Speakers at Upcoming Discussions Alan is the Director of Oxford University’s Leadership Programmes for China, and in the last five years he has been responsible for writing the curriculum training programmes in UK public policy and public administration which have been delivered to over 1000 senior Chinese public officials at municipal, provincial and national level including national ministers. The programmes include the Advanced Leadership Development Programme for those national ministers charged with the strategic implementation of the 11th Five Year plan for a Xiaokang or ‘well balanced society’ of economic development and social justice. With wide experience in both quantitative and qualitative research and analysis Alan has acted as a consultant in public, private and voluntary sectors. In the 1990’s he directed a widely cited Attitudes to Work Survey with a national sample. His most recent work has been in the areas of education, training and employer recruitment strategies and also on the relationship between citizens and cities with reference to urban planning and group and national identity. Michelle Di Leo is the Director of pro-aviation campaign, FlyingMatters. The campaign represents a broad coalition of tourism organisations, trade unions, business, farmers in the developing world as well as the aviation industry which support sustainable growth in aviation. Prior to setting up FlyingMatters, Michelle’s career spanned the consultancy, trade union and voluntary sectors. She has a Masters Degree in Government and Politics. On her Twitter account she describes herself as an armchair politician, know it all and generally pretty opinionated on everything under the sun - see her in action by clicking on this Sunday Programme link. Austin Williams is the director of the Future Cities Project. An architect and project manager by profession, he was previously technical editor of the Architects' Journal and now writes for a wide range of publications on urban and transport issues. He was the coordinator of the 'Future of' series of festivals and is a founder member of ManTowNHuman. He also runs the Bookshop Barnies. His recent book, The Enemies of Progress (Societas) examines the concept of 'sustainability' and presents a critical exploration of its all-pervasive influence on society. It argues that sustainability, manifested in several guises, represents a pernicious and corrosive doctrine that has survived primarily because there seems to be no alternative to its canon: in effect, its bi-partisan appeal has depressed critical engagement and neutered politics. Yvonne Hübner is the Principal Policy Advisor at the Institution of Engineering and Technology, and responsible for transport and manufacturing policy. The IET is one of the world’s leading professional societies for the engineering and technology community, with more than 150,000 members in 127 countries and offices in Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific. She became a Chemical Engineer after studying in Germany at the University of Applied Sciences Fresenius, and is about to finish a PhD in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Surrey. Yvonne recently published a paper on the unintended consequences of transport policy, organised debates on alternative transport fuels, and facilitated the transport session of the joint Defra and Engineering the Future conference on Engineering, Infrastructure & Climate Change Adaptation. Daniel Ben-Ami has worked as a journalist and author for over 20 years, specialising in economics and finance. His work has appeared in general and specialist publications including most of the UK's broadsheets and popular europen talk radio stations. His day job is to edit Fund Strategy, a specialist weekly magazine on investment funds and financial markets, and also writes a blog on economics. His book on global finance, Cowardly Capitalism (Wiley, 2001), argues that the financial markets are characterised by risk aversion rather than the aggressive risk taking generally assumed. Although it was published almost a decade ago it provides a foundation for developing a critique of the way in which the more recent financial crisis is generally understood, and was recommended by the Baker Library of Harvard Business School. His new book Ferraris For All, defending economic progress, will be published in July 2010. Speakers at Recent Discussions Dr Angelica Michelis is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her current research interest and publications focus on the meaning of food and how the process of eating can be understood as a complex exchange between the self and what is considered as its other, with the effect that any concept of identity is directly intertwined with the way we regulate our orifices. Angelica has published a range of articles discussing, for example, the relationship between food and culture, eating and poetry and cooking and crime. She is currently working on a monograph entitled EatingTheory: The Theory of Eating for Manchester University Press. To find out more about her research got to: http://www.eri.mmu.ac.uk/staff/profile.php?id=23. When she is not writing about food she is cooking it, reading about it and eating it! Stephen is a freelance writer and researcher, and has a PhD in political theory. He is currently researching a book on the pathology that is 'healthy living', and is fascinated by joggers, gyms and the (tragic) ascendancy of ‘health’ as a moral good. A series of essays for spiked and a recent chapter on biomedicine and Cartesian dualism explored these themes. His book on the limits of biomedical objectivity in an era of addled subjectivity is well overdue. Geoff Kidder is membership and events director for the Institute of Ideas. He runs the Institute of Ideas’ associate member scheme, which was set up in May 2002, and now have associates throughout the UK and around the world. He also convenes the monthly IoI Book Club in central London, and supervises the IoI's administration and event management. Geoff is also the Institute of Ideas’ resident expert in all sporting matters and covered the Beijing Olympics for Culture Wars - the IoI's online review website. He produces debates, particularly on sport, at the annual Battle of Ideas festival in London - see Are we a nation of sporting losers? and School sport - selling kids short? at the Battle of Ideas 2007. Born in Blackpool but a Salfordian by choice, Ian grew up in Salford with Old Trafford as his back drop and attended his first game in 1973 - a reserve match which cost just 5 pence to get in. He joined Shareholders United / Manchester United Supporters Trust (MUST) in 2004, and has been a passionate, vocal supporter of fan ownership since. He strongly believes that football clubs should benefit the community and fans rather than a corporate asset of distant owners who are only motivated by profit. He would like to see a day when football fans are valued for the contribution they make to the club in terms of passion and pride, and not for how much money can be squeezed out of them, and for 'Football Club' to be back on the badge. Dan Travis is the Director of the Brighton Salon and graduated in Philosophy from Heythrop College, London University in 1995 and has recently completed an MSC in Social and Political Theory at Birkbeck College. He is currently helping companies optimise their marketing strategies by effectively using the Google Search Engine, something that he strongly urges organisations to do more of. Dan has been a Tennis Coach for most of his adult life and is Director of the coaching company 'The Tennis Tigers', having competed for his county at tennis, athletics and cross-country. He is still a competitive tennis player and likes to lift weights. Dan has written extensively about the changing role of Sport in society, the problem of a 'self esteem' based approach to sports coaching and is a regular contributor to Spiked and Culture Wars. He has written a Thinkpiece for the Manifesto Club entitled 'In Support of Competitive Sport' that has provoked a critical response from parents, coaches and government bodies. Further to this Dan is undertaking a project that attempts to examine modern Britain's attitude to excellence and elites. Brendan O’Neill is the editor of the independent online phenomenon, spiked online, and author of the green satire Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas, published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2008. He started his career in journalism at spiked‘s predecessor, Living Marxism, then its successor LM, until it was forced to close in 2000 following a notorious libel action brought by ITN. When he’s not writing for and editing spiked, and commissioning journalists who have something to say and the guts to say it, O’Neill writes widely for publications on both sides of the Atlantic. His journalism has been widely published in the New Statesman, the Spectator, the Guardian, The Sunday Times, the British Journalism Review, the Press Gazette and the Catholic Herald in Britain, and in Salon, Slate, the Chicago Sun-Times, the American Prospect, the American Conservative and Reason magazine in the United States. He is also a feature-writer for the Christian Science Monitor in America and for the BBC in Britain. Professor Inderjeet Parmar is Professor of Government and Head of Politics at the University of Manchester. He has published several monographs and is the co-editor of the 'Studies in US Foreign Policy' series published by Routledge. He studied Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Sociology at the University of London, obtaining his doctorate at the University of Manchester, and joined the Department of Government at Manchester University as a lecturer in 1996. His research interests focus on the history, politics and sociology of Anglo-American foreign policy elites over the past 100 years, specifically embodied in organisations such as philanthropic foundations, think tanks, policy research institutes, university foreign affairs institutes, and state agencies. He has, more recently, become interested in Anti-Americanism, post-9-11 US foreign policy shifts, and the changing character of the US foreign policy Establishment. Finally, he is working on a long-term project on why Britain almost invariably backs the United States in wars, from Korea 1950 to Iraq 2003. To keep up with Inderjeet's latest insights on US foreign policy, click on this Anglo-American relations link. Justine Brian loves good food and hates food snobbery. She trained to cook at Westminster College, and fantasises about giving up the day job to sell high-class cupcakes. For her, the contemporary debate about food confuses the creative and adventurous impulse to try to make better food with a manipulative attempt to use food as a tool of social engineering in areas as diverse as health, parenting and ‘ethical’ living. When not thinking about, reading about or eating food, she is the National Coordinator of the Institute of Ideas and Pfizer Debating Matters Competition, an innovative and engaging new style of debating competition for sixth form students in the UK and internationally. Rob Lyons is deputy editor of Spiked, the online current affairs magazine that aims to challenge conventional thinking on everything from major world events to the nitty-gritty of everyday life. Since Spiked launched in 2001, Rob has specialised in writing about food, health, science and the environment, including the regular column 'Don't Panic', which aimed to challenge the endless stream of scare stories in the media. Rob is currently running the online debate, 'What's the Future of Food?', a collection of over 20 articles and interviews from a variety of people connected to food. Jeremy Taylor is a freelance television producer/ director, specializing in popular science, who has recently turned to book-writing. His first major book, Not a Chimp: The hunt to find the genes that make us human, has recently been published internationally by Oxford University Press. In a previous career he was a stalwart producer for the BBC's flagship science series, HORIZON, for many years, having made over a dozen films for them, including a brace of films with Richard Dawkins which introduced him as a science presenter for the small screen - an act for which Taylor might not be wholeheartedly thanked in some quarters! His great love is evolutionary biology and he has made a number of other films with evolutionary themes including PLAYING WITH MADNESS, for the BBC, and MINDREADERS for Channel 4. Dolan Cummings is Research and Editorial Director at the Institute of Ideas and edits their reviews website, Culture Wars. He has edited two books, ‘The Changing Role of the Public Intellectual’, and ‘Debating Humanism’, and is currently writing a book about, and in defence of, propaganda. He is also a co-founder of the Manifesto Club, which campaigns for freedom in everyday life. Jennie Bristow is a journalist whose writing focuses on parenting issues and intergenerational relations. She was part of the launch team of the website spiked, for which she now writes the monthly ‘Guide to Subversive Parenting’. She has recently launched the website Parents With Attitude. Bristow is author of Maybe I do? Marriage and Commitment in Singleton Society (2002), and several essays on love, intimacy and the politics of the family. In 2008 she co-authored, with Frank Furedi, a high profile report on the impact of the national vetting scheme, titled Licensed to Hug: How child protection policies are poisoning the relationship between the generations and damaging the voluntary sector. Jennie's latest book, Standing Up To Supernanny, will be published by Societas in September 2009. Professor Heather Piper is now a Professorial Research Fellow in the Education and Social Research Institute at Manchester Metropolitan University, having previously been a Social Worker with wide experience of children and families. Her research and publications span a range of contested educational and social issues, and recently co-authored books that share risk as a central concern - Don’t touch! The educational story of a panic (with Ian Stronach), and 'Researching sex and lies in the classroom: Allegations of sexual misconduct in schools' (with Pat Sikes) due to be published by Routledge on 20 November 2009. Her work (click on her photo for link) is characterised by a critical and contrarian approach, drawing on a broad-based and eclectic intellectual territory in sociology, philosophy and social policy, as well as her own professional experience. Kevin is a researcher and lecturer in twentieth century American history and a writer on contemporary issues affecting American society. He is the author of a book on the intellectual history of affirmative action and is now preparing a book on the 1924 Immigration Acts and their impact on American identity and history in the twentieth century. Previously, Kevin has worked on the rise of therapeutic methods of governing during the Nixon administration, the history of post-war liberalism, immigration policy in the early twentieth century, the development of policy, especially of affirmative action, and the development of American culture between the wars. He also maintains an interest in current American political and cultural issues and has published material on assisted suicide, gun control and other current American political issues. Raymond Tallis is honorary visiting professor, department of English, University of Liverpool; former professor, geriatric medicine, University of Manchester. Over the last 25 years, Ray has published extensively outside of medicine. His prose has appeared in Granta, Encounter, PN Review, Philosophy Now, News from the Republic of Letters, Prospect, Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. His novel Absence: a Metaphysical Comedy (Toby Press) came out in 1999, and was re-issued in paperback in 2006. He has published several volumes of verse, the most recent being Fathers and Sons (Iron Press, 1993). A comprehensive list of his non-medical writings can be found in the Bibliography (non-medical) section of this website, and his latest publication is The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being. Dr Stuart Derbyshire is a Senior Lecturer in psychology at the University of Birmingham. His research aims to understand the nature of pain and especially pain that happens without obvious physical cause. Consequently most of his students spend their time trying to hurt people without touching them – touching is cheating. His work has been published in leading medical journals including the British Medical Journal and his current research is funded by the Medical Research Council. He has featured on several documentaries and news programmes and was most recently seen on the One Show hypnotising Michael Moseley before pushing a needle through his hand. In that case, touching wasn’t cheating. Angus Kennedy is the web master for the Battle of Ideas, Culture Wars and Debating Matters websites. He is a Battle of Ideas committee member, has written for spiked, and reviewed for Culture Wars. He is particularly interested in new forms of political language, especially when they advance further erosions of our liberties and display an increasing contempt for our ability to live without interference or regulation. Environmentalism and public health campaigns to protect us from ourselves are contemporary cases in point. Angus believes that we should be free to say what we want and are quite capable of taking responsibility for what we do: words and deeds can still change the world. He wants a politics for adults: not patronising lectures and bans. Angus has a degree in Classics from Oxford, in Linguistics from the University of London and an M. Phil. in Artificial Intelligence from Dundee University. He has always been interested in language, literature and questions of reading and meaning. His professional background is in IT consultancy and software process improvement. His immodest ambition is to be widely-read and well-travelled. Angus is producing the Battle for the Global Economy strand at the Battle of Ideas 2009. Dr Helene Guldberg is co-founder and director of spiked, the first custom-built online current affairs publication in the UK. After working as a primary school teacher, Helene acheived her PhD in developmental psychology from the University of Manchester. She currently teaches undergraduate and post-graduate courses in developmental psychology at the Open University and for the US study abroad programme, and the Centers for Academic Programs Abroad (CAPA) and the Institute for the International Education of Students (IES). Helene is author of 'Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom and Play in an Age of Fear', published by Routledge in January 2009.
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Alan Hudson - 
Austin Williams
Daniel Ben-Ami
Dr Angelica Michelis - 
Stephen Bowler - 
Brendan O'Neill
Professor Inderjeet Parmar - 
Jennie Bristow - 
Stuart Derbyshire - 
