The Polytechnic Touring Association seminar, Nov 13
Wednesday 13th November, 5.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW
Sara Dominici, University of Westminster
“The Polytechnic Touring Association: from culture as education to culture as leisure (1888-1939)”
This paper looks at how the idea of culture promoted by the Polytechnic Touring Association (PTA) changed in the period from 1888, the year subsequently celebrated as the origin of the PTA, and the end of the interwar period. During this timeframe the organisation of the tours shifted from endorsing the Polytechnic’s philanthropic approach, to responding to a commercial context. In 1911 the travel firm had become a separate business. This influenced the PTA’s approach to the tourists, which from individuals to instruct became customers to please and, in turn, the understanding of what would make cultural travel an improving experience. The early excursions were described as ‘educational holiday tours’, thus emphasising travel as an organised form of learning; by the 1930s, these were promoted as ‘holidays to the loveliest places in Europe’, suggesting instead a more ‘relaxed’ approach to the encounter with cultural sites. This paper discusses this passage by considering how the transformation of culture into a product of consumption influenced its commercialisation. Specifically, it evaluates what was understood to be ‘educational’ in the experience of travel offered by the PTA, as the organisation transitioned from providing a learning experience to a service.
Sara is a PhD student affiliated to the IMCC, currently completing her doctoral thesis on the PTA.
Tagged as education, photography, visual culture
We’re back … with apologies
Apologies from all those at the Institute for the interruption to our service. The website has been down for a few days, but we’re very happy to be back!
Overwhelming China on Radio 4
Our own Anne Witchard appears on the recent BBC4 documentary, ‘Overwhelming China’, which traces current anxieties about global economic takeover back through the political sinophobia of the Cold War period to earlier, pulp fantasies of Yellow Peril, Limehouse Chinatown and the ‘discovery’ of the enemy within.
You can listen at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03ffskf
Queer London Research Forum Launch, Nov 29th
Queer London Research Forum Launch Event
Old Cinema, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London
We very much hope that you will be interested in attending. Places must be reserved. This can be done by emailing queerlondonresearchforum@gmail.com
The View from Dover talk, Nov 12
David Herd, ‘The View from Dover’ Tuesday 12 November 2013, 7pm
The Old Cinema, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street
‘The View from Dover’ is the first of a series of talks and essays by David Herd that take their bearings from the site of The Citadel on Dover’s Western Heights. Originally constructed at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, as part of a network of fortifications, The Citadel knew various functions before its present use as an immigration removal centre. Starting at the building itself, with its iconic location, this talk asks what it means to view contemporary culture from such a contested site. Focusing questions of movement and belonging, Dover’s Citadel offers one of the most striking views in modern Britain. What becomes visible, the talk will ask, from a site held legally and linguistically just outside?
David Herd is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Kent, where he is director of the Centre for Modern Poetry. He is the author of Outwith (Bookthug 2012), All Just (Carcanet 2012), Enthusiast! Essays on Modern American Literature (Manchester 2007), and John Ashbery and American Poetry (Manchester 2001).
For further information please contact either Georgina Colby g.colby@westminster or John Beck j.beck@westminster.ac.uk.
The algorithmic heist and narrative control seminar, Oct 30th
Criminal Programming: The algorithmic heist and narrative control
Hallvard Haug, Birkbeck, University of London
Wednesday 30 October, 4pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, Wells Street
Black Gold film showing tonight
Black Gold film showing
Room LA103, University of Westminster, Marylebone, Tues 22 October, 6pm
If you’ve never given much thought to the lives affected each time you choose one brand of coffee over another, allow this handsomely mounted documentary from British filmmakers Marc and Nick Francis to serve as a bracing, double-shot of reality. Focusing exclusively on the coffee-producing regions of Ethiopia — the so-called “birthplace of coffee” — the Francis brothers explore the long and unnecessarily convoluted chain that brings the area’s highly prized coffee beans to the shelves of your supermarket, specialty store or Starbucks. The market prices for coffee are set by buyers and sellers in the financial capitals of New York and London, far from the growers who are most often unaware of the market rate, and at the time of filming, farmers’ profits dropped to a 30-year low: One kilo of beans, which can brew up to 80 cups of $3-a-shot coffee nets the grower less than 23 cents. And yet over the last 15 years, retail sales of coffee have nearly tripled to $80 billion a year with four multinational corporations — Kraft, Nestle, Procter & Gamble and Sara Lee — dominating the market.
Followed by Q&A with the directors.
Staging Science events, Dec 6 and 7 2013
Hosted by our colleagues in the new Centre for the Study of Science and Imagination, a series of exciting events on Staging Science in December:
Staging Historical and Contemporary Science: A Roundtable
Friday December 6, 2013, 6.30-8.00pm (drinks from 6pm)
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street
Jim Al-Khalili (Physicist, Science Communicator and Broadcaster)
Tim Boon (Head of Research, Science Museum)
Imran Khan (Chief Executive, British Science Association)
Katrina Nilsson (Head of Contemporary Science, Science Museum)
Jonathan Renouf (Executive Producer, BBC Science Unit)
Staging Science ColloquiumSaturday December 7, 2013, 9.00-6.00pm
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street
Speakers include: Iwan Morus (Aberystwyth), Daniel Brown (Southampton), Robert Kargon (Johns Hopkins), Jeremy Brooker (Independent Researcher), Tiffany Watt-Smith (Queen Mary), Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (Oxford), Jean-Baptiste Gouyon (Science Museum, London), Bernard Lightman (York, Canada), Martin Willis (Westminster)
6.00-7.00pm: Drinks Reception and Book Launch for Jeremy Brooker’s Temple of Minerva (Regent Street Building Foyer)
followed by
A Performance of the Pepper’s Ghost Illusion with Charles Dickens’s ‘The Haunted Man’
Produced, directed and performed by Richard Hand and Geraint D’Arcy (University of South Wales)
There will be 2 performances of the Pepper’s Ghost Illusion – 7.00-7.30 and 7.45-8.15 (The Old Cinema)
Places for all the events that make up Staging Science are limited. Please apply early for each event as below. In your email please make clear which event or events you wish to attend. Many thanks.
To reserve a place at the Roundtable (Friday evening) please contact Rebecca Spear on rebecca.spear@my.westminster.ac.uk
To reserve a place at the colloquium (Saturday day), which comes with an invitation to the Pepper’s Ghost performance (Saturday evening), please contact Rebecca Spear on rebecca.spear@my.westminster.ac.uk.
Please do advise Rebecca if you wish to come to the colloquium but are not able to attend the evening Performance.
To inquire about a place at the Pepper’s Ghost performance only please contact Professor Martin Willis on m.willis@westminster.ac.uk
For updates on Staging Science connect to SCIMAG’s blog site at: http://scienceimagination.wordpress.com
Tagged as cinema, London, museums, science, visual culture
Reading group at Carroll / Fletcher: Hard Road to Renewal, Nov 12th
A quick plug for our friends and neighbours at the Carroll/Fletcher Gallery:
Reading Group | Chapter 5: The Hard Road to Renewal with Peter Osborne
Tuesday 12 November, 7:00-9:00pm
Carroll / Fletcher, 56-57 Eastcastle Street, London W1W 8EQ
Tickets £5.00, refreshments included
“There is no alternative to making anew the ‘revolution of our times’ or sinking slowly into historical irrelevance. I believe, with Gramsci, that we must first attend ‘violently’ to things as they are, without illusions or false hopes, if we are to transcend the present. … And from that starting point, begin to construct a possible alternative scenario, an alternative conception of ‘modernity’, an alternative future.”
Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal, 1988
Chapter 5, led by Professor Peter Osborne, will take as its starting point the introduction and conclusion of Stuart Hall’s 1988 collection of essays The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. In the twenty-five years since the publication of The Hard Road to Renewal, a period that included thirteen continuous years of Labour government, how has the Left in Britain (both the Labour party and the non-Labour left) responded to Thatcherism’s ‘authoritarian populism’ and ‘the decisive break with the post-war consensus, the profound reshaping of social life which it has set in motion’? And does Hall’s analysis of Thatcherism as a ‘hegemonic conception of politics as a war of position’, and his adoption of a ‘discursive conception of ideology’ and, after Ralph Milliband, of a notion of ‘an accelerated process of recomposition’ of class, provide the basis for an ‘alternative conception of modernity, an alternative future’?
Reading material: Please click here to download.
Book here: www.carrollfletcher.eventbrite.com
Tagged as politics, radical philosophy
Perspectives in Digital Curation roundtable, Nov 7th
Thursday 7th November 2013, 6.30 – 8.30
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street
Perspectives in Digital Curation:
Museum and University collaborations in this emerging field of museum practice
The University of Westminster MA Programme in Museums, Galleries and Contemporary Culture and the Johns Hopkins University Master’s Program in Museum Studies cordially invite you to a roundtable discussion, with the participation of Phyllis Hecht, Director of the JHU MA in Museum Studies, which has this autumn launched a Digital Curation program on this certificate program will also contribute to the new professional literature in the field. Further details at: http://advanced.jhu.edu/digitalcuration.
R.S.V.P. Sharon Sinclair, sinclas@westminster.ac.uk
Ecocriticism, Genocide and Representation in the wake of the Holocaust seminar, Oct 16
October 16th 2013
University of Westminster, room 106, Wells Street, London W1T
Jessica Rapson, Kings College London
‘Closely Allied Structures: Ecocriticism, Genocide and Representation in the wake of the Holocaust’
Historical Novel of the Contemporary Symposium
The Historical Novel of the Contemporary: A Symposium
Tuesday 3rd December, 2-6pm
Carroll / Fletcher Gallery, 56 – 57 Eastcastle Street, London W1W 8EQ
Speakers: Emmanuel Bouju (Rennes), David Cunningham (Westminster), John Kraniauskas (Birkbeck), Fiona Price (Chichester), Leigh Wilson (Westminster)
The subject of a revival in recent decades, in both its ‘literary’ and ‘popular’ forms, for Georg Lukács the historical novel was, above all, that which narrated the ‘pre-history of the present’. Discussing authors ranging from Roberto Bolano to David Peace, Hilary Mantel to Wu Ming, this afternoon symposium considers the historiographic and political forms of the historical novel today as it might narrate the pre-history of our own contemporary.
Tagged as Literature, novel, politics
White Nostalgia and Nordic Noir seminar, Tues 8 Oct
An event in Westminster Sociology Research Series that might be of interest to IMCC-followers:
Ethnic appropriateness: white nostalgia and nordic noir
Dr Ben Pitcher, University of Westminster
Tuesday 8th October, 5.30pm, room 155, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street
This talk explores a widespread cultural trend away from cosmopolitan consumption, and towards ‘ethnically appropriate’ consuming practices. It suggests that in an attempt to identify forms of ‘appropriate’ white ethnicity in multicultural contexts, consumers have engaged with nostalgic fantasies of domestic femininity. It goes on to consider the appeal of Nordic culture to white British consumers, and suggests that it too is marked by fantasies of ethnic appropriateness, in this case manifested in the landscape, climate, food, culture and politics of the Nordic countries.
Marxism in Culture autumn seminars at the IHR
Marxism in Culture
Autumn Term seminars 2013
All seminars start at 5.30pm at the Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU. The seminar closes at 7.30pm and retires to the bar.
Friday 4 October
Diane Morgan (University of Leeds)
Homo Laborans?: The “French Utopian Socialists” View of “Work”.
Location: The Court Room
Friday 15 November
Marcus Rediker (University of Pittsburgh)
The Amistad Rebellion in American Popular Culture, 1839-1841.
Location: The Court Room
Friday 29 November
David Cunningham (University of Westminster)
Prosaic Modernity: Capital, the Bourgeois and the Novel
Location: Bloomsbury Room G35
Friday 13 December
Larne Abse Gogarty (University College London)
Community and Reproduction: Edith Segal’s dance work and Suzanne Lacy’s Expectations
Location: The Court Room
Organisers: Matthew Beaumont, Dave Beech, Alan Bradshaw, Warren Carter, Gail Day, Steve Edwards, Larne Abse Gogarty, Esther Leslie, David Mabb, Antigoni Memou, Chrysi Papaioannou, Nina Power, Dominic Rahtz, Pete Smith, Peter Thomas & Alberto Toscano.
For further information, please contact Larne Abse Gogarty at larne.gogarty.09@ucl.ac.uk or Chrysi Papaioannou at chrysi_p@yahoo.co.uk. All welcome. www.marxisminculture.org
English Literature & Culture Research Seminars 2013
The list of English Literature and Culture research seminars for this semester has been announced. As usual these will take place on Wednesday afternoons at 4pm in room 106 in the University of Westminster’s 32-38 Wells Street building, London W1T.
October 16th: Jessica Rapson, Kings College London
“Closely Allied Structures: Ecocriticsm, Genocide, and Representation in the wake of the Holocaust”
October 30th: Hallvard Haug, Birkbeck, University of London
“Criminal Programming: The algorithmic heist and narrative control”
November 13th: Sara Dominici, University of Westminster
title t.b.c
November 27th: Chris Lloyd, Goldsmiths, University of London
“Looking at the ‘Southern Visual Legacy’ in Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke”
Everybody is welcome, but if you’re not a Westminster staff member or student please email Lucy Bond at: l.bond1@westminster.ac.uk
New Higher Education & Theory reading group
A plug for the Higher Education & Theory Reading Group that’s just been set up by and for staff and postgraduate students at Westminster. The first Organizing Meeting will take place on Wednesday October 2, 2013, from 1:00pm to 2:00pm , in room 359 in 309 Regent Street
This is a cross-faculty reading group on the theory of education, open to all staff and research students at the University of Westminster. The intention is to foster an increased awareness of the contributions of major critical thinkers to pedagogic debate and practice, supplementing the sociological, psychological, and empirical focus of current educational discourse with a broader transdisciplinary emphasis on the importance of philosophical and historical contributions to educational theory. The idea is that a productive critical perspective will be opened up on contemporary pedagogical practice through such theoretical and historical viewpoints, one that will also allow researchers to make connections between their research and their own practice as teachers by re-reading theoretical texts pedagogically. There will be a minimum of 3 reading groups per year. The group will initially meet once a term, with the possibility of meeting more frequently if time and interest permit.
The starting text for the autumn term will be Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Future texts will be decided by the group. The first 5 chapters of the Lyotard text are online here. The full scanned version is here. Pages 47-53 in particular look at higher education.
See also the HERC Community blog webpage: http://hercwestminster.wordpress.com/
To RSVP or register your interest, please email: Steven Cranfield, cranfis@westminster.ac.uk or Matthew Charles, M.Charles1@westminster.ac.uk
Translating China at the Cheltenham Festival
An event at next month’s Cheltenham Festival featuring our own Anne Witchard:
Translating China
Sunday 13 October, 12-1, Montpellier Gardens
How does the west ‘translate’ China and particularly the role of Chinese women past and present? How do western perceptions relate to reality? Acclaimed author of The Good Women of China, Xinran, joins the prize-winning ‘Misty Poet’ Yang Lian, and Anne Witchard, lead researcher on the AHRC project China in Britain: Myths and Realities, to discuss the evolution of gender roles in China, especially during the tumultuous events of the last hundred years.
Book your ticket here: http://www.cheltenhamfestivals.com/literature/whats-on/2013/translating-china/
Whitechapel Salon, 26th September: Ogg, Orlow, and Till on the future of ‘theory’ in art and design education
Whitechapel Gallery Salon: The Future of Theory
Thursday 26 September, 7pm – 9pm
Join Curator Kirsty Ogg, artist Uriel Orlow and Head of Central Saint Martins Jeremy Till for the first in a series of debates on the future of ‘theory’ in art and design education.
Organised with the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, Westminster and University for the Creative Arts.
