Podcasts about crassh

J.J. and Dr. Simon Goldhill try to nail down exactly what Midrash really is and try to place the classical Rabbis in their historical context.Simon Goldhill is a Professor in Greek Literature and Culture and Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at King's College. His latest book is Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity. Previously, Professor Goldhill was Director of CRASSH from 2011-2018. CRASSH is dedicated to interdisciplinary research, with 16 faculty research groups, Humanitas Visiting Professors, and longer term interdisciplinary research projects.

When did we forget how to talk to each other properly? And how to think difficult things through, together? Or has this always been controversial, fraught, and sometimes even deadly? The importance of honest, frank, respectful dialogue among citizens was a belief that Socrates lived and died for back in Ancient Greece. And for Dr Frisbee Sheffield – Associate Professor of Classics at Cambridge and Fellow of Downing College – it is a belief that needs to be re-examined and promoted today. Her recent fellowship at CRASSH saw her bring Socrates and Plato alongside 20th century philosopher Hannah Arendt to ask ‘what's so good about conversation?' At a moment when the University itself was debating freedom of speech, and social media appears an increasingly toxic space, how can we restore the benefits of thoughtful disagreement and face to face discussion? And what might change if we did? Learn More: - Frisbee's page on the Faculty website: https://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/directory/dr-frisbee-c-c-sheffield - Read more of Frisbee Sheffield's work on the ethics of conversation here: https://antigonejournal.com/2021/04/socrates-ethics-conversation/ - Listen to Frisbee Sheffield discussing Plato's dialogues and the death of Socrates with Melvyn Bragg on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0011rzy - Discover the work of Frisbee Sheffield's CRASSH colleague, Kübra Gümüşay, on conversation, language and freedom of speech in a contemporary context, which is mentioned in this episode: https://www.waterstones.com/book/speaking-and-being/kubra-gumusay/gesche-ipsen/9781788168496 Read more on the Hannah Arendt / Adolf Eichmann controversy here: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/wp-content/files_mf/1390334198d9Ezra.pdf And more on Arendt and Socrates here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23955554

In this episode we talk tech, power, and the endless hell of phone storage with sociologist Professor Gina Neff. As the Executive Director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at Cambridge, and the Professor of Technology and Society at Oxford, she briskly rejects the mythology of a ‘lone genius' in Silicon Valley coding every aspect of our daily lives. Instead, she champions those she calls the ‘unsung heroes' of innovation – essentially everyone struggling to make a “better, faster, new way of working” actually … work. Her academic research spans industries as diverse as fashion, construction, and healthcare, and she's equally at home online, winning a coveted Webby award for her beginner's guide ‘The A to Z of AI'. Her love of a good data story well told is anything but dry, and her pandemic project is still flourishing. But her main goal is to empower us all to answer two key questions: what kind of future do we want? And what choices must we make today to make that happen? Learn More: Follow Gina Neff on Twitter (for those daily flower photos and more!) https://twitter.com/ginasue Gina Neff is the Executive Director of The Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at CRASSH - all projects discussed in this episode can be found here: The Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy https://www.mctd.ac.uk/ Watch Gina Neff give the CRASSH annual lecture, on 'The Cost of Data - making sense in digital society' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P94q42MzKvI Her recently published book, Human-Centered Data Science, discussed in this episode can be found here: Human-Centered Data Science https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262543217/human-centered-data-science/ Gina Neff's 'A to Z of AI' project, discussed in this episode, and which won a Webby Award for Best Educational Website in 2021, can be found here: https://winners.webbyawards.com/2021/websites-and-mobile-sites/general-websites-and-mobile-sites/education/174204/the-az-of-ai Other examples of Gina Neff's work can be found here: On why AI must not make working women's lives worse AI must not make women's working lives worse - OECD.AI https://oecd.ai/en/wonk/ai-womens-working-lives A paper relating to her ongoing work on technology in commercial construction, 'Innovation through practice: the messy work of making technology useful for architecture, engineering and construction teams' https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8354369c-816b-4bc9-a74d-4f276fe4cc41 Her work on data, and on work: Who does the work of data? http://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/may-june-2020/who-does-the-work-of-data and Venture Labor https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262527422/venture-labor/

In this first episode of our second season of Thoughtlines we talk about how culture fights back with historian Professor Kenneth Marcus. As a visiting fellow at CRASSH he's been exploring what happens when music ‘goes there' and tackles the horror and heartbreak of war. The ongoing conflict in Ukraine and its musical resistance, rapidly going viral on social media, is effectively his project in real time. But his focus on the epic pacifist works of Arnold Schoenberg, Hanns Eisler, and Benjamin Britten reminds us that music was shaping the global human rights imagination well before now. Not only that, it's also a very effective way to wake up the classroom. Learn more: Many thanks to Larry Schoenberg for permission to use an excerpt from Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 42: http://www.schoenberg.at/index.php/en/joomla-license-sp-1943310036/a-survivor-from-warsaw-op-46-1947 The piano track featured after the introduction is "Waves", written and performed by Kenneth Marcus. Kenneth talks about his book, Schoenberg and Hollywood Modernism, in the Author Hub series at Cambridge University Press: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_u0-3dLsCw&ab_channel=CambridgeUniversityPress-Academic He performs his rap on World War I, titled The War: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_D_K6oWdyI&ab_channel=KennethMarcus One of the only live-performance videos of Hanns Eisler's Germany Symphony (Deutsche Sinfonie, Op. 50) is with the Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester Berlin and Rundfunkchor Berlin, conducted by Max Pommer (1987): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvB_XNCaJKo Examples of using the arts as resistance in the war in Ukraine: Ukraine's music is an effective weapon of resistance - https://theplanet.substack.com/p/ukraines-music-is-an-effective-weapon "I wanted to fight. The army told me to sing" - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-62137767 Ukrainian graduates dance in front of destroyed school in Kharkiv - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2YTdnJX960 Kyiv Chamber Orchestra, on using music for peace and resistance - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hieu5GSA2EM Kenneth Marcus, Cambridge playlist: Handel, Trumpet Concerto in D Major, HWV 335a (Crispin Steele-Perkins, trumpet, Cambridge Music Festival, St. Catherine's College, 1990) Dvorak, Cello Concerto in B Minor, Op. 104 (Steven Isserlis, cello, West Road Concert Hall, 1989) Gershwin, 'S Wonderful (performed at Forbes Mellon Library, Clare College, 1987) Gershwin, I Got Rhythm (performed at College Chapel, Clare College, 1987) Marcus, Long, Hungry World (composed at Thirkill Court, Clare College, 1987) Marcus, Talkin' Love (composed at 30 Hardwick Street, Newnham, 1991) Marcus, Waves (composed at Cambridge, 1991) Quincy Jones with Ice-T, Kool Moe Dee, Big Daddy Kane, and Melle Mel, Back on the Block (played as DJ for Cambridge University Radio, 1990) Strauss, The Blue Danube (Clare May Ball, 1990) Tosh, I Am That I Am (Clare May Ball, 1990) Javanese Gamelan (percussionist in Cambridge Gamelan Society, West Road Concert Hall and Hyde Park, London, 1990) William Byrd, Short Evening Service (King's College Evensong, 1989)

Alina Utrata sits down with John Naughton, a technology columnist at the Observer, senior research fellow in CRASSH and co-founder of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at Cambridge, and Josh Simmons, a postdoc in technology and democracy at Harvard University. They discuss Elon Musk's recent bid for Twitter, what it shows about the power of digital platforms and wealthy men, and how to think about the challenges of reigning in Big Tech.You can follow, John Naughton on Twitter @jjn1, Josh Simons @joshsimonlabour, Alina Utrata @alinautrata and the Anti-Dystopians podcast @AntiDystopians. Sign up for the Anti-Dystopians email newsletter at bit.ly/3kuGM5XAll episodes of the Anti-Dystopians are hosted and produced by Alina Utrata and are freely available to all listeners. To support the production to the show, visit: bit.ly/3AApPN4 For more articles, sign up for the Anti-Dystopians email newsletter at bit.ly/3kuGM5XNowhere Land by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-landLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest this month is Ananya Vajpeyi (read more about her and her main publications here). Her current academic home is the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi. As you will hear, I did not have a lot of work this time: Ananya only required minimal prompting to tell me the story of her life so far, which spans several countries in three continents and many fascinating encounters in and around academia. Ananya's many teachers include Arindam Chakrabarti, Madhu Khanna, Robert Young, Alexis Sanderson, Jim Benson, Matthew Kapstein, Patrick Olivelle, David Shulman,  Sheldon Pollock, Gayatri Spivak and Wendy Doniger. She has worked closely with Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Ashis Nandy and Rajeev Bhargava.She studied and did research at Lady Shri Ram College, the School of Languages at JNU, the University of Oxford, the University of Chicago, the University of Pune, Deccan College and the Bhandarkar Institute.Read more about Ferdinand de Saussure and his Course in General Linguistics, the volume resulting from the 'Ideology and Status of Sanskrit conference; about shudras, Shivaji, Ambedkar and Jim Laine; the Murty Library and the controversy around its editor; and about the fellowships at the Kluge Center and at CRASSH. 

Back at it again in podcast land, and this week we're invoking the Goddess Babalon with the wonderful Peter Grey and Alkistis Dimech, the co-conspirators behind the excellent occult publishing house Scarlet Imprint. This week we delve deep into the topic of Babalon with the pair, and examine: Who was Babalon, How did the Babalon working influence Pete and Alkistis' day to day life, What are Babalon's roots, and much much more.   Reclaiming his chair from the usurper Marck, Ulysses Black returns to co-hosting duties. Main theme by Simon Smerdon (Mothboy) Music bed by chriszabriskie.com Peter Grey Biography: Peter Grey is a writer, and the co-founder of Scarlet Imprint. He is the author of The Red Goddess (2007), which has inspired the resurgence of interest in Babalon, the goddess of Revelation. His Apocalyptic Witchcraft (2013) has been called the most important modern book on witchcraft, placing it in the mythopoetic context of the sabbat and in a landscape suffering climate and ecological collapse. His Lucifer: Princeps (2015), is a study of the origins of the figure of Lucifer; he is currently writing the second part, Lucifer: Praxis. His collected writings, from 2008–2018, are published in The Brazen Vessel (2019) with those of Alkistis Dimech. His most recent work is The Two Antichrists (2021), a return to the Babalon and Antichrist workings of Jack Parsons and his eclipsed sodality The Witchcraft. He has spoken at private public events and conferences worldwide to both practitioners and academics. These have included Occulture, the Occult Conferences in Glastonbury and London, Treadwell's Bookshop, the Esoteric Book Conference in Seattle, Flambeau Noir in Portland, the Psychology, Art and the Occult conference in London, Here to Go II in Norway, the Trans-States conference in Northampton University, the Magic and Ecology conference for CRASSH at Cambridge University and Pagan Federation events. He can be heard on podcasts including Runesoup, Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast, Right Where you are Sitting Now, Thelema Now, Spirit Box, Quarantine Sessions with Jake Kobrin, Against Everyone with Conner Habib, Grimerica, Witches and Wine, Thoth-Hermes, and Rendering Unconscious. Peter lives with his lover Alkistis in the far south west of Cornwall on the edge of the Lizard peninsula, where he surfs in the cold Atlantic, walks the ancient land and pursues his magical practice. Alkistis Dimech Biography: With Peter Grey, I am the co-founder of Scarlet Imprint. I am a writer and artist – working principally with dance and the body. My practice is grounded in butô (dark dance). My work explores the occulted dimensions of the body, its subtle anatomy and sexuality as an archaeology of the flesh – drawing from the esoteric and phenomenological traditions – and seeks to unfold a process and techne of bodily spiritual transformation. I have performed in the UK, Europe and the United States, solo and in collaboration with musicians and artists, notably Z'EV, Gast Bouschet & Nadine Hilbert, and Anji Cheung – and spoken on my practice, and given workshops, at conferences and events in the UK, Europe and the United States. Selected works from 2008 to 2018 are documented in The Brazen Vessel and at alkistisdimech.com. I am currently creating Antimony, a work of texts and images on the angelic, alchemical transfiguration of the body.

In this final episode of the CRASSH 20th anniversary year, we ask the centre's Director, and Grace 2 Professor of English at Cambridge, Steven Connor, whether what we do for a living can ever, or should ever, be anything other than drudgery? Thousands of column inches in the past year have been devoted to ‘The Great Resignation', or ‘The Big Quit' – a mass rebellion by millions of disgruntled employees worldwide who decided their current work just isn't working for them any longer.  Employment, then, is yet another thing to be re-worked by the COVID-19 pandemic, but less examined is why we even do it in the first place. Connor's latest research project, the culmination of a 40-year academic career, aims to unpack our deeply, and sometimes unconsciously, held beliefs about what we ‘do'. He himself is never less than fully and happily occupied, but also shares his thoughts on what could, and should, constitute ‘serious' academic work in the Humanities. And it starts by allowing ourselves to admit that, despite our very best efforts to conceal it, we are having an awful lot of fun. Find out more: The CRASSH website includes Q&As on Steven's two recent books; one with Imke van Heerden in June 2019 (https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/blog/the-madness-of-knowledge-5-questions-to-steven-connor/), on the strangeness of ‘the species that styles itself sapiens', as discussed in his book The Madness of Knowledge (http://www.reaktionbooks.co.uk/display.asp?ISB=9781789140729), and the other, with Judith Weik in October 2019 (https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/blog/giving-way-5-questions-to-steven-connor/) on the nastiness of the idea of agency and the associated ‘lexicon of the illimitable' in Giving Way: Thoughts on Unappreciated Dispositions (https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=31510).   He discusses his writing and especially his more recent work, in the podcast Critical Attitudes, a conversation with Nathan Waddell in March 2021: https://anchor.fm/criticalattitudes/episodes/8--Steven-Connor-e17be4r.   Thaumodynamics: Making a Living in Great Expectations, the Hilda Hulme Lecture given for the Institute of English Studies, London, in June 2021: http://stevenconnor.com/thaumodynamics.html Ceremonics (https://stevenconnor.com/ceremonics.html) is a brief prospectus for the sequence of books he has been writing since 2019 on social performativities. The sequence includes Giving Way: Thoughts on Unappreciated Dispositions (2019); A History of Asking (2022) and Seriously, Though (2022). Essays on crisis-behaviour, desperation styles, anger-management, wishing-rituals and faith-operations form part of this ongoing enquiry. http://stevenconnor.com/emergency.html http://stevenconnor.com/desperate-remedies.html http://stevenconnor.com/modernist-anger-management.html http://stevenconnor.com/best-wishes.html http://stevenconnor.com/religion-beyond-belief.html More of Steven Connor's essays, broadcasts and works-in-progress can be read, heard or watched on his website stevenconnor.com.

In this episode we answer a $100,000 question. Writer and journalist Trish Lorenz won the global essay competition, The Nine Dots Prize, by turning anxiety about the world's ageing population on its head and celebrating the game-changing power of Africa's ‘youthquake'. Part of the prize is the chance to spend a term at CRASSH, and turn that initial 3,000 word entry into a book published by Cambridge University Press. But Trish took the long way round from her home in Berlin – arriving in Cambridge via Lagos and Abuja where she found and interviewed the young Africans who best represent the energy, the ingenuity, and the infectious generosity that she wanted to highlight. The ‘Soro Soke' generation in Nigeria, and beyond, are outspoken, urban, tech savvy, globally connected, and unlike any demographic that has come before. So what happens when we start tuning in to what they have to say? Follow Trish Lorenz on Twitter here: @mstrishlorenz and on Instagram here: @mstrishlorenz Further examples of her journalism can be found here: https://www.clippings.me/users/trishlorenz When Trish misses Lagos, and the energy of the Soro Soke generation, she listens to this track by Wizkid (the most steamed Nigerian artist of all time): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7QiLceJSLQ Two albums that represent the sounds of contemporary Nigeria, both released in 2020, are WizKid's 'Made in Lagos' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OJ_5aS-PdM) and Burna Boy's 'Twice as Tall' (https://open.spotify.com/album/218CJKDCszsQQj7Amk7vIu). More information on The Nine Dots Prize, including the publication announcement for Trish's book on the Soro Soke generation in Africa, appearing in May 2022, can be found here: https://ninedotsprize.org A recent UNICEF study on what it feels like to be young in today's world can be found here: https://changingchildhood.unicef.org And Africa's 'youthquake' is discussed here: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/9781800241589?gC=5a105e8b&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI-v6zgof49AIVdIFQBh2_fwCdEAQYAyABEgKJB_D_BwE The story of how Jesus College, Cambridge, returned a Benin bronze to Nigeria, discussed in this episode, is here: https://www.jesus.cam.ac.uk/articles/jesus-college-returns-benin-bronze-world-first

In this episode we ask an expert on expertise what she knows for sure. Dr Anna Alexandrova is a Reader in the Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, and the principal investigator for the ‘Expertise Under Pressure' group at CRASSH. Her latest research is co-authored with people currently in severe financial hardship, and combines their insights and lived experiences with conventional academic approaches to articulate a more authentic, democratic understanding of what it means to truly ‘flourish' – work which could have significant impact on the government's current wellbeing agenda. At a moment when expertise, globally, is under extreme pressure how can we make space for different ways of knowing? Is it reasonable to expect cast-iron certainty from our public experts? And what did Dr Alexandrova learn as a teenager that has shaped her whole career? Follow Anna Alexandrova and the Expertise Under Pressure team on Twitter via @ExpertiseUnder Anna's writings can be found on her PhilPeople profile (https://philpeople.org/profiles/anna-alexandrova) and her webpage (https://sites.google.com/site/aaalexandrova/). Her 2017 book A Philosophy for the Science of Well-being is now available in paperback: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-philosophy-for-the-science-of-well-being-9780197598894 You can find out about her ongoing work on responsible science of wellbeing (https://twitter.com/BennettInst/status/1409434292430770176) by following the Bennett Institute for Public Policy @BennettInst. Some recent articles include “Wellbeing and Pluralism”(https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-020-00323-8), “Happiness Economics as Technocracy” (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioural-public-policy/article/abs/happiness-economics-as-technocracy/ED0C177E734BCAF9458CF4755775B603), “Mental Health Without Wellbeing” (https://philarchive.org/archive/WREMHWv1). And read more about national poverty charity Turn2Us and the co-production research work mentioned in this episode here: https://www.turn2us.org.uk/Working-With-Us/Co-production-and-involvement-at-Turn2Us

In this episode we talk inequality, life chances, and the daily struggle to balance household budgets with Dr Niamh Mulcahy, economic sociologist at CRASSH and Alice Tong Sze Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. The financial crash of 2008, followed by the UK government's decade of austerity, and the Covid-19 pandemic has left millions of people in Britain facing a very uncertain future and holding increasingly unmanageable levels of personal debt. What set us on such a precarious path? How can we return to what Dr Mulcahy terms "steadiness"? And how is her college addressing these challenges in its own backyard? Learn More: Niamh Mulcahy's book, 'Class and Inequality in the Time of Finance', discussed in this episode is available for pre-order: https://www.routledge.com/Class-and-Inequality-in-the-Time-of-Finance-Subject-to-Terms-and-Conditions/Mulcahy/p/book/9780367530990#

In this episode we join the dots on the global story of abolition with Dr Bronwen Everill, 1973 lecturer in History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Why was the Cambridge connection so central to those campaigning to end the slave trade in Britain? What did these abolitionists have in common with those in West Africa and in the United States? What was the product that both drove slavery and helped early ethical consumers do their bit for the abolitionist cause? And how do we acknowledge the different types of ‘labour' that make an academic life possible today? Learn more: Bronwen Everill's book 'Not Made By Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition' is available here and in all good bookshops: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674240988 Hear Bronwen Everill talking further about the Zong massacre on BBC Radio 4. BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Zong Massacre: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000pqbz Read Bronwen Everill's blog article about buying ethically, and its limitations "Shopping for Racial Justice" (https://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2020/06/shopping-for-racial-justice.html) and her research during her CRASSH fellowship here: - a journal article in History of Science (https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275320945117) on Freetown, Sierra Leone, as a ship-building and repair hub in the nineteenth century - and an African Economic History working paper on measuring the standard of living in nineteenth century Freetown (https://www.aehnetwork.org/working-papers/on-the-freetown-waterfront-household-income-and-informal-wage-labour-in-a-nineteenth-century-port-city/) The plaque to Anna Maria Vassa, discussed at the beginning of this episode, can be found at St Andrew's Church, Chesterton, Cambridge: https://www.standrews-chesterton.org/ St Andrew's Church, Chesterton's Wikipedia entry which discusses the plaqu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Andrew%27s_Church,_Chesterton

In this episode, presenter and broadcast journalist Catherine Galloway talks youth, ageing, research time, and timelessness with Professor Simon Goldhill, a former director of CRASSH, and Professor of Greek Literature and Culture at the Faculty of Classics. We also spend time considering the life-changing power of the moment. As chair of the Nine Dots Prize Board, Professor Goldhill makes the phone call to the winner of this lucrative and prestigious biennial international essay competition, telling the astonished recipient that their ‘out of the box' thinking has netted them $100,000, a publishing contract with Cambridge University Press, and the chance to come to CRASSH for a term to work on turning their essay answer into a book. The latest recipient was announced this month, and we've got the scoop on the idea that won. Thoughtlines is produced by Carl Homer at Cambridge TV. Learn more: - Find more on Professor Simon Goldhill here: https://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/directory/simon-goldhill - To discover the identity of the 2021 winner of the Nine Dots Prize mentioned in this episode click here: https://ninedotsprize.org/ - An open access copy of the first Nine Dots Prize book, Stand Out Of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance In The Attention Economy, by James Williams, is available here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/stand-out-of-our-light/3F8D7BA2C0FE3A7126A4D9B73A89415D - An open access copy of the second Nine Dots Prize book, Bread, Cement, Cactus: A Memoir of Belonging and Dislocation, by Annie Zaidi, is available here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/bread-cement-cactus/75DCB40487D5CD8DCB772761555CF10C Simon Goldhill is the Professor of Greek Literature and Culture at the Faculty of Classics and a Fellow of King's College Cambridge. Professor Simon Goldhill's forthcoming book on time, discussed in this episode, will be released in 2022 by Cambridge University Press, and is titled The Christian Invention of Time: Temporality and the Literature of Late Antiquity. Two of his recent books are A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion and the Bensons in Victorian Britain (The University of Chicago Press, 2016)https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/V/bo24550846.html

Can we imagine a living piece of trash? Can we remember that magic exists and flows through all things, including that trash, the sidewalk, the tires sunk in the bottom of the river? Maybe respect and honour are not just for the pretty things, the magical things like a candle, or a plant, or the multitude of stars. Sabrina Scott asks us to take all beings into account, allowing for their identities to remind us that the world is a breathing, heaving, mass of being - from our own bodies we hold so high, down to the vaccines and microbes which populate all things. Sabrina identifies as a witch. No no, not the tall black hat, broom and cat… (well, maybe a cat), but instead as someone who engages with the material and immaterial consciously and with care and consideration reaching for a broad understanding and engagement that recognizes the beingness of all objects and forms of life. We discuss their book “Witchbody”, magic in the anthropogenic space, gender essentialism in witchy cosmologies, and a bunch more. It was a lot of fun. Sabrina Scott's website Sabrina Scott's presentation at CRASSH

In this episode we talk wisdom, forgetting, and what we all have in common, with Dr Inanna Hamati-Ataya, the Founding Director of the Centre for Global Knowledge Studies at CRASSH. What do the things we share, across all human history, tell us about who we really are? What are we missing? Why does the way we farm our planet need a re-think? And what on earth does the humble potato have to do with it all? (This episode was recorded remotely, during Covid-19 lockdown restrictions) Dr Inanna Hamati-Ataya is Principal Research Associate and Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded project ARTEFACT (http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/programmes/artefact) as of March 2018, and founding director of the Centre for Global Knowledge Studies or gloknos (http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/programmes/centre-for-global-knowledge-studies-gloknos), since September 2017. Inanna answers questions about the project here: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/blog/post/global-epistemics-6-questions-to-inanna-hamati-ataya. She is the founding editor of the book series Global Epistemics (http://gloknos.ac.uk/media/book-series) at Rowman & Littlefield International.

I sat down with Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft to talk theology, finitude, and Schleiermacher. I ask about her journey into theology, the importance of reading Schleiermacher with his biography close at hand, and what she's learnt with sharing Schleiermacher beyond the halls of theology, before engaging with her work on finitude (in particular the freedom and unity found therein).Buy the book.Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft hails from Bury in Greater Manchester. She studied Theology and Religious Studies as an undergraduate here at Sidney Sussex, before moving to Corpus Christi College Cambridge for her doctoral research. In 2015, she took up a postdoctoral research fellowship at CRASSH, on the ERC-funded project ‘Bible and Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Culture’. In the 2016-2017 academic year, she was Director of Studies for Theology at Corpus Christi College. Ruth’s research sits at the intersection of theology, philosophy, literature, and intellectual history, and has focussed on late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century thought in particular. Her first monograph, The Veiled God, reappraises the early work of the German theologian and philosopher, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834). Her research interests include hermeneutics, religious language, gender and epistemology. Find more episodesFollow the Show: @RinseRepeatPod // Follow me: @liammiller87Love, Rinse, Repeat is part of the Uniting Mission and Education family. Check out their upcoming PreachFest 21, June 1st to 3rd, featuring a raft of amazing preachers and teachers. Sign up at ume.nswact.uca.org.au click upcoming events and then click Preachfest! https://ume.nswact.uca.org.au/calendar/preachfest-2021/

Welcome to Thoughtlines, a podcast celebrating the best of academic thinking outside the box, from CRASSH at the University of Cambridge.

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

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

Dr. Karen Pinkus is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She is currently a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall and involved with the CRASSH centre at Cambridge University. Her work focuses on climate change and explores different kinds of fuel from a critical humanities perspective. In this episode, she discusses how Covid-19 and climate change may - and may not - effect one another and she clarifies some of the confusion around their connection. For instance, why are social media memes and images of clear skies and happy dolphins misleading our thinking about environmental change? After reflecting on 30 years of professorship within change-resistant institutions of higher education, Karen Pinkus looks ahead at the next 30 years to come. She raises important questions about the challenges that the University system, and the Humanities particularly, will face due to the pandemic. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/quaranchats/message

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

Dr Jane Partner (Cambridge) Dr Irene Galandra Cooper (CRASSH, Cambridge) Abstracts Dr Jane Partner Reading the Early Modern Body: The Case Study of Textual Jewellery This paper presents part of the initial research for the book Reading the Early Modern Body, which seeks to bring together the many ways – both concrete and abstract – in which the body was presented and interpreted as a text during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One of the central concerns of this research is to examine the ways in which the body could be made into a material text through the actual bodily wearing of language, something that might be achieved through script tattoos, embroidered clothing, inscribed busks, girdle books and textual jewellery. My aim in bringing together these diverse practices is to place them within the broader context of the other less literal but even more widespread practices of interpreting the body that were also framed as acts of reading. Gestures, physiognomic features and transient expressions could all be treated as languages of the body, and interpreting them was a social skill that was particularly necessary in a courtly environment. My paper approaches some of these larger issues by taking the case study of textual jewellery, exploring the ways in which inscribed or letter-shaped jewels could act as markers of identity. The texts that they carry commonly commemorate gifts of love or patronage, advertise familial connections, or assert the piety of the wearer. Alongside examining some particular textual jewels and their depictions in contemporary portraiture, I will also consider literary references to this type of item – for example the motto that is ‘graven in diamonds’ around the neck of the deer in Thomas Wyatt’s poem ‘Whoso List to Hunt’. My discussion will suggest that the accomplishments of knowing how to present one’s own body so that is said the right things, and of how to accurately read the texts presented by other bodies, were crucial skills in the court environment, where corporeal reading operated within a complex, multi-layered network of symbolic reading and interpretation. Jane Partner is a Fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where she carries out research on a range of literary and art-historical topics, often concerning the intersection between the two fields. Her first book is Poetry and Vision in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2018). Arising from her current research for Reading the Early Modern Body, Jane is also planning another project about gems and jewellery in early modern literature. Both these enquiries relate to her own practice as a sculptor with a particular interest in the body and wearable art. Dr Irene Galandra Cooper Potent and Pious: Re-thinking Religious Materiality in Sixteenth-Century Kingdom of Naples Combing through the inventories of early modern Neapolitans, I have been repeatedly struck by the ubiquity of objects made in rock crystal, hyacinth stones, emeralds, as well as other precious and semi-precious stones. Shaped as beads and threaded as rosaries, or formed as pendants carved with Christian images, these objects were highly prized for their outward aesthetics, their iconographies, but also for their curative powers. In them, the distinction between 'religion', 'art', and 'science' is elided: were they treasured for their beauty, their Christian association, or their inner virtues? Combining archival and material sources, I will examine in what ways portable devotional objects were perceived to be so powerful to be able to cure someone's body and soul, and who, across the social spectrum, could afford to tap into their potency. I will also ask how could one recognise its ingenious nature and if particular senses were more useful than others to inform these experiences. Irene Galandra completed her doctorate as a member of the ERC-funded project Domestic Devotions: the Place of Piety in the Italian Renaissance Home, 1400-1600 at the University of Cambridge, where she explored the materiality of devotion in sixteenth-century Naples. Irene was also one of the curators of the successful exhibition Madonnas and Miracles: the Holy Home in Renaissance Italy, held at the Fitzwilliam Museum between March and June 2017. Irene is now Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, where she teaches Italian Renaissance art and material culture at the Department of Modern and Medieval Languages, History of Art and the Faculty of History. She is currently also a researcher at CRASSH's Genius Before Romanticism project. Previous to her PhD, Irene worked for the Wallace Collection, Christie’s, the National Gallery in London, and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. She has published on practices relating to small devotional jewellery such as rosaries and agnus dei.

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.

Professor Neil Kenny (University of Oxford) Edwin Rose ( University of Cambridge) Abstracts Professor Neil Kenny The mineral-hunters: Martine de Bertereau and her husband Jean du Chastelet One kind of object dominated not just the life of Martine de Bertereau (1590–1643), but also her family’s past and so to an extent her social identity: minerals. Little wonder, then, that she married a fellow mineralogist, Jean du Chastelet. They spent their years and their resources prospecting throughout Europe, on a vast scale, before dying in Richelieu’s dungeons. What economic, social, epistemic, and also cultural and narrative frames did their object of choice impose upon them? And what does their singular pursuit of minerals tell us about the relation between knowledge, family, gender, and social hierarchy in early seventeenth-century France? Neil Kenny is Professor of French at the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. His publications include The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany (2004) and an earlier book on the word history of the ‘curiosity’ family of terms. His last monograph was Death and Tenses: Posthumous Presence in Early Modern France (2015). He is currently completing a book called Literary Families and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern France. The example he is discussing today grows out of that project, but is not included in it. Edwin Rose Collecting natural history in late eighteenth-century Britain The late eighteenth century witnessed a distinct rise in natural history collecting, both on a commercial and a scholarly level, alongside a growth in travel by naturalists, the main object of which was for them to acquire natural history specimens for their collections and record their observations of the natural world. One of the most prolific naturalist-travellers was Thomas Pennant (1726–98), whose collection remains intact and is primarily held by the Natural History Museum, London. In this paper, I give a general overview of Pennant’s collecting activities, examining his working practices in the field along with how he synthesised the information and objects he collected to compile his seminal work, British Zoology. This lavishly illustrated publication reached multiple editions from 1766 to 1812. Pennant’s collection was compiled from taxidermy, primarily birds and quadrupeds, from around the globe; shells, fossils, minerals, a small herbarium of dried plants, and a library which amounted to over 10,000 volumes, all of which he kept at his home at Downing Hall, Flintshire, North Wales. Pennant’s natural history collection was rigorously organised according to a variety of different systems of classification, such as that devised by John Ray (1627–1705) and that developed by Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) from the 1730s. The understanding of the connections between this large collection of physical objects, Pennant’s travels and his publications gives a direct insight into how these physical objects were used to create natural knowledge during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Edwin Rose is currently a PhD candidate in the department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. His interests are primarily concerned with the history of natural history, collecting and bibliography from the mid seventeenth to the mid nineteenth centuries, although the main concentration of his current research rests in the period between 1750 and 1830. Edwin has published widely on the history of natural history, in particular on the collections of Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753) and the British Museum, and his most recent article entitled ‘Specimens, slips and systems: Daniel Solander and the classification of nature at the world’s first public museum 1753–1768’ was published in the British Journal for the History of Science in April, 2018. As well as his PhD research, Edwin has two forthcoming publications, one for a special issue in Notes and Records of the Royal Society entitled ‘From the South Seas to Soho Square: The Library of Joseph Banks and the Practice of natural history’ and another which he has co-authored with Anna Marie Roos (University of Lincoln) entitled ‘Lives and Afterlives of the Lithophylacii Britannici ichnographia (1699), the First Illustrated Field Guide to English Fossils’, to be published in Nuncius in January 2019.

Our 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 16 May 2018, Reni Eddo-Lodge will be in conversation with Heidi Safia Mirza. The event is free and open to the public. No registration required. The conversation will be chaired by Shakira Martin (President, National Union of Students). The event has been added to Facebook, if you'd like to invite friends. ‘I am not racist but...’ : An uncomfortable conversation with Reni Eddo-Lodge and Heidi Safia Mirza Never has there been a time when ‘Race’ and racism is so openly talked about and yet its roots so hidden and hard to tackle. The Windrush scandal becomes an administrative botch; Grenfell becomes a privatisation ‘disaster’. Decolonising the curriculum becomes an attack on freedom of speech; the xenophobia that drives Brexit is packaged as rational economic sovereignty. In this post-race, post equality moment defined by colour-blind sentiment (‘we are all the same’) and empty antiracist declarations (‘I am not a racist but’), Reni Eddo-lodge was moved to write her bestselling book – Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race. Fed up of having to explain her mere existence to soothe the conscience of those who want to feel better about the privileged positions they hold, Reni will continue this difficult conversation with the black feminist scholar Heidi Safia Mirza. Together they ask, How does racism and white privilege manifest itself now? Why has the equality legislation and the diversity industry failed? What is the language of ‘antiracism’ and have we moved from ‘institutional racism’ to ‘unconscious bias'? What clarity does a black feminist intersectional approach bring, and how can we decolonise minds and institutions? 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 Heidi Safia Mirza Heidi Safia Mirza is Emeritus Professor in Equalities Studies, UCL Institute of Education and visiting Professor of Race, Faith and Culture at Goldsmith’s College, University of London. She is known for her pioneering intersectional research on race, gender and identity in education and has an international reputation for championing equality and human rights for women, black and Muslim young people through educational reform. She is author of several best-selling books including, Black British Feminism and Young Female and Black, which was voted in the BERA top 40 most influential educational studies in Britain. Her forthcoming coedited book is Dismantling Race in Higher Education: Racism, whiteness and decolonising the academy (Palgrave McMillian 2018).

Professor Regina Lee Blaszczyk (University of Leeds) Professor Regina Lee Blaszczyk The Secret Life of a Colour Card Who decides the colours of the seasons, and why? This presentation explores the hidden history of colour prediction for the creative industries by exploring how a shade card is designed. It pulls back the curtain on the inner workings of the transatlantic fashion system through a case study of the world's pioneering colour forecasting organization, its leading lady Margaret Hayden Rorke, and her Paris colour scouts. The colour forecasting methods that Mrs. Rorke set up in 1920s New York are still used today.

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.

Mervyn Millar (Independent Artist/Puppetry Director & Designer) Perception and Performing Things How is it possible that we can feel empathy for a thing? Since the beginning of civilisation, humans have been compelled and transfixed by performing objects and puppets. From our earliest play, to some of our most sophisticated entertainments, performing things draw on sculpture, movement, texture and context to stimulate emotional responses in an audience. Please "bring a thing" - any object from 1400-2000 that is big enough to hold in two hands and light enough to hold in one hand and is not too fragile to be handled enthusiastically. Theatre director and puppeteer Mervyn Millar was Artist in Residence at QMUL University in London in 2017, exploring the neurology and psychology of our responses to animated objects. His work in theatre has included War Horse, Circus 1903 and work at several leading theatre and opera companies in the UK and Europe. www.significantobject.com

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.

Cecilia Bembibre (University College London) Mark Jenner (University of York)

Caroline van Eck (University of Cambridge) Emily Fitzell (Independent Artist, University of Cambridge)

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.

Panel 2: Security Chair: Professor John Naughton (CRASSH, Cambridge) Dr Chris Doran (Director of Research Collaborations, ARM) Professor Jon Crowcroft (Computer Lab, Cambridge) In 2016 Philip Howard, now Professor of Internet Studies at Oxford and a leading scholar on the impact of the Internet on politics, published Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up in which he tried to assess what the long-term implications of this hyper-connected network might be. Among these possible implications, he noted, are: * The IoT is likely to bring a special kind of stability to global politics (analogous to the uneasy stand-off of the Cold War) * The new world order would be characterised by a pact between big tech firms and governments * Governments may have a decreasing capacity to govern the IoT while corporate (and also bad) actors will become more powerful in the hyper-connected world that the technology will create * The IoT will generate remarkable opportunities for society but the security and privacy risks that it could create will also pose formidable problems for society * The IoT looks like an unstoppable juggernaut, so we should learn from our experience with earlier incarnations of the Internet to try and ensure that history does not repeat itself Pax Technica is an ambitious and far-reaching book, and like all such volumes, it raises almost as many questions — about international and national politics, governance, security and privacy — as it answers. The Technology and Democracy project at CRASSH seeks to use the book as a jumping-off point for exploring some of these questions. We will do this in a major one-day public event in Cambridge on 24 November 2017, featuring Professor Howard and invited experts from a number of relevant disciplines. The event will open with a keynote address, after which three panels of invited experts will discuss specific implications of a hyper-connected world. This talk is part of the Technology and Democracy Events 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.

Ruth Armstrong hosted the second seminar in the ‘Subversive Good’ CRASSH series on Tuesday 27 October. Speakers: Dr Caroline Lanskey (Criminology), Ms Bethany Schmidt (Criminology) and Rev Paul Tyler (Chaplain of HMP Frankland) Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann, Jerusalem wrote that ‘the essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of individuals, and thus to dehumanize them’. In this panel, the speakers will discuss how social spaces and institutions, such as prisons and schools, emerge as political bureaucracies with the potential for dehumanizing and disenfranchising key stakeholders, leading to ‘civic death’. Are there alternatives to such bureaucratized approaches that lead to civic and participatory engagement that humanises the political subject? For more information on the whole series please visit: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/programmes/the-subversive-good This entry provides an audio source for iTunes U.

This was an event in the ‘Subversive Good’ CRASSH series held on Tuesday 1 March 2016. Speakers: - Dr Michelle Ellefson (Psychology and Education) - Dr Tatiana Thieme (Human Geography) - Dr Ben Crewe (Criminology) This seminar will consider how we create ‘spaces’ of physical, social and cognitive transformation. What are the contexts where transformations might be embedded? How might physical, social and cogntive spaces related to each other? Tatiana Thieme (Human Geography) will consider the role of human spaces, especially urban ones where there is a high level of poverty. Michelle Ellefson (Education, Cognitive Psychology) will consider the role of specific aspects of cognition, especially those where the environment impacts their cognitive and neuro-cognitive development. Ben Crewe (Criminology) will consider the role of the physical, psychological and social with reference to his research on how people cope with the impacts of long-term imprisonment. For more information on the whole series please visit: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/programmes/the-subversive-good This entry provides an audio source for iTunes U.

Legal Harms & the New Politics of Resistance: Examining the Juridification of Social (in)justice, Legitimacy, Violence and Extremism Extremism and surveillance are top of the global political agenda. How do state responses to harm shape contemporary culture, and relate to interpersonal violence and resistance? To help us ponder these questions, in a series of four presentations, Eva Nanopoulos (Law) and Loraine Gelsthorpe (Criminology), problematise the ways in which the legal system can both cause and prevent 'harm'. Ryan Williams (Divinity) draws on his analysis of prisoner heirarchies in high security prisons in England to discuss how faith is used as a route to resistance, and Amy Nivette (Sociology) reflects on the relationship between state legitimacy and interpersonal violence. - Dr Eva Nanopoulos (Law): 'The Prevent Strategy' - Dr Ryan Williams (Divinity): 'Islamic Piety and the Subversive Good in Maximum Security Prisons' - Professor Loraine Gelsthorpe (Criminology): 'Imprisonment of Women' - Dr Amy Nivette (Criminology): 'Legal Harms, Delegitimization, and Violence' The presentations are followed by a group discussion with the speakers. Part of The Subversive Good Disrupting Power, Transcending Inequalities Research Group Seminar Series at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. For more information see: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/programmes/the-subversive-good

Alison Liebling (Criminology): 'Towards a person centred social science' Judith Gardom (Education/Criminology): ''The subversive good' - person-centred social science and the politics of recognition' Riffing off a video of Joelle Taylor’s ‘The last poet standing’, this session will explore what (often) unarticulated assumptions do social scientists make about personhood in how they design and explore their research questions? Drawing on her work on Trust, Risk and Faith in High Security prisons, Alison Liebling (Criminology) will lead us in conversation about how visions of human nature shape our theories of individual identity and potential, social action and institutions. Judith Gardom (Education/Criminology) will draw on her work about forms of recognition and its importance in educational settings. She will consider when the personal becomes political, and how this might influence methodology. For more information on the whole series please visit: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/programmes/the-subversive-good This entry provides an audio source for iTunes U.

Amy Ludlow and Ruth Armstrong hosted the second seminar in the ‘Subversive Good’ CRASSH series on Tuesday 27 October. Speakers: Jacob Dunne (undergraduate criminologist, Nottingham Trent University), Ruth Armstrong (Criminology) and Amy Ludlow (Law). Paolo Friere said: ‘Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.’ Contributors will engage with the constraints, realities and potential of education as the practice of freedom. Jacob Dunne (undergraduate criminologist Nottingham Trent) will draw on his own experiences and struggles in gaining access to higher education after serving a prison sentence and Ruth Armstrong (Criminology) and Amy Ludlow (Law) will draw on their experiences of teaching masters level criminology to a class of prisoners and Cambridge post-grads. For more information on the whole series please visit: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/programmes/the-subversive-good This entry provides an audio source for iTunes U.

This was the third seminar in the ‘Subversive Good’ CRASSH series on Tuesday 10 November 2015. Speakers: Baz Dreisinger (Prison to College Pipeline, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY), Karen Graham (Educational Sociology) and Ingrid Obsuth (Criminology) How are security discourses shaping schools as spaces of learning and education as the ‘practice of freedom’? What are the impacts of securitisation upon social justice and inclusion? What if our prisons became hotbeds of learning and connection? Our dialogue will be led by Baz Dreisinger (founder and Academic Director of John Jay’s groundbreaking Prison-to-College Pipeline programme in New York), Ingrid Obsuth, (an expert in the socio-emotional, cognitive and biological aspects of the development and progression of delinquent and aggressive behaviour in young people) and Karen Graham (whose research focusses on the correspondence between experiences in school and in prison). For more information on the whole series please visit: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/programmes/the-subversive-good This entry provides an audio source for iTunes U.