ways of thinking and living in the western world, and the value judgements and actions that are borne out of modern humanism, capital growth, and extraction – in which museums are complicit – are contributing to the devastating consequences of global warming and related more-than-human disasters. It is increasingly apparent that all things are interconnected, and human agency is just one among many others in complex and often unruly processes. Such circumstances require a rethinking of the new museology, curatorial practices, and the anthropocentric conception of strong human agency foundational to museum epistemologies. In this presentation and drawing on her monographs, Museums and the posthumanities: Curating for planetary habitability and The future of digital data, heritage and curation in a more-than human world (Routledge 2023, 2021), Prof Cameron refigures the new museology and curatorial practices as more-than-human, as ecological, embedded, enmeshed, and embodied. Using the example of former President Donald Trump’s tweets that incited the storming of the Capitol on January 6th 2021, she extends the notion of the curatorial beyond the human and machine to embrace the agential and more-than and non-human worlds previously rendered invisible or lacking agency as eco-curating processes of planetary depth and extent. Drawing on the Boulton and Watt steam engine in the Science Museum London collection and its embodied register of carbon emissions, she highlights ways of thinking and acting through more-than-human curatorial interpretative practices that has the potential to engender recuperative measures attentive to earth others, and how such figurations can attune audiences to the reality of material entanglement and accountability, and the more-than-human futures on which we our future prospects depend. Fiona R Cameron is Associate Professor, Principal Research Fellow, Contemporary Museologies at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia and visiting scholar, University of Salento, Lecce, Italy, and visiting professor, the Rachel Carson Center, Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich, Germany and Linkӧping University, Sweden. Fiona is a pioneering figure in digital heritage philosophy, museums’ engagement with social and political issues and climate action, and the posthumanities taking critical museology in new directions. She has 8 Australian Research Council grants, was an investigator on 11 international grants with 6 European universities, 62 European, American, Australasian/Pacific museums and peak bodies advancing climate policy. Fiona has 101 publications including 7 books with leading publishers, MIT Press, Duke UP, and Routledge on these topics.
In our November event, Eric Redman (Washington & Magdalen 1970) will discuss the books from his Kawika Wong Mystery Series: Bones of Hilo and Death in Hilo. Eric Redman is a Seattle-based writer, lawyer, and climate activist who for decades has loved the Big Island of Hawaii, its history, and its people. He is a former contributing editor of Rolling Stone and has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and many other publications. He wrote the nonfiction best-seller, The Dance of Legislation.
Join OPS for an insightful talk as we explore the intersection of journalism, media, and the rapidly evolving psychedelic movement. Featuring distinguished speakers Alexander Beiner, Mattha Busby, and Rosalind Stone, this event will delve into how media narratives are shaping public perception of psychedelics, the challenges of reporting on emerging science, and the role of journalism in the unfolding psychedelic renaissance. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear from experts at the forefront of both the media and psychedelic communities, and gain a deeper understanding of the role journalism plays in this cultural shift.
https://ludvigsinander.net/mini-courses.html
COURSE DETAILS During the course you will have the opportunity to manage a project. You will be able to apply the techniques you learn to a project that you bring along. Topics covered: project initiation, managing stakeholders and risk, time estimation, planning. LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this session you will understand more about: The importance of planning. The tools to make project management succeed. How to estimate the time a project will take realistically. The skills you need to be a good project manager.
If you are planning to run a ‘non-CTIMP’ research study this introductory course is for you. Not all research is subject to clinical trials regulations, but the same standards of conduct apply. This course in Good Clinical Research Practice covers the legislation that applies to ‘non-CTIMP’ research, along with the detailed principles of good practice in clinical research studies. This three-hour online course consists of trainers’ led presentations, short video-talks from those experienced in the conduct of clinical research and interactive exercises. The course is run by the experienced research support specialists from the University of Oxford and Oxford University Hospital’s Joint Research Office, JRO.
The first Oxford Energy Lunch will be an informal gathering of the vibrant, multi-disciplinary community of Oxford academics, researchers, students and staff who work in the energy space. This will be the opportunity to get to know each other better, explore synergies and develop new relationships, around a buffet lunch.
Co-organized with the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies
The good news is that there is now an active debate about AI safety and Responsible AI, particularly since generative AI captured the imagination of governments and the public following the spectacular launch of ChatGPT. Before that, academia and a limited group of professionals in government, business and technology were working on these issues but this was considered by many to be a niche area. The main debate now seems to be between those in favour of regulation and those arguing for self-regulation because, they claim, regulation will stifle innovation. But is it really that simple? Don’t we all have a critical role to play in shaping the future of this powerful technology which will help to determine the future of society and the world we live in?
Governments commonly use proxies for deservingness -- tags -- as inputs to tax systems. Indeed, presumptive taxes based exclusively on tags are the predominant way that property taxes are implemented. Imperfect tagging can affect the welfare costs of taxation by creating avoidance responses (people changing their tags), but this paper proposes and estimates a novel channel through which imperfect tagging affects the welfare costs of taxation. Imperfect tags generate inequity by over- or under-taxing households, and distaste for this inequity generates behavioral responses that aggravate the efficiency costs of taxation. Drawing on property tax data from Manaus, Brazil, we exploit boundary discontinuities and a reform to its presumptive property tax to assess the impact of the resulting inequities on tax compliance. Our findings indicate a large elasticity of compliance in response to inequity, with values ranging from 0.14 to 0.25, at least as large as the elasticity of compliance with respect to the tax liability. We develop a simple model of presumptive property taxation to demonstrate how mistagging influences the welfare costs of taxation and dampens the optimal level of tax progressivity, highlighting the critical balance between revenue maximization and equity considerations in tax policy design.
As the United States heads into a high-stakes presidential election, this seminar series explores the structural problems and political challenges behind the headlines. We examine why American politics is so polarised and ask: what is at stake in the 2024 elections? The seminars will open with a short presentation by an expert, followed by questions and discussion. Everyone with an interest in US politics is welcome. Lunch will be available. Week 1: The Urban-Suburban Divide Did the election results reinforce the partisan divide between cities and rural areas? How, in the wake of Covid and BLM protests, did a critique of cities as dysfunctional and radical play out in this election?
The Lunchtime Lab Talks aim to introduce and highlight the broad spectrum of research that is carried out at the Centre and encourage multidisciplinary interactions. Throughout the year, groups are invited to speak and present their work to our community. Lunch is available from 12:00 in the canteen and talks run from 12:30–13:30 in Room A&B. O'Callaghan Group Speaker: Jiahao Jiang Title: "Single-cell multiomics identify a novel human macrophage subpopulation that conveys increased genetic risk of coronary artery disease" Brady Maher Brady J. Maher, Ph.D. is a Lead Investigator in the Developmental Neurobiology and Functional Genomics division of the Lieber Institute and an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Title: “Connecting Electrophysiological Measures from Schizophrenia Patient-derived Neurons to the Donor's Clinical Status and Cognitive Performance”
The objective of this forum is to create a collaborative and supportive space for graduate students working on projects related to the period. The goal is to foster intellectual exchange and feedback and to encourage a sense of community and camaraderie among graduates working in the Nineteenth Century strand. Structure: • Each session will feature two to three presentations, allowing speakers to showcase their work in progress. • To ensure fruitful discussions, speakers are required to submit a brief abstract of their presentation a week in advance. This abstract will be circulated among participants. • Presentations should last approximately 15 minutes, followed by a 25-minute period dedicated to discussion and feedback. We want to emphasise that the Nineteenth-Century Graduate Forum is open to all who wish to participate. If you are interested in being a speaker for the seminars, please fill in this Google form: https://forms.gle/6inWYTDxtfHDZaYWA (please note that this link is for speakers only). The sign-up deadline to be a speaker is on the 18th of October (Week 1) at midday and we will confirm the selected speakers that same day!
Professor Sir Hilary Beckles is one of the standout, world leading historians on the history of the Caribbean, particularly the transatlantic African Maafa or the trade in enslaved Africans. His work has helped to lead the contemporary call for Reparations for the legacies of slavery. The Centre for Baptist Studies, the Oxford Centre for Religion and Culture, Regent's Park college, New Road Baptist Church and the Race and Resistance seminar, TORCH, in the University of Oxford invite you to attend an afternoon seminar and an evening book launch to celebrate a recent book Interrogating Injustices that has been published in honour of Professor Beckles. Spaces are limited, please book separately for each event.
Are you an early career researcher, fixed-term lecturer, or doctoral student trying to get some writing done? Do you research on a topic related to health, medicine, the body, or mind using Humanities or Social Sciences approaches? The Medical Humanities Writing Group is an inclusive, interdisciplinary and casual gathering, encouraging writing as well as meeting others: all are welcome. We have timed writing blocks and coffee/tea/light refreshments, and are focused on setting writing goals and getting work done in a positive and supportive environment. Attendance is free and you are welcome to join us for anything from a single session, to a few, or even the whole term. If you have any queries, please email gordon.barrett@history.ox.ac.uk.
Who do you need to engage with in the policy world to achieve impact? In this workshop, we will help answer this and other questions by equipping researchers, professional services staff and DPhil students to identify and map the people and groups who influence or are impacted by their research, when it comes to policy engagement. Using stakeholder analysis frameworks and interactive exercises, participants will learn to identify and categorise their relevant audiences across government agencies and other pertinent policy actors. Learning outcomes: - A greater ability to identify, evaluate and prioritise those in the policymaking community who may have an interest in policy-relevant research - A better understanding of the value of a systematic stakeholder analysis - The guidance and resources available to support a stakeholder analysis
Bodleian Bytes is a new series of online talks hosted by the Centre for Digital Scholarship at the Bodleian Libraries. The series engages with innovative national and international research in digital scholarship. It is a virtual space for discussions surrounding different tools and methodologies whilst also providing inspiration for future digital research. The series begins with Ismail Prada Ziegler, University of Bern, and Golnaz Sarkar Farshi, Philipps University Marburg. Ismail Prada Ziegler will discuss the project 'Economies of Space' which is unlocking new ways to explore the Historical Land Records of Basel using modern techniques to annotate, extract, and connect key information. In the talk 'Decolonize Text Data!', Golnaz Sarkar Farshi will introduce a new tool for multilingual network analysis, demonstrating how it can be used to remove language barriers when accessing the content of digitised text documents. Registration is required for this free online event. Registration closes at 17:00 UK time on Friday 8 November 2024.
Integrated assessment models form a large part of the evidence base feeding into the IPCC process, and other domains using global scenarios. However, there are persistent questions as to the adequacy of much of this modelling, both in terms of the models themselves but also how they are being used. In this talk, drawing primarily from UCL’s research, Steve will reflect on the modelling of global scenarios, the approaches taken, and how researchers have sought to address the limitations of their models. From this talk, the emerging issue for discussion will be how the modelling community, across disciplines, can work together to inform action to drive energy system decarbonisation. About the speaker Steve Pye is a Professor of Energy Systems at the UCL Energy Institute, University College London (UCL), and its Deputy Director. Steve has over 18 years’ research experience on energy and climate modelling and policy analysis. His research concerns the challenge of energy system decarbonisation, using different whole system energy modelling approaches, with a particular focus on scenario modelling of national and global low carbon pathways, uncertainty assessment, and the equity and health dimensions of energy transitions. Steve’s research track record is reflected in over 60 peer review journal articles and numerous technical reports and papers. His current research projects include the FCDO-funded programme Climate Compatible Growth, the Horizon Europe DIAMOND project, and UKRI’s Energy Demand Reduction Centre. Steve gained a PhD in Energy Engineering from University College Cork (UCC) in 2019 with a thesis titled ‘Innovative approaches to developing deep decarbonisation strategies.’
About the event Marie Burton and Linda Mulcahy (University of Oxford) will discuss their chapter titled, "Gender, Feminism and Unsung Workers: The Early Years of the Law Centres Movement 1970 – 1980" published in "Women, Their Lives, and the Law: Essays in Honour of Rosemary Auchmuty" (Hart Publishing, 2023). You can read the chapter here (although it is not essential to read the chapter in order to attend): https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:56d525a5-0771-426d-9de2-d5542ad6128a/files/rcf95jc565 About the speakers Marie Burton Dr Marie Burton specialises in access to justice, legal aid, the legal profession and social welfare law. She has over 30 years' experience of working in and around the civil and criminal justice system. Marie is a former practising solicitor and senior policy analyst whose work has influenced the development of national policy on legal aid, financial exclusion, high cost credit and debt. Marie’s recent research focuses on the impact of the Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) on social welfare law. Her study comparing telephone and face-to-face advice identified the significant disadvantages that social welfare law clients experience when dealing with telephone-only services (Calling for Justice: Comparing Telephone and Face-to-face Advice in Social Welfare Legal Aid’, PhD Thesis, LSE, 2015). This research was cited in the Ministry of Justice Post-Implementation review of LASPO in 2019 and other policy responses to the legal aid changes. Marie has also published articles in the Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law and the Journal of Social Security Law. Marie is an experienced law teacher. She has taught law at Middlesex University and the London School of Economics. Marie is interested too in measures aimed at addressing the attainment gap in higher education. Marie qualified as a solicitor in 1994. She worked primarily in the independent advice sector representing clients with a range of social welfare problems. She has practised in the areas of housing and homelessness, education, human rights, criminal and family law. She also acted for victims of crime and has taken actions against the police. She has conducted cases in the High Court, county court, criminal courts and before tribunals and has extensive frontline experience of contested litigation. As a senior policy analyst, Marie influenced the development of national policy. The project she led for the Legal Services Commission (LSC) on the funding of housing possession court duty schemes grew into an essential element of the LSC’s strategy to respond to unmet need for social welfare legal aid. In 2010, her report into payday loans ‘Keeping the Plates Spinning: the perceptions of payday loans in Great Britain’ was one of the earliest in-depth studies of the problems faced by vulnerable consumers using this form of credit and highlighted the need for far-reaching change. Marie has been a Trustee of several voluntary sector organisations, including the Legal Action Group. She is currently a Friend of the Legal Aid Practitioners Group. Linda Mulcahy Linda Mulcahy is the Professor of Socio-Legal Studies and the Director of the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies. She has degrees in law, legal theory, sociology and art history and her work has a strong interdisciplinary flavour. Linda has previously held posts at the LSE, Birkbeck, the Law Commission and Bristol University. She has taken on a number of senior management roles including institutional head of Degree programmes, Head of Department and Dean of Arts. She specialises in dispute resolution and the ways in which lay users experience the legal system. She has undertaken a number of empirical studies of disputes between business people in the car distribution industry, divorcing couples, doctors and patients and neighbours on council estates. Her work has been funded by a range of bodies including the Economic and Social Research Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Nuffield Foundation, the Department of Health, the NHS Executive, the Leverhulme Trust and the Lotteries Board. Linda’s publications span a number of different topics including the socio-legal dynamics of disputes, the design of law courts, feminist and relational perspectives on contract law, visual representations of law and legal methodology. Her most recent book, The Democratic Courthouse authored with Emma Rowden, was published in November 2019. Linda served as an editor of the International Journal of Social and Legal Studies for ten years and is currently a member of the Advisory Board of the Journal of Law and Society. Linda has played an active role in the Socio-Legal Studies Association and continues to have a keen interest in capacity building in the field. She was Chair of the SLSA for three years and has served twice as its Treasurer. Linda has a particular interest in training and supporting research students and early career academics. She was involved in the organisation of the SLSA annual postgraduate conference for over twenty years and now runs an annual methodology masterclass for research students which is funded by the ESRC. While at the LSE Linda served as the Director of the ESRC Doctoral Training Partnership and subsequently took the lead in establishing the LSE PhD Academy, a multi-disciplinary advice and advanced training hub. At Oxford she teaches on the methodology course run by the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies and has also set up a new course on qualitative methodology for lawyers. Linda regularly acts as a research consultant to government bodies, regulators and NGOs and has worked closely with the Public Law Project, JUSTICE, the Howard League for Penal Reform and the Law Centres Network. She has recently been re-elected as is a member of the Council of Justice and is working with the Law Centres Network on a history of radical lawyering. She is an academic advisor on the board of the British Library Life Stories Project. Linda is also a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. Linda regularly travels around the world giving papers and has had Visiting Professor positions at the Faculty of Law in the University of Melbourne and in the School of Architecture at the University of Teachnology in Sydney. She is currently a Visiting Professor at the Australian National University.
We expand the sociological study of power struggles in labor markets to consider how the threat of monopsony (a form of buyer power) affects the size and strength of labor unions (a form of worker power). We focus specifically on the interplay of local union membership and the entry of Walmart Supercenters -- a monopsonistic employer and the largest employer in the US. We study (1) whether greater worker power dissuades Walmart Supercenters from entering a local labor market, (2) whether a successful Supercenter entry subsequently erodes local union membership, and (3) whether unions provide a protective effect against declining economic outcomes after a successful Supercenter entry. Applying stacked difference-in-difference estimates using restricted-access Panel Study of Income Dynamics data, we find that Walmart Supercenters are less likely to enter a local labor market that has high levels of union membership, even when conditioning on attempted Walmart entries. When Walmart Supercenter openings do occur, union membership declines by an average of 4 percentage points in the subsequent 8 years, and is primarily channeled through declining union membership in retail. Remaining union members are not protected against Walmart's downward pressure on wages; in fact, annual earnings among workers who were unionized pre-treatment decline faster than for non-union members after a Walmart Supercenter opens. Worker power can be effective at preventing a rise in buyer power, but conditional on increases in buyer power, worker power tends to decline both in terms of size and protective strength.
The discovery of fire was the beginning of civilisation - and it may well be the end of it, if we continue with the “business as usual” world moulded by fossil fuels. 2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalist John Valliant, author of “Fire Weather” and Associate Professor Ben Franta, Associate Professor of Climate Litigation and the founding head of the Climate Litigation Lab will discuss the implications of the continued use of fossil fuels and how we navigate the legal landscape to mitigate fossil fuels’ most damaging impacts.
The next Oxford Population Health Festival of Global Health event will take place on Wednesday 13 November in the Curzon Cinema Oxford. The doors will open at 16:00 and the event starts at 16:30. This event will be a screening of Human Forever followed by an expert panel discussion. Food will be provided and a cash bar will be available for drinks. Watch the trailer - https://shorturl.at/LTp3R
Discussants: Sofia Sanabria de Felipe, Cameron Bowman, Joanna Innes Response: Richard Whatmore (St Andrews)
Deborah is Sky News' security and defence editor. She covers the biggest foreign stories around the world and carries out her own investigations. She has reported from Europe on Brexit the United States on Donald Trump, and broken stories on suspected Russian disinformation operations and suspected cyber attacks in the UK. Before joining Sky, she was defence editor and previously Iraq correspondent at The Times. She covered wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, as well as focusing on armed forces issues in the UK, including exposing the true extent of a funding crisis within the UK's military. She won the Amnesty International award for national newspaper human rights reporting in 2008 for a series on the plight of Iraqi interpreters working for UK forces in Iraq. This series also won Deborah the inaugural Bevins Prize for investigative journalism in 2008. Prior to joining The Times, Deborah worked for the Reuters news agency after six years at AFP in Tokyo, Geneva, Baghdad and London.
Please join Professor Nancy Weiss Malkiel in conversation with John Bowers, the first event in a series to mark the 50th anniversary of women at Brasenose. Nancy Weiss Malkiel, a scholar in 20th century American history, is professor of history, emeritus, at Princeton University. Professor Malkiel received a B.A. (1965) and an honorary degree (1997) from Smith College and an M.A. (1966) and Ph.D. (1970) from Harvard University. Professor Malkiel is the author of “Keep the Damned Women Out”: The Struggle for Coeducation (Princeton University Press, 2016), a study of the cascade of decisions for coeducation at elite institutions of higher education in the period from 1969 through 1974 – in the United States as well as the first three men’s colleges at Cambridge in 1972, and the first five at Oxford in 1974. The book explores why these decisions occurred when they did, how these very traditional, conservative institutions came to embrace such significant change, and what happened when the women students arrived. Professor Malkiel's previous publications include, most recently, Changing the Game: William G. Bowen and the Challenges of American Higher Education (Princeton University Press, 2023), and, earlier (as Nancy J. Weiss), Whitney M. Young, Jr., and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Princeton University Press, 1989), Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton University Press, 1983), and The National Urban League, 1910-1940 (Oxford University Press, 1974).
Ahead of the final round of negotiations in Busan on an international legally binding treaty on plastic pollution, what are the key human rights issues of the plastics crisis? This lecture will review questions of human rights and global ethics including around pollution, health, affected populations and the polluter pays principle emerging in the negotiations. These questions tie in to a wider set of issues associated with the accelerating Net Zero pivot, for example the shift away from fossil fuels to minerals-intensive clean energy, climate finance, and the evolving concept of a just transition. Taken together, they may, it is suggested, impact the direction of human rights itself in the coming decades. Joshua Lincoln (PhD) is currently a Senior Fellow with the Center for International Law and Governance (CILG) at the Fletcher School of global affairs, Tufts University, where he focuses on global governance, sustainability and the Net Zero transition. Drawing on twenty-five years of experience across four continents, he is an advisor to heads of government and organizations, sits on the board of directors of the Global Governance Forum and the advisory board of the Cambrian Futures Group, and is a member of the New Carbon Economy Consortium.
Lucy Easthope has been a disaster planner for two turbulent decades. She works in preparedness, response and aftermath and throughout this time has challenged others to think differently about what comes next, after tragic events. She is a passionate and thought-provoking voice in an area that few know about: emergency planning. However, in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic, her work became decidedly more mainstream. Alongside advising both the Prime Minister’s Office and many other government departments and charities during the pandemic, she has found time to reflect on a life in disaster. She is known globally for her work and holds research positions in the UK and New Zealand, and is a Professor in Mass Fatalities and Pandemics at the Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath. Her book When the Dust Settles: Stories of Love, Loss and Hope from an Expert in Disaster was released in March 2022 and was a Sunday Times bestseller. In her talk, Lucy will share lessons on a life in extremis and insights into the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
Zoom details https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89574660483 Webinar ID: 895 7466 0483 How do governments manage trade as a tool of diplomacy and commerce? This dual nature of trade policy requires calibration within domestic decision-making institutions and global governance. Going too far in either direction – using trade to advance foreign policy goals or to maximize income -- could stifle growth or heighten security risks. The long history of “Rich nation, strong army” as a development mantra and weaponized interdependence as a coercive tactic have gained new prominence amid the US-China rivalry. The leading organization for economic governance, the World Trade Organization, struggles to address demands for national security exceptions to free trade rules. This lecture explores economic security as a concept, and examines the conditions that shape the practice of economic statecraft. Historical cases show that political interests and status ideas influence why some industries are deemed strategic for national interest. A cross-national comparison highlights that the nature of the political system and interstate rivalries shift how governments balance the weight of diplomacy and commerce in the design of trade policy. Statistical analysis of multilateral cooperation also reveals both formal and informal pathways through which economic and security interests determine which states cooperate. While economic diplomacy contributes to the balance of power between states, the structure of domestic and international institutions -- not military strategy and threats -- determine how states use this power.
Indigenous languages and cultures often fall victim to oversimplified judgments: sometimes, they are excessively romanticized; at other times, they are dismissed as primitive and superstitious. However, a deeper inquiry reveals that indigenous peoples maintain a highly complex and nuanced understanding of the human-nature relationship. Indeed, this has the potential to inform our own (western) situation at this time of planetary crisis. The lecture will explore indigenous peoples’ understanding of the natural world. On the one hand, Nature is acknowledged as a parent: life-giving, nurturing, caring and protecting. On the other hand, Nature is seen as a fearsome, unpredictable and capricious force. Through mythologies, rituals and social practices, Nature is both revered, but also feared, shunned and even “hated”. These two sides are often personified and projected onto spiritual beings and cosmologies. Such conceptualisations shape how indigenous peoples relate to each other in familial, social and cultural units, and how they function with respect to their environmental situation. By analysing these understandings, the lecture will show how indigenous worldviews are based on relational values of love, care, fear and awe. These values can inform western epistemologies, worldviews and policy approaches, especially in light of the challenges of the global socio-ecological crisis. Dr Vijay D’Souza will approach this topic with reference to critical analysis of indigenous languages, cultures and worldviews in Northeast India, where he has worked for nearly two decades. For further information, please see here: https://lsri.campion.ox.ac.uk/events/indigenous-approaches-nature-insights-time-planetary-crisis
Long before humans could be blamed for causing harm and suffering to animals in the world, nature was “red in tooth and claw.” For hundreds of millions of years, creatures have eaten each other, caused disease, and suffered from genetic conditions like cancer. This lecture explores how Christian theologians have tackled this challenge and how it relates to the more general problem of evil. How could a good God create through a process like evolution, when it involves so much suffering, death, and extinction?
Professor Sir Hilary Beckles is one of the standout, world leading historians on the history of the Caribbean, particularly the transatlantic African Maafa or the trade in enslaved Africans. His work has helped to lead the contemporary call for Reparations for the legacies of slavery. The Centre for Baptist Studies, the Oxford Centre for Religion and Culture, Regent's Park college, New Road Baptist Church and the Race and Resistance seminar, TORCH, in the University of Oxford invite you to attend an afternoon seminar and an evening book launch to celebrate a recent book Interrogating Injustices that has been published in honour of Professor Beckles. Spaces are limited, please book separately for each event.
https://ludvigsinander.net/mini-courses.html
This workshop will introduce participants to the key catalogues and finding aids for post-1800 archives and manuscripts at the Bodleian Libraries. In particular the session will focus on Bodleian Archives & Manuscripts, the online catalogue for post-1800 archives and manuscripts. The session will also briefly introduce some of the major UK online gateways for discovering archives. The topics covered include: how to use the Bodleian Archives & Manuscripts online catalogue; other printed archive catalogues in the Bodleian Libraries; major subject areas covered in Bodleian archives and modern manuscripts; and National archive gateways. The workshop will include a question and answer session with Bodleian archivists. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
Discover what elements of storytelling and narrative can be used to enhance a profession in the sciences. Craft compelling and moving stories from your experiences as a scientist using these key story elements: character, conflict, structure, metaphor and description. Apply these storytelling and narrative skills to working in the sciences: communicating research to a range of audiences (including publics, media and funding bodies); enhancing presentation skills; telling scientific stories across a range of media.
My lab studies the distributed mechanisms that support sensorimotor learning, with an emphasis on the role of neuromodulation and sensory systems. In this seminar, I will propose that re-visiting our understanding of the shape of the learning curve and its underlying cognitive drivers is essential for uncovering its neural basis. Rather than thinking about learning as either ‘slow’ or ‘sudden’, I will argue that learning is better interpreted as a combination of the two. I will provide behavioral evidence that sensorimotor learning can be dissociated into two parallel processes: rapid, step-like improvements in the acquisition of task knowledge, paired with a slower and more variable process of behavioral expression, which can be attributed to animals’ structured exploration. I will then present probabilistic optogenetic and longitudinal two-photon imaging results from mice learning an auditory go/no-go task that demonstrates a default role for the auditory cortex in task acquisition. We find dedicated neural ensembles that quickly form to encode the discriminative task contingencies; these late-in-trial contingency signals are uncoupled from the underlying stimulus representation. Finally, I will discuss some ongoing work in my lab focused on the neural basis of lifelong , multi-task learning.
Research Assistants - Do you know where you want your career to go? Do you know what support is out there? Do you know your options beyond academia? We are excited to invite you to a Q&A Discussion Panel and Networking Lunch designed specifically with your future in mind. This event will be a wonderful opportunity to hear from individuals who have walked in your shoes and can offer invaluable insights and support as you navigate your role.
Are you interested in alternatives to the academic career path? If you’re exploring (or decided on) a career outside academia, but you need some pointers on how to take your plan forward, this workshop will get you started. During the session we will look at tools and strategies for identifying attractive roles and understanding what a job really entails, whilst also considering the importance of knowing your own skill set and preferred parameters and using that knowledge to shape your job search. *Workshop objectives*: * Identify appropriate tools to clarify your personal skill set and work preferences * Learn about employers’ views on researchers, and key skills sought by typical sectors of interest * Discover strategies for investigating career options in a structured way * Understand common patterns of transition from academia, and your own rationale for making the move. To get the most out of this workshop: We strongly encourage you to look at the "‘Planning and guidance for Research Students and Staff’":https://www.careers.ox.ac.uk/planning-and-guidance pages of our website before you attend. *All research staff welcome*.
Sandwiches will be provided. This is a hybrid event; you can also join online: Join Zoom Meeting https://zoom.us/j/93872343010?pwd=aoTibzaaMPQHcO5bGheaDKQEng7acs.1 Meeting ID: 938 7234 3010 Passcode: 450394
David Lepidi (MPhil Greek and/or Latin Languages and Literature) Debates on the living capacities of plants in ancient Greek philosophy date as far back as the 5th century BCE, when the Pre-Socratic philosophers first began theorizing about the place of plants in the universe and their interconnectedness with the natural world. Ever since, philosophers have responded to the doctrines of the Pre-Socratics and elaborated new theories on plant physiology and life. Debates hinged on the question of the soul, and whether plants were endowed with the same life processes of animals and human beings. Following a chronological line, this presentation will explore the evolution of the conception of plant life in ancient Greek philosophy.
Walking methodologies have been gaining popularity among scholars interested in exploring the connections between self, place, and community (Evans & Jones, 2011). These methods have been found to provide rich, multi-sensory data that offer insights into people's lived experiences within a specific location (Kinney, 2017). With recognising some of the various accessibility and feasibility constraints and the continual opportunity to take advantage of digital and technological advances, this research has developed what is known as the "virtual walking interview." Complementary to traditional walking interviews, this method allows participants to be virtually navigated around different spaces, capturing numerous spatial data related to their everyday experiences, taking place in the virtual world using Google Earth, specifically Google Maps, a technological medium used by around 1 billion people daily. To assess the practicality and usefulness of this method, through a pilot, five DPhil students from three major academic disciplines (social sciences, humanities, and STEM) participated in this method, aiming to explore their doctoral experience. They also were asked to share their feedback on engaging with such a method. The data generated from the method was rich and spatially sensitive, allowing the researcher to interrogate space in numerous ways and gain an insightful understanding of the student experience, from their avoidance to their engagement with meaningful spaces in their doctoral journey. The method provides researchers with an alternative and radical way of entering spaces from various angles, helping to gain meaning from and insights into everyday spatial experiences. Teams link: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_ZjllZTE4NGQtZTdjNC00OTI4LWI3ODEtYWZiMTkxY2MxNWNh%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%225f581465-1def-4d51-8d4c-45a3b26b5b58%22%7d
Massively parallel assays potentiate both scale and speed of data generation in the biomedical sciences and have proven key to the discovery of antibody, peptide, aptamer leads as well as enzymatic catalysts. While repertoire generation by high-throughput DNA oligonucleotide synthesis is highly developed, and selection strategies (such as phage, yeast & ribosome display) are able to process very large combinatorial (poly)peptide repertoires, these only reveal a highly biased section of the possible genotype / phenotype space. We have developed deep screening [1], an ultra-high-throughput approach that leverages the power of the Illumina HiSeq platform for massively parallel sequencing, display, and global screening of diverse biomolecular repertoires. Deep screening enables the real-time examination of both binding interactions and catalysis in repertoires of RNA, XNA (xeno nucleic acids), peptide and nanobody (VHH) and single-chain Fv (scFv) antibody sequences at a depth of up to 109 individual, simultaneous measurements, enabling the discovery of antibodies with picomolar target affinities in a 3-day experiment directly from synthetic repertoires. The very large genotype-phenotype correlation datasets generated by deep screening combined with transformer machine learning models enable rapid, in silico prediction of novel and highly functional antibody sequences not present in the original repertoires and promise to further accelerate antibody discovery for a wide range of drug targets. We anticipate many applications of the deep screening platform in particular the accelerated discovery and development of antibodies and aptamers for biotechnology and medicine. [1] Porebski BT, Balmforth M, Browne G, Riley A, Jamali K, Fürst MJLJ, Velic M, Buchanan A, Minter R, Vaughan T & Holliger P. (2024) Rapid discovery of high-affinity antibodies via massively parallel sequencing, ribosome display and affinity screening. Nature Biomed Eng. 8 : 214-232. doi: 10.1038/s41551-023-01093-3.
Lesson of the week, clinical cases and research. All clinical and academic staff and students welcome. Coffee, Tea and Cake will be served.
In 1954 the first two volumes of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings were published (The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers). To celebrate this event, and following on from last year’s Tolkien seminars, Exeter College – Tolkien’s undergraduate college – is proud to host a series of free lunchtime talks organised by the Faculty of English on The Lord of the Rings. Open to the public these talks are aimed at going deeper in some key aspects of the novel, Tolkien as a writer, and some of the spin-offs it has generated. Please note that all seminars will take place at the Fitzhugh Auditorium, Cohen Quad (Exeter College), Walton Street, Oxford, OX1 2HG: Week 1(17/10/2024) - Holly Ordway: 'Tolkien as Interpreter and Transformer of Culture: The Making of The Lord of the Rings as a Modern Book'. Week 2 (24/10/2024) - John Garth: 'Quisling and Prisoner: How the Second World War shaped the treason of Isengard'. Week 3 (31/10/2024) - HALF-TERM NO TALK Week 4 (7/11/2024) - Mark Williams: 'A Harmless Vice: Tolkien’s Invented Languages'. Week 5 (14/11/2024) - Giuseppe Pezzini: 'The authors and styles of The Lord of the Rings'. Week 6 (21/11/2024) - Grace Khuri: 'Medievalism in the Margins: Echoes of Anglo-Saxon England in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings – From Page to Screen'. Week 7 (28/11/2024) - Michael Ward: 'C.S. Lewis’s Influence on The Lord of the Rings'. Week 8 (05/12/2024) - Stuart Lee: 'The ‘Key-spring’ of The Lord of the Rings?'.
About the speaker Yuqi is a DPhil candidate at the Department of Sociology, and a member of St Catherine's College. As a social scientist and programmer, Yuqi is passionate about using quantitative and computational methods (especially social network analysis and agent-based modelling) to understand social problems. Yuqi's DPhil thesis is about bridging the STEM gender gap from the perspectives of social network analysis and social experiments. In addition, Yuqi has work experience in full-stack programming, data analysis, and product operations in tech companies. https://www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/people/yuqi-liang
EndNote is a desktop-based reference management tool for Windows and Mac users, which helps you build libraries of references and insert them into your Word document as in-text citations or footnotes and automatically generate bibliographies. This classroom-based introduction to EndNote is open to all University of Oxford students, researchers and staff and teaches you how to use the software so that you can effectively manage your references. The workshop will cover: what EndNote can do for you; adding references to EndNote from a range of sources; managing your references in an EndNote library; adding in-text citations and/or footnotes to your essays and papers; and creating bibliographies. Intended auidence: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
WERD is run as an outreach programme by the Department of Economics, Oxford University to inspire the study of economics and share 'What Economists Really Do'. Find out how economics can be used to shed light on some of the biggest issues facing society today in this successful public webinar series, returning for the fourth successful series in 2024-25. THIS SPECIAL EVENT WILL BE AVAILABLE ONLINE AND IN-PERSON. In-person attendance requires your availability in Christ Church College, Oxford on 14th November 2024. 2:30pm - 4:00pm, Thursday 14th November, 2024 This event is made possible with thanks to our sponsors, EBC Financial Group (UK) Ltd.
The in vivo responses of dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) serotonin neurons to emotionally-salient stimuli are a puzzle. Existing theories centred on reward, surprise, salience, and uncertainty individually account for some aspects of serotonergic activity but not others. Building on recent insights into the physiology of the DRN, here we find a unifying perspective in a prospective code for value, a quantity central to reinforcement learning theory. Our model explains why serotonin neurons are activated by both rewards and punishments, and why these neurons are more strongly activated by surprising rewards but have no such surprise-preference for punishments---observations that previous theories have failed to reconcile. In addition, our model quantitatively predicts in vivo activity fluctuations on the order of a single spike per trial that may have escaped notice in previous work. By unifying previous theories and establishing a \replaced{precise}{deep} connection with reinforcement learning, our work represents an important step towards understanding the role of serotonin in learning and behaviour.
In this online workshop you will be shown the functionality of Zotero, which is a free-to-use software programme used to manage references and create bibliographies. Zotero will be demonstrated on a Windows PC but users of MacOS or Linux computers will be able to follow the demonstration. The workshop will cover: understanding the main features and benefits of Zotero; setting up a Zotero account; importing references from different sources into Zotero; organising your references in Zotero; inserting citations into documents; and creating a bibliography/reference list. Intended audience: students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
In this 60-minute online workshop you will be introduced to the methodologies and principles underpinning the conduct of literature searches for systematic reviews, scoping reviews and other evidence reviews. The session will cover: formulating a focused research question; preparing a protocol; developing a search strategy to address that research question; choosing appropriate databases and search engines; searching for grey literature and ongoing studies; storing and managing references; and documenting and reporting your search. Intended audience: students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
Formerly known as the ‘Cyber Strategy & Technology Studies Working Group’ Postgraduate students, fellows, staff and faculty from any discipline are welcome. This group aims to foster frequent interdisciplinary critical dialogue across Oxford and beyond about the political impacts of emerging technologies. Please contact Elisabeth Siegel at elisabeth.siegel@politics.ox.ac.uk in advance to participate or with any questions. Remote attendance is possible, but in-person attendance is prioritized (and provided refreshment). Discussion topics will be finalized and optional readings will be sent out a week in advance. You do not currently have to be affiliated with the University of Oxford to attend and participate in discussions. Abstract: Governments have begun to view AI compute infrastructures, including advanced AI chips, as a geostrategic resource. This is partly because “compute governance” is believed to be emerging as an important tool for governing AI systems. In this governance model, states that host AI compute capacity within their territorial jurisdictions are likely to be better placed to impose their rules on AI systems than states that do not. In this study, we provide the first attempt at mapping the global geography of public cloud GPU compute, one particularly important category of AI compute infrastructure. Us- ing a census of hyperscale cloud providers’ cloud regions, we observe that the world is divided into “Compute North” countries that host AI compute relevant for AI development (ie. training), “Compute South” countries whose AI compute is more relevant for AI deployment (ie. running inferencing), and “Compute Desert” countries that host no public cloud AI compute at all. We generate potential explanations for the results using expert interviews, discuss the implications to AI governance and technology geopolitics, and consider possible future trajectories. About the speaker: Boxi Wu is a DPhil student at the OII. Their research interests focus on the social and political impacts of AI, focusing on the materiality of AI infrastructure and implications for AI ethics and governance. They have previously worked as a policy researcher, lecturer and strategy consultant. Prior to their DPhil, they completed the MSc at the OII and spent four years at DeepMind on the Responsible AI team, focusing on the ethical and societal implications of frontier AI models across both LLMs and multimodal models. In this role, they advised teams on ethical risks and mitigations and led internal ethics & safety governance forums, most recently focusing on the release of GDM Gemini models.
During the protracted negotiations before and four years after the referendum vote for the UK to leave the EU (Brexit), residents of Harpurhey, North Manchester, England, began to voice their experiences of what they perceived to be a cycle of marginalisation over time in what was, for them, new and experimental ways. This paper ethnographically explores the “double devaluations” (Kalb 2020) of their labour value, of Harpurhey as a “deprived” area, and of its residents as perpetually and by choice “dependent” upon welfare. Rather than a shift towards neo-nationalist alliances, we find new ways of “being political” by expressing a “desire for the political” (Dzenovska and De Genova 2018). Organising and then perceptively critiquing seemingly intractable political and economic change, they dared to imagine a future, however formed, beyond the present and past cycle of marginalisation because, as it stands in Harpurhey, “either way, it can’t get any worse”.
This is a part of the Health Economics Seminar Series See details for this term below: 14/11/2024 - Apostolos Davillas, Macedonia University: Biological Age and Predicting Future Health Care Utilization 21/11/2024 - Cheti Nicoletti, York University: DHD, School Performance and Economic Outcomes 19/12/2024 - David Bradford, Georgia University (Co-Editor for the journal Health Economics):The Effect of a Large Prescription Opioid Diversion Event on Opioid Mortality in the U.S.
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child introduced for the first time an explicit recognition that every child under the age of 18 years is entitled to respect, not only for their economic, social and cultural rights, but also to civil and political rights. It thus acknowledged children as agents in their own lives. It thereby introduced a challenge in the international human rights field which is rooted in the fundamental principle that people have autonomy to exercise choices and take decisions affecting their own lives. While the Convention on the Rights of the Child affirms that all its rights apply equally to all children, clearly children are not able from birth to exercise rights for themselves. Rather, parents or guardians are afforded the rights and responsibilities to make decisions on their behalf. The drafters of the Convention addressed the challenge through the introduction of the concept of the evolving capacities of the child – a recognition that the child, during the course of their childhood, will gain increasing levels of knowledge, skills and understanding, and will thereby acquire greater competencies to exercise rights on their own behalf. The seminar will elaborate the implications and complexity of this concept through three lenses: children’s right to development of their optimum capacities, their right to protection in accordance with their still evolving capacities and their right to recognition of those capacities they have to take increasing levels of responsibility for themselves during the course of childhood. Booking is required for people outside of the Department of Social Policy and Intervention (DSPI). DSPI Members do not need to register. This talk is part of the DSPI Michaelmas Term Seminar Series 2024.
Professor Maeve Caldwell is a member of the academic staff of the Discipline of Physiology, School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin. Her lab is interested in utilising human pluripotent stem cell derived neural lineage cells to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms of neurodegeneration in Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. She is particularly interested in the role astrocytes may play in inflammation in these devastating conditions.
This paper estimates the wage, employment, and reallocation effects of non-core activity outsourcing using Brazil’s unexpected 1993 court-ordered outsourcing legalization. We leverage North-South variation in pre-legalization court permissiveness and compare security guards to less affected occupations. We find that older incumbent security guards were adversely impacted through occupational layoffs, loss of firm-level wage premia, and exit from the occupation. At the same time, increased numbers of younger workers entered the formal sector and became employed at contract firms. On net, legalization increased guard employment by 5%, led by a 50% increase in employment for guards aged 18-24, and had no effect on demographically-adjusted guard wages. The observed labor reallocation effects are explained by the fact that contract firms persistently employ demographically different workers than direct employers.
The event is funded by the British Academy. It will be followed by a wine reception.
In New Sincerity: American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age (Stanford University Press, 2024), Adam Kelly offers a field- defining account of American fiction in the 1990s and 2000s, addressing the work of influential authors including Susan Choi, Helen DeWitt, Jennifer Egan, George Saunders, Colson Whitehead, and David Foster Wallace. This seminar will involve reading pre-circulated copies of the introduction and conclusion to the book, and a discussion with the author.
To join online, please register in advance here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUrdOyrpjotH9fLe4MPfgdU07ypRhiJBaI1
This year's Thomas Harriot lecture will be given in the Harris Lecture Theatre, Oriel College by *Dr Annaleigh Margey*, Head of Humanities at Dundalk Institute of Technology. The lecture will be followed by an informal drinks reception in the Harris Seminar Room, adjacent to the Lecture Theatre, at 18:00. Dr Margey’s lecture will be on “Thomas Harriot, Cartography, and Ireland”. It will explore Harriot’s time, especially his cartography output, in Munster. In doing so, it will seek to situate Harriot’s contributions in the wider context of surveying and mapping in sixteenth-century Ireland, focusing in particular on mapping for military subjugation, the reconnaissance of lands, and the establishment of plantation. All welcome! For further details, contact Professor Robert Fox at "$":mailto:robert.fox@history.ox.ac.uk or Mrs Rebecca Bricklebank at "$":mailto:rebecca.bricklebank@oriel.ox.ac.uk
Leverhulme Visiting Professor Public Lecture
Jonathan Healey, ‘The Fray on the Meadow: Violence and a Moment of Government in Early Tudor England’, _History Workshop Journal_ 85 (2018), 5-25 Paul Griffiths, ‘Punishing Words: Insults and Injuries, 1525-1700’, in McShane, Angela, and Walker, Garthine, eds, _The extraordinary and the everyday in early modern England: essays in celebration of the work of Bernard Capp_ (2010)
The Celtic Seminar is held jointly by Oxford and the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies (CAWCS), Aberystwyth. All Oxford seminars will be at 5.15 pm on Thursdays in a hybrid (online and in person) format. You will be able to join virtually via Microsoft Teams. Please contact david.willis@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk if you need a link to join online. In person, we will be in [TBC]. All CAWCS seminars will be held online at 5.00 pm on Thursdays via Zoom, and, for hybrid seminars, in person at the National Library of Wales. Please contact a.elias@wales.ac.uk for the link.
Please join us on the 14th of November to explore the past, present and future of medical education. Meet researchers and journey through an immersive experience exploring themes such as the history of medical education, the role of lived experience in teaching and virtual reality. This exhibition draws on medical humanities research - highlighting the role of ethics, trust, and historical legacies in shaping the way that medicine is taught. We look forward to hearing your views, responses, and feedback on the nature of medical education, including reflections on how to ensure that medical students are equipped to face the various practical and ethical challenges of health and healing, both today and in the future. There will be two short talks at 6.30pm. Light refreshments are provided.
The Chief Medical Officer has confirmed that attendance at the Surgical Grand Rounds can count toward internal CPD, with 1 point awarded per hour. Please note that in-person attendance is required, and you will need to sign the attendance register. Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend online.
We consider a system of interacting particles as a model for a foraging ant colony, where each ant is represented as an active Brownian particle. The interactions among ants are mediated through chemotaxis, aligning their orientations with the upward gradient of a pheromone field. Unlike conventional models, our study introduces a parameter that enables the reproduction of two distinctive behaviours: the conventional Keller-Segel aggregation and the formation of travelling clusters without relying on external constraints such as food sources or nests. We consider the associated mean-field limit of this system and establish the analytical and numerical foundations for understanding these particle behaviours.
The element vanadium (V) has been applied to challenges spanning Earth and Environmental Sciences. It is a critical metal, with industry applications in next generation batteries and as a steel alloy. It has rich redox chemistry with multiple oxidation states, prompting decades of oxygen fugacity (fO2) proxy development at high and low temperatures, on Earth and other planets. Some organisms even employ V in place of iron to carry oxygen in their bloodstreams. However, vanadium, in its 5+ oxidation state is also highly toxic and is increasing recognised as a potentially serious environmental pollutant. The isotopic composition of vanadium can be applied to investigate all of the above scenarios. The first method to measure V isotopes to a precise useful for Earth and environmental science applications was developed in the Earth Science department at Oxford circa 2009. In this seminar, I will discuss how that analytical development unfolded, and how the applications of vanadium isotopes have evolved from initial lofty ambitions of a direct fO2 proxy in magmatic systems to current potential breakthroughs in environmental pollutant tracing.
Important note: This lecture will be on Microsoft Teams only
Join us in welcoming Dr. Joy White, who will be speaking to us about her latest book, Like Lockdown Never Happened: Music and Culture during COVID. The talk will consider the ways in which contemporary Black musical forms helped us to pass the time during the early days of lockdown, operating as a site of connection, identity, and social commentary. After Dr. White’s talk, there will be a Q&A session so please come prepared with questions. Bio: Dr Joy White (she/her) is a Senior Lecturer in Applied Social Sciences at the University of Bedfordshire and the author of Terraformed: Young Black Lives in the Inner City. Her previous work includes Urban Music and Entrepreneurship: Beats, Rhymes and Young People’s Enterprise, one of the first books to foreground the socio-economic significance of grime music. Recent publications include Growing up under the influence: A sonic genealogy of Grime, and (with Jonathan Ilan) Ethnographer Soundclash: A UK rap and grime story. Joy has also written for The Quietus, The Conversation, Trench, Google Arts + Culture, Red Pepper and Prospect. —------------- Twitter: race_resistance Subscribe to our mailing list by sending a blank email to: race-and-resistance-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk.
The aim of our research is to understand the interplay between cellular oxygen sensing mechanisms occurring over different time-scales. This includes the long-term, transcriptional response mediated by the hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF) pathway, which operates ubiquitously across cells, and the rapid electrophysiological response elicited by hypoxia in specialised cell types, such as the carotid body. We have shown that the HIF-2 isoform spans these two systems in being critical to ventilatory control in response to both acute and chronic hypoxia, in line with its uniquely abundant expression in the carotid body. Our work also describes the pathological role of HIF-2 in cancers of this and related tissues (pheochromocytomas and paragangliomas, PPGLs). This shows that aberrant activation of HIF-2 during development causes a lineage shift to predispose to subsequent PPGL formation, in line with the common occurrence of germline (or post-zygotic but early somatic mutations) mutations in the HIF pathway in these particular tumours. SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY Tammie read Natural Sciences, followed by a PhD in mitochondrial bioenergetics with Professor Martin D. Brand, both at the University of Cambridge. This was followed by a post-doctoral study with Professor Peter J. Ratcliffe and Associate Professorship, both at the Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford. Her research is in understanding the interplay between responses to hypoxia occurring over differing timescales, with a focus on rapid responses to hypoxia. This work was recently awarded a Wellcome Disocvery Award. In October 2024, she was appointed an Associate Professorship at DPAG with Tutorial Fellowship at Trinity College, University of Oxford.
The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program implemented in the '90s offered vouchers to low-income people living in high-poverty neighborhoods to move to richer neighborhoods. We use a dynamic general equilibrium model with residential choice and endogenous local spillovers to explore the quantitative effects of scaling up this policy and compare them to those of alternative neighborhood-specific policies. We find that the MTO program generates large income gains for the children of the recipient families. However, as the scale of the policy increases, general equilibrium effects both dampen these gains and impose large welfare losses for the non-recipient families. An alternative place-based policy that invests resources in local institutions, such as public schools, is less effective on impact, but realizes larger welfare gains over time, while also reducing both inequality and residential segregation.
The workshop is designated to the discussion of various syntactic phenomena and properties that are common across diverse human languages intending to uncover underlying principles applicable to language as a whole. It provides a theoretical insight into the mechanisms of natural language grammar and endeavours to explicate the rationale behind linguistic structures. Employing Georgian as a case study the speakers delve into specific language phenomena and structures to demonstrate how these align with the universal properties of natural language. This workshop brings together linguists working both on theoretical and empirical issues to discuss the ways in which specific language parameters can be accounted for by Universal Grammar. The discussion promises a balanced theoretical exploration and empirical analysis.
We study minimax regret treatment rules in finite samples under matched treatment assignment in a setup where a policymaker, informed by a sample, needs to decide between different treatments for a T≥2. Randomized rules are allowed for. We show that the generalization of the minimax regret rule derived in Stoye (2009) for the case T = 2 is minimax regret for general finite T > 2. We also show by example, that in the case of random assignment the generalization of the minimax rule in Stoye (2009) to the case T > 2 is not necessarily minimax regret and derive minimax regret rules for a few small sample cases, e.g. for N = 2 when T = 3. We also discuss numerical approaches to approximate minimax regret rules for unbalanced samples. We then study minimax regret treatment rules in finite samples when a specific quantile (rather than expected outcome) is the object of interest. We establish that all treatment rules are minimax regret under ""matched"" and ""random sampling"" schemes while under ""testing an innovation"" no-data rules are shown to be minimax regret.
Since Diamond and Dybvig (1983), banks have been viewed as inherently fragile. We challenge this view in a general mechanism design framework. Our approach allows for flexibility in the design of banking mechanisms while maintaining limited commitment of the intermediary to future mechanisms. We find that the unique equilibrium outcome is efficient. Consequently, runs cannot occur in equilibrium. Our analysis points to the ultimate sources of fragility: banks are fragile if they cannot collect and optimally respond to useful information during a run, and not because they engage in maturity transformation. We link our banking mechanisms to recent technological advances surrounding ‘smart contracts,’ which enrich the contracting space and can be used to eliminate financial fragility.
In this month's seminar, co-hosted with the Gradel Institue of Charity, we will be joined by sociologist and non-profit strategist Leah Reisman, and EY sustainability partner and climate strategy advisor, Ben Taylor, to discuss the powerful role consultants play in shaping how organisations think about and do impact, in the non-profit, private and public sectors. Moderated by Professor Marya Besharov, Academic Director of the Skoll Centre, the discussion will reflect on insights from Leah's forthcoming book, How Consultants Shape Non-Profits (November 2024) and Ben's extensive experience delivering sustainability strategies for global organisations. The seminar will discuss consultants' pivotal and complex role in shaping the social impact sector, considering the power advisors wield, the problems that can arise in this relationship, and their potential to shape and scale the impact in the field.
In her book talk, Laura Mamo will discuss how the scientific search for a viral cause of cancer transformed not only how we think about and prevent cancer, but how we think about the relationships among sex, sexuality, and health in the broadest sense. The talk will be followed by a drinks reception.
Dr. Nicola Ranger, University of Oxford Abstract: Eighty years ago in 1944, on the eve of the end of World War II, world leaders came together in Bretton Woods USA with the shared ambition to shape a new global financial and monetary system that would ensure the economic stability and development necessary to avoid future crises and wars. The systems and institutions that emerged - including the World Bank and the IMF - helped shape economic history from then on and presided over an unprecedented period of growth and poverty alleviation around the world. Arguably however, they also presided (and some authors would argue contributed to) a period of unprecedented environmental damage and biodiversity loss. Nature was not on the agenda in 1944. It is today. In this talk - almost exactly two years after the signing of the Global Biodiversity Framework and with only six years to go to meet its 2030 targets - I will discuss how the global financial system needs to evolve to address the combined global challenges of biodiversity loss and climate change. I will particularly focus on the role of the World Bank, IMF and Central Banks. I will propose that the World Bank - as the only global financial institution with the explicit mandate, financial firepower and convening power to address these global challenges - has a particularly important role to play and draw upon both research and my own experience to propose solutions. I'll argue for why we need to power up our public financial institutions, including reforming our development finance architecture. I'll also argue for why the IMF and Central Banks need to do more to explicitly recognise the systemic risks from biodiversity loss across their operations and policies. A theme throughout the talk will be on the role of data, analytics and modelling in underpinning and informing action, giving examples from my own research, as well as discuss the new frontiers of research required in order to place nature at the heart of global finance and governance. Biography Dr Nicola Ranger is the Director of the Global Finance and Economy Group at the ECI and of the Resilient Planet Finance Lab. She is also Executive Director of the Oxford Martin Systemic Resilience Initiative, co-Director of the UKRI Integrating Finance and Biodiversity Programme and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking of the Oxford Martin School. Her research addresses the advancement of finance and policy to address critical societal challenges across climate, nature, food, water, economic development and human well-being. She brings two decades of experience working in senior roles across government, research, international financial institutions and the private sector, and holds multiple advisory roles, with substantial experience in working to drive change both locally and globally and deep technical expertise in data, risk, analytics, scenario analysis, environmental sciences, economics, policy and decision science. The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and Biodiversity Network are interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners. The views, opinions and positions expressed within this lecture are those of the author alone, they do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery/Biodiversity Network, or its researchers.
Join us for the next seminar in the Conversations in Environmental Sustainability series where we will be discussing “Lab-grown, real, or plant/fungi-based meat – which is best for the environment?” This event will explore alternative protein sources and investigate the promises and challenges of lab-grown and plant/fungi-based meat as sustainable alternatives to real meat. The discussion will include the sustainability of these alternative meats in terms of energetic demands, greenhouse gas emissions, water usage, and land use.
Book Launch: In August 2020, Donald Trump announced that his administration had brokered a ground-breaking treaty between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, the first normalization agreement between Israel and an Arab state in more than twenty years. Soon afterward, Bahrain joined the agreements, known as the Abraham Accords. How were these treaties achieved, and why did the parties involved see normalization as in their interest? In what ways have the accords altered the Middle East’s political landscape, and how have they affected the question of Palestine? This book is a groundbreaking in-depth analysis of the Abraham Accords, shedding new light on their causes and consequences. Elham Fakhro demonstrates how shared security concerns, economic interests, and regional political shockwaves led to a surprising strategic convergence between the Gulf states and Israel, setting the stage for covert relations to come out into the open. She examines the role of the Trump administration in negotiating the agreements and shows how the UAE and Bahrain have instrumentalized the accords to burnish their reputations in Western capitals. Fakhro underscores how Washington’s Middle East policy shifted toward expanding the agreements at the expense of attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—with profound costs. Offering a critical lens on a much-hailed agreement, this book argues that the pursuit of normalization in isolation from a lasting solution to the conflict has entrenched the conditions that continually plunge the Middle East into crisis.
The termly OICSD Research Showcase for Michaelmas Term 2024 will be on 15th November, Friday starting at 17:15. This is an opportunity for our scholars and associated community members to share their research with a wider community in Oxford and seek feedback.
Join Dr James Manyika, Senior Vice President of Technology and Society at Google, and Philippa Webb, Professor of Public International Law at the Blavatnik School, for a conversation on ‘how to get Artificial Intelligence right’. They will explore the challenges across the AI pipeline, focusing on implications for human rights, democracy, and public trust. How can humans align with technology that is not limited by human cognition? How can law and policy on AI be anticipatory and not just reactive? How can companies and countries work together on AI’s development and governance? Speaker biographies: James Manyika is the Senior Vice President of Technology and Society at Google. Before his current role at Google, James served for 13 years as Chairman of the McKinsey Global Institute. He is also the vice chair of President Biden’s National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee and co-chair of the UN High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence. Since 2021, James has been a Visiting Professor at the Blavatnik School. Philippa Webb is Professor of Public International Law at the Blavatnik School of Government and a Fellow of Exeter College. Philippa was previously Professor of Public International Law at King’s College London and founding Co-Director of the Centre for International Governance and Dispute Resolution. She has held visiting positions at Columbia University, the Graduate Institute in Geneva, the Vienna Diplomatic Academy and Université Paris Nanterre. In 2023, she was the Director of Studies (English speaking section) of the Hague Academy of International Law for its centenary edition.
Dive into the world of Machine Learning by exploring an exciting dataset alongside your teammates. No prior knowledge required, so whether you're a curious beginner or a seasoned pro, this is the event for you. 📅 When: Saturday 16th November, 9 AM - 5 PM 📍 Where: Department of Statistics, 24-29 St Giles', Oxford, OX1 3LB 👥 Who: Open to *everyone* interested in Machine Learning! Sign up individually or as a group. New to Machine Learning? We’ll be hosting two optional introductory tutorials to help you get up to speed. 📅 When: 13th and 14th November, 3 – 4.30 PM, choose whichever session you prefer 📍 Where: Department of Statistics, 24-29 St Giles', Oxford, OX1 3LB Follow this link to sign up: https://forms.office.com/e/maiMsk09NF Questions or queries? Feel free to reach out to stat0441@ox.ac.uk.
A theologian, a forensic scientist, a funeral director and a palliative care doctor meet to discuss the intersection of academic and practical approaches to death and dying.
Do you need help managing your references? Do you need help citing references in your documents? This online session will introduce you to Endnote, a subscription software programme which can help you to store, organise and retrieve your references and PDFs, as well as cite references in documents and create bibliographies quickly and easily. On completing the workshop you will be able to: understand the main features and benefits of EndNote; set up an EndNote account; import references from different sources into EndNote; organise your references in EndNote; insert citations into documents; and create a bibliography/reference list. Intended audience: students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
For online access, Microsoft Teams links will be sent to the email list in advance or email "$":mailto:sian.pooley@magd.ox.ac.uk for a link.
This study investigates the short-, medium-, and long-term impacts of state censorship on knowledge production, focusing on the largest book banning in Chinese history, triggered by the creation of the Siku Quanshu (Complete Library in Four Sections) during 1772–1783. By analyzing publication data of over 161,000 books spanning from the 1660s to the 1940s, we find that categories subjected to more severe bans experienced a significant decline in publications in the decades following the bans (1780s to 1840s). However, as state control relaxed from the 1840s onwards, there was a marked resurgence in the publication of books in previously restricted categories. Further text analysis reveals notable spillover effects on less sensitive books in the same categories as those banned, indicating a chilling effect and associated self-censorship. We also document dynamic responses from publishers and authors, finding that the exit and entry of publishers help explain both the suppression and subsequent revival of knowledge production.
The main function of the intestinal epithelium is to absorb nutrients from food, but it also serves as a barrier to protect the body from harmful pathogens, chemicals, and food antigens. To aid in its protection, the epithelial layer is patrolled by an unconventional pool of T lymphocytes called intraepithelial lymphocytes (IEL). Despite being one of the largest subsets of T cells, we understand very little of how these cells are maintained in quiescence at homeostasis; are activated in the presence of external insults, how they are fueled and how they respond. Research in my lab aims to define the how IEL coordinate responses to chemical, dietary and microbial inputs at the intestinal epithelium to regulate epithelial function. Using a novel mouse model that for the first time permits inducible depletion of all IEL, we are establishing the roles of IEL in intestinal infection, nutrient absorption and homeostasis.
We encounter dialect very often in literature. It can serve as a highly effective device for writers, helping them reveal their characters with great authenticity. The literary use of dialect also inevitably brings up important political, social and cultural issues. When we come up a line like this when reading a novel: Sit ye down, an' haud yer whisht!, what do we do? And how do we respond when not only occasional dialogue but the whole novel is written in dialect? Dialectal writing takes additional effort from every involved party. It challenges everyone: writers, readers and translators. Its challenging nature has often led to a widespread belief that dialect is in fact untranslatable, and resulted in many cases where it was standardized, corrected and even erased. This only adds to the precarity of the situation where many dialects are facing a high risk of extinction. How can we deal with these challenges when it comes to translating dialect? Can there be equivalence between dialects in different languages, and what is lost in the process of converting dialect into standard language? At this session, we will look into dialect within the larger context of non-standard language and explore various methods for translating it, illustrated by examples from dialectal literary works, such as Scots in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and Swiss German in Pedro Lenz’s Der Goalie bin ig and their translations.
This presentation investigates rater effects in high-stakes examinations using Graph Theory (GT) and Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGM). Rater effects, such as biases and inconsistencies, are common challenges in the scoring process, impacting the fairness and validity of assessments. GT and ERGM offer powerful tools to visualize complex rater interactions and reveal hidden patterns that traditional reliability indices, such as Krippendorff’s alpha or Fleiss’s kappa, may not capture. Using real-world examination data, we demonstrate how graph-based models provide nuanced insights into rater behavior, allowing for the identification of outlier raters and systematic biases. This approach is not intended to replace established methods (e.g., Rasch models) but rather to complement them. Our empirical analysis shows that GT indices and Rasch model estimates are strongly correlated, highlighting their complementarity. Additionally, certain GT indices can be mathematically linked to Rasch model estimates through the pairwise estimation method, further strengthening their theoretical connection. Teams link to join online: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_MDFhZjExMjgtNmYxMS00MmUzLTljMDItYTYyNDdlZWQ1Yzc1%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22b33f55d8-6202-46f8-a141-737715faff88%22%7d
November 18th 2024 1:00pm- 2:00pm Speaker: Prof Louise Thwaites Title: "Developing AI to improve outcomes from infectious diseases in resource-limited settings" Venue: Reuben College- Lecture theatre https://reuben.ox.ac.uk/about-our-building-project
The talk will be about ways we are trying to address the increasing risk posed to public health by falsified vaccines. Currently there is no global infrastructure in place to monitor supply chains using screening methods that can identify fake vaccines. The multidisciplinary Vaccine Identity Evaluation (VIE) consortium brought together diverse scientists with medicine regulatory authorities, international organisations, device and vaccine manufacturers and other stakeholders, to repurpose existing technologies as well as develop novel techniques to protect the global vaccine supply. I will showcase some of our approaches presenting recent data. Nicole Zitzmann is Professor of Virology at the University of Oxford, where she is a Principal Investigator and Associate Head of Department in the Department of Biochemistry, and PI in the Kavli Institute for NanoScience Discovery. Her work focuses on developing broad-spectrum antiviral drugs for pandemic preparedness, and the development of proteomics methods for non-invasive diagnosis and understanding of disease. She is a member of the VIE consortium, where her group focuses on the use of mass spectrometry and the development of several low-cost techniques to detect falsified and substandard vaccines and other liquid medicines.
Online assessment platforms can be useful way to collect research data in rare diseases like spinocerebellar ataxias, where geographical and physical barriers can impact access to traditional research settings. In this talk, we will discuss findings on cognitive, speech, and psychomotor performance from the “SCA-Remote” study, a two-year, international online assessment study assessing motor, speech, cognitive, and mood function in people with spinocerebellar ataxias 1, 2, 3, and 6. Furthermore, we will discuss the development and piloting of “MJDhub”, a new online clinical monitoring and education platform for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians living with Machado-Joseph Disease (spinocerebellar ataxia type 3) in Australia’s Northern Territory. We will reflect on the costs and benefits of online assessment platforms and their potential role in ongoing spinocerebellar ataxia research and clinical practice. Speaker bio: Dr Louisa Selvadurai is a Research Fellow at the School of Psychological
Therapeutic development for neurodegenerative diseases is bridging into a new era, in particular with the emergence of gene and stem cell therapies. However, clinical trial design and efficiency remains hampered by insensitive outcome measures in slowly progressive, non-reversible neurological diseases. This issue is particularly problematic in rare diseases, where participant availability for trials is limited. Here, I will present work from our team using multimodal structural, diffusion, and susceptibility neuroimaging approaches to identify novel and sensitive in vivo outcome measures for disease characterisation and tracking in people with hereditary cerebellar ataxias. Speaker bio: Associate Professor Ian Harding is Group Leader of the Cerebellum & Neurodegeneration Research Group at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Brisbane, Australia. His team uses MRI and PET brain imaging, biofluid assays, and digital tools to measure and track disease expression and progression at mechanistic, neurobiological, and behavioural scales. His research primarily focusses on neurological disorders that impact the cerebellum and cerebellar connections.
Green firms (with high environmental performance ratings) experience a less pronounced reduction in stock prices compared to brown firms (with low environmental performance ratings) in response to monetary policy tightening. Using a stylised theoretical framework and comprehensive empirical analysis, I show that this is driven by investors' preferences for sustainable investing. When interest rates rise, expected future dividends are discounted more heavily, reducing both green and brown asset prices. However, investors favouring sustainable investments are less likely to unwind their green portfolio positions in response to contractionary monetary policy shocks, thereby mitigating the impact on green asset prices.
Leadership in the history of Islam has been fundamentally shaped by two distinct yet overlapping models of religious authority: charismatic and exemplary. Prophet Muhammad was the original charismatic leader of the Muslim community—having assumed the dual mantle as messenger of God’s final revelation and political leader of the first Muslim community. From a Sunni perspective, charisma ended with his death. Muhammad’s legacy continued with the prophetic example of exemplary ethical and religious conduct—what became known as the Sunnah. From a Shia perspective, charisma continued in the bloodline of the Prophet’s descendants, through the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, Ali ibn Abi Talib. Sufis appropriated this latter understanding as well, positing Ali as the original Qalandar. This paper examines how modernist reformers of the 19th and 20th centuries sought to revitalize and renew the Islamic tradition in the context of colonial modernity, while negotiating with these two models of authority. The majority of these reformers were Sunni-identified and denounced the charismatic model through arguments about the finality of prophecy, often grounded in the logics of what Max Weber has described as rationalization—the replacement of traditions, values, and emotions with rational concepts and modes of operation such as civilization progress, western science and education, and bureaucratic order. This paper examines Weberian concepts of charisma and rationalization to understand some of the problems, tensions, and creative possibilities that emerged in the realm of Muslim leadership in the writings of modernist reformers. The paper argues that the charismatic paradigm evoked a contestation of power that led to an amplification of sectarian boundaries and exclusions. These disputes over the charismatic paradigm were foundational to the 19th century modernist project of reform itself.
Leadership in the history of Islam has been fundamentally shaped by two distinct yet overlapping models of religious authority: charismatic and exemplary. Prophet Muhammad was the original charismatic leader of the Muslim community—having assumed the dual mantle as messenger of God’s final revelation and political leader of the first Muslim community. From a Sunni perspective, charisma ended with his death. Muhammad’s legacy continued with the prophetic example of exemplary ethical and religious conduct—what became known as the Sunnah. From a Shia perspective, charisma continued in the bloodline of the Prophet’s descendants, through the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, Ali ibn Abi Talib. Sufis appropriated this latter understanding as well, positing Ali as the original Qalandar. This paper examines how modernist reformers of the 19th and 20th centuries sought to revitalize and renew the Islamic tradition in the context of colonial modernity, while negotiating with these two models of authority. The majority of these reformers were Sunni-identified and denounced the charismatic model through arguments about the finality of prophecy, often grounded in the logics of what Max Weber has described as rationalization—the replacement of traditions, values, and emotions with rational concepts and modes of operation such as civilization progress, western science and education, and bureaucratic order. This paper examines Weberian concepts of charisma and rationalization to understand some of the problems, tensions, and creative possibilities that emerged in the realm of Muslim leadership in the writings of modernist reformers. The paper argues that the charismatic paradigm evoked a contestation of power that led to an amplification of sectarian boundaries and exclusions. These disputes over the charismatic paradigm were foundational to the 19th century modernist project of reform itself.
It is a common belief that early modern physicians did not refer to their patients' physical pain. In fact, they frequently describe it as "unbearable" or "inexpressible." They manifestly seek to alleviate the pain through the use of so-called "anodyne" remedies. Moreover, their writings attest to the depth of their reflections on the signs and expression of physical pain. Admittedly, the therapeutic means then available to physicians were far from those we have known since the development of anaesthetics and analgesics in the second half of the 19th century. Nevertheless, it is crucial to distinguish between this teleological perspective on therapeutic inefficacy and the interest in the issue of physical pain in Early Modern Europe. In this presentation, we will draw on the results of our historical investigation into physical pain in medical and private texts of the 16th and 17th centuries, with a particular focus on the issue of pain expression. This will allow us to discuss a periodization put forward by certain historians of emotions and sensibilities, notably Alain Corbin, who argue that the emergence of a modern sensitivity to pain, i.e. a lesser tolerance of pain, can be dated to the second half of the 18th century. *Raphaële Andrault* is researcher at the CNRS, based at the Institut d'histoire des representations et des idées dans les modernités (IHRIM UMR 5317) at the ENS de Lyon. She works mainly on the mind-body problem in Early Modern Philosophy and Early Life Sciences and Medicine. She is the author of La vie selon la raison. Physiologie et métaphysique chez Spinoza et Leibniz (Champion, 2014) and La raison des corps. Mécanisme et sciences médicales (Vrin, 2016). More recently, she has studied Cartesian conceptions of pain (Le fer ou le feu. Penser la douleur après Descartes, Classiques Garnier, 2024), and supervised with Ariane Bayle the research project "Une archéologie de la douleur, 16e-18e siècles". *Ariane Bayle* is Professor of Comparative Literature at Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 and a member of IHRIM. She studies the relationship between literature and medicine in the early modern period, and more specifically how the reading and writing practices of physicians and surgeons contributed to the construction and dissemination of knowledge. She edited the anthology Le Siècle des Vérolés. La Renaissance européenne face à la syphilis (ed. Jérôme Millon, 2019). Her current research, as part of an IUF delegation (2022-2027), focuses on the medical case writing in the vernacular in the 16th and 17th centuries. Her next book, Soigner et raconter. Écriture de soi et récit de cure chez Leonardo Fioravanti et Ambroise Paré, will be published by Droz, in the "Seuils de la modernité" collection.
In a new Future of the Humanities Project event series — Cultural Encounters: Books that Have Made a Difference — we embrace the other at a time when we have heard much about the ways in which national, religious, and cultural lines divide us as humans. In this series, we invite leading scholars across disciplines to explore themes of cultural encounters both in classic literary works and in contemporary cultural debates. In this event Dr Neil Garrod gives a talk on J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country.
The Alan Tayler Lecture 2024, takes place on Monday 18th November at 4.30pm in the Riverside Lecture Theatre. We are delighted to have Prof Alison Etheridge OBE FRS, University of Oxford give this years lecture. More details will be released shorty on the focus of her talk. Registration is open for all students, alumni, fellows and the general public. The order of events will be as follows: 4.30-5pm: Tea & Coffee (Riverside Lecture Theatre Foyer) 5-6pm: Lecture (Riverside Lecture Theatre). 6-7pm: Drinks (Riverside Lecture Theatre Foyer) About the lecture series St Catherine’s College has a long tradition in applied and industrial mathematics and has hosted an annual series of lectures on Mathematics and its Applications since 1986. In 1995, the series was renamed in memory of Alan Tayler, in tribute to his efforts and achievements in this field. Alan was the first Fellow in Applied Mathematics to be appointed at St Catherine’s. His lifelong commitment was to the practical application of mathematical ideas to problems in science and industry. His vision continues to inspire many national and international collaborations on the theme of mathematics-in-industry. Smith Institute provides system-level thinking underpinned by the mathematical sciences, combining academic excellence with business understanding. We enable companies and government to improve products, processes, services and strategy through the application of cutting-edge mathematical thinking. Alan was a founding member of the Institute’s Council in 1993. The Institute benefited greatly from his energy and vision, and we are delighted to support the annual Alan Tayler Lecture.
Prof. Rho's book, Atomized Incorporation: Chinese Workers and the Aftermath of China's Rise?' (Cambridge University Press, 2023), asks whether the Chinese regime’s selective toleration of workers’ protests has appeased factory workers’ discontent. With export-led growth no longer sustainable, the regime faces new challenges in state-labour relations. Rural-born migrant workers, who make up the bulk of low-skilled factory workers, have engaged in protests to demand better wages and working conditions. The central and local governments take a relatively tolerant approach to these protests, but ensure that workers’ demands remain job-specific. This approach, which Prof. Rho calls atomized incorporation, is assumed to ensure the long-term resilience of the authoritarian regime. The book explores theoretically and empirically the inevitable dilemma of atomized incorporation, which allows some collective claim-making without workers’ organizing. Prof. Rho theorizes the potential benefits and limitation of atomized incorporation from a comparative perspective. If small protests are successful in ensuring regime resilience, what might explain why other authoritarian countries choose different strategies? Conversely, what might be the reasons the Chinese regime does not pursue other avenues, such as institutional co-optation or corporatism, that are considered effective in stabilizing state-labour relations? This book empirically examines these questions from the workers’ perspective. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data collected over two years of intensive field research, Prof. Rho argues that atomized incorporation has successfully demobilized the labour movement because it encourages workers with resources for collective action to reap the rewards. However, this also means that many aggrieved workers are left out because they do not have access to such resources. The regime’s toleration of workers’ demands as atomized economic agents, but not as social and political beings, makes it difficult to depoliticize workers’ discontent. Sungmin Rho is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Her research bridges international and comparative political economy with a focus on labour. Sungmin Rho is broadly interested in interactions between structural economic changes and political and social conflict. Prof. Rho’s book, Atomized Incorporation: Chinese Workers and the Aftermath of China's Rise (Cambridge University Press, 2023), examines political implications of labour unrest by investigating marginalized workers' perceptions, beliefs and behaviour within factories. Other research interests include domestic determinants of trade policy, labour politics and gender studies.
Food was at the nexus of the material and representational concerns of early modern courts. At the court of the Great Elector of Brandenburg-Prussia (1640-1688), food and drink comprised a large percentage of the overall court budget and was closely tracked by court administrators. The servants responsible for the production and presentation of food and drink bridged the internal court cosmos and the external world of markets and food producers to provide impressive meals within a budget. This paper follows some of these individuals over their careers at court, revealing a web of relationships of mutual obligation, which counters the notion of dichotomous, absolute systems of rule. Here, servants were empowered to supplicate for increased privileges and their lord responded. Daniel Graupius, for example, one of only two stewards in Friedrich Wilhelm’s long reign, advocated for career advancement that moved him between the different residences of the elector. Thus, he knit together the diverse realms of Brandenburg-Prussia long before there was a unified Prussia. After settling in Berlin to become Hofküchenmeister, Graupius leveraged his court connections to obtain status and property for himself while helping the elector increase his hold on the city of Berlin. Sebastian Kühn likens this to network building by both parties. Although their stories are not found in history textbooks about the rise of Prussia, the food servants played a quotidian, yet vital, role in the consolidation of power.
In this last session, you’ll delve into the various routes of funding available to you and discover which options are best suited to your business needs. Gain insights into the wealth of resources available at Oxford to support your funding efforts. The session will explore advantages and disadvantages of different options and consider the typical funding journey of different entrepreneurial paths. You’ll also develop a solid understanding of key financial terminology essential for navigating the world of start-up funding. Join us to equip yourself with the knowledge and tools necessary to drive your entrepreneurial endeavour forward.
Investing in a Vision: A Meeting of the Minds in Biotech – Founder & VC in Conversation Join us for an insightful discussion with Sally Dewhurst from Oxford Science Enterprises and Giacomo Gorini from Gorini Labs, as they share their unique perspectives on the booming biotech ecosystem. This engaging session will explore the challenges and triumphs of building a successful biotech venture from the ground up, securing funding, and navigating the complex investment landscape. This event offers attendees a unique opportunity to understand the founder's journey from ideation to funding, and the VC's perspective on identifying promising biotech ventures. The discussion will also explore the current state and future trends of the biotech industry, providing attendees with strategies for successful fundraising and building strong investor relationships. Sally Dewhurst, Oxford Science Enterprises (OSE), Principal, Life Sciences, VC Sally Dewhurst joined Oxford Science Enterprises in February 2021, bringing with her over eight years of experience in oncology research from world-leading academic institutions. She focuses on identifying new opportunities in the life sciences and supports both the creation of new biotech businesses and the management of the existing portfolio. Before joining Oxford Science Enterprises, Sally honed her oncology expertise through a post-doctoral fellowship at Rockefeller University and a PhD at the Francis Crick Institute, where she made key discoveries about cancer evolution. Her research has been published in leading journals including Nature Genetics and Nature Communications. Furthering her expertise, she also studied corporate finance at NYU and consulted for The Solution Lab. Giacomo Gorini, VC-Backed Founder & Researcher Giacomo Gorini has secured funding from Oxford Science Enterprises, the venture capital firm partnered with Oxford University, to pursue the development of innovative antibody technologies. The investment will support proof-of-concept experiments, paving the way for the establishment of a new company. His research is being conducted within the Department of Biochemistry, in laboratory space generously provided by Professor Simon Draper. Monday 18th of November, 2024 6:00 - 8:00 pm The Hub, Kellogg College 60-62 Banbury Rd, Park Town Oxford OX2 6PN ///shares.composers.healthier
The National Health Service of the UK is a totemic institution, much loved by the British public, and which has faced one of its greatest challenges during the COVID pandemic and Brexit. But it faces wider challenges as well. Can it keep up with constant innovation and rising expectations? In this seminar, we will look at how the NHS came into being and how it compares with other models of health system. We will consider the challenges the NHS faces, and what policymakers can do to address them. And we will look towards the future to ask – will we still have an NHS in another fifty years?
Join OPS for a talk with Aidan Hurst, for an exploration into strange and unusual psychoactive substances like DMT, Salvia, and highly-potent cannabinoids. There are compounds that induce downward-shifts in pitch perception to dream-inducing giraffe bone beverages. Aidan will take the audience on a safari through some of his own psychoactive inventions that probe the boundaries of the chemistry of our consciousness. About Aidan: He has invented a handful of novel psychedelic substances, and is currently investigating a 200-year old mystery surrounding a dream-inducing caterpillar. He is hoping to use the outcome of this study to explore the neurochemistry of dreaming. This talk will be accessible to scientists and non-scientists alike.
There is a huge global burden of enteric fever which disrupts the lives of children in settings with inadequate quality water and poor sanitation. This non-specific febrile illness affected approximately 9.3 million people in 2021, resulting in over 100,000 deaths and 8.1 million disability-adjusted life years. Accurately assessing the true burden of the diseases remains difficult due to the lack of sensitive diagnostic tests, adequate laboratory facilities, and robust surveillance systems in endemic regions. As a result, current global estimates may underrepresent the actual disease burden. The first typhoid conjugate vaccine (TCV) (Typbar® TCV, Bharat Biotech International Limited) received WHO prequalification in 2017, based on field safety and immunogenicity data and supported by findings from a controlled human infection model. Since then, the two-year vaccine efficacy has been confirmed at 79%-85% by randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in Nepal, Bangladesh, and Malawi. Over 60 million doses of typhoid conjugate vaccines have been rolled out in the past 5 years. This talk will focus on results from a cluster randomise trial in the Bangladesh to discuss about the development of enteric fever vaccines.
https://www.ethox.ox.ac.uk/events/anthropomorphisation-and-ai-in-the-healthcare-context
Are you looking to learn about the ways in which to transmit scientific ideas and make your research accessible to a non-specialist audience through a variety of mediums? This session will serve as an introduction to science communication and how it can be successfully incorporated into our roles. By the end of this session you will be able to: define science communication and provide a list of examples; explain why science communication is important for both our CPD and the public; list ways in which we can all get involved in science communication. Intended audience: students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
Are you baffled by open, confused by embargoes? Does the mention of the colour gold or green catapult you into a realm of perplexed irritation? Come to this session, where we’ll break down open access and all its many jargon terms, confusing publishing structures and hint at the advantages you can reap by publishing open. We’ll cover: what is open access? key terms – Gold, Green, Article Processing Charges; where to get more information and help; where to look for open access material; and useful tools to assist you in publishing open access. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is a higher order cognitive center that regulates diverse functions like learning, memory, emotion, reward, executive function, and even pain processing, via a descending inhibition on the spinal cord. Not surprisingly, the PFC is implicated in many neurological and psychiatric disorders, some of which are genetically inflicted, while some are adaptive or complex. Yet, molecular mechanisms underlying PFC disorders have been difficult to comprehend owing to the complexity of cell types, circuits and functions of this region, making it extraordinarily challenging to contemplate specificity in therapeutic targeting. However, biochemical, morphological or electrical heterogeneity of neurons, which underlie this complexity, must emerge from their discrete molecular compositions. We asked whether the diversity of cell types (and functions) can be reconciled by mapping their transcriptomic compositions. Using a combination of single cell sequencing and spatial transcriptomics (MERFISH or Multiplexed Error Robust Fluorescence in situ hybridization) we decoded the remarkable molecular diversity of PFC neurons and their discrete anatomical organization patterns along the antero-posterior and dorsal-ventral axes. Distinct cellular and transcriptional features emerged, characterizing the PFC relative to its adjoining cortical areas. Dramatic transcriptional changes were observed across neuronal subtypes during adolescence, when postnatal plasticity peaks in PFC, revealing distinct expression and regulation of several GWAS candidate genes for major neuropsychiatric disorders. By generating cell type specific Cre mouse lines, we mapped neuronal subtypes and circuits underlying adaptive disorders like chronic pain and drug addiction, in their respective disease models. We are currently investigating the transcriptional and epigenetic changes in these circuits during the disease pathogenesis. Cumulatively, our data indicate that redefining composition and organization through single cell omics is greatly facilitating our understanding of the biology and pathology of the PFC and may enable precisely targeting therapies for specific disorders in the future.
Mike studied pre-clinical medicine at King's College, Cambridge, and then completed his clinical studies at UCL. Following postgraduate clinical training, he joined John Hardy's lab at UCL, to develop human stem cell models of Parkinson's disease (PD). Following completion of specialist clinical training in Neurology, he carried out postdoctoral work in Josef Kittler's lab at UCL, researching mitochondrial and synaptic dysfunction in PD. He is currently clinical group leader at the Crick Institute, examining the interaction between mitochondria and neuronal synapses, and how this can be disrupted in neurological and psychiatric disease. As a clinician, he sees patients at the National Hospital for Neurology & Neurosurgery, and University College Hospital.
Join us on Tuesday 19 November, 12:30 - 13:30, at the Big Data Institute (BDI), for the upcoming seminar in the PSI seminar series. Dr. Dalan Bailey will present his research on predicting the next pandemic pathogen, focusing on how emerging enveloped RNA viruses can adapt to new hosts. The seminar will take place from 12:30 to 13:30 in the BDI building, seminar rooms, followed by lunch and networking from 13:30 to 14:30. Abstract: Zoonotic viruses, like SARS-CoV-2, are a significant cause of pandemics due to their ability, especially in error-prone RNA viruses, to rapidly adapt to new hosts. Factors driving zoonotic spillover are diverse, from macro-scale influences such as human population growth and land use changes to molecular-level mechanisms like viral entry, replication, and immune evasion. Understanding these molecular drivers is critical to improving global preparedness, developing vaccines, and advancing therapeutic strategies. My group examines viral entry mechanisms in emerging enveloped RNA viruses to better classify pandemic potential. The 2024 WHO Pathogen Prioritization project highlighted the importance of a family-based approach to assessing pandemic risk, calling for broader research on RNA virus families beyond the well-known human pathogens. A significant gap exists in understanding emerging virus families, with humans themselves potentially serving as unrecognized reservoirs in anthropogenic spillover events. Moreover, computational prediction of pandemic potential based on viral sequences alone requires more comprehensive datasets. Our group investigates receptor usage conservation across viral families, analyzing whether phylogenetic distance and receptor affinity correlate with host range. Establishing links between viral genotypes and host-range phenotypes will improve pandemic prediction models. By generating rich, comprehensive datasets and integrating them into predictive frameworks, we aim to equip the global community with the tools needed to anticipate and respond to future pandemics more effectively.
Climate change is not only a problem of futurity, changing the planet and ways of life for generations to come. From fires to floods, droughts to storms, the impacts of climate-driven weather events are evident and experienced right now, in different forms around the globe. Please join us for a roundtable conversation about this year's flooding in Brazil and how climate change is affecting the country. Panellists: Dr. Alice Evatt (Oxford Net Zero, Environmental Change Institute) Dr. Alice Evatt is a Research Fellow on Net Zero for the Fossil Fuel Sector at Oxford Net Zero and the Environmental Change Institute. Alice is an expert on climate policy and climate ethics, with a special expertise in emergency and disaster theory. Her work is currently focused on innovative carbon management policy design and scaling geological storage. Talk Abstract: Despite the widespread use of the term "climate emergency," we have still not seen any emergency action. Moreover, climate change does seem different from paradigmatic emergencies, like fires, tsunamis and floods. This forces as to ask the question: is climate change a genuine emergency, or is it better understood as an ongoing crisis requiring a different response? Answers to this question will shape the way we approach climate change and its policy solutions. Dr. Neil Hart (Physical Geography, University of Oxford) Neil is a South African by birth and education, who now leads a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship project, First Rains. He is part of wider efforts to estimate emerging climate risks and where possible, build systems to anticipate to mitigate such risks, especially over southern Africa and South America. Talk Abstract: Livelihoods across monsoonal climates have always had exposure to climate risks. However, “too little rain, and then too much” is already experienced and only projected to intensify. I will comment rain-fed agriculture in Africa, low flows in the Zambezi and Rio Negro rivers, and recent flood events, everywhere. Dr. Anthony Calacino (Climate Vulnerability Project, University of Oxford) Anthony Calacino is a political scientist specializing in the political economy of environmental pollution and public opinion on climate change. His research focuses on Brazil and broader Latin America, analyzing how political forces shape environmental policy in these regions. He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford and a Fellow at Nuffield College. Talk Abstract: In recent months, Brazil’s Amazon region has been ravaged by widespread fires, climate-driven droughts, and suffocating smoke that blankets large parts of the country. Climate change is no longer a distant threat; it has arrived in the Amazon. This talk will explore the Brazilian government’s response to the escalating climate crisis and its impact on the daily lives of citizens in this critical region, with a focus on governance challenges and societal consequences. Dr. Ana Paula Khoury (Mackenzie University & Itaim Paulist Laboratory, Universidade São Judas Tadeu) Professor at Mackenzie University's graduate program, with a postdoc from USP's Brazilian Cultures and Identities program (2018). Urban Future Making (DFG-2024) fellow, Fulbright Visiting Scholar in Global Cities (2016), and Klimapolis Lab member (USP/MPI Hamburg, 2019-2024). Leads the Itaim Paulista Lab, engaging local government and students since 2017. Talk Abstract: The Itaim Paulista Laboratory in São Paulo, Brazil, is a university extension project studying the region's social and environmental challenges since 2017. Located in a vulnerable area near the Tietê River's protected zone, it focuses on governance issues in a pilot community within the Lageado watershed. Juliana Moura Bueno (Public Policy and Government Affairs, Google) Juliana is Google’s public policy manager. She coordinates the relationship between the company and government and leads Google’s efforts in this cycle of the G20 and COP30. She was Chief of Staff of the Secretariat of Human Rights of the Presidency of the Republic (2015-2016) and Acting Secretary of Human Rights of the Federal Government (2016).
To join online, please email oxchildpsych@psych.ox.ac.uk to request the Zoom link.
In the People’s Republic of China, a number of social media platforms created in the West, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, are restricted by the Great Firewall. Nevertheless, over the past five years, the number of accounts on these sites created by Chinese officials, journalists, and other actors has been on the rise. These accounts aim to affect the attitudes of individuals living outside of China. In this talk, Dr Naima Green-Riley, Visiting Fellow on the Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative, will discuss the content and dissemination of internationally-targeted social media messaging campaigns from various Chinese sources. She will also discuss how generative artificial intelligence tools (AI) have been used in these campaigns, and their prospects for influence on political and social attitudes moving forward. This event is in-person only.
Sandwich lunch provided
I will talk about our results in this paper (http://ssrn.com/abstract=4931623) that the Product-mix auction language provides new characterisations of ordinary substitutes, and of strong substitutes, when goods are indivisible. Product-mix auctions are sealed-bid mechanisms for trading multiple divisible or indivisible units of multiple differentiated goods. They implement competitive-equilibrium allocations when these exist, based on the bids that participants make in a simple geometric language. All concave substitutes (respectively, strong-substitutes) valuations can be uniquely represented, and no other valuations can be represented, by bids in the corresponding version of this language. This provides new characterisations of ordinary substitutes, and of strong substitutes, when goods are indivisible. We discuss implementation of the auctions, and extensions and variants of the language, e.g., allowing for budget constraints.
Join via MS Teams: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_ZTlhYzAxOGYtZTI0Yy00MzRkLWEyZjYtNzAyZmNjY2YyODQz%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22b84f47ee-130a-4bdd-bb79-3b10ca433ee7%22%7d
Nancy Liang (13:00 - 13:30) Title: Modelling the role of mitophagy in the pathogenesis of Parkinson’s and Mitochondrial disease Abstract: Mitophagy is a selective form of autophagy in which damaged mitochondrion or mitochondrial fragments are engulfed by an autophagosome, which then fuses with the lysosome for degradation and recycling. Mutations in PARK2 (Parkin) are linked to early onset familial Parkinson’s disease, but the precise role of Parkin in PINK1/Parkin mediated mitophagy remains unclear. To date, dysregulated mitophagy has not previously been demonstrated in primary fibroblasts from patients with compound heterozygous Parkin mutations. Meanwhile, mutations in POLG, a gene encoding the catalytic subunit of the mitochondrial DNA polymerase gamma, are the most common cause of recessively inherited mitochondrial diseases. Understanding mitophagy in these diseases can provide insights into underlying pathological mechanisms, and potentially guide the development of targeted therapies. Isobel Gordon (13:30 - 14:00) Title: Quantitative, Non-Contrast MRI of the Breast Tissue to Improve the Detection and Diagnosis of Breast Cancer Abstract: TBC
Blue Origin was founded with a vision of millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of Earth. Blue Origin envisions a time when people can tap into the limitless resources of space and enable the movement of damaging industries into space to preserve Earth, humanity’s blue origin. Blue Origin is working today to create that future by developing reusable launch vehicles and in-space systems that are safe, low cost, and serve the needs of all civil, commercial, and defence customers. Blue Origin’s efforts include flying astronauts to space on New Shepard, producing reusable liquid rocket engines, developing an orbital launch vehicle with New Glenn, building next-generation space habitats, and returning to the surface of the Moon in a permanent way. These endeavours will add new chapters to the history of spaceflight and move all of humanity closer to that founding vision. A key part of this vision is the opening of space resources and their in-situ utilization. The Space Resources Program at Blue Origin has been established to address the challenges required for opening space resources to humanity and to use them in-situ, starting with the Moon, whilst simultaneously infusing technologies back on Earth to benefit humanity today. The Space Resources Program was ignited in 2020 and consists today of nearly seventy scientists and engineers across various disciplines from geophysics, planetary sciences, material sciences, chemistry, metallurgy, semiconductor sciences, and all engineering disciplines required to design, build, and maintain resource prospecting, processing, and manufacturing systems, on the Moon and on the ground. In this talk, I will introduce Blue Origin and our Space Resources Program, our vision, and goals, and will dive into the technologies we are developing in our dedicated Space Resources Center of Excellence in Los Angeles, which range from prospecting for reserves on the Moon and learning how to transform sand and regolith into solar panels to revolutionizing how we mine and process critical metals carbon neutrally and environmentally friendly in a world that calls for profound climate actions.
In this session we will examine article level metrics. We will discuss how citation counting can help identify influential papers in particular fields and how altmetrics provide a different perspective on research output. Using tools such as Web of Science, Google Scholar and Scopus you will learn how to locate different article metrics. The session will also allow you to appreciate the limitations of different metrics and the importance of their cautious interpretation. By the end of the session, you will be familiar with: using Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar to track and count citations to papers and individual researchers; measuring impact using altmetrics; understanding how to contextualise metrics against other, similar papers in a field; the limitations of different metrics. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
In this seminar, I will reflect on how analysing the causes and solutions of wildfires during my PhD prompted a critical re-evaluation of what I learned from the ECM course. While ECM and its faculty inspired me to pursue an academic career, my PhD project made me question the absences and silences in the ECM's content. I began to question how ECM, despite its strengths, facilitated Eurocentric perspectives that underplay the deeper roots of environmental crises, particularly the entanglements of capitalism, colonialism, and racism. Using wildfires as a case in point, I will argue for a more nuanced approach to environmental issues beyond conventional blame targets such as far-right anti-climate politicians, oil and gas companies, or rethinking personal behaviours like air travel and dietary choices. Instead, I argue for engaging with decolonial thought to understand better and address the elements driving environmental destruction.
For those who wish to join online: Join Zoom Meeting https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85285531740?pwd=SEFBa0%C3%975V21SOFo1dk85dm5TWEhSdz09 Meeting ID: 852 8553 1740 Passcode: 911647
Atmospheric Violence explores how people in the militarized, ecologically fragile borderlands of Kashmir attempt to flourish in an environment where violence is everywhere, or atmospheric. Omer Aijazi takes us to remote mountainous valleys in the portion of Kashmir under Pakistan’s control, where life has been shaped by recurring environmental disasters and by the violence of the India/Pakistan border. Through a series of interconnected scenes, Aijazi explores what it means to theorize from the standpoint of those who do not subscribe to the rules by which most others have come to know the world. In conversation with a radical humanist anthropology and affect theory, held accountable to Black and Indigenous studies, Aijazi offers a decolonial approach to disaster studies centering not on trauma and rupture but rather on repair—the social labor of creating and maintaining viable life, even amidst constant diminishment and world-annihilation. Omer Aijazi is a critical disaster studies scholar and decolonial ethnographer of borderland South Asia. He is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Disasters and Climate Crisis at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, University of Manchester.
COURSE DETAILS This short practical session will help you understand more about the career context for research staff at Oxford and beyond. It will enable you to identify the skills and abilities that you need to develop and give you guidance on how to enhance them so you are prepared for a useful conversation in your next CDR. LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this session you will have: An understanding of the career challenges and opportunities facing research staff at Oxford. An understanding of the skills you need to acquire. Started to apply a process of developing these skills.
For some of us, our research projects are situated back home or in locations where we have already spent considerable time. For the rest of us, our field sites could be in locations where we are visiting or living for the first time. Some of us work closely with people in our own communities, whilst others join local communities as external fieldworkers. Depending on our backgrounds, we may navigate fieldwork as "insider" researchers, "outsider" researchers, or both. There may be varying kinds of social norms and local expectations for researchers from different backgrounds. Some of us might start our fieldwork as outsiders, but we may find ourselves no longer entirely outsiders after spending some time in the field, and the ways in which locals consider us may also shift over time. Similarly, insiders may be subject to new expectations from their local communities when returning home for fieldwork after spending some time outside their communities. At this workshop, former fieldworkers will share their experiences in the field, and we will discuss the opportunities and challenges of navigating fieldwork as insiders, outsiders, or both. The workshop is an open space for meeting other fieldworkers and discussing various fieldwork-related topics, including but not limited to tips and strategies to prepare for and navigate fieldwork smoothly. Staff and research students are welcome to join the workshop. Refreshments will be provided. Moderator Keiko Kanno (University of Oxford) Panellists Princess Banda (DPhil, Anthropology, University of Oxford) Dr Shahnoza Nozimova (Postdoctoral Researcher, Centre on Migration, Policy and Society) Professor Alison Shaw (Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford) Professor David Zeitlyn (Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford/ Fellow of Wolfson College)
Over the past two decades, the entrepreneurial ethos has gained prominence in state education systems across many countries, aiming to construct an entrepreneurial identity among children and youth. The entrepreneurial ideal is frequently regarded in sociological literature as part of the neoliberal culture serving the global free market economy. The global entrepreneurial discourse promotes neoliberal values which include future orientation, personal autonomy and individualisation. Concurrently, state education systems strive to shape a national identity. In Israel, this objective is uniquely translated to promote an ethno-national, Zionist, Jewish-Israeli identity. The paradox between entrepreneurialism and ethno-nationalism raises an important question: How does the global entrepreneurial discourse, which advocates for a neoliberal, individualistic, and future-oriented identity, intersects with a state education system that seeks to establish a collectivist and ethno-national identity? The study followed the translation of the global entrepreneurial discourse into the local Israeli state education system (mamlakhti) among policymakers, educators, and within educational spaces through a multi-focal qualitative research. Findings reveal a hybrid entrepreneurial-nationalistic ideal emerging in Israeli education, merging neoliberalism and ethno-nationalism, and combining future orientation with Jewish-Israeli narratives and symbols. As neoliberal and ethno-national narratives are weaved together, the local discourse reclaims and reproduces social in/exclusion, marking social boundaries and perpetuating inequality. The research contributes to the understanding of how discourse (re)shapes the social, by showing how a global educational discourse is redesigned and translated within a socio-political context.
This online session will focus on what ORA is and how to deposit your thesis in ORA, and how to access help with this process. It will also cover the relevant rights and permissions required and other issues that DPhil students need to take into account when preparing their thesis for upload to ORA. Topics include: what ORA is and what you need to deposit; how to deposit your thesis in ORA; observing relevant rights and permissions; and accessing help with depositing your thesis in ORA. Intended audience: all doctoral research students.
Bisimulation is a fundamental equivalence relation in process theory invented by Robin Milner and with an elegant fixed-point definition due to David Park. In this talk I will review the concept of bisimulation and then discuss its probabilistic analogue. This was extended to systems with continuous state spaces. Despite its origin in theoretical work, it has proved to be useful in fields like machine learning, especially reinforcement learning. Surprisingly, it turned out that one could prove a striking theorem: a theorem that pins down exactly what differences one can "see" in process behaviours when two systems are not bisimilar. However, it is questionable whether a concept like equivalence is the right one for quantitative systems. If two systems are almost, but not quite, the same, bisimulation would just say that they are not equivalent. One would like to say in some way that they are "almost" the same. Metric analogues of bisimulation were developed to capture a notion of behavioral similarity rather than outright equivalence. These ideas have been adopted by the machine learning community and a bisimulation-style metric was developed for Markov decision processes. Recent work has shown that variants of these bisimulation metrics can be useful in representation learning. I will tell the tale of this arc of ideas in as accessible a way as possible.
This prognostic study developed and validated a machine-learning model using extensive Swedish and Finnish databases, identifying mortality risk in first-episode psychosis. For patients with predicted high risk, only long-acting injectable antipsychotics and mood stabilizers were associated with decreased mortality risk; among those with predicted low risk, oral aripiprazole and risperidone were associated with decreased mortality risk.
Professor Helen Byrne: Understanding form and function in vascular tumours Professor Irina Udalova & Barbora Schonfeldova: Mechano-osmotic sensing drives the replenishment and function of meniscus-associated macrophages
After his grandfather is diagnosed with dementia, the filmmaker conducts a ritual of anticipatory grief in his grandparents’ abandoned summer house. By using the concept of liminality to explore the house’s past, present and uncertain future, he aims to slow down the moment of a big change and open a discourse his family avoids. Booking is not required for in-person attendance by to join online please visit: https://www.gtc.ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/event/up-the-river-with-acid-2024/?_gl=1*wktne3*_up*MQ..*_ga*MTA0MDM4MDY2LjE3Mjk2ODExNjU.*_ga_1VFN1VJQDG*MTcyOTY4MTE2NC4xLjAuMTcyOTY4MTE2NC4wLjAuMA.. for the link.
We estimate the inter-generational mobility of children of immigrants in eleven European and four non-European countries. In all destinations, immigrant parents earn less than the local born, but the children of immigrants experience substantial – and for daughters, often complete – convergence. The remaining gap between children of immigrants and locals is largest in countries like Denmark and France where children of immigrants are raised near the bottom of the income distribution. After controlling for parental income, daughters of immigrants out-earn daughters of the local born in almost all countries, and the earnings gap tightens (but remains negative) for sons. In part, sons of immigrants remain behind because of their lower employment rates. All children of immigrants do best in countries with more inclusive migration policies (e.g., access to citizenship), and positive attitudes toward immigrants.
We are delighted to be welcoming Professor Darek Wojcik and Dr Stefanos Ioannou to St John's College, Oxford on Tuesday 19th November, 4-6pm to speak about their newly published 'Atlas of Finance' (Yale University Press, 2024) - the first ever book-size collection of maps and visuals dedicated to the topic of finance and a unique illustrated exploration of the development of finance that combines data from every part of the world and covers five thousand years of history. From the emergence of money in the ancient world to today’s interconnected landscape of high-frequency trading and cryptocurrency, the story of finance has always taken place on an international stage. Finance is one of the most globalized and networked of human activities, and one of the most important social technologies ever invented. The Atlas uses graphics and maps to bring the complex and abstract world of finance down to earth, showing how geography is fundamental for understanding finance, and vice versa. It illuminates the people - including Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes - who have shaped our thinking about global finance; brings to life the ways that place-specific histories, laws, regulations, and institutions influence finance; shows how finance relates to innovation, globalization, and environmental change; and details how finance plays a key part in drawing the landscape of uneven development, inequality, and instability. At the same time, it asks questions relevant to everyday lives of people as affected by finance. What are the best financial investments across history? Are you financially literate? How to prepare financially for the effects of climate change? Liaquat Ahamed, Pulitzer Prize winning author of the book “Lords of Finance”, described the Atlas as ”a stunning visual experience, every page a revelation of the mystery of finance and its often hidden pathways across the globe.” Robert J. Shiller, Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences, wrote that “each page bursts with stunning and illuminating illustrations” and “everyone from students to seasoned professionals to armchair experts will learn something from this unique and fun book”. The Atlas of Finance, with word and image, will change the way you view both your money and your world. Darek and Stefanos will be delivering an informative and visually engaging presentation, before taking part in a lively Q&A. The event will be held in the college's Auditorium and will be followed by a drinks reception in the adjacent Reception Room. Please ask the Porters' Lodge on arrival for details on how to find the Auditorium. Tickets are free of charge and the event is open to university members and the public. We look forward to welcoming you to St John's College!
The Jobs for Mathematicians careers fair offers you the opportunity to find out about careers using maths and start planning your next career steps or focus your search. Join the fair to meet recruiters in person and explore the opportunities available. You can also chat to careers advisers and ask questions to help your decision making. The fair is open to all Oxford University students, including undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers, as well as Oxford alumni.
While the unsustainability of the food system requires the promotion of sustainable and healthy food consumption in the EU, its complexity poses an important challenge to developing solutions, because several loosely coupled subsystems interact through a large quantity of drivers that together produce societal outcomes. To identify solutions or leverage points in food systems therefore requires understanding these dynamics at least at a relatively high level of abstraction. Within the EU project PLAN’EAT (“Food systems transformation towards healthy and sustainable dietary behaviour”), we have developed a basic stylized EU food systems map based on a state-of-the-art conceptualisation of food systems in five steps: (1) identification of food system trends, (2) description of mechanisms behind EU food system trends based on literature review, (3) development of a first systems map, (4) first adaptation of the systems map based on expert interviews and (5) second adaptation of the systems map and identification of leverage points through focus groups. We identified patterns and leverage points that capture the main functioning of the current food system, beyond the description of food system actors, activities, interactions and outcomes, and call these “food system logics”—parallel to the notion of “institutional logics” in sociology. We describe how these food system logics pervade the food system and how these are amplified by drivers such as innovation, liberalisation and policy.
Join us in person (refreshments provided) or online (register for webinar link: bit.ly/4dOcNP4)
_Please note that this paper will be pre-circulated._ This seminar is taking place *in person only*. For AHRS updates and pre-circulated papers, please join the mailing list by sending a blank email to "$":mailto:ahrs-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk.
We explore medieval poetry across regions and languages, with the guidance of an expert. Texts in the original language and their translation are shared in handouts, read aloud, explained, and discussed. The aim is to gain a global vision of medieval literature through poetry. Since we are driven by curiosity, the reading group evolves according to participants’ interests and interaction. We warmly welcome academics and students of any level and with any background. Coffee, tea, and biscuits are offered to participants.
Teams link: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3aH7IoYwBLlY_nR8d0DFzqC4yXRigyhbzyOceuytRk4g01%40thread.tacv2/1728553869256?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22be558437-bc8f-4f3b-801c-af85d95b70ea%22%7d
This talk will explore the intersection of climate politics and public support for the green transition in Europe, analyzing the political strategies and public attitudes that shape the continent's response to climate change. It will examine how European governments and institutions are addressing the challenges of decarbonisation, renewable energy adoption, and sustainability, while navigating varying levels of public support and opposition. By investigating the social, economic, and political factors that influence public opinion on green policies, the talk will provide insights into the future of Europe’s green transition and its potential to serve as a global model for sustainable development.
Clean energy technologies have been enjoying exponential growth for decades, and are now causing disruption of the fossil fuel system. Whilst the barriers are many, the drivers of change are more powerful and include falling costs, energy security, Chinese leadership, and the race to the top. So we should expect exponential cleantech growth to continue, with very profound consequences this decade. We need to clear away the barriers and get the job done.
Curated and chaired by Dr James Donaldson (Magdalen College, Oxford) Season 7 of OSiMTA marks a change in format from the first six seasons. In place of twice-termly meetings with one invited speaker, sessions will take place once a term with a larger number of position papers and responses around a focused theme, in order to encourage greater engagement and discussion. We are calling these seminars New Voices in Music Analysis, and each session will be curated by one of the latest generation of Oxford researchers in music theory and analysis.
Since 1980, Anna Deavere Smith has interviewed hundreds of Americans and created more than fifteen one-person shows, as part of a project through which she has been credited with establishing a new form of theatre that combines journalistic techniques of interviewing subjects with the art of interpreting their words through performance. In November’s Balliol Online Lecture, where we focus on a subject that coincides with the North American holidays, Professor Smith will discuss her multi-decade project listening between the lines while travelling across America, developing an ear in order to develop a voice, public figures and private identities, character and stereotypes, performance and knowing. The lecture is taken from excerpts of Smith’s four-part 2024 A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, Chasing That Which Is Not Me / Chasing That Which Is Me, which were delivered at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Anna Deavere Smith is an actress, playwright, teacher, and author, who currently serves as Professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and on President Biden’s Committee for Arts and Humanities. Her play This Ghost of Slavery was recently featured in Atlantic Magazine, one of only two published by the magazine during its 167 year history. Other plays authored by Smith include Notes from the Field about the school to prison pipeline; Let Me Down Easy, about health care; House Arrest, about the U.S. presidency and the press; and Twilight: Los Angeles, about the 1992 riots, named one of the best plays of the last 25 years by The New York Times. As an actress in popular culture, Smith has performed in Netflix’s Inventing Anna, ABC’s For the People and Black-ish, Nurse Jackie and The West Wing, alongside feature films including The American President, Philadelphia and Rachel Getting Married. Smith was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama; the MacArthur Genius Fellowship; a Guggenheim Fellowship; the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize; the George Polk Career Award; the Dean’s Medal of Stanford Medical School; plus several Obie awards together with nominations for Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize. She was selected to give the 2015 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities at the John F Kennedy Centre and to be the 73rd A.W. Mellon Lecturer in Fine Arts at the National Gallery in 2024. She holds several honorary degrees from universities and colleges including the University of Oxford, where she held the George Eastman Visiting Professorship and the associated Visiting Fellowship at Balliol during Michaelmas Term 2023.
Caitlin Sturrock (Bristol): The Sourde-Muette and the Good Mother in Pauliska, ou la perversité moderne (1797-1798) Deafness in eighteenth-century France was a growing fascination; the 1770s marked a period of shifting societal perceptions of the sourd-muet. The Abbé de l’Épée published his treatises on the education of the sourds-muets, institutionalising his methods from the school he opened the decade before, and Pierre Desloges published his influential Observations d’un Sourd et Muet, sur un cours élémentaire d’éducation des sourds et muets in 1779, which marked one of the first interventions of a sourd-muet into these debates. Under the Revolution, the sourd-muet became a figure to imitate during the growing paranoia that spoken language caused the violent excesses of the Terror. This is what underpins the case study of this paper. Published over two volumes in An VI (1797-1798), Jacques-Antoine de Révéroni Saint-Cyr’s Pauliska, ou la perversité moderne follows the virtuous comtesse as she moves across borders – from Poland to Italy – in search of safety for herself, her lover – Ernest – and her son – Edvinski. Facing the Baron d’Olnitz, the counterfeiters under the Danube, and Salviati’s group of mesmerists, Pauliska oscillates between imprisonment and freedom to finally end reunited with Ernest and Edvinski. In examining deafness and irrational hearing, this paper will argue that the eponymous Pauliska is virtuous and rational precisely because she is a sourde-muette. When this disability is also central to ideals of femininity – modesty and virtue – this novel further evokes Revolutionary ideas on motherhood. Here, the ideal of women’s enlightenment and the remedy to the irrationality of the Revolution lie in the sourde-muette. Elliot Koubis (St John’s): ‘Being an “ethical” queer subject: Édouard Louis in Greece’ This paper explores what is means to be an ‘ethical’ queer subject in a time where queer movements have largely receded from view or have won mainstream acceptance in certain contexts. It will also explore whether the imagined LGBTQ+ ‘community’ in this climate imposes norms on queer bodies and expression. Louis’s Changer: Méthode (2021) will be read alongside a recent poetry collection in Greek by Spyros Chairetis, Ο Γοργόνος και άλλα πλάσματα (The Merman and Other Creatures, 2023) to examine whether there exists an anxiety for queer subjects across borders to be radical political actors. The paper will draw upon approaches to homonormativity to show how norms shape attitudes toward the queer body and political solidarity towards marginalized groups, as well as expressions of queer shame and regret. By reading Louis’s work through the lens of Chairetis’s poems, the paper will highlight how both authors use apologetic forms of writing to establish a more ethical relationship with queer subjects and collectives. This comparison will highlight how recent queer writing has impacted our understanding of queer sexuality as a political, anti-normative demand and underline the existence of an anti-normative ‘politics of respectability’ in queer cultures. What is more, this paper will stress the need to place literature from the ‘European South’ on the same level as that from the ‘European North’ and it will demonstrate how such comparisons can yield fruitful results.
Part of Black History Month and now in its third iteration, this year’s exhibition features women of African, Caribbean, Black British, and African American heritage, using photographs, biographies, and writings to bring to life their unique journeys, struggles, and experiences at Oxford and beyond. The exhibition launch will be introduced by Dami Folayan, followed by a panel discussion (speakers to be confirmed).
In light of the UK government’s recent commitment to a “full, trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices”, this year the David N. Lyon lecture will bring together an esteemed panel who will discuss the topic from both a national and global perspective. Our panel, chaired by Professor Tim Soutphommasane, Chief Diversity Officer at the University of Oxford, will speak on “Banning LGBTQ+ Conversion Practices; UK and Global Perspectives”
With the rapid development of AI and biotechnologies (including those relating to germline gene editing, brain-computer Interfaces, life extension , etc.) come vast powers to reshape ourselves and the natural world. As technological advances grant us new powers, so do they blur some boundaries between humans, animals, and machines, prodding us to ask the question: what does it mean to be human? Drawing upon readings in the humanities and the sciences, this group will attempt to bridge the existential and empirical study of human identity - and within that context, ask if and how such reflections might help chart a path forward in relation to the right uses of new and potent technologies. The reading group is open to students at all levels of study (including medical students), as well as faculty. Please contact Andrew Moeller if you are interested in joining: andrew.moeller@history.ox.ac.uk Dates and Time: 5:30 pm, 19 November. Pizza and drinks will be served.
This ½ day course is suitable for clinical and non-clinical staff and aims to provide an introduction to the fundamentals of human factors in healthcare. This course will align with the new National Patient Safety Syllabus. PO number will be accepted for 5 staff or more. 3 CPD credits awarded The course introduces participants to basic human factors frameworks, including the Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS), and focuses on practical applications in the workplace to improve understanding of systems in healthcare. Learning Objectives Improve understanding of human factors principles Introduce and explore a human factors framework (SEIPS) Provide opportunities to practice applying SEIPS to real world examples Course content Definition and background of human factors Human factors applied to healthcare Importance of work place culture (including Just Culture tool) Explanation of SEIPS framework Exercises using SEIPS Plenty of opportunity for discussion and questions
Coaching skills can help you build positive and effective working relationships with all those you work with. Coaching is a highly impactful approach to people development and can support individuals to identify goals, gain insights into challenges, consider options and plan actions. They are a valuable asset to leaders and managers and can be useful in a range of workplace conversations, such as feedback, delegation and career development reviews.
An online introduction to using alerts to keep up to date with new research and save you time. A combination of presenter-led instruction and the opportunity for participants to set up email alerts to receive notifications for publications in their field of research. The workshop will cover: how email alerts can help you; setting up alerts on your favourite databases and other platforms for new content in your field; and managing your alerts. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
COURSE DETAILS Issues covered will include work-life balance, planning, prioritising, the need to differentiate between importance and urgency, and using a range of strategies and time-saving ideas. LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of this session you will understand more about: A range of time saving techniques. Time wasting activities and learn how to deal with them. The difference between important and urgent. The importance of planning and setting time aside.
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses a significant threat to modern medicine, jeopardising the advances achieved over recent decades. Without effective interventions, AMR-related deaths are projected to exceed all other causes by 2050. High performing diagnostics are key to understanding and addressing this problem. In my presentation, I will discuss two innovative solutions developed in collaboration with colleagues at IBMS. First, we are employing Raman spectroscopy for the rapid identification of disease-causing bacteria and determine their sensitivity to antibiotics. This technique promises to enhance the accuracy of diagnosis and expedite appropriate treatment decisions. The ambition is to transition to a culture-free new standard for microbiology diagnostics that generates insight on a single cell level. Second, I will introduce a Loop-Mediated Isothermal Amplification (LAMP) method, a user-friendly amplification technique that requires minimal equipment. We have successfully developed assays targeting the most common sexually transmitted infections (STIs) using this approach. I will present data demonstrating the performance of these assays and explore their potential integration into routine clinical practice, ultimately aiming to improve patient outcomes in the face of rising AMR.
As the United States heads into a high-stakes presidential election, this seminar series explores the structural problems and political challenges behind the headlines. We examine why American politics is so polarised and ask: what is at stake in the 2024 elections? The seminars will open with a short presentation by an expert, followed by questions and discussion. Everyone with an interest in US politics is welcome. Lunch will be available. Week 6: Political Violence In the aftermath of the 2024 election, we ask if there is a growing political violence in the United States? If so, why, and how will it matter?
While advances in AI holds great promise for its potential applications in supporting health, health care and ageing well, there is a real risk that it can make mistakes, malfunction and ultimately cause greater harm than good. AI algorithms are not infallible, and its outputs depend on the quality of its inputs and how we regulate them. This seminar will help to explain the potential benefits, but also the real risks that currently exist in using AI in the support and care of older persons who have very unique needs that are often not appreciated or well considered. We will also explore what safeguards need to be considered to ensure AI can ultimately promote healthy ageing and ageing in the right place.
Written with: Matthew Gichohi (CMI), Mette Løvgren (OsloMet), Charlotte Ringdal (CMI) and Espen Villanger (CMI) In baseline interviews with over 3000 parents in Ethiopia, we find that current and planned FGM rates remain high even among parents who believe FGM should be stopped. We find strong indications in the baseline data that high rates of FGM are driven by perceptions and misperceptions of social norms. Inspired by this, we designed an intervention randomly informing respondents about actual opposition to FGM in nearby communities. We do not find that this intervention changed attitudes or beliefs, but we do observe effects on other preregistered outcomes. These effects are particularly striking among men: When men are informed that men in adjacent communities are more against FGM, we find a 22 percent decline in their intentions to subject their own daughters to FGM. For women, the intervention had no significant effect on their intentions or attitudes towards FGM.
Lunch will be available for all from 1pm in the Richard Doll atrium, followed by the symposium which will begin at 1:45pm. For catering and numbers, may we ask that you register by 12pm Wednesday, 6 November 2024, and let us know if you will be joining us for lunch prior to the symposium and if you have any dietary requirements. This will be on a first come, first served basis. Val exemplified excellence, professionalism, scientific integrity and kindness in her daily work – and was the definition of resilience. This will be a meaningful opportunity for us to come together and reflect on Val's incredible contributions and lasting legacy. Please join us as we remember and celebrate her life and work. If you have any queries prior to the event, please feel free to contact Tarryn Ching by emailing tarryn.ching@nds.ox.ac.uk she will be happy to help.
For our next talk, in the Digital Phenotyping seminar series, we will hear from Prof Jason Lerch, Professor of Neuroscience and the Director of Preclinical Imaging, Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (WIN), University of Oxford; Adjunct Scientist, Mouse Imaging Centre (MICe) of the Hospital for Sick Children and Professor of Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto, on Wednesday20 November 2:00pm – 3:00pm, at the Big Data Institute (BDI). Title: Integrating mouse and human imaging studies of autism to identify molecularly defined subtypes Date: Wednesday 20 November 2024 Time: 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm Venue: BDI/OxPop, Seminar Room 0; followed by refreshments in the atrium Abstract: The high degree of heterogeneity in autism and related neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) presents a substantial hurdle for the accurate assessment of individuals and the development of effective therapies. This has led to the search for clusters of individuals sharing common biology and thus greater uniformity in prognosis or treatment response. With only approximately 20% of individuals presenting with an identified likely causative gene, clustering efforts thus far have focused on using clinical, cognitive, or brain imaging phenotypes. However, such data driven clusters in autism and related NDDs have not been linked to potentially actionable underlying mechanisms, limiting their utility. Here we show, using joint modelling of brain imaging data from 135 mouse models and 1,230 human individuals, that NDDs divide into broad groups with a diffuse set of underlying molecular pathways. Further subdivisions isolate three cross-species transdiagnostic subgroups with precise signalling associations: one showing a chromatin/transcription motif, another being synaptic in origin, with the third representing a mix of transcription, GPCR, and Notch signalling. The identified subgroups differentiate based on extent and direction of brain anatomy changes in areas of the cerebral cortex, cerebellum, corpus callosum, and midbrain. These groups are transdiagnostic and include participants with autism, ADHD, or OCD; therefore, a pure autism cluster is elusive. Our results demonstrate that autism and related NDDs subdivide into clusters with cohesive underlying biological mechanisms, opening the door to future stratified treatment trials when and if treatment is desired. This work provides further evidence that the diagnostic boundaries between autism and related NDDs do not clearly reflect underlying biology. Short bio: Jason Lerch is Professor of Neuroscience and the Director of Preclinical Imaging at the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (WIN) at the University of Oxford and an Adjunct Scientist at the Mouse Imaging Centre (MICe) of the Hospital for Sick Children and Professor of Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto. Jason joined WIN in March of 2019; prior to that he completed his Ph.D. in 2005 in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University and a post-doctoral fellowship at MICe from 2005-2008 with Dr. Mark Henkelman and Dr. John Sled. He received his B.A. in 1999 in Anthropology and Social Studies of Medicine from McGill University. His Ph.D. research, under the supervision of Dr. Alan Evans, was on in-vivo measurements of cortical thickness from MRI. His current research focus is on detecting neuroanatomical changes due to behavioural and genetic manipulations in tightly controlled mouse models, primarily related to neurodevelopmental disorders, and to relate these findings to sadly not so well controlled human subjects. As an antidote to these academic pursuits, he likes to leave the city and hike in the woods, whenever possible. Hybrid Option: Please note that these meetings are closed meetings and only open to members of the University of Oxford. Please respect our speakers and do not share the link with anyone outside of the University. The purpose of these seminars is to foster more communication among employees throughout the University, so we strongly advise in-person attendance whenever feasible. Microsoft Teams meeting Join the meeting now Meeting ID: 364 567 830 533 Passcode: K7wSNR ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ If you wish to know more or receive information related to trainings and events at BDI, please subscribe by emailing bdi-announce-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk. You'll then receive an email from SYMPA and once you reply you'll be on the list!
This research seeks to better understand the extent to which corporate marketing influences public attitudes towards policy within a partisan framework. Existing literature establishes the presence of significant corporate influence in government (campaign finance, lobbying) and the influence of corporate marketing on consumer attitudes (towards corporations themselves). Whilst these corporation/government and corporation/consumer relationships have been explored, this research attempts to investigate the flow of indirect influence from corporation to consumer to government. The scope of this project focuses on the context of ‘greenwashing’ (marketing which expresses environmental values to attract sympathetic consumers) and its potential to alter attitudes towards corporate environmental regulation. More specifically, this research will use a large-n survey experiment to examine whether green marketing can influence public trust in corporate environmental responsibility, and therefore potentially pre-empt public demands for more stringent regulatory policy.
How do you ensure that your research is credible, to yourself and others? Preregistration means specifying in advance your hypotheses, methods, and/or analyses for a study, in a time-stamped file that others can access. Many fields, including behavioural and medical sciences, are increasingly using preregistration or Registered Reports (where a journal accepts your study at preregistration phase, and guarantees to publish the results if you follow the registered plan). If you've never preregistered a study before (or even if you have!) it can be complicated and hard to do well. In this workshop, we will go over the 'what,' 'why,' and 'how' of preregistration, and after some practice exercises, you will start drafting your own preregistration. We will also discuss some of the common challenges of preregistration, and its limitations. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
Are you an early career researcher, fixed-term lecturer, or doctoral student trying to get some writing done? Do you research on a topic related to health, medicine, the body, or mind using Humanities or Social Sciences approaches? The Medical Humanities Writing Group is an inclusive, interdisciplinary and casual gathering, encouraging writing as well as meeting others: all are welcome. We have timed writing blocks and coffee/tea/light refreshments, and are focused on setting writing goals and getting work done in a positive and supportive environment. Attendance is free and you are welcome to join us for anything from a single session, to a few, or even the whole term. If you have any queries, please email gordon.barrett@history.ox.ac.uk.
Pragya Kaul (University of Michigan), “The Holocaust from the Indian Ocean” New histories of Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Europe in the formerly colonized lands of European imperial states have opened room for discussion on the global reaches of the Holocaust. However, these histories have remained siloed within their national frameworks, obscuring the entanglements of the Jewish refugee question with the broader structures of interwar European imperial retrenchment and expansion. This paper instead reveals the entanglements of the Holocaust with the politics, geographies, and histories of Britain’s Indian Ocean Empire. It emphasizes the horizontal networks of imperial power that shaped Britain’s response to the Jewish refugee crisis of the 1930s. Using records from the National Archives of Britain, India, and Kenya, I examine British efforts to resettle German and Austrian refugee Jews in the “white highlands” of Kenya. I argue that within these networks, both British India and Indians emerge as major players determining Jewish refugee resettlement. Vidura Jang Bahadur (Northwestern University), “Images, imaginaries and belonging: Transnational citizenship amongst the desi Chinese community” This paper will explore how the memory of the internment of desi Chinese families between 1962 and 1967 by the Indian state, continues to inform the lives of members of the community in India and in the Indian diaspora in the United States and Canada. I analyze how memory, including the images that are “planted” in their bodies as a result of their lived experiences, inform how they imagine themselves and their place(s) in the communities they build across borders. I argue that images and image-making practices are critical to constructing an individual’s sense of place (Massey, 2008) and practices of citizenship. My two-decade long engagement with the desi Chinese community– as photographer and scholar–complicates the easy distinctions between citizen and non-citizen made by the Indian state during the border conflict between India and China in 1962. By examining documents in state archives and narratives of former internees, I make visible the complex “belongings” of the desi Chinese in India, United States and Canada. Citizenship in my project is understood not just as a legal status, but as an everyday practice through which individuals imagine and negotiate their place(s) in transnational contexts.
Although the case for a swift climate transition is clear, its macro-financial viability remains uncertain. To shed light on the macroeconomic and financial response to deep mitigation trajectories controlled by carbon pricing - such as those reviewed in IPCC reports - we integrate a process-based integrated assessment model into a macroeconomic agent-based model. The hybrid framework allows translating energy systems transformations into macro-financial outcomes at business cycle frequency and volatility. The results reveal that rapid transitions induced by fast-growing carbon prices significantly impact unemployment, inflation, and income distribution. Stabilization policies reduce these economic fluctuations, though not completely so in 1.5°C compatible scenarios. Our paper emphasizes the need for coordinating climate and macroeconomic policy during decarbonization. Additionally, it showcases how model integration can lead to a better understanding of the economic implications of low-carbon futures. About the speaker Francesco Lamperti is Professor of Economics at the Institute of Economics and L’EMbeDS, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies (Pisa) and Scientist at the RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment. His research interests are mainly focused on climate change economics, macroeconomics, agent-based and integrated assessment modelling, and technological change. Francesco has participated in several research projects funded by public and private institutions, and he has published in a wide spectrum of scientific journals (e.g. Nature Climate Change, PNAS, Ecological Economics, the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Environmental Research Letters). Currently, he leads the “FIND” ERC StG project funded by the European Research Council (2024-2028). Francesco holds a Bachelor and a Master of Science in Economics from Bocconi University (Milan) and a Ph.D. in Economics from Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies (Pisa).
The complete set of connections in the brain is called our connectome. Over the last 20 years we have found out more about how this network is organised and how this organisation is linked to brain function [1,2]. I will outline how characteristic network features arise during evolution, how they are linked to brain function, and how they originate during individual brain development [3]. For example, small-world features enable the brain to rapidly integrate and bind information while the modular architecture, present at different hierarchical levels, allows separate processing of various kinds of information while preventing wide-scale spreading of activation [4]. Hubs play critical roles in information processing and are involved in many brain diseases [5]. Recent results show how spatial and temporal factors shape the development of these network features. Temporal factors, in terms of the birth time of neurons and their formation of connections, as well as spatial factors, in terms of the distance between neurons, influence the extent of bidirectional or long-distance connections, network modules, and network hubs. We also show how the spatial organisation of connectomes is linked to improved cognitive performance as seen through network dynamics and synchronization across regions [6]. Finally, I outline how network analysis and simulations can be applied to inform mental health interventions to improve cognitive performance. In particular, I will highlight noninvasive brain stimulation with focused ultrasound which is able to modulate activity in deep-brain structures. [1] Martin, Kaiser, Andras, Young. Is the Brain a Scale-free Network? SfN Abstract, 2001. [2] Sporns, Chialvo, Kaiser, Hilgetag. Trends in Cognitive Science, 2004. [3] Kaiser. Changing Connectomes. MIT Press, 2020 https://mitpress.mit.edu/changing-connectomes [4] Kaiser et al. New Journal of Physics, 2007. [5] Kaiser et al. European Journal of Neuroscience, 2007. [6] Hayward, Huo, Chen, Kaiser. Network Neuroscience, 2023. Biography: Marcus Kaiser is leader of Neuroinformatics UK representing more than 600 researchers in the field (http://www.neuroinformatics.org.uk/) and Chair of the Neuroinformatics Special Interest Group of the British Neuroscience Association. After studying biology and computer science, he obtained his PhD, funded by a fellowship from the German National Academic Foundation, from Jacobs University Bremen in 2005. In 2016, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology. He is on the editorial boards of Network Neuroscience (MIT Press), PLOS Computational Biology, and Royal Society Open Science, and author of the first review on connectomics. Research interests are understanding the origin of brain disorders through modelling brain development and using models to inform therapeutic interventions, in particular using non-invasive brain stimulation (see http://www.dynamic-connectome.org/ ).
Mascall and Barth shared a common concern with the influence of liberal Protestantism on their churches in England and Germany. They agreed this problem was best addressed through the lens of natural theology. Yet, while for Mascall a Thomistically informed understanding of natural theology was the best way to counteract liberal Protestantism’s influence on the Church, for Barth, natural theology was to blame for the Church’s confusion. Was Barth’s sharp delineation between human reason and divine revelation in the end, complicit with the ontological duality of modernity that was the basis of the liberal Protestantism he was rejecting? Dealing with modernity on its own terms, Barth undermined the capacity of the Church’s ministry of Word and Sacrament to be effective agents of personal transformation. Whereas Mascall’s realistic ontology not only repudiates the idealist foundations of liberal Protestantism, it also offers the Church the necessary ontological foundation for understanding its ministry of Word and Sacrament as effective embodiments of God’s transforming grace.
It is well-known that segregation can already emerge if individuals act upon weak preferences to associate with similar others. Yet, evidence on how such ingroup preferences compare across social settings and identity dimensions remains lacking. To address this gap, we conducted three large-scale, preregistered conjoint experiments in the Netherlands on choices of neighborhoods and civic organizations, which enable us to isolate ingroup preferences from other drivers of segregation. We find that ingroup preferences are strong and widespread, showing up in both settings and across all studied dimensions (age, ethnicity, education). The exception is that lower-educated individuals display no meaningful ingroup preferences along educational lines, whereas higher-educated individuals do. Ingroup preferences are strongest among individuals with little exposure to outgroups in real life and are independent of the expected intensity of contact. Our results demonstrate that preferences for similarity play a critical role in sustaining segregation, over and above opportunity structures.
Using examples from the energy transition, climate change mitigation and healthcare, Warren East, former CEO Rolls-Royce & ARM, will explore the interplay of novel technologies and major societal challenges, as well as the obvious and less obvious barriers to the take up of new ideas. The first talk in a new termly series of discussions with industry leaders and policymakers, run jointly by the Oxford Martin School and the Saïd Business School. REGISTRATION To register to join the event live in-person in Oxford: https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/events/warren-east To register to join live online on Crowdcast: https://www.crowdcast.io/c/warren-east
Oxford Mathematics Public Lecture We all have to live with uncertainty about what is going to happen, what has happened, and why things turned out how they did. We attribute good and bad events as ‘due to chance’, label people as ‘lucky’, and (sometimes) admit our ignorance. I will show how to use the theory of probability to take apart all these ideas, and demonstrate how you can put numbers on your ignorance, and then measure how good those numbers are. Along the way we will look at three types of luck, and judge whether Derren Brown was lucky or unlucky when he was filmed flipping ten Heads in a row. David Spiegelhalter was Cambridge University's first Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk. He has appeared regularly on television and radio and is the author of several books, the latest of which is The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck (Penguin, September 2024). Please email external-relations@maths.ox.ac.uk to register to attend in person. The lecture will be broadcast on the Oxford Mathematics YouTube Channel on Wednesday 11 December at 5-6pm and any time after (no need to register for the online version). The Oxford Mathematics Public Lectures are generously supported by XTX Markets.
In an era marked by unprecedented technological advancements, our world is undergoing a profound transformation that challenges the very essence of what it means to be human. From the rise of artificial intelligence, to the widespread use of robotics, to advancements in biotech, to the omnipresence of smartphones, the impact of technology on our lives is undeniable. Technology has revolutionized how we communicate, work, learn, receive medical care, and perceive reality. As we stand at the intersection of innovation and human existence, it is imperative to explore the multifaceted ways in which technology is reshaping our society, raising profound questions about ethics, privacy, and the essence of humanity. This lecture will provide a brief journey into the future, providing projections for how our lives will change as technological innovations continue to accelerate. We will examine how we should think about the future as we strive to create a better world. And we will explore how technology is impacting all areas of human life and how we can leverage behavioural science and human-centred design to ensure that our growing reliance on technology does not eclipse the fundamental importance of human connections. Dr. Scott Clarke is Senior Managing Partner and Global Practice Leader for Digital Transformation & Innovation at Infosys Consulting. As a behavioural economist, Scott has dedicated his career to helping organizations grow and innovate by understanding the ramifications of sociological and technology change and how this affects relationships with their customers and employees. His current work investigates how digital technologies are changing the world, and what types of organizations are best able to lead this change rather than being disrupted by it. Over a 30-year consulting career, Dr Clarke is proud to have partnered with a variety of leading organizations on their digital transformation journeys including Unilever, Nestle, Philips, Burberry, Merck, T-Mobile, Gilead Sciences, Chevron, Johnson & Johnson, Ford Motor Company, and Sony Electronics. Prior to joining Infosys Consulting, he led global management consulting practices for several other professional services organizations including PwC, IBM, Capgemini and Cognizant. Dr Clarke holds a D.Phil in Behavioural Economics from the University of Strathclyde and a BA (Hons) in Economics and Political Science from Queen’s University (Canada). He is formerly Senior Lecturer in Behavioural Economics at Queen Mary University of London. His academic work focuses on the relationship between humanity and technology, and how technology advancements including AI, robotics and biotech expand humanity’s horizons and redefine what it means to be human.
COURSE DETAILS You will learn how to choose the best journal for your work, negotiate the peer review process and deal with reviewer comments. The course will cover: Why publish and how that affects how you publish. The structure of a paper. What to include in the title and abstract. Open access. Impact metrics and citations. Ways to get published more quickly. Publicising your paper once it is published. LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of the session participants will be able to: Develop and understanding of the peer review process. Construct an effective title and abstract. Be equipped to choose journals for future papers. Be equipped to publicise future papers. PREVIOUS PARTICIPANTS HAVE SAID "Nice to have a professional with an in-depth industry knowledge offer training and advice.'" "The course was excellent and very well delivered. there was a real sense of professionalism.'" "Now it doesn't feel so scary to try to publish a paper.'" INTENDED FOR DPhil students and research staff. The course is suitable for DPhil students and postdocs who want to understand the publishing process better, whether or not they have already submitted a paper.
The second in a duo of courses (attendees should attend the Fundamentals course prior to Logistics) that will cover the logistics of researching, publishing, and locating open scholarship resources and tools at the University of Oxford. Subjects include: what is the Oxford University Research Archive; depositing work into ORA via Symplectic Elements; depositing data into ORA-data; applying for one of Oxford’s APC block grants; registering or connecting your ORCID; how to be included in the rights retention pilot; and locating and checking funder policies. Ideally the 'Fundamentals of Open Access' course will have been attended. If you’re not in a position to attend this course you can find similar information in our e-learning package to work through prior to attending Logistics. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
Puzzled by PICO? Daunted by databases? Baffled by Boolean? This one-hour introductory class will offer top tips and advice on how to find literature to answer a research question. No prior experience necessary! Together, we will break down a question into the PICO format, put together a structured search, and try it out in PubMed. By the end of this session, you will be able to: explain what structured searching is, and when to use it; break your research question down into searchable concepts; and make use of Boolean operators (ANDs/ORs) in your structured searches. Intended audience: students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
On 14 August 2024, MPox was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the WHO. Soon after, there arose a perhaps natural proclivity towards comparison between COVID-19 and Mpox. We keep telling ourselves that it is important to learn the lessons of COVID-19, but there is little agreement on whether there is any lesson, what it is, and whether it applies to different diseases. What counts as appropriate response to infectious disease outbreaks depends on contested tradeoffs between different values - for instance, civil liberties vs public safety or lives vs livelihoods. With the heavy disagreement around such tradeoffs, it is unclear what exactly we can learn from the COVID-19 experience, except for the fact that an infectious disease outbreak is likely to bring to light underlying disagreement about the proper place of health, of science, of trust in authorities in our system of values. But perhaps therein lies one of the main lessons of the COVID-19 experience: health crises generate disagreement that, in normal times, doesn’t express itself to such an extent. This lesson can be better understood from a humanities perspective. This workshop will bring together the perspective of history, philosophy, medical geography and other humanities approaches to investigate what the humanities can contribute to learning lessons from the COVID-19 experience, in view of handling MPox and other future infectious disease crises. 12:00 Sandwiches and coffee on arrival Chair Erica Charters Faculty of History, University of Oxford 12:15 Utsa Bose University of Oxford: History 12:25 Alberto Giubilini University of Oxford: Philosophy 12:35 Tolulope Osayomi University of Ibadan and AfOx Fellow, University of Oxford: Medical Geography (on Zoom) 12:45 Mofeyisara Omobowale University of Ibadan: Medical Anthropology (on Zoom) 13:00 Discussion Hybrid option available, registration link will be available soon on the event page on the TORCH website [https://torch.ox.ac.uk/event/from-covid-19-to-mpox-lessons-from-the-humanities]
On 14 August 2024, MPox was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the WHO. Soon after, there arose a perhaps natural proclivity towards comparison between COVID-19 and Mpox. We keep telling ourselves that it is important to learn the lessons of COVID-19, but there is little agreement on whether there is any lesson, what it is, and whether it applies to different diseases. What counts as appropriate response to infectious disease outbreaks depends on contested tradeoffs between different values - for instance, civil liberties vs public safety or lives vs livelihoods. With the heavy disagreement around such tradeoffs, it is unclear what exactly we can learn from the COVID-19 experience, except for the fact that an infectious disease outbreak is likely to bring to light underlying disagreement about the proper place of health, of science, of trust in authorities in our system of values. But perhaps therein lies one of the main lessons of the COVID-19 experience: health crises generate disagreement that, in normal times, doesn’t express itself to such an extent. This lesson can be better understood from a humanities perspective. This workshop will bring together the perspective of history, philosophy, medical geography and other humanities approaches to investigate what the humanities can contribute to learning lessons from the COVID-19 experience, in view of handling MPox and other future infectious disease crises. It will also discuss a blogpost by Alberto Giubilini, Tolulope Osayomi, and Utsa Bose on this topic. Program 12.00: Sandwiches and coffee on arrival Chair: Erica Charters, Faculty of History, University of Oxford 12.15pm: Utsa Bose, University of Oxford: History 12.25pm: Alberto Giubilini, University of Oxford: Philosophy 12.35pm: Tolulope Osayomi, University of Ibadan and AfOx Fellow, University of Oxford: Medical Geography (on Zoom) 12.45pm: Mofeyisara Omobowale, University of Ibadan: Medical Anthropology (on Zoom) 1.00pm - 1.30pm: Discussion
The UN Archives Geneva platform gives access to the fonds and collections managed by the United Nations Library and Archives in Geneva, including the archives of the United Nations in Geneva, the League of Nations (1919-1946), international peace movements (from 1870), and private papers. It offers the possibility to search both the description of files or archival documents and in the full text of archival documents that have been digitised. The presentation given by staff from UN Archives Geneva provides an overview on the archive categories they manage, with a focus on the League of Nations archival fonds and collections, including the LONTAD digitisation project. It explains the difference between archival and official documents, and describes the structure of the League of Nations archives. It also gives an introduction on how to use and perform searches on the UN Archives Geneva Platform. At the end of the session you will understand: the five archives' categories; the distinction between archival and official documents; the organisation of the League of Nations Archives; and how to use the UN Archives Geneva platform.
Buckling is normally associated with a compressive load applied to a slender structure; from railway tracks in extreme heat to microtubules in cytoplasm, axial compression is relieved by out-of-plane buckling. However, recent studies have demonstrated that tension applied to structured thin sheets leads to transverse motion that may be harnessed for novel applications, such as kirigami grippers, multi-stable `groovy-sheets', and elastic ribbed sheets that close into tubes. Qualitatively similar behaviour has also been observed in simulations of thermalized graphene sheets, where clamping along one edge leads to tilting in the transverse direction. I will discuss how this counter-intuitive behaviour is, in fact, generic for thin sheets that have a relatively low stretching modulus compared to the bending modulus, which allows `giant actuation' with moderate strain.
Narrative CVs are being adopted by many funders, nationally and internationally, to give researchers the opportunity to showcase a wider range of skills and experience than is possible in a traditional academic CV; an example is the UKRI Résumé for Research and Innovation (R4RI). Writing a narrative CV requires a different way of thinking about and describing your skills, experience and contributions to research and innovation compared to a traditional CV. Writing your first narrative CV will take some time and effort; you might not be sure about what activities to include, and how to describe their quality, relevance, and your involvement in them. This presentation will try to demystify and simplify narrative CVs by providing advice, prompts and suggestions for how to write one. Join the event via "Teams":https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_OThmOWQ1NDEtYmUwZC00ZTg4LTk4OGYtYjNmNzRkM2FmNGYy%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%221d2cf1ee-340b-4a81-b80d-39e44585f59b%22%7d Speakers: Mary Muers (Research Culture Facilitator, Medical Sciences Division) Tanita Casci (Director, Research Strategy & Policy Unit, Research Services) Kanza Basit (Senior Research Facilitator, Social Sciences Division) Susan Black (Careers Adviser for Researchers, Careers Service) Gavin Bird (Research Facilitator, Earth Sciences)
The relationship of space and time with one’s lived experience is less explored. A reductionist portrayal of space and time in research has made its construct static and closed. We aim to explore the effective use of mobile interviews as a data generation method to better understand the contextual, spatial and temporal embeddedness of lived experiences in qualitative research. Mobile interviews, as an innovative method, have certain sensory and performative attributes. This article intends to show how mobile interviews can enhance the understanding of spatio-temporal dynamics embedded in the everyday lives of rural students. Current research in education lacks both thematic and methodological guidance and reflection on conducting mobile interviews. The contribution of our article is three-fold. First, it aims to decolonise the dominant discourse on rurality by exploring how mobile interviews can facilitate participants to make sense of the contextuality, spatiality and temporality of their everyday life and empower their voices. Second, it aims to enhance the understanding of the associations between spatio-temporal dynamics with identity formation by using mobile interviews. Third, we highlight the guidance and reflections across contexts to support researchers to conduct mobile interviews with rural communities more ethically and efficiently. The article draws from two ongoing doctoral research projects conducted in India and China. One project traces the intergenerational identity construct of forested rural communities in India. Another project focuses on the identity formation of students coming from underprivileged rural backgrounds attending universities in urban China. Both projects have common themes of rurality and the identity construct of rural students. The article will present the experiences of these two researchers using mobile interviews and emphasise the importance of understanding the spatio-temporal dynamics when working with underprivileged rural communities in qualitative research. It will provide methodological guidance and reflections on mobile interviews across contexts. Teams link: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_ZWNiYjMxNzYtNTRiZC00Y2Y1LTkzYjItZWZiNjhkYTIyMDMz%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%225f581465-1def-4d51-8d4c-45a3b26b5b58%22%7d
In 1954 the first two volumes of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings were published (The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers). To celebrate this event, and following on from last year’s Tolkien seminars, Exeter College – Tolkien’s undergraduate college – is proud to host a series of free lunchtime talks organised by the Faculty of English on The Lord of the Rings. Open to the public these talks are aimed at going deeper in some key aspects of the novel, Tolkien as a writer, and some of the spin-offs it has generated. Please note that all seminars will take place at the Fitzhugh Auditorium, Cohen Quad (Exeter College), Walton Street, Oxford, OX1 2HG: Week 1(17/10/2024) - Holly Ordway: 'Tolkien as Interpreter and Transformer of Culture: The Making of The Lord of the Rings as a Modern Book'. Week 2 (24/10/2024) - John Garth: 'Quisling and Prisoner: How the Second World War shaped the treason of Isengard'. Week 3 (31/10/2024) - HALF-TERM NO TALK Week 4 (7/11/2024) - Mark Williams: 'A Harmless Vice: Tolkien’s Invented Languages'. Week 5 (14/11/2024) - Giuseppe Pezzini: 'The authors and styles of The Lord of the Rings'. Week 6 (21/11/2024) - Grace Khuri: 'Medievalism in the Margins: Echoes of Anglo-Saxon England in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings – From Page to Screen'. Week 7 (28/11/2024) - Michael Ward: 'C.S. Lewis’s Influence on The Lord of the Rings'. Week 8 (05/12/2024) - Stuart Lee: 'The ‘Key-spring’ of The Lord of the Rings?'.
Lesson of the week, clinical cases and research. All clinical and academic staff and students welcome. Coffee, Tea and Cake will be served.
When inflation is driven by high commodity prices, or by the price of other globally traded inputs, there can be an expansionary bias in the uncoordinated monetary policy choices of individual central banks. The bias arises because central banks do not internalize the effect of global demand on commodity prices.
(This is a joint event with the Modern History Seminar) It is not easy to categorise Charlotte Yonge’s significance. Known mainly for her best-selling novel, The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), and as a peripheral member of the Oxford Movement, there is a tendency by mainstream literary and historical scholars to overlook the variety of her achievements. Least studied has been her commitment to the expansion of parochial education both locally and nationally, taking forward the battle to defend the voluntary schools of the Church of England after the 1870 Education Act.
A teams link will be circulated beforehand via the OMHEP mailing list. If you would like to attend in person, please contact emma.mckeown@phc.ox.ac.uk Biography Rowena Jacobs is Deputy Director and Professor of Health Economics in the Centre for Health Economics at the University of York. Rowena leads research on the economics of mental health and mental health care. Her research interests include incentives, performance measurement and funding of mental health services, the interplay between physical and mental health and the economic impact of mental health problems. She has expertise in the linkage and use of large and complex datasets to inform mental health policy. She has published widely and acted as an adviser to various UK government and other agencies, as well as the World Bank, WHO and OECD, and her research has had significant impact on policy. Abstract Providing high quality mental healthcare at a reasonable cost is a key policy priority in many countries. There is currently a significant evidence gap in understanding the relationship between cost and quality in mental healthcare. We undertook a systematic review to examine this relationship, as well as the strengths/limitations of the methodology used to estimate the marginal cost of mental health care quality, where this was done. We then sought to estimate the marginal cost of quality in mental healthcare services in England for adults, for a range of quality indicators (both at the individual and at the mental health provider level), including waiting times, readmissions, continuity of care, clinician reported outcome measures and mortality. We calculate quality indicators using data from the Mental Health Service Dataset (MHSDS) for the period 2016/17-2021/22 and cost all activity in the MHSDS using National Cost Collection and Patient Level Information Costing Systems (PLICS) unit costs. Our systematic review finds only 6 studies (of moderate to poor quality based on risk of bias) suggesting a large evidence gap. Our preliminary empirical results are heterogenous depending on the quality indicator used but find predominantly negative marginal costs, suggesting that quality improvement efforts amongst mental healthcare providers might not necessarily be more costly. Policymakers will however need to account for the nuances in results for different measures of quality.
Sopon Bezirdjian had an illustrious career as a decorator of Ottoman palaces in Constantinople. He moved to Victorian Britain in the 1880s, where he published a pattern book and repositioned himself as an Owen-Jones-style authority on ‘Oriental’ ornament. As well as working as a jobbing designer in Manchester, he designed two monumental pavilions for the Paris 1900 Exposition, and his archive of drawings, preserved at the Manchester Metropolitan University Library, also holds a few undated seemingly political works. Sopon’s son, Iskender Bezirdjian, who changed his name to Theodore Birch, worked as a journalist and printer, mainly in Paris, founding the Ottoman Philanthropic Society with other Armenian luminaries like Calouste Gulbenkian in 1908. This paper reconsiders Sopon and his artistic works in the context of Iskender/Theodore’s activism. We will investigate, through these two former Ottoman-Armenians in Britain and Paris, the changing orientations, even of elite Armenians like Bezirdjian/Birch and Gulbenkian, to the developing violence and humanitarian situation in their former homeland. What means did they use to raise their voices, and why did this appear to take so long in this group of Armenians?
About the speaker Jeremy Large is an economist and data scientist at St Hugh's College, Oxford. As well as various topics in financial economics, Jeremy has research interests in the area of demand estimation, where he seeks to understand people’s choices about what to buy from among the wide and complex array of products on offer in today’s economy. This work can help design good policies, such as setting tax and tariffs. Jeremy held a Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford from 2005 until 2008, when he joined the hedge fund AHL within Man Group Plc. Jeremy subsequently joined the hedge fund, Tudor Investment Corporation, where he was a Quantitative Portfolio Manager. Jeremy is also an investor in social enterprise and participates in the activities of the organization, Ashoka.
Zotero is a reference management tool that helps you build libraries of references and add citations and bibliographies to word processed documents using your chosen citation style. This online introduction covers the main features of Zotero. The learning outcomes are to: add references to Zotero; edit and organise references in Zotero; add in-text citations and/or footnotes to your papers; and create bibliographies. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
Postgraduate students, fellows, staff and faculty from any discipline are welcome. This group aims to foster frequent interdisciplinary critical dialogue across Oxford and beyond about the political impacts of emerging technologies. Please contact Elisabeth Siegel at elisabeth.siegel@politics.ox.ac.uk in advance to participate or with any questions. Remote attendance is possible, but in-person attendance is prioritized (and provided refreshment). Discussion topics will be finalized and optional readings will be sent out a week in advance. You do not currently have to be affiliated with the University of Oxford to attend and participate in discussions. About the speaker: Dr. Roxana Radu is an Associate Professor of Digital Technologies and Public Policy and a Hugh Price Fellow at Jesus College. Her research focuses on the governance of technology and internet-related policymaking. She is the author of the monograph 'Negotiating Internet Governance' (Oxford University Press, 2019), inspired by her work with the diplomatic community in Geneva, Switzerland. She often advises governments and international organisations on digital governance issues and currently serves on the Advisory Group of the EU Cybersecurity Agency. Since January 2023, she is the elected Chair of the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet). Roxana holds a PhD (summa cum laude) in International Relations from the Geneva Graduate Institute and an MA (honours) in Political Science from the Central European University.
Health inequalities seem both pervasive and durable. They exist in every country for which we have data, and they have been largely stable in recent years. The degree to which health inequalities are in fact durable over the long run is, however, unclear. We use deep learning and optical character recognition to combine, for the first time, individual level data for almost every person in England and Wales that died between 1860 and 1990 with data on wealth at death taken from probate records. Together, this newly constructed dataset provides the most detailed analysis of health inequalities over the long run ever to be conducted. We show that inequalities in life expectancy between the rich and poor decreased dramatically in the UK between 1860 and 1990, with particularly large reductions since 1940. We provide the most granular picture currently available on both when, and among which parts of the wealth distribution these changes in life expectancy occurred. These results touch on important debates among various academic disciplines (demography, economic history, and medicine) concerning the inequalities underlying the demographic transition, the ‘fundamental causes’ of health inequalities, and the impact of industrialisation on society. Booking is required for people outside of the Department of Social Policy and Intervention (DSPI). DSPI Members do not need to register. This talk is part of the DSPI Michaelmas Term Seminar Series 2024
This is a part of the Health Economics Seminar Series See below the details for this term: 14/11/2024 - Apostolos Davillas, Macedonia University: Biological Age and Predicting Future Health Care Utilization 21/11/2024 - Cheti Nicoletti, York University: DHD, School Performance and Economic Outcomes 19/12/2024 - David Bradford, Georgia University (Co-Editor for the journal Health Economics): The Effect of a Large Prescription Opioid Diversion Event on Opioid Mortality in the U.S.
The innovative upcycling of discarded biomass and littered non-recyclable plastic waste has garnered significant interest for its potential to address sustainability challenges. This seminar will cover the extraction and purification methods of polysaccharides from food processing waste. It will also explore the functionalisation of these polysaccharides and their nanomaterials through chemical modification or blending with other materials, highlighting their potential applications in fields such as dentistry, catalysis, and wastewater treatment. Special emphasis will be placed on chitinous biomass recovered from mushroom cultivations, seafood restaurants, and insect farms. Additionally, the seminar will delve into the novel approach of carbonising non-recyclable plastic waste, such as cigarette filters, to produce hard carbons for alkali-ion batteries. Finally, the sustainability and economic aspects of using discarded biomass and littered non-recyclable plastics as feedstocks for functional materials will be discussed. The goal of the seminar is to provide insights and future trends into how natural and synthetic waste can be transformed into valuable resources through the development of functional materials, thereby contributing to a more sustainable and circular economy.
Dipesh Vasant is a consultant luminal gastroenterologist at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust. Dr Vasant trained mainly in the North West, but undertook a period of advanced motility training in USA, before completing the advanced Salford-Oxford intestinal failure Nutrition fellowship in 2017. He has a strong clinical and research interest in provision of integrated multidisciplinary care and gut-brain therapies for patients’ with disorders of gut-brain interaction and motility disorders, and runs a specialised motility lab in Manchester. Dr Vasant has been a co-author on two recent BSG guidelines in the management of functional GI disorders, and is currently working on a chapter with the Rome Foundation as a committee member for the forthcoming updated Rome V classifications for disorders of gut-brain interaction.
Following the rise of social networks and the spread of dis-information and misinformation on social media, political scientists, social psychologists, and media scholars have proposed and studied several instruments to slow down propagation of false news. In this talk, Sergei Guriev, Dean of the London Business School & leading Russian dissident, will discuss the recent research on the economics of fighting disinformation and fake news on social media. Professor Guriev will argue that the most effective interventions are simple nudges or prompts (so-called accuracy nudges), that shift attention to accuracy in a manner that raises the salience of reputational concerns. In turn, this results in reduced sharing of false news and increased sharing of true content on social media. The insights of this talk matter for our contemporary understanding of populist politics in democratic systems as well as the rise of influential misinformation campaigns by authoritarian regimes. The talk will be followed by a drinks reception. REGISTRATION To register to join the event live in-person in Oxford: https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/events/fighting-misinformation To register to join live online on Crowdcast: https://www.crowdcast.io/c/fighting-misinformation
The Las Casas Institute is launching six short online videos for use in parishes, Sixth-Forms, and University Chaplaincies. Dr Roderick Howlett looks at: (1) What it means to be human; (2) The Economy; (3) Work; (4) the Environment; (5) Conflict Resolution; (6) Citizens’ Responsibility in a Democracy.
Stephen Alford, _All His Spies: The Secret World of Robert Cecil_ (2024); Noah Millstone, ‘Seeing Like a Statesman in Early Stuart England’, _Past and Present_, 223:1 (2014), 77-127 Conrad Russell, ‘The Foreign Policy Debate in the House of Commons in 1621’, _Historical Journal_, 20:2 (1977), 289-309 S.G. Zeitlin, ‘Francis Bacon on peace and the 1604 Treaty of London’, _History of Political Thought_, 41:3 (2020), 487-504.
To join online, please register in advance here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUrdOyrpjotH9fLe4MPfgdU07ypRhiJBaI1
The Celtic Seminar is held jointly by Oxford and the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies (CAWCS), Aberystwyth. All Oxford seminars will be at 5.15 pm on Thursdays in a hybrid (online and in person) format. You will be able to join virtually via Microsoft Teams. Please contact david.willis@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk if you need a link to join online. In person, we will be in [TBC]. All CAWCS seminars will be held online at 5.00 pm on Thursdays via Zoom, and, for hybrid seminars, in person at the National Library of Wales. Please contact a.elias@wales.ac.uk for the link.
Mental disorders, including depression and anxiety, rank among the leading causes of disability worldwide. Emerging evidence suggests that global megatrends, defined as major and long-lasting changes in societal, environmental, and geopolitical landscapes, can exacerbate the risk of mental ill health. In this talk, Dr. Omid V. Ebrahimi discusses how global megatrends and critical incidents, such as infectious disease outbreaks and economic recessions, impact the onset of mental disorders and can alter human behaviour during moments when societal cohesion is most crucial. Drawing on his research into the COVID-19 pandemic, this discussion aims to deepen our understanding of how large-scale societal phenomena interact with individual psychological outcomes, and how insights from past crises can inform strategies for future preparedness and resilience.
In 1461, the manuscript Chantilly, Bibliothèque du Musée Condé, 564 was donated by Francesco d’Altobianco degli Alberti to the three daughters – aged 9 to 14 – of the Florentine banker Tommaso Spinelli. The gift of a seemingly outdated manuscript of complex polyphonic music to young girls (and not to a professional musician, as had happened with the Squarcialupi codex) seems surprising, and raises the question of how long the Trecento repertory could have survived into the next century. A new source contains a long capitolo ternario about the seven joys of the Virgin Mary, written by the Dominican theology master Simone d’Angelo dei Bocci da Siena (1438-1509). The poem is dated 1486 and is dedicated to a lady of the Sienese aristocracy, Madonna Perna degli Ugurgieri, for her spiritual instruction. Towards the end of the poem, the description of the Assumption into heaven is particularly musical, mirroring the classic late-medieval iconography of angels playing instruments and singing around the Virgin. In the tradition of the quodlibet or incatenatura, the verses are built around a series of quotations of musical incipits. In this paper, I propose an identification of many of them (hoping also to gather suggestions from my audience!). The results provide a view on the repertory known to the Sienese upper classes at the end of the 15th century. The presence of many Trecento pieces testifies that – similarly to the Spinelli a few years before – an aristocratic lady such as Madonna Perna was ready to catch the musical references to a dated, but still familiar repertory among the theological subtleties of the poem.
The extant literature suggests that a dramatic move to weaken the power of a large segment of the military elite would invite collective resistance against the dictator. Yet, other theoretical work suggests that the dictator can divide even a powerful elite by offering selective incentives to a subset, thus forestalling collective resistance even in the midst of a naked power grab. In ‘Compensation and the Consolidation of Authoritarian Power: Evidence from China’s 2016 PLA Reform’, Keng-Chi Chang, Victor Shih and Hans H. Tung examine the dynamics of this path to power consolidation through China’s 2016 reform of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). They draw on an original database of Chinese top leaders’ activities and factional ties with PLA officers to show Xi Jinping compensated senior officers in units affected by the reform without displaying favouritism to his followers during its gestation period. After the reform, however, factionalism dominated instead. The paper unpacks how a dictator personalizes political power in a highly institutionalized setting. Victor C. Shih is Director of the 21st Century China Center and Ho Miu Lam Chair Professor in China and Pacific Relations at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego, specializing in China. He is the author of a book published by the Cambridge University Press, entitled Factions and Finance in China: Elite Conflict and Inflation, and also a new book Coalitions of the Weak: Elite Politics in China from Mao’s Stratagem to the Rise of Xi. He is also editor of Economic Shocks and Authoritarian Stability: Duration, Institutions and Financial Conditions, published by the University of Michigan Press. He is further the author of numerous articles appearing in academic and business journals, including The Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, The American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics, and The Wall Street Journal. Shih served as principal in The Carlyle Group’s global market strategy group and continues to advise the financial community on China related issues. Shih graduated summa cum laude at the George Washington University and received his PhD in government from Harvard University. He is currently working on several papers using quantitative data to analyse the Chinese political elite, local debt in China and China’s analysis of the US.
Presenter: Lucia Marchi (University of Trento) Title: The long life of the Trecento repertory Discussants: Blake Wilson (Dickinson College, PA) and Lachlan Hughes (Trinity College, Cambridge) In 1461, the manuscript Chantilly, Bibliothèque du Musée Condé, 564 was donated by Francesco d’Altobianco degli Alberti to the three daughters – aged 9 to 14 – of the Florentine banker Tommaso Spinelli. The gift of a seemingly outdated manuscript of complex polyphonic music to young girls (and not to a professional musician, as had happened with the Squarcialupi codex) seems surprising, and raises the question of how long the Trecento repertory could have survived into the next century. A new source contains a long capitolo ternario about the seven joys of the Virgin Mary, written by the Dominican theology master Simone d’Angelo dei Bocci da Siena (1438-1509). The poem is dated 1486 and is dedicated to a lady of the Sienese aristocracy, Madonna Perna degli Ugurgieri, for her spiritual instruction. Towards the end of the poem, the description of the Assumption into heaven is particularly musical, mirroring the classic late-medieval iconography of angels playing instruments and singing around the Virgin. In the tradition of the quodlibet or incatenatura, the verses are built around a series of quotations of musical incipits. In this paper, I propose an identification of many of them (hoping also to gather suggestions from my audience!). The results provide a view on the repertory known to the Sienese upper classes at the end of the 15th century. The presence of many Trecento pieces testifies that – similarly to the Spinelli a few years before – an aristocratic lady such as Madonna Perna was ready to catch the musical references to a dated, but still familiar repertory among the theological subtleties of the poem
Book abstract: In his new book, 'God’s Man in Iraq: The Life and Leadership of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani', Century International fellow Sajad Jiyad draws on original sources and hundreds of interviews during decades of fieldwork inside Iraq to show how Sistani, as the revered senior Shia cleric in a Shia-majority country, commands the loyalty of millions of faithful. With quiet authority, Sistani has tried from behind the scenes to steer Iraq through a series of existential crises since the U.S. invasion and fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003. During decades of turmoil, war, and regime change in Iraq, Sistani has loomed above every other cleric and politician. In the summer of 2014, as the Islamic State stormed across Iraq, an ascetic Shia cleric raised his voice and rallied the country to stop the extremists’ bloody march. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, at the time eighty-five years old, delivered a decree through a Friday prayer sermon on June 13, 2014: “Citizens who are able to bear arms and fight terrorists in defense of their country, people, and sanctities,” he said, “must volunteer to join the security forces.” The decree, which came to be known as the jihad fatwa, successfully rallied Iraqis—across ethnic and sectarian backgrounds—to repel the Islamic State. The moment is but one of the starkest examples of Sistani’s decisive influence, not just in Iraq but in the wider world of Shia Islam. Sistani has done more to stabilize Iraq than any other figure, and has appealed to perhaps a majority of the world’s Shia Muslims with his indirect model of clerical authority—a stark contrast to the competing model of direct clerical rule advanced by his rivals in Iran. Sistani is now ninety-four, and contenders have already begun positioning themselves to succeed him. Jiyad assesses the players and the complex selection process for Najaf’s leadership. Observers of Iraq and of Shia power will find God’s Man in Iraq an incomparable appraisal of Sistani’s legacy—and an invaluable guide to the perilous transition that will follow his tenure. Bio: Sajad Jiyad is a fellow at Century International and director of the Shia Politics Working Group. An Iraqi political analyst based in Baghdad, he is the managing director of Bridge, an Iraqi nongovernmental organization and consultancy focused on development projects for young people. Sajad’s main focus is on public policy and governance in Iraq. He is frequently published and cited as an expert commentator on Iraqi affairs. Sajad’s educational background is in economics, politics, and Islamic studies.
Using Story Completion to Understand Gen Z’s Religious and Spiritual Role Models Thursday 21 November, 5.15pm. Ertegun House, St Giles, Oxford The Ertegun Scholarship Programme in association with TORCH presents the Ertegun Futures Seminar for Michaelmas Term 2024. We are delighted to welcome Dr Edward David as our speaker for - "Using Story Completion to Understand Gen Z’s Religious and Spiritual Role Models" Dr Edward David is McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Theology & Religion at Oxford and incoming Lecturer in Ethics & Values at King’s College London. He is author of A Christian Approach to Corporate Religious Liberty (2020) and has just received a grant from the John Fell Fund in support of his project investigating religious and spiritual role models for 18- to 27-year-olds. Other themes in his research include organisational and business ethics; virtue theory; philosophical and theological anthropology; and law and religion. Through the Saïd Business School, he has acted as consultant for the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses UK programme, which supports over 1,900 small business owners through networking and educational opportunities. Thursday 21 November, 5.15pm, Ertegun House, St Giles, Oxford.
AI and genomics are transforming our understanding of health and disease. We can now trace a disease from its molecular roots to its pathophysiologic manifestations. In the past, we categorized diseases by their clinical and biochemical manifestations. We developed treatments based on the average responses of large populations of patients. We knew there were inexplicable variations in the natural history of most diseases and in the responses to identical therapies. We couldn’t explain those changes. Now we are beginning to understand them. What will be left for doctors to do in this brave new world? We will need to develop humanistic skills in new ways. Medical training will need more sophisticated and sustained focus on the self-awareness that is essential for empathy, on the complexity of human psychology and spirituality, and the linguistic and meta-linguistic skills that enable communication. Our success or failure will determine whether AI is more like Skynet from Terminator, an artificial neural network-based superintelligence system that becomes conscious and attacks humans or like Wall-E, in which a benevolent, empathic AI, in a post-apocalyptic world, restores our humanity.
Pembroke College invites you to hear from a panel of six industry leaders about career entry, opportunities, and development in the film & TV world. Sharing their insights on the evening are: Oscar-winning producer, David Parfitt; Film & TV Group Partner at Wiggin LLP (law firm), Charles Moore; BBC Film Commissioning Executive, Claudia Yusef; Co-founder of talent agency, Conway van Gelder Grant (representing Cumberbatch, Bonham Carter et al.), Nicola van Gelder; Oscar-nominated screenwriter, Hossein Amini; and the Director of the London Film School, Chris Auty. Members of the audience will have the opportunity to ask questions and attend a drinks reception following the event.
The seventh century reign of Songtsen Gampo, Tibet’s first Buddhist emperor, remains one of the most contentious issues in Tibetan historiography. As the royal founder of both the city of Lhasa and the earliest Buddhist temples on the Plateau, Songtsen Gampo is credited with overseeing the creation of Tibet’s first written script as well as its first written laws. In later hidden ‘treasure texts’ such as the Pillar Testament and the Compendium of Manis, he is described as invoking illusory monks, craftsmen, soldiers, and executioners to do his royal bidding, as well as ritually subduing the ‘she-demoness’ of Tibet in order to found the Jokhang temple at Lhasa. By contrast, near-contemporary dynastic records – not least the Old Tibetan Annals, as unearthed at Dunhuang – provide a more prosaic view of his rule. The overt clash between these two different kinds of account have led to strident dismissals of the later visionary narratives as demonstrating an inability to distinguish fact from myth (Vostrikov), as being revised in terms of later Buddhist doctrine (Huber), as the partisan glorification of an ancestral monarch (Sørensen), and as metaphors for patriarchal gender relations (Gyatso). While each of these insights have some truth to them, their upshot is to set such accounts aside as any kind of reliable history and to relegate them to the domain of folklore. This talk will approach the issue from a slightly different perspective: Rather than concentrating on the truth or falsity of Songtsen Gampo’s life, it will delve into what such texts tell us about the historiographic intentions of the authors. How did the authors wish their readership to understand history and political agency as more general concepts? How did they think history should be written and understood? The answers, I would suggest, may give us some insight into an indigenous Tibetan understanding of history that transcends the European divide between religion and politics.
John Geddes is the WA Handley Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the NIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre.
The Chief Medical Officer has confirmed that attendance at the Surgical Grand Rounds can count toward internal CPD, with 1 point awarded per hour. Please note that in-person attendance is required, and you will need to sign the attendance register. Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend online.
In this 60-minute online workshop you will be introduced to the methodologies and principles underpinning the conduct of literature searches for systematic reviews, scoping reviews and other evidence reviews. The session will cover: formulating a focused research question; preparing a protocol; developing a search strategy to address that research question; choosing appropriate databases and search engines; searching for grey literature and ongoing studies; storing and managing references; and documenting and reporting your search. Intended audience: students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
Join us for the second Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshop of Michaelmas Term 2024, led by Professor Dame Hermione Lee, Professor Elleke Boehmer, and Dr Kate Kennedy. In this interactive workshop, three celebrated life-writers, Professor Dame Hermione Lee, Professor Elleke Boehmer, and Dr Kate Kennedy, will attempt to answer the question, ‘Why Life-Writing?’ Drawing upon selected passages from Deborah Levy’s ‘living autobiography”, Things I Don’t Want to Know (2013), Prof Boehmer will discuss the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ underlying Levy’s approach to writing her life. The evolution of her newly-released book, Cello: A Journey through Silence to Sound (2024)—which intertwines quest-story, life-writing, and autobiography— will inform Dr Kennedy’s response to the workshop's guiding question. Finally, Professor Lee will reflect on the interplay between academic study, biography, and autobiography. Deborah Levy, Things I Don't Want to KnowPreparation: Participants are encouraged to familiarise themselves with the following texts: Deborah Levy, Things I Don’t Want to Know (2013) Kate Kennedy, Cello: A Journey through Silence to Sound (2024) Additionally, participants should be prepared to briefly discuss their experiences—as writers and readers—navigating the relationship between academic study and life-writing. How has your experience of reading or writing a memoir/autobiography/biography related to or enhanced your study of a particular author? This event is exclusively open to current members of the University of Oxford. Workshop places will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis, with priority given to members of the English Faculty. Confirmations of attendance will be sent out one week before the event. Tea, coffee, and cake will be served during the workshop. The event will take place in the St Cross Building on Manor Road (more information). Attendees are encouraged to wear face coverings while indoors and to use an LFT prior to attending.
New contrasting methods, imaging tools, and data analysis strategies allow the observation of otherwise complex or hidden relationships between cellular, subcellular, and molecular constituents of cells and tissues. I will describe how advances in multi-tilt electron tomography, the development of new probes for correlated light microscopy, X-ray micro-CT, correlated multi-ion mass spectroscopy imaging and electron microscopy, and state-of-the-art 3D EM technologies add to our knowledge of structure and function in complex biological systems. Recent accomplishments include the determination of the higher-order structure and functional organization of chromatin in intact cell nuclei; the analysis of actin-associated structures within dendritic spines; and analyses of the extracellular matrix (ECM) around multiple synapse types in mammalian brains. The ECM work explores Roger Tsien’s theory that the brain stores life-long memories by regulating the activity of extracellular proteases and thereby influences the locations and relative strengths of synapses over a lifespan.
Understanding the mechanisms behind the spatial distribution, self-organisation and aggregation of organisms is a central issue in both ecology and cell biology. Since self-organisation at the population level is the cumulative effect of behaviours at the individual level, it requires a mathematical approach to be elucidated. In nature, every individual, be it a cell or an animal, inspects its territory before moving. The process of acquiring information from the environment is typically non-local, i.e. individuals have the ability to inspect a portion of their territory. In recent years, a growing body of empirical research has shown that non-locality is a key aspect of movement processes, while mathematical models incorporating non-local interactions have received increasing attention for their ability to accurately describe how interactions between individuals and their environment can affect their movement, reproduction rate and well-being. In this talk, I will present a study of a class of advection-diffusion equations that model population movements generated by non-local species interactions. Using a combination of analytical and numerical tools, I will show that these models support a wide variety of spatio-temporal patterns that are able to reproduce segregation, aggregation and time-periodic behaviours commonly observed in real systems. I will also show the existence of parameter regions where multiple stable solutions coexist and hysteresis phenomena. Overall, I will describe various methods for analysing bifurcations and pattern formation properties of these models, which represent an essential mathematical tool for addressing fundamental questions about the many aggregation phenomena observed in nature.
Abstract: In her talk, Professor Anu Bradford challenges the common view that more stringent regulation of the digital economy inevitably compromises innovation and undermines technological progress. The existing technological gap between the United States and the EU should not therefore be attributed to the laxity of American laws and the stringency of European digital regulation. Instead, there are more foundational features of the American legal and technological ecosystem that have paved the way for U.S. tech companies’ rise to global prominence—features that the EU has not been able to replicate to date. By severing tech regulation from its allegedly adverse effect on innovation, Bradford seeks to advance a more productive scholarly conversation on the costs and benefits of digital regulation. It also directs governments deliberating tech policy away from a false choice between regulation and innovation while drawing their attention to a broader set of legal and institutional reforms that are necessary for tech companies to innovate and for digital economies and societies to thrive.
Prior to the India-Eurasia collision, the southern Eurasian margin either resembled a Cordillera-style accretionary orogen or a complex Japan-Mariana-style margin with extended back-arc basins and oceanic crust separating volcanic arc(s) from Eurasian continental lithosphere. Distinguishing between these alternative scenarios has implications for the convergence history of India and Eurasia, the development of the India-Eurasia collision zone, and the post-collision structure of the Himalayan orogen. In this presentation I will overview the geological constraints on the India-Eurasia collision in Northwest India and Pakistan, which show that a significant back-arc basin developed in the Late Cretaceous between the Kohistan-Ladakh arc and Eurasia. The Kohistan-Ladakh arc initially intruded a Jurassic forearc ophiolite at the southern edge of Eurasia before drifting southward in the Late Cretaceous during a period of Neotethyan slab rollback. The southward migration of the Kohistan-Ladakh arc away from Eurasia persisted until the Paleocene accretion of the Kohistan-Ladakh arc onto India. Final India-Eurasia continental collision occurred in the Lutetian when the Karakoram terrane was thrust over the Kohistan-Ladakh arc during the formation of the Shyok suture zone. So, at least in the western Himalaya, the Late Cretaceous to Paleocene southern Eurasian margin more closely resembled a Japan-Mariana-style system than a Cordilleran-style orogen. This conclusion is consistent with the paleogeography of the Neotethys Ocean to the East and West of the India-Eurasia collision zone, which is typified by complex southward arc migration, back-arc basin development, and multiple collision events.
This event will be held in person only, under Chatham House rules. We explore how governments have responded to ransomware since its surge in 2020, using case studies of governmental measures and strategies adopted to tackle ransomware networks. From Singapore to France and from Australia to Costa Rica, new policy levers have started to be used, including: 1) expanding the mandates of existing institutions; 2) setting up permanent operations to fight ransomware; 3) exploring new forms of international collaboration and 4) using active defence measures. In the process of countering ransomware, there has been a significant shift from a strictly defensive stance to deploying offensive capabilities that aim to neutralise and shut down attacking systems, within and outside of a given jurisdiction. This presentation discusses the key findings from this research and offers recommendations for public action. Dr Roxana Radu is an Associate Professor of Digital Technologies and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, , University of Oxford and a Hugh Price Fellow at Jesus College. She is passionate about technology governance and building a better digital future. She often advises governments and international organisations on digital governance issues and currently serves on the Advisory Group of the EU Cybersecurity Agency.
Modern neuroimaging has advanced our understanding of the human brain in a way that would have been unthinkable even 30 years ago. fMRI in particular has captured the public imagination, but is certainly not the only way we can use imaging to study human neurophysiology. Here I will discuss recent work using multimodal human neuroimaging combined with non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) to study the physiological processes occurring in the brain as we learn, using human motor learning as an exemplar. I will discuss how techniques such as MR Spectroscopy can reveal neurochemical changes associated with learning, how modern electrophysiology can determine important neural dynamics, and how we can link these levels of explanation to develop potential new therapeutic tools for motor recovery after brain injuries such as stroke. Finally, I will reflect on to what extent we can relate our findings with those from animal models, and what challenges remain to be overcome.
We estimate time series models to show that increased volatility in U.S. interest rates leads to a decline in the common trends of GDP, consumption, and investment, with this effect being more pronounced in emerging economies than in advanced ones. To explain this, we develop a small open economy model featuring endogenous growth, financial crises, and shocks to international interest rate volatility. Our model reveals that large interest rate shocks have asymmetric effects on firm values: adverse shocks cause disproportionately larger declines. This asymmetry arises because firms' values serve as collateral, tightening borrowing constraints and further depressing firm values and economic growth. Consequently, higher interest rate volatility reduces innovation and growth by making large interest rate shocks more likely.
Dr Yun earned a BSc in Molecular Biology from the University of Buenos Aires and a PhD in Genetics and Biochemistry from Cambridge University at the MRC-Laboratory of Molecular Biology, where she focused on the mechanisms underlying genome stability. During her doctoral studies she became interested in the control of cellular plasticity and thus joined Jeremy Brockes’ lab (University College London) where she begun to explore the mechanisms underlying regeneration of complex structures using salamanders as model organisms. Since September 2017 she is a group leader at CRTD-Center for Regenerative Therapies TU Dresden and Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Germany. Her current research leverages the axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum) and the Iberian ribbed newt (Pleurodeles waltl) systems to uncover fundamental principles of regeneration and ageing.
Achieving pressing climate and biodiversity goals demands more than just technological and scientific innovation – it requires deep social, cultural, and political change. However, environmental challenges are often framed as technological and scientific ‘fixes’ that overlook these critical social dimensions, sidelining alternative knowledges and solutions. Ultimately, strengthening connections between people and nature must be at the heart of solutions to the biodiversity and climate crisis. This makes the social sciences – including geography, anthropology, history, arts, psychology, sociology, politics, and economics – vital for opening up alternative perspectives, pathways, and possibilities that foster justice and well-being for both humans and nature. This seminar will explore how integrating social sciences, alongside ecological and technological approaches, can stimulate new ways of understanding environmental challenges and develop more genuinely transformative solutions and real-world impact. This panel brings together social science experts from a range of disciplines – Professor Patrick Devine-Wright (University of Exeter), Dr Beth Brockett (Forest Research), Professor Karen Jones (University of Kent), and Dr Eric Kumeh (University of Oxford) – to explore how more impactful, integrated and collaborative approaches are vital for tackling the poly-crisis of climate change, biodiversity decline, inequality and well-being issues. Drawing on their UK-based and internationally significant research spanning academia, policy, and practice, the panellists will discuss how the social sciences can open up new ways of thinking and innovative solutions to achieving transformative change in ways that are equitable and socially ‘just’. This includes championing inter- and transdisciplinary, more-than-human, and equitable approaches that embrace diverse forms of Indigenous, community-led, and place-based science and expertise. Following a brief opening talk by Dr Constance McDermott, the seminar will feature short presentations by each panelist before opening up to an interactive discussion between the panel and the audience, led by Professor Michael Winter OBE. The event is being organised and co-facilitated by Dr Caitlin Hafferty. Biographies Professor Patrick Devine-Wright Patrick Devine-Wright is Professor of Geography at the University of Exeter. An IPCC lead author in AR6, his research addresses social dimensions of climate change mitigation, including acceptance and justice dimensions of low carbon energy transitions, community engagement with infrastructure siting (e.g. wind energy, power lines, shale gas) and place attachment. He is Director of the £6.25m ESRC-funded ACCESS Network (Advancing Capacity for Climate and Environment Social Science), which aims to increase the visibility, impact and coordination of social science to address environmental challenges, through co-production with researchers and policy makers across the UK. Professor Karen Jones Karen Jones is an environmental historian/historical geographer with an interest in species, spaces and stories. She has worked on various geographies and is a specialist on conservation politics and history, settler colonization and its ecological impacts, landscape values and human engagements with a range of critters (especially wolves). She is currently working on human-environmental relations in this country, especially in the areas of parks and urban greening and on the nature and culture of rewilding. Dr Beth Brockett Beth Brockett works for Forest Research as a Senior Social Scientist. She is currently leading on research which includes developing a better understanding of community benefits from new tree planting and public values relating to trees outside of woodland. Beth previously worked for Natural England providing evidence for the Environmental Land Management Schemes programme, supporting Natural England in embedding an evidence-led, best-practice engagement organisational culture, and she spent time as the social science lead for the national People and Nature Survey. She has a particular interest in promoting the role of social science within the environmental sector and is involved in the multi-partner ACCESS project. Beth's background is in human geography, ecology and soil science and she considers herself an interdisciplinary specialist. She has also previously worked as a farm conservation adviser, an academic researcher, and as a community development practitioner. Dr Eric Kumeh Eric Kumeh is a postdoctoral researcher focused on power and equity in land-use governance. Passionate about land access in rural Africa, questions how multi-level governance of nature recovery influences land-use choices and decisions among marginalized and underserved communities in mosaic landscapes, characterized by diverse and divergent interests, in low-income countries. Professor Michael Winter OBE Michael Winter OBE is the Glanely Professor of Agricultural Change at the University of Exeter based jointly in the Centre for Rural Policy Research and the Department of Geography. He was director of the CRPR from 2002 to 2017 and his career as a rural social scientist spans 45 years with numerous research reports, academic publications, and research grants. He has a long track record of policy engagement and has held many board and committee positions and chairmanships at both local and national levels, including being a board member of Natural England for 7 years until 2023 and of Rothamsted Research for nine years until 2023. Currently he chairs Devon Local Nature Partnership and Natural England Social Science Expert Panel. Dr Constance McDermott Constance L. McDermott is an Associate Professor and Jackson Senior Fellow at Oriel College and the Environmental Change Institute (ECI), University of Oxford. She is also leader of ECI's Land Society and Governance Programme. Her work spans the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa and addresses the linkages among diverse local, regional and global priorities for land use, forests, and climate mitigation and adaptation. She examines both new and old institutions of land use governance, from market-based initiatives such as forest and carbon certification to sovereign state-based and traditional community-based approaches, to better understand how dynamics of trust and power shape environmental and social policies and facilitate or inhibit desired outcomes. Recent research directions include the study of carbon and natural capital markets, and supply chain policies, such as the EUDR, and their intersection with alternative and community-based approaches. Dr Caitlin Hafferty Caitlin Hafferty does research on the governance, politics, and democratic participation aspects of nature recovery and Nature-based Solutions. She conducts transdisciplinary research that is theoretically-informed and has real-world impact, working in collaboration with government, private business, charities, social enterprises, and community organisations, primarily within a UK context. Her current postdoctoral research, funded by the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, explores how nature recovery initiatives can be governed in more participatory and collaborative ways for transformative change towards multiple sustainability objectives, and the impact of private carbon and nature markets in shaping this. The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and Biodiversity Network are interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners. The views, opinions and positions expressed within this lecture are those of the author alone, they do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery/Biodiversity Network, or its researchers.
This panel event, with Sonja Mejcher-Atassi, author of 'An Impossible Friendship', Marilyn Booth, author of 'The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz', and Peter Hill, author of 'Prophet of Reason', will discuss the writing of biography in modern Middle Eastern history. Book abstracts: 'An Impossible Friendship: Group Portrait, Jerusalem Before and After 1948' - In Jerusalem, as World War II was coming to an end, an extraordinary circle of friends began to meet at the bar of the King David Hotel. This group of aspiring artists, writers, and intellectuals—among them Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Sally Kassab, Walid Khalidi, and Rasha Salam, some of whom would go on to become acclaimed authors, scholars, and critics—came together across religious lines in a fleeting moment of possibility within a troubled history. What brought these Muslim, Jewish, and Christian friends together, and what became of them in the aftermath of 1948, the year of the creation of the State of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba? Sonja Mejcher-Atassi tells the story of this unlikely friendship and in so doing offers an intimate cultural and social history of Palestine in the critical postwar period. She vividly reconstructs the vanished social world of these protagonists, tracing the connections between the specificity of individual lives and the larger contexts in which they are embedded. In exploring this ecumenical friendship and its artistic, literary, and intellectual legacies, Mejcher-Atassi demonstrates how social biography can provide a picture of the past that is at once more inclusive and more personal. This group portrait, she argues, allows us to glimpse alternative possibilities that exist within and alongside the fraught history of Israel/Palestine. Bringing a remarkable era to life through archival research and nuanced interdisciplinary scholarship, An Impossible Friendship unearths prospects for historical reconciliation, solidarity, and justice. 'The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt' - Zaynab Fawwaz (d. 1914) emerged from an obscure childhood in the Shi'I community of Jabal 'Amil (now Lebanon) to become a recognized writer on women's and girls' aspirations and rights in 1890s Egypt. This book insists on the centrality of gender as a marker of social difference to the Arabic knowledge movement then, or Nahda. Fawwaz published essays and engaged in debates in the Egyptian and Ottoman-Arabic press, published two novels, and the first play known to have been composed in Arabic by a female writer. This book assesses her unusual life history and political engagements—including her work late in life as an informant for the Egyptian khedive. A series of thematically focused chapters takes up her views on social justice, marriage, divorce and polygyny, the 'gender-nature' debate in the context of local understandings of Darwinism, education, and imperialism and Islamophobia, attending also to works by those to whom Fawwaz was responding. Her role in the first Arabic women's magazine, and her contributions to later women's magazines, are part of the story, too. Further chapters consider her uses of history in fiction to criticize patriarchal control of young women's lives, and her play as an intervention into reformist theatre, and the question of women's access to public culture in 1890s Egypt. Questions of desirable masculinities are central to all of these. Fawwaz was also known for her massive biographical dictionary of world women. In that work as in her essays, Fawwaz articulated an ethics of social belonging and sociality predicated on Islamic precepts of gender justice, and critical of the ways male intellectuals had used 'tradition' to silence women and deny their aspirations. 'Prophet of Reason: Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East' - In 1813, high in the Lebanese mountains, a thirteen-year-old boy watches a solar eclipse. Will it foretell a war, a plague, the death of a prince? Mikha’il Mishaqa’s lifelong search for truth starts here. Soon he’s reading Newtonian science and the radical ideas of Voltaire and Volney: he loses his religion, turning away from the Catholic Church. Thirty years later, as civil war rages in Syria, he finds a new faith – Evangelical Protestantism. His obstinate polemics scandalise his community. Then, in 1860, Mishaqa barely escapes death in the most notorious event in Damascus: a massacre of several thousand Christians. We are presented with a paradox: rational secularism and violent religious sectarianism grew up together. By tracing Mishaqa’s life through this tumultuous era, when empires jostled for control, Peter Hill answers the question: What did people in the Middle East actually believe? It’s a world where one man could be a Jew, an Orthodox Christian and a Sunni Muslim in turn, and a German missionary might walk naked in the streets of Valletta. *Copies of 'An Impossible Friendship' and 'Prophet of Reason' will be available for sale at the event from Gulp Fiction.*
Maki Fukuoka’s research and teaching interests are coordinated by two broad axes: histories of seeing and alternative modes of knowing. Her first book, The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality and Representing the Real in Nineteenth-Century Japan, excavated how the notion of shashin, which came to be used for photography in the 19th century, circulated and articulated a particular need of knowing among the practitioners of materia medica. This paper focuses on contemporary photography, namely Tsuchida Hiromi's publication Fukushima (2018). It explores how Tsuchida visualises and narrativises the region through a new metaphorical approach that challenges how and what we can know about the area that has been marked by the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami.
The Indian National Army (INA) trials of 1945–46 have generally been given short shrift by historians in their cataloguing of the Indian freedom movement. This book examines to what extent the trials had an impact on the final phase of India’s quest for independence. In so doing, it unveils that, while the Indian National Congress’s extended odyssey to win independence was essentially about a passive push-back, at a critical juncture of its campaign to extinguish British colonialism in India, it applauded and capitalised on the INA’s use of force. The central, explosive narrative is about Britain holding a court martial of three officers of the INA – Shah Nawaz Khan, Prem Sahgal and Gurbaksh Dhillon – convicting them, before a dramatic turn in events. The material unearthed by the book throws new light on a decisive juncture leading to the transfer of power in India. It will be indispensable for researchers interested in South Asia, especially the Indian freedom movement. It will be invaluable for students of history, colonialism, military studies, politics in pre-Partition India and law. Ashis Ray has been a foreign correspondent since 1977, broadcasting on BBC, CNN and ITN and writing for Ananda Bazar Group, The Times of India, The Tribune, The Hindu, Hindustan Times, The Guardian, The Observer, The Times, Financial Times and Nikkei Asia, among other publications. He was CNN’s founding South Asia bureau chief before becoming the network’s editor-at-large. He has been elected president of Indian Journalists’ Association (Europe) for several terms. In 1982, the Commonwealth Institute selected him among 10 ‘eminent Indians’ in Britain. In 1995, he was conferred a National Press Award in India. He was made an academic visitor by St Antony’s College, Oxford for 2021–22. He intends to continue in academia. The Trial that Shook Britain is his fourth book.
‘Rewilding’ Later Prehistory: Can prehistory inform our relationships with nature in the present day? The ‘Rewilding’ Later Prehistory project centres on wildlife in Bronze and Iron Age Britain (2500BC to AD43), providing a counterpoint to narratives dominated by an emphasis on advances in farming and domestication, as well as increasingly bounded and permanent settlement. Such ‘human-centred’ approaches are at odds with current environmental concerns, with ecologists, environmentalists and nature practitioners increasingly challenging the notion that domination of, and division from, the rest of the natural world by humans can be considered as synonymous with progress. Combining zooarchaeological, archaeobotanical, isotopic, archaeogenetic and palynological studies, ‘Rewilding’ Later Prehistory sets out to provide a richer understanding of human relationships with wildlife in the past, with a view to building links to nature recovery efforts in the present. Current understandings of human’s role in the natural world are inevitably shaped by a recent history of industrial farming and mass resource extraction, with the idea of humanity as a globe-shaping force expressed in the term often applied to our current era: the ‘anthropocene’. By critically evaluating the rigid divisions applied to archaeological evidence such as ‘wild’ and ‘domestic’, ‘Rewilding’ Later Prehistory seeks to situate humans within nature, as part of ever-changing multi-species environments in which all human action and understanding takes place. Evidence of the ways ‘wildness’ was woven into everyday life manifests in a range of ways – from the wild plants, both utilised and resisted, which filter into fields and flourish in fallow land, to the creation of objects from animal materials, such as boar tusk pendants and decorated antler combs. This talk will address, from an archaeological perspective, a fact that bears down rapidly on us today: that humans cannot exist apart from nature.
Join Worcester College Provost, David Isaac CBE, as he interviews leading role models about their lives and careers. Naz Shah MP has been the Labour Member of Parliament for Bradford West since 2015 and served in the Shadow Cabinet between 2018 and 2023. A former carer, NHS commissioner and mental health charity chair, Shah entered Parliament to advocate for women's rights. Born in Bradford, she was sent to Pakistan at the age of 12 to escape her mother's violent partner, where she was forced into an arranged marriage. Her mother was later jailed for killing the man who abused her and Shah worked with Southall Black Sisters to campaign for her release. Inspired by her mother's work as a Labour councillor and mayor, Emily Thornberry MP joined the Labour Party in her teens. After qualifying as a barrister in the mid-1980s, she began her career representing striking miners, Wapping print-workers and P&O seafarers. Emily won Islington South and Finsbury in 2005, in the wake of the Iraq War, by 484 votes. She has since been re-elected four times and in the shadow cabinet covered the Defence, Brexit, Foreign Affairs, International Trade, and Attorney General briefs.
Apparent paradoxes in the physical descriptions of the natural world around us and in the perceived cosmos have existed since antiquity. These have grown in sophistication as the field of physics has developed over thele centuries and with the advent of the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics in particular. This conference will examine several paradoxes in physics from across the centuries and will scrutinise how the fundamental physics and mathematics underpinning them may help to resolve these. Whilst attendance is free, booking is required for both in-person and online attendance. Please see website for details: https://www.stx.ox.ac.uk/event/happ-one-day-conference-paradoxes-in-physics There will be a special conference dinner at St Cross College, in the evening following the end of the conference, with an after-dinner talk by Professor Sir Roger Penrose OM FRS, Nobel Laureate (University of Oxford) on the visual and mathematical paradoxes in the art of M C Escher. You can book to attend the dinner here: https://www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk/conferences-and-events/st-cross-college/happ-centre/paradoxes-in-physics-one-day-conference
In this online workshop you will be shown the functionality of Zotero, which is a free-to-use software programme used to manage references and create bibliographies. Zotero will be demonstrated on a Windows PC but users of MacOS or Linux computers will be able to follow the demonstration. The workshop will cover: understanding the main features and benefits of Zotero; setting up a Zotero account; importing references from different sources into Zotero; organising your references in Zotero; inserting citations into documents; and creating a bibliography/reference list. Intended audience: students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
We are excited to invite you to Nipah Virus Research Day, a pivotal research event hosted by the Pandemic Sciences Institute that will explore the latest interdisciplinary advancements in Nipah virus research from the PSI Henipavirus Programme and more broadly. There will be three sessions, discussing medical countermeasures, virology and structural biology, as well as ethics and policy. A keynote address will be given by Professor Chris Broder from the Uniformed Services University, Bethesda, MD, USA, discussing research on medical countermeasures for Nipah and Hendra viruses. Highlights include: - Preliminary data from the Nipah virus vaccine clinical trial - Keynote address by Professor Chris Broder - Updates on work by PAD initiative-funded researchers - Novel approaches to societal and ethical considerations for Nipah research and outbreak management - Opportunities to network with other researchers from the PSI The event will take place on 25 November 2024 from 9.30–17:30 in the Richard Doll Building lecture theatre, Old Road Campus, University of Oxford. It will close with a drinks reception from 16.45–17.30. The event is open to staff and students at PSI, and across the University of Oxford. Nipah Virus Research Day Schedule 9:30 - 9:50 – Arrival, coffee, tea and pastries 9:50 -10:00 – Welcome and opening address Session 1: Medical Countermeasures – Vaccines and Monoclonal Antibodies 10:00 -10:45 – Nipah virus vaccine trial 10:45 -10:55 – Break 11:00 -12:00 – Keynote speaker: Chris Broder 12:00 -13:30 – Lunch, with posters and exhibitors Session 2: Virology and structural biology 13:30 -15:15 – Short talks 15:15 -15:45 – Coffee break Session 3: Ethics and policy 15:45 -16:45 – Short talks 16:45 -16:55 – Closing remarks 16:55 -17:30 – Networking drinks
Python Drop in session with Ellen Visscher, CDT student, BDI, University of Oxford Date: Monday 25 November Time: 10:00 - 12:00 Venue: BDI/OxPop Seminar room 0 Register: https://forms.office.com/e/6AJUxJes7y?origin=lprLink Bio: Before commencing her DPhil, Ellen was a backend software developer, using python. She is passionate about python coding practices, and teaches python for data science through the department of continuing education. Ellen has also run a knowledge-share seminar series related to improving researchers’ workflow and practices Abstract : -Do you find yourself using print statements throughout your code? -Are you tired of waiting for your program to keep running to the same point only to have another error be thrown? -Are you still using notebooks for everything even though your codebase is large? It’s time you upgraded to using the python debugger! It will make your life and coding so much easier, and you will wonder how you ever coded before. Topics to be covered: -Using python debugger in VS Code, including within notebook files -Navigating larger python code bases -IDE tips and tricks -Linting tools to format code for you Learning Objectives: -Use python debugger in VS Code including in notebooks -Understand how to set up different run configurations -Navigate code bases, and understand shortcuts for writing clean code -Set up external linters Prerequisite: Be familiar with Python and please bring your own device Audience: Anyone looking to improve their Python skills Software required: VS Code, Python
Huge progress has been made in developing theoretical models of choice that jointly account for both behavioural and neural data. However, certain aspects of decision making that arise in naturalistic environments have been given less attention by cognitive neuroscience to date. For example, decision making in real-world settings is rarely confined to discrete trials; it contains many intermediate ‘information sampling’ decisions about what to attend to as the decision unfolds; and it often requires the decision-maker to actively navigate and explore the environment. These features all introduce unique challenges for the design and analysis of cognitive neuroscience experiments, but once they are accounted for, they can provide a new perspective on the neural representations that support adaptive behaviour. I will discuss recent neurophysiological experiments that address some of these challenges.
Will China or the US lead the way in the Fourth Industrial Revolution? To answer this question, leading thinkers and policymakers in both countries draw lessons from past technology-driven power transitions that centre the moment of innovation – the eureka moment that sparks astonishing technological feats. In this book, Jeffrey Ding offers a different explanation of how technological revolutions affect competition among great powers. Rather than focusing on which state first introduced major innovations, he investigates why some states were more successful than others at adapting and embracing general-purpose technologies at scale. Drawing on historical case studies of past industrial revolutions as well as statistical analysis, Ding develops a theory that emphasizes institutional adaptations oriented around diffusing technological advances throughout the entire economy. Applying GPT diffusion theory to analyze US–China competition in AI, this book derives novel insights about how today’s technological breakthroughs will affect the US–China power balance, as well as the optimal strategies for the US and China to pursue. Jeffrey Ding is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. His book Technology and the Rise of Great Powers, published with Princeton University Press, investigates how past technological revolutions influenced the rise and fall of great powers, with implications for US–China competition in emerging technologies like AI. Ding’s research has been published in European Journal of International Relations, Foreign Affairs, International Studies Quarterly, Review of International Political Economy, and Security Studies. He received his DPhil in 2021 from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and earned his BA in 2016 at the University of Iowa.
Please join either in person or online. For in-person attendees, the talk will be preceded by a light lunch at 12.15pm. Please email comms@sociology.ox.ac.uk with any questions or to receive the Microsoft Teams link.
Literature suggests that promoting equitable educational attainment may be one of the effective ways to address the historical inequities in American society, due to its positive association with an array of desirable outcomes. College preparation and career preparation in high school have both been shown to have positive effects on college enrollment, persistence, and completion, respectively. In Fall 2018, Massachusetts launched Early College and Innovation Career Pathways—a college preparation intervention and a career preparation intervention, respectively—to promote educational attainment and career success for all. This study uses generalized propensity score (GPS) inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) to gauge the comparative effects of participating in either program on college readiness, access, and success. Given that an emergent share of the literature and the United States government define college and career readiness collectively, findings and discussions of this paper explore variations in outcomes by intervention and by racial and socio-economic groups to inform policy and practice towards promoting educational attainment for all in Massachusetts high schools. Teams link to join online: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_YWYzNjg0YzgtYzIwNC00NmJiLTk0YWYtMWQwYzY3YTI0Nzcz%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22b33f55d8-6202-46f8-a141-737715faff88%22%7d
The talk will provide an overview of the current epidemiology of congenital CMV and discuss the current vaccine pipeline. Biography: Seilesh Kadambari is a paediatric infectious diseases consultant at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London and honorary associate professor at the Institute of Child Health, UCL. He completed his training in paediatric infectious diseases at St George’s Hospital in London, John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford and the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. During his training, Seilesh spent three years working in the Paediatric Infectious Diseases Research Group at St George’s University of London and did his PhD in the field of congenital CMV and viral meningitis in young infants. During his clinical lectureship at the University of Oxford, Seilesh published the largest epidemiological study of congenital infections and hopes this will inform future vaccine development. Since completing his clinical lectureship at the University of Oxford, Seilesh has been leading a series of observational cohort and surveillance studies to improve our understanding of the management of congenital CMV and other severe viral infections. In particular, he is conducting a series of epidemiological studies to better understand the burden of congenital CMV and potentially inform screening strategies and vaccine development.
This talk shall draw upon the field-research undertaken by our team at Centre for New Economics Studies (CNES), India, focusing on narratives of daily emergencies, livelihood transitions experienced by vulnerable, unsecured shramiks (working communities) living across urban India. The work is most recently documented in my recent co-edited books: Vulnerable Communities in Neoliberal India: Perspectives from a Feminist Ethnographic Approach and Crisis Narratives: Pan-India Stories of Informal Workers During Covid 19 Pandemic , out with Routledge, Taylor and Francis (2024) and Palgrave MacMillan, Springer Nature (2024). Deepanshu Mohan is Professor of Economics and Dean, IDEAS, Office of InterDiscplinary Studies, O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU), India. His teaching affiliation for taught courses in areas of comparative political economy, development studies, research methods, is with the Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities at the University (JGU), where he is also Director, Centre for New Economics Studies (CNES), and Senior Research Fellow, International Institute of Higher Education (IIHED).
During this forum speakers from Bodleian Open Scholarship Support and across Oxford will discuss current changes in the field of open scholarship. Including subjects like data, open access, open monographs, copyright and more. It is advised that attendees of the forum have previously attended the Fundamentals and Logistics courses to improve understanding. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
Are you planning to present a poster at an upcoming conference, meeting or symposium? This introductory session will provide you with some top tips on how to create a poster presentation which will help you to communicate your research project and data effectively. There will be guidance on formatting, layout, content, use of text, references and images, as well as advice on printing and presenting your poster. This session will also provide help with locating resources such as templates, free-to-use images and poster guidelines. By the end of this session you will be able to: evaluate the effectiveness of templates, formatting, text and images; and plan, prepare and present your poster. Intended audience: students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
Tables have long constituted one of the principal graphic tools through which scientists represent their understanding of the natural world. Nowhere is this more visible than in astronomy, where tabular traditions stretch back to the Babylonians of the first millennium before the common era. Origin stories of fundamental cognitive and epistemic change have relied heavily on the translation of celestial experience into tabular formats, a development said to be driven by broad media shifts (orality to literacy, script to print). In this talk, I show to the contrary that despite the affordances of print and the long history of tabular formats for astronomical purposes, early modern European scholars’ motives for sending records of astronomical observation to the press were contingent and local, as were the emerging conventions of representing such empirical data within the economy of the printed page.
In a new Future of the Humanities Project event series — Cultural Encounters: Books that Have Made a Difference — we embrace the other at a time when we have heard much about the ways in which national, religious, and cultural lines divide us as humans. In this series, we invite leading scholars across disciplines to explore themes of cultural encounters both in classic literary works and in contemporary cultural debates. In this event Dr Anthony O’Mahony, Oxford, gives a talk on The Sayings of the Desert Fathers.
COURSE DETAILS This course covers methods of managing and controlling the process of thesis and report writing, as well as meeting deadlines. It also discusses the principles and practice of high-quality scholarly writing. It includes: The production of reports, papers and theses from a time and project management point of view. The writing task itself: this includes logical argument construction, the importance of structure in a document, appropriate style to be used in academic writing, and how to make the actual writing process as pain-free and effective as possible. An opportunity for you to critique a short paper with your group.
The genetics of depression are advancing at an exponential rate - now we are turning to how genetics can inform prediction and biology. The Genetics Links to Anxiety and Depression or GLAD study is the world's largest study of severe depression and anxiety. We have conducted joint family history, polygenic scores, and trauma prediction modelling and have developed a strong predictor of major depressive disorders status and clinically relevant outcomes like number of episodes and age of onset -- with replication and validation of this model in UK Biobank. Turning to Eating Disorders, these have much stronger genetic risks than depression and I will present our latest analyses from the psychiatric genomic consortium for anorexia nervosa and binge eating behaviour in >23K cases of anorexia and >35,000 cases with either binge eating disorder or binge eating behaviour. Lastly, I will briefly outline our current efforts to Nanopore whole genome sequence 22K samples in the NIHR Bioresource, including 4K eating disorder cases. Zoom details: https://zoom.us/j/98643323773?pwd=bL0TW4vweAlQzIlL5VEFHKYiEaVYPl.1 Meeting ID: 986 4332 3773 Passcode: 758174
Are you preparing a poster presentation for an upcoming conference, meeting or symposium? This interactive session, or ‘poster clinic’, will include a group discussion of different examples of poster presentations, as well as an opportunity to present your own draft of your poster presentation to your fellow attendees. It is expected that the small group of peers in attendance will provide feedback and respectful comments on each other’s work. By the end of this classroom-based session you will be able to: evaluate the effectiveness of your poster presentation and others; and summarise the content of your poster concisely in preparation for a conference. This will NOT be a taught session on how to use image processing software. Intended audience: students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
Get ready to undertake your literature review using your own research questions to build a successful search and apply it to a range of library resources. By the end of the session you will be able to: build a successful search strategy; use a range of bibliographic databases and search tools in the Social Sciences; work effectively with large result sets; source highly cited papers relevant to your research; and set up alerts for newly-published papers on your topic. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
Metabolic Experimental Medicine Join us for the next BRC South Parks Road seminar, where Professors Tomlinson and Hodson will share the latest developments in their team’s metabolic disease research, focussing on metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD). Learn how Oxford’s advanced cellular biology research alongside unique experimental medicine approaches are driving new strategies to improve care and tackle these growing health challenges.
This paper investigates the effect of rising anti-immigrant sentiment in European democratic host countries on support for democracy in African migrants’ origin communities. We propose a novel methodology to estimate migration stocks from sub-national areas of origin to any possible country in the world based on Google trends data. We use these data alongside measures of anti-immigrant sentiment at destination to study origin communities exposure to anti-immigrant sentiment. Consistent with a model of Bayesian learning, we show that exposure to greater anti- immigrant sentiment led to a deterioration in support for democracy among African citizens and the effect is concentrated in non-democratic countries.. We conclude that rising anti-immigrant sentiment in Western democracies has the potential to harm democratic progress in Africa.
The British Foreign Office was the government department responsible for the conduct of British relations with nearly all foreign states. Confidential Print and Foreign Office files were intended for circulation internally within the Foreign Office and to the monarch, the Prime Minister, the Cabinet, other government departments and diplomatic missions abroad. These files are now housed in The National Archives, UK, and have been digitised by Adam Matthew Digital on the Archives Direct cross-searchable platform. The Archives Direct platform includes British government papers from the 19th and 20th centuries relating to Africa, Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, South East Asia, East Asia, Latin America and North America. It’s a crucial resource for the study of politics, international relations, peace and conflict studies, economics and trade, British history and global history. This session will introduce you to The National Archives and their Foreign Office and Confidential Print files, and show you how to search across them to discover sources for your studies and research. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
To join online, please email oxchildpsych@psych.ox.ac.uk to request the Zoom link.
(joint work with Roman Senninger and Daniel Bischof) The rise of partisan antagonism and affective polarisation among members of different political parties has become a significant concern in advanced democracies, posing challenges for political dialogue, social cohesion, and democratic governance. While research on deliberative decision-making highlights the potential of deliberation to foster mutual understanding, we still lack insights into how partisan identities function as social markers to influence citizens' opinion formation in deliberative contexts and shape their willingness to consider alternative perspectives. Drawing on social identity theory and the role of social norms, we hypothesise that citizens' support for policy proposals and their readiness to engage in deliberative discourse are influenced by the partisan identity of the policy proponent. To test this argument, we conduct a large, pre-registered visual conjoint experiment in Germany—a country experiencing increasing affective polarisation—designed to emulate the online citizens' assembly 'Conference on the Future of the EU.' Our results show that when the out-partisan identity of a policy proponent is made salient, individuals are more likely to dismiss the policy proposal, even when they substantively agree with it. By shedding light on how affective polarisation constrains citizens' willingness to engage with policy proposals from out-party members despite ideological alignment, this study advances our understanding of the challenges to effective deliberation and inclusive democratic discourse in Western European societies.
Premised on the understanding that diverse countries have diverse approaches to serving young children, and that all countries can learn from effective early childhood efforts throughout the world, a study was launched to examine diverse early childhood systems. Using data from Australia, England, Finland, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea and led by internationally known scholars from these countries, the Early Advantage effort sought to discern what made these countries have strong services for young children and what lessons/strategies/policies could be extracted that would be prudent and beneficial to other countries globally. Though several years old now, the data do reveal certain commonalities, and evoke common challenges that remain highly salient today. In this presentation, I will summarize the study methodology and findings, stressing what has been learned that could be applied across multiple contexts and countries. I would spend time not only on the content of the study, but on what it takes to mount effective comparative scholarship. Reflecting on study strengths and findings, this presentation could help drive new initiatives and services as participants learn what countries are doing that is both inventive and effective. I will highlight the methodological challenges in doing cross-national work and the durable, transcendent findings from it. Teams link: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3aH7IoYwBLlY_nR8d0DFzqC4yXRigyhbzyOceuytRk4g01%40thread.tacv2/1728553869256?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22be558437-bc8f-4f3b-801c-af85d95b70ea%22%7d
Wang Y et al for the CHANCE-2 Investigators. Ticagrelor versus clopidogrel in CYP2C19 loss of function carriers with stroke or TIA. N Engl J Med 2021;385:2520-2530 Liu H, Jing J, Wang A, Xu Q, Meng X, Li H, Li Z, Wang Y. Genotype-guided dual antiplatelet therapy in minor stroke or transient ischemic attack with a single subcortical infarctions. Neurology 2023;100:e1643-e1654 Lun R, Dhaliwal S, Zitikyte G, Roy DC, Hutton B, Dowlashahi D. Comparison of ticagrelor vs clopidogrel in addition to aspirin in patients with minor ischemic stroke and transient ischemic attack. A network meta-analysis. JAMA Neurol 2021
In this session we will examine metrics for individual researchers. Using tools such as Web of Science, Google Scholar and Scopus you will learn about the researcher h-index and its limitations. You will be introduced to additional metrics tools such as author beamplots which help to contextualise a researcher’s output over time. By the end of the session, you will be familiar with: accessing citation data for specific researchers on Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar; understanding how the h-index is calculated and its inherent limitations; creating an ORCID number to help track all your own research outputs; the importance of research outputs beyond journal and conference papers when assessing a researcher’s impact. Intended audience: Oxford students, researchers and other staff.
Join via MS Teams: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_NGUxNjQ2MTItM2U3Mi00MDk3LWEwYjAtMzFiYzgxNzA2OTZi%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22b84f47ee-130a-4bdd-bb79-3b10ca433ee7%22%7d
The journey to net zero necessitates the development of a resilient and sustainable UK food system that provides healthy diets for all. This presentation delves into a research project focused on understanding the intricate relationship between healthy diets, sustainable food systems, and the net-zero transition. A key aspect of this research is exploring the concept of ‘perverse’ systemic resilience within the food system. The project is one of the activities funded through that Agrifood4NetZero Network+ and is interested in challenging assumptions on transformation, and informing policy decisions and practices that can enhance the system’s resilience. The session will also involve an interactive component where participants will be invited to contribute their insights, particularly on visions of what a net zero future looks and feels like from their perspectives.
We introduce price posting and search frictions into Townsend’s (1980) monetary macro model. Despite costless price adjustment, insufficient search incentives prevent Walrasian outcomes. The set of possible stationary equilibria comprises a finite interval of constant-inflation price paths. We assume that inflation expectations are rational and that they are stationary whenever possible. In this model, transitory small shocks temporarily affect quantities but not prices. However, large shocks—or accumulations of smaller shocks—can move the entire interval of equilibrium price paths beyond the previous path, forcing price adjustment. Even if shocks are temporary, such price movements create persistent changes in output.
In March 2024, the European Association for International Education (EAIE) released its eagerly awaited EAIE Barometer, third edition report. With 2817 individual responses from 46 European Higher Education Area (EHEA) countries, the report offers a comprehensive view of the health and vitality of internationalisation in European higher education, from the perspective of frontline professionals engaged in this work, amidst significant challenges and opportunities. Since then, two spin-off reports have been released zooming in on national and European-level influences and perceptions of impact from internationalisation. During this webinar, Barometer authors Laura Rumbley (Director Knowledge Development and Research, EAIE) and Jody Hoekstra-Selten (Knowledge Development Officer, EAIE) will provide key takeaways from the report, as well as highlight interesting differences based on region, role, and type of institution.
Hate crime laws, which criminalise violent expressions of prejudice, have faced growing criticism. Scholars have argued that hate crime legislation relies on the collaboration of legal institutions that are themselves shaped by histories of prejudice and fail to bring justice to survivors of identity-based violence. But what does it mean for a hate crime law to be successful? And to whose vision of justice are hate crime laws accountable? In India questions about the relationship between legal institutions and histories of oppression have become pressing as the country has seen a rise in violence against Dalit communities (diverse caste groups formerly labelled “untouchable”). Consequently, an emerging "Dalit Lives Matter" movement has campaigned for the successful implementation of the only law in India that currently bears the contours of hate crime legislation: the 1989 Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA). Drawing on extensive fieldwork with survivors of caste atrocities and legal actors in the Indian state of Rajasthan, this talk proposes that analyses, which have highlighted the systemic failure of hate crime legislation, only tell part of the story. The social life of the PoA unveils that hate crime law can (re-)produce and counter-act systems of prejudice and structural violence within the same socio-temporal terrain by producing formal legal failures, alongside new, stubborn modes of hopeful agency. Through a project of legal meliorism – the idea that persistent and creative legal labour can gradually improve oppressive social conditions – Dalit activists, community leaders and lawyers in Rajasthan have begun to battle for structural legal re-invention. Arguing that the PoA can only become a tool of resistance when legal truth regimes are reimagined to acknowledge the unique temporal and spatial framework of lived discrimination, they persistently toil rewrite the evidence systems and processes of Indian criminal law. However, while this meliorist project has generated surprising and hopeful legal transformations, it has also engendered new inequalities along gender and class lines. Hence the talk ultimately proposes that the unique justice hate crime legislation can provide may also innovate unexpected modes of oppression, forcing us to ask: who gets to decide how success in hate crime cases should look? Sandhya Fuchs is a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Bristol. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She is a legal anthropologist by training, and her work explores the relationship between legal institutions, histories of marginalization, and culturally embedded concepts of truth, violence and justice in India. Sandhya’s first book entitled “Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India,” analyses how Dalit communities in India experience and creatively mobilise India’s only hate crime law: the 1989 Scheduled Castes /Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA). Meanwhile, Sandhya’s current research explores what historical narratives, and temporal models Indian Supreme Court Justices mobilise when evaluating hate speech accusations. Sandhya’s research has been published in various journals, such as the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Social and Legal Studies and Contemporary South Asia.
For those who wish to join online: Join Zoom Meeting https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85285531740?pwd=SEFBa0%C3%975V21SOFo1dk85dm5TWEhSdz09 Meeting ID: 852 8553 1740 Passcode: 911647
What sources can we turn to in order to uncover the radical lives of Jewish women in Britain? In this event, Professor Nadia Valman will explore the queer history of Jewish women in Victorian England and the challenges involved in recovering both elite and working-class women’s experiences. She will then shift focus to the twentieth century, highlighting the lives of Jewish anarchist and communist women in London’s East End during the 1930s. Nadia’s talk will delve into the pivotal moments of anti-fascist activism, such as the Battle of Cable Street and the Stepney Rent Strikes, which played a crucial role in shaping the East End's resistance movements Dr Vivi Lachs will explore the overlooked voices of Jewish women in the Yiddish press of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although male voices dominated the Yiddish press, a handful of female writers managed to make a mark, candidly addressing the difficulties faced by women. Vivi’s talk will provide background on the “feuilleton” (urban sketch) section of the Yiddish press and analyse how the fictional works of writers like Katie Brown and Esther Kreitman reflected the struggles of immigrant women in the East End, as well as the intergenerational conflicts within the community. Professor Nadia Valman is Professor of Urban Literature at Queen Mary University of London and the author or editor of eight books on the literary and cultural history of British Jews. She has held Leverhulme and British Academy Research Fellowships, focusing on the history of east London, and has collaborated with local schools, museums, and led public guided walks based on her research. She was the Principal Investigator for the recent AHRC project ‘Making and Remaking the Jewish East End’, and curated a sound installation at Tower Hamlets Archive as part of the project. Dr Vivi Lachs is a Yiddishist and historian of the Jewish East End. Her books Whitechapel Noise and London Yiddishtown explore Yiddish popular culture and the writers of the period from the 1880s to the 1950s. She is a researcher at Queen Mary University of London and directed the performance “Secrets of the London Yiddish Stage” as part of the AHRC project ‘Making and Remaking the Jewish East End’. In 2019, she was a Yiddish Book Centre Translation Fellow. Vivi also performs with the bands Klezmer Klub and Katsha’nes, co-runs the Great Yiddish Parade, and leads East End guided tours. This event is free and open to all. If you wish to attend the event via Zoom, please register and select the 'Online via Zoom' attendance option. A meeting link will be sent to you on the day of the event.
This lecture examines the commercial legacy of the Ḥibshūsh family, a prominent Yemenite Jewish dynasty that played a pivotal role in the Red Sea basin trade from the 1880s to the 1970s. Utilizing a rich archive of primary sources, this global micro-historical study illuminates the intricate Jewish-Arab commercial networks that flourished across geopolitical boundaries, encompassing Yemen, Mandatory Palestine, Israel, Ethiopia, and beyond. By analyzing the Ḥibshūsh family's extensive business operations, particularly in coffee trade and textile imports, we gain novel insights into Jewish-Muslim relations from a transnational, commercial perspective. This approach reveals the nuanced interactions between Arab-Asian, Israeli, and African communities in the Red Sea region, offering a fresh historical perspective within the contexts of colonial rule (Italian and British) and the Yemenite monarchy. While existing scholarship on Israel's engagement with the Red Sea region and Africa has predominantly focused on political, and security dimensions, this study shifts the lens to long-established Jewish business networks. It explores how Yemenite Jewish entrepreneurs, exemplified by the Ḥibshūsh family, maintained and adapted trade routes connecting Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti, and Israel before and after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. This research contributes significantly to our understanding of Israel's economic history and its commercial ties in the region. By examining how the Ḥibshūsh family navigated shifting political landscapes while sustaining cross-cultural business relationships, we gain deeper insights into the role of Yemenite Jews in shaping Israel's early economic connections in the region; the continuity and adaptation of pre-state Jewish trade networks in the post-1948 era; and the interplay between Israel's diplomatic efforts and private commercial initiatives in Africa. Through this focused study, we illuminate a crucial yet often overlooked aspect of Israeli-African relations, demonstrating how commerce served as a bridge between cultures and nations in this strategically vital region.
The SSD EDI events are intended to shine a spotlight on the contribution of SSD researchers to the broad field of scholarship on equality, diversity, and inclusion. The aim is to highlight that EDI is not just a matter of management of people and organisations, but also an intellectual challenge and a thriving academic field in which SSD researchers play a leading role within the University and beyond. This term we are collaborating with Dr Debbie Aitken from the Department of Education to showcase research being undertaken by faculty and doctoral students in that department. Session 1 (2:30-3:50pm) - Futures in Equitable Teacher & Schools Education Zaiba Patel, DPhil in Education ‘Decolonising the Secondary School History Curriculum’. Rachel Robinson, DPhil in Education ‘The Black and Minority Ethnic Experience of Teacher Education’ Nadia Talukdar, DPhil in Education ‘An Intersectional Exploration of the Experiences of Female Muslim Trainee Teachers in Primary Initial Teacher Training Education in England’ 3.50 – 4:10 pm : Coffee Break Session 2 (4:10-5:30pm) - Exploring Race, Disability & Neurodiversity in Medical and Higher Education Ben Balogun-Ojuri, DPhil in Education ‘Differential Attainment of Black British Doctors in BAME/BME Representation of Very Senior Management (VSM) in the NHS: Individual Perceptions and Implications at Micro Level.’ Dr Xin Xu, Departmental Lecturer in Higher/Tertiary Education, and Georgia Lin, DPhil in Education ‘Neurodivergent Education for Students, Teaching & Learning (NESTL) project.’ Dr Gbemisola David-West, Obstetrics and Gynaecology Registrar & Clinical Teaching Fellow ‘Understanding the Postgraduate Training Experiences of Black doctors: A Study of Resilience.’ Followed by Drinks Reception
About the event The Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, in collaboration with the Feminist Jurisprudence Discussion Group, is pleased to host the presentation of the book ‘Women, Gender, and Constitutionalism in Latin America', edited by Francisca Pou, Ruth Rubio Marín, and Verónica Undurraga. With the three editors in attendance, we are excited to engage in a broad discussion of this contribution to gender comparative constitutionalism. The launch includes two panel discussions: 16:00 Panel 1. ‘Women, Gender, and Constitutionalism: Regional Perspectives’ The panel will have the editors’ introduction to the book and three discussants commenting from their own regional perspectives (South Africa, Eastern Europe, and South Asia). Speakers: Francisca Pou Giménez (National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico), Ruth Rubio Marín (University of Seville, Spain), and Verónica Undurraga Valdés (Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Chile). Discussants: Kate O’Regan (University of Oxford), Barbara Havelková (University of Oxford), and Aparna Chandra (National Law School of India University). Chair: Rosario Grimà Algora (University of Oxford) 17:30 Coffee / Tea break 17:45 Panel 2. ‘Women, Gender, and Constitutionalism: Latin American Perspectives’ The panel will have Latin American discussants commenting on 4 of the 11 national chapters included in the volume (Colombia, Perú, Chile, and Mexico), followed by a discussion with the editors. Discussants: Mónica Arango Olaya (University of Oxford), Carlos Zelada (University of Oxford), Natalia Morales Cerda (UCL), and Luz Helena Orozco y Villa (University of Oxford). Respondents: Francisca Pou Giménez (National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico), Ruth Rubio Marín (University of Seville, Spain), and Verónica Undurraga Valdés (Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Chile). Chair: Rosario Grimà Algora (University of Oxford) Read more about the panellists here: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/content/event/book-launch-women-gender-and-constitutionalism-latin-america
The global MPI is an international comparable measure of acute multidimensional poverty across more than 100 countries in developing regions. Each year a thematic report is jointly produced by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative in ODID and the United Nations Development Programme exploring the data. In this seminar, Sabina Alkire will discuss the findings from this year’s report ‘Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2024: Poverty amid conflict’ which examines some of the ways in which poverty and conflict intersect and reflects on what this means for poverty reduction. Join us in person (refreshments provided) or online (register for webinar link: bit.ly/4dOcNP4)
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This paper investigates the effect of rising anti-immigrant sentiment in European democratic host countries on support for democracy in African migrants’ origin communities. We propose a novel methodology to estimate migration stocks from sub-national areas of origin to any possible country in the world based on Google trends data. We use these data alongside measures of anti-immigrant sentiment at destination to study origin communities exposure to anti-immigrant sentiment. Consistent with a model of Bayesian learning, we show that exposure to greater anti- immigrant sentiment led to a deterioration in support for democracy among African citizens and the effect is concentrated in non-democratic countries.. We conclude that rising anti-immigrant sentiment in Western democracies has the potential to harm democratic progress in Africa.
A few years of populist rule fundamentally changes the politics of a country. The question is, does it change irrevocably? Not necessarily. In countries where populists have been successfully removed from power, as in Poland, there is theoretically a window of opportunity for a return to liberal democracy. In practice, however, this is extremely difficult, as the current government of Donald Tusk is discovering. The challenge is all the greater as the war in Ukraine and the crisis of democracy in Western countries affect the entire region. Drawing on his book “The New Politics of Poland” (Suhrkamp, 2023), as well as the book “Posttraumatische Souveränität” (Suhrkamp, 2023), Dr Jarosław Kuisz will analyse the post-populist moment in Poland against the background of the country's recent, but also medium and longer political history. With a comment by Dr Eli Gateva, the seminar will also examine similarities and differences with other countries in Central and Eastern Europe.
Professor Janina Dill delivers the inaugural lecture for the Dame Louise Richardson Chair in Global Security at the Blavatnik School of Government. Global Security: Is Law Our Last Hope? We are living through a crisis of global security, with armed conflicts multiplying and escalating. International law seems as relevant as it seems ineffective in addressing these challenges. Can international law de-escalate conflicts and protect civilians? The lecture will highlight political and doctrinal obstacles to securing the globe by means of law. And yet without the rule of law, we have no hope of global security at all. The lecture is followed by a drinks reception.
Margins and flyleaves in medieval manuscripts had a literary life of their own. Often, they were filled with ever-growing layers of various minuscule texts: e.g., pen trials and scribal notes, recipes and prayers, glosses and poems. The latter are a particularly interesting case: Of course, not every verse was added for a deeper reason. Occasionally, authors (or literary-loving scribes) simply used any free spot they could find. But in many cases, such poetic additions interact with the original content of the manuscript. In the case of an Exlibris or dedication, this happens in an obvious way because they hint at the social and institutional context, at donors, owners, and users. Other examples are more complex though, and poetry serves a hermeneutic frame, instructing the readers about the religious or epistemological meaning of the book they hold in their hands. The aim of the paper is to introduce some examples of poetic frames and explore their forms and functions.
Historians of the Middle East have extensively explored how imperial powers and international institutions during the interwar period used the idea of “minority rights and protection” to solidify their rule and influence over large parts of the region. Rather than focusing on the Eurocentric premises of this idea, the present lecture considers the role of Muslim anti-colonialists in challenging the utilization of the humanitarian discourse of protection by colonial powers. As a case study, it examines the 1931 General Islamic Congress (GIC) in Jerusalem, which brought Muslims from across Asia and Africa together to address various issues affecting Muslims worldwide. Amid the Stalinist anti-religious campaigns, Muslim emigres (muhajirs) from the USSR and their Arab co-religionists used the platform of the GIC to initiate a transnational campaign to protect the religious rights of millions of Soviet Muslims from Moscow’s policies. Investigating what the principle of “protection” meant for these anti-Soviet activists and their Arab counterparts, the lecture argues that this campaign inspired alternative visions of world order and protection of vulnerable populations, including those that were not necessarily internationally defined as numerical “minorities.” The lecture thus shows how Muslim thinkers – in contrast to European colonial empires – understood and reformulated the language of protection, and thereby recovers the role of Muslim anti-colonialists in the international history of minority rights during the interwar period.
This talk presents insights from an 18-month investigation into the supply chains of AI, funded by a British Academy grant awarded to Dr Ana Valdivia. During this time, Ana conducted ethnographic research in Chile and México, which have emerged as key hubs for data centres in Latin America. Dr Valdivia’s research introduces a theoretical framework called the ‘supply chain capitalism of AI,’ uncovering the minerals, commodities, and facilities that are crucial to AI development today. This study examines the interactions and controversies surrounding data centres, involving communities, governments, and private actors. By integrating digital methods and interviews, it proposes a transdisciplinary approach to analysing the political and environmental impacts of AI supply chains. This research aims to contribute to both global and local debates about the environmental impact of AI from critical data studies lens.
Biography: Dominik Lukeš is a Lead Business Technologist at the AI and ML Competency Centre with a focus on digital scholarship and academic practice. Prior to joining the Centre he started the Reading and Writing Innovation Lab where he focused on technologies supporting reading and writing in academic contexts. Dominik's research focus is in linguistics and language pedagogy. He has previously run workshops at Oxford on using corpus analysis tools for humanities research. Dominik's core area of expertise is an intersection of conceptual metaphor theory and discourse analysis with a particular focus on construction grammar. He was the founding member of the journal Cognitive Approaches to Critical Discourse Analysis (CADAAD) and co-edited with Chris Hart the 2007 volume Cognitive Linguistics in Critical Discourse Analysis. He also translated George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things into Czech. He is the author of Czech Navigator, a grammar of Czech for non-native speakers. He blogs on MetaphorHacker.net and maintains a site focusing on exploring Large Language Models as Semantic Machines and publishes an occasional newsletter on AI in Academic Practice. Abstract: This talk will explore what exactly large language models (LLMs) have learned about language, and why it matters. It will attempt an outline of an answer to how these models understand the structure of language, and how this compares to how humans think about language. To answer the question, it will look at how LLMs perform across a range of different languages, even those with smaller digital footprints, and what this implies about how they represent language. It will contrast the results from this investigation with the latest findings from the field of "mechanistic interpretability." These findings offer insights into the inner workings of LLMs, offering clues about the fundamental differences between how we understand language and how language is represented inside the models. Finally, it will suggest a need a new approach to LLM research that brings together a richer understanding of language and a systematic investigation into how LLMs perform across a variety of languages.
For the last few months, there has been a renewed focus on cases of sexual violence against women in India. The United Nations has designated 25th November as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. Mr Gopal Subramaniam, former Solicitor General of India and Somerville College’s Foundation Fellow will be in conversation with Dr Aradhana CV, Lord and Lady McNair Early Career Fellow in Law and former OICSD Scholar to discuss the state of legal reforms in relation to sexual violence in India. Mr Subramaniam who also served as member of the Justice J.S. Verma Committee, appointed by the Government of India to recommend amendments to Criminal Laws. The Committee recommended amendments to various Indian laws to ensure the safety of women and young children. Dr Aradhana C.V. will moderate the discussion. She joined Oxford as the Cornelia Sorabji Scholar (2017) for her BCL and completed her DPhil as the inaugural Gopal Subramaniam Scholar (2019). Her research focuses on rape adjudication in India.
OCLW is delighted to welcome counsellor and psychotherapist Philippa Smethurst to Wolfson College to launch her impactful new book, 20 Ways to Break Free from Trauma. Philippa will present and discuss her book in conversation with BBC journalist Mike Wooldridge. Philippa Smethurst is a counsellor, psychotherapist, supervisor, trainer, and author with 30 years of experience. She began writing this book on trauma during the pandemic lockdown when many people felt overwhelmed and were questioning their lives and making changes. To her, unpacking trauma seemed like an appropriate response to a challenge facing our world. In 20 chapters, the book gives answers to the following questions: What is trauma? How do we respond when life feels unbearable? How might we understand our and others’ complex responses when life feels too much? Based on real-life experience, this book takes us on a 20-point tour of trauma on both body and mind. Why 20? We may know about the ‘fight-flight’ response to being overwhelmed or in danger. We may not know of the numerous and sometimes complex other ways that trauma shows up in our bodies and minds, from dissociation and anger to brain hijacking and trust issues. Drawing on the latest brain—and body-based research, she uses stories, poetry, and reflective exercises to provide guidance and tools for moving through trauma toward growth and resilience. The book identifies 20 ways that trauma manifests. The premise is that understanding these ways of trauma can be empowering. The book offers practical steps to help you or someone you support to overcome trauma and become more resilient. Mike Wooldridge is a veteran BBC journalist with nearly five decades of experience, covering some of the most pivotal global events and human crises. His reporting has spanned from East Africa, where he covered key moments such as Nelson Mandela's release, to South Asia and beyond. Notably, he was the first journalist to interview Terry Waite after his release from captivity in 1991—Waite has written the foreword for 20 Ways to Break Free from Trauma. Wooldridge’s deep understanding of trauma and resilience, gained from decades of witnessing human suffering and survival, makes him an ideal conversational partner for this event.
Join OPS for an exciting and immersive event with Dr Benjamin Outram, the creator of Squingle, a psychedelic VR puzzle game that takes players on a journey through vibrant, otherworldly dimensions. Benjamin will share insights into the creative process behind the game, from its unique design to the psychedelic inspiration that shaped its development. Attendees will also get a chance to test out Squingle with some VR headsets, offering a hands-on experience of this mind-bending game. Don't miss this opportunity to dive into the world of psychedelic virtual reality and explore the future of immersive gaming.
Modern research, even that not involving humans or animals directly, can potentially be used in a wide variety of both positive and negative ways. It is the researcher’s responsibility to think about, and plan for the potential impact of their work, and how their work can be carried out in an appropriately ethical and responsible manner. In this course we will discuss a variety of case studies to understand responsible research and innovation principles and practice, and plan our research according to ethical and professional standards, avoiding and mitigating the risks of negative impacts.
Engaging policymakers across international borders requires a nuanced approach that accounts for diverse political, cultural, and regional contexts. Join us in this OPEN conversation, to delve into what works for informing public policy when decision-makers are based overseas. Drawing from the work of former OPEN award holders in various regions across the Globe, participants will explore key topics such as navigating complex political landscapes, building effective stakeholder networks, and addressing cultural differences. This is a very interactive session where participants will have the opportunity to exchange ideas with leading experts drawing on their experience working at the intersection of academia and policy: Dr Isang Awah: Head of Advocacy at the Global Parenting Initiative (GPI), with extensive experience in African policy contexts Professor Richard Maude: Head of the Epidemiology Department at Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit, Bangkok, Thailand, offering insights from South-East Asian health policy; Dr Jose Maria Valenzuela: Postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS), bringing perspectives from Mexico's energy and climate policy. Come prepared to ask questions, share perspectives from your own context, and engage in an open dialogue.
EndNote is a desktop-based reference management tool for Windows and Mac users, which helps you build libraries of references and insert them into your Word document as in-text citations or footnotes and automatically generate bibliographies. This online introduction to EndNote is open to all University of Oxford students, researchers and staff and teaches you how to use the software so that you can effectively manage your references. The workshop will cover: what EndNote can do for you; adding references to EndNote from a range of sources; managing your references in an EndNote library; adding in-text citations and/or footnotes to your essays and papers; and creating bibliographies.
In this online workshop you will be shown the functionality of RefWorks. RefWorks is a subscription software programme used to manage references and create bibliographies that University of Oxford members can use for free during their time at the university and as alumni. The workshop will cover: understanding the main features and benefits of RefWorks; setting up a RefWorks account; organising your references in RefWorks; inserting citations into documents; and creating a bibliography/reference list. Intended audience: students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
The Lunchtime Lab Talks aim to introduce and highlight the broad spectrum of research that is carried out at the Centre and encourage multidisciplinary interactions. Throughout the year, groups are invited to speak and present their work to our community. Lunch is available from 12:00 in the canteen and talks run from 12:30–13:30 in Room A&B. Bhattacharya Group Speaker: Megan Payne Title: “Development of a Class-B Evasin-Derived Peptide for Inhibiting Islet Inflammation” Bull Group Speaker: TBC Title: TBC
I examine the causes and consequences of environmental beliefs. Rice farmers in Bangladesh must learn about their soil’s salinity to choose the appropriate seed. Comparing beliefs to agronomic readings, I document both significant over- and underestimation of salt levels. A simple identification problem explains this pattern: farmers learn about multiple unobserved threats from ambiguous signals. Bayesian farmers endogenously process data in support of their priors, e.g., someone worried about high salinity will interpret low yield as a sign of too much salt. Climate change amplifies this process by systematically altering the risks considered most threatening. I confirm the framework's predictions using a lab-in-the-field exercise and natural experiments that isolate salient shocks that capture attention (e.g., tidal flooding) and subtle shifts that go unnoticed (e.g., irrigation water contamination through rising sea-levels). Despite equal effects on true salt levels, salient saltwater floods increase salinity beliefs substantially more than does subtle irrigation intrusion. These experiences shape how farmers interpret new data: past exposure to salient shocks increases the mental link between low yield and salinity while subtle shocks reduce the perceived diagnosticity of salinity clues. In large-scale field experiments, correcting misperceptions significantly alters farmers' demand for salinity-tolerant seeds with substantial consequences for profits.
As the United States heads into a high-stakes presidential election, this seminar series explores the structural problems and political challenges behind the headlines. We examine why American politics is so polarised and ask: what is at stake in the 2024 elections? The seminars will open with a short presentation by an expert, followed by questions and discussion. Everyone with an interest in US politics is welcome. Lunch will be available. Week 7: Shifting Voter Allegiances Did the 2024 election reinforce or reverse some of the shifting patterns of voter allegiance that have been visible in recent years?
TBA
This 90-minute session will cover some more advanced techniques for finding medical literature to answer a research question. We will recap some basics, then demonstrate searching in several medical databases, including using subject headings (MeSH) and the differences between different platforms. After the main workshop, one of the Bodleian Health Care Libraries Outreach Librarians will be available for another 30 minutes to answer questions about your own searches, so feel free to bring along what you are working on. By the end of this session, you will be able to: explain what subject headings are, and how to use them; search for words that appear near to other words; take a search from one database into another; and save a search and document it. Intended audience: students, staff and researchers from MSD and OUH.
Are you an early career researcher, fixed-term lecturer, or doctoral student trying to get some writing done? Do you research on a topic related to health, medicine, the body, or mind using Humanities or Social Sciences approaches? The Medical Humanities Writing Group is an inclusive, interdisciplinary and casual gathering, encouraging writing as well as meeting others: all are welcome. We have timed writing blocks and coffee/tea/light refreshments, and are focused on setting writing goals and getting work done in a positive and supportive environment. Attendance is free and you are welcome to join us for anything from a single session, to a few, or even the whole term. If you have any queries, please email gordon.barrett@history.ox.ac.uk.
Dr Carlos Espaliú Berdud will host this online only event.
This lecture will unpack the lay sermon delivered by John Winthrop in 1630 as the first ships in the great Puritan migration from England neared the shores of Massachusetts. The sermon is remembered most for its peroration – “we shall be as a city upon a hill” – which still informs the American Thanksgiving holiday. The interest for a Pusey audience lies in how Winthrop defined Christian Charity and adapted this to the work of building a community in New England. Some aspects of the sermon still resonate – “we must be knit together in this work as one man…we must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality.” In other ways Winthrop’s acute analysis of factors that might lead Puritans away from second commandment duties is of its time and unfamiliar. The lecture, and discussion following it, will branch out from the sermon itself to look at how Winthrop’s vision played itself out on the ground. A theme of the recollection is the peculiarity of the Puritans’ covenant theology and their interest in the then novel concept of a covenant of grace.
Debates on data assemblages have extensively accounted for their technical nature, emphasizing the labors of gathering, the spatiality of assemblages, the material consequences of data infrastructures, among other things. A growing amount of literature has employed a political economy analysis to deconstruct the “black boxes” of data assemblages with the view to unpacking the choices and rationalities that inform prevailing data systems. They have treated assemblages as processes through which orders of knowledge and orders of value are fundamentally inscribed in ways that are sometimes both materially and epistemically violent. In this study, we employ data assemblage as an analytical framework to understand the specific arrangements of power and authority influencing the data imaginaries and property logics currently being enacted across two informal settlements in Nairobi and Mombasa, Kenya. We draw on in-depth interviews with actors situated at different locations in the development of the Social Tenure Domain Model (STDM), a ‘pro-poor land rights recording system’ to understand its underlying political economy and how its imaginaries are translated into the concrete in Mathare and Kwa Bullo informal settlements. This approach enables us to showcase the imaginaries that are advanced in the STDM assemblages by its advocates and the on-the-ground politics that feature in its experimentation. From this analysis, the study demonstrates the limits of data imaginaries and alternative property rationalities that are introduced in the absence of clear commitments to land redistribution by the state. This invites us to explore possibilities of more insurgent data practices which build on the creative elements within social movements to not only expand the epistemic control of data by residents located in the informational peripheries but to also advance their political projects of recognition.
Concentrated economic power has become an increasing cause for concern. Recent research has highlighted the pivotal role of inheritance (patrimony) in amassing substantial wealth and the consequent influence of families in shaping economic power today. Curiously, both notions of capitalists and, in particular, family capitalists are largely absent from recent academic debates on this subject. After all, such concepts have long vanished from sight as tools for sociological inquiry. “Capital” is allegedly “back,” but capitalists are nowhere to be found. Leveraging comprehensive population-wide register data on shareholding, occupation, wealth, and board membership, I examine the kinship ties of Norwegian capitalists from 1970 to 2021, a period that includes individuals born more than a century apart. By consolidating kin linkages through births and marriages, I identify an average of 22 kin connections per capitalist, including up to six generational linkages. My findings suggest that family ties continue to play a significant role in shaping and maintaining economic power today. To capture this dynamic, I argue, it is necessary to move from the ownership of net wealth to the organization of corporate property and to broaden the concept of family from nuclear constellations to wider kinship ties.
This seminar presents very preliminary and partial findings from an ongoing British Academy funded study to examine the impulses which led so many to volunteer their time and energy to welcome and make Syrians and other refugees feel ‘at home’ upon arrival in the United Kingdom and Sweden. Rather than focus on the suffering of Syrians and other displaced people seeking safety (Chatty, 2018; Rabo et al, 2021; Beck, 2021; Cantat, 2021), it turns to interrogate the motivations which drove so many citizens and residents to step forward and be generous to those in need (Chatty, 2017). In the UK there was little media sympathy for such hospitality whereas in Sweden media was generally very supportive. These two study sites offer an opportunity to study volunteering to come to the aid of Syrians in both a relatively hostile policy environment and a sympathetic one. The Research Objective It is this spirit of being hospitable, of being generous, both among nationals and refugees in the United Kingdom, and Sweden, that this project seeks to understand. It proposes to examine, empirically, the impulse which led so many to volunteer their time to welcome and make Syrians feel ‘at home’ upon arrival in the United Kingdom and Sweden. By November 2024 the study will have interviewed in the region of twenty or twenty-five participants out of a proposed sample of fifty participants. about half of the number of participants Rather than focus on the suffering of forced migrants seeking safety (Ticktin, 2011), this study turns to examine the hosting community, and focusses on those who individually stepped forward and offered hospitality (Chatty, 2017). The seminar will be followed by drinks in the Hall.
Please join us for the PSI satellite seminar on Wednesday, 27 November, 17:00 – 19:00 at West Wing Lecture Theatre, St Cross College. We are delighted to host Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu, Assistant Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the head of the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence in Berlin, Germany. Dr Chikwe will share his experience as a frontline policymaker in Nigeria during the COVID-19 pandemic. The discussion, including Q&A, will start from 17:00 to 18:00. There will be book signing, networking opportunities, and informal discussions from 18:00 to 19:00. Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic reinforced the importance of National Public Health Institutes in national, regional and international health security. The Bill for an Act to establish the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (NCDC) was signed into law in November 2018, less than two years before the COVID-19 pandemic. This talk will cover the experience of a frontline policymaker navigating and laying a solid foundation for a burgeoning public health institution with a limited budget and human resources. The discussion will draw on various topics, including Nigeria’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic regarding disease surveillance, coordination of testing and diagnostics, the crucial role of public engagement and risk communication in empowering communities, health systems strengthening, and international collaboration. Dr Chikwe recently co-authored a book, “An Imperfect Storm: A Pandemic and the Coming of Age of a Nigerian Institution”, which provides a compelling narrative of Nigeria’s COVID-19 response, a story of resilience and hope in the face of a global crisis. A few copies of the book will be available for sale after the seminar. You can also order your copy on Amazon here – https://www.amazon.com/dp/978604889X. Biography Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu is Assistant Director-General for the Division of Health Emergency Intelligence and Surveillance Systems in the World Health Organization (WHO) Emergencies Programme. He leads the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence in Berlin, Germany. Before this, he was the first Director-General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) from 2016 to 2021. In 2017, he served as the Interim Director of the West Africa Regional Centre for Surveillance and Disease Control. He has held positions in the South African National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), the United Kingdom’s Health Protection Agency, and Germany’s Robert Koch Institute (RKI).
Sound and radio have become a flourishing new frontier in modern China studies. However, most recent books, dissertations and articles on audio broadcasting rely on written and printed sources such as state archives and memoirs. Lamenting the absence and inaccessibility of sound archives, historians have focused on media infrastructures and technopolitics, showing that sound studies is indeed possible without audio sources. Nevertheless, what are we missing by not listening to actual sounds? If audio recordings become available, what should we listen for? This presentation will explore two types of audio(visual) sources for studying Chinese Socialist soundscapes. First, Professor Li will analyze retrospective representations of radios and loudspeakers during the Mao era in films made between the mid-1970s and mid-2000s: China Behind (1974), Maple (1980), Blue Kite (1992), Farewell My Concubine (1993), To Live (1994), In the Heat of the Sun (1995), Xiu Xiu, The Sent-Down Girl (1998), Platform (2000), Electric Shadows (2005), and Shanghai Dreams (2005). Professor Li proposes to treat such fictional films as media history, as they thematize the impact of mass media on ordinary people's historical experiences. This will be followed by an introduction to a serendipitous collection of audio recordings of PRC radio between 1966 and 1971 - received and tape-recorded in Hong Kong by the American journalist Robert Elegant. After listening to short clips of central, local and 'enemy' radio, including readings of newspaper editorials, live broadcasting of mass rallies and parades, as well as contrarian voices and noises, there will be a discussion about what we hear and any unique insights that a sonic archive can give us beyond textual sources. Jie Li is Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She is the author of Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life, Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era, and Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China, which won the Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Award and a Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship. She co-edited the volume Red Legacies in China: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution and published various articles on film, media, museum, and sound studies. She was recently named a Harvard College Professor for her contributions to undergraduate teaching.
The queer history reading group is a student-led reading group discussing new work in queer history, theory classics, historical fiction, and more. Open to undergraduates and postgraduate students! We meet at the Weston Library reading space and the Jolly Farmers pub (see location details for each session) RSVP to "$":mailto:eszter.dkovacs@history.ox.ac.uk to receive the reading in advance.
Revisiting the Non-Recognition of Territorial Conquests: Manchuria, Japan, and the United States, 1899-1940. Jiang Zhifeng, National University of Singapore Transnational Networks and Sino-European Relations during the Cold War: The Case of Italy-China Friendship Association (1962-1977) Clara Galzerano, University of Trento
How should we interpret past mathematicians who may use the same vocabulary as us but with different meanings, or whose philosophical outlooks differ from ours? Errors aside, it is often assumed that past mathematicians largely made true claims—but what exactly justifies that assumption? In this talk, we will explore these questions through general philosophical considerations and three case studies: 19th-century analysis, 18th-century geometry, and 19th-century matricial algebra. In each case, we encounter a significant challenge to supposing that the mathematicians in question made true claims. We will show how these challenges can be addressed and overcome.
Enlightenment Workshop Joint Session
Join Principal John Bowers in conversation with Brasenose alumnae Sarah Castle, Sarah Jackson, Debba Jenkins and Liz Padmore. Speaker profiles: Debba Jenkins (Modern Languages 1977) Deborah is particularly interested in the development of partnerships to address complex problems. She has held leadership positions in organisations from tiny third sector projects to major healthcare providers and provided consultancy to organisations in the UK and abroad. She was a founder of the city leadership programme Common Purpose, has been a NED and Chair in the NHS for more than 25 years and set up and ran two experimental children’s companies transforming failing children’s services in Sunderland and Reading for the DfE. Currently Deborah is CEO of TDI, a charity finding practical solutions to manage the risk of sexual offending, and chairs NCFE, the UK’s third biggest vocational qualifications awarding body, the Northern Neonatal Clinical Network, and Cultura (formerly the North of England Civic Trust). She is also an executive director of Trades4Care, a CIC she co-founded to provide work experience and coaching for young people interested in a career in trades, and runs her own consultancy, Kindling Ltd. Sarah Jackson (Classics 1977) As a charity CEO, Sarah was at the forefront of making change for working parents, including new rights to flexible working, maternity leave, and leave for fathers. Her career covered campaigning, parliamentary lobbying, research, policy development and practical work with employers, earning her an OBE for services to quality of life. Today she offers advisory services to employer around hybrid and flexible working, is a Visiting Professor at Cranfield University School of Management and is a trustee of three charities: Parents and Carers in Performing Arts (which she chairs), Rosa fund for women and girls, and Scottish Opera. Sarah Castle (Geography 1981) Sarah has over twenty-five years' monitoring and evaluation experience of reproductive health programmes in low and middle income countries. She also has considerable expertise in policy analysis and programme development with an emphasis on gender and social inclusion. Having been educated at BNC and Harvard, she spent eight years at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine doing research, teaching and student supervision. Sarah has spent much of her life in Mali, West Africa where she likes nothing better than sitting under a mango tree talking to women about family planning! Her consultancy clients include UNFPA, USAID, WHO and The World Bank.
With the UK's Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act put on hold by the new government over the summer, and both pro-Palestine activists and 'cancelled' conservatives frequently claiming that their freedom has been infringed, academic freedom is making headlines. Dr Eric Kaufmann, Director of Buckingham University's Centre for Heterodox Social Science, has co-authored an influential report arguing that a "hostile climate" is chilling academic freedom in Britain. His new (2024) book, Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced A Cultural Revolution, takes a critical look at so-called 'woke' culture, arguing that an emerging climate of "progressive extremism" is producing pervasive "concept creep" as liberal ideas of freedom and equality are reinterpreted to justify restricting negative liberties such as freedom of speech, assembly, and religion. Kaufmann's controversial but nuanced analysis of academic freedom is grounded in decades spent studying cultural politics and a wealth of empirical data. Join us to challenge, and be challenged. Details of the event venue will be provided on registration.
Putting in place effective processes for learning is key to getting better at policy engagement, and to meeting some of the demands we face to demonstrate the impact of our work. But what tools and resources can we use - and how do we use them? To help researchers answer these questions, the Policy Engagement Team is offering a short course, comprising two parts, each lasting 2 hours. Learning outcomes: - A better understanding of the foundational concepts of monitoring and evaluation, including the principles and methodologies used to assess policy engagement outcomes. - More proficiency to develop a theory of change, and to track outcomes and impacts. 28 November: In Part 1, participants will engage in small-group and plenary activities. They will learn about effective techniques for monitoring, evaluation, and learning related to policy engagement. These concepts are then applied through drafting a theory of change. 5 December: In Part 2, participants will expand their understanding of tracking outputs and impacts throughout the project cycle by utilizing pertinent tools and techniques. They will put their knowledge into practice by applying one of the previously reviewed tools within the context of a case study.
COURSE DETAILS This highly interactive workshop will be based around an example of writing an explainer or news article for the wider, non-specialist public website (though the lessons can be applied to any communication context). It is highly recommended that you will have already attended the introductory workshop (Telling Stories That Matter), or equivalent introductory workshops on storytelling. Brief reading material will be provided to ensure you are up to date with the fundamentals of storytelling that are the basis of this workshop. LEARNING OUTCOMES By the end of the course participants will be able to: Apply storytelling elements to their research story. Increase understanding of effective storytelling elements including summary and clarity.
In his introductory talk, Professor Behrens will describe his work in land use, food & energy systems, and climate change. He’ll answer questions ranging from “how much mining do we need for the energy transition” to “how much land in the UK and worldwide could we spare through dietary shifts”. He'll talk about his work in legal and political advocacy, and outline his new Global Professorship programme on rapid food transformations in a rapidly changing world at the Oxford Martin School. REGISTRATION To register to join the event live in-person in Oxford: https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/events/towards-a-liveable-planet To register to join live online on Crowdcast: https://www.crowdcast.io/c/towards-a-liveable-planet
Ruka Hussain (MSt History of Art and Visual Culture) Over the course of five visits to the American West in the 1830s, George Catlin (b.1796) created a collection of Native American portraits, artifacts, animal and landscape paintings, which he toured using a range of performance strategies such as lectures and audience participation. My paper characterises Catlin’s work as occupying a point of juncture between European and American romanticism, and between literary/artistic Romantic movements and burgeoning scientific disciplines. By considering the spatial-temporal experiences of particular forms of visual culture and their degrees of scientific, historical or ecological realism, I chart the ways in which Catlin's gallery engaged (historical) imagination and sewed lines between ecology, anthropology, and history, and how he exploited the particular forms of painting to depict and engage the viewer in the socio ecosystems of the American West. Developing an argument about contemporary romantic empiricism, I demonstrate how Catlin’s work offered his viewers direct access to nature, a quasi-empirical encounter of their own.
This paper explores how the normative values which govern the mainstream undergraduate admissions process at Oxford are impacted by the introduction of the Astrophoria Foundation Year (AFY). The AFY offers a route for students from disadvantaged backgrounds to access undergraduate study at Oxford with lower grades than normally required, challenging some internal narratives concerning merit and fairness. The project explores how the meaning of the AFY is constructed by admissions stakeholders and how this inflects their actions towards it: how narratives of permeation or compartmentalisation are deployed, how actors various support, oppose, accommodate and co-opt the AFY, and the impacts these actions have on both the AFY and the mainstream admissions process itself. Teams link: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_OTA0MDk4YTYtMzEwYS00OTMyLTlhNDAtY2ViMjI1ZTUyZWE1%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%225f581465-1def-4d51-8d4c-45a3b26b5b58%22%7d
In my laboratory we combine x-ray crystallographic and cryoEM based analyses with biophysical and functional studies to study the assembly and modulation of cell surface signalling complexes involved in development and tissue homeostasis. We aim to generate mechanistic insights, at atomic resolution, which can be tested by functional studies in vitro and in vivo. Through interdisciplinary collaborations we have integrated mechanistic insight with functional context in fly, zebrafish and mouse model systems. I will discuss some of the recent results we have generated by applying this approach to the signalling mechanism of the semaphorin-plexin cell guidance system and to the extracellular modulation of signalling by the morphogen Wnt. Published examples of our work on these two systems include the following: G.T. Powell=, A. Faro=, Y. Zhao=*, H. Stickney=, L. Novellasdemunt, P. Henriques, G. Gestri, E. Redhouse White, J. Ren, W. Lu, R.M. Young, T.A. Hawkins, F. Cavodeassi, Q. Schwarz, E. Dreosti, D.W. Raible, V.S.W. Li, G.J. Wright, E.Y. Jones*, S.W. Wilson*. (2024) ‘Cachd1 is a novel Frizzled- and LRP6-interacting protein required for neurons to acquire left-right asymmetric character.’ Science 384, 573-579. V. Mehta, K.L. Pang, D. Rozbesky, K. Nather, A. Keen, D. Lachowski, Y. Kong, D. Karia, M. Ameismeier, J. Huang, Y. Fang, A. del Rio Hernandez, J.S. Reader, E.Y. Jones and E. Tzima*. (2020) ‘The Guidance Receptor Plexin D1 is a mechanosensor in endothelial cells.’ Nature 578, 290-295. I.J. McGough=, L. Vecchia=, B. Bishop, T. Malinauskas, K. Beckett, D. Joshi, N. O'Reilly, C. Siebold, E.Y. Jones* and J-P. Vincent*. (2020) ‘Glypicans shield the Wnt lipid moiety to enable signalling at a distance.’ Nature 585, 85-90
Swallowing dysfunction (dysphagia) is a common problem after neurological diseases, with potentially life-threatening consequences including dehydration, malnutrition, aspiration and pneumonia, posing a substantial burden on healthcare resources. Exploring how the brain and swallowing muscles interact therefore becomes key to understanding the factors that can lead to dysphagia in disease states such as stroke. In my talk, I will first cover how the pharynx/swallowing is controlled by central pathways using brain imaging and brain stimulation based approaches. I will then examine how these neurophysiological pathways can be disrupted following neurological disease, and finally I will touch on how these pathways can be manipulated by neurostimulation to rehabilitate swallowing after neurogenic dysphagia associated with stroke and other neurological disorders.
Lesson of the week, clinical cases and research. All clinical and academic staff and students welcome. Coffee, Tea and Cake will be served.
Insight into Academia is a seminar series exploring topics relevant to those considering higher education roles in research, teaching, and related areas. This workshop will focus on teaching in higher education. During this session we explore teaching roles available in higher education and assist you in deciding whether it is the right next step for you. We will investigate how to gain teaching experience within your current role, and the qualifications you might pursue to set you up for success in the next chapter of your career. While particularly relevant to research staff and DPhil students, the seminar is open to anyone considering a career involving teaching in higher education, regardless of your current level of study or employment. If you would like to discuss your ideas and options further, you can always book in a 1:1 appointment with a Careers Adviser. *This event takes place via CareerConnect platform, you must have a CareerConnect account to book a place and join*. * Students can access CareerConnect with their SSO credentials * Research staff (Fixed term grades 6-9) can register for an account "here":https://oxford.targetconnect.net/unauth/445810/login?utm_source=person&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=visit * Academic or professional services colleagues are welcome to join online events and should request the joining link from the careers service via the contact email below.
Jonathan Edwards and the Spiders: Tracing the Ecological in Early American Environmental Thought (Sheila Byers): Jonathan Edwards was fascinated by spiders. Long before he dangled a metaphorical spider over the fire in “Sinners in the Hands of Angry God,” he wrote his earliest texts on the movements of spiders in the woods near his Connecticut Colony childhood home. This talk focuses on Edwards’s spider writings as indicative of his stance as an environmental thinker. I argue that Edwards expresses two divergent views of the environment: the first an orderly natural world determined by divine necessity and organized by human thought, and the second a swarming, ecological environment that refuses formulaic thinking. Following the implications of the second stance adds a surprisingly materialist and contingent element to what is generally accepted as Edwards’s strictly idealist, determinist philosophy. "To Modell Out a Land of So Much Worth": Model Thinking in Colonial New England - (Ethan Plaue): This talk illuminates the unexpected contributions of Puritan intellectual culture to the scientific practice of modeling. At the intersection of American literary history, the history of science, and the history of architecture, this talk stakes the claim that Puritan model thinking contributed at once to a scientific willingness to be selectively wrong and to the epistemologies of ignorance that are central to early American colonialism. An abbreviated version of an article in preparation, this talk will be drawn from the article's first section, which traces the conceptual history of modeling in Europe and America with special reference to the celebrated sermon, “A Modell for Christian Charity,” traditionally attributed to the Puritan leader John Winthrop. The sermon, I argue, refashions model thinking into an epistemological practice most appropriate for explaining material inequality in early American colonial society.
In 1954 the first two volumes of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings were published (The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers). To celebrate this event, and following on from last year’s Tolkien seminars, Exeter College – Tolkien’s undergraduate college – is proud to host a series of free lunchtime talks organised by the Faculty of English on The Lord of the Rings. Open to the public these talks are aimed at going deeper in some key aspects of the novel, Tolkien as a writer, and some of the spin-offs it has generated. Please note that all seminars will take place at the Fitzhugh Auditorium, Cohen Quad (Exeter College), Walton Street, Oxford, OX1 2HG: Week 1(17/10/2024) - Holly Ordway: 'Tolkien as Interpreter and Transformer of Culture: The Making of The Lord of the Rings as a Modern Book'. Week 2 (24/10/2024) - John Garth: 'Quisling and Prisoner: How the Second World War shaped the treason of Isengard'. Week 3 (31/10/2024) - HALF-TERM NO TALK Week 4 (7/11/2024) - Mark Williams: 'A Harmless Vice: Tolkien’s Invented Languages'. Week 5 (14/11/2024) - Giuseppe Pezzini: 'The authors and styles of The Lord of the Rings'. Week 6 (21/11/2024) - Grace Khuri: 'Medievalism in the Margins: Echoes of Anglo-Saxon England in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings – From Page to Screen'. Week 7 (28/11/2024) - Michael Ward: 'C.S. Lewis’s Influence on The Lord of the Rings'. Week 8 (05/12/2024) - Stuart Lee: 'The ‘Key-spring’ of The Lord of the Rings?'.
Extreme weather events, exacerbated by climate change, have had significant impacts on the economy, highlighting the pressing need to address the transmission of physical climate risks to financial markets. In this paper, we assess the impact of extreme rainfall risk on bond spreads by leveraging county-level precipitation and urban investment bonds in China. Our findings suggest that a one-day increase in the frequency of extreme rainfall in the previous year results in an increase of bond spreads by approximately 3 basis points. Notably, while adaptation bonds effectively reduce the adverse impact of extreme rainfall on local financing costs, we find no evidence that extreme rainfall risk influences the issuance behavior of local bonds. Furthermore, interventions by higher-level authorities can mitigate these impacts. This paper contributes to the literature by clarifying how climate risks are integrated into bond market pricing and underscores the importance of adaptive financial instruments in managing physical climate risks. About the speaker Yangsiyu Lu is an assistant professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) and a research associate with University of Oxford's Institute for New Economic Thinking. She was a DPhil researcher in the Economics of Sustainability group at INET. Before joining HKUST(GZ), she worked as a research fellow at Paris School of Economics and Boston University. Her multi-disciplinary research focuses on energy, climate and the environment. She is particularly interested in three areas: 1) Transition of fossil fuel assets, 2) Investment in clean technologies, and 3) Management of transitional risks. She holds a DPhil degree specialised in Environmental Economics from the University of Oxford, a master’s degree in Energy and Environment from IMT Mines Albi, and a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science and Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Postgraduate students, fellows, staff and faculty from any discipline are welcome. This group aims to foster frequent interdisciplinary critical dialogue across Oxford and beyond about the political impacts of emerging technologies. Please contact Elisabeth Siegel at elisabeth.siegel@politics.ox.ac.uk in advance to participate or with any questions. Remote attendance is possible, but in-person attendance is prioritized (and provided refreshment). Discussion topics will be finalized and optional readings will be sent out a week in advance. You do not currently have to be affiliated with the University of Oxford to attend and participate in discussions. About the speakers: Kayla Blomquist is a DPhil Affiliate of the Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative; a current DPhil candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute; and Co-Director of the Oxford China Policy Lab. Her research focuses on international approaches to artificial intelligence governance, concepts of legitimacy, and US-China relations. Kayla's expertise has been featured in outlets including The Economist, Just Security, and Oxford Global Society, and she recently wrote as the lead contributing author to the Oxford China Briefing Book. Prior to joining Oxford, she worked as a diplomat in the US Mission to China for 4 years, where she specialised in the governance of emerging technologies, human rights, and improving the use of new technology within government services. She also has experience in the non-profit sector managing democracy-building and anti-corruption grants in East and Southeast Asia. Kayla previously studied at Peking University and is professionally fluent in Mandarin. She holds an MSc in social science of the Internet from the University of Oxford and a bachelor's degree in international relations, public policy, and Mandarin Chinese from the University of Denver’s Korbel School of International Studies. Elisabeth Siegel is a DPhil Affiliate of the Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative, a current DPhil candidate at the Oxford Department of Politics and International Relations, and the leader of the Oxford Technology & Security Nexus, a constituent group of the Oxford Strategy, Statecraft, and Technology Centre at Pembroke College. She is the Director of Events for the Oxford China Policy Lab.
In this seminar, I will reflect on the role of place in shaping the mobility aspirations of young people in coastal towns in England. In the Global North, youth mobility has become a normalised part of the journey to higher education and ‘cosmopolitan’ adulthood. However, we argue that this is only part of the story for young people in coastal towns. Many of these coastal towns now face persistent socio-economic and infrastructural challenges. Against this backdrop, many coastal youth feel that they are marginalised within their towns and that the town is on the margins - culturally, economically, and geographically. This sense of marginality simultaneously propels youth out-migration and stigmatises those who stay behind. To make this argument, I draw on qualitative data we generated with young people in three coastal towns in England, including in-depth interviews, mapping workshops, and participatory arts and place-based methods.
Researching violence with young people is fraught with conceptual, ethical and methodological challenges. Violence is shrouded in power dynamics and emotions that constrain speaking out, with violence often underreported, and inadequately addressed. In this seminar, we will discuss how the qualitative research team from the Contexts of Violence in Adolescence Cohort study (CoVAC) have engaged with young people in Luwero, Uganda over several years (2018-2022), to learn about their experiences and perspectives on violence. CoVAC is a mixed methods, longitudinal study on how family, peer, school and community contexts affect young people’s experiences of violence in adolescence and early adulthood. It is a multi-disciplinary collaboration of researchers and practitioners in Uganda and the UK, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UCL Institute for Education and Raising Voices, an activist organization based in Uganda that prevents violence against women and children. Using a multi-dimensional framing of violence as a web of power, our analysis has explored material, structural and symbolic forces shaping young people’s experiences of violence, their subjectivities, and ways of resisting. During the seminar, we will share our analysis of the multi-faceted views narrated by young people on corporal punishment in schools, and on interventions, including legal bans. We will trace how their perspectives related to their shifting subject positions within the web of power, and consider the implications for violence prevention interventions in schools. Booking is required for people outside of the Department of Social Policy and Intervention (DSPI). DSPI Members do not need to register. This talk is part of the DSPI Michaelmas Term Seminar Series 2024
Online seminars run from 4.30pm to 6.00pm (UK time) via Zoom Webinar Join via: https://visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/tosca
In modern museums, a type of Chinese neolithic jades with a cylindrical hollow encased in a square outer surface is often exhibited as jade cong 琮. This image diverges significantly from the descriptions of cong as a flat ritual jade with multiple sides in both classical commentaries and records of state rituals. The discrepancy between these conceptions can be traced back to Eastern Han sources, but it was more directly a result of antiquarians’ redefinition of jade cong in the late nineteenth century to accommodate unearthed objects. This study examines the contention over evidence between China’s classicist and antiquarian traditions in conceptualising cong. It argues that antiquarian scholars distinguish themselves from classicists by treating unearthed objects as alternative evidence, but they also place objects as much as possible under the authority of classical texts. The antiquarians’ deep entanglement with classical tradition needs to be considered when evaluating their legacies in the modern-day naming of unearthed objects. Qin Yang is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Department of Classics and Archaeology, University of Nottingham. She received her PhD from the Australian National University with a thesis on visual forms of classical interpretation in Song China. She currently works on two strands of research: one is about the transformation of classical learning during the Song period; and the other is about Chinese religions in anecdotal sources in comparison with Greek religion, with a focus on dream production and divine epiphanies.
To join online, please register in advance here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUrdOyrpjotH9fLe4MPfgdU07ypRhiJBaI1
Arthur F. Kinney, ‘O vita! misero longa, foelici brevis: Thomas Lodge’s Struggle for Felicity’, in his _Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England_ (1986), 363-424
The Celtic Seminar is held jointly by Oxford and the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies (CAWCS), Aberystwyth. All Oxford seminars will be at 5.15 pm on Thursdays in a hybrid (online and in person) format. You will be able to join virtually via Microsoft Teams. Please contact david.willis@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk if you need a link to join online. In person, we will be in [TBC]. All CAWCS seminars will be held online at 5.00 pm on Thursdays via Zoom, and, for hybrid seminars, in person at the National Library of Wales. Please contact a.elias@wales.ac.uk for the link.
This event launches the Handbook of Research Methods in Migration, with the participation of co-editors William Allen and Carlos Vargas- Silva, along with several chapter authors. This thoroughly revised and updated second edition of the Handbook, bring together a diverse range of experts to explore the latest research methods in migration studies, taking stock of major changes that have been salient for migration research—as well as the social sciences more broadly—in the last decade. Spanning a variety of different methodologies, this second edition of the Handbook of Research Methods in Migration provides practical guidance on designing, completing, and communicating migration research, considering diverse audiences including migrants themselves. You can find out more about the Handbook here: https://www.elgaronline.com/edcollbook/book/9781800378032/9781800378032.xml
Julia Hollander writes non-fiction that originates in the lived experience, interweaving personal narratives with cutting edge research. Her first book, Indian Folk Theatres (Routledge, 2009) derived from over a decade working in India as a stage director and performer. She went on to write two memoirs about family life, When the Bough Breaks (John Murray, 2010), and Chicken Coops for the Soul (Guardian Books, 2011). More recently, she returned to her performing arts roots with Why We Sing (Atlantic, 2023) an exploration of the way in which singing benefits everyday wellbeing. She has also written plays for BBC radio including a dramatisation of When the Bough Breaks.
What is the challenge that lies ahead for Keir Starmer and his Government? Is to remake Britain? Or merely to repair it? Professor Marc Stears (Director, UCL Policy Lab; former chief speechwriter to the Labour Party; co-author of 'England: Seven Myths that Changed a Country') and Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Principal, Somerville College; former Leader of the House of Lords) will explore the direction of the Starmer Labour government -- and its prospects at a time defined by economic and geopolitical challenges.
The Chief Medical Officer has confirmed that attendance at the Surgical Grand Rounds can count toward internal CPD, with 1 point awarded per hour. Please note that in-person attendance is required, and you will need to sign the attendance register. Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend online.
Underlying many biological models are chemical reaction networks (CRNs), and identifying allowed and forbidden dynamics in reaction networks may give insight into biological mechanisms. Algebraic approaches have been important in several recent developments. For example, computational algebra has helped us characterise all small mass action CRNs admitting certain bifurcations; allowed us to find interesting and surprising examples and counterexamples; and suggested a number of conjectures. Progress generally involves an interaction between analysis and computation: on the one hand, theorems which recast apparently difficult questions about dynamics as (relatively tractable) algebraic problems; and on the other, computations which provide insight into deeper theoretical questions. I'll present some results, examples, and open questions, focussing on two domains of CRN theory: the study of local bifurcations, and the study of multistationarity.
In the aftermath of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19 epidemiologists began appealing to “herd immunity” as an explanation for the rise and fall of epidemics. Originally invoked to explain experiments with mouse populations exposed to disease, by the late 1920s herd immunity was being spoken of as an observable quality of human communities in response to diseases such as dipthheria, scarlet fever and influenza. As the century proceeded and a growing array of vaccines enabled the ability to cultivate immunity against once everyday infections, however, herd immunity was increasingly equated by many with a strategy or outcome of mass vaccination. I argue that this long-standing tension between observing and cultivating immunity offers important insights into the controversy surrounding the relevance of the concept during the recent pandemic.
The late Ediacaran Shuram anomaly is the largest carbon isotope excursion of the entire marine sedimentary record, with an amplitude of about 15‰. It was first reported in 1993 in separate studies from Oman, Australia and Russia, since which time it has been identified all over the world in strata aged between about 580 and 560 Ma. Although repeatedly assigned to biased sampling, it is more parsimoniously assigned to a sustained perturbation to the global carbon cycle. The Shuram anomaly is now known to be sandwiched between two major glaciations but is itself associated with global warming and biological radiations of benthic animals across an increasingly oxidised seafloor. Low organic burial rates during the Shuram anomaly are consistent with independent evidence for highly efficient organic remineralisation, implying net transfer of oxidising power from rock sulphate to the carbon cycle. Other negative anomalies occurred between 1.6 and 0.5 Ga, and preceded all Neoproterozoic glaciations. This talk will consider whether ‘sink-switching’ between the sulphur and carbon rock reservoirs was a defining characteristic of the Proterozoic Earth system.
This event is online only. The COVID-19 pandemic was marked by a slew of misinformation around vaccine efficacy, non-pharmaceutical interventions, appropriate prophylactic and therapeutic treatments, and more. Though much of this misinformation has been attributed to low-quality sources, scientific findings themselves may have been weaponised to this end. In this talk, we cover recent work showing that COVID-19 science was vastly misrepresented on the Twitter platform, owing mostly to a large misinformation cluster that engaged in selective citation of scientific papers. Alongside this false consensus, we analyze the temporal prominence of the pro- and anti-science clusters, and we uncover the adaptation of decades-long anti-vaccinati