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Tea, coffee and biscuits from 11.50

Can a government improve access to good schools for the poor when its middle-class supporters rely on educational advantage to maintain their own position in society? Recent advances in the study of comparative political economy of education have highlighted how inequalities created at school structure redistributive politics of higher education and skill formation systems. Yet, we still know little about the politics of redistribution of compulsory schooling - where everyone attends school, but the quality of the teaching and learning differs widely between schools.

In our first session of the Global Thinkers of the International Discussion Series join us in a discussion with P.K. Dutta from Jawaharlal Nehru University, to speak on the life and international thought of Rabindranath Tagore.

Former UN Assistant Secretary-General Michael von der Schulenburg will speak about his new book On Building Peace – Rescuing the Nation-State and Saving the United Nations, based on a lifetime working in countries with wars, conflict and social disintegration. He argues that preserving a global order for the future will need what many thought to be outmoded or even dead: strong nation-states and a stronger United Nations.

About the speaker

In this paper, Tamsin Barber interrogates the role of recent debates around Modern Slavery and trafficking in framing and understanding the experience of new Vietnamese migrants working in the cannabis trade and nail salons in the UK. By reflecting upon wider aspects of the lived experience and biographical processes of migration, the speaker will argue that these frameworks can unintentionally become complicit in rendering these migrants more vulnerable by disregarding their agency (more broadly conceived) and pre-migratory conditions.

Turning from the articulation of constitutional rule in terms of office, to the idea of rule itself as articulated in Aristotle and Xenophon, this lecture argues for the centrality of rule as hierarchical subordination requiring obedience not only to law but also to individual rulers as such. It then explores the psychosocial demands of willing obedience on the part of the ruled.