The European Studies Centre, St Antony's College, is delighted to welcome and host, at its opening event for the academic year 2020/21, João Vale de Almeida, the Ambassador of the European Union to the United Kingdom. He will be the lead speaker for our customary panel discussion on "Europe: State of Play". The year 2020 has been truly extraordinary for the EU, its member states and all citizens.

In this talk, Dr Annette Idler will discuss preliminary findings of the multi-year AHRC-ESRC funded project “The Changing Character of Conflict Platform: Understanding, Tracing, and Forecasting Change across Time, Space, and Cultures”. First, she will present a general overview on how the Conflict Platform promotes dialogue across methodologies and epistemologies, bringing together large data analysis with ethnographic fieldwork, complexity science, visualisation techniques, visual arts, and historical tracing back to the Thirty Years War.

We kindly invite you to the second edition of the Occasional CONPEACE Webinar Series. As part of this series, researchers of the programme CONPEACE (conpeace.ccw.ox.ac.uk) – From Conflict Actors to Architects of Peace (University of Oxford) and international speakers analyse security challenges in Latin America and beyond. They explore how security architectures need to be adapted to adequately respond to changing security landscapes from a people-centred security perspective.

The following seminars will take place at 1pm unless otherwise stated. All welcome to join via Zoom, but registration required: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/calendar.

Have you ever been denied insurance, a loan, or a job? Have you had your credit card number stolen? Do you have to wait too long when you call customer service? You might have the data economy to thank for all that and more.

Digital technology is stealing our personal data and with it our power to make free choices. To reclaim that power, and our democracy, we must take back control of our personal data. Surveillance is undermining equality. We are being treated differently on the basis of our data. But what can we do?

Shakespeare and the Political Way attempts to argue that the questions traditionally addressed under the heading ‘Shakespeare and politics’ – whether the plays are revolutionary or reactionary, what contemporary events the dramas allude to, and how they construct history and legitimacy – tend to overlook some deeper questions about Shakespeare’s representations of political power. Political power as such is brought into conflict, in the plots, with economic clout, the workings of violence, religious authority, magic means, and other sources of domination.

The European Public Sphere Project is a multi-annual research effort engaging top-level movers and shakers from the worlds of politics, business and media in Europe with the aim of developing actionable policy-oriented proposals to nurture the Europeanisation of national public spheres. This second public event will be held via Zoom to discuss means of operationalising European democracy. In particular, the project lead Dr.

Can exposure to counter-stereotypes about gender roles improve people's attitudes toward gender equality and LGBT rights? Previous work suggests that gender stereotypes contribute to inequitable attitudes, but there is lack of empirical evidence on whether undermining such stereotypes enhance equitability. We conducted four survey experiments to test whether counter-stereotypical information about gender roles increase equitable attitudes toward women and sexual minorities.

The following seminars will be given at 2pm on Wednesdays via Zoom. For more information on how to sign up and attend the seminar, please visit our website https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/calendar.
Convenor: Meera Selva

Technocratic cabinets and expert, non-political ministers appointed in otherwise partisan cabinets have become a common reality in recent decades in both young and older democracies, but we know little about how citizens see this change and what values, perceptions and experiences drive their attitudes towards technocratic government. The article explores the latter topic by drawing on recent comparative survey data from 9 countries, both young and consolidated democracies from Europe and Latin America.