I will be stepping out of the blogosphere and into the Real World to talk about 'Utopian Organisation in Music' (improv, rave, Cornelius Cardew, central African polyphony) for this year's Oxford Radical Forum, held at Wadham College. I'm up on Sunday afternoon, followed by Owen Hatherley and Nina Power, who'll be familiar to many as Zer0 book authors and the writers of the Sit Down Man, You're a Bloody Tragedy and Infinite Thought blogs respectively.
OXFORD RADICAL FORUM :: 6-7 March (this weekend!)
We are proud and excited to present to you the THIRD Oxford Radical Forum, taking place this Friday - Sunday, 6 - 7 March.For those who don't know, the Oxford Radical Forum is a three-day event bringing together activists, speakers and academics to discuss and debate key issues for the left and critical political thought, from climate-change to women's liberation, culture, race and resistance.
::Please note that all sessions take place in Wadham College and some sessions run simultaneously.
FRIDAY
--2:30 – 3:45
:: DIRECT ACTION WORKSHOP
Seeds For Change
Seeds For Change Network is a non-profit training and support co-op helping people organise for action and positive social change. Currently based in Oxford and Lancaster, all members of the network have a background in grassroots social and environmental justice campaigning, on issues such as peace, roads, and GM, and they have been involved in setting up and running various community resource centres.http://www.seedsforchange.org.uk/
Venue: MOSER THEATRE, Wadham College
--
4:30 – 6:00
:: ENGLAND’S POST-IMPERIAL MELANCHOLIA
Paul Gilroy
Paul Gilroy is the Anthony Giddens Professor of Social Theory at the London School of Economics (LSE) and the author of several critically-acclaimed and influential books including The Black Atlantic, After Empire and the seminal There Aint No Black in the Union Jack. Gilroy’s work has been characterised by a sustained engagement with issues of race, empire, cultural identity and the relationship between these in society, as a conscious contribution to the struggle against racism and imperialism.
Venue: MOSER THEATRE, Wadham College
--
6:45 – 8:15
:: THE BLACK AND THE RED: MARXISM & ANARCHISM TODAY
Paul Blackledge and Ruth Kinna
Paul Blackledge sits on the boards of the Historical Materialism and International Socialism journal and is Reader in political theory at Leeds Metropolitan University. He is the author of Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History and co-editor of Alasdair MacIntyre’s Engagement with Marxism: Essays and Articles and also written and published widely on issues from ethics to historiography, from anarchism to the working class and Rugby.
Ruth Kinna is Senior Lecturer in politics at Loughborough University and the editor of Anarchist Studies. Her publications include William Morris: The Art of Socialism and Anarchism: A Beginners’ Guide. She works both on recovering traditions from late nineteenth-century socialism as well as on contemporary anarchism and on art and utopianism.
Venue: MOSER THEATRE, Wadham College
--
8:30-…
:: FORUM DINNER
All Forum attendees welcome…
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -
SATURDAY
--11:00 – 12:15
:: COMMONWEALTH AND CONVIVIALITY: ANTI-CAPITALISM AND THE POLITICS OF PLEASURE
Kate Soper and Jeremy Gilbert
Kate Soper, London Metropolitan University, is the author of The Politics and Pleasures of Consuming Differently.
Jeremy Gilbert, University of East London, is the author of Anti-capitalism and Culture.
Venue: NEW SEMINAR ROOM, Wadham College
--
1:15 – 2:30
:: AGAINST THE COLONIAL PRESENT
Patricia Daley and Priyamvada Gopal
Patricia Daley is a lecturer in Human Geography at Oxford University. She is the author of Gender and Genocide in Burundi: The Search for Spaces of Peace in the Great Lakes Region. Another of her projects examines the condition of new African diaspora communities in Great Britain. Her charitable work includes acting as a member of the advisory panel of the Windle Trust, a non-governmental organization that provides scholarships to African Refugees.
Priya Gopal teaches English at Cambridge University. She is the author of Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence, a study of writers on the Indian subcontinent whose work was engaged with questions of political and social transformation. She writes occasionally for newspapers and magazines in the United Kingdom and India on topics such as empire and multiculturalism.http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/priyamvadagopal
Venue: NEW SEMINAR ROOM, Wadham College
--
3:00 – 4:15
:: FIGHTING FASCISM, RACISM AND IMMIGRATION CONTROLS IN BRITAIN TODAY
Teresa Hayter and
Speaker from Unite Against Fascism
Teresa Hayter is a long-standing and renowned activist against racism and immigration controls, and has been centrally involved in the ‘Campaign to Close Campfield’ detention-centre. She is the author of Open Borders: The Case against Immigration Controls (Pluto) and previously wrote, among many others, the influential book, Aid as Imperialism. She is also a visiting lecturer at Oxford Brookes University.
Venue: NEW SEMINAR ROOM, Wadham College
Simultaneous with:
:: BODY POLITIC DRAMA WORKSHOP>>
Caitlin McLeod and Cara Verkerk (Warwick University, Theatre Studies Finalists)
"Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women's bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them and their owners. Whether the curves imposed are the ebullient arabesques of the tit-queen or the attenuated coils of art-nouveau they are deformations of the dynamic, individual body, and limitations of the possibilities of being female." This will be an informal, playful workshop/discussion with the intention of opening up dialogue between young women. We will focus on the disjunction between the reality of our bodies and the destructive and powerful 'Beauty Myth' that is imposed on us every day.
Venue: MOSER THEATRE, Wadham College
--
4:45 – 6:00
:: DISASTER POLITICS IN HAITI: AID, EXPLOITATION AND THE ARMY
Peter Hallward and Richard Seymour
Peter Hallward is the author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment (Verso), is Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University and is part of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy. As well as being an expert on Haiti and continental philosophy and theory, Hallward is engaged in an ambitious project to develop a notion of collective, self-determining political will - ‘The Will of the People’.
Richard Seymour is most well-known for the highly-popular blog Lenin’s Tomb. He is also a political activist and author of the praised book The Liberal Defence of Murder, a critique of humanitarian and liberal justifications for war and imperialism. Currently Seymour is working on a book on David Cameron, which promises to do for the Conservative leader something similar to what Alain Badiou achieved with his recent book on Sarkozy.
Venue: NEW SEMINAR ROOM, Wadham College
--
7:00 – 8:30
:: ONE MILLION CLIMATE JOBS – NOW!
Jonathan Neale and
former Vestas worker and occupier (TBC)
Jonathan Neale is a leading activist on climate issues and is the International Secretary of the Campaign against Climate Change. He is the author of Stop Global Warming: Change the World, as well as many, many others, on subjects as diverse as mutineers and the Sherpa climbers of the Himalayas, as well as fiction and theatre for children. Neale played the role of Karl Marx for the European premiere of Howard Zinn’s play, Marx in Soho.
Venue: NEW SEMINAR ROOM, Wadham College
--
9:00 p.m. – 3:00 (a.m.!)
PERFORMANCE // SPOKEN WORD // GIG // DJs
@ “THE CELLAR”
Featuring Babygravy and others
An eclectic mixture of live music, spoken word and comedy, arts-performance, and – after midnight – serious dance music until late.
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
SUNDAY
--1:15 – 2:30
:: UTOPIAN ORGANIZATION IN MUSIC
Adam Harper
Adam Harper is the writer behind Rouge’s Foam, a blog of forward-thinking essays on the aesthetics of contemporary music. Topics he’s written about include recent trends of political nostalgia in art and experimental pop, new rhythmic techniques in dance music and the ideological restrictions of modern classical music. He is currently adapting some of this writing into a book for Zer0, to be called ‘Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-making’. Having studied musicology at Oxford and Goldsmiths College, he now lives in Peckham, London, producing music for film and theatre and writing for the modern music magazine Wire.
Venue: OKINAGA ROOM, Wadham College
--
3:00 – 4:15
:: MILITANT MODERNISM AND THE RUINS OF BRITISH UTOPIA
Owen Hatherley
Owen Hatherley is an architect and wrote the recent manifesto, Militant Modernism, a work dedicated to the architecture department at Southampton City Council. He is currently working on a book for Verso which seeks to excavate utopian elements in ‘the ruins’ of twentieth-century, British modernism. He also blogs at The Measures Taken and Sit Down Man, You’re a Bloody Tragedy.
Venue: OKINAGA ROOM, Wadham College
--
4:45 – 6:00
:: WOMEN’S LIBERATION
Nina Power and Laurie Penny
Nina Power is author of the book, One-Dimensional Woman, and the popular blog Infinite Thought: http://cinestatic.com/infinitethought/. A Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University, she is the co-editor of Alain Badiou's On Beckett and his Political Writings. Nina has published widely on topics including Iran, humanism, vintage pornography and Marxism; she also writes for several magazines, including New Statesman, New Humanist, Cabinet, Radical Philosophy and The Philosophers' Magazine.
Laurie Penny is a feminist activist and keeps the popular blog http://pennyred.blogspot.com/ She is staff writer at One In Four magazine, and also contributes to Red Pepper and Liberal Conspiracy. She was a parliamentary researcher for the Labour party. A socialist, deviant, reprobate, queer, aspiring author, she lives with toast-eating pagans in a little house somewhere in London, smoking and drinking and plotting to subtly re-arrange the world to suit her ideals.
Venue: OKINAGA ROOM, Wadham College
--
7:00 – 8:30
:: CONTEMPORARY POLITICS IN FRANCE AND THE NOUVEAU PARTI ANTICAPITALISTE
Stathis Kouvelakis
Stathis Kouvelakis is a lecturer at King’s College London (KCL) and an activist in the French Nouveau Parti Capitaliste (NPA) and in the KCL University and College Union. Intellectually, his two main projects are a thorough critique of the chief concepts and assumptions of liberal political thought and the study of Karl Marx’s early philosophical formation, in the context of revolution; his Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx (Verso) was translated into English with a preface by Fredric Jameson.
OKINAGA ROOM, Wadham College
--
8:45 – …
DRINKS AND FAREWELLS
Posts
Congratulations! Any chance of a recording?
ReplyDeleteCheers! I'm planning to put the text of the talk up here sometime this week, but there's a lot of it, sound clips to include etc. It'll be here though.
ReplyDelete