Culture, Power & Politics – Open Seminar Series
Please note that the first seminar is already booked up, but do sign up anyway to go on the waiting list HERE and join the mailing list HERE.
What will it do?
It will mainly explore ideas from the traditions of cultural studies and radical theory, considering their relevance to understanding contemporary political issues, struggles and campaigns, as well as key themes in political history.
Who is it for?
Ideally, it’s for anyone who is interested. The idea for the seminar has come out of discussions amongst members of the New Economy Organisers’ Network and Compass. Our hope is that the seminars will be useful and relevant both to political activists and organisers and to others simply interested in exploring the ideas.
We also hope that they will work for people who have no prior knowledge of the subjects and for those who may be world-class experts, and everyone in between. If you don’t know anything about these subjects then feel free to come and find out. If you’re an expert – then come and join in the discussions to help others learn and to deepen your own understanding through conversation with others. We believe that all learning is collective!
Who is organising it?
Initially, at least, the seminar is being organised, convened and led by Jeremy Gilbert, a professor at the University of East London, with support and encouragement from Dan Vockins, Jacqui Howard, Joe Cox, Neal Lawson, Jo Littler and Alan Finlayson. To what extent others get involved in organising, convening and teaching on the seminar remains to be seen, and probably depends on whether it lasts past summer 2015
What will the format be?
Well in principle this will depend on who turns up and what they want to do. Ideally we would like it to be a fairly free-flowing mixture of lecture, open workshop, group discussion, skill-share and political debate. If people turn up with no real interest in learning or helping others learn about the topic of the session, then they will not be offered a platform to pontificate; but apart from that we would like to keep it fairly open.
At the moment the general idea is that the seminar will convene monthly, and that sessions will be grouped into short series of 3-4 seminars at a time, covering particular subjects. It will generally assumed that the same people will participate for each session of a series, but it’s not like we’re going to ban you for missing one. There will be some suggested reading which will hopefully always be available online, but it will never be assumed that everyone has read it. The sessions will be recorded and podcast.
What will the topics be?
Hopefully this will be something that the participants in the seminar will end up discussing and determining as a group. At the moment, however, the rough plan initially is for several series of 3-4 linked seminars each on the following themes:
The first session
Please reserve a place here, seminars are free!
1. Why do people go along with neoliberalism when most people seem to hate it? Why hasn’t there been more resistance to austerity since 2010, when even the Metropolitan Police were predicting that there would be? How do people come to desire their own oppression?
We’ll look at the Marxian tradition of ideology critique, which tries to understand the ways in which world-views which are favourable to powerful groups become disseminated and normalised throughout societies. In particular we will consider Gramsci’s ideas about ‘hegemony’ and ‘common sense’, which have recently been very influential on Podemos in Spain, because they offer a theory of political change as well as a theory of cultural and political power. If we get really ambitious we might get into some of the more complex attempts to theorise the relationship between the political and the psychic in the work of thinkers such as Althusser, Kristeva and Deleuze & Guattari. Also we’ll try to look at the historical context of these thinkers’ work and the political struggles from which it emerged.
If you’d like to join the next seminar then you can simply register for free at our eventbrite page HERE.
For more details and links to readings, go HERE.
2 How do we understand the emerging politics of radical democracy – Syriza, Podemos, Scotland, etc?
We’ll look at a range of thinkers who have been cited as an inspiration on these kinds of politics: Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, Hardt & Negri, etc, at the histories which inspired them and at the wide range of experiments in radical democratic organising and institutions which have emerged in the era of ‘network culture’.
(These first two themes have been chosen mainly because specific people in our organisations have requested them. The next two are ones that seem at least as important to us.)
3 What’s the heritage of current debates in feminism and intersectionality?
Feminist thought from de Beauvoir to Butler and beyond. Is ‘intersectionality’ the best model of interacting, overlapping power relationships that anyone has come up with? What’s the origin and influence of Judith Butler’s classic observation that ‘identity is the lived scene of coalition’s difficulty’? How do we confront patriarchy today, and is ‘patriarchy’ even the best concept we have for understanding gendered and sexualised power?
4 Black Lives Matter: Anti-racist, anti-imperialist and postcolonial thought from Fanon to Ferguson.
Struggles against imperialism, racism and colonialism have shaped the modern world as much as any others and remain crucial today. Is there any way that understanding this history and the ideas that it has produced can assist us in confronting the brutal realities of institutionalised racism today?
Etc. You get the general idea.
More details please?
More detailed information on specific sessions, click on the menu above. For details of the first session click HERE.
Where and When?
The seminar will take place at the New Economics Foundation, 10 Salamanca Place, London SE1 7HB (nearest tube: Vauxhall) 6:30-8:30pm (roughly), and the first three will take place on May 19th, June 16th and July 14th (these are all Tuesday evenings).
How do I join?
If you’d like to join the next seminar then you can simply register for free at our eventbrite page HERE.
How do I stay in touch if I don’t want to go to that one (or even if I do)?
You can join the mailing list HERE