The IGP's Director’s Seminars Series

Thursday 1 October, 2020 |

The IGP's Director's Seminars are an opportunity for audiences to get an in-depth theoretical perspective on sustainable and inclusive prosperity. These Seminars are given by academics who are pushing for new ways of thinking and new ways of researching society's grand challenges.

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08 October 2020, 4:00 pm–6:00 pm

Ruth Yeoman

Dr Ruth Yeoman is a Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford. She is an expert in applying the ethics and practices of meaningfulness and mutuality to organisations and systems.

Drawing upon her academic research, she has worked with large and small private and public sector organisations to develop new approaches based on a synthesis of meaningfulness and mutuality. Example research consulting projects include: developing a mutual leadership programme for Rochdale Boroughwide Housing; applying mutuality to whole council public service transformation for Cheshire West and Chester LA; strategic use of mutuality in a coordinated UK financial mutuals sector for the Association of Financial Mutuals and the Building Societies Association. She was a lead consultant for the Cabinet Office 2015 ‘Mutuals in Heath’ initiative. For the Said Business School, Oxford, she helped to establish ‘Mutuality in Business’, funded by Mars Inc. For the Big Innovation Centre, she led a collaboration including the Bank of England and the Office of National Statistics investigating the role of intangible assets in national wealth creation. Ruth has served as a member of the HM Treasury Council of Economic Advisers, a fellow of the Big Innovation Centre and an adviser for the Fabian Society’s Changing Work Centre.

Her research projects include: Ownership, Leadership and Meaningful Work (funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme); Values to Shared Value Creation in Sustainable Supply Chains (funded by Oxford’s John Fell); The Meaningful City (funded by Hermes Investment Management and Tampere University). Ruth has degrees from Imperial College (BSc. Physics), London Business School (MBA), and Royal Holloway, University of London (MA in Politics of Democracy, PhD).

22 October 2020, 4:00 pm–6:00 pm

Dr Rochelle Burgess

Rochelle Burgess is a Lecturer in Global Health at the Institute for Global Health at UCL. For the past 10 years she has worked global health issues with an emphasis on community participation and qualitative methodologies. She is interested in the promotion of community approaches to health globally, and views communities as a route to studying the interface between health concerns and broader development issues such as poverty, power, systems of governance, and community mobilisation (civil society).

For more than a decade she has researched community mental health care systems and their capacity to respond to the needs of marginalised groups, including HIV/AIDS affected women living in poverty in South Africa (since 2007), and Black and Minority Ethnic groups in South West London (since 2013). She is currently co-PI of a study exploring the post-conflict mental health needs of internally displaced communities in Colombia with an emphasis on female ex-combatants and the afro-Caribbean community. She is also developing new projects on the mental health consequences of child marriage in the SADC region, alongside colleagues from the African Union.

05 November 2020, 4:00 pm–6:00 pm

Andrew Oswald

Andrew Oswald is a Professor of Economics and Behavioural Science at the University of Warwick. His research is principally in applied economics and quantitative social science. It currently includes work on the COVID-19 crisis and health economics. In more normal times Andrew Oswald also works on the empirical study of job satisfaction, human happiness, mental health, unemployment, labour productivity, and the influence of diet on psychological well-being. He serves on the board of editors of Science. Previously at Oxford and the London School of Economics, with spells as Lecturer, Princeton University (1983-4); De Walt Ankeny Professor of Economics, Dartmouth College (1989-91); Jacob Wertheim Fellow, Harvard University (2005); Visiting Fellow, Cornell University (2008); Research Director, IZA Bonn (2011-12); Visiting Fellow, University of Zurich (2016); Visiting Fellow, Yale University (2016). He is an ISI Highly-Cited Researcher.

26 November 2020, 4:00 pm–6:00 pm

Torsten Bell

Torsten is the Chief Executive of the Resolution Foundation, a think tank that combines analytical rigour with policy prescriptions to improve the living standards of those in Britain on low to middle incomes. He has a background in economic policy, with his current research focuses including inequality, the labour market, tax and benefits, and housing and wealth. Prior to leading the Resolution Foundation, Torsten was Director of Policy for the Labour Party. He has also worked in HM Treasury, as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers during the financial crisis and as a civil servant.

10 December 2020, 4:00 pm–6:00 pm

Gail Whiteman

Gail's research utilises organisation theory on knowledge to analyse how a range of actors (companies, civil society, and local communities) make sense of ecological change, and how these actors transform and build resilience across scales given environmental pressures and social inequities.Professor Whiteman is also the Professor-in-Residence at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and was actively involved in building science-based targets including those for a future low-carbon economy. She is a Research Fellow of the Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research (4CMR), a Steering Committee member of the Future Earth Forum, and is an Executive Board member of the Resilience Alliance, an international research organisation of scientists and practitioners who collaborate to explore the dynamics of social-ecological systems.Her research has been published in the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Studies, Ecology & Society, and Nature, etc. Professor Whiteman was a 2011 Global Finalist in the Aspen Institute’s high-profile ranking of Faculty Pioneers in sustainability.

Her research aims to help organisations deal more effectively with sustainability challenges, an objective she established during her former career in the private sector. She has led or is leading a number of large research grants related to sustainability and climate change, including the ICE-ARC research grant coordinated by the British Antarctic Survey. Professor Whiteman is also active in innovative business sustainability training and education and was the organiser of a high-profile event in 2011 – the Engaged Business Leaders’ Forum - in which H.R.H. Princess Irene of the Netherlands and H.R.H. Prince Carlos de Bourbon de Parme participated.