Tag Archives: UEL

Events, Past Events

Common Ground: Democracy & Collectivity in an Age of Individualism

We live in an epoch of personal choice, hyper-mobility, celebrity-worship and fiercely competitive labour markets. But this is also the age of networked communication, of global culture, of Occupy and the new politics of ‘the Commons’.

What are the connections and tensions between such apparently diverse tendencies, and do they help democracy to develop, or render it impossible?

This public seminar, marking the launch of Jeremy Gilbert’s book Common Ground (Pluto Press),  will discuss the relationship between collectivity, individuality, affect and agency today, asking whether personal freedom is the great achievement of our era — or if individualism is actually forced on us by capitalist culture, fatally limiting our capacity to solve the problems that we can only solve together.What forms of politics, culture and philosophy might take us beyond the limits of traditional conservatism or banal individualism?

At: Brilliant Corners, 470 Kingsland Road, Dalston, London, E8 4AE

Speakers: Anthony Barnett, Lisa Blackman, Mark Fisher, Jeremy Gilbert
Continue reading Common Ground: Democracy & Collectivity in an Age of Individualism →

Past Events

Annual Lecture 2014: Glenn Greenwald

Glenn PortraitThe Centre for Cultural Studies Research at the University of East London is delighted to announce that our annual lecture for 2014 will be given by Glenn Greenwald, who came to the attention of the world in June 2013 as the journalist responsible for the publication of documents leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The documents, which were published simultaneously in The Guardian and The Washington Post, revealed the extraordinary extent of US and UK government surveillance of both private citizens and foreign governments.  Since then, the UK government has threatened Greenwald with criminal investigation and his partner, David Miranda, has been arrested and held for nine hours while passing through Heathrow airport on the pretext that he was carrying encrypted electronic documents. Greenwald, who is currently living in Brazil, has publicly stated that ‘not being able to visit the UK is not something that I regard as a punishment’. Continue reading Annual Lecture 2014: Glenn Greenwald →