How did we get here?  Forgotten Moments, Lost Leaders, and Remembering our Recent Radical Past

 

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Culture, Power and Politics is a series of open seminars, free to anyone, which has been hosted by the New Economy Organisers Network and convened and mainly taught by Jeremy Gilbert, a professor at the University of East London.

For the moment, this series has merged with the Introduction to Cultural Studies course at Open School East. Click the link for full details.

The next session will be

Tuesday May 31st 

How did we get here?  Forgotten Moments, Lost Leaders, and Remembering our Recent Radical Past

Special extended session (5:30-8:30) on the radical history of our times with several special guest speakers:

Natasha Nkonde and Deborah Grayson who are researching the radical history of the Greater London Council in the 1980s, Andy Beckett who writes for the Guardian and is that author of two acclaimed major studies of the politics and culture of the 70s and 80s (When the Lights Went Out and Promised You a Miracle) and John Medhurst, author of That Option No Longer Exists, will join us for an extended panel discussion.

This session will start at 5:30 with a discussion with Andy Beckett talking about his historical work and the importance of understanding our recent past
 
(don’t worry if you are a regular attender who can only make it at 6:30 – we’ll understand!)
 
6:30-7:30 Deborah, Natasha and John will be talking about their research,
 
7:30-8:30 Jeremy  offer some observations on how we can use some key theoretical concepts to illuminate the issues under discussion, along the lines of:
 

How did we get into this mess? Rising inequality, climate catastrophe, miserable youth and a culture which can’t innovate: it’s hard to believe that until some time in the 80s, people actually believed the world was getting better.  Can Cultural Studies help us to understand how we got here? It can and it will.

In this session we’ll bring together many of the ideas from the previous weeks, and the previous term, to see how they can help answer this questions. We’ll be looking at some classic Cultural Studies text such as Sturt Hall et. al’s Policing the Crisis published in 1978 (which starts off analysing newspaper reports about muggings, and ends up basically predicting Thatcherism before anyone else could see it coming), and asking if culture in 2016 is still stuck in ‘the long 1990s’. 

Free, no booking required, no need to have attended pervious events in the series.

 

Facebook Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/279707685702649/


Open School East
The Rose Lipman Building
43 De Beauvoir Rd
London N1 5SQ
6:30-8:30 pm (or a bit later…)
Please forward to anyone who might be interested.