Music, Politics and Agency Seminar 3: Sonic Radicalism

By jamiehakim | Published: 18 May 2012
23 May 2012
13:00to17:00

Centre for Cultural Studies Research, School of Arts and Digital Industries, University of East London presents

Music, Politics and Agency Seminar 3: Sonic Radicalism

Room EB.1.03, Docklands Campus, University of East London

Can sound subvert? Thinkers since Plato have assumed that it can, that social form and musical form are intrinsically linked, resonant, or pre-figurative of each other. In this seminar, leading and innovative thinkers will interrogate and explore these claims and their implications.

Speakers and Papers:

Adam Harper
Musical Radicalism Beyond the Sonic

Adam Harper is a music critic, music theorist and author of Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making (Zero Books), which argues for a contemporary reappraisal of modernist aesthetics and offers a system for understanding musical creativity, as well as pamphlets on the future of music and underground pop music for the Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts and Precinct respectively. He is a PhD candidate, tutor and teacher at the University of Oxford, writes regularly for Wire and Dummy magazines and blogs at Rouge’s Foam.

Matthew Pritchard

‘Cornelius Castoriadis: Music and the Radical Imagination’

Matthew Pritchard is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Music Faculty, University of Cambridge. His work centres on the history of music theory and aesthetics in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, addressing such topics as the role of the musical motive as vehicle for metaphorical imagination and negotiation, the political origins of modern music analysis, and the social organization of music-aesthetic discourse. “Who killed the concert? Heinrich Besseler and the inter-war politics of Gebrauchsmusik” recently appeared, with an accompanying translation of Besseler’s 1925 essay “Fundamentals of Musical Listening”, in the journal /twentieth-century music/.

Dhanveer Singh Brar

“The whites have become black” – grime, blackness and pathology

Dhanveer is a PhD candidate in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College. His research focuses on black radicalism and its obscured manifestation through phonic substance. He has taught at Goldsmiths College, University of East London and Central St Martins College of Art. Dhanveer is also a member of the University for Strategic Optimism.

Respondent – Jeremy Gilbert

Chair – Tim Lawrence

All Welcome – No need to register

Room EB.1.03 is on the first floor, main building: turn left from main square when entering the square from Cyprus station.

Cyprus DLR (Docklands Light Railway) station is literally situated at the campus.

To plan your journey to Cyprus station,seehttp://journeyplanner.tfl.gov.uk/user/XSLT_TRIP_REQUEST2?language=en

Please allow time for possible transport delays and for finding your way around the campus.

For any further details contact j.gilbert@uel.ac.uk

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Critical Beats 4: Dancing, Sound Systems and Party Environments

By jamiehakim | Published: 18 May 2012
14 June 2012
19:30to21:30
The Centre for Cultural Studies Research at the University of East London presents the final event in the CB series:
Critical Beats #4: Dancing, Sound Systems and Party Environments
Circus 2 at Stratford Circus, £3/£1
Why do different scenes generates different forms of dancing? How do differently configured sound systems create different party environments? Does the quality of sound matter anymore? Do we need DJs and party scenes now we’ve got the internet? Is London party culture suffering a death by property price inflation?

Panelists: Snowboy, Julian Henriques, Colleen Murphy, Jeremy Gilbert
Moderator: Tim Lawrence

Snowboy (a.k.a. Mark Cotgrove ) is the author of From Jazz Funk & Fusion to Acid Jazz: The History of the UK Jazz Dance Scene as well as a percussionist, DJ, music promoter and bandleader of Snowboy and the Latin Section.
Julian Henriques is the author of Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing.
Colleen Murphy (also known as DJ Cosmo) is a founding member of Lucky Cloud Sound System and the organiser of Classic Album Sundays. She has DJed at the Loft and Deep Space in New York.
Jeremy Gilbert is the co-author of Discographies: Dance Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound. He is a founding member of Lucky Cloud Sound System and DJs at Beauty and the Beat.
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How Do you Like Your Diversity? Unravelling Multiculturalism, Interculturalism and Cosmopolitanism

By jamiehakim | Published: 18 May 2012
22 May 2012
18:30to20:30

CCSR is delighted to announce:

How Do you Like Your Diversity? Unravelling Multiculturalism, Interculturalism and Cosmopolitanism

Panel discussion led by Handel Kashope Wright, with respondents Mica Nava, Roshini Kempadoo and Ashwani Sharma

Location: Rivington Place, London EC2A 3BA

Admission: £5 (£3 concs) + booking fee.

Handel Wright will analyse developments and limitations in the theories and politics of multiculturalism and diversity. He will be joined by Mica Nava, Roshini Kempadoo and Ashwani Sharma who will engage with Wright’s analysis from the perspectives of their own research and practice. The discussion will include a review of the usefulness of terms such as multiculturalism, diversity, interculturalism and cosmopolitanism in the contemporary political context. Accelerating global trends in online social environments, the arts and popular culture confound the debate and everyday experiences of difference and social justice. The panel asks if our established theoretical and creative practices are adequate to the challenges posed by neo-liberalism, transnational urban cultures and emergent forms of bio-political racism.

http://www.iniva.org/events/what_s_on/how_do_you_like_your_diversity

http://www.eventbrite.com/event/3442000115

This event is a collaboration between Iniva and the Centre for Cultural Studies Research (CCSR) School of Art and Digital Industries, University of East London.

Handel Kashope Wright is Professor and Director of the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education at University of British Columbia, Canada and has published widely on Africana cultural studies, anti-racism, multiculturalism and its alternatives. He is currently visiting Research Professor at CCSR, University of East London.

Mica Nava is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of East London. Her most recent book is Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Gender, Culture and the Normalisation of Difference.

Roshini Kempadoo is a Photographer, Media Artist and Reader at the University of East London. The photographs State of Play (2011) were recently exhibited in Justina Barnicke Gallery, Toronto. Her chapter ‘Imagining Her(story): Engendering archives’ in Renewing Feminisms: Radical Narratives, Fantasies and Futures in Media Studies is out later this year.

Ashwani Sharma is Principal Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London, and is the co-editor of the online journal darkmatter (www.darkmatter101.org). He is currently completing a book on Race and Visual Culture in the Global Age.

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CCSR Annual Lecture 2012 – Richard Sennett

By jamiehakim | Published: 8 March 2012
29 May 2012
17:30to19:30

The Centre for Cultural Studies Research is delighted to announce its 2012 Annual Lecture


THE CRAFT OF COOPERATION

to be given by

RICHARD SENNETT

Richard Sennett is Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and at New York University. In his long and distinguished career he has written fifteen exceptionally influential books, among them The Fall of Public Man (1977), The Conscience of the Eye (1991), The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (1998),Respect, In an Age of Inequality (2003), The Culture of the New Capitalism (2005), The Craftsman (2008) and, most recently, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation (2012)

West Building Ground Floor Theatre
University of East London Docklands Campus
DLR station: Cyprus

Refreshments will follow the lecture

ALL WELCOME      ADMISSION FREE

RSVP here

Further information from Jeremy Gilbert (j.gilbert@uel.ac.uk)

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Music, Politics, Agency: Gender, Sexuality and Sound

By jamiehakim | Published: 28 February 2012
7 March 2012
14:00to18:30
Centre for Cultural Studies Research presents
Music, Politics, Agency: Gender, Sexuality and Sound
Wednesday 7 March 2012
14:00-18:30
UEL’s Docklands Campus
EB.G.11
(ground floor, main building, turn left upon entering the main square after leaving Cyprus DLR (which is situated at the campus))
Free. All welcome. No need to book.
Lisa Blanning (The Wire), A Feminist Reading of Gangsta Rap
Freya Jarman-Ivens (University of Liverpool), Classical Music, Affective Marketing, and Distributed
Subjectivities
Tim Lawrence (UEL), Networking and Contact: Samuel Delany, Queerness and the New York Dance Floor, 1980-83
Helen Reddington (UEL), Outside the Box: Gendered Mediation in Contemporary Recording Practice
Moderator: Jeremy Gilbert (UEL)
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Pushing the Limits of the Affective Workspace: Revolts, Absorption, and Ecologies of Waste

By jamiehakim | Published: 27 February 2012
21 March 2012
14:00to17:00
Centre for Cultural Studies Research presents

Pushing the Limits of the Affective Workspace: Revolts, Absorption, and Ecologies of Waste

A symposium with Jussi Parikka, Stevphen Shukaitis and Tony D. Sampson

Chair: Jeremy Gilbert, CCSR

Wednesday March 21st 2012
2:00pm-5:00pm
UEL Docklands Campus
Room EB.G.10
(ground floor, main building, turn left upon entering the main square after leaving Cyprus DLR (which is situated at the campus))
Free, All welcome. No need to book.

The boundaries of capitalist workspaces are continuously stretched to new limits. Work is pushed into the home, the obsolescent and the unconscious. Focusing on affective labour, new materialism and neuromarketing, this seminar looks initially beyond the media screens of the digital industries to the wasteful ecologies of obsolescent technology. It then explores resistance to contemporary capitalism extending to, for example, the refusal of caring labour. Last, it repositions the attentive subject of cognitive capitalism in a neurological space of absorbent and mostly unconscious consumption.

Media Matters as Ecology
Jussi Parikka, Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton).

This talk investigates “new materialism” through the context of media ecology – but ecology understood literally and through electronic waste, and the various temporalities and materialities of obsolescence. It argues, following Sean Cubitt’s and German media theory lead, for such a focus to technical media that accounts not only what’s on the screen, but what enables “media” as content to exist. German media theory has been successful to track this back to the engineering and scientific roots of modern entertainment media, but this talk focuses on electronic waste, and its relation to information technology work, but from a slightly alternative perspective. As such, the talk also touches discussions of “affective labour” as well as non-representational approaches to contemporary media culture.

Learning from Affective Revolts: Social Reproduction & Political Subjectiviation
Stevphen Shukaitis, University of Essex / Autonomedia

Despite the importance that autonomist feminism has played in the development of autonomist politics and struggles it is commonly relegated to little more than a glorious footnotes of figures emerging out of operaisti thought (such as Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno). Organizing around gender, affective labor, and issues of reproduction posed numerous important questions to forms of class struggle that focused exclusively on the figure of the waged industrial worker. Revolts of housewives, students, the unwaged, and farm workers led to a rethinking of notions of labor, the boundaries of workplace, and effective strategies for class struggles: they enacted a critical transformation in the social imaginary of labor organizing and struggle. By drawing on the history and of these struggles (such as the various Wages for Housework Campaigns and current organizing such as Precarias a la Deriva) and ideas of those involved (such as Silvia Federici, Leopoldina Fortunati, Mariarosa Dallacosta, and Alisa Del Re) this paper will explore some lessons that can be learned from these a(e)ffective insurgency.  Taking seriously the questions posed by these struggles are extremely important because as Alisa Del Re argues, attempting to refuse and reduce forms of imposed labor and exploitation without addressing the realms of social reproduction and housework amounts to building a notion of utopia upon the continued exploitation of female labor. Furthermore the often cramped positions that organizing forms of affective labor and social reproduction (housewives, sex workers, etc) occupies becomes all the more important as these processes are further integrated into the composition of contemporary capitalism. How does one refuse caring labor? Strategies for organizing around affective labor, what Precarias a la Deriva have called a “very careful strike,” are important to learn from to find ways “not a high productivity of domestic labor but a higher subversiveness in the struggle.” (Dallacosta/James)

Following the Glint in the Eye of the Consumer
Tony D. Sampson, University of East London
New developments in marketing techniques not only aim to sidestep the self-reporting of consumer experiences, but also look beyond the explicit cognitive realm of visual representation to exploit instead the implicit, unconscious affective systems of consumption. Like this, the neuromarketer measures the streams of affect the consumer somatically absorbs in the atmosphere. As the enthusiastic CEO of one US based neuromarketing company puts it, these techniques help the marketer to go beyond conscious consumer engagement with a product and actively seek out what unconsciously attracts them. “Absorption is the ideal,” he claims. This is because it “signifies that the consumer’s brain has not only registered your marketing message or your creative content, but that the other centers of the brain that are involved with emotions and memory have been activated as well.” Along these lines, persuasion and absorption seemingly involves priming the sensory experiences of consumption so as to achieve a number of design goals intended to influence purchase intent.
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Critical Beats: Electronic Dance Music, Club Culture and the East London Connection

By jamiehakim | Published: 13 February 2012
23 February 2012
19:30to21:30
Co-hosts the Centre for Cultural Studies Research at UEL and the Wire present:
Critical Beats: Electronic Dance Music, Club Culture and the East London Connection
#3: Aesthetics, Innovation and Tradition
Has electronic dance music culture reached the point of aesthetic exhaustion? Is sonic innovation now misunderstood by critics who aren’t connected to the dance music scene? Or is newness overrated to begin with?
Panelists: Simon Reynolds (Retromania, Rip It Up and Start Again, Energy Flash), Lisa Blanning (the Wire), Tony Herrington (the Wire)
Moderator: Steve Goodman (Kode9, Sonic Warfare, UEL)
Circus 1 at Stratford Circus, Thursday 23 February 2012, 19:30-21:30, £5/£2
Advanced booking recommended:
Box office: 0844 357 2625
With thanks to the Institute of Performing Arts Development.
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Then and Now: The Changing Context of Debate?

By jamiehakim | Published: 9 November 2011
9 November 2011
18:30

The current exhibition, Entanglement: The Ambivalence of Identity (14th September – 19th November 2011) curated by Iniva provides an opportunity to explore a context for international and artists of the diaspora, their work and its curation.

Cultural policy on identity, advocacy by artists, critics and theorists of African, Asian and Caribbean diaspora, and curatorial approaches to multiculturalism have most often shaped and determined the debates about artists from the colonial/postcolonial diaspora. Their work and status have been defined by such contexts over the last 20 years in Britain.

The panelists of Then and Now, Karen Alexander, Roshini Kempadoo (CCSR), Nina Mangalanayagam and Ashwani Sharma (CCSR) will explore how identity politics, definitions of blackness and internationalism are ongoing concerns for artists and curators albeit set within changing practices, definitions and attitudes. Against a historical backdrop of notes from Iniva’s archive, this panel will explore this legacy in a contemporary climate in which state multiculturalism is declared dead, where there are increasing pressures for public/private arrangements for art institutions, and where artists work within a hyper-globalised art environment.

For more information:  http://www.iniva.org/events/what_s_on/then_and_now

Location: Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts), Rivington Place, EC2A 3BA

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Jack Halberstam podcast

By jamiehakim | Published: 27 October 2011

Jack Halberstam gave a riveting paper yesterday on her new book The Queer Art of Failure (2011), which looks at, amongst other things, how failure can be used to mobilize radical politics.

To listen to a podcast of the talk and the Q&A that followed click here: Jack Halberstam

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PoP Moves: VENUE CHANGE

By jamiehakim | Published: 27 October 2011

Due to unforeseen circumstances, the venue for the PoP Moves has been changed. We will now be meeting at the Docklands campus of the University of East London (University Way, E16 2RD). This is located beside the Cyprus station on the DLR. See the Docklands campus map here.

For more details on the venue change click here: Amplifying Movement IMP INFO

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  • CCSR Publications

    pick poetics cover

    Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts by Maggie Humm

    Hold On To Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-92 by Tim Lawrence

    Snapshots of Bloomsbury by Maggie Humm

    Technoculture The Key Concepts by Debra Benita Shaw

    Anticapitalism and Culture by Jeremy Gilbert

    Visceral Cosmopolitanism by Mica Nava
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