2011 Global Civil Society Yearbook launch [Audio]
Speaker(s): Pierre Calame, Judy El-Bushra, Dr Hakan Seckinelgin | The 2011 Yearbook provides a critical examination of the ways global civil society promotes and delivers social justice. How does the 'global' make a difference to traditional concepts of social justice? Pierre Calame is director of the Fondation Charles Léopold Mayer for the Progress of Humankind. Judy El-Bushra is Programme Manager of Africa Great Lakes Region and Researcher at International Alert. Hakan Seckinelgin is a lectur
Gender, Words and Power: meanings of inequality at a time of neo-liberalism [Audio]
Speaker(s): Professor Mary Evans | This lecture explores changing vocabularies of feminism and the possibilities of a new political language and new forms of politics. Mary Evans is LSE centennial professor attached to the Gender Institute from 2010 to 2013.
Environmental Diplomacy [Audio]
Speaker(s): Dr René Castro | René Castro is the Minister for Foreign Affairs for Costa Rica. He obtained his Masters and PhD from Harvard University. His research focused on the design and development of an environmentally sustainable economy and management of natural resources. He had previously obtained a BSc in civil engineering from Universidad de Costa Rica. Dr Castro has also been Minister of Energy and the Environment, Vice Minister of the Interior, Director of the National Transport In
African Urbanism [Audio]
Speaker(s): Edgar Pieterse | Africa is the fastest urbanising region in the world, and has become the focus of increasing attention from architects and planners, academics, development agencies and urban think-tanks. Professor Edgar Pieterse argues for a new way of thinking about African cities to accompany this surge of interest and to replace traditional views of African cities as sites of absence and neglect. Rapid urbanisation along with impressive economic growth rates for much of the Conti
Big Society and Social Policy in Britain: a panel discussion [Audio]
Speaker(s): Frances Crook, Professor David Lewis, Rory Stewart MP, Karl Wilding | In 2010 prime minister David Cameron introduced the idea of the Big Society. It is yet unclear what this actually means, let alone what impact it will have on social policy in Britain or overseas. This panel will examine these questions and discuss their views on the Big Society. Frances Crook is the appointed director of the Howard League for Penal Reform. She was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s New Years Honours
How Life In The Internet Changes The Practice Of Macroeconomics [Audio]
Speaker(s): Edward Hugh | A surprising feature of economic analysis of the current crisis has been the pivotal role played by a small number of bloggers, often positioned far from the academic mainstream. This event will feature one of the top bloggers on the Euro Crisis who will discuss the role the bloggers have played in our understanding of the current Euro Crisis, and in what ways having more data in our hard drive than the sum total of all previous economists changes our understanding of m
The Nobel Lecture: Equilibrium in the Labour Market with Search Frictions [Audio]
Speaker(s): Professor Christopher Pissarides | Editor's note: Content Copyright: © The Nobel Foundation 2010. We apologise for the poor audio quality during the first few minutes of the video. Christopher Pissarides was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Sciences in 2010 (jointly with Peter Diamond and Dale Mortensen) for their work on the economics of unemployment, especially job flows and the effect of being out of work. Christopher Pissarides is professor of economics at LSE and h
Literary Festival 2011 - This House Believes that the Future of Rights is Left not Right [Audio]
Speaker(s): David Davis MP, Professor Conor Gearty | For the past twenty weeks Conor Gearty has been writing a collaborative book online, at www.therightsfuture.com, with an essay appearing weekly alongside regular longer items and occasional brief remarks on current affairs, with each post being open for comment from the general public. Many have replied with dedication and commitment. The result is a series of essays, discussions and critical engagements addressing such issues as the meaning o
Literary Festival 2011 - Facts are Subversive: crossing the borders between history and journalism [
Speaker(s): Professor Timothy Garton Ash | The border between journalism and academic history is a minefield. Timothy Garton Ash has been crossing it stubbornly for the last thirty years, attempting to combine the crafts of journalist and historian, writing what he calls ‘history of the present’. Taking examples from his most recent book, Facts are Subversive, he talks about the delights and pitfalls of this mongrel craft. Timothy Garton Ash is the author of nine books of political writing o
Literary Festival 2011 - New Ways to Witness Wars [Audio]
Speaker(s): James Brabazon, Jill McGivering, Ed Vulliamy | Three of the best British conflict reporters describe three very different ways to tell the stories of three very different war-zones. Fiction, biography and reportage are used to tell gripping narratives of some of the most brutal places in the world. These are the deep, nasty, real stories of Mexico’s drug wars, an African coup, and the so-called war on terror in Afghanistan. One is a novel, another a personal biography and another a
Literary Festival 2011 - The Four Walls of My Freedom [Audio]
Speaker(s): Donna Thomson, Geraldine Bedell | Donna Thomson will discuss her book, The Four Walls of My Freedom, which describes her family's experience of coping with her son's cerebral palsy. Her own encounter with adversity takes on new meaning when viewed through the lens of Professor Amartya Sen and other philosophers' roadmaps of how to realize a good life against all odds. This lens includes not only people with disability, but also the enormous generation of post-WWII Baby Boomers who ar
Literary Festival 2011 - Through the Soviet Looking-Glass [Audio]
Speaker(s): Francis Spufford | At first sight, the USSR of the 1950s and 1960s is a formidably remote and strange place for an early 21st-century western observer to try to inhabit: ideological, materially alien, suffused with obsolete expectations, and operating in its daily life and economic life according to rules that eerily reverse our own. But the reward for crossing this particular imaginative border, argues Francis Spufford, is the discovery, in the mirrorworld of the Soviet Union, of de
Literary Festival 2011 - Literature and Islamophobia: Muslima Authors Speak Out [Audio]
Speaker(s): Shelina Zahra Janmohamed, Senay Özdemir, Naema Tahir | There are few places in Europe in which the voices of multiculturalism and Islamophobia have clashed more forcefully than in the Netherlands, often in the most dramatic ways. To name just a few, Pim Fortuyn, Theo Van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and most recently Geert Wilders have been very much in the international press over the last decade. In the UK we are now 14 years on from the publication of the influential Runnymede Trust rep
The Impact of Politics on Economy in Turkey - in Turkish [Audio]
Speaker(s): Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu | Mr. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu MP, the leader of the main opposition Republican People's Party in Turkey, is visiting LSE only months before Turkey goes to the polls in a national parliamentary election. Mr. Kılıçdaroğlu will present and discuss his party's views on political, economic, and social aspects of Turkey. He will specifically address the interrelations between politics and economy in Turkey.
The Doha Round is Alive; and more important than ever [Audio]
Speaker(s): Lord Brittan | Since 2008 it has looked to many as if the Doha Round trade negotiations were dead, or at best comatose. At the G20 Summit last November, world leaders gave it a shot in the arm, and there are now significant signs of life in Geneva. If concluded, it would provide an insurance policy against future protectionism and economic benefits estimated at over $360 billion. The challenge is to realise the window of opportunity in 2011 in order to seal the deal. On the last day
21st Century Statecraft [Audio]
Speaker(s): Alec Ross | Technology and innovation have changed the conditions for statecraft in the 21st century. Just as the internet has changed economics, culture, and politics, it is also transforming the practice of foreign policy. It is not simply the fact that more people are using ever more sophisticated technologies; the structural and demographic changes that have accompanied these quantum leaps in connection technologies are highly disruptive. Recent events in North Africa and the Mid
Triumph of the City: how our greatest invention makes us richer, smarter, greener, healthier and hap
Speaker(s): Professor Edward Glaeser | Building and maintaining cities is difficult and density has costs, but in this presentation Professor Edward Glaeser will argue that these costs are worth bearing, because whether in London’s ornate arcades or Rio’s fractious favelas, whether in the high rises of Hong Kong or the dusty workplaces of Dharavi, our culture, our prosperity, and our freedom are all ultimately gifts of people living, working, and thinking together – the ultimate triumph of
Nonlinear Studies of Coronal Heating by the Resonant Absorption of Alfven Waves
A series of animations showing various quantities from a coronal heating simulation
Beyond a Global Deal? A UN+ Approach to Climate Governance [Audio]
Speaker(s): Dr Robert Falkner, Professor Lord Giddens, Thomas Hale, André Lieber, Scott Moore, Professor Michael Jacobs | How can we make progress on climate change in the face of gridlock? Global Governance 2020 is a group of young academics, policymakers and business people from China, the United States and Europe. Robert Falkner is senior lecturer in international relations at LSE and a leading expert on global environmental politics. Anthony Giddens is former director of LSE and the author,
Following the trail of Islamism and the Veil across time and borders [Audio]
Speaker(s): Professor Leila Ahmed | Professor Ahmed asks why the wearing of veils or headscarves has become a growing phenomenon in America – and across the world. Having almost vanished from many Muslim majority cities, why in the 1970s did veiling (or covering) suddenly begin to grow more common and rapidly spread first across Muslim majority societies and then later in the West? Following this trail Professor Ahmed explores the forces which brought about this "rebirth" of veiling, and how
