Every year, our Global Challenges Speaker Series offers our Sixth Formers the opportunity to hear from a range of speakers, all experts in their field, on a range of topics relevant to the wider world.
Professor Madeleine Reeves, University of Oxford
Migration: Understanding Borders
Madeleine Reeves is a social anthropologist interested in borders, labour migration, sovereignty, time, and social reproduction. She joined COMPAS and the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford in January 2022 from the University of Manchester, where she taught for fourteen years. Her research over the last two decades has focused on three broad areas:
- the anthropological study of borders and bordering in regions of fragile state governance and territorial dispute
- interdisciplinary debates about the intersections between infrastructure, immobility, inter-communal conflict, and co-existence.
- transnational labour migration from Central Asia to Russia
Alexander Nelms and Kate Mason (National Union of Farmers)
Issues facing British agriculture in the 2020s
Alexander and Kate both farm in Oxfordshire and between them have a range of different experiences with the UK farming sector. They will talk about their backgrounds and what led them into farming, the issues facing British agriculture in the 2020s and answer questions about the industry, and encourage students to challenge and question the information we are exposed to about where our food comes from and how it is produced.
Alison Morgan KC, 6KBW College Hill
The Criminal Justice System: how does it work and what are its current challenges?
Appointed Queen’s Counsel in 2019, Alison was Chambers & Partners Crime Junior in 2012 and was appointed Junior Treasury Counsel at the Central Criminal Court by the Attorney General in July 2012. Alison acted as Junior Counsel for the Prosecution in the trial of those accused of murdering Stephen Lawrence. Thereafter, she acted as Junior Counsel in the Ellison Review, reviewing allegations of police corruption relating to the investigation. She has been involved in prosecuting some of the most complex terrorism prosecutions of the last 15 years including the Ricin Conspiracy, the 21/7 Bomb, the plot to bomb the London Stock Exchange and the terrorist attack at Parsons Green Station. She is currently instructed as leading counsel in the cases of Khairi Saadallah (the alleged terrorist attack in Reading in the summer of 2020) and the on-going criminal investigation into the tragic events at Grenfell Tower.
Professor Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Professor of Migration and Refugee Studies, University College London
Migration: Understanding issues around conflict displacement and statelessness
Professor Fiddian-Qasmiyeh’s research focuses on the intersections between gender, generation and religion in experiences of and responses to conflict-induced displacement and statelessness, with a particular regional focus on the Middle East and North Africa. She has conducted extensive research in refugee camps and urban areas including in Algeria, Cuba, Egypt, France, Lebanon, South Africa, Syria, Sweden, and the UK. At UCL she is Co-Director of the Migration Research Unit, and the coordinator of the Refuge in a Moving World research network