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This event is part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas. Bookings will open at 11:00 on Monday 24 September 2018.
From MOOCS to networked institutions, remote and off-shore degrees, flexible and flipped learning, Universities seem to be changing at an unprecedented rate, on an unprecedented scale. This talk lays out some of the most radical of these changes and asks: What are we are witnessing now? Are we in the age of hyper education, and the end of Universities as they have been for centuries?
Talk by Alison Wood, Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities -
Smuts Memorial Lecture Series 2017
Lecture Three: On the way home without a world: the case of Delhi
Speaker: AbdouMaliq Simone (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity)
Lecture Three Abstract
This lecture explores what it means to live without a world, without an overarching orientation or anchorage that compels bodies, things and places to have something inevitably to do with each other; where the purported coherence undermines itself in the politics of imposing a univocal frame. Here, the very intensity of segregating forces, of expulsions, land-grabs, and gentrification—which indeed are the predominant descriptors of contemporary urban development—also rebound in weird ways, suggesting, even for a moment, not the romance with urban cosmopolitan mixture, but a contingent density of differences that don’t seem to know how to narrate how they all got to be in the same “neighborhood.”
Focusing on a series of “strange alliances” in a dense Muslim working class district in Delhi, I attempt to grasp how contexts that provide for both a plurality of small, continuous attainments and prolific blockages are a means of attempting to understand what it means to be at home without a world. -
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Smuts Memorial Lecture Series 2017
Lecture Two Abstract
This lecture takes up the manufacturing of darkness as relationality spiraling out of control. Here, the capacity to render any experience as a piece of interoperable data intersects with the inability of any infrastructure to hold the sheer panoply of heterogeneous actions, recursions, and feedback loops that run up and down discernible scales. All of the devices and regimens capable of demonstrating exactly how things relate to each other, in their very implementation, unleash an excess of unscalable details and an aesthetics that renders the tropes of overarching organizational logics inoperable.
I explore some of the ways in which residents in Jakarta and Hyderabad, India, deal with this darkness, this situation where many countervailing realities all seem to be equally possible and appearing; where the accelerated, haphazard, and brazenly opportunistic expansions of built environments that seek to get far away from what a given city was before reaffirm or cultivate interiorities of care, of people looking out for each other. -
Smuts Memorial Lecture Series (7, 9, 13 November 2017)
Series Title: The Uninhabitable: Afterlives of the Urban South
Speaker: AbdouMaliq Simone (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity)
Series Abstract
So many forces are at work to make habitation impossible or nearly impossible in many urban contexts. So much work is devoted toward detailing the demise of urban life in all of its aspects, and the way this destruction is unequally distributed across different regions and populations. In this series of three lectures, I invoke the uninhabitable, not as a quality of urban conditions, but rather a method of living-with this urban—and all of its intensifications, extension, ambiguities, and apocalyptic implications—as something strange, productively dark, and seemingly impermeable to calculation or figuring.
As such, this living-with is an arena of inexplicable conjunction, collaboration, unsettling; a profusion of undomesticated circulating details momentarily coalescing as affirmations, instigations of something else besides, right next to the otherwise resounding drudgery and bleakness of contemporary urbanization and its accelerated repetition of limiting formats and implosive horizons. A repetition that promises to destroy us, no matter how much we have been in the dark about such matters from the get-go.
Lecture One Abstract
The lecture models itself as an improvisatory ensemble. For it seeks to demonstrate the uninhabitable as rhythms of endurance; that rhythm is what ensues from those aspects of urban life that cannot be precisely measured or scaled, where the vectors of here and there, now and then become largely indistinguishable.
In a world of so much toxicity, inequality, stupidity, violence, and precarity, there is something else that offers no evidence for its existence, which cannot be mobilized as proof or resistance. Yet, it resounds as an aspect of even the most banal and quotidian of maneuvers. It points to a generic darkness in which every detail is compressed, but a darkness that hides nothing, that embodies no secrets. Just a parallel track; what Ornette Coleman would call “harmolodics”, a democracy of the ensemble, the capacity to deliver the same melody in a different way.
The lecture draws upon Quranic and Black eschatological notions of darkness to think about ways of living-with this something else beside(s) the proliferating manifestations of both the erasures of life and non-life and the rampaging political technologies that police boundaries demarcating the viable and unviable. The lecture is full of stories of strange alliances, improvisations, endless journeys of African entrepreneurs, crimes that spiral far beyond their origin, the circulation of messages in Freetown, and ways in which even the most desperate make sure to have something forceful to say to audiences far beyond their reach, how they refuse the inhabitation of the present, but also exceed this refusal. -
Researching South-South Development Cooperation
The conference's keynote lecture, 'Tupi or Not Tupi: Anthropophagy and Emulation in the Study of South-South Cooperation', given by Professor Adriana Erthal Abdenur (Pontifical Catholic University, Rio de Janeiro)
Convenors
Elsje Fourie (University of Maastricht)
Emma Mawdsley (University of Cambridge)
Wiebe Nauta (University of Maastricht)
Summary
The 'rise of the South' over the last 10-15 years has led to tectonic shifts in global development ideas, practices and actors. As growing providers of development assistance, states like Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Korea, Mexico, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, as well as a variety of non-state development organisations and movements, are becoming increasingly active and influential in bilateral, regional and international cooperation. Usually this has been framed as a successful projection of material, ideational and ontological power that has enabled Southern (and Arab) development partners to challenge long-standing 'North-South' development hegemonies.
While research is accelerating around many aspects of the rapidly growing and complex phenomenon of South-South Development Cooperation (SSDC), there has been limited space for reflection on the epistemological and methodological challenges posed by research in and with these Southern partners. Yet our own experiences, and discussions with differently positioned researchers in different sites, reveal new and emerging questions of identity, power and positionality for researchers and their partners and respondents; as well as unfamiliar and challenging conceptual frameworks for 'development'. Existing critical reflection on 'mainstream' international development ideas, practices and research from feminist, postcolonial and critical race theory has powerfully challenged the hierarchies and assumptions associated with the historically dominant North-South axis, while also providing paradigm-shifting innovations in methodologies and ethics in research praxis. To what extent are such critical reflections relevant to explore these new actors, hierarchies and identities emerging and deepening in and around SSDC?
This conference is the first of its kind in its specific focus on the epistemological and related methodological challenges associated with researching South-South development cooperation. The conference will invite researchers on SSDC - from graduates and early career scholars to leading figures in the field - to reflect critically on the changing politics of knowledge and knowledge production that these actors and trends present. We are particularly keen to include Southern-based researchers, funding permitting. The conference will be multidisciplinary in character, with researchers invited from Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Development Studies, Feminist Studies, International Relations, Media Studies and Political Studies -
Alexandra Hyde (Gender Institute, LSE)
This paper is based on an ethnographic study of a British Army camp overseas, from the perspective of civilian women married to servicemen. By focusing on the experiences and attitudes of ‘military wives’ within the Army’s social and institutional structure, the aim of this research is to investigate the ways in which the depth and scope of militarisation might be argued to be contingent upon or indeed, mediated by other factors such as gender, race, class, sexuality and national identity. My initial analysis suggests that the terms of the Regiment’s cohesion as a community overseas are negotiated through a range of formal and informal, material and cultural ‘bargains’ with the military.
In the additional context of the Regiment’s recent deployment to Afghanistan, this ethnography also offers some observations on the multiple modes of mobility, absence, mobilization and separation that characterise both the camp’s community as a whole, and the flux of everyday life for military families. In my tentative conceptualisation, I aim to account for a more fluid, productive tension between what I call ‘military mobilities’ and the Regiment’s rigid hierarchies, fixed structure, prescribed traditions and sovereign status. Using ethnographic examples, I will elaborate upon the places where the borderlines of the military merge into the civilian, extend beyond the public life of the institution into the domestic sphere and, in the particular circumstances of the Regiment’s multiple locations, occupy what might be argued as ‘transnational’ social space. -
Conference Conveners
Ashley Moffett (Professor of Reproductive Immunology)
Megan Vaughan (Professor of Commonwealth History)
Conference Summary
Millennium Development Goal 5 (MDG5) aims to improve maternal health. Unlike other MDGs, few countries are on track to achieve even the first goal of MDG 5, namely, to reduce maternal mortality by 75%. Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from the highest regional maternal mortality rate (MMR) at 640 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births and the annual decline has only been 0.1%. In stark contrast, average MMR in developed countries is 14.
The focus for discussion and action to reduce maternal mortality rates is of necessity largely restricted to the fields of medicine and public health. At the same time, however, there is a spectrum of challenging biological, social and cultural issues that constitute the context within which maternal mortality occurs. In our workshop we plan to break new ground by bringing together those with expertise in current initiatives to reduce MMR with leading researchers in genetics, immunology, obstetric epidemiology, and social and biological anthropology.
The aim of the conference is to provide a forum within which people with very different expertise and experience can explore the latest research findings and see how these could influence understanding and ideas for action to reduce maternal mortality in Africa.
The following two areas, taken together, will form the focus of the conference:
Biological mechanisms determining birth outcomes
The social and historical context for maternal mortality in Africa
We see this as a unique opportunity to bring together those with experience of implementing initiatives aimed at reducing MMR with researchers from different but highly relevant academic disciplines. Our focus on this important issue will enable us to bring together the latest research in fields that all too often do not ‘talk’ to each other. An additional question to be posed in the course of this conversation concerns the very nature of interdisciplinary enquiry. Do we have a language with which to talk meaningfully of the interactions between biology and history? To what extent can basic scientific research inform policy-making? -
Conference Conveners
Ashley Moffett (Professor of Reproductive Immunology)
Megan Vaughan (Professor of Commonwealth History)
Conference Summary
Millennium Development Goal 5 (MDG5) aims to improve maternal health. Unlike other MDGs, few countries are on track to achieve even the first goal of MDG 5, namely, to reduce maternal mortality by 75%. Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from the highest regional maternal mortality rate (MMR) at 640 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births and the annual decline has only been 0.1%. In stark contrast, average MMR in developed countries is 14.
The focus for discussion and action to reduce maternal mortality rates is of necessity largely restricted to the fields of medicine and public health. At the same time, however, there is a spectrum of challenging biological, social and cultural issues that constitute the context within which maternal mortality occurs. In our workshop we plan to break new ground by bringing together those with expertise in current initiatives to reduce MMR with leading researchers in genetics, immunology, obstetric epidemiology, and social and biological anthropology.
The aim of the conference is to provide a forum within which people with very different expertise and experience can explore the latest research findings and see how these could influence understanding and ideas for action to reduce maternal mortality in Africa.
The following two areas, taken together, will form the focus of the conference:
Biological mechanisms determining birth outcomes
The social and historical context for maternal mortality in Africa
We see this as a unique opportunity to bring together those with experience of implementing initiatives aimed at reducing MMR with researchers from different but highly relevant academic disciplines. Our focus on this important issue will enable us to bring together the latest research in fields that all too often do not ‘talk’ to each other. An additional question to be posed in the course of this conversation concerns the very nature of interdisciplinary enquiry. Do we have a language with which to talk meaningfully of the interactions between biology and history? To what extent can basic scientific research inform policy-making? -
7 West Road
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Dr Heather Webb (French and Italian, Ohio) and Dr Florian Mussgnug (Italian, UCL), preview their CRASSH conference 'Apocalissi: Eschatological Imagination in Italian Culture from Dante to the Present' (9-10 October 2009).
