“Science, Philosophy, Technology: Resisting a Post-Truth World” St Hugh’s College Oxford University, Oxford

Recent political and economic events across the globe have both revealed and galvanized a systematic repulsion of truth and science through strategic, nefarious and overt campaigns. This conference begins with the belief that the university has largely surrendered its raison d’ê·tre to the pressures of a profit-centred economic paradigm that has created massive debts for students, compromised research protections and academic freedoms for faculty, and undermined quality teaching. Consequently, the pressures to make profits in education have also undermined the pursuit of truth and truth-telling in research findings, which have unleashed decades of unaccountable corporate activities that have threatened the environment and the health of democratic institutions. The conference creates a space in which strategies and tactics can be exchanged for recovering the locus classicus of the scholars’ responsibility to truth, students and to society.