Expert Lectures

Public lecture from the British Sociological Association's 2021 conference.

Abstract:

Science is continually changing with new findings and discoveries. When people reject these findings, we end up in a position where we can’t make intelligent decisions about important matters.

Naomi Oreskes explores how the trustworthiness of scientific claims derives from the rigorous vetting they go through.She discusses how people need a more realistic view of science’s strengths and weaknesses, so when mistakes do inevitably happen, we don’t discredit science completely.

Naomi Oreskes is Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. A world-renowned geologist, historian and public speaker, she is a leading voice on the role of science in society and the reality of anthropogenic climate change.

This talk was recorded on 13th April 2021. Watch the Q&A.: https://youtu.be/RQ2_PlzSgcc

Abstract: The representation of ancient Egypt in science-fiction movies emphasise its exotic aspects, magic and lost knowledge. The 1970s TV show Battlestar Gallactica showed ancient Egypt as one of the starting points of civilization, including the pyramids and the temple of Karnak as scenarios for the lost planet Kobol, the home planet of human beings that colonized the galaxy. Many other sci-fi movies used similar references to emphasise Egypt’s place in history as the primeval civilization and the realm of a lost legacy. This approach is also repeated in documentaries and schoolbooks and it is a manifestation of a Western colonial type of History. In this paper I explore the historical elements presented in Battlestar Gallactica as a construct of a historical narrative, one that keeps ancient Egypt as eternal, immutable and mysterious. I challenge this line of thought that puts ancient Egypt as a starting point of a civilizational discourse highlighting the decolonial debates in History and Egyptology.

Streamed on July 9th 2021 as part of the "Do Ancient Egyptians Dream of Electric Sheep?" symposium.

Abstract: In this lecture, Anne Orford will discuss her new book International Law and the Politics of History, which explores the ideological, political, and material stakes of apparently technical disputes over how the legal past should be studied and understood. As the future of international law has become a growing site of struggle within and between powerful states, debates over the history of international law have become increasingly heated. This lecture argues that the turn to history has become a turn to a particular tone or style of writing about law – a turn to history as empiricist method. The turn to history as a method for thinking about law is strongly neoformalist. Historical scholarship, we are told, is impartial, neutral, and free of political manipulation of the past for presentist purposes. Anne Orford argues in contrast that there can be no impartial accounts of international law's past and its relation to empire and capitalism. Rather than looking to history in a doomed attempt to find a new ground for formalist interpretations of what past legal texts really mean or what international regimes are really for, she urges lawyers and historians to embrace the creative role they play in making rather than finding the meaning of international law.