Largest ever Cambridge Festival of Ideas launches on Monday

The Festival of Ideas, now in its seventh year, will run for two weeks until 2 November with events - most of them free - ranging from exhibitions, cinema screenings, debates, immersive performances, participatory workshops and concerts.

The Festival is one of the ways to get involved in serious debate, engage with scholars, learn about cutting edge research, think about new challenges, trends and ideas with the thousands of people who attend events at the Festival of Ideas. Speakers include Booker prize-winning novelist Ben Okri, gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, heterodox economist Ha-Joon Chang, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, comedian Bridget Christie and poet Blake Morrison.

The theme of this year’s Festival is Identities and many of the talks and debates centre around this. They include:

• Mixed race: the future of identity politics in Britain
  Speakers include writer and broadcaster Sarfraz Manzoor and Chamion Caballero from London South Bank University, whose research informed the BBC's Mixed Britannia series. Other participants in the debate, which will be chaired by journalist Yasmin Alibhai Brown, are Gabriella Beckles-Raymond, a Lecturer in the Theology and Religious Studies Department at Canterbury Christ Church University, and Dinah Morley, vice chair of People In Harmony, a national organisation working to support mixed race people and families. The debate will look at how the growing number of mixed race children in the UK - one of the fastest growing groups - will impact on attitudes to multiculturalism (25 October)
   
• Challenges to sexual identities: global perspectives
  This event will examine the causes of the rise in extremism against gay people in some parts of the world and address what drives tolerance and diversity. Speakers include Peter Tatchell, Susan Golombok, professor of Family Research and director of the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge, Anthony Obinnah, Deputy Secretary of Justice for Gay Africans, and Dr Kath Browne of Brighton University. It will be chaired by Alison Hennegan, a Director of Studies in English at Cambridge and former literary editor of Gay News (25 October)

The Festival will see a host of inspiring interactive sessions for people of all ages, including a pre-history day, a comic creation master class, a hip hop event which explores exploring mental illness through hip hop beats and lyrics, medieval storytelling and family drawing workshops. This year the Festival partners with the Southbank Centre’s Women of the World Festival for a day of events celebrating the achievements of women and the challenges still facing them.

In addition to debates on the pinkification of girlhood and cyberbullying with Caroline Criado-Perez, herself the target of cyberbullies, there is a speed mentoring session with a high-profile range of mentors, including Dame Carol Black, Principal of Newnham College Cambridge and Adviser on Work and Health at the Department of Health, and Dame Barbara Stocking, former CEO of Oxfam GB and President of Murray Edwards College. Dame Carol, author of a recent government report on wellbeing at work, will also talk about how to survive the ups and downs associated with women, particularly those with children, breaking through the glass ceiling. Many of the activities are free, including WOW Marketplace, Give it a go - interactivites activities and demonstrations for all ages, including Cambridge Hands on Science (CHaOS) - and short talks on everything from sexism in science and the future of feminism to domestic violence and immigration.

The Festival is also partnering with Heffers on its unique Classics Forum with experts including Professor Paul Cartledge, Tom Holland and Professor Maria Wyke and with Curating Cambridge, a five-week journey of exploration into the culture, community, passion, diversity, vision and individuality that makes Cambridge what it is. Curating Cambridge includes a number of exhibitions  including The Thing Is… at The Polar Museum, Silent Partners: Artist & Mannequin from Function to Fetish at the Fitzwilliam, and Buddha’s Word: The Life of Books in Tibet and Beyond at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Accompanying events such as lunchtime talks and creative workshops are being offered in connection with these exhibitions and there are many more activities and events.

Other highlights include:

• Playing and Praying? - a panel discussion featuring three academics and two athletes, discussing their work and personal experiences and the parallels between sport and religion, such as the regular and conscious disciplining of body and mind. The panel will explore the ways that sport, faith and society interact in Britain today. It will ask what role faith plays in the sporting lives and motivations of elite athletes, particularly those from religious minorities and how sport and sporting heroes shape the face of religion and relations between faiths in Britain today.  Speakers include Mahfoud Amara, Deputy Director of the Centre for Olympic Studies and Research at Loughborough University, who has a specific interest in sport in Arab and Muslim contexts and in sport, multiculturalism, Adrian Cassidy, a member of the GB Rowing Team until he broke his neck in two places and Salma Bi who plays for Five Ways Old Edwardians at club level and is the first British Asian woman player to be selected for Worcestershire county. (22 October)
• Fiction – a play where the audience will be plunged into darkness to explore the boundary between consciousness and sleep. Commissioned by the Cambridge Festival of Ideas, Cambridge Junction and Bournemouth Arts by the Sea Festival and funded by Arts Council England, Fiction is the second performance by writer Glen Neath and director David Rosenberg using binaural sound and absolute darkness and is described as “an anxious journey through the sprawling architecture of our dreams and an exercise in empathy” (29 October)
• Cambridge Shorts - a premiere for a series of student-led films about new research at the University of Cambridge, from DNA origami to illuminated manuscripts (20 October)
• A climate of conspiracy: a heated debate - Professor David Runciman and Dr Alfred Moore will represent two very different types of climate conspiracists and will debate what the debate on climate change tells us about democracy today, and the hopes we invest in it (24 October)
• India-Pakistan: a common ground - What is the common ground for India and Pakistan in terms of development, economic growth and research. With Dr Joya Chatterji, Dr Ornit Shani, Dr Bhaskar Vira and Dr Kamal Munir (1 November)
• Big Brother 2.0 - a debate by leading experts on whether our privacy is the price we pay for an easier and secure future or whether this is simply a false sense of security (1 November)
• Jedi and witches and indigo children! Oh my! - Beth Singler, a digital anthropologist, discusses the new online religious identities and who they echo wider changes in society and religion (25 October)

The Festival of Ideas is sponsored by Cambridge University Press and Anglia Ruskin University, which also organises events. Event partners include RAND Europe, University of Cambridge Museums, Heffers, the Cambridge Junction and Botanic Garden. The Festival's media partner is BBC Radio Cambridgeshire.