Program

Saturday 21st January 2012

11.15-1.00pm ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVES ON THE USED CLOTHING TRADE
Chair: Professor Nicky Gregson, Durham University
‘
Between A and B: Reprocessing Western second-hand clothing for global markets.’
Julie Botticello (Research Associate, SOAS)

‘The World of Calamity Clothing in Mozambique.’
Andrew Brooks (Geography, King’s College London)

‘The making of Unravel.’
Meghna Gupta (Independent filmmaker)

‘Oxfam Frip Ethique – A social enterprise solution.’
Sarah Farquhar (Head of Retail Brand, Oxfam)

2.00-4.00 pm NEW MODELS: RECYCLING, UPCYCLING AND CLOSING THE LOOP
Chair: Lucy Siegle, Journalist & Broadcaster

‘Fashion and the Community; developing community resources for sustainable fashion and recycling.’
Lizzie Harrison (Founder/Antiform and ReMade in Leeds)

‘The potential of the fashion designer to reduce consumer’s textiles waste.’
Jade Whitson-Smith (University of Leeds)

‘A sneak look behind the curtains of a textile merchant.’
Ross Barry (LMB Business Development Manager)

‘Design for Recycling; closing the loop for textiles.’
Kate Goldsworthy (Textile Futures Research Centre, Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design)

‘Closed Loop or Wear Nothing.’
Cyndi Rhoades (CEO, Worn Again)

The talks will be open to the public on a first come,first served basis. The exhibition opens at 11am
– please arrive promptly to ensure a place.

Please contact Lucy Norris for more information
at lucy.norris [at] ucl.ac.uk
Bargehouse
Oxo Tower Wharf
Bargehouse Street
South Bank
London SE1 9PH

Wednesday, November 09, 2011, from 5:30 PM to 7:00 PM, Galbraith Building, 35 St. George Street, Room 119

Community Development Graduate Collaborative Program Seminar Series

What does it mean to do community-driven research?   This seemingly innocuous question is overlain with conflicting politics, tensions and ethics along with the potential for social change that attracts many activist-scholars to this form of research in the first place. During this seminar, I will attempt to conceptualize a reflexive assessment of praxis by drawing on five years of participatory action research with community groups, organizations and residents in the inner suburban region of Southeast Scarborough.

My entry to this community, and to this talk, begins with a failed struggle to prevent the demolition and displacement of public space through policy-supported demolition of a community mall. But next I tell the story of how this loss has segued into a grassroots attempt to re-spatialize the barriers of inequality between city and inner suburbs in response to processes of gentrification and suburban decline. With an emphasis on change, I focus on the imbrications between politics, research and activism through exploration of three key questions: How do we, as researchers, maintain long-term commitment to an evolving community development project? How do we build and maintain effective relationships with communities that support residents as experts? How do we deal with struggles, conflict and transition? Through reflection on shared struggles, successes and failures over the course of a long-term community development project, I hope to spark discussion over how we can best position ourselves and evaluate our work as scholar-activists.Vanessa Parlette is a doctoral student in urban geography at the University of Toronto. She has been involved in participatory planning and community projects in Southeast Scarborough for the last five years and has drawn on these experiences to question and contest ongoing processes of inequality that perpetuate the racialization and segregation of poverty in Toronto’s inner suburbs.

via Univ. of Toronto Cities Centre.

Rewriting Lyotard aims to bring together students and faculty from the University of Alberta and universities across the US and UK, whose research considers the work of French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. Over the course of two and half days of papers and discussion, presenters and audience members will have the chance to engage across disciplines and specific research topics and explore the many facets that Lyotard’s thought has to offer. We are keen to engage both students and faculty across a range of disciplines in order to promote an interdisciplinary event that takes as its focus the intersections between various areas of research. The rich and varied nature of Lyotard’s writings, which include topics such as art, politics, ethics, literature, capitalism and history, creates the possibility for these cross-disciplinary conversations.

The last few years have seen a resurgence in scholarship on Jean-François Lyotard, including a series of recent and on-going translations of his work into English (Enthusiasm, Discourse, Figure), the bi-lingual five-volume Writings on Contemporary Art and Artists, and a number of recent publications of essays on his work in both French and English (Minima Memoria, Gender After Lyotard, Les Transformateurs Lyotard, and the collection in French entitled simply Lyotard). With this conference, we aim to further this interest and foster its development by bringing together the disparate community of scholars working on various facets of Lyotard’s thought. Writers and artists interested in Lyotard’s philosophy are also welcome.

In “Rewriting Modernity”, Lyotard takes up the notion of “rewriting” as a way of avoiding the periodization inherent in the term “postmodern”. He links the act of re-writing to the process of “working through” the event – including the event of reading itself. By framing this conference around the concept of re-writing, we invite scholars from various disciplines to share their workings-through and re-writings of Lyotard’s texts, ideas, and concepts. We thus not only seek to pay tribute to his work, but challenge and engage in dialogue with his philosophies and, as he repeatedly invited his readers to do, explore how we might think differently, think otherwise, and think on radically new terms.

Taking as our focus the forthcoming collection of essays on Lyotard’s later writings, “Jean-François Lyotard: New Encounters”, we are particularly interested in papers addressing the “later” themes and works, but other topics on Lyotard are also welcome. Areas of interest might include, but are not limited to, aesthetics/philosophy of art, ethics, politics, gender, confession, and biography, as well as Lyotard’s relation to philosophy, the social sciences, cultural studies, art history, and psychoanalysis.

As an alternative to one or two keynotes speakers, we have instead confirmed participation from a number of scholars and students from philosophy, cultural theory/studies, art and drama who will provide a strong base for the conference sessions:

Herman Parret (Leuven University), Keith Crome (Manchester Metropolitan University), Rachel Jones (University of Dundee), Vlad Ionescu (Leuven University), Neal Curtis (University of Nottingham), Matthew Pateman (Kingston University), Claire Nouvet (Emory University), Stephen Barker (University of California, Irvine), Antony Hudek (University College of London), Matthew McLennan (Ottawa University) and Christopher Bamford (Leeds Metropolitan University).
The conference is sponsored by HM Tory Chair, Rob Shields, Faculty of Arts, University of Alberta and numerous Departments.

Organizing committee:
Heidi Bickis, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Sociology
Rob Shields, HM Tory Chair, Department of Sociology/Art and Design
Peter W. Milne, Department of Philosophy, Santa Clara University
Kent Still, Department of Philosophy, Emory University

Please send inquiries to Rewritinglyotard@gmail.com.

-Rob

There is no doubt that most Canadian Arctic settlements will be affected because they are predominantly in exposed locations on the shoreline. Iqaluit, a quickly sprawling capital of Nunavut with a population of about 7500 is the focus of my research on Inuit urbanization and Arctic cultural capitals. Iqaluit is mostly under 10m above high tide, rising to a ridge about 30m above sea level. The most dramatic case is Tuktoyaktuk, at the mouth of the the Mackenzie Delta on the Beaufort Sea where many parts of the town have been undermined by tidal action. However other settlements such as Pangnirtung, on Baffin Island, have already suffered from major storms; flooding washed out a key bridge.

Yesterday, Forum on the Future released its report ‘Megacities on the Move‘ that argues for planning to ensure more sustainable access to goods and services in cities.  They present four scenarios as videos – one solution, ‘Planopolis’ is here. But urban access to goods such as food depends on long supply chains back to rural locations.  We need solutions for the far corners of the world as well as cities.

- Rob

Performing Places
Convenor: Katharine Willis

“The space of the city is not a static reality defined by built forms or demographic facts, but is instead a form of spatial practice created by the interweaving of everyday actions and interactions of its citizens. These interactions are no longer confined to face-to face contact, as communications media have re-arranged many social environments so that most people now find themselves in contact with others in new ways. Walls, doors, gates and distances still frame and isolate encounters, but new technologies have increasingly encroached on the situations that take place in physically defined settings. This session will look at how thinking about places as performative opens up new possibilities for both understanding and reacting to the potentials for communications technologies in space.

Networked space
The media theorist Castells has popularized the concept of the ‘space of flows’; where space is understood as linking up electronically separate locations in an interactive networks that connects activities and people in distinct geographical contexts. He contrasts this with the traditional concept of the ‘space of places’; which he defines as organizing experiences and activity around the confines of locality. One of the social consequences of such networked space is that that multiple social realities can occur in one place. The same physical space may be caught within the domain of two different social occasions. The social situations that occur in these overlapping behaviour settings support gatherings that possess a special characteristic in that they exist on more than one social level. For example, presence in public space and interaction has traditionally been equated with face-to-face contact. Yet, presence in public space as mediated by new technologies has a different type of aesthetic, no longer dominated by visual access but by informational access. The features and structure of the interaction is enabled by a connection, which is not necessarily achieved through physical movement from one location to another. As such, everyday actions and behaviours no longer belong to particular places, and are now multiplexed and overlaid; there now exists the possibility to switch rapidly from one activity to another while remaining in the same place, so we end up using the same place in many different ways. On one hand this gives rise to confusion, and ambiguous and contested zones emerge, where the multiple and overlapping behaviours created create disparate, fragmented and discontinuous spatial references. On the other hand we can consider space as a field of interaction, composed of intersections of mobile elements it is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it (de Certeau 1984, 117). In this case space is performed so that, rather than being inhabited as an intransitive bounded entity, it is experienced as a far more fluid event-based space that comes into existence only through the social actions of those present.

Performative space
In this session we will investigate the social effects of communications media on how space is inhabited and acted upon. We will explore the relevance of concepts such as neighbourhood, community and territory in times when cities become essentially transitory social spaces for many of those who experience them. In particular we will focus on the performative nature of space.”

Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be sent by email (following website instructions) by March 15th 2010.

Continuing on the theme of urban salons, The New Art of Suburbia, a two-evening panel discussion and forum recorded for podcast, will address these changes and implications for the arts and culture. Dealing with changes in the development and urban fabric of Toronto, speakers from a variety of backgrounds will tackle pressing questions:

What is the nature and role of creative communities in the suburbs?

How can we better understand and support arts and cultural activities in the suburbs?

How can we create and support a vibrant arts scene in suburban communities?

- Rob

Urban Salon, London.  Recent talk of note: Illegal’ Geographies of the City: Everyday Places of Water and Sanitation in a New Delhi Squatter Settlement, Ayona Datta (Sociology and Cities Programme, LSE)

City Group,  Berkeley-Stanford.  Recently of note: roundtable discussion of Lefebvre’s Writings on Cities

Globalization and World Cities Network, Loughborough UK.  Recently of note: several new reports on cities, knowledge and education.

-Rob

In person, Rushdie is relaxed, wittier and far better read than one would expect. He is funny, almost like a comic who can’t help himself but make jokes that push the limits just past the conventional mores of his audience by saying publicly what might be thought privately. His ability to sustain conversations on history and ethics is also a surprise. I have just time to put up some of his comments on mobilities, frontiers, movement, cities, space and culture, based on my brief notes.

Home:

‘Many of us now come from many places… Its ok to feel at home in different places.’

‘Once you’ve packed and unpacked as many books [as I have in my move to New York in 1999], then that’s where you live!’

[Home is where there are] ‘Echos of home which you never have anywhere elses…’

Travel

To the question about what are the most difficult frontiers in a person’s life, regarding a quote from one of his books that humans are ‘frontier crossing’ people:

‘The most difficult…most important frontier…my father asked if I wanted to go to boarding school in England. My decision when I was 12…’

And later: ‘In ‘Ground Beneath our Feet’ [the argument is made that]…There are two great dreams: the dream of home and of leaving…the direction of away, our imaginings, what excites us is that, …the outcast. … What if Odysseus had stayed home… the journey of the person who departs is absolutely at the heart of our dreams…’

Religion

‘Despite the storehouse of powerful narratives which religions are …[there is, we live in a] Twilight of the gods. A time comes when we have to take on for ourselves our responsibility for our fate…this is a kind of growing up… found in both Nordid and Greek mythologies.’

The last time the Gods appear… intervene in the affairs of man… is the wedding of Cadmus the inventor of the alphabet and the nymph Harmonia – the union of writing and peace.’

Later, Rushdie contrasts the foundations of contemporary European and American political cultures: ‘the Western European idea of freedomn is freedom from religion, not to be declared ‘anathema’ by the church. In the United States liberty is freedom to have religion…. the main preoccupation of the First Amendment.’

Islam:

‘It is important to understand that Islam has never created a free society…’

‘In an open society, people constantly questions their first foundations on which they are based and disagrees on them. [Thus] it shifts and those disagreements shift. …. Societies that don’t allow you to question the fundamental principals on which they are based are not free.’

‘Literalists who insist [that religion is based on] the actual word of god… Once can’t be quesitoned other things atrophy. …Questions are considered to be blasphemy.  A stultifying atmosphere results.’

 And later, recommending the book of David Eggers What is the What: ‘as for the question of ethics, I don’t want to be told by some priest how to live… it is the Mystery’

Freedom

‘An open society requires the ability to quesiton. If you can’t ask difficult questions, quesitons people don’t want asked… you can’t grow.’

‘If you look at the cites of the Muslim world in the 50s and 60s… very different from today… Beirut, the Paris of the Middle East… Cairo. If have witnessed their backsliding into a bog of narrow mindedness during my lifetime… in part a self-inflicted wound.’

‘Who would you rather be, a heretic, apostate or a blasphemer?’

The Global: East and West

‘Amerigo Vespucci was one of the first to understand that this [American continents] was a new thing, it was not India. It was very very big and another big ocean was on the other side… [The 1400s are] a world in which one can see our world at the moment of its birth. [The natives of the New World had a very different sense of time, which didn't invovle progress].. The time included the collision of two different existential ideas of how one lived … either …in a sense of eternity or in a Western European sy in dynamic linear time.’

‘What united these worlds [the Mughal and Florentine Courts] was a belief in magic, even more than god. If you gell in love…you went and got a love potion to make the other person love you back. …[It was a time of the] use of sexual charms. …how to manuals.’

‘The division of East and West is a retro notion which is broken down inside me. Bombay was built in India as an English city on Indian soil. [There is no ancient] Bombay… Old bombay was a fishing village.’

Rushdie’s hilarious comments on American politics and the election of Obama can be found in the broadcast version of this interview.

Salman Rushdi was in Edmonton to launch the inaugural Festival of Ideas and as part of the University of Alberta Centenary. He spoke to Eleanor Wachtel at a full house in the Winspear Centre. Their conversation will be broadcast on CBC Radio’s ‘Writers and Company‘.

- Rob

Mark Jackson (U of Bristol) has alerted me to a terrific-sounding session on the theme of air and materialities to be held at the 2009 meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) in Las Vegas.

CFP: ‘Aerographies’: re-thinking unthought elemental and metaphysical assumptions in recent human geographies
AAG 2009, Las Vegas, March 22nd-27th.

“…our concepts have been formed on the model of solids.” (H. Bergson)

“Metaphysics always supposes, in some manner, a solid crust from which to raise a construction.” (L. Irigaray)

The most vital of geography’s concerns are those that materiality opens in thinking the connections between earth and life (Whatmore 2006). The return to materialist concerns in recent cultural, social and political geographies reflects this vitality. Geographies of affect, emotion, performance and performativity, mobilities, non-representation, science and technology, corporeality, everyday life, representation and vision, memory, networks and assemblages, complexity, etc… all premise their engagements through specificities of the material, whose complex, relational dynamics “en-world” us in multiple ways. Yet, while engaged material practices are said to open relational thinking in dynamic ways, “matter”, and what we mean by the term itself, remains under considered. This has implications, for the objects we think with shape our metaphysical and ontological presumptions. As such, how we engage what we mean by matter is shaped by the objects we mobilize and the empirical sites we refract.

As Irigaray and Bergson argue, we moderns privilege “the solid crust” to give our thought shape. But what if Being and thought are not of the same matter? What if we began with the non-solid? What if we began, /in medias res/, as Irigaray insists we must, with air? Is air the forgotten material mediation of our geographical logos?

We are interested to deepen and extend recent efforts to re-think the geographies of material relation (ex. Ingold, 2008; Olwig, 2008), by interrogating the elemental assumptions behind how we engage the conceptual and practical spaces of matter and relation. In particular, we are interested to engage air as an evocative “object” for thinking relational and experiential space. Would beginning with the most ephemeral, and yet the constitutively most important element for life, enable us to reflect relational interaction in exciting and ever more relevant ways? Can ‘thinking with air’ respond with rigor, innovation, and responsibility to contemporary geographical imperatives ? Can it do so within registers perhaps under recognized in our present earth-writing? Can air be an evocative object for extending geographical engagements with relational materiality and space?

Deadline for abstracts: Oct. 10th, 2008
Reply via email with abstract to: <m.jackson@bristol.ac.uk>
Organisers: Mark Jackson, Maria Fannin, J-D Dewsbury – U of Bristol.

~ Matthew