Professor Fiona Williams explores how contemporary social movements – especially those around gender, race, migration, disability, austerity and the environment – pose material, political and ethical questions as to how we are to live our lives.

Professor David Spiegelhalter, , Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory, Centre for Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge delivers the annual Sidney Ball lecture at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford

For the 2016 Sidney Ball Memorial Lecture, Professor Colin Crouch, Vice-President for Social Sciences, gives a talk on European social policies. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

The 2015 Sidney Ball Memorial Lecture, Anti-Deinstitutionalization and Anti-Institutionalization for Persons with Severe Mental Illnesses: Finding Common Ground, delivered by Dr Phyllis Solomon, University of Pennsylvania. In the U.S. and the U.K., there are currently two diametrically opposed policy positions being promoted for the care and treatment of persons with severe mental illness, anti-deinstitutionalization and anti-institutionalization. Both share the same goal of ensuring the best quality of life for those with severe psychiatric disorders, but the pathways to achieving this goal are very different and have resulted in much contention. Each espouses a different belief system regarding this population and their presumed capabilities, and varying emphasis on maximizing protection of the community versus protection of individual rights, resulting in contrasting mental health policies and practice orientations. The presentation will delineate the history from which these positions evolved, consequent views, and policies and practices that emerged from the differing attitudes, culminating in a proposed practice approach that when supported by appropriate policy offers a more balanced approach to serving adults with mental illness–navigating risk management that preserves freedom and opportunities of risk while affording mutually satisfactory “risk control”.

The Sidney Ball Memorial Lecture 2014 given by Professor Tom Cook. This paper identifies three major assumptions of the current evidence-based policy movement that seeks to use scientific methods to identify effective social policy initiatives: (1) Randomized controlled trials are the best way of identifying what works and should be preferred for building up an evidence base or should even constitute the only legitimate inputs into that base; (2) In policy research it is not difficult to label the causal agent in general language; and (3) Extrapolating from past causal findings (however secure) to future policy contexts depends on formal sampling theory. Empirical evidence is used to address these three assumptions. Each is found to be overstated. A somewhat different model of evidence-based research is briefly proposed. It makes more realistic assumptions about how research can contribute to evidence-based policy and respects the conceptual interdependencies between creating high quality tests of causal propositions, correctly labeling the cause (or effect), and minimizing the extrapolation from past knowledge to future applications.

The 2013 lecture 'Speaking Truth to Power: Social Policy in Action' delivered by Baroness Lister of Burtersett on 4th of December 2013 in the Nissan Lecture Theatre, St. Antony's College. The Department of Social Policy and Intervention celebrates its Centenary this academic year. A major lecture, delivered by Baroness Lister of Burtersett and introduced by the Chancellor of the University, Lord Patten of Barnes. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

The 2012 lecture 'The Reform of the Welfare State and the Dynamics of People's Lives' delivered by Professor John Hills (London School of Economics) on Wednesday, 31 October 2012 at 5 p.m. in the Nissan Lecture Theatre, St. Antony's College. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Professor Mark Lipsey (Peabody Research Institute, Vanderbilt University) delivers the 2011 Sidney Ball Memorial Lecture. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

2010 Sidney Ball memorial Lecture given by Professor Gøsta Esping-Andersen at St Antony's College.