Contributor(s): Chris Brown | LSE London's 2013 Lent term seminar series begins on the 14th of January. Speakers from within and beyond academia will focus on many of the implications of the current economic and political environment for London, covering relevant issues such as the road pricing, UK trends in higher education, census data and localism. Presenters include academics and practitioners from relevant fields.
Mar 11, 2013•1 hr 24 min
Contributor(s): Enda Kenny | Enda Kenny is Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of Ireland, a position he has held since March 2011. He has been the Leader of Fine Gael since June 2002 and has represented the people of Mayo as a Fine Gael member of Dáil Éireann since 1975. He served as Minister for Tourism and Trade from 1994 - 1997. He was also Vice-President of the European People’s Party from 2006-2012.
Mar 11, 2013•51 min
Contributor(s): Dr Ama de Graft Aikins, Dr Gora Mboup, Professor Vanessa Watson | Notwithstanding improvements, urban health in Africa remains a particular challenge, with 70 per cent of urban dwellers living in informal settlements, facing multiple disease burdens. How might we move towards healthy African cities? Ama de Graft Aikins is a visiting fellow at LSE Health and senior lecturer at the Regional Institute for Population Studies, University of Ghana. Gora Mboup is a senior demographic an...
Mar 07, 2013•1 hr 36 min
Contributor(s): Louise de Sousa, Elda Moreno, Pragna Patel | The Istanbul Convention is the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence. It is the first legally binding instrument in Europe and in terms of scope the most advanced treaty in the world creating a comprehensive legal framework to prevent violence, to protect victims and to end the impunity of perpetrators. It defines and criminalises various forms of violence against women (i...
Mar 07, 2013•1 hr 27 min
Contributor(s): Professor Dr Ahmet Davutoglu | Professor Dr Ahmet Davutoglu is Minister of Foreign Affairs of the 60th Government of the Republic of Turkey, a position he has held since 2009. He was born on February 26th, 1959 in Konya and completed his secondary education at the Istanbul High School. In 1983 he graduated from the Bosphorus University with a double major in Political Science and Economics at the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences. He completed his MA in the Departm...
Mar 07, 2013•1 hr 28 min
Contributor(s): Mark Hoban | Presented by British Government @ LSE and LSE Civil Service and Public Policy Alumni Group.
Mar 06, 2013•1 hr 14 min
Contributor(s): Dr Gareth Jones, Juan Sebastian Lama, Gloria Morrison, Dr Austin Zeiderman | This panel event is a student-led initiative, full title 'Urban Controversies: how controversies shape our cities,' with speakers Dr Gareth Jones (Reader, LSE Urban Geography), Juan Sebastian Lama (architect, PUC Chile and MSc City Design student), Gloria Morrison (Campaigning Coordinator, JENGbA) and Dr Austin Zeiderman (LSE Cities Research Fellow), talking about natural and man-made disasters and their...
Mar 06, 2013•1 hr 44 min
Contributor(s): Baroness Williams | Shirley Williams is a former Labour cabinet minister and one of the Gang Of Four who left Labour to start the Social Democrats.
Mar 05, 2013•1 hr 6 min
Contributor(s): Paul Collier | How to Harness Natural Resource Wealth for Accelerated Development.
Mar 05, 2013•1 hr 18 min
Contributor(s): Pablo Fernandez, Carlos Lopez, Miguel Klingenberg | The recent expropriation of Repsol by the Argentine government raises important legal, diplomatic and policy issues that put into question the current system of international investment protection. This seminar invites to debate on this issues from the investor's perspective. Pablo Fernández is Professor of Finance at the IESE Business School, Madrid. Carlos López Jall is the Director of International Organizations and European ...
Mar 04, 2013•1 hr 56 min
Contributor(s): Alain Juppé | At this time of mistrust towards the European Union, Alain Juppé reiterates his strong beliefs and his faith in Europe's future. A plea by a French statesman who has always been committed to the European enterprise. Alain Juppé was President of the political party Union for a Popular Movement from 2002 to 2004. He served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2011 to 2012. He also served as Prime Minister of France from 1995 to 1997 under President Jacques Chirac a...
Mar 04, 2013•1 hr 18 min
Contributor(s): Dr Hazem Kandil | Cambridge University's Dr Hazem Kandil will help explain why Egypt's popular uprising has so far failed to overthrow the regime through exploring the positions of the main players in the revolt: the military, security, and the various political factions. Kandil's latest book, Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen: Egypt's Road to Revolt, (Verso, 2012) analyses Egypt’s transformation from military regime to police state, on the road to revolution. Hazem Kandil is the Cam...
Mar 04, 2013•1 hr 27 min
Contributor(s): Hilary Lawson | Philosophers have pursued truth, and many have placed truth at the centre of their account of meaning. But might this be a mistake? Could error be at the heart of language, and adventure, rather than truth, be the matter in hand? In the first of three events on the theme, Hilary Lawson argues for a radical reappraisal of the importance of error. This lecture is the first of a three-part series entitled Error, Lies and Adventure, the second talk 'The Power of Lies'...
Mar 04, 2013•1 hr 29 min
Contributor(s): Baljit Bains | LSE London's 2013 Lent term seminar series begins on the 14th of January. Speakers from within and beyond academia will focus on many of the implications of the current economic and political environment for London, covering relevant issues such as the road pricing, UK trends in higher education, census data and localism. Presenters include academics and practitioners from relevant fields.
Mar 04, 2013•1 hr 24 min
Contributor(s): Miranda Glover, Charles Leadbeater, Sam Riviere | Some people have been struck by the aphoristic potential of Twitter. Others see developments in new media as bringing the era of the literature to an end. This panel will explore the way new media impacts on traditional literary and philosophical forms of writing and reading. One question is about the *threat* of new media to classical literacy: fragmentation and overload in new media leading to the withering away of traditional l...
Mar 02, 2013•1 hr 27 min
Contributor(s): Dr Clémentine Deliss, Elke Krasny, Maria Lind, Justin McGuirk | In recent years arts practice has shifted towards new modes of collaborative production while digital platforms continually offer new ways to distribute and engage with the arts. As performing and visual arts organisations are transforming relationships with audiences, more varied roles have emerged for curators beyond exhibition making and collections management. Curating has evolved to embrace audience-generated co...
Mar 02, 2013•1 hr 35 min
Contributor(s): Ben Galley, Claire Squires, Damon Zucca | New technologies have the potential to revolutionise how publishing works. And the benefits for authors of faster and more accessible opportunities are obvious. But the death of books has long been predicted but has not yet come to pass. This session will look at the prospects for the future of academic and traditional publishing in the digital age. The session will examine the current state of play in digital publishing, how readers’ vie...
Mar 02, 2013•1 hr 23 min
Contributor(s): Claude Fischler, Matthew Fort, Katie Miller, Carl Warner | Food is something of an obsession in contemporary culture, with 'celebrity' chefs topping the bestseller lists and pop-up restaurants and foodie blogs the height of cool. But are we thinking about food in the right way? Food shortages are predicted to be the next major world crisis, and obesity and eating disorders increasingly test our health services. Do campaigns to encourage sustainable healthy eating make any differe...
Mar 02, 2013•1 hr 26 min
Contributor(s): Paul Farley, Tristan Gooley, Sara Maitland | Paul Farley has received widespread acclaim for his poetry, including the Whitbread Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the E.M. Forster Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. From 2000-02 he was poet-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, and as a broadcaster he has made many programmes with the BBC on art, landscape and literature, including Auden: Six Unexpected Days, The Larkin Tapes and Children of the Whit...
Mar 02, 2013•1 hr 30 min
Contributor(s): Pat Barker | Moving from the Slade School of Art to Queen Mary's Hospital, where surgery and art intersect in the rebuilding of the shattered faces of the wounded, Pat Barker’s latest novel Toby's Room is a riveting drama of identity, damage, intimacy and loss. This event will explore art’s responsibility to war, and the links between art, literature, science and history. Pat Barker was born in Thornaby-on-Tees in 1943. She was educated at LSE and has been a teacher of history an...
Mar 02, 2013•54 min
Contributor(s): Carola Luther, Michael McGregor, Dr Llewelyn Morgan | How well can political ideas and sentiments be expressed and illuminated in poetry? Are oblique references more successful than the overt? Is the formulation of political ideas in poetry intrinsically more difficult than other ideas? Does a poet’s expression of politics necessarily compromise her status as a poet, or are our views of these matters culturally specific, related to assumptions about and ideals of the poet that ca...
Mar 02, 2013•1 hr 28 min
Contributor(s): Gabriella Ambrosio, Vered Cohen–Barzilay, Marina Nemat | Literature has a unique capacity to touch the hearts and minds and engage readers in a way that is distinctly different from political or academic texts. Can it play a role in exposing human rights violations? Should literature be ‘engaged’, and should authors take political or social stand? Gabriella Ambrosio’s first novel, Before we Say Goodbye, was inspired by the true story of a suicide bombing and is widely used as an ...
Mar 02, 2013•1 hr 28 min
Contributor(s): Dr Vayu Naidu, Michael Wood | After a performance by the highly acclaimed story teller Vayu Naidu of a story from the Ramayana, this discussion will explore the oral tradition of storytelling, and fiction. Vayu Naidu is a story teller. She is founder and artistic director of the Vau Naidu company, which promotes storytelling as theatre, with a signature style combining text, music and dance. She has brought research and performance of oral traditions into British Academy, creatin...
Mar 02, 2013•1 hr 38 min
Contributor(s): Katy Darby | Bored of the same old viewpoint or genre? Want to inject new life into your prose? Katy Darby talks about experimenting and playing around with different approaches to writing fiction. We'll explore the genesis and development of ideas (and come up with some new ones of our own) - and discuss ways of telling a story which can refresh a dusty narrative and teach an old plot new tricks. Katy Darby is author of The Unpierced Heart, director of short story event Liars' L...
Mar 02, 2013•1 hr 3 min
Contributor(s): Jonathan Gibbs | It’s a truism that technology is changing the way we live our lives – but should this fact change just what we write about, or should it change the way we write too? In this workshop we will look at – and try out – various ways that writers have tried to keep pace with the new dynamics of the digital age, including flash fiction and Twitter fiction, as well as seeing what happens when we try to incorporate these new ways of understanding the world, and dealing wi...
Mar 02, 2013•51 min
Contributor(s): Hugh Tomlinson QC, Karon Monaghan QC, Jamie Burton, Martin Howe QC, Richard Honey, Tim Frost, Will Hutton, Andrew Lilico, Ruth Porter, Magdalena Sepulveda, Polly Toynbee | Organisers: Professor Conor Gearty, Professor of Human Rights Law, LSE; Professor Aoife Nolan, Professor of International Human Rights Law, The University of Nottingham. Introduction: Conor Gearty (LSE Department of Law) and Aoife Nolan (Just Fair). Judge: Hugh Tomlinson QC (Matrix Chambers). Prosecution: led b...
Mar 01, 2013•2 hr 16 min
Contributor(s): Professor Russell Goulbourne, Dr Tim Hochstrasser, Dr Paul Keenan | This discussion will explore the work and influence of the French Enlightenment philosopher, art critic and writer Denis Diderot, a key figure for the Festival in the 300th anniversary of the year of his birth. Probably best known for co-founding and editing the Encyclopedie, our panel of experts will discuss this and other less well-known areas of his life, including his association with Catherine the Great and ...
Mar 01, 2013•1 hr 24 min
Contributor(s): Jenny Uglow | Jenny Uglow celebrates National Women’s History Month and its theme ‘women inspiring innovation through imagination’ with this talk about Sarah Losh, who built an extraordinary church in a village near Carlisle in the 1840s. As a woman innovator she broke all conventions in designing, supervising the building, and even carving the alabaster - sixty years before women architects were accepted into RIBA. She has been called ‘a Charlotte Bronte of wood and stone’, defy...
Mar 01, 2013•1 hr 4 min
Contributor(s): Professor David Abulafia | One great sea, a multitude of cultures and an embarrassment of riches: David Abulafia shares his intellectual odyssey from Alicante to Alexandria, from Salerno to Smyrna. David Abulafia is professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge University and author of The Great Sea: a human history of the Mediterranean. Helen Moore is fellow and tutor at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and University lecturer in the Faculty of English. This event forms part of ...
Mar 01, 2013•1 hr 24 min
Contributor(s): Professor John Gray | John Gray draws on an extraordinary array of memoirs, poems, fiction and philosophy to make us re-imagine our place in the world. Writers as varied as Ballard, Borges, Freud and Conrad are mesmerised by forms of human extremity - experiences on the outer edge of the possible, or which tip into fantasy and myth. What happens to us when we starve, when we fight, when we are imprisoned? And how do our imaginations leap into worlds way beyond our real experience...
Feb 28, 2013•1 hr 26 min