LSE: Public lectures and events

Speaker(s): Professor Christine Bell, Dr Aisling Swaine | ‘Conflict-related violence against women’ is often understood to mean sexual violence, specifically rape used as a weapon of war. But this is only one part of a broad continuum of gender violence which must be understood and addressed within and across conflict settings. In her new book, Conflict-Related Violence Against Women: Transforming Transition, Aisling Swaine examines the contexts of Liberia, Northern Ireland and Timor-Leste to identify a spectrum of forms of gender violence. She analyses their occurrence, and the relationship between them, within and across different points of pre-, mid- and post-conflict. Swaine proposes that a transformation rather than a transition is required in the aftermath of conflict, if justice is to play a role in preventing gender violence. Christine Bell (@christinebelled) is Principal Director of the Political Settlements Research Programme, Assistant Principal (Global Justice), Co-Director, Global Justice Academy, and Professor of Constitutional Law, University of Edinburgh. Aisling Swaine (@AislingSwaine) is Assistant Professor of Gender and Security at the Department of Gender Studies, LSE, where she teaches primarily on the MSc in Women, Peace and Security. Christine Chinkin is Director of the Centre for Women, Peace and Security. The Centre for Women, Peace and Security (@LSE_WPS) is a leading academic space for scholars, practitioners, activists, policy-makers and students to develop strategies to promote justice, human rights and participation for women in conflict-affected situations around the world.

Speaker(s): Professor Mariana Mazzucato | In her new book, The Value of Everything, which she will discuss in this lecture, Mariana Mazzucato, argues that if we are to reform capitalism, we urgently need to rethink where wealth comes from. Which activities are creating it, which are extracting it, and which are destroying it? Answers to these questions are key if we want to replace the current parasitic system with a type of capitalism that is more sustainable, more symbiotic: that works for us all. Mariana Mazzucato (@MazzucatoM) is Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London (UCL) where she is also Founder and Director of the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. She is author of the highly-acclaimed book The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, and winner of the 2014 New Statesman SPERI Prize in Political Economy, the 2015 Hans-Matthöfer-Preis and the 2018 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. She advises policymakers around the world on how to deliver 'smart', inclusive and sustainable growth. She was named as one of the '3 most important thinkers about innovation' in the New Republic. Wouter den Haan is Co-director for the Centre for Macroeconomics and Professor of Economics at LSE. The Department of Economics at LSE (@LSEEcon) is one of the largest economics departments in the world. Its size ensures that all areas of economics are strongly represented in both research and teaching. The Centre For Macroeconomics (@CFMUK) brings together world-class experts to carry out pioneering research on the global economic crisis and to help design policies that alleviate it.

Speaker(s): Professor Tony Bennett, Professor Angela McRobbie, Dr Clive James Nwonka, Professor Beverley Skeggs | This event will consider the prospects for contemporary thinking within the cultural studies tradition to engage with current inequalities. Mindful of the historical importance of this tradition, dating back to the 1960s and including work by Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, feminist cultural theory, and Bourdieu, the panel will both take stock of these older perspectives and offer their thoughts on contemporary prospects. Tony Bennett is Research Professor in Social and Cultural Theory in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. Angela McRobbie is Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths University of London. She has recently elected Fellow of the British Academy. Her early work was carried out at Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and her most recent books include: The Aftermath of Feminism 2008, Be Creative 2015. She is currently completing Feminism, Neoliberalism and Popular Culture (Polity 2019). Clive James Nwonka (@CJNwonka) is Course Leader for the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity, LSE. His research is interested in how inequality is visualised and framed in cinema and cultural policy, through both film studies and cultural studies approaches. Beverley Skeggs (@bevskeggs) is Academic Director for the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity, LSE. Bev is one of the foremost feminist sociologists in the world, her work has been significant in drawing attention to the intersections between class and gender inequality. Mike Savage (@MikeSav47032563) is Martin White Professor of Sociology at LSE and co-Director of LSE International Inequalities Institute. The International Inequalities Institute at LSE (@LSEInequalities) brings together experts from many LSE departments and centres to lead critical and cutting edge research to understand why inequalities are escalating in numerous arenas across the world, and to develop critical tools to address these challenges.

Speaker(s): Gro Harlem Brundtland, Hector Castañón, Aya Chebbi, Ban Ki-moon, Graça Machel, Njoki Njoroge Njehu, Dr Wanda Wyporska, Ernesto Zedillo | Join The Elders, the Fight Inequality Alliance, and Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity to honour grassroots efforts around the world to turn around the inequality crisis and learn how you can join the movement working to #WalkTogether to #FightInequality. Around the world, the gap between the richest and the rest of society has reached extremes not seen in a century. The global inequality crisis is undermining efforts to end poverty, racial and class-based discrimination, advance women’s rights, defend the environment, protect human rights and democracy, prevent conflict, and promote fair and dignified employment. We have an unacceptable concentration of wealth and power in the hands of elites, whilst hundreds of millions fight to survive. Together we will raise the voices of grassroots ‘Sparks of Hope’ who are fighting the root causes of inequality, and joining together in alliance to build more equal peaceful and just societies, and identify how we can each take steps towards freedom with equality. Gro Harlem Brundtland was the first female Prime Minister of Norway and is Deputy Chair of The Elders; a medical doctor who champions health as a human right; put sustainable development on the international agenda. Hector Castañón is a consultant for UN-HABITAT México; fellow of LEAD International for sustainable development; coach at Rhize.org for grassroots leadership training and cofounder of Tómala.Mx, a cross sectoral network of civil society organizations. He is a member of the Mexican Citizen Assembly to Address Sustainable Development Goals 1 and 10 related to poverty and inequality (AO1O), which is the Mexican chapter of the Fight Inequality Alliance. Aya Chebbi (@aya_chebbi) is an award winning pan-African feminist activist and blogger.

Speaker(s): Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Ola Rosling | When asked simple questions about global trends – why the world's population is increasing; how many young women go to school; how many of us live in poverty – we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers according to the book's authors In their new book Factfulness, Professor of International Health Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Ola Rosling, offer a radical new explanation of why this happens, and reveal the ten insticts that distort our perspective Ola Rosling (@OlaRosling) and Anna Rosling Rönnlund (@AnnaGapminder), Hans Rosling’s son and daughter-in-law, were co-founders of the Gapminder Foundation, and Ola its director from 2005 to 2007 and from 2010 to the present day. After Google acquired the bubble-chart tool called Trendalyzer, invented and designed by Anna and Ola, Ola became head of Google's Public Data Team and Anna the team's senior user experience (UX) designer. They have both received international awards for their work Tiziana Leone (@tizianaleone) is an Assistant Professor at the London School of Economics. Tiziana’s research agenda is focused around maternal and reproductive health, including a lifecourse approach to women’s health The Department of International Development (ID) was established in 1990 as the Development Studies Institute (DESTIN) to promote interdisciplinary postgraduate teaching and research on processes of social, political and economic development and change The Global Health Initiative is a cross-departmental research platform set up to increase the coherence and visibility of Global Health research activity across the School, both internally and externally. It provides support for interdisciplinary engagement and showcases LSE’s ability to apply rigorous social science research to emerging global health challenges.

Speaker(s): Chris Hughes, Professor Natalie Fenton, Kam Sandhu | Co-founder of Facebook Chris Hughes makes the case that one-percenters like him should pay their fortune forward in a radically simple way: a guaranteed income for working people Chris Hughes (@chrishughes) is co-founder of the Economic Security Project and co-founder of Facebook. His new book is Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn Natalie Fenton (@NatalieFenton1) is Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths and vice-chair of Hacked-Off, of the Media Reform Coalition and the Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy. She has published many books and articles, the most recent Digital Political Radical is published by Polity Kam Sandhu (@KamBass) is a journalist and editor of Real Media, a co-operative dedicated to public interest journalism. Her research areas include inequality, data and corporate accountability. Her work has featured in New Internationalist, InSurge Intelligence, DeSmog, The Real News Network and more Beverley Skeggs (@bevskeggs) is Academic Director, Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme, International Inequalities Institute The International Inequalities Institute at LSE (@LSEInequalities) brings together experts from many LSE departments and centres to lead critical and cutting edge research to understand why inequalities are escalating in numerous arenas across the world, and to develop critical tools to address these challenges.

Speaker(s): Dr Linda Yueh | Linda Yueh will discuss her new book that helps us to think about the biggest economic challenges of our time by drawing on the ideas of the great economists whose thinking has already changed the world Linda Yueh (@lindayueh) is a Fellow in Economics at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University, Adjunct Professor of Economics at London Business School, and a Visiting Senior Fellow at LSE IDEAS Linda Yueh (@lindayueh) is a Fellow in Economics at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University, Adjunct Professor of Economics at London Business School, and a Visiting Senior Fellow at LSE IDEAS Michael Cox is Director of LSE IDEAS and Emeritus Professor of International Relations at LSE LSE IDEAS (@lseideas) is LSE's foreign policy think tank. We connect academic knowledge of diplomacy and strategy with the people who use it.

Speaker(s): Professor Toby Dodge, Dr Rachel Ibreck, Rim Turkmani, Lyse Doucet | This event will launch LSE’s new Conflict Research Programme funded by the UK’s Department for International Development. The CRP aims to understand why contemporary violence is so difficult to end and to analyse the underlying political economy of violence with a view to informing policy, with a special focus on Iraq, Syria, South Sudan, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Members of the research team will present their ideas and initial findings to Javier Solana, the former foreign policy chief of the European Union. Toby Dodge (@ProfTobyDodge) is Director of the LSE Middle East Centre, Kuwait Professor and Professor in the International Relations Department at LSE. He is also Senior Consulting Fellow for the Middle East at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London. Rachel Ibreck's research centres on the politics of human rights, justice and civil society in the context of conflict and genocide, principally in Africa. Rim Turkmani (@Rim_Turkmani) is a Senior Research Fellow with the Conflict Research Programme on the Syrian war economy and the role of Syrian civil society in brokering peace and creating stability from the bottom up. Lyse Doucet (@bbclysedoucet) is chief international correspondent at the BBC. Lyse has been reporting for the BBC for nearly 30 years, with posts in Abidjan, Kabul, Islamabad, Tehran, Amman and Jerusalem. Javier Solana (@javiersolana) is President of the ESADE Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics and a former EU High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy. He is a Visiting Professor at LSE. Mary Kaldor is a Professor of Global Governance and Director of the Conflict and Civil Society Research Unit in the LSE Department of International Development. Professor Kaldor directs the unit’s largest research project, the Conflict Research Programme (CRP). The Conflict and Civil Society Research Unit is based within the International Development Department at LSE. The Unit focuses on understanding conflict and violence in Africa, Europe and the Middle East and bridging the gap between citizens and policy makers. Update, Monday 19 March: Due to unforeseen circumstances Rory Stewart will no longer be speaking at this event.

Speaker(s): Professor Aeron Davis, Polly Toynbee, Joe Earle, Polly Toynbee, Joe Earle | Join Aeron Davis, Polly Toynbee, Joe Earle and Bev Skeggs for a discussion on Britain’s dysfunctional leadership. Aeron Davis will cast the evening off by arguing that the Brexit vote and 2017 election result are more than temporary setbacks for the Establishment. Instead, there is a deeper crisis of leadership that has been developing over decades. The great transformations of the 1980s onwards have not only upended societies, they have reshaped elite rule itself. The UK is producing a new generation of leaders who, although richer, have lost coherence, vision, influence and power. Their failings are not only damaging the wider public, economy and society, they are undermining the very foundations of the Establishment itself. Joining Aeron to offer their take on Britain’s top tier will be Polly Toynbee, the Guardian’s award-winning political affairs columnist, and Joe Earle, author and campaigner for economic reform. The event will be chaired by the LSE’s Bev Skeggs. The event will also launch Aeron Davis’s new book Reckless Opportunists: Elites at the End of the Establishment. The book, based on 350 interviews with elite figures across business, politics and finance, asks: how did we end up producing the leaders that got us here and what can we do about it?

Speaker(s): Professor Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet | Arabs and Persians have historically been placed in a binary and oppositional relationship. This bifurcated past has influenced the contemporary politics and historiography of the region, with far-reaching consequences for the stability and economic viability of different Middle Eastern communities. This clash of ethnicities becomes especially prominent in the Persian Gulf, where migrants, sailors, indigenous communities, and laborers have intermingled and forged a unique and multi-ethnic culture that defies facile categorization. Yet with the imposition of nationalism these multi-cultural communities have had to accept or adapt to the dominant state identity. This lecture will analyse the process of identity formation in the communities of the Persian Gulf by studying textual sources, as well as imperial and national objectives, that have determined these outcomes. Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet is Walter H Annenberg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania. Roham Alvandi is is Associate Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. This event is the Department of International History Annual Gulf History Lecture with generous support from LSE Kuwait Programme.

Speaker(s): Dr Joseph Slaughter | Modern Euro-American law operates by fashioning legal persons as creatures endowed with rights and responsibilities. This figurative process of personification is a means of emancipation. Indeed, the fourteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution laid the legal groundwork not only for recognition of the full legal personality of ex-slaves; it also “emancipated” the business corporation, which possesses legal rights and responsibilities by way of analogy to the human, figured as a metaphorical assemblage of human body parts. A perverse version of that analogical operation also sits at the bottom of international human rights law. Technically speaking, international law seems to protect the rights of the human, through the figure of the international legal person, by way of analogy to the human being itself. However, Joseph Slaughter argues that some of the qualities of international legal personhood that we now think of as properly belonging to human beings first appeared in the form of colonial charter companies. In this talk, Joseph Slaughter examines the rhetorical magic of modern law that populates the social world with personified legal fictions that may “resemble us too much” by reading international human rights law alongside and through early Nigerian novelist Amos Tutuola’s enchanting The Palm-wine Drinkard. Joseph Slaughter is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University in the City of New York. Gerry Simpson is a Professor of Public International Law at LSE. This event is the Annual London Review of International Law Lecture supported by the SOAS Centre for the study of Colonialism, Empire and International Law. LSE Law (@lselaw) is an integral part of the School's mission, plays a major role in policy debates & in the education of lawyers and law teachers from around the world.

Speaker(s): Lord Sainsbury | David Sainsbury will be talking about his lifetime of philanthropy. Lord Sainsbury is founder of the Gatsby Charitable Foundation. He donated £200 million of Sainsbury’s shares to the Foundation’s assets. Stephan Chambers is Marshall Institute Director. The Marshall Institute (@LSEMarshall) aims to increase the impact and effectiveness of private action for public benefit through research, teaching and convening.

Speaker(s): Professor Catherine Barnard, Professor Simon Hix, Jill Rutter, Professor Tony Travers | One year on from the triggering of Article 50, how far have the Brexit negotiations progressed? What lessons are there for the UK and the European Union? What are the implications for the future? Catherine Barnard (@CSBarnard24) is Professor of European Union Law, University of Cambridge. Simon Hix (@simonjhix) is Harold Laski Professor of Political Science, Department of Government, LSE. Jill Rutter (@jillongovt) is a programme director for Brexit at the Institute for Government and has co-authored a number of the Institute reports on the implications of Brexit for Whitehall and Westminster. Tony Travers is Director, Institute of Public Affairs, LSE. Kevin Featherstone is Head of the European Institute, Eleftherios Venizelos Professor of Contemporary Greek Studies and Professor of European Politics. This lecture is part of the LSE Programme on Brexit. The LSE European Institute (@LSEEI) is a centre for research and graduate teaching on the processes of integration and fragmentation within Europe. In the most recent national Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014) the Institute was ranked first for research in its sector. The Institute of Public Affairs (@LSEPubAffairs) is one of the world's leading centres of public policy. We aim to debate and address some of the major issues of our time, whether international or national, through our established teaching programmes, our research and our highly innovative public-engagement initiatives.

Speaker(s): Dharshini David | The dollar is the lifeblood of globalisation: China holds billions in reserve for good reason. Greenbacks, singles, bucks or dead presidents, call them what you will, $1.2 trillion worth are floating around right now – and half the dollars in circulation are actually outside of the USA. But what is really happening as these billions of dollars go around the world every day? By following $1 from a shopping trip in suburban Texas, via China’s Central Bank, Nigerian railroads, the oil fields of Iraq and beyond, The Almighty Dollar answers questions such as: why is China the world’s biggest manufacturer – and the US its biggest customer? Is free trade really a good thing? Why would a nation build a bridge on the other side of the globe? Dharshini David (@DharshiniDavid) is an economist and broadcaster. From 2009 she fronted Sky News’ daily financial coverage and copresented Sky News Tonight. Keyu Jin (@KeyuJin) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics and a member of the Centre for Macroeconomics and Centre for Economic Performance. The Department of Economics at LSE (@LSEEcon) is one of the largest economics departments in the world. Its size ensures that all areas of economics are strongly represented in both research and teaching. The Centre For Macroeconomics (@CFMUK) brings together world-class experts to carry out pioneering research on the global economic crisis and to help design policies that alleviate it.

Speaker(s): Peter Frase | Robots and artificial intelligence promise to reshape the economy. But the political struggle between workers and owners will determine who really benefits from these changes. Peter Frase (@pefrase) is an editor at Jacobin Magazine and author of Four Futures. Robin Archer is Director of the Ralph Miliband Programme at LSE. The Ralph Miliband Programme (@RMilibandLSE) is one of LSE's most prestigious lecture series and seeks to advance Ralph Miliband's spirit of free social inquiry.