Spring 2013 | Public lectures and events | Video

Contributor(s): Professor Craig Calhoun | In this lecture LSE Director Professor Craig Calhoun, considers the threats, internal and external to global capitalism.

Contributor(s): Professor Cécile Laborde, Professor Tariq Modood, Professor Anne Phillips | Under the combined criticisms of feminism, secularism and nationalism, multiculturalism is repeatedly being pronounced dead. Has it really reached the end of the road and what are the alternatives? Cécile Laborde is professor of political theory at University College London. Tariq Modood is the founding director of the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship at the University of Bristol. Anne Phillips is director of the Gender Institute and professor of political and gender theory in the LSE Gender Institute.

Contributor(s): Dr Isatou Touray | This talk discusses the efforts made by grassroots Gambian activists and community campaigns, as well as external forces, in building resistance to female genital mutilation in one of the few countries in the world where the practice remains not legally prohibited. Isatou Touray is founder and Executive Director of the Gambia Committee on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children (GAMCOTRAP), an organisation which has campaigned for women’s and girls’ rights since the 1980s, and which has been a leader in the struggle to eliminate Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). In addition to a prolific list of publications, Dr Touray has engaged extensively with other rights organisations in The Gambia and beyond. This has included membership of the Gender Action Team for the Ratification of the African Protocol on Women’s Rights, and the Technical Advisory Body for the Policy for the Advancement of Gambian Women, and acting as Secretary General for the Inter-African Committee on Traditional Practices. In recognition of her achievements, sacrifices and service to others, in 2008 Dr Touray was awarded the US Ambassadorial Prize for ‘International Woman of Courage’ and was voted ‘Gambian of the Year’, an honour bestowed previously on only two female nationals. This event is supported by the LSE Annual Fund.

Contributor(s): Professor Ali Ansari | Launching his latest book, The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran, Professor Ali Ansari will explore the idea of nationalism in the creation of modern Iran, considering the broader developments in national ideologies that took place following the emergence of the European Enlightenment and showing how these ideas were adopted by a non-European state. Ali Ansari is Professor in Modern History with reference to the Middle East at University of St Andrews, where he is also the founding director of the Institute for Iranian Studies.

Contributor(s): James Dawson, Kate Kingsley, Meg Rosoff | This event celebrates the culmination of the LSE/First Story creative writing competition for key stages 3, 4 and 5 and will include a prize-giving presentation, as well as a reception following the event. Trying new things can be daunting, but also inspiring. In our creative writing trying a new genre or subject, or exploring what new technology has to offer can be liberating. But is it sometimes best to stick to the classics? Find out what has inspired our panel of authors, and join in the discussion. James Dawson, author of dark teen thrillers Hollow Pike and Cruel Summer, grew up in West Yorkshire, writing imaginary episodes of Doctor Who. He later turned his talent to journalism, interviewing luminaries such as Steps and Atomic Kitten before writing a weekly serial in a Brighton newspaper. Until recently, James worked as a teacher, specialising in PSHCE and behaviour. He is most proud of his work surrounding bullying and family diversity. He now writes full time in London and is published by Indigo/Orion. Kate Kingsley is the author of Young, Loaded & Fabulous, a scandalous YA series about mean teens at British boarding school. After growing up between London and New York City, Kate started her writing career at GQ magazine. She has been published in places like The Sunday Times Magazine and the New York Times. This is her first year working with the wonderfully talented First Story students, an experience she is absolutely loving. She currently lives in East London, where she's writing her sixth book. Meg Rosoff was born in Boston, educated at Harvard and St Martin’s College of Art, and worked in New York City for ten years before moving to London permanently in 1989. She worked in publishing, politics, PR and advertising until 2004, when she wrote How I Live Now, which won the Guardian Children’s fiction prize (UK), Michael L Printz prize (US), the Die Zeit children’s book of the year (Germany) and was shortlisted for the Orange first novel award. Her second novel, Just in Case, won the 2007 Carnegie Medal. Meg’s other books include What I Was, The Bride's Farewell and There Is No Dog. This event is linked to LSE's 5th Space for Thought Literary Festival|, taking place from Tuesday 25 February - Saturday 2 March 2013, with the theme 'Branching Out'.

Contributor(s): Michael Ward | LSE London's 2013 Lent term seminar series begins on the 14th of January. Speakers from within and beyond academia will focus on many of the implications of the current economic and political environment for London, covering relevant issues such as the road pricing, UK trends in higher education, census data and localism. Presenters include academics and practitioners from relevant fields. Each seminar is chaired by one of the members of LSE London, while speaker’s presentations, available podcasts and any other related documents are posted here regularly after each session.

Contributor(s): Professor Peter Hall | This presentation explores the origins and consequences of the contemporary crisis of the Euro from the perspective of a varieties-of-capitalism approach to the political economy. It associates the inadequacies of the governing institutions adopted for the Euro with a set of mythologies that was blind to the presence of distinctive varieties of capitalism in Europe and locates some of the roots of the crisis in the problems associated with combining joining varieties of capitalism in a single currency. The problems encountered by the Euro lie less in the ‘asymmetrical shocks’ anticipated in 1992 and more in the ‘institutional asymmetries’ across political economies. The problems the EU has had in resolving the crisis are also linked to divergent diagnoses of the problem rooted in distinctive philosophies of governance associated again with varieties of capitalism in Europe. Peter A. Hall is Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies, a faculty associate of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, and co-director of the Program on Successful Societies for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Hall is co-editor of Successful Societies: How Institutions and Culture Affect Health (with M. Lamont), Changing France: The Politics that Markets Make (with B. Palier, P. Culpepper), Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage (with D. Soskice), The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism across Nations, Developments in French Politics I and II (with A. Guyomarch, J. Hayward and H. Machin), European Labor in the 1980s and the author of Governing the Economy: The Politics of State Intervention in Britain and France as well as over seventy articles on European politics, public policy-making, and comparative political economy.

Contributor(s): Professor Paul Preston, Dr Daniel Beer, Professor Helen Graham, Professor Dan Stone | A discussion of the atrocities against civilians in the Spanish Civil War, the political consequences in Spain today and the parallels with Nazi and Soviet experiences. Paul Preston is Director of the LSE’s Cañada Blanch Centre and author of numerous books on Spain of which the latest is The Spanish Holocaust. Daniel Beer is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at Royal Holloway and the author of Renovating Russia: the Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity (Cornell, 2008). Helen Graham is Professor of History at Royal Holloway. Her most recent book is The War and its Shadow. Spain’s Civil War in Europe’s Long Twentieth Century (2012). In 2010 she was Visiting Chair in Spanish Culture and Civilisation at the King Juan Carlos Centre, New York University. Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History at Royal Holloway, University of London. His books include Histories of the Holocaust (OUP, 2010); The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History (OUP, 2012) and The Holocaust, Fascism and Memory (Palgrave, 2013). The Cañada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies is located within the European Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science and is the focus of a flourishing interest in contemporary Spain in Britain. LSE Works is a series of public lectures, that will showcase some of the latest research by LSE's Research Centres. In each session, LSE academics will present key research findings, demonstrating where appropriate the implications of their studies for public policy. A list of all the LSE Works lectures can be viewed online.

Contributor(s): Professor David Ferris | This lecture will argue that painting, rather than retreat from the transformation of the visual image announced by photography, has now become photography’s most important interpreter. David Ferris is professor of humanities and comparative literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Contributor(s): Alexis Tsipras | Alexis Tsipras is President of Syriza-USF (Official Opposition Party, Greece). Professor Kevin Featherstone is director of the Hellenic Observatory at LSE.