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: Wrongs not righted: how might we think about repair?

This talk explores the troubling history of the entanglements between Britain and Jamaica, through the establishment of a slave society from the late seventeenth century, the time of abolition and emancipation, and moments of crisis in 1865 and 1938.

GCSJ seminar series: Overcoming colonial continuities in the area of social protection

Drawing on documentary analysis and stakeholder interviews, the talk offers a critical, comparative analysis of how colonial pasts have influenced social protection policies and institutions in Mainland Tanzania and Cote d’Ivoire, to what extent the current dynamics of policymaking enable alignment with national social protection priorities, and how domestic leadership in social protection arrangements could be strengthened.

GCSJ seminar series: Friends and Lovers

How do we negotiate the boundaries between “just friends” and “dating”? This talk offers some pointers, noting in particular the importance of our assumptions about roles and stereotypes.

GCSJ seminar series: Towards an entrepreneurial welfare state? An empirically informed theoretical perspective

In this talk, we focus on the prospect of an entrepreneurial welfare state. We argue that an entrepreneurial welfare state ought to redistribute the benefits of innovation. However, getting the level of redistribution right is crucial for maintaining incentives for innovation. An entrepreneurial welfare state depends on the balance between entrepreneurial functions and welfare functions.

GCSJ seminar series: Space in common? Property, waste and their colonial lives in the cosmos

This talk focuses on the politics of use and pollution (due to both light and debris) of the night sky as an environmental common and discusses the fraught postcolonial dynamics of accessing and occupying orbits.

GCSJ seminar series: Legislating against political lying: risks and feasibility

In this seminar, Alex Barber (Philosophy) and Sean Cordell (Philosophy) identify four core challenges for the Senedd proposal in its latest iteration. More positively, we identify some potential workarounds and some alternative approaches to the problem of political lying in a democracy.

GCSJ seminar series: Mothers, boys' circumcision and a new politics of harm in Kenya

We explore how Kenyan mothers are becoming involved in male circumcision, which is usually a men-only space. The talk examines new ideas about cultural rights, genital cutting, and harm in the law and ethics in Kenya.

GCSJ seminar series: Toothless tigers? Regional organisations and democracy promotion

Since the end of the Cold War, a growing number of regional organisations (ROs) around the world have formally adhered to democracy as common norm and have adopted institutionalised mechanisms to promote, protect and defend it.

GCSJ seminar series: Decentring the human in social science research

This seminar brings together scholars from varying disciplinary backgrounds who share a common concern to unlock the potential of social science research to expand our understanding of who and what counts as part of 'the social'.

GCSJ seminar series: The Religious Toleration and Peace (RETOPEA) H2020 project

This session reflects on the project Religious Toleration and Peace (RETOPEA), and its ‘Docutube’ method.