CRASSH: Recent Episodes
Cambridge University
Participants: Tali Hatuka (Tel Aviv University), Zizi Papacharissi (University of Illinois-Chicago), Doina Petrescu (University of Sheffield / atelier d’architecture autogerée), Laura Lo Presti (University of Padua)
Moderators: Alex Grigor, Michal Huss, Konstantinos Pittas
Description: This panel deals with the ways that radical alterations in scale, time, and place, prompted by the digital age and by technological advancement require new methodologies for mapping, studying, and interpreting the commons. Taking into consideration people on the move due to conflict, migration, gentrification, and homelessness on the one hand, cyberspaces, virtual places, and digital communications on the other, what are the new points of entry into and membership of the commons? If we agree that the commons is essential to a healthy polity and functioning democracy, what issues does the privatisation of the digital commons raise? How might we renegotiate power dynamics around the production, distribution, and representation of knowledge, information and data? If common spaces are always contested, as is the notion of a coherent or unified 'collective', what is the role of protest and demonstration both in the physical and digital spheres?
The final section of this panel included audiences participation. This was not recorded due to GDPR guidelines. Thank you for your understanding.
VIRTUAL CONFERENCE PROGRAMME: Commoning the City Friday 12 June 2020, 14.00 – 15.45 (BST)
Participants: Ash Amin (University of Cambridge), Massimo De Angelis (University of East London), Shannon Mattern (The New School), Richard Sennett (Chair, Council on Urban Initiatives, United Nations Habitat)
Whose Commons, for Whom? Friday 12 June 2020, 17.00 – 18.45 (BST)
Participants: Tali Hatuka (Tel Aviv University), Zizi Papacharissi (University of Illinois-Chicago), Doina Petrescu (University of Sheffield / atelier d’architecture autogerée), Laura Lo Presti (University of Padua)
Reclaiming the Cultural Commons Saturday 13 June 2020, 13.00 -14.45 (BST)
Participants: Sepake Angiama (Institute for International Visual Arts-London), Gavin Grindon (University of Essex), Ella McPherson (University of Cambridge), Pelin Tan (Bard College)
All recordings are available on: https://www.youtube.com/user/crasshpublicity
Participants: Sepake Angiama (Institute for International Visual Arts-London), Gavin Grindon (University of Essex), Ella McPherson (University of Cambridge), Pelin Tan (Bard College)
Moderators: Alex Grigor, Michal Huss, Konstantinos Pittas
Description: This panel looks at contestations around cultural commons and strategies to re-claim and re-mobilise them. In addition, the unfolding global health crisis urges to think about its repercussions to the basic rights of access to culture, to the diversity of cultural content and expression online, and to the precarious-now more than ever-art and cultural labour. With cultural institutions closing down, major artistic and cultural events postponed, and community cultural practices suspended on the one hand, and with the acceleration in the digitisation of cultural content and the surge in online access to this content on the other, what are the potentialities and stakes of this new reality in light of the coronavirus pandemic? How can widespread protests against toxic philanthropy, institutional racism, art washing, and gender discrimination help us to envision museums taking the side of the commons? How can culture and aesthetics serve as innovative terrains for encounters and exchanges, solidarity and sharing, synergies and community building?
The final section of this panel included audiences participation. This was not recorded due to GDPR guidelines. Thank you for your understanding.
VIRTUAL CONFERENCE PROGRAMME: Commoning the City Friday 12 June 2020, 14.00 – 15.45 (BST)
Participants: Ash Amin (University of Cambridge), Massimo De Angelis (University of East London), Shannon Mattern (The New School), Richard Sennett (Chair, Council on Urban Initiatives, United Nations Habitat)
Whose Commons, for Whom? Friday 12 June 2020, 17.00 – 18.45 (BST)
Participants: Tali Hatuka (Tel Aviv University), Zizi Papacharissi (University of Illinois-Chicago), Doina Petrescu (University of Sheffield / atelier d’architecture autogerée), Laura Lo Presti (University of Padua)
Reclaiming the Cultural Commons Saturday 13 June 2020, 13.00 -14.45 (BST)
Participants: Sepake Angiama (Institute for International Visual Arts-London), Gavin Grindon (University of Essex), Ella McPherson (University of Cambridge), Pelin Tan (Bard College)
All recordings are available on: https://www.youtube.com/user/crasshpublicity
Participants: Ash Amin (University of Cambridge), Massimo De Angelis (University of East London), Shannon Mattern (The New School), Richard Sennett (Chair, Council on Urban Initiatives, United Nations Habitat)
Moderators: Alex Grigor, Michal Huss, Konstantinos Pittas
Description: This panel explores the current potentials of and constraints for the production of the city (understood as a social, historical, and multi-sensual construct) as a common space. How can we prevent a pandemic from becoming another excuse for neoliberal austerity, new enclosures, repression, and mass securitisation at the city level? How can physical spaces become ‘common’, against the backdrop of the privatisation impetus of global capitalism and the proliferation of virtual spaces? As information and communication technologies influence the city’s networks and the processes of immaterial labour, what new capacities to be ‘in common’ emerge and what new forms of solidarity and mutual care networks can be prefigured? How can emerging urban social movements practise the commons in translocal spaces?
The final section of this panel included audiences participation. This was not recorded due to GDPR guidelines. Thank you for your understanding.
VIRTUAL CONFERENCE PROGRAMME: Commoning the City Friday 12 June 2020, 14.00 – 15.45 (BST)
Participants: Ash Amin (University of Cambridge), Massimo De Angelis (University of East London), Shannon Mattern (The New School), Richard Sennett (Chair, Council on Urban Initiatives, United Nations Habitat)
Whose Commons, for Whom? Friday 12 June 2020, 17.00 – 18.45 (BST)
Participants: Tali Hatuka (Tel Aviv University), Zizi Papacharissi (University of Illinois-Chicago), Doina Petrescu (University of Sheffield / atelier d’architecture autogerée), Laura Lo Presti (University of Padua)
Reclaiming the Cultural Commons Saturday 13 June 2020, 13.00 -14.45 (BST)
Participants: Sepake Angiama (Institute for International Visual Arts-London), Gavin Grindon (University of Essex), Ella McPherson (University of Cambridge), Pelin Tan (Bard College)
All recordings are available on: https://www.youtube.com/user/crasshpublicity
This talk considers how specifically language-based AI systems (for example, speech recognition, machine translation or smart telecommunications interfaces) have affected and transformed modern society. In an age when we spend large parts of our daily lives communicating with our smartphones and Virtual Personal Assistants such as Siri, Cortana, and Alexa, we need to consider how these technologies actually impact our lives. While these intelligent systems can certainly have a positive impact on society (e.g. by promoting free speech and political engagement), they also offer opportunities for distortion and deception. Unbalanced data sets used to train automated systems can reinforce problematical social biases; automated Twitter bots can drastically increase the spread of fake news and hate speech online; and the responses of automated Virtual Personal Assistants during conversations about sensitive topics (e.g. suicidal tendencies, religion, sexual identity) can have serious consequences. We will explore some of these issues as well as discuss opportunities to implement these systems and technologies in ways that may affect more positively the kinds of social change that will shape modern digital democracies in the immediate future.
A talk by Dr Stephanie Ullmann and Dr Marcus Tomalin from the 'Giving Voice to Digital Democracies' project at CRASSH.
7 June 2019
The Quentin Skinner Fellow for 2018-19, Dr Emma Hunter, will give the annual lecture and participate in the related symposium. Online registration is now available. Please click here to book your place or use the online registration link on this page. The standard fee is £20, and £10 for students/unwaged. This includes lunch and refreshments.
Once approached primarily as part of the history of the West, liberalism has recently begun to receive attention from a global perspective. Yet the history of liberalism in twentieth-century Africa remains little studied. This is perhaps not surprising. Powerful historiographical frameworks have marginalised the history of liberal thought in Africa. In both the scholarly and popular imagination, colonial rule in the first half of the twentieth century in Africa is understood as defined by a conservative reaction against what had come to be seen as the failed liberal projects of the nineteenth century. If in the 1940s and 1950s, liberal thought seemed briefly to take centre stage, the years after independence again seemed to bear witness to its renewed marginalization.
However, a great deal of the reworking of core political concepts which characterized the political thought of twentieth-century Africa took place in dialogue with global ideas which owed much to thinkers situated in a liberal tradition. At the same time, studying political thinking in Africa both in the present and in the past reveals the importance of strands of thinking about freedom which were on the margins of or outside these traditions. These strands of thought are often hidden from view. Sometimes this is because written sources do not exist or the languages in which they are written or the archives in which they are conserved make them hard for historians to access. Sometimes they are hidden from view by the categories through which historians work.
These issues, and the methodological challenges involved in addressing them, will be the focus of the Quentin Skinner Colloquium of 2019. The Colloquium will provide an opportunity to explore the history of liberalism, broadly defined, in twentieth-century and twenty-first-century Africa, as well as to contribute to a wider methodological discussion, prompted by the emergence of the new field of global intellectual history, on how to move the study of the history of political thought beyond Western contexts.
Susan Stryker (University of Arizona)
'Transgeneration: Or, Becoming-With My Monstrous Kin'
In this keynote address, Susan Stryker tells the story, from her perspective, of how the essay 'My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix' entered the world and what that monstrous assemblage has been doing since it found its way into print. In doing so, she charts a trajectory across queer theory in the 1990s, the emergence of transgender studies as an increasingly legible field, the shift in cultural studies toward questions of ontology and technicity, and new articulations of transness and blackness within contemporary social theory.
http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/28386
lgbtQ+@cam was launched by the School of Humanities and Social Sciences in 2018 to promote research, outreach and network building related to queer, trans and sexuality studies at the University of Cambridge. Working closely with allied initiatives in other Faculties and Centres, the lgbtQ+@cam programme combines small focussed workshops and seminar series with larger conferences and events to both enhance existing teaching and research in lgbtQ+ studies at Cambridge, and build stronger links to queer research and study programmes nationally and internationally. The goal of lgbtQ+@cam is to increase participation in this transformative field, and to transform higher education as a result.
https://www.lgbtq.sociology.cam.ac.uk/About
This event is part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas. Bookings will open at 11:00 on Monday 24 September 2018.
From MOOCS to networked institutions, remote and off-shore degrees, flexible and flipped learning, Universities seem to be changing at an unprecedented rate, on an unprecedented scale. This talk lays out some of the most radical of these changes and asks: What are we are witnessing now? Are we in the age of hyper education, and the end of Universities as they have been for centuries?
Talk by Alison Wood, Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
CRASSH is delighted to invite you to the book launch for Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy by James Williams, winner of the inaugural Nine Dots Prize. This event is free and open to the public, and a drinks reception will follow the event.
Author: James Williams (University of Oxford)
Discussants: Maria Farrell (Writer and Technology Consultant) John Naughton (The Observer's Technology Correspondent)
WINNER OF THE INAUGURAL $100,000 NINE DOTS PRIZE Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy Published by Cambridge University Press on 31 May 2018 Paperback or Open Access
Former Google advertising executive, now Oxford-trained philosopher James Williams launches a plea to society and to the tech industry to help ensure that the technology we all carry with us every day does not distract us from pursuing our true goals in life. As information becomes ever more plentiful, the resource that is becoming more scarce is our attention. In this 'attention economy', we need to recognise the fundamental impacts of our new information environment on our lives in order to take back control. Drawing on insights ranging from Diogenes to contemporary tech leaders, Williams's thoughtful and impassioned analysis is sure to provoke discussion and debate. Williams is the inaugural winner of the Nine Dots Prize, a new Prize for creative thinking that tackles contemporary social issues.
Our CRASSH Impact speaker this Easter Term will be Reni Eddo-Lodge, whose Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race recently won the 2018 Jhalak Prize for the best book by a British BAME writer.
On 15 May 2018, Reni Eddo-Lodge will be in conversation with Priyamvada Gopal. The event is free and open to the public. No registration required.
The conversation will be chaired by Lola Olufemi (Women's Officer, Cambridge University Students' Union).
The event has been added to Facebook, if you'd like to invite friends.
For details of Reni Eddo-Lodge's conversation with Heidi Safia Mirza, please click here.
About Reni Eddo-Lodge
Reni Eddo-Lodge is a London-based, award-winning journalist. She has written for the New York Times, the Voice, Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Independent, Stylist, Inside Housing, the Pool, Dazed and Confused, and the New Humanist. She is the winner of a Women of the World Bold Moves Award, an MHP 30 to Watch Award and was chosen as one of the Top 30 Young People in Digital Media by the Guardian in 2014. She has also been listed in Elle's 100 Inspirational Women list, and The Root's 30 Black Viral Voices Under 30. She contributed to The Good Immigrant.
Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race is her first book. It won the 2018 Jhalak Prize, was chosen as Foyles Non-Fiction Book of the Year and Blackwell's Non-Fiction Book of the Year, was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and the Orwell Prize and shortlisted for the British Book Awards Non-Fiction Narrative Book of the Year and the Books Are My Bag Readers Award for Non-Fiction.
About Priyamvada Gopal
Priyamvada Gopal is a Reader in Anglophone and Related Literatures at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Churchill College. She is the author of Literary Radicalism in India (Routledge 2005) and The Indian Novel in English: Nation, History and Narration (Oxford 2009). She has written for The Guardian, The Nation, Al-Jazeera, Open: the Magazine and The Hindu among others. She has also participated in programmes with the BBC, NDTV-India, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio and al-Jazeera. Her forthcoming book, Insurgent Empire is due out with Verso in Spring 2019.
The lecture explores how complaint can be understood as a form of diversity work, as the work you have to do in order to make institutions more open and accommodating to others. The lecture draws on written and oral testimonies provided by those who have made complaints about racism, sexism, sexual harassment and bullying within universities. The lecture addresses the difficulty of making complaints and asks how and why complaints are blocked. The lecture shows how we learn about the institutional (as usual) from those who are trying to transform institutions.
Sara Ahmed is an independent feminist scholar and writer. She has held academic appointments at Lancaster University and Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. She has recently completed a book What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use and has begun a new research project on complaint. Her previous publications include Living a Feminist Life (2017), Willful Subjects (2014), On Being Included (2012), The Promise of Happiness (2010), Queer Phenomenology (2006), The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014, 2004), Strange Encounters (2000) and Differences that Matter (1998). She also blogs at www.feministkilljoys.com.
CRASSH Impact Lecture Series, Lent Term Speaker: Sara Ahmed
Use is a small word with a lot of work to do, a small word with a big history. As Rita Felski describes in her introduction to a special issue of New Literary History on use, 'the very word is stubby, plain, workmanlike, its monosyllabic bluntness as bare and unadorned as the thing that it names' (2013, 5). This lecture explores different uses of use across a range of intellectual traditions including biology, design and psychology as well as education. It considers the role of utilitarianism in the forming of the modern university (with specific reference to London University, now UCL). One of the aims of the lecture will be to put ordinary use back into the archives of utilitarianism, showing how use in an 'inside job', how use shapes and moulds the university. Drawing on an empirical study of diversity work, first presented in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012), the lecture explores how and why diversity is 'in use' as a way of demonstrating how universities are occupied, how they are shaped by patterns of use that often remain unnoticed until they are contested.
Sara Ahmed is an independent feminist scholar and writer. She has held academic appointments at Lancaster University and Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. She has recently completed a book What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use and has begun a new research project on complaint. Her previous publications include Living a Feminist Life (2017), Willful Subjects (2014), On Being Included (2012), The Promise of Happiness (2010), Queer Phenomenology (2006), The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014, 2004), Strange Encounters (2000) and Differences that Matter (1998). She also blogs at www.feministkilljoys.com.
Public Lecture
Jon Agar and Jacob Ward (University College London)
'Communications, control and cybernetics in post-war British systems: rail, post and telecoms'
Discussant: Matthew Gandy (University of Cambridge)
Convenors
Andrew McKenzie-McHarg (University of Cambridge)
Poornima Paidipaty (University of Cambridge)
Egle Rindzeviciute (Kingston University)
Summary
As more and more of our collective activities (education, pension planning, health management, environmental protection) are mediated by rapidly moving markets and computerized technologies, uncertainties abound. Such visions of a technologically mediated — and seemingly limitless — future are not new. They echo the technological futurism popularized in the middle of the twentieth century by cybernetics. Beginning with the 1948 publication of Norbert Wiener’s book, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, cybernetics inaugurated path-breaking scientific explorations of feedback and self-regulation in biological and mechanical systems. It initiated an ambitious set of technoscientific discussions that provocatively transcended traditional disciplinary boundaries. Cyberneticians argued that patterns of feedback and self-regulation were key to understanding the operation of anti-aircraft guns, the erratic movements of victims of brain injury, the dynamics of group psychology, the relationship of human societies to their natural environment and much more.
These insights furnished profound reassessments of notions of agency, of distinctions between the human and the non-human and of models of learning and memory. The scholarship on cybernetics has, however, only recently began to trace the legacies of this movement beyond the Cold War era. By providing insights into the enduring impact of mid-century techno-science on our contemporary information landscape, 'The Afterlives of Cybernetics' conference will contribute to a more thorough history of the present by helping us understand the antagonisms and synergies that animate the multiple offshoots of cybernetic thought, including operations research, AI, rational choice theory, predictive analysis, design thinking, behavioural economics and risk management. This in turn will lay the foundations for a better understanding of how these knowledge practices allow us to project, imagine and engage with uncertain and unbounded futures.
Smuts Memorial Lecture Series 2017
Lecture Three: On the way home without a world: the case of Delhi
Speaker: AbdouMaliq Simone (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity)
Lecture Three Abstract
This lecture explores what it means to live without a world, without an overarching orientation or anchorage that compels bodies, things and places to have something inevitably to do with each other; where the purported coherence undermines itself in the politics of imposing a univocal frame. Here, the very intensity of segregating forces, of expulsions, land-grabs, and gentrification—which indeed are the predominant descriptors of contemporary urban development—also rebound in weird ways, suggesting, even for a moment, not the romance with urban cosmopolitan mixture, but a contingent density of differences that don’t seem to know how to narrate how they all got to be in the same “neighborhood.”
Focusing on a series of “strange alliances” in a dense Muslim working class district in Delhi, I attempt to grasp how contexts that provide for both a plurality of small, continuous attainments and prolific blockages are a means of attempting to understand what it means to be at home without a world.
Smuts Memorial Lecture Series 2017
Lecture Two Abstract
This lecture takes up the manufacturing of darkness as relationality spiraling out of control. Here, the capacity to render any experience as a piece of interoperable data intersects with the inability of any infrastructure to hold the sheer panoply of heterogeneous actions, recursions, and feedback loops that run up and down discernible scales. All of the devices and regimens capable of demonstrating exactly how things relate to each other, in their very implementation, unleash an excess of unscalable details and an aesthetics that renders the tropes of overarching organizational logics inoperable.
I explore some of the ways in which residents in Jakarta and Hyderabad, India, deal with this darkness, this situation where many countervailing realities all seem to be equally possible and appearing; where the accelerated, haphazard, and brazenly opportunistic expansions of built environments that seek to get far away from what a given city was before reaffirm or cultivate interiorities of care, of people looking out for each other.
Smuts Memorial Lecture Series (7, 9, 13 November 2017) Series Title: The Uninhabitable: Afterlives of the Urban South Speaker: AbdouMaliq Simone (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity)
Series Abstract
So many forces are at work to make habitation impossible or nearly impossible in many urban contexts. So much work is devoted toward detailing the demise of urban life in all of its aspects, and the way this destruction is unequally distributed across different regions and populations. In this series of three lectures, I invoke the uninhabitable, not as a quality of urban conditions, but rather a method of living-with this urban—and all of its intensifications, extension, ambiguities, and apocalyptic implications—as something strange, productively dark, and seemingly impermeable to calculation or figuring.
As such, this living-with is an arena of inexplicable conjunction, collaboration, unsettling; a profusion of undomesticated circulating details momentarily coalescing as affirmations, instigations of something else besides, right next to the otherwise resounding drudgery and bleakness of contemporary urbanization and its accelerated repetition of limiting formats and implosive horizons. A repetition that promises to destroy us, no matter how much we have been in the dark about such matters from the get-go.
Lecture One Abstract
The lecture models itself as an improvisatory ensemble. For it seeks to demonstrate the uninhabitable as rhythms of endurance; that rhythm is what ensues from those aspects of urban life that cannot be precisely measured or scaled, where the vectors of here and there, now and then become largely indistinguishable.
In a world of so much toxicity, inequality, stupidity, violence, and precarity, there is something else that offers no evidence for its existence, which cannot be mobilized as proof or resistance. Yet, it resounds as an aspect of even the most banal and quotidian of maneuvers. It points to a generic darkness in which every detail is compressed, but a darkness that hides nothing, that embodies no secrets. Just a parallel track; what Ornette Coleman would call “harmolodics”, a democracy of the ensemble, the capacity to deliver the same melody in a different way.
The lecture draws upon Quranic and Black eschatological notions of darkness to think about ways of living-with this something else beside(s) the proliferating manifestations of both the erasures of life and non-life and the rampaging political technologies that police boundaries demarcating the viable and unviable. The lecture is full of stories of strange alliances, improvisations, endless journeys of African entrepreneurs, crimes that spiral far beyond their origin, the circulation of messages in Freetown, and ways in which even the most desperate make sure to have something forceful to say to audiences far beyond their reach, how they refuse the inhabitation of the present, but also exceed this refusal.
This talk explores what factors - religious, economic, political - make some and not others believe in conspiracy theories. Hugo Drochon considers what impact that has had on contemporary political events, from Brexit to Trump.
Was Diana killed by the Secret Services? Is climate change a hoax? Did man not walk on the moon? Who shot JFK? Drawing on a nation-wide survey conducted with YouGov about belief in conspiracy theories, this talk explores what factors -religious, economic, political – make some and not others believe in conspiracy theories, and what impact that has had on contemporary political events, from Brexit toTrump. Hugo Drochon is a researcher with the 'Conspiracy and Democracy' research project at CRASSH.
We’re bombarded by information about our health. But who should be trusted? Physicians? Scientists? Patients? Pharma? Instinct? Come along for a range of researcher perspectives and to offer your own.
The safety and effectiveness of medical interventions is highly contested, even when it is backed by clinical research. Who should we trust? The truth of the scientists loyal to evidence-based medicine paradigms, or that of patients with their lived experience? Should we trust big pharma? Or perhaps no one at all? In this panel discussion, we will address these questions, which are, quite literally, of life-and-death significance.
The panel will include five speakers, all from the University of Cambridge: Anna Alexandrova, Gabriele Badano, Stephen John, Trenholme Junghans, and Jacob Stegenga. Speakers will first give a short talk each, looking from different angles at the plurality of actors who claim their perspective should take centre stage in clinical research. Next, they will have a short conversation among themselves before opening the floor to questions from the audience.
Organised by the 'Limits of the Numerical' research project at CRASSH.
CRASSH Impact Lecture Series, Michaelmas Term Speakers: Michael Puett (Harvard University) and Julia Lovell (Birkbeck)
Michael Puett is the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology, as well as the Chair of the Committee on the Study of Religion, at Harvard University. His interests are focused on the inter-relations between philosophy, anthropology, history, and religion, with the hope of bringing the study of China into larger historical and comparative frameworks. His books include To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China and The Path: A New Way to Think About Everything (co-authored with Christine Gross-Lo).
Julia Lovell is a Reader in Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research has so far focused principally on the relationship between culture (specifically, literature, architecture, historiography and sport) and modern Chinese nation-building. Her books include The Great Wall: China Against the World 1000 BC - AD 2000 and The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (winner of the 2012 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature).
This event is part of the CRASSH Impact Lecture Series.
CRASSH Impact Lecture Series, Michaelmas Term Speaker: Professor Michael Puett (Harvard University)
We seem to have a relatively clear (if somewhat uncomfortable) narrative concerning the rise and (potential) decline of neoliberalism. But, if we take into account the perspective of China, such a narrative may have to be re-thought. This talk will place some of the current political debates in China within a larger historical context and argue that these debates may force us to re-think some of our assumptions concerning the workings of the state and the economy and accordingly to re-think some of our readings of recent history. My hope is that the talk will help to contribute to developing a more global understanding of political theory.
Michael Puett is the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology, as well as the Chair of the Committee on the Study of Religion, at Harvard University. His interests are focused on the inter-relations between philosophy, anthropology, history, and religion, with the hope of bringing the study of China into larger historical and comparative frameworks. His books include To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China and The Path: A New Way to Think About Everything (co-authored with Christine Gross-Lo).
This lecture is part of the CRASSH Impact Lecture Series.
The lecture by Jon Agar and Jacob Ward (University College London) will be open to all free of charge. Further information, including an abstract, is available here.
Convenors
Andrew McKenzie-McHarg (University of Cambridge)
Poornima Paidipaty (University of Cambridge)
Egle Rindzeviciute (Kingston University)
Summary
As more and more of our collective activities (education, pension planning, health management, environmental protection) are mediated by rapidly moving markets and computerized technologies, uncertainties abound. Such visions of a technologically mediated — and seemingly limitless — future are not new. They echo the technological futurism popularized in the middle of the twentieth century by cybernetics. Beginning with the 1948 publication of Norbert Wiener’s book, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, cybernetics inaugurated path-breaking scientific explorations of feedback and self-regulation in biological and mechanical systems. It initiated an ambitious set of technoscientific discussions that provocatively transcended traditional disciplinary boundaries. Cyberneticians argued that patterns of feedback and self-regulation were key to understanding the operation of anti-aircraft guns, the erratic movements of victims of brain injury, the dynamics of group psychology, the relationship of human societies to their natural environment and much more.
These insights furnished profound reassessments of notions of agency, of distinctions between the human and the non-human and of models of learning and memory. The scholarship on cybernetics has, however, only recently began to trace the legacies of this movement beyond the Cold War era. By providing insights into the enduring impact of mid-century techno-science on our contemporary information landscape, 'The Afterlives of Cybernetics' conference will contribute to a more thorough history of the present by helping us understand the antagonisms and synergies that animate the multiple offshoots of cybernetic thought, including operations research, AI, rational choice theory, predictive analysis, design thinking, behavioural economics and risk management. This in turn will lay the foundations for a better understanding of how these knowledge practices allow us to project, imagine and engage with uncertain and unbounded futures.
Keynote lecture by Professor Paolo Quattrone (University of Edinburgh)
'Who said accounting was boring? Rhetoric and the making of socie-ties’
--
Convenors
Clément Feger (University of Cambridge)
Bhaskar Vira (University of Cambridge)
Laurent Mermet (AgroParisTech)
Summary
After the recent development of accounting for biodiversity and ecosystems at the business level and at the national level, a third construction site in accounting research is necessary at the scale of inter-organizational ecosystem management.
This calls for a constructive dialogue between conservationists who design and use new information systems on ecosystems in multiple contexts but face challenges in obtaining the political and social changes they expect, and critical accounting researchers who can provide deep knowledge on the connections between information, accounts exchange, accountabilities, values and all forms of collective organized action.
The workshop will build on the presence of a strong community of conservation research and practice in Cambridge (notably based at the University of Cambridge's Conservation Research Institute and the Cambridge Conservation Initiative), and will provide them for the first time with a space to engage with critical and social and environmental accounting researchers.
We hope that this new interdisciplinary bridge will set off theoretical elaborations, as well as concrete working relationships and future experimentations of accounting for the management of ecosystems innovations that can ultimately lead to better achievement of ecological and social results. The new path of research that this workshop will discuss will provide a critical, theoretical and practical alternative to the already well-established collaborations of conservation research with the field of economics.
The conference will combine intensive closed workshop sessions with two public events on the topic.
Convenors
Clément Feger (University of Cambridge)
Bhaskar Vira (University of Cambridge)
Laurent Mermet (AgroParisTech)
Summary
After the recent development of accounting for biodiversity and ecosystems at the business level and at the national level, a third construction site in accounting research is necessary at the scale of inter-organizational ecosystem management.
This calls for a constructive dialogue between conservationists who design and use new information systems on ecosystems in multiple contexts but face challenges in obtaining the political and social changes they expect, and critical accounting researchers who can provide deep knowledge on the connections between information, accounts exchange, accountabilities, values and all forms of collective organized action.
The workshop will build on the presence of a strong community of conservation research and practice in Cambridge (notably based at the University of Cambridge's Conservation Research Institute and the Cambridge Conservation Initiative), and will provide them for the first time with a space to engage with critical and social and environmental accounting researchers.
We hope that this new interdisciplinary bridge will set off theoretical elaborations, as well as concrete working relationships and future experimentations of accounting for the management of ecosystems innovations that can ultimately lead to better achievement of ecological and social results. The new path of research that this workshop will discuss will provide a critical, theoretical and practical alternative to the already well-established collaborations of conservation research with the field of economics.
The conference will combine intensive closed workshop sessions with two public events on the topic.
Keynote Lecture
Chair: Jonathan Linebaugh (University of Cambridge)
Frederick Beiser (Syracuse University)
'The Politics of Strauss’ Biblical Criticism'
Respondent: Ian Cooper (University of Kent)
Session One - Roundtable Discussion
Chair: Ruth Jackson and Hanna Weibye (University of Cambridge)
Panellists:
Andrew Bowie (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Maureen Junker-Kenny (Trinity College Dublin)
Gareth Stedman-Jones (Queen Mary, University of London)
Joachim Whaley (University of Cambridge)
Putting Dirt in Its Place: The Contemporary Politics of Waste
Conference Keynote Lecture : Zsuzsa Gille (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) - 'Overflows, Agencement, and Inequalities of the Circular Economy'
Convenor
Patrick O'Hare (University of Cambridge)
Summary
This conference explores the socio-material interfaces where waste meets politics in the present. It brings together a group of established and emergent waste scholars from across the social sciences to discuss the contemporary dynamics of waste and waste labour in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. Five themed panels - on infrastructure, labour, circulation, elimination and reconceptualization– provide a structure through which waste will be explored in all its complexity.
Drawing largely on ethnographic research, presenters will debate how legal, regulatory, cultural, bio-political and economic factors influence what is configured and classified as waste. Can we speak of ‘waste regimes’? What role do religion, class and race play in determining the division of waste labour? Are formalization and privatization of waste management leading to the dignification or dispossession of waste workers? Can ethnographic and sociological explorations of the materialities of waste politics challenge normative understandings and definitions of waste, commodity and value? Are ideas like 'zero waste' and the 'circular economy' green modernist fables or realizable policies, and how do they reconfigure existing patterns of accumulation and inequality?
A Black Feminist conversation: Black life, law, love and survival in times of Trump and Brexit
Feminist professors of colour Patricia J. Williams (Columbia University) and Heidi Safia Mirza (Goldsmiths, University of London) will debate Black life, law, love and survival in times of Trump and Brexit. The discussion will be chaired by Sarah Franklin (University of Cambridge).
Patricia Williams is perhaps America’s most distinguished writer on law, race and gender. She is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University and writes a regular column for The Nation. Her books include The Alchemy of Race and Rights, The Rooster’s Egg and Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race.
Speaker: Patricia J. Williams (Columbia University)
Patricia Williams will remark on tensions between discourses of universalised longing for human identity, human rights, unbounded, globalised connection – and the traumatised and traumatising language of dislocation and dis-identification with ever more fragmented categories of 'other'.
In Conversation: Paul Gilroy and Patricia Williams
Patricia J. Williams (Columbia University) will join Paul Gilroy (King’s College London) in conversation at the launch of the CRASSH Impact series, Law, Race, Gender and Public Policy. The discussion will be chaired by former President of the Cambridge University Students' Union, Priscilla Mensah.
Dr Sophie Smith (University of Oxford) is the Quentin Skinner Fellow 2016-17. She will be giving the annual Quentin Skinner lecture and participating in the symposium.
What are we trying to understand when we study politics - and to what end? These are often thought of as relatively new questions in the long history of political thought. On the conventional view, though the ancients certainly wrote about politics, self-conscious reflection on politics as 'science' or 'philosophy' properly speaking was a nineteenth century invention. Furthermore, the story goes, it was only in the nineteenth century that we see the relationship between political science and practical politics, not least the politics of empire, first emerge.
While the empirical and positivistic emphases of British, American and European political scientists in the nineteenth century were indeed new, the idea that there might be a 'science of politics', fit to be taught in universities, with its own methods, sources and ends, was not. Neither was the thought that, in the words of one early modern author, ‘the philosophical principles of politics’ were a necessary part of the statesman’s arsenal. In both antiquity and early modernity authors engaged with questions about what it means to study politics. Indeed, some of the topics we consider central to distinctively modern meta-discussions about the nature of, for example, 'political theory’ were in fact present in some of the very earliest discussions about the nature of what early modern authors called scientia civilis. These include debates about the sources of political normativity, about utopianism and its limits, and about possible tensions between theory and practice. This symposium will reflect on this history and its significance for thinking about how we study politics today.
Researching South-South Development Cooperation
The conference's keynote lecture, 'Tupi or Not Tupi: Anthropophagy and Emulation in the Study of South-South Cooperation', given by Professor Adriana Erthal Abdenur (Pontifical Catholic University, Rio de Janeiro)
Convenors
Elsje Fourie (University of Maastricht)
Emma Mawdsley (University of Cambridge)
Wiebe Nauta (University of Maastricht)
Summary
The 'rise of the South' over the last 10-15 years has led to tectonic shifts in global development ideas, practices and actors. As growing providers of development assistance, states like Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Korea, Mexico, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, as well as a variety of non-state development organisations and movements, are becoming increasingly active and influential in bilateral, regional and international cooperation. Usually this has been framed as a successful projection of material, ideational and ontological power that has enabled Southern (and Arab) development partners to challenge long-standing 'North-South' development hegemonies.
While research is accelerating around many aspects of the rapidly growing and complex phenomenon of South-South Development Cooperation (SSDC), there has been limited space for reflection on the epistemological and methodological challenges posed by research in and with these Southern partners. Yet our own experiences, and discussions with differently positioned researchers in different sites, reveal new and emerging questions of identity, power and positionality for researchers and their partners and respondents; as well as unfamiliar and challenging conceptual frameworks for 'development'. Existing critical reflection on 'mainstream' international development ideas, practices and research from feminist, postcolonial and critical race theory has powerfully challenged the hierarchies and assumptions associated with the historically dominant North-South axis, while also providing paradigm-shifting innovations in methodologies and ethics in research praxis. To what extent are such critical reflections relevant to explore these new actors, hierarchies and identities emerging and deepening in and around SSDC?
This conference is the first of its kind in its specific focus on the epistemological and related methodological challenges associated with researching South-South development cooperation. The conference will invite researchers on SSDC - from graduates and early career scholars to leading figures in the field - to reflect critically on the changing politics of knowledge and knowledge production that these actors and trends present. We are particularly keen to include Southern-based researchers, funding permitting. The conference will be multidisciplinary in character, with researchers invited from Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Development Studies, Feminist Studies, International Relations, Media Studies and Political Studies
How does literary reference affect the interpretation of largely abstract works? In her recent book, Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (Princeton University Press, 2016), Mary Jacobus focuses on the artist’s use of poetry in his work, which often includes handwritten words and phrases—-naming or quoting poets ranging from Sappho, Homer, and Virgil to Mallarmé, Rilke, and Cavafy. In the artist’s own words, he “never really separated painting and literature.” Mary Jacobus's opening presentation will be followed by a wide-ranging discussion with Peter de Bolla (English) and Alyce Mahon (Art History) spanning both Twombly's work (currently the focus of a Pompidou retrospective) and that of his friend Robert Rauschenberg (currently the focus of a Tate Modern retrospective).
Mary Jacobus, Professor Emerita of English at the University of Cambridge, was Director of CRASSH from 2006-2011. She has written widely on Romanticism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and visual art. Alyce Mahon is a Reader in Modern and Contemporary Art History at the Department of History of Art. She is currently researching the American Surrealist Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) and curating the first major retrospective exhibition of Tanning for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid for 2018-2019. Peter de Bolla is Professor of Cultural History and Aesthetics and Direct of the Concept Lab at CRASSH.
Keynote
Anthony Vidler (Cooper Union / Yale University)
How to Do Things with Diagrams
Convenors:
Lukas Engelmann (University of Cambridge)
Caroline Humphrey (University of Cambridge)
Christos Lynteris (University of Cambridge)
Summary
Diagrams inhabit a liminal space between representation and prescription, words and images, ideas and things. From key moments of scientific and intellectual innovation (Darwin’s tree-diagram, Levi-Strauss’s diagram of the raw and the cooked, Lacan’s L-scheme, Waddington’s epigenetic landscape image and Francis Crick’s DNA double helix sketch) to everyday uses in all spheres of social, political, economic and cultural life, the diagram seeks resemblance to the empirical yet aspires to generalization. Conversely, employed across the disciplines as a thinking tool, the diagram hence holds the promise of transforming abstract issues into graspable images and translating the unseen into intelligible and actionable form. Both convincing and misleading and always positioned at the threshold of vision and the unseen, diagrams operate as abstractive and constitutive components of empirical realities.
This conference aims to explore the interdisciplinary, shared traits of diagrammatic thinking so as to go beyond the notion of simplification, of “drawing information together”, which forms the usual analytical ground for understanding syntactic visualizations in the sciences and humanities. Rather than seeing diagrams as systems of linkages, the aim of the conference is to explore the dialectic of inscription and erasure as an inherent and generative trait of diagrammatic practices.
Questions to be raised in the conference revolve around the following themes: How does the visual and logical indeterminacy of diagrams, their resistance to being fully perceived as images or understood as logical arguments, define their operation as ways of reasoning? And to what extent does diagrammatic reasoning extend beyond the realm of diagrams as visual/textual objects? By bringing together ethnographic, historical and philosophical perspectives on the diagram, in its applications across the disciplines, this conference aims to explore its role at the pivot of modern transformations and aporias between abstraction and form.
11 July 2016 - Keynote address as part of the 2016's Race to Save the World conference.
Madeleine Albright (Former U.S. Secretary of State)
Vin Weber (Republican Party strategist and former Congressman)
Chair : Steven Schrage (University of Cambridge)
Professor Khaled El-Rouayheb, Leverhulme Visiting Fellow at CRASSH for 2015-2016, delivers the second of his Leverhulme lectures.
This lecture will trace the emergence of a novel ideal of “deep reading” among Ottoman scholars of the seventeenth century. Medieval Arabic-Islamic educational manuals tended to focus on student-teacher relations and the acquisition of knowledge through listening. In the seventeenth century, Ottoman scholars articulate a new ideal of the acquisition of knowledge through “deep reading”. This development would seem to be related both to the increasing importance of the rational and instrumental sciences, and to the Ottoman examination system of the seventeenth century.
Professor Khaled El-Rouayheb, Leverhulme Visiting Fellow at CRASSH for 2015-2016, delivers the first of his Leverhulme lectures. The second lecture, The Rise of "Deep Reading" in Ottoman Scholarly Culture, will take place on Wednesday 4 May.
The science of ādāb al-baḥth or munāẓarah emerged relatively late in Islamic history. Its roots lay in the earlier science of eristic (jadal or khilāf) that had developed among early Islamic theologians and jurists (with some influence from Aristotelian topics and late-antique rhetoric). In this lecture, I will argue that there was an explosion of interest in the science in the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century. I will discuss the wider intellectual context of this development, as well as some of its consequences for the Ottoman tradition of logic.
The seventh Balzan-Skinner lecture and symposium with Balzan-Skinner Fellow Dr Teresa Bejan.
As the core premise of modern moral and political philosophy, equality often demands more allegiance than investigation. The question of its historical emergence as a social and political ideal is generally set aside in favor of identifying the causal and constitutive harms of various kinds of inequality – political, social, or economic. This talk will explore ideas of equality as a political principle, a religious commitment, and a social practice in seventeenth-century England. These fascinating but forgotten visions of “equality before egalitarianism” shed light on the development of a central concept in modern political thought while providing some analytical clarity and historical insight sorely missing in contemporary debates.
James English (University of Pennsylvania): Revisiting the "Great Divide”: The Past, the Future, and the Contemporary Novel
Conference Details
Summary
This interdisciplinary symposium seeks to expand and enrich our understanding of contemporary literary production. Moving beyond the traditional triumvirate of author, reader and text, we situate today’s fiction within a wider field, encompassing literary agents, editors, book reviewers, writing teachers, prize judges, festival organizers, and more.
‘Books in the Making’ brings some of the key players in the book trade into dialogue with academics from a range of disciplines, including literary and cultural studies, sociology, and the digital humanities. By creating new conversations between these too-often separate spheres, we consider the various ways in which books are made today. The symposium also explores the extent to which the book as a medium is now being ‘remade’ by new formats and technologies. By investigating these processes of making and remaking, we address a question that has not yet been posed systematically: that of the consequences for contemporary writing of ongoing changes in its production and dissemination.
On Thursday 14th April the symposium will open at 6pm with a public event in Lady Mitchell Hall, organised in conjunction with the Cambridge Literary Festival, featuring the best-selling American crime writer Lee Child in conversation with Andy Martin.
On Friday 15th the symposium will feature a plenary address from James English (University of Pennsylvania), author of The Economy of Prestige (2005), along with sessions bringing academics into conversation with publishing professionals to discuss three key aspects of the ‘making’ of contemporary literature:
CREATION: This session expands the concept of literary ‘creation’ to include not just the act of writing, but related activities including the teaching of writing, the role and influence of literary agents, and the shaping of literary categories such as ‘the bestseller’.
PUBLICATION: In this session, academics and members of the book trade consider the impact of current publication processes on contemporary writing. The conversation will involve both corporate and independent presses; print publishers and those whose business models are based upon new technologies.
RECEPTION: This session reconsiders traditional questions of reading, evaluation and interpretation by connecting them to social and institutional contexts including literary festivals, book reviewing and journalism, and literary prizes.
Tim Boon (Science Museum): Reflections on Creating a Research Culture
Julien Clement (Musée du Quai Branly, Paris): Research in question at the musée du Quai Branly
The Museum as Method: Collections, Research, Universities
Summary
If for many years collections seemed peripheral to innovative work in the arts and social sciences, there is a new sense that university museums can be research bases of a powerful and distinctive kind.
New approaches to material and visual culture, artefact studies and the intertwined histories of collections, exploration and the histories of science and the humanities promise to reconstitute the museum as a laboratory and the collection as a research technology. Increasingly, major cross-disciplinary projects have used collections as lenses upon larger issues ranging over art, culture, history and environment. Yet collections and the issues of method and analysis that they raise remain relatively under-theorised.
Over the same period, changing funding environments and new perceptions among policymakers of the importance of research, innovation, and the cultural sector raise the issues of what university museums contribute to higher education, and of the place and value of research in public and national museums.
This conference, formally supported by the University of Cambridge Museums and Botanic Garden (UCM) brings together scholars from disciplines interested in material culture and curators from across the arts and sciences, to reflect on both questions of methodology and public policy.
Viola König (Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin)
Respondent - Hedley Swain (Arts Council of England)
The Museum as Method: Collections, Research, Universities
Summary
If for many years collections seemed peripheral to innovative work in the arts and social sciences, there is a new sense that university museums can be research bases of a powerful and distinctive kind.
New approaches to material and visual culture, artefact studies and the intertwined histories of collections, exploration and the histories of science and the humanities promise to reconstitute the museum as a laboratory and the collection as a research technology. Increasingly, major cross-disciplinary projects have used collections as lenses upon larger issues ranging over art, culture, history and environment. Yet collections and the issues of method and analysis that they raise remain relatively under-theorised.
Over the same period, changing funding environments and new perceptions among policymakers of the importance of research, innovation, and the cultural sector raise the issues of what university museums contribute to higher education, and of the place and value of research in public and national museums.
This conference, formally supported by the University of Cambridge Museums and Botanic Garden (UCM) brings together scholars from disciplines interested in material culture and curators from across the arts and sciences, to reflect on both questions of methodology and public policy.
Chair: Dr Alexander Marr
A public conversation between Professor Ann Jefferson (University of Oxford and currently a Fellow of the Paris Institute for Advanced Studies) and Professor Darrin McMahon (Dartmouth College) about the history of genius and organised as part of the Genius before Romanticism: Ingenuity in Early Modern Art and Science research project.
Professor Jerome McGann (University of Virginia) will give a public lecture as part of the CRASSH Mellon CDI Visitng Fellowship programme.
Abstract
As my title suggests, Hans-George Gadamer's dialectic of enlightenment is my point of reference. I mean to recover and revise Gadamer's thought by shifting it from a philosophical to a philological perspective. From the living example of certain individuals, I propose a model of humanist enquiry that seems to me worth preserving and emulating, particularly now when educational policy is reinvesting so heavily in a technical expertise offered by the STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics)
The sixth Balzan Skinner Lecture with Balzan Skinner Fellow 2014-15 Dr Anna Becker.
While ‘gender’ is a well-established subject in many historical disciplines, such as cultural history, social history and global history, the same cannot be said for the history of political thought. Especially once we turn to the sort of early modern political thought that can be seen as republican in a broad sense, women seem to disappear. They are simply not political: they are not citizens, they cannot participate in the sphere of the city or the commonwealth. In my lecture I shall develop a methodological approach to the question of how to write gender in and into the history of political thought in a historically sound and firmly contextual way that avoids anachronisms and show – as Joan Scott has suggested – that gender is indeed a ‘useful category’ in the history of political thought.
Katherine Hayles - A Theory of the Total Archive: Infinite Expansion, Infinite Compression, and Apparatuses of Control
Keynote / Public Lecture from the conference The Total Archive
Conference Summary
Conveners
Boris Jardine (University of Cambridge) Matthew Drage (University of Cambridge, PhD candidate) Ruth Horry (University of Cambridge)
Summary
The complete system of knowledge is a standard trope of science fiction, a techno-utopian dream and an aesthetic ideal. It is Solomon’s House, the Encyclopaedia and the Museum. It is also an ideology – of Enlightenment, High Modernism and absolute governance.
Far from ending the dream of a total archive, twentieth-century positivist rationality brought it ever closer. From Paul Otlet’s Mundaneum to Mass-Observation, from the Unity of Science movement to Isaac Asimov’s Encyclopedia Galactica, from the Whole Earth Catalog to Wikipedia, the dream of universal knowledge dies hard. These projects triumphantly burst their own bounds, generating more archival material, more information, than can ever be processed. When it encounters well defined areas – the sportsfield or the model organism – the total archive tracks every movement of every player, of recording every gene and mutation. Increasingly this approach is inverted: databases are linked; quantities are demanded where only qualities existed before. The Human Genome Project is the most famous, but now there are countless databases demanding ever more varied input. Here the question of what is excluded becomes central.
The total archive is a political tool. It encompasses population statistics, GDP, indices of the Standard of Living and the international ideology of UNESCO, the WHO, the free market and, most recently, Big Data. The information-gathering practices of statecraft are the total archive par excellence, carrying the potential to transfer power into the open fields of economics and law – or divest it into the hands of criminals, researchers and activists.
Questions of the total archive engage key issues in the philosophy of classification, the poetics of the universal, the ideology of surveillance and the technologies of information retrieval. What are the social structures and political dynamics required to sustain total archives, and what are the temporalities implied by such projects?
In order to confront the ideology and increasing reality of interconnected data-sets and communication technologies we need a robust conceptual framework – one that does not sacrifice historical nuance for the ability to speculate. This conference brings together scholars from a wide range of fields to discuss the aesthetics and political reality of the total archive.
Conference Summary
What is criticism? There is a telling irony in the fact that a word concerned with the making of clear separations and distinctions (< Greek krinein) should be used of early modern practices so various and so very often blurred in their disciplinary affiliation, method, aim, and indeed location. Thinking about literature and the visual arts is found in many places – in treatises on the arts of poetry or painting; in defences, apologies, praises, and paragoni; in critical prefaces, dedicatory epistles, commendatory verses, letters, and essays; in commentaries, editions, reading notes, and commonplace books; within or on the thresholds of works of poetry and painting (and in the on-stage audience of the play-within-a-play). It is situated between different disciplines and methods – borrowing structure, terminology, and taxonomy from rhetoric and logic, for example, or using the analogy of one art to think about another, as when Renaissance literary theorists build on a long tradition (it is there in Aristotle, and in Homer) of thinking about the visual arts in order to think about poetry, fiction, and mimēsis. Critical ideas and methods come into England from other places, most notably Italy, France, and the Low Countries, and take root in particular locations – the court, the Inns of Court, the theatre, the great house, the university hall, school, and library. And commonplaces of classical poetics and rhetoric – decorum, speaking pictures, nature and art, necessity and probability – serve both to connect and to measure the space between different critical discourses. Tracing the history of the development of early modern thinking about literature and the visual arts therefore requires that one think about various kinds of place – both material and textual – and the practices particular to those places; it also requires that those different places be brought into dialogue with each other. This is work that has yet to be done, and its lack accounts for the ongoing reluctance of many critics, literary historians, and art historians to engage fully with early modern thinking about the very materials they study. This conference will bring together scholars working in departments of English, modern languages, classics, and art history to look at the many different places of early modern criticism. It aims to initiate a dialogue involving scholars who are interested in the scope of criticism, and in looking at what happens on its margins; and who are keen to interrogate their own critical practices and disciplinary methods by investigating their history.
CRASSH Mellon CDI Visiting Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah (New York University) in conversation with Professor Ash Amin (University of Cambridge).
Abstract
“Cosmopolitanism” is an ancient idea – that we are – or should aspire to be –citizens of the world and not merely beholden to a local community. This originally Epicurean and then Christian ideal has become one of the most pressing issues in modern ethics and political thought thanks to the brilliant work of Kwame Anthony Appiah, whose book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers inaugurated a debate that has also been taken forward by Martha Nussbaum and Danielle Allen. If globalization has become the condition of modern society what are the implications for ethical action? Can we care for distant others as vividly as we do for our own immediate ties? How do the claims of a universal ethics stand against the recognition of cultural difference? What “habits of co-existence” are required to make the global world habitable? What narrative or moral or affective obligations make sense in or across modern societies?
Gandhian nonviolence is often misconstrued as a static moral injunction against violence or simply a condemnation of violent resistance. Gandhi himself is portrayed as a saintly idealist, pacifist, or purveyor of conviction politics – a moral critic of politics, speaking from standpoint of conscience and truth. I aim to show why this view of Gandhi and Gandhian politics is misleading. Against the saint-as-politician, or the moral man of conscience, I pursue Gandhi’s political thinking from the vantage point of Gandhi the political actor and innovator who vividly understood that politics is closely bound to the possibility of violence. This was the core of Gandhi’s realism – a view of politics as shaped by endemic tendencies towards conflict, domination, and violence coupled with an account of how nonviolent political action can constrain and mitigate these same tendencies to effect progressive change.
When ends are pursued without sufficient attention to the practical means necessary to enact them, for Gandhi, it gives free reign to the negative entailments of politics: to forms of incitation and indignation, resentment and hostility that dehumanize political opponents; and to psychological temptations towards violence and attendant forms of moral erosion. This lecture explores Gandhi’s understanding of the negative passions and egoistic dispositions that both enable and are enabled by the dynamics of political contestation. I consider Gandhi’s account of the moral psychology of violence alongside the analyses of Max Weber and Reinhold Niebuhr – thinkers particularly significant for the development of realism in the twentieth century. I aim to show how Gandhi’s political thought bridged developments in both Indian and Western intellectual traditions and political repertoires to produce a novel synthesis and provocation.
Mark Mazower, Ira B. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University, will give a public lecture as part of the CRASSH Mellon CDI Visiting Fellowship Programme.
Mark Mazower is Ira B. Wallach professor of history at Columbia University. Trained in classics, philosophy and history at Oxford, and in international affairs at Johns Hopkins University, he is the author of several books on the history of Greece, modern Europe and international affairs. These include: Inside Hitler's Greece: the Experience of Occupation, 1941-44 (Yale, 1993), Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (Penguin, 1998), Salonica: City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950 (HarperCollins, 2004), Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (Penguin, 2008) and most recently Governing the World: the History of an Idea (Penguin, 2012). He comments regularly on international affairs for the Financial Times and the Guardian, and reviews for the TLS, the New York Times, the LRB and other journals.
Public Keynote Lecture
Conference Summary
This two-day conference on institutions and institutional change in South Asia brings together historians, economic historians, economists, sociologists and political scientists to critically discuss and debate institutional development in the region. With panels ranging from the origins of institutions in the region to contemporary attempts at policy reform to the informal economy and innovation, the conference includes contributions from eminent scholars and emerging researchers. The primacy accorded to institutions in literature on economic development by eminent scholars like Dani Rodrik and Daron Acemoglu has been challenged by academics like Ha-joon Chang, but the debate has remained closeted among economists. This conference aims to enrich and expand the dialogue by engaging experts from other disciplines like history and politics to contextualise the emergence of institutions in their historical and socio-political context. The geographical focus on South Asia will enable the discussion to be grounded and targeted at understanding one of the poorest regions of the world, often castigated for its weak and corrupt institutions. The diversity in the fortunes of India and other regional players like Pakistan and Sri Lanka, will allow a critical appreciation of other factors helping or hindering economic growth with or without strong institutions.
Mary Poovey, Samuel Rudin University Professor in the Humanities, New York University, will give a lecture as part of the CRASSH Mellon CDI Visiting Professor programme.
This lecture explores some of the challenges of moving from a lifelong research project centred in eighteenth and nineteenth-century British literature to a project focused on modern economics and finance, mostly in the United States. Mary Poovey will discuss the argument of the book she and Kevin R Brine are completing, A Modern Way of Knowing: Studies in the History of Financial Modeling, and she will examine the risks and rewards of this intellectual swerve.
All medical fields have their cultures, both among professionals and in the wider world. Such cultures tend to be metaphorically rich. By that token surgery has been associated with, variously, butchery, cutting open, delving inside, mutilation, penetration and so on. We can see these features in satires, which for several centuries have developed a critical language, visual as well as verbal, for speaking about the aspects of surgery that perhaps seem most frightening to outsiders, and that may sometimes be embraced by insiders in developing a collective identity. Feminist commentators and artists have been particularly alert to the gender issues embedded in medical cultures generally, and surgical cultures specifically. I was first working on these themes in the 1980s, but since then a good deal has changed. One of the most striking shifts is the rise of elective surgery, which covers a wide range of phenomena, but in all cases is capable of shedding light on the ways people think about, represent and spend money on their bodies. Another is the interest in disability. My current interest is primarily in visual representation. So I also can’t help but observe how persistent religious motifs are in the representation of pain, suffering and bodily mutilation. My talk will consider a range of artistic representations of bodies in the context of surgery, for example, by Barbara Hepworth in the 1940s and John Bellany in the 1980s, and explore how we might use them to think about broader historical and political issues. Surgeons’ relationships with human bodies have been contentious for a long time; visual culture offers rich opportunities for exploring the complexities involved.
Ludmilla Jordanova is Professor of History and Visual Culture at the University of Durham. She has held posts at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Essex, York, East Anglia and at King’s College, London. Her training was in the natural sciences, history and philosophy of science and art history. She has long worked on aspects of medicine, and she seeks to blend history and art history while doing so. A Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery between 2001 and 2009, she is currently a Trustee of the Science Museum group. The Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence in Historical Practice came out in 2012; she is currently preparing the third edition of History in Practice and writing a book about ‘medical’ portraits to be called Traces of Life.
Dame Margaret Anstee en conversación con Almudena de la Cueva y Alison Sinclair, como colofón a la Conferencia y Simposio MacColl, "Recordando a JB Trend: el discreto internacionalista," Universidad de Cambridge, 2013.
Mellon CDI-invited Fellow
Cornel West
Cornel West, one of America’s most celebrated and provocative public intellectuals, in conversation with Ben Okri (novelist) and respondent Malachi McIntosh (University of Cambridge) on Literature and the Nation.
The French Embassy has generously sponsored a cycle of lectures and workshops which bring to Cambridge leading scholars from France to interact and foster research collaborations with experts in Cambridge from across the Schools of Arts and Humanities and Humanities and Social Sciences. In this second year of collaboration, the cycle of talks and workshops will explore the complex theme of identity in 21st-century France and beyond.
The lectures, which will be given in English, are open to any member of the University.
In this fourth lecture, co-organised by the Department of French, Professor Vincent Descombes (L'École des Hautes Études on Sciences Sociales) will give a talk on Criteria for Collective Identities.
The lecture will address the question whether there is any connection between two concepts of identity: the logical concept on the one hand, i.e. 'identity' as we understand it when we make an assertion of identity ('the Morning Star = the Evening star'), and the psychological concept on the other hand, i.e. the kind of identity we have in mind when we are speaking of an 'identity crisis' or putting forward a programme of 'identity politics'.
Firstly, Professor Descombes will consider whether there are identity criteria for collective entities such as cities, schools, churches, countries, etc. This is basically a question about the ontological status of instituted groups. Secondly, he will ask who is in a position to define the criteria to be applied to a group in order to make judgments as to its identity over time. This is a question about the idea of a collective consciousness and a moral psychology of people in groups. Can a group entertain a self-definition like an individual person? Having such a power is what it takes to have an identity in the psychological sense. He will attempt to make sense of such an ascription of a psychological identity to groups by spelling out the semantics of the pronoun 'we'.
About Vincent Descombes
Born in 1943, Vincent Descombes is a French philosopher, based at the Centre de Recherches Politiques Raymond Aron, which is part of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He is also a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago. His Le Même et l’Autre (1979) (translated asModern French Philosophy) provided an important critical account of French philosophy from 1933 to 1978. His subsequent work has engaged with the analytic tradition. Although he has a wide range of interests, he is particularly interested in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of action. Among his many works may be cited: Grammaire d'objets en tous genres, Éditions de Minuit, 1983 (Objects of All Sorts: A Philosophical Grammar, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); Proust: philosophie du roman, Éditions de Minuit, 1987 (Proust: Philosophy of the Novel, Stanford University Press, 1992); Philosophie par gros temps, Éditions de Minuit, 1989 (The Barometer of Modern Reason: On the Philosophies of Current Events, Oxford University Press, 1993); La Denrée mentale, Éditions de Minuit, 1995 (The Mind's Provisions: A Critique of Cognitivism, Princeton University Press, 2001); Les Institutions du sens, Éditions de Minuit, 1996; Le Complément de sujet, Gallimard, 2004; Philosophie du jugement politique, Paris, Points Essais, Seuil, 2008. His lecture will address the theme of identity, which he has explored in Les embarras de l'identité, Gallimard, 2013.
Mellon CDI-invited Fellow
Cornel West
Cornel West, one of America’s most celebrated and provocative public intellectuals, in conversation with Mary Margaret McCabe (KCL) and respondent Constanze Güthenke (Princeton University) on Philosophy in the Public Sphere.
This is the second of two Leverhulme Re:Enlightenment Lectures by Clifford Siskin (Henry W and Alfred A Berg Professor of English and American Literature, New York University; Director, The Re:Enlightenment Project) who is currently a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at CRASSH.
The video of the first lecture When System Met History: The Tectonics of the Modern Disciplines held on Tuesday 5 March 2013 is online here.
These lectures examine how knowledge gets stuck and the strategies for restarting it. Ranging from past to present--and back--they link Galileo's and Bacon’s efforts to advance knowledge to efforts to scale up to new possibilities today. The first lecture highlights the “good fortune” (Bacon) of new tools, by debuting one. Like Galileo's spyglass, "Tectonics" zooms in--in this case, to clarify how our modern disciplines emerged from Enlightenment. The second lecture zooms out to reconsider the history of science in terms of Newton choosing "system" as his tool for guesswork.
Together, these lectures explore the conditions of possibility for a centre such as CRASSH--a collaborative effort to reconnect the arts, social sciences and humanities. The first condition is the division of knowledge into those categories, with their second-order divisions into the narrow but deep disciplines of modernity. The second condition is that we think that there’s something to gain by this reconnect—that knowledge needs new forms of guesswork now. That thought—that we have a historically-specific opportunity for reorganizing and advancing knowledge—is also central to the The Re:Enlightenment Project's effort to explain and transform our Enlightenment inheritance. These lectures are not an effort to study Re:Enlightenment but to enact it.
Dr Gabriel Paquette (The Johns Hopkins University, US):
CRASSH Balzan-Skinner Fellow 2012-13 Romantic Liberalism in Southern Europe, c. 1820-1850
Email: gpaquet1@jhu.edu
In 1820, revolutions broke out in Spain, Naples, and Portugal. The revolutionaries overthrew absolutist regimes and forced monarchs to accept written constitutions and some representative institutions. In the case of the Iberian countries, these years also were marked by the final dismemberment of their Atlantic empires. By 1823, the fledgling liberal governments in Southern Europe had collapsed. The leaders were imprisoned, exiled, or executed. Over the course of the succeeding decades, cycles of revolution and reaction dominated the politics of Southern Europe. The political tumult occurred against the backdrop of, and helped to inform, an extraordinarily fertile cultural moment, Romanticism, which in turn cross-pollinated the political thought of the epoch. By focusing on several leading political writers, poets, historians and novelists from different Southern European countries, the lecture will explore and analyze the intersections, connections, and divergences between Liberalism and Romanticism in Southern Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century.
The French Embassy has generously sponsored a cycle of lectures and workshops which bring to Cambridge leading scholars from France to interact and foster research collaborations with experts in Cambridge from across the Schools of Arts and Humanities and Humanities and Social Sciences. In this second year of collaboration, the cycle of talks and workshops will explore the complex theme of identity in 21st-century France and beyond.
Simon Schaffer (HPS) & Sujit Sivasundaram (History) introduce the conference 'Exploring Traditions: Sources for a Global History of Science'.
Edmund de Waal on his installation 'A Local History' for the Alison Richard Building, University of Cambridge.
Dame Margaret Anstee gives the MacColl lecture beginning the symposium 'Remembering JB Trend: the quiet internationalist,' University of Cambridge, 2013. Further details: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2073/
This is the first of two Leverhulme Re:Enlightenment Lectures by Clifford Siskin (Henry W and Alfred A Berg Professor of English and American Literature, New York University; Director, The Re:Enlightenment Project) who is currently a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at CRASSH.
The second lecture, Guesswork: System, Science, and the Advancement of Knowledge, will be held on Monday 29 April 2013.
These lectures examine how knowledge gets stuck and the strategies for restarting it. Ranging from past to present--and back--they link Galileo's and Bacon’s efforts to advance knowledge to efforts to scale up to new possibilities today. The first lecture highlights the “good fortune” (Bacon) of new tools, by debuting one. Like Galileo's spyglass, "Tectonics" zooms in--in this case, to clarify how our modern disciplines emerged from Enlightenment. The second lecture zooms out to reconsider the history of science in terms of Newton choosing "system" as his tool for guesswork.
Together, these lectures explore the conditions of possibility for a centre such as CRASSH--a collaborative effort to reconnect the arts, social sciences and humanities. The first condition is the division of knowledge into those categories, with their second-order divisions into the narrow but deep disciplines of modernity. The second condition is that we think that there’s something to gain by this reconnect—that knowledge needs new forms of guesswork now. That thought—that we have a historically-specific opportunity for reorganizing and advancing knowledge—is also central to the The Re:Enlightenment Project's effort to explain and transform our Enlightenment inheritance. These lectures are not an effort to study Re:Enlightenment but to enact it.
A talk by Edmund de Waal on his installation 'A Local History' for the Alison Richard Building.
A Local History
A local history is an installation of three vitrines filled with porcelain, sunk below the paving outside the Alison Richard Building on the Sidgwick Site of Cambridge University. These vitrines are meant to be discovered, to be happened upon as you come and go across the site. They are there to make you pause momentarily. They are not sculpture as a Grand Statement.
If you find them and look down through the gridded glass you will see piles of porcelain dishes, cylinders arranged in rows, and aluminium boxes filled with shards. The dishes are taken from moulds that I made from a Chinese Ming Dynasty dish, a plate from the French Sèvres porcelain factory, and a Staffordshire serving dish. These three dishes are iconic in form: they exemplify porcelain from three of the greatest places where it has been manufactured over the last thousand years. You will see that these pieces are glazed in whites, creams and celadons, and that there are also glimpses of gilding. Gold was used to highlight the value of porcelain, a material so prized that it was often called white gold. It was also used in Chinese and Japanese art when a vessel had been broken: to mend the porcelain with a seam of golden lacquer emphasized that it had been used and appreciated. I hope the flashes of gold, the fragments of broken vessels and the memories of ancient dishes act as a kind of palimpsest: a writing, erasing, and rewriting using objects.
If you look up inside the atrium of the building you will see another vitrine, this time full of shelves holding celadon vessels. This vitrine, atlas, is my record of lost pots. It holds 120 lids from lidded jars that I have made over the last twenty years and broken because they were not quite right, because the glaze ran, because of a crack along a rim. If the structure of the vitrine looks familiar, it is because it is a gentle echo of a manuscript page with texts, footnotes and commentaries in intimate conjunction.
All these vitrines are a kind of archive. They record my thinking about the history of porcelain, my travels, my love of fragments, my obsession with shadows, my reading. They are for this particular place – a threshold into a building, and a threshold into a site full of libraries and archives, and the people who care about libraries and archives.
About Edmund de Waal
Edmund de Waal is one of the world’s leading artists working in ceramics today. He is best known for his large-scale installations of porcelain vessels, with interventions at Waddesdon Manor, the Victoria & Albert Museum, Tate Britain and MIMA. Much of his recent work has been concerned with ideas of collecting and collections: how objects are kept together, lost, stolen, or dispersed.
Increasingly, Edmund’s work has come from a dialogue between minimalism, sound and space, seen in his two permanent installations: Signs & Wonders at the V&A and a sounding line at Chatsworth House. In September 2012, Edmund will take his work beyond the museum space in his first piece of public sculpture, a local history, to be installed at the new Alison Richard’s Building at the University of Cambridge. Other future projects include working with the Chinese porcelain collections at the Fitzwilliam Museum, for an exhibition opening in February 2013, and a collaborative project with the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Edmund is also widely known as a writer. In 2010, Chatto & Windus published his family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes, which has become an international bestseller. It has won many literary prizes, including the Costa Biography Award, the Galaxy New Writer of the Year Book Award and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. By 2013, it will be published in over twenty-three languages. In 2011 Edmund was commissioned by Phaidon to write The Pot Book, a colour-illustrated anthology of 300 ceramic vessels. His other publications include a monograph on Bernard Leach (1997) and a survey of 20th Century Ceramics (2003).
Edmund was appointed a Trustee of the V&A and awarded an OBE for his services to art in 2011. In June 2012, he was made a Senior Fellow at the Royal College of Art.
Edmund was born in Nottingham in 1964. During his school years in Canterbury, he was apprenticed to the potter Geoffrey Whiting. After reading English at Cambridge, Edmund spent a further year studying at the Mejiro Ceramics Studio in Tokyo. He lives and works in London.
CRASSH presents an evening with Posy Simmonds, cartoonist and graphic novelist, on inventing plots, characters, make-up, wardrobe, props, location, lighting, special effects, performing goats...
Filming Transnational Interiors
‘Sharing Transnational Interiors: A Boat on the Mediterranean Sea’ - Mireille Rosello
The third Balzan-Skinner lecture and colloquium explores one crooked and circuitous route by which John Locke was claimed by liberalism and came over time to be refashioned in its image. For it was Locke's fate to become the hero of what we might call 'the fable of liberalism', the story which liberalism recounts to itself about its origins and purposes in enacting and reproducing its preferred ways of thinking about the human condition and the nature and limits of political life. This fable begins with Hobbes, and charts a more or less inevitable process which culminates in 'modernity' - the triumph of reason over superstition, of the individual over the inherited order, of the rule of law over the rule of man, of freedom over authority - and the concomitant faltering and waning of authority in all its guises in modern societies. The fable of liberalism, like most fables, is designed to charm the mind. It does not so much ignore or supersede the facts as organize them selectively with a view to perpetuating a particular view of things, a view which associates modernity with reason, individualism, the rule of law, freedom and every good thing in life, refashioning the history of political thought and the internal political and social mechanisms of liberal society alike in its own image.
Locke is a pivotal figure - perhaps the pivotal figure - in the history of liberalism on this view. In liberal minds it was Locke who put into currency the persuasive conceptions which contributed centrally to the emergence and spread of liberal ways of thinking about politics which continue to ramify in the present. It was Locke who established that the legitimacy of a political authority was a necessary condition of obedience to it and that its legitimacy was a product of the consensual route by which it came into existence; and it was Locke who established that the route by which it came into existence determined the ends for which it existed and, with these, the scope of its authority. In short, the liberal desiderata of limited government, legitimacy, and consent were explained in an exemplary way by Locke, and he remains the great exemplar for understanding and conducting politics legitimately even today.
The DH23things programme will begin in September, 2012 with this launch event featuring a session from Meg Westbury of the Judge Business School Library on 30 Things in 30 Mins – a fast-paced tour of 30 of the most useful digital tools available on the web to help the researcher.
23Things for Digital Humanities (DH23) is a self-directed, peer mentored reflective programme to help researchers in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Cambridge University to explore digital technologies and the ways in which they impact on various aspects of their working lives, and thereby to develop their own strategic approach to engagement with digital technologies. It is a way to discover and explore digital tools which might be useful to you but also a framework for evaluation, reflection and wider integration of digital technologies to enhance your work, to the level which is appropriate for you.
POIESIS: Interdisciplinary Interventions on Urban Transformation
Urban Democracy by Design?
Introduction: Poiesis and Cross-Sectoral Work Markus Hipp (Executive Director, BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt)
Panelists: Michael Arad (Partner, Handel Architects) Ricky Burdett (Professor of Urban Studies and Director of the Cities and the Urban Age Programme, London School of Economics) Saskia Sasen (Robert S Lynd Professor of Sociology, Columbia University) Richard Sennett (University Professor, New York University and Centennial Visiting Professor, London School of Economics)
Chair: Ash Amin (1931 Chair in Geography, University of Cambridge)
The Poiesis symposium is the culmination of a three year research project on the making and remaking of cities led by Richard Sennett and Craig Calhoun in partnership with the Herbert Quandt and Gerda Henkel Foundations. Over three days, the international, interdisciplinary, group of scholars and practitioners involved in the project – from architects and filmmakers to physicists, sociologists and lawyers – will be convened by Cambridge geographer Ash Amin to discuss the future city. Combining plenaries, workshops and roundtable discussions, the symposium will debate the salience of reading the city from its physical and cultural infrastructures, the potential of urban democracy 'by design', and the implications of comprehensive urbanism for social thought and political practice.
Workshop on Beauty, Towards Political Anthropology - 2012
Convened by International Political Anthropology [IPA] at the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) Cambridge with IPA book launch.
Professor Arpad Szakolczai (University College Cork) Dr Agnes Horvath (Cambridge University) Dr Harald Wydra (Cambridge University) James Cuffe (University College Cork) Professor Sixto Castro (University of Valladolid) Anna-Riikka Kauppinnen (LSE, London) Arvydas Grisinas (Kent,University of Canterbury) James Fairhead (UCC) Eugene McNamee (University of Ulster, Belfast) Daniel Gati (IPA, Florence) Peter Gati (IPA, Florence) Diletta Tonatto (IPA, Florence) Peter Kearney (UCC) Acomo Oloya (University of Bristol) Tony O'Connor (UCC)
Alexandra Hyde (Gender Institute, LSE)
This paper is based on an ethnographic study of a British Army camp overseas, from the perspective of civilian women married to servicemen. By focusing on the experiences and attitudes of ‘military wives’ within the Army’s social and institutional structure, the aim of this research is to investigate the ways in which the depth and scope of militarisation might be argued to be contingent upon or indeed, mediated by other factors such as gender, race, class, sexuality and national identity. My initial analysis suggests that the terms of the Regiment’s cohesion as a community overseas are negotiated through a range of formal and informal, material and cultural ‘bargains’ with the military.
In the additional context of the Regiment’s recent deployment to Afghanistan, this ethnography also offers some observations on the multiple modes of mobility, absence, mobilization and separation that characterise both the camp’s community as a whole, and the flux of everyday life for military families. In my tentative conceptualisation, I aim to account for a more fluid, productive tension between what I call ‘military mobilities’ and the Regiment’s rigid hierarchies, fixed structure, prescribed traditions and sovereign status. Using ethnographic examples, I will elaborate upon the places where the borderlines of the military merge into the civilian, extend beyond the public life of the institution into the domestic sphere and, in the particular circumstances of the Regiment’s multiple locations, occupy what might be argued as ‘transnational’ social space.
Professor Herbert Huppert (FRS, Chairman of EASAC Working Group on Carbon Capture and Storage)
This is Climate Histories' final meeting of the academic year. Professor Herbert Huppert FRS will speak on past volcanic eruptions and the future of carbon sequestration. He is from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and is interested in modeling complex systems.
Conference Conveners
Ashley Moffett (Professor of Reproductive Immunology) Megan Vaughan (Professor of Commonwealth History)
Conference Summary
Millennium Development Goal 5 (MDG5) aims to improve maternal health. Unlike other MDGs, few countries are on track to achieve even the first goal of MDG 5, namely, to reduce maternal mortality by 75%. Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from the highest regional maternal mortality rate (MMR) at 640 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births and the annual decline has only been 0.1%. In stark contrast, average MMR in developed countries is 14.
The focus for discussion and action to reduce maternal mortality rates is of necessity largely restricted to the fields of medicine and public health. At the same time, however, there is a spectrum of challenging biological, social and cultural issues that constitute the context within which maternal mortality occurs. In our workshop we plan to break new ground by bringing together those with expertise in current initiatives to reduce MMR with leading researchers in genetics, immunology, obstetric epidemiology, and social and biological anthropology.
The aim of the conference is to provide a forum within which people with very different expertise and experience can explore the latest research findings and see how these could influence understanding and ideas for action to reduce maternal mortality in Africa.
The following two areas, taken together, will form the focus of the conference:
Biological mechanisms determining birth outcomes The social and historical context for maternal mortality in Africa We see this as a unique opportunity to bring together those with experience of implementing initiatives aimed at reducing MMR with researchers from different but highly relevant academic disciplines. Our focus on this important issue will enable us to bring together the latest research in fields that all too often do not ‘talk’ to each other. An additional question to be posed in the course of this conversation concerns the very nature of interdisciplinary enquiry. Do we have a language with which to talk meaningfully of the interactions between biology and history? To what extent can basic scientific research inform policy-making?
Conference Conveners
Ashley Moffett (Professor of Reproductive Immunology) Megan Vaughan (Professor of Commonwealth History)
Conference Summary
Millennium Development Goal 5 (MDG5) aims to improve maternal health. Unlike other MDGs, few countries are on track to achieve even the first goal of MDG 5, namely, to reduce maternal mortality by 75%. Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from the highest regional maternal mortality rate (MMR) at 640 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births and the annual decline has only been 0.1%. In stark contrast, average MMR in developed countries is 14.
The focus for discussion and action to reduce maternal mortality rates is of necessity largely restricted to the fields of medicine and public health. At the same time, however, there is a spectrum of challenging biological, social and cultural issues that constitute the context within which maternal mortality occurs. In our workshop we plan to break new ground by bringing together those with expertise in current initiatives to reduce MMR with leading researchers in genetics, immunology, obstetric epidemiology, and social and biological anthropology.
The aim of the conference is to provide a forum within which people with very different expertise and experience can explore the latest research findings and see how these could influence understanding and ideas for action to reduce maternal mortality in Africa.
The following two areas, taken together, will form the focus of the conference:
Biological mechanisms determining birth outcomes The social and historical context for maternal mortality in Africa We see this as a unique opportunity to bring together those with experience of implementing initiatives aimed at reducing MMR with researchers from different but highly relevant academic disciplines. Our focus on this important issue will enable us to bring together the latest research in fields that all too often do not ‘talk’ to each other. An additional question to be posed in the course of this conversation concerns the very nature of interdisciplinary enquiry. Do we have a language with which to talk meaningfully of the interactions between biology and history? To what extent can basic scientific research inform policy-making?
Conveners
Dr Ying Jin (Architecture, University of Cambridge) Dr Tony Hargreaves (Architecture, University of Cambridge) Co-ordinated by Marion Houston
Scientific Committee
Professor Marcial Echenique (Architecture, University of Cambridge) Professor Mike Batty (Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL) Professor Michael Wegener (Spiekermann & Wegener Urban and Regional Research, Dortmund)
Conference Summary
AUM2012 is the second of a planned series of annual symposia for discussing applied urban simulation models that offer insight into complex dynamics of urban change and inform practical initiatives. AUM2012 aims to bring together scholars and practitioners from diverse disciplines, professional institutions and government agencies in many countries. The cross-fertilisation of ideas is expected to serve as a springboard for innovation in urban modelling at different levels – from conceptual experiments to policy appraisal.
AUM2012 will continue to focus on models of large city regions, especially their applications in addressing grand challenges such as energy and climate change. It is open to all model types and styles, with papers welcomed that assess different pathways towards energy efficient and climate wise cities, where system-level thinking is still hampered by a lack of common understanding of the theories and tools. We have also welcomed papers that report innovations in methods and techniques.
The preceding 2011 symposium showed that the format was effective in facilitating an in-depth understanding of the state of the art across model types and styles, and of possibilities to link and interface the models for tackling policy questions. We hope the discussions will lead to meta-analyses that systematically compare model specifications, mechanisms, scenario inputs and policy assessment outputs. An example of such meta-analyses is Wegener (2010) [click here]. The meta-analyses will run concurrently with the symposium series and we look forward to hearing from urban modellers who wish to contribute to it.
In Praise of Shadows: Installations and Archives: A talk by Edmund de Waal at Kettle's Yard
ST Lee Professorial Fellow 2011-12
The ST Lee Professorial Fellowship has been made possible by a generous endowment by Dr ST Lee, of Singapore to the School of Advanced Study at the University of London.
Professor Steven Shapin
A lecture by Steven Shapin (Franklin L Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University) on the cultural and social history of how people have tasted wine and talked about its tastes followed by a wine reception.
Abstract
How have people talked about the organoleptic characteristics of wines? How and why have descriptive and evaluative vocabularies changed over time? These vocabularies have shifted from the spare to the elaborate, from medical implications to aesthetic analyses, from a leading concern with 'goodness' (authenticity, soundness) to interest in the analytic description of component flavours and odours. The causes of these changes are various: one involves the importance, and eventual disappearance, of a traditional physiological framework for appreciating the powers and qualities of different sorts of aliment, including wines; another concerns the development of chemical sciences concerned with flavour components; and still another flows from changing social and economic circumstances in which wine was consumed and the functions served by languages of connoisseurship. The historical span surveyed here extends from Antiquity to the present and displays talk about wine tastes as a perspicuous site for understanding aspects of wide-ranging social and cultural change.
Conveners
Dr Ying Jin (Architecture, University of Cambridge) Dr Tony Hargreaves (Architecture, University of Cambridge) Co-ordinated by Marion Houston
Scientific Committee
Professor Marcial Echenique (Architecture, University of Cambridge) Professor Mike Batty (Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL) Professor Michael Wegener (Spiekermann & Wegener Urban and Regional Research, Dortmund)
Conference Summary
AUM2012 is the second of a planned series of annual symposia for discussing applied urban simulation models that offer insight into complex dynamics of urban change and inform practical initiatives. AUM2012 aims to bring together scholars and practitioners from diverse disciplines, professional institutions and government agencies in many countries. The cross-fertilisation of ideas is expected to serve as a springboard for innovation in urban modelling at different levels – from conceptual experiments to policy appraisal.
AUM2012 will continue to focus on models of large city regions, especially their applications in addressing grand challenges such as energy and climate change. It is open to all model types and styles, with papers welcomed that assess different pathways towards energy efficient and climate wise cities, where system-level thinking is still hampered by a lack of common understanding of the theories and tools. We have also welcomed papers that report innovations in methods and techniques.
The preceding 2011 symposium showed that the format was effective in facilitating an in-depth understanding of the state of the art across model types and styles, and of possibilities to link and interface the models for tackling policy questions. We hope the discussions will lead to meta-analyses that systematically compare model specifications, mechanisms, scenario inputs and policy assessment outputs. An example of such meta-analyses is Wegener (2010) [click here]. The meta-analyses will run concurrently with the symposium series and we look forward to hearing from urban modellers who wish to contribute to it.
A half-day workshop in conjunction with Jay Winter's 2012 Humanitas Visiting Professorship in War Studies at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH).
Prof Alex Danchev : The Images of Abu Ghraib Professor of International Relations, University of Nottingham
Dr Beatrice Jauregui : American Communion: Vietnam War Veterans Reunions Research Fellow in Social Anthropology, Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge
Ms Jananne Al-Ani : The Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land without People Award-winning Artist, London
Building on Professor Jay Winter’s series of lectures on Writing War, Figuring War, and Filming War, as well as a concluding symposium on Imagining War in the 20th Century and After, this workshop will provide an opportunity to further explore the general topic of 'imagining war' by linking it with some of the concerns of the Between Civilisation and Militarisation Faculty Research Group, particularly the murky and manipulable imagined line between 'civil' and 'military' spheres of action and influence. We will focus on the interrelations among the following conceptual triad: conflict + culture + witnessing. In this triad, ‘culture’ will be understood to encompass forms of creative expression and exhibition, as well as definitions of the term that stem from anthropology and political science, in particular the idea of ‘cultural violence’. Questions about practices of ‘witnessing’ and offering ‘testimony’ will be applied not only to the arts, social sciences and humanities as intellectual institutions, but also to the roles and responsibilities that various actors in conflict situations might perform, from military soldiers and museum archivists, to civilians living in war torn spaces, and even to the spaces themselves. Some of the questions raised during the workshop include: What kinds of politics of memory and recognition emerge from war? How do artistic expressions and exhibitions serve various actors in war situations in presenting testimonies of experiences? How have artists been drawn to war themes from ‘outside’ as witnesses to ‘internal’ conflicts? How do artistic and historical memorials offer more and less satisfying testimony to the destruction and loss occasioned by war?
A half-day workshop in conjunction with Jay Winter's 2012 Humanitas Visiting Professorship in War Studies at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH).
Mr Paul Cornish : Exhibiting War. A New First World War Gallery for the Imperial War Museum. Senior Curator and Historian, Imperial War Museum, London
Dr Dacia Viejo-Rose : Cultural and Symbolic Violence: The case of Spain, 1936-2006 British Academy Post-doctoral Fellow, Macdonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge
Dr Khadija Carroll La: If you fight the dragon long, the dragon you become: Comments on Monuments in the Balkan Newton Fellow, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge
Building on Professor Jay Winter’s series of lectures on Writing War, Figuring War, and Filming War, as well as a concluding symposium on Imagining War in the 20th Century and After, this workshop will provide an opportunity to further explore the general topic of 'imagining war' by linking it with some of the concerns of the Between Civilisation and Militarisation Faculty Research Group, particularly the murky and manipulable imagined line between 'civil' and 'military' spheres of action and influence. We will focus on the interrelations among the following conceptual triad: conflict + culture + witnessing. In this triad, ‘culture’ will be understood to encompass forms of creative expression and exhibition, as well as definitions of the term that stem from anthropology and political science, in particular the idea of ‘cultural violence’. Questions about practices of ‘witnessing’ and offering ‘testimony’ will be applied not only to the arts, social sciences and humanities as intellectual institutions, but also to the roles and responsibilities that various actors in conflict situations might perform, from military soldiers and museum archivists, to civilians living in war torn spaces, and even to the spaces themselves. Some of the questions raised during the workshop include: What kinds of politics of memory and recognition emerge from war? How do artistic expressions and exhibitions serve various actors in war situations in presenting testimonies of experiences? How have artists been drawn to war themes from ‘outside’ as witnesses to ‘internal’ conflicts? How do artistic and historical memorials offer more and less satisfying testimony to the destruction and loss occasioned by war?
Professor Jay Winter: Imagining the Great War: The Historial de la grande guerre, Péronne, Somme
Charles J. Still Professor of History, Yale University and CRASSH Visiting Humanitas Professor, University of Cambridge
Building on Professor Jay Winter’s series of lectures on Writing War, Figuring War, and Filming War, as well as a concluding symposium on Imagining War in the 20th Century and After, this workshop will provide an opportunity to further explore the general topic of 'imagining war' by linking it with some of the concerns of the Between Civilisation and Militarisation Faculty Research Group, particularly the murky and manipulable imagined line between 'civil' and 'military' spheres of action and influence. We will focus on the interrelations among the following conceptual triad: conflict + culture + witnessing. In this triad, ‘culture’ will be understood to encompass forms of creative expression and exhibition, as well as definitions of the term that stem from anthropology and political science, in particular the idea of ‘cultural violence’. Questions about practices of ‘witnessing’ and offering ‘testimony’ will be applied not only to the arts, social sciences and humanities as intellectual institutions, but also to the roles and responsibilities that various actors in conflict situations might perform, from military soldiers and museum archivists, to civilians living in war torn spaces, and even to the spaces themselves. Some of the questions raised during the workshop include: What kinds of politics of memory and recognition emerge from war? How do artistic expressions and exhibitions serve various actors in war situations in presenting testimonies of experiences? How have artists been drawn to war themes from ‘outside’ as witnesses to ‘internal’ conflicts? How do artistic and historical memorials offer more and less satisfying testimony to the destruction and loss occasioned by war?
Natalie Zemon Davis and Amitav Ghosh: Storytelling and the Global Past
John-Paul Ghobrial (History, Churchill College)
This public lecture will bring together the prize-winning historian Natalie Zemon Davis and the celebrated novelist Amitav Ghosh to reflect on prevailing approaches to writing about the global past. Masterful storytellers in their own right, both speakers have experimented in novel, poignant, and bold ways with several of the key questions facing global historians today. In doing so, they have also embraced the productive tension at the boundaries of history and fiction. The event, therefore, is intended as much as a reflection on global history as an opportunity to consider wider issues of narrative, plausibility, and authenticity in historical writing in its myriad forms. In doing so, it will encourage the audience and participants to think together about the limits and opportunities facing historians and novelists, respectively, in their attempts to depict the global past.
Rising Powers in the International System: Harnessing Opportunities, Managing Challenges
Rising Powers in the International System Chair and Discussant: Professor Andrew Gamble
The Rise of the BRICs – Dr Jim O’Neill (Goldman Sachs) The Historic Struggle for Mastery – Professor Brendan Simms (POLIS, Cambridge; Member, Steering Committee, CRP) Negotiating with and as New Powers – Dr Amrita Narlikar (POLIS, Cambridge; Director, CRP)
Conference Summary
After witnessing the critical role new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) played in supporting political change in Northern Africa at the beginning of 2011, expectations have grown that in Sub-Saharan Africa authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes may also be challenged by emerging uses of ICTs for political change. However, there have been little signs that long-standing leaders in countries like Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, or Uganda may be ousted from power by a popular uprising supported by and coordinated through the use of new technologies. What are the reasons for this apparent absence of impact? How much of the lack of technologically mediated mobilizations for greater rights and political freedoms depends simply on the limited diffusion of ICTs such as the Internet? How much depends instead on the particular nature of politics on the African continent (where the most significant protests to date have been channelled by partisan and divisive politics rather than being the expression of an empowered civil society)? And, in the absence of revolutionary outcomes, are ICTs affecting and possibly transforming the nature of political mobilization and participation in more subtle ways?
The workshop will address these questions by providing a platform for scholars studying the role of ICTs in political transformations to engage with the arguments put forward by researchers investigating governance processes in Africa. It will focus not only on the newest technologies, but explore the unique ways in which new and old means of communication are being and could be combined in Sub-Saharan Africa to enable citizens to express voice and affect political processes. Participants will examine, for example, whether and how the increasing availability of mobile phones is promoting innovative ways of influencing government policies and of claiming rights, but also how these innovations fit in longer term patterns of use of communication to affect governance. The overarching aim is to explore whether, as has been the case for applications such as mobile banking, the most significant uses of ICTs for participatory politics in Africa may emerge from a unique combination of global influences and local needs, rather than from the application of tools and uses that have been proved successful in external contexts. This inter-disciplinary workshop complements the Cambridge Centre of Governance and Human Rights (CGHR)’s current research project on how innovations in ICTs can transform governance processes in Africa.
Conference Summary
After witnessing the critical role new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) played in supporting political change in Northern Africa at the beginning of 2011, expectations have grown that in Sub-Saharan Africa authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes may also be challenged by emerging uses of ICTs for political change. However, there have been little signs that long-standing leaders in countries like Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, or Uganda may be ousted from power by a popular uprising supported by and coordinated through the use of new technologies. What are the reasons for this apparent absence of impact? How much of the lack of technologically mediated mobilizations for greater rights and political freedoms depends simply on the limited diffusion of ICTs such as the Internet? How much depends instead on the particular nature of politics on the African continent (where the most significant protests to date have been channelled by partisan and divisive politics rather than being the expression of an empowered civil society)? And, in the absence of revolutionary outcomes, are ICTs affecting and possibly transforming the nature of political mobilization and participation in more subtle ways?
The workshop will address these questions by providing a platform for scholars studying the role of ICTs in political transformations to engage with the arguments put forward by researchers investigating governance processes in Africa. It will focus not only on the newest technologies, but explore the unique ways in which new and old means of communication are being and could be combined in Sub-Saharan Africa to enable citizens to express voice and affect political processes. Participants will examine, for example, whether and how the increasing availability of mobile phones is promoting innovative ways of influencing government policies and of claiming rights, but also how these innovations fit in longer term patterns of use of communication to affect governance. The overarching aim is to explore whether, as has been the case for applications such as mobile banking, the most significant uses of ICTs for participatory politics in Africa may emerge from a unique combination of global influences and local needs, rather than from the application of tools and uses that have been proved successful in external contexts. This inter-disciplinary workshop complements the Cambridge Centre of Governance and Human Rights (CGHR)’s current research project on how innovations in ICTs can transform governance processes in Africa.
The Moving Image: Re-configuring Spaces of Loss and Mourning in the 21st Century (26-27 February 2010).
Dr Heather Webb (French and Italian, Ohio) and Dr Florian Mussgnug (Italian, UCL), preview their CRASSH conference 'Apocalissi: Eschatological Imagination in Italian Culture from Dante to the Present' (9-10 October 2009).
Harald Wydra: Understanding New Wars (Conference trailer)
Understanding New Wars (12-13 February 2010).
Dr Saad Eskander (Director, Iraq National Library, Baghdad), 'Iraq National Library and Archives in Transition: Old Tasks and New Responsibilities'. This lecture was part of the Postcolonial Empires Grad/Fac group (October 2009).
James Elkins: 'The Variable Relation of Photography and Science'
Professor James Elkins (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), 'The Variable Relation of Photography and Science'. Professor Elkins was delivering the keynote address for the conference 'William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography' (CRASSH, Cambridge, 24-26 June, 2010).
Hannah Dawson: The normativity of nature in early-modern thought
The Balzan-Skinner inaugural lecturer by Dr Hannah Dawson of the University of Edinburgh, the theme is the normativity of nature. Examining the relationship between nature and morality in early enlightenment thought
Chaired Debate: Is Building Bigger and 'Better' Climate Change Models a Poor Investment? Jonathan Rougier (University of Bristol) and Tim Palmer (University of Oxford)
Deliberating new media: creating alternative politics in the Middle East and Africa?
The New Media / Alternative Politics conference on 14-16 October debated the relationship between communication technologies and political change in the Middle East and Africa. Amy Saunderson-Meyer, from FreedomFone in Zimbabwe, Herman Wasserman of Rhodes University and Firoze Manji, editor of Pambazuka News joined this panel discussion at the opening session.
Chris Gregory: On Money, Debt and Morality: Before Smith, Smith, After Smith
Debt Conference
Keynote Address
Introduced by Dame Marilyn Strathern
Chris Gregory (The Australian National University): On money, debt and morality: Before Smith, Smith, After Smith
The theme of war in paintings like Twombly's Fifty Days at Iliam reveals how martial art becomes polemical in making the destructiveness of the past visible to contemporary viewers.
Professor Simon Goldhill responds, comparing Twombly's classicism with that of another modern artist, Andy Warhol.
In this year's Balzan-Skinner Lecture, Dr Joel Isaac (Queen Mary, University of London) discusses the analytic tradition of philosophy in the United States. The lecture will be followed by a colloquium on Friday 6 May 2011.
Ms Lily Ford (London Consortium): Views from the Air, Viewed in the Archive.
Covert Cultures: Art and the Secret State, 1911-1989
Dr David Hendy (University of Westminster): Radio, Mind-Control & Air War in the Early Twentieth-Century Britain
Covert Cultures: Art and the Secret State, 1911-1989
A colloquium with Cathy Caruth (Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Comparative Literature and English, Emory University). Professor Caruth will be talking about her paper Lying and History. This follows her lecture at CRASSH on Thursday 10 March.
This is Part 2 or 2
A colloquium with Cathy Caruth (Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Comparative Literature and English, Emory University). Professor Caruth will be talking about her paper Lying and History. This follows her lecture at CRASSH on Thursday 10 March.
This is Part 1 or 2
A lecture by Cathy Caruth (Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Comparative Literature and English, Emory University) in which she discusses Derrida's 'Archive Fever', Freud, and Jensen's 'Gradiva'.
The lecture will be followed by a colloquium on Friday 11 March in which Professor Caruth will be talking about her work.
The New Media / Alternative Politics conference on 14-16 October debated the relationship between communication technologies and political change in the Middle East and Africa. Amy Saunderson-Meyer, from FreedomFone in Zimbabwe, Herman Wasserman of Rhodes University and Firoze Manji, editor of Pambazuka News joined this panel discussion at the opening session.
Professor Prasenjit Duara (National University of Singapore), 'Translating Religion and Secularism in China', a lecture in association with the AHRC China Network.
Professor Jay Winter (History, Yale University) 'Moving Images: From Silent Film to Film Silences in War Films, 1914-2009'. Keynote lecture at CRASSH conference 'The Moving Image' (26-27 February, 2010). This paper explores the long history of representation of war in film, from the Great War to the present. It suggests first that silent film provided a form of public séance in an era when spiritualism was at its apogee, and secondly, that it is the silences in later 'talkies' which enable us to see how cinematic mourning practices work.
Professor Veit Erlmann (Butler School of Music, University of Texas at Austin), 'The Physiologist at the Opera: Claude Perrault and the Politics of Pleasure in the Ancien Régime'. Professor Erlmann was speaking to the Mellon-funded seminar series 'Music and Society' as a Mellon Invited Fellow (22, February 2010).
A dance performance by Tzo Zen Ang and Sandy Kwok choreographed by Jennifer Hersch with music by Ruth Boswell. This piece explores the madness which can arise when beauty and pain cannot be assimilated in the psyche as a woman finds herself on the edge between love and loss. The performance was part of the CRASSH conference, 'Pain in Performance and 'Moving Beauty'' (21-22 May, 2010).
A dance performance by Tzo Zen Ang, Saba Hinrichs and Jennifer Hersch, choreographed by Lise Smith. The performance was part of the CRASSH conference, 'Pain in Performance and 'Moving Beauty'' (21-22 May, 2010).
Dr Havi Carel (Philosophy, University of the West England), 'Subjective Wellbeing and Objective Health'. Keynote lecture at the Health and Welfare Group Annual Symposium at CRASSH (16 June 2010).
Lines from a verse-letter by John Keats, set to music by Jeremy Thurlow. Performers: Gwylim Bowen (tenor), Misha Mulloy-Abbado (horn), Jeremy Thurlow (piano). The performance was part of the CRASSH conference, 'Pain in Performance and 'Moving Beauty'' (21-22 May, 2010).
A performance by Jeremy Hardingham with Lucy Beynon and Lisa Jeschke in Berlin. The performance was part of the CRASSH conference, 'Pain in Performance and 'Moving Beauty'' (21-22 May, 2010).
An event co-organised by the Centre of Governance and Human Rights (CG+HR), Cambridge, The Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA) and CRASSH, in which refugee academics shared their experiences confronting professional and personal threats in their native countries along with the challenges of settling and working in the UK.
Professor David Spiegelhalter re-caps on the scope of the year-long Mellon Sawyer sponsored seminar series Modelling Futures and looks towards the Series-concluding international conference in September 2010.
Professor Elaine Scarry (English, Harvard), 'Beauty and Social Justice'. Professor Scarry was delivering the first of two keynote addresses to the conference 'Pain in Performance and 'Moving Beauty' (21-22 May, 2010). The second keynote (available in the CRASSH collection) was by Professor Helmut Lethen (The IFK, Vienna)
Professor Helmut Lethen (The IFK, Vienna), ''Pain has no meaning' (Paul Valéry). Narratives of Anti-Therapeutic Realism as a Provocation of Cultural Studies'. Professor Lethen was delivering the second of two keynote addresses to the conference 'Pain in Performance and 'Moving Beauty' (21-22 May, 2010). The first keynote (available in the CRASSH collection) was by Professor Elaine Scarry (English, Harvard).
Professor Maarten Hajer (Director of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and Professor of Public Policy at the University of Amsterdam), 'Reframing Climate Policy: Reflections on Science, Politics and the Role of the State'. Professor Hajer was delivering the keynote address at the conference 'Democratising Futures' (28 May). Part of the Mellon Sawyer sponsored seminar series 'Modelling Futures: Understanding Risk and Uncertainty'.
Roberto Scazzieri (Professor of Economic Analysis, Economics, Bologna and CAMSHET - Cambridge History of Economic Analysis at Clare Hall). Opening lecture at CRASSH conference 'Rethinking Social Economy' (7 May, 2010).
Dr Ha-Joon Chang (Economics, Cambridge) and Dr Milfor Bateman (Economics, Juraj Dobrila Pula, Croatia) speaking at CRASSH conference 'Rethinking Social Economy' (7 May, 2010).
Dr Sarah Kember and Dr Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths, University of London) address the question of 'creativity' and its application under the umbrella of 'creative industries'; they consider the links often made with originality, genius or chance and offer an alternative reading that draws on work by Henri Bergson and Jacques Derrida (CRASSH, 17 May 2010. Part of the Intermedia Research Group.)
Professor Sheldon Pollock (Columbia): The Great Chain of Academic Being: A View from the Bottom: Reflections on the Non-Western, the Non-Modern and the Philological (CRASSH, 13 May, 2010). Professor Pollock was speaking at the Centre as part of the Mellon CDI Invited Fellows Programme.