GCSJ Seminars

Promoting a variety of research topics within the disciplines covered under the centre. The Research Centre for Global Challenges and Social Justice (GCSJ) Seminar Series highlights the breadth of research across the centre’s disciplines, bringing together scholars and practitioners to explore pressing global challenges.  

Covering topics such as social justice, inequality, sustainability, and migration, the seminars provide a space for sharing new research, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue, and encouraging critical discussion across diverse perspectives.

GCSJ seminar series: Care-full lunar exploration - challenges and opportunities for protecting the Moon

This talk, presented by Dr Alessandra Marino, Senior Lecturer in Geography, looks at lunar protection as requiring interdisciplinary conversations on how to approach the Moon with care.

GCSJ seminar series: Decolonisation as a contested practice: Evidence from The Open University

Opening April’s Seminar will be Professor Allan Laville, OU’s Pro VC of Equality Diversity and inclusion. Presenter – Dr Shannon Martin – Researcher/Equality & inclusion/Government & Academic sectors/Decolonisation.

GCSJ seminar series: Public opinion & national security in the UK - A people-centred approach

Presented by Dr Thomas Martin Senior Lecturer in International Studies, this talk focuses on the research into the politics of national security.

GCSJ seminar series: Opening the pandora’s box of inequality in innovation systems

How does innovation affect income inequality? This talk explores how innovation systems can both increase and reduce inequality. It challenges the conventional explanations offered by mainstream economics - such as the skill-biased technological change account - and highlights the critical role of the mechanisms and strategies adopted by key actors in innovation systems.

GCSJ seminar series: Marginalised and stigmatised - sex work should not cost my life

After researching sex workers in Cape Town and the UK there seems to be a desperate need for the safeguarding of sex worker.

GCSJ seminar series: The Palestine exception: Tackling inequalities through transdisciplinary decolonial research

This theme is being pursued by the OU Palestine Solidarity Group within the OU’s Open Societal Challenge programme. Our Challenge aims to de-exceptionalise Israel/Palestine through research, education, partnerships with other university Palestine solidarity groups and national campaigns to build a transdisciplinary decolonisation research programme.

GCSJ seminar series: Greening the Gulf? renewables, fossil capitalism, and the ‘East-East’ axis of world energy

Drawing upon his recent book Crude Capitalism (Verso 2024), Adam Hanieh explores the growing role of the six Gulf Arab states (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman) in solar, wind, and other climate technologies that underpin dominant approaches to the 'Green Transition'.

GCSJ seminar series: Rearticulating archives: still thinking with Doreen Massey

In this talk, we discuss what it might mean to keep thinking with Doreen Massey today. As a profoundly influential geographer based at the Open University for many decades, our aim is not a retrospective focused on Massey as an individual academic figure.

GCSJ seminar series: Existential Dis/Connections: Opening up conversations

In this seminar we will introduce the developing work of Existential Dis/Connections. The seminar will offer tasters for making connections from a number of different starting points, opening up conversations and encouraging new spaces that can accommodate discomfort, uncertainty and new possibilities.

GCSJ seminar series: How should academics engage with policy-makers to create impact?

Join us for a talk by Rajiv Prabhakar, Senior Lecturer in Personal Finance. Rajiv will be drawing on his experience of engaging with the UK Parliament to the ways that researchers might engage with policy makers more generally to crate impacts.