Actions of Homeo and Diffeo groups on manifolds

In this talk, I discuss the general question of how to obstruct and construct group actions on manifolds. I will focus on large groups like Homeo(M) and Diff(M) about how they can act on another manifold N. The main result is an orbit classification theorem, which fully classifies possible orbits. I will also talk about some low dimensional applications and open questions. This is a joint work with Kathryn Mann.