Our conference for 2013 will address the problematics of space both as concept and as lived social reality, with a particular emphasis on the tension between spaces of control in the context of contemporary neoliberalism, spaces of resistance and the apocalyptic spaces which emerge from war, forced migration and the failures of consumer capitalism.

What are the politics of space in contemporary contexts? How can we re-think space beyond the public/private divide? How do spatial arts re-configure space and the way in which it is experienced? What new configurations of space may emerge from burgeoning forms of community? How do the theatres of contemporary war force a re-assessment of spatial concepts? Is it still possible for the notion of virtual space to function in opposition to the striated space of contemporary cities?

We are pleased to announce that Deborah Dixon and Carl Lavery of Aberystwyth University,  Dimitris Papadopoulos (University of Leicester) and the independent artist Joanna Rajkowska have been confirmed as keynote speakers. The conference will also offer the chance to participate in movement workshops and performative explorations of space. Registration details and a full programme will be published here shortly.

The family and, in particular, maternal behaviour, has long been subject to public scrutiny. However, since the mid-1990s heightened government and media concern with parenting practices has produced a series of escalating moral panics around child welfare issues. While overt parent-bashing and bewailing the demise of the ‘traditional’ family were once associated with the moral majority in the US and old-style Conservatives in the UK, government intrusion into and commentary on family life has become increasingly central to the discourse of all mainstream political parties. The assumption parental incompetency– rather than broader socio-economic conditions–is responsible for a range of social problems has been reflected in public policy and the rise of media commentary (in current affairs journalism and reality TV), on the subject of modern parenting.

The Family in Crisis symposium brings together a range of scholars from sociology, cultural studies, journalism, history and literature in order to analyse the way the neoliberal rhetoric of competitiveness and individualism has accompanied the hostile scrutiny of parents/family life reflects and reinforced certain middle-class, hetero-normative views of gender relations and family life as well as the ways in which this can and has been resisted.
Topics include: The family and moral crusades, the ‘problem’ of teenage girls, maternal memoirs, childcare gurus and the discourse of infant determinism, the same sex couples bill, comic dad’s lit and the domestic sublime in contemporary literature.

Confirmed speakers: Professor Frank Furedi, Dr Julia Dane, Dr Roberta Garrett, Dr Jan Macvarish, Professor Peter Childs and Dr Michael Peplar.

Venue: SportsDock (SD) 1.12, Docklands Campus, University of East London.

The event is free but registration is required in advance and places are limited. Please contact Roberta Garrett (r.garrett@uel.ac.uk) the seminar convener, to confirm your attendance.

Professor Frank Furedi, Keynote speaker
Frank Furedi is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent’s School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research. He is a cultural commentator who has appeared on Newsnight, Sky and BBC News, Radio Four’s Today program and has published many articles in UK and international newspapers . He is the author of Culture of Fear, Where Have All The Intellectuals Gone?, Paranoid Parenting, Therapy Culture, and On Tolerance: In Defence of Moral Independence and has recently published a book on the Jimmy Saville scandal : Moral Crusades in an Age of Mistrust: The Jimmy Saville Scandal

Dr Julia Dane
Having obtained a degree in Psychosocial Studies at UEL, Julia conducted her Postgraduate research in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, London. Julia’s research interests are around media representation of gender and sexuality. In particular, she is interested in teenage girls’ engagement with contemporary discourses of femininity. Julia has taught Media and Advertising at UEL since 2006, with a focus on representation and audience/consumer research.

Dr Jan Macvarish
Dr Jan Macvarish is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Kent. Her interests lie in the sociology of interpersonal relationships, parenting, family life, sex and intimacy. Her doctoral thesis (2007), entitled ‘The New Single Woman: Contextualising Individual Choice’, explored the construction of contemporary singleness through qualitative interviewing of single, childless women and cultural analysis of the new ‘culture of singleness’. She has been involved in a study of teenage parents, a ESRC-funded study, ‘Assessing Child Welfare under the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act: the new law ‘ and is currently working on the Faraday Institute funded study, ‘Biologising parenting: neuroscience discourse in English social and public health policy’

Dr Roberta Garrett
Dr Roberta Garrett is a senior lecturer in literature at the University of East London. She has published a book on gender and postmodern film: Postmodern Chick Flicks (Palgrave, 2007) and articles on women’s film and gender and the family. She is currently researching a book on literary representations of the modern family which examines misery memoirs, comic ‘mum’s lit, women’s autobiographical writing on motherhood and dysfunctional domestic novels

Professor Peter Childs
Peter Childs has recently been appointed Pro Vice-Chancellor (leading research and scholarship) at Newman University. He has published numerous essays and articles on authors such as Paul Scott, Ian McEwan, E. M. Forster and Hanif Kureishi. He has additionally edited or written over a dozen books on diverse subjects ranging from contemporary British culture to post-colonial theory. He has published most recently on Ian McEwan and contemporary British heritage fiction, and is currently researching a monograph on Julian Barnes for Manchester University Press. Peter was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship by the Higher Education Academy in 2004 and elected a Fellow of the English Association in 2005.

Dr Michael Peplar
Dr Michael Peplar is Assistant Professor of History, Academic Director, Boston University London. He is currently teaching literature and history, with a particular focus on contemporary London. He has written a monograph on the Family Matters: Ideas about the Family in British Culture since 1945, Longman, 2002 and is currently working on debates on the same-sex marriage bill.

CONFLICTING  LEGACIES, HUGO CHAVEZ AND MARGARET THATCHER: Neo-liberalism and new wars versus social justice and peace

Tariq Ali is a writer and filmmaker. He has written over two dozen books on world politics and history. His novels, including the series known as the ’Islam Quintet’, have been translated into many languages. He is a longstanding editor of the New Left Review and writes regularly for the London Review of Books and the Guardian

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

Refreshments will follow the lecture

ALL WELCOME      ADMISSION FREE

What does gender mean in an age defined by post-feminist ideologies, and in cultures that have been ‘sexualised’? Women may have been gaining economic, social and cultural entitlements in recent years, but post-Fordist economies continue to exploit gender inequalities. And whilst a variety of ‘new femininities’ have promised freedoms and opportunities, they have also articulated further responsibilities associated with being a woman in the twenty-first century. Similarly, the increasing visibility of so-called ‘softer’ masculinities and the continuing appeal of the metrosexual man seem to signal transformations in the idea of what it means to be a man. Yet such opportunities for softness and flexibility are unevenly available in economic conditions designed to install an equality of inequality. If men are becoming softer and women more post-feminist, how are we to understand the position of queer identities? Is homosexuality ‘disappearing’ in the drive towards homonormativity? Is there a place for gender dissent in lesbian and gay cultures, or do challenges to binary constructions of gender and domestic nuclearity no longer have any meaning in an era of gay marriage?

Future Sex brings together a range of speakers from media, cultural and literary studies, and sociology to consider the question of gender in neoliberalism. Topics under discussion will include the nature of the acceptable phallus, sex advice, competition and modern man, mum’s lit, the future of the sissy, gender and sex on MTV, and how women’s labour is performed.

Confirmed speakers: Ros Gill, Bev Skeggs, Andrew Branch, Julia Dane, Roberta Garrett, Catherine Harper, Stephen Maddison.

Venue: Room EB.2.44, East Building, University of East London, Docklands Campus

The event is free but registration is required in advance and places are limited. Please contact either Andrew Branch (a.r.branch@uel.ac.uk) or Stephen Maddison (s.maddison@uel.ac.uk), the seminar conveners, to confirm your attendance.

Professor Bev Skeggs
Bev’s research interests consolidate around the issue of value and values. How do we know what value and values are? What do they do? Bev only realized this was her central concern recently when she was asked to summarise her work and noticed that all her research has been framed around these issues. Hence value/s has led her through issues of class and gender formation, an exploration of symbolic value through media and cultural formations; using feminist and poststructuralist theory, Pierre Bourdieu and to the economic abstractions of Marx, to help her understand. Bev’s still working on this topic (it is her life’s work), currently attempting to understand how value moves on, through and with people as they live the imperatives of exchange in capitalism. But, more significantly, what remains beyond exchange? What matters to people? How do they formulate value/s beyond economic perceptions? Bev has been developing the idea of ‘person value’ through ‘value struggles’ to understand how different forms of de/valued personhood are lived. In July 2011 she became the joint managing editor of the journal Sociological Review, a major journal which has just celebrated 100 years of shaping the field and became, in 2003, an elected Academician of the Academy of the Learned Societies for the Social Sciences. Bev’s paper is titled, ‘Performing one’s value in public; the sensual spectacle of women’s labour’.

Professor Ros Gill
Rosalind Gill completed her PhD in Social Psychology at the Discourse and Rhetoric Group (DARG), Loughborough University in 1991, and has since worked across a number of disciplines including Sociology, Gender Studies and Media and Communications. She has been based at Goldsmiths College, the Open University and spent 10 years at the LSE before moving to King’s College London to take up a position as Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis in 2010. Ros’ current research interests centre around the following themes: cultural and creative work; media and popular culture; discursive, narrative, visual and psychosocial approaches and gender and sexuality. Ros, and her colleagues Laura Harvey and Meg Baker, will be discussing mediated sex advice in magazines, self-help texts, on TV and online.

Dr Andrew Branch
Andrew is a member of the Centre for Cultural Studies Research and the London East Research Institute. His current research focus is on the representations of social class by those media which seek to regulate its hierarchical structure. He is particularly interested in how working-class youth subjectivities are embodied, formulated and negotiated in this respect and how cultural geography can help us explore specific sites of cultural incubation. Andrew’s working paper is titled, ‘In it to win it’ and will allow him to discuss his current project on sexuality and the making of modern men. His website is located at: www.andrewbranch.org.uk

Dr Julia Dane
Having obtained a degree in Psychosocial Studies at UEL, Julia conducted her Postgraduate research in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, London. Julia’s research interests are around media representation of gender and sexuality. In particular, she is interested in teenage girls’ engagement with contemporary discourses of femininity. Julia has taught Media and Advertising at UEL since 2006, with a focus on representation and audience/consumer research. Julia’s paper is titled, ‘How low can you go? Gender and sexuality in MTV’s The Valleys’.

Dr Roberta Garrett
Roberta teaches Literature and Cultural Studies at UEL. She has published a book on postmodern cinema and women’s film (Postmodern Chick-Flicks, Palgrave, 2007) and is currently working on representations of parenting and family culture in neoliberalism. Roberta will be discussing novels and children in the form of mum lit and the public mother.

Professor Catherine Harper
Catherine started as the new Dean of the School of Arts and the Digital Industries in October 2011. She has led Architecture and Design at the University of Brighton for five years, with previous academic, research and management experience at the University for the Creative Arts, the University of the Arts, Goldsmiths College and the University of Ulster. Originally a visual arts and textiles practitioner, she has specialised in public commissions, installation and performance, undertaking artist residencies in Ireland, Canada and the Czech Republic. She now writes on textiles, is UK editor of Textile: the Journal of Cloth and Culture, and sits on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education. Her first book was published by Berg in 2007, and her third, Fabrics of Desire, will be delivered in late 2012. A member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College and an Arts Council Advisor, Catherine is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and sits on the International Committee for Fashion in Fiction. Catherine’s paper is titled, ‘The acceptable phallus…’.

Dr Stephen Maddison
Stephen is a member of the Centre for Cultural Studies Research at UEL and of the On/Scenity AHRC-Funded Research Network, and co-runs the website OpenGender where you can read many of his articles and chapters, as well as writing by colleagues on sexuality, gender and neoliberalism. Stephen’s research addresses questions of sexuality and gender, cultural politics and popular culture. He is currently working on two major projects, one on the materialism of pornography, and one on the author Philip Pullman. Pornography is the world’s most prolific and profitable culture industry, with a social impact beyond the tens of thousands of porn films and sites produced each year. Stephen’s work on pornography has appeared in several major collections, including Mainstreaming Sex (2009), Porn.com (2010) and Hard to Swallow (2011). Philip Pullman is the hugely successful author of the His Dark Materials Trilogy, and is a prominent cultural commentator. Stephen’s research, undertaken collaboratively with Dr Christine Butler, addresses notions of childhood, education, agency and bourgeois dissent in the context of neoliberalism. Stephen’s paper is titled, ‘Is the future sissy?’

Presented in association with Iniva, the fourth and final event in the Centre for Cultural Studies Research seminar series Culture & Polity explores the question of public policy. As the government’s austerity drive continues to whittle away arts funding while ministers question the very value of the arts, how should artists and arts bodies respond? What might a progressive arts policy look like? Is Britain’s cultural and creative sector under threat. Or will hard times inspire aesthetic and political radicalism?

Speakers: Tessa Jackson, Chief Executive Officer, Iniva; Áine O’Brien, Co-Director of Counterpoints Arts, London; Gavin Poynter, Professor and Chair, London East Research Institute, University of East London, and Cecilia Wee, London Regional Council of Arts Council England.

Venue: PS2, Iniva, Rivington Street, London

Admission £7/£5

Tessa Jackson: Chief Executive Officer, Iniva. Tessa has over 25 years experience within the visual arts as a gallery director, curator, and consultant on cultural policy and strategic planning in Britain and internationally. Tessa was the founding Artistic Director of Artes Mundi and has curated recent exhibitions by NS Harsha, Chen Chieh-jen and Zineb Sedira.

Áine O’Brien: Áine is Co-Director of Counterpoints Arts, London, and leads on creative direction at Pivotal Arts, Dublin. She created the Forum on Migration and Communications and co-founded the Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice. Her productions to date (film, print and curation) explore global storylines linking migration, creative documentary and social change.

Gavin Poynter: Professor and Chair, London East Research Institute, University of East London. Gavin has widely published on London 2012, the economics of the service industries and urban regeneration. He has completed several studies on the East London region, including for the OECD/DCLG, GLA, and local boroughs. He is the co-editor of London After Recession: A Fictitious Capital?

Cecilia Wee: London Regional Council of Arts Council England. Cecilia is a curator, writer and broadcaster who produces projects in the fields of experimental sound, performance and visual art practices. A Visiting Lecturer in Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art, she is also Chair of the Live Art Development Agency, a Council Member of Resonance FM and a member of the Artquest Advisory Board.

Chair: Tim Lawrence, Co-director, CCSR, School of Arts and Digital Industries, University of East London.

This is the third seminar in our Culture and Polity series in which our invited speakers will be examining the city both as a concept and as a space marked by social and cultural divisions and in which conflicting notions of community emerge. Has the economic downturn restructured the suburb from paradise to pressure cooker, making it the new inner city precariously perched on the edge? What are the political consequences of the impact of privatisation on city space? The award-winning film-maker John Smith will also present his film ‘Blight’ which revolves around the building of the M11 Link Road in East London, which provoked a long and bitter campaign by local residents to protect their homes from demolition.

Room EB.G.10, Docklands Campus

Rupa Huq: ‘On the Edge: Rethinking Suburbia in the Downturn’

Suburbs and the relationships that sustain them have been subject to tremendous changes in the last fifty years, with changing work patterns, changing family lives, changing patterns of home ownership and a massive shift in the structural relationships between inner cities and their surrounding urban environment. But this transformation has been largely overlooked, and the suburbs have lived on in the collective imagination as places that are homogenous and/or boring. Yet suburbs have always come in many shapes and sizes with widely varying forms of suburban life encompassing diversity and variety. This paper takes the stereotypical image of suburbs as site of stifling conformism and stagnation to consider re-imagining of the suburbs taking concepts such as gender, ethnicity, class, religion, lifestyle, consumerism, family life, gentrification, property relations, political representation, city life and globalisation and argues for the need to radically rethink the way we understand contemporary suburban life. Has the downturn reconstructured the suburb from paradise to pressure cooker making it the new inner city precariously perched on the edge?

Rupa Huq is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Kingston University. She both lives and works in suburbia, having previously served as Deputy Mayoress of London Borough of Ealing (2010-11) Her publications include “Beyond Subculture” (2006, Routledge) and “On the Edge” (2013, Lawrence and Wishart).

Mike Raco: ‘State-led Privatisation and the Demise of the Democratic State: Welfare Reform and Localism in an Era of Regulatory Capitalism’

This paper focuses on the impacts that privatisation is having on local democratic processes in the UK. It argues that we are witnessing the emerge of a new mode of regulatory capitalism, accompanied by: the judicialisation of public policy; the mobilisation of new private sector elites; and the rolling out of new contractual landscapes. This reality is far removed from the neo-liberal utopian imaginaries of policy-makers and some critical academics. States have become bigger, not smaller. They spend more money than ever before and regulate expanding fields of social life. Drawing on examples from London the discussion contends that the principles of accountability that underpinned the post-war settlement are being systematically eroded at the same time, paradoxically, as modernising governments promise greater community empowerment and localism. The implications for community politics are profound. Traditional forms of representation and protest are becoming increasingly ineffective in a context where the boundaries between the state and private sector are becoming increasingly blurred. New skills and resources are now required to contest and influence policy-making processes, particularly at the local scale. Those best able to adapt to these changing realities are more likely to influence policy decisions than those who are not.

Mike Raco is Professor of Urban Governance and Development in the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. He has published widely on the topics of urban governance, regeneration, sustainability, and the politics of urban economic development. Recent books include: State-led Privatisation and the Demise of the Democratic State: Welfare Reform and Localism in an Era of Regulatory Capitalism (Ashgate, Hants.); Regenerating London: Governance, Sustainability and Community in a Global City (with Rob Imrie and Loretta Lees, Routledge, London); and The Future of Sustainable Cities: Critical Reflections (with John Flint, Policy Press, Bristol). 

John Smith: ‘Blight’ (film presentation and discussion)

Blight was made in collaboration with the composer Jocelyn Pook. It revolves around the building of the M11 Link Road in East London, which provoked a long and bitter campaign by local residents to protect their homes from demolition. The images in the film record some of the changes which occurred in the area over a two-year period, from the demolition of houses through to the start of motorway building work. The soundtrack incorporates natural sounds associated with these events together with speech fragments taken from recorded conversations with local people.

Although it is entirely constructed from records of real events, Blight is not a straightforward documentary. The film exploits the ambiguities of its material to produce new meanings and metaphors, frequently fictionalizing reality through framing and editing strategies. The emotive power of music is used in the film to overtly aid this invention.

John Smith lives and works in London. He teaches part-time at the University of East London where he is Professor of Fine Art. He is represented by Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin. Since 1972 he has made over fifty film, video and installation works that have been shown in cinemas, art galleries and on television around the world and awarded major prizes at many international film festivals. He regularly presents his work in person and in recent years it has been profiled through retrospectives at film festivals in Oberhausen, Tampere, St. Petersburg, La Rochelle, Mexico City, Uppsala, Cork, Bristol, Hull and Glasgow.

Chair: Ashwani Sharma, School of Arts & Digital Industries, University of East London

This is the second seminar in our Culture & Polity series in which our invited speakers will be examining the post-neoliberal subject as produced by the strategies of behavioural economics, security screening and the discourse of virology. What is the meaning of community and the social under these conditions? What forms of governance emerge from new techniques of securitisation and behaviour management and what are the implications for democratic processes?

Room EB.G.10 Docklands Campus

Will Davies: ‘Experiments in Community: Relational Government and Audit After Neoliberalism’.

The neoliberal era is – or was – characterised by the extension of economic modes of evaluation into new corners of social, cultural and political life. Various critical scholars noted that it either eradicated the ‘social’ realm as a distinct terrain of action, or else re-imagined it in ways that was supportive of the ‘economic’. But in the wake of various crises of neoliberalism, the ‘social’ has reappeared with its own logic, as ‘social media’, ‘social prescribing’, ‘social enterprise’ and so on. Policy-makers have re-discovered the social, not simply as an economic ‘externality’, but as a psychological or neurological resource, which facilitates wellbeing and behavioural rationality. But what sorts of evidence, audit and evaluation will be required to realise new forms of ‘relational government’? What does it mean for a policy to ‘succeed’, if not in a purely  economistic sense? The paper will suggest that audited field experiments in community and behavioural policy, accompanied by data analytics, represent a key methodological basis for governance in the emerging era.

Will Davies is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick. His research looks at the policy uses of economic techniques and methods, especially with respect to the promotion of competitiveness and wellbeing.

Tony D Sampson: ‘The Immunologic Strategem: How to Spread Fear by Not Specifying Whom Your Enemy Is’

The immunologic stratagem involves the spreading of fear relating to encounters between a knowable self and an unknown nonself to justify, among other things, the intensification of security measures. It is not merely an ideologically conceived deception. Its attempt to control the idiom by way of linguistic trickery is just one layer of a far more concentrated discursive formation. Indeed, discursive formations do not necessarily operate at the level of ideology at all (Foucault, 1980). There is, as such, a need to locate both the discursive and prediscursive forces that assemble real practices. My approach in this talk shifts away from the importation of language into discourse, toward the assembled components of fearmongering stratagems wherein immunology can be seen to permeate the very matter and functionality of network security. The binary filtering of self and nonself exceeds abstract diagrammatic forces, becoming part of the concrete relations established between end users and the software they encounter. Key to this ever evolving stratagem is the growing significance of an unknown (and sometimes unwitting) threat to the unified body that functions on both a discursive and prediscursive plane. This unknown enemy is increasingly located as the source of contagion but is opportunely kept at a distance and cloaked in anonymity.

Tony D. Sampson is a Reader in Digital Media and Communications at the University of East London. His ongoing interest in contagion theory is reflected in his recent publications, including The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture (2009), which he coedited with Jussi Parikka, and Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2012. He blogs at http://viralcontagion.wordpress.com/

Mark Maguire: ‘Policing the Emotions: Abnormal Behaviour Detection in Counter-Terrorism Operations’

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork with counter-terrorism officers in secure ports of entry. I briefly discuss the problematization of terrorist threats to airports as a way to appreciate the importance of a key incident in Boston-Logan Airport in late 2001. I show the ways in which one of my key research participants identified a gap in security systems and later assembled techniques for policing at the level of life itself – abnormal behaviour detection by means of skilled vision. The system he developed has spread throughout the world, from counter-terrorism measures in Belfast to military deployments in Iraq. My ethnographic research is composed of participant observation in counter-terrorism training, from interrogation techniques and counter-surveillance measures to live deployments with armed uniformed and covert officers. This paper will contrast the apprenticeship required to develop skilled vision with the recent US Homeland Security-led systems that use affective computing to detect emotional deviance or ‘malintent’. The paper will make use of a number of concepts available in the work of Bentham and Nietzsche, Foucault and Agamben. My concern here is to stake out a position for the anthropology of contemporary (in)securitization.

Mark Maguire is Head of the Department of Anthropology, National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He researches the technologies and processes of securitization, especially counter-terrorism, biometric security, affective computing and the detection of abnormal behaviour and ‘malintent’.

Chair: Debra Benita Shaw, School of Arts & Digital Industries, UEL.

This is the first seminar in our Culture and Polity series, interrogating urgent questions of cultural change in the context of new forms of community, contemporary commodity forms and government policy.

This session will bring together a range of perspectives on the question of digitization and value, from the spheres of media and cultural studies, digital arts practice, and open source enterprise. To what extent do networked digital technologies enable new forms of human subjectivity, social organization and expressive new forms of culture? Do digital production tools and networked communications provide new modalities of intensity and sensation? Or do the materialities of digitization merely extend the field of neoliberal authority? Can technology offer new tools for building communities and potentially emancipate impoverished groups and environments? How do we conceive of value in a digital world?

Room EB1.45, first floor, East Building, UEL Docklands Campus, E16 2RD

Dr Paula Graham: ”Big Society’ and the Digitisation Agenda – Transforming Tower Hamlets?’
Dr Graham is Director of Fossbox and founder of Flossie

Professor Gary Hall: ‘#My Subjectivation’
Professor Hall is Director of the Centre for Disruptive Media, Coventry University and author of Digitize this book! The Politics of New Media(Minnesota UP, 2008)

Dr Roshini Kempadoo: ‘Templating Our Visual Selves: The Question of Critical Aesthetics’
Dr Kempadoo is Reader in Media Studies, School of Arts & Digital Industries, UEL, Digital Image Artist and photographer whose work has recently been shown as part of About Change (World Bank Art Program, Washington DC) and Wrestling with the Image: Caribbean Interventions (Art Museum of the Americas, Washington DC)

Professor Susanna Paasonen: ‘Stickiness, Labour & Online Porn’
Professor Paasonen teaches Media Studies at University of Turku, Finland and is the author of Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography(MIT Press, 2011)

For further information please contact Stephen Maddison s.maddison@uel.ac.uk.

INIVA, Rivington Place London EC2A 3BA
Entry: £6/3
Book here

Pat Thomas spent five years in Oakland, CA, researching Listen, Whitey! The Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975. Befriending members of the Black Panther Party, Thomas discovered rare recordings of speeches, interviews, and music by noted activists Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, Elaine Brown, The Lumpen and many others. He also tracked down the forgotten history of Motown Records and its Black Power subsidiary label, Black Forum, along with little known strands of Black Consciousness poetry, inspired religious recordings, and numerous regional and privately pressed Black Power 7″ soul singles from across the United States.

Presentation: Pat Thomas (author Listen, Whitey! The Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975)
Respondent: Dhanveer Brar (Goldsmiths, “Masculinity, Blackness and Performance in Mid to Late 20th Century African American Popular Music”)
Presented in association with INIVA.

EB.1.03, UEL, Docklands Campus, 11:00-18:00

11:00-13:00: Commerce, Creativity and Capitalism

Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism

Jeremy Gilbert, author of Anticapitalism and Culture, CCSR/UEL

Chair: Tim Lawrence

13:00-14:00

Lunch

14:00-16:00: Music and Neoliberal Capitalism

Dave Hesmondhalgh, author of Creative Labour, University of Leeds

Timothy Taylor, author of The Sounds of Capitalism, UCLA

Chair: Tim Lawrence

16:00-18:00: Panel discussion: Musicianship, Capitalism and Cultural Policy

Graham Jeffrey, University of the West of Scotland

Douglas Lonie, Youth Music

Ewan Pearson, DJ/producer

Cecilia Wee, Arts Council

Chair: Jeremy Gilbert

With thanks to the School of Arts & Digital Industries and the Higher Education Innovation Fund.

All welcome. No registration required.