LSE: Public lectures and events

Contributor(s): Professor David Sumpter | What is the best way to think about the world? How often do we consider how our own thinking might impact the way we approach our daily decisions? Could it help or hinder our relationships, our careers, or even our health? Acclaimed mathematician David Sumpter shows how we can deal with the chaos and complexity of our lives with four easily applied approaches to our problems: statistical, interactive, chaotic and complex. Combining engaging personal experience with practical advice and inspiring tales of ground-breaking scientific pioneers (with a tiny bit of number crunching along the way), Sumpter explains how these tried and tested methods can help us with every conundrum, from how to bicker less with our partners to pitching to a tough crowd - and in doing so change our lives.

Contributor(s): Professor Oriana Bandiera, Chipokota Mwanawasa, Asif Saleh, Ali Sarfraz | The conversation will centre around the pressing needs of adaptation and social protection, both integral for survival and resilience in these regions. The speakers will discuss the need for research and innovative strategies promoting sustainable livelihoods and diversification of jobs, highlighting policy interventions that fortify the most vulnerable against escalating climate shocks.

Contributor(s): Alison McGovern MP, Professor Henrik J Kleven, Professor Linda Scott | In this event, expert and best-selling author Linda Scott, in a conversation with academic and political leaders, discusses how the unequal division of the burden of parenthood fuels women’s systematic exclusion from economic participation.

Contributor(s): Professor Sir Christopher Pissarides, Professor Charlie Beckett, Dr Giulia Gentile | We’ll hear about the introduction of Artificial Intelligence in the courtroom, and what might happen if robots take over the roles of judges. Experts will explore how journalism and other professional fields could be affected by the AI revolution. They will discuss what individuals can do to prepare, and the role of governments and businesses in addressing practical and ethical concerns about the technology. Maayan Arad talks to: Professor Sir Christopher Pissarides, LSE professor of economics and Nobel Prize winner; Professor Charlie Beckett, LSE media professor and director of Polis, LSE’s journalism think-tank; and Dr Giulia Gentile, Lecturer in Law at the University of Essex Law School and former a Fellow at LSE Law School.   Contributors Professor Sir Christopher Pissarides Professor Charlie Beckett Dr Giulia Gentile Chat GPT Research LawGPT? How AI is Reshaping the Legal Profession by Giulia Gentile The digitisation of justice risks blurring the lines between public and private actors by Giulia Gentile AI in the courtroom and judicial independence: An EU perspective by Giulia Gentile Forthcoming report by JournalismAI – a project of Polis, the LSE’s journalism think-thank. The Pissarides Review into the Future of Work and Wellbeing The Institute for the Future of Work

Contributor(s): James Ball | The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World, takes us into the depths of the internet to trace the origins and rapid ascent of QAnon – the world's first digital pandemic – and how we can build immunity. Imagine a deadly pathogen that, once created, could infect any person in any part of the globe within seconds. No need to wait for travellers, trains, or air traffic to spread it, all you need is an internet connection. In his new book, James Ball decodes the cryptic language of the online right and with a surgeon's precision tracks the spread of QAnon, the world's first digital pandemic. QAnon began in 2017 as an internet community dedicated to supporting President Trump and intent on outing a global cabal of human traffickers. What started as a macabre game of virtual make believe quickly spiralled into the spread of virulently hateful, dangerous messaging – which turned into tragic, violent actions. From a standoff at the Hoover Dam, to the storming of the U.S. Capitol on 6 January 2021, to protesting COVID-19 lockdowns, this digital pandemic has spread globally and shows no signs of stopping.

Contributor(s): Dr Joana Setzer, Catherine Higham, Dr Maria Antonia Tigre, Professor Lauge Poulson, Dr Birsha Ohdedar, Sophie Marjanac, Laura Ford | This influential report presents an overview of climate litigation, highlighting recent developments and future trends. The report is widely read and cited by civil society organisations, policymakers, the legal community, judges, financiers, scholars and media all around the world. Over the past year, the climate litigation field has seen novel case strategies deployed against a broad array of government and corporate actors. Notable examples in the private sector include a world-first case brought against Shell's Board of Directors, as well as against a commercial bank. Three new cases have also been brought against Russia, Finland and Sweden, to challenge the inadequacy of their national climate plans more Increasingly a broad range of actors is compelled to understand how the litigation landscape is evolving and what risks litigation poses to their activities in the public and private spheres. The event is chaired by the Grantham Research Institute’s Director, Elizabeth Robinson, and will begin with a short presentation from authors Joana Setzer and Catherine Higham on the findings of the 2023 Global Trends in Climate Change Litigation report. The presentation is followed by a panel discussion, with five distinguished experts in the field. Panellists react to the report and draw out key aspects from their own experience in the field.

Contributor(s): Professor Gary Younge, Gary Stevenson, Dr Faiza Shaheen, Kimberly McIntosh | Part memoir, part polemic, this is a personal and statistical look at how society is built, the people it leaves behind, and what we can do about it. Our panel of speakers discuss the prospects for social mobility in Britain today, and how we can create opportunities for all.

Contributor(s): | More and more individuals and groups are taking action and using their voices to tackle the growing social and economic inequalities. Social movements and activists engage with, challenge, and seek to shape policy processes and wider political transformations to tackle inequalities through forms of mobilisation as well as everyday forms of action and resistance. From racial justice to climate emergency and women’s rights, they are imagining and building more equal, just, and sustainable societies all across the world. Looking beyond just forms of resistance, this panel will discuss the role of activists and social movements in today’s world and examine their agency in imagining utopian futures and creating change. How are social movements providing creative spaces for not only challenging inequalities but also coming up with alternative ideas for solutions to address the problems they are fighting against? And how and to what extent are these ideas informing policy changes?

Contributor(s): Erin K. Wilson, Georgette Bennett, John Casson, Dr Mukulika Banerjee | But this has distracted us from asking how religion itself is changing and, in turn, changing understandings of identity, political participation and citizenship for millions of people around the world. In many countries religion is being fused with populist politics and becoming an important component in new nationalisms such as in Russia and India where Orthodox Christian and Hindu Nationalists discourse have taken on new importance. In other places it is being mobilised as a source of resistance to state oppression or corporate exploitation. Are these more political expressions of religion less grounded in personal piety and community practice, reflecting a different kind of secularisation – the loss of transcendence? Is religion in today’s world more politicised, more tribal, and less spiritual? Or are we in fact in a post-secular era where spiritual impulses are changing our understanding of ‘secular’ politics?

Contributor(s): Dr Angela Spatharou, Dr Alexandra Gomes, James Fransham | We are rightly concerned about the misuse of our personal data, but data science and the tracking of data reveal crucial information about the impacts of change on people, as the COVID-19 pandemic uncovered. Health and well-being must also be seen beyond the medical point of view - the space we live in has a strong impact on us, as shown in our Festival exhibition Mapping People and Change.

Contributor(s): Tomiwa Owolade | Debate abounds around racism, identity, diversity, immigration and colonial history, and, in the rush to address injustice, Britain has followed the lead of the world's dominant power: America. We judge ourselves by America's standards, absorb its arguments and follow its agenda. But what if we're looking in the wrong place?In This is Not America, Tomiwa Owolade argues that too much of the conversation around race in Britain is viewed through the prism of American ideas that don't reflect the history, challenges and achievements of increasingly diverse black populations at home. If we want to build a long-lasting and more effective anti-racist agenda - one that truly values black British communities - we must acknowledge that crucial differences exist between Britain and America; that we are talking about distinct communities and cultures, distinguished by language, history, class, religion and national origin.

Contributor(s): | These include reported mass rape, torture, and abductions of children, as well as the destruction of civil infrastructure like schools, hospitals, and residential homes. Efforts are under way by inter-state and non-state organisations, governments, and civil society to document the crimes and the material consequences and costs of the invasion. The panel, including prominent Ukraine policy practitioners and leading academic experts on Ukraine and Russia, discuss whether there is a legal case to be made that Russia is committing crimes of aggression and/or genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes; and what the prospects are for prosecuting the crimes in international tribunals. They will also ask what the perpetrators’ responsibility is for post-war reconstruction of Ukraine, whether through paying for damages or tackling legal issues (such as the possibility of using Russia’s frozen assets).

Contributor(s): Ros Taylor, Professor Gwyn Bevan | So what is wrong with the design of British government, and how has it resulted in catastrophic failures of governance in recent years? To mark the publication of his new book with LSE Press, Professor Gwyn Bevan and political podcaster and author Ros Taylor will reflect on a century of systemic failures of governance and explore what an innovative state might look like in the future.

Contributor(s): Professor Michael Wooldridge, Dr Giulia Gentile, Dr Thomas Ferretti, Dr Christine Chow | The sudden rise of ChatGPT has confirmed that artificial intelligence is no longer a technology of the future, but is already shaping our everyday lives – from work and education to policing, transport and even sport.

Contributor(s): Professor Vladislav Zubok, Professor Tomila Lankina, Adam Curtis, Grigor Atanesian | Adam Curtis’s BAFTA-nominated BBC series, Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone, documents what it felt like to live through the collapse of communism and democracy, based on preserved and digitised footage from BBC archives and forgotten or never shown scenes from Soviet life and life in post-Soviet states. Adam Curtis and Traumazone producer Grigor Atanesian, in conversation with Professor Vladislav Zubok and Professor Tomila Lankina, will reflect on what went wrong thirty-something years ago.

Contributor(s): Lucia Osborne-Crowley, Winnie M Li, Dr Kathryn Claire Higgins, Rowena Chiu | More than five years after the first Weinstein allegations appeared in news headlines, #MeToo continues to impact our media landscape, but we should not ignore the impact this movement has had on the individual people caught in the glare of the media spotlight. Which survivors are seen as believable in the media? What is the emotional labour required of survivors whose experiences of trauma are made so very public? Our unique panel looks at at these mediated struggles for visibility, authenticity, and recognition around #MeToo, drawn from their own lived experience, media practice, and academic research. Rowena Chiu’s story became public during the Harvey Weinstein investigation and later a Hollywood film adaptation. Winnie M Li’s experience with news media reports of her rape prompted her subsequent writing, activism, and PhD research. Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s personal trauma informed her own study of the law, and then her astute journalism around sexual assault. They will speak in dialogue with Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kathryn Claire Higgins, whose latest book is Believability: Sexual Violence, Media, and the Politics of Doubt (2023).

Contributor(s): Lord Willetts, Swatee Deepak, Dr Ayça Çubukçu, Daniel Chandler | Whilst many are dissatisfied with the status quo, it is surprisingly hard to find a coherent vision of what a better and fairer world would look like. In the Festival’s closing event, leading thinkers put forward their suggestions.

Contributor(s): Dr Katerina Glyniadaki | Drawing examples from her research on migration management, Dr Glyniadaki discusses some steps that organisations for migrants take to prevent crises, as well as some strategies individual migrants employ to tackle transition and overcome relevant challenges.

Contributor(s): Professor Sam Friedman, Professor Lee Elliot Major | A society with high social mobility creates opportunities for people from all backgrounds to excel. The UK is becoming less socially mobile, meaning that, compared to previous generations, the chances of young people starting out today are more tightly tied to their background. Leading experts in this field discuss not only what can be done to level the playing field - but why it’s not being done already and what is needed to turn ideas into action.

Contributor(s): Dr Eleanor Knott, Dr Kristin Surak, Dr Robtel Neajai Pailey | In this session three scholars from across the social sciences explore the varying, complex, and global nature of inequalities produced in and through citizenship in the 21st century. Drawing on their newly released books, our panel discuss new transformations in citizenship and (in)equality, ranging from contestations around dual citizenship for Liberia, to the sale of citizenship by microstates to millionaires, to the extra-territorial acquisition of citizenship in Crimea and Moldova.

Contributor(s): Dr Karin A. King, Dr Aurelie Cnop-Nielsen | Negotiation is one of the most important skills of successful managers in organisations today. In the context of ongoing change in business, economies and society, organisations need to adapt the design of work and the workplace. The ability to use negotiations effectively day to day has become a key skill for managers to support employees and teams through ongoing change. This session looks closely at what it takes to be an effective negotiator and what that means for supporting people in organisations today to navigate ongoing complex change. Participants consider how you can develop the skills it takes to support your teams to navigate change while creating more value for all involved through effective negotiations.

Contributor(s): Professor Nicola Lacey, Professor Robert J. Sampson | Does when you are born shape your life chances? A leading sociologist discusses his ground-breaking study of criminal justice that shows that when you come of age matters as much (and perhaps more than) who you are in determining whether you get arrested.

Contributor(s): Martin Lewis | Ours is an age of rampant inequalities and pervasive financial struggles, where the power of big banks and corporations seems overwhelming to the individual. Whilst you might hope for longer term systemic change, what can you do in the shorter term to improve your financial situation and change your relationship with money?

Contributor(s): Dr Jonathan Cardoso-Silva | Generative AI is a field of artificial intelligence that can create new data based on existing data, such as text, images, code and sounds. It can mimic the way humans create new ideas, concepts and designs that are both diverse and novel. It has the potential to transform higher education by enhancing learning outcomes, fostering creativity and enabling authentic assessments. However, it also poses challenges and ethical implications, such as ensuring quality, integrity and fairness. This talk will demonstrate how generative AI can be used to create engaging and personalised learning experiences for students in higher education. It will show examples of how generative AI tools can generate text, images, code and sounds based on text prompts, sketches or other inputs. It will also discuss how generative AI can enable more authentic assessments that measure students’ knowledge and skills in a relevant and meaningful way. The talk will highlight the opportunities and challenges of using generative AI in higher education and provide some practical tips and best practices for educators and learners.

Contributor(s): Sadiq Khan | For many years, Sadiq wasn't fully aware of the dangers posed by air pollution, nor its connection with climate change. Then, aged 43, he was unexpectedly diagnosed with adult-onset asthma - brought on by the polluted London air he had been breathing for decades. Scandalised, Sadiq underwent a political transformation that would see him become one of the most prominent global politicians fighting (and winning) elections on green issues. Since becoming Mayor of London in 2016, he has declared a climate emergency, introduced the world's first Ultra-Low Emission Zone, and turned London into the first-ever 'National Park City'. Now, Sadiq draws on his experiences to reveal the seven ways environmental action gets blown off course - and how to get it back on track. Whether by building coalitions across the political spectrum, putting social justice at the heart of green politics, or showing that the climate crisis is a health crisis too, he offers a playbook for anyone - voter, activist, or politician - who wants to win the argument on the environment. It will help create a world where we can all breathe again.

Contributor(s): Dr Rachel O'Neill, Adrienne Herbert, Dr Thomas Curran | Over the past 30 years, there has been a substantial increase in the percentage of people who feel they need to be perfect. The pressure we put on ourselves to be perfect and the expectations we feel from others and society-at-large can lead to depression, burnout and other mental illnesses, particularly amongst younger generations.

Contributor(s): Dr Luca Taschini, Annet Nakyeyune, Bogolo Kenewendo | We consider the ways in which climate change mitigation will be financed, seeking approaches from key African academics and professionals. We address the environmental and ecological challenges the continent faces and critically evaluate climate capitalism.

Contributor(s): Dr Emilio Lastra-Gil | People in different organisations may use the same new technology differently and, consequently, change informal organising in distinct ways. Materiality allows social effect if it is constant in the organisation under study. The aim of this session will be to discuss the socio-materiality perpective of ICTs.

Contributor(s): Dr Anna Valero, Rain Newton-Smith, Chris Skidmore, Dr Liam F Beiser-McGrath | As new ways to power our homes, workplaces and transport are developed there will be opportunities for sustainable, healthier economic growth. But there will also be costs for firms, workers and households. To date, climate action has faced challenges from the people, through protests and failed referenda, but has also been driven by public support and activism. How we can ensure the net zero transition is an inclusive one, so that crucial public support can be maintained and built?

Contributor(s): Dr Jens Madsen, Laura de Molière, Professor Conor Gearty, Stella Creasy | Prevented by risk or fear; hampered by bureaucracy; stifled by people circumventing interventions; or cancelled out by unintended consequences - the panel will consider the legal, social, political and psychological reasons why change is so hard.

Contributor(s): Dr Jasmine Virhia, Yolanda Blavo | In this session, we cover the changes to the workplace owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, the potential changes we expect to see in the future, and the UTOPIA framework, which we developed for the future of financial and professional services.

Contributor(s): Susan Scholefield, David Sinclair, Professor Sir Vince Cable | Prior to retiring people rarely consider these questions, and there is little of a public policy framework to help them do so. How much do we understand – or anticipate - the psychological life-change around moving from a full-time executive role to something else? The path to retirement is sometimes direct, sometimes voluntary and rarely what we think it will be. We discuss what research, teaching and ethnography can tell us about public policy around aging and the transition from work to retirement. The discussion touches on current public policy debates about the retirement age, anti-age discrimination, health and well-being.

Contributor(s): Dr Linda Yueh, Baroness Shafik, Zanny Minton Beddoes, Professor Richard Davies | Expert economists share stories of what is possible, and what the pitfalls might be, showing how economists and policymakers have changed our lives – to create safer, happier and fairer societies.

Contributor(s): Professor Adam Przeworski | The contemporary period of crisis has fundamentally altered party-political landscapes in democracies around the world. The rise of the far right, shifting voter preferences, renewed union activism, and new ideas have all contributed to a host of new opportunities and constraints for social democrats and the parties they inhabit -- and untangling this series of challenges will be key for understanding our shared political futures.

Contributor(s): Professor Kris Manjapra | Manjapra argues that during each of the supposed emancipations from slavery – whether Haiti after the revolution, the British Empire in 1833 or the United States during the Civil War – Black people were dispossessed by the moves meant to free them. Emancipation codified existing racial-colonial hierarchies - rather than obliterating them, with far-reaching consequences for climate colonialism and for environmental justice. For centuries, Black reparations movements emerged in opposition to emancipation’s racial distribution of social exploitation, toxicity, and precarity. Black reparations movements enacted liberation, sovereignty, Maroon ecologies, and alternative ways of dwelling beyond the racial-colonial order. Manjapra highlights the radical traditions of Black reparations as a long and ongoing struggle against the world order first created by slavery, then redoubled by emancipation, with deep consequences for how we approach climate justice today.

Contributor(s): Professor Tyler Cowen | For the first time, Large Language Models give us a direct and effective means of conversing with Artificial Intelligence on substantive questions of our choosing, including matters of economics. How do Large Language Models change our conception of how economies work? Are economies better described by words than we thought, or less well described? Given this new power of text, is Michael Polanyi's phenomenon of inarticulable knowledge more or less important?

Contributor(s): Professor Cornelia Woll, Dr C Raja Mohan, Professor Charles A Kupchan, Dr Selina Ho | Support for traditional international institutions such as the UN and the WTO is weakening in the Global North as well as the Global South. Can these institutions be revived and if so, how? Or is the postwar rules-based order now so fractured that we are likely to get more international and domestic “buy in” starting anew?

Contributor(s): Professor Raj Chetty | This talk will discuss recent research using data on billions of friendships from Facebook that identifies economic connectedness -- the degree of social interaction between low- and high-income people -- as a key predictor of economic mobility.  It will then discuss what factors determine the degree of interaction across class lines and policy implications to increase the forms of social capital most relevant for upward income mobility.

Contributor(s): Hannah Barnes, Professor Lucinda Platt | In this event investigative journalist Hannah Barnes speaks about her book: how she came to investigate the Tavistock’s gender service for children, the testimony she received, and her attempts to understand how safeguarding concerns got lost and the service unraveled.

Contributor(s): Professor Charles Stépanoff | In these three cases, we engage in opaque communication that is far from the standard psycholinguistic model of transparent discussion between adults. Yet anthropologists know that these asymmetrical situations can be some of the most emotionally intense in human lives. This willingness to build sociality beyond linguistic humanity (with infants, deceased and non-humans) allows humans to have a future, a past and a rich relationship with their living environment. This lecture argues that our ontological polyglossia is not a deviance but an intrinsic feature of the human condition. In these asymmetrical situations, the mind of our interlocutor remains opaque to us, which requires exploratory imagination and communicational creativity from us. We will explore this polyglossia in ritual language and in the kinship relationships Siberian peoples build with animals and the dead.

Contributor(s): Bee Rowlatt, Angela Saini | Join us as Angela reveals the true roots of gendered oppression, and the complex history of how male domination became embedded in societies across the globe. Travelling to the world’s earliest known human settlements, and tracing cultural and political histories from the Americas to Asia, she overturns simplistic universal theories to show that what patriarchy is and how far it goes back really depends on where you are. Despite the push back against sexism and exploitation in our own time, even revolutionary efforts to bring about equality have often ended in failure and backlash. Saini examines what part every one of us plays in keeping patriarchy alive, and asks that we look beyond the old narratives to understand why it persists.

Contributor(s): Dr William MacAskill | Does what we do today determine the happiness or misery of trillions of people in the future? MacAskill proposes that by making wise moral decisions today, we can navigate a multitude of crises – bioengineered pandemics, technological stagnation, climate change, and transformative AI – more fairly for generations to come.

Contributor(s): Dr Gabriella Paolucci, Dr Poornima Paidipaty, Professor Bridget Fowler | This book is the first sustained work reflecting on the relations between these two major theorists, and includes contributions from major writers drawing from both scholarly traditions. This new book especially focuses on "the practice of critique" that both thinkers exercised vigilantly throughout their careers. We reflect that ongoing dialogue with the entire body of Marxian critique is a constant in Bourdieu's writings, most clearly evidenced by the adoption of a critical perspective on the social world, and reinforced by the repeated references to Marx’s texts.

Contributor(s): Professor Raghuram Rajan | When the Federal Reserve expanded its balance sheet via large-scale asset purchases (quantitative easing) in recent years, we find an increase in commercial bank deposits with a shortening of their maturity, and also an increase in outstanding bank lines of credit to corporations. However, when it halted the balance-sheet expansion in 2014 and even reversed it during quantitative tightening starting in 2017, there was no commensurate shrinkage of these claims on liquidity. Consequently, the past expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet left the financial sector more sensitive to potential liquidity shocks when the Fed started shrinking it, necessitating Fed liquidity provision in September 2019 and again in March 2020. If the past repeats, the shrinkage of the central bank balance sheet is not likely to be an entirely benign process and will require careful monitoring of the size of on- and off-balance-sheet demandable claims on the banking sector. It is reasonable to ask whether the prior expansion and then shrinkage of the central banks balance sheets had left the private financial sector more vulnerable to such disruptions, and as a result, dependent on further liquidity interventions.

Contributor(s): Polly Toynbee, Professor David Runciman, Professor Margaret Levi, Daniel Chandler | In his new book, Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like?, Daniel Chandler argues that the ideas we need are hiding in plain sight, in the work of the twentieth century's greatest political philosopher, John Rawls. Although Rawls revolutionised philosophy — he is routinely compared to figures such as Plato, Hobbes and Mill – his distinctive vision of a fair society has had little impact on politics, until now. In this talk Daniel Chandler explores how Rawls’ ideas can rehabilitate liberalism as a progressive public philosophy, and point the way towards a practical agenda that would reinvigorate democratic politics and transform, or even transcend, capitalism.

Contributor(s): Professor John Foot | But how much does the contemporary period of political upheaval compare to the past? And what does this mean for the left in Italy and beyond? To find out, we're joined by John Foot to discuss his new book Blood and Power: The Rise and Fall of Italian Fascism.

Contributor(s): Professor Brian Burgoon, Professor Michael Cox, Professor Sara Hobolt, Professor Peter Trubowitz, Dr Leslie Vinjamuri | In Geopolitics and Democracy, Peter Trubowitz and Brian Burgoon provide a new explanation of why the liberal international order has buckled under the pressures of anti-globalist political forces. They trace the anti-globalist backlash to foreign policy decisions made by Western leaders in the decade after the Cold War’s end. These decisions sought to globalize markets and pool national sovereignty at the supranational level while undercutting social protections at home—a combination of policies that succeeded in expanding the Western liberal order, but at the cost of mounting public discontent and political fragmentation. This roundtable will discuss the book and its broader implications for democracy and the liberal order going forward.

Contributor(s): Professor Leonard Wantchekon, Professor Lord Stern, Professor Diane Coyle, Professor Pranab Bardhan | A generation ago, the so-called Washington Consensus laid out a series of do´s and don’t´s for policymakers around the world, and particularly in emerging and developing countries. The world has changed a great deal since 1989 and so has the collective wisdom on what sound policies look like. Today, goals such as sustainability, equity and cohesion play a much bigger role in orienting policy design than they did in the 1980s. There is a growing sense that states should take a more proactive role in confronting all these challenges, but is also likely that many states lack the capacity to do the job well, and will need to be reformed and made fit for purpose. This panel brings together experts discussing key emerging priorities and challenges across a number of policy areas, reflecting on not just what these policy priorities are and why, but also on how they can be implemented.

Contributor(s): Professor William Cook | The general setting is the following. Complexity theory suggests there are limits to the power of general-purpose computational techniques, in engineering, science and elsewhere. But what are these limits and how widely do they constrain our quest for knowledge? The TSP can play a crucial role in this discussion, demonstrating whether or not focused efforts on a single, possibly unsolvable, model will produce results beyond our expectations. We discuss the history of the TSP and its applications, together with computational efforts towards exact and approximate solutions.

Contributor(s): Professor Catarina Dutilh Novaes | Catarina Dutilh Novaes gives a public lecture on her Lakatos Award winning book, The Dialogical Roots of Deduction. Catarina is known for her research on the history and philosophy of logic, philosophy of mathematics, social epistemology, reasoning and cognition, and argumentation theory.

Contributor(s): Paul Mason, Dr Luke Cooper, Dr Olesya Khromeychuk | Before February 2022 Ukraine was already at war with Russia. This conflict, which began in February 2014 as Russia responded militarily to the "Revolution of Dignity", had already cost thousands of Ukrainian lives by the time of the second Russian invasion. One of them was Olesya Khromeychuk's brother Volodymyr, who died from shrapnel on the frontline in eastern Ukraine. Her book, "The death of a soldier told by his sister", combines memoir and essay, in a poignant account of the costs of the human costs of war, empire and authoritarianism. The book provides a vivid answer as to why, facing a full-scale military onslaught from Russia in February 2022, the people of Ukraine chose to resist. In this public lecture, Olesya discusses the book in light of the events of this year. Her lecture is followed by a discussion with Luke Cooper and Tim Judah.

Contributor(s): Dr Cleve Scott, Geoffrey Robertson, Dr Bob Morris | What can we learn from recent constitutional changes in the Caribbean? And what are the lessons from Britain’s own Republican experiment?

Contributor(s): Dr Jonathan Birch, Professor Kristin Andrews, Dr Rosalind Arden | Since this episode was recorded the UK Animal Welfare Act 2022 has become law. This extends animal welfare protections to animals such as octopuses, lobsters and crabs - a direct result of the findings of LSE academic Dr Jonathan Birch – featured in this episode - that animals are sentient. They have the capacity to experience pain, distress or harm.For this episode, James Rattee travels to the local park to find out how smart dogs are, he’ll hear about a campaign arguing that chimpanzees are animals deserving of their own rights and, finally, he’ll ask whether insects and other invertebrates have feelings. The 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. Research Foundations of Animal Sentience Project Chimpanzee Rights: The Philosophers’ Brief, Kristin Andrews, Gary L Comstock, Crozier G.K.D., Sue Donaldson, Andrew Fenton, Tyler M John, L. Syd M Johnson, Robert C Jones, Will Kymlicka, Letitia Meynell, Nathan Nobis, David Pena-Guzman and Jeff Sebo. A general intelligence factor in dogs, Rosalind Arden, Mark James Adams, Intelligence Volume 55, March–April 2016, Pages 79-85

Contributor(s): Dr Mara Pasquamaria Squicciarini | Dr Mara Pasquamaria Squicciarini (@mara_squi) is based in the Department of Economics at Bocconi University and is currently a visiting academic at Harvard. Her research interests include economic history, economic growth and development, and applied macroeconomics. Patrick Wallis is Professor of Economic History at LSE. His research explores the economic, social and medical history of Britain from the 16th to 18th century.

Contributor(s): Professor Sophia Kalantzakos, Daniel Litvin, Rob Patalano, Eric Buisson | Transitioning to net-zero emissions requires a large-scale economic transition to renewable energy. Scaling up the manufacturing of the technologies, including solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles will result in significant demand for and dependency on the supply of a range of minerals for the foreseeable future. These ‘transition-critical minerals’, including metals, minerals and Rare Earth Elements, are required to manufacture the green technologies needed for the transition to a low-carbon economy. As a low-carbon future will not be possible without these minerals, supply chain risks and demand uncertainties are central topics that need to be assessed and addressed, with potential implications for economic and financial stability. The type of transition to a net-zero economy significantly determines the materiality of the risks, with a delayed and disorderly transition presenting greater challenges for financial and price stability.

Contributor(s): Dr Alison Winch, Dr James Muldoon, Miranda Hall, Professor Jeremy Gilbert, Professor Myria Georgiou | But are the digital platforms we have today, and the business models that drive them, good for political life? And even if they are good for some dimensions of politics, for example mobilization, do they work as well for building solidarity and for forming long-term campaigns of progressive political change? What weight should we give to the fears of polarization online versus the more positive potentials of the digital? And differences of scale matter here between urban politics and the national or global? Finally, if we do have concerns about our current digital platforms, how do we build better ones? Who should do this, and what sorts of resource will they need? Our speakers who have all written books highly relevant to these topics will address and debate these urgent questions.

Contributor(s): Dr Andrew Bailey | Andrew Bailey is Governor of the Bank of England, a position he has held since March 2020. Andrew served as Chief Executive Officer of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) from 1 July 2016 until taking up the role of Governor. As CEO of the FCA, Andrew Bailey was also a member of the Prudential Regulation Committee, the Financial Policy Committee, and the Board of the Financial Conduct Authority. Andrew previously held the role of Deputy Governor, Prudential Regulation and CEO of the PRA from 1 April 2013. While retaining his role as Executive Director of the Bank, Andrew joined the Financial Services Authority in April 2011 as Deputy Head of the Prudential Business Unit and Director of UK Banks and Building Societies. In July 2012, Andrew became Managing Director of the Prudential Business Unit, with responsibility for the prudential supervision of banks, investment banks and insurance companies. Andrew was appointed as a voting member of the interim Financial Policy Committee at its June 2012 meeting. Previously, Andrew worked at the Bank in a number of areas, most recently as Executive Director for Banking Services and Chief Cashier, as well as Head of the Bank's Special Resolution Unit (SRU). Previous roles include Governor's Private Secretary, and Head of the International Economic Analysis Division in Monetary Analysis. Minouche Shafik is President and Vice Chancellor of the London School of Economics and Political Science. She was previously a senior leader of the Bank of England, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. She is an alumna of LSE. Her new book, What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract, is out now.

Contributor(s): Professor Yasheng Huang | Drawing on new data, he will explore the policy implications of this historical pattern for China at a time of mounting strategic and economic rivalry with the United States.

Contributor(s): Ralitsa Angelova, Oliver Bulleid, Christian Hilber, Kath Scanlon | We’ll hear how planning restrictions established in the 1700s are still preventing development on some of London’s most valuable land. Experts will set out why we can’t afford to not build on the greenbelts that circle some of our major cities. And an Executive Director will explain how his organisation is building homes that will be truly affordable in perpetuity. Sue Windebank talks to: Ralitsa (Rali) Angelova, a young mum whose family has had the chance to buy an affordable flat in London; Oliver Bulleid, Executive Director of the London Community Land Trust; Professor Christian Hilber, an urban and real estate economist at LSE and; Kath Scanlon, Distinguished Policy Fellow at LSE London.

Contributor(s): Dr Richard V Reeves, Dr Abigail McKnight | Boys in OECD countries are 50% more likely than girls to fail at all three key school subjects: maths, literacy, and science. Meanwhile, suicide is the biggest killer of men under the age of 45 in the UK. Profound economic and social changes of recent decades have left many men at a disadvantage in these areas. Many previous attempts to treat this condition have made the same fatal mistake - of viewing the problems of men as a problem with men. In his new book, Richard V Reeves explores how the male malaise is the result of deep structural challenges and societal issues. Richard draws on a careful analysis of social, economic, and demographic trends; current discussions on gender in psychology, public policy, economics and sociology; as well as on interviews with men and women, girls and boys. In particular, he examines the worrying signs that males are less responsive to social programs and policies intended to promote economic mobility.

Contributor(s): Professor Lars-Erik Cederman | Lars-Erik Cederman addresses the link between nationalism and conflict in relation to the Ukraine war.

Contributor(s): Catherine McKenna, Chris Skidmore MP | Catherine McKenna will be in conversation with Chris Skidmore MP about how to carry forward and implement the findings of the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Expert Group on Net-Zero Commitments of Non-State Entities, which were published in November 2022. The Group’s report sets out a roadmap to prevent net zero from being undermined by false claims, ambiguity and “greenwash”.

Contributor(s): Professor Pinelopi Goldberg | The world is trending away from globalisation. Brexit, the rise of protectionism in the US, and calls for re- or friend-shoring are recent manifestations of this trend. Pinelopi Goldberg, the Elihu Professor of Economics at Yale University and former Chief Economist of the World Bank Group, discusses the causes and implications of the retreat from globalisation for growth and inequality.

Contributor(s): Professor Mariana Mazzucato | Where does value come from? What is the difference between value creation and value extraction? And what is the role of the state in directing and co-shaping economies that are innovative, inclusive and sustainable? Mariana Mazzucato will explain how we lost sight of what value means and why we need to rethink the economic theory and practice that is shaping our economies. The contemporary concept of value - as interchangeable with price - has trapped policymakers in a debate about public “spending” rather than public “investment.” This has enormous implications for how economies are structured, and has impacted how leaders across the political spectrum frame economic policy and industrial strategy. Notably, as industrial policy is being revived, there is an opportunity to embed dynamic conditionalities in state funding to steer growth that is sustainable and inclusive – tackling wealth creation and inequality on a pre-distributive basis. Changing the status quo requires a different understanding of public value and public purpose, and the design of policy as not just market fixing but market shaping. Key to this is also the revival of stakeholder value through a new social contract between public and private actors, ensuring that partnerships between the state, private sector, and labour create shared value. In this way, governments can impact not only the rate of growth, but it’s direction.

Contributor(s): Professor Faruk Birtek, Professor Yaprak Gürsoy, Professor Laurent Mignon, Professor Şuhnaz Yılmaz | It will assess transformations in society, foreign policy, literature and politics while providing an overview of the history of the Turkish Republic, as well as the nation’s competing understandings of itself and idealisations of its past and future. When the Turkish Republic was founded on 29 October 1923, one of its ideals was the modernisation and Westernisation of the newly built nation. In the following century, these ideals have changed in content, but in many spheres of life, dialogues with the idea of progress have continued. Relations with the West and different interpretations of modernity divided the nation. Yet the notion of participating in a historically decisive movement of progress toward something distinctively better than the past has united generations and different political groups in various ways.

Contributor(s): Daniel Jolles, Dr Aliya Hamid Rao, Belton Flournoy, Dr Claire Crawford | Weak productivity in Britain is an acute problem. Explanations have included insufficient necessary skills, an overinvestment in unnecessary skills at the university level, capital shallowing and too little creative destruction. In this webinar we explore a different explanation. We ask whether a failure to recruit and operationalise diverse talent is an underlying root cause of slow growth.

Contributor(s): Paul Johnson | Government decisions determine the welfare of the poor and the elderly, the state of the health service, the effectiveness of our children’s education, and how prepared we are for the future: whether that is a pandemic or global warming. As a society, we are a reflection of what the government spends. Johnson looks at what happened following the financial crisis of 2008-09 and the austerity years that followed. He examines the way that the government tackled the economy during Covid – when the UK budget shot up to over a trillion for the first time – and he analyses prospects for our future as we grapple with looming recession and the cost of living crisis.

Contributor(s): Professor Alex Voorhoeve, Dr Elin Palm, Dr Orla Lynskey | Prominent ethical and legal frameworks claim that governments and businesses can permissibly process personal information, under specific conditions, as soon as data subjects give their consent. This already justifies constraints on personal data processing practices to secure free, informed, and unambiguous consent, as well as to respect the context in which consent was given. But consent is not the whole story. Processing personal data without consent may be permissible in some cases when other “legitimate interests” are at stake, such as national security or fraud prevention: so, how to balance privacy and other legitimate interests? On the other hand, emerging accounts of privacy propose that obtaining individual consent is sometimes insufficient to justify personal data processing. If giving away one’s personal data reveals information about others, or if coordination failure leads to suboptimal privacy for all, collective privacy decisions may be required.

Contributor(s): Dr Nihan Albayrak-Aydemir, Roger’s Bacon, Dr Dario Krpan, Dr Celestin Okoroji, Feiyang Wang | This low diversity of thought is reflected in numerous aspects of social sciences—for example, certain research topics (e.g., those that may be easily publishable) are prioritized over other important but less desirable topics (e.g., those that are not heavily cited or easy to publish); some methodologies such as experimentation are widely used whereas less common methods (e.g., self-observation) are neglected; short-term projects with quick gains are prioritized over the long-term ones; some participant populations are understudied (e.g., non-WEIRD samples - i.e., non-western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic); and theorizing is driven by arbitrary conventions and overly reliant on available research findings while avoiding speculation that could lead to new insights. In this event, social scientists of varied backgrounds will express their perspectives on diversity of thought in social sciences followed by a panel discussion.

Contributor(s): Dr Stuart Gordon, Sveto Muhammad Ishoq, Halima | The UK government could soon be sending some asylum-seekers on a one-way flight to Rwanda as part of a controversial strategy to deter those crossing the English Channel on small boats. Joanna Bale talks to Dr Stuart Gordon, Sveto Muhammad Ishoq and Halima, an Afghan refugee living in a hotel, about what it’s like to flee your country and policy ideas to help resolve the situation. Research links: Regulating humanitarian governance: humanitarianism and the ‘risk society’ by Stuart Gordon: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/105296/ The protection of civilians: an evolving paradigm? by Stuart Gordon: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/101979/ Afghan women’s storytelling and campaigning platform: https://chadariproject.com/about-chadari/

Contributor(s): Baroness Barker, Natalie Gamble, Dr Kirsty Horsey, Professor Isabel Karpin | In 2023, the Law Commission will publish its long-awaited final proposals for reform of the law relating to surrogacy in the UK.

Contributor(s): Professor Roy Allison | Russia and Western states have long clashed over the nature of international society and the desirability of a liberal rule-based international order. Relations plunged with Russia’s annexation of Crimea, which flouted a core prohibition of the United Nations Charter system against territorial expansion by force. Putin’s renewed all-out invasion of Ukraine now appears openly revanchist. This lecture assesses the implications for international order at large and the operation of international law, including international humanitarian law, around the conflict. It dissects the peculiar logic and false justifications Putin offers for Russia’s aggression. Does he really believe Russia occupies some common civilizational and territorial space with Ukraine, justifying the subjugation of Ukraine to return ‘historic Russian regions’? Or is this cynical cover for strategic ends aimed at the mobilisation of domestic support? With no end to the war in sight, the lecture also questions what remains of the post-Cold war territorial settlement in Europe and whether an eventual negotiated settlement of the war is conceivable under the current Russian leadership.

Contributor(s): Professor Helen Thompson | The war in Ukraine, mounting cost of living crisis and the looming threat of climate change all underscore the importance of energy to contemporary politics. To help make sense of this vital aspect of 21st century political economy, the Ralph Miliband Programme is joined by Helen Thompson to discuss how many of the defining dislocations of our contemporary world are best understood through the lens of energy politics.

Contributor(s): Martin Wolf, Diane Coyle, Jesse Norman MP | Democracy and capitalism are the political and economic 'operating systems' of today's high-income democracies. But how stable is the relationship between them? The answer is 'not very', since it requires a separation of power from wealth inconsistent with almost all historical experience. In his new book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, Martin Wolf argues that this complex system can best be described as a marriage of 'complementary opposites'. The book analyses how this marriage happened, why it is fragile and how economic and political changes have undermined it. It concludes by asking what needs to be done in response to developments that threaten the survival of liberal democracy itself.

Contributor(s): Dr Hans Kluge | Three years of COVID-19 have exposed the fault lines in health systems across the WHO European Region and globally. The pandemic has also driven home the gross inequities that impact access to health within societies and between countries. As we embark on the 4th year of what the UN Secretary-General has labelled the worst global crisis since World War Two, it’s clear that governments and health partners need a new approach to strengthening health systems overall. Dr Kluge avers that a dual track approach to health strategy and policy must be our new normal. Countries must prepare for the health emergencies that lie ahead, arriving faster than ever before, while, at the same time, investing in essential, everyday health services. This approach addresses this range of health challenges, requiring political commitment at the highest levels, grassroots efforts to strengthen primary health care, innovations in health such as digital health and the adoption of disciplines such as behavioural and cultural insights.

Contributor(s): Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala | LSE President and Vice Chancellor Minouche Shafik in conversation with Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Director-General of the World Trade Organization.

Contributor(s): Vicky Pryce, Stefaan de Rynck | A close aide to Michel Barnier, Stefaan De Rynck had a ringside seat in the Brexit negotiations. In his book, Inside the Deal, which he discusses at this event De Rynck demonstrates how the EU-27’s unity held firm while the UK vacillated throughout, changing negotiators, prime ministers, their aims and tactics. From the mood in the room to the technical discussions, he gives an unvarnished account of the process and obstacles that shaped the final deal.

Contributor(s): Liam Byrne MP, Ed Miliband MP, Dr Andy Summers | Using research evidence and on-the-ground experience, they are looking at how to shape a greener economy and close socioeconomic, health and well-being divides in the UK.

Contributor(s): Marie Yovanovitch, Professor Tomila Lankina | with Tomila Lankina and Peter Trubowitz.

Contributor(s): John Alty, Geoffrey Yu, Han-Koo Yeo, Crawford Falconer, Iana Dreyer, Ignacio Garcia Bercero | The world economy is going through a phase of considerable turmoil and instability. First, globalisation seems to be reversing with an acceleration of economic disintegration among major trading powers, securitisation of global trade and investment relations within geo-economic blocks and paralysis of multilateral global governance. Second, our domestic economies are undergoing profound structural shifts in the light of the climate emergency, energy scarcity and rise of digital technologies and artificial intelligence. And third, the centre of the world economy is shifting towards the Asia and Global South. How do policy-makers see these developments? And how can states position themselves to benefit rather than lose from today’s phase of turmoil?

Contributor(s): Dr Joseph Spooner, Sara Williams | Borrowing is a fundamental part of our world, but with millions considered over-indebted before the pandemic and a deepening cost of living crisis fueled by stagnating wages and high inflation, for many the burden of debt looks only set to increase. This month, LSE iQ asks “Do we always need to pay our debts?”, exploring the reasons people might find themselves with problematic levels of debt, the options open to those in financial trouble and how bankruptcy laws could be used more impactfully to the benefit of both individuals and society. Jess Winterstein talks to: Dr Joseph Spooner, Associate Professor in the LSE Law School and author of Bankruptcy: the case for relief in an economy of debt, and Sara Williams, founder of debt advisory website Debt Camel. https://debtcamel.co.uk/

Contributor(s): Professor Stuart Wilks-Heeg, Alberto Parmigiani, Dr Kate Alexander Shaw | Questions over the motivation and effect of financial contributions to political parties and candidates have been a constant source of contention in the politics of democratic countries. However, difficulties accessing reliable data have often constrained research about political finance. In the UK the Electoral Commission has been recording all political donations since its foundation, with detailed information on the date, amount and type of contribution, and names of donors. This panel will discuss preliminary findings of a British Academy/Leverhulme funded study of these donations, and seek to draw broad conclusions about how British politics is funded and what we still need to know.

Contributor(s): Dr Alessio Terzi, Dr Anna Valero | Historically, industrialisation, capitalism, and affluence have contributed to the emissions that are warming the planet’s atmosphere. As humanity starts to grapple with the Herculean challenge of climate change, should economic growth be abandoned to stand a chance of success? Would this lead to a better society, especially in already rich nations, freeing them from pointless consumerism? In Growth for Good, Alessio Terzi takes these legitimate concerns as a starting point to draw the reader on a journey into the socioeconomic, evolutionary, historical and cultural origins of the growth imperative. Rather than simply stating impossibilities, the book draws a credible agenda to enrol capitalism in the fight to stave off climate catastrophe. Shelving command-and-control solutions, or the complete reliance on, the market, Terzi details a plan involving an activist government, proactive business, and engaged citizens.

Contributor(s): Dr Erica Thompson, Dr Stephanie Hare, Professor Diane Coyle | This discussion lifts the lid on science for decision support, so that we can be savvier with how we use science, rather than following it blindly.

Contributor(s): Dr Peter Wilson, Professor Stephanie J. Rickard, Professor John Bew, Sir Paul Tucker | As outlined in his new book, democracies are facing a drawn-out contest with authoritarian states entangling much of public policy with global security issues. He lays out some principles for a sustainable system of international cooperation, showing how democracies can deal with China and other illiberal states without sacrificing their deepest political values. Examples are drawn from the international monetary order, including the role of the US dollar, trade and investment regimes, and the financial system. The approach takes its inspiration from David Hume rather than the standard International Relations menu of Hobbes, Kant, or Grotius, so that each of power, norms and material interests matter. After his opening remarks, our panel engages in a discussion with Paul and each other, and questions from the audience.

Contributor(s): Dr Anne Giersch, Claire North, Dr Bryan W Roberts, Dr Karim PY Thébault | The asymmetry between the past and the future is called the Arrow of Time. For example, the events of the past year have shaped all of us, but the future years are ours to shape. We all perceive the Arrow: we remember the start of the pandemic, but we don't "remember" or even know when it will end in the future. We have hopes about the future, but must simply accept and learn from what has happened in the past. Where do these differences come from? How do they arise in human psychology? Do they have an origin in the physical nature of space and time? What can reflecting on the difference between the past and the future tell us about our place in the post-pandemic world?

Contributor(s): Professor Jonathan Hopkin, James Murray, Dr Andy Summers, Dr Kate Summers | The panel will reflect on what shapes public demand for tax justice, its relation to tackling inequality and the challenges posed by taxing the super-rich.

Contributor(s): Professor Baroness Wolf | Governments around the world are increasingly preoccupied with the financial 'returns' to education; and yet are overseeing the destruction of long-established and once-effective vocational education systems. Why is this? And is it inevitable?

Contributor(s): Professor Shiera Malik, Professor Siba N'Zatioula Grovogui | In these times of multiple crises - of war, ecological catastrophe and resurgent decolonial contestations of the existing order - it often feels like the traditional tools of global governance have lost their relevance and power.  Rather than merely a Western, liberal text, he offers the UDHR as a document with a plurality of authors and sensibilities; a re-reading that could help us (re-)imagine much needed alternatives to the current global order and its various crises.

Contributor(s): Professor Marc Raboy, Dr Alison Norah Gillwald, Dr Gillian Marcelle, Dr Linje Manyozo, Professor Sharon Strover, Professor Hopeton Dunn | Speakers address the legacy of LSE’s Robin Mansell, a leading figure in the field of information and communication technologies (ICTs) theory and practice

Contributor(s): Dr Luiz Awazu Pereira da Silva, Dr Deniz Igan, Dr Benoit Mojon | The debate is intensified by deep recessions related to the COVID-19 pandemic and resurgent food and energy inflation increasing cost of living in 2022, which unequally impact different groups within society. This event marks the launch of the book Inequality Hysteresis, which highlights a new facet of inequality: its persistence or ‘hysteresis’ after recessions.

Contributor(s): Professor Thierry Balzacq | Diplomatic apologies, joint military exercises, gift giving, and global summits, are assumed to be some of the most iconic rituals of world politics. However, many actions that are achieved by means of rituals can be enacted otherwise. What criteria, then, do scholars employ to say that an action or an event is a ritual, and what difference (if any) does it make to its character as well as to its efficacy? To answer this question, Thierry Balzacq develops a grammar of ritual and contrasts it to alternative theories of action in world politics. Ritual is not a residual category of a phenomenon or an event, but is a qualitatively transformed way of going about acting, which, less frequently noticed, entails moral commitments. In this respect, it is posited that ritual enacts a social order as much as it enhances the salience of the action it involves. He will show how, and examine the theoretical implications of a ritual analysis by revisiting four dominant approaches to action in international relations: discourse, performance, practice and habitus, and strategic views. It is argued that while ritual intersects with each account, it does not extend wholesale.

Contributor(s): Olena Zelenska | The event, organised in coordination with the LSE SU Ukrainian student society, was chaired by LSE Director Minouche Shafik. (For the most part, this event is delivered in Ukrainian.)

Contributor(s): Dr Aaron Cheng, Michael Steranka, Joanna Ferreria | Gaming has become a normal part of many people's everyday lives, from mobile to console games it is easier than ever to be a gamer. But how do online games affect us?  This month, LSE iQ asks: Can gaming make us happier? We talk about online abuse in gaming and the toxic nature of some gamers and how a location-based game like Pokémon Go gently nudges players to go outside to play and interact with others.  Mike Wilkerson talks to: Dr Aaron Cheng, Assistant Professor in LSE’s Department of Management; Michael Steranka, Product Director at the creators of the game Pokémon Go Niantic; and Joanna Ferreria an online blogger and avid gamer.  Research blog: https://www.lse.ac.uk/News/Latest-news-from-LSE/2022/d-Apr-22/Location-based-mobile-games-like-Pok%C3%A9mon-Go-may-help-alleviate-depression

Contributor(s): Kyriakos Mitsotakis | Is Greece on the path to a sustained economic recovery? How substantive have the reforms been? With elections due next year, and with recent controversies, political stability seems at a premium. What vision does the PM have for Greece? And, how are the geopolitics of the region changing? Where does Greece stand on the new issues facing a changing Europe?

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): Professor Manisha Pathak-Shelat, Marium Saeed, Professor Sonia Livingstone, Dr Daniel Kardefelt-Winther, Patrick Burton, Dr Alexandre Barbosa | Our panel explores implementing child rights online.

Contributor(s): Professor Leigh Gardner | Leigh Gardner discusses her new book, Sovereignty without Power: Liberia in the Age of Empires, 1822-1980.

Contributor(s): Dr Louise Ashley, David Goodhart, Professor Mark Williams | Despite a narrative of merit, the City of London is characterised by persistent inequalities in its demographic make-up. Against this backdrop, Ashley asks - how does the City reproduce inequality despite an apparent commitment to objective merit, why do efforts to diversify fail to work – and crucially, who benefits?

Contributor(s): Dr Eva Micheler, Professor Sandy Pepper, Professor Alex Voorhoeve, Katherine Griffiths | Over the last 30 years senior executive pay in the USA, UK and many other developed countries has increased dramatically, generating enormous debate and, at times, public and political outrage. Sandy Pepper’s book argues that this ‘soaraway’ inflation in executive pay is the result of a market failure that has lead remuneration committees to become trapped in a prisoner’s dilemma – where they feel they must recommend over-the-odds payments in the vain hope of obtaining or retaining superior talent. For institutional investors too, these developments have created a collective action problem, with many historically unwilling or unable to intervene to curtail excessive corporate executive pay. Combatting this ‘market failure’ approach to executive pay ultimately requires a stronger, reformed ethical response from investors, companies, and executives – but what solutions are feasible?

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

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

Contributor(s): Professor Diane Coyle | null

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): Lord Nicholas Stern | null

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

Contributor(s): John F Kerry | null

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

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 Craig Calhoun | null

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

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

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

Contributor(s): Otegha Uwagba | null

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

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

Contributor(s): Professor Hélène Rey | null

Contributor(s): Professor Shani Orgad | 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): 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): 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 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