Arts and human welfare: creative action in medicine, sociopolitics and the environment
14th Annual Human Welfare Conference
Friday 13 May 2022 08:30Location: |
Green Templeton College |
Registration now open for this year’s Human Welfare Conference!
The conference will feature talks, workshops, and panel discussions by esteemed faculty and students from University of Oxford and beyond. If you are joining us in person, you will get to enjoy a spectacular recital by world-renowned pianist and Green Templeton College’s very own musician-in-residence Maki Sekiya. The evening will also include a formal dinner with a special live jazz piano performance. Don’t miss out on the chance to experience Green Templeton College at its fullest!
We are delighted to have the conference held in hybrid format.
You can keep up to date here, and on the Facebook event page!
Whether you are a student, professional, researcher, or artist, all are welcome to join this conference! The committee are very excited to see you all there!
If any accessibility requirements are needed or should you have any additional questions, please do not hesitate to message us here or contact our co-chairs, Giada, giada.portaluppi@gtc.ox.ac.uk and Midori, midori.hosoda@gtc.ox.ac.uk.
Programme
08:30-9:00 Registration
09:00-9:30 Opening Ceremony
EP Abraham Lecture Theatre
09:35-10:25 Art and Medicine: Therapy and Advocacy-Poetry
Workshop By Safia Khan
EP Abraham Lecture Theatre
10:25-10:40 Coffee Break
Stables Bar
10:40-11:30 Social Change Through Art
By Professor Peter McDonald
EP Abraham Lecture Theatre
11:30-11:40 Short Break
Stables Bar
11:40-12:30 Perspective of Art in Ecology and Climate Change
By Maya Adams and Awa Adiaye
EP Abraham Lecture Theatre
12:30-13:30 Lunch Break
Stables Bar
13.40-14:10 Maki Sekiya Live Performance
Common Room
14:25-15:40 Panel Discussion: Art and Human Welfare-Pandemic to Today
Moderated by Sir Muir Gray
Common Room
15:40-17:00 Closing Ceremony
Common Room
About the speakers
Medicine
Safia Khan
Safia Khan is a fifth-year medical student at Green Templeton College and poet. Alongside her studies, she was the 2021 winner of the New Poets Prize. Her work has featured in The North, Poetry Wales, BATH MAGG, and various anthologies including Grist. Her debut collection, Too Much Mirch, is forthcoming with Smith | Doorstop in summer 2022.
Outside of poetry, she has an academic interest in neuroscience, medical education, and social determinants of health. She is currently working with the University to expand teaching of health inequalities into the medical curriculum. She has also performed as a member of Garfunkel and the Green Templeton Big Band.
Sociopolitics
Peter McDonald
Peter D. McDonald is Professor of English and Related Literature and Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford. He writes on literature, the modern state and the freedom of expression; the history of writing systems, cultural institutions and publishing; multilingualism, translation and interculturality; and on the promise of creative criticism. He is the author of Artefacts of Writing: Ideas of the State and Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing (Oxford, 2017); The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences (Oxford, 2009); British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880-1914 (Cambridge, 1997); and co-author of PEN: An Illustrated History (Interlink/Thames & Hudson, 2021).
Environment
Maya Adams
Maya’s body of work explores different modes of being in a world whose physical and social climate is rapidly changing. She is interested in how stories of the past and stories of the present interact and shape our ideas of what the future can be. Her work has touched upon concepts of ecological grief, climate justice, and expressions of liminality or “in-between-ness” regarding race and gender. Maya graduated with an MSc in Environmental Change and Management at the University of Oxford and has a passion for creative communication and climate action.
Environment
Awa Ndiaye
Awa Ndiaye is a spoken word poet whose work explores various themes including identity, social justice, and climate change. With an MSc in Environmental Change and Management from Oxford, she combines her formal education and work in climate change with her art to question and challenge mainstream discourses on climate, which often erase the perspectives of the very people at the forefront of the climate crisis.
Awa also curates spaces where people connect intentionally, share vulnerably, and reflect critically. Her poetry beautifully holds these spaces by allowing people to access a deeper place within themselves and to connect through shared emotions.
Panellists in addition to above speakers
Weimin He
Dr. Weimin He, Artist-in-Residence, Green Templeton College, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers, a Trustee of the Muban Educational Trust and a member of the Chinese Artists’ Association. He is also a life drawing tutor at the Ruskin School of Art. His artworks have been exhibited or collected worldwide, including by The British Museum, The Ashmolean Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The China National Gallery.
Maki Sekiya
Maki Sekiya was appointed as Musician-in-Residence at Green Templeton College in 2017 and has been delighting us with her virtuosic solo recitals on a termly basis. Maki started her career at the age of 10 in Japan, later securing her place in the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory and has been performing internationally ever since. Alongside her performing career, Maki has a keen interest in the holistic role of music and has formed a local music community ‘Oxford Music Hub’ to connect like-minded musicians across different generations.
Moderator
Sir Muir Gray
Sir Muir Gray
Muir Gray entered the Public Health Service by joining the City of Oxford Health Department in 1972 after qualifying in medicine in Glasgow, the city of his birth. The first phase of his professional career focused on disease prevention, for example on helping people stop smoking. Then he developed all the screening programmes in the NHS, for pregnant women, children, adults and older people. During this period he was appointed as the Chief Knowledge Officer of the NHS and was awarded both a CBE and later a Knighthood for services for the NHS. He set up charities to promote urban walking and an Oxford based Centre for Sustainable Healthcare.
He set up the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare and Better Value Healthcare and has published a series of HowTo Handbooks for example, How `to Get Better Value Healthcare.
His other mission, of fifty years, is how to help people live longer better is ageing and how to cope with it and he has published a book for people aged seventy called Sod 70!, one for the younger decade called Sod60! and a book on diet – Sod It, Eat Well! Based on his research and experience he has developed a new paradigm to help people live longer better, to compress morbidity at the end of life and to reduce the incidence of dementia and frailty and therefore reduce the need for social care. This is based in the new Optimal Ageing Programme at Oxford.
About the Human Welfare Conference
Green Templeton College’s annual Human Welfare Conference brings together leading graduate students, academics, and practitioners to engage with the specific challenges and opportunities of systematically improving human welfare in both academic and professional contexts. Encouraging collaboration between researchers from different backgrounds and disciplines, the conference explores new and comprehensive ways to tackle important issues relevant to human welfare. Explore past conferences
Type: Conferences
