How best to engage China is the first major foreign policy challenge for a post-Brexit UK and a critical question for the future of Britain’s global and open knowledge economy.

China is set to overtake the US to become both the world’s biggest spender on R&D and the UK’s most significant research partner, raising pressing questions for policymakers at a time of rising geopolitical tensions.

- What will government support schemes during the pandemic do to our wallets in the future?

Innovation is often understood in terms of inventions and technology, and so primarily an activity that takes place within STEM. But innovation is broader than that and something that Social Scientists are doing across the University. This can come in the form of innovation in public policymaking, organisational and institutional innovation, and social entrepreneurship; it goes beyond the context of income generation arising from new inventions and technologies.

As the 'FMSystem' project reaches its midway point, and in consultation with its International Advisory Board, this second workshop will present the team’s work in progress and explore some initial findings.

Programme

09:30-09:45 Tentative Conclusions and Open Questions

09:45-11:15 'Conversations’ on

1) chronology
2) urban hubs and their relationships to the fiscal-military system, and
3) comparing urban ‘fiscal-military hubs’ functioning as centres of expertise, resource accumulation and production.

The series

This term’s series explores social science’s big concepts. It examines the contested meaning and diverse application of some of the theoretical ideas that unify and challenge social scientists. It brings together the bright minds of Oxford, and high profile external speakers, to consider the range of ways in which we can think about ‘power’, ‘space’, ‘identity’, and ‘belonging’.

In September 2019, Balliol College began to investigate its connections with the proceeds of
slavery as part of a broader project examining the College’s multifaceted relationship to
Empire. Though better known for its role as an educator of colonial administrators in the late
nineteenth century, this project has established that the college has ties with earlier periods of
British colonialism and received benefactions from a number of individuals who derived a
significant proportion of their wealth from slavery.

The Arab uprisings of a decade ago threatened to redraw the political map of the Middle East and North Africa region, and set in motion forces that as first sight appeared to be out of the control of ruling regimes, dominant regional powers, and external interested parties. Within the region, the one country whose policies and behaviour was profoundly influenced by the early-2010s uprisings was the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The pandemic has accelerated digitisation across many sectors of the economy and society.