Autumn 2015 | Public lectures and events | Audio and pdf

Contributor(s): Zoe Konstantopoulou | Greece is at the forefront of questions connecting human rights protection, debt and austerity. Zoe Konstantopoulou will share her insights on the fight to secure social rights. Zoe Konstantopoulou (@ZoeKonstant) was President of the Greek Parliament and a politician of the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), and is a practicing lawyer. She was elected to the post of President on 6 February 2015 with a record number of 235 out of 300 votes, making her the youngest Speaker in the history of the Hellenic Parliament. As Speaker, she worked to expose the truth around the debt and human crises in Greece. She holds a law degree from the University of Athens, a Master’s in Law from Columbia University with a focus on International Law, Human Rights and Criminal Law and a DEA from the University of Paris 1 (Panthéon la Sorbonne) in European Criminal Law and Criminal Policy in Europe. In her legal practice she is active in the fields of criminal law and human rights. She is a member of the Athens and New York Bars. Margot Salomon (@Margot_Salomon) is associate professor in the Centre for the Study of Human Rights and Department of Law. The Centre for the Study of Human Rights at LSE (@LSEHumanRights) is a trans-disciplinary centre of excellence for international academic research, teaching and critical scholarship on human rights. LSE Law (@lselaw) is an integral part of the School's mission, plays a major role in policy debates & in the education of lawyers and law teachers from around the world.

Contributor(s): Professor David Harvey | David Harvey's politicised work on geography, social theory, urban political economy and capitalism has shaped academic debate for decades. He is one of the most cited social scientists in the world, and his works have been translated into multiple languages. Here, Harvey joins a panel of experts to explore his ideas - and alternative views. David Harvey (@profdavidharvey) is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology & Geography at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Michael Storper (@michaelstorper) is Professor of Economic Geography at LSE, and holds Professorships at Sciences-Po and UCLA. Jane Wills is Professor of Human Geography, Queen Mary, University of London. Murray Low is Associate Professor of Human Geography in the LSE Department of Geography & Environment. The LSE Department of Geography & Environment (@LSEGeography) is a centre of international academic excellence in economic, urban and development geography, environmental social science and climate change.

Contributor(s): Anote Tong | Kiribati is in the front line of climate change. Despite Kiribati's best efforts at mitigation, relocation of its people may be the only long term option as the physical fabric of the country becomes uninhabitable. Anote Tong has been President of Kiribati since 2003, and steps down at the end of 2015 after meeting the term limits prescribed by the Kiribati Constitution. Climate change has been the defining issue of his Presidency. President Tong is an alumnus of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Robin Mansell (@REMVAN) is LSE Deputy Director and Provost and Professor of New Media and the Internet in the Department of Media and Communication.

Contributor(s): Professor Oriana Bandiera, Mushtaque Chowdhury, Professor Esther Duflo, Anna Minj, Muhammad Musa, Desmond Swayne | Can extreme poverty be eliminated through programmes targeting the world’s ultra-poor? The panel will discuss the merits of so called graduation approaches. Oriana Bandiera is a Professor of Economics at the LSE and the Director of STICERD. Mushtaque Chowdhury is Vice-Chairperson, BRAC. Esther Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT. Anna Minj is Director of the Targeting the Ultra Poor Programme, BRAC. Muhammad Musa, Executive Director, BRAC. Desmond Swayne is Minister of State at DFID. Robin Burgess is a Professor of Economics at LSE and Director of the IGC. The International Growth Centre (@The_IGC) aims to promote sustainable growth in developing countries by providing demand-led policy advice based on frontier research. Based at LSE and in partnership with Oxford University, the IGC is initiated and funded by DFID. BRAC (@BRACworld) is a global leader in creating opportunity for the world’s poor.

Contributor(s): Professor Ian Morris | 20,000 years ago, ‘international relations’ meant interactions between tiny foraging bands; now it means a global system. Philippe Roman Chair Ian Morris explains how the growth of the international system and the shifts of power within it are linked to geography and energy extraction. In tracing this story, Professor Morris asks: Why were the world’s greatest powers concentrated in western Eurasia until about AD 500? Why did they shift to East Asia until AD 1750? Why did they return to the shores of the North Atlantic? And where will they go next? Ian Morris is Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs at LSE IDEAS for 2015-16. Michael Cox is Director of LSE IDEAS. LSE IDEAS (@LSEIDEAS) is a foreign policy think-tank within LSE's Institute for Global Affairs.

Contributor(s): Tim Judah | Veteran war reporter and Economist correspondent Tim Judah explores the impact of the ongoing conflict on the inhabitants of Ukraine. His new book is In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine. Tim Judah (@timjudah1) writes for the New York Review of Books and the Economist, most recently on the situation in Ukraine. In his career he has covered the aftermath of communism in Romania and Bulgaria and the war in Yugoslavia for The Times and the Economist. His most recent books are Kosovo: What Everyone Needs to Know and The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. Robert Cooper is a Visiting Senior Fellow at LSE IDEAS. He was educated at Oxford and joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1970. Since then Mr Cooper has worked at various British Embassies abroad and since mid-2002 he has been working on behalf of the EU. The International Relations Department at LSE (@LSEIRDept) is now in its 87th year, making it one of the oldest as well as largest in the world.

Contributor(s): Dr Kate Devlin, Dr Mateja Jamnik, Professor Huw Price, Dr Mark Sprevak | AI is progressing fast. What level has it reached? Is human-level AI a realistic possibility? And if it is achieved in the near future, what will the consequences be for humanity? Could AI threaten our very existence? In this panel discussion, philosophers Huw Price and Mark Sprevak and computer scientists Mateja Jamnik and Kate Devlin discuss these and other questions concerning AI and the future of humanity. Kate Devlin is a Lecturer in Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Mateja Jamnik is Senior Lecturer in Computing at Cambridge. Huw Price is Professor of Philosophy, Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, Cambridge. Mark Sprevak is Senior Lecture of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Dr Jonathan Birch is Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, LSE and Forum for European Philosophy Fellow. The Forum for European Philosophy (@ForumPhilosophy) is an educational charity that organises a full and varied programme of philosophy and interdisciplinary events in the UK.

Contributor(s): Professor Wendy Carlin | The financial crisis triggered a fundamental rethinking of how economics students are taught and what they learn. An international collaborative project of economists (the CORE project), led by Wendy Carlin, has responded with a new curriculum that provides tools for engaging with the issues of economic inequality, environmental sustainability, innovation and wealth creation, and financial instability. Some policy shortcomings can be traced to a view – standard in undergraduate economics teaching – that the pursuit of self-interest in competitive markets is a sufficient guide to how society should allocate its resources. But this confidence in unregulated markets finds little support in recent economic research. In this new, empirically based view, instability, growing economic disparity and environmental destruction are not exceptions to the rule but rather the expected outcomes of an unregulated market economy. Fundamental changes have occurred, too, in economic knowledge of individual behaviour resulting in a growing recognition of the economic importance of ethical and other-regarding motives alongside self-interest. The tools of economics can be taught using new research insights and empirical results to address questions of importance to students, policy-makers and a broader public. Wendy Carlin is Professor of Economics at University College London, and Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Robin Archer is Director of the Ralph Miliband Programme at LSE. The Ralph Miliband Programme (@rmilibandlse) is one of LSE's most prestigious lecture series and seeks to advance Ralph Miliband's spirit of free social inquiry.

Contributor(s): Vince Cable, Professor Diane Coyle, Bronwyn Curtis, Anna Leach | This event marks the official launch of the LSE Business Review blog bringing together a panel of prominent economists to discuss productivity, the UK’s economic future and the road ahead. Vince Cable (@vincecable) was MP for Twickenham from 1997-2015. He was the Liberal Democrat's chief economic spokesperson from 2003-2010, having previously served as Chief Economist for Shell from 1995-1997. He was Business Secretary under the Coalition Government from 2010-2015. He is the author of The Storm and his latest publication After The Storm. Diane Coyle, OBE (@diane1859), is a Professor of Economics at the University of Manchester. Until April 2015 she was vice-chairman of the BBC Trust, the BBC's governing body, and was previously a member of the Migration Advisory Committee and the Competition Commission. She began her career at the UK Treasury. Bronwyn Curtis is a global financial markets economist and a member of the LSE’s Court of Governors. She is a non-executive director of JP Morgan Asian Investment Trust and Scottish American Investment Trust. She was Head of Global Research at HSBC and Managing Editor of European Broadcast at Bloomberg LP. Anna Leach is head of the economic analysis team at CBI, overseeing the quarterly global macroeconomic forecast and the business surveys of economic conditions across the UK economy. Previously she worked in macroeconomic analysis at the Treasury and as a labour market economist at DWP, as well as undertaking a secondment to the Treasury Select Committee. John Van Reenan (@johnvanreenen) is a professor in the Department of Economics at LSE and director of LSE's Centre for Economic Performance. LSE Business Review (@LSEforBusiness) is an LSE-wide initiative to improve knowledge-exchange activities connecting social science researchers with business professionals in firms, enterprises and markets. The cross-disciplinary blog draws on contributions from LSE and other universities, business executives, consultants, think tanks and not-for-profit organisations.

Contributor(s): Professor Charles Taylor | Professor Charles Taylor will look at the constant temptation for modern democracies to veer towards exclusion. This is despite them being founded on a principle of inclusion, and is due to a weakness built into motivations which democracies draw upon. Having firmly established this context, Professor Taylor will discuss the exclusionary moves we have seen in many Western democracies which have targeted (unfamiliar) religions. Why this intense focus and how to overcome it? This lecture will focus mainly on the Quebec/Canadian situation, and will also point to the current parallels evident in many European countries today. Charles Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at McGill University. His recent works include: Modern Social Imaginaries, A Secular Age, and Laïcité et Liberté de Conscience (with Jocelyn Maclure). Professor Craig Calhoun (@craigjcalhoun) is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. This event is co-organised with the Québec Government Office in London.