Week 2,

10 Oct

Speaker: Alice Sharp (Director, Invisible Dust)

Host: A.Smith

Invisible Dust brings artists and scientists together to produce exciting new works of art that explore our environment and climate change.

Alice Sharp Director and Curator will introduce Invisible Dust's award-winning work, which includes 'Offshore: artists explore the sea', a Hull City of Culture 2017 exhibition that attracted 390,000 visitors.

Invisible Dust will then facilitate a conversation to generate partnership ideas with The University of Warwick for a three-year programme on peace and biodiversity leading up to Coventry 2021, to include artist residencies, installations, exhibitions and live events.

This proposed programme of activity will also include existing International partners from the Universities of Ottawa and Auckland.

www.invisibledust.com

OC0.04

The Oculus, Ground Floor

Speaker: Maria Lopez (London, Met)

Host: S.Panichelli-Batalla

This presentation addresses the crisis of violence and security provision in Mexico. It addresses the violence affecting women in Juárez, where nearly 1,500 women have been reported murdered since the mid-1990s, and over 3,000 are still missing. Many of the victims are found strangled, mutilated, dismembered, stabbed, sexually abused, burned and with their breasts cut off in desert zones, vacant lots, stream beds, sewers and rubbish dumps. Elaborated pink crosses adorned with flowers and the victims’ names written in black on the crossbars are located by activists in places where women’s corpses have been found. They symbolise the urgent need for strategies to prevent new murders, the protest against the impunity for the crimes already committed and the demand for adequate revaluation of the ideology that ignores and sometimes justifies physical and structural violence against women in the region. The issue of femicide and the impunity over it ultimately provides evidence of the predetermined value on who is targeted to die in Juárez and why.

Students (various)

Host: S.Panichelli-Batalla

Speaker: Mark Adams (Vitsoe, Leamington Spa)

Host: C.Jenainati

Via lessons from Charles Darwin, the Routemaster bus and the strongly-held beliefs of those who strove for a better world, Mark Adams will explore how good design has the power to make our ailing planet just a little bit better.

Speaker: Hannah Martin (Greenpeace, UK)

Host: K.Harris

How do we campaign as activists and NGOs when we know that time is running out to tackle climate change? What role do NGOs play in the wider environmental movement and how do we maintain hope in changing times? How do we engage people and what does a movement look like? I will speaking and facilitating a discussion based on my experience of organising at the grass-roots level and campaigning for Greenpeace on issues like fracking and wider energy issues including the Canadian tar sands and deforestation.

R2.41, Ramphal

16:30-18:00

Speaker: Olayinka Egbokhare (WMS)

Host: K.Harris

A story set in Southwest of Nigeria in 2018-2019. It traces the travails of Demilade, a final year male student whose best friend, Lens, a son of a Nigerian Senator is suffering from substance abuse induced psychosis. The story brings to light the challenges faced by adolescents who are into substance use, the mental health implications, the pathway to care, stigmatisation, faith healing, possibilities of management and recovery.

Olayinka Egbokhare, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., (IBADAN) lectures in the Department of Communication and Language Arts, University of Ibadan. Her research interests include Media Effect Studies, Public Speaking, Advocacy, Writing as Communication, Advertising Message Development and Gender Issues. She has taught courses along these lines of interests both at the undergraduate and post graduate levels. She has worked with UNICEF in Nigeria as a communication consultant on its Interpersonal Communication Skills as an intervention for Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission of HIV (PMTCT of HIV).She was a member of the steering committee that produced the training manual and conducted training of trainers for the Interpersonal communication skills training for medical personnel in the six geo-political zones covered by UNICEF. She teaches communication skills to postgraduate students on the Masters programme of the Centre for Child and Adolescent Mental Health, of the Department of Psychiatry, College of Medicine, University of Ibadan. She is a trained mental health advocate and has participated in many workshops and seminars on health promotion.

Week 6,

13 Feb

Speaker: Mouzayian Khalil-Babatunde (Nile University of Nigeria)

Host: C.Jenainati

Social enterprises and SDGs: how do we measure social impact?

Social enterprises are catching as a new business model in African countries, and many of these businesses align their goals, mission and vision to at least one Sustainable Development Goal (SDG). 5 out of the 17 SDGs relate to sanitation and environmental sustainability directly, another 7 cover interrelated issues and targets. In developing countries ravaged by poverty and its related vices, environmental sustainability appear secondary and fail to get adequate government attention. Yet, poor sanitary conditions, environmental degradation and unregulated industrial activities affect the most vulnerable through the spread of diseases and environmental pollution. The research pilot examines 3 social enterprises in Abuja, Nigeria set up to achieve SDGs on the environment primarily through waste management, environmental education and advocacy. Interviews provide insight on the nature and impact of their activities, including how they are funded and what challenges they encounter. This presentation focuses on the way these social entrepreneurs measure [social] impact (a) of their businesses and (b) in relation to SDGs; then why, if at all, it is important to measure social impact.

Speaker: Professor Gretchen Bakke (Berlin)

Host: B.Brazeau

A Grid’s Eye view on Contemporary Energy Transitions: Getting Renewables into the Electricity System and then getting the Fossils Fuels Out.

In places with highly developed electrical infrastructure (grids) the integration of renewable means of making electricity has been surprisingly fraught. Even supporters of renewable power struggle as variably made electricity (when the wind blows, for example, but not when it doesn’t) and distributed generation (solar scattered all over the place) confound the logics of contemporary grids. Infrastructure in this transition is materially incalcitrant, while its resistance to change is often read as political or ideological. In this talk, I detail the infrastructural, cultural and business (structures and cultures) that make a thoroughgoing renewables revolution difficult to accomplish. I point to likely scenarios for strong, resilient, and smart electrified futures and then welcome the elephant into the room, as energy transition 2.0 – the total elimination of fossil fuels from energy systems – overwhelms and complicates the many successes of transition 1.0 (all those renewables) that has already come so far. This presentation draws on my 2016 book The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between America and Our Energy Future – an entertaining yet careful study of the historical, infrastructural, business, and legislative contexts of the energy transition in the US. I move beyond this, however, to also consider the implications of a phase-out of fossil fuels for contemporary electricity systems.

Speaker: Professor Alessandra Petrina (Padova, Italy)

Host: B.Brazeau

Abstract: The link between Beethoven’s Fidelio and the notion of conflict is inherent in the very inception of this opera. The notion of conflict, paradoxical as it may seem, is central to what we call classical music, both in its composition and in its form. We shall explore this notion by looking at the circumstances surrounding the composition of Fidelio: the relation between Beethoven and the operatic tradition, the theme of the work in the context of the French Revolution, the composer’s struggles with a work that cost him immense efforts, the reception in Napoleonic Vienna that forced him to rewrite the opera over and over again. At the same time, by analysing one central moment of Fidelio—Florestan’s lament and aria—we shall try and understand how Beethoven expresses the notion of conflict in the choice of instruments, tonalities, and in the requirements made to the human voice.

Week 2,

01 May

Speaker: David Solomon (Blueprints)

Host: S.Panichelli-Batalla

Title: From Warwick University to Blueprints: the challenge of achieving economic justice”

Abstract:

David Solomon is a Warwick University alumni who studied Economic and International Studies from 1995-98. Today, he is the CEO of the NGO Blueprints, whose mission is to make a meaningful change to address the problems facing some of the world’s most vulnerable communities. Blueprints intends to do this by replacing spontaneous generosity with scalable investment.

David will talk about building a new model for economic development through his organisation Blueprints, which works in Cuba, Colombia & Costa Rica. Blueprints was built to establish economic justice, to enable indigenous and developing countries to secure an equitable share of their own development. David has advised Heads of State, Heads of Intelligence and notable global leaders on how to create a more equitable path to economic development

Speaker: Dr T Theobald

Host: S.Panichelli-Batalla

Vulnerability, Adaptation to Climate Change Among Smallholder Farmers in Kagera Region, Tanzania

Abstract: This article dwells on the broader discourse of vulnerability and adaptation concepts as commonly discussed in climate change debates. Vulnerability to climate change is intimately related to poverty, and the poor communities are least able to adapt to climate change. However, climate change impacts differ between regions due to variations of communities’ adaptive capacity. Thus, there are some regions seriously affected by the impacts of climate change than the others globally. This in fact situates vulnerability and adaptation concepts at the centre of the discussion regarding how the poor communities in developing countries respond to climate stimuli. Using the case study of smallholder farmers in Kagera Region located at the north-western corner of Tanzania, this article confines itself to answer the following questions including; what are the different sources of vulnerability to climate change within the community? In which ways do the smallholder farmers in Kagera Region respond to climate change impacts? This study used case study research design, in which both qualitative and quantitative data were employed in data collection. The findings unveiled that extreme poverty, inadequate social services, increased drought and reduced precipitations, as well as incidence of pests and diseases to both crops and livestock were the major causes of community vulnerability to climate change. However, decrease of grazing land was also reported by the local communities to have caused community vulnerability due to contemporary land grabbing in the study area. Despite increased community vulnerability in the study area, local communities have been applying a repertoire of mechanisms to withstand with the impacts caused by climate change. Some of the employed strategies include diversification of livelihood, grain storage, use of locally made pesticides, crop diversification and storage of fodders. Thus, understanding of community vulnerability is important in getting relevant information concerning the capacity of an individual or a group of people to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impacts caused by natural or man-made hazards. 

Keywords: Vulnerability, Adaptation, Climate Change