LSE: Public lectures and events

Contributor(s): Lord Sumption, Professor Martin Loughlin, Dr Munira Mirza | It will examine the desire among some members of the public to have a democracy without parties or professional politicians, an idea which has its roots in the ancient world. Jonathan Sumption will first discuss such arguments after which there will be a panel discussion.

Contributor(s): Dr Paris Chronakis, Professor Meena Dhanda, Professor James Mark | At issue is the cultural politics of European politics, and we will be discussing how and what kind of European histories get remembered or memorialised, what and who gets included (whose statues are erected and whose toppled), and whose story is left out.

Contributor(s): Claire Harding, Dave Hill, Manny Hothi, Stewart Lansley, Professor Baroness Lister | Join us for this important discussion as our panel each presents their thoughts. Our audience are invited to contribute to the discussion as we unpick this difficult question. This event is inspired by the life, work and legacy of George Lansbury (1859–1940). A pioneering campaigner for peace, women’s rights, local democracy and improvements in labour conditions, Lansbury was an adopted East Ender who made a great contribution to local as well as national life.

Contributor(s): Dr Gregory T Chin | This lecture will present why it has become imperative for China to increase the international use of its currency, the Renminbi (RMB), considering the growing reliance of the United States on economic warfare, including financial warfare, and the fracturing of the liberal global monetary order. The focus is on mapping the internationalization of the RMB, particularly key recent breakthroughs in the preconditions for the RMB to function as an international currency. The primary agents in the making of the RMB into an international currency are China's Party-state, counterpart state agencies, and especially the participating market actors, Chinese corporate actors, the leading commercial banks and manufacturing-and-trading companies -- and their overseas partners -- who are increasingly using the RMB, internationally, for their economic transactions. RMB internationalization has entered a key phase, where pre-existing obstacles still have to be overcome, but where the gradual increases in the RMB's international use are also being met by profound changes in the global monetary order, namely the ongoing shifts to a more multipolar global monetary system and to digital currencies.

Contributor(s): Kate Raworth, Maria Carrasco | Doughnut Economics, a framework coined by Raworth, sets out a 21st-century economic vision of meeting the needs of all people within the means of the living planet, through regenerative and distributive design. Over 40 cities and regions worldwide have already started to engage with the concepts and tools, aiming to turn these concepts into practice in place. How are they getting started, and what are the challenges they face? Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist and co-founder of Doughnut Economics Action Lab, will share the core concepts and tools, along with examples from cities and places that are seeking to turn this economic vision into practice. She will be joined by Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity, Maria Carrasco, for the discussion.

Contributor(s): Iain Anderson, Trevor Phillips | This is a time where the rights of all protected groups are being eroded – to note just two examples, the overturning of Roe vs Wade and the cancellation of the UK’s Safe to be Me landmark LGBT+ summit after an uproar over changes to the planned conversion therapy ban. What can civil society do to fight back against what appears to be an inexorable tide?

Contributor(s): Dr James Morrison, Professor Stephanie J. Rickard, Joseph C Sternberg, Dr Linda Yueh | A group of leading political analysts size up US national and state elections and what they mean for democratic governance in America.

Contributor(s): Professor André Singer, Professor Claudia Heiss | Is Latin America experiencing a new pink tide?  Can Lula make a dramatic political comeback in Brazil’s closely fought Presidential election? And why has Chile’s new left-wing President failed to secure revision of the Pinochet constitution?

Contributor(s): Professor Ruha Benjamin | Long before the pandemic, Ruha Benjamin was doing ground-breaking research on race, technology, and justice, focusing on big, structural changes. But the twin plagues of COVID-19 and anti-Black police violence inspired her to rethink the importance of small, individual actions. Part memoir, part manifesto, her new book Viral Justice, which she will talk about at this event, is a sweeping and deeply personal exploration of how we can transform society through the choices we make every day.

Contributor(s): Professor David Wengrow | Reflecting on the practices of ancient societies, European or non-European, the Victorian anthropologist Sir James Frazer invited us to suppose that "evidence of superstitious belief and custom" among them should suffice to "disabuse" the modern reader of the notion that they were anything "like us". Today, any consideration of the considerable differences between "their" ways of life and "ours" has to reckon with the scientific consensus that, for at least the last 200,000 years, there has been no major evolutionary development in human capacities: physiologically and neurologically "they" are "us". How, then, should we understand the transition of the human between then and now? How did it all begin, and what does this tell us about our time? In conversation with Simon Glendinning, David Wengrow will explore these questions, and his new book.

Contributor(s): Professor Barry R Weingast | Both Hayek and Smith differ from more recent attempts to define liberty. Indeed, the term, “liberty,” has largely disappeared from traditional economics. As part of a larger study of Adam Smith’s politics, Barry Weingast suggests why this is the case. The reason for this disappearance is that modern economics assumes away the problem that liberty solves, namely, in Hayek and Smith's terms, that of arbitrary power, and in modern terms, that of government predation.

Contributor(s): Dr Benedetta Berti, Professor Christopher Coker, Andy Salmon | After NATO published its new Strategic Concept in June 2022, in the midst of Russia’s war on Ukraine, and 12 years on from its last Strategic Concept, this event takes a look at how the strategy was formed and what it is for.

Contributor(s): Ignacio Garcia Bercero, Emily Lydgate | The talk will discuss issues for a potential trade and climate negotiating agenda such as subsidies, liberalisation of goods and services with a positive climate impact, standards for measuring carbon intensity or the role of border carbon measures. It will look into the potential of tackling those issues in a WTO context either multilaterally or through open plurilateral approaches. Photo by Porapak Apichodilok on Pexels

Contributor(s): Professor Leslie McCall | Questioning widespread notions of US exceptionalism, the lecture critically examines common assumptions about how Americans think about issues of economic inequality (in outcomes and opportunities and across dimensions of race and class) and related policies that reduce economic inequality. Using a wide range of existing and original data sources, as well as multiple methodological approaches, Professor McCall analyses public views in the United States over time and in a comparative context. She proposes a multi-dimensional framework for understanding public views of inequality rooted in desires for substantive economic and educational opportunities through a broad set of social rights, employment protection and support, and redistribution of pay. The in-depth study of the American case in comparative perspective and supplementary cross-national analyses suggests that this novel analytical framework can shed light on the politics of inequality throughout advanced political economies.

Contributor(s): Professor Shakuntala Banaji, Dr Ram Bhat | Social Media and Hate argues that these phenomena, and the extreme violence and discrimination they initiate against targeted groups, are connected to the socio-political contexts, values and behaviours of users of social media platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, ShareChat, Instagram and WhatsApp. The argument moves from a theoretical discussion of the practices and consequences of sectarian hatred, through a methodological evaluation of quantitative and qualitative studies on this topic, to four qualitative case studies of social media hate, and its effects on groups, individuals and wider politics in India, Brazil, Myanmar and the UK. The technical, ideological and networked similarities and connections between social media hate against people of African and Asian descent, indigenous communities, Muslims, Dalits, dissenters, feminists, LGBTQIA communities, Rohingya and immigrants across the four

Contributor(s): Geoff Tily | Without taxation there is no government. Taxation is essential, but who is to pay, and for what? For centuries people have fought over these questions, and these fights have been at the heart of the development and crises of democracy, from Magna Carta through the French Revolution to the Global Financial Crisis and the Pandemic. Bringing together internationally renowned academic experts and policymakers, this documentary retraces this fascination history across France, Britain and Germany from as far as the Middle Ages up to the present day.

Contributor(s): Professor Hazel V Carby, Ruby Hembrom | Indigenous, black and Latinx communities suffer the health consequences of living in the most polluted and toxic environments. Indigenous peoples across the Americas are also at the forefront of opposition to the extraction and transportation of fossil fuels. In this event, Hazel Carby will be discussing and showing the work of indigenous artists who are responding to environmental and ecological crises and degradation.

Contributor(s): Dr Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa, Maarya Rabbani | Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa is Assistant Professor in Human Rights and Politics at the Department of Sociology, LSE. She is a Belgian/Rwandan International Relations scholar and former journalist and Senior Research Fellow of the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies (JIAS), South Africa.  Maarya Rabbani is the 2022-23 Education Officer at LSE Students’ Union. She is a British-Afghan scholar and holds two MSc degrees in Education, and Comparative Politics from the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics and Political Science, respectively.  Eric Neumayer is Professor of Environment and Development at LSE, having joined the Department of Geography and Environment in 1998.

Contributor(s): Professor Abraham L Newman, Dr Jamie Martin, Professor Stephanie J. Rickard | The war in Ukraine raises questions about whether states must be ‘strategic’ about their national economic policies due to geopolitical risks. The scramble for supplies to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic, long-term trends of growing competition between the United States and China and the rise of populism had already fuelled geopolitical tensions, along with fears that globalisation is eroding. As a result, some of the global economy’s most prominent players prioritise economic resilience and reshoring global supply chains with ‘friendly’ allied states. The potential outcome is a fracturing of a globalised economy based on these alliances or outright deglobalisation. All of this is culminating in escalating economic disruptions for lower-income countries, with countries in sub-Saharan Africa facing possible default on their sovereign debt. Added to this, the war in Ukraine has caused the most significant commodity shock since the 1970s. International institutions, like the World Trade Organization, continue to defend global trade and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank continue to champion international cooperation to address economic and social welfare. What are the political, social, and economic implications of these challenges for the global economy? How should international laws and institutions address these challenges to economic integration? How do precedents for twentieth-century international economic institution building help us contextualise today’s challenges?

Contributor(s): Professor June Barrow-Green | In 1916 the physician Ronald Ross published the first of three papers on the mathematical study of epidemiology or, as he called it, ‘pathometry’. The second and third of these papers appeared the following year co-authored with the mathematician Hilda Hudson. At the time Hudson, who had ranked equivalent to the 7th wrangler in the 1903 Cambridge Mathematical Tripos, was well known for her work on Cremona Transformations. So how and why did Hudson, a geometer, end up collaborating with Ross, winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1902 for his work on the transmission of malaria? And what role did she play? In her talk June Barrow-Green shall discuss the nature and extent of their collaboration, as well as the content and significance of their work.

Contributor(s): Professor Neil Cummins, Professor Sam Friedman, Sabrina Daniel | It examines how we wear and reveal our social class in English society today. Do accents really matter? Is it enough to imitate one supposed ‘social betters’ to achieve social mobility? What cost is there to the individual who changes their social status? Sue Windebank talks to an LSE Law student who reveals how she has overcome the challenges of being an asylum seeker and a care leaver to study law at the School. Professor Sam Friedman, a sociologist of class and inequality, discusses the arbitrariness of what is considered ‘high culture’. And economic historian Professor Neil Cummins reveals how class will probably determine who you marry.

Contributor(s): Professor Gary Gerstle | As a new progressivism gains steam on the left, and Donald Trump gears up for a second run on the right, we are joined by Gary Gerstle to discuss his new book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order America and the World in the Free Market Era.

Contributor(s): Professor Alpa Shah, Professor Nikhil Anand, Dr Kasia Paprocki | Bangladesh dominates mainstream narratives of climate disaster. Frequently described as the ‘world’s most vulnerable country to climate change’, the oversimplified spectre of a major country slipping underwater has yielded a crisis narrative that erases a complex history of landscape transformation and intense, contemporary political conflicts. Colonialism, capitalism, and local agrarian struggles have so far shaped the country’s coastline more than carbon emissions. Today, both national and global elites ignore this history, while crafting narratives and economic strategies that redistribute power and resources away from peasant communities in the name of climate adaptation.  Threatening Dystopias draws on over two years of multi-sited ethnographic and archival fieldwork with development practitioners, policy makers, scientists, farmers and rural migrants, to investigate the politics of climate change adaptation in Bangladesh from multiple perspectives and scales, offering an in-depth analysis of the global politics of climate change adaptation and how they are both forged and manifested in this unique site.

Contributor(s): Professor Julian Go, Professor Noortje Marres, Professor Melinda Mills, Professor Mike Savage | We bring together four outstanding social scientists with a range of research interests and a range of traditions to discuss whether social science is explanation or it is nothing. Inspired by the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, the contributors speak in favour or in opposition to this motion. Noortje Marres and Mike Savage will speak in opposition, while Julian Go and Melinda Mills will speak in favour.

Contributor(s): Professor Luc Bovens, Dr Susanne Burri, Professor Kieran Setiya | All human lives, even very comfortable ones, involve some degree of suffering and hardship. We face personal losses and traumas, and confront a world that seems full of injustice, misery and absurdity. Can philosophy help us to cope?

Contributor(s): Professor Robert Falkner, Dr Rita Floyd | This lecture, part of a series on Strategy: New Voices will explore the strategic nexus between great power conflict, energy independence and climate action, and how to develop effective international strategies that help us prevent catastrophic global warming. The war in Ukraine has heightened concerns over the impact that geopolitical instability will have on future climate change and energy policy. Great power tensions and conflict threaten to harm the search for international cooperation on global challenges. At the same time, Russia’s military aggression has galvanised European powers to seek strategic autonomy and reduce their reliance on fossil fuel imports. Will it also end up galvanising leading powers to accelerate the net zero transition?

Contributor(s): Dr Joe Zammit-Lucia | We are transitioning from the age of financialised capitalism to one of political capitalism. The discussion explores how political issues ranging from geopolitical rivalry to climate and environment to culture wars to wealth inequality to diversity and inclusion are now affecting every aspect of business activity and increasingly taking priority over economic considerations. Which businesses and brands can adapt appropriately and thrive in the emerging era - and how?

Contributor(s): Professor Nick Crafts | After World War 2, Britain faced issues which are familiar today: strengthening the welfare state, dealing with an inflated public debt, improving productivity performance, underpinning support for the market economy, and credibly promising a better future. The Attlee government has been widely praised for its handling of this difficult situation and it is often said that we should remember the lessons of the 1940s.

Contributor(s): Professor Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Lina Abou Habib, Dr Steffen Hertog | The Kafala System, an employment scheme in the Middle East, has attracted much academic scrutiny and criticism over the decades. Human rights activists align the system with slavery, unfreedom, and human trafficking. In her new book, which she will discuss at this event, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas offers more nuanced accounts of workers relationships with their employers in the United Arab Emirates. Rhacel's work employs novel methods of researching the Kafala system and its impact on workers and questions concepts such as unfreedom and freedom. Whilst her arguments highlight the dehumanising treatment and lack of recognition of migrant domestic workers, her empirical data crucially illuminates the diversity of work conditions. A key argument is that rather than ‘abuse’ being the main point of reference in Kafala debates, it is the absence of labour standards in the region that leads to unequal and complex employment relationships. A diverse panel of academics, stakeholders and human rights activists will offer their reflections on Parreñas’ book, highlighting their expertise from the Middle East.

Contributor(s): Professor Emily Jackson, Professor Theda Skocpol, Professor Jeffrey K Tulis | This panel of leading experts on US history and politics consider where the Court is headed and what this means for American democracy.

Contributor(s): Professor Sophie Harman, Dr Marsha Henry | In this year’s Fred Halliday lecture, Sophie Harman seeks to answer two fundamental questions: first, why do women die when they don’t have to? and second, what happens when we take the relationship between women’s health and global politics seriously? To answer these two questions, Harman will map key trends in how women’s health is used and abused for political advantage around the world; and offer a key provocation, that these trends are fundamental to understanding, and even predicting, the chaos and crisis the world finds itself in. Women and women’s health saw it coming.

Contributor(s): Dr Rory Finnin | “If Russia stops fighting, there will be no war. If Ukraine stops fighting, there will be no Ukraine” is the sentiment used by many Ukrainian protesters mobilising against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In this talk, the panellists will consider both Russia's war against and invasion of Ukraine since February 2022 and the longer trajectory of Russia's aggression against Ukraine since 2014, first in Crimea and second in Donetsk and Luhansk. The panellists will reflect on what we know about Ukraine and Ukrainian citizens prior to and since Russia's aggression began, as well as perspectives we can take to understand the scale and consequences of Russia's aggression.

Contributor(s): Simon Commander, Emeritus Professor Saul Estrin | Although the connections world has not yet seriously impeded Asia’s economic renaissance, it comes with significant costs and fallibilities. In their new book, which they will talk about at this event, Saul Estrin and Simon Commander argue that if Asia’s claim to the 21st century is not to be derailed, major changes must be made to policy and behaviour to promote more sustainable economic and political systems. Join the speakers and Minouche Shafik, Director of LSE, for an evening exploring what the future could hold for Asian capitalism.

Contributor(s): Dr Tamma Carleton, Dr Asad Gilani, Professor Michael Greenstone, Dr Eric Obutey | Climate change is already increasing global temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, and resulting in more frequent and severe floods and droughts. Developing countries are most vulnerable to climate change, which can aggravate the effects of poverty and rapid urbanisation. Without effective policies for adaptation and mitigation, climate change may push hundreds of millions further into poverty and limit the opportunities for sustainable development. In order to formulate effective and equitable adaptation and mitigation strategies, governments must be equipped with a thorough estimation of the costs and benefits of various policies.

Contributor(s): Ray Dalio | Expertly putting into perspective the “Big Cycle” that has driven the successes and failures of all the world’s major empires and countries —including the Dutch, the British, and the American— throughout history. The discussion will follow the book revealing the timeless and universal forces behind these shifts and uses them to look into the future, offering practical principles for positioning oneself for what’s ahead.

Contributor(s): Dr Ganga Shreedhar, David Shukman | Sea levels are rising, carbon emissions are increasing and deforestation is continuing at an alarming rate. Human created climate change is drastically reshaping life on earth, with up to 75% of the diversity of the species on our planet on their way to becoming extinct. This month, LSE iQ asks: How can we survive the next mass extinction? We’ll discuss the dangers of greenwashing, what it’s like to witness an environmental catastrophe and how we can change our behaviour to benefit the planet. Anna Bevan talks to: Dr Ganga Shreedhar, Assistant Professor in LSE’s Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science, and Associate at the Grantham Research Institute of Climate Change and the Environment and the Inclusion Initiative; and former BBC Science Editor, and now Visiting Professor in Practice at the Grantham Research Institute, David Shukman.   Research Stories of intentional action mobilise climate policy support and action intentions (2021) by Sabherwal, Anandita and Shreedhar, Ganga Personal or Planetary health? Direct, spillover and carryover effects of non-monetary benefits of vegetarian behaviour (2021) by Shreedhar, Ganga and Galizzi, Matteo

Contributor(s): Dr Clare Balboni, Lord Deben, Dr Shaun D Fitzgerald, Professor David Keith, Dr Anna Valero | Should we also consider a Plan B of encouraging new technological solutions? And if so, what kind of solutions are there and how would we act upon them? This event brings together some new thinking on this issue.

Contributor(s): Professor Robin Burgess, Professor John Van Reenen, Professor Mar Reguant, Pol Simpson | The panel discusses new thinking and evidence from leading thinkers and practitioners on this vital subject, including detailed studies of one of the possible success stories – solar power. Does the rapid rise in the use of solar energy represent a ray of hope in addressing the climate crisis?

Contributor(s): Daniel Pink | Too often, people brush off their regrets, chosing always to stay positive and look forward. In his latest book, which he will talk about in this event, Daniel Pink points to regrets as a beacon of our individuality that can be leveraged for better decision making and to understand our core values. Grace Lordan and Daniel Pink discuss the true value in understanding regret and using it to our advantage.

Contributor(s): Lea Ypi, David Hope, Julian Limberg, Tomila Lankina | Joanna Bale talks to Lea Ypi, David Hope, Julian Limberg and Tomila Lankina about defining freedom, debunking trickle-down economics and defying the Bolsheviks.

Contributor(s): Lord Carnwath, Dr Joana Setzer, Dr Roda Verheyen, Kate Higham, Mark Odaga, Ana Carolina Haliuc, Anne Corrigan, Michael Burger | This annual report – which has been published regularly since 2017 – provides an overview of the state of the art of climate litigation and highlights recent developments and recommendations for action. The event begins with a short presentation from authors Joana Setzer and Catherine Higham on the findings of the Grantham Research Institute’s 2022 Global Trends in Climate Change Litigation Policy Report. The presentation is followed by a panel discussion, with five distinguished experts in the field. Panellists react to the report and to draw out key aspects from their own experience in the field. The report is based on data in the Climate Change Laws of the World database which has a user base of nearly 200,000 users a year. Users include policy-makers from national legislatures, environment ministries, and central banks among many others.

Contributor(s): Dr Ann Olivarius | Ann Olivarius is a pioneer of the women’s rights movement, instigating change politically, legally, and in the workplace, creating a world where women are safer and more equal in the UK and the USA. She is a trailblazing feminist lawyer who has made tackling sexual harassment and discrimination her life's work.  Join Grace Lordan in her conversation with Ann Olivarius as they look back on the progress that women have made over the last 50 years. They discuss the current threats facing the Women’s Rights Movement today from the workplace to the community to the political agenda, including why US abortion rights are under attack at this specific point in history.

Contributor(s): Valeria Gontareva | Her remarks also include observations on the Ukrainian banking sector, financial needs, global implications and worldwide economic shocks.

Contributor(s): Piroska Nagy Mohacsi, Dr Angela Lusigi, Dr Ernest Addison | This event explores the financial and economic prospects for the region’s emerging economies, the impact of COVID-19 on development prospects, and more.

Contributor(s): Dr Kristin Surak, Dr Neil Cummins, Aroop Chatterjee | The COVID world has also entailed a much larger state intervention than at any time since the 1950s, linked to the twin challenges of an aging society and the need to invest in net zero, alongside any costs of recovery. This is something both of the major political parties appear to have signed on to. The question then is not only how much should we tax, but who should we tax, and how far the wealthy should be the focus of increased taxation. Questions of fairness will be central to the debate. In this event we present evidence on the trends in wealth inequality in society and reflect on the political challenges involved in addressing these.

Contributor(s): Dr Imaobong Umoren, Professor Mike Savage , Dr Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa | Calls for a decolonisation of the history curriculum, or changes to the way "Empire" is commemorated and discussed, are frequently dismissed or fought against as an attack on British history. Our panel discuss why this debate matters and what we should be doing about it.

Contributor(s): Ed Miliband MP | For the past four years, Ed Miliband has been discovering and interviewing brilliant people all around the world who are successfully tackling the biggest problems we face, transforming communities and pioneering global movements. Go Big draws on the most imaginative and ambitious of these ideas to provide a vision for the kind of society we need.

Contributor(s): Rob Sharp, Dr Eva Polonska-Kimunguyi, Professor Myria Georgiou, Abdulrahman Bdiwi | Over the past decades, and across continents, numerous refugee “crises” have led to the explosion of the global refugee population, which has more than doubled in the last ten years. As so many are forced to leave their homes, not all refugees gain the same level of visibility, welcome, and recognition. What are the consequences for the lives of those who move and those who receive them? How do media representations of refugees affect their reception? And how do refugees use digital media to themselves tell their stories of uprooting and migration?

Contributor(s): Dr Jonathan Birch, Huw Golledge, Penny Hawkins | In the UK, a new law requires all policymakers to have due regard for animal sentience. This law has given new urgency to the question: which other animals are sentient? Might some invertebrates, such as octopuses, crabs, snails, or even insects, have experiences that deserve respect and welfare protection?

Contributor(s): Dr Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, Dr Devika Hovell, Dr Martin Binder | Multilateralism seems in crisis precisely when it is needed most. Challenges are multifaceted and originate from established, emerging and declining powers. In his address to the UN Security Council in April 2022, President Zelenskyy of Ukraine said: “It is now clear that the goals set in San Francisco in 1945 during the creation of a global international security organization have not been achieved. And it is impossible to achieve them without reforms. Therefore, we must do everything in our power to pass on to the next generations an effective UN with the ability to respond preventively to security challenges and thus guarantee peace.” What reforms could revitalise the UN and what are the prospects of them being enacted?

Contributor(s): Dr Nikita Simpson, Dr James Rattee, Dr Joanna Lewis, Suad Duale | As we emerge from it, we are beginning to see the legacies of stigma and trauma that have disproportionately impacted certain groups – especially marginalised groups who are underserved by the state. This participatory short film animates longer-term ethnographic research conducted over the past 24 months across the UK by LSE’s COVID and Care Research Group, led by Professor Laura Bear. It highlights the story of psychotherapist Suad Duale and the Somali single mothers who have stepped up to support their community in this time. Co-directed by Suad Duale, Dr Nikita Simpson and Dr James Rattee, it provides insight into the profound work done by some people to ferry their communities through this crisis.

Contributor(s): Christine Lagarde, Dr José Viñals | Since November 2019, Christine Lagarde (@Lagarde) has been the President of the European Central Bank. Between 2011 and 2019, she served as the eleventh Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Prior to that she served as French Economic Finance Minister from 2007 to 2011 after having been Trade Secretary from 2005 to 2007. A lawyer by background, she practiced for 20 years with the international law firm Baker McKenzie, of which she became global chairman in 1999. In all such positions, she was the first woman to serve. In 2020, Lagarde was ranked the second most influential woman in the world by Forbes and has been named by TIME as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Christine Lagarde was named Officier in the Légion d'honneur in April 2012 and Commandeur dans l’ordre national du mérite in May 2021. José Viñals was appointed to Standard Chartered PLC in October 2016 and became Group Chairman in December 2016. José was appointed Chairman of Standard Chartered Bank in April 2019. José began his career as an economist and as a member of the faculty at Stanford University, before spending 25 years at the Central Bank of Spain, where he rose to be the Deputy Governor. José joined the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2009 and stepped down in September 2016 to join Standard Chartered PLC. Minouche Shafik is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Prior to this, she was Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. She is an alumna of LSE. Her new book, What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract, is out now. She is co-chair of the Economy 2030 Inquiry commission.

Contributor(s): Teniola Tayo, Richard Kozul-Wright | The economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Africa have been severe, with formal and informal sectors affected by lockdowns, decreasing exports, disruptions to global supply chains, mounting debt and increasing levels of poverty. Fiscal responses have been unable to weather dramatic shifts in business and economic activity worldwide, with major challenges for local populations seeking employment and food security. With historic changes within the continent to the way trade is being conducted, a crucial part of Africa’s economic recovery from COVID-19 therefore hangs on what happens in this area. Will the much-hyped African Continental Free Trade Area really transform the continent’s economic prospects, or does an economic recovery depend on external actors? With a small percentage of Africa receiving vaccines to COVID-19, how can trade work to counter the challenges of supply?

Contributor(s): Elif Shafak | In her latest novel, award-winning author Elif Shafak explores belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal through a story of two teenagers in 1970s Cyprus, from opposite sides of a divided land who seek refuge in a taverna to forget the sorrows of the world outside. In conversation with Professor Tomila Lankina, whose latest book explores the legacies of Tsarist Russia and the Russian revolution and how they continue to shape Russian society today, she will explore what we as a society, and as individuals, can do to bring about a better post-COVID world.

Contributor(s): Professor Nicholas Barr, Andrew Dilnot, Michelle Dyson, Lord MacPherson | A decade after the Dilnot Report called attention to the fact that the finance of social care had been ignored for too long and that the system was "confusing, unfair and unsustainable", the government announced an overhaul to the way adult social care is financed in England. The government’s proposal, to increase finance for social care through an increase in National Insurance contributions (NICs), has attracted a range of diverging opinions. The speakers will debate current proposals and possible alternatives.

Contributor(s): Ruben Lapa Maximiano, Natura Gracia, Roberto Alimonti | As the world slowly comes out of the pandemic, a number of policy questions arise: was state intervention sufficient? Were the instruments appropriate? Has the level-playing field been altered by the uneven capacity of states to dip into their own pockets? Would a European coordinated strategy have been more appropriate? The panel's aims is twofold: first, to evaluate what happened during the pandemic, taking stock of the effectiveness of the state aid measures and the competition tools used to respond to and manage the crisis; second, to assess whether any policy changes are necessary to upgrade the toolkit for the next crisis to come.

Contributor(s): Dr Orla Lynskey, Professor Andrew Murray | Globally, we are seeing increasing regulatory alignment to rights-based data protection frameworks. However, a wide variety of alternative data governance initiatives with diverse objectives and conceptual starting points are also emerging. In this session we discuss the legal challenges this entails as well as the opportunities it presents for more effective data governance.

Contributor(s): Dr Jason Wong, Lara Pohl-Martell, Jocelyn Blériot | The idea of a circular economy, in which waste and pollution are eliminated through better design, reuse of resources and regeneration, is a radical solution to climate change and biodiversity loss, as well as social problems. But is a shift away from a linear economy achievable, and how?

Contributor(s): Professor Kristina Spohr, Dr Fiona Hill | A leading national security expert and best-selling author discusses Putin’s Russia, America’s future, and the implications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for the future of European security and democracy.

Contributor(s): Dr Jonathan Roberts | In this session, Dr Jonathan Roberts discusses these questions and more and how they relate to new institutions, organisations and mechanisms that aim to create significant social change. He will explore how social entrepreneurs recognise opportunities, how they mobilise resources, how they often use commercial mechanisms for the public good, and how they should always work in partnership with those they seek to help.

Contributor(s): Dr Anna Valero, Rebecca McDonald, Dr Carl Benedikt Frey | Accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, underlying structural changes have placed significant pressure on labour markets. This has profound implications for inter-personal and inter-place inequalities. The challenge, therefore, is how we create good jobs in a time of crisis, where everyone and everywhere benefits. This event will discuss the opportunities a transition to net zero presents, and how skills policy needs to be reframed to support strong, sustainable and inclusive job creation.

Contributor(s): Dr Mukulika Banerjee, Dr Yascha Mounk, Professor Lea Ypi | Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the recent changes in the US electoral system, the introduction of additional documentation in the UK and growing electoral authoritarianism in the world’s largest democracy India – all indicate a distortion of democratic institutions as well of their democratic cultures. This panel examines the future of democracy as a political system and explores the importance of cultivation of values and institutions in the preservation of democracy.

Contributor(s): Professor Oya Dursun-Özkanca, Colonel (retired) Rich Outzen, Professor Gencer Özcan | The questions that will be addressed include the following: How have relations between Turkey and NATO evolved in the past 70 years? What has been the Turkish strategy toward NATO in the past two decades? How have the US and the NATO alliance approached Turkey since the early 2000s? The talk will also assess the future prospects of Turkey’s role in NATO given the changing regional circumstances in the Black Sea region.

Contributor(s): Carolyn Fairbairn, Torsten Bell | What can we learn from past periods of change? And how can we build a new economic strategy that responds to the challenges of the 2020s, as well as our legacy problems of weak productivity, high inequality and stagnating living standards? The UK is facing a decisive decade of huge economic change, from restructuring after Brexit and the pandemic, to urgently transitioning towards a net zero future, and adapting to technological shifts amid an ageing population. Some of these shifts present big new opportunities for people and places throughout the country. But they bring challenges too, and failing to respond to the disruption they will bring carries huge risks – to our living standards, our communities, and to our planet. The UK’s many strengths must be harnessed to manage this change well.

Contributor(s): Iman Mersal, Lola Olufemi, Mai Taha | We discuss questions of literary style through the use of photography, poetry, and personal writing, as well as questions of politics through a focus on the intimate, care work, and how past experiences shape the future. This is an inter-generational and transnational conversation: while both texts showcase place-based writing that is attentive to context, they also transcend place and engage with a transnational feminist orientation that takes care seriously as a universal experience and as a political question. These texts are exciting examples of experimental writing and publishing, demonstrating the power and beauty of feminist writing in our current moment.

Contributor(s): Dr Grace Lordan | The world of work is being shaped by the Great Resignation, technology changes and varying policies around hybrid working. But what does this all mean for skills? What skill-set should you hone to be a future leader? What skills should you acquire to be in demand on the labour market? Do we all need to be tech savvy? And what are the skills that will allow a person be in demand in the labour market a decade from now. Join Dr Grace Lordan, author of Think Big, where she will answer these questions and more. Grace will also be telling you more about the value of investing in becoming an inclusive leader through a behavioural science approach.

Contributor(s): Professor G John Ikenberry, Professor Mary Kaldor, Professor Charles A Kupchan, Professor Ayşe Zarakol | Leading experts on world politics take up these questions and others about the future of the liberal world order.

Contributor(s): Dr Grace Lordan, Helen Krause, Ruben Gnanalingam, Andrew Cohen, Fred Brettschneider | As investor interest in ESG (environmental, social, governance) grows, we consider what components of “S” should be prioritised and measured, delving into how the sector could evolve as “S” measurement becomes more sophisticated.

Contributor(s): Professor Patrick Tomlin, Professor S. Matthew Liao, Dr Anca Gheaus | In all societies, parents have rights over their children. In particular, they have the right to make decisions on behalf of their children in all areas of their children’s lives, including education, religious observance and relationships. Parental rights fulfil two roles: protecting children’s interests and protecting parents’ interest in rearing their children in line with their values. Yet, these interests are often in tension with one another.

Contributor(s): Dr Lexi Stadlen, Professor Patricia Jeffery, Sonia Faleiro | This event marks the launch of Lexi Stadlen’s newly published Nine Paths which explores the intimate lives of nine women and their families on an island in the Sunderban, at the eastern edge of India, over the course of a year. There are weddings to celebrate and deaths to mourn, families to care for, difficult marriages to navigate and tragedies to overcome, as we observe the everyday drudgery, unexpected turmoil and the dreams of something better. A conversation chaired by Alpa Shah with Lexi Stadlen, sociologist Patricia Jeffrey who has conducted four decades of research in a Muslim village in Uttar Pradesh and journalist Sonia Faleiro who most recently wrote the The Good Girls, the ordinary killing of two low caste girls in a village in Uttar Pradesh.

Contributor(s): Professor Glenn Loury | Glenn Loury explores the importance of social networks in influencing education decisions and how a lack of access to networks can act as a barrier to educational attainment. In addition, he will explore the politics of racial inequalities, with a particular focus on the US context. This will involve a critique of identity politics and the kind of anti-racism politics that has emerged in the US.

Contributor(s): Professor Ricky Burdett, Dr Amara Enyia, Tracy Jooste, Dr Robtel Neajai Pailey | Drawing on their research and practice and in conversation with each other, Atlantic Institute’s Leaders in Residence, Amara Enyia and Tracy Jooste, and LSE academics Robtel Neajai Pailey and Ricky Burdett will consider how in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic we can not only build back better, but also build differently.

Contributor(s): Professor Tim Besley, Dr Tania Burchardt, Professor Michael Cox, Sir Anthony Seldon | This event explores how the UK has changed during the 70 years of the Queen’s reign and will consider how the UK’s: economy, government and politics, social policy and foreign relations have evolved between 1952 and 2022.

Contributor(s): Yvonne Farrell, Francis Kéré, Anne Lacaton, Shelley McNamara, Jeanne-Philippe Vassal, Professor Ricky Burdett | From innovative uses of local resources and participatory design methods in Africa, to the exploration of generosity of space and economic use of materials in educational and residential buildings in cities of the global North, the speakers will argue that architecture plays an increasingly  critical role in constructing more open, resilient and healthy places for people.

Contributor(s): Dr Nayanika Mathur | The Anthropocene is taken to constitute not just a new geologic age of the planet characterised by extreme events, biodiversity loss, the melting of glaciers, etc. – the climate crisis – but also as an imperative of finding new ways of doing and communicating anthropological labour.

Contributor(s): Simon Kuper, Professor Jane Gingrich, Professor Mike Savage | Drawing on his forthcoming book, Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK, Kuper will discuss the dynamics and effects of Britain’s ruling class and its ‘chumocracy’, with responses from Mike Savage – a sociologist of elites – and Jane Gingrich, Professor of Comparative Political Economy. In his new book, Simon details how Oxford University has produced most of the most powerful Conservative politicians of our time. They aren't just colleagues - they are peers, rivals, friends. And, when they walked out of the world of student debates onto the national stage, they brought their university politics with them. How has this reality helped define and design modern Britain?

Contributor(s): Anna Błuś, Suzanne Hoff, Elene Lam, Dr Niina Vuolajärvi | In this event, Niina Vuolajärvi will outline the main outcomes and recommendations of a policy brief on sex buyer criminalization and its intersections with immigration controls in the Nordic region. The brief is based on Vuolajärvi’s large-scale ethnographic research that includes 210 interviews conducted between 2012-2019 in Sweden, Norway, and Finland. The panel will discuss how the “Nordic model” style regulation looks like in other countries and from a perspective of anti-trafficking efforts.

Contributor(s): Dr Annette Zimmermann, Dr Zeynep Pamuk, Professor Jocelyn Maclure, Dr Etienne Brown | Public administrations increasingly use AI to automatise the allocation of public services. Judges use risk-assessment algorithms to determine a person’s eligibility for bail or parole. Social media platforms use AI to optimise content moderation, while political actors can use these platforms to engage in microtargeting and misinformation. And law enforcement agencies can use facial recognition systems and predictive analytics to strengthen surveillance. This new reality requires careful examination: Who should be responsible for selecting principles of AI governance? How can we align the decisions of AI systems with democratic values? Are “black box” algorithms undermining transparency and our capacity to exercise scrutiny over public decisions? Panellists reflect on these and related questions and engage with the audience.

Contributor(s): Dr Robin Archer | Equality is an idea that has broad appeal – most people endorse the principle that we should be equal before the law, and even defenders of the market put their case in terms of equal property rights. But the socialist idea that people should be equal in their material circumstances is more controversial, and recent trends in egalitarian political philosophy, rather than stepping up to defend it, have tended to back away.

Contributor(s): Lord Malloch-Brown | For decades, democracy and human-rights advocates have assumed that a growing number of governments were embracing democracy, freedom and the international law. Yet today, 38 percent of the world’s population live in countries which are not free – the highest proportion in a quarter of a century. As the enemies of open society further accelerate their attacks, and Ukraine becomes the frontline in a systems-breaking clash between democracy and authoritarianism, where do we turn next in today’s fight for open society?

Contributor(s): Dr Juliana Bidadanure | Age shapes social institutions, roles, and relationships, as well as how we assign obligations and entitlements within them. Each life-stage also brings its characteristic opportunities and vulnerabilities, which spawn inequalities between young and old. How should we respond to these age-related inequalities? Are they objectionable in the same way gender or racial inequalities are? Or is there something distinctive about age that should mitigate our concern for inequalities between young and old? Juliana Bidadanure addresses these and related questions, presenting the theory of justice between age groups that she develops in her book Justice Across Ages: Treating Young and old as Equals. The book advances ethical principles to guide a fair distribution of goods like jobs, healthcare, income, and political power among persons at different stages of their life. If we are ever to live in a society where people are treated as equals, she argues, we must pay attention to how age membership can alter our social standing, and we must regard with suspicion commonplace forms of age-based social hierarchy.

Contributor(s): Professor Scott Barrett | This keynote lecture explains: why, despite thirty years of diplomatic effort, global collective action on climate change has failed; how climate diplomacy can be made more effective; and what past and ongoing diplomatic failures imply for future climate diplomacy.

Contributor(s): Rupal Patel, Dr Jack Meaning | The book addresses ten questions that are the key to understanding economics, from ‘Why aren’t Freddos 10p anymore?’ to ‘What actually is money?’. Along the way, it offers idiosyncratic examples of economics in action: whether in the City of London, the Bank of England canteen, Springfield Power Plant or the National Lottery. The result is an authoritative and surprisingly witty guide to economics and why it matters.

Contributor(s): Sylvana Q Sinha, Riya Pabari, Lord Hastings, Michael Fraccaro, Dr Christian Busch | How can we set ourselves (and others) up for success and “smart luck” in a world full of uncertainty? How can we create a career that combines money and meaning—even today, when we cannot know which jobs will still exist tomorrow?  This event marks the LSE launch of the international paperback version of Christian Busch’s book Connect the Dots: The Art & Science of Creating Good Luck. By learning to identify, act on and share serendipity, we can use uncertainty as a pathway to more joyful, purposeful and successful lives. Christian Busch has studied hundreds of subjects who improved their lives by learning to see opportunities in the unexpected.

Contributor(s): Professor Nancy Fraser | In the wake of the perfect storm that is COVID, how can we stop it from cannibalising our whole world?

Contributor(s): Professor Nichola Raihani, Dr Erez Yoeli, Dr Moshe Hoffman | Reviving game theory, Hoffman and Yoeli use it to explain our most puzzling behaviour, from the mechanics of Stockholm syndrome and internalised misogyny to why we help strangers and have a sense of fairness. Fun and powerfully insightful, Hidden Games is an eye-opening argument for using game theory to explain all the irrational things we think, feel, and do and will change how you think forever.

Contributor(s): Professor Abhijit Banerjee | The recent pandemic has highlighted the importance of communicating reliable information to very large populations who are all exposed to multiple other sources of information and misinformation. The talk reviews what is known about the proper design of communication strategies—who to inform, how much information, through what means.

Contributor(s): Dr Liam Kofi Bright, Dr Zena Hitz, Professor Alex Voorhoeve | Is tranquility a recipe for good mental health, well-being and fulfilment, or merely a way to cut ourselves off from what really matters? Should a life well lived include periods of suffering and stress?

Contributor(s): Kiera Byland, Nyasha Derera, Kester Edwards, Heidi Mallet | This discussion also offers an opportunity to learn more about the challenges individuals with intellectual disabilities face, and the remarkable talents and abilities they bring to their families, neighbourhoods, communities and nations.

Contributor(s): Dr Michael Callen, Professor Michael Cox, Dr Devika Hovell, Nargis Nehan | Less than months after the western military withdrawal in August 2021, this special issue explores lessons that can be drawn from the fall of the government in Kabul. Inviting scholars from different disciplinary background, the issue reflects on why the US decided to leave, what this may mean for the Western alliance system, the consequences for women’s rights, the geopolitical fall out, international law, development and the economics of peace.

Contributor(s): Bee Rowlatt, Fawzia Amini, Baroness Kennedy | The fall of Kabul last summer was a minute-by-minute tragedy, as the Taliban swept to power and many Afghans desperately tried to escape. Among the most vulnerable were women lawyers who had formerly stood up to the Taliban, and as the ‘death lists’ began to circulate, these women had the most to lose. But as we witnessed the rolling back of human rights, the events of last August also summoned acts of immense courage and selflessness. In the spirt of Mary Wollstonecraft, Baroness Kennedy shares the extraordinary stories behind the evacuation of Afghan women judges following the fall of Kabul, and her own connection to their escape. This exchange examines the hopes for women's rights internationally, set the story we all watched on the news into the framework of international justice, and consider those who are left behind.

Contributor(s): Philip Keefer, Professor Aldo Madariaga, Dr Erin McFee | Trust is the belief that others will not act opportunistically. It is faith in others—in their honesty, dependability, and goodwill. Trustworthy people make promises they can keep, follow through on those promises, and do not violate social norms. When trust is absent, society and its members suffer: citizens demand and politicians supply public policies that do not advance collective welfare, feeding disenchantment with democracy; citizens and government officials demand increasing regulation and red tape that slow growth and restrict access to social programs; and the performance of firms and public sector organisations declines as mistrust undermines collaboration, recruitment and innovation. The event discusses the sources and consequences of mistrust and reforms that can offset it.

Contributor(s): Professor Annette Lareau, Sibylle Gollac, Dr Aliya Rao | The event will examine a host of related issues including gender dynamics (and tensions) surrounding wealth and philanthropic giving in families, particularly when the wealth and economic expertise of the wife exceeds that of her husband. Professor Lareau highlights the “stickiness” of gender in shaping these family dynamics, thereby complicating and stigmatising the formidable economic advantages these women hold. Following her presentation, Sibylle Gollac and Dr Katharina Hecht will join the discussion.

Contributor(s): Professor Julian Go | Sociology was born in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a project in, of, and for empire. Its concerns, theories, and epistemology therefore reflected the standpoint of metropolitan elites. Sociology today carries the legacies of this imperial tradition, including its analytic biases.

Contributor(s): Professor Boris Vujcic, Dr Debora Revoltella, Francis Malige, Fokion Karavias, Dr Anthony Bartzokas | What are the forces reshaping finance in South East Europe? What are the lessons learned from the policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic? What are the prospects for banks during the recovery phase? How technology and nonfinancial corporations are transforming the banking sector? A panel of experts from the region discuss key challenges from the build-up of vulnerabilities, proposals by various institutions for future action and the role that banks and investors could play towards building back better after the pandemic.

Contributor(s): Dr. Aaron Reeves, Laura Lane, Daphine Aikens | As food and energy prices soar, it’s predicted that the demand for food banks will reach record highs as those on low incomes and benefits face an uphill battle to make ends meet. Joanna Bale talks to LSE’s Aaron Reeves and Laura Lane, as well as Daphine Aikens, founder and CEO of Hammersmith and Fulham food bank, and some of her clients.

Contributor(s): Sylvie Goulard, Frank Elderson, Otávio Damaso, Dr Ma Jun | Panellists discuss the findings of the report of the Joint NGFS-INSPIRE Study Group on Biodiversity and Financial Stability. The report investigates and strengthens the case for action to enable central banks and supervisors to not only understand the issues the planet is facing due to the unparalleled loss of biodiversity, but also to define the actions that must be taken within existing mandates in the collective effort to address this vital challenge. The report sets out how financial risks stemming from biodiversity loss can have implications for financial stability and therefore the core objectives and policy frameworks of central banks and supervisors. The decline of ecosystem services as a result of biodiversity loss poses physical risks for economic and financial actors that depend upon those services.

Contributor(s): Professor Michael Cox, Professor Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, Professor Peter Trubowitz | The defeat of Donald Trump in November 2020 followed by the attack on the US Congress on 6 January 2021 represented a tipping point moment in the history of the American republic. Divided at home and facing a world sceptical of American claims to be the ‘indispensable nation’ in world politics, it is clear that the next few years will be decisive ones for the United States. But how did the US, which was riding high only 30 years ago, arrive at this critical point? And will it lead to the fall of what many would claim has been one of the most successful empires of modern times? In this volume, Michael Cox, a leading scholar of American foreign policy, outlines the ways in which five very different American Presidents – Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and now Biden - have addressed the complex legacies left them by their predecessors while dealing with the longer-term problems of running an empire under increasing stress. In so doing, he sets out a framework for thinking critically about US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War without ever losing sight of the biggest question of all: can America continue to shape world affairs or is it now facing long-term decline?

Contributor(s): Professor Shani Orgad, Professor Rosalind Gill, Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola, Dr Katherine Angel | Interrogating the prominence of confidence in contemporary discourse about body image, workplace, relationships, motherhood, and international development, Orgad and Gill demonstrate how “confidence culture” demands of women near-constant introspection and vigilance in the service of self-improvement. They argue that while confidence messaging may feel good, it does not address structural and systemic oppression. Rather, confidence culture suggests that women—along with people of colour, the disabled, and other marginalised groups—are responsible for their own conditions. Rejecting confidence culture’s remaking of feminism along individualistic and neoliberal lines, Orgad and Gill explore alternative articulations of feminism that go beyond the confidence imperative.

Contributor(s): Professor Richard Whitman, Professor Ben Tonra, Dr Kate Ferguson | The invasion of Ukraine seems to have brought not only a new geopolitical environment, but also a re-evaluation of UK foreign policy priorities post-Brexit. What does this mean for the prospect of ‘Global Britain’? Is a British foreign policy outside the EU better able to set its own path or is it even more exposed to the vagaries of international politics? To what extent does the emerging security architecture in Europe suit British priorities? And are relations between the UK and the Republic of Ireland finally out of their recent rocky patch?

Contributor(s): Professor Margaret MacMillan | The growth of the Axis and the failures of the democracies to counter it are often blamed for the outbreak of war in 1939. Is this fair? And could the Western democracies have done more to make common cause with the Soviet Union against the Axis? This lecture focusses on the two years from 1939-1941 and key turning points such as the Nazi-Soviet pact, the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact, the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the Japanese attack on the United States and other powers.

Contributor(s): Professor Cathy McIlwaine | As part of ongoing debates within feminist geography and beyond, the discussion explores the intersections among multiple types of direct and indirect gendered violence across borders and territories. The lecture draws empirically on research conducted over the last 5 years on violence against Brazilian migrant women in London and among women living in the favelas of Maré in Rio de Janeiro. The discussion reflects the feminist co-production of research with a range of organisations and on the role of arts-based methods and engagements in enhancing understandings of gendered violence and through which diverse forms of resistance emerge.

Contributor(s): Professor Philipp Ager | The 1920s border closure is one of the most fundamental changes to United States immigration policy in the past century. In the early 20th century, European immigrants faced few restrictions for entry into the US and close to one million immigrants arrived on the nation's shores each year. This era of open immigration ended in the 1920s with a series of increasingly restrictive immigration quotas, eventually limiting entry from affected countries to 150,000 a year. Professor Ager will discuss the socio-economic consequences this policy had for the US population at that time, and what lessons can be learned from it.

Contributor(s): Professor Sara B Hobolt, Professor Liesbet Hooghe, Professor Lauren McLaren | Sara Hobolt is the Sutherland Chair in European Institutions and Professor in the Department of Government at LSE.  Liesbet Hooghe is the WR Kenan Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Research Professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, Florence.  Lauren McLaren is Professor of Politics at the University of Leicester. Chris Anderson is Professor in European Politics and Policy.

Contributor(s): Dr Alexandra Gomes, Professor Patrick Wallis, Professor Emily Jackson, Professor Julia Black | We’ll be hearing from Dr Alexandra Gomes, co-creator of Kuwaitscapes (More on the research project that inspired the game, and to download the Kuwaitscapes game), Professor Patrick Wallis, who created an audio drama from the records of a historical document discovered about the Lock Asylum, a home for down-and-out women, Professor Emily Jackson, whose work on fertility has led to a change in the law, and British Academy President and LSE Professor Julia Black, who is spearheading the SHAPE campaign.

Contributor(s): Professor Tomila Lankina | The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia: From Imperial Bourgeoisie to Post-Communist Middle-Class, challenges the notion that the Soviet Union destroyed the social structure of the past and built a new, Soviet, society, with a new party and nomentklatura elite.

Contributor(s): Dr Anthony Masters, Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter | Anthony Masters is Statistical Ambassador for the Royal Statistical Society. David Spiegelhalter is Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, Centre for Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge. They are the authors of COVID by Numbers: making sense of the pandemic with data. Qiwei Yao is Professor in the Department of Statistics at LSE.

Contributor(s): Dr Alina Averchenkova, Professor Barry Buzan, Professor Kathy Hochstetler, Dr Miriam Prys-Hansen, Professor Stacy Vandeveer | Great powers are also great polluters, particularly when it comes to the global greenhouse gas effect. Through the 2015 Paris Agreement and recent international conferences, all major powers - from the United States to China, India, Brazil, Russia and the EU - have committed to bringing greenhouse gas emissions under control and decarbonising their economies by 2050.

Contributor(s): Professor Cheryl Schonhardt Bailey, Dr Stephen Holden Bates, Lord Tyrie | In recent decades, we have seen an explosion in expectations for greater accountability of public policymaking. But, as accountability has increased, trust in governments and politicians has fallen. By focusing on the heart of public accountability—the reason-giving by policymakers for their policy decisions (i.e. deliberative accountability)

Contributor(s): Elizabeth Nyamayaro | Dr Christine Chow talks with Elizabeth Nyamayaro about her outstanding leadership in launching one of the world's largest global solidarity movements for gender equality, HeForShe, in addition to her work in the UN and her best-selling book I am a Girl From Africa.

Contributor(s): Dr Rachel Gong, Dr Sabina Lawreniuk, Dr Murray Mckenzie, Dr Do Young Oh, Abbey Pangilinan | COVID-19 presents huge challenges to governments, businesses, civil societies, and people from all walks of life, but its impact is highly variegated, affecting society in multiple negative ways, with uneven geographical and socioeconomic patterns. In this regard, this edited volume brings together the voices of researchers who work on and in Southeast Asia to show how COVID-19 reveals existing contradictions and inequalities in our society, compelling us to question what it means to return to 'normal' and what insights we can glean from Southeast Asia for thinking about a post-pandemic world.

Contributor(s): Winnie Byanyima | This event with Winnie Byanyima, the feminist activist who leads the UN’s response to HIV and AIDS and who chairs the People’s Vaccine Alliance for COVID-19, will highlight lessons rooted in ongoing experience from the AIDS response and the commonalities between the two pandemics, as well as learnings from other health crises, to set out an approach that can actually succeed in keeping us all safe. The COVID-19 crisis has alerted world leaders to the urgency of stopping and preventing pandemics, which are recognised as undermining health, stability, and economic progress. But the path on which the world is embarking to overcome pandemics cannot succeed, because it is failing to address their underlying systemic drivers. Inequalities are increasingly preventing overwhelming majorities in most developing countries from accessing COVID-19 vaccines, enabling the pandemic to spread and the virus to mutate. If we end inequalities upfront, we will increase our odds of ending AIDS, ending COVID-19 and winning against future pandemics. But business as usual will fail. In this time of emergency, the only realistic approach is a radical one, the only safe response is to be bold.

Contributor(s): Tim Davie | With constant scrutiny of its public service remit, multiple new entrants in the market and changes in the way audiences consume content, what’s the future of the BBC?

Contributor(s): Dr Leslie Vinjamuri, Gideon Rachman, Professor Charles A Kupchan, Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook | Leading foreign policy experts size up the Biden administration’s foreign policy and what we might expect from the administration going forward.

Contributor(s): Professor Shasa Dobrow, Professor Sally Maitlis, Nick O’Shea | We’ll learn how following a calling turned one LSE graduate to beer and building a successful social enterprise, via a holy revelation. We’ll hear stories of animal hoarding, passions gone wrong and burnout. And there’s some hopeful news for those of us who just haven’t found our passion yet.

Contributor(s): Anita Peña Saavedra, Dr Armine Ishkanian, Dr Irene Guijt, Dr Paul Apostolidis | In the wake of COVID-19, a range of civil society actors, from grassroots groups, social movements, and NGOs, stepped in to provide support and assistance to communities. Alongside providing material support (e.g., food, medical supplies etc.) and mutual aid, civil society organisations have been at the forefront in campaigning for better policies and social protections for communities.  Panellists discuss how civil society organisations are responding to the new challenges and examine the forms of solidarity and agency that are emerging. As we ponder the question, “How do we get to a post-COVID world?", we need to consider the ways in which actors across civil society are not only meeting immediate needs, but more importantly, how through prefigurative forms of action they are imagining and enacting new social relations and practices of wellbeing and care.

Contributor(s): Professor Luitgard Veraart | Domino effects of losses can bring down entire financial systems with severe knock-on effects on the real economy. This talk considers insights from mathematics to model loss cascades and apply them to recent financial stress events. We live in an interconnected world. As the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, interconnections affect both our lives and our livelihoods. In this talk, Luitgard Veraart will show how we can use mathematical models to quantify and manage risk arising from interconnections in financial markets. A particular focus will be on systemic risk and financial stability. Examples provided from the 2007-2009 financial crisis and the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic will illustrate how mathematical models can inform the debate on mitigating systemic risk. Meet our speaker and chair Luitgard Veraart is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at LSE. She joined LSE in 2010 after holding positions in the USA and in Germany. She is a co-winner of the 2019 Adams Prize awarded by the University of Cambridge for her research in the Mathematics of Networks. Jan van den Heuvel is Professor of Mathematics and Head of the Department of Mathematics at LSE. More about this event The Department of Mathematics (@LSEMaths) is internationally recognised for its teaching and research in the fields of discrete mathematics, game theory, financial mathematics and operations research.

Contributor(s): Professor Winnie Yip, Dr Xuefei Ren, Professor Xiaobo Lü, Bill Bikales | Leading scholars of health policy, development economics, urban governance and public administration will assess the policy agenda of their respective field in relation to the goal of building ‘common prosperity’ recently proposed by the CCP.

Contributor(s): Nadia Calviño Santamaría, Professor Iain Begg | Nadia Calviño Santamaría discusses issues related to the current economic recovery, with a particular focus on the policy lessons from the pandemic and the way ahead.

Contributor(s): Professor Christopher Murray | The COVID-19 pandemic has had massive global impacts infecting more than 3.5 billion and causing more than 15 million excess deaths. The virus has directly killed millions and the lockdowns needed to dampen transmission may have contributed in various ways to millions of pandemic related deaths not due to SARS Cov2 infection. The COVID-19 pandemic has not only been a major shock to human health but has had unprecedented economic impacts. The distribution of health and economic effects has not been even around the world. Countries judged prior to the pandemic to be better prepared to manage threats such as the United Kingdom and Unites States have not faired particularly well during 2020 and 2021.

Contributor(s): Sophie Magennis, Professor Florian Trauner, Dr Natascha Zaun | This event explores the current challenges affecting migration throughout Europe.Thirty years ago the Maastricht Treaty was signed, creating today’s ‘European Union’ and representing the biggest single transformative text on European integration since the Treaty of Rome in 1958. As internal barriers began to fall, new walls and policies have risen between Europe and the rest of the world. How did Maastricht treaty affect migration through and to Europe? How have migration policies developed today?

Contributor(s): Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh | A moment of change is when circumstances shift quickly. They include life course moments – like becoming a parent or changing careers - and external changes – such as travel disruption or the impact of wider societal disruption. The relationship between moments of change and environmental impact is complex. There are differences across individuals, cultures and society. Professor Whitmarsh will discuss this research, including how this relates to net zero societal change and the COVID-19 pandemic. She will also share her thoughts on implications for policy makers.

Contributor(s): Dr Jessica Whyte | In this talk, Jessica Whyte will trace the development of neoliberal attitudes to the subjective comportment required for a functioning competitive market. Her focus is on the irony by which a neoliberal movement that emerged as a critique of the stoic resignation of previous liberals in the face of poverty, mass unemployment and economic misery, ultimately came to counsel what Friedrich Hayek termed “submission” to our market-dispensed fates. Neoliberalism is commonly understood as a philosophy embracing free trade or laissez-faire. And yet, a key impetus for its development was the rejection of the earlier liberal idea that markets operated in a realm of natural freedom. Walter Lippman, the American journalist who inspired the early neoliberals, believed that liberals had become simple apologists for the miseries of the existing legal order because they neglected the role of law and the state in consolidating the liberal capitalist order. By doing so, he argued, they were reduced to preaching “stoic resignation” in the face of the human suffering that resulted from the market.

Contributor(s): Dr Elizabeth Frazer, Professor Kimberly Hutchings, Professor Paul Kelly | In his new book Paul Kelly considers the lessons about political violence, war and revolution to be learned from ten major thinkers over centuries – Thucydides, St Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Clausewitz, Lenin, Mao, Schmitt - and draws some lessons for our times. Join us as a panel of speaker discuss the theme of this new publication from LSE Press. Modern international relations apparently shows a rapid swing back towards ‘great power’ politics and the use of force and violence in inter-state relations, dashing the millennial hopes of an irreversible shift towards a more ethically based international regime. Yet a whole succession of major thinkers have espoused versions of a ‘realist’ strand urging recognition of the inevitable presence of violence in international affairs. You can order the book, Conflict, War & Revolution: the importance of violence in international politics, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney.

Contributor(s): Dr Arun Advani, Alex Cobham, Professor Jayati Ghosh | But with progress towards coordinated global taxation having stalled since, what are some of the major challenges facing the global tax justice movement—in both the global north and global south? And how might the left capitalise on the popular re-emergence of an issue it has long championed?

Contributor(s): Professor Ha-Joon Chang, Dr Francis Mustapha Kai-Kai, Dr Faiza Shaheen, Waleed Shahid | Ministers and policy influencers from across the world discuss how they are addressing inequality and why we have not seen the scale and speed of progress the pandemic has warranted. Speakers discuss a recent report, From rhetoric to action: Delivering equality and inclusion from the Pathfinders initiative hosted by the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, which considers what actually works to address inequality and exclusion in different country settings.

Contributor(s): Sebastian Mallaby | Investing always involves bets on an uncertain future, but venture capitalists face uncertainty of an extreme sort. How do they decide which startups have a chance of making it? How do they impact the economy and society? And why is venture capital spreading globally?

Contributor(s): Dr Effie Fokas, Dr Yannis Ktistakis | Yannis Ktistakis, Judge of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and Effie Fokas, researcher on ECtHR religion case law, will engage in a discussion about issues such as religious education in state schools, the legal status of religious minorities and exemption from sharia law (in the case of Muslims of Thrace), and of the critical role played by the ECtHR in such areas.

Contributor(s): Professor Jacob Hacker, Dr Ursula Hackett, Professor G John Ikenberry, Mark Landler, Professor Paula D. McClain | Has President Biden made good on his core campaign promises concerning the pandemic, the economy, and race, inequality, and climate change? Will the Democrats take a drubbing in November’s midterm elections?

Contributor(s): Professor Joseph Fishkin, Professor Marc Fleurbaey, Dr Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington | The lingering pandemic crisis and the growing awareness that we are already facing the climate crisis require a rethinking of the objectives and instruments of political action. In this public event three speakers discussed the idea of equality that societies should pursue in the difficult times ahead. This event launches III's new research theme Opportunity Mobility and Intergenerational Transmission of Inequality.

Contributor(s): Steve Baker MP, Professor Paul Dolan, Nancy Hey, Dr Johanna Thoma | These questions are particularly relevant at a time when we start to fully understand the consequences of responses to the COVID-19 pandemic on a range of aspects of people’s lives: from mental health to domestic violence, from economic to educational outcomes. A focus on wellbeing can challenge the processes through which different public policy goals have been prioritised.

Contributor(s): Professor Wojciech Sadurski | In 2019, Wojciech Sadurski published Poland's Constitutional Breakdown, in which he described the legal and political events that led to the country's recent turn towards illiberalism and democratic backsliding. Join us as he gives an update on the developments in Poland since: what has changed? What has remained the same? And what does Poland's constitutional future hold?

Contributor(s): Shani Orgad | We find out the real reasons some mums leave the workforce, deep dive into the media coverage of one of the world’s most talked-about mothers, Meghan Markle, and get Shani’s advice on how to do it all.

Contributor(s): Hilary Cooper, Professor Simon Szreter | Hilary Cooper and Simon Szreter discuss their book in which they reveal the deep roots of our vulnerability and set out a powerful manifesto for change post-Covid-19. They argue that our commitment to a flawed neoliberal model and the associated disinvestment in our social fabric left the UK dangerously exposed and unable to mount an effective response. This is not at all what made Britain great. The long history of the highly innovative universal welfare system established by Elizabeth I facilitated both the industrial revolution and, when revived after 1945, the postwar Golden Age of rising prosperity. Only by learning from that past can we create the fairer, nurturing and empowering society necessary to tackle the global challenges that lie ahead - climate change, biodiversity collapse and global inequality.

Contributor(s): Dr Anastasia Chamberlen, Peter Dawson, Professor Antony Duff | Societies take it for granted that we should punish those who commit crimes. Punishment for serious crime takes various forms in different areas of world and periods of history: caning, mutilation, death, exile, servitude, and imprisonment are all examples. But why do societies engage in this practice? What purpose does punishing serve? And does the punishment we find in modern societies do an effective job of meeting these aims? A leading philosopher, a decorated criminologist, and a prominent prison reform campaigner and ex-governor engage in a dialogue to answer these questions.

Contributor(s): Dr Rachel Kleinfeld, Professor Lawrence Sherman, Ziyanda Stuurman | Western models of policing and criminal justice are facing crises of legitimacy at the same time as violent crime is the main source of violent death in the world. How then can police institutions respond to help provide security whilst remaining democratic and accountable? Our panellists focus on examining the causes of the main police-related problems, especially in the Global South, and how these problems best be addressed.

Contributor(s): Marie-Noelle Nwokolo | This lecture is part of a series, titled Strategy: New Voices, organised by the Global Strategies Project in LSE IDEAS. LSE IDEAS (@lseideas) is LSE's foreign policy think tank. Through sustained engagement with policymakers and opinion-formers, IDEAS provides a forum that informs policy debate and connects academic research with the practice of diplomacy and strategy. The Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa (@AfricaAtLSE) promotes independent academic research and teaching; open and issue-oriented debate; and evidence-based policy making. The Institute connects social sciences disciplines and works in partnership with Africa to bring African voices to global debates.

Contributor(s): Professor Harlan Krumholz | We find ourselves in the early 21st century with a plethora of data and a paucity of personalised information to transform care and outcomes. With ever more investments in health care, ever more digital data, ever more computational power, we find that our health indices are declining, our disparities increasing, and ability to translate the life science revolution into tangible population health gains diminishing. In what should be the golden age of health, we are caught in neutral at best, and, in some cases, reverse. Our health care infrastructure was built for a different age, and the economic models, poorly suited to current opportunities, resist change that is necessary for progress.

Contributor(s): Professor Margaret MacMillan | The year 1917 marked a significant change with the revolutions in Russia and its withdrawal from the war and the entry of the United States. This lecture looks at the shifting balance of power and the changes in the alliances of the opposing sides and assesses the part played by each in the ending of the war and the Allied victory. Finally it examines the role of alliance relationships in the making of the peace.

Contributor(s): Dr Jan Lucassen, Professor Sara Horrell | Jan Lucassen provides an inclusive history of humanity’s busy labour throughout the ages. Spanning China, India, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, Lucassen looks at the ways in which humanity organises work: in the household, the tribe, the city, and the state. He examines how labor is split between men, women, and children; the watershed moment of the invention of money; the collective action of workers; and at the impact of migration, slavery, and the idea of leisure.

Contributor(s): Professor Owen Flanagan, Dr Céline Leboeuf, Dr Emily McRae, Professor Jesse J Prinz | Is anger sometimes a useful emotion? It is often suggested that we should try to suppress our anger. Perhaps passion is a virtue, but anger is simply unproductive. But might anger be useful for achieving positive social change? Can it help us make better moral judgments (or even form part of those judgements)? Can 'good' anger be distinguished in a principled way from 'bad' anger? How do different schools of thought answer these questions?

Contributor(s): Professor Steven Bernstein, Professor Barry Buzan, Dr Robert Falkner, Professor Kathy Hochstetler | Climate change and other environmental threats have moved to the top of the international agenda. All major powers are now committed to fighting global warming and ensuring environmental sustainability. But it has not always been thus. How did the society of states come to accept a responsibility for the global environment? And how deeply committed are states to safeguarding the planet?

Contributor(s): Achim Steiner | UNDP’s Human Development Report regularly highlights the impacts of so-called ‘wicked problems’ of under-development, instability and conflict. Recent initiatives such as the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development and the SDG Investor Platform aim to encourage more business and investor contributions to tackling these problems and delivering the SDG Agenda. In this keynote lecture, the head of UNDP Achim Steiner argues that we need to step up multi-stakeholder co-operation and collective efforts to combat rising poverty and inequality, violence that particularly affects women and girls, and economic fragility, that are exacerbated by current crises like COVID-19 and climate change. The lecture will mark the launch of the LSE IDEAS report Maximising business contributions to sustainable development and positive peace. A human security approach. The report sets out what a human security approach means for business, and highlights issue areas such as information technology, impact investing and migration, where the private sector can make a difference through helping to build resilient communities and delivering the SDGs.

Contributor(s): Professor Claudia Goldin, Professor Jane Humphries, Dr Berkay Ozcan, Dr Iva Tasseva | Drawing on decades of her own groundbreaking research, Goldin provides a fresh, in-depth look at the diverse experiences of college-educated women from the 1900s to today, examining the aspirations they formed—and the barriers they faced—in terms of career, job, marriage, and children; how the era of COVID-19 has severely hindered women’s advancement, yet how the growth of remote and flexible work may be the pandemic’s silver lining. Career and Family explains why we must make fundamental changes to the way we work and how we value caregiving if we are ever to achieve gender equality and couple equity.

Contributor(s): Professor Lord Stern | Nicholas Stern (@lordstern1) is the IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government, Chairman of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and Head of the India Observatory at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He was knighted for services to economics in 2004, made a cross-bench life peer as Baron Stern of Brentford in 2007, and appointed Companion of Honour for services to economics, international relations and tackling climate change in 2017. Minouche Shafik is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Prior to this, she was Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. She is an alumna of LSE.

Contributor(s): Dr Grace Lordan, Dr Carsten Sorensen, Professor Connson Locke, Hailley Griffis | Joanna Bale talks to LSE’s Connson Locke, Grace Lordan and Carsten Sorensen, as well as Hailley Griffis, a social media management company executive, who believes that offices will soon become extinct.

Contributor(s): Dr Noura Erakat | The report built on decades of the intellectual work and political advocacy of Palestinians scholars and organizations. Notably, the HRW report diverges from those legacies in significant ways.

Contributor(s): Professor Luitgard Veraart | This talk explains insights from mathematics to model loss cascades and apply them to recent financial stress events.

Contributor(s): Professor Didier Fassin, Dr Richard Martin, Christina Varvia | The book engages in a 'counter-investigation' into a fatal encounter between armed French police and a member of the travelling community.  In doing so, it raises deep and troubling questions about the quality of interactions between marginalized communities and official police and judicial processes; and about power, prejudice, and differing constructions of truth.  It will be of interest to lawyers, criminologists, anthropologists and sociologists, and indeed to a general audience.

Contributor(s): Professor Richard H Thaler | Richard H Thaler was awarded the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to the field of behavioural economics. He is the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioural Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is a member of the National Academy of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2015 he was the president of the American Economic Association. He has been published in numerous prominent journals and is the author of Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics.

Contributor(s): Professor Manolis Galenianos, Professor Alan Manning, Professor Antigone Lyberaki | Manolis Galenianos is Professor of Economics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Antigone Lyberaki is Professor of Economics at Panteion University, Greece.  Alan Manning is Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics and Director of the Community Programme at the Centre for Economic Performance at LSE. Vassilis Monastiriotis is Associate Professor of Political Economy at the European Institute (LSE).

Contributor(s): Dr Jonathan Birch, Professor Kristin Andrews, Dr Rosalind Arden | This episode features Jonathan Birch, Associate Professor in LSE's Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, Professor Kristin Andrews, the York Research Chair in Animal Minds at York University (Toronto) and Dr Rosalind Arden, Research Fellow at the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science.

Contributor(s): Dr Beverly Daniel Tatum | Walk into any racially mixed secondary school and you will see young people clustered in their own groups according to race. Is this self-segregation a problem to address or a coping strategy? Beverly Daniel Tatum guides us through how racial identity develops, from very young children all the way to adulthood, in black families, white families, and mixed race families, and helps us understand what we can do to break the silence, have better conversations with our children and with each other about race, and build a better world.

Contributor(s): Surood Mohammed Falih, Pramila Patten, Robinah Rubimbwa | A nine-year-old girl is sold to a 50-year-old man for $2000. This is Afghanistan today. But it was Iraq a few years ago, and Uganda before that. The horror of sexual violence that threatens the lives of girls and women, as well as many boys and men in today’s wars, is no longer an unknown.

Contributor(s): Dr Nora Fisher Onar, Professor Sieglinde Gstöhl, Professor Karen E Smith | This book gives us a taste of how rich analyses of EU external action have become. Once considered an exception, now EU foreign policy in its various guises appeals to a variety of theoretical perspectives and engages with the most important contemporary political debates, from the role of ‘normative power Europe’ to leadership and effectiveness issues to feminist insights. In this book launch, the editors share their motivations for putting together this collection and, together with contributors, discussant and the audience, discuss the ultimate question: can the study of EU external action overcome Euro-centrism and contribute to a truly global politics?

Contributor(s): Professor John Merriman | John Merriman is the Charles Seymour Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune and a recipient of the American Historical Association’s award for a career of Distinguished Scholarship. Robin Archer is the Director of the postgraduate programme in political sociology and the Director of the Ralph Miliband Programme at LSE.

Contributor(s): Professor Claudia Goldin, Professor Jane Humphries, Dr Berkay Ozcan, Dr Iva Tasseva | Drawing on decades of her own groundbreaking research, Goldin provides a fresh, in-depth look at the diverse experiences of college-educated women from the 1900s to today, examining the aspirations they formed—and the barriers they faced—in terms of career, job, marriage, and children; how the era of COVID-19 has severely hindered women’s advancement, yet how the growth of remote and flexible work may be the pandemic’s silver lining. Career and Family explains why we must make fundamental changes to the way we work and how we value caregiving if we are ever to achieve gender equality and couple equity.

Contributor(s): Will Hutton, Alison McGovern MP, Sir Geoff Mulgan | Are the problems faced by the UK different now? And what lessons are there in progressive renewal? To mark the book's 25th anniversary, this event will bring together Will Hutton with leading political thinkers to update the work and consider parallels between the UK politics of the mid-90s and now.

Contributor(s): Dawid Konotey-Ahulu, Philip Fernandez, Ida Liu, Dr Grace Lordan, Beatriz Martin | This discussion marks the launch of the inclusion framework - a new behavioural science based framework to create inclusive global organisations.

Contributor(s): Professor Luis Garicano, Professor Stefanie Stantcheva, Professor Nikos Vettas | These programs differ in ambition, as well as in the scope of policies. This discussion highlights key features of the French, Greek and EU programs, while also focusing on policies to reduce inequality.

Contributor(s): Professor Amartya Sen | Where is 'home'? For Amartya Sen (87) home has been many places – Dhaka in modern Bangladesh where he grew up, the village of Santiniketan where he was raised by his grandparents as much as by his parents, Calcutta where he first studied economics and was active in student movements, and Trinity College, Cambridge, to which he came aged nineteen.

Contributor(s): Dr Tarleton Gillespie, Dr Cait McKinney, Dr Dylan Mulvin | Our world is built on an array of standards we are compelled to share. In Proxies, Mulvin examines how we arrive at those standards, asking, To whom and to what do we delegate the power to stand in for the world? Mulvin shows how those with the power to design technology, in the very moment of design, are allowed to imagine who is included—and who is excluded—in the future.

Contributor(s): Professor Fatima El Tayeb, Abeera Khan, Dr Richard Mole, Dr Alyosxa Tudor | Challenging the binary of tolerant West and intolerant others, the event will discuss how both homophobia and homonationalism are intertwined with nationalist projects across the continent.

Contributor(s): Professor Fatima El Tayeb, Abeera Khan, Dr Richard Mole, Dr Alyosxa Tudor | Challenging the binary of tolerant West and intolerant others, the speakers discuss how both homophobia and homonationalism are intertwined with nationalist projects across the continent.

Contributor(s): Professor Steven Bernstein, Professor Barry Buzan, Dr Robert Falkner, Professor Kathy Hochstetler | Climate change and other environmental threats have moved to the top of the international agenda. All major powers are now committed to fighting global warming and ensuring environmental sustainability. But it has not always been thus. How did the society of states come to accept a responsibility for the global environment? And how deeply committed are states to safeguarding the planet?

Contributor(s): Professor Paul Pierson, Professor Kathleen Thelen | Drawing on their new volume, The American Political Economy: Politics, Markets, and Power, Paul Pierson and Kathleen Thelen lay out a comparatively informed framework for understanding how business power, union decline, racial inequity, government weakness and regional disparities are impacting contemporary American politics and policy.

Contributor(s): Professor Michael Cholbi, Dr Will Daddario, Priya Jay | Can we grieve well? Is mourning for public figures very different to the grief we feel after the death of friends and family? What is it like to grieve in the midst of something like a pandemic, where so many lives are touched by tragedy? And what have we learned about grieving though this pandemic, where death is both very publicly discussed but also hidden by the demands of social distancing? We explore the nature of grief and grieving.

Contributor(s): Professor Catherine D'Ignazio, Professor Lauren F Klein | Drawing from their recent book, Data Feminism, Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein present a set of principles for data science that are informed by decades of intersectional feminist activism and critical thought. To illustrate these principles they will discuss a range of recent research projects, including some of their own. Taken together, these examples demonstrate how feminist thinking can be operationalised into more ethical, more intentional, and more capacious data practices, in the digital humanities, computational social science, human-computer interaction and beyond.

Contributor(s): Professor Monica McWilliams, Halima Mohamed, Amina Rasul | null

Contributor(s): Professor Lawrence H. Summers | He received a bachelor of science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975 and was awarded a PhD from Harvard in 1982. In 1983, he became one of the youngest individuals in recent history to be named as a tenured member of the Harvard University faculty. In 1987, Mr Summers became the first social scientist ever to receive the annual Alan T. Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation (NSF), and in 1993 he was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, given every two years to the outstanding American economist under the age of 40. He is currently the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University and the Weil Director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business & Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Silvana Tenreyro is Professor in Economics at the London School of Economics. She obtained her MA and PhD in Economics from Harvard University. Before joining the Bank, she was co-Director and Board member of the Review of Economic Studies and Chair of the Women’s Committee of the Royal Economics Society. She is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). Since 1 January 2021, she is the President of the European Economic Association.

Contributor(s): April Rinne | Rinne shows that when everything is in flux, everything benefits from a flux mindset: the ability to consistently see all change as an opportunity, not a threat. She harnesses her very personal experiences with flux, including the death of both of her parents in a car accident when she was 20, as well as her history as a futurist, advisor, global development executive, microfinance lawyer, investor, mental health advocate, certified yoga teacher, globetrotter (100+ countries) and insatiable hand stander, to bring global perspective and cross-cultural understanding to how we see, think about, struggle with and ultimately forge positive relationships with change.

Contributor(s): Professor Simona Iammarino, Dr Tom Kemeny, Dr Megha Mukim | null

Contributor(s): Professor Christopher Gordon, Dr Richard Munang, Timo Leiter, Dr Swenja Surminski | null

Contributor(s): Mauricio Cárdenas, Ricardo Lagos, Juan Manuel Santos, Baroness Shafik | null

Contributor(s): Professor Diane Coyle | null

Contributor(s): Professor Catherine D'Ignazio, Professor Lauren F Klein | Catherine D'Ignazio (@kanarinka) is an Assistant Professor of Urban Science and Planning at MIT. She is also Director of the Data + Feminism Lab, which uses data and computational methods to work towards gender and racial equity. Catherine is a scholar, artist/designer and hacker mama who focuses on feminist technology, data literacy and civic engagement. Her 2020 book, Data Feminism, co-authored with Lauren F Klein, charts a course for more ethical and empowering data science practices. Lauren Klein (@laurenfklein) is an Associate Professor in the departments of English and Quantitative Theory and Methods at Emory University. She works at the intersection of digital humanities, data science, and early American literature, with a research focus on issues of gender and race. Lauren is the author of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States and, with Catherine D’Ignazio, Data Feminism. Fiona Steele is a Professor and Head of Department at LSE's Department of Statistics. Her research interests are in developments of statistical methods that are motivated by social science problems. Fiona was awarded the Royal Statistical Society Guy Medal in Bronze in 2008 and elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2009.

Contributor(s): Professor George Alogoskoufis, Professor Helen Louri-Dendrinou, Professor Lucas Papademos, Professor Sir Christopher Pissarides | What are the pre-conditions – economic, political and institutional - for a sustained recovery of the Greek economy? What's scope is there for recovery, which priorities need to be set, and what are the prospects for their attainment?

Contributor(s): Professor Emily Boyd, Professor Ademola Oluborode Jegede, Professor Kyle Whyte | Emily Boyd is Professor in sustainability science and Director of Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies. She is a leading social scientist with a specialist focus on the interdisciplinary nexus of poverty, governance and resilience in relation to global environmental change. Ademola Oluborode Jegede is a Professor of Law and an NRF rated researcher in the School of Law, University of Venda, Thohoyandou, South Africa. He holds degrees from Obafemi Awolowo University Ile-Ife, University of Ibadan and the Centre for Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria. His research principally focuses on the interface of climate change and biodiversity loss with human rights of vulnerable populations. Kyle Whyte (@kylepowyswhyte) is George Willis Pack Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. His research addresses environmental justice, focusing on climate policy and Indigenous peoples, the ethics of cooperative relationships between Indigenous peoples and science organizations, and problems of Indigenous justice in public and academic discussions. He is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and serves on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. Rebecca Elliott (@RebsFE) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at LSE. Her research examines the economic and political governance of climate change, with a current focus on flood insurance, disaster risk management, and welfare state politics in the United States. More about this event The LSE's Phelan United States Centre (@LSE_US) is a hub for global expertise, analysis and commentary on America. Our mission is to promote policy-relevant and internationally-oriented scholarship to meet the growing demand for fresh analysis and critical debate on the United States. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series imagining what the world could look like after the crisis, and how we get there.

Contributor(s): Lord Darroch | What have we learnt after the PM’s recent visit to Washington and from the ‘AUKUS’ agreement?

Contributor(s): Professor Graciela L Kaminsky, Professor Carmen M Reinhart, Professor Thomas J Sargent | Can we draw parallels between the impact of crisis and war on state’s indebtedness in the past with the consequences of public borrowing in today’s age of independent central banks and aging populations? This panel discussion will bring together experts on the history of finance to examine the fiscal challenges brought about by the pandemic. By situating today’s challenges in their historical context, they will address whether lessons can be learnt from the past about the ways in which debt can be managed and how it will affect the world’s economies in the future. Meet our speakers Graciela L Kaminsky is Professor of Economics and International Affairs at George Washington University with expertise in international finance and open-economy macroeconomics. Her research focuses on contagion, currency and financial crises, exchange rates, fiscal and monetary policies, international capital flows, and sovereign debt crises. She has done extensive research on capital flows to Latin American countries during the first globalisation era of 1820-1931. Carmen M Reinhart (@carmenmreinhart) is Senior Vice President, Development Economics and World Bank Group Chief Economist. Assuming this role on June 15, 2020, Reinhart provides thought leadership for the institution at an unprecedented time of crisis. She also manages the Bank’s Development Economics Department. She comes to this position on public service leave from Harvard Kennedy School where she is the Minos A. Zombanakis Professor of the International Financial System. Thomas J Sargent is William R. Berkley Professor of Economics and Business at NYU Stern. He was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Economics, shared with Princeton University's Christopher Sims, for his empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy. Olivier Accominotti is Professor of Economic History at LSE and a Research Fellow at the Centre of Economic Policy Research. His research interests cover international finance and economic history and he has published extensively in these areas, especially on the international propagation of financial crises, the determinants of global capital flows, the evolution of the foreign exchange market, and the structure of the global financial system and money markets. More about this event The Department of Economic History (@LSEEcHist) iis one of the world’s leading centres for research and teaching in economic history. It is home to a huge breadth and depth of knowledge and expertise ranging for the medieval period to the current century. The Economic History Advisory Board assists the Department in promoting its activities with an emphasis on alumni outreach, external relations and events. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series imagining what the world could look like after the crisis, and how we get there. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEPostCOVID

Contributor(s): Dr Benjamin Ho, Dr Joseph Chinyong Liow, Dr Beverley Loke | null

Contributor(s): Lord Nicholas Stern | null

Contributor(s): John F Kerry | null

Contributor(s): Professor Alexandra Georgakopoulou, Professor Daniel Miller, Dr Rebecca Roache | But is there more to this than a mere increase in communication? Do these different channels of communication change the nature of communication itself? And what might all this mean for our sense of self and identity?

Contributor(s): Professor Lea Ypi | Pyramid schemes bankrupted the country, leading to violence. One generation’s dreams became another’s disillusionment. As her own family’s secrets were revealed, Ypi found herself questioning what “freedom” really means. With acute insight and wit, Ypi traces the perils of ideology, and what people need to flourish.

Contributor(s): Professor Piroska Nagy-Mohácsi, Professor Ricardo Reis, Gent Sejko | null

Contributor(s): Professor Craig Calhoun | null

Contributor(s): Professor Sara Hobolt, Professor Sofia Vasilopoulou | null

Contributor(s): Dr Tarik Abou-Chadi | null

Contributor(s): Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge, Dr Yoriko Otomo, Dr Adam Etinson | null

Contributor(s): Paul Mason, Professor Lea Ypi | null

Contributor(s): Otegha Uwagba | null

Contributor(s): Professor Shani Orgad | null

Contributor(s): Professor Hélène Rey | null

Contributor(s): Fredrick Ouko, Liz Sayce, Kate Stanley, Professor Tom Shakespeare | null

Contributor(s): Adrian Wooldridge | null

Contributor(s): Professor Alpa Shah, Professor David Wengrow | null

Contributor(s): Shri Shaktikanta Das, Dr Swati Dhingra, N K Singh, Martin Wolf | In this event, the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India and the Chair of the 15th Indian Finance Commission will discuss the challenges facing the economy of India and what we can expect from it in the future. Meet our speakers and chair Shri Shaktikanta Das (@DasShaktikanta), former Secretary, Department of Revenue and Department of Economic Affairs, Indian Ministry of Finance, assumed charge as the 25th Governor of the Reserve Bank of India in December 2018. Immediately prior to his current assignment, he was acting as Member, 15th Finance Commission and G20 Sherpa of India. Swati Dhingra (@swatdhingraLSE) is Associate Professor in Economics at LSE, and associate of the Centre for Economic Performance. She is currently a member of the UK’s Trade Modelling Review Expert Panel and LSE’s Economic Diplomacy Commission. She is Research Fellow at CEPR, and on the editorial boards of Journal of International Economics and Review of Economic Studies. N K Singh (@NKSingh_MP) is a prominent Indian economist, academician, and policymaker. He is the President of the Institute of Economic Growth and the Chairman of the 15th Finance Commission. Prior to this position, he presided as Chairman of the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Review Committee. He also served as a member of the Upper House of the Parliament, the Rajya Sabha, from 2008 to 2014. Martin Wolf (@martinwolf_) is Associate Editor and Chief Economics Commentator at the Financial Times, London. He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 2000 for services to financial journalism. His most recent publication is The Shifts and The Shocks: What we’ve learned – and have still to learn – from the financial crisis (London and New York: Allen Lane, 2014). Andrés Velasco (@AndresVelasco) is Professor of Public Policy and Dean of the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Minouche Shafik is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science and will deliver opening remarks. Nick Stern (@lordstern1) is the IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government and will deliver closing remarks. More about this event The LSE School of Public Policy (@LSEPublicPolicy) is an international community where ideas and practice meet. Our approach creates professionals with the ability to analyse, understand and resolve the challenges of contemporary governance.

Contributor(s): Dr Eduardo Cavallo, Marla Dukharan, Dr Andrew Powell, Professor Andrés Velasco | The year 2020 will be remembered as one of the most challenging in modern history. Latin America and the Caribbean lost 7.4% of GDP, the largest drop on record in a single year. The region is expected to recover in 2021 but faces a hazardous time ahead. Most countries will require some type of adjustment to maintain fiscal sustainability. While the way forward will be challenging, specific public policies should help countries realize a stronger recovery, not just to the low growth rates of the pre-pandemic period, but to higher rates of growth that will benefit all, with more efficient public policies, higher productivity in the private sector, and more sustainable economies. Meet our speakers and chair Eduardo Cavallo is Principal Economist at the Research Department of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington DC. Prior to joining the IDB, Eduardo was a Vice-President and Senior Latin American Economist for Goldman Sachs in New York. Eduardo had already worked at the IDB as a Research Economist between 2006 and 2010. Before that he served as a research fellow at the Center for International Development (CID), a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, and a member of the faculty at the Kennedy School of Government's Summer Program. In Argentina he co-founded Fundación Grupo Innova. Marla Dukharan (@Marladukharan) is a Caribbean economist. She is a point of reference for monitoring regional developments and country-level economic performance, and is known for leading discussions and publishing reports on the Caribbean implications of global geopolitical developments. Marla has become a key influencer in public-private sector engagement and decision making. Because of her deep commitment to making a difference, Marla has become a leading voice in the call to reduce gender and income inequality, eliminate corruption, and to improve the resilience of our economies through the introduction of fiscal responsibility frameworks. Andrew Powell (@AndyPowell_IDB) is the Principal Advisor in the Research Department (RES) at the Inter-American Development Bank. He holds a Ba, MPhil. and DPhil. (PhD) from the University of Oxford, was Lecturer at Queen Mary’s College, London and at the University of Warwick. He was Chief Economist of the Central Bank of the Republic of Argentina and Professor at the Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires. He has been Visiting Scholar at Harvard University, at the IMF and at the World Bank. Andrés Velasco (@AndresVelasco) is Professor of Public Policy and Dean of the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gareth Jones is Director of the Latin America and Caribbean Centre at LSE. He is Professor of Urban Geography in the Department of Geography and Environment at LSE and an Associate Member of the International Inequalities Institute. Susana Mourato, Pro-Director (Research) at LSE, Malcolm Geere, Inter-American Development Bank Executive Director for the United Kingdom and Eric Parrado Herrera, Chief Economist and General Manager of the Research Department of the Inter-American Development Bank will deliver introductory remarks. More about this event You can read Inter-American Development Bank’s 2021 Latin American and Caribbean Macroeconomic Report on ‘Opportunities for Stronger and Sustainable Postpandemic Growth’ at Opportunities for Stronger and Sustainable Post-Pandemic Growth in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Latin America and Caribbean Centre (@LSE_LACC) is the focal point for LSE’s research and public engagement with Latin America and the Caribbean, the Centre builds upon the School’s long and important relationship with the region. The LSE School of Public Policy (@LSEPublicPolicy) is an international community where ideas and practice meet. Our approach creates professionals with the ability to analyse, understand and resolve the challenges of contemporary governance. The Inter-American Development Bank (@the_IDB) is the largest source of development financing for Latin America and the Caribbean. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series imagining what the world could look like after the crisis, and how we get there.

Contributor(s): Lawrence Wright | From the fateful first moments of the outbreak in China to the storming of the US Capitol to the extraordinary vaccine rollout, Lawrence Wright’s The Plague Year tells the story of COVID-19 in authoritative, galvanising detail and with the full drama of events on both a global and intimate scale, illuminating the medical, economic, political, and social ramifications of the pandemic. A vivid, sweeping, panoramic account of the pandemic’s origins and the missed opportunities and mistakes in the ongoing global fight to contain it. Meet our speaker and chair Lawrence Wright (@lawrence_wright) has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. He is also an author, a screenwriter and a playwright. Wright has published twelve books, including The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda's Road to 9/11, which was translated into twenty-four languages and won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. In 2018, the book was adapted into a Hulu original drama. Peter Trubowitz (@ptrubowitz) is Professor of International Relations and Director of the Phelan US Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Associate Fellow at Chatham House. More about this event The LSE's Phelan United States Centre (@LSE_US) is a hub for global expertise, analysis and commentary on America. Our mission is to promote policy-relevant and internationally-oriented scholarship to meet the growing demand for fresh analysis and critical debate on the United States. You can order the book, The Plague Year: America in the time of COVID-19, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series imagining what the world could look like after the crisis, and how we get there. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEUSPandemic

Contributor(s): Professor Paul de Grauwe, Professor Waltraud Schelkle, Martin Wolf | The idea of a common currency materialised with the Maastricht Treaty thirty years ago. But soon after it was tested in a major crisis in 1992/93, with more to come. This panel will discuss whether the reforms since 2010 have been sufficient to make the Euro a "mature" currency. Meet our speakers and chair Paul De Grauwe (@pdegrauwe) is John Paulson Chair in European Political Economy at the LSE European Institute. Prior to joining LSE, Paul was Professor of International Economics at the University of Leuven, Belgium. He was a member of the Belgian parliament from 1991 to 2003. Waltraud Schelkle is Professor in Political Economy at the European Institute and has been at LSE since 2001. She is also an Adjunct Professor (Privatdozentin) of Economics at the Economics Department of the Free University of Berlin. Martin Wolf (@martinwolf_) is chief economics commentator at the Financial Times. Angelo Martelli (@angelo_martelli) is Assistant Professor in European and International Political Economy at the LSE European Institute. He worked as a Consultant for the Jobs Group of the World Bank, as a Policy Fellow for the Open Innovation Team of the UK Cabinet Office and HM Treasury and as a Technical Expert for the IMF. More about this event The 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 the Institute was ranked first for research in its sector. This event is part of the LSE European Institute’s 30thanniversary celebrations. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEEI30

Contributor(s): Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter | Join us for this event discussing Anne-Marie Slaughter's new book, Renewal: From Crisis to Transformation in Our Lives, Work, and Politics. Like much of the world, America is deeply divided over identity, equality, and history. Renewal is Anne-Marie Slaughter’s candid and deeply personal account of how her own odyssey opened the door to an important new understanding of how we as individuals, organisations, and nations can move backward and forward at the same time, facing the past and embracing a new future.Weaving together personal stories and reflections with insights from the latest research in the social sciences, Slaughter recounts a difficult time of self‐examination and growth in the wake of a crisis that changed the way she lives, leads, and learns. She connects her experience to her nation's crisis of identity and values as the country looks into a four-hundred-year-old mirror and tries to confront and accept its full reflection. Meet our speaker and chair Anne-Marie Slaughter (@SlaughterAM) is CEO of New America and the Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. From 2009–2011, she served as director of policy planning for the United States Department of State. Prior to her government service, Dr Slaughter was the Dean of Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs (formerly the Woodrow Wilson School) from 2002–2009 and the J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law at Harvard Law School from 1994-2002. Her books include Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family and The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World. She is also a contributing editor to the Financial Times and writes a bi-monthly column for Project Syndicate. Peter Trubowitz (@ptrubowitz) is Professor of International Relations and Director of the Phelan US Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Associate Fellow at Chatham House. More about this event The LSE's Phelan United States Centre (@LSE_US) is a hub for global expertise, analysis and commentary on America. Our mission is to promote policy-relevant and internationally-oriented scholarship to meet the growing demand for fresh analysis and critical debate on the United States. You can order the book, Renewal: From Crisis to Transformation in Our Lives, Work, and Politics, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series imagining what the world could look like after the crisis, and how we get there. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEUSPurpose

Contributor(s): Professor Lord Alderdice, Dr Fabio Idrobo, Professor Nicola Lacey, Federico Rodriguez | null

Contributor(s): Molly Mathieson, Alexander Mazonowicz, Professor Hanna Pickard | What is addiction? Although it is often discussed in terms of neurobiology, this can’t begin to capture what it means to be addicted and what addiction does to our sense of self. Philosophers have long been concerned with questions about the self and identity, so might philosophy be able to help us to understand addiction? And what does understanding the relationship between addiction and identity mean for recovery? Philosopher Hannah Pickard and members of New Note Orchestra, the first recovery orchestra in the world, discuss. Meet our speakers and chair Molly Mathieson is the founder and Chief Executive of New Note Projects. Alexander Mazonowicz is a musician with New Note Orchestra. Hanna Pickard is Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. Jonathan Birch (@BirchLSE) is Associate Professor of Philosophy at LSE. More about this event The Forum for Philosophy (@forumphilosophy) hosts events exploring science, politics, and culture from a philosophical perspective. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEForum

Contributor(s): Dr Santiago Levy, Professor Nora Lustig, Dr Marcela Meléndez, Professor James Robinson | For as long as data on income inequality has been available, Latin America has stood as one of the world’s two most unequal regions (along with sub-Saharan Africa). Despite some promising declines during the 2000s, inequality in many countries remains higher today than it was in the 1970s, suggesting a persistent high-inequality political economy equilibrium. Inspired by the Deaton Review of inequality in the UK, an independent group of scholars from across many countries and disciplines – co-sponsored by the International Inequalities Institute at LSE; the InterAmerican Development Bank; Yale University; and the Institute for Fiscal Studies – is launching a five-year review of what we know – and what we need to learn – about the nature, causes and consequences of the high-inequality equilibrium in Latin America. In this public launch event, three of the Review Panel members and two eminent discussants will present and debate some of the core questions of the nascent LAC Inequality Review. Meet our speakers and chair Santiago Levy is a Non-resident Senior Fellow with the Global Economy and Development Program at the Brookings Institution and former president of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association. He is former Vice President for Sectors and Knowledge at the IADB. Nora Lustig (@noralustig) is Samuel Z. Stone Professor of Latin American Economics and the founding Director of the Commitment to Equity Institute (CEQ) at Tulane University. Her research is on economic development, inequality and social policies with emphasis on Latin America. Marcela Meléndez (@MelendezMarcela) is UNDP Chief Economist for Latin America and the Caribbean. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University and is an Economist from Universidad de los Andes. James Robinson is Institute Director of The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts at the University of Chicago. His work explores the underlying relationship between poverty and the institutions of a society and how institutions emerge out of political conflicts. Andrés Velasco (@AndresVelasco) is Professor of Public Policy and Dean of the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Francisco Ferreira (@fhgferreira) is the Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and Director of the International Inequalities Institute at LSE. More about this event The International Inequalities Institute (@LSEInequalities) at LSE brings together experts from many LSE departments and centres to lead cutting-edge research focused on understanding why inequalities are escalating in numerous arenas across the world, and to develop critical tools to address these challenges. This event marks the launch of their Latin America and Caribbean Inequality Review. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series imagining what the world could look like after the crisis, and how we get there. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSELACIR

Contributor(s): Professor Nichola Raihani | Join us for this event with Nichola Raihani who will be talking about her new book, The Social Instinct. Exploring evolution, animal behaviour and human psychology, The Social Instinct reveals how and why cooperation has shaped and defined humankind - and what happens when it goes wrong. This is the first book by Professor Raihani, drawing on decades of research in the field. Written at a time of global pandemic, when the challenges and importance of cooperation have never been greater, The Social Instinct is a journey through all life on Earth, with insights into what makes us human and how our societies work. You can order the book, The Social Instinct, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney. Meet our speaker and chair Nichola Raihani (@nicholaraihani) is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Professor in Evolution and Behaviour at UCL. Her group's research focuses on the evolution of social behaviour in humans and non-human species. She has been widely published in scientific journals, won the 2018 Philip Leverhulme Prize in Psychology for her research achievements, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology in 2018. She has also worked in the BBC Science Development Team. Stephan Chambers is the inaugural director of the Marshall Institute at LSE. He is also Professor in Practice at the Department of Management at LSE and Course Director for the new Executive Masters in Social Business and Entrepreneurship. More about this event The Marshall Institute (@LSEMarshall) works to improve the impact and effectiveness of private action for public benefit through research, teaching and convening. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series imagining what the world could look like after the crisis, and how we get there. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSETheSocialInstinct

Contributor(s): Professor Nicholas Barr, Professor Sir Tim Besley, Dr Tania Burchardt, Gregg McClymont | Join our panelists as they come together to discuss the new issue of the LSE Public Policy Review, Beveridge 2.0: Reciprocity Across the Life-Cycle. The welfare state plays a central role in managing risks and tackling vulnerability across the life-cycle. This new issue of the LSE Public Policy Review focuses on the relationships between individuals and between generations that underpin welfare state institutions. In face of emerging social and economic changes, our understanding of the social contract invites questions around the role of reciprocity as a principle of social cooperation, and around the way in which reciprocal relationships affect the design and financing of welfare state institutions. Meet our speakers and chair Nicholas Barr is Professor of Public Economics in the European Institute at LSE. Tim Besley is School Professor of Economics of Political Science and Sir W. Arthur Lewis Professor of Development Economics in the Department of Economics at LSE. Tania Burchardt is Associate Director of the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE) and Deputy Director of STICERD at LSE. Gregg McClymont (@greggmcclymont) was UK Shadow Minister of State for Pensions 2011-2015 and a member of the Prime Minister’s 2014 Further Devolution to Scotland Commission. He was MP for Cumbernauld 2010-15. Before entering politics, he was a Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford – having trained as a historian in the Universities of Glasgow, Pennsylvania and Oxford. He is currently a visiting fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford and Exec. Director Public Affairs at IFM Investors. Minouche Shafik is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Prior to this, she was Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. She is an alumna of LSE. Her new book, What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract, is out now. More about this event The LSE School of Public Policy (@LSEPublicPolicy) is an international community where ideas and practice meet. Our approach creates professionals with the ability to analyse, understand and resolve the challenges of contemporary governance. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series imagining what the world could look like after the crisis, and how we get there.

Contributor(s): Michel Barnier | This event will explore Michel Barnier's new book, My Secret Brexit Diary: a glorious illusion. In June 2016, the people of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. As the EU's chief negotiator, for four years Michel Barnier had a seat at the table as the two sides thrashed out what Brexit would really mean. The result would change Britain and Europe forever. During the 1600 days of complex and often acrimonious negotiations, Michel Barnier kept a secret diary. He recorded his private hopes and fears, and gave a blow-by-blow account as the negotiations oscillated between consensus and disagreement, transparency and lies. You can order the book, My Secret Brexit Diary: a glorious illusion, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney. Meet our speaker and chair Michel Barnier (@MichelBarnier) was European Commission's Head of Task Force for Relations with the United Kingdom from 2019 to 2021. He previously served as Chief Negotiator, Task Force for the Preparation and Conduct of the Negotiations with the United Kingdom under Article 50. Kevin Featherstone is Eleftherios Venizelos Professor in Contemporary Greek Studies and Professor in European Politics in the European Institute at LSE. Minouche Shafik, Director of LSE will deliver introductory and closing remarks. More about this event The 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 the Institute was ranked first for research in its sector. The LSE School of Public Policy (@LSEPublicPolicy) is an international community where ideas and practice meet. Our approach creates professionals with the ability to analyse, understand and resolve the challenges of contemporary governance. This event is part of the LSE Programme: Brexit and Beyond, which is a dedicated series to stimulate the public debate and informed discussion about this most pivotal topic. It comprises a variety of events, targeting LSE staff and students, as well as the general public and specific categories of policy-makers, practitioners and professionals working on Brexit; with the aim of continuing to shape the discussion surrounding its complex and uncertain agenda. The Programme is organised by LSE's European Institute and School of Public Policy. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEBrexit

Contributor(s): Professor David Cutler | From New York to New Delhi, COVID-19 has had a devastating impact on our urban world, turning the physical proximity which is central to the creative energy of the city into a potentially deadly threat to our health and wellbeing. Most of us live or work in cities. They are a vital part of both local and global economies and shape the lives we lead and our interactions with others. How can we adjust to this new reality and what lessons can we learn from the past? In this event, Harvard Economics professors Edward Glaeser and David Cutler examine the history and future of the global city. They argue the biggest threats are those we have created ourselves - inequalities in housing, health, work and education - and that we need to address these as a matter of urgency if our cities are to continue to thrive and drive economic growth and prosperity. Meet our speakers and chair David Cutler is the Otto Ekstein Professor of Applied Economics at Harvard University. He holds joint appointments in the economics department, the School of Public Health and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He served in Bill Clinton’s administration and was a senior health care advisor to Barack Obama. As well as numerous academic books and articles he published Your Money or Your Life: Strong Medicine for America's Health Care System. Edward Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1992. He is also Director for the Cities Research Programme at the International Growth Centre, LSE and Oxford. He has published numerous academic books and articles on urban economics, economic growth, law, health and inequality and is the bestselling author of The Triumph of the City (Penguin Press 2004). Jo Beall is an Emeritus Professor and Distinguished Research Fellow at LSE Cities and has conducted research in Africa and Asia on urban development and governance as well as cities in situations of conflict and state fragility. Jo was formerly Deputy Vice-Chancellor, University of Cape Town with responsibility for international strategy and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. She has written numerous books and articles on a wide range of topics. More about this event LSE Cities (@LSECities) studies how people and cities interact in a rapidly urbanising world, focusing on how the design of cities impacts on society, culture and the environment. Through research, conferences, teaching and projects, the centre aims to shape new thinking and practice on how to make cities fairer and more sustainable for the next generation of urban dwellers, who will make up some 70 per cent of the global population by 2050. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series imagining what the world could look like after the crisis, and how we get there. You can order the book, Survival of the City : Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation (UK delivery only), from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney.

Contributor(s): Dr Ulrike Franke, Dr Christian Odendahl, Mujtaba Rahman, Professor Daniela Schwarzer | After 16 years of Angela Merkel's chancellorship, the signals for a new beginning in German politics are ambiguous. Her own party has gone for a candidate who promises continuity. But the Green Party has become the second strongest contender for office and this opens up new possibilities for coalition governments. What does either continuity or change mean for key policies and for European integration? The panel to discuss this question consists of a new generation of leading experts who analyse German politics and policymaking from an international vantage point. Meet our speakers and chair Ulrike Franke (@rikefranke) is a senior policy fellow at ECFR. She leads ECFR’s Technology and European Power initiative. Her areas of focus include German and European security and defence, the future of warfare, and the impact of new technologies on geopolitics and warfare. Christian Odendahl (@COdendahl) is chief economist at the Centre for European Reform. Christian works on European monetary and fiscal policy, European integration and economic growth, financial markets as well as German politics. He commentates regularly on economic issues in print and broadcast media. Mujtaba Rahman (@Mij_Europe) is Managing Director, Europe, at the Eurasia Group. Mujtaba leads and oversees the firm's analysis and advisory work on Europe, helping clients to navigate the macro-politics of Brussels and its interaction with the member states, across a wide range of policy areas. Prior to joining Eurasia Group, Mujtaba worked at the European Commission's Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs and at the UK Treasury. He is an Adjunct Professor at Sciences-Po in Paris, as well as a Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Daniela Schwarzer (@d_schwarzer) is Executive Director for Europe and Eurasia at the Open Society Foundations. Since 2016, she has served as director and CEO of the German Council on Foreign Relations and has advised the EU Commission and national governments on European affairs. Waltraud Schelkle is Professor in Political Economy at the European Institute and has been at LSE since 2001. She is also an Adjunct Professor (Privatdozentin) of Economics at the Economics Department of the Free University of Berlin. More about this event The 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 the Institute was ranked first for research in its sector. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series imagining what the world could look like after the crisis, and how we get there. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEGermanyVotes

Contributor(s): Professor Adam Tooze | When news first began to trickle out of China about a new virus in December 2019, risk-averse financial markets could never have predicted the total economic collapse that would follow as stock markets fell faster and harder than at any time since 1929, currencies across the world plunged and investors panicked. Adam Tooze's new book, Shutdown, tells the story of what followed and, in conversation with Patrick Wallis, he will survey the damage and outline potential ways into recovery. Meet our speaker and chair Adam Tooze (@adam_tooze) is the author of Crashed, The Deluge and The Wages of Destruction. He has been the recipient of the Wolfson Prize for History, the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Prize and the Lionel Gelber Prize. Tooze has taught at Cambridge and Yale and is now Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University. Adam is an alumnus of LSE. Patrick Wallis (@phwallis) is Professor of Economic History at LSE. His research explores the economic, social and medical history of Britain and Europe from the 16th to 18th century. More about this event The Department of Economic History (@LSEEcHist) iis one of the world’s leading centres for research and teaching in economic history. It is home to a huge breadth and depth of knowledge and expertise ranging for the medieval period to the current century. You can order the book, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series imagining what the world could look like after the crisis, and how we get there. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEPostCOVID

Contributor(s): Roméo Dallaire, Guissou Jahangiri, Rosa Emilia Salamanca | 21 September marks the International Day of Peace, an opportunity to commit to building a culture of peace. But what exactly is a culture of peace and how do we build it? On this 40th anniversary of World Peace Day our world is far from peaceful. The US withdrawal from Afghanistan has precipitated war and surrender to the Taliban leaving Afghans behind. Women peacebuilders, who have long been on the frontlines negotiating for peace, now face exponential risk of targeted killings along with other activists and human rights defenders. Meanwhile Colombia marks the fifth anniversary of its peace agreement and despite initial progress, women peacebuilders voice concern about the lack of implementation, particularly regarding the inclusion of women and youth, and the deteriorating security situation. The Global Peace Index reported deterioration in peace in 73 countries, a trend of nine of the last 13 years. Demonstrations, riots and militarisation continue to increase, exacerbated by the weakness of state institutions and rule of law exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Meet our speakers and chair Roméo Dallaire (@romeodallaire) is founder of the Dallaire Institute for Children, Peace, and Security, a celebrated advocate for human rights, respected government and UN advisor and former Canadian Senator. Throughout his distinguished military career, General Dallaire served in staff, training, and command positions through North America, Europe, and Africa. Most notably, General Dallaire was Force Commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda prior to and during the 1994 genocide. Guissou Jahangiri (@guissoujahangir) is a women’s rights pioneer and a cultural and peace activist. She was elected for a second term as the Vice President of the FIDH world-wide movement for human rights and is the Executive Director of Armanshahr/OPEN ASIA. She leads advocacy campaigns in Afghanistan and the greater region and has spent five years in war-torn Tajikistan as a Human Rights Watch researcher. Jahangiri is also acting head of the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Rosa Emilia Salamanca (@milucina) is the Director of Corporación de Investigación y Acción Social y Económica, a feminist organisation based in Colombia. She is a member of the National Summit of Women and Peace, the Thinking and Action collective and a 2018 Women Peacemaker at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice at the University of San Diego. Salamanca is also a member of the National Commission for Guarantees for Security and Non-Repetition. Sanam Naraghi Anderlini (@sanambna) is Director of the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security and the founder of The International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN).More about this event The LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security (@LSE_WPS) is an academic space for scholars, practitioners, activists, policy-makers and students to develop strategies to promote justice, human rights and participation of women in conflict-affected situations around the world. Through innovative research, teaching, and multi-sectoral engagement, the Centre for Women, Peace and Security aims to promote gender equality and enhance women’s economic, social and political participation and security. This event is the sixth in the Coming of Age of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda series and is co-hosted with ICAN and Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEWPS

Contributor(s): Professor David Kaye, Dr Damian Tambini, Alan Rusbridger, Professor Jean Seaton | Join us for the launch of Damian Tambini’s new book, Media Freedom, where we'll be joined by media experts to discuss media freedom and international human rights law standards in media governance today. The contentious role of social media in recent elections and referendums has brought to the fore once again the fundamental question of media freedom and the extent to which, and the way in which, the media should be regulated in a modern democratic society. In Media Freedom, Dr Damian Tambini surveys the history of media in the US, the UK and Europe in order to develop a new theory of media freedom that is capable of resolving current controversies about how best to regulate the media, including the internet and social media. Tambini argues that democratic regulation of the media must build upon - and learn from - the long history of accommodation between the press, broadcasting, the state and corporate power. By attending to this history, we can see that media freedom is not absolute but rather conditional, taking the form of a social contract of privileges and connected duties. Meet our speakers and chair David Kaye (@davidakaye) is a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression (2014-2020). His 2019 book, Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet, explores the ways in which companies, governments and activists struggle to define the rules for online expression. Alan Rusbridger (@arusbridger) was Editor in Chief of the Guardian from 1995-2015. He is currently Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and Chair of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. During his time at the Guardian, both he and the paper won numerous awards, including the 2014 Pulitzter Prize for Public Service Journalism. His memoir of journalism and its future, Breaking News, was published in 2018, and his latest book, News and How to Use it, was published in 2020. Jean Seaton is Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster, an Official Historian of the BBC and Director of the Orwell Foundation. She is the author of Carnage and the Media: the Making and Breaking of News about Violence, Power Without Responsibility: the Press and Broadcasting in Britain and Pinkoes and Traitors: the BBC and the nation 1974-1987. She has written and broadcasted widely on the history and role of the media and historical, political and cultural matters. Damian Tambini (@damiantambini) is Distinguished Policy Fellow and Associate Professor at the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. He is an expert in media and communications regulation and policy, and active in policymaking and academic research. Dr Tambini is frequently called to give evidence to parliamentary committees and provide formal and informal policy advice to government and served on the Communications Consumer Panel, a non-executive role at the communications regulator Ofcom. Lee Edwards (@leemoya) is Professor of Strategic Communications and Public Engagement in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE, where she also serves as Director of Graduate Studies and Programme Director for the MSc Strategic Communications. More about this event The Department of Media and Communications (@MediaLSE) is a world-leading centre for education and research in communication and media studies at the heart of LSE’s academic community in central London. The Department is ranked #1 in the UK and #3 globally in the field of media and communications (2021 QS World University Rankings). You can order the book, Media Freedom, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series imagining what the world could look like after the crisis, and how we get there. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEMediaFreedom

Contributor(s): Mary Ann Sieghart | Join us for this event at which Mary Ann Sieghart will talk about her new book The Authority Gap. The Authority Gap provides a perspective on the unseen bias at work in our everyday lives, to reveal the scale of the gap that still persists between men and women. Marshalling a wealth of data, and including interviews with pioneering women such as Baroness Hale, Mary Beard and Bernadine Evaristo, this is a fresh feminist take on how to address and counteract systemic sexism in ways that benefit us all. Meet our speaker and chair Mary Ann Sieghart (@MASieghart) makes programmes for BBC Radio 4 and is a Visiting Professor at King’s College London. She spent 2018-19 as a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where she researched her book, The Authority Gap, on why women are taken less seriously than men. She spent 19 years as Assistant Editor of The Times and is a Trustee of The Scott Trust, owner of The Guardian and The Observer. Grace Lordan (@GraceLordan_) is the Founding Director of The Inclusion Initiative (TII) and an Associate Professor in Behavioural Science at LSE. Grace is an expert advisor to the UK government sitting on their skills and productivity board. Her academic writings have been published in top international journals in economics and the broader social sciences. Think Big, Take Small Steps and Build the Future you Want is her first book. More about this event TII (@lse_tii) aims to bring behavioural science insights to firms to allow them to enhance the inclusion of all talent, and simultaneously produce academically rigorous and relevant research that links directly to TII’s purpose. You can order the book, The Authority Gap, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSESieghart

Contributor(s): Antonia Belcher, Pips Bunce, Belton Flournoy, Jane Hill, Arlene McDermott | Celebrate and reflect on the success of the Pride movement through a behavioural science lens. Grace Lordan, Director of The Inclusion Initiative will chair this event and will be joined by a cross-industry expert panel. This panel session will cover biases, narratives, norms, networks, resilience among other behavioural science topics. The event will also be looking to the future, mapping out what the panel expect for the future of the Pride movement, and taking audience questions. Join us for this moment of celebration. Those that join can expect to laugh, learn and lean into the behavioural science of Pride. Meet our speakers and chair Antonia Belcher (@BelcherAntonia) is the founder of MHBC Cumming construction consulting. Antonia has 40 plus years’ experience in the construction and property industries and leads her own construction business that she formed in 2007. She has been recognised on numerous occasions as one of the Financial Times’ Top 100 LGBT+ Executives. Transitioning in 2000/2003 in a male dominated working environment, where there was no history or visible LGBT+ influences to draw on, she presses for positive change for LGBT+ good in all business spheres, but especially in her chosen career path of surveying. Along with her role as a Director and Head of Global Markets Technology Strategic Programs at Credit Suisse, Pips Bunce is co-chair of the firm’s EMEA LGBT+ & Ally Network. She is a proud and out member of the Trans community, more specifically identifying as both gender-fluid and non-binary and is champion in progressing LGBTQI+ inclusion and equality. Pips was awarded a prestigious position in the OUTStanding and Yahoo Finance executive LGBT+ Leader list, shortlisted for the European Diversity Awards and won the Inspirational Leader category as part of the British LGBT Awards in recognition for her work and commitment. Pips also carries out work with other key organisations having presented in Parliament, worked with the Government Equalities Office, the United Nations and many others. In addition to being a Director in Protiviti’s Technology & Digital consulting practice, Belton Flournoy (@AussieBelton) is founder of Protiviti UK's LGBT+ group, which won best LGBT+ network in 2019 by the Inclusive Tech Alliance. Belton was shortlisted as a top 10 inspirational business leader in 2020 by the British LGBT+ awards, was recently listed as #18 on Yahoo Finance’s Top 100 Future Leaders, #15 on Yahoo Finance’s Top 100 Ethnic Minority Leaders and was featured on the top UK Black Role models, presented by Google. Belton was co-founder of Pride in the City. Belton now sits on The Inclusion Initiative at LSE advisory board. Jane Hill (@JaneHillNews) is a BBC journalist and presenter. She regularly presents BBC News at One, and other BBC News programmes. For 15 years she has been involved with organisations that highlight the value and importance of inclusion and role modelling. Jane is proud to work with, ia, Diversity Role Models and The Albert Kennedy Trust. She has mentored young journalists and hosted conferences and projects that help women and girls, and members of all minority groups. Jane also supports health charities that are close to her heart: Parkinson's UK, Breast Cancer Now and Cancer Research UK. Jane is a Fellow of the British American Project and sit on its Advisory Board, and is an Honorary Fellow of Queen Mary, University of London. Arlene McDermott is Head of Business Management Group Legal and Compliance and is also co-chair of London Stock Exchange Group’s LGBTQ+ network LSEG Pride. The network has had a huge impact on LSEG, enjoying support from the most senior levels of the organisation. Arlene has participated in numerous panels, including for myGwork and for Lesbian Visibility Week. She has also been listed on the Pride Power List 2020 and 2021, Global Diversity List 2020, Visible Lesbian 100 list 2020 and 2021 and the OUTstanding 100 LGBT+ Executives List 2020. LSEG’s LGBTQ+ network has been shortlisted for the DIVA network of the year award 2020 and 2021 and was also shortlisted for the Women in Finance Diversity Initiative of the Year award. It has also raised funds for charities including akt and supported the launch of Pride in the City’s 2020 programme with a Market Close ceremony at London Stock Exchange. Grace Lordan (@GraceLordan_) is the Founding Director of The Inclusion Initiative (TII) and an Associate Professor in Behavioural Science at LSE. Grace is an expert advisor to the UK government sitting on their skills and productivity board. Her academic writings have been published in top international journals in economics and the broader social sciences. Think Big, Take Small Steps and Build the Future you Want is her first book. More about this event TII (@lse_tii) aims to bring behavioural science insights to firms to allow them to enhance the inclusion of all talent, and simultaneously produce academically rigorous and relevant research that links directly to TII’s purpose. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEPride

Contributor(s): Professor David Autor, Professor Judy Wajcman | This is an event shortcast, a digested version of our live online public events series. This event was recorded on May 5th 2021. A full version is available to download on the LSE player.

Contributor(s): Dr Lasana Harris, Professor Anil Seth, Dr Jennifer Sheehy Skeffington, Dr Tiffany Watt Smith, Professor Paul Dolan | This is an event shortcast, a digested version of our live online public events series. This event was recorded on 28th June 2021. A full version is available to download on the LSE player.

Contributor(s): Dr Gertjan Vlieghe | Gertjan Vlieghe's term as an external member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee comes to an end in August. Join us for his final lecture as a member of the MPC. In this speech, Dr Vlieghe will consider what we have learned in the past five years about some of the persistent structural drivers of low neutral interest rates, such as demographics, debt and the distribution of income. Considerable new research has been published in these areas, both theoretical and empirical, which explores these drivers, including the extent to which they are interlinked. Since these developments constrain the available monetary policy space, Dr Vlieghe then considers how monetary policy should be set in a constrained environment, as well has how these constraints could be lifted to ensure the effectiveness of future monetary policy. Meet our speaker and chair Gertjan Vlieghe is a member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England. Prior to his appointment he was a partner and senior economist at Brevan Howard Asset Management. Prior to this he has held positions at Deutsche Bank and the Bank of England including Economic Assistant to Governor Mervyn King. Dr Vlieghe's published research has focused on the importance of money, balance sheets and asset prices in the economy. He holds a doctorate from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Minouche Shafik is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Prior to this, she was Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. She is an alumna of LSE. More about this event The Centre For Macroeconomics (@CFMUK) is a research centre that brings together a group of world class experts to carry out pioneering research on the study of nations’ prosperity, and the crises that afflict them, helping to design policies that will create a healthier and more resilient economy. The Department of Economics (@LSEEcon) at LSE, is one of the leading economics departments in the world. We are a large department, ensuring all mainstream areas of economics are strongly represented in research and teaching. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEVlieghe Transcript A transcript of Dr Gertjan Vlieghe's speech is available to download from Revisiting the 3D Perspective on Low Long Term Interest Rates. Slides A copy of Dr Gertjan Vlieghe's slides is available to download from Revisiting the 3D Perspective on Low Long Term Interest Rates.

Contributor(s): Professor Shakuntala Banaji, Dr Koen Leurs, Dr Giovanna Mascheroni, Professor Jochen Peter, Dr Mariya Stoilova | Online opportunities bring diverse benefits for children, including positive outcomes on learning, participation, creativity, and identity. An important “ladder of opportunities” for children in Europe, digital technologies can activate the potential for social inclusion, equality and children’s rights. Even so, relatively little is understood about how online opportunities generate benefits for children. Opportunities for children have long been theorised, but how should they be rethought in a digital world? In this webinar we will debate the theories and concepts that underpin such questions, drawing on different disciplinary approaches. Meet our speakers and chair Shakuntala Banaji is Professor of Media, Culture and Social Change and Programme Director for the Msc in Media, Communication and Development in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. Her forthcoming book Social Media Hate with Ram Bhat (scheduled spring, 2022) theorises the landscape of disinformation and trolling in the U.K., India, Brazil and Myanmar with particular attention to the connections between contemporary and historical violence. Koen Leurs (@koenleurs) is an Assistant Professor in Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the Department of Media and Culture, Utrecht University. He works on digital migration and recently directed the projects Connected migrants: comparing digital practices of refuge and expatriate youth and Media literacy through making media: a key to participation of migrant youth?. Currently Koen is a fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies, writing a book on digital migration. Giovanna Mascheroni (@giovannamas) is Associate Professor at the Department of Communication and Performing Arts, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. She is part of the management team of EU Kids Online, and WP leader in the H2020 project, ySKILLS. She is also leading DataChildFutures, a national project investigating the data practices of Italian families with children aged 0- to 8-year-olds. Her work focuses on the social shaping and the social consequences of digital media, internet of things and datafication for children and young people. Her forthcoming book, Datafied childhoods: Data practices and imaginaries in children’s lives, co-authored with Andra Siibak, will be published in the Digital Formations series. Jochen Peter is a Full Professor at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam. His work explores how young people’s use of new technologies affects their psycho-social development, including the antecedents and consequences of children’s interaction with social robots, the impact of online communication on teenagers’ sociality, and the relationship between sexually explicit material online and adolescents’ sexual attitudes and behaviour. Peter Jochen has published more than 100 journal articles and book chapters. Mariya Stoilova (@Mariya_Stoilova) is a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her area of expertise is at the intersection of child rights and digital technology with a particular focus on the opportunities and risks of digital media use in the everyday lives of children and young people, data and privacy online, digital skills, and pathways to harm and well-being. Sonia Livingstone (@Livingstone_S) is Professor of Social Psychology at the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has published 20 books including The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age. Since founding the 33 country EU Kids Online network, Sonia has advised the UK government, European Commission, European Parliament, Council of Europe, OECD and UNICEF. More about this event The Department of Media and Communications (@MediaLSE) is a world-leading centre for education and research in communication and media studies at the heart of LSE’s academic community in central London. We are ranked #1 in the UK and #3 globally in our field (2021 QS World University Rankings). This event is part of the CO:RE - Children Online: Research and Evidence webinar series on theory for the EU H2020 project. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEChildren Featured image (used in source code with watermark added): Photo by Robo Wunderkind on Unsplash.

Contributor(s): Samira Ben Omar, Dr Atiya Kamal, Caroline MacDonald, Pasha Shah | The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed both how essential and how fractured Britain’s systems of social care and community health are and the racial and economic divides that determine who is able to access them. It has also, paradoxically shown some ways forward for community engagement as local authorities, the NHS and community groups have built new caring relationships that have saved lives and generated mutual support. This event brings together a diverse range of speakers involved in these policies and local initiatives to move beyond recovery and renewal from COVID-19 and question what equitable social infrastructures might look like in a post-covid world. The event also marks the launch of the LSE Covid and Care Research Group's second report, based on deep ethnographic and qualitative research across the UK. It hopes to set an agenda for investment, research and policy for both central government and local authorities. Meet our speakers and chair Samira Ben Omar (@benomsam) is Assistant Director of Equalities for the North West London Collaboration of CCGs and co-founder of the Community Voices movement for change. Atiya Kamal (@Atiya_K) is a Senior Lecturer in Health Psychology at Birmingham City University. Caroline MacDonald is Assistant Director of People, Places and Communities, at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. Pasha Shah is Head of Community Engagement at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. Laura Bear (@BearLauraLSE) is Professor of Anthropology at LSE, and a participant in the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours, the ethnicity subgroup of Sage and Independent Sage. She leads the LSE Covid and Care research group. More about this event The Covid and Care Research Group, hosted by LSE's Anthropology Department, are building a conversation between policy makers and the UK population over issues of disadvantage and recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. You can view the full LSE Covid and Care Research Group's second report, based on deep ethnographic and qualitative research across the UK here: Social Infrastructures for the Post-COVID recovery in the UK. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19 Featured image (used in source code with watermark added): Photo by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Unsplash.

Contributor(s): Lionel Barber | Join us for this event with former editor of the Financial Times Lionel Barber at which he will discuss his new book, The Powerful and the Damned: life behind the headlines in financial times. Lionel Barber spent over a decade rubbing shoulders with the global giants of business, finance and politics. Recounting conversations, late-night dinners and unexpected comic nuggets from those who make the news, The Powerful and the Damned is a portrait of the rich, famous, powerful and occasionally damned. In his first authored book, Barber offers unflinching pen portraits of the world’s leading characters, from Trump, Merkel and Draghi, to Prince Andrew, Mohammed Bin Salman and Dominic Cummings. In parallel, Barber provides a personal account of how he transformed the FT into a multi-channel global news organisation with a strong of international awards and groundbreaking reporting. This created a monumental shift for the whole news media landscape. You can order the book, The Powerful and the Damned: life behind the headlines in financial times (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney. Meet our speaker and chair Lionel Barber (@LionelBarber) was editor of the Financial Times from 2005 until January 2020, widely credited with transforming the FT from a newspaper publisher into a multi-channel global news organisation. During his editorship, the FT passed the milestone of 1million paying readers, winning many international awards and accolades for its journalism. Charlie Beckett (@CharlieBeckett) is the founding director of Polis, the think-tank for research and debate around international journalism and society in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. More about this event The Department of Media and Communications (@MediaLSE) is a world-leading centre for education and research in communication and media studies at the heart of LSE’s academic community in central London. We are ranked #1 in the UK and #3 globally in our field (2021 QS World University Rankings). Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEBarber

Contributor(s): Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Professor Mariana Mazzucato, Dr Clare Wenham | This is an event shortcast, a digested version of our live online public events series. This event was recorded on 17th March 2021. A full version is available to download on the LSE player.

Contributor(s): Professor Ron Deibert | Join us to hear from Ron Deibert as he explores the disturbing impact of the internet and social media on politics, the economy and the environment, and asks us to consider how best to construct a viable communications ecosystem that supports civil society and contributes to the betterment of the human condition. Disruptive technology, scientific advancements, and a global pandemic have forever changed the way we live and work. Our digital tools allow us to innovate, accelerate growth, and connect with one another as never before, but they often come with unexpected consequences. The same technologies that had been used for public uprisings against oppressive governments are now being used by those governments against political demonstrators, whistleblowers and dissidents. Meet our speaker and chair Ron Deibert (@RonDeibert) is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and Department of Political Science, as well as the Director of the Munk School's Citizen Lab. The Citizen Lab is an interdisciplinary laboratory focusing on research, development, and high-level strategic policy and legal engagement at the intersection of information and communication technologies, human rights, and global security. Andrés Velasco (@AndresVelasco) is Professor of Public Policy and Dean of the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. More about this event The LSE School of Public Policy (@LSEPublicPolicy) equips its students with the skills and ideas needed to transform people and societies. It is an international community where ideas and practice meet. The School's approach creates professionals with the ability to analyse, understand and resolve the challenges of contemporary governance. The Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto (@munkschool) is a leading hub for interdisciplinary research, teaching and public engagement. It is home to world-class researchers and more than 50 academic centres, labs and programs. The school is made up of 60 faculty members, academic directors and chairholders, with many more affiliated faculty engaged in teaching and research. Find out more about the LSE and University of Toronto double degree – Master of Public Administration and Master of Global Affairs. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEMunk

Contributor(s): Gordon Brown | Join us to hear from United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education and former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown speaking about his new book. When the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe in 2020, it created an unprecedented impact, greater than the aftermath of 9/11 or the global financial crisis. But out of such disruption can come a new way of thinking, and in this new book Gordon Brown offers his solutions to the challenges we face in 2021 and beyond. In the book, he states that there are seven major global problems we must address: global health; climate change and environmental damage; nuclear proliferation; global financial instability; the humanitarian crisis and global poverty; the barriers to education and opportunity; and global inequality and its biggest manifestation, global tax havens. Each one presents an immense challenge that requires an urgent global response and solution. All should be on the world’s agenda today. None can be solved by one nation acting on its own, but all can be addressed if we work together as a global community. You can order the book, Seven Ways to Change the World, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney. Meet our speaker and chair Gordon Brown (@GordonBrown) is the United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education and former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He is Chair of the Global Strategic Infrastructure Initiative of the World Economic Forum and also serves as Distinguished Global Leader in Residence of New York University. He served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2007 to 2010. Minouche Shafik is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Prior to this, she was Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. She is an alumna of LSE. More about this event The LSE School of Public Policy (@LSEPublicPolicy) equips its students with the skills and ideas needed to transform people and societies. It is an international community where ideas and practice meet. The School's approach creates professionals with the ability to analyse, understand and resolve the challenges of contemporary governance. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

Contributor(s): Dr Ela Drazkiewicz-Grodzicka, Professor Bradley Franks, Dr Erica Lagalisse | Conspiracy theories fomented by political division and a global pandemic have gained traction in the public consciousness in the last couple of years. For some people these ideas are just fun and entertaining, but for others their interest in them becomes much more consuming. Why do people become involved in this kind of conspiratorial thinking? That’s the question that LSE iQ tackles in this month’s episode. Concerns that 5G phone masts reduce our bodies’ defences against COVID-19 and that vaccines are being used to inject us with micro-chips - allowing us to be tracked and controlled - may seem extraordinary to many of us. But these beliefs have led to the vandalism of 5G phone masts and made some reluctant to be vaccinated. In this episode of LSE iQ, Sue Windebank finds out how left-wing anarchists got caught up in conspiratorial thinking and how Irish parents looking for support and community were accused of spreading a conspiracy. And is LSE unknowingly carrying out the wishes of the Illuminati? Listen to hear how LSE became embroiled in a global conspiracy. Sue talks to: Dr Ela Drążkiewicz from the Institute for Sociology at the Slovak Academy of Sciences; Professor Bradley Franks from LSE’s Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science; and Dr Erica Lagalisse from LSE’s Institute of Inequalities.   Contributors Dr Ela Drazkiewicz-Grodzicka Professor Bradley Franks Dr Erica Lagalisse   Research Taking vaccine regret and hesitancy seriously. The role of truth, conspiracy theories, gender relations and trust in the HPV immunisation programmes in Ireland (2021) by Elżbieta Drążkiewicz Grodzicka in Journal for Cultural Research Beyond “Monologicality”? Exploring Conspiracist Worldviews (2017) by Bradley Franks, Adrian Bangerter, Martin W. Bauer, Matthew Hall and Mark C. Noort in Frontiers in Psychology Occult Features of Anarchism: With Attention to the Conspiracy of Kings and the Conspiracy of the Peoples (2019) by Erica Lagalisse

Contributor(s): Professor Francisco Ferreira, Professor Ricardo Hausmann, Professor Adnan Khan, Professor Lucinda Platt | Join us to discuss a special issue of LSE's Public Policy Review, a brand new public policy journal. The special LSEPPR issue on COVID 19 is now available LSE's Public Policy Review. The COVID-19 pandemic represents an extraordinary health and economic global challenge as well as an opportunity to re-evaluate many aspects of modern economy, society, and government. The crisis has mobilised scientific efforts at an unprecedented scale, with an impressive emerging body of research spanning across disciplines. This special issue invites scholars from across the School to explore a range of key questions the pandemic has raised - from the factors shaping government responses and collective behaviour, to the relationship between policy-making and scientific evidence; from the impact of the pandemic on economic policy and employment, to how it intersected with inequalities related, for instance, to gender or ethnicity. Through their different disciplinary lenses the papers in this issue offer a rich and comprehensive insight into some of the key questions emerging from the current crisis. Meet our speakers and chair Francisco Ferreira (@fhgferreira) is Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and Director of the International Inequalities Institute at LSE. Ricardo Hausmann (@ricardo_hausman) is Rafik Hariri Professor of the Practice of International Political Economy and the Director of the Growth Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School. Adnan Khan (@adnanqk) is Professor in Practice at LSE's School of Public Policy. Lucinda Platt (@PlattLucinda) is Professor of Social Policy and Sociology and Head of Department of Social Policy at LSE. Tania Burchardt is Associate Director of the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE) and Deputy Director of STICERD. More about this event The School of Public Policy (@LSEPublicPolicy) equips you with the skills and ideas to transform people and societies. It is an international community where ideas and practice meet. Their approach creates professionals with the ability to analyse, understand and resolve the challenges of contemporary governance. Beveridge 2.0 Redefining the Social Contract is a programme hosted by the School of Public Policy that aims at bringing LSE's community together with the intent of exploring important policy questions, fostering dialogue across disciplines and identifying avenues for collaborative cross-disciplinary research. The LSE Public Policy Review is a public policy journal hosted by the School of Public Policy at LSE and published by LSE Press (@LSEPress). It brings together policy-relevant research from across the social sciences. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19 Featured image (used in source code with watermark added): Photo by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Unsplash. Podcasts

Contributor(s): Michaela Rafferty, Jeremiah Emmanuel, Jason Allen | Even before the pandemic, young people in the UK faced many forms of inequality and their health and wellbeing was being eroded by a lack of jobs, a shortage of affordable housing, and cuts to public services. As the gap between the generations grows and young people’s voices and concerns are not adequately taken into account by policy makers and politicians, it is no surprise that young people increasingly feel anxious of what the future holds. This panel brings three young leaders who are working in and beyond their local communities to address inequalities in education, housing, employment and the criminal justice system. The three panellists, Jason Allen, Jeremiah Emmanuel, and Michaela Rafferty, will draw on their ongoing work and share their experiences in dialogue with one another and the audience. In doing so, they will not only consider the consequences of inequalities on young people’s lives and their wellbeing, but also discuss what can be done to tackle those inequalities. Meet our speakers and chair Jason Allen has a dedicated career and specialism in the treatment of trauma in young people. He is recognised as an national expert in gang and youth violence in London and currently runs Mary’s, a hub for counselling, mentoring and gang mediation in Camden which he built from its inception in 2006. His professional training is wide-ranging and he is currently completing a Masters Degree in Psychology and Trauma. Jeremiah Emmanuel (@je1bc) was raised in a single-parent family in south London and started working within his local community from a young age, campaigning around issues that affect his generation. He was elected into the UK Youth Parliament and later became a young mayor within London, as well as setting up a Youth Council for the BBC. Dreaming in a Nightmare, his new book, is a manifesto for how we can tackle inequality in the UK and improve the lives of young people today. Michaela Rafferty (@MichaelaRaffert) is a Youth Engagement and Campaigns Organiser at Just for Kids Law, who exist to ensure young people have their legal rights and entitlements respected and promoted, and their voices heard and valued. She spent 12 years as a community youth worker and human rights activist in Belfast, and has worked in youth rights initiatives in Palestine, women’s empowerment projects in Tajikistan and human rights education in refugee camps in Greece. Michaela is a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity. Armine Ishkanian (@Armish15) is Associate Professor of Social Policy and the Executive Director of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme at LSE. Her research focuses on the relationship between civil society, policy processes, and social transformation. She is co-convenor of the Politics of Inequality research theme based in the International Inequalities Institute. More about this event The International Inequalities Institute (@LSEInequalities) at LSE brings together experts from many LSE departments and centres to lead cutting-edge research focused on understanding why inequalities are escalating in numerous arenas across the world, and to develop critical tools to address these challenges. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEIII Featured image (used in source code with watermark added): Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.

Contributor(s): Dr Lasana Harris, Professor Anil Seth, Dr Jennifer Sheehy Skeffington, Dr Tiffany Watt Smith, Professor Paul Dolan | Join Paul Dolan and his guests to launch the latest series of his podcast, Duck - Rabbit, with a discussion of the neuroscience and social science behind our polarisation problem. Why do we respond to the world in one way and not another? What makes us want to be, or feel, part of a group? What drives our judgements, choices and assumptions? Think of this: you’re shown a picture, it's black and white and sort of blurry, and you are asked what animal you see. You look closely and you see that it’s a duck. But if you’re told it’s a rabbit? Well, you can see for a second how someone could think that but it’s definitely a duck. That’s true of life isn’t it? Think Brexit, climate change, marmite, and even Covid – once we’ve chosen our tribe, we rarely change our minds and see the other side. Meet our speakers and chair Lasana Harris (@lasana_harris) is Associate Professor in Experimental Psychology at University College London, having previously held positions at New York University, USA, Duke University, USA, and Leiden University, the Netherlands. A social neuroscientist who takes an interdisciplinary approach to understand human behaviour, his research explores the neural correlates of person perception, prejudice, dehumanization, anthropomorphism, social learning, social emotions, empathy, and punishment. Anil Seth (@anilkseth) is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex and Founding Co-Director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. In his work, he seeks to understand the biological basis of consciousness by bringing together research across neuroscience, mathematics, artificial intelligence, computer science, psychology, philosophy and psychiatry. His new book - Being You: A New Science of Consciousness - will be published in autumn 2021. Jennifer Sheehy Skeffington (@jsskeffington) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at LSE, researching the interface between psychology and society. One stream of research examines how socioeconomic status and inequality shape basic decision-making processes. Another reveals the psychological underpinnings of ideology, and what this means for intergroup conflict and political polarisation. Tiffany Watt Smith (@drtiffwattsmith) is Reader in Cultural History at Queen Mary University of London, where she is also Director of the Centre for the History of Emotions. Her books include: Schadenfreude (2019), The Book of Human Emotions (2015), and On Flinching (2015). In 2019 she was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize, and her research has been funded by the Wellcome Trust, the British Academy and the AHRC. In 2015 she was named a BBC New Generation Thinker and her TED talk The History of Human Emotions has been viewed more than 4 million times. Paul Dolan (@profpauldolan) is Professor of Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is author of the Sunday Times best-selling book Happiness by Design, and Happy Ever After. He is host of the Duck – Rabbit podcast, in which he discusses the polarisation problem with members of the public, academics, commentators, politicians and activists to try to understand why we can’t be more understanding of each other. Episodes currently available discuss marriage and monogamy; security and liberty; freedom of speech; lifestyle choices; and class. This event marks the release of two new episodes. Simon Hix (@simonjhix) is the Pro-Director for Research and the Harold Laski Professor of Political Science at LSE. An LSE alumnus, he is one of the leading researchers, teachers, and commentators on European and comparative politics in the UK. Simon has recently been appointed Stein Rokkan Chair in Comparative Politics at the European University Institute in Florence and will take up his new post in September. More about this event The Department of Psychological & Behavioural Science (@LSE_PBS) is a growing community of researchers, intellectuals, and students who investigate the human mind and behaviour in a societal context. Our department conducts cutting-edge psychological and behavioural research that is both based in and applied to the real world. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19 Featured image (used in source code with watermark added): Kaninchen und Ente by unknown artist (1892) (public domain).

Contributor(s): Dr Maria Christina Chatziioannou, Dr Andreas Kakridis, Professor Stathis N Kalyvas | How far may the economic problems of the modern Greek state be attributed to the nature of its origins? It’s small, albeit enlarging, size; the lack of popular trust in public institutions and authority; the recourse to patrons and to ‘rent-seeking’; and, its own vulnerability to external powers: are these path-dependent features that overwhelm the scope for change? This panel will discuss the inheritance of 1821 for the course of development taken by modern Greece and how it has structured options and choices. When, and how, has or might such historical determinism be overcome? Meet our speakers and chair Maria Christina Chatziioannou is the Director of the Institute for Historical Research at the National Hellenic Research Foundation. She is Editor of the Historical Library for 1821 supported by the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation as part of the "Bicentennial Initiative 1821-2021". Her latest publication is Entangled histories and collective identity: Narratives of the Chios massacre (1822) (2021). Andreas Kakridis is Assistant Professor of Economic History at the Ionian University, Corfu; since 2017 he has also served as the Scientific Advisor to the Historical Archive of the Bank of Greece. He has taught at the University of Athens (2009-16) and the Panteion University (2016-19), and has also been a visiting fellow at the University of Columbia, New York (2014-15). Stathis Kalyvas (@SKalyvas) is Gladstone Professor of Government at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, and a fellow of All Souls College. Until 2018 he was Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science at Yale University, where he founded and directed the Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence and co-directed the Hellenic Studies Program. In 2019 he founded and directs the T. E. Lawrence Program on Conflict and Violence at All Souls College. He has written extensively on civil wars, ethnicity, and political violence. His current research focuses on global trends in political violence and conflict. He has an additional interest in the history and politics of Greece. Joan R. Rosés is Head of the Department of Economic History at LSE. His research interests comprise historical economic geography, European economic history (19th and 20th centuries), long term economic growth and productivity, and labour markets. More about this event The Hellenic Observatory (@HO_LSE) is internationally recognised as one of the premier research centres on contemporary Greece and Cyprus. It engages in a range of activities, including developing and supporting academic and policy-related research; organisation of conferences, seminars and workshops; academic exchange through visiting fellowships and internships; as well as teaching at the graduate level through LSE's European Institute. The event is part of 21 in 21, celebrating the 2021 bicentenary of the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 21 Greek-British encounters. The 21 in 21 events are sponsored by the A.G. Leventis Foundation. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEGreece

Contributor(s): Dr Cecilia Rouse | How does the Biden-Harris Administration evaluate the current state and growth trajectory of the U.S. economy as it emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic? How are the Administration’s plans to expand infrastructure investment and aid to families and children likely to impact the U.S. in the long run? In this lecture, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers Cecilia E. Rouse will offer a rare inside view of U.S. economic policymaking at the beginning of a new presidency. Her lecture will provide a fast-paced tour of the macroeconomic issues confronting the Administration and discuss the role of economists and economic research in U.S. policy debates. Meet our speaker and chair Cecilia Rouse (@CeciliaERouse) is the 30th Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. Before joining the Administration, she was dean of Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, as well as the Lawrence and Shirley Katzman and Lewis and Anna Ernst Professor in the Economics of Education at the university. From 2009 to 2011, Rouse served as a member of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and, from 1998 to 1999, worked at the National Economic Council in the Clinton administration as a Special Assistant to the President. Her distinguished academic research has explored a wide array of topics in the economics of education. Tim Besley is School Professor of Economics of Political Science and W. Arthur Lewis Professor of Development Economics in the Department of Economics at LSE. More about this event The Morishima lecture series is held in honour of Professor Michio Morishima (1923-2004), Sir John Hicks Professor of Economics at LSE and STICERD's first chairman. STICERD (@STICERD_LSE) brings together world-class academics to put economics and related disciplines at the forefront of research and policy. Founded in 1978 by the renowned Japanese economist Michio Morishima, with donations from Suntory and Toyota, we are a thriving research community within LSE. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSESTICERD

Contributor(s): Professor Sophie Harman, Professor Naila Kabeer, Dr Gustavo Matta, Dr Clare Wenham | At this book launch, we discuss the need for gender mainstreaming in global health security. As many news reports have made clear during COVID-19, there has been a recent sea change in thinking about the secondary effects of infectious disease control policy on women. However, we have yet to see this reflected in global health policy. When Zika made headlines in 2016, images of women cradling babies affected with microcephaly spread across the media and pulled on heartstrings. But, as this book argues, whilst this outbreak was about women and babies, it also highlighted the lack of broader gendered considerations in global health security. Taking Zika as its primary case but also touching on more recent experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic, Feminist Global Health Security asks what the policy response to disease outbreaks tell us about the role of women in global health security. Meet our speakers and chair Sophie Harman (@DrSophieHarman) is Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary, University of London, with a specific interest in global health, African Agency, film and visual methods, and gender politics. She was awarded the Joni Lovenduski Prize for outstanding professional achievement by a mid-career scholar by the Political Science Association (PSA) in 2018, the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2018, and nominated for the BAFTA for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director, or Producer in 2019 for her feature film Pili. Naila Kabeer (@N_Kabeer) is Professor of Gender and Development at the Department of Gender Studies and Department of International Development at LSE. Her research interests include gender, poverty, social exclusion, labour markets and livelihoods, social protection and citizenship and much of her research is focused on South and South East Asia. Naila is currently involved in ERSC-DIFD Funded Research Projects on Gender and Labour Market dynamics in Bangladesh and India. Gustavo Matta (@GustavoCMatta) is a public health Researcher at Sergio Arouca National School of Public Health at Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is also the Coordinator of Zika Social Sciences Network. Clare Wenham (@clarewenham) is Assistant Professor of Global Health Policy at LSE. She specialises in global health security, the politics and policy of pandemic preparedness and outbreak response. She has researched this for over a decade, through influenza, Ebola and Zika. Her research poses questions of global governance, the role of WHO and World Bank, national priorities and innovative financing for pandemic control. More recently she has been examining the role of women in epidemics and associated policy. For COVID-19, Clare is Co-Principal Investigator on a grant from the CIHR and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation analysing the gendered dimensions of the outbreak. Justin Parkhurst (@justinparkhurst) is an Associate Professor of Global Health Policy in the LSE Department of Health Policy. He is co-director of the MSc in Health Policy, Planning, and Financing programme, and the current serving Chair of the LSE Global Health Initiative. Dr Parkhurst’s research interests lie in global health politics and policy, as well as the political nature of evidence use to inform policy decisions. More about this event The Global Health Initiative (@LSEGlobalHealth) 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. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. You can order the book, Feminist Global Health Security, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

Contributor(s): Maria Gavouneli, Notis Mitarachi | Join us for the 18th Hellenic Observatory Annual Lecture which this year will be delivered by Notis Mitarachi, Greece's Minister of Migration & Asylum. Greece has been at the epicentre of much of the migration crisis in the Mediterranean. The accommodation and processing of asylum-seekers and refugees in Greece has proved both challenging and controversial. But there are also major implications of the crisis for the European Union and its individual member states in their burden-sharing. What are the lessons from this humanitarian crisis on Europe’s shores? We explore the ways forward. Meet our speaker and chair Notis Mitarachi is Minister of Migration & Asylum of the Hellenic Republic and an MP in the constituency of Chios (New Democracy Party - EPP). In 2019 he was appointed as the Deputy Minister of Labour and Social Affairs, responsible for the Social Security & Pension System. In 2012-2015 he served as Deputy Minister for Economic Development and Competitiveness. He has also served as Alternate Governor in the BoG of the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction & Development (EBRD) and as Governor in the BoG of the Black Sea Trade & Development Bank (BSTB). Before returning to Greece in 2010, he had a long international career in the private sector. He is a graduate of INSEAD (MBA), Oxford University (MSc in Industrial Relations) and The American College of Greece (BSc in Business Administration). He is a Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute and a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Charterholder. Maria Gavouneli is Associate Professor of International Law, Faculty of Law at the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens. She is the President of the Greek National Commission for Human Rights, Member of the Managing Board, National Transparency Authority and Senior Policy Advisor, Hellenic Foundation for European & Foreign Policy – ELIAMEP. She was a Fulbright Scholar – Greece at the University of California Berkeley (2018-2019) and Associate Research Fellow, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London (2005-2019). She has published extensively on the law of the sea, energy and environmental law as well as migration issues. Kevin Featherstone is Eleftherios Venizelos Professor in Contemporary Greek Studies and Professor in European Politics in the European Institute at LSE, where he is also Director of the Hellenic Observatory. More about this event This event is the Hellenic Observatory Annual Lecture. The Hellenic Observatory (@HO_LSE) is internationally recognised as one of the premier research centres on contemporary Greece and Cyprus. It engages in a range of activities, including developing and supporting academic and policy-related research; organisation of conferences, seminars and workshops; academic exchange through visiting fellowships and internships; as well as teaching at the graduate level through LSE's European Institute. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEGreece

Contributor(s): Professor Joel Mokyr | Joel Mokyr will discuss the Great Divergence, the rapid economic and technological growth between c. 1500 and 1950, that gave the West the opportunity to dominate (and often oppress and exploit) the rest of the world. The lecture will answer a simple but haunting question: how were they able to do that? Meet our speaker and chair Joel Mokyr is the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Economics and History at Northwestern University and Sackler Professor (by special appointment) at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at the University of Tel Aviv. His most recent book is A Culture of Growth, published in 2016. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Mary Morgan is Albert O. Hirschman Professor of History and Philosophy of Economics in the Department of Economic History at LSE. More about this event The Department of Economics (@LSEEcon) at LSE, is one of the leading economics departments in the world. We are a large department, ensuring all mainstream areas of economics are strongly represented in research and teaching. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEEconomics

Contributor(s): Sir Geoffrey Vos | In discussion with Andrew Murray, the Master of the Rolls, Sir Geoffrey Vos, will be outlining the evolution of the civil justice system, including the potential of technology to alter fundamentally the administration of justice, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Meet our speaker and chair Geoffrey Vos began his appointment as Master of the Rolls and Head of Civil Justice in January 2021. Sir Geoffrey previously served as Chancellor of the High Court of England and Wales from October 2016 to January 2021, and prior to this was President of the European Network of Councils for the Judiciary, and Lord Justice of Appeal. Andrew Murray (@AndrewDMurray) is Professor of Law with particular reference to New Media and Technology Law and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (FRSA). He is also Deputy Head of LSE's Department of Law. More about this event 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 Department of Law (@LSELaw) is one of the world's top law schools with an international reputation for the quality of its teaching and legal research. Our community is one of the largest in the School, and has played a major role in policy debates, policy-making and the education of lawyers and law teachers globally. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

Contributor(s): Catherine Woollard | Six years after the beginning of Europe’s so called ‘refugee’ or ‘migration’ crisis, we ask what has happened since and (how) has Europe changed? This event will explore Europe’s ‘refugee’ or ‘migration’ crisis, asking whether Europe has changed since, and what happened to the people who arrived and the policies that governed their arrival. Meet our speakers and chair Heaven Crawley (@heavencrawley) is Professor of International Migration at the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations at Coventry University. She is also the Director of the UKRI GCRF South-South Migration, Inequality and Development Hub (MIDEQ). Lucy Mayblin (@LucyMayblin) is a political sociologist whose research focuses on asylum, human rights, policy-making, and the legacies of colonialism. She was recently awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for her research achievements in the area of asylum and migration. Masooma Torfa (@MasoomaTorfa) was born and grew up in Jaghuri, Afghanistan. She is currently a PhD researcher on forced migration and refugee integration at the University of Hohenheim in Germany. She is the co-founder and directing member of Female Fellows an NGO that is working on the integration and empowerment of migrant women in southern Germany. Masooma has professional work experiences in development projects in Afghanistan with the United Nations Kabul Office and USAID. In the field of migration, she has worked with numerous institutions including the European Commission, the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE), the European Program for Integration and Migration (EPIM), Advocate Europe, and Malteser. Catherine Woollard is Director of the European Council of Refugees and Exiles. Manmit Bhambra (@BhambraManmit) is Research Officer in the Religion and Global Society Research Unit at LSE, and Research Director for Migration at the 89 Initiative, Belgium. More about this event 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 89 Initiative (@89initiative) is a European think-do tank. Through cutting-edge research, the Initiative seeks to help solve Europe’s biggest generational challenges and nudge policy-makers and society forward. This event is part of the LSE European Institute Series, Beyond Eurocentrism. This event series aims to explore how the shape and shaping of Europe – its political-economy, its political policy making, or its political culture – needs to be rethought in a time of the exhaustion of Eurocentrism. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEEurocentrism

Contributor(s): Dr Judd Birdsall, Dr H A Hellyer, Dr Courtney Freer | This roundtable discussion will bring together experts from around the world to examine the Biden Administration’s approach to international religious freedom and the implications this has on American foreign policy. Biden’s predecessor made Religious Freedom a cornerstone of its foreign policy, notably highlighted by the creation of the State Department’s “Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom”, which the UK is expected to host in 2022. Will he carry on a similar legacy? Or will we see a substantial shift from the Biden Administration? Finally, what does this mean for America’s foreign policy? Featured image (used in source code): Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Meet our speaker and chair Judd Birdsall (@JuddBirdsall) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University. He was previously based at the Centre for Geopolitics at Cambridge University and continues to serve as an affiliated lecturer in the Cambridge University Department of Politics and International Studies. He has served in the U.S. State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom and on the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff. Courtney Freer (@courtneyfreer) is Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a non-resident fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings Institution. Her book Rentier Islamism: The Influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gulf Monarchies, published in 2018, traces the political and social role of Islamists in the Arabian Gulf. H A Hellyer, (@hahellyer) a Carnegie Endowment scholar, is Fellow of Cambridge University’s Centre for Islamic Studies, and Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. A prolific public intellectual on governance, international relations, security, and religion, in the West & the Arab world, he is the author of 7 books in these areas. A former Brookings Fellow, he currently helps steer the EU-funded project ‘GREASE’ on “Radicalisation, Secularism & the Governance of Religion”. James Walters (@LSEChaplain) is Director of the LSE Religion and Global Society research unit and a senior lecturer in practice in the Department of International Relations. More about this event International Relations (@LSEIRDept) has been taught at LSE since 1924. The Department was not only the first of its kind, but has remained a leading world centre for the development of the subject ever since. The Department has always been strongly international in character and today the majority of our graduate students, a good proportion of our undergraduates, as well as many members of the faculty are drawn from Europe, North America and further afield. At the same time we have always prided ourselves as having both a national and an international role in training diplomats and future university teachers. The LSE's United States Centre (@LSE_US) is a hub for global expertise, analysis and commentary on America. Our mission is to promote policy-relevant and internationally-oriented scholarship to meet the growing demand for fresh analysis and critical debate on the United States. LSE Religion and Global Society (@LSE_RGS) is an interdepartmental research unit which conducts, coordinates and promotes social science research that seeks to understand the many ways in which religion influences, and is influenced by, geopolitical change. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEFoRB

Contributor(s): Dr Chiara Cordelli | Many governmental functions today—from the management of prisons and welfare offices to warfare and financial regulation—are outsourced to private entities. Education and health care are funded in part through private philanthropy rather than taxation. Can a privatised government rule legitimately? The Privatized State argues that it cannot. In this new book, Chiara Cordelli argues that privatisation constitutes a regression to a precivil condition—what philosophers centuries ago called “a state of nature.” Chiara is going to discuss her book and issues such as privatisation in the democratic state , role of private actors and a new way of administering public affairs with LSE academic Kate Vredenburgh. Meet our speaker and chair Chiara Cordelli (@chiaracordelli) is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She is the co-editor of Philanthropy in Democratic Societies. Kate Vredenburgh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at LSE. Stephan Chambers will provide a brief welcome speech. Stephan is the inaugural director of the Marshall Institute at LSE. He is also Professor in Practice at the Department of Management at LSE and Course Director for the new Executive Masters in Social Business and Entrepreneurship. More about this event The Marshall Institute (@LSEMarshall) works to improve the impact and effectiveness of private action for public benefit through research, teaching and convening. You can order the book, The Privatized State, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEPrivatizedState

Contributor(s): Alexandra Palt | As we emerge from a global pandemic, businesses are being forced to re-evaluate their role. More than ever, businesses are being held accountable for demonstrating purpose and acting responsibly. Alexandra Palt, Executive Vice-President and Chief Corporate Responsibility Officer of L’Oréal, the world’s number one cosmetics group, will discuss how companies can transform their business model to ensure the respect of planetary boundaries, encourage their ecosystem of suppliers, customers and consumers to follow their lead, and be part of the solution to some of the world’s most pressing challenges. Meet our speaker and chair Alexandra Palt is Executive Vice-President and Chief Sustainability Officer of L’Oréal and Executive Vice-President of the L’Oréal Foundation. Sandy Pepper is Professor of Management Practice in the Department of Management at LSE. More about this event The Department of Management (@LSEManagement) is a world class centre for education and research in business and management. At the heart of LSE’s academic community in central London, we are ranked #2 in the world for business and management. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

Contributor(s): Gordon Brown, John Campbell, Dr Jill Pellew, Professor Andrés Velasco | Richard Haldane pioneered cross-party and cross-sector cooperation. How might Haldane's approach - that of the philosopher-statesman - be applied to politics today? A close friend of Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Haldane was involved in the founding of LSE and his visionary thinking also laid the foundations for Imperial College, the ‘red brick’ universities, the University Grants Committee and the Medical Research Council. As Minister for War he shaped the modern British Army, and was instrumental in the creation of the BEF, the Territorial Army, the Imperial General Staff, the RAF, MI5 and MI6. As a lawyer and philosopher and in particular in his judicial work after becoming Lord Chancellor he was deeply concerned with the development of an effective State and Civil Service. His influence extended beyond the UK to the continent of Europe and to the Empire, especially Canada. Meet our speakers and chair Gordon Brown (@OfficeGSBrown) is the United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education and former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He is Chair of the Global Strategic Infrastructure Initiative of the World Economic Forum and also serves as Distinguished Global Leader in Residence of New York University. He served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2007 to 2010. John Campbell is the Co-founder and Chair of Campbell Lutyens. He read Economics at the University of Cambridge, winning an exhibition at Sidney Sussex College for his work in economic history. He began his career in corporate finance at N.M. Rothschild. Married with three children, he has long been inspired by Lord Haldane's example. His book, Haldane: The Forgotten Statesman Who Shaped Modern Britain, was published by Hurst and Co in July 2020. Jill Pellew is a Senior Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Studies, University of London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She is currently a Trustee of the Victoria County History for Oxfordshire, a Fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar, and a Trustee of the 21st Century Trust. Andrés Velasco (@AndresVelasco) is Professor of Public Policy and Dean of the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Julia Black is LSE Strategic Director for Innovation and Professor of Law at the Department of Law. More about this event The School of Public Policy (@LSEPublicPolicy) equips you with the skills and ideas to transform people and societies. It is an international community where ideas and practice meet. Their approach creates professionals with the ability to analyse, understand and resolve the challenges of contemporary governance. You can order the book, Haldane: The Forgotten Statesman Who Shaped Modern Britain (UK delivery only), from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney. Gordon Brown will be joining this event via a pre-recorded talk, and will not be speaking live. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEHaldane

Contributor(s): Professor Stephen Machin, Professor Anna Vignoles | Current Centre Director, Stephen Machin, reflects on 30 years of CEP research to look at the education and economic inequalities facing younger generations and asks what are the longer-term consequences for social mobility in the UK? Meet our speaker and chair Stephen Machin (@s_machin_) is Professor of Economics and Director of the Centre for Economic Performance at LSE. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, has been President of the European Association of Labour Economists, is a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists and was an independent member of the Low Pay Commission from 2007-14. Anna Vignoles (@AnnaVignoles) is the Director of the Leverhulme Trust, taking up her position in January 2021. Previously, she was Professor of Education and fellow of Jesus College at the University of Cambridge, where her research focused on the economic value of education and issues of equity in education. Simon Hix (@simonjhix) is the Pro-Director for Research and the Harold Laski Professor of Political Science at LSE. An LSE alumnus, he is one of the leading researchers, teachers, and commentators on European and comparative politics in the UK. Simon has recently been appointed Stein Rokkan Chair in Comparative Politics at the European University Institute in Florence and will take up his new post in September. More about this event The Centre for Economic Performance (@CEP_LSE) is an interdisciplinary research centre at LSE. Established by the ESRC in 1990, it is now one of the leading applied economic research groups in Europe. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

Contributor(s): Ada Colau | null

Contributor(s): Professor Odd Arne Westad | For the last seventy years, the United States has been the predominant state within the international system. Does it make sense to call the United States an empire? Is its power now irrevocably waning? Are we in the midst of a transfer of global power and wealth from west to east? Will China — another international power that can be seen as an empire — be the state benefitting most from the global changes we are now seeing? Meet our speaker and chair Odd Arne Westad is the Engelsberg Chair for 2020/21 at LSE IDEAS. He is currently the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale, and is a former director of LSE IDEAS. Christopher Coker is Director of LSE IDEAS. More about this event In this series of four lectures, the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale, Odd Arne Westad, will discuss the concept of empire and why it is still relevant today. This event is the final in the series. A podcast of the first lecture can be found at Empires Past & Present: the idea of empire. The second lecture, Empires Past and Present: empire around 1800, took place in January, a podcast is available. The third lecture, Empires Past and Present: empire around 1900, took place in March, a podcast will be available. LSE IDEAS (@lseideas) is LSE's foreign policy think tank. We connect academic knowledge of diplomacy and strategy with the people who use it. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

Contributor(s): Lauren Slater, Professor Tim Lewens, Dr Adrian Alsmith | We trace the development of our modern ideas about the mind, from the highly influential work of Descartes and the impact of Darwinian evolution to more recent accounts of the ‘extended’ mind and the enhancements made possible by new technologies. Why is Descartes so important? What changed with Darwin? And in what ways have technological advances changed how we think about the mind? Join us as we explore the story of one of the central concerns of philosophy. Meet our speakers and chair Adrian Alsmith is Lecturer in Philosophy at Kings College London. Tim Lewens is Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Lauren Slater (@laurenamslater) is Associate Tutor of Philosophy at Birkbeck. Clare Moriarty (@quiteclare) is a Fellow at the Forum for Philosophy at LSE and IRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. More about this event The Forum for Philosophy (@forumphilosophy) hosts events exploring science, politics, and culture from a philosophical perspective. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEForum

Contributor(s): Professor Patrick Le Galès, Madeleine Bunting, Professor Gurminder K Bhambra, Professor Mike Savage | In his new book, The Return of Inequality, which he will discuss at this event, sociologist Mike Savage explains inequality’s profound deleterious effects on the shape of societies. Meet our speakers and chair Mike Savage (@MikeSav47032563) joined LSE in 2012 and is now Martin White Professor of Sociology. Between 2015 and 2020, he was Director of LSE’s International Inequalities Institute, which hosts the Atlantic Fellows programme, the largest global programme in the world devoted to challenging inequalities. Gurminder K Bhambra (@GKBhambra) is Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies in the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, and a Fellow of the British Academy (2020). She was previously Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. She is author of Connected Sociologies and Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination and co-editor of Decolonising the University. Madeleine Bunting is an award winning freelance writer and former Guardian columnist and associate editor. Her recent books include Love of Country and Island Song. Patrick Le Galès is CNRS Research Professor of Sociology and Politics at Sciences Po in Paris, Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics, and founding Dean of Sciences Po Urban School. His research deals with the governance and the political economy of metropolis in different parts of the world, on mobility inequalities and class, the reconfiguration of the state and political authority. Alpa Shah (@alpashah001) is Associate Professor of Anthropology at LSE and leads the International Inequalities Institute research theme on Global Economies of Care. More about this event The International Inequalities Institute (@LSEInequalities) at LSE brings together experts from many LSE departments and centres to lead cutting-edge research focused on understanding why inequalities are escalating in numerous arenas across the world, and to develop critical tools to address these challenges. The Department of Sociology (@LSEsociology) seek to produce sociology that is public-facing, fully engaged with London as a global city, and with major contemporary debates in the intersection between economy, politics and society – with issues such as financialisation, inequality, migration, urban ecology, and climate change. You can order the book, The Return of Inequality (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

Contributor(s): Professor Peter Henry | In a 2015 communique, the World Bank claimed that rich-country private capital could close the infrastructure services gap, achieve the sustainable development goals, and make money by moving from “billions to trillions” in infrastructure investment in poor countries. This lecture introduces an equilibrium framework. The framework compares a poor country’s social rate of return on infrastructure investment with: (a) the poor country’s return on private capital, and (b) the average rich country’s return on private capital. Applying the framework to the existing, comprehensive cross-country estimates of the social rate of return on infrastructure, reveals, contrary to the World Bank’s claim, that only 7 of 53 poor countries clear the dual-hurdle rate in both paved roads and electricity. Meet our speaker and chair Peter Henry (@PeterBlairHenry) is WR Berkley Professor of Economics and Finance and Dean Emeritus at NYU’s Stern School of Business, and Principal Investigator the Ph.D. Excellence Initiative, a post-baccalaureate program that addresses underrepresentation in economics by mentoring exceptional students of color interested in pursuing doctoral studies. He is the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles, as well as Turnaround: Third World Lessons for First World Growth. Tim Besley is Professor of Economics and Political Science and Sir W. Arthur Lewis Professor of Development Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. More about this event The Department of Economics (@LSEEcon) at LSE, is one of the leading economics departments in the world. We are a large department, ensuring all mainstream areas of economics are strongly represented in research and teaching. This event is in honour of W. Arthur Lewis. He taught at LSE from 1938 until 1948 and went on to serve as an economic advisor to numerous African and Caribbean governments. He received a Nobel Prize in Economics in 1979, sharing it with Theodore Shultz, “for their pioneering research into economic development research with particular consideration of the problems of developing countries". This event also forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19 Live captions

Contributor(s): Poul Mathias Thomsen | The event will assess the long-term impact of COVID-19 crisis on the Euro Area taking into account the existing structural differences between member states and in particular the fundamental limitations on policies evident from past experience. It will discuss, the pandemic crisis in relation to the North-South fragmentation within the Euro Area as COVID-19 will significantly increase public debt levels in countries with already limited fiscal space, despite the transfers and debt mutualization implied by the policy response at the European level. Meet our speaker and chair Poul Mathias Thomsen is former Director of the IMF's European Department and Visiting Professor in Practice at LSE European Institute. Kevin Featherstone is Eleftherios Venizelos Professor in Contemporary Greek Studies and Professor in European Politics in the European Institute at LSE. More about this event The 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 the Institute was ranked first for research in its sector. The LSE 'Europe in Question' Discussion Paper Series (@leqsLSE) was established in May 2009 to publish high quality research on Europe and the European Union from scholars across LSE and beyond. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

Contributor(s): Dr Alpa Shah, Sonia Faleiro | Sonia Faleiro will be in conversation with Alpa Shah about her new book Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing. A deep investigation into the death of two low-caste teenage girls, Faleiro explores the coming of age, the failures of care, and the violence of caste, honour and shame in contemporary India. Meet our speakers and chair Sonia Faleiro (@soniafaleiro) is a journalist and writer. She is the author of Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars, a book of the year for the Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times, Economist and Time Out. Alpa Shah (@alpashah001) is Associate Professor of Anthropology at LSE and leads the International Inequalities Institute research theme on Global Economies of Care. Her most recent book is the award winning Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas. Armine Ishkanian (@Armish15) is Associate Professor of Social Policy and the Executive Director of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme at LSE. Her research focuses on the relationship between civil society, policy processes, and social transformation. She is co-convenor of the Politics of Inequality research theme based in the International Inequalities Institute. More about this event The International Inequalities Institute (@LSEInequalities) at LSE brings together experts from many LSE departments and centres to lead cutting-edge research focused on understanding why inequalities are escalating in numerous arenas across the world, and to develop critical tools to address these challenges. You can order the book, The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing (UK delivery only), from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEIII

Contributor(s): Leena Koni Hoffmann, Rachel Bezner-Kerr, Miltone Ayieko | The COVID-19 pandemic is set to radically increase food insecurity in Africa, exacerbating an issue that has only worsened in recent years. The World Bank warns Africa is heading from a health crisis into a food crisis, and the United Nations predicts the rate of chronic malnutrition over the next twelve months could double. Decisive lockdowns, imposed by many African governments to prevent the virus’ spread, have disrupted the continent’s supply chains and led to rising unemployment. At the same time, huge locust swarms continue to devastate crops across East Africa and, in the continent’s southern region, years of drought have led to repeated crop failures. African countries have quickly become more reliant on externally sourced food at a time when international markets are experiencing unprecedented changes. Government and international interventions are already in motion, but questions remain about the scale and nature of their delivery. This is especially the case for people living in conflict-affected regions, where humanitarian food aid is harder to deliver. What can be done to address the upcoming emergency? If regional or global collaboration is needed, how and when can this be delivered for those most in need? Join our event as experts discuss the outlook for the continent’s food security, and what measures should be taken.

Contributor(s): Dr Robtel Neajai Pailey, Dr Ian Sanjay Patel, Dr Megan Ryburn | Citizenship. What does that word really signify? This episode of LSE IQ takes a look at the issue in all its complexities, uncovering how decisions made by a 19th century West African Gola ruler connect to today’s Liberian land ownership laws; why British citizenship became racialised in the decades following the second world war – legislation that led to the Windrush Scandal, devastating the lives of hundreds of black Britons; and how Bolivian migrants in the present day have struggled to create new lives in Chile. To understand more about the many ways citizenship can impact our lives, Jess Winterstein spoke to Dr Robtel Neajai Pailey, Dr Ian Sanjay Patel and Dr Megan Ryburn Speakers: Dr Robtel Neajai Pailey, Dr Ian Sanjay Patel and Dr Megan Ryburn   Dr Robtel Neajai Pailey, Department of Social Policy, LSE https://www.lse.ac.uk/social-policy/people/academic-staff/dr-robtel-neajai-pailey Dr Ian Sanjay Patel, Department of Sociology, LSE https://www.lse.ac.uk/sociology/people/ian-patel Dr Megan Ryburn, Latin America and Caribbean Centre (LACC), LSE https://www.lse.ac.uk/lacc/people/megan-ryburn   Research Development, (Dual) Citizenship and its Discontents in Africa: The political economy of belonging to Liberia by Dr Robtel Neajai Pailey (Cambridge University Press). To read the Introduction free of charge see https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/development-dual-citizenship-and-its-discontents-in-africa/B96CB2D100CFEC03EE476D103F46348B# The ebook is also available in the LSE library. We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the end of empire by Dr Ian Sanjay Patel (Verso) https://www.versobooks.com/books/3700-we-re-here-because-you-were-there Uncertain Citizenship: everyday practices of Bolivian migrants in Chile by Dr Megan Ryburn (University of California Press). https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520298774/uncertain-citizenship

Contributor(s): Baroness Shafik, Professor Lord Giddens, Professor Craig Calhoun, Professor Julia Black | Join us for this special event to celebrate 125 years of the London School of Economics and Political Science. We will be joined by the current director and former directors of LSE. Meet our speakers and chair Julia Black is Strategic Director of Innovation and Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She was Pro Director of Research from 2014-19 and Interim Director of LSE from 2016-17. Craig Calhoun (@craigjcalhoun) is Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University and Centennial Professor at LSE. He was Director of LSE from 2012 to 2016. Anthony Giddens was Director of LSE from 1997-2003. He was educated at the University of Hull and the London School of Economics and Political Science. At LSE, he wrote a dissertation on 'Sport and Society in Contemporary Britain'. He has taught at the University of Leicester and subsequently at Cambridge, where he was Professor of Sociology. Minouche Shafik is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Prior to this, she was Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. She is an alumna of LSE, having studied MSc Economics. Michael Cox is Emeritus Professor of International Relations whose most recent work includes an introduction to a centennial edition of J.M. Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace. He is currently working on a new history of LSE entitled, The "School": LSE and the Shaping of the Modern World. More about this event 125 years of LSE It’s our anniversary! Join our celebrations as we explore the past, discover new stories, and impact the future. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSE125

Contributor(s): Professor Andrés Velasco | Join us to hear from Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein speaking about his new book. Voter fraud, the legitimacy of COVID-19, and fake news are just a few examples of the lies that have recently been spreading like wildfire. Lying has been around for as long as we can remember but today is different, and in many respects, worse. Falsehoods are amplified as never before through powerful social media platforms that reach billions. And unfriendly governments, including Russia, are circulating lies in order to destabilize other nations, including the United Kingdom and the United States. In the face of those problems, Cass Sunstein probes the fundamental question of how we can deter lies while also protecting freedom of speech in his new book Liars: Falsehoods and Free Speech in an Age of Deception. Meet our speaker and chair Cass R. Sunstein (@CassSunstein) is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. Professor Sunstein has testified before congressional committees on many subjects, and he has been involved in constitution-making and law reform activities in a number of nations. His latest book is Liars: Falsehoods and Free Speech in an Age of Deception. Andrés Velasco (@AndresVelasco) is Professor of Public Policy and Dean of the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. More about this event The School of Public Policy (@LSEPublicPolicy) equips you with the skills and ideas to transform people and societies. It is an international community where ideas and practice meet. Their approach creates professionals with the ability to analyse, understand and resolve the challenges of contemporary governance. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. You can order the book, Liars: falsehoods and free speech in an age of deception, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

Contributor(s): Professor Ian Goldin | We are at a crossroads. The wrecking-ball of COVID-19 has destroyed global norms. Many think that after the devastation there will be a bounce back. The event will explore Ian Goldin's latest book, Rescue: From Global Crisis to a Better World. Ian Goldin believes that this crisis can create opportunities for change, just as the Second World War forged the ideas behind the Beveridge Report. Published in 1942, it was revolutionary and laid the foundations for the welfare state alongside a host of other social and economic reforms, changing the world for the better. Ian Goldin tackles the challenges and opportunities posed by the pandemic, ranging from globalisation to the future of jobs, income inequality and geopolitics, the climate crisis and the modern city. It is a fresh, bold call for an optimistic future and one we all have the power to create. Meet our speaker and chair Ian Goldin (@ian_goldin) is the Oxford University Professor of Globalisation and Development and was the founding Director of the Oxford Martin School. Ian leads the Oxford Martin Programmes on Technological and Economic Change, Future of Work and Future of Development. Ian previously was World Bank Vice President and the Group’s Director of Development Policy, after serving as Chief Executive of the Development Bank of Southern Africa and Economic Advisor to President Nelson Mandela. Ian is an alumnus of LSE. You can order the book, Rescue: From Global Crisis to a Better World, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney. Andrés Velasco (@AndresVelasco) is Professor of Public Policy and Dean of the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. More about this event The School of Public Policy (@LSEPublicPolicy) equips you with the skills and ideas to transform people and societies. It is an international community where ideas and practice meet. Their approach creates professionals with the ability to analyse, understand and resolve the challenges of contemporary governance. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

Contributor(s): Professor Gurminder K Bhambra | The social sciences are implicated in the reproduction of the very structures of inequality that are ostensibly their objects of concern. This is partly the result of their failure to acknowledge the ‘connected histories’ of one of their primary units of analysis – the modern nation-state, postcolonial scholar Gurminder K. Bhambra will argue. In the inaugural Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity Keynote Lecture, Professor Bhambra will explore the social sciences’ failure to acknowledge the extent to which modern nation-states were bound up with relations of colonial extraction and domination. Without putting such relations at the heart of our analyses, we cannot address global inequality effectively. Positing colonial histories as central to national imaginaries and the structures through which inequalities are legitimated and reproduced, she will explore a framework for a reparatory social science, oriented to global justice as a reconstructive project of the present. The past cannot be undone, she will conclude, but its legacies can be transformed to bring about a world that works for us all. Meet our speaker and chair Gurminder K. Bhambra (@gkbhambra) is Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies in the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, and a Fellow of the British Academy (2020). She was previously Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. She is author of Connected Sociologies and Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination and co-editor of Decolonising the University. Armine Ishkanian (@Armish15) is Associate Professor of Social Policy and the Executive Director of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme at LSE. Her research focuses on the relationship between civil society, policy processes, and social transformation. She is co-convenor of the Politics of Inequality research theme based in the International Inequalities Institute. More about this event The Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme is a Global South-focused, funded fellowship for mid-career activists, policy-makers, researchers and movement-builders from around the world. Based at the International Inequalities Institute, it is a 20-year programme that commenced in 2017 and was funded with a £64m gift from Atlantic Philanthropies, LSE’s largest ever philanthropic donation. The International Inequalities Institute (@LSEInequalities) at LSE brings together experts from many LSE departments and centres to lead cutting-edge research focused on understanding why inequalities are escalating in numerous arenas across the world, and to develop critical tools to address these challenges. This event will have live captioning and BSL interpreters. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEInequalities

Contributor(s): Professor Kevin Featherstone, Professor Brigid Laffan, Professor Kalypso Nicolaidis, Professor Dimitri A. Sotiropoulos, Professor George Tsebelis | Join us for this event that will introduce the new volume The Oxford Handbook of Modern Greek Politics, edited by Kevin Featherstone and Dimitri A. Sotiropoulos. This ground-breaking volume provides a panorama of Greek politics from the transition to democracy in 1974 to the present day. Its 43 chapters are written by leading Greek and international specialists, providing unprecedented breadth and authority. Join the editors in a discussion with Brigid Laffan, Kalypso Nicolaidis and George Tsebelis, concerning its major arguments and themes and the challenges for Greece. Meet our speakers and chair Kevin Featherstone is Eleftherios Venizelos Professor in Contemporary Greek Studies and Professor in European Politics in the European Institute at LSE, where he is also Director of the Hellenic Observatory. He was the first foreign member of the National Council for Research and Technology (ESET) in Greece, serving from 2010-2013. He has contributed regularly to international media on European and Greek politics. Brigid Laffan (@BrigidLaffan) is Director and Professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute (EUI), Florence. She was Vice-President of UCD and Principal of the College of Human Sciences from 2004 to 2011. She was the founding director of the Dublin European Institute UCD from 1999 and in March 2004 she was elected as a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Kalypso Nicolaidis is professorial Chair in Transnational Governance at the EUI School of Transnational Governance in Florence. She is currently on leave from the University of Oxford where she has been Professor of International Relations and a governing body fellow at St Antony’s College at the European Studies Centre since 1999. Previously Professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and at ENA, she has worked with numerous EU institutions. Her last book is: Exodus, Reckoning, Sacrifice: Three Meanings of Brexit. LSE alumnus Dimitri A. Sotiropoulos (@DimitriASotiro1) is Professor of Political Science at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration of the University of Athens. In 2003 he was Senior Research Fellow at LSE's Hellenic Observatory, in 2009-2010 Visiting Fellow in South East European Studies at St. Antony’s College, Oxford and in the autumn of 2016 Visiting Fellow at the Science Po, Paris. In 2018-2019 he was Visiting Professor at Tufts University and Visiting Fellow at Harvard’s Center of European Studies at Princeton’s Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies. George Tsebelis is the Anatol Rapoport Collegiate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan; member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; honorary PhD from the University of Crete. His work uses Game Theoretic models to analyze the effects of institutions; it covers Western European countries and the European Union. His more recent work studies institutions in Latin America and in countries of Eastern Europe, as well as Greece. Spyros Economides is Associate Professor in International Relations and European Politics at LSE and Deputy Director of the Hellenic Observatory. His current research concentrates on the external relations and security policies of the EU; Europeanisation and foreign policy, and the EU’s relationship with the Western Balkans. His latest publication is Economides and Sperling (eds.) EU Security Strategies: Extending the EU System of Security Governance. More about this event The Hellenic Observatory (@HO_LSE) is internationally recognised as one of the premier research centres on contemporary Greece and Cyprus. It engages in a range of activities, including developing and supporting academic and policy-related research; organisation of conferences, seminars and workshops; academic exchange through visiting fellowships and internships; as well as teaching at the graduate level through LSE's European Institute. You can order the book with a 30% discount ahead of its launch by using code ASFLYQ6 at checkout at The Oxford Handbook of Modern Greek Politics. An interview with the editors about the book can be found at The Oxford Handbook of Modern Greek Politics: An interview with the editors. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEGreece

Contributor(s): Professor Anne Phillips | Drawing on her forthcoming book Unconditional Equals, Anne Phillips explores the dangers of treating equality as conditional on some supposedly shared human characteristic. The claim to be regarded as an equal, or to consider others as our equals, is often explained by reference to some quality all humans are said to possess, something like rationality, a capacity for autonomy, or a sense of justice. This sounds inclusive, but this kind of justification sets up a test. Historically, many millions have been deemed to fail the test: women, the enslaved, the colonised, and those too poor to be considered fully human. The legacy of this way of understanding equality continues today: in philosophical argument, in public policy, and in everyday talk. One of the consequences is that we cannot be confident of a shared belief in even ‘basic’ human equality, not to mention support for the kind of socio-economic equality usually associated with those on the left. This lecture explores whether we can think of an equality that is genuinely unconditional. That is, not based on supposed facts about human beings, not something we might forfeit through our actions or character, but something we ourselves enact through our commitments and claims. Meet our speaker and chair Anne Phillips is the Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science in the Department of Government at LSE. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2003 and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2013, She holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Aalborg and Bristol, and in 2016 received the Sir Isaiah Berlin Award for Lifetime Contribution to Political Studies. She is the author of several books including The Politics of Presence: the Political Representation of Gender, Race, and Culture (1995) and the forthcoming book Unconditional Equals. Robin Archer is Director of the Ralph Miliband Programme. You can pre-order the book, Unconditional Equals (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney. More about this event 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. The Department of Government (@LSEGovernment) is home to some of the most internationally respected experts in politics and government; producing influential research that has a global impact on policy, and delivering world-class teaching to our students. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEUnconditionalEquals

Contributor(s): Vishal Talreja | Education is a national endeavour, but with our growing interdependence, is it time we acknowledge it has a global purpose? Join us for the launch of Thrive: The Purpose of Schools in a Changing World. The event will take the form of an open conversation about the risks and opportunities as education takes a new course. There is no denying that education is in a moment of flux. With disrupted labour markets, entrenched inequality, and stalled social mobility, long-standing international assumptions about education’s purpose are under strain. Meanwhile, the climate crisis and the reckoning with colonialism are pressing for wholescale reform of what schools and universities prioritise. What movements or institutions are fit to lead this change? And what form should change take? There is a need for a new narrative of what education is for: can it be global? Meet our speakers and chair Suchetha Bhat (@suchethab) is the CEO of Dream a Dream, a nonprofit in India working with 3 million children a year in four states across India, empowering those from vulnerable backgrounds to overcome adversity and thrive in a fast-changing world. She is on the Advisory Board of Amani Institute and Kizazi. She mentors many young women social entrepreneurs and non-profits in India, and is an advisor to the Delhi government on the establishment of a new school board of education. Tom Fletcher (@TFletcher) is the Principal of Hertford College, Oxford, a former UK Ambassador to the Lebanon, and founder of the movement Towards Global Learning Goals. He has been a No 10 Foreign Policy Advisor, a Visiting Professor at New York University, and authored The Naked Diplomat. Valerie Hannon (@valeriehannon) is the author of Thrive: the Purpose of Schools in a Changing World. She was co-founder of Innovation Unit and of the Global Education Leaders’ Partnership, and has been a consultant advisor to the OECD and to various Education Ministries worldwide. Andreas Schleicher (@SchleicherOECD) is Director for Education and Skills at the OECD. He initiated and oversees the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and has worked for over 20 years with ministers and education leaders to improve education. Vishal Talreja (@vishaltalreja) is the Co-founder and Trustee of Dream a Dream. He is an Ashoka Fellow, Eisenhower Fellow, Salzburg Global Fellow and a Board Member at PYE Global and Goonj. He is a Founding Member of Weaving Lab, Catalyst2030 and a Steering Committee Member of Karanga. He is also an advisor to the Delhi government in curriculum reforms. Amelia Peterson (@AKMPeterson) is a Fellow in the Social Policy department at LSE, where she currently convenes the MSc course in Education Policy. She studies education system reforms in multiple countries around the world, with a focus on assessment and qualification reform. More about this event The Department of Social Policy (@LSESocialPolicy) is an internationally recognised centre of research and teaching in social and public policy. From its foundation in 1912 it has carried out cutting edge research on core social problems, and helped to develop policy solutions. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

Contributor(s): Professor Janet C. Gornick, Dr Laurie C. Maldonado, Professor Ive Marx, Dr Rense Nieuwenhuis | In the United States, single mothers are often blamed for their own circumstances and offered little support. The American social policy discourse is very much shaped by the image of the “welfare queen” – a never-married single mother who is dependent on public assistance and refuses to work. However, experiences of lone parents across Europe and other countries calls this stereotype into question. So what does this mean for social policy? Our panel will engage in discussion and provide comparative policy lessons intended to improve the lives of single-parent families in the United States. The panel will also discuss future directions and pressing challenges for single-parent families during a time of COVID-19, as well as social and political unrest in the U.S. Meet our speakers and chair Janet C. Gornick (@JanetGornick) is the Director of the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and Director of the US Office of LIS. She has published widely on social welfare policies and their impact on gender disparities in the labor market and/or on income inequality. She has published widely in academic journals. Laurie C. Maldonado (@LCMaldonado1) is Assistant Professor of Social Work at Molloy College, New York. Her research examines the consequences of social policy on the lives of single parent and their families. She has co-edited a book, titled The Triple Bind of Single-Parent Families. Previously, she has worked as a research associate for The Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality. Ive Marx (@IveMarx) is a Professor at the University of Antwerp where he also services as the Director of the Centre for Social Policy Herman Deleeck. His main research interest is labour market and welfare state change in relation to the distribution of income, with a particular focus on poverty. Rense Nieuwenhuis (@RNieuwenhuis) is Associate Professor at Stockholm University SOFI. He studies how family diversity and social policy affect poverty and economic inequality. His research is country-comparative and has a gender perspective. Dr Nieuwenhuis’s recent research is on single-parent families, how women’s earnings affect inequality between households, and family policy outcomes. Amanda Sheely (@AmandaSheely3) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She studies social assistance programs for lone mothers, with a primary focus on the United States. More about this event The Department of Social Policy (@LSESocialPolicy) provides top quality international and multidisciplinary research and teaching on social and public policy challenges facing countries across the world. From its foundation in 1912 it has carried out cutting edge research on core social problems, and helped to develop policy solutions. LSE's United States Centre (@LSE_US) is a hub for global expertise, analysis and commentary on America. Its mission is to promote policy-relevant and internationally-oriented scholarship to meet the growing demand for fresh analysis and critical debate on the United States. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSESingleParent

Contributor(s): Professor Niall Ferguson | Disasters are inherently hard to predict. But when catastrophe strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet the responses of many developed countries to a new pathogen from China were badly bungled. Why? While populist rulers certainly performed poorly in the face of the pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work - pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters. Drawing from multiple disciplines, including economics, network science and cliodynamics, his new book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe offers not just a history but a general theory of disaster. Meet our speaker and chair Niall Ferguson (@nfergus) is one of Britain's most renowned historians. He is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, and a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. Andrés Velasco (@AndresVelasco) is Professor of Public Policy and Dean of the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He was a presidential candidate in Chile in 2013. He also was the Minister of Finance of Chile between March 2006 and March 2010. During his tenure he was recognized as Latin American Finance Minister of the Year by several international publications. More about this event The School of Public Policy (@LSEPublicPolicy) equips you with the skills and ideas to transform people and societies. It is an international community where ideas and practice meet. Their approach creates professionals with the ability to analyse, understand and resolve the challenges of contemporary governance. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. You can order the book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

Contributor(s): Professor Paul Dolan | Join us for this fireside chat where Paul Dolan will continue his reflection on ten years of behavioural science at LSE, discussing biases, narratives, happiness, resilience and more. We will be drawing from research from LSE walls and beyond. We will also be looking to the future, mapping out the most important and exciting areas of study. Those that join us can expect to laugh, learn and lean into behavioural science. Meet our speaker and chair Paul Dolan (@profpauldolan) is Professor of Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is author of the Sunday Times best-selling book Happiness by Design, and Happy Ever After and host of a new podcast series Duck – Rabbit, which explores our polarised culture. Grace Lordan (@GraceLordan_) is an associate professor in behavioural science at LSE. Her research focuses on why some people have successful lives as compared to others because of factors beyond their own control. She is the founder and director of The Inclusion Initiative, a research centre at LSE and the author of Think Big: Take Small Steps and Build the Career You Want. More about this event The Department of Psychological & Behavioural Science (@LSE_PBS) is a growing community of researchers, intellectuals, and students who investigate the human mind and behaviour in a societal context. Our department conducts cutting-edge psychological and behavioural research that is both based in and applied to the real world. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEPBS

Contributor(s): Dr Amal-lee Amin, Carlota Cenalmor, Professor Lord Stern, Josué Tanaka | The challenge of scaling up sustainable investments to support a strong and green recovery and the much more difficult environment for mobilising finance in the post-pandemic world has highlighted the importance of strengthening the role of national and international development banks. This panel event examines the role of the multilateral development banks (MDBs) in achieving this mobilisation from the global north to the global south including scaling up and aligning action with climate responsible development, and sustaining that action. Even though the need to mobilise greater sums of private finance to meet climate goals is well accepted, this will only increase in the post-COVID-19 world. The three agendas of climate finance, MDBs and mobilisation are the key channels where the global north currently takes actions consistent with its “responsibilities” (including as set out in the Paris agreement). Yet, none of these channels directly set out north-south equity arguments or justifications for global north responsibility around recovery and transformation in the global south. Meet our speakers and chair Amal-lee Amin (@AmaleeAmin) is Director of Climate Strategy at CDC Group and Senior Advisor to the UK Government on COP26. Before this she was Chief of the Climate Change Division at the Inter-American Development Bank. At CDC, she has been leading work with the Adaptation and Resilience Collaborative to accelerate investments in adaptation and resilience. Carlota Cenalmor (@CarlotaCenalmor) is Permanent Representative of the European investment Bank Group, Washington D.C. Before this she was a senior lawyer at the EIB's headquarters in Luxembourg, responsible for new financial instruments as well as for compliance, procurement, and institutional policies. Nick Stern (@lordstern1) is the IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government, Chairman of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and Head of the India Observatory at the London School of Economics. Josué Tanaka is the founding leader of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) climate finance initiative launched in 2006 covering investment, policy development, capacity building and technical assistance across the EBRD countries of operations. He was the Managing Director responsible for climate action and operational strategy and planning at the EBRD until December 2020. He is Visiting Professor in Practice, Grantham Research Institute at LSE. Nick Robins (@NVJRobins1) is Professor in Practice for Sustainable Finance at the Grantham Research Institute at LSE. More about this event The Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment (@GRI_LSE) was established by the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2008 to create a world-leading centre for policy-relevant research and training on climate change and the environment, bringing together international expertise on economics, finance, geography, the environment, international development and political economy. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

Contributor(s): Professor Kristin Andrews, Professor Sarah Brosnan, Dr Susana Monsó | Do non-human animals have morals? Can chimpanzees tell right from wrong? Do dolphins think about what they ought to do? And can a dog really be good? Recent scientific work can shed light on these issues, but they also take us to the heart of two great philosophical questions: what does it mean to be moral and what (if anything) makes humans unique? Meet our speakers and chair Kristin Andrews (@KristinAndrewz) is York Research Chair in Animal Minds at York University, Canada. Sarah Brosnan (@drsfbrosnan) is Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, Philosophy and Neuroscience at Georgia State University. Susana Monsó (@Susana_MonsO) is Lise Meitner Fellow at the Messerli Research Institute, Vienna. Jonathan Birch (@BirchLSE) is Fellow at the Forum for Philosophy and Associate Professor of Philosophy at LSE. More about this event The Forum for Philosophy (@forumphilosophy) hosts events exploring science, politics, and culture from a philosophical perspective. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEForum

Contributor(s): Dr Mukulika Banerjee, Professor Paul Dolan, Professor Andrés Velasco, Dr Clare Wenham | Over a year on from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, what key lessons have been learnt that should shape the policies that national and global actors should pursue. Meet our speakers and chair Mukulika Banerjee (@MukulikaB) is a social anthropologist at LSE and was the inaugural director of the LSE South Asia Centre from 2015-2020. She was awarded an LSE Research Grant to study the impact of COVID-10 in India, with Maitreesh Ghatak (LSE Economics). Her forthcoming monograph Cultivating Democracy : politics and citizenship in agrarian India, will be published later this year, and is based on over 20 years of research in rural India. Paul Dolan (@profpauldolan) is Professor of Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is author of the Sunday Times best-selling book Happiness by Design, and Happy Ever After and host of a new podcast series Duck – Rabbit, which explores our polarised culture. Andrés Velasco (@AndresVelasco) is Professor of Public Policy and Dean of the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Clare Wenham (@clarewenham) is Assistant Professor of Global Health Policy at LSE. She specialises in global health security, the politics and policy of pandemic preparedness and outbreak response. She has researched this for over a decade, through influenza, Ebola and Zika. Her research poses questions of global governance, the role of WHO and World Bank, national priorities and innovative financing for pandemic control. More recently she has been examining the role of women in epidemics and associated policy. For COVID-19, Clare is Co-Principal Investigator on a grant from the CIHR and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation analysing the gendered dimensions of the outbreak. Simon Hix (@simonjhix) is the Pro-Director for Research and the Harold Laski Professor of Political Science at LSE. An LSE alumnus, he is one of the leading researchers, teachers, and commentators on European and comparative politics in the UK. Simon has recently been appointed Stein Rokkan Chair in Comparative Politics at the European University Institute in Florence and will take up his new post in September. More about this event The School of Public Policy (@LSEPublicPolicy) equips you with the skills and ideas to transform people and societies. It is an international community where ideas and practice meet. Their approach creates professionals with the ability to analyse, understand and resolve the challenges of contemporary governance. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

Contributor(s): Professor Cheshire Calhoun | Join us for the Brian Barry Memorial Lecture, an annual event honouring the work of political philosopher and former colleague, Professor Brian Barry. Embedded in our social practices are three distinct, default conceptions of a responsible person connected with three distinct basic expectations of and stances toward responsible persons. First is the conception of responsible persons as capable of living up to normative expectations and thus being accountability responsible. Second is a conception of responsible persons as in fact disposed to satisfy minimal normative expectations and thus as compliance responsible. Third is a conception of responsible persons as responsibility takers, that is, as both capable of electing and disposed at least sometimes to actually take the initiative to do good things that could be omitted without blame. In this event Cheshire Calhoun argues that these conceptions are not competing and are rather jointly essential for capturing the complex ways we think about and interact with responsible persons and the centrality of resentment, trust, and hope in everyday life. Meet our speaker and chair Cheshire Calhoun is Professor of Philosophy and head of Philosophy faculty at Arizona State University. She has recently been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Her work stretches across the philosophical subdisciplines of normative ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of emotion, feminist philosophy, and gay and lesbian philosophy. Kai Spiekermann (@SpiekermannKai) is Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Government at LSE. Among his research interests are normative and positive political theory, philosophy of the social sciences, social epistemology and environmental change. More about this event The Department of Government (@LSEGovernment) is a world-leading centre for study and research in politics and government. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEResponsible

Contributor(s): Kate Klonick | The problem of fake news and other contentious online content is one of our most pressing challenges - it is widely believed to have played a major role in the election of President Donald Trump, the outcome of the Brexit Referendum, and in general threatens the healthy functioning of news media in modern democracy. Our panellists will discuss the risks of deceptive content (both mis and dis information) and will examine what a healthy and mature democracy such as the United Kingdom should do to combat those risks while protecting the rights of individuals and political parties to engage in open and free political debate. Meet our speakers and chair Kate Klonick (@Klonick) is an Assistant Professor at St. John's University Law School and an Affiliate Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. Her research on networked technologies' effect on social norm enforcement, freedom of expression, and private governance has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, The New Yorker, New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian and numerous other publications. Andrew Murray (@AndrewDMurray) is Professor of Law at LSE with particular reference to New Media and Technology Law. He is also Deputy Head of the Department. In 2018/19 he was the specialist advisor to the House of Lords Communications Committee inquiry “Regulating in a Digital World”. Chi Onwurah (@ChiOnwurah) is the Shadow Minister for Science, Research & Digital and the Labour MP for Newcastle upon Tyne Central. Prior to this she was Shadow Minister for Industrial Strategy, Science and Innovation. Jeremy Horder is Professor of Criminal Law at LSE. He was Chairman of Oxford’s Faculty of Law from 1998-2000. From 2005-2010, he was a Law Commissioner for England and Wales, with responsibility for criminal law reform, before becoming Edmund Davies Professor of Criminal Law at King’s College London, from 2010-2013. More about this event The Department of Law (@LSELaw) is one of the world's top law schools with an international reputation for the quality of its teaching and legal research. Our community is one of the largest in the School, and has played a major role in policy debates, policy-making and the education of lawyers and law teachers globally. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

Contributor(s): Professor Craig Calhoun | n the second part of his three-part lecture series, Craig Calhoun will chart the implications of genetic engineering and other transformations of the biological human being for an era which has put the human at the centre of its conception of the good. Meet our speaker and chair Craig Calhoun (@craigjcalhoun) is Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University and Centennial Professor at LSE. He is also a previous Director of LSE. Monika Krause is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and co-Director of LSE Human Rights. More about this event A podcast of the first lecture in this series is available to download from The Human in Human Rights. LSE Human Rights (@LSEHumanRights) is a trans-disciplinary centre of excellence for international academic research, teaching and critical scholarship on human rights. The Department of Sociology (@LSEsociology) seek to produce sociology that is public-facing, fully engaged with London as a global city, and with major contemporary debates in the intersection between economy, politics and society – with issues such as financialisation, inequality, migration, urban ecology, and climate change. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECalhoun

Contributor(s): Dr Weeam S Hammoudeh, Dr Omar Dewachi, Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah | Regional politics in the Middle East continues to have a cumulative impact on health, affecting health systems capacity and delivery of services. Conflicts in the region are deeply influenced by historical, ethnic, cultural and political factors. This event will discuss the geopolitical barriers to strengthening health systems in the region, presenting a country case study comparison of Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq. Panellists will also discuss how COVID-19 has exacerbated existing health insecurities and threats. Meet our speakers and chair Ghassan Abu-Sittah is a British-Palestinian Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeon. In 2012 he became Head of the Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the AUBMC and in 2015 co-founded and became director of the Conflict Medicine Program at Global Health Institute at the American University of Beirut. Omar Dewachi (@Khanabat) is Associate Professor at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Trained in medicine and anthropology, Omar works at the intersections of global health, history of medicine and political anthropology. He focuses on the human and environmental manifestations of decades of conflict and military interventions in Iraq and the broader Middle East. Weeam S Hammoudeh (@Whammoudeh) is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Community and Public Health, and coordinator of the mental health unit. She holds a PhD and MA in Sociology from Brown University, and an MPH in Community and Public Health from Birzeit University. Tiziana Leone (@tizianaleone) is an Associate Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Tiziana’s research agenda is focused around maternal and reproductive health, including a lifecourse approach to women’s health. More about this event The Global Health Initiative (@LSEGlobalHealth) 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. The LSE Middle East Centre 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. The Middle East Centre works to enhance understanding and develop rigorous research on the societies, economies, politics and international relations of the region. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

Contributor(s): Robert Newman, Professor Kieran Setiya, Dr Zoe Walker | We explore what’s philosophically interesting about comedy. Both have a lot in common: showing up the ordinary as odd, critiquing the status quo, hecklers… But can humour be a source of knowledge? What does it tell us about how we interact with one another? What role does it play in our social and political life? And will we ruin the joke by explaining it?! Meet our speakers and chair Robert Newman (@mrrobnewman) is a comedian and author. Kieran Setiya (@KieranSetiya) is Professor of Philosophy at MIT. Zoe Walker is Lecturer in Philosophy at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Sarah Fine (@DrSJFine) is Fellow at the Forum for Philosophy at LSE and Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at King’s College London. More about this event The Forum for Philosophy (@forumphilosophy) hosts events exploring science, politics, and culture from a philosophical perspective. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEForum

Contributor(s): Naïm Abou-Jaoudé, Sharan Burrow, Rathin Roy, Dr Rhian-Mari Thomas | This is an event shortcast, a digested version of our live online public events series. This event was recorded on March 2nd 2021. A full version is available to download on the LSE player.

Contributor(s): Mandu Reid, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Mary-Ann Stephenson, Dr Clare Wenham | This is an event shortcast, a digested version of our live online public events series. This event was recorded on March 3rd 2021. A full version is available to download on the LSE player.

Contributor(s): Dr Taina Bucher, Professor Christine Hine, Dr Jean-Christophe Plantin, Dr Bieke Zaman | Technologies are spreading into all aspects of our lives via smart devices, internet of things, augmented reality, and data profiling. Children’s lives have become digital by default and technology is the taken-for-granted means of playing, seeing family, doing schoolwork, hanging out with friends in a post-COVID world. The distinction between the offline and online no longer offers a meaningful way of conceptualising the infrastructure of life but what can we replace it with? Where does the digital begin and end, what does it incorporate? What are the implications for children? In this webinar we will debate the theories and concepts that underpin such questions, drawing on different disciplinary approaches. Meet our speakers and chair Taina Bucher (@tainab) is an Associate Professor in Screen Cultures at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo. She studies the relationships and entanglements between algorithms, social and political concerns – examining how users experience and make sense of algorithmic power and politics. Her first book, IF…THEN: Algorithmic power and politics details the ontological politics at stake in the algorithmic media landscape. Christine Hine (@DigiSocSurrey) is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Surrey. Her work offers a sociology perspective on science and technology with a particular focus on the role played by new technologies in the knowledge construction process. She is interested in the development of ethnography in technical settings and in "virtual methods" (internet-based social research). She has developed mobile and connective approaches to ethnography that combine online and offline social contexts. Jean-Christophe Plantin (@JCPlantin) is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. His research investigates the politics of digital platforms, the evolution of knowledge infrastructures, and the rise of digital sovereignty. His first book, Participatory Mapping: New Data, New Cartography details the use of web-based mapping platforms by non-experts to participate in socio-technical debates. Bieke Zaman (@biekezaman) is an Associate Professor in Human-Computer Interaction and research group leader of the Meaningful Interactions Lab (Mintlab) at the Institute for Media Studies, KU Leuven, Belgium. Her work lies primarily at the intersection of human computer interaction research and communication sciences and focuses on children, digital media and design; media convergence in a digital society; progressive research and dissemination methods. Sonia Livingstone (@Livingstone_S) is a Professor of Social Psychology at the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has published 20 books including “The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age.” Since founding the 33 country EU Kids Online network, Sonia has advised the UK government, European Commission, European Parliament, Council of Europe, OECD and UNICEF. More about this event The Department of Media and Communications (@MediaLSE) is a world-leading centre for education and research in communication and media studies at the heart of LSE’s academic community in central London. We are ranked #1 in the UK and #3 globally in our field (2021 QS World University Rankings). This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

Contributor(s): Dr Michael Fullilove | COVID-19 originated in Wuhan, China’s authoritarian system enabled it to contain the virus even as the United States became a global epicentre of disease. Does this point to a long-term shift in international relations? Or will the traditional strengths of liberal nations reassert themselves? And how should the West respond to the China challenge? Meet our speaker and chair Michael Fullilove (@mfullilove) is the Executive Director of the Lowy Institute. He previously worked as a lawyer, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, and an adviser to Prime Minister Paul Keating. He is Nonresident Senior Fellow at Brookings and serves on the Advisory Council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London. Dr Fullilove writes widely on foreign policy in publications including The New York Times, Financial Times and The Atlantic. Robin Archer is Director of the Ralph Miliband Programme. More about this event 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. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

Contributor(s): Professor Judy Wajcman, Professor David Autor | How will technological innovation change the workplace? How can we harness technological advances for social benefit? Join leading economist David Autor in discussion with Judy Wajcman as we explore the relationships between emerging technologies and the future of work in America and beyond. Meet our speakers and chair David Autor (@davidautor) is Ford Professor of Economics and Associate Department Head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Economics. He is Co-Director of the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future and the National Bureau of Economic Research Labor Studies Program. Professor Autor has written extensively on labor-market impacts of technological change and globalization’s effects on wages, inequality and electoral politics. Judy Wajcman (@jwajcman1) is the Anthony Giddens Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the Principal Investigator on the Women in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence research project at the Alan Turing Institute, a member of the AI100 Standing Committee, and a Fellow of the British Academy. Professor Wajcman has published widely in the fields of work and organizations, science and technology studies and feminist theory. Peter Trubowitz (@ptrubowitz) is Professor of International Relations, and Director of the US Centre at LSE and Associate Fellow at Chatham House. More about this event The LSE's United States Centre (@LSE_US) is a hub for global expertise, analysis and commentary on America. Our mission is to promote policy-relevant and internationally-oriented scholarship to meet the growing demand for fresh analysis and critical debate on the United States. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

Contributor(s): Professor Philippe Aghion | Philippe Aghion, Professor at the Collège de France and LSE, offers a cutting-edge analysis of what drives economic growth and a blueprint for prosperity under capitalism. With the launch of his book, of which he is a co-author, The Power of Creative Destruction, Philippe Aghion draws on cutting-edge theory and evidence to examine the roots of growth and inequality, competition and globalisation, the determinants of health and happiness, technological revolutions, secular stagnation, middle-income traps, climate change, and how to recover from economic shocks. He shows that we owe our modern standard of living to innovations enabled by free-market capitalism. We hear more and more calls for radical change, even the overthrow of capitalism. Aghion suggests the answer is to create a better capitalism by understanding and harnessing the power of creative destruction—innovation that disrupts, but that over the past two hundred years has also lifted societies to previously unimagined prosperity. The Power of Creative Destruction shows that a fair and prosperous future is ultimately ours to make. Meet our speaker and chair Philippe Aghion is Professor at the Collège de France and the London School of Economics and Political Science and was previously Professor of Economics at Harvard. His new book The Power of Creative Destruction, is co-authored with Céline Antonin and Simon Bunel. Steve Pischke has been in the Economics Department at LSE since 2000, is an associate in the CEP, and currently Head of the Department. His key expertise is in Labour Economics, Economics of Education, and Applied Econometrics. More about this event The Department of Economics (@LSEEcon) at LSE, is one of the leading economics departments in the world. We are a large department, ensuring all mainstream areas of economics are strongly represented in research and teaching. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. You can order the book, The Power of Creative Destruction - Economic Upheaval and the Wealth of Nations, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

Contributor(s): Ken Benoit, Andrew Murray, Seeta Peña Gangaradhan, Alison Powell, Bernhard von Stengel | Computer algorithms shape our lives and increasingly control our future. They have crept into virtually every aspect of modern life and are making life-changing choices on our behalf, often without us realising. But how much power should we give to them and have we let things go too far? Joanna Bale talks to Ken Benoit, Andrew Murray, Seeta Peña Gangaradhan, Alison Powell and Bernhard Von Stengel. Research links: Hello World by Hannah Fry; Information Technology Law: The Law and Society by Andrew Murray; Explanations as Governance? Investigating practices of explanation in algorithmic system design by Alison Powell (forthcoming).

Contributor(s): Sir Anthony Seldon | The Office of the British Prime Minister has endured longer than any other democratic political office, but how have the 55 remarkable individuals who have led the country through peace, crisis and war shaped the role? Join us as we mark the third centenary of the office of the Prime Minister by exploring some of the greatest achievements, the relationship with the monarchy and who has been most effective and why in their time at Number 10. Meet our speaker and chair Anthony Seldon (@AnthonySeldon) is a contemporary historian who has written and edited numerous books, including the definitive accounts of the last five Prime Ministers. He is the honorary historian at Number 10 Downing Street, chair of the National Archive Trust, and has interviewed virtually all those who have worked in Number 10 in the last 50 years. Anthony is an alumnus of LSE. Tony Travers is Professor in LSE's Department of Government and Associate Dean of the LSE School of Public Policy. His expertise lies in local and national government and cities. More about this event The Department of Government (@LSEGovernment) is home to some of the most internationally respected experts in politics and government; producing influential research that has a global impact on policy, and delivering world-class teaching to our students. You can order the book, The Impossible Office? The History of the British Prime Minister, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEPrimeMinisters

Contributor(s): Muna Luqman, Fatou Bensouda, Hamsatu Allamin | Focusing on the escalating violence and ongoing kidnappings of women and girls in Nigeria and the continued targeting of civilians in Yemen, for this fourth session of the Coming of Age of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda series Sanam Naraghi Anderlini will be in conversation with Hamsatu Allamin, founder of the Allamin Foundation for Peace Development in Maidugiri, Nigeria; Fatou Bensouda, Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC); and Muna Luqman, leading peacebuilder and founder of Food4Humanity in Yemen.  Reflecting on their personal experiences and journeys into their fields of expertise, this discussion will draw attention to the growing challenge of failed governance by states, the emergence of ungoverned and ‘alternatively governed’ spaces, and the implications for civilians. The panellists will also discuss the role of the ICC when states are implicated in violence against their own citizens, and what can be done when the state is absent and new entities emerge, with no respect for international norms. Meet our speakers and chair Hamsatu Allamin is an educator by profession, with 32 years’ experience in teaching, public administration, and project management. She is a gender activist and human rights defender, who initiated the creation of the Network of Civil Society for Peace in Borno and Yobe states in Nigeria. Fatou Bensouda is the first woman to serve as Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), having assumed office in 2012. In 2011, she was elected by consensus by the Assembly of States Parties to serve in this capacity. Through her work, she has strived to advance accountability for atrocity crimes, highlighting in particular the importance of addressing traditionally underreported crimes such as sexual and gender-based crimes, mass atrocities against and affecting children, as well as the deliberate destruction of cultural heritage within the Rome Statute framework. Muna Luqman (@munaluqman) is the Founder and Chairperson of Food4humanity. She is an activist for women, peace and security; co-founder of the Women Solidarity Network; and member of the Women’s Alliance for Security Leadership. Sanam Naraghi-Anderlini (@sanambna) is the Director of the Centre for Women, Peace and Security. More about this event 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 of women in conflict-affected situations around the world. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEWPS

Contributor(s): Professor Amartya Sen, Bee Rowlatt | Join two great minds in exploring the themes of justice and equality: Amartya Sen and Enlightenment hero Mary Wollstonecraft, as Amartya Sen gives the inaugural Wollstonecraft Society Lecture. Mary Wollstonecraft claimed human rights for all. She overcame limited education and a background of domestic violence to become an educational and political pioneer, and one of the greatest thinkers of the eighteenth century. As well as her intellectual audacity, it is Wollstonecraft’s love for humanity, her self-proclaimed “ardent affection for the human race” that continues to inspire. This event explores how, despite a savage pandemic, economic downturn, and increasing isolation in both political and individual life, there is a counter-story of community building and education, of optimism and hope. Meet our speakers and chair Bee Rowlatt (@BeeRowlatt) is a writer and public speaker, and a programmer of events at the British Library. Her most recent book In Search of Mary retraced Wollstonecraft’s 1795 treasure hunt over the Skagerrak sea. She led the campaign for the Wollstonecraft memorial sculpture and is chair of the Wollstonecraft Society. Amartya Sen is Thomas W Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University and an LSE Honorary Fellow. His research has ranged over social choice theory, economic theory, ethics and political philosophy, welfare economics, theory of measurement, decision theory, development economics, public health, and gender studies. Amartya Sen’s books have been translated into more than thirty languages and his awards include the Nobel Prize in Economics. He was Professor of economics at LSE from 1971 to 1977, and he taught part-time at the School from 1978 to 1982. His memoir, Home In The World, will be published in July by Penguin. LSE announced the Amartya Sen Chair in Inequality Studies in 2019. Alpa Shah (@alpashah001) is Associate Professor of Anthropology at LSE and leads the International Inequalities Institute research theme on Global Economies of Care. Her most recent book is the award winning ‘Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas’. More about this event The International Inequalities Institute (@LSEInequalities) at LSE brings together experts from many LSE departments and centres to lead cutting-edge research focused on understanding why inequalities are escalating in numerous arenas across the world, and to develop critical tools to address these challenges. The Wollstonecraft Society (@TheWollSoc) is a registered charity carrying Mary Wollstonecraft’s legacy of human rights, equality and justice into young people’s lives. It delivers learning materials and experiences, inspired by Wollstonecraft’s work, for young people who might not have heard of her. The annual WS lecture features an outstanding speaker on themes related to her work, and each year it awards a state-educated student the Wollstonecraft Prize for Political Engagement. This lecture is also part of a week-long celebration of events around Mary Wollstonecraft organised by the Newington Green Meeting House. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. This event will have live captioning and BSL interpreters. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19 Featured image (used in thumbnail): Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie (c. 1797), National Portrait Gallery, London is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.

Contributor(s): Professor Paul Dolan | Listen to a preview of a new podcast by Professor Paul Dolan, which explores the problem of polarisation. LSE Professor Paul Dolan has spent years researching happiness. Can he find a way through the divisions that make us miserable? In this podcast series Paul brings together friends from the different worlds he straddles in his own life to work through the issues that most divide us - COVID, freedom of speech, class and lifestyle choices. He uses insights from behavioural science to explain why we’re split and how we might fix it. Listen now: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0zUaiarx2SxILYha3gAtGE Acast: https://play.acast.com/s/duck-rabbit/duck-rabbit This podcast series forms part of LSE's Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative. A Mother Come Quickly production.

Contributor(s): Professor Kehinde Andrews | Coretta Phillips will be in conversation with Kehinde Andrews to discusses his new book, The New Age of Empire. A book that offers no easy answers to critical questions, The New Age of Empire presents a new blueprint for challenging age-old systems. Andrews argues that the "West is rich because the Rest is poor", and that reforming a racist global order calls for radical solutions. Meet our speaker and chair Kehinde Andrews (@kehinde_andrews) is Professor of Black Studies at the School of Social Sciences at Birmingham City University. Kehinde led the development of Europe’s first Black Studies undergraduate degree. He is also director of the Centre for Critical Social Research, founder of the Harambee Organisation of Black Unity, and co-chair of the Black Studies Association. You can order the book, The New Age of Empire: how racism and colonialism still rule the world, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney. Coretta Phillips is Professor of Criminology and Social Policy in the Department of Social Policy at LSE. Author of the award-winning book The Multicultural Prison, she researches race, ethnicity, crime, criminal justice and social policy. Her current multi-disciplinary project will provide the first systematic, comprehensive and historically grounded account of the crime and criminal justice experiences of Gypsies and Travellers in England since the 1960s. More about this event The Department of Social Policy (@LSESocialPolicy) is an internationally recognised centre of research and teaching in social and public policy. From its foundation in 1912 it has carried out cutting edge research on core social problems, and helped to develop policy solutions. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

Contributor(s): Professor Gurminder Bhambra, Dr Jens Lerche, Dr Sanjay G. Reddy, Professor Diego Sánchez-Ancochea, Dr Nora Waitkus, Professor Thomas Piketty | This event will debate Thomas Piketty’s urgent new book, Capital and Ideology, and will feature an interdisciplinary panel of experts. The conversation will probe his views on race and slavery, the nature of capitalism, the impact of political divides, and the contours of long-term social change. Piketty, in conversation with interlocutors, will present the book’s framework and his historically-informed approach for understanding and combating inequalities today. This discussion is linked to a just-published special issue of The British Journal of Sociology, featuring a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary set of responses to Piketty. Meet our speakers and chair Gurminder Bhambra (@GKBhambra) is Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex. Jens Lerche (@JensLerche) is Reader in Agrarian and Labour studies in the Department of Development Studies at SOAS. LSE alumnus Thomas Piketty (@PikettyLeMonde) is Professor at EHESS and the Paris School of Economics. Sanjay G. Reddy (@sanjaygreddy) is Associate Professor of Economics at The New School for Social Research. Diego Sánchez-Ancochea (@dsanco) is Professor of the Political Economy of Development, University of Oxford. Nora Waitkus (@nora_wait) is Research Officer at the International Inequalities Institute at LSE and Assistant Professor at Tilburg University. Poornima Paidipaty (@paidipaty) is an LSE Fellow in Inequalities. More about this event The Department of Sociology (@LSEsociology) seek to produce sociology that is public-facing, fully engaged with London as a global city, and with major contemporary debates in the intersection between economy, politics and society – with issues such as financialisation, inequality, migration, urban ecology, and climate change. The International Inequalities Institute (@LSEInequalities) at LSE brings together experts from many LSE departments and centres to lead cutting-edge research focused on understanding why inequalities are escalating in numerous arenas across the world, and to develop critical tools to address these challenges. The British Journal of Sociology (@BJSociology) is a leading international sociological journal, with a focus on the social and democratic sociological questions of our times, the journal leads the debate on key methodological and theoretical questions and controversies in contemporary sociology. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. This event will have live captioning and BSL interpreters. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

Contributor(s): Professor Richard Bradley, Professor Justin E. H. Smith | Julian Le Grand will talk with Justin E. H. Smith about his new book, Irrationality - A History of the Dark Side of Reason. Irrationality ranges across philosophy, politics, and current events. Challenging conventional thinking about logic, natural reason, dreams, art and science, pseudoscience, the Enlightenment, the internet, jokes and lies, and death, the book shows how history reveals that any triumph of reason is temporary and reversible, and that rational schemes, notably including many from Silicon Valley, often result in their polar opposite. The problem is that the rational gives birth to the irrational and vice versa in an endless cycle, and any effort to permanently set things in order sooner or later ends in an explosion of unreason. Because of this, it is irrational to try to eliminate irrationality. For better or worse, it is an ineradicable feature of life. Meet our speaker and chair Justin E. H. Smith (@jehsmith) is Professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris 7–Denis Diderot. His books include The Philosopher: A History in Six Types. Richard Bradley is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research is concentrated in decision theory, formal epistemology and the theory of social choice but he also works on conditionals and the nature of chance. His book Decision Theory with a Human Face, recently published with Cambridge University Press, gives an account of decision making under conditions of severe uncertainty theory suitable for rational but bounded agents. Julian Le Grand has been Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science since 1993. From 2003 to 2005 he was seconded to No 10 Downing St to serve as Senior Policy Adviser to the Prime Minister. He is the author, co-author or editor of over twenty books, and more than one hundred refereed journal articles and book chapters on economics, philosophy, and public policy. More about this event The Marshall Institute (@LSEMarshall) works to improve the impact and effectiveness of private action for public benefit through research, teaching and convening. You can order the book, Irrationality - A History of the Dark Side of Reason, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEIrrationality

Contributor(s): Professor Etienne Balibar | A cosmopolitics that allows it for mankind to address its common interests is clearly needed, as demonstrated again by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is even urgent, a matter of life and death for millions, and survival for the planet as a livable environment. But there can exist no cosmopolitics without a cosmopolitan idea. From this point of view, we find ourselves in an extremely contradictory situation: always an “essentially contested concept” throughout history, cosmopolitanism today appears squeezed between powerful nationalisms competing for global or local hegemony, and utopian ideals in search of their capacity to rally the multitude. The lecture does not offer a blueprint, it traces a genealogy and delineates some possibilities for the future which is already our actuality. Meet our speaker and chair Etienne Balibar is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris-Nanterre, and Anniversary Chair of Contemporary European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. He is also visiting professor at Columbia University in the City of New York. Ayça Çubukçu (@ayca_cu) is an Associate Professor of Sociology at LSE and co-director of LSE Human Rights. More about this event LSE Human Rights (@LSEHumanRights) is a trans-disciplinary centre of excellence for international academic research, teaching and critical scholarship on human rights. The Department of Sociology (@LSEsociology) seek to produce sociology that is public-facing, fully engaged with London as a global city, and with major contemporary debates in the intersection between economy, politics and society – with issues such as financialisation, inequality, migration, urban ecology, and climate change. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECosmopolitanisms

Contributor(s): Professor Michael R. King, Richard Nesbitt, Ghela Boskovich, Vineet Malhotra, Brenda Trenowden | Join us for a panel discussion on The Technological Revolution in Financial Services: How Banks, Fintechs and Customers Win Together, edited by Michael R. King and Richard W. Nesbitt. Financial services is going through a global transformation. Structural changes are being driven by three forces: regulation, technology, and demographics. This combination is changing the competitive landscape by lowering barriers to entry and increasing competition from outside the industry. These new entrants are leveraging technology to gain a foothold in financial services, with many of them following the disruption playbook and building a foothold at the bottom end of the market by targeting underserved customers. Rather than being threatened by Fintech startups, banks will be more threatened by global technology companies like the Chinese Techfins Alibaba and Tencent and the bigtech companies Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. These tech companies have platform ecosystems that embed financial services, including payments, lending, investing, and insurance. Technology companies will prove to be the real threats to incumbents over the next decade. You can order the book at The Technological Revolution in Financial Services: How Banks, Fintechs, and Customers Win Together. Meet our speakers and chair Ghela Boskovich (@GhelaBoskovich) is a self-proclaimed Fintech fanatic, and Founder of FemTechGlobal™, a network dedicated to challenging the status quo, and improving the inclusiveness and diversity in Financial Services. She is also Head of Europe for the Financial Data and Technology Association. Michael R. King is the Lansdowne Chair in Finance at University of Victoria’s Gustavson School of Business. Prior to UVic, Michael was at Ivey Business School (2011-2019), where he held the Tangerine Chair in Finance and co-founded the Scotiabank Digital Banking Lab – Canada’s first FinTech research centre. He is the co-author of The Technological Revolution in Financial Services: How Banks, Fintechs and Customers Win Together (with Richard W. Nesbitt). Vineet Malhotra is MD and Head of Retail and Alternate Solutions Group at CIBC Capital Markets. Vineet is also Head of Simplii, an online bank serving Canadian customers. The Retail Solutions Group manufactures and delivers Global Markets products, including Foreign Exchange, Fixed Income, Precious Metals, and Structured Solutions for CIBC Capital Markets’ 6 million retail clients in Canada. Richard Nesbitt is an Adjunct Professor of the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Richard is working with the London School of Economics and Political Science as Chair of a new research institute “The Inclusion Initiative at LSE”. Richard was Chief Operating Officer of CIBC until September 2014. From 2004 to 2008 Richard was Chief Executive Officer of Toronto Stock Exchange. Richard is an alumnus of LSE. Brenda Trenowden (@BTrenowden) is a Partner at PwC leading the Inclusive Culture, Diversity and Purpose consulting practice. As Global Chair of the 30% Club, Brenda worked with Chairs, CEOs and leaders around the world. Brenda was listed as one of the 100 Most Influential Women in Finance for 3 years running and in 2018, was awarded a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List for services to the financial sector and gender equality. Minouche Shafik is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Prior to this she was Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. More about this event The Department of Psychological & Behavioural Science (@LSE_PBS) is a growing community of researchers, intellectuals, and students who investigate the human mind and behaviour in a societal context. Our department conducts cutting-edge psychological and behavioural research that is both based in and applied to the real world.

Contributor(s): Dr Daphne Nicolitsas | Putting available talent to its best use is key for the welfare of individuals and of the society to which they belong. Unequal access to opportunity in education and labour markets tampers with the allocation of talent leading to more inequality, poverty traps and lower welfare for all. This lecture reviews recent evidence on the misallocation of talent by economic class and gender in different settings, highlighting how temporary shocks - such as the current pandemic can have permanent consequences. Meet our speakers and chair Oriana Bandiera (@orianabandiera) is the Sir Anthony Atkinson Professor of Economics at LSE, and a fellow of the British Academy, the Econometric Society, CEPR, BREAD and IZA. She is co-editor of Econometrica, vice-president of the European Economic Association, and director of the Gender, Growth and Labour Markets in Low-Income Countries (G²LM|LIC) programme. She serves on the council of the Econometric Society, on board of the International Growth Centre and as vice-president of the Collegio Carlo Alberto. Aristides N. Hatzis is Professor of Philosophy of Law and Theory of Institutions at the University of Athens. He is the Director of Research at the Center for Liberal Studies-Athens, a Fellow of the Institute for Research in Economics and Fiscal Issues-Paris, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Society of European Contract Law, the Steering Committee of the European Network for Better Regulation and the Editorial Board of the European Review of Contract Law. Daphne Nicolitsas is, since Feb 2014, an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics of the University of Crete. Prior to that she worked in economic policy related jobs and in the financial sector. Her main research interests lie in labour economics and in industrial organization, fields in which she has publications in international journals. Currently, she is co-ordinating an EU-funded project, with partners from top EU Universities, on the structure and conduct of Employers’ Associations in the EU. Kevin Featherstone is Eleftherios Venizelos Professor in Contemporary Greek Studies and Professor in European Politics and the Director of the Hellenic Observatory. More about this event The Hellenic Observatory (@HO_LSE) is internationally recognised as one of the premier research centres on contemporary Greece and Cyprus. It engages in a range of activities, including developing and supporting academic and policy-related research; organisation of conferences, seminars and workshops; academic exchange through visiting fellowships and internships; as well as teaching at the graduate level through LSE's European Institute. The National Bank of Greece (@NationalBankGR), backed by its 179-year participation in the country's economic and social life, is one of the leading Greek financial organisations, with strong tradition and noteworthy contribution to the economic and social transformation of Greece. The Bank’s broad customer base, respected brand name, strong market share in deposits and enhanced capital adequacy ratios secure it with the liquidity needed to finance Greek businesses and reflect the long-standing relationship of trust it enjoys with its clientele. This event forms part of the Hellenic Observatory Athens Lecture Series, co-organised with the National Bank of Greece and supported by the LSE Hellenic Alumni Association. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEAthensLectures

Contributor(s): Professor Naila Kabeer | Join us for this first lecture in our new series organised in memory of Sylvia Chant which will be delivered by Naila Kabeer. Professor Kabeer will use a feminist economic lens to analyse a range of different impacts associated with COVID-19 and to explore the kinds of policies that such a lens would suggest for a more resilient and equitable future. Meet our speaker and chair Naila Kabeer (@N_Kabeer) is Professor of Gender and Development at the Department of Gender Studies and Department of International Development at LSE. Eric Neumayer is Professor of Environment and Development and Pro-Director (PVC) Planning and Resources at LSE. More about this event The Sylvia Chant Lectures are organised in memory of Sylvia Chant, Professor of Development Geography. The Department of Geography and Environment (@LSEGeography) is a centre of international academic excellence in economic, urban and development geography, environmental social science and climate change. LSE Gender (@LSEGenderTweet) pioneers intersectional, interdisciplinary and transnational teaching and research, addressing the tenacity of gendered power relations and gendered inequalities in times of global transformations. Established in 1993, LSE Gender is the largest Department of Gender Studies in Europe. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

Contributor(s): Baroness Shafik, Juan Manuel Santos, Professor Amartya Sen | What should a social contract for the 21st century look like? Launching her new book, What We Owe Each Other, LSE Director Minouche Shafik draws on evidence from across the globe to identify key principles for a social contract for every society. She will be in conversation with Juan Manuel Santos and Amartya Sen. The social contract governs all aspects of society, from politics and law to our families and communities. Accelerating changes in technology, demography, climate and global health, as we have seen over the last year, will reshape our world in ways we have yet to fully grasp. How do we pool risks, share resources and balance individual with collective responsibility? What part do we each have to play? You can order the book, What We Owe Each Other: a new social contract, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney. Meet our speakers and chair Minouche Shafik is Director of LSE. Prior to this she was Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. An economist by training, Baroness Shafik has spent most of her career straddling the worlds of public policy and academia. After completing her BSc in economics and politics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, she took an MSc in economics at LSE before completing a DPhil in economics at St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford. In 2020 the UK Government announced that she would be made a Life Peer in the House of Lords. Juan Manuel Santos Calderón (@JuanManSantos) is the former President of the Republic of Colombia, serving two terms, from 2010 to 2018. He was Colombia’s first Foreign Trade Minister, has been Minister of Finance and before being elected President, was Minister for National Defence. Prior to entering politics, President Santos was deputy director of El Tiempo newspaper, and wrote a weekly opinion column. He was awarded the King of Spain International Journalism Award and named president of the Freedom of Expression Commission for the Inter American Press Association (IAPA). In 2016 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He is a member of The Elders and a Honorary Graduate of LSE. President Santos studied for a Master of Science in the Department of Economics at LSE in 1975. Amartya Sen is Thomas W Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University and an LSE Honorary Fellow. His research has ranged over social choice theory, economic theory, ethics and political philosophy, welfare economics, theory of measurement, decision theory, development economics, public health, and gender studies. Amartya Sen’s books have been translated into more than thirty languages and his awards include the Nobel Prize in Economics. Tim Besley is School Professor of Economics of Political Science and W Arthur Lewis Professor of Development Economics in the Department of Economics at LSE. He is also a member of the National Infrastructure Commission. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and British Academy. He is also a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Economic Association and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Contributor(s): Professor Jim Sidanius | The Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements have led to a renewed focus on the persistence of inequality along the lines of race, gender, and their intersection. Political psychology attempts to shed light on this through connecting individual behaviour to wider institutional and ideological dynamics. On the eve of the completion of an updated edition of his now classic text, Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Hierarchy and Oppression, political psychologist Jim Sidanius will present some of his latest ideas on the psychological foundations of intergroup inequality, followed by a conversation on their relevance to twenty-first century struggles for social justice. Meet our speaker and chair Jim Sidanius is the John Lindsley Professor of Psychology in memory of William James and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington (@jsskeffington) is an Assistant Professor in the department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at LSE. More about this event The Department of Psychological & Behavioural Science (@LSE_PBS) is a growing community of researchers, intellectuals, and students who investigate the human mind and behaviour in a societal context. Our department conducts cutting-edge psychological and behavioural research that is both based in and applied to the real world.

Contributor(s): Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad | A discussion about race and racial inequity in the United States, past and present. Meet our speaker and chair Khalil Gibran Muhammad (@KhalilGMuhammad) is Professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. He is the former Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library and the world’s leading library and archive of global black history. Khalil’s scholarship examines the broad intersections of race, democracy, inequality and criminal justice in modern U.S. history. He is author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Harvard), which won the 2011 John Hope Franklin Best Book award in American Studies. Peter Trubowitz (@ptrubowitz) is Professor of International Relations and Director of the US Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Associate Fellow at Chatham House. More about this event The LSE's United States Centre (@LSE_US) is a hub for global expertise, analysis and commentary on America. Our mission is to promote policy-relevant and internationally-oriented scholarship to meet the growing demand for fresh analysis and critical debate on the United States. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEUSRace

Contributor(s): Professor Odd Arne Westad | In this series of four lectures, the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale, Odd Arne Westad, discusses the concept of empire and why it is still relevant today. Even if the Europeans had deemed the 19th century a “long peace”, the world had changed tremendously between 1800 and 1900. Of the 1800 powers only a few remained strong, and they were all European. But, at the same time, the concept of empire was changing, and new forms of anti-imperial resistance was starting to grow. This third lecture will discuss high imperialisms, their relationship to globalising capitalism, and how a destabilised European world initiated the tragedies of the 20th century. Meet our speaker and chair Odd Arne Westad is the Engelsberg Chair for 2020/21 at LSE IDEAS. He is currently the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale, and is a former director of LSE IDEAS. Christopher Coker is Director of LSE IDEAS. More about this event A podcast of the first lecture can be found at Empires Past & Present: the idea of empire. The second lecture, Empires Past and Present: empire around 1800, took place on 26 January, a podcast is available. LSE IDEAS (@lseideas) is LSE's foreign policy think tank. We connect academic knowledge of diplomacy and strategy with the people who use it. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEEngelsberg

Contributor(s): Kgalema Motlanthe, Ruth Dreifuss, Helen Clark, Juan Manuel Santos Calderón | In the last decade, the negative consequences of the international drug control regime based on repression and coercion have increasingly become visible barriers to sustainable development. Despite important reforms and paradigm changes in certain countries and regions, drug policies still pose serious challenges to the international development objectives. These consequences range from negative outcomes in control of infectious diseases, in access to controlled pain relief, in over incarceration and disproportionality of sentencing targeting certain populations, to breaches in the rule of law as drug laws are not complied with. These consequences are visible and dire at all levels of governance, and affect the most marginalized populations first. What can be done to mitigate the negative consequences of drug policies on development, and what reforms are suggested? This high-level discussion will explore the experiences of four former heads of state or government, from four regions in the world, to discuss the medium and long-term solutions to the harms created by current drug control policies. Meet our speakers and chair Juan Manuel Santos Calderón (@JuanManSantos) is the former President of the Republic of Colombia, serving two terms, from 2010 to 2018. He was Colombia’s first Foreign Trade Minister, has been Minister of Finance and before being elected President, was Minister for National Defence. Prior to entering politics, President Santos was deputy director of El Tiempo newspaper, and wrote a weekly opinion column. He was awarded the King of Spain International Journalism Award and named president of the Freedom of Expression Commission for the Inter American Press Association (IAPA). In 2016 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He is a member of The Elders, a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy and a Honorary Graduate of LSE. President Santos studied for a Master of Science in the Department of Economics at LSE in 1975. Helen Clark (@HelenClarkNZ) is a global leader on sustainable development, gender equality and international co-operation. She served three successive terms as Prime Minister of New Zealand between 1999 and 2008. She then became the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Administrator for two terms from 2009 to 2017, the first woman to lead the organisation. She was also the Chair of the United Nations Development Group, a committee consisting of the Heads of all UN funds, programmes and departments working on development issues. In 2019 Helen Clark became patron of The Helen Clark Foundation. In 2020, she was elected chair of the Global Commission on Drug Policy. Ruth Dreifuss was elected Federal Councillor in 1993 by the Federal Assembly, and was re-elected twice. From 1993 to her resignation in 2002, she was Head of the Federal Department of Home Affairs, in charge of public health and social insurance. During the year 1999, Ruth Dreifuss was President of the Swiss Confederation. After her retirement from government, she chaired the commission mandated by WHO that reported on public health, innovation and intellectual property rights, and co-chaired the High Level Panel on Access to Medicines, mandated by the United Nations Secretary-General. Ruth Dreifuss is member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, which she chaired from 2016 to 2020. She also serves as a member of the International Commission against the Death Penalty. Kgalema Motlanthe was elected President of the Republic of South Africa by the Parliament in September 2008, a position he held until 9 May 2009. He was appointed by President Jacob Zuma to serve as the Deputy President. He served in that position from 11 May 2009 until 24 May 2014. Motlanthe also served two five-year terms as Secretary General of the ANC from December 1997 to December 2007, and was the Deputy President of the African National Congress from December 2007 to December 2012. He now heads the Kgalema Motlanthe Foundation that was established when he left office of government and is a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy. Andrés Velasco (@AndresVelasco) is the Dean of the LSE School of Public Policy. He was the Minister of Finance in Chile between 2006 and 2010 and has held professorial roles at the Harvard Kennedy School and Columbia University´s School of International and Public Affairs. More about this event The School of Public Policy (@LSEPublicPolicy) equips you with the skills and ideas to transform people and societies. It is an international community where ideas and practice meet. Their approach creates professionals with the ability to analyse, understand and resolve the challenges of contemporary governance. The purpose of The Global Commission on Drug Policy (@globalcdp) is to bring to the international level an informed, science-based discussion about humane and effective ways to reduce the harm caused by drugs and drug control policies to people and societies. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEPolicy

Contributor(s): Dr Natalia Kanem | Natalia Kanem, Executive Director of UNFPA, the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency, will discuss why bodily autonomy and sexual and reproductive health and rights are fundamental to advancing human dignity and equality, prosperity and peace, and sustainable development that leaves no one behind. Meet our speaker and chair Natalia Kanem (@Atayeshe) is United Nations Under-Secretary General and Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund (@UNFPA). UNFPA is the United Nations sexual and reproductive health and rights agency. Appointed by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres in 2017, Dr. Kanem has more than 30 years of strategic leadership experience in the fields of preventive medicine, public and reproductive health, social justice and philanthropy. She started her research career in academia with the Johns Hopkins and Columbia University schools of medicine and public health. Rishita Nandagiri is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Methodology at LSE. Her doctoral research (Department of Social Policy, LSE; 2019) was a multimethod study investigating women’s abortion-related trajectories to care in Karnataka, India. She was previously an LSE Fellow in Health and International Development at the Department of International Development. More about this event The Global Health Initiative (@LSEGlobalHealth) 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. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEHealth

Contributor(s): David R. Malpass | Join World Bank Group President David Malpass, ahead of the Spring Meetings, at the London School of Economics and Political Science as he discusses what is needed to build a green, inclusive, and resilient recovery from the pandemic. The crisis has worsened inequality and disproportionately impacted the poorest and most vulnerable, particularly women and children. In his conversation with Minouche Shafik, Director of LSE, President Malpass will share his thoughts on accelerating a recovery that tackles growing inequalities and improves livelihoods. Meet our speaker and chair David R. Malpass (@DavidMalpassWBG) was selected as 13th President of the World Bank Group by its Board of Executive Directors on April 5, 2019. His five-year term began on April 9. Mr Malpass previously served as Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs for the United States. Mr Malpass represented the United States in international settings, including the G-7 and G-20 Deputy Finance Ministerial, World Bank–IMF Spring and Annual Meetings, and meetings of the Financial Stability Board, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. Minouche Shafik is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Prior to this, she was Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. More about this event This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19 A transcript of David Malpass's speech is available at Tackling the COVID-19 Pandemic of Inequality to Build a Green, Inclusive, & Resilient Recovery.

Contributor(s): Dr Grace Lordan | In this event, Paul Dolan will be in conversation with Grace Lordan about her new book, Think Big: Take Small Steps and Build the Future You Want. In this book, drawing on cutting-edge research from behavioural science, Grace offers immediate actionable solutions and tips that will help you get closer to your dream future. Focusing on six key areas - time, goal planning, self-narratives, other people, your environment, and resilience - Dr Lordan reveals practical, science-backed life hacks that will help you get ahead. Join us in this special event, to mark the launch of Think Big where Grace will be talking about her practical framework that will keep you moving in the right direction towards any goal, even during a pandemic. You can order the book, Think Big: Take Small Steps and Build the Future You Want, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney. Meet our speaker and chair Grace Lordan (@GraceLordan_) is an associate professor in behavioural science at LSE. Her research focuses on why some people have successful lives as compared to others because of factors beyond their own control. She is the founder and director of The Inclusion Initiative, a research centre at LSE and the author of Think Big: Take Small Steps and Build the Future You Want. Paul Dolan (@profpauldolan) is Professor of Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is author of the Sunday Times best-selling book Happiness by Design, and Happy Ever After. More about this event The Department of Psychological & Behavioural Science (@LSE_PBS) is a growing community of researchers, intellectuals, and students who investigate the human mind and behaviour in a societal context. Our department conducts cutting-edge psychological and behavioural research that is both based in and applied to the real world. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

Contributor(s): Professor Sinan Aral | Join us for this talk by MIT professor Sinan Aral who will draw on two decades of his own research and business experience and go under the hood of the biggest, most powerful social networks to tackle the critical question of just how much social media actually shapes our choices, for better or worse. In his new book, which he will be talking about, Aral shows how the tech behind social media offers the same set of behaviour-influencing levers to both Russian hackers and brand marketers—to everyone who hopes to change the way we think and act—which is why its consequences affect everything from elections to business, dating to health. Along the way, he covers a wide array of topics, including how network effects fuel Twitter’s and Facebook’s massive growth to the neuroscience of how social media affects our brains, the real consequences of fake news, the power of social ratings, and the impact of social media on our kids. In mapping out strategies for being more thoughtful consumers of social media, The Hype Machine offers the definitive guide to understanding and harnessing for good the technology that has redefined our world overnight. Meet our speaker and chair Sinan Aral (@sinanaral) is the David Austin Professor of Management, Marketing, IT, and Data Science at MIT; director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy; and head of MIT’s Social Analytics Lab. Edgar Whitley is an Associate Professor (Reader) of Information Systems at LSE Department of Management.

Contributor(s): Professor Jessica Wilson, Dr Vanessa Seifert, Philip Ball | The biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Is there an even more general theory that can make sense of all the sciences? The various scientific disciplines each have their own methods, theories, and practices. This is the case even when different sciences try to explain the same phenomena. Can we translate between these distinct disciplines? What does this even mean? Might all of science be reduced to physics one day? Our panel discuss reduction, emergence, and the unity of the sciences. Meet our speakers and chair Philip Ball (@philipcball) is a science writer and Editor of Nature. Vanessa Seifert (@seifert_vanessa) is Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Bristol. Jessica Wilson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. Clare Moriarty (@quiteclare) is a Fellow at the Forum for Philosophy and IRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. More about this event The Forum for Philosophy (@forumphilosophy) hosts events exploring science, politics, and culture from a philosophical perspective. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEForum