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Events before 2010.
2010-2011
Locating the Social
1st International HIV Social Science and Humanities Conference
11-1 June 2011, ICC Durban, South Africa
Conference Co-chairs: Mary Crewe, Susan Kippax, Marsha Rosengarten
http://www.iaohss.org/
This is the first international conference aimed at discussing and supporting contributions of the social sciences and humanities to HIV research and action.
HIV is a profoundly social disease, the causes and consequences of which are deeply embedded in the social, cultural and political processes that shape national development, social institutions and civil society, interpersonal relations, and the everyday lives of communities, families and peoples. One of the most distinct contributions to be made by the social sciences and the humanities has been their ability to integrate multiple levels of empirical evidence and model complex, non-linear, dynamic relationships in ways that may reconfigure our understanding of otherwise seemingly intractable problems and offer novel strategies in their place. Social science also emphasizes a critical, reflexive stance and willingness to confront the social, ethical, and political dimensions of scientific investigations of the epidemic. Most evident in the history of the epidemic to date is the contribution by the social sciences and the humanities to successful HIV prevention efforts such as the normalisation of condom use against sexual transmission and the introduction of safe injecting equipment for injecting drug use. Social scientific research has also provided insights into issues related to the treatment and care of people living with HIV and AIDS, and has addressed the broader social and political barriers to effective responses to HIV.
Yet there have been few forums in which scholars from different social science and humanities disciplines can come together to develop connections among the various phenomena we study, and between ourselves and our biomedical, policy and community based colleagues. Little attention has been given to enlivening interdisciplinary exchanges on the tools of our trade, the place of innovation in theory and method, and the modes of engagement with and collaboration with biomedicine.
This conference will aim to provide such a forum: a forum for those keen to extend the scope of the social sciences and its capacity to trace connections between all kinds of phenomenon, notably those that contribute to the complexity and changing nature of the epidemic.
Speakers for the 1st International HIV Social Science and Humanities Conference include:
* Dr Fred Eboko
* Prof Ezekiel Kalipeni
* Dr Kane Race
* Mr Jonathan Stadler
* Dr Fraser McNeill
* Dr Sam Friedman
* Dr Judith Auerbach
* Prof Vihn Kim Nyugen
* Prof Gary Dowsett
* Prof Peter Aggleton
* Dr Martin Holt
* Dr Rebecca Hodes
* Prof Nicoli Nattrass
* Prof Aggee Lomo
* Dr Kate Philip
Accumulation: the material ecologies and economies of plastic
21 June 2011, 10 am to 6 pm
Goldsmiths, University of London
LG01 New Academic Building
A one day interdisciplinary symposium organized by the Centre for Invention and Social Process and Design Department, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland, Australia.
More than any other material, plastic has become emblematic of economies of abundance and ecological destruction. If the postwar ‘plastics age’ was cleaner and brighter than all that preceded it, its boosterism has now become intertwined with anxiety as the burdens of accumulating and leaching plastics wastes are registered in environments and bodies. Plastic accumulates meanings, functions, concerns, visibilities, values, properties and futures – how then to make sense of this?
The purpose of this interdisciplinary workshop is to explore the vitality, complexity and irony of plastic and, as such, to examine a range of issues that cut across arts, humanities, natural sciences, politics and the social sciences. Among the questions to be addressed will be: How does plastic act simultaneously as raw material, object and process? How might recognition of the material force of plastic prompt new forms of politics, environmental responsibility and citizenship? Is it possible to engage with the processual materiality or plasticity of plastic without fixing it as an object of study or illustrative case? What is the future of plastic as an assemblage of carbon in the context of peak oil and the shift toward new carbon economies? How can we develop an analytics attentive to how plastic might provoke invention and invite certain forms of material thinking? In the realm of natural-cultural ecologies how does the recalcitrance of plastic, its durability and persistence, reveal the relational exchanges between human and nonhuman?
Speakers will include: Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Tom Fisher, Jennifer Gabrys, Gay Hawkins, Celia Lury, James Marriott, Mike Michael and Richard Thompson.
The symposium is free but seats are limited. To reserve a place please contact:
Email plastics.seminar@gmail.com
Making and Opening: Entangling Design and Social Science
A one-day conference on Design and Social Science,
Goldsmiths, University of London
24 September 2010
Sponsored by: Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process, Interaction Research Studio, Incubator for Critical Inquiry into Technology and Ethnography.
Design and social science disciplines intersect at a number of points. While there is excellent work exploring many of these points of contact, there is also a tendency for social science to treat design as a topic (eg what does design do and how might this be accounted for in sociological terms?), and for design to treat social science as a resource (eg what useful knowledge does sociology produce and how can this be deployed to model users or construct scenarios?).
This day conference will contribute to the move beyond this pattern. Collecting a group of leading practitioners in design and social science, the conference will present a series of dialogues and commentaries on a range of common, open issues:
- Speculation/Anticipation;
- Participation/Impact;
- Discipline/Contamination;
- Making/Method.
In the process, the conference will explore possible, emergent interrelations and synergies between design and social science, for example: how might the practices of speculative or critical designers furnish social science with new insights into the study and articulation of society? How might social science's interest in complexity contribute to the iterative process of making in design?
Speakers will include: Bill Gaver, Pelle Ehn, Mike Michael, Bill Moggridge, Harvey Molotch, Michelle Murphy, Lucy Suchman, Nina Wakeford.
This event is financially supported by the Economic and Social Research Council and is part of London Design Festival.
Race and Medicine: Toward Ethical Noninnocence
a seminar with Anne Pollock, Assistant Professor of Science, Technology and Culture
5 - 7pm, 26 September 2011
Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process (CSISP)
1204 Warmington Tower
Goldsmiths, University of London
Too often, academic engagement with topics of race and medicine uses a grammar of lamentation, adopting an aggrieved subject position and mourning the racialization perpetuated by powerful discourses such as genomic research and pharmaceuticalized medicine. For example, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved BiDil for “heart failure in self-identified black patients,” there was quick consensus in the critical studies of race and medicine that this was an egregious example of the geneticization of race and pharmaceutical profiteering. Paradoxically, part of the problem with this approach is that it is too comfortable: biomedicine appears far more stable than it is, and the analyst far less implicated. Pointing out that any given present or future racialized medical technology emerges from a historical context of racial oppression or serves vested interests is only one component of critique. Paying attention to the partial and contingent sites of resistance it opens up is also vital to avoiding decontextualization. So is leaving space open for surprise. This talk uses BiDil as an example to argue that in the face of racialized biomedical technologies, we should resist traditional bioethics’ call to embrace or to debunk, and instead strive for ethical noninnocence. Our deep engagement with the context of racialized technologies should take into account not only the residue of a horrific history and the specter of an unacceptable future, but also the unbearable present. We should feel suspicious of any position that promises to settle something as fraught as a new intersection of race and medicine, and strive not to provide a yes or no answer, but to engage in an ongoing process of making medicine answerable to truth and justice.
Anne Pollock is an Assistant Professor of Science, Technology and Culture at Georgia Tech, and a visiting scholar at the BIOS Centre at the London School of Economics. Her research focuses on biomedicine and culture. She is particularly interested in how medical categories and technologies are enrolled in telling stories about identity and difference, especially with regard to race, gender, and citizenship. Her forthcoming book, Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference, tracks the intersecting discourses of race, pharmaceuticals, and heart disease in the United States from the founding of cardiology to the commercial failure of BiDil. She is also engaged in ongoing projects in three areas: feminism and heart disease; American health disparities and citizenship claims; and global pharmaceuticals amid economic crisis and the pharmaceuticalization of philanthropy.
This event was part of 'What is Ethics?' An on-going seminar series at CSISP organised by Marsha Rosengarten.
2009-2010
MEDICINE AS A TACTIC OF WAR – Israel’s occupation of Palestine
Seminar with EYAL WEIZMAN & MIRI WEINGARTEN
4.30 - 6.30 Tuesday 16 March
RHB 312, Goldsmiths, University of London
Eyal Weizman - Illegal aid: humanitarian control?
Eyal Weizman is an architect and director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. He studied architecture at the Architectural Association in London and completed his PhD at the London Consortium/Birkbeck College. Since 2007 he is a member of the architectural collective "decolonizing architecture" in Beit Sahour/ Palestine www.decolonizing.ps Since 2008 he is a member of B'Tselem board of directors. www.btselem.org. Weizman has taught, lectured, curated and organised conferences in many institutions worldwide. His books include The Lesser Evil [Nottetempo, 2009], Hollow Land [Verso Books, 2007], A Civilian Occupation [Verso Books, 2003], the series Territories 1,2 and 3, Yellow Rhythms and many articles in journals, magazines and edited books. Weizman is a regular contributor and an editorial board member for several journals and magazines including Humanity, Cabinet and Inflexions. Weizman is the recipient of the James Stirling Memorial Lecture Prize for 2006-2007 and was chosen to deliver the Edward Said Memorial Lecture for 2010.
Miri Weingarten - Controlling health: access to healthcare in the Gaza strip
Miri Weingarten worked for Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-Israel) for 11 years. Physicians for Human Rights-Israel struggles for the fulfilment of the right to health of all people under Israeli control, including Jewish-Israeli citizens, Palestinian citizens of Israel, Bedouin living in 'unrecognized' village in the Negev desert, migrant workers, asylum seekers and undocumented people, prisoners and detainees, and Palestinians living in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. PHR-Israel combines direct medical aid with solidarity activities, advocacy, campaigning and education. It is guided by the triple discourse of medical ethics, human rights and social justice. In 2009, Miri relocated to London and in March 2010 she became the director of a new Jewish media project called JNews - Alternative Jewish Perspectives on Israel and Palestine.
Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process Seminar Series: What is ethics?
co-sponsored by:
Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process, Goldsmiths, University of London
Overseas Development Institute
San Francisco AIDS Foundation
Centre for Global Health and Inequality, University of Amsterdam
International HIV/AIDS Alliance
National AIDS Manual
for further information please contact m.rosengarten@gold.ac.uk
see also http://www.odi.org.uk/events/details.asp?id=2128&title=reframing-social-dimensions-hiv-biomedicalised-epidemic-case-treatment-as-prevention
Common to both design and (parts of) the social sciences is a shared pre-occupation with objects. On the one hand, design is concerned with making and interpreting objects including the finished article (e.g. consumer products), ‘experimental’ design aids (e.g. prototypes), and projective representations (e.g. scenarios). Recently, design has also begun to re-engage with more speculative objects whose ambiguous functionality contributes to the exploration of the social and the material, the political and the aesthetic. On the other hand the social sciences also work with objects, including categorical objects such as race, gender, and health, empirical objects ranging from the mundane to the exotic, and conceptual objects such as the notions social scientists use to understand and theorize the social. Here, the sociology of science and technology has been especially productive, introducing notions such as boundary objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989), epistemic objects (Rheinberger, 1997), immutable mobiles (Latour, 1990), quasi-objects, black boxes (Latour, 1988) to name but a few. Accordingly, a focus on material, empirical and conceptual objects brings into sharp relief overlaps and disjuncture between the two disciplines and a rich space for dialogue.
This seminar series will seek to bring into view and explore existing objects of both design and social science as well as draw out objects of novelty for both disciplines. In doing so we will seek to engage with emerging issues and topics in both disciplines such as the outputs of speculative and critical design, participation, engagement and publics as well as addressing notions concerning heterogeneity, process and event. This series will continue to serve as a platform for opening up interdisciplinary research futures.
Autumn Term 2009
Seminar 1: Introducing the Objects of Design and Social Science
Wednesday October 14th
With: Bill Gaver, Tobie Kerridge, Mike Michael & Alex Wilkie, Goldsmiths
Seminar 2: Buildings as Things
Wednesday November 4th
With: Albena Yaneva, The University of Manchester.
Seminar 3: Speculative and Critical Objects
Wednesday November 18th
With: James Auger, Royal College of Art & Jimmy Loizeau, Goldsmiths.
Spring Term 2010
Seminar 4: Objects and Services
Wednesday January 27th
With: Chris Downs.
Seminar 5: From Objects to Issues?
Wednesday February 17th
With: Noortje Marres, Oxford University.
Seminar 6: Object Fair
Wednesday March 10th
With: Bill Gaver, Tobie Kerridge, Mike Michael & Alex Wilkie, Goldsmiths.
** Please Note: all seminars run from 4:00pm - 6:00pm and are hosted by the Interaction Research Studio, 6th Floor, Ben Pimlott Building, Goldsmiths, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW.
2008-2009
Summer term
How environmental publics fail: material democracy, Walter Lippmann, and the problem of affectedness'
Noortje Marres (University of Oxford)
Respondents: Gay Hawkins (University of New South Wales, Sydney) and Lisa Blackman (Goldsmiths)
Chair: Professor Mike Michael, Director of Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process
April 29, 5 - 7 pm
Goldsmiths RHB 137a
This talk will consider the conceptual figure of the 'environmental public,' and its role in what is often construed as the failure of the environment to effectively engage wider audiences. It unpacks an influential version of this concept, that of the 'community of the affected,' by returning to one of its earlier instantiations, in the 1920s writings of the American pragmatist Walter Lippmann. In this work traces can be found of an alternative perspective on 'material democracy,' which we will explore, and especially the problem of the public that Lippmann drew attention to: in technological societies publics have to deal with quite impossible cartographies of relevance.
Noortje Marres is Research Fellow at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, University of Oxford. She has a background in science and technology studies, and did her doctoral research at the University of Amsterdam and the Ecole des Mines, Paris, on issue-centred concepts of democracy in technological societies. Previously she was a Marie Curie fellow in Sociology at Goldsmiths, where she worked on material forms of publicity emerging in relation to climate change, especially in and around the home.
Gay Hawkins is a Professor of Media and Social Theory in the School of English, Media and Performing Arts at the University of NSW, Sydney, Australia. Her 2006 book 'The Ethics of Waste' explored how the vitality of waste as matter makes claims on us. She is currently working on a major collaborative and international study of the biopolitics of bottled water. 'Plastic Water ' will be published by MIT press in 2011.
Lisa Blackman is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, and works at the intersection of critical psychology and cultural theory. Her most recent book is The Body: Key Concepts (Berg, 2008). She is currently working on Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Relationality and the Problem of personality (Sage, 2011), which investigates the importance of suggestion and contagious communication for thinking about affect, the body and subjectivity within social and cultural theory.
What is Medicine?
What is the 'mental' in 'mental illness?': Psychiatry, the double-brain and the problem of hearing voices.
Lisa Blackman, Media & Communication Goldsmiths
Wednesday, 25th February 4-6pm
This talk will outline the importance of Julian Jayne's (1976) book, The Origins of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind and its relevance for those interested in affect theory, process, body studies and the vexed problem of subjectivity. The talk will discuss nineteenth century debates surrounding the 'double-brain', its re-articulation within contemporary brain imaging studies of voice hearing (auditory hallucinations), and the reduction of what the double-brain may allow us to do and think to a cognitive capacity seen to enable the 'self-monitoring of inner speech'. The talk will draw on genealogical work on 'attention' (Crary) as well as work on the 'skin ego' (Anzieu) to refigure the problem of the 'mental' in 'mental illness' as a problem of distributed embodiment that cannot be contained by contemporary neuroscience nor affect theory unless we can adequately account for the problem of the 'one and the many'; how we live singularity in the face of multiplicity. The talk will prioritise the importance and relevance of re-thinking 'interiority' in the context of this work.
What is Medicine?
Transforming Behaviour: Human and animal nature in the behavioural genetics laboratory
Gail Davies, Geography, UCL
Wednesday, 6 May 2009 4 - 6pm
12th floor seminar room Warming Tower
This paper looks at the relationship between changing understandings of human and animal behaviour as they are enmeshed in and emerge from the complex contexts of contemporary behavioural genetics. Mice models, and more recently genetically altered mice, have played a critical role in understanding human affective disorders, linking animal models, laboratory experimentation and therapeutic interventions. This paper explores the achievement of these links, but also the challenges to them. Attention to the site of the laboratory reveals the contingencies and human capabilities intricately involved in the performance of such experiments, meaning they can be difficult to standardize and repeat. Arguments about environmental enrichment reveal different interpretations of animal behaviour, challenging the external validity of animal models. Such attention suggests the material practices and scientific arguments linking human diseases and the genetically modified mice are ultimately circular and the meanings of animal behaviour remain ambiguous. Yet something is clearly being transformed in these circulations. Utilising the theoretical insights from Agamben and Latour, I suggest this is our understandings of both animal and human nature, and the relationship between the two.
Gail Davies is a lecturer in Geography at UCL in London. Her research is broadly concerned with the way relations between humans, nonhumans and the natural world are imagined and governed, connecting to debates around the 'geographies of science' and 'more-than-human geographies'. She is currently tracing the biogeography of genetically altered laboratory animals to understand the role played by transgenic animals in the spaces of the international bioeconomy and in the political and ethical debate.
Collecting Animals (Blood) for Humans in Medicine: Following a Tale of The True Blue Blood of the Horseshoe Crab
Priska Gisler
13 May 2009
In the contemporary biotechnological world of hospitals and clinical research the Limulus Amebocyte Lysate Test stands for a success story that is based on the blood of the Horseshoe Crab. LAL is an endotoxin test for drugs, biological products and medical devices in order to prevent patients from immune activation or even a toxic shock. The production of LAL follows highly standardized means and belongs to what Michael Lynch has called the industrialization of molecular biology.
According to Donna Haraway, the immune system is one of the iconic and mythic objects of high technology culture in the 20th century (Haraway, 1995, 162). In her view, in the realms of the normal and the pathological myths entwine around the immune system as discourses between the self and the other, contributing to determine the limits of the self. She points to the tight links between myth, laboratory and the clinic. However, she bothers less about the materials and objects that are applied on a daily basis in research and clinical setting.
What is missing in Haraway’s considerations as much as in scientific or public debate is an account on the histories and the contexts of the objects themselves, the bloods, platelets, proteins that are present in contemporary biomedicine. I will argue that the objects and their fields of origin are left out because focusing on the collection process itself would mean to keep in mind the relation between humans and living things. Observing sampling techniques would mean to speak about the collector and his or her approach towards these goods before they are integrated into an established collection order or a biomedical paradigm.
Mabel Boyden was a custodian of the Serological Museum at Rutgers University (1948 – 1974) and active in the field of immuno-chemical research that led to the development of the LAL-test. In my talk I will follow her on a trip to collect the blood of the horseshoe crab. Her account that appeared in the Bulletin of the Serological Museum entails ‘speech figures’ and ‘myths’ (Haraway, 1995) that were as much constitutive as they were descriptive for the immunological discourse of her time. While her narrative was dedicated to ‘knowing and following the rules’, ‘to be ready for the crabs’ and to ‘the work of the day’, it offers insight into how the limits between the self and the other were negotiated in the mid 1960s – a time that was coined by a turn of the biological sciences towards the molecular level of the living things.
Priska Gisler has been a research fellow at the Collegium Helveticum (a transdisciplinary institution jointly hold by ETH Zurich and University of Zurich) since 2003 and is currently directing a research group on the project “Tracking the Human: Technologies of Collecting, Ordering and Comparing or The Problem of Relevant Knowledge”, and she is also head of the SNF-funded project “Research in Humans: The genealogy of a law in the making”. She is currently a visiting fellow at CSISP, Goldsmith College.
After her studies in Sociology, Social and Economic History and Modern History at University of Zurich, she completed a discourse analytical dissertation on gender politics (Universities of Bern and Potsdam) in 1999. From 1998 to 2003 she was senior scientist and lecturer at the Chair for Philosophy and Social Studies of Science, ETH Zurich. Priska Gisler has been teaching at ETH Zurich, the Universities of Zurich, Basel and Vienna, and the Zurich University of Fine Arts.
Uncanny Belongings: Bioethics and the technologies of fashioning flesh
Fiona K. O'Neill, Lancaster University
Wednesday, 11th March 4-6pm
Most of us will at some point experience bodily engagement with, and embodied support through, a 'biotechnology' ~ broadly understood here as any technology designed to work intimately with the human body and to some degree with its embodiment. Such biotechnologies not only affect a person's identity, but their overall sense of belonging.
So how might we experience, appreciate and understand some of these variously intimate human-technology relations, as with transplantation, prosthetics or hearing aids? What are the mimetic or animating potentialities of biotechnology? (Can Aristotle's work on psuché and philia give us some means to acknowledge these individual experiences?) And what of innovative and convergent somatechnics?
Such experiences of medical technologies and techniques can leave one with a certain disquiet. With reference to medical phenomenology and Wittgenstein's On Certainty, one can come to appreciate such experiences as speaking to our uncanny canniness ~ our bodily knowing. Thus, suggesting the clinical and ethical significance of such experiences for patients and practitioners alike, in a profession dominated by rational, evidence based practice. And how might our embodied experiences of uncanny illness, health and medicine background our ability to trust?
Looking from standard to future-present biotechnologies we see developments which treat the human body as a plastic resource ripe with potential. How might we appreciate the reasons, affects and effects of fashioning flesh? Indeed, what happens when we enter our bodies into the paradox and conundrum that is fashion? Might medicine already be caught up in the politics of fashioning bodies?
Dr Fiona O'Neill has an eclectic professional background as an educator, facilitator and researcher. Presently, she tutors medical students in the School for Health and Medicine at Lancaster University, is conducting freelance research for the Probation Service and is a member of the North West Research Ethics Committee. She recently conducted research for Nowgen / Cesagen on young persons' perspectives toward the treatment-enhancement debate, whilst developing her transdisciplinary doctoral studies; with several publications to date and forthcoming.
Her present work considers human-technology relations; the bodied and embodied bioethical issues within and beyond standard, innovative and convergent technologies of medicine. Thinking through public and personal experiences, narratives and expectations of well-being and uncertainty with regard to the clinical and ethical impact of biotechnological protocols and practices.
Interrogating the logic of care: the case of medically unexplained symptoms
Monica Greco, Sociology, Goldsmiths
Wednesday, 18th March 4-6pm
This paper responds to an invitation by Mol (2008) to articulate multiple varieties of the 'logic of care' in relation to situations, conditions, and examples other than Type 1 diabetes (which is the object of her own ethnography). Medically unexplained symptoms are chosen here as a case defined by much greater ambiguity, controversy, and arguably by the greater significance of dimensions of care that are purposely excluded from an object- and practice- centred approach. On this basis, the paper explores how we might think about the affective dimensions of (self-)care, and seeks to articulate some methodological implications with a view to investigating such dimensions empirically.
Monica Greco lectures in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of Illness as a Work of Thought (Routledge 1998), and of articles on aspects of psychosomatics, vitalism, and medical humanities. She has coedited The Body: A Reader (with M. Fraser, Routledge 2005) and The Emotions: A Social Science Reader (with P. Stenner, Routledge 2008).
All seminars will be in the seminar room 12th floor Warmington Tower
The Remaking of Sensorial Experience and the Politics of Speculative Constructivism
Friday, 3 October 2008
3:30-5 pm
Small Hall (Cinema), Richard Hoggart Building
Feminist knowledge politics in science and technology studies have engaged with an epistemological reclaiming of the worlds of emotions, affects and the sentient body as intrinsic to the world of fact production. The affirmation of the sensorial is one of the ways through which constructivist involvement with science and technology invokes the materiality and embodiment of experience. In this context, a move to touch appears as a speculative vision of feminist technology. This paper argues that reclaiming the possibility of touch requires attention to the politics of the expanding market of haptic technologies, which also speculates with the remaking of our sensorial experience.
This event is free and open to the public. .
CSISP, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths
What is Medicine?
Biobanking in Singapore: Post-developmental state, experimental population
Wednesday 1 October 2008, 4.00-6.00pm
Room 1204, 12th Floor, Warmington Tower
Like other wealthy states in East Asia, Singapore is busy building a bioeconomy. The government has allocated about $US 5 billion to life sciences research, under the aegis of the Biomedical Sciences Initiative (BMSI). In this paper I want to single out one important life sciences research project to consider some of the biopolitical implications of bioeconomic development, in Singapore, but also more generally. This project is the Singapore Consortium for Cohort Studies (SCCS), a large prospective population cohort designed to track gene environment interactions in metabolic disease, specifically type two diabetes and ischemic heart disease, diseases that have developed in the Singaporean population due to rapid modernization. I will use the Singapore Consortium for Cohort Studies as a site for examining the question: how are populations figured in bioeconomic development? To put it another way, what are the biopolitics of the bioeconomy? The Singapore example is telling, both because the rate of bioeconomic development is so startling and because it forms an explicit element in the state's attempt to reposition the national population in the global economy.
2007-2008
Seminar Series
Design and Social Sciences
A new seminar series for 2007-2008.
Speakers include:
William Gaver | Department of Design, Goldsmiths
Tobie Kerridge | Department of Design, Goldsmiths
Mike Michael | CSISP, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths
Terry Rosenberg | Department of Design, Goldsmiths
Nina Wakeford | Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths
Alex Wilkie | Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths
Matt Ward | Department of Design, Goldsmiths
Matt Watson | Department of Geography, Sheffield
Jennifer Gabrys | Department of Design, Goldsmiths
All seminars will take place in room 1204, Warmington Tower.
Wednesday 3rd October | 4.00-6.00pm
Brief Introductions: Mike Michael and Bill Gaver muse on Design and Social Science
Wednesday 17th October | 4.00-6.00pm
Nina Wakeford, 'Experience, Models and Translation'
Wednesday 31st October | 4.00-6.00pm
Terry Rosenberg, 'Criticality and Practice'
Wednesday 21st November | 4.00pm-6.00pm
Tobie Kerridge, 'Designers as Naive Polyglots?'
Wednesday 5th December | 4.00-6.00pm
Bill Gaver and Mike Michael, 'Where Next? Reflections on the futures of "Design and Social Science"
Design and Social Science seminar participants
including (from left to right): Andy Boucher, Bill Gaver, Britt
Hatzius, Kat Jungnickel and Matt Ward.
It has become increasingly apparent that there are many points of contact between design and social science disciplines. In many respects, these have arisen in an ad hoc fashion, and there has been relatively little sustained reflection on what broader lessons can be drawn.
The CSISP seminar series on ‘Design and Social Science’ aims to explore these points of contact through a range of discussions that address such key topics as theory, practice, research, user, object, product, audience etc. Though the immediate objective is to enhance mutual understanding across disciplinary practices, it is also hoped that this series can serve as a platform for opening up interdisciplinary research futures.
design_social_science_poster
Spring term
Design and Social Sciences
Continuing the seminar series from last term.
All seminars will take place in the CSISP seminar room, WT1204, from 4pm - 6pm.
Wednesday 16 January
Alex Wilkie, 'Prospecting users: user-centered
design and commercial social science'
Wednesday 30 January
Matt Ward, 'Disruption, disturbance and deviation:
towards a definition of design's critical practice'
Wednesday 20 February
Matt Watson, 'Product design and the
practices of everyday life'
Wednesday 5 March
Jennifer Gabrys, 'Museum of failure: electronics, obsolescence and archives'
Wednesday 19 March
Mike Michael and Bill Gaver, 'Design and social sciences:
what, where, when next? And how?'
Jennifer Gabrys presenting 'Museum of Failure: electronics,
obselescence and archives, Wednesday 5th March 2008.
It has become increasingly apparent that there are many points of contact between design and social science disciplines. In many respects, these have arisen in an ad hoc fashion, and there has been relatively little sustained reflection on what broader lessons can be drawn.
The CSISP seminar series on ‘Design and Social Science’ aims to explore these points of contact through a range of discussions that address such key topics as theory, practice, research, user, object, product, audience etc. Though the immediate objective is to enhance mutual understanding across disciplinary practices, it is also hoped that this series can serve as a platform for opening up interdisciplinary research futures.
What is Medicine? series, Annemarie Mol
Continuing the Seminar Series begun in 2006-2007
Thursday 6 November, 4-6pm
Ben Pimlott Lecture Theatre
Ben Pimlott Building
Goldsmiths, University of London
This event is free - all are welcome.
.
Annemarie Mol is Socrates Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Twente. She has published The Body Multiple. Ontology in Medical Practice; co-edited Differences in Medicine (with Marc Berg) and Complexities (with John Law); and authored and co-authored a variety of articles on bodies, techniques and spatialities. Her new book, The Logic of Care, is published in 2008 by Routledge.
Download annemarie-mol for this event [pdf]
In the social sciences, medicine has figured for decades as something to criticise. It deserved to be unmasked as (behind its helping face) it was really a matter of social control, or a mode of governing through discipline rather than punishment, or otherwise a place where doctors hold power over patients. These days, however, it is time to do something different. No, the point is not to be a better realist and to neutrally (rather than critically) describe medicine as it is. Instead, medicine deserves help. It is in urgent need of words that articulate its specificity in such a way that health care does not get completely colonised by (the logic of) the market (where doctors have products to sell to their customers), the state (that makes laws configuring patients as citizens), the protocol (that presumes that facts precede decisions, which precede actions, which precede evaluations), epidemiology (or rather the version of epidemiology that takes individuals to compose collectives), ethics (in as far as it separates deliberation from practice) and other rationalist endeavours. In my recent book The Logic of Care I have tried to provide such words and to articulate some of medicine's tinkering techniques for living with fragile bodies, unruly diseases and unpredictable technologies in complex daily lives. The case that I analysed is that of diabetes care. This allows me to now take up the question of your seminar series 'What is medicine?' as if it has an answer.
What is Medicine?
Drugs, Medico-moralism and the Use of Pleasure in Harm Reduction
In conjunction with | Department of Sociology
Thursday 10 January
5.00-7.00pm | Room 1204, Warmington Tower
With Kane Race | University of Sydney
Dr Kane Race is a Senior Lecturer of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. He has published widely on questions of risk, government and ethics in the context of HIV prevention, sexual practice and drug use, and participates extensively in the social response to HIV/AIDS in Australia. His forthcoming book, Pleasure Consuming Medicine (Duke University Press) takes up questions of sex, drugs, citizenship and health, and provides a critical analysis of neoliberal discourses of drug use.
Please follow the link for details of last year's What_is_Medicine_abstracts_2006-2007 seminars
Pleasure is more or less absent from serious talk within medicine, though it is a common enough motive for, and element of, human activity. When it comes to drugs, pleasure is often positioned as the grounds upon which legal and moral distinctions (between licit and illicit instances) are made. Taking drugs for pleasure would appear to transgress the moral logic of ‘restoring health’ that guarantees medical legitimacy. But the undeniable importance and common appeal of pleasure might lead us to wonder whether this routine exclusion and disavowal of pleasure doesn’t serve to prop up the self-evidence of medical rationality. After all, enabling pleasure is also one of medicine’s most basic concerns. In this paper I consider how a more open acknowledgement of pleasure might help to reframe public health practice and policy concerning the use of illicit drugs. I use Foucault’s History of Sexuality to conceptualize practices of ‘harm reduction’ (the loose mix of policies and procedures that take distance from prohibitionist initiatives). Making reference to concepts such as ‘care of the self’ and the ‘use of pleasure’, I argue that Foucault’s work suggests a distinction between ‘therapeutic’ and ‘social pragmatic’ approaches to pleasure, and that this distinction may be useful for framing relatively de-pathologizing modes of care. While Foucault is often used to critique the regulatory effects of public health, my reading aims to develop a more flexible approach to the practices of bodies and pleasures – one that is critically attuned to the operation of disciplinary norms, capable of preventing specific dangers, but also open to embodied experimentation and the different possibilities of pleasure.
What is Medicine?
Tracing Animals: Following Non-Human Animals in Making Biomedicine
Tuesday 5 February
5 - 7pm | Room 1204, Warmington Tower
With Lynda Birke | University of Chester
Dr Lynda Birke is a biologist who has long worked in feminist science studies. She has published extensively in this area, particularly on feminist questions in biology. More recently, she has focussed on the human/animal relationship - including the use of animals in science. Her most recent book (with Arnie Arluke and Mike Michael) is "The Sacrifice: How Scientific Experiments Transform Animals and People" (2007: Purdue).
She is currently doing research on horses and their relationship with people, in the Anthrozoology Unit, University of Chester.
What role do nonhuman animals play in the construction of medical knowledge? Animal researchers typically claim that their use has been essential to progress. But just how have animals fitted into the development of biomedicine? And how has their history fed into the ethical controversy around animal use? In this paper, I want to do two things: first, to trace how nonhuman animals, and their body parts, have become
incorporated into laboratory processes and places. They have long been designed to fit into scientific procedures - now increasingly so through genetic design. Animals and procedures are closely connected - animals in science are disassembled and reassembled in various ways. Indeed, whatever else it is, biomedical knowledge can be said to rest on a large pile of animal bodies and body parts. So, secondly, I want also to ask the speculative question - what might biomedicine have looked like if it hadn't relied so heavily on a never-ending supply of animals?
What is Medicine?
Of Wolves and Management
Monday 9 June | 4.30-6.00pm
With Rasmus Johnsen | Copenhagen Business School
Rasmus Johnsen has an MA in Philosophy and Literature and is a PhD Fellow at the Department for Management, Politics and Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School. He is currently working on a PhD involving a genealogy of the relation between melancholy and achievement. He has also published on stress management and the contemporary conceptualization of depression. He is currently a visiting scholar at the CSISP.
Alberto Toscano listening to Rasmus's description of the
industrial psychopath.
Rasmus Johnsen (out of shot) discusses a Danish website
designed to help employees identify psychopaths in the workplace.
The work-place psychopath: he lacks compassion, empathy, remorse, and any sense of guilt. He is charming, manipulative, and sometimes very effective. Everyone knows one or has heard a story about one. Although it is a serious allegation, many people will say: “Yeah, I know…but I had a boss, I swear, he was for real…” In Denmark, a trade union organizing commercial and clerical employees has put an online test on their web-page to assist their members in figuring out if their boss is one. But what is at stake in the description of psychopathic behaviour at work? In this presentation I will raise this question by examining the phenomenon of lycanthropy found in medicine, trials, and folk lore of the middle-ages. Just as the werewolf (lit.: man-wolf) is neither man nor beast, the work-place psychopath is neither a corporate nor an authentic self – and yet somehow both the were-wolf and the psychopath paradoxically must define precisely what they cannot be.
Workshops Summer Term
The Physique of the Public
Organised with the Space of Democracy /
Democracy of Space research network
Friday 6 June | Room 137a, Richard Hoggart Building
Speakers:
Jane Bennett | Political Science, Johns Hopkins University
Matthew Fuller | Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths
Javier Lezaun | James Martin Institute, Oxford University
David Oswell | Sociology, Goldsmiths
Albena Yaneva | Architecture, Manchester University
Claire Waterton | Sociology, Lancaster University
Sarah Whatmore | Geography, Oxford University
Brian Wynne | Sociology, Lancaster University
Discussants:
Andrew Barry | Geography, Oxford University
Gail Davies | Geography, UCL
Kate Nash | Sociology, Goldsmiths
If you would like to be put on the waiting list, please contact Natalie Warner at (@gold.ac.uk).
Suggested donation £8, £4 concessions
Celia Lury introducing David Oswell and his presentation
'Making room for Democracy in the everyday: sensate
publics and mediated experience in the home'.
Kate Nash discussing Javier Lezaun's paper 'Off-shore
democracy: socio-technical interventions and worker
participation', a session chaired by Mike Michael.
This one-day workshop will bring together social researchers and theorists who bring an interest in publicity and citizenship to the study of material and physical practices.
In fields like science and technology studies, it has long been acknowledged that non-human entities play an important role in the (un)making of social connections. However, everyday dealings with things, technologies, and nature are also increasingly recognized, and explicitly formatted, as occasions for ethical and political involvement. In engaging with these developments, authors in political theory, sociology and geography have begun to explore whether and how everyday practices may be understood as sites for the organisation of publics by socio-material means. This workshop aims to further explore this ‘object’ or material turn in the study of publics and citizenship. It is meant to provide a space for more detailed consideration of the kinds of practices, events and devices that this turn brings into view, from flood management to the art of sowing seeds. Within this context, the workshop will also engage broader conceptual questions about the type of politics, morality or ethics that a socio-material perspective on the public opens up. Thus, it will consider the implications of attempts to bring ‘democracy’ within the realm of embodied experience, including for the types of agency that are enabled and disabled by the repositioning of citizenship, and public involvement, as relations of material and physical entanglement.
2006-2007
Seminar series
What is Medicine?
Speakers included:
Simon Carter | Open University
Melinda Cooper | University of East Anglia
Allam Jarrar | Medical Relief Committee, Palestine
Brett Neilson | Cultural and Social Analysis, UWS
Darrin Waller | Medical AID for Palestinians
Click link for What_is_Medicine_abstracts_2006-2007 about the speakers
What is medicine? In this seminar series, medicine will be understood, minimally, as an assemblage of temporal and spatial technologies whose modes of practice traverse biogenetics, communicable disease, diagnostic imaging, standards of medical aid in warfare, medical ethics
in clinical trials and global movement of body tissue and organs. How is medicine curative, preventative and generative in welcome and unwelcome ways? In view of these divergences, how might its substance be the focus for new styles of intervention and evaluation?
Workshops
Networks and Assemblages: The Rebirth of Things in Latour and DeLanda
Friday 20 April
5.00-7.00pm, Ben Pimlott Lecture Theatre
With Graham Harman | American University in Cairo
Graham Harman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo. He supported himself through part of graduate school as a Chicago sportswriter, in which capacity he interviewed figures such as Sammy Sosa and Bobby Knight. He is the author of Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects, Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things, and Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing, as well as translator of Gudrun Kramer's History of Palestine.
In recent years, Manuel DeLanda has been one of the more imaginative defenders of realism in philosophy. In his latest book, A New Philosophy of Society (2006), DeLanda portrays a world of alliances and alloys in which things are nonetheless not defined by their interactions with other things. This brings DeLanda into tacit agreement and enmity with Bruno Latour, who also pictures a world of autonomous actors partially linked in networks. Although their models of reality are strikingly similar, and though both authors contribute to a badly needed revival of metaphysics in the continental tradition, they disagree on the key point of how a thing is defined by its relations within the world. This talk aims to clarify the silent dispute between Latour and DeLanda, which deserves to be a central controversy of the emerging object-philosophy.
The Contemporary Prehistory of Capitalism: Debating 'So-Called Primitive Accumulation' Today
A presentation by Sandro Mezzadra (Bologna), with a reply by Massimo De Angelis (UEL)
Tuesday 29 May
2.00-4.00pm | Room 137, Richard Hoggart Building
Sandro Mezzadra is Associate Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bologna and visiting professor at CSISP. His research has focused for many years on borders politics, citizenship and migration. He is involved in various forms of borders and migration related activism in Italy and in Europe. He is the author of Diritto di fuga. Migrazioni, cittadinanza, globalizzazione (Ombre Corte, 2006, 2nd ed.).
Massimo De Angelis is a Reader in economics at the University of East London. He edits The Commoner website and blog: http://www.commoner.org.uk/. He is the author of The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital (Pluto, 2007).
The past few years have witnessed renewed interest and lively polemics around the Marxist notion of "primitive accumulation". Though it is commonly understood as the violent premise for the expanded reproduction of capital - an original expropriation written, as Marx put it, "in letters of blood and fire" - many now regard primitive accumulation as a continuing process that cannot be relegated to the prehistory of capitalist society, and thus choose to speak of the present as an era of "new enclosures" or "accumulation by dispossession". In his talk, Sandro Mezzadra, visiting professor at CSISP, will return to the origins of this debate in Part VIII of Marx's Capital http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/index.htm and reflect on how a rereading of Marx can help us, in conjunction with postcolonial theory, to dislocate a linear interpretation of the temporality of capitalism, recast our concept of exploitation, and rethink political subjectivation, labour and struggle in the heterogeneous space of global capital. Sandro Mezzadra's talk will be followed by a reply from Massimo De Angelis, who in his writings and his editorship of The Commoner http://www.commoner.org.uk/ has played a crucial role in reviving the debate on primitive accumulation.
'Human Rights for all Minorities' - Rereading Du Bois
A seminar with Sandro Mezzadra, Brian Alleyne & Brett St. Louis | CSISP & Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths
Wednesday 23 May
5pm-7pm | Room 137, Richard Hoggart Building
More about | Department of Sociology
More about | Department of Sociology
Sandro Mezzadra is Associate Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bologna and visiting professor at CSISP. His research has focused for many years on borders politics, citizenship and migration. He is involved in various forms of borders and migration related activism in Italy and in Europe. He is the author of Diritto di fuga. Migrazioni, cittadinanza, globalizzazione (Ombre Corte, 2006, 2nd ed.).
'Human Rights for all Minorities' will focus on three main aspects of Du Bois' work. Firstly, the "spatial" coordinates of Du Bois' thought. They will be analyzed from the point of view of the dialectic between the experience of the loss of a world that characterized African-American and colonial experience of modernity on the one hand, and the necessity to reinvent the world in which Du Bois himself eventually saw the very condition of effectivity of African-American and anti-colonial struggles. Secondly, the concept of race will be discussed and Du Bois' own contribution to the development of "Black Marxism" highlighted (C. Robinson). Especially the analysis presented by Du Bois in "Black Reconstruction" will be critically discussed with reference to recent developments of the debate on race and racism in the US (T. Allen, D. Roediger, the so called "Critical race theory"). Thirdly, the focus will be on the concept of democracy developed by Du Bois, especially looking at the tension between the "universal" dimension of the concept itself and the "particular" struggles developing around the colour line.
One-off events
The Revitalised Whiteheadian Process Philosophy, the Difficulty in Making Some Moral and Political Difference in the World, and Parfit's Imaginary Examples
Monday 16 October
4.30 - 6.00pm | Room 1204 | Warmington Tower
With Seppo Poutanen | Academy of Finland | Visiting Research Fellow, CSISP
Seppo Poutanen is a post-doctoral research fellow of the Academy of Finland. His research interests include social epistemology, social theory, feminist theory and sociology of health and illness.
This paper briefly describes the revitalisation of processualist ideas, sums up what is practically at stake, and sketches a central problem of philosophist practical ethics. Connecting this problem to Whitehead’s ideas shows how so-called constructive postmodernism shares goals with mainstream practical ethics. However, the attainment of these goals is both hindered and complicated by the fact that the Whiteheadian, constructive postmodernists should pay more attention to the intuitive feel of their arguments. To this end a method of imaginary examples is suggested, the potential of which is explored via the work of philosopher Derek Parfit.
The Social Production of Novelty: "Innovation" as an emic view of context
Wednesday 6 December
4.30 - 6.00pm | Room 1204 | Warmington Tower
With Dawn Nafus | Intel
Dawn Nafus is an anthropologist at Intel in Portland, Oregon. She earned her PhD at the University of Cambridge (2003) and has interests in discourses of 'the technological', cultural notions of time, migration, mobility and border spaces, and gender and technology. She has done research in Russia and the UK.
If we know that technology is socially shaped, why does it persistently present itself as having come from nowhere? This paper will interrogate the highly structured and politically configured ways in which novelty is enacted both in technology industries and in the discourse of state actors that covet their presence as economic panacea. I show how novelty production is entangled in processes of purification (in the Latourian sense more so than the religious), perennially securing a brief contextlessness from which to act. In the world of computer artefacts, to impact society is to be outside it. The paper will draw on fieldwork conducted in the East of England in 2005, and will conclude with some comment on how this particular way of conceptualising and enacting innovation has inflected technology firms' engagement with social science knowledge practices.
Conferences
Speculative Realism
Friday 27 April
1.00-7.00pm, Ben Pimlott Lecture Theatre
A one-day conference co-sponsored by COLLAPSE
Chaired by | Sociology, Goldsmiths
Participants:
Ray Brassier | Middlesex University
Iain Hamilton Grant | UWE (University of West England)
Graham Harman | American University in Cairo
Quentin Meillassoux | Ecole Normale Superieure
Contemporary continental philosophy often prides itself on having overcome the age-old metaphysical battles between realism and dualism. Subject-object dualism has supposedly been destroyed by the critique of representation and supplanted by a fundamental correlation between thought and world. This workshop will bring together four philosophers whose work questions some of the basic tenets of this continental orthodoxy. Speculative realism is not a doctrine but the umbrella term for a variety of research programmes committed to upholding the autonomy of reality against the depredations of anthropocentrism, whether in the name of transcendental physicalism, object-oriented philosophy, or abstract materialism.
Oil and Politics
Thursday 10 - Friday 11 May
SOAS, Vernon Square Campus, Pentonville Road, London
With the support of the British Academy
Organised by CSISP | Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths | School of Geography, Oxford University | Department of Development Studies, SOAS
Plenary speakers:
Timothy Mitchell | Politics, New York University
MIchael Watts | Institute of International Studies, Berkeley
Speakers:
Andrew Barry | Geography, Oxford University
Gavin Bridge | Environment and Development, Manchester
George Frynas | Middlesex University Business School
James Marriott | Platform, London
Martin Skalsky | Film-maker, Czech Republic
Alberto Toscano | Sociology, Goldsmiths
Alex Vines | Chatham House, London
Gisa Weszkalnys | Geography, Oxford University
Oil is one of the most crucial and controversial substances today. This conference opens up the field to film-makers and artists, social anthropologists, human geographers, and social and cultural theorists in order to connect oil to a wide set of concerns, to make links across seemingly disparate issues, and to begin to develop and explore a variety of methods and methodologies suitable for the investigation of oil.
Topics included:
- Governing Oil in West Africa
- The Business of Oil
- Documenting the Politics of Oil
- Oil and the New Imperialism
2005-2006
Seminar series
Art: Conflict: Justice
Participants :Eyal Weizman (Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths) Jacqueline Damon and Cyril Musila (INICA) | James Marriott (CSISP and Platform) | Nicole Wolf (Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths) | Andrew Barry and Gisa Weszkalnys (CSISP, Goldsmiths) | Lucy Kimbell (Said Business School, Oxford) | Rita Duffy (artist, Belfast)
Organised with the Unit for Global Justice
Dis/placements
Participants: Nancy Fraser (New School for Social Research, New York University | Cathy Irwin (Research Fellow, Tavistock Clinic) | Sasha Roseneil (Sociology and Gender Studies, Leeds) | Vikki Bell (Sociology, Goldsmiths) | Nirmal Puwar (Sociology, Goldsmiths) | Susie Orbach (Visiting Professor, LSE) | Sara Ahmed (Media and Communications, Goldsmiths) | Vic Seidler (Sociology, Goldsmiths) | Valerie Walkerdine (Psychology, Cardiff)
This interdisciplinary event brought together people interested in the connections between 'psyche' and 'social' within a broadly defined psychosocial field.
Gabriel Tarde: Economy, Psychology and Invention
Thursday 1 December
1.00 - 6.00pm | Room 104 | Senate House
Presenters: Nigel Thrift (Geography, Oxford) | Vincent Lepinay (International Centre for Advanced Studies, New York University) | Lisa Blackman (Media and Communications, Goldsmiths) | Eric Alliez (Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex) | Andrew Barry (CSISP, Goldsmiths) | Chris McLean (Manchester Business School) | Alberto Toscano (Sociology, Goldsmiths)
Organised with the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths and Oxford University with the support of Economy and Society
Andrew Barry | barry (pdf 172kb)
Lisa Blackman | blackman (pdf 279kb)
Vincent Lepinay | lepinay (pdf 272kb)
Chris McLean | maclean (pdf 292kb)
Nigel Thrift | thrift (pdf 524kb)
Talking Open Source: A Workshop
Friday 5 May
Ben Pimlott Lecture Theatre
Organised with Brian Alleyne (Sociology, Goldsmiths)
Presenters: David Berry (Sussex) | Andrea Rota (LSE) | Robert Zimmer (Goldsmiths) | Chris Brauer (Goldsmiths) | Brian Alleyne (Goldsmiths) | Liat Oren (LSE) | Matti Kohonen (LSE)
This workshop brought together people working on various aspects of open source from different disciplinary perspectives.
Bringing the Crowd Back In: Revitalising an old semantics
Friday 2 December
1.00 - 2.30pm | Room 1204 | Warmington Tower
With Christian Borch, Visiting Fellow, CSISP | Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen
Christian's current research focuses on the sociology of crowds. This project consists of two parts: first, a semantic history of thenotion of crowds from its significant position in late 19th centrey social theory (Le Bon, Tarde, etc.) to its present marginal status; second, an attempt to reformulate the notion of crowds for contemporary purposes. His other interests include Luhmannian systems theory, Michel Foucault, Gabriel Tarde, urban theory and theoretical criminology.
Materialising New Media
Wednesday 3 May
4.30 – 6.00pm | Room 1204 Warmington Tower
With Anna Munster | University of New South Wales
Anna Munster is a senior lecturer in the School of Art History and Theory, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Australia. She has recently published Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (University Press of New England). She is a contributor to journals such as Culture Machine and CTheory and was the recipient of a large Australian Research Council Discovery Grant.
As new media began to coalesce as a significant field of cultural activity and thinking through the mid-1990s, much of the visual culture and theorising of information technologies emphasised a disembodied relation to these media. In this paper, I will argue, drawing on my new book Materializing New Media, for the importance of a materialist approach to new media and of the aesthetic contribution made by new media arts and culture to materializing our relationships to information culture. Rather than seek a counter to the privileging of consciousness and abstraction in cyberspace in "the body", I argue for digital embodiment as an unfolding relation to everyday engagements with new media.
Book Launch: Alain Badiou, Being and Event
Thursday 27 April
2.00 - 6.00pm | Room 143 | Main Building
Reception to follow
With Oliver Feltham, Justin Clemens and Alberto Toscano
To celebrate Continuum Books' recent publication of Alain Badiou's 1988 magnum opus L'Etre et l'evenement, CSISP hosted a roundtable discussion between the book's translator, Oliver Feltham, and two scholars of Badiou's work. Some of the book's principal themes were introduced: being as multiplicity, the idea of the generic, the namimg of the event, and the difference between presentation and representation.
Inventing Intimacy in Research
Friday 17 February
10.00am - 6.00pm | Small Hall/Cinema | Main Building
Organised by Mariam Fraser | CSISP and Nirmal Puwar | Sociology, Goldsmiths
Speakers: Mariam Fraser (CSISP, Goldsmiths) | Nirmal Puwar (Sociology, Goldsmiths) | Marsha Rosengarten (CSISP, Goldsmiths) | Simon Cohn (Anthropology, Goldsmiths) | Carolyn Steedman | Alia Syed | Julia O'Connell | Ania Dabrowska | Bronwyn Parry
Working with different materials and in different domains, this conference explored the relation between intimacy and research. How does the specificity of a research subject, or a particular methodology, create intimate relations? What kinds of intimacies are produced in our exchanges with the past through archival research? What are the possibilities of transcultural memory work with film? What ethical issues are raised by intimate ethnographic research? How intimate are scientific objects? Is it possible to think through intimacy without either privileging or excluding the subjectivity of the researcher?
2004-2005
Seminars
Jung's Psyche: the Self as a rational field |
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Thinking Bodies: the making of the body reader |
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Monday 13 June With Paul Atkinson | The Guild, London |
Thursday 21 February With Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco | Sociology, Goldsmiths |
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Motility and the 'Disposal' of Affect |
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Between Organic, Psychic and Social Processes: thinking affect and emotion through (a critique of) autopoietic systems theory |
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Wednesday 8th June With Professor Rolland Munro | Department of Management, Keele University |
Thursday 10 February With Paul Stenner | Psychology, UCL |
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Embodying the Psychological: cultures of
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Affect as Methodology: bodies,
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Monday 6 June With Lisa Blackman | Media and Communications, Goldsmiths |
Thursday 3 February With Beckie Coleman | Sociology, Goldsmiths |
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Finance, Attention and Affect |
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Embodied Virus |
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Thursday 2 June With Christian Marazzi | Scuola Universitaria Professionale della Svizzera Italiana | Lugano, Switzerland |
Monday 31 January With Marsha Rosengarten | Sociology, Goldsmiths |
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Mike Smith Studio |
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Strange Practices: children's fear of
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Tuesday 24 May With Mike Smith | Mike Smith Studio |
Monday 17 January With Karen Wells | Centre for Urban and Community |
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Translation and the Mechanics of Embodiment: from La Mettrie's 'Machine Man' to Haraway's 'Material Semiotic' |
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The Politics of Bad Feeling |
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Monday 23 May With David Oswell | Sociology, Goldsmiths |
Wednesday 8 December With Sara Ahmed | Media and Communications, Goldsmiths |
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But Malice Afterthought: cities and the
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Explorations in Authority: a psychosocial approach |
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Wednesday 18 May With Professor Nigel Thrift | School of Geography and the Environment, Oxford University |
Monday 6 December With Paul Hoggett | Politics, University of West England |
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Fractured Identities and the Embodiment of Grief |
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Sonic Envelopes: aurality, subjectivity, and geometry |
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Monday 9 May With Vic Seidler | Sociology, Goldsmiths |
Wednesday 24 November With Peg Rawes |
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The Symbolic Concretisation of Fear and Insecurity in the Making of Objects of Class Hatred |
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Feminist Research and Men's Bodies |
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Wednesday 4 May With Beverley Skeggs | Sociology, Goldsmiths |
Monday 22 November With Ulla-Britt Lilleaas | Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo |
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Taking Care: migration and the political
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The Affect of Law |
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Wednesday 16 March With Sandro Mezzadra | Politics, Institutions and History | University of Bologna |
Wednesday 10 November With Kirsten Campbell | Sociology, Goldsmiths |
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Cultural Virus |
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Ethic or Morality: thinking bioethics |
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Thursday 10 March With Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman | Culture and Innovation Studies | University of East London |
Monday 8 November With Andrea Stockl | Sociology, Goldsmiths |
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Where does Bioethics come from? |
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Psychiatric Culture and Embodiment |
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Monday 7 March With Oonagh Carrigan | Centre for Family Research, |
Monday 25 October With Lisa Blackman | Media and Communications, Goldsmiths |
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(In)different Politics: from the
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Homosexuality and its Vicissitudes: the 'homosexual' other in psychoanalytic theory and practice |
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Thursday 24 February Claudia Aradau | International Relations, Open University |
Friday 15 October With Jack Drescher |
Workshops
Affectio and Affectius: A workshop on Deleuze's Spinoza Lectures
Wednesday 27 October
4.30 - 6.00 pm | Room 1204 | Warmington Tower
Led by Alberto Toscano | Sociology, Goldsmiths
One-off events
'"Where" Your People From Girl?' Gender, Race and Place Beneath Clouds
Tuesday 14 September
4.30 - 6.00pm | Room 138 | Main Building
Film review with Rosalyn Diprose
