UCL Institute of Advanced Studies

by Mary Fulbrook. Responses by Jane Caplan, Elizabeth Harvey and Nicholas Stargardt. A single word - Auschwitz - is often used to encapsulate the totality of persecution and suffering involved in the Holocaust. But this obscures the fuller story, and the multiple legacies of Nazi persecution across generations and continents. In Reckonings, Fulbrook explores the continuing impact of the Holocaust...

by Patrick Hayes (Oxford), Huw Marsh (QMUL), Julia Jordan (UCL) and Andrew Dean (UCL) Literary studies, if it is anything, is serious-minded. It is tragedy, not comedy, where the prestige lies. Does this seriousness obscure our ability to value the comic in works of art? What can the comic do? And how might the comic upset our disciplinary expectations? Three academics who have researched comic au...

The UCL Institute of the Americas is delighted to host an international panel of experts who will discuss the 2018 Quebec election campaign, its outcome and its implications for both Quebec and Canada as a whole. The Quebec general election taking place on Monday 1 October looks as though it could result in a realignment in Quebec politics as the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) led by Francois Legau...

Non-independent territories account for more than half the states of the Caribbean today. Despite this, narratives of Caribbean decolonization frequently brush over or ignore the non-sovereign states of the region. Histories of global decolonization are even more likely to disregard these territories. However, there is much to be learned about the nature of decolonization from these seemingly unco...

by political cartoonist Zunar Zunar's work was exhibited at UCL on January 14-23. Please find more information at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/events/2019/jan/ias-laughter-laughter-political-tool-zunar-malaysia-exhibition

by Herman L Bennett (CUNY). Discussant: Toby Green (Kings College London) Through an examination of early modern African-European encounters, African Kings and Black Slaves offers a reappraisal of the dominant depiction of these exchanges as being solely mediated through the slave trade and racial difference. By asking in what manner did Europeans and Africans configure sovereignty, polities, and...

by William Davies (Goldsmiths), Emily McTernan (UCL) and Jeffrey Howard (UCL) Is free speech under attack on campus? Are 'snowflake' students demanding trigger warnings, a decolonized curriculum, and the deplatforming of speakers with whom they disagree spoiling universities? William Davies has recently written in the guardian that such panicked talk is mostly a conservative fiction aimed at energ...

by Larne Abse Gogarty (Slade, UCL), Shumi Bose (Central Saint Martins), Seth Graham (SSEES, UCL), Pil and Galia Kollectiv (RCA / U. of Reading / London Metropolitan), and Florian Mussgnug (UCL) Thinkers from different disciplines such as literature, arts and architecture, have shown dissatisfaction with the pervasive contemporary use of irony: laughing at everything, and avoiding seriousness, acco...

by Rosemary Bechler (OpenDemocracy) Caterina di Fazio (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) Satvinder Juss (King’s College) Lorenzo Marsili (European Alternatives) Niccolo Milanese (European Alternatives) Chantal Mouffe (University of Westminster) Andrea Pisauro (Oxford Psychology/DiEM U.K.) Marina Prentoulis (The University of East Anglia/Another Europe is Possible) Uta Staiger (UCL European Institute) Fra...

by Catherine Hall (Emerita Professor, UCL) and Lonnie Bunch (Honorary Visiting Research Fellow, IAS & Director of the Smithsonian NMAAHC). Speakers discussed the collection for the African American Museum and the political work involved. This discussion aims to set connections between the UK and the USA's status quo.

by Simon Constantine, Steve Edwards, Jonathan Stafford, and Andrew Witt. Responses from Tamar Garb. Moderated by Stephanie Schwartz. First published in 1995, Allan Sekula’s Fish Story offers one of the most important and stunning critiques of the economic logic of global capital. The book, which was produced over seven years, and combines text and photographs into an ‘experimental essay’, tackles...

An inclusive exercise in cultural analysis, this book deals with the gravitas and folly of identity politics, the boom of so-called African art, and the fetish and fascination with a global Esperanto. Designed to provoke thought and feeling, it is hoped that this collection of essays on South African art will reach a wide audience. The book’s strength lies in its diversity of focus and cultural fr...

by Professor Helen Margetts (University of Oxford)

by writer and teacher Ashraf Jamal. In The Waiting Country: A South African Witness, published in 1995, Mike Nicol arrives at the core of this paper. ‘We lie to accommodate’, he says. ‘We lie because we think it does not matter. We lie because we think that in the face of so many years of misery, a lie that is for the good is not a lie at all. And we lie because we have no self-respect. We lie bec...

by Shaista Aziz (Journalist, writer, and stand-up comedian), Dr Tiffany Page (Lecturer in Sociology, University of Cambridge), Kate Parker (London Director, The Schools Consent Project), Laura Thompson (PhD researcher, City University London) The IAS Vulnerability Seminar Series hosted a panel that touched on the ways in which visibility can be empowering – exposing the reality of sexual violence,...

by Mariana Mazzucato (IIPP, UCL) The false dichotomy between "the public sector" and "the private sector" leaves out the vital role that government has played - and must continue to play - in acting as financial backer and risk-taker in the most important innovations of our time that can help tackle the grand challenges facing us. Furthermore the lie ends up causing a situation by which risks are...

Large-scale mining projects are strongly backed by the Colombian and Peruvian state as a source of revenue and jobs. However, they have a long record of damaging social and environmental impacts. They harm people’s health and disrupt food production. They contribute to biodiversity loss and pollute water sources. Local communities are frequently displaced, repressed and criminalised for protesting...

Miguel Diaz Canel became president of Cuba one month ago. What is the historical significance of this event, and what are the challenges facing this new leadership? This seminar brings together four panellists - three from Cuba and one from the UK - to present their analysis of the historical moment and views on the new government's political, economic and social challenges ahead.

This edited collection explores citizenship in a transnational perspective, with a focus on Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. It adopts a multi-disciplinary approach and offers historical, legal, political, and sociological perspectives. The two overarching themes of the book are ethnicity and Indigeneity. The contributions in the collection come from widely respected international scholars who...

Richard and Sally Price - How are anthropologists to react as the peoples they study increasingly commoditize their ethnicity in response to globalization? As veteran ethnographers of two very different societies in the Caribbean – rural Martinique and Maroons from the interior of Suriname, both of which are implicated in partial globalization – we have come to feel an ethical and epistemological...

From the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, the RCMP security service – prompted by fears of left-wing and communist subversion – monitored and infiltrated the women’s liberation movement in Canada and Quebec. This book investigates why and how this movement was targeted, weighing carefully the presumed threat its left-wing ties presented to the Canadian government against the defiant challenge its camp...

by Professor Steve Fuller (University of Warwick) Are the moral proscriptions against lying overrated? Find more information at: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/ias-events/a-post-truth-take-on-lying

Canadian authors Gary Geddes and Ann Eriksson have spent much of their lives writing about politics in its broadest sense. According to Pablo Neruda, 'Political poetry is more deeply emotional than any other except love poetry. You must have traversed the whole of poetry before you become a political poet.' Neruda’s words apply equally to fiction and non-fiction: to write well about civic, public,...

by Prof Anthony Julius (Chair in Law and Arts, UCL) Find more information at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/ias-events/vulnerability-and-censorship

by Lola Frost and Edmund Clark in conversation with Anna Marazuela Kim What is the relation of vulnerability to precarity, fragility and risk in the making of art? How might art make visible vulnerable states and subjects in ways that challenge conventional aesthetic, political and social categories, subverting existing hierarchies of power while staging quiet, yet potent, modes of dissent? Find m...