The Reith Lectures

This year's Reith lecturer is Professor Patricia Williams, one of the most provocative intellectuals in American law.

In her fifth and final Reith lecture, Professor Patricia Williams explores ways of preventing racism. She attempts to point the way forward by drawing out solutions which include developing the ability to resist racism's inevitability and reconciling racial tensions across the divide.

This year's Reith lecturer is Professor Patricia Williams, one of the most well known intellectuals in American law.

In her fourth of five Reith lectures Professor Patricia Williams examines the impact of racialised science on attitudes to race. She argues that scientific statements about black people in terms of genetic attributes of, for example, athleticism or intelligence, nurture racial stereotyping; and she explains why it is so difficult to argue against what are supposedly scientific facts.

This year's Reith lecturer is Professor Patricia Williams, one of the most well known intellectuals in American law.

In her third Reith lecture, Professor Patricia Williams looks at the juxtaposition of race and class and their interaction in society and argues that there is a tendency of the dominant society to conflate race and class, especially when constructing black stereotypes. Discussions of race and class often combine the two categories, leaving both these aspects of a problem inadequately addressed.

This year's Reith lecturer is Professor Patricia Williams, one of the most well known intellectuals in American law.

In her second Reith lecture, Professor Patricia Williams explores how race related problems in society seem to be rendered invisible by 'colour blindness'. Using examples from American legal cases she analyses society's systemic denial of racial experiences. Discussing her expression 'racial voyeurism', she argues that all of these problems stem from racial and cultural domination.

This year's Reith lecturer is Professor Patricia Williams, one of the most well known intellectuals in American law. She served as a deputy city attorney from 1976-1978 in the Los Angeles City Attorney's Office and as Staff Attorney for the Western Center on Law and Poverty in Los Angeles. She has been affiliated with Columbia University Law School since 1991, and has also taught at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and at the City University of New York in Queens. Professor Williams has published widely in the areas of race, gender, and law, and on other issues of legal theory and legal writing. Her highly regarded first book, "The Alchemy of Race and Rights: A Diary of a Law Professor" is an autobiographical work that illuminates some of America's most complex problems.

In her first lecture, Professor Patricia Williams examines how the issue of colour remains so powerfully determinative of everything from life circumstance to manner of death, in a world that is, by and large, officially 'colour blind'. She considers the tensions between ideological and social measures to eliminate racism and the material conditions experienced by individuals, and argues that the very notion of blindness about colour constitutes an ideological confusion at best and denial at worst.

This year's Reith Lecturer is Jean Aitchison, a Professor of Language and Communication in the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford.

In her fifth and final lecture, Professor Jean Aitchison looks at the possibilities and the pitfalls of the way we use language, and how it can shape as well as distort our view of the world. She examines how the huge choice of words and sentences available to us also sets up possible snares and how humans may be subconsciously trapped by their language.

This year's Reith Lecturer is Jean Aitchison, a Professor of Language and Communication in the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford.

In her fourth lecture, Professor Jean Aitchison examines words themselves. An educated native speaker of English knows at least 50,000 words and word-learning ability is inbuilt in humans. Professor Aitchison explains how we manage to recall these words at speed when we need them, and how meaning and sound are interwoven.

This year's Reith Lecturer is Jean Aitchison, a Professor of Language and Communication in the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford.

In her third lecture, Professor Aitchison examines the predictable way in which the language web develops. Language has a biologically organised schedule with children everywhere following a similar pattern. Children learn to talk so readily because they instinctively know in advance what languages are like; the outline is pre-programmed and the network is built up in a pre-ordained sequence. Professor Aitchinson looks at how adults can help and sometimes slow down a child's progress.

This year's Reith Lecturer is Jean Aitchison, a Professor of Language and Communication in the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford.

In her second lecture, Professor Aitchison examines the origin of language in the human species, and explores how a fresh look at the role of language has led to new ideas about how it started. By looking at behaviour which we share with our ape relatives, the original role of language can be uncovered. How did the use of sounds arise? And more importantly, how did particular sounds come to be used as symbols, with firm meanings?

This year's Reith Lecturer is Jean Aitchison, a Professor of Language and Communication in the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford.

In her first lecture, Professor Aitchison asks: Is our language sick? She explores what troubles us most about the way in which our language is changing, who is responsible, and what rules are being discarded. She considers why many of these rules were artificially constructed in the first place and argues that we need to understand language, not try to control it. Informal speech is not intrinsically worse than formal speech, she says, but different, and that the ever-shifting nature of language, is what keeps it flexible.