Join Professor A. C. Grayling, one of the UK’s leading public philosophers and author of For the People: Fighting Authoritarianism, Saving Democracy, in conversation with Dr Leor Zmigrod, a political neuroscientist and author of The Ideological Brain, as part of the Calleva-Airey Neave Global Security Seminar Series. The seminar is moderated by Dr Julia Ebner, Calleva Researcher and Leader of Oxford’s Violent Extremism Lab.

As the closing seminar of the series, this session will consider the contemporary pressures facing democratic systems, including the role of political structures, information ecosystems, and individual psychological predispositions. It will examine how institutional and cognitive factors intersect to shape the resilience or vulnerability of democratic governance in the face of authoritarian and extremist currents, and reflect on possible strategies — institutional, civic, and psychological — for strengthening democratic practices and safeguarding political freedoms in a rapidly changing global environment.

The event is followed by a drinks reception.

This seminar series is funded by the Calleva Centre for Evolution and Human Science and the Airey Neave Trust.

Speaker biographies

A. C. Grayling CBE MA DPhil (Oxon) FRSA FRSL is the Principal of Northeastern University London, and its Professor of Philosophy. He is also a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He is the author of over thirty books of philosophy, biography, history of ideas, and essays. He was for a number of years a columnist on the Guardian, the Times, and Prospect magazine. He has contributed to many leading newspapers in the UK, US and Australia, and to BBC radios 4, 3 and the World Service, for which he did the annual 'Exchanges at the Frontier' series; and he has often appeared on television. He has twice been a judge on the Booker Prize, in 2014 serving as the Chair of the judging panel. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Vice President of Humanists UK, Patron of the Defence Humanists, Honorary Associate of the Secular Society, and a Patron of Dignity in Dying.

Dr Leor Zmigrod is a political psychologist and neuroscientist, and author of The Ideological Brain, which reveals the psychological and neurobiological traits that predispose some minds to extremism as well as the ways in which immersion in rigid ideologies might transform our brains and bodies. Her research centers on what makes some individuals susceptible to extreme ideologies and the harms that ideologies pose to individual’s cognitive freedom. She studied at Cambridge University as a Gates Scholar before winning a Junior Research Fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge. She has held visiting fellowships at Stanford, Harvard, and both the Berlin and Paris Institutes for Advanced Study. She was listed on ‘Forbes 30 Under 30’ in Science and has won numerous prizes, including the Women of the Future Science Award and the Glushko Prize.