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Global Challenges and Social Justice

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Events

Mar 5

AI Opportunities? Responses on implications for research and teaching

Wednesday, March 5, 2025 - 13:00 to 14:30

Online

This is the second roundtable of the 2024-2025 GCSJ Roundtable series. This roundtable invites an open and critical exploration of the concerns, questions and opportunities regarding the use of AI within teaching and learning. 

Mar 12

Teaching equitably about climate change: Linking Higher Education research with School teaching?

Wednesday, March 12, 2025 - 09:30 to 14:30

Online, via Microsoft Teams

Hosted by the Centre for Global Challenges and Social Justice (GCSJ), join us for a discussion with the developers of new teaching materials for Key Stage 3 to address the climate crisis through a decolonial lens

Mar 14

GCSJ seminar series: Overcoming colonial continuities in the area of social protection

Friday, March 14, 2025 - 12:00 to 13:00

Online

Drawing on documentary analysis and stakeholder interviews, the talk offers a critical, comparative analysis of how colonial pasts have influenced social protection policies and institutions in Mainland Tanzania and Cote d’Ivoire, to what extent the current dynamics of policymaking enable alignment with national social protection priorities, and how domestic leadership in social protection arrangements could be strengthened.

Mar 18

Wrongs not righted: how might we think about repair? - A GCSJ Research Talk

Tuesday, March 18, 2025 - 14:00 to 15:15

Online, via Microsoft Teams

This talk explores the troubling history of the entanglements between Britain and Jamaica, through the establishment of a slave society from the late seventeenth century, the time of abolition and emancipation, and moments of crisis in 1865 and 1938. It will argue that there are colonial wrongs to be righted: there is a debt. Who carries responsibility? What would recognition mean? How might we think about repair?

Mar 21

‘I do not sleep to dream, but dream to change the world’: Black Dreaming in ‘the Wake’; Reflections on Futures Past – A TESS Talk

Friday, March 21, 2025 - 12:00 to 13:30

Online, via Microsoft Teams

This event is part of the Thinking Expansively Seminar Series (TESS) and will explore Blackness, futurity, and geographies, drawing on Christina Sharpe's concept of "the wake." It examines how dreams and joy within Blackness inform new visions of the future, using Caribbean literature and film to reimagine Black futures. Through works like Erna Brodber's One Bubby Susan and Jaz Morrison’s films, the talk challenges traditional ideas of time and Black experience.

Apr 11

GCSJ seminar series: Existential Dis/Connections: Opening up conversations

Friday, April 11, 2025 - 12:00 to 13:30

Online

In this seminar we will introduce the developing work of Existential Dis/Connections. The seminar will offer tasters for making connections from a number of different starting points, opening up conversations and encouraging new spaces that can accommodate discomfort, uncertainty and new possibilities.

May 16

GCSJ roundtable: Disengaged or discerning sceptics? Research and insights on active citizenship

Friday, May 16, 2025 - 12:00 to 13:00

Online

This roundtable will showcase current research from across the OU focused on engaging disengaged citizens across various contexts.

 

Jun 18

Challenging prejudice and disinformation

Wednesday, June 18, 2025 - 13:00 to 14:30

Online

As part of this roundtable discussion, members of three research teams will reflect on how external engagement and research impact can creatively, effectively and ethically be facilitated to challenge prejudice and disinformation. 

Past Events

An Integrated System for Refugee Students: Access and Success in Higher Education - A TESS Talk

21st February 2025

This event is part of the Thinking Expansively Seminar Series (TESS) and examines how digital education can empower refugee learners by addressing the unique challenges they face in accessing and succeeding in higher education. It explores the development of an integrated framework that provides tailored, multi-tiered support systems in host countries, moving beyond generic approaches to meet the specific needs of refugee students.

GCSJ seminar series: Friends and Lovers

14th February 2025

How do we negotiate the boundaries between “just friends” and “dating”? This talk offers some pointers, noting in particular the importance of our assumptions about roles and stereotypes.

A question of reflexivity: experiences of African researchers - Thinking Expansively Seminar Series (TESS)

24th January 2025

Thinking Expansively Seminar Series (TESS). TESS is an interdisciplinary series hosted by GCSJ at The Open University.

Dr Omolola Olarinde in her talk invites researchers, particularly those less familiar with reflexivity, to explore how employing reflexivity can enrich their research.

GCSJ seminar series: Towards an entrepreneurial welfare state? An empirically informed theoretical perspective

17th January 2025

In this talk, we focus on the prospect of an entrepreneurial welfare state. We argue that an entrepreneurial welfare state ought to redistribute the benefits of innovation. However, getting the level of redistribution right is crucial for maintaining incentives for innovation. An entrepreneurial welfare state depends on the balance between entrepreneurial functions and welfare functions.

Book Launch: Border Abolition Now (Hosted by GCSJ)

20th November 2024

Borders must be abolished. That is the key premise of this book. Exploring different scenes of anti-border organising, sites of border violence, and underscoring the importance of abolition to bordering, Border Abolition Now demands transformative politics to dismantle these systems of oppression.

GCSJ seminar series: Space in common? Property, waste and their colonial lives in the cosmos

15th November 2024

This talk focuses on the politics of use and pollution (due to both light and debris) of the night sky as an environmental common and discusses the fraught postcolonial dynamics of accessing and occupying orbits.

GCSJ roundtable: How far did we decolonise

16th October 2024

This Centre for Global Challenges and Social Justice (GCSJ) roundtable event invites a critical exploration of the multifaceted work of decolonisation across the Open University.

GCSJ seminar series: Legislating against political lying: risks and feasibility

11th October 2024

In this seminar, Alex Barber (Philosophy) and Sean Cordell (Philosophy) identify four core challenges for the Senedd proposal in its latest iteration. More positively, we identify some potential workarounds and some alternative approaches to the problem of political lying in a democracy.

GCSJ seminar series: Mothers, boys' circumcision and a new politics of harm in Kenya

12th July 2024

We explore how Kenyan mothers are becoming involved in male circumcision, which is usually a men-only space. The talk examines new ideas about cultural rights, genital cutting, and harm in the law and ethics in Kenya.

GCSJ seminar series: Toothless tigers? Regional organisations and democracy promotion

14th June 2024

Since the end of the Cold War, a growing number of regional organisations (ROs) around the world have formally adhered to democracy as common norm and have adopted institutionalised mechanisms to promote, protect and defend it.