CRASSH

ST Lee Professorial Fellow 2011-12

The ST Lee Professorial Fellowship has been made possible by a generous endowment by Dr ST Lee, of Singapore to the School of Advanced Study at the University of London.

Professor Steven Shapin

A lecture by Steven Shapin (Franklin L Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University) on the cultural and social history of how people have tasted wine and talked about its tastes followed by a wine reception.

Abstract

How have people talked about the organoleptic characteristics of wines? How and why have descriptive and evaluative vocabularies changed over time? These vocabularies have shifted from the spare to the elaborate, from medical implications to aesthetic analyses, from a leading concern with 'goodness' (authenticity, soundness) to interest in the analytic description of component flavours and odours. The causes of these changes are various: one involves the importance, and eventual disappearance, of a traditional physiological framework for appreciating the powers and qualities of different sorts of aliment, including wines; another concerns the development of chemical sciences concerned with flavour components; and still another flows from changing social and economic circumstances in which wine was consumed and the functions served by languages of connoisseurship. The historical span surveyed here extends from Antiquity to the present and displays talk about wine tastes as a perspicuous site for understanding aspects of wide-ranging social and cultural change.

Conveners

Dr Ying Jin (Architecture, University of Cambridge)

Dr Tony Hargreaves (Architecture, University of Cambridge)

Co-ordinated by Marion Houston

Scientific Committee

Professor Marcial Echenique (Architecture, University of Cambridge)

Professor Mike Batty (Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL)

Professor Michael Wegener (Spiekermann & Wegener Urban and Regional Research, Dortmund)

Conference Summary

AUM2012 is the second of a planned series of annual symposia for discussing applied urban simulation models that offer insight into complex dynamics of urban change and inform practical initiatives. AUM2012 aims to bring together scholars and practitioners from diverse disciplines, professional institutions and government agencies in many countries. The cross-fertilisation of ideas is expected to serve as a springboard for innovation in urban modelling at different levels – from conceptual experiments to policy appraisal.

AUM2012 will continue to focus on models of large city regions, especially their applications in addressing grand challenges such as energy and climate change. It is open to all model types and styles, with papers welcomed that assess different pathways towards energy efficient and climate wise cities, where system-level thinking is still hampered by a lack of common understanding of the theories and tools. We have also welcomed papers that report innovations in methods and techniques.

The preceding 2011 symposium showed that the format was effective in facilitating an in-depth understanding of the state of the art across model types and styles, and of possibilities to link and interface the models for tackling policy questions. We hope the discussions will lead to meta-analyses that systematically compare model specifications, mechanisms, scenario inputs and policy assessment outputs. An example of such meta-analyses is Wegener (2010) [click here]. The meta-analyses will run concurrently with the symposium series and we look forward to hearing from urban modellers who wish to contribute to it.

A half-day workshop in conjunction with Jay Winter's 2012 Humanitas Visiting Professorship in War Studies at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH).

Prof Alex Danchev : The Images of Abu Ghraib

Professor of International Relations, University of Nottingham

Dr Beatrice Jauregui : American Communion: Vietnam War Veterans Reunions

Research Fellow in Social Anthropology, Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge

Ms Jananne Al-Ani : The Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land without People

Award-winning Artist, London

Building on Professor Jay Winter’s series of lectures on Writing War, Figuring War, and Filming War, as well as a concluding symposium on Imagining War in the 20th Century and After, this workshop will provide an opportunity to further explore the general topic of 'imagining war' by linking it with some of the concerns of the Between Civilisation and Militarisation Faculty Research Group, particularly the murky and manipulable imagined line between 'civil' and 'military' spheres of action and influence. We will focus on the interrelations among the following conceptual triad: conflict + culture + witnessing. In this triad, ‘culture’ will be understood to encompass forms of creative expression and exhibition, as well as definitions of the term that stem from anthropology and political science, in particular the idea of ‘cultural violence’. Questions about practices of ‘witnessing’ and offering ‘testimony’ will be applied not only to the arts, social sciences and humanities as intellectual institutions, but also to the roles and responsibilities that various actors in conflict situations might perform, from military soldiers and museum archivists, to civilians living in war torn spaces, and even to the spaces themselves. Some of the questions raised during the workshop include: What kinds of politics of memory and recognition emerge from war? How do artistic expressions and exhibitions serve various actors in war situations in presenting testimonies of experiences? How have artists been drawn to war themes from ‘outside’ as witnesses to ‘internal’ conflicts? How do artistic and historical memorials offer more and less satisfying testimony to the destruction and loss occasioned by war?

A half-day workshop in conjunction with Jay Winter's 2012 Humanitas Visiting Professorship in War Studies at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH).

Mr Paul Cornish : Exhibiting War. A New First World War Gallery for the Imperial War Museum.

Senior Curator and Historian, Imperial War Museum, London

Dr Dacia Viejo-Rose : Cultural and Symbolic Violence: The case of Spain, 1936-2006

British Academy Post-doctoral Fellow, Macdonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge

Dr Khadija Carroll La: If you fight the dragon long, the dragon you become: Comments on Monuments in the Balkan

Newton Fellow, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge

Building on Professor Jay Winter’s series of lectures on Writing War, Figuring War, and Filming War, as well as a concluding symposium on Imagining War in the 20th Century and After, this workshop will provide an opportunity to further explore the general topic of 'imagining war' by linking it with some of the concerns of the Between Civilisation and Militarisation Faculty Research Group, particularly the murky and manipulable imagined line between 'civil' and 'military' spheres of action and influence. We will focus on the interrelations among the following conceptual triad: conflict + culture + witnessing. In this triad, ‘culture’ will be understood to encompass forms of creative expression and exhibition, as well as definitions of the term that stem from anthropology and political science, in particular the idea of ‘cultural violence’. Questions about practices of ‘witnessing’ and offering ‘testimony’ will be applied not only to the arts, social sciences and humanities as intellectual institutions, but also to the roles and responsibilities that various actors in conflict situations might perform, from military soldiers and museum archivists, to civilians living in war torn spaces, and even to the spaces themselves. Some of the questions raised during the workshop include: What kinds of politics of memory and recognition emerge from war? How do artistic expressions and exhibitions serve various actors in war situations in presenting testimonies of experiences? How have artists been drawn to war themes from ‘outside’ as witnesses to ‘internal’ conflicts? How do artistic and historical memorials offer more and less satisfying testimony to the destruction and loss occasioned by war?

Professor Jay Winter: Imagining the Great War: The Historial de la grande guerre, Péronne, Somme

Charles J. Still Professor of History, Yale University and CRASSH Visiting Humanitas Professor, University of Cambridge

Building on Professor Jay Winter’s series of lectures on Writing War, Figuring War, and Filming War, as well as a concluding symposium on Imagining War in the 20th Century and After, this workshop will provide an opportunity to further explore the general topic of 'imagining war' by linking it with some of the concerns of the Between Civilisation and Militarisation Faculty Research Group, particularly the murky and manipulable imagined line between 'civil' and 'military' spheres of action and influence. We will focus on the interrelations among the following conceptual triad: conflict + culture + witnessing. In this triad, ‘culture’ will be understood to encompass forms of creative expression and exhibition, as well as definitions of the term that stem from anthropology and political science, in particular the idea of ‘cultural violence’. Questions about practices of ‘witnessing’ and offering ‘testimony’ will be applied not only to the arts, social sciences and humanities as intellectual institutions, but also to the roles and responsibilities that various actors in conflict situations might perform, from military soldiers and museum archivists, to civilians living in war torn spaces, and even to the spaces themselves. Some of the questions raised during the workshop include: What kinds of politics of memory and recognition emerge from war? How do artistic expressions and exhibitions serve various actors in war situations in presenting testimonies of experiences? How have artists been drawn to war themes from ‘outside’ as witnesses to ‘internal’ conflicts? How do artistic and historical memorials offer more and less satisfying testimony to the destruction and loss occasioned by war?

Natalie Zemon Davis and Amitav Ghosh: Storytelling and the Global Past

John-Paul Ghobrial (History, Churchill College)

This public lecture will bring together the prize-winning historian Natalie Zemon Davis and the celebrated novelist Amitav Ghosh to reflect on prevailing approaches to writing about the global past. Masterful storytellers in their own right, both speakers have experimented in novel, poignant, and bold ways with several of the key questions facing global historians today. In doing so, they have also embraced the productive tension at the boundaries of history and fiction. The event, therefore, is intended as much as a reflection on global history as an opportunity to consider wider issues of narrative, plausibility, and authenticity in historical writing in its myriad forms. In doing so, it will encourage the audience and participants to think together about the limits and opportunities facing historians and novelists, respectively, in their attempts to depict the global past.

Rising Powers in the International System: Harnessing Opportunities, Managing Challenges

Rising Powers in the International System

Chair and Discussant: Professor Andrew Gamble

The Rise of the BRICs – Dr Jim O’Neill (Goldman Sachs)

The Historic Struggle for Mastery – Professor Brendan Simms (POLIS, Cambridge; Member, Steering Committee, CRP)

Negotiating with and as New Powers – Dr Amrita Narlikar (POLIS, Cambridge; Director, CRP)

Conference Summary

After witnessing the critical role new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) played in supporting political change in Northern Africa at the beginning of 2011, expectations have grown that in Sub-Saharan Africa authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes may also be challenged by emerging uses of ICTs for political change. However, there have been little signs that long-standing leaders in countries like Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, or Uganda may be ousted from power by a popular uprising supported by and coordinated through the use of new technologies. What are the reasons for this apparent absence of impact? How much of the lack of technologically mediated mobilizations for greater rights and political freedoms depends simply on the limited diffusion of ICTs such as the Internet? How much depends instead on the particular nature of politics on the African continent (where the most significant protests to date have been channelled by partisan and divisive politics rather than being the expression of an empowered civil society)? And, in the absence of revolutionary outcomes, are ICTs affecting and possibly transforming the nature of political mobilization and participation in more subtle ways?

The workshop will address these questions by providing a platform for scholars studying the role of ICTs in political transformations to engage with the arguments put forward by researchers investigating governance processes in Africa. It will focus not only on the newest technologies, but explore the unique ways in which new and old means of communication are being and could be combined in Sub-Saharan Africa to enable citizens to express voice and affect political processes. Participants will examine, for example, whether and how the increasing availability of mobile phones is promoting innovative ways of influencing government policies and of claiming rights, but also how these innovations fit in longer term patterns of use of communication to affect governance. The overarching aim is to explore whether, as has been the case for applications such as mobile banking, the most significant uses of ICTs for participatory politics in Africa may emerge from a unique combination of global influences and local needs, rather than from the application of tools and uses that have been proved successful in external contexts. This inter-disciplinary workshop complements the Cambridge Centre of Governance and Human Rights (CGHR)’s current research project on how innovations in ICTs can transform governance processes in Africa.

Conference Summary

After witnessing the critical role new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) played in supporting political change in Northern Africa at the beginning of 2011, expectations have grown that in Sub-Saharan Africa authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes may also be challenged by emerging uses of ICTs for political change. However, there have been little signs that long-standing leaders in countries like Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, or Uganda may be ousted from power by a popular uprising supported by and coordinated through the use of new technologies. What are the reasons for this apparent absence of impact? How much of the lack of technologically mediated mobilizations for greater rights and political freedoms depends simply on the limited diffusion of ICTs such as the Internet? How much depends instead on the particular nature of politics on the African continent (where the most significant protests to date have been channelled by partisan and divisive politics rather than being the expression of an empowered civil society)? And, in the absence of revolutionary outcomes, are ICTs affecting and possibly transforming the nature of political mobilization and participation in more subtle ways?

The workshop will address these questions by providing a platform for scholars studying the role of ICTs in political transformations to engage with the arguments put forward by researchers investigating governance processes in Africa. It will focus not only on the newest technologies, but explore the unique ways in which new and old means of communication are being and could be combined in Sub-Saharan Africa to enable citizens to express voice and affect political processes. Participants will examine, for example, whether and how the increasing availability of mobile phones is promoting innovative ways of influencing government policies and of claiming rights, but also how these innovations fit in longer term patterns of use of communication to affect governance. The overarching aim is to explore whether, as has been the case for applications such as mobile banking, the most significant uses of ICTs for participatory politics in Africa may emerge from a unique combination of global influences and local needs, rather than from the application of tools and uses that have been proved successful in external contexts. This inter-disciplinary workshop complements the Cambridge Centre of Governance and Human Rights (CGHR)’s current research project on how innovations in ICTs can transform governance processes in Africa.

A lecture by David Hendy at CRASSH - 12 March 2009