Alumnus Dr Ira Lieberman (1982) and Dr Jennifer Isern will be giving a talk based on their recent book ‘The Future of Microfinance’ on poverty and Microfinance. Read more about the book and the speakers in the downloads.

Please join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81873856466?pwd=OXJuYVRxS3J4V2Z0VVRTeUNHVjFuQT09

Meeting ID: 818 7385 6466

Passcode: 639361

The Palestinian independent researcher and activist Adam Haj Yahia has been involved in grassroots organizing and community building initiatives, concerned with feminist, queer, and anti-colonial movements and communities in Palestine. In recent years, LGBTQIA+ issues have been increasingly discussed in mainstream media and society, leading to an acceleration in change and a shift in dynamics. In his research, Adam looks at how LGBTQIA+ Palestinians navigate through online platforms since then, and which parts of their identities and views they choose to disclose for anti-colonial, political, and social reasons.

For this event, Adam will give some insight into the political and colonial frameworks in Palestine and how they intersect with LGBTQIA+ folks' lives and queer issues. We will also learn about the ways in which queer politics in the Palestinian context differ from the more liberal/individualistic ones in western societies and how it is crucial to discuss these politics through an intersectional lens.

Click here to join on Zoom
Meeting ID: 882 3864 9555
Passcode: 211577

The series



This term’s series explores social science’s big concepts. It examines the contested meaning and diverse application of some of the theoretical ideas that unify and challenge social scientists. It brings together the bright minds of Oxford, and high profile external speakers, to consider the range of ways in which we can think about ‘power’, ‘space’, ‘identity’, and ‘belonging’.

Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English in the English Faculty, University of Oxford, and Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW), based at Wolfson College. She was the Director of TORCH 2015-17, and PI on the Andrew W. Mellon-funded ‘Humanities and Identities’ project at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, 2017-18. She is a founding figure in the field of colonial and postcolonial studies, and internationally known for her research in anglophone literatures of empire and anti-empire. She is a novelist and short story writer, most recently of The Shouting in the Dark (2015 and 2019), and To the Volcano (2019).


 

We'll be watching via Zoom, and subsequently discussing the film, 'Whale Rider'; by the director of Mulan about a Maori girl who aspires to be a chef against all odds...

Email us for Zoom details.

Come join us for a discussion led by Clara Barker on the challenges and achievements of LGBTQI+ inclusion in Science, Technology,

Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields.

Clara Barker is a thin-film material scientist who manages the Centre for Applied Superconductivity, in the materials department at Oxford University, her work briefly profiled in Nature in Jan 2021, which can be read here.

Clara Barker the chair of the LGBT+ advisory group to Oxford University and the Dean for Equality and Diversity at Linacre College, as well as a member of the Royal Societies Equality and Diversity Committee.

In 2018 she won the first VC’s diversity role model award from the University. She runs a youth group for LGBTI+ young people, is a Stonewall school role model, and presented a talk at a TEDxWomen London event in 2018. For her volunteer work she won a Points of Light Award from the UK Prime Minister in 2017.

The Art of Mass Decarceration

Bryonn Bain in conversation with Wolfson Creative Arts Fellow Carey Young

Join us for a dialogue about the power of the arts as a tool for building movements for justice in the age of mass incarceration, and creative potential of dialogues between art and the legal sphere.

Bringing hip hop, spoken word poetry, theatre, and the blues into prisons in 25 US states and across three continents, Bryonn Bain will discuss the challenges and triumphs of his work over three decades to build bridges between carceral institutions - including Rikers Island, Sing Sing, Folsom, Whitemoor, and Brixton prisons – and institutions including UCLA, Columbia, Harvard, New York University, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and Carnegie Hall.

Bain will also introduce two formerly-incarcerated poets, Jermaine Archer and Brandy Russell, who will read their work. This event will be chaired by Wolfson Creative Art Fellow Carey Young and is organised in collaboration with Beyond the Bars (Los Angeles) and Abolition Curriculum (ABC).

To register please contact Luisa Summers, Arts Administrator at luisa.summers@wolfson.ox.ac.uk by 12noon on Thursday 25 February 2021. Details to join the event on Zoom will be sent to you by email.

About Bryonn Bain:

Described by Cornel West as an artist who “…speaks his truth with a power we desperately need to hear,” Bryonn Bain is Brooklyn’s own hip hop theatre innovator, spoken word poetry champion, prison activist, actor, author and educator. After teaching the first hip hop and spoken word workshop in the Dramatic Arts at Harvard University, Bain began consulting Columbia University’s Center for Justice and School of Law as a Visiting Scholar, and founded the prison education program offering college degrees from NYU to men incarcerated in upstate New York. Bain is a Professor in the School of the Arts and African American Studies at UCLA, where he is also the director of the UCLA Prison Education Program and co-supervises the UCLA International Human Rights Law Clinic. Bain has worked with students, faculty and administrators across the university to develop UCLA’s Prison Education Program.

Wrongfully imprisoned during his second year at Harvard Law School, Bryonn successfully sued the NYPD, interviewed with Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes,” and wrote the Village Voice cover story – “Walking While Black” – drawing the largest response in the history of the nation’s most widely-read progressive newspaper. He is the creator and performer of the critically acclaimed theatre production Lyrics From Lockdown (executive produced by Harry Belafonte), and the author of four books including The Ugly Side of Beautiful: Rethinking Race and Prisons in America (Third World Press, 2012) and the forthcoming Critical Minded: Rebel Voices on Justice. Bain is developing a limited TV series based on his life and work with Emmy Award winner Rob Reiner (“A Few Good Men”) and Warner Brothers. Bryonn is also the host and co-producer of a new series for AMC/The Sundance Channel titled “We The Jury”, which reviews some of America’s most controversial courtroom cases. www.bryonn.com

About Carey Young:

Carey Young is current Wolfson Creative Arts Fellow, and is a visual artist based in London. She is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Her artistic work since 2003 has focussed on law as subject and medium. Recently, she has created films and photographic series within carceral architectures and courthouses in order to tell new stories about law, identity, gender and power. Young has exhibited widely, including Tate Britain, Centre Pompidou (Paris and Brussels), New Museum (New York), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) and Migros Museum (Zurich) amongst others. Young is Associate Professor in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, and Hon. Research Fellow in the School of Law, Birkbeck. www.careyyoung.com

We will meet to discuss "Girl, Woman, Other" by Bernardine Evaristo [308 pages - ebook available through SOLO]:

This is Britain as you've never read it.

This is Britain as it has never been told.

From Newcastle to Cornwall, from the birth of the twentieth century to the teens of the twenty-first, Girl, Woman, Other follows a cast of twelve characters on their personal journeys through this country and the last hundred years.

They're each looking for something - a shared past, an unexpected future, a place to call home, somewhere to fit in, a lover, a missed mother, a lost father, even just a touch of hope...

Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible.

The Tibetan and Himalayan Studies Centre's celebration of the Tibetan New Year of the Iron Ox 2148!