On 28th November OxTalks will move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events' (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
There will be an OxTalks freeze beginning on Friday 14th November. This means you will need to publish any of your known events to OxTalks by then as there will be no facility to publish or edit events in that fortnight. During the freeze, all events will be migrated to the new Oxford Events site. It will still be possible to view events on OxTalks during this time.
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Abstract: The aim and effect of transnational terrorism today, including from ethnonationalist and racial supremacist resurgence, is to fragment social consensus by forcing people into opposing camps, with no room for innocents. The impetus to moral confusion and corruption afforded by the internet and social media, together with state-backed malign information campaigns that play on deep-seated cultural values to undermine democratic institutions and possibilities for social consensus, are inciting political polarization and further fragmentation.
Can social science help to bolster resilience?
A partial answer focuses on contributions from behavioral and brain studies into how “devoted actors,” committed to non-negotiable “sacred values” and the groups those values are embedded in, resort to extreme behaviors and resist rational-actor approaches to conflict resolution when opposing values, like those regarding God or country, are involved.
