CRASSH

The lecture by Jon Agar and Jacob Ward (University College London) will be open to all free of charge. Further information, including an abstract, is available here.

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.

Keynote lecture by Professor Paolo Quattrone (University of Edinburgh)

'Who said accounting was boring? Rhetoric and the making of socie-ties’

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Convenors

Clément Feger (University of Cambridge)

Bhaskar Vira (University of Cambridge)

Laurent Mermet (AgroParisTech)

Summary

After the recent development of accounting for biodiversity and ecosystems at the business level and at the national level, a third construction site in accounting research is necessary at the scale of inter-organizational ecosystem management.

This calls for a constructive dialogue between conservationists who design and use new information systems on ecosystems in multiple contexts but face challenges in obtaining the political and social changes they expect, and critical accounting researchers who can provide deep knowledge on the connections between information, accounts exchange, accountabilities, values and all forms of collective organized action.

The workshop will build on the presence of a strong community of conservation research and practice in Cambridge (notably based at the University of Cambridge's Conservation Research Institute and the Cambridge Conservation Initiative), and will provide them for the first time with a space to engage with critical and social and environmental accounting researchers.

We hope that this new interdisciplinary bridge will set off theoretical elaborations, as well as concrete working relationships and future experimentations of accounting for the management of ecosystems innovations that can ultimately lead to better achievement of ecological and social results. The new path of research that this workshop will discuss will provide a critical, theoretical and practical alternative to the already well-established collaborations of conservation research with the field of economics.

The conference will combine intensive closed workshop sessions with two public events on the topic.

Convenors

Clément Feger (University of Cambridge)

Bhaskar Vira (University of Cambridge)

Laurent Mermet (AgroParisTech)

Summary

After the recent development of accounting for biodiversity and ecosystems at the business level and at the national level, a third construction site in accounting research is necessary at the scale of inter-organizational ecosystem management.

This calls for a constructive dialogue between conservationists who design and use new information systems on ecosystems in multiple contexts but face challenges in obtaining the political and social changes they expect, and critical accounting researchers who can provide deep knowledge on the connections between information, accounts exchange, accountabilities, values and all forms of collective organized action.

The workshop will build on the presence of a strong community of conservation research and practice in Cambridge (notably based at the University of Cambridge's Conservation Research Institute and the Cambridge Conservation Initiative), and will provide them for the first time with a space to engage with critical and social and environmental accounting researchers.

We hope that this new interdisciplinary bridge will set off theoretical elaborations, as well as concrete working relationships and future experimentations of accounting for the management of ecosystems innovations that can ultimately lead to better achievement of ecological and social results. The new path of research that this workshop will discuss will provide a critical, theoretical and practical alternative to the already well-established collaborations of conservation research with the field of economics.

The conference will combine intensive closed workshop sessions with two public events on the topic.

Keynote Lecture

Chair: Jonathan Linebaugh (University of Cambridge)

Frederick Beiser (Syracuse University)

'The Politics of Strauss’ Biblical Criticism'

Respondent: Ian Cooper (University of Kent)

Session One - Roundtable Discussion

Chair: Ruth Jackson and Hanna Weibye (University of Cambridge)

Panellists:

Andrew Bowie (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Maureen Junker-Kenny (Trinity College Dublin)

Gareth Stedman-Jones (Queen Mary, University of London)

Joachim Whaley (University of Cambridge)

Putting Dirt in Its Place: The Contemporary Politics of Waste

Conference Keynote Lecture : Zsuzsa Gille (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) - 'Overflows, Agencement, and Inequalities of the Circular Economy'

Convenor

Patrick O'Hare (University of Cambridge)

Summary

This conference explores the socio-material interfaces where waste meets politics in the present. It brings together a group of established and emergent waste scholars from across the social sciences to discuss the contemporary dynamics of waste and waste labour in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. Five themed panels - on infrastructure, labour, circulation, elimination and reconceptualization– provide a structure through which waste will be explored in all its complexity.

Drawing largely on ethnographic research, presenters will debate how legal, regulatory, cultural, bio-political and economic factors influence what is configured and classified as waste. Can we speak of ‘waste regimes’? What role do religion, class and race play in determining the division of waste labour? Are formalization and privatization of waste management leading to the dignification or dispossession of waste workers? Can ethnographic and sociological explorations of the materialities of waste politics challenge normative understandings and definitions of waste, commodity and value? Are ideas like 'zero waste' and the 'circular economy' green modernist fables or realizable policies, and how do they reconfigure existing patterns of accumulation and inequality?

A Black Feminist conversation: Black life, law, love and survival in times of Trump and Brexit

Feminist professors of colour Patricia J. Williams (Columbia University) and Heidi Safia Mirza (Goldsmiths, University of London) will debate Black life, law, love and survival in times of Trump and Brexit. The discussion will be chaired by Sarah Franklin (University of Cambridge).

Patricia Williams is perhaps America’s most distinguished writer on law, race and gender. She is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University and writes a regular column for The Nation. Her books include The Alchemy of Race and Rights, The Rooster’s Egg and Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race.

Speaker: Patricia J. Williams (Columbia University)

Patricia Williams will remark on tensions between discourses of universalised longing for human identity, human rights, unbounded, globalised connection – and the traumatised and traumatising language of dislocation and dis-identification with ever more fragmented categories of 'other'.

In Conversation: Paul Gilroy and Patricia Williams

Patricia J. Williams (Columbia University) will join Paul Gilroy (King’s College London) in conversation at the launch of the CRASSH Impact series, Law, Race, Gender and Public Policy. The discussion will be chaired by former President of the Cambridge University Students' Union, Priscilla Mensah.

Dr Sophie Smith (University of Oxford) is the Quentin Skinner Fellow 2016-17. She will be giving the annual Quentin Skinner lecture and participating in the symposium.

What are we trying to understand when we study politics - and to what end? These are often thought of as relatively new questions in the long history of political thought. On the conventional view, though the ancients certainly wrote about politics, self-conscious reflection on politics as 'science' or 'philosophy' properly speaking was a nineteenth century invention. Furthermore, the story goes, it was only in the nineteenth century that we see the relationship between political science and practical politics, not least the politics of empire, first emerge.

While the empirical and positivistic emphases of British, American and European political scientists in the nineteenth century were indeed new, the idea that there might be a 'science of politics', fit to be taught in universities, with its own methods, sources and ends, was not. Neither was the thought that, in the words of one early modern author, ‘the philosophical principles of politics’ were a necessary part of the statesman’s arsenal. In both antiquity and early modernity authors engaged with questions about what it means to study politics. Indeed, some of the topics we consider central to distinctively modern meta-discussions about the nature of, for example, 'political theory’ were in fact present in some of the very earliest discussions about the nature of what early modern authors called scientia civilis. These include debates about the sources of political normativity, about utopianism and its limits, and about possible tensions between theory and practice.

This symposium will reflect on this history and its significance for thinking about how we study politics today.