On Wednesday the 28^th January CCPS will be delighted to host a talk from Peter Horrocks, former director of the BBC World Service and soon-to-be vice-chancellor of the Open University. Over a 30 year career with the Corporation, Peter has worked as a journalist, editor, producer and executive producer and in a range of senior management positions in TV, radio and on-line. He has edited Newsnight and Panorama and, following appointment as Head of Current Affairs in 2000 worked as executive producer on influential and ground-breaking documentaries including Brits, Dirty War and The Power of Nightmares. He will look back on his career in these various roles and reflect on the opportunities and challenges for a globally connected BBC. As a key figure in Britain’s media for the last three decades, he will offer some provocations for our students aiming to shape their careers in the contemporary and emerging media landscape.

The event will be hosted in G50 Millburn House at 5pm-6.30pm. We expect this event to be popular so please e-mail Paula Watkins to reserve a place on p.watkins@warwick.ac.uk 

Refreshments will be provided.

Oliver Bennett has published a new book - Cultures of Optimism: The Institutional Promotion of Hope (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)

In this sequel to his book on Cultural Pessimism, Oliver Bennett explores how individuals and societies sustain hope. The book focuses on the institutional propagation of optimism in diverse domains: democratic politics; work; the family; religion; and psychotherapy. Drawing on a range of disciplines, including social and evolutionary psychology, intellectual history and organisational behaviour, Bennett addresses a number of questions: what are the functions of optimism in modern societies? How and why do institutions promote it? What values and attitudes are involved? The institutional actions explored, conceptualised as cultural policy in its broadest sense, point to the promotion of hope and optimism as a near-universal cultural imperative.

For reviews and further details see here

Jeremy Ahearne has published a new book – Government Through Culture and the Contemporary French Right (Palgrave, November 2014).

Culture, understood broadly, lay at the heart of contrasting right-wing strategies for government in France during the pivotal decade of 2002–2012. Looking at issues of political secularism, educational reform, televisual performance, public memory and nation-branding, the book analyses how Presidents Chirac and Sarkozy sought to redefine contemporary French identity. This study extends prevailing conceptions of 'cultural policy' and shows how this constitutes a core dimension, alongside economic and social policies, of modern right-wing government. It traces, over the course of the decade in question, a dramatic hardening of the attitudes and values informing these programmes for cultural hegemony. These reflect enduring transformations in the political and symbolic landscape of contemporary France.

For reviews and further details see http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/government-through-culture-and-the-contemporary-french-right-jeremy-ahearne/?K=9781137290984