LSE: Public lectures and events

Speaker(s): Elif Shafak | Today all across the Middle East we observe a backlash of patriarchy. Women are being pushed back into the private space, reminded of their roles as mothers and wives. Even the fundamental rights that we thought we had can be lost easily. In truth, not only the Middle East but all over the world, women, especially Muslim women, are increasingly asking the most difficult questions and having the most engaging discussions on identity, religion, faith, freedom and sexuality. Join us for a thought-provoking discussion about some of the most compelling issues of our times. Elif Shafak (@Elif_Safak) is an award-winning novelist and the most widely read female writer in Turkey. She is also a political commentator and an inspirational public speaker. She writes in both Turkish and English, and has published 15 books, 10 of which are novels, including the bestselling The Bastard of Istanbul and The Forty Rules of Love. Her latest novel is Three Daughters of Eve. Her books have been translated into more than forty languages. She has been longlisted for the Orange Prize, MAN Asian Prize; the Baileys Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Award, and shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and RSL Ondaatje Prize. Elif is a TED Global speaker, a member of Weforum Global Agenda Council on Creative Economy in Davos and a founding member of ECFR (European Council on Foreign Relations). She has been awarded the title of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2010 by the French government. Elif has taught at various universities in Turkey, UK and USA. She holds a degree in International Relations, a masters degree in Gender and Women’s Studies and a PhD in Political Science. She is known as a women’s rights, minority rights and LGBT rights advocate. Mary Evans is Centennial Professor in the Gender Institute at LSE. Prior to coming to the LSE as a Visiting Fellow she taught Women's Studies and Sociology at the University of Kent. The primary focus of Professor Evans' work is those narratives (be they fictional or otherwise) through which we construct our social identity. Professor Evans is particularly interested in the part that gender and class play in these narratives and the ways in which narratives of ourselves are a essential part of what we define as the modern. LSE’s Gender Institute (@LSEGenderTweet) is the largest gender studies centre in Europe. With a global perspective, the Gender Institute’s research and teaching intersects with other categories of analysis such as race, ethnicity, class and sexuality; because gender relations work in all spheres of life, interdisciplinarity is key to our approach. The LSE Middle East Centre (@LSEMiddleEast) builds on LSE's long engagement with the Middle East and North Africa and provides a central hub for the wide range of research on the region carried out at LSE.

Speaker(s): Bridget Holding | A toolkit of small, playful experiments, to revolutionise how you tell stories in all genres. We will take body awareness, movement and spoken word into writing, with a focus on the ground-breaking world of ‘new’ nature writing, one of the fastest growing and best-selling genres. With her focus on learning from nature, and the embodied, holistic experience of the storyteller, university tutor and psychotherapist Bridget Holding is revitalising traditional creative writing teaching. All levels of writing experience, and confidence, welcome! Bridget Holding (@BridgetHolding) is a former screenwriter, whose articles have appeared in Writing Magazine and The Psychotherapist, among other publications. She is also a UKCP registered psychotherapist. She’s a former associate lecturer for The Open University, and has been a tutor of creative writing for The University of Exeter since 2008. Bridget is the founder of Wild Words. Her online and real-world courses explore the relationship between ourselves, our world and our words. Winnie M Li (@winniemli ) is a writer, activist, and PhD researcher at LSE. Her debut novel, Dark Chapter, will be published in the UK/Ireland in June and in the US/Canada in September, followed by Dutch and Swedish publications. She has an MA with Distinction in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths. At LSE’s Department of Media and Communications, she is researching the uses of social media by rape survivors to narrate their experiences. Winnie is also Co-Founder of the Clear Lines Festival, the UK's first-ever festival dedicated to addressing sexual assault and consent through the arts and discussion.

Speaker(s): Sarah Bakewell, Dr Andy Martin and Professor Stella Sandford | ‘Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?’ asks Martin Heidegger in his Introduction to Metaphysics. In this panel, we explore the ideas of being and nothing as described by existentialism’s most famous thinkers: Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus. What is the allure of the existentialists that their reputations should endure in popular and contemporary culture? And how is it that existentialist philosophy can be, at once, avidly consumed by modern audiences and unapologetically esoteric? Coffee, French cigarettes, and black polo necks not provided; intelligent discussion and provocative questions most definitely are. Sarah Bakewell (@Sarah_Bakewell) is author of three biographies, including the bestselling How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, which won the Duff Cooper Prize for Non-Fiction and the National Books Critics Circle Award for Biography in the US, and was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and the Marsh Biography Award. Her latest books is At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails. Andy Martin (@andymartinink) is a lecturer in French at Cambridge University and author of Stealing the Wave, Napoleon the Novelist, Waiting for Bardot and The Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre vs Camus. Stella Sandford is Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London and a member of the Radical Philosophy Editorial Collective. She is author of How to Read De Beauvoir. Shahidha Bari (@ShahidhaBari) is a lecturer in Romanticisma at Queen Mary, University of London and Forum for European Philosophy Fellow. The Forum for European Philosophy (@ForumPhilosophy) is an educational charity that organises a full and varied programme of philosophy and interdisciplinary events in the UK.

Speaker(s): Tim Buckley and David Mansfield | Over the last fifteen years there has been a revolution in the deserts of south and southwest Afghanistan. Across the provinces of Helmand, Farah, Kandahar and Nimroz windswept sand and rock has been replaced by over 300,000 hectares of agricultural land. Driven by population pressure, opium prohibition and conflict 1.2 million people have settled in what was once uninhabitable desert land. Tim Buckley is Chief Operating Officer in Alcis. Tim is well known and respected across geographic, defence and intelligence networks. He served in the British Army for ten years, providing critical GIS insight, expertise, support and advice to organisations worldwide. A GIS and remote sensing expert with over fifteen years' experience in conflict and fragile environments, Tim has recently spent over two years working within the counter narcotics and agriculture sectors in Afghanistan. David Mansfield currently works as an independent consultant, advising a range of bilateral, multilateral and non-government organisations, including the UK Government, the EC, the World Bank, GTZ, as well as various NGOs on both policy and operational issues with regard to illicit drugs in Afghanistan and on alternative livelihoods in particular. John Collins is Executive Director of the LSE IDEAS International Drug Policy Project. He is also coordinator of the Expert Group on the Economics of Drug Policy. John is coordinating a British Council funded project on “Illicit Drug Production and the Search for Peace in Colombia” as well as an LSE Research Division project on “Shifting Drug Strategies in Ireland and the UK”. This event will be followed by a guided tour of the exhibition, Revolutions in the Afghan Desert: Water, Green Tech and illegal opium cultivation until 7.30pm. LSE IDEAS (@LSEIDEAS) is a foreign policy think-tank within LSE's Institute for Global Affairs. Update Friday 24 February 2017, 1.30pm: due to unforeseen circumstances, Richard Brittan and Sharon Harvey will no longer be speaking at this event. LSE apologises for any inconvenience this may cause.

Speaker(s): Dr Laura Beers | In 1908 Ellen Wilkinson, a fiery, outspoken teenager from a working-class family in Manchester, was the only girl who spoke in school debates. By 1945, Wilkinson, still a rebellious redhead, had helped found the Communist Party, earned a seat in Parliament as Minister of Education, and become a renowned advocate for the poor and dispossessed at home and abroad. She was one of the first female delegates to the United Nations, and played a central role in the post-war Labour government. Laura Beers’s new book about Wilkinson’s remarkable life is a richly detailed portrait of a time when left-wing men and women from a range of backgrounds sought to reshape domestic, imperial, and international affairs. Wilkinson is best remembered as the leader of the Jarrow March, the 300-mile march of two hundred unemployed shipwrights and steelworkers to petition the government for help. But this was just one small part of Red Ellen’s larger transnational fight for social justice. She was involved in a range of campaigns, from the quest for official recognition of the Spanish Republican government, to the fight for Indian independence, to the effort to smuggle Jewish refugees out of Germany. During Wilkinson’s lifetime, many radicals viewed themselves as members of an international socialist community, and some, like her, became involved in socialist, feminist, and pacifist movements that spanned the globe. By focusing on the extent to which Wilkinson’s activism transcended Britain’s borders, Laura Beers reframes our perception of the British Left in the early twentieth century. Laura Beers (@Fiery_Particle) is Associate Professor of History at American University and a Birmingham Fellow at the University of Birmingham. She is author of Your Britain: Media and the Making of the Labour Party and Red Ellen: The Life of Ellen Wilkinson, Socialist, Feminist, Internationalist.

Speaker(s): Anne Applebaum, Jonathan Fenby, Gideon Rachman | Editor's note: Owing to a technical problem the question and answer session has been omitted from the podcast. For forty years the Cold War defined the world in which we all lived, shaping our political choices, killing over 25 million people, and nearly leading to the destruction of humanity itself on one very special day in October 1962. Thirty years later the Cold War was no more and the world – we were told – could now look forward to a "new world order". Yet it was not be. America under G.W Bush revived spectres of the past by talking of a new 'axis of evil'. Russian reform turned into Putin’s annexation of Crimea. While in China talk of a 'peaceful rise' was replaced by an altogether more assertive stance which seemed to question the established rules of the international community. This discussion asks and tries to answer three big questions: In what sense did the Cold War represent a revolution in world history? Was 1989 yet another – very different kind of - revolution in international affairs? And why does the Cold War we all thought dead and buried continue to exercise such influence on our discourses about the modern world? Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum) is a Visiting Professor in Practice at the Institute of Global Affairs at LSE and a columnist for the Washington Post. Jonathan Fenby (@JonathanFenby) is a former editor of the Observer and South China Morning Post and a founding partner and Managing Director of Trusted Sources Research Service. He is an author of several popular books on China, including the acclaimed Tiger Head, Snake Tails; The Penguin History of Modern China; and Will China Dominate the 21st Century? Gideon Rachman (@gideonrachman) is the chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times. In 2016 he won the Orwell Prize for Journalism and was named Commentator of the Year at the European Press Prize awards. Previously he worked for The Economist for fifteen years, serving as a foreign correspondent in Washington, Bangkok and Brussels. His new book is Easternisation: war and peace in the Asian century. Michael Cox is Director of LSE IDEAS. LSE IDEAS (@LSEIDEAS) is a foreign policy think-tank within LSE's Institute for Global Affairs.

Speaker(s): Dr Bill Kissane, Anthony Loyd | Editor's note: We apologise for the poor quality audio in this podcast. Since the European Enlightenment scholarly interest in revolutions has greatly dwarfed the interest in civil war, and whilst revolutions have often been glamorized in history, civil war has had almost exclusively negative connotations. But the last two decades have seen a resurgence of interest in civil war amongst the academic community. Has this vindicated the view that civil war is a uniquely destructive form of conflict? Bill Kissane is Associate Professor in Politics in the LSE Department of Government and a member of the Conflict Research Group. He is author of Nations Torn Asunder: the Challenge of Civil War. Anthony Loyd is a roving foreign correspondent for The Times. He began reporting for The Times in Bosnia over twenty years ago. He has since covered conflicts around the world and won four major awards for the newspaper for his coverage from Syria. Denisa Kostovicova (@DenisaKost) is an Associate Professor in Global Politics at the Government Department and a Research Fellow at the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit at the Department of International Development at LSE. The Conflict Research Group (CRG) is a multi-disciplinary research and consultancy unit. Its members include leading experts in conflict-related research from five of LSE's academic departments, including Government, International Relations, Sociology, the Methodology Institute, and the European Institute.

Speaker(s): Harriet Harman, Katrine Marçal, Lieutenant Commander Alexandra Pollard, Dr Nicola Rollock | Women in the UK workplace have undoubtedly taken great steps over the past 40 years, but at the current rate of progress it will take 50 years to close the gender pay gap and a child born today will not see equal representation in her lifetime. Our panel discuss the progress that women have made across politics, economics, academia and the armed forces, but also what obstacles remain to be overcome and what can be done to challenge the barriers that prevent women progressing. Harriet Harman (@HarrietHarman) was elected as Labour MP for Peckham in 1982. Joining a House of Commons which was 97% male, she had three children while in Parliament. She has been politics' most prominent champion for women's rights, introducing the National Childcare Strategy, the Equality Act and changing the law on domestic violence. She was the first woman to represent the Labour Party at Prime Minister's Questions. Her memoir A Woman's Work is published in February 2017. Katrine Marçal (@katrinemarcal) is a columnist for Swedish paper Aftonbladet where she writes articles on Swedish and international politics, economics and feminism. and author of Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? which was shortlisted for The August Prize and won the Lagercrantzen Award. Alexandra Pollard is a Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Navy, having joined in 1997. She has had a varied and challenging career, mostly at sea, since passing out from Britannia Royal Naval College. In 2014, she became the Executive Officer and Second in Command in HMS RICHMOND, joining her in the South Atlantic and then deploying for 9 months in 2015 to the Arabian Gulf and Indian Ocean to support counter narcotics operations. During the final months of this deployment RICHMOND was re-tasked to support the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean as part of the multi-national Operation SOPHIA which saw her taking the role of On Scene Commander in the rescue of 3000 migrants by 7 different ships. Now employed within the Naval Personnel area, she is conducting a short period as a Career Manager for Warfare Officers before returning to sea in 2017 in Command of HMS NORTHUMBERLAND. Nicola Rollock (@NicolaRollock) is Deputy Director of the Centre for Research in Race & Education at the University of Birmingham. She is interested in improving the ways in which we commonly think about racism and in identifying solutions to persistent race inequalities within the education system and the workplace. Nicola is Editor of the journal Whiteness & Education and lead author of the award-winning book The Colour of Class: the educational strategies of the Black middle classes. She is a trustee of the British Educational Research Association (BERA), which works to support and improve educational research across the UK and, is a Patron of the Equality Challenge Unit’s Race Equality Charter, which is aimed at improving the experiences and success of faculty and students of colour. Nicola was selected, in 2015, as a Woman of Achievement by the Women of the Year Council and was included in the 2014 Powerlist of Britain’s most influential Black people. Alison Rankin Frost is a communications strategist specialising in brand and reputation resilience. She is a lay Governor of LSE.

Speaker(s): Eimear McBride | Editor's note: Unfortunately Ali Smith was unable to speak at this event. The turn of the 20th century saw a move away from the traditional towards the experimental and radical in the arts, with modernist writers breaking with established forms and subjects. In this discussion two award-winning contemporary novelists discuss modernism, its legacy and their own revolutionary approaches to fiction. Eimear McBride’s debut novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing took nine years to publish and subsequently received the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction, Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, the Goldsmiths Prize, Desmond Elliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her latest novel is The Lesser Bohemians. Ali Smith has won numerous awards for her work, including the Baileys Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize for How to be both, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her latest novel, Autumn, is an inventive meditation on a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive. Toby Lichtig (@TobyLichtig) is an editor at the Times Literary Supplement.

Speaker(s): Rod Judkins | The real currency of our time isn’t money. It’s ideas. You’re surrounded by ideas. Films, products, books, music, money, messages, services and everything in your culture began life as a vision in someone’s head. If you have ideas, you’re at the heart of things. ‘What abilities will someone need to succeed in 5, 10, or 15 years’ time?’ Rod Judkins’ answer to that question focuses on people’s ability to think conceptually. Universities used to teach students skills and then, out in the world, they applied them. But culture sped up. Soon, in the three years it took a student to reach the workplace, their skills were out of date. Now the pace of change is so fast, skills are of little use. To be at home in the world of the future, you will need to be an adaptable, open minded, problem solver, communicator, inventor, artist and entertainer. During this talk, there will be exercises designed to encourage you to think beyond what is accepted and conventional. An Olympic athlete trains their body. A creative thinker has to exercise just as hard, but train their imagination. Rod Judkins (@rodjudkins) is a lecturer at Central St Martin’s, one of the world’s pre-eminent art schools whose alumni – ranging from artists like Lucian Freud, Antony Gormley, through to the designers Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen – have helped shape our culture. Judkins has lectured on the subject of creativity at universities and to businesses around the world. He blogs at Psychology Today, and also acts as a consultant to numerous private companies. Trained at The Royal College of Art, he has exhibited at galleries including Tate Britain, The National Portrait Gallery and The Royal Academy. Neil McLean is the Director of the Academic and Professional Development Division at LSE. His research interest is in how identities are negotiated though communication, with his doctoral work on the formation of teaching identifies among novice social science teachers. His interest in communication and identity relates to creativity, both in terms of how we define ourselves and how creativity could redefine what we mean by an education at the LSE. LSE LIFE is the School's centre for the academic, personal and professional development of its taught students. Located on the ground floor of the Library, it acts as a centralised point of contact for students looking for support, guidance, and ideas about how to succeed in their studies and extend their learning outside the classroom. LSE LIFE integrates for the first time the many development opportunities offered by different LSE departments and services and brings together a range of one to one, workshop and large group learning events.

Speaker(s): Dr Prashant Kidambi, Peter Oborne | 'Cricket is an Indian game accidentally invented by the English': one of India's leading public intellectuals once proclaimed. Ashis Nandy's provocative claim might well be extended to the rest of the subcontinent now. Cricket was brought to the Indian sub-continent by British colonial officers who chose to not teach it to the natives. However, the game was learned through watching and soon gained popularity resulting in a tour of England by an Indian team in the early part of the twentieth century. This panel explores how the story of cricket between England and South Asia has been nothing short of revolutionary, upsetting colonial power balances and creating unexpected alliances. Divided in all manner of ways, South Asia countries seem to have found in this colonial game an unlikely force for national unity. From Afghanistan to Sri Lanka, the game is now pursued in the subcontinent with a passion that defies easy explanations and which calls into question many of the prevailing assumptions about empire, colonialism and culture. This panel will draw on the perspectives of history to explore the dynamics of cricket in contemporary South Asia. Why has the game acquired such enduring roots in South Asia? Are there any common features in the way cricket is played, patronised and followed in the different countries of the region? Why is the game so intensely politicised in these countries? In what ways has the rise of India as a major cricketing powerhouse had an impact on cricketing relations with its neighbours? Is the IPL here to stay and if so, is it a force for good or does it threaten to irrevocably transform cricket as a sport? Prashant Kidambi is Associate Professor in Colonial Urban History at the University of Leicester. Dr Kidambi's research explores the social history of Indian cricket. He is currently completing a book on the history of the first 'Indian' cricket tour of Great Britain in 1911, an intriguing story peopled by an improbable cast of princes, Parsis and plebieans that casts interesting light on the interplay between sport, nation and empire. Peter Oborne (@OborneTweets) is a regular commentator on politics for television, Associate Editor of The Spectator and former chief political commentator of the Daily Telegraph. He is author of Wounded Tiger: The History of Cricket in Pakistan and White on Green: Celebrating the Drama of Pakistan Cricket. Mukulika Banerjee (@MukulikaB) is Director of the South Asia Centre at LSE. The South Asia Centre (@SAsiaLSE) leads the school's long-term engagement in the region by facilitating multi-disciplinary approaches and comparative research by LSE academics.

Speaker(s): Matt Cook, Sue O'Sullivan | Editor's note: Owing to a technical problem the question and answer session has been omitted from the podcast. This event explores what changed in the years after the Sexual Offences Act in 1967, which partly decriminalised homosexuality in the UK. Matt Cook talks about a gay squatting community in Brixton. Sue O'Sullivan talks about working collectively on Spare Rib magazine. Matt Cook is a lecturer of History and Gender Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London and Co-director of the Raphael Samuel History Centre. He is author of Queer Domesticities: Homosexuality and Home Life in 20th Century London. Sue O'Sullivan has been involved in the UK women's liberation movement from its start. She got into writing and publishing via hand-produced Women's Liberation Movement newsletters and ended up on various feminist publication collectives, including Red Rag, Spare Rib, Feminist Review, Sheba Feminist Press and finally ICW News, the newsletter of the International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS. Collective working brought joy and sorrow! Anne Summers is Chair of the Friends of the Women's Library. Hosted by the LSE Library (@LSELibrary) in conjunction with their exhibition "Glad to be Gay: the struggle for legal equality" on display in the LSE Library Gallery from 9 January – 7 April 2017.

Speaker(s): Nona Buckley-Irvine, Georgia Gould, Professor John Hills and Omar Khan | Are today's young people getting a bum deal? Young people have experienced the biggest pay squeeze in the aftermath of the financial crisis, seen their dreams of home ownership drift out of sight and witnessed a welfare state in retreat. Are these short term effects or do they run deeper, and how can policy make a difference? The Resolution Foundation, convenors of the Intergenerational Commission, partner with the International Inequalities Institute to debate this pressing issue. Nona Buckley-Irvine (@nonajasmine) is a Labour Party activist in Sussex and the former General Secretary of LSESU. She also works in higher education policy for a think tank and has a range of voluntary experience working with young people. Georgia Gould (@Georgia_Gould) is a Labour councillor and Cabinet member for Young People, Adults and Health in the London Borough of Camden. She campaigns and writes on issues related to young people and her book Wasted - How Misunderstanding Young Britain Threatens Our Future was published last year. John Hills is Chair of CASE, Co-Director LSE International Inequalities Institute and Richard Titmuss Professor of Social Policy, LSE. Omar Khan is Director of the Runnymede Trust, having previously been its Head of Policy. Omar sits on the Department for Work and Pensions' Ethnic Minority Employment Stakeholder Group, is a Governor at the University of East London and a 2012 Clore Social Leadership Fellow. Omar's other advisory positions include chair of Olmec, chair of the Ethnicity Strand Advisory Group to Understanding Society, chair of the advisory group of the Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity at the University of Manchester, Commissioner on the Financial Inclusion Commission and a member of the 2014 REF assessment, the 2011 Census, and the UK representative (2009-2013) on the European Commission’s Socio-economic network of experts. David Willetts is Executive Chair of the Resolution Foundation think tank, a Visiting Professor at King’s College London, Governor of the Ditchley Foundation and a member of the Council of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He was previously the Minister for Universities and Science and Member of Parliament for Havant. David has written widely on economic and social policy. His most recent book The Pinch was published by Atlantic Books in 2010. The Resolution Foundation (@resfoundation) is a non-partisan and award-winning think-tank that works to improve the living standards of those in Britain on low to middle incomes. They are currently hosting the Intergenerational Commission, bringing together leaders from business, academia and policy-making to devise a means of repairing the social contract between generations. 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 Tanya Harmer, Nataliya Kibita and Dr David Motadel | Legacy of the Russian Revolution in Ukraine.' The Soviet Union, the state that was created as a result of the Russian revolution of 1917 no longer exists. Its economic model collapsed, while its ideology is discredited. Yet some political institutions that had been formed during the Soviet times are very much alive even today. Nataliya looks at how political institutions that had been formed in Ukraine in 1917 developed and consolidated during the Soviet times and survived the fall of the Soviet Union. She argues that political institutions that had been formed under the pressure of Ukrainian nationalism in 1917 and transformed under the pressure of Russian centralism after 1920 protect Ukraine today from becoming an authoritarian state. Tanya Harmer: 'Latin America’s Revolutionary Twentieth Century.' What were the impacts and legacies of the Bolshevik Revolution in Latin America? How did it feed into the region’s revolutionary twentieth century? A hundred years after the Bolshevik Revolution and fifty years after Che Guevara’s death in Bolivia, Tanya offers a broad history of revolution in Latin America from Mexican Revolution in 1910 to the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the Central American revolutionary insurgencies of the 1980s. In examining the history of revolution in the region, she argues that the Bolshevik Revolution was a pivotal moment for left-wing politics but that local ideas and people were also vitally important. David Motadel (@DavidMotadel) is an Assistant Professor of International History at LSE. He works on the history of modern Europe and Europe’s relations with the wider world. He is the author of a book on the history of Muslims under German rule in the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2014), ranging from North Africa and the Balkans to the Caucasus and the Crimea, and the editor of a volume on Islam in the European empires (Oxford University Press, 2014). His articles have been published in a number of journals, including Past and Present, the Journal of Contemporary History, and the Historical Journal. Nataliya Kibita is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of International History at LSE. Her main research interest is Ukraine’s state- and nation-building. Currently, she is working on a new research project that explores the historical origins of formal and informal political institutions that allow Ukraine to rebuff authoritarianism today. Before joining the LSE in September 2015, Dr Kibita taught Soviet history at the University of Edinburg and University of Glasgow. Tanya Harmer (@TanyaHarmer) is an Associate Professor in the Department of International History at LSE. She is a specialist on the Cold War in Latin America with a particular interest in the international, transnational and global dynamics of the struggle. She has written an inter-American history of Chile during the presidency of Salvador Allende (1970-73) and conducted research on Brazilian Cold War interventions in the Southern Cone of Latin America, US-Chilean relations in the mid-1970s and the Cuban Revolution’s influence in Latin America. Her current research deals with the history of Chile’s Revolutionary Left. The Department of International History (@lsehistory) is one of the top five university history departments in the UK.

Speaker(s): Professor John Worrall | Editor's note: We apologise for the poor quality audio in this podcast. Many people unreflectingly think that 'Man' plays a special role in the Universe. Although this view was endorsed by Aristotelian cosmology, revolutionary developments in science, particularly those associated with Copernicus and with Darwin, seem to have made it entirely untenable. So what does science teach us about our place in the Universe? John Worrall joined LSE as an undergraduate in 1965, initially as a student of statistics. But, seduced by Karl Popper's lectures, soon switched to a course that was part statistics and mathematics and part philosophy. He came under the influence of Imre Lakatos - who tried to convert him to his own brand of 24 hour a day philosophy. He studied for a PhD under Lakatos - developing the latter's methodology of research programmes and testing it against a detailed case history from 19th century physics. Worrall was appointed to a Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method lectureship at LSE in 1971, becoming Professor in 1998. Having for many years played the cricket of pure reason for the LSE Staff Cricket XI, his chief Departmental role is now as leader of its rock n roll band (The Critique of Pure Rhythm - name not his idea). Worrall's main intellectual interests are in theory-change in science - and its impact on the twin theses of scientific rationality and scientific realism. More recently he has developed a major interest in methodological and philosophical issues in medicine particularly concerned with clinical trials and the general issue of the warrant for causal claims in medicine. He was for 10 years the editor of The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, has held visiting fellowships at the Universities of Pittsburgh and of Otago, and has lectured around the world - in the USA, China, South America, Australia and New Zealand as well as Eastern and Western Europe. He is former President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science. Roman Frigg is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, Director of the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS), and Co-Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Time Series (CATS) at LSE. The Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS), established in 1990, aims to promote research into philosophical, methodological and foundational questions arising in the natural and the social sciences, as well as their application to practical problems.