2019

FAIR FASHIONA panel discussion with representatives from and founders of ethical and Fairtrade fashion and sports brands, followed by a fashion show where their clothes and accessories will be modeled by Brookes students.18:00 Friday 15 March 2019 Glass TankIn partnership with Brookes Union Fashion Society, Brookes Union Sound and Light Society and Oxford Brookes Estates and Facilities Management team. No booking required - just turn up.ACTIVISM! OPEN MIC POETRY NIGHTExploring the themes of this year’s Oxford Human Rights Festival and LGBTQ+ History Month (History: peace, reconciliation, and activism), we invite local poets and Oxford Brookes students to read and perform work inspired by the themes, either by themselves or by other poets.19:00 Tuesday 19 March 2019 Glass TankIn partnership with the Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre and the Oxford Brookes LGBTQ+ Staff Forum. No booking required - just turn up.BOOTS ON THE GROUND: FINDING EMPOWERMENT THROUGH ACTIVISM, CRAFTIVISM AND PROTESTA narrative of powerlessness is sold to us on a daily basis. As complex political options are reduced and polarised between ‘no deal’ or a ‘bad deal’ democratic processes leave large swathes of the population wanting. Switching on the television frequently serves as an unwelcome reminder that there isn’t enough money, enough time, or enough resources, and reaffirms that our world is plagued with multiple forms of injustice which, as individuals, we can do little to impact. In its broadest sense, ‘inequality’ could justifiably be nominated the political and social zeitgeist for our time.Faced as we are with an endless list of seemingly insurmountable iniquities, apathy could become an appealing and easily-accessible place of refuge from our own seeming lack of agency. The question we should be asking ourselves is, how we find empowerment in situations which leave us feeling powerless?Using personal photos, mementos and examples of craftivism, Emily discusses finding empowerment through her activism, some of the challenges she faces as an activist ‘on the ground’, and whether any of it really makes a difference.Talk followed by audience Q&A with Emily Scott.12:30 Wednesday 20 March 2019 Glass TankNo ticket necessary. Open to everyone.RESEARCHING INVISIBLE PEOPLE IN MODERN SLAVERY: PROJECTS AT OXFORD BROOKES AND ELMORE COMMUNITY SERVICES, OXFORD How do we as researchers know about such invisible people? How do we inquire into the lives and experiences of people who are invisible among us, because they might have followed paths to change their lives for the better and fallen into tangled webs of exploitation, systems of debt and other complex socio-economic structures as well as powerful personal and criminal relations that hold them in some forms of modern slavery? How can we contribute to inform, critique and improve policies as well as institutional and business practices to eliminate slavery through research in universities and in charities? To conclude the photo exhibition ‘Invisible People’ in the Lab and as an extension to the Oxford Human Rights Festival, Dr Tamsin Barber (Oxford Brookes, Social Sciences Department), Dr Kate Clayton-Hathway (Oxford Brookes, Centre for Diversity Policy Research and Practice)and Fiona Gell (Elmore Community Services, Oxford) will present and discuss their respective research and experience as researchers: on modern slavery from Vietnam to cannabis farms and nails salons in London, from Central Europe to hotels in Scandinavia and the UK, to local responses to address threats and provide effective responses to identify, protect, refer and support victims in Oxford. Panel presentation and dicussion followed by audience Q&A.12:30 Thursday 21 March 2019 Glass Tank / The LabNo ticket necessary. Open to everyone.ACTIVISM 4 - 22 March 2019 Oxford Brookes UniversitySpeaker biographiesReverend Kate Harford is a Christian priest who leads the Multifaith Chaplaincy at Oxford Brookes University and offers spiritual and pastoral care to any member of the university (of any or no faith). She works closely with other Chaplains to ensure that all staff and students can access the Multifaith Chaplaincy for support, and coordinates the events in the Mulitfaith Chaplaincy. Kate was ordained in November 2015 by the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC). She has a particular interest in interfaith dialogue, queer and intersectional feminist theology, and theologies of suffering and mental health. Before ordination Kate worked with charities for young people across the UK, homeless people in London, and LGBT+ asylum seekers within and beyond the church. Kate is a leader in Girl Guides and enjoys knitting, crochet, roller derby, and playing the flute in a concert band. She is married to Emily and they live locally with their tortoiseshell cat, Mrs. Evadne Cake.Dr. Katarzyna Grabska is a Senior Fellow at the Global Migration Centre at the Graduate Institute Geneva. She holds a BSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics and an MA in International Affairs and Conflict management from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Her research interests focus on inter-linkages between conflict, forced displacement, gender, generations and rights. She received her PhD in Development Studies/Anthropology from the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex, UK. Her research focuses on social transformations in the context of forced displacement and return among southern Sudanese refugees. She is particularly interested in intersections of power, gender identities and gender and generational relations in forced displacement situations and the impact of (forced) migration on youth. She has worked and researched in the humanitarian field on issues of human rights, migration, and refugees in Egypt, Guinea, Ghana, Kyrgyzstan, South Sudan, Cambodia and Vietnam. She has conducted research on refugee livelihoods and access to rights in the Middle East and East Africa. Before embarking on doctoral studies, she worked as a researcher at the Forced Migration and Refugee Studies program at the American University in Cairo and was a coordinator and a researcher with the Development Research Centre on Migration, Globalization and Poverty. Between 2011-2012, she was a post-doctoral research fellow with the NCCR North-South involved in a research on migration and mobilities in Ghana, Sudan and Nepal. She has been involved in research and in teaching of gender and development courses at IHEID as well as of anthropology of humanitarian action at CERAH.Professor Patricia Daley is Professor of the Human Geography of Africa. She is also Vice-Principal and The Helen Morag Fellow in Geography at Jesus College, Oxford and co-founder of the Oxford University Black and Minority Ethnic staff network. Professor Daley’s principal research interests spans forced migration, identity politics and citizenship, intersections of space, gender, militarism, sexual violence and peace (feminist geo-politics); Critical Race Theory and decolonizing methodologies and the relationship between conservation, resource extraction, and rural livelihoods with the geographical loci of research in East and Central Africa, and the UK.Professor Cathrine Brun is Director of the Centre for Development and Emergency Practice (CENDEP), a multidisciplinary centre under School of Architecture at Oxford Brookes Univeristy that brings together aid workers, academics,, professionals and preactitioners to develop practice-oriented approaches in disaster risk reduction and response, chronic poverty, building urban resilience, conflict transformation, refugee studies and torture prevention. She has worked for 20 years on forced migration as a result of conflict and disasters. Currently she is working particularly on humanitarianism in protracted displacement and chronic crises and with housing for forced migrants. Much of her work has been in urban contexts and in camps. As a human geographer, she is interested in how, in chronic crises and displacement, the relationships between people and places change due to displacement, with a view to understanding the relationships between displaced and their hosts and notions of housing and home. Her work often emphasises how people who experience crises deal with adversity – especially how they strategise and manoeuvre in the course of encounters with institutions and regimes. Her work has also engaged with the ethics and politics of humanitarianism, the experiences and practices of humanitarians, and the unintended consequences of humanitarian categories and labelling practices, particularly in the context of long-term conflict and displacement. Temporal and spatial dimensions of both forced migration and humanitarianism are cross-cutting themes in her work. Collaborating with colleagues, organisations and citizen groups in Sri Lanka, Georgia and more recently Malawi, she has developed innovatory methods for ethnographic fieldwork, participatory action research and real time research. She is interested in how such methodological insights may contribute to improving knowledge production, particularly among humanitarian organisations.Mike Leigh OBE is an award winning film screenwriter, playwright and director, best known for filmwhich focus on British working class life, such as Secrets and Lies and Vera Drake, as well as the suburban aspirational seventies comedy of manners Abigail's Party.Mike Wooldridge OBE is a world affairs correspondent for the BBC. He has been their East Africa, South Africa, and Religious Affairs correspondent, reporting on the influence of religion in modern societies, focusing on conflict arising from religion. In 1996 he moved to Delhi to become the South Asia correspondent and in 2001 he became a world affairs correspondent.Jeremy Gilley is a British actor and film maker, and founder of the non-profit organisation Peace One Day.Dr. Scilla Elworthy was nominated three times for a Nobel Peace Prize nominee for her work with Oxford Research Group to develop effective dialogue between nuclear weapons policy-makers worldwide and their critics, work which included a series of meetings between Chinese, Russian and western nuclear scientists and military. She founded Peace Direct in 2002 to fund, promote and learn from local peace-builders in conflict areas: Peace Direct was voted ‘Best New Charity’ in 2005. She was awarded the Niwano Peace Prize in 2003 and was adviser to Peter Gabriel, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Sir Richard Branson in setting up ‘The Elders’. Scilla co-founded Rising Women Rising World in 2013, and FemmeQ in 2016 to establish the qualities of feminine intelligence for women and men as essential to use in building a safer world. Her TED talk on nonviolence has been viewed by over 1,400,000 people.Her latest book The Business Plan for Peace: Building a World Without War (2017) and her book Pioneering the Possible: awakened leadership for a world that works (North Atlantic Books, 2014) both received critical acclaim from experts in the field. Scilla is an Ambassador for Peace Direct, a Councillor of the World Future Council and patron of Oxford Research Group; adviser to the Syria Campaign and the Institute for Economics and Peace. She advises the leadership of selected international corporations as well as students and young social entrepreneurs. Scilla is a mother, stepmother, and grandmother and loves messing about in her garden near Oxford in the UK.Dr. Brigitte Piquard is an anthropologist; Reader in Humanitarianism and Conflict at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. She has conducted field researches mainly in Asia and the Middle East.  Since 2005, she has been working in the OPT, particularly on spatial occupation and resilience. She is the head of the Building Sumud Project (BSP), an action research project aiming at monitoring interactions between social and environmental impacts of the occupation and symbolic violence. It highlights the potential of architectural and social intervention towards conflict transformation. (www.buildingsumud.org).  She is also the initiator of the Observatory of Symbolic Violence launched for the moment in Colombia and in Palestine.Dr. Emily Scott is an intersectional feminist, advocate for women’s equality and volunteer with Oxford Sexual Abuse and Rape Crisis Centre.