Dr Sanjay Sharma and Reading Decoloniality members warmly invite you to discuss Multicultural Encounters (2006) during the launch of the Reading Decoloniality publication and reading group.

Claire Alexander’s review of Sharma’s Multicultural Encounters describes the contribution as both ‘ambitious’ and ‘challenging’ in how it questions the relevance of the term ‘multiculturalism’ during a period of its supposed demise. Sharma asks ‘how do we, as academics and as teachers, confront the idea and the reality of difference?’ and how might this ‘inform an ethical and transformative anti-racist engagement in the classroom?’

Sharma’s important monograph allows us to examine the disruptive ability of academia grounded in decolonising pedagogies as we wrestle with the often used, yet always insufficient collective terms ‘diverse’, ‘BAME’ and ‘global majority’.

Sharma will discuss the third chapter ‘Teaching Difference: Representations and Rhizomes’, set as the reading for the event, before we invite participants to share thoughts on the reading.

Reading Decoloniality members Dr Claire French and Dr Giulia Champion will conclude the discussion with an overview of the speakers in the coming summer programme, June to August 2023, while contextualising this new outlet for thought, collaboration and organisation.

This is a hybrid event with in-person speakers and participation at IAS, University of Warwick (click for interactive map) and online participation via Zoom.

Sign up here

With Dr Nese Ceren Tosun, Uniqorn Academy

Career change clarity & management workshop - More information to be confirmed

The climate crisis is inextricably bound up with the divide between the country and the city. It is no accident that the burning of fossil fuels and the urbanisation of the world have advanced in lockstep in recent centuries, while the demands of agribusiness, especially livestock farming, have simultaneously displaced sustainable farming practices and contributed to the emission of greenhouse gasses. The imagination of climate futures is also shaped by the shifting contours of the urban and the rural. Whether it be visions of flooded cities or scorched forests, the future seems to hold destruction for both the city and the country.

Just as the climate crisis has disturbed some of the other dualisms of the modern world (human/nonhuman, nature/culture, and so on), the dichotomy between the city and the country also seems to be increasingly precarious. One thinks of climate fiction imaginaries of abandoned cities being slowly rewilded or experiments in new modes of living (like urban community gardening) that introduce the rustic into the town. Moreover, the conventional connotations of the urban and rural are coming under strain in the Anthropocene; it appears that neither the modernity associated with the city nor the tradition of the countryside will survive the encounter with the wild weather of the future unscathed.

Our interdisciplinary conference, Un/Building the Future: The Country and the City in the Anthropocene, will explore the co-constitution of the urban and rural in the face of the Anthropocene. Raymond Williams’s iconic The Country and the City (1973), which our title alludes to, scrutinised how the emergence of capitalism in the nineteenth century capsized ingrained narratives of urban and rural life. Un/Building the Future is concerned with whether the shifting environmental contours of the twenty-first century are having a similarly radical effect.

We are interested in contributions that examine how the unfolding environmental catastrophe is disturbing and reforming the symbolisations of the country and city, producing new locales, both real and imaginary, that are not quite contained by our traditional spatial horizons. How are the categories of the country and the city morphed by the ecological crisis? What does thinking these concepts together help us to understand about current climate trajectories? Are these ideas of the urban and the rural even viable, or must they be radically rethought? How are the spatial imaginaries of the Anthropocene approached from different perspectives in the field, whether that be feminist, queer, anti-racist, decolonial, Marxist or posthumanist?

Possible topics include but are not limited to:
• Post-apocalyptic spaces
• Climate resilience
• The rural and the (neo)pastoral
• Suburbia and suburban futures
• The future city; eco- and/or smart-cities
• Multispecies design, including urban design and wildlife corridors
• Cultural representations of un/built futures, including in climate fiction, science fiction/speculative fiction, solarpunk, Afro- and African futurism, Indigenous futurism, Chicano futurism, etc. in any media (novel, short story, graphic novels, podcasts, videogames, fanfiction, fine art, etc.)
• Gender and sexuality, race, dis/ability, class, and/or national identity and the un/built environment
• Un/built environments in utopias and dystopias, including ecodystopias
• Food systems and their relationship to the country and the city
• Digital infrastructures and their relationship to built infrastructure
• Energy futures and the built environment
• Green transitions/transformations
• Collapse and breakdown

With Nicola Jones, Athena Professional, Dr Emily Henderson (Associate Professor Reader, Education Studies)

In this session, we will consider how to do something which most people find really difficult; giving feedback. Whether feedback is positive or challenging, what are the things that make it more likely to be well-received by your students? How do you actually say what needs to be said? And how do you sustain the supervisor-supervisee relationship once feedback has been delivered?

We will also discuss when and how to be facilitative. Is it always the right approach?

At the end of this session participants will have:

• • Discussed why feedback matters
  • Demonstrated use of a feedback model to:
    • • Endorse positive behaviour
      • Challenge behaviour
  • Considered when a facilitative approach is appropriate
  • Identified what a facilitative approach looks like

With GradTrain

The interview process can be the most daunting part of securing a job. Through skills-practice (old term 'role-play') led by two professional actors, this workshop allows students to try out ideas and approaches in a safe environment and with no consequences of not getting the job! Having the opportunity to see it in action takes the risk out of trying things out for the first time in the actual interview. You can make mistakes, celebrate your improvements and benefit from real-time feedback on the input you are giving our interviewee. Our trainers have in-depth experience in the interview process (from both sides of the fence) and will be able to ensure that you are more comfortable and prepared for when it comes to the real thing. Practice doesn't always make perfect, but it comes a close second!

With the IAS Team

This event will give our Fellows the opportunity to present a snapshot of their research to the IAS community. Each fellow will have 3 minutes and one slide to communicate their work in an ‘elevator pitch’ style presentation. Each session will be followed with questions to encourage innovative conversation, networking and potential collaboration between research disciplines. The audience will have the chance to vote for their favourite talk, with the winner of the Research Snapshot Event receiving a prize which will be awarded during the end-of-term social.