CRASSH

Participants: Tali Hatuka (Tel Aviv University), Zizi Papacharissi (University of Illinois-Chicago), Doina Petrescu (University of Sheffield / atelier d’architecture autogerée), Laura Lo Presti (University of Padua) Moderators: Alex Grigor, Michal Huss, Konstantinos Pittas Description: This panel deals with the ways that radical alterations in scale, time, and place, prompted by the digital age and by technological advancement require new methodologies for mapping, studying, and interpreting the commons. Taking into consideration people on the move due to conflict, migration, gentrification, and homelessness on the one hand, cyberspaces, virtual places, and digital communications on the other, what are the new points of entry into and membership of the commons? If we agree that the commons is essential to a healthy polity and functioning democracy, what issues does the privatisation of the digital commons raise? How might we renegotiate power dynamics around the production, distribution, and representation of knowledge, information and data? If common spaces are always contested, as is the notion of a coherent or unified 'collective', what is the role of protest and demonstration both in the physical and digital spheres? The final section of this panel included audiences participation. This was not recorded due to GDPR guidelines. Thank you for your understanding. VIRTUAL CONFERENCE PROGRAMME: Commoning the City Friday 12 June 2020, 14.00 – 15.45 (BST) Participants: Ash Amin (University of Cambridge), Massimo De Angelis (University of East London), Shannon Mattern (The New School), Richard Sennett (Chair, Council on Urban Initiatives, United Nations Habitat) Whose Commons, for Whom? Friday 12 June 2020, 17.00 – 18.45 (BST) Participants: Tali Hatuka (Tel Aviv University), Zizi Papacharissi (University of Illinois-Chicago), Doina Petrescu (University of Sheffield / atelier d’architecture autogerée), Laura Lo Presti (University of Padua) Reclaiming the Cultural Commons Saturday 13 June 2020, 13.00 -14.45 (BST) Participants: Sepake Angiama (Institute for International Visual Arts-London), Gavin Grindon (University of Essex), Ella McPherson (University of Cambridge), Pelin Tan (Bard College) All recordings are available on: https://www.youtube.com/user/crasshpublicity

Participants: Sepake Angiama (Institute for International Visual Arts-London), Gavin Grindon (University of Essex), Ella McPherson (University of Cambridge), Pelin Tan (Bard College) Moderators: Alex Grigor, Michal Huss, Konstantinos Pittas Description: This panel looks at contestations around cultural commons and strategies to re-claim and re-mobilise them. In addition, the unfolding global health crisis urges to think about its repercussions to the basic rights of access to culture, to the diversity of cultural content and expression online, and to the precarious-now more than ever-art and cultural labour. With cultural institutions closing down, major artistic and cultural events postponed, and community cultural practices suspended on the one hand, and with the acceleration in the digitisation of cultural content and the surge in online access to this content on the other, what are the potentialities and stakes of this new reality in light of the coronavirus pandemic? How can widespread protests against toxic philanthropy, institutional racism, art washing, and gender discrimination help us to envision museums taking the side of the commons? How can culture and aesthetics serve as innovative terrains for encounters and exchanges, solidarity and sharing, synergies and community building? The final section of this panel included audiences participation. This was not recorded due to GDPR guidelines. Thank you for your understanding. VIRTUAL CONFERENCE PROGRAMME: Commoning the City Friday 12 June 2020, 14.00 – 15.45 (BST) Participants: Ash Amin (University of Cambridge), Massimo De Angelis (University of East London), Shannon Mattern (The New School), Richard Sennett (Chair, Council on Urban Initiatives, United Nations Habitat) Whose Commons, for Whom? Friday 12 June 2020, 17.00 – 18.45 (BST) Participants: Tali Hatuka (Tel Aviv University), Zizi Papacharissi (University of Illinois-Chicago), Doina Petrescu (University of Sheffield / atelier d’architecture autogerée), Laura Lo Presti (University of Padua) Reclaiming the Cultural Commons Saturday 13 June 2020, 13.00 -14.45 (BST) Participants: Sepake Angiama (Institute for International Visual Arts-London), Gavin Grindon (University of Essex), Ella McPherson (University of Cambridge), Pelin Tan (Bard College) All recordings are available on: https://www.youtube.com/user/crasshpublicity

Participants: Ash Amin (University of Cambridge), Massimo De Angelis (University of East London), Shannon Mattern (The New School), Richard Sennett (Chair, Council on Urban Initiatives, United Nations Habitat) Moderators: Alex Grigor, Michal Huss, Konstantinos Pittas Description: This panel explores the current potentials of and constraints for the production of the city (understood as a social, historical, and multi-sensual construct) as a common space. How can we prevent a pandemic from becoming another excuse for neoliberal austerity, new enclosures, repression, and mass securitisation at the city level? How can physical spaces become ‘common’, against the backdrop of the privatisation impetus of global capitalism and the proliferation of virtual spaces? As information and communication technologies influence the city’s networks and the processes of immaterial labour, what new capacities to be ‘in common’ emerge and what new forms of solidarity and mutual care networks can be prefigured? How can emerging urban social movements practise the commons in translocal spaces? The final section of this panel included audiences participation. This was not recorded due to GDPR guidelines. Thank you for your understanding. VIRTUAL CONFERENCE PROGRAMME: Commoning the City Friday 12 June 2020, 14.00 – 15.45 (BST) Participants: Ash Amin (University of Cambridge), Massimo De Angelis (University of East London), Shannon Mattern (The New School), Richard Sennett (Chair, Council on Urban Initiatives, United Nations Habitat) Whose Commons, for Whom? Friday 12 June 2020, 17.00 – 18.45 (BST) Participants: Tali Hatuka (Tel Aviv University), Zizi Papacharissi (University of Illinois-Chicago), Doina Petrescu (University of Sheffield / atelier d’architecture autogerée), Laura Lo Presti (University of Padua) Reclaiming the Cultural Commons Saturday 13 June 2020, 13.00 -14.45 (BST) Participants: Sepake Angiama (Institute for International Visual Arts-London), Gavin Grindon (University of Essex), Ella McPherson (University of Cambridge), Pelin Tan (Bard College) All recordings are available on: https://www.youtube.com/user/crasshpublicity

This talk considers how specifically language-based AI systems (for example, speech recognition, machine translation or smart telecommunications interfaces) have affected and transformed modern society. In an age when we spend large parts of our daily lives communicating with our smartphones and Virtual Personal Assistants such as Siri, Cortana, and Alexa, we need to consider how these technologies actually impact our lives. While these intelligent systems can certainly have a positive impact on society (e.g. by promoting free speech and political engagement), they also offer opportunities for distortion and deception. Unbalanced data sets used to train automated systems can reinforce problematical social biases; automated Twitter bots can drastically increase the spread of fake news and hate speech online; and the responses of automated Virtual Personal Assistants during conversations about sensitive topics (e.g. suicidal tendencies, religion, sexual identity) can have serious consequences. We will explore some of these issues as well as discuss opportunities to implement these systems and technologies in ways that may affect more positively the kinds of social change that will shape modern digital democracies in the immediate future. A talk by Dr Stephanie Ullmann and Dr Marcus Tomalin from the 'Giving Voice to Digital Democracies' project at CRASSH.

7 June 2019 The Quentin Skinner Fellow for 2018-19, Dr Emma Hunter, will give the annual lecture and participate in the related symposium. Online registration is now available. Please click here to book your place or use the online registration link on this page. The standard fee is £20, and £10 for students/unwaged. This includes lunch and refreshments. Once approached primarily as part of the history of the West, liberalism has recently begun to receive attention from a global perspective. Yet the history of liberalism in twentieth-century Africa remains little studied. This is perhaps not surprising. Powerful historiographical frameworks have marginalised the history of liberal thought in Africa. In both the scholarly and popular imagination, colonial rule in the first half of the twentieth century in Africa is understood as defined by a conservative reaction against what had come to be seen as the failed liberal projects of the nineteenth century. If in the 1940s and 1950s, liberal thought seemed briefly to take centre stage, the years after independence again seemed to bear witness to its renewed marginalization. However, a great deal of the reworking of core political concepts which characterized the political thought of twentieth-century Africa took place in dialogue with global ideas which owed much to thinkers situated in a liberal tradition. At the same time, studying political thinking in Africa both in the present and in the past reveals the importance of strands of thinking about freedom which were on the margins of or outside these traditions. These strands of thought are often hidden from view. Sometimes this is because written sources do not exist or the languages in which they are written or the archives in which they are conserved make them hard for historians to access. Sometimes they are hidden from view by the categories through which historians work. These issues, and the methodological challenges involved in addressing them, will be the focus of the Quentin Skinner Colloquium of 2019. The Colloquium will provide an opportunity to explore the history of liberalism, broadly defined, in twentieth-century and twenty-first-century Africa, as well as to contribute to a wider methodological discussion, prompted by the emergence of the new field of global intellectual history, on how to move the study of the history of political thought beyond Western contexts.

Susan Stryker (University of Arizona) 'Transgeneration: Or, Becoming-With My Monstrous Kin' In this keynote address, Susan Stryker tells the story, from her perspective, of how the essay 'My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix' entered the world and what that monstrous assemblage has been doing since it found its way into print. In doing so, she charts a trajectory across queer theory in the 1990s, the emergence of transgender studies as an increasingly legible field, the shift in cultural studies toward questions of ontology and technicity, and new articulations of transness and blackness within contemporary social theory. http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/28386 lgbtQ+@cam was launched by the School of Humanities and Social Sciences in 2018 to promote research, outreach and network building related to queer, trans and sexuality studies at the University of Cambridge. Working closely with allied initiatives in other Faculties and Centres, the lgbtQ+@cam programme combines small focussed workshops and seminar series with larger conferences and events to both enhance existing teaching and research in lgbtQ+ studies at Cambridge, and build stronger links to queer research and study programmes nationally and internationally. The goal of lgbtQ+@cam is to increase participation in this transformative field, and to transform higher education as a result. https://www.lgbtq.sociology.cam.ac.uk/About

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

CRASSH is delighted to invite you to the book launch for Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy by James Williams, winner of the inaugural Nine Dots Prize. This event is free and open to the public, and a drinks reception will follow the event. Author: James Williams (University of Oxford) Discussants: Maria Farrell (Writer and Technology Consultant) John Naughton (The Observer's Technology Correspondent) WINNER OF THE INAUGURAL $100,000 NINE DOTS PRIZE Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy Published by Cambridge University Press on 31 May 2018 Paperback or Open Access Former Google advertising executive, now Oxford-trained philosopher James Williams launches a plea to society and to the tech industry to help ensure that the technology we all carry with us every day does not distract us from pursuing our true goals in life. As information becomes ever more plentiful, the resource that is becoming more scarce is our attention. In this 'attention economy', we need to recognise the fundamental impacts of our new information environment on our lives in order to take back control. Drawing on insights ranging from Diogenes to contemporary tech leaders, Williams's thoughtful and impassioned analysis is sure to provoke discussion and debate. Williams is the inaugural winner of the Nine Dots Prize, a new Prize for creative thinking that tackles contemporary social issues.

Our CRASSH Impact speaker this Easter Term will be Reni Eddo-Lodge, whose Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race recently won the 2018 Jhalak Prize for the best book by a British BAME writer. On 15 May 2018, Reni Eddo-Lodge will be in conversation with Priyamvada Gopal. The event is free and open to the public. No registration required. The conversation will be chaired by Lola Olufemi (Women's Officer, Cambridge University Students' Union). The event has been added to Facebook, if you'd like to invite friends. For details of Reni Eddo-Lodge's conversation with Heidi Safia Mirza, please click here. About Reni Eddo-Lodge Reni Eddo-Lodge is a London-based, award-winning journalist. She has written for the New York Times, the Voice, Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Independent, Stylist, Inside Housing, the Pool, Dazed and Confused, and the New Humanist. She is the winner of a Women of the World Bold Moves Award, an MHP 30 to Watch Award and was chosen as one of the Top 30 Young People in Digital Media by the Guardian in 2014. She has also been listed in Elle's 100 Inspirational Women list, and The Root's 30 Black Viral Voices Under 30. She contributed to The Good Immigrant. Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race is her first book. It won the 2018 Jhalak Prize, was chosen as Foyles Non-Fiction Book of the Year and Blackwell's Non-Fiction Book of the Year, was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and the Orwell Prize and shortlisted for the British Book Awards Non-Fiction Narrative Book of the Year and the Books Are My Bag Readers Award for Non-Fiction. About Priyamvada Gopal Priyamvada Gopal is a Reader in Anglophone and Related Literatures at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Churchill College. She is the author of Literary Radicalism in India (Routledge 2005) and The Indian Novel in English: Nation, History and Narration (Oxford 2009). She has written for The Guardian, The Nation, Al-Jazeera, Open: the Magazine and The Hindu among others. She has also participated in programmes with the BBC, NDTV-India, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio and al-Jazeera. Her forthcoming book, Insurgent Empire is due out with Verso in Spring 2019.

The lecture explores how complaint can be understood as a form of diversity work, as the work you have to do in order to make institutions more open and accommodating to others. The lecture draws on written and oral testimonies provided by those who have made complaints about racism, sexism, sexual harassment and bullying within universities. The lecture addresses the difficulty of making complaints and asks how and why complaints are blocked. The lecture shows how we learn about the institutional (as usual) from those who are trying to transform institutions. Sara Ahmed is an independent feminist scholar and writer. She has held academic appointments at Lancaster University and Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. She has recently completed a book What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use and has begun a new research project on complaint. Her previous publications include Living a Feminist Life (2017), Willful Subjects (2014), On Being Included (2012), The Promise of Happiness (2010), Queer Phenomenology (2006), The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014, 2004), Strange Encounters (2000) and Differences that Matter (1998). She also blogs at www.feministkilljoys.com.

CRASSH Impact Lecture Series, Lent Term Speaker: Sara Ahmed Use is a small word with a lot of work to do, a small word with a big history. As Rita Felski describes in her introduction to a special issue of New Literary History on use, 'the very word is stubby, plain, workmanlike, its monosyllabic bluntness as bare and unadorned as the thing that it names' (2013, 5). This lecture explores different uses of use across a range of intellectual traditions including biology, design and psychology as well as education. It considers the role of utilitarianism in the forming of the modern university (with specific reference to London University, now UCL). One of the aims of the lecture will be to put ordinary use back into the archives of utilitarianism, showing how use in an 'inside job', how use shapes and moulds the university. Drawing on an empirical study of diversity work, first presented in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012), the lecture explores how and why diversity is 'in use' as a way of demonstrating how universities are occupied, how they are shaped by patterns of use that often remain unnoticed until they are contested. Sara Ahmed is an independent feminist scholar and writer. She has held academic appointments at Lancaster University and Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. She has recently completed a book What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use and has begun a new research project on complaint. Her previous publications include Living a Feminist Life (2017), Willful Subjects (2014), On Being Included (2012), The Promise of Happiness (2010), Queer Phenomenology (2006), The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014, 2004), Strange Encounters (2000) and Differences that Matter (1998). She also blogs at www.feministkilljoys.com.

Public Lecture Jon Agar and Jacob Ward (University College London) 'Communications, control and cybernetics in post-war British systems: rail, post and telecoms' Discussant: Matthew Gandy (University of Cambridge) Convenors Andrew McKenzie-McHarg (University of Cambridge) Poornima Paidipaty (University of Cambridge) Egle Rindzeviciute (Kingston University) Summary As more and more of our collective activities (education, pension planning, health management, environmental protection) are mediated by rapidly moving markets and computerized technologies, uncertainties abound. Such visions of a technologically mediated — and seemingly limitless — future are not new. They echo the technological futurism popularized in the middle of the twentieth century by cybernetics. Beginning with the 1948 publication of Norbert Wiener’s book, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, cybernetics inaugurated path-breaking scientific explorations of feedback and self-regulation in biological and mechanical systems. It initiated an ambitious set of technoscientific discussions that provocatively transcended traditional disciplinary boundaries. Cyberneticians argued that patterns of feedback and self-regulation were key to understanding the operation of anti-aircraft guns, the erratic movements of victims of brain injury, the dynamics of group psychology, the relationship of human societies to their natural environment and much more. These insights furnished profound reassessments of notions of agency, of distinctions between the human and the non-human and of models of learning and memory. The scholarship on cybernetics has, however, only recently began to trace the legacies of this movement beyond the Cold War era. By providing insights into the enduring impact of mid-century techno-science on our contemporary information landscape, 'The Afterlives of Cybernetics' conference will contribute to a more thorough history of the present by helping us understand the antagonisms and synergies that animate the multiple offshoots of cybernetic thought, including operations research, AI, rational choice theory, predictive analysis, design thinking, behavioural economics and risk management. This in turn will lay the foundations for a better understanding of how these knowledge practices allow us to project, imagine and engage with uncertain and unbounded futures.

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.

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.

This talk explores what factors - religious, economic, political - make some and not others believe in conspiracy theories. Hugo Drochon considers what impact that has had on contemporary political events, from Brexit to Trump. Was Diana killed by the Secret Services? Is climate change a hoax? Did man not walk on the moon? Who shot JFK? Drawing on a nation-wide survey conducted with YouGov about belief in conspiracy theories, this talk explores what factors -religious, economic, political – make some and not others believe in conspiracy theories, and what impact that has had on contemporary political events, from Brexit toTrump. Hugo Drochon is a researcher with the 'Conspiracy and Democracy' research project at CRASSH.

We’re bombarded by information about our health. But who should be trusted? Physicians? Scientists? Patients? Pharma? Instinct? Come along for a range of researcher perspectives and to offer your own. The safety and effectiveness of medical interventions is highly contested, even when it is backed by clinical research. Who should we trust? The truth of the scientists loyal to evidence-based medicine paradigms, or that of patients with their lived experience? Should we trust big pharma? Or perhaps no one at all? In this panel discussion, we will address these questions, which are, quite literally, of life-and-death significance. The panel will include five speakers, all from the University of Cambridge: Anna Alexandrova, Gabriele Badano, Stephen John, Trenholme Junghans, and Jacob Stegenga. Speakers will first give a short talk each, looking from different angles at the plurality of actors who claim their perspective should take centre stage in clinical research. Next, they will have a short conversation among themselves before opening the floor to questions from the audience. Organised by the 'Limits of the Numerical' research project at CRASSH.

CRASSH Impact Lecture Series, Michaelmas Term Speakers: Michael Puett (Harvard University) and Julia Lovell (Birkbeck) Michael Puett is the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology, as well as the Chair of the Committee on the Study of Religion, at Harvard University. His interests are focused on the inter-relations between philosophy, anthropology, history, and religion, with the hope of bringing the study of China into larger historical and comparative frameworks. His books include To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China and The Path: A New Way to Think About Everything (co-authored with Christine Gross-Lo). Julia Lovell is a Reader in Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research has so far focused principally on the relationship between culture (specifically, literature, architecture, historiography and sport) and modern Chinese nation-building. Her books include The Great Wall: China Against the World 1000 BC - AD 2000 and The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (winner of the 2012 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature). This event is part of the CRASSH Impact Lecture Series.

CRASSH Impact Lecture Series, Michaelmas Term Speaker: Professor Michael Puett (Harvard University) We seem to have a relatively clear (if somewhat uncomfortable) narrative concerning the rise and (potential) decline of neoliberalism. But, if we take into account the perspective of China, such a narrative may have to be re-thought. This talk will place some of the current political debates in China within a larger historical context and argue that these debates may force us to re-think some of our assumptions concerning the workings of the state and the economy and accordingly to re-think some of our readings of recent history. My hope is that the talk will help to contribute to developing a more global understanding of political theory. Michael Puett is the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology, as well as the Chair of the Committee on the Study of Religion, at Harvard University. His interests are focused on the inter-relations between philosophy, anthropology, history, and religion, with the hope of bringing the study of China into larger historical and comparative frameworks. His books include To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China and The Path: A New Way to Think About Everything (co-authored with Christine Gross-Lo). This lecture is part of the CRASSH Impact Lecture Series.

The lecture by Jon Agar and Jacob Ward (University College London) will be open to all free of charge. Further information, including an abstract, is available here. Convenors Andrew McKenzie-McHarg (University of Cambridge) Poornima Paidipaty (University of Cambridge) Egle Rindzeviciute (Kingston University) Summary As more and more of our collective activities (education, pension planning, health management, environmental protection) are mediated by rapidly moving markets and computerized technologies, uncertainties abound. Such visions of a technologically mediated — and seemingly limitless — future are not new. They echo the technological futurism popularized in the middle of the twentieth century by cybernetics. Beginning with the 1948 publication of Norbert Wiener’s book, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, cybernetics inaugurated path-breaking scientific explorations of feedback and self-regulation in biological and mechanical systems. It initiated an ambitious set of technoscientific discussions that provocatively transcended traditional disciplinary boundaries. Cyberneticians argued that patterns of feedback and self-regulation were key to understanding the operation of anti-aircraft guns, the erratic movements of victims of brain injury, the dynamics of group psychology, the relationship of human societies to their natural environment and much more. These insights furnished profound reassessments of notions of agency, of distinctions between the human and the non-human and of models of learning and memory. The scholarship on cybernetics has, however, only recently began to trace the legacies of this movement beyond the Cold War era. By providing insights into the enduring impact of mid-century techno-science on our contemporary information landscape, 'The Afterlives of Cybernetics' conference will contribute to a more thorough history of the present by helping us understand the antagonisms and synergies that animate the multiple offshoots of cybernetic thought, including operations research, AI, rational choice theory, predictive analysis, design thinking, behavioural economics and risk management. This in turn will lay the foundations for a better understanding of how these knowledge practices allow us to project, imagine and engage with uncertain and unbounded futures.

Keynote lecture by Professor Paolo Quattrone (University of Edinburgh) 'Who said accounting was boring? Rhetoric and the making of socie-ties’ -- Convenors Clément Feger (University of Cambridge) Bhaskar Vira (University of Cambridge) Laurent Mermet (AgroParisTech) Summary After the recent development of accounting for biodiversity and ecosystems at the business level and at the national level, a third construction site in accounting research is necessary at the scale of inter-organizational ecosystem management. This calls for a constructive dialogue between conservationists who design and use new information systems on ecosystems in multiple contexts but face challenges in obtaining the political and social changes they expect, and critical accounting researchers who can provide deep knowledge on the connections between information, accounts exchange, accountabilities, values and all forms of collective organized action. The workshop will build on the presence of a strong community of conservation research and practice in Cambridge (notably based at the University of Cambridge's Conservation Research Institute and the Cambridge Conservation Initiative), and will provide them for the first time with a space to engage with critical and social and environmental accounting researchers. We hope that this new interdisciplinary bridge will set off theoretical elaborations, as well as concrete working relationships and future experimentations of accounting for the management of ecosystems innovations that can ultimately lead to better achievement of ecological and social results. The new path of research that this workshop will discuss will provide a critical, theoretical and practical alternative to the already well-established collaborations of conservation research with the field of economics. The conference will combine intensive closed workshop sessions with two public events on the topic.

Convenors Clément Feger (University of Cambridge) Bhaskar Vira (University of Cambridge) Laurent Mermet (AgroParisTech) Summary After the recent development of accounting for biodiversity and ecosystems at the business level and at the national level, a third construction site in accounting research is necessary at the scale of inter-organizational ecosystem management. This calls for a constructive dialogue between conservationists who design and use new information systems on ecosystems in multiple contexts but face challenges in obtaining the political and social changes they expect, and critical accounting researchers who can provide deep knowledge on the connections between information, accounts exchange, accountabilities, values and all forms of collective organized action. The workshop will build on the presence of a strong community of conservation research and practice in Cambridge (notably based at the University of Cambridge's Conservation Research Institute and the Cambridge Conservation Initiative), and will provide them for the first time with a space to engage with critical and social and environmental accounting researchers. We hope that this new interdisciplinary bridge will set off theoretical elaborations, as well as concrete working relationships and future experimentations of accounting for the management of ecosystems innovations that can ultimately lead to better achievement of ecological and social results. The new path of research that this workshop will discuss will provide a critical, theoretical and practical alternative to the already well-established collaborations of conservation research with the field of economics. The conference will combine intensive closed workshop sessions with two public events on the topic.

Keynote Lecture Chair: Jonathan Linebaugh (University of Cambridge) Frederick Beiser (Syracuse University) 'The Politics of Strauss’ Biblical Criticism' Respondent: Ian Cooper (University of Kent)

Session One - Roundtable Discussion Chair: Ruth Jackson and Hanna Weibye (University of Cambridge) Panellists: Andrew Bowie (Royal Holloway, University of London) Maureen Junker-Kenny (Trinity College Dublin) Gareth Stedman-Jones (Queen Mary, University of London) Joachim Whaley (University of Cambridge)

Putting Dirt in Its Place: The Contemporary Politics of Waste Conference Keynote Lecture : Zsuzsa Gille (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) - 'Overflows, Agencement, and Inequalities of the Circular Economy' Convenor Patrick O'Hare (University of Cambridge) Summary This conference explores the socio-material interfaces where waste meets politics in the present. It brings together a group of established and emergent waste scholars from across the social sciences to discuss the contemporary dynamics of waste and waste labour in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. Five themed panels - on infrastructure, labour, circulation, elimination and reconceptualization– provide a structure through which waste will be explored in all its complexity. Drawing largely on ethnographic research, presenters will debate how legal, regulatory, cultural, bio-political and economic factors influence what is configured and classified as waste. Can we speak of ‘waste regimes’? What role do religion, class and race play in determining the division of waste labour? Are formalization and privatization of waste management leading to the dignification or dispossession of waste workers? Can ethnographic and sociological explorations of the materialities of waste politics challenge normative understandings and definitions of waste, commodity and value? Are ideas like 'zero waste' and the 'circular economy' green modernist fables or realizable policies, and how do they reconfigure existing patterns of accumulation and inequality?

A Black Feminist conversation: Black life, law, love and survival in times of Trump and Brexit Feminist professors of colour Patricia J. Williams (Columbia University) and Heidi Safia Mirza (Goldsmiths, University of London) will debate Black life, law, love and survival in times of Trump and Brexit. The discussion will be chaired by Sarah Franklin (University of Cambridge). Patricia Williams is perhaps America’s most distinguished writer on law, race and gender. She is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University and writes a regular column for The Nation. Her books include The Alchemy of Race and Rights, The Rooster’s Egg and Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race.

Speaker: Patricia J. Williams (Columbia University) Patricia Williams will remark on tensions between discourses of universalised longing for human identity, human rights, unbounded, globalised connection – and the traumatised and traumatising language of dislocation and dis-identification with ever more fragmented categories of 'other'.

In Conversation: Paul Gilroy and Patricia Williams Patricia J. Williams (Columbia University) will join Paul Gilroy (King’s College London) in conversation at the launch of the CRASSH Impact series, Law, Race, Gender and Public Policy. The discussion will be chaired by former President of the Cambridge University Students' Union, Priscilla Mensah.

Dr Sophie Smith (University of Oxford) is the Quentin Skinner Fellow 2016-17. She will be giving the annual Quentin Skinner lecture and participating in the symposium. What are we trying to understand when we study politics - and to what end? These are often thought of as relatively new questions in the long history of political thought. On the conventional view, though the ancients certainly wrote about politics, self-conscious reflection on politics as 'science' or 'philosophy' properly speaking was a nineteenth century invention. Furthermore, the story goes, it was only in the nineteenth century that we see the relationship between political science and practical politics, not least the politics of empire, first emerge. While the empirical and positivistic emphases of British, American and European political scientists in the nineteenth century were indeed new, the idea that there might be a 'science of politics', fit to be taught in universities, with its own methods, sources and ends, was not. Neither was the thought that, in the words of one early modern author, ‘the philosophical principles of politics’ were a necessary part of the statesman’s arsenal. In both antiquity and early modernity authors engaged with questions about what it means to study politics. Indeed, some of the topics we consider central to distinctively modern meta-discussions about the nature of, for example, 'political theory’ were in fact present in some of the very earliest discussions about the nature of what early modern authors called scientia civilis. These include debates about the sources of political normativity, about utopianism and its limits, and about possible tensions between theory and practice. This symposium will reflect on this history and its significance for thinking about how we study politics today.

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

How does literary reference affect the interpretation of largely abstract works? In her recent book, Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (Princeton University Press, 2016), Mary Jacobus focuses on the artist’s use of poetry in his work, which often includes handwritten words and phrases—-naming or quoting poets ranging from Sappho, Homer, and Virgil to Mallarmé, Rilke, and Cavafy. In the artist’s own words, he “never really separated painting and literature.” Mary Jacobus's opening presentation will be followed by a wide-ranging discussion with Peter de Bolla (English) and Alyce Mahon (Art History) spanning both Twombly's work (currently the focus of a Pompidou retrospective) and that of his friend Robert Rauschenberg (currently the focus of a Tate Modern retrospective). Mary Jacobus, Professor Emerita of English at the University of Cambridge, was Director of CRASSH from 2006-2011. She has written widely on Romanticism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and visual art. Alyce Mahon is a Reader in Modern and Contemporary Art History at the Department of History of Art. She is currently researching the American Surrealist Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) and curating the first major retrospective exhibition of Tanning for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid for 2018-2019. Peter de Bolla is Professor of Cultural History and Aesthetics and Direct of the Concept Lab at CRASSH.

Keynote Anthony Vidler (Cooper Union / Yale University) How to Do Things with Diagrams Convenors: Lukas Engelmann (University of Cambridge) Caroline Humphrey (University of Cambridge) Christos Lynteris (University of Cambridge) Summary Diagrams inhabit a liminal space between representation and prescription, words and images, ideas and things. From key moments of scientific and intellectual innovation (Darwin’s tree-diagram, Levi-Strauss’s diagram of the raw and the cooked, Lacan’s L-scheme, Waddington’s epigenetic landscape image and Francis Crick’s DNA double helix sketch) to everyday uses in all spheres of social, political, economic and cultural life, the diagram seeks resemblance to the empirical yet aspires to generalization. Conversely, employed across the disciplines as a thinking tool, the diagram hence holds the promise of transforming abstract issues into graspable images and translating the unseen into intelligible and actionable form. Both convincing and misleading and always positioned at the threshold of vision and the unseen, diagrams operate as abstractive and constitutive components of empirical realities. This conference aims to explore the interdisciplinary, shared traits of diagrammatic thinking so as to go beyond the notion of simplification, of “drawing information together”, which forms the usual analytical ground for understanding syntactic visualizations in the sciences and humanities. Rather than seeing diagrams as systems of linkages, the aim of the conference is to explore the dialectic of inscription and erasure as an inherent and generative trait of diagrammatic practices. Questions to be raised in the conference revolve around the following themes: How does the visual and logical indeterminacy of diagrams, their resistance to being fully perceived as images or understood as logical arguments, define their operation as ways of reasoning? And to what extent does diagrammatic reasoning extend beyond the realm of diagrams as visual/textual objects? By bringing together ethnographic, historical and philosophical perspectives on the diagram, in its applications across the disciplines, this conference aims to explore its role at the pivot of modern transformations and aporias between abstraction and form.

11 July 2016 - Keynote address as part of the 2016's Race to Save the World conference. Madeleine Albright (Former U.S. Secretary of State) Vin Weber (Republican Party strategist and former Congressman) Chair : Steven Schrage (University of Cambridge)

Professor Khaled El-Rouayheb, Leverhulme Visiting Fellow at CRASSH for 2015-2016, delivers the second of his Leverhulme lectures. This lecture will trace the emergence of a novel ideal of “deep reading” among Ottoman scholars of the seventeenth century. Medieval Arabic-Islamic educational manuals tended to focus on student-teacher relations and the acquisition of knowledge through listening. In the seventeenth century, Ottoman scholars articulate a new ideal of the acquisition of knowledge through “deep reading”. This development would seem to be related both to the increasing importance of the rational and instrumental sciences, and to the Ottoman examination system of the seventeenth century.

Professor Khaled El-Rouayheb, Leverhulme Visiting Fellow at CRASSH for 2015-2016, delivers the first of his Leverhulme lectures. The second lecture, The Rise of "Deep Reading" in Ottoman Scholarly Culture, will take place on Wednesday 4 May. The science of ādāb al-baḥth or munāẓarah emerged relatively late in Islamic history. Its roots lay in the earlier science of eristic (jadal or khilāf) that had developed among early Islamic theologians and jurists (with some influence from Aristotelian topics and late-antique rhetoric). In this lecture, I will argue that there was an explosion of interest in the science in the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century. I will discuss the wider intellectual context of this development, as well as some of its consequences for the Ottoman tradition of logic.

The seventh Balzan-Skinner lecture and symposium with Balzan-Skinner Fellow Dr Teresa Bejan. As the core premise of modern moral and political philosophy, equality often demands more allegiance than investigation. The question of its historical emergence as a social and political ideal is generally set aside in favor of identifying the causal and constitutive harms of various kinds of inequality – political, social, or economic. This talk will explore ideas of equality as a political principle, a religious commitment, and a social practice in seventeenth-century England. These fascinating but forgotten visions of “equality before egalitarianism” shed light on the development of a central concept in modern political thought while providing some analytical clarity and historical insight sorely missing in contemporary debates.

James English (University of Pennsylvania): Revisiting the "Great Divide”: The Past, the Future, and the Contemporary Novel Conference Details Summary This interdisciplinary symposium seeks to expand and enrich our understanding of contemporary literary production. Moving beyond the traditional triumvirate of author, reader and text, we situate today’s fiction within a wider field, encompassing literary agents, editors, book reviewers, writing teachers, prize judges, festival organizers, and more. ‘Books in the Making’ brings some of the key players in the book trade into dialogue with academics from a range of disciplines, including literary and cultural studies, sociology, and the digital humanities. By creating new conversations between these too-often separate spheres, we consider the various ways in which books are made today. The symposium also explores the extent to which the book as a medium is now being ‘remade’ by new formats and technologies. By investigating these processes of making and remaking, we address a question that has not yet been posed systematically: that of the consequences for contemporary writing of ongoing changes in its production and dissemination. On Thursday 14th April the symposium will open at 6pm with a public event in Lady Mitchell Hall, organised in conjunction with the Cambridge Literary Festival, featuring the best-selling American crime writer Lee Child in conversation with Andy Martin. On Friday 15th the symposium will feature a plenary address from James English (University of Pennsylvania), author of The Economy of Prestige (2005), along with sessions bringing academics into conversation with publishing professionals to discuss three key aspects of the ‘making’ of contemporary literature: CREATION: This session expands the concept of literary ‘creation’ to include not just the act of writing, but related activities including the teaching of writing, the role and influence of literary agents, and the shaping of literary categories such as ‘the bestseller’. PUBLICATION: In this session, academics and members of the book trade consider the impact of current publication processes on contemporary writing. The conversation will involve both corporate and independent presses; print publishers and those whose business models are based upon new technologies. RECEPTION: This session reconsiders traditional questions of reading, evaluation and interpretation by connecting them to social and institutional contexts including literary festivals, book reviewing and journalism, and literary prizes.

Tim Boon (Science Museum): Reflections on Creating a Research Culture Julien Clement (Musée du Quai Branly, Paris): Research in question at the musée du Quai Branly The Museum as Method: Collections, Research, Universities Summary If for many years collections seemed peripheral to innovative work in the arts and social sciences, there is a new sense that university museums can be research bases of a powerful and distinctive kind. New approaches to material and visual culture, artefact studies and the intertwined histories of collections, exploration and the histories of science and the humanities promise to reconstitute the museum as a laboratory and the collection as a research technology. Increasingly, major cross-disciplinary projects have used collections as lenses upon larger issues ranging over art, culture, history and environment. Yet collections and the issues of method and analysis that they raise remain relatively under-theorised. Over the same period, changing funding environments and new perceptions among policymakers of the importance of research, innovation, and the cultural sector raise the issues of what university museums contribute to higher education, and of the place and value of research in public and national museums. This conference, formally supported by the University of Cambridge Museums and Botanic Garden (UCM) brings together scholars from disciplines interested in material culture and curators from across the arts and sciences, to reflect on both questions of methodology and public policy.

Viola König (Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin) Respondent - Hedley Swain (Arts Council of England) The Museum as Method: Collections, Research, Universities Summary If for many years collections seemed peripheral to innovative work in the arts and social sciences, there is a new sense that university museums can be research bases of a powerful and distinctive kind. New approaches to material and visual culture, artefact studies and the intertwined histories of collections, exploration and the histories of science and the humanities promise to reconstitute the museum as a laboratory and the collection as a research technology. Increasingly, major cross-disciplinary projects have used collections as lenses upon larger issues ranging over art, culture, history and environment. Yet collections and the issues of method and analysis that they raise remain relatively under-theorised. Over the same period, changing funding environments and new perceptions among policymakers of the importance of research, innovation, and the cultural sector raise the issues of what university museums contribute to higher education, and of the place and value of research in public and national museums. This conference, formally supported by the University of Cambridge Museums and Botanic Garden (UCM) brings together scholars from disciplines interested in material culture and curators from across the arts and sciences, to reflect on both questions of methodology and public policy.

Chair: Dr Alexander Marr A public conversation between Professor Ann Jefferson (University of Oxford and currently a Fellow of the Paris Institute for Advanced Studies) and Professor Darrin McMahon (Dartmouth College) about the history of genius and organised as part of the Genius before Romanticism: Ingenuity in Early Modern Art and Science research project.

Professor Jerome McGann (University of Virginia) will give a public lecture as part of the CRASSH Mellon CDI Visitng Fellowship programme. Abstract As my title suggests, Hans-George Gadamer's dialectic of enlightenment is my point of reference. I mean to recover and revise Gadamer's thought by shifting it from a philosophical to a philological perspective. From the living example of certain individuals, I propose a model of humanist enquiry that seems to me worth preserving and emulating, particularly now when educational policy is reinvesting so heavily in a technical expertise offered by the STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics)

The sixth Balzan Skinner Lecture with Balzan Skinner Fellow 2014-15 Dr Anna Becker. While ‘gender’ is a well-established subject in many historical disciplines, such as cultural history, social history and global history, the same cannot be said for the history of political thought. Especially once we turn to the sort of early modern political thought that can be seen as republican in a broad sense, women seem to disappear. They are simply not political: they are not citizens, they cannot participate in the sphere of the city or the commonwealth. In my lecture I shall develop a methodological approach to the question of how to write gender in and into the history of political thought in a historically sound and firmly contextual way that avoids anachronisms and show – as Joan Scott has suggested – that gender is indeed a ‘useful category’ in the history of political thought.