Friday 27th November 2020 at 16:00 GMT, 11:00 EST

'The Cultural Evolution of Explanations: from the Royal Society of London to Online Conspiracy Forums'

In the first seminar of the Behavioural Data Science Series, from the Alan Turing Insitute Simon DeDeo (Carnegie Mellon University and the Santa Fe Institute) will lead a discussion on the cultural evolution of explanations. This work provides new insights into the basic psycho-social phenomenon of explanation-making, and shows how fundamental advances in the cognitive sciences can be applied to large-scale social phenomena of interest to the social and political sciences. The talk is based on joint work with Zachary Wojtowicz, Chloe Perry, Gabe Salmon, Will Thompson, and Zachary Nova

Behavioral Humanities Speaker series

Tuesday 16th March 2021 @ 3pm GMT

Unfolding vision: Cezanne’s ‘personal way of seeing’

Professor Paul Smith

This paper concerns perceptual explanations for a range of so-called ‘distortions’ in Cezanne’s paintings. Drawing on Gestalt and recent psychology, it examines how the painter’s habit of fixating for up to twenty minutes on objects caused things in peripheral vision to fade away and their vertical edges to slope to the left, and horizontal edges to look ‘broken’. It will also investigate why Cezanne’s faces appear devoid of character because of the same sustained way of looking, or how this supplanted normal, holistic, and fast face perception based on low-spatial frequency information. The paper will end by considering how Cezanne viewed the landscape slowly, for several hours at a time, and how doing so made it possible to synthesis those of its features which are most revealing about shape, and thereby express its ‘heaviness’.

Tuesday 23rd March 2021 @ 3pm GMT

"Warts and All”: Film, Ethics and Human Frailty

Dr Michele Aaron

In the 2017 AHRC funded research project, 'Digital Technology and Human Vulnerability: Towards an Ethical Praxis', participants from John Taylor Hospice in North Birmingham were given critical and practical training to create six films. These have been displayed and discussed with all kinds of audiences, locally, nationally and internationally, ever since. In this presentation, I want to use the films themselves to reconsider the ethical issues at the heart of this project and its central concern with the potential of film to transform our understanding of, and response to, human vulnerability. Michele Aaron is Reader in Film and Television and a Fellow of Warwick's Institute of Engagement. Her last two books focused on death and dying: an edited collection and the monograph, Death and the Moving Image: Ideology, Iconography and I (2014). She has increasingly redirected her fascination with difficult images into collaborative projects with community groups, charities and artists, and Screening Rights Film Festival, which she set up in 2015, to explore further the potential for film to affect personal, social and political change.

Monday 5th April 2021 13:50-16:30

Tuesday 6th April 2021 13:50-16:30

Workshop on Exposure to Political Violence and Economic Behaviour

This workshop was be the first of a series of similar dissemination events on the micro-level consequences of political violence exposure.

Organised by Dr Arzu Kibris, Associate Professor, Politics and International Studies (PAIS), the first event of this series will focus on economic behaviour. Please join us for a very interesting program of presentations by esteemed scholars of political violence.