Features

By Kevin Grecksch and Jessica Holzhausen

Property rights are essential in western market societies and often taken for granted. They are ubiquitous and we do not question them. They are also a crucial element in the discussion of natural resource management.

In the context of climate change, understanding our concept of property rights, and how it influences our interpretation of who natural resources belong to, becomes increasingly important. At a basic level, property rights usually provide the owner exclusive, guaranteed rights, which always includes the notion of excludability. If an individual is the proprietor of a natural resource, this person determines access and allocation. This exclusive right is usually protected by the state. Problems stem from when property rights on resources cause inequalities of access to necessary resources like water, or are an obstacle for the successful implementation of climate adaptation measures.

Many would see property rights as ‘natural’ – yet they are far from natural. They express a social relationship that is very specific to western liberal democracies. For instance, many indigenous people have a concept of property and possession that does not serve the individual but society. It is often based on customary law with complex structures and rules to protect and regulate access to natural resources and the knowledge about it.

Property rights have been the subject of study of almost all well-known political theorists and philosophers. No matter if we talk about Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, property rights always form an intricate part of the social contract that defines the relationship between individuals and the state. For John Locke, a key justification in favour of property rights is that the state guarantees the exclusiveness of a property and defends a person’s right to it. To this day Locke’s justification is a cornerstone of political and economic reasoning in the United States of America. To question property rights is to question the very reason of the state.

On the other hand, we find theorists like the French 19^th century anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. He claimed that ‘property is robbery’ and argued that the property of the nobility and the clergy was based on faineance (i.e. indolence) because the wealth was not earned through labour, but instead stolen from those who laboured to create wealth. Or as the American unionist Bill Haywood said: The mine owners did not find the gold, they did not mine the gold, they did not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy all the gold belonged to them!

In recent decades, property rights have been discussed mainly within a law and economics framework, thereby neglecting other perspectives. With environmental and societal challenges such as climate change reaching the top of political and social agendas, property rights may prove again to be a crucial issue. However, we find that the concept is still used in a simplistic manner. Good examples of this one-dimensional interpretation are The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), an initiative with focus on the economic benefits of biodiversity, and the Nagoya Protocol on the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the utilisation of genetic resources. Both reduce the value of natural resources to its economic value and the introduction of property rights is seen as a panacea, thereby paying little or no attention to the social and cultural value of natural resources.

Hence, a new perspective, taking into account narratives surrounding property could provide useful insights and add to the mere administrative and regulatory perspective of property rights. Narratives are people’s accounts of events by which they or others were affected. They often come in the form of stories. In the context of property rights, narratives look at stories told about property rights, at how people see themselves and others in this social construct, at stereotypes, collective memory and how property influences identities – especially collective identities.

The UK has a complex, multilevel administration system where state legislation has not always addresses local necessities, and where local authorities have often felt let down by a central government perceived to be too far away to understand local problems. A good example occurred in Wales in the 1960s, when the Tryweryn Valley was flooded to create a reservoir to provide water for the city of Liverpool. This uprooted the community of Capel Celyn, where people lost their homes, their school and their church. Despite protests in Wales and the fact that every single Welsh MP voted against the scheme, it was overruled by central government and allowed for compulsory purchases of land. Liverpool City Council obtained authority through an Act of Parliament, thereby avoiding having to gain consent from Welsh planning authorities. Protests against the scheme were dramatic – protestors placed an explosive device at the base of an electrical transformer and microphone wires were cut during the opening ceremony. Even today, “Cofiwch Dryweryn” (Remember Tryweryn) graffiti can be found on walls and bridges in the area upholding the narrative of an unjust scheme.

Hence, property rights may exist and they provide legal certainty, but they are not the end of the story. People have an attachment to nature, to places and often refer to ‘my river’ or ‘my forest’. Successful adaptation to climate change should take these narratives into account. In addition, people often have a deep knowledge about natural resources in their area and tapping into this knowledge could prove to be very useful, and also support acceptance and legitimacy of climate change adaptation measures.

Dr Kevin Grecksch is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the Faculty of Law. Dr Jessica Holzhausen is a writer and historian. 

Find out more about Oxford's environment research at the True Planet website. 

Professor Peter Frankopan became a bestseller in 2015 when his book, The Silk Roads, captured interest across the world. As well as traveling as prolifically as the roads it’s named after, the book was also named one of the 25 most important books to be translated into Chinese in the last 40 years. It’s an engaging and erudite look at how travel and connections between cultures in the east became a lynchpin of world history. Richly researched, Peter’s been praised for giving its readers the chance to challenge the western perspective and see history in a bold new light. His follow-up, The New Silk Roads, looks to the future and how recent events are shaping a future along new global lines.

This month, Frankopan was awarded the Calliope Prize by the German Emigration Center Foundation. The awarding panel said the way The Silk Roads ‘breaks with the Eurocentric perspective’ was a big part of their decision.

Professor Peter Frankopan wins Calliope Prize

Frankopan, who is Professor of Global History at Oxford University, has always been fascinated by how schools in the west don’t teach a lot of history about Asia, Africa or the Americas (pre-Columbus). When he first came to Oxford as a graduate student, he was excited to build on how the university teaches the history of regions to the east of Constantinople (modern Istanbul). Certainly, it seems like his writing hit upon a hunger for new and diverse points of view.

Asked to explain part of the wide appeal of his work, Peter said: ‘I suppose that the main thing is that if you look at the history of exchange, of connections, and how the big jigsaw puzzle of world history fits together, one can find new perspectives even about things that seem very familiar.’

 ‘Delighted’ to be awarded the prize, Frankopan is looking forward to putting the lion’s share of the prize money towards a new project: working with the German Emigration Center, Frankopan will look at links between multilingualism and having an open view of the world.

Speaking of the upcoming project, he said: ‘I have always been interested in how language helps facilitate exchange, as well as overcoming boundaries. So as well as being honoured by the recognition for my past work, I am excited by the prospect of gathering data not only about how to measure the openness of societies, but see if and how the conclusions might have practical applications in the future.’

While the research is in the early planning stages, Peter explained: ‘My working assumption is that multilingualism tends towards two forms: first, elites who can afford language lessons, including the time to study, learn and memorise. Second, those who are forced to adapt because they are migrant workers and need to learn languages to work and survive. I have an open mind about how language proficiency is linked to tolerance and open-mindedness. But the aim of the research is to gather data so we can quantify and shape these ideas. And of course, potentially be proved wrong – and find that we are drawn into different directions. That in itself would be very interesting.’

The award is given to a researcher who ‘help[s] convey migration in a lasting, global and easily understandable way’. This is in keeping with the German Emigration Center’s mission to illustrate the impact of both emigration from the country and immigration to it.

It seems appropriate then that Peter sees the new collaboration as part of an academic duty to enable progress through generations: ‘One of our roles at Oxford is to teach, inspire and encourage the next generation to think about what matters, and to help train them on how to best answer those questions. So my hope is just that: to be a link in a chain that enables others to build on my work and research. Then they can take things on in whichever direction they think is most productive.’

Professor of Global History, Peter Frankopan, has been awarded the Calliope Prize from the German Emigration Centre Foundation. The Calliope Prize award ceremony will take place on November 23, 2019 at the German Emigration Center.

Continuing our series celebrating ‘amazing people at Oxford who you should know about’,  ScienceBlog talks to Dayne Beccano-Kelly, an electrophysiologist and a Career Development Fellow in Oxford Parkinson’s Disease Centre, in the department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics at Oxford University.

With more than ten years’ experience in the field, Dayne discusses his research using human neurones to improve treatments and the quality of life for people with neurodegenerative conditions such as Parkinson’s disease. He also shares how he is aiming to tackle the lack of BAME leadership opportunities in STEM, by mentoring and inspiring black and minority ethnic scientists of tomorrow.

How would you describe your journey to Oxford?

I am from Cardiff originally, and took my undergraduate degree at Leeds University in bio-chemistry, as a route into medicine. But, after my first year, I changed my mind with a stint in research, as part of my year in industry.

Time and experience showed me that what I really wanted to do was science research, helping people, but being the one to garner the knowledge that would help. It is fun to be continually asking the questions, and driving the conversation on known scientific knowledge.

Was Oxford what you expected it to be?

Oxford is a melting pot of scientific ideas that are often brewing a stone’s throw away, which makes it easier to interact with other scientists and develop collaborations.

I have been here four years now and don’t feel marginalised at Oxford. I expected there to be a low number of BAME academics at Oxford, because there have been at every other institution.

Having lived in Vancouver directly before this, which I loved in a different way, I can feel the contrast. It’s great to be surrounded by so much history. Vancouver is younger than Arsenal FC, my football team.

What motivates you?

By understanding how Parkinson’s Disease works I am helping people every day. As a scientist, and on a personal level, that is one of the best things that we can do.

It is important to remember that there are people waiting for us to get this right. Meeting them patients as I/we do helps to consider them like members of my family. It makes you want to fight for them that little bit harder.

In a nutshell what is neuro electrophysiology?

Neurotransmitters are chemical messages that allow neurones to talk to one another.  When received by a neuron the information is changed into and transmitted as an electrical current. It is this combination of chemical and electrical signal that allows us to move, think, talk remember and everything in between. Neurodegenerative disorders affects this communication by causing neurons to degenerate and die. In Parkinson’s disease (PD) it is a specific set of cells that produce a neurotransmitter called dopamine which are under threat.  These control goal directed movement and cognition and it is why we see the symptoms we do in PD as these neurones are no longer able to do their job.   

Dayne and his colleagues from the Wade-Martins research group. Image credit: OU

How does your research support care improvements in this area?

My research focuses on converting adult human cells into stem cells, and then converting them into neurones so that we can test for changes in Parkinson’s Disease. The cells that we create are plugged into an open electrical circuit, which we use to measure how neurones talk to each other, via the chemical-electrical signals that I mentioned. I have focused my work on looking at the earliest possible changes we can see in this cross talk between neurones, and what this can tell us about what is going wrong in the condition. If we can understand this, we could begin to think of stopping the disorder in its earliest stages.

In the past this research has been conducted using animal cells, cell lines etc., but this is the first time we are able to use human neurones to investigate human disease in this way. Understanding these cell changes can help us to tailor medicines to better treat the condition.

How did you come to specialise in Parkinson’s research?

As a child I always wanted to be scientist, and naturally wanted to make people better. As a young boy, I apparently stood at the bottom of my arthritic grandfather’s bed, and said ‘I am going to fix you.’ So early on my path was set.

When I was studying at Leeds I was awarded a year in industry at the Mayo Clinic in America, and that sealed the deal. I had a great mentor there, the pathologist Dr. Dennis Dickson. His effervescence and passion for his work rubbed off on me and I just thought ‘man, this is what I want to do.’

My work there focused on Progressive Supranuclear Palsy – an atypical Parkinsonian disorder. I have worked on different neurodegenerative conditions throughout my career at different institutions in various parts of the world, including Scotland, Canada and the US.

What is the most surprising thing you have learned through your research?

As scientists we should just want to know the truth, however, not every scientist sees it that way and that baffles me. I heard a great quote from Prof. Diane Lipscombe at a conference I attended a few weeks ago, she said: “Always follow the data, it will always be more interesting than your imagination can ever generate.” I love that, I think it’s great to generate unexpected things; it’s another question to answer.

I also find it surprising and sad, that I have not encountered more black senior scientists in my career. I find that very jarring.

Has this lack of BAME mentoring opportunities affected your own career?

I’ve been driven enough to get to this stage by myself, but it’s an issue, It would have been nice to have a senior black individual that I could ask, ‘how did you do it? What were the things that you encountered? Was it the same as my experience, or am I just some kind of strange outlier?’

I work with black female and Asian team members, but I am the only black man, and have been in every place I have worked. I very rarely encounter another black male person – sometimes there are postdoctoral students, but they are few and far between.

I am at a point in my career where I want to reach PI level, in order to be a mentor and a leader to the next generation. I love teaching and want to start engaging with people like the British black academics, and teaching groups where there are more opportunities to mentor.

What do you think can be done to change this imbalance?

It is important for young BAME students to see role models as early in life as possible. I want to start programmes that engage them earlier, offer mentoring and introduce them to role models like them, as early as possible.

Many black families who have had senior generations encounter prejudice, preach that you must persevere and you will get a chance to show what you can do. My family was definitely one of those. However, there are a few that sometimes say that certain roles are not for us, and that if you try you will face discrimination. These are in the minority, but it does happen and is very damaging. I want people to see what I am doing, how I am doing it, and see that it isn’t not worthwhile.

What do awareness activities like Black History Month mean to you?

I’ve been really happy to see the University getting more involved in this. People take notice of Oxford, and, from my stand point, the more the University does, it can only be better for everybody.

There are lots of awareness activities throughout the year, a day here, a week here, and I am really glad that it’s a month. Right now we have to do this though, because we have to make people proud. But, you want to reach a stage where dedicating a month to it doesn’t make sense. Why limit it? Let’s celebrate all cultures, all year round.

Are there any things that Oxford as an institution could do to be more inclusive?

Athena Swan was first introduced to create parity in the field for women – as it should be. But, the equivalent (the Race equality Charter) and its awards have far less of a song and dance made about it. I would like to see more effort in this area.

I’m not saying that 50% of professors at Oxford should be black – that would be disproportionate, but there is a disparity between the number of BAME in Britain, and the numbers that enter University, and even more so the attrition of those doing STEM subjects at degree to those doing PhD or higher. It needs to be something that is spoken about more openly, more often and more loudly without shame and actively changed.

If it isn’t, then instead of waiting for it to be the general consensus, why not start the trend here? You’re Oxford. If you are going to use your clout for something, this would be great place to start.

Access in higher education is a very topical issue at the moment, do you have any ideas on what could improve the sector for BAME students

It’s important to keep the dialogue going and make your voice heard. The dialogue for our generation has to be, we need more senior black and Asian scientists.

Dayne is a passionate advocate for the power of mentoring, and is keen to work with young BAME pupils, introducing them to academic role models that they can relate to early on in life. Image credit: OU

I was reading about how ‘Stormzy effect’ is driving Cambridge access progress, which is a great message overall. But, it is not tenable to do this across the board. That’s why I am so passionate about encouraging BAME students in academia and doing so from an early age. The more of us there are, the more we can show that we are just as capable as anyone else. Over time there will be a generational shift, and people will just focus on the science, not the colour of your skin.

Has prejudice been a factor in your career?

I have encountered certain prejudices in my career – not at Oxford, but it has happened. People have made flippant comments about my benefiting from positive discrimination, things that shouldn’t be said to me, or to anyone in this decade.

As a black academic, sometimes when you talk about your experiences you get shot down for being over the top, or ‘always’ going on about race. When in actuality, it is the first time you have said anything.

Just because people cannot imagine it, or have not had that experience themselves, does not mean it doesn’t exist. It is a real thing.

Does this experience impact your approach to your work?

My colleagues and friends, would never expect anything less of me because of the colour of my skin. But I am sure there are people that do. I have been told in the street to go home, so I know they exist. I would be remiss if I didn’t have that consideration in my mind to try and change that, so the next generation don’t have to.

Andy Murray openly says that he doesn’t think of Serena Williams as anything more than a great tennis player, and a peer, rather than a female tennis player. That is the stage we have to get to. The task and achievement are the thing that is focussed on, not the gender or the race of the person doing it. It is something that can only come from the previous generation’s battle and fighting for that.

Have these experiences affected you personally?

I would be lying if I said no. Perception and bias are something that we are all prone to. If someone looks at me and makes an assumption, I probably do the same thing. But it is something we have to be aware of and try to make the change.

As a BAME individual you never know if people negatively respond to the colour of your skin, unless they outright say it, but I actively think about how I appear to others.

What motivates you?

I can only thank my family and my mum, for driving me forward. They instilled me with the confidence to succeed which has let me get where I am today. I am their project, they are the scientists.

Some of the stories that they have are just… I’ve experienced stuff, but I have never experienced that stuff. They raised me to always work twice as hard as anyone else, because you have to expect this behaviour, like the recent football game between England and Bulgaria. At times you despair, but I’m not going to lament it.

I just want to get high enough up the chain that I can pull others over the wall with me, if I start to berate and feel sorry for myself, I am not going to get there.

What is next for you?

Currently there is no known cure for any neurodegenerative disease. There are drugs that have been complete game changers, and have helped people to better cope with their disorder for a time. But sometimes medical trials on certain groups fail, and drugs are written off too early I believe.

I want to be involved in pushing forward a dialogue between academia, pharmaceuticals and the medical community. We have to be aware that the drugs we generate may only fit a subset of patients. Just because they don’t work for one group, does not mean they won’t for another.

Dayne and colleagues. Image credit: OU

Researchers Thea Sommerschield and Professor Jonathan Prag (Faculty of Classics, Oxford), alongside Yannis Assael (Google DeepMind and Oxford’s Department of Computer Science) explain how they have been working to restore damaged ancient Greek inscriptions using DeepMind AI.

Historians rely on different sources to reconstruct the thought, society and history of past civilisations. Many of these sources are text-based – whether written on scrolls or carved into stone, the preserved records of the past help shed light on ancient societies. Such sources include inscriptions, texts inscribed on a durable surface (such as stone, pottery or metal). Inscriptions are one of the main direct sources of new evidence from the ancient world, but the majority have suffered damage over the centuries, and parts of the text are illegible or lost (Figure 1). Restoring the missing or damaged text is one of the main undertakings of the discipline of Epigraphy. It is a complex and time consuming task, but ancient historians can estimate the likelihood of different possible solutions based on context clues in the inscription – such as grammatical and linguistic considerations, layout and shape, textual parallels, and historical context. Although complex, the restoration of these documents is necessary for a deeper understanding of civilisations past.

Figure 1: Damaged inscription: a decree of the Athenian Assembly relating to the management of the Acropolis (dating 485/4 BCE). IG I3 4B. (CC BY-SA 3.0, WikiMedia)

Figure 1: Damaged inscription: a decree of the Athenian Assembly relating to the management of the Acropolis (dating 485/4 BCE). IG I3 4B. (CC BY-SA 3.0, WikiMedia)

We have been using machine learning trained on these ancient inscribed texts to build a system that can furnish a more complete and systematically ranked list of possible restoration solutions, which we hope will augment historians’ understanding of a text.

Pythia

Pythia, which takes its name from the woman who delivered the god Apollo's oracular responses at the Greek sanctuary of Delphi - is the first ancient text restoration model that recovers missing characters from a damaged text input using deep neural networks. Bringing together the disciplines of ancient history and deep learning, this work offers a fully automated aid to the text restoration task, providing ancient historians with multiple textual restorations, as well as the confidence level for each hypothesis.

Pythia takes a sequence of damaged text as input, and is trained to predict character sequences comprising hypothesised restorations of ancient Greek inscriptions (texts written in the Greek alphabet dating between the seventh century BCE and the fifth century CE). The architecture works at both the character- and word-level, thereby effectively handling long-term context information, and dealing efficiently with incomplete word representations (Figure 2). This makes it applicable to all disciplines dealing with ancient texts (philology, papyrology, codicology) and applies to any language (ancient or modern). To train Pythia, the largest digital corpus of ancient Greek inscriptions (PHI Greek Inscriptions) was converted to machine actionable text (called PHI-ML). On PHI-ML, PYTHIA’s predictions achieve a 30.1% character error rate, compared to the 57.3% of evaluated human epigraphists. Moreover, in 73.5% of cases the ground-truth sequence was among the Top-20 restoration hypotheses of Pythia, which effectively demonstrates the impact of this assistive method on the field of digital epigraphy, and sets the state-of-the-art in ancient text restoration.

Figure 2: Pythia processing the phrase μηδέν ἄγαν (Mēdèn ágan) "nothing in excess," a fabled maxim inscribed on Apollo’s temple in Delphi. The letters "γα" are the characters to be predicted, and are annotated with ‘?’. Since ἄ??ν is not a complete word, its embedding is treated as unknown (‘unk’). The decoder outputs correctly "γα".

Figure 2: Pythia processing the phrase μηδέν ἄγαν (Mēdèn ágan) "nothing in excess," a fabled maxim inscribed on Apollo’s temple in Delphi. The letters "γα" are the characters to be predicted, and are annotated with ‘?’. Since ἄ??ν is not a complete word, its embedding is treated as unknown (‘unk’). The decoder outputs correctly "γα".

The combination of machine learning and epigraphy has the potential to transform the study of ancient texts, and widen the scope of the historian’s work. For this reason, the Oxford and DeepMind teams collaborated to create an open-sourced online Python notebook, Pythia, and PHI-ML’s processing pipeline on GitHub. By so doing, we hope to aid future research and inspire further interdisciplinary work.

Read more about this work on the original DeepMind blog post, or the preprint article 'Restoring ancient text using deep learning: a case study on Greek epigraphy' on arXiv.