The Intellectual Forum

Dr Julian Huppert, Director

The last year has seen a very welcome return to in-person Intellectual Forum events. Alongside welcoming people back into West Court in person, we have continued to livestream many of our events, using the state-of-the-art camera equipment in the Frankopan Hall.

The equipment has enabled our online audiences to interact with speakers by asking questions via Zoom, and also means that we have been able to record most of our public events. The recordings can be found on the College ’ s YouTube channel –https://tinyurl.com/JesusCollegeYouTube We have researched where our online audiences are watching from and can see that we have reached every continent but Antarctica.

There have been many exceptional talks and events over the year. Highlights include the very well-attended In Conversation with Mary Beard; Nick Pickles, Twitter ’ s global head of public policy who joined us just after the big announcement from Elon Musk; and Lisa Jardine Lecturer Professor Bill Sherman. We organised a set of events for ‘Space Month’ followed by a one-day workshop on Communities in Space, featuring the College ’ s own astronaut, Dr Jenni Sidey-Gibbons (PhD Engineering, 2015).

Continuing with the space theme, we partnered with the Our Place in Space team to screen a film by the artist and children ’ s author Oliver Jeffers, followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker. The screening was part of a series of events centred around an epic-scale model of the solar system, starting with the Sun on Midsummer Common, stretching all the way to Pluto in Waterbeach.

In October we co-hosted a celebration of the Yidan Prize going to CAMFED, which included speakers such as Julia Gillard, former Australian Prime Minister and current Chair of the Wellcome Trust, and Princess Laurentien of the Netherlands.

The reach of IF events

We also hosted a complex international conference for the Research for Health in Conflict in the Middle East and North Africa (R4HC-MENA) project looking at the lessons learned in the development of research and policy capacity strengthening in conflict affected areas in the MENA region. This involved live-streams in English and Arabic, speakers and attendees from across the world, both in-person and online, providing a fantastic showcase of the College ’ s hybrid event capabilities.

Last year we partnered with online course provider edX to provide courses across the world. Our first course focusses on the ‘Active Bystander ’ approach to responding to sexual harassment. It covers the history of the #MeToo movement and explores the evidence from several disciplines about what individuals can do when they see poor behaviour taking place – and what works to tackle the problem whilst staying safe.

The second, Managing conflict and polarisation in the workplace and beyond, explores the causes of polarisation and the part that we all play (often subconsciously) in exacerbating it. The course equips learners with tools to heal and handle these divisions in the workplace, at home and beyond. These courses are accessible by anyone in the world with an internet connection and are free to take.

We have started work on two more offerings on edX to be published next year; a course on digital productivity and wellbeing, and a professional certificate in sustainable finance and systemic risk. The professional certificate, developed with Dr Ellen Quigley, is aimed at asset owners. By introducing the concept of Universal Ownership and equipping finance professionals with tools and tactics to mitigate systemic risks through responsible investment practices, we hope that it will have a significant impact. You can access our edX courses at https://www.edx.org/school/jesuscollege

Over the summer we were joined by two student interns, Kefeshe Bernard and Lewis Westwood-Flood. Kefeshe ’ s research investigated the cultural and ethnic biases and inequality of universal school lunch provision in UK primary schools, whilst Lewis ’ s project focused on fundraising and ‘transparent’ disbursement platforms and the legal and operational risks they could present to the parties involved.

It has been a busy year, and we have lots planned for the coming year. We will continue to stream many of our events online and hope you will join us from wherever you are. n