You're warmly invited to the Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies' Annual Lecture on Weds 19^th June at 5pm in the FAB Cinema, followed by a wine reception.

Entitled Ecologisation is not a metaphor: Culture in the Web of Life, the lecture draws from Dr. Sterling's research, critically examining heritage and museums through the lens of art and ecology. Abstract and bio below. Please register here https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/scapvc/ccmps/research/beinghuman2024/annuallectureregistrationLink opens in a new window

The lecture forms part of our PGR conference Being Human in the Media and Creative Industries, that will run throughout the day on 19th June. Details and registration page for that are hereLink opens in a new window.

We hope to see you there!

ECOLOGISATION IS NOT A METAPHOR: CULTURE IN THE WEB OF LIFE

Ecological thinking has long been entangled with different ideas about how to organise political, economic and social life. In the face of climate change and the environmental crisis, the urgency of thinking and acting ecologically has only intensified. Cultural actors and institutions have mobilised to address these concerns with new environmental programming, innovative sustainability strategies, and declarations of a climate and ecological emergency. This talk will argue that such shifts don’t just point towards alternative ways of living on and with the planet, they also instigate a fundamental reorientation of culture in the web of life. Drawing on the work of Jason Moore, this conceptualisation recognises that – like all forms of human organisation – cultural policies and practices are always co-constituted through nature. By focusing on the evolving place of museums in this web, the talk will explore how museums have contributed to the planetary crisis through specific symbolic and material practices, but also how emerging approaches in the field might, in some small way, help to ecologise society more broadly.

Colin Sterling is Assistant Professor / Senior Lecturer in Heritage, Museums and the Environment at the University of Amsterdam, where he teaches across heritage and memory, museum studies and artistic research. Colin's research critically examines heritage and museums through the lens of art and ecology. He is the author of Heritage, Photography, and the Affective Past (Routledge, 2020) and co-editor of Deterritorializing the Future: Heritage in, of and after the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2020). He is co-editor of the journal Museums & Social Issues.

Please note that R&IS advise that this workshop is intended for research active staff and research students.

Call for Papers

Radical Traditions

The Role of Contemporary Arab Women in Revolutionising Arab Patriarchal Society

Saturday 12 October 2024/ University of Warwick/ Faculty of Arts

Call for Papers / Deadline: 30 July

 Opening and Closing Keynote Speakers: Dr. Ebtihal Mahadeen (University of Edinburgh) & Prof. Rebecca Ruth Gould (SOAS, University of London)

Edited Collection CFP – Warwick Series in the Humanities, Routledge

Editor: Raad Khair Allah (University of Warwick)

In an interview with the Progressive Magazine, Nawal El Sadaawi, the Arab world’s most prominent feminist and writer, says: “Women are half the society. You cannot have a revolution without women. You cannot have democracy without women. You cannot have equality without women. You can’t have anything without women” (2011). Influenced by these themes, this interdisciplinary one-day workshop and the proposed edited collection aim to shed light on the radical traditions expressed in the efforts and achievements of contemporary Arab women in challenging patriarchal social norms and structures and thereby transforming Arab societies.

We encourage participants to critically reflect on the meaning of freedom, challenge existing power systems of oppression, and imagine alternative possibilities for a more liberated and just society. By engaging in dialogue, reflection, and creative thinking, participants will be inspired to become agents of change and contribute to the ongoing struggle for freedom and social justice.

We are calling for papers from across disciplines such as literature, art history, film studies, gender studies, cultural studies, sociology, media, music, and anthropology and more.

You are invited to submit abstracts of maximum 300 words for 15-20-minute papers by 30 July 2024. Full chapters of 5000–7000-word chapters will be due by 30 January 2025 on a broad range of topics including but not limited to:

Ø Resistance and agency in contemporary Arab women’s literary and visual outputs

Ø  Palestinian literature, cinema, and art of occupation

Ø Arab women’s struggle, in anti and post-colonial resistance and civil wars, for liberation and human rights

Ø Anti- colonial nationalism and the nation as a woman

Ø The intersection and the challenge of multiple forms of oppression

Ø Representations and the politics of sexuality, gender, and power dynamics  

Ø The female body as a site of repression and resistance

Ø Intellectual, political, and sexual freedom

Ø Tensions between authenticity and originality in Arab feminist self-expression

Ø Censorship and suppression of feminist cultural artefacts

Ø Arab women’s resistance to localised forms of patriarchy and Western, orientalist stereotypes  

Ø Writing the difference and the invention of “the new Arab woman”

Ø Arab feminism in local dynamics and in international and transnational worlds

Ø Art as a tool for reclaiming sexuality, identity, and power

Ø AI-generated representations and amplifying marginalised Arab women’s voices

Ø Contemporary Arab women’s movements: identity, mobilisation, autonomy

Ø The influence of digital platforms on the visibility and spread of Arab women’s works, serving as new spaces for artistic and narrative freedom

Please send abstracts and short biographies of 200-250 words to radicaltraditions@gmail.com

Congratulations to the winners of the HRC Doctoral Fellowship Competition.

We look forward to their conferences next year (24/25)

Humanities Research Centre – Visiting Speaker’s Fund – Professor Yannis Hamilakis

Outputs Supported Through the Visiting Speaker’s Fund

1) Keynote lecture for the Classical Association Annual Conference, the field-leading conference in Classics in the UK.

2) Research and Career-Development Seminar for Postgraduate Students in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Warwick.

Description Of Outputs

Funds from the HRC Visiting Speaker’s Fund in combination with a contribution from the Department of Classics and Ancient History supported the travel and accommodation of Professor Yannis Hamilakis, a world-leading scholar, to deliver the keynote lecture at the UK field-leading Classical Association (CA) conference which Warwick hosted during May 22-24, 2024.

Professor Yannis Hamilakis is an extremely high profile archaeologist and scholar in the area of the socio-politics of the past (Greece especially) and is currently the Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology and Professor of Modern Greek Studies at Brown University.

Professor Hamilakis’ keynote lecture, entitled, Undoing Monumental Racecraft: The Acropolis Otherwise was delivered on the afternoon of Friday March 22, 2024 on Oculus 1.05 to an international audience of approximately 270 Classicists. Professor Hamilakis’ talk presented a dissection of the Athenian Acropolis as it is traditionally presented – a monument to Classical Athens. He presented how and why the acropolis was ‘cleansed’ of its non-Classical past during the 19th century in order to present very specific messages about these monuments that were heavily informed by European nationalisms of the time. The lecture then presented would-be 19th century plans for the Acropolis that were proposed by a Bavarian architect who was employed by the newly established Greek monarchy. These plans included locating a royal palace, and even a horse-racing track on top of the hill.

Professor Hamilakis then presented evidence from the traditionally overlooked Medieval and the Ottoman periods, and presented a very strong case for why we need to re-consider these traditions as valuable stakeholders in the history of this monument. Two of the particularly fascinating case studies presented related to the largely discarded remains of Ottoman-era headstones from a cemetery at the entrance to the Acropolis, as well as evidence for a community of enslaved people of African origin who lived at the base of the Acropolis in the 18th century. Both communities have been more-orless completely written out of the history of the Acropolis in favour of the traditional presentation of a ‘pure’ Classical Greek monument which has been heavily informed by 19th century nationalism which has its origins in a different part of Europe. This lecture calls for a reassessment and a considered decolonisation of the Acropolis by those of us who teach using its monuments. Presenting a longer-term and diverse history/archaeology of the Acropolis enables a more careful contextualisation of the monuments, and enables us to question the historiography around, and the reception of, what is all-too-often framed as an iconic feature of ‘western’ culture.

The keynote lecture did not have a question session, but The Classical Association (CA) run a promotional campaign for this conference, part of this strategy includes Twitter/X. On Jan 30, 2024, as requested, I sent the @HRCWarwick to the organising committee to pass along to the CA communications team for use in promotions regarding the keynote lecture. the CA conference held a drinks event in the Agora of the Faculty of Arts Building during which Professor Hamilakis fielded a range of questions about the lecture from colleagues across our discipline.

On the morning of March 23, Professor Hamilakis held a hybrid-seminar in the Faculty of Arts Building for Postgraduate Researchers in the Department of Classics and Ancient History. This even was attended by seven postgraduate (PG herein) researchers, Professor Hamilakis and the author. The seminar discussion began with questions from the postgraduate community about the keynote lecture that took place on the previous night. That particular discussion focused on the would-be 19th century development plans for the Acropolis as well as the active process of prioritising specific archaeological and historical phases of a site for presentation. On Professor Hamilakis’ direction, the seminar discussion then moved on to cover more practical topics that were of specific interest to the postgraduate community in Classics and Ancient History.

These topics included:

• Developing an academic career.

• Strategic publishing.

• Navigating disciplinary boundaries in research.

• Developing PhD projects.

The seminar discussion was lively, and lasted slightly beyond the scheduled 1-hour time slot. Online participation was facilitated using Microsoft Teams and a ‘Meeting Owl’, which proved to be an excellent tool for ensuring both audio and visual participation by the online attendees. The postgraduate students from Classics and Ancient History were happy to ask questions and to listen to advice/suggestions from Professor Hamilakis. Oral feedback provided to me from the participants indicated that this was a helpful and engaging session.

The original aims of this application were to secure financial support from the Visiting Speaker’s Fund in order to bring a field-leading scholar to the University of Warwick. This speaker, Professor Hamilakis, was to deliver a keynote address at the largest annual UK conference in our discipline (the Classical Association Conference) and to lead a seminar discussion with postgraduate students from the Department of Classics and Ancient History. These aims were all met, and the number of attendees and engagement at both the keynote lecture and the seminar exceeded our initial aims.

Stonebreakers: Film Screening and Roundtable Discussion
Wednesday 13 March 2024 

HRC report – Joanne Lee

Internal webpage: Stonebreakers (warwick.ac.uk)
Coventry Cathedral webpage: Stonebreakers - Film Screening - Coventry Cathedral

On Wednesday 13^th March, Valerio Ciriaci (director) and Isaak J. Liptzin (producer) visited Warwick as part of their UK tour to present their documentary film Stonebreakers (Awen Films, 2022). Thanks to the generous support from the HRC Visting Speaker’s Fund and from the Warwick Institute of Engagement, along with contributions from departments of History, PAIS, SCAPVC and the SMLC, we were able to stage two separate events: an afternoon on-campus event open to staff and students, and an evening event in the Chapter House theatre of Coventry Cathedral open to members of the public.

Valerio Ciriaci and Isaak J. Liptzin co-founded Awen Films in 2012 and Stonebreakers is their third documentary feature film. The documentary chronicles the fight around historical memory in the US that exploded in 2020 during the George Floyd protests and the presidential election. It interrogates understandings of national narratives and foundational myths (in particular Columbus and the Founding Fathers) and explores debates around contested monuments, statues and landmarks. The film premiered in 2022 at the Festival dei Popoli in Florence, where it won three awards.

The afternoon screening and roundtable panel discussion took place in the Cinema Room of the Faculty of Arts Building with an audience of around 40 staff and students and was followed by a drinks reception.In the evening, a similar free event took place in the Chapter House theatre of Coventry Cathedral with around 30 in attendance. Although scheduled on a busy day in the last week of term, the film drew in a varied audience with interests in US politics, racial justice, decolonising movements, historical memory and documentary filmmaking.

The film-screenings (70 minutes) were followed by a roundtable panel discussion – the aim of which was not only to allow the filmmakers to explain the ideas behind the making of the film and respond to questions from the audience, but also to bring them into dialogue with researchers and cultural activists who specialise in different aspects of US history and politics, questions of memory and memorialisation, and cultural policy and inclusion.

Afternoon panelists included:

Jess Eastland-Underwood: a final year PhD Student from PAIS whose research looks at how everyday understandings of the concept of ‘the economy’ in the USA mobilised the anti-lockdown and George Floyd protests during the Covid-19 pandemic. Her published work has looked at interpretations of the economic ideology of the Founding Fathers in the Tea Party movement as well as the way popular conceptions of ‘the market’ reproduce white supremacy.

Alison Cooley: Professor in Classics at Warwick, Deputy Head of Classics, and Director of the Humanities Research Centre. Her interest in contemporary debates surrounding statues and memorials stems from her research into the cultural and political aspects of the Roman world. She has a forthcoming chapter on the destruction of ancient monuments from Pharaonic Egypt to Imperial Rome: 'Control: The destruction of monuments', in D. Agri and S. Lewis (eds.) Cultural History of Media: Antiquity (Bloomsbury)

Lara Ratnaraja: an independent cultural consultant who specialises in diversity, innovation, leadership, collaboration and cultural policy within the cultural, the HE and digital sectors. She co-produces a series of cultural leadership programmes for people from diverse backgrounds linked to geographical place and also curates a digital Conference called Hello Culture. Her projects include working with the 8 Welsh National Arts Companies to develop a cultural framework for diversity co-designed with creative stakeholders and residents.Lara is on the board of Compton Verney and is Co-Chair of the Coventry Biennial. She is also on the UK Council for Creative UK and the Equality Monitoring Group for Arts Council Wales.

Evening panelists included:

David Wright: David teaches and writes about cultural policy and the creative industries in the Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies at Warwick. His recent work has concerned campaigns for statues and memorials to figures from twentieth-century popular culture. He is currently writing a book for Liverpool University Press: Celebrity and Public Art: Memorialising Popular Culture and his recent open access article in the European Journal of Cultural Studies concerned nostalgia and statues to comedians in the North of England.

Ras Emmanuelle Henry Cottrell: founder of I&I Collective – an international collective of promoters, producers, performers, DJs, artists & activists. One of his recent projects at St Mary’s Guildhall in Coventry involved exploring the history of the American civil rights activist Frederick Douglass who visited the city in 1847 where he delivered three lectures as part of his anti-slavery campaigns.

Lydia Plath: Associate Professor of US History at Warwick, where she specialises in the history of racism and racial violence. Her research projects have investigated the representation of slavery in twentieth and twenty-first century American cinema. Her teaching centres on African American history and her module ‘America in Black and White’ won the inaugural Historians of the Twentieth Century United States Inclusive Curricula Prize. Lydia is one of the facilitators of the Tackling Racial Inequality at Warwick Staff Development Programme.

Both afternoon and evening screenings led to lively and insightful panel discussions in which participants debated the quest for representation within the film: was the struggle really about whether a statue or monument should stand, or was the struggle for territorial rights and political space more important? Why do certain stories become central to the national narrative while other stories and voices are marginalised? How can we incorporate activism into our teaching and research? Questions to the director and producer also explored cinematography and considered how much of the intensity and beauty of the film derives from the choice to avoid a didactic voice-over, the use of music to build tension and the powerful juxtaposition of imagery. At both events, we really needed an extra hour to fully explore these aspects!

The events were successful in bringing filmmakers together with researchers at Warwick and external collaborators while the subject of racial justice and political representation clearly resonated with both audiences. We hope to purchase the documentary for the library so that other members of the university can watch a film which makes a vital contribution to political debates about monuments, memorialisation and constructions of national narratives. We extend our thanks and appreciation to Valerio and Isaak for coming to Warwick and sharing their film with us – we eagerly await their next film project!