SSD EDI Annual Lecture
Poster for the 2025 EDI lecture
In 2024, the Social Sciences Division launched its annual EDI lecture series. Each year we invite distinguished speakers from both inside and outside of academia to share insights from their work, research and careers. We encourage audience Q&As and hope that these events foster meaningful conversations around key topics of equality, diversity and inclusion.
EDI lecture 2026
More information on the 2026 EDI lecture will be available shortly. Please note that our EDI lectures are only open to University members.
Past lectures
The second annual Social Sciences Division EDI Lecture was delivered by Afua Hirsch - award-winning journalist, bestselling author, filmmaker, and Oxford alumna.
Afua Hirsch studied PPE at Oxford. Her bestselling books, including Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging (2018) and Decolonising My Body: A Radical Exploration of Rituals and Beauty (2023), have shaped conversations on race, identity, and decolonisation.
In this lecture, she shared insights from her career and research, offering reflections on some of today’s most urgent questions around race and belonging.
Afua Hirsch is the founder of Born In Me, a production company creating premium scripted and unscripted TV and film, including Africa Rising, an ongoing BBC series exploring the art and culture of African countries. She is also the host of Legacy, a top-3 global podcast hit for Wondery and Amazon Music, now in its twentieth season. A journalist for more than twenty years, she is a former Guardian correspondent, associate editor of British Vogue, and a professor of journalism at the University of Southern California.
Professor Garland-Thomson, Professor of English and Bioethics at Emory University, is a renowned US-based author, educator, and thought leader. She shared her pioneering work to develop the field of critical disability studies and to bring disability culture, access, and justice to a broad range of institutions and communities. Her lecture covered a diverse array of topics relevant to disability, ranging from disability and artistic creation to euthanasia and selective foetal testing.
Professor Garland-Thomson's 2016 op-ed about her own experiences ‘Becoming Disabled’, was the inaugural article in a weekly series in the New York Times. She recently co-edited the series into a collection, ‘About Us: Essays from the Disability Series’, which captures the voices of a community that has for too long been stereotyped and misrepresented. ‘About Us’ offers intimate stories of how those with disabilities navigate a world not built for them.
Her work claims a space in which people with disabilities can be seen and heard as they are – not as others perceive them.
She was joined at our event by a discussant, Professor Jonathan Herring of Oxford's Law Faculty, whose work focusses on how the law interacts with “the important things in life: not money, companies or insurance; but love, friendship and intimacy”. His current projects include a co-edited collection on the philosophy of disability law.
