Spring 2011 | Public lectures and events | Video

Contributor(s): Professor Ulrich Beck, Professor Lynn Jamieson | In the global age there are increasing numbers of long-distance relationships, bi-national couples, marriage migrants, foreign domestic workers and fertility tourists. What are their common characteristics? Ulrich Beck is the British Journal of Sociology LSE Centennial Professor.

Contributor(s): Professor Nicola Clayton, Professor Erica Fudge, Professor Gregory Radick | This panel discussion will provide historical and contemporary perspectives on animal cognition and will consider the challenges facing the study of animal minds. Nicola Clayton is professor of comparative cognition at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of the Royal Society. Erica Fudge is professor of English studies in the School of Humanities at the University of Strathclyde. Gregory Radick is professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Leeds.

Contributor(s): Henry Siegman | Henry Siegman is president of the U.S./Middle East Project, an initiative focused on U.S.-Middle East policy and the Israel-Palestine conflict, launched by the Council on Foreign Relations in 1994. The organization was established as an independent policy institute in 2006 under the chairmanship of General Brent Scowcroft. Mr Siegman is also a visiting research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and a consultant for the Norwegian Peacebuilding Centre (Noref) in Oslo. Mr Siegman has published extensively on the Middle East peace process and has been consulted by governments, international agencies, and non-governmental organizations.

Contributor(s): Shelina Zahra Janmohamed, Senay Özdemir, Naema Tahir | There are few places in Europe in which the voices of multiculturalism and Islamophobia have clashed more forcefully than in the Netherlands, often in the most dramatic ways. To name just a few, Pim Fortuyn, Theo Van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and most recently Geert Wilders have been very much in the international press over the last decade. In the UK we are now 14 years on from the publication of the influential Runnymede Trust report Islamophobia: a Challenge for us All which sets out an agenda for overcoming social exclusion of British Muslims. Fiction writers from Muslim backgrounds have played an important role in the debate about multiculturalism and Islamophobia. We will explore how they see their art as a tool to facilitate cross-cultural dialogue and political discourse about integration.

Contributor(s): Professor John Gray | During the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century science became the vehicle for an assault on death. The power of knowledge was summoned to free humans of their mortality. Science was used against science and became a channel for faith. John Gray is most recently the acclaimed author of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, and Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. Having been Professor of Politics at Oxford, Visiting Professor at Harvard and Yale and Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, he now writes full time. His selected writings, Gray’s Anatomy, were published by Penguin in 2009. The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death is published in February 2011.

Contributor(s): Tahmima Anam, Mirza Waheed | A new generation of writers from the subcontinent has been producing exciting work on the region's armed conflicts. This panel features two such writers: Tahmima Anam, author of A Golden Age, a novel about the 1971 Bangladesh war, and Mirza Waheed, author of The Collaborator, a novel about the ongoing conflict in Kashmir. Anam and Waheed will be in conversation with Sumantra Bose, professor of international and comparative politics at LSE.

Contributor(s): Sam Leith, Lionel Shriver, Nigel Warburton | With rapid developments in communication and publication technologies, the book – as conventionally conceived – is no longer the only point of connection between writers and their audiences. New media cross many geographical borders with ease, creating potentially global readerships. New communication technologies empower audiences to answer back, dissolving the traditional borders between writers and readers. And with this, the boundaries between forms of writing begin to be reconfigured. How do writers and readers of fiction and sustained non-fiction relate to each other in this new space? What does technology mean for the future of the author?

Contributor(s): Francis Spufford | At first sight, the USSR of the 1950s and 1960s is a formidably remote and strange place for an early 21st-century western observer to try to inhabit: ideological, materially alien, suffused with obsolete expectations, and operating in its daily life and economic life according to rules that eerily reverse our own. But the reward for crossing this particular imaginative border, argues Francis Spufford, is the discovery, in the mirrorworld of the Soviet Union, of deeply recognisable human behaviour, and deeply familiar human hopes. Francis Spufford, a former Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year (1997), has edited two acclaimed literary anthologies and a collection of essays about the history of technology. His books include I May Be Some Time, which won the Writers' Guild Award for Best Non-Fiction Book of 1996, the Banff Mountain Book Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award, The Child That Books Built, Backroom Boys, and most recently Red Plenty. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College.

Contributor(s): Brian Chikwava, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Olumide Popoola | This panel will consider a number of complementary and competing themes around the topic of diaspora and place. Particular places, and perhaps especially cities, consist of large diasporic populations often represented as indications of cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism and conviviality. Diasporas may be formed through forced or voluntary movements, leaving behind certain places but having often powerful relationships to them, and creating new senses of place elsewhere. Ideas of diaspora, as well as travel, movement, and exile, have become important subjects and tropes within contemporary literature. Notions of longing and belonging are perhaps most discreetly and passionately played out in the novel, that may be biographical to the life of the author as exile and/or ‘global cosmopolitan’. How we perceive London, New York or Johannesburg (as well as smaller towns) may be informed by the authorial gaze on the city by writers.

Contributor(s): Donna Thomson, Geraldine Bedell | Donna Thomson will discuss her book, The Four Walls of My Freedom, which describes her family's experience of coping with her son's cerebral palsy. Her own encounter with adversity takes on new meaning when viewed through the lens of Professor Amartya Sen and other philosophers' roadmaps of how to realize a good life against all odds. This lens includes not only people with disability, but also the enormous generation of post-WWII Baby Boomers who are beginning to sense the health care crisis that is looming as they deal with their own aging and increasingly infirm parents. Geraldine Bedell is an author and critic. She is currently working on developing a new project for mumsnet and is the founder of the website Agebomb. She has been a writer The Observer and The Independent on Sunday. She has also written for The Times, Telegraph, Mail and Express, and for many women's and general interest magazines.