RSA Events

Our capacity to survive, adapt and flourish relies on designing a future that is concurrently sustainable and resilient. Whereas sustainability is accepted as a key tenet of good design, resilient design is still in its infancy seeking greater understanding and definition.Dame Jo da Silva RDI has earned global recognition as an engineer who has applied her knowledge and design expertise to improve safety, promote inclusivity, and enhance resilience of communities, cities, and infrastructure globally. Her talk will focus on her personal journey and growing understanding of what resilience means in practice based on her experiences working with vulnerable communities, ‘building back better’ following crises and exploring what makes cities resilient.Prior to the Address, 5 new Royal Designers for Industry (RDI) and 4 new Honorary Royal Designers for Industry will be welcomed to the Faculty.The title ‘Royal Designer for Industry’ is awarded annually by the RSA to designers of all disciplines who have achieved sustained design excellence, work of aesthetic value and significant benefit to society.The RDI is the highest accolade for designers in the UK. Only 200 designers can hold the title. Non-UK designers may become honorary Royal Designers.The ‘Royal Designers’ are responsible for designing the world around us, enriching our cultural heritage, driving innovation, inspiring creativity in others and improving our quality of life.  #RSARDIBecome an RSA Events sponsor: https://utm.guru/udI9xDonate to The RSA: https://utm.guru/udNNBFollow RSA Events on Instagram: https://instagram.com/rsa_events/Follow the RSA on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RSAEventsLike RSA Events on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rsaeventsofficialJoin our Fellowship: https://www.thersa.org/fellowship/join 

The Grenfell Tower disaster was the worst residential fire in Britain since World War II and it didn’t have to happen. The fire climbed up cladding as flammable as solid petrol. Fire doors failed to self-close. There was no alarm to warn sleeping residents and no evacuation plan. As smoke seeped into their homes, all were told to ‘stay put’ and 72 people would lose their lives.Five years on, many of the resulting public inquiry’s recommendations remain unmet. Many high-rise buildings have yet to have the same dangerous cladding removed. Peter Apps is deputy editor of Inside Housing and the only journalist to have followed the story of Grenfell from the start. At the RSA, he looks at how such a disaster could take place in the wealthiest borough in the wealthiest city in one of the wealthiest countries in the world and asks: what needs to be done to prevent a tragedy like Grenfell from ever happening again?#RSAhousingBecome an RSA Events sponsor: https://utm.guru/udI9xDonate to The RSA: https://utm.guru/udNNBFollow RSA Events on Instagram: https://instagram.com/rsa_events/Follow the RSA on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RSAEventsLike RSA Events on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rsaeventsofficialJoin our Fellowship: https://www.thersa.org/fellowship/join

Black African communities have had a seismic impact across British culture, sports, politics, and more. Immigration from countries like Nigeria, Ghana and Zimbabwe has created many vibrant communities across Britain, especially in London. Across food, faith, and culture, the nation's capital has become a melting pot of ideas of what it is to be Black, African, and British. What can the eclectic nature of African London teach us about ties that bind immigrant communities together and to their home countries? How are these communities shaped by ongoing racial discrimination between White and Black communities and between Black Africans and Afro-Caribbeans?  At the RSA, writer, editor and restaurant critic, Jimi Famurewa shares stories of time spent immersed in the culture, tradition, food, and politics of Black African London and explores what this can teach us about the nature of modern London, modern Britain, and modern diaspora life.#RSAjourneysBecome an RSA Events sponsor: https://utm.guru/udI9xDonate to The RSA: https://utm.guru/udNNBFollow RSA Events on Instagram: https://instagram.com/rsa_events/Follow the RSA on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RSAEventsLike RSA Events on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rsaeventsofficialJoin our Fellowship: https://www.thersa.org/fellowship/join 

Small change can have a big impact on our lives. Through knock-on effects and cumulative action, little shifts have the potential for great harm and great good. And when it is easy to feel overwhelmed at the scale of change needed to solve big, structural problems, we need to recognise the value of practical change we can enact on a daily basis.In recent times, the twin plagues of Covid-19 and anti-Black police violence have caused Ruha Benjamin to rethink the importance of these every day, individual actions across our lives and societies - from the impact of the chronic stress of racism and inequities in our health care system to the power of community organisers who are fostering mutual aid and collective healing.Here at the RSA, Ruha Benjamin will demonstrate the impact of these micro-changes, drawing on her personal experience and professional research on race, technology, and justice. Alongside the chair of the discussion, Mandu Reid, leader of the Women’s Equality Party, Ruha will offer an inspiring and practical vision of how seemingly minor decisions and habits can spread virally and have exponentially positive effects.#RSAviraljusticeBecome an RSA Events sponsor: https://utm.guru/udI9xDonate to The RSA: https://utm.guru/udNNBFollow RSA Events on Instagram: https://instagram.com/rsa_events/Follow the RSA on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RSAEventsLike RSA Events on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rsaeventsofficialJoin our Fellowship: https://www.thersa.org/fellowship/join 

When the economist Ha-Joon Chang arrived in Britain in the eighties, he was struck by how bland and homogeneous the British diet was. But it wasn’t just the food – in mainstream economic thinking too, there seemed to only be one item on the menu – the Neoclassical tradition.  Whilst our diet has expanded and diversified since then, our economic preference has remained stubbornly singular. Chang argues that just as a nourishing and appetising diet needs a variety of flavours and nutrients, our economics also needs to borrow from different traditions and ways of thinking in order to produce the best results for the greatest number of people.   Discover more about how economics affects every dimension of our lives - check out Ha-Joon Chang's RSA Animate here.#RSAeconomicsBecome an RSA Events sponsor: https://utm.guru/udI9xDonate to The RSA: https://utm.guru/udNNBFollow RSA Events on Instagram: https://instagram.com/rsa_events/Follow the RSA on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RSAEventsLike RSA Events on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rsaeventsofficialJoin our Fellowship: https://www.thersa.org/fellowship/join 

Is there scope for the introduction of a universal basic income as a transformative public health intervention?As part of an academic partnership, funded by Wellcome, the RSA is exploring the potential for a UBI, how it could work in practice and what its impacts might be. The research brings together new analysis which shows that even a fiscally neutral UBI could have a significant effect in reducing poverty and insecurity and bring health benefits to those benefiting from the scheme. Speakers to include report authors Matthew Johnson, Northumbria University and Hannah Webster, RSA; and guest speakers Ruth Lister CBEand Professor Guy Standing.The event marks the launch of a new RSA report exploring the health and wellbeing impacts of a universal basic income.Read our interim report on a UBI and mental health#RSAUBIBecome an RSA Events sponsor: https://utm.guru/udI9xDonate to The RSA: https://utm.guru/udNNBFollow RSA Events on Instagram: https://instagram.com/rsa_events/Follow the RSA on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RSAEventsLike RSA Events on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rsaeventsofficialJoin our Fellowship: https://www.thersa.org/fellowship/join

Households, businesses and even essential services are feeling the pressure, with the poorest in our society most harshly affected.To add to the burden, wages and salaries have failed to rise in line with inflation. The past summer saw several sectors push back on this, as train operators, posties, barristers, dock workers and more went out on strike. Some success was achieved, but for many, their battle is ongoing. With cost of living pressures expected to worsen over the winter, what kind of support is needed now from employers and from the government? And what can the ‘summer of discontent’ teach us about the power of collective action and how people can best make their voice heard in the workplace and wider society?Hear representatives from Citizens Advice, the Living Wage Foundation and the Trades Union Congress as they explore these urgent questions and their potential solutions.  #RSAdiscontentBecome an RSA Events sponsor: https://utm.guru/udI9xDonate to The RSA: https://utm.guru/udNNBFollow RSA Events on Instagram: https://instagram.com/rsa_events/Follow the RSA on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RSAEventsLike RSA Events on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rsaeventsofficial 

Rejecting both New Labour’s embrace of free markets and the statism of Corbynism, Blue Labour thinking sought to reconnect Labour with its working-class base, and to bring assets, power and dignity back to local communities. As workers' rights and futures - and the future of the places they live - take centre-stage in politics once more, Blue Labour’s founder, political scientist Maurice Glasman, is joined by Shadow Levelling-Up Secretary Lisa Nandy MP to explore what left-conservatism has to offer the Labour Party, and the country, in the post-Brexit, post-Covid era.#RSAcommongoodBecome an RSA Events sponsor: https://utm.guru/udI9xDonate to The RSA: https://utm.guru/udNNBFollow RSA Events on Instagram: https://instagram.com/rsa_events/Follow the RSA on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RSAEventsLike RSA Events on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rsaeventsofficialListen to RSA Events podcasts: https://bit.ly/35EyQYU 

But, despite affording billions greater material wealth, health and freedom, the age of plenty has not delivered the utopia it initially seemed to promise.  Brad DeLong, one of the world’s leading economists, argues that instead of ushering in an era of prosperity, wellbeing and unlocked human potential, the gains of what he terms the ‘long twentieth century’ have not only been equivocal and double-edged, but also unfairly distributed.   DeLong’s magnum opus, Slouching Towards Utopia was an instant NYT bestseller, and has been universally lauded as the must-read account of 20th century economics.  Join us as we explore why true economic and human progress is a complicated game of snakes and ladders, and what we need to do to create a better world.#RSAutopia Become an RSA Events sponsor: https://utm.guru/udI9xDonate to The RSA: https://utm.guru/udNNBFollow RSA Events on Instagram: https://instagram.com/rsa_events/Follow the RSA on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RSAEventsLike RSA Events on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rsaeventsofficialListen to RSA Events podcasts: https://bit.ly/35EyQYU

Across the 19th and 20th centuries, the Huxley family reshaped how we think about humanity and our relationship with the natural world. Within a family of scientists, educators, novelists, mystics, and filmmakers, two men led the way: ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, the zoologist T.H. Huxley and his grandson and intellectual inheritor, the ecologist and conservationist, Julian Huxley.From religion to genetics, to human psychology, the Huxleys’ impact was felt across some of the most controversial and significant topics of their day. In studies of the natural world, they contributed to the foundation of the new sciences of ecology and animal conservation.Adept at writing about themselves in painfully revealing, honest and unprecedented ways, the family’s lives, marriages, successes and failures were also subject to their fascination with emotional, sexual, and psychological experience.At the RSA, leading historian of science Alison Bashford is joined by historian Thomas Dixon and writer Stuart Jeffries to discuss the impact of three generations of Huxleys, exploring how the roots of the Huxley legacy reach deep into scientific and cultural conversations we are still having today. #RSAhuxleyBecome an RSA Events sponsor: https://utm.guru/udI9xDonate to The RSA: https://utm.guru/udNNBFollow RSA Events on Instagram: https://instagram.com/rsa_events/Follow the RSA on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RSAEventsLike RSA Events on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rsaeventsofficialListen to RSA Events podcasts: https://bit.ly/35EyQYU