Sidney Ball Memorial Lectures Oxford University

This talk draws on the ways racialisation features in contemporary society and raise basic, but vexed questions about identities and the stories we tell to account for ourselves and contemporary social relations. The 21st century has undoubtedly been marked by periods of upheaval and disjunction. Examples include the global COVID-19 pandemic, the revitalising of Black Lives Matter by the US murder of George Floyd by a policeman, the Russian war against Ukraine, the murder of Sarah Everard by a UK policeman and the accession of King Charles. Analyses of all these events have highlighted socioeconomic, gendered and racialised inequities, and contestations over how to account for difference as shown, for example, in the heated debates over the 2021 report of the UK Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. These contestations raise basic, but vexed questions about identities and the stories we tell to account for ourselves and contemporary social relations. The answers to such questions are central to producing both liveable lives and liveable societies.

This talk draws on the ways racialisation features in contemporary society to discuss three issues central to addressing these questions. First, recognition that no one social category can explain differences, making intersectional perspectives crucial. Second, that social disruptions make some previously unheard stories sayable, hearable and potentially transformative. Third, that histories come alive in new ways at such times, revitalising the present and future in ways that make the contestations likely to mark the Carolean age important to all of us.

Ann Phoenix is Professor of Psychosocial studies at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, Department of Social Science, UCL Institute of Education. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Academy of Social Sciences.

The annual Sidney Ball lecture was instituted by Barnett House and named in 1920 after the first chairman of the Barnett House Committee, Sidney Ball. The event brings a distinguished speaker to Oxford every autumn to discuss key themes in social policy and intervention.

Professor Fiona Williams explores how contemporary social movements – especially those around gender, race, migration, disability, austerity and the environment – pose material, political and ethical questions as to how we are to live our lives.

Professor David Spiegelhalter, , Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory, Centre for Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge delivers the annual Sidney Ball lecture at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford

For the 2016 Sidney Ball Memorial Lecture, Professor Colin Crouch, Vice-President for Social Sciences, gives a talk on European social policies. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

The 2015 Sidney Ball Memorial Lecture, Anti-Deinstitutionalization and Anti-Institutionalization for Persons with Severe Mental Illnesses: Finding Common Ground, delivered by Dr Phyllis Solomon, University of Pennsylvania. In the U.S. and the U.K., there are currently two diametrically opposed policy positions being promoted for the care and treatment of persons with severe mental illness, anti-deinstitutionalization and anti-institutionalization. Both share the same goal of ensuring the best quality of life for those with severe psychiatric disorders, but the pathways to achieving this goal are very different and have resulted in much contention. Each espouses a different belief system regarding this population and their presumed capabilities, and varying emphasis on maximizing protection of the community versus protection of individual rights, resulting in contrasting mental health policies and practice orientations. The presentation will delineate the history from which these positions evolved, consequent views, and policies and practices that emerged from the differing attitudes, culminating in a proposed practice approach that when supported by appropriate policy offers a more balanced approach to serving adults with mental illness–navigating risk management that preserves freedom and opportunities of risk while affording mutually satisfactory “risk control”.

The Sidney Ball Memorial Lecture 2014 given by Professor Tom Cook. This paper identifies three major assumptions of the current evidence-based policy movement that seeks to use scientific methods to identify effective social policy initiatives: (1) Randomized controlled trials are the best way of identifying what works and should be preferred for building up an evidence base or should even constitute the only legitimate inputs into that base; (2) In policy research it is not difficult to label the causal agent in general language; and (3) Extrapolating from past causal findings (however secure) to future policy contexts depends on formal sampling theory. Empirical evidence is used to address these three assumptions. Each is found to be overstated. A somewhat different model of evidence-based research is briefly proposed. It makes more realistic assumptions about how research can contribute to evidence-based policy and respects the conceptual interdependencies between creating high quality tests of causal propositions, correctly labeling the cause (or effect), and minimizing the extrapolation from past knowledge to future applications.