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•
DOCTORAL RESEARCH
SYMPOSIUM:
Cultural
Memory
Date:
25-27 June 2008
Venue:
Hazelwood House
This
event is now fully subscribed
Approaches to collaborate on future similar symposia offering
small group, intensive reflection on themes within the
CCCR programme are welcome from staff in other Universities
in the EU.
•
Click
here for a PDF of the Abstracts
•
RESEARCH
SEMINAR:
Creating
Insecurity: art and culture in the age of security
Guest
Speaker: Wolfgang Sützl
Time/Date: 16.00-18.00,
11th June 2008
Venue: Roland
Levinsky building RL209, University of Plymouth.
In
the words of Giorgio Agamben, security has become the
'guiding concept' of international politics after 9/11,
and the 'sole criterion of political legitimation'. But
security, reducing plural, spontaneous and surprising
phenomena to a level of calculability, also seems to operate
against a political legitimacy based on possibilities
of dissent, and stands in clear opposition to artistic
creativity. Being uncalculable by nature, art is often
incompatible with the demands of security and, consequently,
viewed as a 'risk', leading to the arrest of artists,
and a desertification of innovative environments for the
sake of security. Yet precisely the position of art outside
of the calculable seems to bring about a new politization
of art, and some speak of art as 'politics by other means'.
Has art become the last remaining enclave of a critique
of violence? Yet how 'risky' can art be? Wolfgang Sützl
will address these issues alongside researchers from the
Art & Social Technologies Research group and the Centre
for Critical Cultural Research. Following the presentation,
Professor Steve Furnell will respond from the perspective
of Information Systems Security.
The
seminar is part of the development of ideas for the forthcoming
publication 'Creating Insecurity' (planned for late 2008,
for which Sützl is guest editor), the fourth volume in
the DATA browser series published by Autonomedia.
www.data-browser.net
The
seminar is organised by the Art & Social Technologies
Research Group in collaboration with the Centre for Critical
Cultural Research, and is free for researchers
in any academic field at any University.
•
CONFERENCE:
8th
International Conference of the Utopian Studies Society
Keynote
speakers:
Lalit
Kishor Bahti, Esther Leslie, David Cross
Date:
12-14 July 2007
Venue:
Portland Square, University of Plymouth
•
The
opening keynote session of this conference also formed
part of the AHRC workshop on the dynamics of cultural
agency – see AHRC project
on this site (which includes podcasts of the keynote speakers)
For
details of the conference including abstracts see www.utopia2007.org.uk
•
CONFERENCE:
The
Public Sphere: Between Contestation and Reconciliation
Speakers
included:
Vardan
Azatyan, Hrach Bayadyan, Jeremy Diggle, Sophie Gerlach,
Paul Gough, Angela Harutyunyan, Sophie Hope, Vardan Jaloyan,
Mel Jordan, Nazareth Karoyan, Vahram Martirosoyan, Malcolm
Miles, Jane Rendell, Anna
Schober, Steven Wright
Date:
October 2005
Venue:
The American University, Yerevan, Armenia
Organized
with the National Association of Art Critics (Armenia)
Supported
by: The British Council, The Open Society Foundation,
University of Plymouth, University of the West of England
[above
photo: speakers from the conference at the Temple of Helios,
Garni (1st century CE), photo A Harutyunyan]
•
Summary
by Angela Hartyunyan:
The
three-day conference 'The Public Sphere Between Contestation
and Reconciliation' organized by the National Association
of Art Critics in collaboration with the Critical Spaces
program of the University of Plymouth, UK in October 25-27,
2005, brought together artists and scholars from Armenia,
Austria, France, Germany, Turkey and the UK.
The aim was to address some of the issues related
to the notion of the public sphere in post-socialist contexts.
In this context, 'post-socialism' did not merely
denote ongoing transformations of economic relations,
socio-political and cultural conditions in the former
Eastern bloc countries but was also conceived as a conceptual
umbrella under which the disintegration of the social
welfare states in Western Europe and, specifically, post-Thatcherist
Britain were advancing in the wake of neo-liberal reform.
Moreover, not only did the 'term post-socialism'
prove to be conceptually potent for challenging the rigid
geographical boundaries and contexts it had been traditionally
applied to, but the term 'the public sphere' as defined
in Euro-American academic discourses, required both to
be contested and reconciled with its original
Enlightenment theoretical framework and the concomitant
contexts of its production.
Against
this background, the conference provided a discursive
forum for the relevance of the notion of the public sphere
in the context of post-Socialist transformation, questioning
its boundaries as applied to different historical conditions. The conference's debates frequently addressed
the operational aspects of the term and the ways in which
it potentiates the formation of subjectivities and identities
within the new relational forms of production and ownership
which accompany globalization. The discussions encompassed
multi-layered and diverse intellectual view points from
interdisciplinary positions, historical contexts as well
as subjective experiences.
The public-sphere was addressed as a site for the
contestation of collective memory and erasure.
The 'dialectics' of historical memory and oblivion affected
by the ideological meta-narratives of power discourses
underline not merely the spatial embodiments of narratives articulated by public spaces
(monuments, symbols, shrines, etc.) but also the temporal
dimensions of the public sphere in the post-Fordist era
of high capitalism: the public time. Art/cinema/literature/mass
media were considered in their relation to and as (non)
public spheres in which a truly subversive intervention
could realize this potential as already implied in the
very structure of the concept. All that is required to more fully explore
this potential is to denaturalize the term when applying
it to different historical contexts -the former Yugoslavia,
Armenia, Turkey, GDR, UK- and come to recognize the public
sphere as a dynamic that ultimately functions in terms
of inclusion and exclusion and hierarchy. And, last but not least, the public sphere was articulated
as a performative space: the act of reading/interpreting/commenting
through which the embodied subjectivity of the reader/interpreter/commentator
constructs its own narratives and fictions in a way that these identities and relations are acted upon
and continuously negotiated.
*****
The Centre for 