Backdoor Broadcasting Company

SCARCITY EXCHANGES

A series of exchanges on and around the topic of Scarcity, bringing together the leading thinkers in the field to expound on one of the most pressing, but often avoided, issues of the day.

Scarcity Exchanges brings together some extraordinary speakers around a single, and very pressing, issue. That resources are diminishing is a commonplace, but scarcity is about much more than the destruction of our natural resource base: it is a socially and economically constructed condition that affects us all, and will increasingly do so. If the 2000s was the decade of false abundance, then the 2010s will likely be defined through scarcity. This series of exchanges will open up the discussion as to what scarcity might mean, and its social, economic, and environmental implications.

Dougald Hine and Andrew Simms – Economies of Scarcity (AUDIO HERE)

Alfredo Brillembourg and David Satterthwaite – Cities of Scarcity (AUDIO HERE)

Ed van Hinte and Steve Broome – Scarcity and Consumption (AUDIO HERE)

Iain Boal and Lyla Mehta – Concepts of Scarcity (AUDIO HERE)

Saskia Sassen - Fabricating Scarcity (AUDIO HERE)

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Scarcity Exchanges are part of a wider research project, Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment, led by Jeremy Till at the University of Westminster, with partners at the Oslo School of Architecture and TU Vienna. The project is funded by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area). For details of the project and Scarcity Exchanges visit scibe.eu

Event Date: 1 June 2011
University of Westminster
Cayley Theatre
Marylebone Campus
35 Marylebone Road
London NW1 5LS

SCARCITY EXCHANGES

A series of exchanges on and around the topic of Scarcity, bringing together the leading thinkers in the field to expound on one of the most pressing, but often avoided, issues of the day.

Scarcity Exchanges brings together some extraordinary speakers around a single, and very pressing, issue. That resources are diminishing is a commonplace, but scarcity is about much more than the destruction of our natural resource base: it is a socially and economically constructed condition that affects us all, and will increasingly do so. If the 2000s was the decade of false abundance, then the 2010s will likely be defined through scarcity. This series of exchanges will open up the discussion as to what scarcity might mean, and its social, economic, and environmental implications.

Iain Boal and Lyla Mehta – Concepts of Scarcity

Iain Boal is a social historian and co-founder of the Retort collective, an association of radical writers, artisans, and artists in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has taught at Harvard, Stanford, and the University of California, Berkeley and Santa Cruz. He is presently Research Fellow of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London. Lyla Mehta is a sociologist at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, and editor of the recent publication The Limits to Scarcity. Her work is concerned with the politics of water scarcity and the linkages between gender, displacement, and resistance

Introduction by Jeremy Till .

Ian Boal talk:

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Lyla Mehta talk:

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questions:

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Scarcity Exchanges are part of a wider research project, Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment, led by Jeremy Till at the University of Westminster, with partners at the Oslo School of Architecture and TU Vienna. The project is funded by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area). For details of the project and Scarcity Exchanges visit scibe.eu

Event Date: 6 May 2011
Room B34 10:00 – 18:00
Birkbeck, University of London
Malet Street, Bloomsbury
London WC1E 7HX

The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities presents:

The Luddites, without Condescension
A Conference on the 200th Anniversary
of the Frame-breakers’ Uprising

In the Spring of 2011 Birkbeck will host a one-day conference to mark the 200th anniversary of the uprising of the handloom weavers in the dawn of the industrial revolution under the command of the mythic General Ludd. Even though the movement was sparked by skilled artisans, “luddite” has ever since been a byword for technophobes facing backwards and mindless rejection of progress. The conference will gather historians of luddism and others interested in what in 1800 was called “the machinery question”, to consider not only the historical luddites, urban and rural, but also contemporary movements of direct resistance, north and south, to capitalist modernization – for example, anti-nuclear movements, opposition to agricultural transgenics, resistance to big dams. The concluding session will address the issue of modernity itself, its model of temporality and the assumption that history is future-directed.

Introduction by Iain Boal.

Session 1: Ludd, Rebecca and History from Below

Peter Linebaugh (Toledo and Midnight Notes) – The Luddites and the Atlantic commons

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Discussion with audience, primed and moderated by Anna Davin (History Workshop)

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Session 2: Modernization and Contemporary Movements of Resistance

Dave King (Corporatewatch) – The Luddites200 Project and the politics of technology today

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Audience questions.

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Iain Boal (Birkbeck) - To put your bodies upon the gears: Some reflections on machines, sabotage and direct action

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Discussion with activists and audience.

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Session 3: Rebels Facing Backwards and the Dream of Modernity

T.J. Clark (Retort) – A Left with no Future

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Esther Leslie (Birkbeck) - Response

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Closing general discussion.

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Event Date: 21 March 2011
Room B36
Birkbeck College
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HX

Orbiting London – A Conversation with Iain Sinclair

Iain Sinclair, writer, poet and film-maker, will discuss – in conversation with Iain Boal, (social historian and Fellow of the Institute for the Humanities) his four decades of chronicling the life of the capital. More than any contemporary author Sinclair’s work is suffused with the spirit of place, of London as a palimpsest, in particular the environs of Hackney, his home since the mid-60s. Sinclair’s books include Downriver, Rodinsky’s Room, London Orbital, Lights out for the Territory, London: City of Disappearances, Hackney: That Rose-Red Empire.

Iain Boal (BIH Research Fellow) is a social historian of science and technics, with a special interest in visual culture, public space and the commons. Educated in the British Isles, he moved to the US in 1982, where he has taught at Harvard, Stanford and the University of California, in the Geography Dept at Berkeley and Community Studies at Santa Cruz. He is associated with Retort, a group of writers, artists and artisans based for two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area. With James Brook he edited Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information (City Lights). He is the author, with T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts, of Retort’s Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (Verso). He is co-editor of West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California (PM Press, 2011), and his brief history of the bicycle in planetary perspective, The Green Machine, is forthcoming from Notting Hill Editions. In 2005/6 he was a Guggenheim Fellow in Science and Technology.

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talk:

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