Talks, Debates & Lectures taking place at Conway Hall
Ranging widely across literature, art, science and beyond, Liz Williams debunks many of the prevailing myths surrounding magical practice, past and present, while offering a rigorously researched and highly accessible account of what it means to be a pagan today.
Love, desire, intimacy — we all know what these are meant to look like. But what happens when they descend into violence? Rachel Louise Snyder’s perceptions changed on domestic violence changed when she began talking to the victims and perpetrators.
Ainissa Ramirez shows us the power of telling inclusive stories about technology. She also shows that innovation is universal – whether it’s splicing beats with two turntables and a microphone or splicing genes with two test tubes and CRISPR.
This is the story of our quest to understand the most mysterious object in the universe: the human brain. Matthew Cobb reveals how we came to our present state of knowledge.
Today in one the richest countries in the world, 60% of households in poverty have people in jobs, inequality is the highest it has been for 100 years, climate change threatens our extinction and automation means millions are forced into a life of precarity. The solution? Basic Income, says Guy Standing.
Without writing, indigenous elders memorised a vast amount of information on which survival depended both physically and culturally. Does this explain the purpose of ancient monuments including Stonehenge, Easter Island and the Nasca Lines? Can we use these memory methods in contemporary life? Dr Lynne Kelly explains.
Sarah Scales takes an anthropological look at the UFO community, told through first-person experiences with researchers in their element as they pursue what they see as a solvable mystery – both terrestrial and cosmic.
It’s well past time for museums to be honest about their acquisitions history and how objects arrive in their collections in the first place. Alice Procter seeks to resist triumphalist nostalgia with art history. How did the narratives of Empire come into being? Who controls them?
Professor David Nash explores the crime of blasphemy: as an act of individuals but also as a widespread and constant presence in cultural, political and religious life.
Editor of politics.co.uk Ian Dunt takes stock of the post-Coronavirus world and asks if maybe, with a bit of luck, we’re seeing the end of the nationalist uprising.
The model of ‘the good life’ and its formulas for success ignore the haunting possibility that one may not succeed and as a result be deemed ‘a failure’. Beverley Clack explores that often-neglected theme of failure, not just as the opposite of achievement but also how it has been conflated with loss.
Geoff White, one of the UK’s leading technology correspondents, charts the astonishing development of hacking, from its conception in America’s hippy tech community in the 1970s, through its childhood among the ruins of the Eastern Bloc, to its coming of age as one of the most dangerous and pervasive threats to our digital world.
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