Stuart Hood – Centenary Day Conference

Stuart Hood

STUART HOOD (1915-2011)

CENTENARY DAY CONFERENCE

Open University in London and the South-East

1-11 Hawley Crescent

London NW1 8NP

(Near Camden Town tube on the Northern Line)

Saturday November 28

10.30 a.m. – 5.30 p.m.

We hope to provide coffee and tea and there will be a social space for discussion over lunch (not provided). There are takeway catering facilities nearby.

There is no conference fee.  But please register your attendance with Hilary Horrocks at: hilaryhorrocks@btinternet.com as the venue has a limited capacity.

*

Stuart Hood, born in small-town NE Scotland in 1915, volunteered for army service in 1940 and was captured in the North African desert while stationed in Cairo with British Intelligence. He was released from an Italian prisoner of war camp at the time of the Armistice in September 1943 and, during an almost-year-long journey to meet the Allied advance, fought with Tuscan partisans, participating in the now semi-mythologised Battle of Valibona (January 1944). His memoir Pebbles from My Skull (1963), often republished, mainly as Carlino, is a classic reflection on his time in war-torn Italy. He worked for 17 years at the BBC, resigning in frustration from the position of Controller of Programmes, Television, in 1963, having been responsible for programmes such as Z-Cars and That Was the Week That Was. He made important documentaries including The Trial of [Soviet dissidents] Daniel and Sinyavsky; and was briefly Professor of Media Studies at the Royal College until asked to resign following his support for student protests. He latterly taught at the University of Sussex. He was a distinguished translator, particularly from German (including the poems of his great friend, Erich Fried) and Italian (including work by Dario Fo and Pier Paolo Pasolini). Returning to an earlier career as a fiction writer, he published a series of novels – A Storm from Paradise (1985), The Upper Hand (1987), The Brutal Heart (1989), A Den of Foxes (1991), and The Book of Judith (1995) – which draw on his Scottish childhood, his wartime experiences and his encounters with, amongst others, members of the Baader-Meinhof group. He joined the Communist Party as a student in Edinburgh but after the war was an anti-Stalinist socialist and briefly, in the 1970s, a member of the Workers Revolutionary Party. Influenced by the class-conscious trade unionists he had met in his university days, he was, also in the 1970s, an active Vice-President of the film and TV technicians’ union, ACTT.

Provisional conference programme follows …

 

PROVISIONAL PROGRAMME (subject to amendment)

10.30 Arrival and Registration

10.45 Welcome, Terry Brotherstone and David Johnson

 

10.50-11.50 Session One

10.50 Showing of extracts from Stuart Hood’s documentary return to his childhood home, A View from Caterthun, with commentary by filmmakers Don Coutts and Christeen Winford.

11.20 Hilary Horrocks (freelance editor and independent researcher), ‘Stuart Hood, Partigiano – finding traces today in Emilio-Romagna and Tuscany’.

 

11.55-12.45 Session Two

11.55 Phil Cooke (University of Strathclyde), ‘The Italian Resistance: recent work on the historical context of Carlino’.

12.20 Karla Benske (Glasgow Caledonian University), ‘Showcasing the “compexity of human reactions”: an appreciation of Stuart Hood’s novels’.

 

12.45 Lunch

 

2.00-3.15 Session Three

2.00 Robert Lumley (University College, London), ‘Keeping Faith: revisiting interviews with Stuart Hood’.

2.25 Brian Winston (University of Lincoln) and Tony Garnett (film and TV director and producer), ‘Stuart Hood and the Media’.

3.15-3.30 Break

 

3.30-4.45 Session Four

3.30 David Johnson (Open University), ‘Stuart Hood, Scottish Literature and Scottish Nationalism’.

3.55 Haim Bresheeth (London School of Economics), ‘Working with Stuart on the Holocaust’.

4.20 Terry Brotherstone (University of Aberdeen) will lead a discussion on Stuart Hood’s politics, including his involvement in the 1970s with the Workers Revolutionary Party.

 

4.45-5.30 Session Five

4.45 Final reflections and future proposals.

5.15 Close.

5.30 Social gathering nearby.

 

First Published in http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/stuart-hood-1915-2011-centenary-day-conference-28-november

 

***END***

‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

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Approaching Posthumanism and the Posthuman

Capitorg

APPROACHING POSTHUMANISM AND THE POSTHUMAN

Conference and Doctoral Workshop

June 4-6, 2015 – St. Maurice, Switzerland

 

Keynote Speakers:

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington University

Stefan Herbrechter, Coventry University

Margrit Shildrick, Linköping University

Cary Wolfe, Rice University

 

Organizers: Deborah Madsen, Manuela Rossini, Kimberly Frohreich, and Bryn Skibo-Birney

 

CALL FOR PAPERS: http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/57765

 

A highly topical and sometimes contentious notion, posthumanism continues to spark debates as to how it is

and should be defined, particularly in relation to humanism. One might ask whether the posthuman is merely

an imaginative, literary, and/or theoretical figure or if we are already posthuman. Is posthumanism simply

“after the human” or does it speak to a being beyond, above, within, encompassing, and surpassing what we

currently know as “the human”? Moreover, even if we recognize that posthumanism is inextricably bound to

and wound up in humanist discourse, does the posthuman figure effectively open up alternative perspectives

and positions from which to question, to destabilize, and to decenter the human?

 

These questions permeate contemporary literature, film and television, comic books, video games, social

media, philosophical and theoretical essays in which posthuman figures abound. From avatars and cyborgs to

clones and zombies, the posthuman appears continually to challenge the line dividing the human from the

nonhuman. Whether blurring the distinction between human and machine, human and animal, organic and

inorganic, or the living from the dead, whether destabilizing gender, sexuality, race, class, age, the

mind/body dichotomy, or species categorization, posthumanism points to the ways in which (the exclusion

of) the Other is necessary to the self-bounded identity of the human(ist) subject. More than a contemporary

issue, posthumanism appears whenever “humanness” or anthropocentrism is in crisis, and critics have

accordingly noted the presence of posthumanist thought, themes, and figures not only in postmodern

literature but in much earlier literary periods as well.

 

The aim of this conference is both to explore the multiple ways in which posthumanism in its various

configurations questions, complicates, destabilizes, and “haunts” humanism and the human, as well as to

discuss theoretical approaches to posthumanism and/or the posthuman. In addition to inhabiting a wide range

of literary periods, genres, and media, posthumanism can also be said to blur the seemingly well-defined

borders between humanities disciplines, lending itself to interdisciplinary approaches involving literary and

cultural studies, media studies, animal studies, and fields like the digital, medical, and environmental

humanities, as well as drawing from multiple theoretical frameworks such as feminism, gender studies, queer

theory, race theory, disability studies, postcolonial studies, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction.

 

Please send 300 word abstracts to Kimberly Frohreich (kimberly.frohreich@unige.ch) and Bryn Skibo-

Birney (bryn.skibo@unige.ch) by September 15, 2014.

 

Paper topics can address (but are not limited to) any of the above areas and themes across disciplines, periods, genres, and media.

An additional list of potential paper topics is below:

• Posthumanist discourse and/or figures in medieval, early modern, modern or contemporary literature
• Posthuman figures in film and television
• Posthuman figures in comic books and graphic novels
• Posthuman figures in contemporary media forms, e.g. video games, social media, etc.
• Posthumanism and critical animal studies
• Digital humanities and posthumanism
• Medical humanities and posthumanism
• Environmental humanities and posthumanism
• Postcolonial posthumanism
• Posthumanism and the Gothic (then and now)
• Posthumanism and fantasy, science fiction and/or speculative fiction
• Virtual versus embodied reality
• Monsters, ..freaks,.. and/or superheroes
• Metamorphoses and interspecies being/becoming
• Posthuman(ist) subjectivities
• Embodying posthumanism or the posthuman body
• The posthumous
• Language and the posthuman
• Posthumanism and gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, and/or class
• Anthropomorphism
• Posthuman politics and ethics

 

**END**

‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn_Rikowski?ev=hdr_xprf

Online Publications at The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

 

Journeys Across Media

The Black Rock

JOURNEYS ACROSS MEDIA

Journeys Across Media (JAM)

The Body and The Digital

Friday 19th April 2013, University of Reading

2013 will mark the 11th anniversary of the annual Journeys Across Media (JAM) Conference for postgraduate students, organised by postgraduates working in the Department of Film, Theatre & Television at the University of Reading. JAM 2013 seeks to focus on and foster current research relating to the Body and the Digital, as today they are interactive and interdependent facets in the media of film, theatre and television; and more widely, in the areas of performance and art. It is a relationship which continues to develop and redefine cinematic, televisual and theatrical practices.

French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty once stated: “The body is our general medium for having a world.” Today, the world of live and screened performance are perceived and received differently, due to the body’s relationship with the digital. Approaches and practices of phenomenology, embodiment, the haptic and the experiential are being re-examined as they continue to encounter digital culture in new ways. Representations and experiences of embodiment are often integral dynamics of theatre, television, film and television, and are preoccupations that can be explored through diverse media or digital influences.

This is a call for postgraduates engaging in contemporary discourses and practices relating to the Body and the Digital, to submit papers or practice-based research for the JAM 2013 Conference. Topics may include, but are not restricted to:

-Interactivity between Digital languages and the Body

-Sonic Representations of the Body in Digital Performance

-The Digitized Body in Performance

-The Role of the Body in Digital Games and Virtual Performance

-Post-Colonial Bodies in the Contemporary Moment

-Preparing the Body for Performance

-Notions of Embodiment (i.e. Violent, Disabled, Explicit)

-Traditions of Corporeally focused Film, Theatre and Television

-Embodied Spectatorship or Audiences, and Physicality

-Phenomenology of the Lived, Performed and Screened Body

-The Haunted Body

-Politics of the Body

-Unconventional and Other Bodies

The body, its presence, perceptions and experience, are becoming increasingly underpinned and influenced by the digital age. JAM 2013 will endeavour to open a dialogue about the relationship between the body and digital in contemporary scholarship and practice, posing many questions including: How does the body encounter digital media and how do digital media frames position the body – both in mainstream iterations, social media contexts and in art/installation/performance contexts? Furthermore, it will also be worth considering how digital technology has affected the way that humans approach unfamiliar body movement traditions, beyond regional and national borders?  

JAM 2013 will provide a discussion forum for current and developing research in film, theatre, television and new media. Previous delegates have welcomed this opportunity to gain experience of presenting their work at different stages of their development, while having the opportunity to meet and form contacts with fellow postgraduate students. Furthermore, participants at JAM 2013 have the possibility of being published in the Journal of Media Practice.

Non-Presenting delegates are also very welcome to attend this conference.

CALL FOR PAPERS deadline: 1st February 2013

Please send a 250-word abstract for a fifteen minute paper and a 50-word biographical note to Johnmichael Rossi, Gary Cassidy, Edina Husanovic, Shelly Quirk, Matthew McFrederick at jam2013@pgr.reading.ac.uk .

 

CALL FOR PRACTICE-BASED WORK deadline: 1st February 2013

Continuing from the success of last year’s JAM 2012 Conference: Time Tells, which experimented with conference structure to include live performances, film screenings and installations taking place throughout the day, we invite artists working in various mediums to propose presentations of their work, relevant to the conference theme.

Please send a 250-word outline describing the piece you are proposing to present, as well as duration and any specific technical/space requirements, and a 50-word biographical note. Relevant images and links to your work would also be helpful. As outlined above please e-mail the Conference organisers at jam2013@pgr.reading.ac.uk.

 

We would appreciate the distribution of this call for papers and wider promotion of this conference through your networks. Journeys Across Media is supported by the Department of Film, Theatre & Television at Reading and the Standing Conference of University Drama Departments.

 

**END**

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Cultures of Surveillance

The Lighthouse

CULTURES OF SURVEILLANCE

Call for Papers:

“Cultures of Surveillance”: An Interdisciplinary Conference,

Sponsored by The Film Studies Space: The Centre for the Cultural History of the Moving Image,

UCL (University College London), 29 September – 1 October 2011

We are being watched. The amazing part is that we are no longer even surprised by this. The culture of surveillance increasingly surrounds us in Europe where omnipresent CCTV cameras remind us that nothing escapes the invisible gaze of those behind the lens. At UCL, we have long been surveyed by our founder, Jeremy Bentham, who sits in a wooden case in the lobby and peers from glass eyes and a wax head: his own ‘icon’ body signals that he not only knew what surveillance meant but named it through his invention of the Panopticon. That imaginary device, which Bentham proposed would “help reform morals, preserve health, invigorate industry, diffuse instruction, and lighten public burdens,” continues to be a resonant touchstone for questions about the way governments and private agencies keep watch over our interests – and theirs. This conference, held where Bentham goes on watching both literally and metaphorically, proposes to explore, broadly, the interdisciplinary frameworks for understanding modern surveillance and, particularly, how surveillance practices intersect with visual technologies and histories of culture.

Our conference project emerges from an eagerness to think in new ways about surveillance practices as they intersect with culture, visual culture, and moving image studies. We start from the vantage point that there are many frameworks through which surveillance might be imagined today, ranging from the kinds of surveillance that entail keeping a friendly watch over each other to those represented by policing practices, government monitoring, and undercover investigations.

Our call for papers likewise assumes that questions about surveillance have become central to today’s world, as states and cultures grapple with the complex dynamics of security and liberty and as corporations demand ever more precise data about the world’s populations. As a modern panoptical city, Londonstands at the centre of the shift away from a Cold War culture of surveillance toward the post-9/11 order of things. It has long been one of the centres for the development and deployment of surveillance practices ranging from census taking to identification methods (such as fingerprinting, photography, passports, and DNA typing). It has also served over the past two centuries as a crucial nexus for practices of culture that perpetuate – and often question – the work of both social surveillance and self-surveillance: for example, the novel, detective fiction, museums, and the BBC. Visual recording and representations have historically played a central role in surveillance practices throughout the industrialising world: printmaking, photography, the cinema, and televisual moving images have accompanied the rise of the modern police force and the development of security systems in public as well as private spaces. “Cultures of Surveillance” hopes to address these intertwined histories of surveillance, practices of governance, visual technologies, and cultural forms.

This conference is sponsored by UCL’s Film Studies Space, an interdisciplinary centre for the study of the cultural history of moving images. It derives from two ongoing research projects, The Work of Film, investigating the ways moving images have been utilised by states and corporations to guide the conduct of populations; and The Autopsies Project, examining the afterlife of material objects in relation to the history of consumer culture and cinematic memory. We hope that conference presenters will discuss a range of issues in the long history of surveillance practices, from photography to digital media.

We anticipate contributions that analyse the myriad ways that visual culture has been enmeshed with political rationalities. We are keen to expand our frameworks far beyond the sphere of Londonand to look outside the Panopticon. We especially hope that contributions will find new ways of asking what it means to watch and to be watched, and to police and to be policed. We look forward to discussing ways that scholars of the humanities can interrogate the networks of surveillance that both protect and transform our world.

Following an opening lecture by Professor Tom Gunning, The University of Chicago, on Thursday, 29 Sept. 2011, the Conference will take place on Friday and Saturday, 30 Sept. and 1 Oct. 2011.

Topics might include but are not limited to:

* Histories of surveillance technologies and their applications

* The geo-politics of surveillance (in the 19th century? in Cold War culture? After 9/11?)

* Architectures of surveillance – visibility and urban space

* Film and television representations of surveillance / Film and the construction of public space

* Photography and the police

* Constructions of identity and surveillance methods (fingerprinting, passports, census taking)

* The hidden objects of surveillance (cameras, tape recorders, transmitters, interceptors, tracking systems)

* Histories and representations of objects associated with the collection, storage, and retrieval of personal data: from filing cabinets, paper shredders, computers …. (etc.)

* The Obsolete Objects of Surveillance (i.e., objects of surveillance that have fallen out of use)

* How do objects make visible personal data that is otherwise invisible?

* Self-policing: how do we watch them watch us?

* Technologies of the self and new media / Technologies of the self and dead media

* Systems of meaning and truth under surveillance/ imaginary and real inventions for policing and detecting such as lie detectors, truth serums, mind reading

* War-time surveillance: rationing and ration books, black market trading (representations and history)

* Governmental efforts to educate citizens (e.g. road safety campaigns, anti-littering campaigns, anti-smoking campaigns, etc.), both in filmic representation or through tv and press media.

* The gadgets of surveillance in spy films

* The art of CCTV cameras / Cultural plays with CCTV

* Watching cultures and Reality TV

* The relationship of bodies to surveillance technologies.

* The arts of documentary photography

* Prison plans and texts

* Watching you watching me: photography OF the police

* Under-cover policing in Film Noir / Policing practices in TV crime series

* Police procedurals (novelistic, cinematic, televisual)

* Forensic science and the invention of modern vision

* Panopticism and cinematic surveillance: theories, practices, and representations

* The relationship between voyeurism and surveillance

* New visibilities of surveillance / Changing temporalities and spaces of surveillance

* Documentary (as) surveillance

* Self-registration (tattoos, dog-tags) and rights

* Neighbourhood watch, curtain twitchers, vigilante work: putting the everyday under surveillance

* ‘Take back the night’ and women’s relationship to surveillance

* The political economy of visual technology and surveillance

* Advanced capitalism and (visual) cultures of surveillance

* Surveillance regimes in comparative historical, national, and political contexts

* Watching out for the future: surveillance technologies in science fiction

* ‘They have me under surveillance’: Paranoia and modernity

* Design technologies and panopticism / anti-panopticism

* The aesthetics of surveillance

* What can humanities scholars bring to current debates about surveillance?

* How can film studies contribute to debates about surveillance culture?

Individual papers are invited from scholars and researchers in any discipline of the humanities, arts, social sciences, and sciences. Scholars from postgraduate to permanent senior academics are welcome to submit papers. Presentations would equally be welcomed from artists and filmmakers.

One-page abstracts for 20-minute presentations and a brief c.v. should be sent by Wed., 15 June to:

The Culture of Surveillance Conference Organisers

(Lee Grieveson, Rebecca Harrison, Jann Matlock, and Simon Rothon) at deadobjects@gmail.com

Participants will be notified by 30 June 2011

A conference publication is projected.

For more information on our projects, see http://www.autopsiesgroup.com and http://twitter.com/autopsiesgroup

—END—

‘I believe in the afterlife.

It starts tomorrow,

When I go to work’

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Human Herbs’ at: http://www.myspace.com/coldhandsmusic (recording) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h7tUq0HjIk (live)

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Centre for the Study of Education and Work – Update 3rd April 2011

Student Rebellion

CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF EDUCATION AND WORK – UPDATE 3rd APRIL 2011

EVENTS

CANADIAN ASSOCIATION FOR PRIOR LEARNING ASSESSMENT (CAPLA) FALL FOCUS WORKSHOP AND AGM

November 13 -15, 2011
One King West Hotel
Toronto, Ontario

The significance of our conference venue at One King West (formerly the Dominion Bank Building) has provided the inspiration to consider the recognition of prior learning (RPL) as an investment in the future. Recognizing prior learning (RPL) pays big dividends for people, communities, organizations and countries. Managing one’s own knowledge assets is vital in an ever-changing labour market. Cashing in on what people know and can do is important to employers and to the future prosperity of Canadians and newcomers.

Sponsorship: CAPLA is looking for individuals and organizations who are able to provide financial support to assist with the costs associated with this important event. Please contact us at 1-613-860-1747 or capla@agendamanagers.com to hear more.

Attention Presenters! We are looking for innovative practices, current research, new trends, international programs and service delivery models that contribute to our understanding and overall effectiveness of prior learning assessment and recognition (PLAR) and qualification recognition (QR). If you would like to be a presenter, please send a 100 word description to the Conference Secretariat at CAPLA@agendamanagers.com or call 1-877-731-1333 or 1-902-422-1886 by April 30.

Conference registration fees start at $379. Additional details and program updates can be found on the CAPLA website at http://www.capla.ca or by calling the Conference Secretariat at 1-877-731-1333.

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READNEX POETRY SQUAD, PRESENTED BY BARRIO NUEVO

April 15, 2011
9 pm
Blue Moon Pub
725 Queen St. East, Toronto

Description: “Since the emergence, disappearance, and resurgence of The Last Poets, no other group of young stanza-kickers have come about and made a significant impact in the music world. Thankfully the ReadNex Poetry Squad has decided to fill this void.”

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MINING AND RESISTANCE IN CENTRAL AMERICA: CANADIAN CORPORATIONS AT WAR AGAINST RIGHTS OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

April 10
2 p.m. – 4 p.m.
OISE, 252 Bloor Street West, Room 5150
Toronto
No Registration. Everyone welcome.

Presenters: Juan Carlos Jimenez, Megan Cotton-Kinch, organizers in the Mining Injustice Solidarity Network.

Canadian mining companies are continuing to contaminate water, poison land and tear apart communities in Central America. In El Salvador, the government has ruled that metal mining would fatally pollute the rivers needed for agriculture, but the country itself is now being sued for $77 million under a free trade agreement. In Guatemala, Mayan communities are fighting back through community-controlled referendums, but face the imposition of martial law. In Honduras, the Canadian government was one of the first to legitimize a bloody military coup, which replaced a left-leaning government with one more friendly to mining interests.

Organizers from Mining Injustice Solidarity Network will present on how Canada is complicit in intimidation, assassinations, anti-environmental lawsuits and military coups and how we in Canada can join in solidarity with the struggle for justice.

Readings: http://www.miningwatch.ca/en/corporate-rights-over-human-rights-canadian-mining-central-america

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q20YxkM-CGI

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BOOK LAUNCH – MEDIA MEDIOCRITY: HOW THE TELEVISION MAKES US STOOPID!

April 16, 2011
4:00pm – 6:00pm
Another Story Bookshop
315 Roncesvalles Ave
Toronto, ON

Meteorologist, TV/film producer, university lecturer, writer, broadcaster and general media expert, Richard Zurawski is coming to the store to lead a discussion about how the media is failing to keep us informed.

Why do so many people still deny the “hypothesis” of global climate change? All but a few rogue scientists agree that we have a crisis on our hands, but all we get from TV and news media are debates in the form of sound bites… Why are we denying the voices of those experts in favor of politicians and pundits? So get up off the couch and let’s have a discussion (with an expert) face to
face!

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REBEL FILMS – MADE IN DAGENHAM

Friday, April 8
7 p.m.
OISE, 252 Bloor St. West, Room 2-212
St. George Subway Station
Everyone welcome. $4 donation requested.

Made in Dagenham 2010, 113 minutes. In 1968, the Ford auto factory in Dagenham was one of the largest single private employers in the United Kingdom. In addition to the thousands of male employees, there are also 187 underpaid women machinists who primarily assemble the car seat upholstery in poor working conditions. Dissatisfied, the women fight for a better deal. However, Rita O’Grady learns that there is a larger issue in this dispute: that women are paid an appalling fraction of the men’s wages for the same work across the board on the sole basis of their sex. Refusing to tolerate this inequality any longer, O’Grady leads a strike by her fellow machinists for equal pay for equal work. What follows would test the patience of all involved in a grinding labour and political struggle that ultimately would advance the cause of women’s rights around the world. Marie Clarke Walker, Canadian Labour Congress Executive V.P., will lead off a discussion on the film.

Please visit: http://www.socialistaction-canada.blogspot.com or call 416 – 535-8779.

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SOCIAL ECONOMY CENTRE – MANAGING HUMAN RESOURCES IN NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATIONS CERTIFICATE

With Kunle Akingbola (University of Toronto / Toronto Rehab)

Human resources are not only the core asset of community organizations; such organizations cannot replace their human capital with investment in physical capital. Coupled with the pressure to be efficient and strategic, maximizing human capital is essential to achieving organizations goals. This
certificate program is designed to strengthen human resource management and leadership competencies by helping managers to acquire tools and resources to enhance leadership skills, manage organizational change and gain knowledge around effective compensation.

* Change Management – April 21
* Compensation and Benefits – May 27

9:30 am-4:00 pm
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto
252 Bloor Street West, Toronto (St. George subway station)
         
Cost: $140 + HST.  A limited number of spaces are available to students at a discounted rate. Discount for those registering for more than one workshop, or for more than one person registering from the same organization.

To Register: Access the online registration form at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FY65KMM or contact Lisa White at secworkshops@gmail.com, or 416-978-0022.

Kunle Akingola is a Human Resources Manager/Consultant and Adjunct Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto with extensive experience in both the non-profit and corporate sector

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NEWS & VIEWS

RACE, CLASS STRUGGLE AND ORGANIZED LABOUR IN THE “AGE OF WISCONSIN”

By Ajamu Nangwaya, Linchpin

…The racialized section of the United States’ working-class has been bearing the brunt of the racist, sexist and capitalist battering of the welfare state structures since the 1980s without much sympathy from their white working-class counterparts…But predominantly-white Wisconsin is up in arms when the chicken comes home to roost in their own backyard! Martin Luther King was quite right when he declared, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” We can only hope that white workers come to realize that white supremacist beliefs and practices only weaken the working-class – to the advantage of the small capitalist elite.

Read more: http://linchpin.ca/content/left/Race-class-struggle-organized-labour-%E2%80%9CAge-Wisconsin%E2%80%9D

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BILL 150: ATTACK ON PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONS

By Herman Rosenfeld, BASICSnews

By the end of March, the Ontario Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty will have passed Bill 150. It declares the TTC to be an essential service and denies Toronto public transit workers – members of the Amalgamated Transit Workers Union (ATU) Local 113 – the right to strike.

The attack on the transit workers was one of the first things that the newly elected right-wing populist Mayor of Toronto did this winter. Building on the memory of a short transit stoppage and the municipal workers strike from a couple of summers ago, Ford saw this as part of his plans to demonize public sector workers as a way of isolating all unions and weakening the collective gains of working people.

Read more: http://basicsnews.ca/?p=2918

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INVITATION TO JOIN LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCHERS OF ONTARIO (LARO)

The Latin American Researchers of Ontario (LARO), a recently formed non-profit association, is extending a warm invitation to individuals and organizations to join its membership and collective work.

The organization aims to promote research on Latin America and Latin Americans in Ontario. It hopes to provide an inclusive and interdisciplinary space for individuals who share an interest in the production and dissemination of written, oral, visual, and other knowledge and who define themselves and/or their work as Latin American.

In an effort to challenge elitist tendencies, the organization seeks give priority and visibility to grassroots research and to question prevalent forms of inequality.

Members will have the opportunity to share their work, knowledge, experiences and ideas with other members and constructively learn from each other. As a new organization, LARO is open to the incorporation of new ideas, visions, and projects.

For more information, we invite you to visit our website: http://www.latinamericanresearchers.com/

If you wish to become a LARO member and/or receive information from us, please click the link below to our contact page and send us your contact information, including your research interest, and let us know if you would like your name to appear in the public members’ list: http://www.latinamericanresearchers.com/contact.html.

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A PRIMER ON CLASS STRUGGLE

By Michael Schwalbe, Common Dreams

When we study Marx in my graduate social theory course, it never fails that at least one student will say (approximately), “Class struggle didn’t escalate in the way Marx expected. In modern capitalist societies class struggle has disappeared. So isn’t it clear that Marx was wrong and his ideas are of little value today?”

Read more: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/31-4

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MAKING IT COUNT – CCPA’S (CANADIAN CENTRE FOR POLICY ALTERNATIVES) FEDERAL ELECTION BLOG

The CCPA has launched a federal election blog to bring you expert analysis on the issues that will—or should—define the election.

Making It Count features timely commentary from CCPA staff and research associates, who will be weighing in everything from the economy and federal finances to the social and environmental challenges facing our country.

Read more: http://federalelectionblog.ca/

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ABOUT CSEW (CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF EDUCATION & WORK, OISE/UT):

Head: Peter Sawchuk
Co-ordinator: D’Arcy Martin

The Centre for the Study of Education and Work (CSEW) brings together educators from university, union, and community settings to understand and enrich the often-undervalued informal and formal learning of working people. We develop research and teaching programs at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (UofT) that strengthen feminist, anti-racist, labour movement, and working-class perspectives on learning and work.

Our major project is APCOL: Anti-Poverty Community Organizing and Learning. This five-year project (2009-2013), funded by SSHRC-CURA, brings academics and activists together in a collaborative effort to evaluate how organizations approach issues and campaigns and use popular education.

For more information about CSEW, visit: http://www.csew.ca

—END—

‘I believe in the afterlife.

It starts tomorrow,

When I go to work’

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Human Herbs’ at: http://www.myspace.com/coldhandsmusic (recording) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h7tUq0HjIk (live)

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

MySpace Profile: http://www.myspace.com/glennrikowski

The Ockress: http://www.theockress.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.com

Historical Materialism 18.4 Now Out

World Crisis

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM 18.4 NOW OUT
Historical Materialism
Research in Critical Marxist Theory
Volume 18 Issue 4, 2010

CONTENTS:

Articles

Charles Post
Exploring Working-Class Consciousness: A Critique of the Theory of the ‘Labour-Aristocracy’

Adelino Zanini
On the ‘Philosophical Foundations’ of Italian Workerism: A Conceptual Approach

Duy Lap Nguyen
Le Capital Amoureux: Imaginary Wealth and Revolution in Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love – Reflections on ‘Gewalt’

Domenico Losurdo
Moral Dilemmas and Broken Promises: A Historical-Philosophical Overview of the Nonviolent Movement

Interventions

Gail Day, Steve Edwards & David Mabb
‘What Keeps Mankind Alive?’: the Eleventh International Istanbul Biennial. Once More on Aesthetics and Politics

Geoff Mann
Value after Lehman

Review Articles

Thomas Jeannot
on Andrew Kliman’s Reclaiming Marx’s ‘Capital’: A Refutation of the Myth of Inconsistency

Fred Moseley
on Andrew Kliman’s Reclaiming Marx’s ‘Capital’: A Refutation of the Myth of Inconsistency

Gail Day
on Pier Vittorio Aureli’s The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture Within and Against Capitalism

Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism

Richard Dienst
Television

Contacts:

http://www.brill.nl/hima

http://www.historicalmaterialism.org

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/brill/hm/2010/00000018/00000004;jsessionid=2mld2ngru5pxk.alice

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Journeys Across Media 2011

Mediation

JOURNEYS ACROSS MEDIA 2011

Friday 6th May 2011

SPACE IN OUR TIME: EXPLORING THE FRONTIERS OF SCREEN AND LIVE PERFORMANCE SPACE

Journeys Across Media (JAM) 2011 is the 9th annual international conference for postgraduate students, organized by postgraduates working in the Department of Film, Theatre & Television at the University of Reading. It provides a discussion forum for current and developing research in film, theatre, television and new media. Previous delegates have welcomed the opportunity to gain experience of presenting their work at different stages of development in the active, friendly and supportive research environment of Film, Theatre & Television at the University of Reading. This year JAM will be guest-editing the Autumn issue of Intellect’s Journal of Media Practice and in 2012 an associated journal to the conference will be launched, providing further opportunities for new researchers to publish their work and interact with established scholars.

Non-presenting delegates are also very welcome.

The 9th JAM conference seeks to address issues of space in performance, media and wider society and instigate discussions about space across disciplines, practices and fields of research.

Space in performance and media is constantly shifting. Emerging technologies and new models of physical spaces have radically shaped our conceptions and experiences of performing, the world and our performing within that world. Artistic experimentation in live performance tests and contests space as a neutral/political/liminal/active zone.

Through innovative spatial delineations and/or site specific work, contemporary theatre and performance challenge conventions of text and space, performance and institution and performance and audience. Issues of space are increasingly central to performance studies and the experience of live performance. The growing popularity of companies such as Secret Cinema reflect the importance of the exhibition site for cinema and possibilities for cross-media events. The organisation and handling of space on screen can reveal the conceptual reality of a time, rather than just function as background. Studies of the cinematic screen continue to focus on ideological articulations through oppositions, such as on-screen/off-screen space, interior/exterior, centre/periphery, inclusion/exclusion in space. Meanwhile, televisual spaces continue to change both in terms of on-screen representation and how the television as an object inhabits space, particularly in relation to its online dissemination and the proliferation of products which facilitate its access.

This is a call for postgraduates engaging in contemporary discourses around space to submit papers for the JAM 2011 conference; topics may include, but are not restricted to:
Cross-disciplinary/inter-disciplinary spaces
National/International space; Globalisation
Centrality – Marginality of/in space
Gendered spaces
Space and memory
Critical masses (people in space)
Space as a character
Absence/non-place
Time and Space in performance
Architecture and performance
Immersion and illusion in contemporary performance spaces
Space in Contemporary art
Ownership and accountability
Ontology of space

CALL FOR PAPERS deadline: Friday 30th January 2011

Please send a 250-word abstract and a 50-word biographical note for a fifteen-minute paper to Amanda Beauchamp, Becki Hillman, Tonia Kazakopoulou, Martin O’Brien and James Rattee, at jam2011@reading.ac.uk. Proposals for practice-as-research presentations/performances are warmly invited; these have to conform to the 15-minute format.

We would appreciate the distribution of this call for papers and wider promotion of this conference through your networks. Journeys Across Media is supported by the Standing Committee of University Drama Departments (SCUDD) and the Graduate School in Arts and Humanities, University of Reading.

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

MySpace Profile: http://www.myspace.com/glennrikowski

The Ockress: http://www.theockress.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.com

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

The Socialist 1960s: Popular Culture and the City in Global Perspectives

 

The 1960s

THE SOCIALIST 1960s: POPULAR CULTURE AND THE CITY IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

Program and Schedule
Fisher Forum 2010

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
June 24-26

The Socialist 1960s: Popular Culture and the City in Global Perspective

THURSDAY, JUNE 24

7-8:30  Film showing: “Wings” (dir. Larisa Shepitko, 1966) (101 Armory Building, 505 E. Armory Ave., Champaign)

8:30-9:30  Panel discussion (101 Armory)

*Chair*: Anne E. Gorsuch (History, University of British Columbia)
Lilya Kaganovsky (Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Comparative Literature, University of Illinois)
Eugénie Zvonkine (Cinema, University of Paris 8)

*FRIDAY, JUNE 25*

**Third Floor, Levis Faculty Center, 919 W. Illinois St., Urbana
9-9:30  Welcome and introductions (Diane Koenker, History, University of Illinois)

9:30-11:  *Panel One: Socialist Spaces*

*Chair*: Anne E. Gorsuch

Lewis H. Siegelbaum (History, Michigan State University), “Togliatti: A Sixties Socialist City in the Seventies”

Susan Reid (Art History, Sheffield University, UK), “Making Oneself At Home in the Soviet Sixties”

Joao Goncalves (Anthropology, University of Chicago), and Marial Iglesias (History and Philosophy, University of Havana, Cuba) “Bring in the Sputnik, Topple the Eagle: The Birth of Socialist Havana in the Early 1960s*”*

*Discussant*: Christine Varga-Harris (History, Illinois State University)

1-2:30: *Panel Two: Youth Cultures*
*Chair*: Padraic Kenney (History, Indiana University)

Anne Luke (History, Wolverhampton University, UK), “Listening to /Los Beatles/:  Being Young in 1960s Cuba”

Rossen Djagalov (Comparative Literature, Yale University), “Musical Counterpublics: Guitar Poetry and International Socialism with a Human Face in the 1960s”

*Discussant: * Donna Buchanan (Ethnomusicology, University of Illinois)

3-5:  *Panel Three: Contact Zones*

*Chair*: Lilya Kaganovsky

Shawn Salmon (History, University of California), “Building Out: the Soviet Hotel in the 1960s”

Polly Jones (Literature, University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies), “The “Thaw” Goes International: Soviet Literature in Translation and Transit in the 1960s ”

Nicholas Rutter (History, Yale University), “Missionary Tourism at the World Youth Festivals of the 1960s”

*Discussant:* Anne E. Gorsuch

*SATURDAY, JUNE 26*

9:30-11:30. *Panel Four: Television*

*Chair*: Roshanna Sylvester (History, DePaul University)

Heather Gumbert (History, Virginia Polytechnic University), “Sixties Television: Redefining Socialist Womanhood in the GDR”

Christine Evans (History, University of California, Berkeley), “The 1960s Soviet Television Game Show as Cold War Genre”

Robert Edelman (History, University of California, San Diego), “From Soccer Tourism to Cosmopolitan Hooliganism: The Consequences of International Club Football inside the USSR, 1965-1975”

*Discussant*: James Brennan (History, University of Illinois)

1-3: *Panel Five: Tourism*

*Chair: *George Gasyna (Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Illinois)

Christian Noack (History, National University of Ireland), “Unchained Melodies? The Soviet Tourist Song Movement between Bard Poetry and Soviet Mass Culture”

Mark Keck-Szajbel (History, University of California, Berkeley), “The Popularity and Peril of Hitchhiking in 1960s People’s Poland”

Rachel Applebaum (History, University of Chicago), “Detour on the Friendship Train: Soviet Tourism to Czechoslovak Cities and the Prague Spring, 1964-1969”

*Discussant: *Diane Koenker

3:30-5:00: *Closing Roundtable*

/The Socialist Sixties in Global Perspective: Questions and Research Agenda/**

**Chair: Diane Koenker

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

MySpace Profile: http://www.myspace.com/glennrikowski

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon at MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/coldhandsmusic

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon at: https://rikowski.wordpress.com/cold-hands-quarter-moon/

The Ockress: http://www.theockress.com

Wavering on Ether: http://blog.myspace.com/glennrikowski

A great video and song, ‘Daystar’ by Will Roberts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6f_pA5XUPk

Tenses of Imagination: Raymond Williams on Science Fiction, Utopia and Dystopia

Raymond Williams

TENSES OF IMAGINATION: RAYMOND WILLIAMS ON SCIENCE FICTION, UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA

http://www.peterlang.com/index.cfm?vID=11826&vLang=E&vHR=1&vUR=2&vUUR=1

New from Peter Lang:

TENSES OF IMAGINATION: RAYMOND WILLIAMS ON SCIENCE FICTION,  UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA

Edited by Andrew Milner

Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien,
2010. X, 243 pp.
Ralahine Utopian Studies. Vol. 7
Edited by Raffaella Baccolini, Joachim Fischer, Tom Moylan and Michael
J. Griffin
ISBN 978-3-03911-826-7 pb.
sFr. 52.– / €* 35.60 / €** 36.60 / € 33.30 / £ 30.– / US-$ 51.95

Raymond Williams was an enormously influential figure in late twentieth-century intellectual life as a novelist, playwright and critic, ‘the British Sartre’, as The Times put it. He was a central inspiration for the early British New Left and a close intellectual supporter of Plaid Cymru. He is widely acknowledged as one of the ‘founding fathers’ of cultural studies, who established ‘cultural materialism’ as a new paradigm for work in both literary and cultural studies. There is a substantial secondary literature on Williams, which treats his life and work in each of these respects. But none of it makes much of his enduring contribution to utopian studies and science fiction studies. This volume brings together a complete collection of Williams’s critical essays on science fiction and futurology, utopia, and dystopia, in literature, film, television, and politics, and with extracts from his two future novels, The Volunteers (1978) and The Fight for Manod (1979). Both the collection as a whole and the individual readings are accompanied by introductory essays written by Andrew Milner.

Contents: Space Anthropology, Utopia, and Putropia. Left Culturalism: Science Fiction (1956) – William Morris (1958) – George Orwell (1958) – The Future Story as Social Formula Novel (1961) – Terror (1971) – Texts in their Contexts. Cultural Materialism: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1971) – The City and the Future (1973) – On Orwell: An Interview (1977) – On Morris: An Interview (1977) – Learning from Le Guin. (Anti-) Postmodernism: Utopia and Science Fiction (1978) – The Tenses of Imagination (1978) – Beyond Actually Existing Socialism (1980) – Resources for a Journey of Hope (1983) – Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984 (1984) – The Future Novels: From The Volunteers (1978) – From The Fight for Manod (1979).

‘With the twenty-first-century reader very much in mind, Andrew Milner’s selection of texts offers a new, “alternative” Raymond Williams – the critic and occasional author of science fiction, the futurologist, the wary, self-questioning utopian thinker for whom intellectual pessimism is a lazy response and never the last word.’ – Professor Patrick Parrinder, University of Reading

‘The future was the ultimate stake in all Raymond Williams’s thinking and writing, as Andrew Milner simply and powerfully shows us now, by assembling a volume of writings on science fiction and utopianism that turns out to be a very substantial, wide-ranging reader in Williams’s work as a whole. The defining importance of “the sense of the future”, as he called it, the future as the essential discipline of political and moral imagination, is the lesson of this very welcome collection.’ – Professor Francis Mulhern, Middlesex University.

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

MySpace Profile: http://www.myspace.com/glennrikowski