CRASSH

Researching South-South Development Cooperation

The conference's keynote lecture, 'Tupi or Not Tupi: Anthropophagy and Emulation in the Study of South-South Cooperation', given by Professor Adriana Erthal Abdenur (Pontifical Catholic University, Rio de Janeiro)

Convenors

Elsje Fourie (University of Maastricht)

Emma Mawdsley (University of Cambridge)

Wiebe Nauta (University of Maastricht)

Summary

The 'rise of the South' over the last 10-15 years has led to tectonic shifts in global development ideas, practices and actors. As growing providers of development assistance, states like Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Korea, Mexico, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, as well as a variety of non-state development organisations and movements, are becoming increasingly active and influential in bilateral, regional and international cooperation. Usually this has been framed as a successful projection of material, ideational and ontological power that has enabled Southern (and Arab) development partners to challenge long-standing 'North-South' development hegemonies.

While research is accelerating around many aspects of the rapidly growing and complex phenomenon of South-South Development Cooperation (SSDC), there has been limited space for reflection on the epistemological and methodological challenges posed by research in and with these Southern partners. Yet our own experiences, and discussions with differently positioned researchers in different sites, reveal new and emerging questions of identity, power and positionality for researchers and their partners and respondents; as well as unfamiliar and challenging conceptual frameworks for 'development'. Existing critical reflection on 'mainstream' international development ideas, practices and research from feminist, postcolonial and critical race theory has powerfully challenged the hierarchies and assumptions associated with the historically dominant North-South axis, while also providing paradigm-shifting innovations in methodologies and ethics in research praxis. To what extent are such critical reflections relevant to explore these new actors, hierarchies and identities emerging and deepening in and around SSDC?

This conference is the first of its kind in its specific focus on the epistemological and related methodological challenges associated with researching South-South development cooperation. The conference will invite researchers on SSDC - from graduates and early career scholars to leading figures in the field - to reflect critically on the changing politics of knowledge and knowledge production that these actors and trends present. We are particularly keen to include Southern-based researchers, funding permitting. The conference will be multidisciplinary in character, with researchers invited from Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Development Studies, Feminist Studies, International Relations, Media Studies and Political Studies

How does literary reference affect the interpretation of largely abstract works? In her recent book, Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (Princeton University Press, 2016), Mary Jacobus focuses on the artist’s use of poetry in his work, which often includes handwritten words and phrases—-naming or quoting poets ranging from Sappho, Homer, and Virgil to Mallarmé, Rilke, and Cavafy. In the artist’s own words, he “never really separated painting and literature.” Mary Jacobus's opening presentation will be followed by a wide-ranging discussion with Peter de Bolla (English) and Alyce Mahon (Art History) spanning both Twombly's work (currently the focus of a Pompidou retrospective) and that of his friend Robert Rauschenberg (currently the focus of a Tate Modern retrospective).

Mary Jacobus, Professor Emerita of English at the University of Cambridge, was Director of CRASSH from 2006-2011. She has written widely on Romanticism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and visual art. Alyce Mahon is a Reader in Modern and Contemporary Art History at the Department of History of Art. She is currently researching the American Surrealist Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) and curating the first major retrospective exhibition of Tanning for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid for 2018-2019. Peter de Bolla is Professor of Cultural History and Aesthetics and Direct of the Concept Lab at CRASSH.

Keynote

Anthony Vidler (Cooper Union / Yale University)

How to Do Things with Diagrams

Convenors:

Lukas Engelmann (University of Cambridge)

Caroline Humphrey (University of Cambridge)

Christos Lynteris (University of Cambridge)

Summary

Diagrams inhabit a liminal space between representation and prescription, words and images, ideas and things. From key moments of scientific and intellectual innovation (Darwin’s tree-diagram, Levi-Strauss’s diagram of the raw and the cooked, Lacan’s L-scheme, Waddington’s epigenetic landscape image and Francis Crick’s DNA double helix sketch) to everyday uses in all spheres of social, political, economic and cultural life, the diagram seeks resemblance to the empirical yet aspires to generalization. Conversely, employed across the disciplines as a thinking tool, the diagram hence holds the promise of transforming abstract issues into graspable images and translating the unseen into intelligible and actionable form. Both convincing and misleading and always positioned at the threshold of vision and the unseen, diagrams operate as abstractive and constitutive components of empirical realities.

This conference aims to explore the interdisciplinary, shared traits of diagrammatic thinking so as to go beyond the notion of simplification, of “drawing information together”, which forms the usual analytical ground for understanding syntactic visualizations in the sciences and humanities. Rather than seeing diagrams as systems of linkages, the aim of the conference is to explore the dialectic of inscription and erasure as an inherent and generative trait of diagrammatic practices.

Questions to be raised in the conference revolve around the following themes: How does the visual and logical indeterminacy of diagrams, their resistance to being fully perceived as images or understood as logical arguments, define their operation as ways of reasoning? And to what extent does diagrammatic reasoning extend beyond the realm of diagrams as visual/textual objects? By bringing together ethnographic, historical and philosophical perspectives on the diagram, in its applications across the disciplines, this conference aims to explore its role at the pivot of modern transformations and aporias between abstraction and form.

11 July 2016 - Keynote address as part of the 2016's Race to Save the World conference.

Madeleine Albright (Former U.S. Secretary of State)

Vin Weber (Republican Party strategist and former Congressman)

Chair : Steven Schrage (University of Cambridge)

Professor Khaled El-Rouayheb, Leverhulme Visiting Fellow at CRASSH for 2015-2016, delivers the second of his Leverhulme lectures.

This lecture will trace the emergence of a novel ideal of “deep reading” among Ottoman scholars of the seventeenth century. Medieval Arabic-Islamic educational manuals tended to focus on student-teacher relations and the acquisition of knowledge through listening. In the seventeenth century, Ottoman scholars articulate a new ideal of the acquisition of knowledge through “deep reading”. This development would seem to be related both to the increasing importance of the rational and instrumental sciences, and to the Ottoman examination system of the seventeenth century.

Professor Khaled El-Rouayheb, Leverhulme Visiting Fellow at CRASSH for 2015-2016, delivers the first of his Leverhulme lectures. The second lecture, The Rise of "Deep Reading" in Ottoman Scholarly Culture, will take place on Wednesday 4 May.

The science of ādāb al-baḥth or munāẓarah emerged relatively late in Islamic history. Its roots lay in the earlier science of eristic (jadal or khilāf) that had developed among early Islamic theologians and jurists (with some influence from Aristotelian topics and late-antique rhetoric). In this lecture, I will argue that there was an explosion of interest in the science in the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century. I will discuss the wider intellectual context of this development, as well as some of its consequences for the Ottoman tradition of logic.

The seventh Balzan-Skinner lecture and symposium with Balzan-Skinner Fellow Dr Teresa Bejan.

As the core premise of modern moral and political philosophy, equality often demands more allegiance than investigation. The question of its historical emergence as a social and political ideal is generally set aside in favor of identifying the causal and constitutive harms of various kinds of inequality – political, social, or economic. This talk will explore ideas of equality as a political principle, a religious commitment, and a social practice in seventeenth-century England. These fascinating but forgotten visions of “equality before egalitarianism” shed light on the development of a central concept in modern political thought while providing some analytical clarity and historical insight sorely missing in contemporary debates.

James English (University of Pennsylvania): Revisiting the "Great Divide”: The Past, the Future, and the Contemporary Novel

Conference Details

Summary

This interdisciplinary symposium seeks to expand and enrich our understanding of contemporary literary production. Moving beyond the traditional triumvirate of author, reader and text, we situate today’s fiction within a wider field, encompassing literary agents, editors, book reviewers, writing teachers, prize judges, festival organizers, and more.

‘Books in the Making’ brings some of the key players in the book trade into dialogue with academics from a range of disciplines, including literary and cultural studies, sociology, and the digital humanities. By creating new conversations between these too-often separate spheres, we consider the various ways in which books are made today. The symposium also explores the extent to which the book as a medium is now being ‘remade’ by new formats and technologies. By investigating these processes of making and remaking, we address a question that has not yet been posed systematically: that of the consequences for contemporary writing of ongoing changes in its production and dissemination.

On Thursday 14th April the symposium will open at 6pm with a public event in Lady Mitchell Hall, organised in conjunction with the Cambridge Literary Festival, featuring the best-selling American crime writer Lee Child in conversation with Andy Martin.

On Friday 15th the symposium will feature a plenary address from James English (University of Pennsylvania), author of The Economy of Prestige (2005), along with sessions bringing academics into conversation with publishing professionals to discuss three key aspects of the ‘making’ of contemporary literature:

CREATION: This session expands the concept of literary ‘creation’ to include not just the act of writing, but related activities including the teaching of writing, the role and influence of literary agents, and the shaping of literary categories such as ‘the bestseller’.

PUBLICATION: In this session, academics and members of the book trade consider the impact of current publication processes on contemporary writing. The conversation will involve both corporate and independent presses; print publishers and those whose business models are based upon new technologies.

RECEPTION: This session reconsiders traditional questions of reading, evaluation and interpretation by connecting them to social and institutional contexts including literary festivals, book reviewing and journalism, and literary prizes.

Tim Boon (Science Museum): Reflections on Creating a Research Culture

Julien Clement (Musée du Quai Branly, Paris): Research in question at the musée du Quai Branly

The Museum as Method: Collections, Research, Universities

Summary

If for many years collections seemed peripheral to innovative work in the arts and social sciences, there is a new sense that university museums can be research bases of a powerful and distinctive kind.

New approaches to material and visual culture, artefact studies and the intertwined histories of collections, exploration and the histories of science and the humanities promise to reconstitute the museum as a laboratory and the collection as a research technology. Increasingly, major cross-disciplinary projects have used collections as lenses upon larger issues ranging over art, culture, history and environment. Yet collections and the issues of method and analysis that they raise remain relatively under-theorised.

Over the same period, changing funding environments and new perceptions among policymakers of the importance of research, innovation, and the cultural sector raise the issues of what university museums contribute to higher education, and of the place and value of research in public and national museums.

This conference, formally supported by the University of Cambridge Museums and Botanic Garden (UCM) brings together scholars from disciplines interested in material culture and curators from across the arts and sciences, to reflect on both questions of methodology and public policy.

Viola König (Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin)

Respondent - Hedley Swain (Arts Council of England)

The Museum as Method: Collections, Research, Universities

Summary

If for many years collections seemed peripheral to innovative work in the arts and social sciences, there is a new sense that university museums can be research bases of a powerful and distinctive kind.

New approaches to material and visual culture, artefact studies and the intertwined histories of collections, exploration and the histories of science and the humanities promise to reconstitute the museum as a laboratory and the collection as a research technology. Increasingly, major cross-disciplinary projects have used collections as lenses upon larger issues ranging over art, culture, history and environment. Yet collections and the issues of method and analysis that they raise remain relatively under-theorised.

Over the same period, changing funding environments and new perceptions among policymakers of the importance of research, innovation, and the cultural sector raise the issues of what university museums contribute to higher education, and of the place and value of research in public and national museums.

This conference, formally supported by the University of Cambridge Museums and Botanic Garden (UCM) brings together scholars from disciplines interested in material culture and curators from across the arts and sciences, to reflect on both questions of methodology and public policy.