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Mobutist Modernism: Art Education, State Sponsorship and the Visual Arts in Zaire

Series
African Studies Centre
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Sarah Van Beurden delivers paper at 'Cultural Production in Africa's Extractive Communities' workshop.

This is the first of five papers delivered at this workshop on 16 May 2019.

‘Cultural Production in Africa’s Extractive Communities’ is the sixth research seminar of the ERC project ‘Comparing the Copperbelt’ based at the University of Oxford. It focuses on the intersection between mining and cultural production in Central, Western and Southern Africa. Mining was one of the most important engines of transformation in Africa’s recent social and economic history. Industrial-scale mining – of gold, copper, tin, coal, oil, and diamonds – generated new towns and hurled people together from myriad cultural, linguistic and regional backgrounds. Thus, mining regions have also proved to be important venues of new forms of cultural production. Examples include DRCongo’s popular painting, Zambia’s psychedelic rock revolution in the 1970s, or Sotho migrant workers’ lifela song-poem genre. While certain forms of popular art have been the object of detailed study, e.g. in J.C. Mitchell’s 1956 ethnography of the Kalela dance, many of these studies have tended to be narrow in geographical focus.

This seminar will attempt a more global view and will look at a variety of cultural forms across a variety of regions and time periods. It will integrate analysis of cultural production into regional histories that have more commonly been characterised in structural and material terms, exploring the ways in which processes of cultural, political and economic change found expression in everyday life. Questions to be addressed include: in what ways did new forms of popular art integrate various cultural influences to address social issues specific to the mining context? How does the
21st century mining context, defined by plurality and competing global companies, impact cultural production? How do cultural forms produced in such contexts relate to and compare with those produced in other areas of the country? What can popular art tell us about the lived experiences of the societies that produced it?

Episode Information

Series
African Studies Centre
People
Sarah Van Beurden
Keywords
comparing the copperbelt
mobutu
art
education
Department: Centre for African Studies
Date Added: 14/12/2019
Duration:

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Is climate conflict inevitable?

Series
Futuremakers
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In this Futuremakers episode we ask experts the question - is climate conflict inevitable?
In 2010, Jeffrey Mazo outlined in his book 'How global warming threatens security and what to do about it' four ways in which climate and environmental change could produce security threats - a general systemic weakening, boundary disputes, resource wars, and by multiplying instability in already fragile or weak states.  Yet so far in our second series, with conversations around energy use, international treaties and individual choices, talk of conflict has received much less attention. 
Is this a fair reflection of the relative threat, or should people be paying far more attention to these potential future developments? Is global conflict due to climate change inevitable?
With Peter to discuss this are; Kate Guy, from the Centre for Climate and Security in Washington DC, a doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford specialising in International Relations, who focusses on the intersection of climate change and national security; and Dr Troy Sternberg, from Oxford's School of Geography and the Environment, whose research has explored how environmental and climate changes in the Gobi region of northern China and Mongolia, have impacted on security in the Middle East.

Episode Information

Series
Futuremakers
People
Peter Millican
Kate Guy
Troy Sternberg
Keywords
climate change
global warming
climate
Environment
Energy
war
warfare
conflict
threat
security threats
Department: Oxford University Development Office
Date Added: 13/12/2019
Duration: 00:49:30

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Climate change - who should we sue?

Series
Futuremakers
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In this episode of Futuremakers, we’re asking what does a rise in litigious climate action mean for society as we race to meet climate targets?
To date, there have been climate change legal cases in at least 28 countries. From Greta Thunberg leading a group of young people in filing a lawsuit against five countries at the UN, to the Hague Court of Appeals upholding a historic ruling against the Dutch government, increasing numbers of people are taking legal action together to demand governments do more. And with various oil and gas companies being sued by US cities for costs of climate-related damages, today on Futuremakers, we’re asking: what does this rise in litigious climate action mean for society as we race to meet climate targets?
Joining Peter Millican on the panel today - Fredi Otto, Acting Director of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford, and a lead author on extremes in weather in the ongoing assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC). Liz Fisher, Professor of Environmental Law at Oxford and General Editor of the Journal of Environmental Law. Myles Allen, Professor of Geosystem Science, and a lead author on the IPCC’s Special Report on 1.5 degrees.

Episode Information

Series
Futuremakers
People
Peter Millican
Fredi Otto
Liz Fisher
Myles Allen
Keywords
law
court
sue
Litigation
environmental law
lawsuit
legal
legal action
climate change
global warming
climate
Environment
Energy
food
Waste
Plastics
water
biodiversity
Department: Oxford University Development Office
Date Added: 13/12/2019
Duration: 00:56:52

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The Future of UK-Africa Research Partnerships Development Research and Beyond

Series
Africa Oxford Initiative
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Gill Wells is the Head of Research Services European and International Team and Strategic Lead on GCRF at the University of Oxford.
Gill talks about the meaning of development research and funds available in the UK to form international research collaborations.

Episode Information

Series
Africa Oxford Initiative
People
Gill Wells
Keywords
politics
Health
research
research partnerships
Department: Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine
Date Added: 13/12/2019
Duration: 00:24:58

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Communicating the Diagnosis of Life Threatening Conditions to Children

Series
Africa Oxford Initiative
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Professor Alan Stein, Head of Section, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Oxford delivered this talk at an AfOx insaka.
Alan talks about the importance of using appropriate guidelines while talking to children about the diagnosis of life threatening diseases.

Episode Information

Series
Africa Oxford Initiative
People
Alan Stein
Keywords
Africa
politics
Health
children
childhood diseases
Department: Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine
Date Added: 13/12/2019
Duration: 00:25:23

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Future of Cannabusiness

Series
Future of Business
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As restrictions on medical cannabis use loosen around the world, companies and entrepreneurs are entering the marijuana market in a big way. We learn more from leading players in this space and the first publicly-listed cannabis company.
As restrictions on medical cannabis use loosen around the world, companies and entrepreneurs are entering the marijuana market in a big way. To learn more, we spoke with Tejinder Verk and Paul Steckler of Canopy Growth, one of the leading players in this space and the first publicly-listed cannabis company.

Episode Information

Series
Future of Business
People
Tejinder Verk
Paul Steckler
Keywords
Said Business School
cannabis
regulation
Health
marijuana
Department: Saïd Business School
Date Added: 12/12/2019
Duration: 00:17:52

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The 2019 Esmond Harmsworth Lecture in American Arts and Letters

Series
Rothermere American Institute
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New Yorker fiction through the decades

Deborah Treisman has been fiction editor at The New Yorker since 2003, having joined the magazine in 1998. She hosts the award-winning New Yorker Fiction Podcast. She has edited the anthology 20 Under 40: Stories from The New Yorker (2010) and most recently (with Anne Doran), Walter Hopps’s The Dream Colony: A Life in Art (2017).
Published since 1925, The New Yorker features journalism, commentary, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It has a wide audience beyond New York and is well known for its illustrated and often topical covers, its commentaries on popular culture and eccentric Americana, and its attention to modern fiction. It is published weekly for most of the year, with some issues covering a fortnight.
The annual Esmond Harmsworth Lecture in American Arts and Letters is the centrepiece of the Oxford’s American literary calendar. Made possible by the generosity of Esmond V. Harmsworth, the lecture has been given by some of America’s leading novelists, poets, playwrights, and literary critics.

Episode Information

Series
Rothermere American Institute
People
Deborah Treisman
Keywords
journalism
commentary
fiction
Satire
cartoons
poetry
Department: Rothermere American Institute
Date Added: 12/12/2019
Duration:

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The Origins of the American Economy

Series
Harmsworth Lecture series
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Professor Peter Mancall (University of Southern California) delivered the 2019 Harmsworth Lecture in American History at 5 pm on Tuesday 19 November.
Peter C. Mancall is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at the University of Southern California. He is the author of six books and an elected fellow of the Society of American Historians and the Royal Historical Society. He gained his PhD from Harvard University in 1986.

Episode Information

Series
Harmsworth Lecture series
People
Peter Mancall
Keywords
harmsworth
American history
economy
Rothermere American Institute
Department: The Queen's College
Date Added: 12/12/2019
Duration: 00:41:59

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Health Policy Evaluation

Series
Evidence-Based Health Care
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Professor Karla Hemming discusses using evidence-based policy in the evaluation of policy interventions and answers the question 'how useful is the stepped-wedge study as an evaluation design?
Professor Karla Hemming is the Professor of Biostatistics at the Institute of Applied Health Research, University of Birmingham.

Episode Information

Series
Evidence-Based Health Care
People
Karla Hemming
Keywords
healthcare
Department: Medical Sciences Division
Date Added: 12/12/2019
Duration: 01:03:52

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Strachey Lecture: Can one Define Intelligence as a Computational Phenomenon?

Series
Strachey Lectures
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Can we build on our understanding of supervised learning to define broader aspects of the intelligence phenomenon. Strachey Lecture delivered by Leslie Valiant.
Supervised learning is a cognitive phenomenon that has proved amenable to mathematical definition and analysis, as well as to exploitation as a technology. The question we ask is whether one can build on our understanding of supervised learning to define broader aspects of the intelligence phenomenon. We regard reasoning as the major component that needs to be added. We suggest that the central challenge therefore is to unify the formulation of these two phenomena, learning and reasoning, into a single framework with a common semantics. Based on such semantics one would aim to learn rules with the same success that predicates can be learned, and then to reason with them in a manner that is as principled as conventional logic offers. We discuss how Robust Logic fits such a role. We also discuss the challenges of exploiting such an approach for creating artificial systems with greater power, for example, with regard to common sense capabilities, than those currently realized by end-to-end learning.

Episode Information

Series
Strachey Lectures
People
Leslie Valiant
Keywords
computer science
logic
Department: Department of Computer Science
Date Added: 11/12/2019
Duration: 01:05:08

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