Wednesday 8th February, 4 – 6pm
Westminster Forum, University of Westminster, 5^th Floor, Wells Street, London W1T 3UW

PROPAGANDA ON THE SOCIALIST PERIPHERY
Power, reform and identity in Soviet Uzbek posters
Dr Elizabeth Waters, University of Westminster

Recent work on Soviet propaganda has looked both at the techniques used to convey political messages and the extent to which the USSR succeeded in controlling information and public opinion. Scholarship on Central Asia has examined the power of peripheral elites to influence centrally generated plans and of populations to resist communist change. Disagreement continues over whether the ‘Soviet project’ in the region was one of affirmative action or of colonial intent. This seminar looks at these issues in relation to Uzbekistan in the early decades of Soviet power and assesses the evidence on the character and impact of social, economic and political reforms that is provided by posters used in campaigns to promote women’s emancipation, cotton production and Uzbek identity.

Elizabeth Waters is Principal Lecturer in the Department of Modern and Applied Languages at the University of Westminster. Most of her previous research has been on Soviet social history in the 1920s. Recently she participated in a study of alcohol consumption in Kazakhstan. This seminar represents work-in-progress on her new project on Uzbek Soviet propaganda.

Hosted by the Contemporary China Centre. All welcome, but non-University of Westminster attendees please register at: d.hird@westminster.ac.uk

Wednesday 1 February 2012, 6 pm – 8 pm,
Room 152, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

True Lies of War
Group for War and Culture Studies Seminar

Hongping Annie Nie, University of Oxford
“China’s War with Japan (1937-1945): A Study of Chinese History Textbooks”

Dr. Hongping Annie Nie (MA in Education, Calvin College, USA; Ph. D. in Cross-cultural Education, Biola University, USA) is currently Faculty Tutor of Chinese Politics at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. She is also a core member of the Leverhulme funded China’s War with Japan Project, History Faculty, University of Oxford. Her research interests include moral/ideological education, mass communication, patriotism, and national memory. Among her publications are The Dilemma of Moral Education Curriculum in a Chinese Secondary School (University Press of America, 2007) and “On-line Gaming, Ideological Work, and Nationalism in China” (Journal of Contemporary China, forthcoming).

Celine Righi, London School of Economics
“Memory in post-Civil War Lebanon under artistic scrutiny: a space for individual and social autonomy in the public debate?”

Celine Righi completed a Master in Political Sciences at Science Po Lyon in 2000 and a Master in Social Psychology at Paris IX Dauphine University in 2001. After working for a think tank in Paris and Lyon in the field of social and economic development, Celine embarked in her PhD in 2008 at the Institute of Social Psychology at London School of Economics.

Entrance free. To reserve a place, please R.S.V.P. Dr Caroline Perret: C.Perret@westminster.ac.uk

Thursday 16 February 2012, 7pm
Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1
Price: £7.00 / £5.00 concessions (includes free glass of wine).

This season’s Whitechapel Salon organised by the IMCC in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery is on ‘Cultures of Capitalism’. Our fourth discussion focuses on future of education under contemporary capitalism, with guest participants Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism, Andrew McGettigan, author of the arts and humanities blog Critical Education, and Andrea Phillips, Reader in Fine Art Practice and Director of Research Studies, Goldsmiths. Chaired by Marquard Smith.

Book your ticket at: http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/product/category_id/22/product_id/1120?session_id=1325609439457568b84811bd9f97bb2cb619476b46

Thursday 8 December 2011, 7pm
Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1
Price: £7.00 / £5.00 concessions (includes free glass of wine).

This season’s Whitechapel Salon organised by the IMCC in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery is on ‘Cultures of Capitalism’. Our third discussion focuses on imagining the Spaces of Capital. How can art and politics image, represent or map the spaces of contemporary capitalism? And, in the light of current spaces of occupation, what critical and political possibilities for resistance or opposition might such imaginings contain? Participants include Alberto Toscano, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths and author of The Idea of Fanaticism, and Andy Merrifield, author of Metromarxism and Dialectical Urbanism, along with a representative from the Haircut Before the Party collective. Chaired by David Cunningham.

Book your ticket at: http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/product/category_id/22/product_id/1027?session_id=1320678264848dfa9cc85be835a3493e662f207489

Tuesday 22nd November, 4-6pm
Westminster Forum, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 
 
Pascal Gielen (Groningen University, The Netherlands)  
‘Mapping the Community Arts: Artistic Autonomy, Repressive Tolerance and Pastoral Power’

In recent years there has been increased attention to so-called ‘socially engaged art practices’. Equipped with a sense of urgency and intent, artists and curators develop work with the support of communities or groups to tackle political and social issues. While the success of these projects are not easily measurable, they often reiterate the role of artist/curator as protagonists of specific forms of social change, which posits a direct contrast to recent activism which carefully distances itself from any leader-based political organizational categories.

Pascal Gielen, co-editor of the recently published volume Community Art, will draw out a critical cartography of community art and will speak about the power and impotencies of this phenomenon. Since modernity, art and community, artist and social work have had an ambivalent relationship, can art have a role in building communities? What is the political potency of forms of art that strive to integrate individuals and social groups? Pascal Gielen is Professor of Sociology of the Arts and Director of the research centre Arts in Society at Groningen University. His publications include The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude: Global Art, Memory and Post-Fordism (Valiz, 2009) and the co-edited Being an Artist in Post-Fordist Times (NAi Publishers, 2009).

Thursday 8 December 2011, 7pm
Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1
Price: £7.00 / £5.00 concessions (includes free glass of wine).

This season’s Whitechapel Salon organised by the IMCC in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery is on ‘Cultures of Capitalism’. Our third discussion focuses on imagining the Spaces of Capital. How can art and politics image, represent or map the spaces of contemporary capitalism? And, in the light of current spaces of occupation, what critical and political possibilities for resistance or opposition might such imaginings contain? Participants include Alberto Toscano, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths and author of The Idea of Fanaticism, and Andy Merrifield, author of Metromarxism and Dialectical Urbanism, along with a representative from the Haircut Before the Party collective. Chaired by David Cunningham.

Book your ticket at: http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/product/category_id/22/product_id/1027?session_id=1320678264848dfa9cc85be835a3493e662f207489

At the Workface: A Talk by Fred Lonidier
Tuesday 13 December 2011, 3.30-5.30pm
Fifth Floor, 32-38 Wells Street, University of Westminster, London W1T

Seminar: new arts and trade unions partnerships
Proposals for a national documentation project and AHRC research network focused on promoting new creative synergies and campaign strategies connecting the unions, social networking groups, NGOs, and arts sectors.

Fred Lonidier is one of the leading pioneers from the late 1960s onwards, of the arts and trade union movement in the USA. He studied at Yuba College and San Francisco State (graduate work in sociology and photography), and later joined the University of California at San Diego Faculty in 1972.  His work continues to deal with the possibilities of photography applied to trade union campaigns for social justice, labor history, and social change. He has also been the guiding energy behind the pioneer US Trade Union sponsored Labor Link TV which cablecasts on three channels in San Diego County. His work has recently focused on workers rights and cross-border labor struggles and solidarity between U.S. and Mexican workers.

Admission is free, but please book a place in advance from Dr Stefan Szczelkun: szczels@wmin.ac.uk

Coordinated by Littoral Arts Trust in association with Critical Network, Strategies for Free Education, and the IMCC, University of Westminster.

Wednesday 19 October 2011, 4-6pm
Cayley Room, Room 152, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

‘Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Queer Politics in Postsocialist China’
Dr. Hongwei Bao (Goldsmiths)

One of the most interesting phenomena in modern Chinese language is manifested by the semantic change of the term tongzhi. Literally ‘comrade’, tongzhi was the most popular address term in China’s socialist era. Since the 1990s, the term has been used by LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) people in the Chinese-speaking world to refer to sexual minorities. Today, the queer use of tongzhi has dominated Chinese cyberspace. How did the change take place? What does the change mean? Was this simply linguistic change, or does it indicate transformations in bodies, desires, identities and subjectivities under shifting governmentalities? In this talk, Dr. Hongwei Bao traces the genealogy of the term tongzhi, discusses its political and social implications, and unveils its pertinence for contemporary Leftist politics.

Dr. Hongwei Bao is a British Academy visiting fellow at the Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London. He has taught media and communication, gender studies, cultural studies and Asian Studies at the National Academy of Chinese Theatrical Arts, Beijing, the University of Sydney, and University of Potsdam.

All welcome, but non-University of Westminster attendees please register with Derek Hird: d.hird@westminster.ac.uk

Radical Philosophy Conference 2011
Columbia University, New York
Friday 21st October 2011, 9am – 7.30pm.

Radical Philosophy will be visiting New York for its 2011 conference, held in collaboration with Columbia University. The event is free but advance registration is essential: radicalphilosophyrsvp@gmail.com

Sessions:
Postcolonial Worlds ∙ Representing Capitalism ∙
Biocapital and Security ∙ Temporalities of Crisis ∙ Politics of Information ∙

Speakers:
Claudia Aradau; Souleymane Bachir Daigne; Tim Bewes; Antonia Birnbaum; Finn Brunton; Marilena Chaui; David Cunningham; Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui; David Golumbia; Harry Harootunian; Esther Leslie; Rosalind C. Morris; Mark Neocleous; Peter Osborne; Kristin Ross; Kaushik Sunder Rajan; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Further details including conference programme and abstracts at:
http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/uncategorized/radical-philosophy-conference-2011

Register at: radicalphilosophyrsvp@gmail.com

Our friends in University of Westminster’s Contemporary China Centre present:

Through Time and Space with Chairman Mao:? The Afterlife and Global Impact of the Great Helmsman
A panel discussion with Pankaj Mishra and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, chaired by Harriet Evans
Monday, July 4, 2011, 5.00 p.m. – 6.30 p.m.
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

How is Mao thought about in contemporary China and in other parts of Asia? In what ways have debates about his legacy and posthumous uses of his image paralleled or diverged from those of other larger-than-life figures associated with independence movements from Nehru to Nasser and from Ho to Che? What should we make of the “red song” movement sweeping through the PRC, which can be treated as fueled by nostalgic yearning or attributed to political manoeuvring?

Pankaj Mishra is the author of The Romantics: A Novel, which won the LA Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, and Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond. His new book The Rise of Asia and the Remaking of the Modern World will be published next year.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Professor of History and Chair of the Department at UC Irvine, where he also serves as the Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies. His books include Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China (1991), China’s Brave New World (2007), Global Shanghai, 1850-2010 (2009), and China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (2011). He is a co-founder of the “China Beat” blog/electronic magazine.

Harriet Evans is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies, and Director of the Contemporary China Centre, University of Westminster, and is curator of the exhibition ‘Poster Power: Images from Mao’s China, Then and Now.’

Contemporary China Centre
www.westminster.ac.uk/schools/humanities/research/asian-studies

For enquiries about the Contemporary China Centre, please contact
Professor Harriet Evans: evansh@westminster.ac.uk

Cloning Tom: An Audience with W.J.T. Mitchell
Monday 13^th June 2011, 2:00-6:00pm , 309 Regent Street, University of Westminster

To celebrate the publication of Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (University of Chicago Press), the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture is thrilled to host an audience with Professor W. J.T. Mitchell. Mitchell will deliver a presentation entitled ‘The Historical Uncanny:  Phantoms, Doubles, and Repetition in the War on Terror’. His presentation will be followed by a Roundtable with contributors including Maxime Boidy (Strasbourg), Abdelwahab El-Affendi (Westminster), Eyal Weizman (Goldsmiths), and Mitchell himself. The event will be chaired by Dr Marquard Smith (Westminster).

The event is FREE but booking is essential so please RSVP to Sharon Sinclair: sinclas@wmin.ac.uk

Professor W. J. T. Mitchell is Editor of Critical Inquiry and the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, the Department of Art History, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of seminal books including What Do Pictures Want? and Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, and editor of collections such as Against Theory, Landscape and Power, On Narrative, and Picture Theory.

Maxime Boidy is the French translator of W.J.T. Mitchell’s Cloning Terror (with S. Roth) and has also translated books by Susan Buck-Morss and Mike Davis, as well as Mitchell’s Iconography. He is a doctorial candidate in the Laboratoire Cultures et Sociétés en Europe at Université de Strasbourg.

Dr Abdelwahab El-Affendi is Reader in Politics at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster and co-ordinator of the Centre’s Democracy and Islam Programme. He is also currently an ESRC/AHRC Fellow in the Global Uncertainties Programme working on a project entitled ‘Narratives of Insecurity, Democratization and the Justification of (Mass) Violence.’ Dr El-Affendi is author of books including About Muhammad: The Other Western Perspective on the Prophet of Islam, The Conquest of Muslim Hearts and Minds, For a State of Peace: Conflict and the Future of Democracy in Sudan, Rethinking Islam and Modernity, and Who Needs an Islamic State?

Dr Marquard Smith is Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster, and Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Visual Culture.

Dr Eyal Weizman is Director of the Centre of Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. His work includes buildings and stage sets in Israel/Palestine and Europe. Weizman works with a variety of NGOs and Human right groups in Israel/Palestine. He co-curated the exhibition A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, and co-edited the publication of the same title. These projects were based on his human-rights research, and were banned by the Israeli Association of Architects. They were later shown in the exhibition Territories in New York, Berlin, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Malmoe, Tel Aviv and Ramallah. His books include Lesser Evils, Hollow Land, A Civilian Occupation, and the series Territories 1,2 and 3.

Dr Amy Jane Barnes
‘Representing Communism: exhibitions of revolutionary Chinese art in 1970s Britain’
Tuesday 5th April, 2011, 4.00–6.00 pm
Westminster Forum, University of Westminster, 5th Floor, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T

In 1972, President Richard Nixon visited China, facilitating a period of rapprochement between East and West, which corresponded with a discernable shift in popular attitudes towards the People’s Republic and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) in both North America and Western Europe. This presentation looks at the development and reception of two exhibitions of Chinese revolutionary art held in Britain as a direct result of the renewal of Sino-British diplomatic relations in 1971-1972: a small display of woodblock prints held at the Gulbenkian Museum of Oriental Art, Durham, in the summer of 1974 and Peasant Paintings from Hu County (Arts Council), which toured Britain in 1976-1977. The presentation will focus on how utopian visions of the People’s Republic were translated into, and consolidated by exhibitionary practice.

Amy Jane Barnes completed her PhD in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester in 2010. She is currently working as an independent researcher, undertaking projects on behalf of the Eunamus project (http://www.eunamus.eu/), and New Walk Museum and Art Gallery in Leicester. She recently co-edited National Museums: New Studies from Around the World (2011), and the forthcoming volume The Thing about Museums: Objects and Experience, Representation and Contestation.

Hosted by ur friends in the Contemporary China Centre. All welcome. Participants from outside the University of Westminster please register in advance with Dr Derek Hird at d.hird@westminster.ac.uk

Hosted by the Institute, Tom Mitchell will be at the University of Westminster on the afternoon of 13th June, with a number of shiny interlocutors, to discuss his new book Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present. Watch this space for further details.

From The University of Chicago Press website: The  phrase “War on Terror” has quietly been retired from official usage, but it persists in the American psyche, and our understanding of it is hardly complete. Nor will it be, W. J. T Mitchell argues, without a grasp of the images that it spawned, and that spawned it. Exploring the role of verbal and visual images in the War on Terror, Mitchell finds a conflict whose shaky metaphoric and imaginary conception has created its own reality. At the same time, Mitchell locates in the concept of clones and cloning an anxiety about new forms of image-making that has amplified the political effects of the War on Terror. Cloning and terror, he argues, share an uncanny structural resemblance, shuttling back and forth between imaginary and real, metaphoric and literal manifestations. In Mitchell’s startling analysis, cloning terror emerges as the inevitable metaphor for the way in which the War on Terror has not only helped recruit more fighters to the jihadist cause but undermined the American constitution with “faith-based” foreign and domestic policies.

Bringing together the hooded prisoners of Abu Ghraib with the cloned stormtroopers of the Star Wars saga, Mitchell draws attention to the figures of faceless anonymity that stalk the ever-shifting and unlocatable “fronts” of the War on Terror. A striking new investigation of the role of images from our foremost scholar of iconology, Cloning Terror will expand our understanding of the visual legacy of a new kind of war and reframe our understanding of contemporary biopower and biopolitics.

W. J. T. Mitchell is Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He is editor of the interdisciplinary journal Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Morey Prize in art history given by the College Art Association of America. His publications include: “The Pictorial Turn,” Artforum, March 1992; “What Do Pictures Want?” October, Summer 1996; What Do Pictures Want? (2005); The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (1998); Picture Theory (1994); Art and the Public Sphere (1993); Landscape and Power (1992); Iconology (1987); The Language of Images (1980); On Narrative(1981); and The Politics of Interpretation (1984).

An Encounter with Judith Butler
Friday 4^th of February
Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

Organised by our friends in the Centre for the Study of Democracy, Judith Butler will be visiting Westminster in early February. Programme as follows.

10.20am – 1pm: Judith Butler’s contribution to contemporary ethical and political issues
with Isabell Lorey, Vikki Bell, Stewart Motha, Elena Loizidou
chaired by Chantal Mouffe

2pm – 4.30pm: Judith Butler’s contribution to gender theory
with Henrietta Moore, Mandy Merck, Leticia Sabsay, Terrell Carver
chaired by Harriet Evans

5pm: Public lecture by Judith Butler
“The Right to Appear. Towards an Arendtian Politics of the Street”

The event is free but places are limited. To reserve a place contact: Jessica.Schmidt@my.westminster.ac.uk

Thursday 10 February 2011, 7pm
Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1
Price: £8.00 (includes free glass of wine).

In collaboratiion with the Whitechapel Gallery, the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture is hosting the final discussion in this year’s ‘Matter Matters’ Salon at the gallery. Social historian Iain Boal, philosopher Kate Soper and cultural theorist Allan Stoekl discuss the matter of sustainability. Chaired by David Cunningham.

Book your ticket at: 
http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/index.php/fuseaction/shop.product/product_id/815?

Boundaries and Communities
Friday 26 November 2010, 6.30pm
The Showroom, 63 Penfold Street, London NW8

David Cunningham will be one of the participants in a discussion at The Showroom gallery in North West London organised as part of the exhibition The Church Street Partners’ Gazette curated by Turkish artist Can Altay. Boundaries and Communities focuses on visible and invisible boundaries, how they are negotiated, neglected, transgressed, or forcefully maintained, in the contemporary metropolis. Other contributors include: Neil Bennett (Terry Farrell and Partners), Janna Graham (Serpentine Gallery), Chloe McCarthy (My City Too), Jonathan Mosley (architect) and a representative of the Migrants Resource Centre.

The Showroom is a short walk from Edgware Road underground station, which is served by the Hammersmith and City, Circle and Bakerloo lines.

Wednesday 17 November 2010, 4-6pm
The Westminster Forum, 5^th Floor, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW

Professor Rebecca Karl (New York University)
‘Mao Zedong and China in the World’

Rebecca E. Karl is author of Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, and of Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History (both Duke University Press). Her most recent book, The Magic of Concepts: Philosophy and ‘the Economic’ in Twentieth Century China, is forthcoming.

Co-organised by The Contemporary China Centre and the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture

The IMCC’s resident activist artist, and ex-member of the Scratch Orchestra, Stefan Szczelkun, will be taking part in a performance, with Keith Rowe and Carole Finer, as part of Cornelius Cardew and the Freedom of Listening, curated by Dean Inkster, at the Culturgest, Porto on Saturday 15th May. Later on the same evening Stefan will also be in conversation and showing a selection of excerpts from his Active Archives video project.

The Porto exhibition traces the career of the English avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew, and includes scores and vast archival material of the experimental performances developed by Cardew and the members of the Scratch Orchestra, which he co-founded in 1969, along with posters from the period following Cardew’s decision in the mid-1970s to renounce his work as an avant-garde composer and devote his energy to politics.

FREE content: Entire Obama Issue of ‘Journal of Visual Culture’, including contributions by Dora Apel, Lauren Berlant, Lisa Cartwright, Anna Everett, Raimi Gbadamosi, Curtis Marez, Nicholas Mirzoeff, W.J.T. Mitchell, Shawn Michelle Smith, Gayatri Spivak, Julian Stallabrass, Marita Sturken, and many, many more.

To access go to:
http://vcu.sagepub.com/current.dtl

Click on link by each article marked ‘PDF’.

Download, read, enjoy, circulate.

Tuesday 16th February, 3.00-5.00pm
Westminster Forum, 5th Floor, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

Richard Barbrook (University of Westminster)
‘What’s the actual title? The Game of War: Understanding Situationist’

Hosted by our nextdoor neighbours in the Centre for the Study of Democracy, colleague and fellow traveller Richard Barbrook talks about Guy Debord and Class Wargames. Free to all.

Find out more about Class Wargames here.