Contributor(s): Amitav Ghosh | Amitav Ghosh is one of India's most acclaimed authors and cultural commentators. His novels include 'The Glass Palace', 'The Hungry Tide' and his most recent 'Sea of Poppies', the first volume of the Ibis Trilogy. He is also a celebrated travel and non-fiction writer, including such works as 'In an Antique Land' and 'Incendiary Circumstances'.

Contributor(s): Professor Lord Stern | Nick Stern is IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government at LSE and chairman of LSE's new Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. He also directs the Asia Research Centre and the India Observatory at LSE. He was Chief Economist of the World Bank (2000-2003), then Head of the UK Government Economic Service and led a Review of the Economics of Climate Change which was published in October 2006. In October 2007 he was appointed to the House of Lords as a non-party political peer.

Contributor(s): Raj Patel | "Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing." Credit has crunched, debt has turned toxic, the gears of the world economy have ground to a halt. It's now clear that the market doesn't only get it wrong about sub-prime mortgages; it gets it wrong about everything. We need to ask again one of the most fundamental questions a society ever addresses: why do things cost what they do?

Contributor(s): Vladimir Gligorov, Laza Kekic, Peter Sanfey | Vladimir Gligorov is Senior Economist at the Vienna Institute of International Economic Studies. Laza Kekic is Regional Director of Central & Eastern Europe & Director of Country Forecasting Services at the Economist Intelligence Unit. Peter Sanfey is Lead Economist in the Office of the Chief Economist, EBRD.

Contributor(s): Alain de Botton | This talk will raise a host of questions about the meaning and purpose of work - in particular investigating the effects of industrialisation and modernisation on the individual worker. Alain de Botton is a philosopher, author and entrepreneur.

Contributor(s): Dr Phillip Campbell, Professor Paul Freemont, Professor Richard Kitney, Professor Nikolas Rose, Hugh Whittall, Dr James Wilsdon | Bioengineers are trying to create synthetic organisms that do not occur naturally. Is this an amazing scientific feat or something we should be worried about? Phillip Campbell is editor in chief of Nature. Paul Freemont and Richard Kitney are co-directors of the EPSRC Centre for Synthetic Biology, Imperial College. Nikolas Rose is director of the BIOS Centre at LSE. Hugh Whittall is director of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. James Wilsdon is director of the Science Policy Centre at the Royal Society.

Contributor(s): Professor Bridget Hutter | In this lunchtime series of lectures, a selection of LSE's academics from across the spectrum of the social sciences explain the latest thinking on how social scientists work to address the critical problems of the day. They survey the leading ideas and contributions made by their discipline, explain the types of problems that are addressed and the tools that are used, and explore the kinds of solutions proposed.

Contributor(s): Professor Julia Black, Professor Charles Goodhart, Professor Michael Power, Dr Paul Woolley | The consequences of banks' risk taking behaviour will be felt by the public finances of many countries for at least another generation. Risk taking behaviour is the lifeblood of financial markets. How can, and should, it be managed? Julia Black is professor of law at LSE. Charles Goodhart is professor emeritus of banking and finance at LSE. Michael Power is professor of accounting at LSE. Paul Woolley is senior fellow at LSE's Paul Woolley Centre for the Study of Capital Market Dysfunctionality.

Contributor(s): Professor Michel Wieviorka | Sociologists have published very little on the present economic crisis. But sociology is not lacking in ways and means to study the crisis in a more general framework of a global mutation over the past 35 years. Michel Wieviorka is professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.

Contributor(s): Slavoj Zizek | Slavoj Zizek argues that the neoliberalism died twice: first as a political doctrine in the tragedy of the attacks of 9/11; then its farcical collapse as an economic theory when the meltdown at the end of 2008 brought an end to the utopia of global market capitalism. Has this crisis now offered a vital opening for the left to seize the reins of politics and the state?