Oxford college lectures, from Enigma codebreaking to walkable streets
Lectures, panel seminars and memorial lectures recorded at Kellogg College in Oxford, with speakers addressing a room and taking its questions. The range runs from the ANC's economic policy and patient safety to nine centuries of Oxford history, Enigma codebreaking and how cities handle migration.
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Kellogg College in Oxford uses this feed for recordings of its lectures, talks and panel seminars, and they sound like what they are: people speaking to a room. The introductions stay in. So do the logistics, from a warning that a photographer is present to a book shipment held at customs and an image lost from a speaker's single permitted slide. That texture is welcome, because the material is dense. Vishnu Padayachee and Robert van Niekerk of the University of Witwatersrand present research on the African National Congress and its economic and social policy, stopping short of accepting claims of betrayal or sellout during the negotiated transition. Their account gives more weight to South African big business and to reform-minded technocrats in the apartheid state, revisits the public debt figures, discusses the macroeconomic research group known as MERG, and reaches back to 1940s proposals for a national health service. Marie Lindquist, Director of the Uppsala Monitoring Centre, delivers the Anne McLaren Lecture 2019 under the question 'Can reformed communication save patients from harm?' Her answer draws on Aristotle's guidance on persuasive style, the polarised debate over vaccines and a demand that negative findings be published. The register shifts with Christopher Day's history of the University of Oxford, which he announces will be light-hearted. He suggests nobody in their right mind would design the university this way, casts the Earl of Leicester as the control freak's control freak, and uses an early photograph of an 1860 museum on a greenfield site to show how much science has since grown up around it. Lord Bilimoria, a Kellogg Bynum Tudor Fellow, tells the Cobra beer story, including the brewer who offered him an 8% beer called Knockout, and closes on a saying of Gandhi's about beliefs shaping destiny. Then there are the panels. David Howard, a fellow of the college and co-director of the Global Centre on Healthcare and Urbanisation, introduces Healthy Cities seminars on walkable, mixed-use places and on how cities manage migration. On walkability, one speaker's mapping finds London's conservation areas among its most compact, dense and connected districts, while others take in Oxford's medieval layout and Barcelona's superblocks. On migration, the panel sets Palermo's continued welcome to newcomers against the limits of city action for migrants on the move between cities. Beyond these, the titles keep circling urban life, with episodes on heritage, public art, rapid urbanisation, transport and European migration. Medicine and evidence form a second thread. Elsewhere sit Brexit, women in the workplace, Enigma codebreaking at Bletchley Park, Milton's Lycidas and the Cambrian Explosion. A listener curious about how Oxford came to work the way it does has an obvious starting point in the history lecture. One drawn to policy argument backed by evidence will find more in the ANC talk and the migration panel.
Made for: Suits a listener who likes hearing a speaker build an argument in front of a room, questions included, and who is happy to move between Oxford history, urban planning, migration policy, drug safety and South African politics from one recording to the next.
What sets it apart: Suits a listener who values the room as much as the talk: these are recordings of college events, with introductions, audience questions and asides such as a book shipment stuck at customs still audible, spread across named series including the Kellogg Urban Knowledge Exchange, the Healthy Cities seminars and the Anne McLaren Lecture.
Podcasts from Kellogg College, one of Oxford University's largest and most international graduate colleges.
A hip implant's CE mark and a beer label: your curiosity gets an unusually wide syllabus.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A broad, historically grounded look at ANC economic thought, fiscal history, and welfare-state ambitions in South Africa's transition.
The changing economic and social-policy making of the ANC traces a long argument about South Africa's economic transition, from revised public-debt calculations to the framework developed by the Macro Economic Research Group.
A careful seminar on how cities shape belonging, mobility, and the practical terms of integration.
Migration comes through as an urban question with reach well beyond the city boundary. This Kellogg College seminar looks at how cities can support or obstruct settlement, integration, and diversity, while also testing what integration means in a more mobile world.
Oxford's walkability emerges through medieval streets, parking policy, housing pressure, and university transport choices.
Oxford's walkability is framed here as a practical test of design, pressure, and university policy. Kellogg College sets up a public discussion around urban healthcare and sustainable urban development, before the focus narrows to the university's transport strategy: fewer car…
A grounded seminar on how cities absorb the local consequences of migration policy.
Europe, Migration and Cities keeps migration and Brexit close to the place where policy is most exposed: the city. David Howard frames a seminar asking why cities have had so little space in national debate, even as international agendas increasingly acknowledge their role in…
A serious lecture on medicine safety, public trust, and the human cost of evidence arriving late.
Medicine safety is treated here as something more intimate than policy. Marie Lindquist traces the subject from the thalidomide scandal to the international drug-monitoring work of the Uppsala Monitoring Centre since 1978, while Carl Hennigan's introduction gives the theme a…
Héctor and Beto dissect Mexican grammar, slang, and news in native-speed Spanish conversations.
Small habit changes meet hands-on AI experiments.
Kellogg College hosts a discussion of how the African National Congress changed its economic and social-policy positions before and during South Africa’s early-1990s democratic negotiations.
Kellogg College’s seminar examines how cities manage migration, settlement, integration, and diversity while national governments control entry policies.
Kellogg College's "Next steps?
David Howard, a Kellogg College fellow, opens the seminar on migration and cities by asking whether city leaders would change the Brexit conversation if they sat at the table.
Marie Lindquist uses the Anne McLaren Lecture 2019 at Kellogg College to argue that patient safety depends on trust, social science, and communication as much as medicine.
Sir Dermot Turing traces Enigma codebreaking from Hans Tilo Schmidt's thefts and Gustave Bertrand's photographs to the British Bombe at Bletchley Park.
["Lord Billimoria uses a Kellogg College lecture to explain how Cobra beer began with the problem of lagers being too gassy and ales being too heavy for Indian food.", "He says Clay Christensen's Harvard Business School question about the purpose of life shaped how he thinks about entrepreneurship, hard work, and staying with a business when others would quit.", "The brand's early growth came from serendipity, a consumer survey that privileged extra smooth taste over imported status, and a move from importing to brewing locally in the UK.", "He also walks through three near-failure moments, a 10-P framework for business, and the role of trust and integrity in surviving a boycott, a pulled deal, and the 2008 crisis."]
Kellogg College's Healthy Cities seminar examines how urban planning, housing, transport, and public space affect NHS demand and population health.
Kellogg College's lecture explains Oxford's history by tracing how a university that now contains 38 colleges developed from medieval institutions modeled on Paris and Bologna.
Cathy Niakan’s Anne McLaren Lecture 2018 explains how single-cell analysis and CRISPR-Cas9 are being used to study the first cell-fate decisions in human embryos.
Kellogg College’s Rapid Urbanisation seminar examines how cities can absorb projected population growth while managing environmental and professional-capacity constraints.
Kellogg College’s Urban Knowledge Exchange seminar asks how urban heritage should be managed as cities change, with speakers addressing preservation, development, and public benefit.
Kellogg College launches its Urban Knowledge Exchange seminar series with four speakers debating whether urban public art should be judged by quality, community value, or its ability to challenge existing arrangements.
Kellogg College’s International Women’s Day 2018 event brings together Betty Webb, Maya Segal, and Baroness Hilda of Kentish Town to examine women’s work across Bletchley Park, medicine, and politics.
At Kellogg College, Andrew Oswald uses the 2016 Understanding Society survey to compare age, ethnicity, education, and financial perceptions as predictors of the Brexit vote.
Kellogg College's lecture examines David Nicholls's influence on debates about associationism, pluralism, postliberalism, and British politics.
At Oxford Alumni Weekend, Sharon Micken introduces presentations by Carl Hennigan and Deb Cohen on how medical devices and drugs can appear beneficial before evidence reveals risks.
Kellogg College's panel asks whether bodies such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Organization for Migration, and the Global Forum for Migration and Development amount to meaningful global governance of migration.
Professor Gad Heumann’s Kellogg College lecture uses the 1838 emancipation of Caribbean slavery to ask whether freedom existed when apprentices still owed former masters 45 hours of unpaid work weekly.
Kellogg College’s lecture on social sustainability in transport argues that the social pillar remains less visible than economic efficiency and environmental limits.
Kellogg College’s “Decay” research seminar examines disappearance as a source of evidence across urban planning, applied linguistics, and literature.
Kellogg College’s “Decay” seminar examines how loss, degeneration, and absence can generate research questions across urban studies, applied linguistics, and literature.
A Kellogg College lecture examines the transition from Neoproterozoic microbial mats to animal ecosystems containing predators, food chains, burrows, and free-swimming fauna.
A welcome and introduction to a lecture by Archbishop Desmond Tutu at Kellogg College, Oxford.
A lecture introducing a summer school on computer science, contrasting well-defined problems from the previous year with ill-defined problems to be tackled this week.
A historian explains the 900-year evolution of Oxford University, arguing that its current structure is a product of historical development.