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Event Date: 28 April 2012
Room B04
43 Gordon Square
Birkbeck, University of London
London WC1H 0PD

The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities presents:

Ideology Now – Conference

Dr Matthew Beaumont (English, UCL)
Ideology and Contagion: the Contemporary Disaster Film

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Event Date: 28 April 2012
Room B04
43 Gordon Square
Birkbeck, University of London
London WC1H 0PD

The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities presents:

Ideology Now – Conference

What is the role of ideology in politics and culture today? With the disappearance of conflict between East and West in the Cold war, and with the apparent blurring of Right and Left in our recent politics, many have declared that ideology is a thing of the past. Politicians use the word ‘ideology’ as an insult. But has ideology really disappeared? And if not, where and how does it now operate? Is the narrative of the death of ideology itself an ideological move? Are there any overt forms of ideology that are still meaningful (environmentalism; neoliberalism; capitalism)? How do covert forms of ideology operate in politics and culture? Is the twenty-first century West more covertly ideological than other eras in history, or other places in the world?

Programme:

Introduction by Dr Eliane Glaser  (English and Humanities, Birkbeck) .

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Professor Esther Leslie (English and Humanities, Birkbeck) – Ideology and Misery

[AUDIO HERE]

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Dr Matthew Beaumont (English, UCL) – Ideology and Contagion: the Contemporary Disaster Film

[AUDIO HERE]

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Esther Leslie, Matthew Beaumont – Audience Questions

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Ferdinand Mount (writer and former head of policy at 10 Downing Street)
Let’s try “The End of Ideology” again?

[AUDIO HERE]

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Nick Pearce (Director, Institute for Public Policy Research)
A defence of social democratic ideology

[AUDIO HERE]

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Ferdinand Mount, Nick Pearce – Audience Questions

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Steven Poole (author, Unspeak: Words are Weapons and Guardian columnist)
Cash Value: The Stealth Ideology of Financial Metaphor in Everyday Speech

[AUDIO HERE]

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Dan Hind (author, The Return of the Public and Common Sense)
From the End of Ideology to the End of an Ideology: Financial Crisis and the Collapse of Common Sense

[AUDIO HERE]
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Steven Poole,  Dan Hind -  Audience Questions

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Owen Hatherley (author, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain)
Eyesores, monstrosities and carbuncles: The language of architectural common sense

[AUDIO HERE]
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Dr Louise Owen (Theatre Studies, Birkbeck)
Right thinking at the National Theatre

[AUDIO HERE]
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Owen Hatherley, Louise Owen – Audience Questions

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Dr Nina Power (Philosophy, Roehampton)
The Spectre of the “Public”: The Ideology of Law and Order

[AUDIO HERE]
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Professor Renata Salecl (Law, Ljubljana) – Passion for Ignorance

[AUDIO HERE]

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Nina Power, Renata Salecl – Audience Questions

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Event Date: 26 May 2011
Room B35, Birkbeck Main Building
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HX

 

Talking Books – Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain

This is the first in a series of public debates and conversations in 2011 about academic books of major importance. This event will revolve around Stefan Collini’s book Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain. On its publication in 2006, the book attracted extensive comment for its analysis of the concept of the intellectual and its exploration of the traditional claim that ‘real’ intellectuals have not existed in Britain (or, more often, England). For this event, four younger scholars from various disciplines will reflect on the significance of the book and its bearing on their own work. In conversation with the author they will move beyond the immediate reception of the book and consider its subject-matter in a series of longer perspectives.

Speakers to include:

• Stefan Collini (Cambridge)
• Matthew Beaumont (English, UCL)
• Joel Isaac (History QMUL)
• Clarisse Berthezène (Institut Charles V, Université Paris)
• Jonathan Derbyshire (New Statesman)
• Joanna Bourke (Birkbeck) Chair

Matthew Beaumont is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at UCL, where he has recently set up a City Centre. He is the author of Utopia Ltd. (2005) and the co-author, with Terry Eagleton, of The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue (2009). In addition, he is the editor of Adventures in Realism (2007) and the co-editor of Restless Cities (2010).

Joel Isaac is Lecturer in History at Queen Mary, University of London. He also currently holds the Balzan-Skinner Lectureship in Modern Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge (Spring 2011). His research focuses on the history of philosophy and the social sciences in the United States.

Jonathan Derbyshire is Culture Editor of the New Statesman. His literary journalism has also appeared in the Financial Times, the Guardian, Prospect and the Times Literary Supplement.

Clarisse Berthezène is a Lecturer (“maître de conférences”) at the University of Paris Diderot. She is the author of Les conservateurs britanniques dans la bataille des idées. Ashridge College, premier think tank conservateur (Presses de sciences po, 2011) and a number of articles on British Conservatism, notably « Creating Conservative Fabians : the Conservative Party, Political Education and the Founding of Ashridge College, 1929-1931 », Past & Present, 182, February 2004, pp. 211-240. Her new book Training Minds for the War of Ideas. The cultural and intellectual politics of Conservatism in the interwar years will be coming out with Manchester University Press.

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Introduction by Joanna Bourke.

Order of Speakers:

Stefan Collini

Matthew Beaumont

Joel Isaac

Clarisse Berthezène

Jonathan Derbyshire

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