UCL Institute of Advanced Studies

The UCL IA US Foreign Policy and National Security Seminar series is a new series that will be running throughout the year at the UCL Institute of the Americas. Series convenors: Francesca Akhtar and Alin Barbantan, both UCL Americas PhD students. This session's panellists are Dr Alex Ferguson (University of Southampton) on “Press Management and U.S. Support for France in Indochina, 1950-54” and D...

by Timothy Mitchell (Columbia). Chaired by Andrew Barry (Geography, UCL) The climate emergency confronts us with the problem of growth. Can we avert a planetary catastrophe by altering the ways we consume resources, adopting a new path of “green growth”? Or is the survival of human societies incompatible with continued economic expansion, requiring the radical alternative of de-growth? Answers on...

Mel Cappe (Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, and former Canadian High Commissioner to the UK) - After Brexit, Canada will have access to the EU with less friction than the UK. Are there lessons from Canada to help the UK in its post Brexit world? Much has been heard during the Brexit debate about the so-called ‘Canada Plus’ model of a new relationship for the UK with the EU’ based o...

How did drama and history-writing shape James’s multiple accounts of the Haitian Revolution? This paper follows the revision trail of the genesis and evolution of James’s The Black Jacobins history and other Haitian Revolution-related writings, charting his evolving interest in the leadership of Toussaint Louverture against the backdrop of his Marxist political path. Building on Michel-Rolph Troui...

Carrie Gibson discusses her latest book, which examines the long Hispanic past of the USA. While the Pilgrim myth may linger in US popular memory, her book explains how the story of European colonialism started much earlier, with the Spanish in the 15th century and their incursions into Florida and South Carolina. The islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico were crucial to both this early history and the...

by Chris Knight (Anthropology, UCL)and Jackie Walker. Chaired by Tamar Garb (IAS) With the publication of ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’ half a century ago, Noam Chomsky burst onto the US political scene as a leading critic of the war in Vietnam. Privilege, he argues, brings with it the responsibility to tell the truth and expose lies, but our intellectual culture only pays lip-service to t...

by Christoph Lindner (Dean of The Bartlett). Respondent: José Torero Cullen (Department of Civil, Environmental, Geomatic & Environmental Engineering). Chaired by Clare Melhuish (Urban Lab) and introduced by Tamar Garb (IAS/History of Art)

UCL IA US Foreign Policy and National Security Seminar Series: The Changing Nature of US Warfare in the 21st Century. The UCL IA US Foreign Policy and National Security Seminar series is a new seminar series that will be running throughout the year at the UCL Institute of the Americas, 51 Gordon Square, London. The objective of the series is to engender discussion and debate with both students and...

Mexico bucked the trend of right-wing governments in Latin America on July 1, 2018, when Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) won the presidential election by a landslide. The promises of a ‘radical transformation’, a fight against corruption and greater equality in the nation that was the laboratory of neoliberalism raised expectations, not only in Mexico but around the world. A year later, it's cl...

by Avril Alba, Yasmin Khan, and Tom Lawson. Chaired by Tamar Garb. This panel discussion was jointly organised by the IAS and the German Historical Institute London (GHIL), and was part of the GHIL's Contested Histories seminar series (summer term 2019). Please find the programme here and the poster here. This panel asked how do colonial history, the Second World War, and the Holocaust intersect?...

‘The Temptation of War: alcohol and the Canadian forces’ by Luke Flanagan and ‘The Khaki University of Canada – Hope for a Better Future’ by Diana Beaupré and Adrian Watkinson.

Please note the first 10 minutes of the event are missing (ABColombia’s introduction and the first couple of minutes of Danilo Rueda’s talk. Join a conversation with Colombian Human Rights Defender Danilo Rueda of the Inter-Church Commission for Justice and Peace (CIJP), a human rights organisation with more than 31 years of experience of working to expose human rights violations in the conflict r...

Adopting Argentina’s popular uprisings against neoliberalism including the 2001-02 rebellion and subsequent mass protests as a case study, The Mobilization and Demobilization of Middle-Class Revolt analyzes two decades of longitudinal research (1995-2018), including World Bank and Latinobarómeter household survey data, along with participant interviews, to explore why nonpolitically active middle-...

by Anthony Gardner (University of Oxford), Magdalena Radomska (Art History Institute, Adam Mickiewicz University inPoznań), Marko Ilić (SSEES, UCL). Moderated by Maja and Reuben Fowkes (Post-socialist Art Centre, IAS, UCL) This panel discussion brought together contributors to the special issue of Third Text on Actually Existing Artworlds of Socialism and guest respondents to debate the legacy of...

What does political life look like when it is not read in the context of collectives like parties, unions, movements, NGOs, or the trope of resistance? Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Beetham, an impoverished neighbourhood in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, this paper approaches the politics of the urban poor by looking into everyday acts, gestures and discussions aimed at com...

Professor Kevin Middlebrook discusses the US approach to the Venezuela crisis on CNN by UCL Institute of Advanced Studies

Professor Kevin Middlebrook discusses US-Russia relations and the Venezuelan crisis by UCL Institute of Advanced Studies

by Nina Mickwitz (University of the Arts London), Nicola Streeten (www.streetenillustration.com), and Roger Sabin (University of the Arts London). Chaired by Dominic Davies (City University of London). Though today we use the term ‘comics’ to refer to a wide range of cartoons, graphic narratives and sequential art that are by no means necessarily humorous, the word still betrays the long historica...

by Ilona Németh, with interventions by Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe) and Leon Wainwright (Open University). Moderated by Maja and Reuben Fowkes (PACT UCL). In her Eastern Sugar project, Bratislava-based artist Ilona Németh investigates the pathologies of economic transition, uncovering its roots in the flawed mechanism of privatisation mired by asset-stripping and syst...

The dominant narrative is that Canada has a positive record when it comes to slavery, and that it was an antislavery haven for African American slaves in the antebellum period who were fleeing from slavery in the United States. However, there were enslaved people in the colonies that would later become Canada, under both French and British rule. This paper explores how newspapers in colonial Canad...

by Terry Kurgan in conversation with Tamar Garb and Eva Hoffman Terry Kurgan’s book begins with a family snapshot made by her Polish grandfather in 1939 on the eve of the war. Presenting this evocative image as a repository of multiple histories—public, private, domestic, familial and generational—she sets off on a series of meditations on photography that give us startling insights into how photo...

William Hardin Burnley (1780-1850) was the largest slave owner in Trinidad during the nineteenth century. Born in the United States to English parents, he settled in Trinidad in 1802 and became one of the most influential citizens and prominent agent in the British Empire. A central figure among the elite and moneyed transnational slave owners, Burnley moved easily though the Atlantic world of the...

by Catherine Grant (Digital Media and Screen Studies, Birkbeck) In this illustrated talk, Catherine Grant will explore the emergence of the audiovisual essay in screen studies, focusing on her own creative/critical "material thinking" research as a video editor, a curator, a publisher and a theorist of such videos. She will also discuss the issues that arise with such work in educational contexts...

From the outset of modern urban planning’s development as an emerging international movement in the 1890s, a varied group of middle and upper class English-Canadians embraced planning: they formed connections with the international cohort, imported foreign ideas, and disseminated this knowledge across Canada. Yet, despite the importance of such transnational exchanges to Canada’s early planning mo...

The U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA or NAFTA II) was initialled by the leaders of the three countries at the G20 Summit in Buenos Aires on November 30, 2018. It must still be ratified by each country’s national legislature and this will not be an easy task, especially in the United States where the Democrats now control the House and will not want to allow Trump to claim any political victorie...