2nd Annual Research Festival on Global Challenges and Social Justice

Dates: Wednesday, May 15, 2024 - 11:00 to Friday, May 17, 2024 - 15:00
Location: Online and in-person, Library seminar rooms 1&2

GCSJ logo

We would like to invite you to join the GCSJ Research Festival on Global Challenges and Social Justice between 15 and 17 May 2024. The festival will include both in-person and online elements and will bring together a variety of speakers and formats to showcase exciting OU research and give researchers a platform to exchange ideas and expand their networks.

Time	Title and Speakers
11.00-12.00pm	Decriminalisation of Sex Work in Cape Town Speaker: Bev Orton Violence against women and girls in South Africa is one of the highest in the world. This also applies to femicide. Sex workers in South Africa face many challenges, murder, rape, sexual assault and significant barriers to safety. The reasons for becoming sex workers are varied and reflect their vulnerabilities and poverty. Not only financial poverty but also educational and skills poverty. Many experience violence within relationships and stigma from communities. They are also targets of violence for police and clients. Sex work enables their children to go to school, puts food on the table for their children, the parents, the children of their brothers and siters and some even manage to pay University fees for their children. Decriminalisation of sex work would enable safeguarding and access to health care. Register for this event via Eventbrite
12.00-1.15pm	Imaginaries of Environmentalism: Epiphanies, Fantasies, and Rituals Organised by the disciplines of Philosophy, Religious Studies, Politics & International Studies Speakers: Charlotte Weatherill: Colonial Fantasies of Invulnerability to Climate Change Sophie-Grace Chappell: Epiphanies and the Environment Maria Nita: Rituals for the Climate Crisis Chair: George Revill Abstract: Environmentalism has a politics of policy and activism, but it’s also a contested space of emotion and imagination. These papers bring together different ideas around environmentalism and imagined alternatives to the harm and violence that is being enacted upon the world. Register for this event via Eventbrite
1:15-1:30pm	Break
1:30-2:45pm	Borders and the Hostile Environment Speakers: Kathryn Medien Dan Taylor Chair: Liudmila Nikanorova In this roundtable, Dan Taylor, Kathryn Medien and Anita Grodkievicz of the Rosmini Centre, Wisbech discuss recent projects exploring how migrants in the UK are experiencing and responding to the UK’s “hostile environment” policies. Over the last year, Dan has been undertaking an Open Societal Challenges project exploring borders, community and connection in the Fens, a part of England which produces much of the UK’s food, much of it through low-waged farm and factory work that has become systematically reliant on migrant labour, some of it trafficked. Anita Grodkievicz and her organisation the Rosmini Centre have worked tirelessly supporting migrants in one Fens market town, Wisbech. We hear from her past and present work supporting migrants in the area, from investigations into people trafficking to labour conditions for migrant workers post-Brexit. For some years Kathryn has analysed the historical development of and resistance to a “hostile environment” in the UK towards migrants and racialised Britons. Drawing on archival work and contemporary fieldwork, Kathryn explores how activists framed their resistance to the hostile environment through identifying connections between internal bordering and the ongoing legacies of the British Empire and colonialism. Such a framing illuminates the intimacies between bordering policies in Britain and elsewhere, allowing us to create solidarities between anti-border and anti-racist struggles globally. Register for this event via Eventbrite

Library Atrium area – for refreshments and lunch.
Find details on the webinar and registration for the following events

Time	Title and Speakers
9:30-10:00am	Coffee on arrival
10:00-11:00am	Seminar I: Contemporary Challenges of Information and Trust Organised by the disciplines of Philosophy, Religious Studies, Politics & International Studies Speakers: Dan Cavedon-Taylor: Deepfakes, Hollow Political Harms Precious Chatterje-Doody: Religious Institutions as Information Actors: Identity, Emotions and War Paul-Francois Tremlett: From Manila to Wolverhampton and Back Again: The Return of Religion and the Rise of Religious Literacy Chair: Jamie Gaskarth Abstract: The contemporary crisis of social, political and media trust is well-documented, as is the range of the challenges it poses for reliably making sense of news and current affairs in a real-time global media ecology. In this context, our immediate affective responses can significantly condition how we react to social stimuli, creating conflicting trends in who and what we trust. This panel looks in more detail at some of these trends. Placing the spotlight on some of the most pressing issues in studies of contemporary information manipulation, the panel interrogates their philosophical and conceptual backstories, as well as their real-world relevance.
11:00am-12:00pm	Seminar II: Tackling Multi-dimensional Inequalities Organised by the disciplines of Development, Economics Speakers: Thais DeCarvalho-R-Lopes: The loss of environmental capital and intergenerational impoverishment in the Peruvian Amazonia Julia Chukwuma: The financialisation of healthcare: Public-Private-Partnerships and health in Africa Andrew Trigg: Rosa Luxemburg on inequality and economic crises Charlotte Cross: Title TBC Chair: Dinar Kale Abstract: Building on the research conducted in the Development and Economics stream, this session engages with causes, consequences and potential solutions associated with multi-dimensional inequalities. Inequalities have become a pervasive and ubiquitous part of everyday lives in the Global North and Global South. These inequalities are shaped by historical contexts, social structure, and power dynamics, and they manifest in various dimensions such as income, gender, race, and relationships underpinning them. Within this context, this session will examine how individuals, communities, firms, and countries navigate, negotiate and challenge these unequal relationships in different areas such as health, gender and the environment.
12:00-1:00pm	Lunch
1:00-2:00pm	Keynote Speech: Whose side is the law on? Speaker: Jolyon Maugham KC, founder and director of the Good Law Project Chair: Umut Erel Jo Maugham is the founder and executive director of Good Law Project, a non-profit which uses the law to hold power to account and protect the public interest. It took a leading role in overturning Boris Johnson’s unlawful prorogation of parliament and in exposing the cronyism at the heart of the government’s £50bn Covid procurement, and more recently has forced the government to rewrite its threadbare net zero strategy. Jo was appointed QC in 2015 and has advised Labour and the government on tax policy. He is a regular contributor on national media and has written extensively for newspapers including the Financial Times, the Times and the Guardian. His Sunday Times bestseller showing how the law can work for everyone, Bringing Down Goliath, was published in 2023 and is out in Penguin paperback in April 2024. Jo’s keynote speech titled “Whose side is the law on?” will interrogate whether the stories the law tells about itself are true. Does it level up power or embed it? What does it mean to say you must not undermine public confidence in the law? Does the law advance the agenda of progressives - or does it hold them back?
2:00-2:15pm	Coffee break
2:15-3:15pm	Seminar III Organised by the disciplines of Social Policy & Criminology, Sociology Speakers: Isla Masson: Ambiguous Loss: The Experiences of Remand Prisoners’ Loved Ones: Remand remains a particularly punitive and painful form of incarceration for prisoners, as well as their loved ones on the outside attempting to provide support. Through a unique application of Boss’s (1977) theory of Ambiguous Loss this paper contributes new knowledge about the nature, scope, and resilience shown by loved ones supporting remanded prisoners in England and Wales, indicating where future research and policy should be focused. Lucy Bryant: Who’s running the show? The regulation of live music in England and Wales: How is the live music industry shaped by its regulatory landscape? Live music is subject to a variety of regulation, including planning regulation; the areas of live music regulation which cite ‘safety’ as a goal (health and safety; licensing; event security); and employment regulation. Presenting findings from their PhD research, Lucy Bryant shares patterns identified across these regulatory areas which suggest that the productive power of regulation has contributed to the development of a live music industry formed in the image of neoliberalism. Ece Kocabicak: Women’s labour force participation in developing countries: The impact of gendered landownership rights? Conventional demand and supply arguments on gender gaps in non-agricultural employment overlook the influence of women’s unpaid farm work on their participation in paid employment. Using cross-country panel data analysis and a case study from India with a difference-in-differences model, this paper demonstrates that legal discrimination against women in land inheritance curtails female participation in non-agricultural paid employment. The paper thereby contributes an explanation for the apparent paradox observed in developing countries where persistent gender gaps in non-agricultural paid employment coexist with economic growth. Chair: Keir Irwin-Rogers
3:15-4:15pm	Seminar IV: Thinking Spatially in Turbulent Times: the Future is Open? Organised by the discipline of Geography & Environmental Studies Speakers: Claire Wellesley Smith: Stitching the City Edward Wigley: in-between purity and pollution: wudu, encounters and emotions Gunjan Sondhi: Re-placing migrant women in early 20th Century England Chair: Sonja Rewhorn Abstract: This session forms part of the Open Geographies research conversations that explore how thinking spatially opens up different ways of making sense of the politics of the present. It offers us provocations to consider how radically different notions of openness (and closure) are being articulated through various cultural and political projects, experiments, movements, and resistances – and asking: What’s at stake? One avenue into this exploration is to seek for openings for new modes of engagement through creative practice, open public geographies, and political praxis. The panel explores and reflects on how starting from elsewhere – beyond the canonical and familiar ways of research and knowledge production, and using creative method of exploring storytelling can enable us to tell geographical stories. Storytelling to tell geographical stories centre the role of place and spatial thinking to offer us innovative points of entry into examining the politics of the present.
4:15-5:00pm	Networking and refreshments

Time	Title and Speakers
12:00-1:15pm	Seminar: Actually Decolonising? Frictions, Facilitation and Frontiers Speakers: Gunjan Sondhi Craig Walker Parvati Raghuram Abstract: Decolonisation has taken up a lot of print space in recent years. First there has been a wholesale endorsement of decolonisation including in Geography where authors have tried to decolonise this and decolonise that (Raghuram and Sondhi, forthcoming). Similarly, many research projects have obtained funding by using the decolonial word to make claims to justice and equality. There has also been, for some time, a critique of rhetorical decolonisation and warnings against simply jumping on the decolonial bandwagon (Moosavi 2020). Authors have argued against the tendency to make this only an epistemic endeavour devoid of the political impetus within which original decolonial thought was embedded. They have urged us to think through the inheritances and responsibilities that decolonisation entails. Between these two ends are many attempts to actually decolonise. Institutions have attempted to change curricula, reading lists, and even staffing. This paper draws on AHRC funded project Decolonising Education for Peace in Africa. The project aimed to shift the narrative of Africa as a continent marred by conflict to instead explore already existing values and knowledges of peace on the continent. It involved a range of sub-projects which stretch across 15 countries. Each project worked with a mix of NGOs and university academics in Africa although many were simultaneously being supported by UK academics. The paper introduces the project and explores actual decolonisation through three themes: friction, facilitation and frontiers. These provide three cuts into the practicalities of actually decolonising." Register for this event via Eventbrite.
1:15-1:30pm	Break
1:30-2:45pm	Seminar: Participatory Action Research (PAR) Methods for Reflective Collaborative Practice: Engaging with Local Authority Policies in Britain and Brazil Speakers: Andrea Berardi: Community-led Policy Innovation for Local Food-Growing Les Levidow: Brazil’s EcoSol-agroecology networks engaging Local Authority policies Commentary by Agnes Czajka Rationale: Participatory Action Research (PAR) is research into practice undertaken by those involved, aiming to improve their situation. To pursue common aims, practitioners jointly plan actions, implement them, observe the effects and reflect on the practical implications; then they repeat the cycle. Through this process, they can become a stronger collective actor. They gain new understandings of the change process. Separate individuals become a more cohesive group, learning how to devise more effective actions. This webinar will focus on PAR methods for Local Authority policy-change, especially for promoting solidaristic agri-food alternatives in Britain and Brazil. After the talks, webinar participants can describe their own efforts with PAR methods. Contributors should contact the hosts beforehand at FASS-SSGS-Research-Centre@open.ac.uk Register for this event via Eventbrite

Time

Title and Speakers

12:00-1:15pm

Seminar: Actually Decolonising? Frictions, Facilitation and Frontiers

Speakers:
Gunjan Sondhi
Craig Walker
Parvati Raghuram

Abstract: Decolonisation has taken up a lot of print space in recent years. First there has been a wholesale endorsement of decolonisation including in Geography where authors have tried to decolonise this and decolonise that (Raghuram and Sondhi, forthcoming). Similarly, many research projects have obtained funding by using the decolonial word to make claims to justice and equality. There has also been, for some time, a critique of rhetorical decolonisation and warnings against simply jumping on the decolonial bandwagon (Moosavi 2020). Authors have argued against the tendency to make this only an epistemic endeavour devoid of the political impetus within which original decolonial thought was embedded. They have urged us to think through the inheritances and responsibilities that decolonisation entails. Between these two ends are many attempts to actually decolonise. Institutions have attempted to change curricula, reading lists, and even staffing.

This paper draws on AHRC funded project Decolonising Education for Peace in Africa. The project aimed to shift the narrative of Africa as a continent marred by conflict to instead explore already existing values and knowledges of peace on the continent. It involved a range of sub-projects which stretch across 15 countries. Each project worked with a mix of NGOs and university academics in Africa although many were simultaneously being supported by UK academics. The paper introduces the project and explores actual decolonisation through three themes: friction, facilitation and frontiers. These provide three cuts into the practicalities of actually decolonising."

1:15-1:30pm

Break

1:30-2:45pm

Seminar: Participatory Action Research (PAR) Methods for Reflective Collaborative Practice: Engaging with Local Authority Policies in Britain and Brazil

Speakers:
Andrea Berardi: Community-led Policy Innovation for Local Food-Growing
Les Levidow: Brazil’s EcoSol-agroecology networks engaging Local Authority policies
Commentary by Agnes Czajka

Rationale: Participatory Action Research (PAR) is research into practice undertaken by those involved, aiming to improve their situation. To pursue common aims, practitioners jointly plan actions, implement them, observe the effects and reflect on the practical implications; then they repeat the cycle. Through this process, they can become a stronger collective actor. They gain new understandings of the change process. Separate individuals become a more cohesive group, learning how to devise more effective actions. This webinar will focus on PAR methods for Local Authority policy-change, especially for promoting solidaristic agri-food alternatives in Britain and Brazil.

After the talks, webinar participants can describe their own efforts with PAR methods. Contributors should contact the hosts beforehand at FASS-SSGS-Research-Centre@open.ac.uk