University of Cambridge

What has Brexit revealed about how we view ourselves and how others see us?

Listen again to our panel discussion with Professor Robert Eaglestone, Ali Meghji, lecturer in social inequalities, anthropologist Professor Katharine Tyler and international relations expert Ayse Zarakol. Chaired by David Reynold.

This event took place as part of the Cambridge Festival of ideas on 19 October 2019.

Will automation make us redundant or are there qualities that are essentially human which will become more sought after?

Listen again to robots expert Hatice Gunes, Allegre Hadida, University Senior Lecturer in Strategy at Judge Business School, author and lecturer Laura Dietz and Stephen Cave from the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. Chaired by Julian Clover from Cambridge 105 Radio.

This panel discussion was part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas and took place on Saturday 19 October 2019.

Risk expert Professor David Spiegelhalter and social psychologist Dr Sander van der Linden explore how we can discuss risk sensibly without causing conspiracy theories and mass panic.

Our current stance on Class A drugs is not working. Is the lack of success in reducing the harm drug-users do to themselves or others a matter of economics, politics, ethics or education? Rowan Williams, Master of Magdalene College, chairs a discussion on safer drug use and the research on drug consumption rooms.

Panel Chair: Dr Rowan Williams

Panel members:

Fiona Godlee

Editor in Chief of The BMJ. Qualified doctor, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. She has written and lectured on a broad range of issues, including health and the environment, the ethics of academic publishing, evidence based medicine, access to clinical trial data, research integrity, open access publishing, patient partnership, conflict of interest, and overdiagnosis and overtreatment.

Fiona is honorary professor at the Netherlands School for Primary Care Research (CaRe), honorary fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners, a senior visiting fellow at the Institute of Public Health at the University of Cambridge, honorary fellow of the Faculty of Public Health and a by-fellow of King’s College Cambridge. She is on the advisory or executive boards of the Health Improvement Studies (THIS) Institute, Alltrials, the Peer Review Congress, the International Forum for Quality and Safety and Healthcare, Evidence Live, Preventing Overdiagnosis, the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change and the Climate and Health Council.

Fiona was a Harkness Fellow (1994-5), President of the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) (1998-2000), Chair of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (2003-5), and PPA Editor of the Year (2014). Fiona is co-editor of Peer Review in Health Sciences.

Johannes Lenhard

A published researcher within the European homeless sector. Three years researching people on the street and their institutional surroundings in London and two years of fieldwork in Paris (with additional context on Copenhagen and San Francisco).

Johannes main interest and argument is as follows: “I am seeing lots of people in situation of housing exclusion / homelessness suffering additionally because of their addiction problems (often linked also to mental health issues). In most contexts addiction will lead to further exclusion (e.g. not being able to access housing because of it). I believe that there is an ideological bias - particularly pronounced in the US - supported often by the pedal structure criminalising drugs that leads to these effects. Thinking about the American war on drugs in particular, how we treat a big proportion of homeless people won’t change unless we as society change our way of treating the addiction they are living with (which in itself is often linked to the situation of homelessness rather than being a causal factor). I am interested in discussing how we can move more quickly and comprehensively to a context of harm reduction rather than criminalisation (as out into place for instance in Copenhagen, Geneva or areas of Portugal) also given the overwhelming evidence that economically and health-wise it makes absolute sense to do so.”

Vicki Markiewicz

Executive Director, Change Live Grow (CGL) and has worked in the substance misuse sector since 1998 and benefits from years of valuable experience in a range of different roles. After completing a MA Degree in Criminology from the University of Cambridge, Vicki worked on the frontline (HMP Wormwood Scrubs and Brixton) and the community. Vicki then worked for the Home Office Drugs Prevention Advisory Service before joining Hertfordshire County Council as a commissioner. Vicki has spent the past ten years working for Change Grow Live, a Health and Social Care Charity, as Executive Director for the East, London and South East.

CGL provides health and social care services support to adults, children, young people and families. CGL currently delivers the contact for addiction support services in Cambridge.

Person with Lived Experience

The scientific consensus on climate change is clear so how do we get everyone on board for the kind of radical action required to save the planet? With writer Hugh Warwick, composer and environmental activist Lola Perrin, Professor Matthew Gandy and Laura Diaz Anadon, Professor of Climate Change Policy. Chaired by Steve Evans from the Centre for Industrial Sustainability.

How much did your health shape your fate in the Middle Ages? If you were a typical peasant or townsperson, how much was your fate in your own hands? How much did it really depend upon chance encounters with random microbes, runaway carts, crop failures, and the like?

In this talk, members of the After the Plague: Health and History in Medieval Cambridge project experiment with several ways of getting beyond abstract numbers and putting a human face on the problem. One way is to look at actual life stories of people from medieval Cambridge, as revealed by multidisciplinary studies of their skeletons. A second is to use virtual, interactive life stories, using a computer game to play out the lives of typical medieval people. Finally, moving up to the historical scale, we use World Health Organisation style methods to ask "what was the biggest health problem of the Middle Ages?" If you got to play God and wipe out one health problem, what would it be? The Black Death? Influenza? Toothache? Come and find out!

The Balkans has long been Europe’s most unstable region. After a series of devastating conflicts in the 1990s, the Balkans was pacified when the US intervened militarily to impose a settlement which transformed the internal boundaries from Yugoslavia into international borders, resulting in a set of multiethnic states such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia and Kosovo.

However, this settlement has been consistently challenged by the peoples of the region who believe the security, rights and opportunity they desire can only be attained by establishing nation states, based on the established model in the rest of Europe.

For the last year, Serbia and Kosovo’s leaders have been openly discussing an exchange of territory along ethnic lines, with the apparent approval of the United States and the European Union. Meanwhile, Albania and Kosovo have stated their intention to unify next decade and the Serbs and Croats in Bosnia are driving the country towards disintegration.

In this presentation, PhD student Timothy Less will ask how long its current borders can hold, what the map of the region will look like in the future, and whether the region make a transition to nation statehood without another conflict, and what the response of the outside powers should be.

Revolution is everywhere, from people power uprisings in Sudan and Algeria to the rise of Islamic State and the emergence of populism. But how should we understand this new age of revolution? And what links contemporary movements to their predecessors in history?

George Lawson, from the Department of International Relations LSE, will explore how revolutions begin, unfold and end. His talk aims to unravel the ‘anatomies of revolution’, and to generate a nuanced understanding of the place of revolution in the contemporary world.

What would it be like to live in a metropolis where horses and livestock abound, and influence every aspect of daily life? How would this affect your attitudes and conduct towards man and beast? Tom Almeroth-Williams answers these questions by exploring how human–animal interactions shaped Georgian London.

Researcher Tyler Shores on how the move from books to screens is affecting our reading habits, whether digital distraction alters how we take in information and what this means for the future of reading.