Helen and Felicity will be speaking about the reality of fair trade through critical perspectives from their work and their current research in Nicaragua. They will address some of the issues involved in transforming food politics including wider issues of food sovereignty, gender equality, collective organisation, local participation and democracy. Helen and Felicity hope to engage in debate with HC members about how, within the context of neo-liberal globalisation, we might contribute to transforming relations in favour of sustainable green practices, community-led development and active citizenship, based on the principles of autonomy, social justice,  equality, accountability, and solidarity.

Helen Dixon is a British Nicaraguan feminist writer and translator, international community-led development consultant and social movement activist with 25 years of experience working in Nicaragua and with Latin America and the Caribbean women’s networks. She moved to the UK in 2011 and is currently working as an associate tutor and independent member of a consultancy team with the Institute for Development Studies, at the University of Sussex, as well as being engaged in writing a novel. 

Felicity Butler is a UK based expert on gender and Fair Trade. She lived and worked on these issues in Nicaragua for more than a decade as well as working for three major Fair trade companies in the UK: Equal Exchange, ETICO and TWIN TRADING. She has recently been awarded an MA with distinction by  Royal Holloway and is now doing PhD research on the unpaid work of women in Fair Trade supply chains topic in conjunction with The Body Shop and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). 

The persistent myth is that the British monarchy is a harmless, powerless constitutional decoration from a bygone age, an institution that brings in the big tourism dollars and unites the nation with weddings, anniversaries and royal babies.

The reality is that the monarchy is a central pillar of Britain’s political system, granting power to our politicians through the Privy Council and to the Windsor family through state secrecy, privileged access and a personal royal veto.  It is an institution that serves the interests of the political class while protecting the interests of one family.

There is no pay-back for the British people: the tourism dollars are a fiction dreamt up by royalists who cannot defend the monarchy on any credible terms.  The monarchy is far from harmless or powerless, but the good news is that there is a sound, democratic alternative that is ours for the taking.

 

Graham Smith is a leading republican and Chief executive officer of Republic, the campaign for a democratic alternative to the monarchy.  Graham has led the organisation for eight years, taking Republic through a period of huge growth during the royal wedding, jubilee and the media’s baby hysteria.  Graham has appeared on BBC News, Breakfast, the Today programme and numerous other national, international and local media outlets.  Recently Republic has led the way in challenging Prince Charles and the Duchy of Cornwall over its avoidance of corporation tax, resulting in a House of Commons inquiry.

Will McInnes is a passionate voice on how the internet is radically changing our personal behaviour, our organisations and our society.

Will is co-founder and MD of NixonMcInnes, a pioneering social business consultancy based in Brighton. He’s the author of Culture Shock, a handbook which provides an inspirational guide for better ways to do business. And curator of Meaning conference, the annual gathering of people who believe that business can and must be better in the 21st century.

NixonMcInnes itself is constantly experimenting with its own radical management practices and has been recognised byWorldBlu as one of the most democratic workplaces in the world for the past five years.

Will is also a non-executive director of Wired Sussex, which supports the development of the digital business community in the Brighton area. He’s married with two energetic young boys, is a total fitness geek, loves camping and eating far too much curry.

In his talk Will will share his passion for a new kind of business citing examples of organisation who are doing things differently all over the world. 

 

If you’re interested the movement for better business then come along to Meaning conference on 8 November in Brighton’s Corn Exchange. Be part of change.

Everybody in the construction industry is feeling the financial squeeze at the moment, and I think we all realise that to keep competitive we need to reduce labour costs. However we can’t do much about the price of raw materials; they just keep on rising, as is the cost of throwing material away. So we need to consider how to turn our waste into a valuable resource to save money and help save our beautiful planet.

Duncan Baker-Brown will discuss the world wide environmental issues caused by our throw-away approach to living on Planet Earth. He will also discuss positive solutions such as The Waste House currently being built in Brighton, as well as many other examples of designers, makers and industries proving that “there is no such thing as waste – just stuff in the wrong place” …and that land fill sites are our new mines!

 

Award-winning eco architect, lecturer at the University of Brighton, Director of BBM Sustainable Design, and environmental campaigner, Duncan has been at the forefront of sustainable design for over 20 years. He designed ‘The House That Kevin Built’ with Kevin McCloud in 2008. It was UK’s first prefabricated house made almost entirely of organic ‘compostable’ material and it was built in only 6 days live on Channel 4 attracting 5 million viewers a night. Duncan is the joint curator of the WasteZone, the designer of the Waste Totem for EcoBuild and the University of Brighton’s Waste House currently being built. He is passionate about looking at ways of making our current cities truly sustainable places to live in.

Mass Observation has been collecting data on everyday life in Britain since 1937. Its vast archive contains diaries, subjective accounts of observations including overheards and ephemera, as well as a vast collection of responses to in depth surveys from over 6000 respondents from all over the UK. This talk will discuss the ethics and validity of using such everyday insights as a sociological and historical resource as well as examining the role of contemporary social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to mass observe today’s world for tomorrow’s history.

 

Fiona Courage is Special Collections Manager and Curator of the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex. She has worked with Mass Observation for over ten years, providing care and accessibility for anyone who wishes to use its Archive. She has  presented and published papers and articles on Mass Observation and has been involved in the design and implementation of various educational, artistic and academic projects which utilise or are inspired by Mass Observation and its Archive of everyday life in Britain.

 

“Pushed to extremes, austerity is bad economics, bad arithmetic, and ignores the lessons of history. We, an international group of economists and social scientists, are outraged at the narrow range of austerity policies which are bringing so many people around the world to their knees, especially in Europe. Austerity and cutbacks are reducing growth and worsening poverty. In our professional opinions, there are alternatives – for Britain, Europe and all countries that currently imagine that government cutbacks are the only way out of debt. The low-growth, no-growth trap means that the share of debt in GNP falls ever more slowly, if at all. It may even rise – as it has in some countries”

Sir Richard Jolly joins us in June to discuss the issues raised in Be Outraged – there are alternatives, a booklet to which he contributed.

Sir Richard Jolly is Honorary Professor at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex and from 2000-2010 was Senior Research Fellow and co-Director of the UN Intellectual History Project at the Graduate Center, City University New York. Before this, Richard Jolly was for nearly 15 years an Assistant Secretary General of the UN as Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF and from 1996 to 2000, Principal Coordinator of the widely-acclaimed Human Development Report. He has co-authored some 20 books and over 100 articles on development and on UN history, including UN Contributions to Development Thinking and Practice and UN Ideas That Changed the World. He was knighted by the Queen in 2001 for services to international development.

Consciousness is at once the most familiar and the most mysterious feature of our existence. It fades every night when we fall into a dreamless sleep, and returns again when we wake up or dream. Without consciousness there would be no world and no self; there would be nothing at all. Over the last decade or two, a new science of consciousness has begun to reveal its biological basis. This new science will not only help us better understand our place in nature, but will also provide important new opportunities for the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of neurological and psychiatric disorders. For these reasons, understanding the biology of consciousness is widely recognized as a key scientific challenge for the 21st century. In this talk Anil Seth will give a whistle-stop tour of the frontiers of consciousness science, focusing on eight ‘key’ questions driving current research.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/mar/01/consciousness-eight-questions-science

Anil Seth is Co-Director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex, which was founded in 2010 and is now recognized as an internationally leading focus for consciousness research. He is also Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at Sussex, an EPSRC Leadership Fellow, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Amsterdam. Research in his group integrates consciousness science with computational and cognitive neuroscience, bringing together psychologists, mathematicians, physicists, psychiatrists, neurologists, and philosophers. He has delivered over 100 lectures internationally including more than 20 keynote and public talks, and his work has been widely covered in the media including the New Scientist, The Guardian, and The Observer. He has published over 90 scientific papers and is currently editing and co-writing ‘The 30 Second Brain’ for Lewes-based Icon Press. He holds degrees in Natural Sciences (MA, Cambridge, 1994), Knowledge-Based Systems (M.Sc., Sussex, 1996) and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (D.Phil., Sussex, 2001). He was also a postdoctoral and associate fellow at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego

Looking at the history of self-killing from classical antiquity through the period of prohibition by Church and State to the current era of partial decriminalisation, and discussing recent legal challenges including those of Diane Pretty, Debbie Purdy and Tony Nicklinson, Paul Bowen QC poses the question whether the time has now come to recognise a right to die at the time, and in the manner, of the individual’s choice.

 

Paul Bowen QC is a human rights barrister based at Doughty Street Chambers in London specialising in cases against the State and state bodies on behalf of vulnerable and marginalised individuals, in particular people with physical and mental disabilities, prisoners, asylum seekers, terrorist suspects and the families of people who have died in custody or at the hands of state agents.  He has a particular interest in the right of autonomy and acted for Debbie Purdy and Tony Nicklinson in their ‘right to die’ cases.  Paul lives in Brighton with his wife and two small children.

An examination of the conflict of interest between our society’s current lifestyle and future generation’s need for a stable planet.

Duncan will present a summary of scientific consensus on climate change, and discuss the social and political implications.

He will explore what needs to be done to avoid this, and whether the actions we are currently taking to protect the environment are in fact just ineffectual, easy options.

In short: Despite our apparent intelligence, are we going to hell in a hand cart?

 

—

Duncan Roy is a barrister and former fire eater. He is a also prolific blogger (http://blog.scrapperduncan.com). You can follow him on twitter at @scrapperduncan.

 

“Beyond representative democracy: adventures in trusting the public”

In her 1977 novel The Dispossessed, Ursula le Guin creates an egalitarian, anarchist society on the planet Anarres. Life on Anarres is hard, communal, but is portrayed as basically happy. However, after 150 years or so, the revolution starts to break down as authoritarian structures begin being developed.

The fight for democracy is often told as a fight about systems of government, different ways to cast our votes and constitutional change, but this is only part of the picture. However good it is, any system or constitution will eventually be subverted by those with power and money. In this talk Simon will explore experiments over the past 10 years or so to engage the public beyond the electoral cycle. He’ll draw on these to discuss ways in which the public voice could be more systematically brought into the way we make the most important decisions facing our country and their potential to hold decision-makers to account. He’ll contrast this to recent moves by the coalition government to introduce more direct democracy. While he’ll not chart a clear path to a mythical, happy, communal society, he’ll suggest a few faltering steps towards a system of government where the voices of citizens are heard and acted on more clearly, and might just keep our elected representatives on the straight and narrow.

 

Simon Burall is the Director of Involve. He has long and extensive experience the fields of democratic reform, governance, public participation, stakeholder engagement, and accountability and transparency. He has worked at the national level in Africa, Asia and Europe as well as on related issues of global governance and democracy.

In addition to his role with Involve, Simon is also the Chair of Democratic Audit, an Ambassador for WWF UK and Head of Dialogue at the ScienceWise Expert Resource Centre.

Before moving to Involve Simon was a Research Fellow at ODI from 2006 – 2009. His interests included stakeholder engagement in the reform of the international aid delivery system and how to make development finance more effective. Prior to this he was the Executive Director of the One World Trust from 1999 – 2005 where he initiated and oversaw the development of the influential Global Accountability Index. Before joining the Trust, Simon re-established the UK volunteer network for AFS, an organisation based in Leeds co-ordinating intercultural exchange visits. Simon has taught both science and English in Namibia and Zimbabwe and was an election monitor in Bosnia Herzegovina in 1997.