18 Feb 2026
MUBI and Index on Censorship present IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT. After the screening, join us for a panel discussion exploring the role of cinema in challenging authoritarianism in Iran. Our speakers will examine how film becomes an act of resistance and the harsh realities faced by citizens living under state repression.
Winner of the prestigious Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes festival, the latest film from Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi (Taxi, No Bears) – his first work following his most recent prison sentence – is both a muscular thriller and an engaging morality tale, following a group of citizens considering revenge against a man they believe was their torturer.
Nominated for two Oscars and five Golden Globes, including Best International Feature Film, Best Original Screenplay and Best Director.
About the speakers
Tara Aghdashloo is an award-winning writer, director, multidisciplinary artist and poet born in Iran. Her background spans journalism, political philosophy, and visual arts. She holds a BA in Journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University and an MA in Global Media and Postnational Communication from SOAS, University of London. Her essays have been published in London Review of Books, The Guardian, and Financial Times, and her early documentary and broadcast work aired on Channel 4 and the BBC among others.
Malu Halasa is a writer and editor. She is the editor of Woman Life Freedom: Voices and Art from the Women’s Protests in Iran (2023) and has coedited two anthologies on the country’s photography, art and culture, with Maziar Bahari and Hengameh Golestan.
Negin Shiraghaei is a feminist journalist, activist, and community organizer with over two decades of experience in media and international human rights. She is the founder and director of Azadi Network, a grassroots initiative committed to centering and elevating the voices of Iran’s most marginalized through bold storytelling, movement-building, and advocacy. Since the eruption of the Women, Life, Freedom uprising, Negin has been a force in mobilizing transnational solidarity, leveraging media, international policy forums, and grassroots organizing to demand global accountability and amplify the resistance of women and marginalized communities in Iran. Her interventions—from the UN to the streets of London—have helped carve out space for Iranian feminist voices in public discourse and policy debates. Negin’s work continues to focus on protecting civic space, uplifting frontline defenders, and challenging systems of gendered oppression.
Chair: Jemimah Steinfeld is CEO of Index on Censorship. She has lived and worked in both Shanghai and Beijing where she has written on a wide range of topics, with a particular focus on youth culture, gender and censorship. She is the author of the book Little Emperors and Material Girls: Sex and Youth in Modern China, which was described by the FT as “meticulously researched and highly readable”. Jemimah has freelanced for a variety of publications, including The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Vice, CNN, Time Out and the Huffington Post.
8 Sep 2025
Since 2017, the #MeToo movement has encouraged millions of women to share their experiences of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). But speaking out hasn’t come without risks. Some survivors (and the journalists covering their stories) have faced legal threats from the very people accused of perpetrating SGBV. As a result, British courts have been weaponised to continue abuse, with few protections in place.
SLAPPs (strategic lawsuits against public participation) are lawsuits aimed at stifling public interest speech. They are designed not to win in court, but to intimidate, drain resources and silence voices. Their aim isn’t justice, but suppression.
Join us for the launch, sponsored by Baroness Helena Kennedy KC, of From Survivor to Defendant, a new report from Index on Censorship exploring how SLAPPs are being used against survivors of SGBV across the UK and Ireland.
With words from Baroness Helena Kennedy KC (House of Lords), Jemimah Steinfeld (Index on Censorship), Olga Jurasz (Centre for Protecting Women Online, The Open University), SLAPP targets Nina Cresswell and Verity Nevitt, and Mark Stephens CBE (Howard Kennedy).
RSVP to confirm your attendance here.
The report was prepared with the generous support of the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and the Open University’s Centre for Protecting Women Online.
Index is grateful for the contributions of the survivors, and especially the Gemini Project who shared their research with us.
We are grateful to our event co-sponsors, the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute.
5 Sep 2025
As artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly transforms society, the truth is becoming ever harder to discern, raising questions about our trust in journalism, politics and even history. How do we operate in the mirror world of AI and identify the truth tellers from the tricksters?
Join Index on Censorship, the Institute for Creativity and AI and Global (Dis)Order for a panel discussion and launch of Index’s latest magazine issue on Wednesday 1 October at City St George’s, University of London.
With speakers Dr Eduardo Alonso (professor of Artificial Intelligence/director of the AI Research Centre (CitAI) City St George’s), Kenneth Cukier (deputy executive editor, The Economist), Timandra Harkness (writer, broadcaster and presenter).
All guests will receive a free copy of the magazine on arrival. The panel discussion will be followed by a reception.
Full address: Room A130, College Building [A], City St’ Georges, EC1V 4PB
Illustration by Tatyana Zelenskaya.
Sponsored by Sage.
About the speakers
Dr Eduardo Alonso is Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Director of the AI Research Centre (CitAI) at City St George’s, University of London. He specialises in agent-based AI (now rebranded as Agentic AI) and in the philosophy of AI, including ethical and legal considerations and the socio-economic impact of both symbolic and connectionist models (known as GenAI and LLMs). He is a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College and the university’s academic liaison with the Alan Turing Institute, United Kingdom’s National Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.
Kenneth Cukier is deputy executive editor of The Economist, following two decades at the paper as a foreign correspondent, technology writer, data editor and commentary editor. He is the coauthor of the NYT bestselling book “Big Data” with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, which was translated into over 20 languages, and “Framers” on AI and mental models, with Viktor and Francis de Véricourt. Previously Kenn was the technology editor of the Wall Street Journal Asia in Hong Kong and worked at the International Herald Tribune in Paris.
Timandra Harkness is a writer, broadcaster and presenter. She is a familiar voice on radio, writing and presenting BBC Radio 4’s FutureProofing and other series including How To Disagree, Steelmanning and Political School. BBC Radio documentaries include Data, Data Everywhere, Divided Nation, What Has Sat-Nav Done To Our Brains, and Five Knots. Her book ‘Big Data: does size matter?’ was published by Bloomsbury Sigma in 2016, with an updated paperback edition in June 2017. Her second non-fiction book, ‘Technology is Not the Problem’, published in 2024 by Harper Collins, is now out in paperback.
About
Index on Censorship is a UK-based charity dedicated to defending and promoting freedom of expression around the world. Founded in 1968 as Writers and Scholars International, we have a long and proud history of standing up for the right to speak, write, create and protest without fear.
The Institute for Creativity and AI is City St George’s new space to research and explore strategic impacts at the intersection of creativity, creative work and AI technologies. It is wilfully interdisciplinary, and involves academics and students from all City St George’s schools.
Global (Dis)Order is a dedicated interdisciplinary research group based at City St George’s, University of London formed to develop new international research to further our understanding of global order and disorder. It aims to form a unique, global and diverse network practitioners, public intellectuals, researchers, and academics, who are making sense of, interpreting, and navigating Global Disorder.
24 Jun 2025
Since returning to office, Donald Trump has intensified efforts to crush dissent in the USA: cracking down on protest, targeting the press and threatening academic freedom. His campaign against free expression is sending shockwaves across the USA and beyond.
What does this mean for democracy, independent journalism, and the right to speak out?
Join us on Tuesday 5 August at St John’s Waterloo for the launch of Land of the Free?, the latest magazine issue by Index on Censorship. Come for a reception and panel discussion looking at the impact of the Trump administration on free speech in the USA, and the wider implications for the rest of the world.
Speakers
Anvee Bhutani
Anvee is an award-winning American journalist & a reporter at The Wall Street Journal in London. She has reported across four continents, from the aftermath of the Moroccan earthquake and Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon to the U.S.-Mexico border and Muslim communities in India. Most recently, she was a contributing reporter with The New York Times, covering the government crackdown on higher education and pro-Palestine activism. Anvee has worked with outlets including the Guardian, Teen Vogue, the BBC, the Telegraph, Channel 4, CNN and MSNBC, where she was part of the Emmy-nominated US 2024 election night coverage. A graduate of Columbia Journalism School the University of Oxford, Anvee is a strong advocate of global press freedom. She speaks five languages.
Charlie Holt
Charlie is the European lead for Global Climate Legal Defense (CliDef), which emboldens climate defenders to act in the face of risk knowing that lawyers have their backs. Prior to CliDef, Charlie advised on legal strategy for Greenpeace International, where he led the organisation’s SLAPP resilience strategy and sat on the European Commission’s Expert Group on SLAPPs. He currently sits on the Steering Committee of the Coalition Against SLAPPs in Europe (CASE) and co-chairs the UK Working Group on SLAPPs. Between 2016 and 2024, Charlie advised on the Greenpeace International response to two aggressive large-scale SLAPPs targeting Greenpeace entities in the USA – including the Energy Transfer lawsuit filed in response to the North Dakota pipeline protests – and in 2018 helped to set up the US anti-SLAPP coalition Protect the Protest.
Hanna Komar
Hanna Komar is a Belarusian poet, writer, translator and performer. She’s published five poetry collections, including the most recent Ribwort, and a non-fiction book about the experience of incarceration for peaceful protest in Belarus. Her debut play Body in Progress was staged at the Voila! festival in London.
She will perform a poem informed by the banned words list introduced by Trump administration, co-written with Katerina Koulouri.
Erica Wagner
Erica Wagner is Consulting Editor, Comment for the Observer. She was the literary editor of the London Times for seventeen years and is a contributing writer for the New Statesman, consulting literary editor for Harper’s Bazaar and a host of the CHANEL podcast, “Les Rencontres”. She is the author of Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling, The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge, winner of the Eccles Centre and Hay Festival Writer’s Award; her other books are Ariel’s Gift, Seizure, Gravity, Mary and Mr Eliot: A Sort-of Love Story and she is the editor of First Light, a celebration of the work of Alan Garner. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023 and in 2025 was awarded a Public Humanities Fellowship by the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She identifies as a New Yorker.
About Index on Censorship
Index on Censorship is a UK-based charity dedicated to defending and promoting freedom of expression around the world. Founded in 1968 as Writers and Scholars International, we have a long and proud history of standing up for the right to speak, write, create and protest without fear. Read about the history of Index on Censorship
We publish the work of censored writers and artists, spotlight global threats to free speech, and foster debate on the value of freedom of expression. We believe that everyone should be free to express themselves without fear of censorship, persecution or violence. Our mission is simple but vital: to raise awareness, challenge suppression and amplify voices that others try to silence.
Sponsored by Sage.
