Christopher Bailey is a Visiting Professor at York St John University and Professor Emeritus in Cultural History at Leeds Beckett University. Chris worked in art and design higher education for over thirty five years and has published research on cultural policy, design history and the impact of IT on pedagogy in the visual arts. He established the Centre for Cultural Policy & Management at Northumbria University and […]
Speakers and Panellists
previous speakers
Pauline Hadaway
Pauline Hadaway has worked in arts and education in the UK and Ireland since 1990 and is co-founder of The Liverpool Salon, a new forum for public debate on Merseyside. She is undertaking a professional doctorate at the University of Manchester’s Institute of Cultural Practices, researching different uses of cultural heritage as a tool for peace-building in Northern Ireland and Britain. She has been published widely […]
Penny Lewis
Penny Lewis is a lecturer in Architecture & Urban Planning and the Wuhan Joint Degree Programme Leader at the University of Dundee. She is also a founding member of the Foundation for Architecture & Education (AE Foundation), and she writes for newspapers and architectural publications. Her work includes; Challenging Contextualism (2004) and Curious Rationalism (2006). She is co-author of In Defence of the Dome (1999), and contributed a chapter to Future of the Community: […]
Michael Thomson
Michael Thomson is Professor of Law at the University of Leeds. He is a graduate of the Universities of Southampton (LLB) and Birmingham (PhD Law), and joined the School of Law in July 2013, having previously held a Chair in Law at Keele University. His interests span the fields of health law, children’s rights, and legal theory with a particular focus on legal embodiment. He is the […]
Georgia Testa
Georgia Testa is a lecturer in Medical Ethics in the School of Philosophy, Religion and the History of Science at the University of Leeds. Her main teaching responsibility is for the medical ethics provision in the School of Medicine, and on Biomedical Ethics for the Inter-disciplinary Ethics Applied Centre. Georgia’s current and past teaching for Philosophy includes Introduction to Ethics; Environmental Ethics; War, Terror and Justice; and The […]
Ann Furedi
Ann Furedi has been CEO of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (bpas) since 2003; which is the UK’s leading abortion service. Before then she was director of policy and press for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, the UK’s regulator of embryo research and assisted conception. Ann has written extensively in defence of women’s autonomy of reproductive choice, and is the author of The Moral Case for Abortion (Palgrave […]
Michael Meadowcroft
Michael Meadowcroft has been active in Liberal politics for over fifty years. He has been a Leeds City Councillor, a West Yorkshire Metropolitan County Councillor, and was MP for Leeds West, 1983-87. Over the past twenty years he has been mainly concerned with new and emerging democracies, and has led or been a member of some fifty missions to thirty-five countries. His academic thesis was […]
Stephen Coleman
Stephen Coleman is Professor of Political Communication at the University of Leeds, Honorary Professor in Political Science at the University of Copenhagen and Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. His main research interests are: methods of political engagement; uses of digital media in representative democracies; intersections between popular culture and formal politics; political efficacy; citizenship education; political aesthetics, performance and rhetoric; literary and […]
Alastair Donald
Alastair Donald is the associate director of the Academy of Ideas, and coordinates planning and programming across projects including Battle of Ideas and Battle of Ideas Europe, and is co-founder of the IoI’s residential school Living Freedom which allows 18-25-year-olds to explore the meaning and ideals of freedom in the twenty-first century. Alastair is the co-editor of the books The Lure of the City: from slums to […]
Andrew Brown
Andrew Brown is Professor of Economics and Political Economy and Divisional Director of Research at the University of Leeds Business School. HIs research advances explanations of key developments in economy and society. He has published on theories of value and growth, financialisation, the euro, job quality and satisfaction, well-being, infrastructure economics, and ICT. He also stresses the research importance of methodology and philosophy, and leads large-scale interdisciplinary […]