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
Soul Dust: the magic of consciousness [Audio]
Speaker(s): Professor Nicholas Humphrey | How is consciousness possible? What biological purpose does it serve? Nicholas Humphrey has a radical new theory. Consciousness, he argues, is nothing less than a magical-mystery show that we stage inside our own heads – paving the way for spirituality, and allowing us to reap the rewards, and anxieties, of living in the 'soul niche'. Nicholas Humphrey is emeritus professor of psychology at LSE. His many books include A History of the Mind, Leaps of Fa
An Evening with Bjørn Lomborg: Putting Global Warming into Perspective [Audio]
Speaker(s): Professor Bjørn Lomborg, Dimitri Zenghelis | Global warming is real, but it is often presented one-sided and in exaggerated form. This leads to bad policies that will do little to tackle the warming at extremely high cost, as evidenced by the Kyoto protocol and the new EU promises. The breakdown at Copenhagen shows that we need smarter solutions focused on getting long-term solutions like renewables that are cheaper than fossil fuels. And finally, we should remember, that if we rea
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 - Adaptation in an age of Digitisation: its fans, practitioners and foes [Aud
Speaker(s): Dr Shakuntala Banaji, Professor Andrew Burn, Blake Morrison | This provocative panel centres on the range of adaptations practised in today’s diverse multimedia landscape. These include adaptations of format (book to screen, game to film, short-story to stage) and adaptations of place, time and culture (Shakespeare into Hindi film). The panel will ask: How and why do such adaptations retain the original flavour and appeal to wide audiences? Is something lost in the process? Shakunt
Where is Future Growth Going to Come From? [Audio]
Speaker(s): Professor John Van Reenen, Professor Jonathan Haskel | Where will the sources of new growth come from in the wake of the financial crisis and recession? What is the role of education, labour markets and government policy in supporting this growth?John Van Reenen has been professor of economics at LSE and the director of the Centre for Economic Performance, since October 2003.Jonathan Haskel is a Professor of Economics at Imperial College Business School based in the Healthcare Manage
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
India and China: Competition, Co-operation or conflict? [Audio]
Speaker(s): Dr Shashi Tharoor | This lecture is part of India Week 2011. Dr Shashi Tharoor is an elected Member of Parliament and a former Minister of State for External Affairs in the Government of India. A prize-winning author of twelve books, both fiction and non-fiction, he is also a widely-published critic, commentator and columnist. In 2007 he concluded a nearly 29-year career with the United Nations, including working for refugees in South-East Asia at the peak of the "boat people" crisis
Literary Festival 2011 - Writing Across Borders: Empathy in the Age of Conflict [Audio]
Speaker(s): Elif Shafak | Storytelling is an ancient and universal art at the heart of which lies the need to imagine and the ability to empathize with others. In a world beset with cultural clashes, misunderstandings and invisible ghettoes, stories keep connecting us across worlds, across words. Women have always been great storytellers in my country, and yet the written culture is still "a man's world". Why do fewer women write even though they compose the majority of fiction readers today? Ho
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 - Crossing Borders: Migration in Women's Writing in Poland [Audio]
Speaker(s): Ursula Chowaniec, Izabela Filipiak, Grazyna Plebanek | Three female Polish authors discuss migration in women's writing in Poland. Urszula Chowaniec is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies Andrzej Frycz-Modrzewski Cracow Academy in Poland. Izabela Filipiak is an author of several books of fiction and nonfiction who debuted after the fall of the iron curtain in Poland. Grazyna Plebanek – writer, author of best-selling novels Illegal Liaisons (WAB 2010) and Gi
Literary Festival 2011 - Reality Hunger [Audio]
Speaker(s): Geoff Dyer, Robert Hudson, David Shields | Is the novel dead? Is art theft? Can you copyright reality? David Sheilds’s Reality Hunger questions every assumption we ever made about art, the novel, journalism, poetry, film, TV, rap, stand-up, graffiti, sampling, plagiarism, writing, and reading. The questions Shields addresses- the bending of form and genre, the lure and blur of the real- play out constantly around us, and Reality Hunger is a radical reframing of how we might think a
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 - New technologies and the Reinvention of the Author [Audio]
Speaker(s): Sam Leith, Lionel Shriver, Nigel Warburton | With rapid developments in communication and publication technologies, the book – as conventionally conceived – is no longer the only point of connection between writers and their audiences. New media cross many geographical borders with ease, creating potentially global readerships. New communication technologies empower audiences to answer back, dissolving the traditional borders between writers and readers. And with this, the bounda
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
Animal Minds [Audio]
Speaker(s): Professor Nicola Clayton, Professor Erica Fudge, Professor Gregory Radick | This panel discussion will provide historical and contemporary perspectives on animal cognition and will consider the challenges facing the study of animal minds. Nicola Clayton is professor of comparative cognition at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of the Royal Society. Erica Fudge is professor of English studies in the School of Humanities at the University of Strathclyde. Gregory Radick is profess
The Global Chaos of Love [Audio]
Speaker(s): Professor Ulrich Beck, Professor Lynn Jamieson | In the global age there are increasing numbers of long-distance relationships, bi-national couples, marriage migrants, foreign domestic workers and fertility tourists. What are their common characteristics? Ulrich Beck is the British Journal of Sociology LSE Centennial Professor.
Jeffrey Boloten on The State of the Global Art Market 2011 [Audio]
Speaker(s): Jeffrey Boloten | As part of HRL Contemporary's collaboration with the LSE, we are delighted to present our first lecture examining the relationship between art and commerce. Jeffrey Boloten, Managing Director of ArtInsight will be talking on the current state of the global art market. An expert in this area, Boloten will use recent research and data to analyse the international art system and its functions from a macro perspective. The slippery subjects of how value is ascertained
Catch-Up History and the Cold War [Audio]
Speaker(s): Professor Lord Peter Hennessy | World-renowned expert on Cold War intelligence and espionage Peter Hennessy will address recently declassified documents and how history can help us 'catch-up' with the threats of today. Peter Hennessy is Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History at QMUL and was recently elected a Fellow of the British Academy as well as being an Honorary Fellow of LSE. Before joining the Department in 1992, he was a journalist for twenty years with spells on Th
Documenting China: Being a Professional Photographer in the Middle Kingdom [Audio]
Speaker(s): Ryan Pyle | Canadian born, award winning, documentary photographer Ryan Pyle first visited China in 2001. After a 3 month trip around the country he was hooked. He has never left since. It was very much Ryan's first trip to China that inspired him to enter the discipline of photography, and since then his imagery has graced the pages of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, The Sunday Times Magazine and the Financial Times Magazine. Ryan will visit the LSE
