The consensus is clear on the need to decarbonise faster than ever before to avert the worst impacts of climate change. Calls for a just, equitable transition from fossil fuels for developing countries supported by the North have grown louder. At COP26, India's call for a coal "phase-down" has since mushroomed into wider calls for a phase-out of all fossil fuels, even as countries look to shield their own energy security and industry.

In this talk, Dr Goodwin will put his research on water politics in Ecuador into dialogue with The Social and Political Life of Latin American Infrastructures, a new cross-disciplinary book that he co-edited (Alderman and Goodwin, 2022). In the introduction to the book, the editors build on the infrastructure literature to argue that it is fruitful to conceptualise infrastructures as a relational and experimental processes.

Lecture by Glenn Fine, Former Inspector General for the US Departments of Justice and Defence. Followed by a Q&A.

Pembroke Alumnus Glenn Fine (1979, PPE) will cover his career as an Inspector General for the US Departments of Justice and Defence, as well as the issues he encountered in these roles, including:

investigating abuses to immigrant detainees after the 9/11 attacks
investigating corruption in the Federal Bureau of Prisons
overseeing the FBI’s use of terrorist watchlists and misuse of national security letters

This methods lecture will introduce discourse network analysis, a methodological toolbox for analysing policy debates and their development over time. At its core, the open-source software Discourse Network Analyzer (DNA) and its associated R package rDNA allow researchers to code actors’ policy beliefs in text data, for instance on how to solve a complex policy problem like the pension gap in the face of demographic change or on the adoption of a specific health or environmental policy.