Please note the first 10 minutes of the event are missing (ABColombia’s introduction and the first couple of minutes of Danilo Rueda’s talk.

Join a conversation with Colombian Human Rights Defender Danilo Rueda of the Inter-Church Commission for Justice and Peace (CIJP), a human rights organisation with more than 31 years of experience of working to expose human rights violations in the conflict regions of Colombia.

Danilo Rueda works in a hostile environment and has been subjected to various death threats for his work supporting grassroots communities, who have devised a unique way to resist forced displacement and land grabs by living in humanitarian and biodiversity zones protected by special measures from the IACHR. Recently, the armed conflict between neo-paramilitary groups, the ELN guerrilla and dissidents of the FARC has increased in the rural areas.

Danilo will discuss the impact of conflict, how it is exacerbated by economic interests and what communities understand peace to mean as they struggle for their land rights and land restitution.

Chair: Louise Winstanley, Programme and Advocacy Manager, ABColombia

Panel:

Danilo Rueda, Executive Secretary, Inter-Church Justice and Peace Commission, Colombia

Sara Chandler, member of the Colombia Caravana UK Lawyers Group

Susi Bascon, Peace Brigades International UK

This event was jointly organised by PBI and ABColombia.

Adopting Argentina’s popular uprisings against neoliberalism including the 2001-02 rebellion and subsequent mass protests as a case study, The Mobilization and Demobilization of Middle-Class Revolt analyzes two decades of longitudinal research (1995-2018), including World Bank and Latinobarómeter household survey data, along with participant interviews, to explore why nonpolitically active middle-class citizens engage in radical protest movements, and why they eventually demobilize. In particular it asks, how do they become politicized and resist economic and political crises, along with their own hardship?

Theoretically informed by Gramsci’s notions of hegemony, ideology and class consciousness, Ozarow posits that to affect profound and lasting social change, multisectoral alliances and sustainable mobilizing vehicles are required to maintain radical progressive movements beyond periods of crisis. With the Argentinian revolt understood to be the ideological forbearer to the autonomist-inspired uprisings which later emerged, comparisons are drawn with experiences in the USA, Spain, Greece UK, Iceland and the Middle East, as well as 1990s contexts in South Africa and Russia. Such a comparative analysis helps understand how contextual factors shape distinctive struggling middle-class citizen responses to external shocks.

This book will be of immense value to students, activists and theorists of social change in North America, in Europe and globally.

by Anthony Gardner (University of Oxford), Magdalena Radomska (Art History Institute, Adam Mickiewicz University inPoznań), Marko Ilić (SSEES, UCL). Moderated by Maja and Reuben Fowkes (Post-socialist Art Centre, IAS, UCL)

This panel discussion brought together contributors to the special issue of Third Text on Actually Existing Artworlds of Socialism and guest respondents to debate the legacy of the socialist system for contemporary art and politics.

'Research into the institutional settings and practicalities of artistic production during the socialist period is giving rise to more nuanced accounts that complicate the distinctions made between the heroism of the neo-avant-garde and complicity of official artists, revealing an art system that was more variegated, flexible and generative than has been widely assumed. This panel examines the far-reaching implications of the understanding that artists from across the stylistic and ideological spectrum were productively imbricated in the calculated opacities and unlikely rapprochements of the ‘actually existing’ artworlds of socialism. Discussion of the specific traits of Eastern bloc artworlds and the key differences between art institutional landscapes across the Cold War divide opens onto the critical question as to what might be salvaged from the historical experience of art under socialism. Furthermore, if post-socialism is conceived not as a timeless category but as a specific historical period, then what are the prospects for the socialist project in the new social and political circumstances of unfolding global disorder?

What does political life look like when it is not read in the context of collectives like parties, unions, movements, NGOs, or the trope of resistance? Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Beetham, an impoverished neighbourhood in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, this paper approaches the politics of the urban poor by looking into everyday acts, gestures and discussions aimed at community-building and eventually, social justice. Activists in the Beetham thought about their futures and worked toward their objectives within sets of fluid, malleable and varied social relations to family, friends, neighbours, politicians, gang leaders and strongmen, saints, deities and spirits. These socialities, rather than pre-existing and fixed collectives based on a common identity or cause, were the primary context for acting and thinking politically. Investigating the development of political subjects in socialities of differently situated people and spirits, I pay attention to culturally meaningful forms of love experienced and expressed within such relations. The paper explores three activists’ affective socialities as sources of a temporal orientation, sense of self, social skills and emotional intelligence crucial to the activists’ political work in the Beetham. They worked towards “bringing people together,” for example by creating safe spaces for discussion, with the long-term objective of building a community. Unlike the fluid and heterogenous socialities that fostered activists’ work, the community they sought to build was a temporally and spatially located collective with shared experiences of structural violence and oppression, and possibly shared visions for a different future.

Speaker:

Maarit Forde is a senior lecturer in cultural studies and the head of the Department of Literary, Cultural and Communication Studies at the University of the West Indies in St. Augustine. Her research and teaching have focused on the anthropology of religion and political anthropology particularly in the Caribbean and its diaspora. In recent publications, she has looked into the government and politics of religion and healing in the colonial Caribbean; death and mortuary rituals; and the civic engagement of the urban poor. Passages and Afterworlds: Anthropological Perspectives on Death in the Caribbean was published last year by Duke University Press. Maarit is currently on sabbatical leave and visiting the University of Tampere in Finland, working on a book manuscript on subject formation and political activism in urban Trinidad.

Professor Kevin Middlebrook discusses the US approach to the Venezuela crisis on CNN by UCL Institute of Advanced Studies

Professor Kevin Middlebrook discusses US-Russia relations and the Venezuelan crisis by UCL Institute of Advanced Studies

by Nina Mickwitz (University of the Arts London), Nicola Streeten (www.streetenillustration.com), and Roger Sabin (University of the Arts London). Chaired by Dominic Davies (City University of London).

Though today we use the term ‘comics’ to refer to a wide range of cartoons, graphic narratives and sequential art that are by no means necessarily humorous, the word still betrays the long historical connections between comedy and laughter, on the one hand, and this most versatile and enduring of forms, on the other.

This panel offers three short position papers on the relationship between comedy and the comics form from three different perspectives. Comics scholar Roger Sabin will begin by offering a brief history of the relationship between early British comics and the wider comedy environment at the turn of the twentieth century, exploring the overlaps between the comic and the music hall and tracing the cultural landscape that shaped the very definition of the word ‘comic’.

Comics artist and scholar Nicola Streeten will then reflect on the critically overlooked uses of humorous comics by feminist activists throughout the twentieth century, from the suffrage movement to the present day, exploring the role that laughter has played in supporting and disseminating the messages of feminism.

Finally, comics scholar Nina Mickwitz will help us get to grips with the way in which comics and cartoons create humour through their visual and multi-modal properties. She will outline some of the different critical approaches that might be used to make sense of the formal components of comics, focusing on the comics strip Nancy, originally drawn by Ernie Bushmiller (1905-82) and more recently revived under the pseudonym Olivia Jaimes, to consider the multimodal delivery of humour, rhythm and visual gags.

by Ilona Németh, with interventions by Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe) and Leon Wainwright (Open University). Moderated by Maja and Reuben Fowkes (PACT UCL).

In her Eastern Sugar project, Bratislava-based artist Ilona Németh investigates the pathologies of economic transition, uncovering its roots in the flawed mechanism of privatisation mired by asset-stripping and systemic nepotism during the headlong rush from late socialism to feral capitalism. She chronicles the brutal dismantling of the material infrastructure of a once thriving sugar industry, investigates the invisible causes of its decline in the distant machinations of multinational corporations, and revivifies the forms, practices and sociability of sugarloaf-making in an exhibition setting. The choice of sugar as the prism through which to examine the multiple upheavals of the era of globalisation brings deeper historical connections with a cane sugar trade based on slavery linked to an earlier phase of capitalist expansion. This panel aims to bring comparative perspectives and parallel experiences from other geographies to the discussion of the turbulent geohistories of sugar illuminated by Ilona Németh’s work. Considered also is the extent to which the traumatic social transformations highlighted by Eastern Sugar are symptomatic of global changes to the world of labour brought by automization and how far the global scourge of populism can be traced back to economic dislocations following the collapse of the communist system.

The dominant narrative is that Canada has a positive record when it comes to slavery, and that it was an antislavery haven for African American slaves in the antebellum period who were fleeing from slavery in the United States. However, there were enslaved people in the colonies that would later become Canada, under both French and British rule. This paper explores how newspapers in colonial Canada represent enslaved people in Canada and slavery in the wider Americas, focusing on two newspapers published in Lower Canada between 1789-1793. It argues that advertisements about runaway slaves and selling enslaved people show that Canada was part of a wider print culture of slavery in the Americas. Newspaper editors simultaneously created an anti-slave-trade sentiment in their newspapers by reprinting texts from the abolition debate raging in Britain, France and the United States: colonial Canada was part of an international abolition network. By recovering these two aspects of Canada’s printed response to slavery in the Atlantic world, this paper suggests one way in which Canadians were able to read about the history of slavery in Canada and to suppress this history.

Speaker

Dr Eleanor Bird

Eleanor Bird is an Honorary Research Fellow at Lancaster University, where she is the BAVS/BARS Nineteenth-Century Matters Fellow 2018/19 and is using GIS technology to explore representations of nature and Canada in slave narratives. Her PhD ‘Canada and Slavery in Print, 1789-1889’, was awarded from the University of Sheffield in August 2018 and looks at how Canada’s self-image as an antislavery haven has developed across newspapers and slave narratives, situating Canada within a black Atlantic and abolition print history. She has a strong interest in public engagement work, including an historical cake-making evening, and she has written various blog posts for the British Library, as well as having held research fellowships with the Eccles Centre and the Nova Scotia Museum.

by Terry Kurgan in conversation with Tamar Garb and Eva Hoffman

Terry Kurgan’s book begins with a family snapshot made by her Polish grandfather in 1939 on the eve of the war. Presenting this evocative image as a repository of multiple histories—public, private, domestic, familial and generational—she sets off on a series of meditations on photography that give us startling insights into how photographs work: what they conceal, how they mislead, what provocations they contain. Each essay takes up the thread of the story of her family’s epic journey across Europe as they flee—country by country—Nazi occupation, until they reach Cape Town, South Africa. But Kurgan takes detours, circles back, diverts attention elsewhere, enriching and also disrupting the narrative with digressions on the way Google has changed our relationship to photography, on her grandfather’s eloquent daily journals, on the shipboard flirtations of her fascinating grandmother, on vanity, on self representation, on loss and return, home and exile. Kurgan’s richly satisfying essays are part memoir, part travelogue, part analysis and they demonstrate her sophisticated understanding of a medium that has long engaged her as an artist.