WHAT'S ON
Full List
The Nights Are Quiet in Teheran by Shida Bazyar
Culture | Thurs 15th Oct | 7:00-8:30 pm
Monthly meet up to discuss a great read, along with drinks & good company.
*Doors open at 6.30pm. The book club begins at 7pm.
‘The pages … pulse with solidarities and betrayal, with heartache and humor.” ― the judges of The International Booker Prize 2026
Set across four decades, from 1979 to 2009, this is a polyphonic novel of one family’s flight from and return to Iran. It is about revolution, oppression, resistance, and the absolute desire for freedom.
1979. Behzad, a young communist revolutionary, fights with his friends for a new order after the Shah’s expulsion. He tells of sparking hope, of clandestine political actions, and of how he finds the love of his life in the courageous, intelligent Nahid.
1989. Nahid lives her new life in West Germany with Behzad. With their young children, they spend hour after hour in front of the radio, hoping for news from others who went into hiding after the mullahs came to power.
1999. Laleh returns to Iran with her mother, Nahid. Between beauty rituals and family secrets, she gets to know a Tehran that hardly matches her childhood memories.
2009. Laleh’s brother Mo is more concerned with a friend’s heartbreak than with student demonstrations in Germany. But then the Green Revolution breaks out in Iran and turns the world upside down.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shida Bazyar studied writing in Germany, and worked in youth education for many years. Born in 1988, she is the author of the novels The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran and Sisters in Arms. The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran has won the Blogger Literary Award, Ulla Hahn Prize, and Uwe Johnson Prize. The English translation was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.
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ADDITIONAL INFO
ACCESS
Bar open with snacks
PIANO QUARTETS
Brussels Muzieque
Music / Sun 18 Oct / 7pm
Join Brussels Muzieque for an evening of Romantic piano-quartet masterpieces.
The ensemble brings together four artists of the Brussels chamber scene: Lithuanian pianist Monika Dars, laureate of the Joseph Darche Piano Prize and chamber-music teacher at the Royal Conservatory of Mons; Kazakh violinist Meruert Karmenova, a sought-after soloist across Europe and recently appointed concertmaster in Antwerp; Polish violist Monika Młynarczyk, co-principal viola of La Monnaie / De Munt; and cellist Eduardo Tonietto, founder and artistic director of Brussels Muzieque, active internationally as a chamber musician.
Their programme spans the early and high Romantic style: Gustav Mahler’s youthful Piano Quartet, already charged with symphonic imagination; the lyrical Andante from Johannes Brahms’s Piano Quartet in C minor, Op. 60; and Robert Schumann’s Piano Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 47, performed in full — a cornerstone of the repertoire, rich in dialogue and warmth
*Dinner available after the concert, please book in advance
ACCES
Bar & snacks & light food
Gypsy-Jazz: Django Chutney & Trio Qu'a Trois
Music / Thurs 22nd Oct / 8pm
*Doors & bar open 7pm. Concert starts at 8pm.
Back by popular demand, Brighton based gypsy-jazz trio Django Chutney are coming back to blow away our Full Circle audience — and this time they're sharing the stage with Trio Qu'a Trois, with the two bands taking it in turns throughout the night.
Their combination part vocal harmonies, huge repertoire that draws from so many eras and genres of the 20th century, virtuoso guitar show-offs, and ridiculous sense of fun and musical adventure has helped them secure fans in the jazz world and across the spectrum alike - all ages and all musical tasted will find something to enjoy in Django Chutney & Trio Qu'a Trois hugely entertaining and energetic performances.
Drawing from Chutney's repertoire, along with more modern tunes, 20's blues, and the very-possible chance of some Black Sabbath, Django Chutney steamroller the audience with a forceful jazz-guitar sound that amazes and delights in equal measure.
Trading sets across the evening, Trio Qu'a Trois bring their own distinct flavour to the Full Circle stage - a trio built around guitar, helicon, saxophone and banjo, blending gypsy-jazz swing with a playfully unconventional instrumentation that sets them apart.
THE BAND "Django Chutney"
Jed Cutler – Guitar & Vocals
Tom Bailey – Double Bass & Vocals
Ben Mack – Guitar & Vocals
THE BAND "Trio Qu'a Trois"
Gilles Kremer – Guitar & Helicon
Augustin Dive (Gus) – Saxophone
Philippe Quewet (Max) – Banjo & Double bass
Find them on:
WHEELCHAIR
WAF CAFF
Ideas I Tues 3rd Nov I 12.15 - 1.15pm **OPEN TO ALL**
We meet for one hour on the first Tuesday of every month at Rond-Point Schuman, outside the European Commission, to stand up for democracy.
Each gathering focuses on a different issue, highlighting where rights and freedoms are at risk.
This is about freedom and about us as engaged citizens. Coffee and conversation are part of the gathering.
Democracy & coffee ☕
Join us and exercise your democratic rights.
No need to book, just drop by.
Fix the System or Replace it? Political Imagination in Action By Michael Damman & Maaike Berthoud Ideas / Action | NEW DATE Tue 10th Nov | 6:30 - 9 pm Doors open at 6 pm. The event starts at 6:30 pm
Fix the System or Replace it? Political Imagination in Action
By Michael Damman & Maaike Berthoud
Ideas / Action | NEW DATE Tue 10th Nov | 6:30 - 9 pm Doors open at 6 pm. The event starts at 6:30 pm
Ideas / Action | NEW DATE Tue 10th Nov | 6:30 - 9 pm
Doors open at 6 pm. The event starts at 6:30 pm
We feel stuck. Representative democracy is failing to meet the challenges of our era. Is reform possible or is something more radical required?
Come spend an evening in an unconventional Democracy Escape Room. Discover what ways-out are available to us today to get unstuck from the impasse. This is an immersive and entertaining session of vision-building and strategising to repair and reinvigorate our democracy. And because a democracy reset needs energised citizens, fun & games are also in store for you.
With the guidance of experienced facilitators Michaël and Maaike, we'll expose structural flaws in our political system and propose democratic innovations to address them. We'll identify what's most urgent, question proposals and assess their merits, determining what it would take - legally, politically, strategically - to implement any of the solutions. Together, we'll construct a viable way out and a credible path to enact the solutions.
Expect real talk and honest debate about turning frustration into action. Expect to find community and gain an invigorated spirit. You'll leave with the tools to imagine what's next, and concrete ways for committed action.
BOOK FOR DINNER AFTER THE SESSION
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Michaël Damman brings a rare combination of anthropological insight and hands-on organisational experience to the field of democratic innovation. Having spent many years working across the socio-cultural, educational, and psychosocial sectors, he has developed a deep, practice-based understanding of how groups think, decide, and act together. He is particularly drawn to questions of collective intelligence, citizen participation, and shared governance - not as abstract ideals, but as processes that can be designed, tested, and improved. At the Brussels Citizens' Assembly, he coordinates evaluations and designs interactive formats that give citizens real ownership of pluralist information. At Agora.brussels, he builds partnerships with associations advancing democratic renewal. He's also part of the Belgian democratic reform movement Démocratie XXL, advocating for expanding citizens' political rights through direct and deliberative democracy.
Maaike Berthoud boats an exceptional blend of theoretical insight and hands-on creative experience. As a theatre teacher and director with a background in participatory democracy, she embodies a unique approach to political engagement, bringing together academic rigor and the arts. Previously a political consultant at Dreamocracy, her talent for fostering collaboration and encouraging innovative thinking has helped to creatively integrate diverse perspectives in political contexts.
Bar & snacks
POST-SALON DINNER DINING I Fri 09 Oct I 8.45pm Book your dinner for after the event ** OPEN TO SALON PARTICIPANTS & MEMBERS**
Dinner is served after the event. Single plate (vegetarian) meal. Available to all event participants & members.
We only have 120 tickets and we always sell out!!
It's time to dust off your dancing shoes and join a traditional Scottish ceilidh.
No previous experience or dancing skills required - the band will be calling out the steps as we go along. If you're a ceilidh regular then you know how much fun it is!
Bring your friends or come along but please, no spikey heels on our rather beautiful wooden floor.
* 7.30pm doors open - bar snacks available
* 8.00pm start dancing!
* 10.30pm Band finishes
*TICKET INCLUDES 1 DRINK (BEER, WINE OR SOFT)
BAR SNACKS AVAILABLE ALL EVENING
Bar & light food
The Hoggies are the original Brussels-based Scottish ceilidh band.
Nation of Strangers by Ece Temelkuran
Culture | Sat 14th Nov | 3:30 - 5 pm
NEW! A regular non-fiction book club focused on how individuals and communities navigate, survive, and resist unjust systems.
*Doors open at 3 pm. The book club begins at 3.30 pm.
‘the most urgent and necessary book of our times, for our times' ― Michael Morpurgo
Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish writer, political thinker and journalist. Her work appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, New Statesman, Frankfurter Allgemeine, La Stampa, Der Spiegel and Le Monde Diplomatique among other prominent international media outlets. During her twenty-year career as a journalist, and before she lost her job due to political oppression, she was twice recognized as Turkey’s most read political columnist. She has lived in Lebanon, Tunisia and France, and was a visiting fellow at St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford. Her books, both fiction and non-fiction, have been published and translated in several countries. She is on the advisory board of Progressive International and Democracy Next.
In 2019, she published the internationally acclaimed nonfiction book How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship, about the rise of right-wing populism and how it operates. In 2021-2023 she was a fellow at The New Institute, Hamburg, working on a project "A New Vocabulary for 21st Century Progressives. In 2023, she received the El Mundo International Journalism Awards in the Freedom of the Press category for her body of work. Temelkuran was longlisted for the 2026 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction for Nation of Strangers.
She Who Remains by Rene Karabash
Culture | Thurs 19th Nov | 7:00-8:30 pm
High in the Accursed Mountains, in an Albanian village ruled by the ancient laws of the Kanun, Bekja escapes an arranged marriage by becoming a sworn virgin, renouncing her womanhood to live as a man. Her decision sets off a brutal chain of events, destroying her family and separating her from the one she loves the most. Years later, as Bekija – now Matija – tells their story to a visiting journalist, long-buried truths come to light, along with the realisation of all that might have been.
She Who Remains - a dark and poetic novel about identity, gender, love, freedom, and societal norms - was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.
Rene Karabash (born Irena Ivanova) is a Bulgarian poet, writer, screenwriter, actor and playwright. She has won multiple awards for her work, including several Best Actress awards for her role in the film Godless. Her debut novel, She Who Remains, was awarded the 2019 Elias Canetti Prize, Bulgaria’s most prestigious literary award. It has been translated into over a dozen languages, and a film, adapted by the author, is set to be released in 2026. The English language edition was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. Karabash is also the author of the collection Omar’s Letters to His Future Wife, and is working on her second novel.
You already know us, you know what we do, and that by coming YOU make this a great event!
BOOK YOUR WEEKEND PASS NOW Get free access to all events the whole weekend!One Day Pass available too.
This year's Ideas Festival explores connection, questioning what truly holds us together in a hyper-connected yet disconnecting world. Since 2013, Full Circle's 3-day in-house festival brings thinkers together for talks, conversations, and communal reflection. A crew of local hosts brings nourishing and entertaining activities into the mix. The festival is designed for depth, with unhurried spaces for ideas and bonds to form. Expect talks, workshops, live music, art, books, food and a pinch of unexpteced.
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You already know us, you know what we do, and that the next one will be even better than the last one!
Join us for the launch of Connection Art Show
"Connection" is an exhibition about the threads that bind us to one another, to place, to memory, and to the world around us.
Creative expression unlocks and reveals a world of literal, abstract, personal, or political interpretations: Intimacy and relationship, community and belonging, ancestry and heritage, identity and the self, ecology and the body, technology and its paradox of closeness and distance...
Artists in this vernissage invite us to reflect on what it means to be truly connected, offering new ways of seeing, thinking and being through countless forms.
FREE ENTRY
Drinks available from our bar
Ideas Festival / Fri 20th Nov / 7 - 8:30 pm
*Hours might change*
What if the problem with climate conversations isn't that we're not scared enough — but that we're too scared to think clearly?
Melting glaciers. Ticking clocks. Apocalyptic headlines. We've been told fear is what moves people to act. Professor François Gemenne isn't buying it. One of the sharpest minds in environmental geopolitics, he argues that catastrophe-driven messaging doesn't spur action — it breeds fatalism, anxiety and division, and it's why the climate debate has stalled.
In this Salon, Gemenne makes the case for a different conversation entirely: one rooted in human agency, not helplessness. He'll explore what it actually takes to make a sustainable future feel attractive, achievable, and fair and he’ll connect the dots, showing why climate action can't be treated as an isolated "green issue" when it's entangled with everything from agriculture to social justice.
Come talk about the hard things without the polarization. A shared, desirable vision of the future starts with better dialogue, not louder alarm bells.
GET THE WEEKEND OR DAY PASS
François Gemenne is a specialist of environmental geopolitics and the governance of migration, as well as a FNRS senior research associate at the University of Liège, where he also directs the Hugo Observatory, and at the University of Versailles (CEARC). He also lectures on environmental and migration policies in various universities, including Sciences Po (Paris and Grenoble) and ULB in Brussels. He has worked in particular with populations displaced by environmental changes, including natural disasters, and the policies of adaptation to climate change. He has conducted field studies in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina, Tuvalu, China, Kyrgyzstan, the Maldives, Mauritius and Japan, after the Fukushima disaster. In 2010, he was awarded the ISDT-Wernaers Prize for achievement in the communication of science to the general public.
GOOD READS
Parler Du Climat Sans Plomber L’Atmosphère (2026) ; L'écologie n'est pas un consensus. Dépasser l'indignation (2022). Atlas De L'Anthropocène (2021), On A Tous Un Ami Noir (2020), Dis, C'Est Quoi L'Immigration?(2020), Géopolitique Du Climat (2015), Geopolitique Du Changement Climatique (2015).
Ideas Festival / Sat 21st Nov / 1.30 - 3 pm
The recent decision by the University of Chicago to ban AI, laptops and phones from its undergraduate Social Sciences Core is bold, but also somewhat expected. The way AI is changing our lives is the subject of much debate, fears and hopes, but when it comes to our brains and more in general our very ability to think and do so critically, we cannot but ask ourselves what the purpose of a university should be in the age of AI. Should universities teach students how to use their brains rather than simply how to use AI?
With the expert guidance of Critical AI maestro, Benedetta Brevini, we'll get to the thorny questions: what happens to writing, summarising, critical thinking, interpretation and independent research when machines can perform these tasks instantly? What about original thought? And most importantly, what would an education designed around these principles look like in practice? Join Benedetta as she connects the dots between tech, society and democracy. Make sense of it all and learn what you could do about it.
Dr Benedetta Brevini is an expert in Critical AI, the relationship between data capitalism, AI and the climate crisis and environmental communication. She is currently Research professor in platforms and society at KU Leuven, and Associate Professor of political economy of communication at the University of Sydney. Before joining academia she worked as a journalist in Milan, New York and London for CNBC, RAI and the Guardian and held tenured positions at City University London and Brunel University London. She writes on The Guardian’s Comment is Free and contributes to a number of print and web publications including South China Morning Post, OpenDemocracy and the Conversation. She is currently working on a new book project on Communication, Data Capitalism and the Climate Emergency.
Martina Salvante is a historian of fascism, gender, and disability based in the UK, where she has taught and researched at the Universities of Warwick and Nottingham. She also serves on the editorial board of Genesis, Italy's journal of women's and gender history. Her teaching centres on helping students progressively take ownership of their learning through interaction, carefully scaffolded knowledge, and critical thinking. A fierce advocate for the humanities, she argues that the real question is not how students can master AI, but whether universities can still teach them to think for themselves.
Ideas Festival / Sat 21st Nov / 3.15 - 4.30 pm
What happens when a violinist picks up a paintbrush, and composers pick up their pens? Revel in a show like no other, where sound, image and object cross into one.
Grammy-nominated violinist Peter Sheppard Skærved has long been celebrated for his championing of new music. Less widely known is his parallel life as a painter. In this special performance, he brings the two worlds together, presenting music written by some of today's leading composers in direct response to his visual work. The programme features violin miniatures by Robert Saxton, Sadie Harrison, and other distinguished composers. Each piece is a small, concentrated musical portrait: a colour, a gesture, a mood caught on canvas and translated into sound. As the music unfolds, projections of the paintings that inspired it will accompany the performance.
A new musical creation also premieres at this event. Brussels-based composer Nigel Clarke has composed a short new work based on several objects proposed by the festival's audience. Objects that somehow mean connection to each of us. Everyday things become the seeds of music, and you can now hear what they have grown into.
Peter Sheppard Skaerved is 'one of the finest living exponents of the violin’ (Gramophone Magazine September 2026). A renowned violinist, chamber musician and researcher known for his pioneering approach to the music of the past and of our own time. He has released over 90 albums of solo and chamber music, performed as a soloist in over 30 countries and has had morethan 400 works written for him by composers such as Judith Weir, Michael Finnissy and Hans Werner Henze. A prolific recording artist, both as a soloist and as leader of the Kreutzer Quartet, he is also the recipient of numerous awards and a former Grammy Award nominee. Peter is the only living violinist to have performed on the violins of Ole Bull, Joachim, Paganini and Viotti. He is also Viotti Lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music (UK) and was recently named Honorary Professor at the Royal Northern College of Music in recognition of his contribution to music research and the positive impact his work has had on the industry.
Nigel Clarke studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music with Paul Patterson, where he was awarded the Academy’s highest distinction, the Queen’s Commendation for Excellence. Clarke has previously held positions as Young Composer in Residence at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, Composition and Contemporary Music Tutor at the Royal Academy of Music, London, Head of Composition at the London College of Music and Media, Visiting Tutor at the Royal Northern College of Music, Associate Composer to the Young Concert Artists Trust, Black Dyke Band, the Band of HM Grenadier Guards, Brass Band Buizingen, Middle Tennessee State University Bands, Royal Military School of Music, Kneller Hall and International Composer-in-Association to the Grimethorpe Colliery Band. Clarke has also co-written film soundtracks to:Jinnah, The Little Vampire, The Little Polar Bear, The Thief Lord, Baseline, & Willand in 2006 was a co-nominee at `The World Soundtrack Awards’ in the `Discovery of the Year’ category. In 2008 Clarke was awarded the title of Doctor of Musical Arts from University of Salford.
Ideas Festival / Sat 21st Nov / 5pm - 6.30pm
Somewhere beneath the Arctic ice, a communications cable goes dark - severed, deliberately, in the middle of the night. It's one small, chilling image from a much larger story: as the fastest-warming place on Earth thaws, distant lives that once had little reason to touch are being pulled into sudden, unavoidable proximity. What happens next?
Award-winning investigative journalist Kenneth R. Rosen, has spent his career documenting individuals and communities caught inside systems that are fraying, colliding, or failing around them. Today, his focus is the Arctic.
He traces how a warming Arctic is reshaping supply chains, security, and geopolitics far beyond the polar circle, forcing nations and communities into new, often fraught, forms of contact. Connection, in Kenneth's reporting, is forced, hostile, and destabilizing - the kind that happens when melting ice opens new shipping lanes, exposes untapped resources, and drags rival powers into the same contested space.
Join Kenneth as he discusses how a polar war might affect people, communities and their land.
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Kenneth R. Rosen is an award-winning narrative journalist and author. He narrative reporting from around the world focuses on how major geopolitical issues and conflict shape individual lives. He has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and the Atlantic, and reported from more than two dozen countries. Rosen was a 2025 Ira A. Lipman Fellow at Columbia University. He received the 2022 Kurt Schork Freelance Award for his reporting from Ukraine, Syria, and Malta. His earlier book Troubled prompted government inquiries into abuses at youth care facilities.
Polar War: Submarines, Spies, and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arctic (2026); Troubled: The Failed Promise of America's Behavioral Treatment Programs (2021); Bulletproof Vest (2020).
MODERATOR
Maria Martisiute is a policy analyst based in Brussels, specialising in defence, security and foreign affairs. Her career has spanned different worlds: NATO, the EU institutions, national administrations, industry and NGOs. She focuses on the Arctic as a place where security, infrastructure and diplomacy meet, and on how the EU and NATO can better coordinate in Europe’s northern flank. She co-authored an analysis urging the EU’s new Arctic strategy to put security at its core.
Ideas Festival / Sat 21st Nov / 6.30pm - 8pm
Why do people turn to the past when the future feels unbearable? And why does that turn so often lean authoritarian?
Critical theorist and ‘pyrotechnic thinker’ Dr. Louisa Toxværd Munch has spent her career examining the conditions that let fascism take root – and disconnection is at the heart of it. Nostalgia isn't really about the past, it's what happens when people can no longer imagine a shared future together. Isolation doesn't just make us lonelier, it makes us easier to manipulate, easier to divide, and more susceptible to the manufactured ignorance that authoritarian movements depend on.
Louisa makes the case that the way out is relational, not individual. Critical thinking, resistance cannot be done alone. We build these together - in classrooms, in communities, in (disappearing) third spaces, and in the rooms where people still gather to question power.
Louisa Toxvaerd Munch is a Danish critical theorist, writer, and educator whose work examines nostalgia, historical consciousness, and the political conditions enabling the resurgence of the far right. A PhD researcher and teacher at the University of Warwick, she brings critical theory to a broad public audience through writing, lectures, and social media. Drawing on Arendt, hooks, and Freire, she champions education as a democratic safeguard against manufactured ignorance. She is the author of the forthcoming Glitch: How to Think in a Time of Monsters (Allen Lane/Penguin), which reframes societal breakdowns as sites of resistance and collective agency.
Glitch: How to Think in a Time of Monsters (forthcoming, Allen Lane/Penguin).
FAMILY LEXICON: WRITING FICTION IN A SECOND LANGUAGE
with Eleonora Balsano
Ideas Festival / Sun 22nd Nov / 11 am - 1 pm
Many multilingual people never try writing fiction because they think they aren't allowed to, since their vocabulary is too limited, their grammar isn't perfect and they’ve heard at some point in their lives that ‘real writers only write in their mother tongue’. None of this is true!
Many of the best novels of recent decades were written by people using a language they learned as adults. In this workshop we'll start from the words we all carry from childhood, the nicknames, family expressions and invented words that only make sense at home, and we'll use them as material for writing in the language we use now. Through short exercises, participants will see that writing in a second language can make their prose more precise and more personal, and that what they see as a limitation is often what makes their writing interesting.
If you speak more than one language and have always wanted to write fiction, whatever your level of experience, this is for you.
Ideas Festival / Sun 22nd Nov / 1.15 - 1.45 pm
Harmonise body and soul through sound, and come recharge your batteries with a truly revitalising gong session. This short but powerful 30 minute gong therapy shot will renew your energy and calm your mind as the resonating sounds of different gongs wash over you.
No extra equipment needed.
*There are three Gong sessions throughout the day, starting at 1:15 pm, 3:30 pm and 5:40 pm
Gabriela Garcia Toledo has dedicated herself to personal and holistic development since 2005 when a life-altering brain injury prompted to re-evaluate her path. Leaving a career in EU affairs, she embraced a new path by becoming a certified yoga instructor for children and adults, and developed a deep proficiency in gong therapy, driven by her belief in the restorative power of sound. Her vision is that sound therapy will offer innovative insights to healthcare, providing safe and effective solutions for a wide range of conditions without adverse effects.
A news commentary with James Kanter & guest reporters
Ideas Festival / Sun 22nd Nov / 2 - 3.30 pm
Live & On the Record: EU Scream Podcast with James Kanter
Sit back for an informative and entertaining live news commentary delivering a curated selection of insightful stories - on the theme of connection.
Cutting through the noise of a relentless news cycle, senior journalist James Kanter will chair a cast of skilled Brussels-based journalists and reporters. Each delves into some of the main events in Europe and beyond, with detailed commentary and analysis. Coverage might span politics and world order, AI developments and extreme weather, EU membership, viral social trends and what not.
Behind the news combines journalistic reporting with expert discussion. Join in and dig into the stories defining our time.
ABOUT THE HOSTS & GUESTS
James Kanter is an American and British award-winning journalist and Brussels-based commentator on EU affairs. Previously at Herald Tribune and The New York Times. He's co-founder and editor of the Podcast EU Scream.
Guests to be announced soon
Ideas Festival / Sun 22nd Nov / 3.30 - 4 pm
Harmonise body and soul through sound, and come recharge your batteries with a truly revitalising gong session. This short but powerful 30 minute gong therapy will renew your energy and calm your mind as the resonating sounds of different gongs wash over you.
Ideas Festival / Sun 22nd Nov / 4pm - 5.30pm
"I know we haven't known each other for long, but the connection I feel with you is profound." That's not a person talking but an AI companion, one of millions now fulfilling roles once reserved for friends, lovers, and therapists. Globally, ‘love machines’, personalised AI apps that simulate friendship, intimacy, therapy, or even communication with deceased loved ones, have been downloaded over million times and are used daily.
Sociologist James Muldoon has spent years studying the human cost of our AI systems. Drawing on interviews with users, developers, and the chatbots themselves, he examines why people are increasingly turning to machines for love and comfort, and what that reveals about the state of human connection today.
His findings reveal a striking shift: growing social distance, eroding support systems, and a dating landscape leaving people desperate for connection - all fuelling an unregulated 'loneliness economy.'
This talk isn't about technology itself. It's about what we accept as connection when the real thing feels out of reach, and who profits from that. Are these technologies ultimately bridging the gap between us, or widening it? Join James as he explores what AI relationships reveal about intimacy and connection in 2026.
James Muldoon is a sociologist and author whose work explores the human side of AI and other technologies. Muldoon is specialised in AI governance, data governance, AI supply chains, and the political economy of AI. He is Lecturer in Social Economy and in Global Ethics & innovation of AI at the University of Essexand a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, as well as an Affiliated Fellow at Yale Law School. He has authored five books and his writing has appeared in the Guardian, TIME, and the BBC.
Love Machines: How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Our Relationships (2026); Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labour Powering AI (2025, co-authored with Mark Graham and Callum Cant); Platform Socialism: How to Reclaim Our Digital Future from Big Tech (2022)
Ideas Festival / Sun 22nd Nov / 5.40 - 6.10 pm
Ideas Festival / Sun 22nd Nov / 6 - 7.30 pm
Every human being alive today shares a single point of origin: Africa. It's a scientific fact often stated, but rarely felt — and it's the starting point for Zeinab Badawi's extraordinary retelling of the continent's history.
Renowned award-winning journalist, broadcaster & filmmaker Zeinab Badawi has spent years travelling to more than thirty African countries, interviewing historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and local storytellers to reconstruct a history too often erased or told by outsiders. For too long, Africa's story has been shaped by western narratives of slavery and colonialism, or ignored altogether. Badawi sets out to change that, weaving together an epic, sweeping account of the oldest inhabited continent on Earth, told through the voices of Africans themselves - from ancient civilizations and medieval empires ruled by remarkable queens and kings, to the miseries of conquest and the elation of independence.
This is a story about reconnection: of scattered histories rejoined, of a continent restored to its rightful place at the centre of the human story, and of an origin all of us — wherever we live now — ultimately share.
Join Zeinab as she reveals why understanding Africa's history is essential to understanding who we all are, and how deeply, ancestrally connected we remain.
Zeinab Badawi is an award-winning Sudanese-British journalist, broadcaster, and author, best known for presenting flagship programs on BBC World News and BBC News. Throughout her decorated four-decade career in media, she has interviewed numerous world leaders and prominent figures. Beyond journalism, her major contributions to history and education include the recent acclaimed 20-part BBC series on the (African) history of Africa, which she created and presented. This extensive project, which involved traveling to over 30 African countries, led her to author the book An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence.
An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence.
RETHINking capitalism on a burning planet
Salon / Ideas | Tues 8 Dec | 6.30-8.30pm
*Doors open at 6.30pm. The speaker will start at 7pm.
Not a Member yet? Join Full Circle now & come to events at the Members' rate!
Join us for a rare opportunity to hear historian Alessandro Stanziani discuss Earth Capital, his sweeping new history of capitalism - one that finally puts the planet itself at the centre of the story.
For eight centuries, Stanziani argues, capitalism has run on two engines of exploitation: coerced human labour and what he calls 'Earth capital' - the land, fossil fuels, and natural resources we've mined, farmed, and burned in pursuit of growth. As forced labour receded after 1870, our plunder of the planet accelerated at a breakneck pace, bringing us to the ecological reckoning we face today.
Stanziani's investigations journey from Russia to the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean to France, weaving calories, energy, labour, and law into one urgent, unified narrative. However, he doesn't just diagnose the crisis. He makes the case for a radical new social contract built on democracy, equality, and environmental sustainability.
This new genre of 'total history' provides an essential viewpoint for anyone debating humanity's future. Come hear the ideas and join the conversation.
Alessandro Stanziani is a social and economic historian at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Paris. He has written numerous books on the history of bonded labour, the history of capitalism, global history, food history.
Earth Capital: The Long History of Capitalism and Its Aftermath (2025); Les Entrelacements Du Monde: Histoire globale, pensée globale (2024); Les Guerres Du Blé: Une éco-histoire écologique et géopolitique (2024) Labor on the Fringes of Empire: Voice, Exit and Law (2018); After Oriental Despotism, Eurasian Growth in a global perspective (2014); Sailors, Slaves, and Immigrants (2014).
Beginning Middle End by Valeria Luiselli
Culture | Thurs 10th Dec | 7:00-8:30 pm
‘Inventive, brilliant, playful, and transporting' ― by Katie Kitamura, author of Audition
A mother and a daughter take off on a road trip after the collapse of a marriage. Their journey begins in Sicily during a summer of rapidly-changing winds, volcanic rumbles and sudden tempests. How do you begin again, the mother wonders, if you got the beginning wrong? The trip soon becomes a quest for origins – not just to the familial past across continents, languages and generations, but also further back to a mythical and even geological past.
With her daughter coming into her own and her mother showing signs of dementia, the narrator finds herself confronting the primary questions of life: How do stories shape our children’s imaginations? How do we situate ourselves deeply in the world while accepting our transience in it? How are a family’s memories made and what happens when they disappear?
A road novel, a mother-daughter story, a mystery, Beginning Middle End is a shapeshifting novel that offers an exhilarating testament to the power and instability of the stories we hold most dear.
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in Costa Rica, South Korea, South Africa and India. She is an acclaimed award-winning author and the Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature at Bard College Her previous novel, Lost Children Archive, was an international critical and commercial success. It was a New York Times 10 Best Books of 2019, won the Rathbone Folio Prize 2020, the Dublin Award 2021, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the Booker Prize 2019 among others. In 2019 she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant for “challenging conventional notions of authorship in fiction, essays, and inventive hybrids of the two that pose profound questions about the various ways we piece together stories and document the lives of others.” Her work is published in more than thirty languages.
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