Spring 2010 | Public lectures and events | Video

Contributor(s): Jonathon Porritt | At the beginning of this new decade more people in the US and UK remain unpersuaded by the science of climate change than this time last year. Could it be that people have spotted the yawning gap between the politicians' apocalyptic rhetoric and the bland lifestyle advice to change your light bulbs or drive more slowly? What if there's no solution to climate change without freeing ourselves from our obsession with economic growth?

Contributor(s): John Lanchester | Has the credit crunch exposed the futility of academic economics? Should LSE be closed down and converted into something more socially productive? In this lecture John Lanchester challenges the profession of economics with fundamental questions about its purpose and direction.

Contributor(s): Chris Bryant MP | After the recent focus on internal issues, the EU is now turning its attention to global matters. What impact will the emerging economic powerhouses of India, China and Brazil have on Europe's revitalised outward-looking perspective? Chris Bryant MP is UK Minister for Europe.

Contributor(s): Professor Sonia Livingstone | 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): Tim Bale | Why did the world's oldest and most successful political party dump Margaret Thatcher only to commit electoral suicide under John Major? Just as importantly, what stopped the Tories getting their act together until David Cameron came along? The answers, Tim Bale shows, are as provocative as the questions.

Contributor(s): Tim Judah, Nick Thorpe | After months of renewed celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, has a new malaise taken over? Are there any indicators of hope in the shadow of the unfinished project? Tim Judah is Balkans correspondent for The Economist. Nick Thorpe is Eastern Europe correspondent for the BBC.

Contributor(s): Felix Kuehn, Alex Strick van Linschoten | Born in a small village of Kandahar, Abdul Salam Zaeef rose to become a senior member of the Taliban. His memoirs of his former role, recently translated from Pashto and edited by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, reveal an extraordinary and provocative counter-narrative to the standard accounts of Afghanistan since 1979. Using My Life with the Taliban as an entry point to discussion at this lunchtime event, Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehnwill explore the history and role of Kandahar: the birthplace of the Taliban movement and focal area for the recently announced military 'surge'.

Contributor(s): Isabel Dedring | Isabel Dedring will discuss developing and implementing a vision for a low carbon London. Isabel Dedring is environment adviser to the Mayor of London. She has also been director of the policy unit at Transport for London.

Contributor(s): Professor John Bowen | During the 1980s people living in Europe and North America took cognizance of two major developments in religion and public life. Islam assumed a more prominent role both in majority Muslim societies and in societies of relatively recent residence. And forms of Christianity took on greater public roles in much of the West. These parallel developments have given rise to interrogations on many fronts: concerning the nature of secularism, the proper role of religious commitments in liberal democracies, and the accommodations required for Islam to assume its new role in those democracies. Confusion reigns over how to understand claims made in the name of Islam, or for that matter those made in the name of laïcité, toleration, or multiculturalism. This series of three lectures attempts to address some of these issues from a perspective that is anthropological, political-theoretic, and comparative.

Contributor(s): Jaron Lanier | Something started to go wrong with the digital revolution at the start of the 21st century. Individual creativity has begun to go out of fashion and people are being restricted to what can be represented on a computer. Are we deadening the human experience? Jaron Lanier delivers a call to arms in support of the human and reflects on the good and bad developments in design 20 years after the invention of the web. Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, philosopher and all round digital guru who has spent his careers pushing the transformative power of modern technology to its limits. From inventing virtual reality and creating the world's first immersive avatars, as one of the premier designers at work today he received in 2009 a lifetime achievement award from the IEEE and was named one of the top 100 public intellectuals by Prospect and Foreign Policy. This event celebrates the publication of his latest book You are Not a Gadget.