CRASSH

The lecture explores how complaint can be understood as a form of diversity work, as the work you have to do in order to make institutions more open and accommodating to others. The lecture draws on written and oral testimonies provided by those who have made complaints about racism, sexism, sexual harassment and bullying within universities. The lecture addresses the difficulty of making complaints and asks how and why complaints are blocked. The lecture shows how we learn about the institutional (as usual) from those who are trying to transform institutions.

Sara Ahmed is an independent feminist scholar and writer. She has held academic appointments at Lancaster University and Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. She has recently completed a book What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use and has begun a new research project on complaint. Her previous publications include Living a Feminist Life (2017), Willful Subjects (2014), On Being Included (2012), The Promise of Happiness (2010), Queer Phenomenology (2006), The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014, 2004), Strange Encounters (2000) and Differences that Matter (1998). She also blogs at www.feministkilljoys.com.

CRASSH Impact Lecture Series, Lent Term

Speaker: Sara Ahmed

Use is a small word with a lot of work to do, a small word with a big history. As Rita Felski describes in her introduction to a special issue of New Literary History on use, 'the very word is stubby, plain, workmanlike, its monosyllabic bluntness as bare and unadorned as the thing that it names' (2013, 5). This lecture explores different uses of use across a range of intellectual traditions including biology, design and psychology as well as education. It considers the role of utilitarianism in the forming of the modern university (with specific reference to London University, now UCL). One of the aims of the lecture will be to put ordinary use back into the archives of utilitarianism, showing how use in an 'inside job', how use shapes and moulds the university. Drawing on an empirical study of diversity work, first presented in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012), the lecture explores how and why diversity is 'in use' as a way of demonstrating how universities are occupied, how they are shaped by patterns of use that often remain unnoticed until they are contested.

Sara Ahmed is an independent feminist scholar and writer. She has held academic appointments at Lancaster University and Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. She has recently completed a book What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use and has begun a new research project on complaint. Her previous publications include Living a Feminist Life (2017), Willful Subjects (2014), On Being Included (2012), The Promise of Happiness (2010), Queer Phenomenology (2006), The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014, 2004), Strange Encounters (2000) and Differences that Matter (1998). She also blogs at www.feministkilljoys.com.

Public Lecture

Jon Agar and Jacob Ward (University College London)

'Communications, control and cybernetics in post-war British systems: rail, post and telecoms'

Discussant: Matthew Gandy (University of Cambridge)

Convenors

Andrew McKenzie-McHarg (University of Cambridge)

Poornima Paidipaty (University of Cambridge)

Egle Rindzeviciute (Kingston University)

Summary

As more and more of our collective activities (education, pension planning, health management, environmental protection) are mediated by rapidly moving markets and computerized technologies, uncertainties abound. Such visions of a technologically mediated — and seemingly limitless — future are not new. They echo the technological futurism popularized in the middle of the twentieth century by cybernetics. Beginning with the 1948 publication of Norbert Wiener’s book, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, cybernetics inaugurated path-breaking scientific explorations of feedback and self-regulation in biological and mechanical systems. It initiated an ambitious set of technoscientific discussions that provocatively transcended traditional disciplinary boundaries. Cyberneticians argued that patterns of feedback and self-regulation were key to understanding the operation of anti-aircraft guns, the erratic movements of victims of brain injury, the dynamics of group psychology, the relationship of human societies to their natural environment and much more.

These insights furnished profound reassessments of notions of agency, of distinctions between the human and the non-human and of models of learning and memory. The scholarship on cybernetics has, however, only recently began to trace the legacies of this movement beyond the Cold War era. By providing insights into the enduring impact of mid-century techno-science on our contemporary information landscape, 'The Afterlives of Cybernetics' conference will contribute to a more thorough history of the present by helping us understand the antagonisms and synergies that animate the multiple offshoots of cybernetic thought, including operations research, AI, rational choice theory, predictive analysis, design thinking, behavioural economics and risk management. This in turn will lay the foundations for a better understanding of how these knowledge practices allow us to project, imagine and engage with uncertain and unbounded futures.

Smuts Memorial Lecture Series 2017

Lecture Three: On the way home without a world: the case of Delhi

Speaker: AbdouMaliq Simone (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity)

Lecture Three Abstract

This lecture explores what it means to live without a world, without an overarching orientation or anchorage that compels bodies, things and places to have something inevitably to do with each other; where the purported coherence undermines itself in the politics of imposing a univocal frame. Here, the very intensity of segregating forces, of expulsions, land-grabs, and gentrification—which indeed are the predominant descriptors of contemporary urban development—also rebound in weird ways, suggesting, even for a moment, not the romance with urban cosmopolitan mixture, but a contingent density of differences that don’t seem to know how to narrate how they all got to be in the same “neighborhood.”

Focusing on a series of “strange alliances” in a dense Muslim working class district in Delhi, I attempt to grasp how contexts that provide for both a plurality of small, continuous attainments and prolific blockages are a means of attempting to understand what it means to be at home without a world.

Smuts Memorial Lecture Series 2017

Lecture Two Abstract

This lecture takes up the manufacturing of darkness as relationality spiraling out of control. Here, the capacity to render any experience as a piece of interoperable data intersects with the inability of any infrastructure to hold the sheer panoply of heterogeneous actions, recursions, and feedback loops that run up and down discernible scales. All of the devices and regimens capable of demonstrating exactly how things relate to each other, in their very implementation, unleash an excess of unscalable details and an aesthetics that renders the tropes of overarching organizational logics inoperable.

I explore some of the ways in which residents in Jakarta and Hyderabad, India, deal with this darkness, this situation where many countervailing realities all seem to be equally possible and appearing; where the accelerated, haphazard, and brazenly opportunistic expansions of built environments that seek to get far away from what a given city was before reaffirm or cultivate interiorities of care, of people looking out for each other.

Smuts Memorial Lecture Series (7, 9, 13 November 2017)

Series Title: The Uninhabitable: Afterlives of the Urban South

Speaker: AbdouMaliq Simone (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity)

Series Abstract

So many forces are at work to make habitation impossible or nearly impossible in many urban contexts. So much work is devoted toward detailing the demise of urban life in all of its aspects, and the way this destruction is unequally distributed across different regions and populations. In this series of three lectures, I invoke the uninhabitable, not as a quality of urban conditions, but rather a method of living-with this urban—and all of its intensifications, extension, ambiguities, and apocalyptic implications—as something strange, productively dark, and seemingly impermeable to calculation or figuring.

As such, this living-with is an arena of inexplicable conjunction, collaboration, unsettling; a profusion of undomesticated circulating details momentarily coalescing as affirmations, instigations of something else besides, right next to the otherwise resounding drudgery and bleakness of contemporary urbanization and its accelerated repetition of limiting formats and implosive horizons. A repetition that promises to destroy us, no matter how much we have been in the dark about such matters from the get-go.

Lecture One Abstract

The lecture models itself as an improvisatory ensemble. For it seeks to demonstrate the uninhabitable as rhythms of endurance; that rhythm is what ensues from those aspects of urban life that cannot be precisely measured or scaled, where the vectors of here and there, now and then become largely indistinguishable.

In a world of so much toxicity, inequality, stupidity, violence, and precarity, there is something else that offers no evidence for its existence, which cannot be mobilized as proof or resistance. Yet, it resounds as an aspect of even the most banal and quotidian of maneuvers. It points to a generic darkness in which every detail is compressed, but a darkness that hides nothing, that embodies no secrets. Just a parallel track; what Ornette Coleman would call “harmolodics”, a democracy of the ensemble, the capacity to deliver the same melody in a different way.

The lecture draws upon Quranic and Black eschatological notions of darkness to think about ways of living-with this something else beside(s) the proliferating manifestations of both the erasures of life and non-life and the rampaging political technologies that police boundaries demarcating the viable and unviable. The lecture is full of stories of strange alliances, improvisations, endless journeys of African entrepreneurs, crimes that spiral far beyond their origin, the circulation of messages in Freetown, and ways in which even the most desperate make sure to have something forceful to say to audiences far beyond their reach, how they refuse the inhabitation of the present, but also exceed this refusal.

This talk explores what factors - religious, economic, political - make some and not others believe in conspiracy theories. Hugo Drochon considers what impact that has had on contemporary political events, from Brexit to Trump.

Was Diana killed by the Secret Services? Is climate change a hoax? Did man not walk on the moon? Who shot JFK? Drawing on a nation-wide survey conducted with YouGov about belief in conspiracy theories, this talk explores what factors -religious, economic, political – make some and not others believe in conspiracy theories, and what impact that has had on contemporary political events, from Brexit toTrump. Hugo Drochon is a researcher with the 'Conspiracy and Democracy' research project at CRASSH.

We’re bombarded by information about our health. But who should be trusted? Physicians? Scientists? Patients? Pharma? Instinct? Come along for a range of researcher perspectives and to offer your own.

The safety and effectiveness of medical interventions is highly contested, even when it is backed by clinical research. Who should we trust? The truth of the scientists loyal to evidence-based medicine paradigms, or that of patients with their lived experience? Should we trust big pharma? Or perhaps no one at all? In this panel discussion, we will address these questions, which are, quite literally, of life-and-death significance.

The panel will include five speakers, all from the University of Cambridge: Anna Alexandrova, Gabriele Badano, Stephen John, Trenholme Junghans, and Jacob Stegenga. Speakers will first give a short talk each, looking from different angles at the plurality of actors who claim their perspective should take centre stage in clinical research. Next, they will have a short conversation among themselves before opening the floor to questions from the audience.

Organised by the 'Limits of the Numerical' research project at CRASSH.

CRASSH Impact Lecture Series, Michaelmas Term

Speakers: Michael Puett (Harvard University) and Julia Lovell (Birkbeck)

Michael Puett is the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology, as well as the Chair of the Committee on the Study of Religion, at Harvard University. His interests are focused on the inter-relations between philosophy, anthropology, history, and religion, with the hope of bringing the study of China into larger historical and comparative frameworks. His books include To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China and The Path: A New Way to Think About Everything (co-authored with Christine Gross-Lo).

Julia Lovell is a Reader in Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research has so far focused principally on the relationship between culture (specifically, literature, architecture, historiography and sport) and modern Chinese nation-building. Her books include The Great Wall: China Against the World 1000 BC - AD 2000 and The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (winner of the 2012 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature).

This event is part of the CRASSH Impact Lecture Series.

CRASSH Impact Lecture Series, Michaelmas Term

Speaker: Professor Michael Puett (Harvard University)

We seem to have a relatively clear (if somewhat uncomfortable) narrative concerning the rise and (potential) decline of neoliberalism. But, if we take into account the perspective of China, such a narrative may have to be re-thought. This talk will place some of the current political debates in China within a larger historical context and argue that these debates may force us to re-think some of our assumptions concerning the workings of the state and the economy and accordingly to re-think some of our readings of recent history. My hope is that the talk will help to contribute to developing a more global understanding of political theory.

Michael Puett is the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology, as well as the Chair of the Committee on the Study of Religion, at Harvard University. His interests are focused on the inter-relations between philosophy, anthropology, history, and religion, with the hope of bringing the study of China into larger historical and comparative frameworks. His books include To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China and The Path: A New Way to Think About Everything (co-authored with Christine Gross-Lo).

This lecture is part of the CRASSH Impact Lecture Series.