Backdoor Broadcasting Company

Event Date: 17 June 2013
Windsor Auditorium
Windsor Building
Royal Holloway University of London
Egham, Surrey
TW20 0EX

Royal Holloway University of London in association with the Magna Carta Trust presents:

The 2013 Magna Carta Lecture

Dr. Bertrand Ramcharan (Former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights) – The UN Quest for the Protection of Human Rights

Dr. Bertrand Ramcharan was the acting United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights for fourteen months at the level of United Nations Under-Secretary-General. He is an acknowledged international expert and leader on the international law and practice of human rights. Over three decades, he served in human rights, peacemaking, political and policy-planning roles in the United Nations. He was responsible for the largest peacekeeping operation in the history of the United Nations in Yugoslavia.
A Barrister of Lincoln’s Inn, with a Doctorate in international law from the London School of Economics and Political Science, he has been a Commissioner of the International Commission of Jurists and also a Member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration.
He has taught as Adjunct Professor of International Human Rights Law at Columbia University and has written or edited some twenty books and numerous articles. He is the holder of the prestigious Diploma in International Law of the Hague Academy of International Law, where he has also been Director of Studies.

Introduction by Professor Paul Layzell (Principal, RHUL).

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Event Date: 17 June 2013

Main Lecture Theatre

Founder’s Building

Royal Holloway University of London

Egham, Surrey

TW20 0EX

The School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Royal Holloway, University of London presents:

Professor Griselda Pollock (Director, Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory & History (CentreCATH) and Professor of Social & Critical Histories of Art, University of Leeds) – The Nameless Artist in the Theatre of Memory: Interdisciplinary and Ethical Challenges in the Analysis of One Work— Charlotte Salomon’s “Leben? oder Theater?” ["Life? or Theatre?"] (1941-43)

The lecture will be about Charlotte Salomon, an artist murdered at the age of 26 in Auschwitz who deposited a single work comprising 769 paintings and supplementary or rejected works totalling 1325 items with a local doctor before going into ultimately discovered hiding in the South of France.  Salomon is increasingly becoming the object of interdisciplinary studies in autobiography and life-narratives, and this lecture will explore the various frames of analysis with which Professor Pollock has experimented in seeking a way to write about this unique work and the issues it has posed. Working across image, music and text at the intersection of political history and individual trauma, Salomon’s project defies the categories established by the various disciplines and genres it touches to provoke both methodological perplexity and innovation.

Introduction by Dr Hannah Thompson (RHUL).

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We were unsure about the copyright issues surrounding photographs of the paintings, so here are the results of a Google image  search on Charlotte Salomon’s ‘ Leben oder Theater’ (click on text)

Event Dates: 17 – 21 June 2013
Various Venues
Birkbeck Main Building
Birkbeck, University of London
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HX

The Birkbeck School of Law presents:

Law on Trial 2013: Legal Utopias: The Future of Law and Legal Education

Against a background of profound changes in higher education policy, and in the year in which the Legal Education and Training Review (LETR) will report its findings to its sponsoring regulators in May 2013, the School of Law at Birkbeck places legal education on trial in this week of free lectures and workshops.

With roundtable discussions featuring distinguished legal academics, novelists, journalists and political activists, who explore the influence of legal education and legal educators on the wider cultural and social landscape, this is a trial not to be missed!

Take part as we debate the future of the School of Law, positioned in a climate where both publicly funded and privately sourced legal education providers battle with high fees and an ever expanding competitive market. Have your say over access to legal education as our panels explore whether legal academics should confront challenges of widening participation by developing a culture of pro bono – offering legal education freely outside their universities/colleges.

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Monday 17 June 2013

The Utopian Law School and the Fate of the University

Chair: Professor Adam Gearey (Birkbeck)

Is there an alternative to debt and privatised education? Does a law school do any more than produce skilled operatives to grease the wheels of capital? This first panel of 2013’s Law on Trial intends to ask some critical questions about the perilous state of British Universities and the possibility of imagining alternatives. To what extent can a Law School address the wider community and its legal needs? Is a university simply a business turning a profit from its human capital? How can thinking about law be made part of an education in politics or ‘critical’ humanities? Equally important is the history of thinking differently about education- from the Anti-University of London, to the student protests of the 1960s and the Occupied spaces of present day. If the task of the utopian or critical law school is more than its own survival – how can these traditions of hope and dissent make any sense to us now?

Speakers for this session include:

Dr. Maia Pal, Department of International Relations, University of Sussex

Professor Jane Holder, Faculty of Laws, UCL

Professor Thomas Docherty, Professor of English and of Comparative Literature, University of Warwick

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Dr Maia Pal’s images:

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Event Date: 13 June 2013 

Royal Asiatic Society

Stephenson Way 
London NW1 2HD

The Royal Asiatic Society presents:

Dr Norbert Peabody (Cambridge) - On the Origins of Indian Nationalism

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Event Date: 8 May 2013
Attlee Suite,
Portcullis House,
House of Commons,
London SW1A 2LW

The Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, Birkbeck, University of London and the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, University of Oxford in partnership with the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism present:

Symposium on Integration, Disadvantage and Extremism

The Symposium will reflect on the government’s integration strategy and to do so in the light of both contemporary developments and recent scholarship. It will bring the most current evidence-based research to bear on urgent issues of policy for an invited audience of academic experts, policy makers and parliamentarians.

PROGRAMME

Welcome and Introduction by Professor David Feldman (Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism, Birkbeck, University of London) and  John Mann MP (Chair, All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism)

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Session 1: Integration and Disadvantage Today

Introduction: Andrew Stunell OBE MP – Integration and Disadvantage Today

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Dr Rob Berkeley (Runnymede Trust) – If Integration is the Answer, What Was the Question?

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Professor Anthony Heath (University of Oxford) – Muslim Integration and Disadvantage

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Dr Ben Rogaly (University of Sussex) and Becky Taylor (Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, Birkbeck, University of London) – The Struggle Against Disadvantage: Challenging the Ethnicization of Class

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Session 2: Integration and Extremism

Introduction and Chair: Baroness Sayeda Warsi – Integration and Extremism

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Vidhya Ramalingam (Institute for Strategic Dialogue) - Far-Right Extremism in Britain: What Drives and Sustains Commitment?

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Dr Nasar Meer (Northumbria University) – Thinking Through Muslim Integration & Extremism

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Dave Rich (Community Security Trust) – Antisemitism and Extremism

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Session 3:  Is Localism Sufficient?

Introduction and Chair: Gavin Barwell MP – Is Localism Sufficient?

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Professor Maleiha Malik (Kings College London) – The Role of the Law

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Dr Ben Gidley (COMPAS, University of Oxford) – Is Localism Enough?

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David Feldman (Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, Birkbeck, University of London) – Concluding Remarks

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Event Date: 12 June 2013
Room 532, Main Building
Birkbeck, University of London
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HX

The Birkbeck Institute for Social Research presents:

The Persistence of Segregation in the 21st Century American Metropolis

Speaker: Professor John Logan (Brown)

Segregation is increasingly central to British and European discussions about ethnicity, integration and place. What can we learn from America, which has a longer history of immigration and residential segregation? Professor John Logan, one of America’s foremost experts on historical and contemporary patterns of American segregation, references a current American debate in which some claim we are at the “end” of a century of segregation. Professor Logan explains why he believes this is erroneous. He also places this debate in the context of the experience of European immigrant groups in American cities a century earlier. Professor Logan contrasts these European immigrants’ eventual spatial assimilation with contemporary America, where relatively strong and enduring ethnic boundaries divide the major ethno-racial groups.

John Logan is Professor of Sociology at Brown University. He is Principal Investigator for US2010, a project supported by the Russell Sage Foundation to analyze trends in American society that are revealed by the most recent data sources, including Census 2010 (www.facebook.com/pages/US-2010-Census-Project/174107215941839). He has also undertaken studies of neighborhood change and individual mobility in U.S. cities in the period 1880-1920, and today. Before coming to Brown he was Director of the Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research. Professor Logan is co-author, along with Harvey Molotch, of Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (University of California, 2007).

Introduction by Professor Eric Kaufman (Birkbeck).

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Event Date: 12 June 2013
Geffrye Museum
Kingsland Road,
London,  E2 8EA

The Geffrye Museum in partnership with the Raphael Samuel History Centre present:

Queer Homes

Explore the meanings and practicalities of home-making for lesbians and gay men past and present at this fascinating roundtable discussion.

• Brent Pilkey‘s (University College London) research takes a queer approach to architectural history by looking at the domestic spaces of ordinary Londoners.
• Alison Oram (Leeds Metropolitan University) explores how knowledge of same-sex love in the past is disseminated at historic houses, often seen as the most conservative type of heritage site.
• Amy Murphy’s (Glasgow University) research concerns lesbian identity in post-war Britain, with particular focus on the way it relates to interior, domestic worlds.
• Matt Cook (Birkbeck College) has investigated how gay men’s lives relate to domestic space across the twentieth century.

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Event Date: 11 June 2013

Room B33

Birkbeck Main Building

Birkbeck, University of London

Malet St

London WC1E 7HX

Department of Media and Cultural Studies presents:

 Itinerancy, Dislocation, Nomadic Subjects: Vagabond (Agnes Varda,1985)

In this series we will watch three films in which the main protagonist is an itinerant or a wanderer.  Whilst there is a great deal of journeying in cinema, this series distinguishes itself from the main stream genre of the road movie -whose forward propulsion mimics or can be seen as a metaphor for both the film itself rushing through the projector,and for narrative itself as linear journey rushing toward resolution and/or death. In the classical Hollywood journey/odyssey genre film the protagonist is often theactive (often male) agent who mobilises the (often) linear trajectory of the films’ structure.

In this series we are interested in films that wander, meander, loop and weave -films that explore aimlessness, waiting, ‘dead time’, margins and associative oblique trajectories, films whose movement follows a different pattern, structure and logic creating a disorganised mobility that allows us to ask the question: can the cinematic produce nomadic subjectivitiesand what can that mean politically,  psychically, formally, affectively, aesthetically?

Screening two:  Agnes Varda’s 1985 film Vagabond, with a roundtable discussion.

Panel: Professor James Williams (Royal Holloway) Dr Libby Saxton (Queen Mary College) Chair: Dr Amber Jacobs (Birkbeck)

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Event Date: 23 May 2013

Room B01
Clore Management Centre
Birkbeck, University of London
Torrington Square
London WC1E 7HX

The London International Development Centre (LIDC) presents:

The 2013 LIDC Bi-Annual Conference

‘Five years of interdisciplinary research in development – looking back and looking forward’
In May 2013 LIDC will organise its first Bi-Annual Conference bringing together LIDC membership: staff, students and alumni from Bloomsbury Colleges. The conference, held every two years, will offer its members a platform to showcase successful interdisciplinary research projects in development, engage with one another and the Centre, and generate new interdisciplinary project ideas.

PROGRAMME

Welcome and introduction

•    Introduction: Prof. Jeff Waage (Director, LIDC)

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•    Welcome: Prof. Chris Husbands (Director, IOE; Chair, The Bloomsbury Colleges)

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•    International development research at Birkbeck: Dr. Karen Wells (Associate Dean, Department of Geography, Environment and Development Studies, Birkbeck)

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Keynote address

•    Prof. Sir John Beddington (UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser 2008-2013)

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Session 1: LIDC’s interdisciplinary initiatives – progress so far

This session offers an overview of interdisciplinary initiatives across Bloomsbury Colleges on the examples of three projects supported by LIDC in the past few years. Project leaders will talk about how the collaboration came about, what it achieved, and how an interdisciplinary approach added value.

•    Agri-Health: Prof. Bhavani Shankar (SOAS) and Dr. Alan Dangour (LSHTM)

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•    One Health: Prof. Richard Kock (RVC) and Dr. Jo Lines (LSHTM)

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•    Students as Global Citizens: Dr. Nicole Blum (IOE) and  Nick Short (RVC)

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Award Ceremony for the LIDC Fellowship Scheme

This year LIDC launched the first LIDC Fellowship Scheme, offering seed grants to fund innovative interdisciplinary research projects across Bloomsbury Colleges. In this session the first LIDC Fellows will receive their awards.
Chair: Prof. Jonathan Elliott (RVC,  Chair, Bloomsbury Research Committee)

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Session 2: New interdisciplinary frontiers

In this session we will focus on two topical areas, conflict and gender, as interdisciplinary frontiers with potential for new cross-Bloomsbury research. We will ask experts in each area to suggest interdisciplinary research questions and how to address potential challenges to future collaborative work.

•    Conflict:

Prof. Chris Cramer (SOAS) and Dr Jennifer Palmer (LSHTM)

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•    Gender:

Dr. Jenny Parkes (IOE), Dr. Karen Devries (LSHTM) and Dr. Elizabeth Hull (SOAS)

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Session 3: Interdisciplinarity – What should Bloomsbury Colleges be doing?

The session will bring together international development experts from Bloomsbury Colleges for a discussion on what LIDC Colleges are doing and what they ought to be doing in interdisciplinary research and teaching.

•    Dr. Doug Bourn (IOE)
•    Prof. Richard Kock (RVC)
•    Prof. Sharon Huttly (LSHTM)
•    Dr. Jasmine Gideon (Birkbeck)

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Beyond Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – a new development agenda?

In 2010 LIDC brought together an interdisciplinary team of experts from Bloomsbury Colleges to produce a report published by the Lancet: ‘The Millennium Development Goals: a cross-sectoral analysis and principles for goal setting  after 2015’. In this session we will bring together MDG experts to revisit the findings of the Lancet-LIDC Commission and examine progress on the MDGs since the report’s publication. Secondly, we look beyond 2015: What should be the shape of future goals?

•    Prof. Elaine Unterhalter (IOE)
•    Dr. Colin Poulton (SOAS)
•    Prof. Andy Haines (LSHTM)
•    Prof. Emerita Angela Little (IOE)
•    Hugh Waddington (3ie)

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Closing

•    Prof. Jeff Waage (Director, LIDC)

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Event Date: 7 December2012

Room 532
Birkbeck Main Building
Birkbeck, University of London
Malet St Bloomsbury
London WC1E 7HX

The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities presents:

Simon Critchley – Masterclass II:

Hamlet, Nietzsche, Joyce – tragedy, lethargy and disgust

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