Participants: Tali Hatuka (Tel Aviv University), Zizi Papacharissi (University of Illinois-Chicago), Doina Petrescu (University of Sheffield / atelier d’architecture autogerée), Laura Lo Presti (University of Padua)

Moderators: Alex Grigor, Michal Huss, Konstantinos Pittas

Description: This panel deals with the ways that radical alterations in scale, time, and place, prompted by the digital age and by technological advancement require new methodologies for mapping, studying, and interpreting the commons. Taking into consideration people on the move due to conflict, migration, gentrification, and homelessness on the one hand, cyberspaces, virtual places, and digital communications on the other, what are the new points of entry into and membership of the commons? If we agree that the commons is essential to a healthy polity and functioning democracy, what issues does the privatisation of the digital commons raise? How might we renegotiate power dynamics around the production, distribution, and representation of knowledge, information and data? If common spaces are always contested, as is the notion of a coherent or unified 'collective', what is the role of protest and demonstration both in the physical and digital spheres?

The final section of this panel included audiences participation. This was not recorded due to GDPR guidelines. Thank you for your understanding.

VIRTUAL CONFERENCE PROGRAMME:

Commoning the City

Friday 12 June 2020, 14.00 – 15.45 (BST)

Participants: Ash Amin (University of Cambridge), Massimo De Angelis (University of East London), Shannon Mattern (The New School), Richard Sennett (Chair, Council on Urban Initiatives, United Nations Habitat)

Whose Commons, for Whom?

Friday 12 June 2020, 17.00 – 18.45 (BST)

Participants: Tali Hatuka (Tel Aviv University), Zizi Papacharissi (University of Illinois-Chicago), Doina Petrescu (University of Sheffield / atelier d’architecture autogerée), Laura Lo Presti (University of Padua)

Reclaiming the Cultural Commons

Saturday 13 June 2020, 13.00 -14.45 (BST)

Participants: Sepake Angiama (Institute for International Visual Arts-London), Gavin Grindon (University of Essex), Ella McPherson (University of Cambridge), Pelin Tan (Bard College)

All recordings are available on: https://www.youtube.com/user/crasshpublicity

Participants: Sepake Angiama (Institute for International Visual Arts-London), Gavin Grindon (University of Essex), Ella McPherson (University of Cambridge), Pelin Tan (Bard College)

Moderators: Alex Grigor, Michal Huss, Konstantinos Pittas

Description: This panel looks at contestations around cultural commons and strategies to re-claim and re-mobilise them. In addition, the unfolding global health crisis urges to think about its repercussions to the basic rights of access to culture, to the diversity of cultural content and expression online, and to the precarious-now more than ever-art and cultural labour. With cultural institutions closing down, major artistic and cultural events postponed, and community cultural practices suspended on the one hand, and with the acceleration in the digitisation of cultural content and the surge in online access to this content on the other, what are the potentialities and stakes of this new reality in light of the coronavirus pandemic? How can widespread protests against toxic philanthropy, institutional racism, art washing, and gender discrimination help us to envision museums taking the side of the commons? How can culture and aesthetics serve as innovative terrains for encounters and exchanges, solidarity and sharing, synergies and community building?

The final section of this panel included audiences participation. This was not recorded due to GDPR guidelines. Thank you for your understanding.

VIRTUAL CONFERENCE PROGRAMME:

Commoning the City

Friday 12 June 2020, 14.00 – 15.45 (BST)

Participants: Ash Amin (University of Cambridge), Massimo De Angelis (University of East London), Shannon Mattern (The New School), Richard Sennett (Chair, Council on Urban Initiatives, United Nations Habitat)

Whose Commons, for Whom?

Friday 12 June 2020, 17.00 – 18.45 (BST)

Participants: Tali Hatuka (Tel Aviv University), Zizi Papacharissi (University of Illinois-Chicago), Doina Petrescu (University of Sheffield / atelier d’architecture autogerée), Laura Lo Presti (University of Padua)

Reclaiming the Cultural Commons

Saturday 13 June 2020, 13.00 -14.45 (BST)

Participants: Sepake Angiama (Institute for International Visual Arts-London), Gavin Grindon (University of Essex), Ella McPherson (University of Cambridge), Pelin Tan (Bard College)

All recordings are available on: https://www.youtube.com/user/crasshpublicity

Participants: Ash Amin (University of Cambridge), Massimo De Angelis (University of East London), Shannon Mattern (The New School), Richard Sennett (Chair, Council on Urban Initiatives, United Nations Habitat)

Moderators: Alex Grigor, Michal Huss, Konstantinos Pittas

Description: This panel explores the current potentials of and constraints for the production of the city (understood as a social, historical, and multi-sensual construct) as a common space. How can we prevent a pandemic from becoming another excuse for neoliberal austerity, new enclosures, repression, and mass securitisation at the city level? How can physical spaces become ‘common’, against the backdrop of the privatisation impetus of global capitalism and the proliferation of virtual spaces? As information and communication technologies influence the city’s networks and the processes of immaterial labour, what new capacities to be ‘in common’ emerge and what new forms of solidarity and mutual care networks can be prefigured? How can emerging urban social movements practise the commons in translocal spaces?

The final section of this panel included audiences participation. This was not recorded due to GDPR guidelines. Thank you for your understanding.

VIRTUAL CONFERENCE PROGRAMME:

Commoning the City

Friday 12 June 2020, 14.00 – 15.45 (BST)

Participants: Ash Amin (University of Cambridge), Massimo De Angelis (University of East London), Shannon Mattern (The New School), Richard Sennett (Chair, Council on Urban Initiatives, United Nations Habitat)

Whose Commons, for Whom?

Friday 12 June 2020, 17.00 – 18.45 (BST)

Participants: Tali Hatuka (Tel Aviv University), Zizi Papacharissi (University of Illinois-Chicago), Doina Petrescu (University of Sheffield / atelier d’architecture autogerée), Laura Lo Presti (University of Padua)

Reclaiming the Cultural Commons

Saturday 13 June 2020, 13.00 -14.45 (BST)

Participants: Sepake Angiama (Institute for International Visual Arts-London), Gavin Grindon (University of Essex), Ella McPherson (University of Cambridge), Pelin Tan (Bard College)

All recordings are available on: https://www.youtube.com/user/crasshpublicity

This talk considers how specifically language-based AI systems (for example, speech recognition, machine translation or smart telecommunications interfaces) have affected and transformed modern society. In an age when we spend large parts of our daily lives communicating with our smartphones and Virtual Personal Assistants such as Siri, Cortana, and Alexa, we need to consider how these technologies actually impact our lives. While these intelligent systems can certainly have a positive impact on society (e.g. by promoting free speech and political engagement), they also offer opportunities for distortion and deception. Unbalanced data sets used to train automated systems can reinforce problematical social biases; automated Twitter bots can drastically increase the spread of fake news and hate speech online; and the responses of automated Virtual Personal Assistants during conversations about sensitive topics (e.g. suicidal tendencies, religion, sexual identity) can have serious consequences. We will explore some of these issues as well as discuss opportunities to implement these systems and technologies in ways that may affect more positively the kinds of social change that will shape modern digital democracies in the immediate future.

A talk by Dr Stephanie Ullmann and Dr Marcus Tomalin from the 'Giving Voice to Digital Democracies' project at CRASSH.

7 June 2019

The Quentin Skinner Fellow for 2018-19, Dr Emma Hunter, will give the annual lecture and participate in the related symposium. Online registration is now available. Please click here to book your place or use the online registration link on this page. The standard fee is £20, and £10 for students/unwaged. This includes lunch and refreshments.

Once approached primarily as part of the history of the West, liberalism has recently begun to receive attention from a global perspective. Yet the history of liberalism in twentieth-century Africa remains little studied. This is perhaps not surprising. Powerful historiographical frameworks have marginalised the history of liberal thought in Africa. In both the scholarly and popular imagination, colonial rule in the first half of the twentieth century in Africa is understood as defined by a conservative reaction against what had come to be seen as the failed liberal projects of the nineteenth century. If in the 1940s and 1950s, liberal thought seemed briefly to take centre stage, the years after independence again seemed to bear witness to its renewed marginalization.

However, a great deal of the reworking of core political concepts which characterized the political thought of twentieth-century Africa took place in dialogue with global ideas which owed much to thinkers situated in a liberal tradition. At the same time, studying political thinking in Africa both in the present and in the past reveals the importance of strands of thinking about freedom which were on the margins of or outside these traditions. These strands of thought are often hidden from view. Sometimes this is because written sources do not exist or the languages in which they are written or the archives in which they are conserved make them hard for historians to access. Sometimes they are hidden from view by the categories through which historians work.

These issues, and the methodological challenges involved in addressing them, will be the focus of the Quentin Skinner Colloquium of 2019. The Colloquium will provide an opportunity to explore the history of liberalism, broadly defined, in twentieth-century and twenty-first-century Africa, as well as to contribute to a wider methodological discussion, prompted by the emergence of the new field of global intellectual history, on how to move the study of the history of political thought beyond Western contexts.

Susan Stryker (University of Arizona)

'Transgeneration: Or, Becoming-With My Monstrous Kin'

In this keynote address, Susan Stryker tells the story, from her perspective, of how the essay 'My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix' entered the world and what that monstrous assemblage has been doing since it found its way into print. In doing so, she charts a trajectory across queer theory in the 1990s, the emergence of transgender studies as an increasingly legible field, the shift in cultural studies toward questions of ontology and technicity, and new articulations of transness and blackness within contemporary social theory.

http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/28386

lgbtQ+@cam was launched by the School of Humanities and Social Sciences in 2018 to promote research, outreach and network building related to queer, trans and sexuality studies at the University of Cambridge. Working closely with allied initiatives in other Faculties and Centres, the lgbtQ+@cam programme combines small focussed workshops and seminar series with larger conferences and events to both enhance existing teaching and research in lgbtQ+ studies at Cambridge, and build stronger links to queer research and study programmes nationally and internationally. The goal of lgbtQ+@cam is to increase participation in this transformative field, and to transform higher education as a result.

https://www.lgbtq.sociology.cam.ac.uk/About

This event is part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas. Bookings will open at 11:00 on Monday 24 September 2018.

From MOOCS to networked institutions, remote and off-shore degrees, flexible and flipped learning, Universities seem to be changing at an unprecedented rate, on an unprecedented scale. This talk lays out some of the most radical of these changes and asks: What are we are witnessing now? Are we in the age of hyper education, and the end of Universities as they have been for centuries?

Talk by Alison Wood, Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities

The Quentin Skinner Fellow for 2017-18, Dr Avi Lifschitz, will give the annual lecture and participate in the related symposium.

How should readers approach the philosophical writings of an author who was not only a political thinker – but also, and primarily, a major political agent? Are written works in this case merely tools for public self-fashioning or self-justification?

These issues will stand at the centre of the Quentin Skinner Lecture in summer 2018, focused on the test case of Frederick II of Prussia (‘the Great’, r. 1740-1786). The Prussian monarch was unique in the eighteenth century (and beyond) in composing a large corpus of philosophical works that did not only aim to analyse current affairs; he reflected on the nature of political action and its links to justice, virtue, human reason, and the passions. While the monarch engaged closely with the history of political thought, most historians have accorded little significance to his philosophical works. Accounts of Frederick and his Prussia usually assume that his philosophical writings must have been mere masks in a game of Realpolitik.

The lecture will reassess such assumptions, arguing that Frederick’s philosophical works can be taken seriously beyond their practical or political uses – even if their author was disingenuous at the time of writing. By drawing on a wide range of Frederick’s works, the lecture raises broader methodological questions concerning the study of written work by active political agents in different eras.

CRASSH is delighted to invite you to the book launch for Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy by James Williams, winner of the inaugural Nine Dots Prize. This event is free and open to the public, and a drinks reception will follow the event.

Author: James Williams (University of Oxford)

Discussants:

Maria Farrell (Writer and Technology Consultant)

John Naughton (The Observer's Technology Correspondent)

WINNER OF THE INAUGURAL $100,000 NINE DOTS PRIZE

Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy

Published by Cambridge University Press on 31 May 2018

Paperback or Open Access

Former Google advertising executive, now Oxford-trained philosopher James Williams launches a plea to society and to the tech industry to help ensure that the technology we all carry with us every day does not distract us from pursuing our true goals in life. As information becomes ever more plentiful, the resource that is becoming more scarce is our attention. In this 'attention economy', we need to recognise the fundamental impacts of our new information environment on our lives in order to take back control. Drawing on insights ranging from Diogenes to contemporary tech leaders, Williams's thoughtful and impassioned analysis is sure to provoke discussion and debate. Williams is the inaugural winner of the Nine Dots Prize, a new Prize for creative thinking that tackles contemporary social issues.

Our CRASSH Impact speaker this Easter Term will be Reni Eddo-Lodge, whose Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race recently won the 2018 Jhalak Prize for the best book by a British BAME writer.

On 15 May 2018, Reni Eddo-Lodge will be in conversation with Priyamvada Gopal. The event is free and open to the public. No registration required.

The conversation will be chaired by Lola Olufemi (Women's Officer, Cambridge University Students' Union).

The event has been added to Facebook, if you'd like to invite friends.

For details of Reni Eddo-Lodge's conversation with Heidi Safia Mirza, please click here.

About Reni Eddo-Lodge

Reni Eddo-Lodge is a London-based, award-winning journalist. She has written for the New York Times, the Voice, Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Independent, Stylist, Inside Housing, the Pool, Dazed and Confused, and the New Humanist. She is the winner of a Women of the World Bold Moves Award, an MHP 30 to Watch Award and was chosen as one of the Top 30 Young People in Digital Media by the Guardian in 2014. She has also been listed in Elle's 100 Inspirational Women list, and The Root's 30 Black Viral Voices Under 30. She contributed to The Good Immigrant.

Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race is her first book. It won the 2018 Jhalak Prize, was chosen as Foyles Non-Fiction Book of the Year and Blackwell's Non-Fiction Book of the Year, was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and the Orwell Prize and shortlisted for the British Book Awards Non-Fiction Narrative Book of the Year and the Books Are My Bag Readers Award for Non-Fiction.

About Priyamvada Gopal

Priyamvada Gopal is a Reader in Anglophone and Related Literatures at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Churchill College. She is the author of Literary Radicalism in India (Routledge 2005) and The Indian Novel in English: Nation, History and Narration (Oxford 2009). She has written for The Guardian, The Nation, Al-Jazeera, Open: the Magazine and The Hindu among others. She has also participated in programmes with the BBC, NDTV-India, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio and al-Jazeera. Her forthcoming book, Insurgent Empire is due out with Verso in Spring 2019.