Contributor(s): Professor Nikolas Rose | Thanks to the insights of genomics and neuroscience we now understand ourselves in radically new ways. Is a new figure of the human, and of the social, taking shape in the 21st century? Nikolas Rose is professor of sociology and director of BIOS at LSE.
Contributor(s): David Miliband MP | For the first time since First World War, governments in Britain, France, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden and Italy come from the centre-right. Is this just an accidental quirk of fate or is it more serious? David Miliband has worked at the top of UK government and politics for over 15 years. He was the youngest Foreign Secretary in thirty years from 2007 to 2010. As Secretary of State for the Environment he pioneered the world's first legally binding emissions r...
Contributor(s): John Bruton | John Bruton is chair of IFSC Ireland. He was EU ambassador to the US from 2004 to 2009, and was Taoiseach (prime minister) of Ireland from 1994 to 1997.
Contributor(s): Gunilla Carlsson | Although the overall trend in reaching the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) is positive we still face major challenges in many places of the world. Millions of people suffer from hunger and lack of access to safe drinking water. Africa is particularly hard-hit. Governments that pursue democratic development hand-in-hand with human rights stand a better chance of achieving the Millennium Development Goals. How can we ensure that the developed world delivers on ...
Contributor(s): Gideon Levy | Gideon Levy is a Haaretz columnist and a member of the newspaper's editorial board. In his lecture he will explore how Israeli society deals with the occupation and with the international criticism of this. He will also examine the role of the Israeli media in supporting the occupation. Gideon Levy joined Haaretz in 1982, and spent four years as the newspaper's deputy editor. He is the author of the weekly Twilight Zone feature, which covers the Israeli occupation i...
Contributor(s): Lord Brittan | Since 2008 it has looked to many as if the Doha Round trade negotiations were dead, or at best comatose. At the G20 Summit last November, world leaders gave it a shot in the arm, and there are now significant signs of life in Geneva. If concluded, it would provide an insurance policy against future protectionism and economic benefits estimated at over $360 billion. The challenge is to realise the window of opportunity in 2011 in order to seal the deal. On the last ...
Contributor(s): Professor John Hills, Dr Polly Vizard, Professor Sir Tony Atkinson, David Darton | At the centre of CASE's work is the understanding of different aspects of inequality and the impacts of public policy on them. At this event, John Hills and Polly Vizard will present findings from the detailed analysis of economic inequalities carried out by the National Equality Panel, and across wider dimensions using the Equality Measurement Framework, as developed by CASE and its partners for t...
Contributor(s): Professor Mary Kaldor, Javier Solana | This event will reflect on the work of the Human Security Study Group at LSE since 2004 and its impact in the development of European foreign and security policy. Mary Kaldor is professor of global governance at the Department of International Development and co-director of LSE Global Governance, London School of Economics & Political Science. Javier Solana is senior visiting professor at LSE Global Governance and former secretary genera...
Contributor(s): Archbishop Vincent Nichols | Archbishop Nichols will be speaking about the importance of religious freedom, and arguing that promoting religious freedom increases our capacity to do good in the public square. He will also be drawing out some implications from Catholic social teaching for a richer understanding of human dignity and the role of the state and the market in serving human needs. Vincent Nichols is the 11th Archbishop of Westminster. He was elected president of the Cat...
Contributor(s): Professor Michael Cox, Professor Arne Westad | Niall Ferguson argues that the world is now being shaped more by the emerging economies of the East than by the once dominant West. But within the West another kind of power shift is taking place, one that leads to the growing irrelevance of Europe. Is this true? And does it really matter? Michael Cox is professor of international relations at LSE and codirector of LSE IDEAS. Arne Westad is professor of international history at LSE a...
Contributor(s): Adam Brett, Deborah Doane, Julia Clark, Robin Murray | In this discussion event, a range of speakers look back over 15 years of the Fairtrade Mark and consider whether the movement for a fairer trading system has been ambitious enough. Is Fairtrade catalysing broader social change? Should Fairtrade be working with big corporates and retailers? Is Fairtrade moving producers up the value chain? Is it time to make the rules harder? Adam Brett co-founded Tropical Wholefoods, and is a...
Contributor(s): Professor Sir Tony Atkinson | Fifty years ago, it was believed that income inequality was falling and that poverty had largely been eliminated. This lecture returns to Richard Titmuss' masterly crossexamination of the evidence about income inequality and argues that we have much to learn, but also to add. Tony Atkinson is the centennial professor at LSE. His most recent book is Top Incomes: a global perspective.
Contributor(s): Professor Niall Ferguson | The decisive breakthroughs in the Cold War occurred in seemingly unrelated fields – nuclear arms control and human rights. But was the collapse of communism a reflection of imperial overstretch or the result of liberal aspirations for freedom? This event celebrates the publication of Professor Ferguson's new book Civilization: The West and the Rest. Niall Ferguson is Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs at LSE IDEAS for 2010-11.
Contributor(s): Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu | Mr. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu MP, the leader of the main opposition Republican People's Party in Turkey, is visiting LSE only months before Turkey goes to the polls in a national parliamentary election. Mr. Kılıçdaroğlu will present and discuss his party's views on political, economic, and social aspects of Turkey. He will specifically address the interrelations between politics and economy in Turkey.
Contributor(s): Professor Ernst Fehr | Authority and power permeate political, social, and economic life - yet there is limited empirical knowledge about the motivational origins and consequences of authority. Based on an experimental approach, Ernst Fehr's lecture will explore the psychological consequences of authority for important economic interactions. He will document the human desire to exercise authority, the motivation-enhancing effect of possessing authority and the detrimental motivat...
Contributor(s): Dr Hallvard Lillehammer, Dr Bart Streumer | Is moral thought embroiled in some kind of error? And is the error attributable to moral thought as such or to those who interpret it as erroneous? Hallvard Lillehammer is senior lecturer and Sidgwick Lecturer in Philosophy at Cambridge University. Bart Streumer is lecturer in philosophy at the University of Reading.
Contributor(s): Professor Fawaz Gerges | Regardless of the outcome of events in Egypt, for Arabs, psychologically and symbolically, this is their Berlin Wall moment. They are on the brink of a democratic wave similar to the one that swept through Eastern Europe more than 20 years ago, hastening the Soviet Union's collapse. The Arab intifada has put to rest the claim that Islam and Muslims are incompatible with democracy. The democratic virus is mutating and will probably give birth to a new lang...
Contributor(s): Ryan Pyle | Canadian born, award winning, documentary photographer Ryan Pyle first visited China in 2001. After a 3 month trip around the country he was hooked. He has never left since. It was very much Ryan's first trip to China that inspired him to enter the discipline of photography, and since then his imagery has graced the pages of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, The Sunday Times Magazine and the Financial Times Magazine. Ryan will visit the...
Contributor(s): Professor Lord Peter Hennessy | World-renowned expert on Cold War intelligence and espionage Peter Hennessy will address recently declassified documents and how history can help us 'catch-up' with the threats of today. Peter Hennessy is Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History at QMUL and was recently elected a Fellow of the British Academy as well as being an Honorary Fellow of LSE. Before joining the Department in 1992, he was a journalist for twenty years with spells o...
Contributor(s): Professor Ulrich Beck, Professor Lynn Jamieson | In the global age there are increasing numbers of long-distance relationships, bi-national couples, marriage migrants, foreign domestic workers and fertility tourists. What are their common characteristics? Ulrich Beck is the British Journal of Sociology LSE Centennial Professor.
Contributor(s): Jeffrey Boloten | As part of HRL Contemporary's collaboration with the LSE, we are delighted to present our first lecture examining the relationship between art and commerce. Jeffrey Boloten, Managing Director of ArtInsight will be talking on the current state of the global art market. An expert in this area, Boloten will use recent research and data to analyse the international art system and its functions from a macro perspective. The slippery subjects of how value is ascertain...
Contributor(s): Professor Nicola Clayton, Professor Erica Fudge, Professor Gregory Radick | This panel discussion will provide historical and contemporary perspectives on animal cognition and will consider the challenges facing the study of animal minds. Nicola Clayton is professor of comparative cognition at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of the Royal Society. Erica Fudge is professor of English studies in the School of Humanities at the University of Strathclyde. Gregory Radick is pro...
Contributor(s): Henry Siegman | Henry Siegman is president of the U.S./Middle East Project, an initiative focused on U.S.-Middle East policy and the Israel-Palestine conflict, launched by the Council on Foreign Relations in 1994. The organization was established as an independent policy institute in 2006 under the chairmanship of General Brent Scowcroft. Mr Siegman is also a visiting research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Un...
Contributor(s): Shelina Zahra Janmohamed, Senay Özdemir, Naema Tahir | There are few places in Europe in which the voices of multiculturalism and Islamophobia have clashed more forcefully than in the Netherlands, often in the most dramatic ways. To name just a few, Pim Fortuyn, Theo Van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and most recently Geert Wilders have been very much in the international press over the last decade. In the UK we are now 14 years on from the publication of the influential Runnymede Trust ...
Contributor(s): Professor John Gray | During the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century science became the vehicle for an assault on death. The power of knowledge was summoned to free humans of their mortality. Science was used against science and became a channel for faith. John Gray is most recently the acclaimed author of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, and Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. Having been Professor of Politics at Oxford, Vis...
Contributor(s): Tahmima Anam, Mirza Waheed | A new generation of writers from the subcontinent has been producing exciting work on the region's armed conflicts. This panel features two such writers: Tahmima Anam, author of A Golden Age, a novel about the 1971 Bangladesh war, and Mirza Waheed, author of The Collaborator, a novel about the ongoing conflict in Kashmir. Anam and Waheed will be in conversation with Sumantra Bose, professor of international and comparative politics at LSE.
Contributor(s): Sam Leith, Lionel Shriver, Nigel Warburton | With rapid developments in communication and publication technologies, the book – as conventionally conceived – is no longer the only point of connection between writers and their audiences. New media cross many geographical borders with ease, creating potentially global readerships. New communication technologies empower audiences to answer back, dissolving the traditional borders between writers and readers. And with this, the bounda...
Contributor(s): Francis Spufford | At first sight, the USSR of the 1950s and 1960s is a formidably remote and strange place for an early 21st-century western observer to try to inhabit: ideological, materially alien, suffused with obsolete expectations, and operating in its daily life and economic life according to rules that eerily reverse our own. But the reward for crossing this particular imaginative border, argues Francis Spufford, is the discovery, in the mirrorworld of the Soviet Union, o...
Contributor(s): Brian Chikwava, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Olumide Popoola | This panel will consider a number of complementary and competing themes around the topic of diaspora and place. Particular places, and perhaps especially cities, consist of large diasporic populations often represented as indications of cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism and conviviality. Diasporas may be formed through forced or voluntary movements, leaving behind certain places but having often powerful relationships to them, ...
Contributor(s): Donna Thomson, Geraldine Bedell | Donna Thomson will discuss her book, The Four Walls of My Freedom, which describes her family's experience of coping with her son's cerebral palsy. Her own encounter with adversity takes on new meaning when viewed through the lens of Professor Amartya Sen and other philosophers' roadmaps of how to realize a good life against all odds. This lens includes not only people with disability, but also the enormous generation of post-WWII Baby Boomers wh...
