St Cross Colloquia

Colloquia Week 4 HT11: Egyptian Collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum.

Colloquia Week 4 HT11: Tactical Voting.

Colloquia Week 5 MT10: Reparative Reasoning: An Abductive Approach to Religious Conflict.

Colloquia Week 4 MT10: Moving goods and moving people: transport, infrastructure and economic transformation in Tanzania.

Colloquia Week 2 TT10 - Outsourcing Governance - limitations to new models of ethical governance in global supply chains.

Colloquia Week 7 HT10 - Daniel Nicolae; "A hidden secret or placebo effect? How Saladin's physicians took care of souls and bodies".

Colloquia Week 4 HT10 - Noel Lobley; The Sound of Africa - Hugh Tracey tried to record the entire African continent but was anybody listening?

Colloquia Week 3 HT10 - Dr Heiko Schiffter; "Lyophilization of Protein Pharmaceuticals".

Colloquium week 7 MT09 (Junior member speaker).

Colloquium - Week 5 MT09 (Senior Speaker).

'Sino-Japanese Relations beyond ODA' Colloquium - week 2 MT09.

"The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Failed States: Somalia, State Collapse and the Global War on Terror" A paper presented during the weekly Colloquium. Over recent decades, several states have experienced mounting difficulties in fulfilling classic state-functions such as guaranteeing territorial integrity and law and order. Since 11 September 2001, this phenomenon has been particularly associated with terrorism, trans-border criminality and global instability. Through analysis of America's Somalia-policy, this paper will illustrate theoretical flaws underpinning the Orthodox Narrative of State-Failure together with the disastrous on-the-ground implications of Washington's new "Long War" in the Horn of Africa. Today, an insurgency is ravaging Somalia and the humanitarian situation has plummeted: the narrow world-vision of the Global War on Terror is hindering the re-emergence of legitimate authority and blocking bottom-up responses to human security questions.

A paper presented on Tuesday 9th June 2009 at the St Cross College Colloquium. Recent literature and policy movements in the UK and USA have given a great deal of focus to evidence-based practice (EBP) in social services, however there remains little clarity in the literature as to the realities of what these concepts look like in practice. As educational models in the social sciences and policy pressure on human services continue to develop, it is imperative to examine what is being considered as evidence for practice, how evidence is being accessed, interpreted and used by practitioners, and what barriers may exist to the uptake of research.

A Paper detailing fieldwork analysing funding for conservation and development in the Dominican Republic. The debate over the best way to conserve biological resources while allowing for the development of communities that live around or in and work with those resources has long been contentious. The degree to which forest residents, subsistence farmers, and indigenous tribes degrade or protect biodiversity remains unresolved, as does the best way to merge the interests and needs of communities in biodiversity-rich areas with those of conservationists. Based on theories of social capital and civil society, some have argued that the best managers of biodiversity are locals, those who know their resources, land, and communities. Others, pointing to links between poverty and development and a variety of cases where community-management regimes have failed, insist that traditional fences-and-fines techniques are the only known way to protect biodiversity. Further, this debate also requires consideration of best-practices for conservation in light of increasing pressure from human and climatic sources, including the role of non-park and buffer zones as valid conservation spheres.

There are some standard modern myths (e.g. "medieval people thought the earth was flat"; "they were considered old at the age of 30", etc.) which historians are always encountering in their audiences, and I will try to de-bunk some of these.