Contributor(s): Bronislaw Komorowski | Bronislaw Komorowski, Poland's parliamentary speaker, has been thrust into the role of acting president after the death of Lech Kaczynski in a plane crash in Russia. As Marshal of the Sejm, Poland's lower house of parliament, since November 2007, presidential powers were automatically transferred to Mr Komorowski upon Mr Kaczynski's death.
Jun 02, 2010•1 hr 6 min
Contributor(s): Ritt Bjerregaard | As mayor of Copenhagen, Ritt Bjerregaard presided over a number of pioneering initiatives - including promoting cycling and low emissions zones - which help demonstrate how cities can provide solutions to global challenges such as climate change
Jun 01, 2010•1 hr 19 min
Contributor(s): Shankar Acharya, Isher Ahluwalia, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Surjit Bhalla, Martin Wolf | India has traversed a long way since the economic reforms of the early 1990s, and is now widely recognized as one of the fastest growing countries in the world. In view of Montek Singh Ahluwalia's key role in crafting reforms which helped integrate India with the world economy, this volume (India's Economy: Performance and Challenges Essays in Honour of Montek Singh Ahluwalia) in his honour bri...
Jun 01, 2010•2 hr 5 min
Contributor(s): Carlos Gutierrez | The global financial crisis caused some governments to turn inward. Is protectionism here to stay? What can the US and EU do to stimulate growth and encourage trade?
May 27, 2010•1 hr 16 min
Contributor(s): Professor Claudia Goldin | The talk concerns the challenges facing highly-educated young men and women who wish to have families while pursuing careers such as those in business, medicine, law, and academia. The long history of the career and family quest among college graduate women is explored, and relationships between demands in the labor market for workplace flexibility and the response by occupations, firms, and institutions are addressed.
May 27, 2010•1 hr 4 min
Contributor(s): Dr Antonieta Medina Lara, Barbara Nyanzi-Wakholi | Until only a few years ago, an AIDS diagnosis in Africa was seen as the harbinger of an inevitable and lingering death. In rich countries, anti-retroviral therapy has made AIDS a manageable condition for most infected people. The challenge has been to provide such treatment in resource constrained settings, particularly in Africa. In a unique study combining sophisticated quantitative and qualitative analysis, Antonieta Medina La...
May 27, 2010•1 hr 12 min
Contributor(s): Lieutenant Colonel Shannon D. Beebe, Professor Mary Kaldor, Clare Short, Rory Stewart MP | A panel of speakers explore an idea for stabilising the dangerous neighbourhoods of the world through the implementation of human security ideas. The event celebrates the publication of The Ultimate Weapon is No Weapon: Human Security and the New Rules of War and Peace written by Shannon D Beebe and Professor Mary Kaldor, published by Perseus Books.
May 26, 2010•1 hr 34 min
Contributor(s): Zack Cooper, Simon Dietz, Sarabajaya Kumar, Sarah Mistry | This keynote panel is part of the LSE PhD Poster Exhibition: Relating Research to Reality hosted on May 26 in the NAB. The panel will speak to the theme of the PhD Poster Exhibition, exploring diverse approaches to engagement between academia and wider society.
May 26, 2010•1 hr 1 min
Contributor(s): Saif al-Islam Alqadhafi | Saif al-Islam Alqadhafi is currently Chairman of the Gaddafi International Foundation for Charity and Development based in Tripoli, Libya. He received his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics in 2009. The topic of his thesis was The Role of Civil Society in the Democratization of Global Governance Institutions: From 'Soft Power' to Collective Decision-Making? He received a Masters Degree in Business from Vienna's IMADEC University in 2000. He gradua...
May 25, 2010•1 hr 22 min
Contributor(s): Professor Hashim Sarkis | Is there anything to say about Beirut beyond the obvious, and by now exhausted, lessons of post-war reconstruction and identity politics? What is a "Beirut normal"? Is it worth examining? The lecture puts forward these questions not in order to diminish the city's architectural output but to reveal aspects of the city that have been overwhelmed by the discourses of war and politics. Through a series of specific architectural and urban analyses, the lectu...
May 25, 2010•1 hr 33 min
Contributor(s): Dr Paul Woolley | Paul Woolley explains why banking has grown so dominant, profitable and prone to crisis. He shows how giant funds, the custodians of social wealth, should act to make finance a better servant to society.
May 25, 2010•1 hr 26 min
Contributor(s): Professor Muhammad Yunus | Muhammad Yunus has developed a visionary new dimension for capitalism which he calls "social business". By harnessing the energy of profit-making to the objective of fulfilling human needs, social business creates self-supporting, viable commercial enterprises that generate economic growth even as they produce goods and services that make the world a better place. In Building Social Business, Professor Yunus shows how social business has gone from being...
May 25, 2010•1 hr 4 min
Contributor(s): Dr Adam S Posen | There is a battle for the future of our planet between profiteers who threaten to destroy natural resources for gain and backward-looking environmental romantics who thwart constructive development. Paul Collier uses his ground-breaking research to offer realistic and sustainable solutions that reconcile the immediate needs of the world's growing population without despoiling the planet for future generations.
May 24, 2010•1 hr 25 min
Contributor(s): Professor Paul Collier | Cities are the magnets for more than half the world's population. In such urban conditions, architects are increasingly called into debates about environmental and social sustainability, governance, and social inequality. Shaping Cities is an Urban Age public lecture series organised by LSE Cities that identifies the growing complexity of architectural practice in relation to the challenges of exponential urbanism.
May 24, 2010•1 hr 23 min
Contributor(s): Professor Edwin Hutchins | Edwin Hutchins discusses how the shift to seeing cognition as a biological rather than a logical phenomenon presents challenges and opportunities for understanding the relations between culture and cognition.
May 20, 2010•1 hr 23 min
Contributor(s): Professor John Roberts | As early as 2005 Roubini speculated that house prices would soon sink the economy, and in 2006 warned the IMF that the The quality of management varies significantly across countries, with less developed countries featuring a large share of poorly managed firms. In a field experiment we explore why so many Indian firms are poorly managed, whether this can be improved and what the effect of better management is on performance. We find strong positive resul...
May 20, 2010•1 hr 16 min
Contributor(s): Dr Sam Tororei | The WHO estimates that 10 per cent of the population in poor countries is disabled. Disabled people have and want sexual lives - and, because of their disabilities, they may also be sexually abused and exploited. In this lecture Dr Sam Tororei from the Nairobi based Regional AIDS Training Network (RATN) will present findings from the most recent research. He will talk about how in Kenya steps are being taken to protect disabled people from sexual abuse while enco...
May 20, 2010•1 hr
Contributor(s): Professor William Easterly | This lecture argues that occasions when development economists were more certain about 'the solution to global poverty' have often led to harmful consequences for the world's poor in the long-run. Sceptical criticism is a creative force that redirects attention and effort away from centrally-directed expert solutions towards effective decentralised problem-solving.
May 19, 2010•1 hr 39 min
Contributor(s): Professor Nouriel Roubini | As early as 2005 Roubini speculated that house prices would soon sink the economy, and in 2006 warned the IMF that the United States was likely to face a catastrophic housing bust resulting in deep recession. Back then he was nicknamed 'Dr Doom' by the New York Times. In hindsight, economists have called him a prophet.
May 18, 2010•1 hr 19 min
Contributor(s): Professor Carlota Perez | Drawing lessons from history, this lecture will argue that the potential of information technologies, the challenges of the environment and the scope for re-specialisation in the globalised economy could bring about a sustainable global 'golden age'.
May 18, 2010•1 hr 31 min
Contributor(s): Professor Rahul Mehrotra. | Mumbai, a Kinetic City, presents a compelling vision that potentially allows us to better understand the blurred lines of contemporary urbanism and the changing roles of people and spaces in urban society. An architecture or urbanism of equality in an increasingly inequitable economic condition requires looking deeper to find a wide range of places to mark and commemorate the cultures of those excluded from the spaces of global flows. These don't neces...
May 18, 2010•1 hr 36 min
Contributor(s): Professor Richard Sennett, Dr Rowan Williams. | A dialogue between a social philosopher and theologian about ritual and narrative.
May 14, 2010•1 hr 30 min
Contributor(s): Sir Christopher Kelly | The lecture will discuss some of the issues facing the health and social care system following the election.
May 14, 2010•56 min
Contributor(s): Professor Craig Calhoun, Professor Bruno Latour, Alan Rusbridger, Professor Judy Wajcman, David Adjaye, Professor Geoff Mulgan, Lord Richard Rogers, Polly Toynbee. | In this exciting half-day conference two panels on 'Public Life and Public Policy' and 'Cities and the Public Realm', discuss these themes in the context of the work of Professor Sennett, the eminent sociologist whose recent books include The Culture of the New Capitalism and The Craftsman.
May 14, 2010•1 hr 13 min
Contributor(s): Professor Craig Calhoun, Professor Bruno Latour, Alan Rusbridger, Professor Judy Wajcman, David Adjaye, Professor Geoff Mulgan, Lord Richard Rogers, Polly Toynbee. | In this exciting half-day conference two panels on 'Public Life and Public Policy' and 'Cities and the Public Realm', discuss these themes in the context of the work of Professor Sennett, the eminent sociologist whose recent books include The Culture of the New Capitalism and The Craftsman.
May 14, 2010•1 hr 23 min
Contributor(s): Stefan Halper | Beyond the military and economic challenge presented by Beijing, there lies a battle of ideas. China's market authoritarian model promises to shape the developing world in the 21st Century offering both new modes of governance and a path around the West. What does this mean for the Enlightenment ideals that have informed Western progress for some 200 years? What does it mean for the millions seeking a better life across the Third World?
May 13, 2010•1 hr 24 min
Contributor(s): Professor John Kay | Many goals are more likely to be achieved when pursued indirectly: the most profitable companies are not the most aggressive in chasing profits and the wealthiest are not the most materialistic. By understanding the principle of Obliquity we can make better decisions in our personal and professional lives
May 13, 2010•1 hr 23 min
Contributor(s): Dr Rane Willerslev | The question which runs throughout this talk can be stated in stark form: is it a mistake to take our interest in an ethnographic phenomenon in the direction of an empirical investigation, when what is really needed with respect to its clarity is an imaginative contemplation of it? It is my overall argument that this is indeed the case and that the Malinowskian recourse to empirical evidence as the ultimate criterion for anthropological knowledge is misguided...
May 13, 2010•55 min
Contributor(s): Howard Davies and Paul Volcker | Howard Davies is director of LSE. Prior to this, from 1997-2003 he was Chairman of the Financial Services Authority, the single regulator for the UK financial sector, which was created under his leadership from nine separate regulatory agencies. From 1995-1997 he was Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. His latest book is Banking on the Future: the fall and rise of central banking, written with David Green, which will be launched at LSE at a pu...
May 13, 2010•1 hr 1 min
Contributor(s): Professor Tim Crane, Professor AC Grayling | For the last 150 years or so European philosophers and sociologists have tended to regard religion as just one more pre-scientific myth and superstition that has had its day, and likely to wither on the vine of History. This view, the secularization thesis, seems today to be in poor shape. Not only does there appear to be no sign of withering, still less a clear path of scientific and rational progress, but religion seems to be revivin...
May 12, 2010•1 hr 30 min
