In this lecture, Professor Stav Shufan-Biton examines how Israeli Jews living outside Israel experience holy time, focusing on Shabbat, Jewish holidays, and local religious and civil holidays such as Halloween and Christmas.

The Annual Oxford Taiwan Studies Conference 2026, hosted by the Oxford Taiwan Studies Programme, explores the theme “Taiwan and Its Neighbours: Indo-Pacific States in a Changing World Order.” As geopolitical competition intensifies and the regional balance of power continues to evolve, Taiwan’s position has become increasingly central to debates on economic security, technological transformation, and strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific. Bringing together leading scholars and policy experts, the conference situates Taiwan within its wider regional context by examining how neighbouring st

Humphrey Battcock Lecture 2026 How to achieve resilient, secure, low-carbon economies: Lessons from China and the United States With global geopolitics - and oil prices - in near daily turmoil, the need for a just transition to green energy is ever more apparent. But how does this seismic change towards green industrialisation actually happen? What does it look like in sectors that most of us interact with daily, like the automotive industry? What are the public policies that can permanently shift major economies and the processes of technological innovation that help or hinder progress?

Join Zahid Hasnain, Lead of the Global Program on Public Administration Reform at World Bank Group, in conversation with Christian Schuster, Professor Management and Public Policy, as they discuss the World Bank’s evolving thinking on how to attain good government and public sector performance, and the World Bank’s new report on Public Workforce Performance and Prosperity. Speaker biographies: Zahid Hasnain is a Lead Governance Specialist at World Bank.

After the 1952 revolution, the Egyptian state became an ideological project promoted by national cultural and media institutions. Focusing particularly on the years under the leadership of Gamal Abdel Nasser (1954–1970), Chihab El Khachab uses official written and visual sources produced by different governmental departments to show how low- and mid-ranking bureaucrats represented and embodied the Egyptian state through a praxis of 'achievement' (ingāz, pl. ingazāt). This study demonstrates how a successful anti-colonial nationalist movement built its own state apparatus.

This panel discussion will assess how far the government’s good intentions on housing are being realised. But what are the prospects for tackling the UK’s dysfunctional property taxes? Is the speculative builder model for private sector housing supply fit for purpose? Do we need radical new ways of expanding access for Britain’s families to decent roofs over their heads? The UK faces a severe housing crisis. House prices remain far too high compared to incomes. Renters and the young bear the brunt of the affordability crisis. Many spend over a third of their earnings on housing alone.

This talk discusses the naturalisation of identitarian thinking across the political spectrum and in academic life. It considers the social institutional forces that have enabled its proliferation in many Western societies. Identity politics across much of the political left, alongside ethnonationalism, racism and civilisational discourse on much of the right, are expressions of a broader identitarian logic.

Join us for the launch of Critical Conditions, the debut memoir by Hadi Abdullah, newly translated into English by Alessandro Columbu. Written in the aftermath of revolution, war, and exile, Critical Conditions is both a personal account of survival and a profound meditation on witnessing, resistance, and the politics of memory. Blending the immediacy of frontline reporting with lyrical reflection, Abdullah’s memoir traces his transformation from a teaching assistant in Homs to one of the most recognisable media voices of the Syrian uprising.

Join Kevin Vallier, Professor of Philosophy at the Univeristy of Toledo, and Thomas Simpson, Alfred Landecker Professor of Values and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, for a seminar on agentic capital, intelligence inequalities, and alignment. AI will transform social order, yet we lack a general theory of how it impacts politics and the economy. In this event, Professor Vallier offers such a theory. AI's transformative potential arises from its status as agentic capital: capital that can act and spawn autonomously.