Wednesday 30 January, 3-7pm
A0.23 Social Sciences Building

The Rafto Foundation has awarded the 2017 Rafto Prize to Parveena Ahangar (leader and co-founder of The Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons - APDP) and Parvez Imroz (President of the Jammu-Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society) for their extraordinary work on campaigning for basic human rights in Indian-held Kashmir, in one of the world’s most militarized zones.

For more information regarding the APDP, please see http://apdpkashmir.com. For more information about JKCCS, see: https://jkccs.wordpress.com.

On the 4^th of November, Dr. Goldie Osuri participated in a public conference held by the Rafto Foundation in advance of the award ceremony. At the public conference, the Rafto laureates gave their keynote speeches on human rights in Kashmir. Alongside other experts, Dr. Osuri spoke on Human Rights and International Solidarity - a talk directed at an international human rights community regarding recommendations addressing human rights in Kashmir.

You can see a video of Dr Osuri's talk here: http://jammukashmir.tv/index.php/video/663/goldie-osuri–-associate-professor-at-the-department-of-sociology-university-of-warwick/.

For more information about the public conference, visit the Rafto webpage https://www.rafto.no/events/the-2017-rafto-conference

Thursday 20th October 18.00 Embrace of the Serpent Arts Centre Film screening with QnA
***** free tickets to students on a first come first served basis - please collect from Sociology Main Office ******

The Social Theory Centre and the Department of Sociology present Embrace of the Serpent film screening and Q&A with Christine and Stephen Hugh-Jones, anthropologists working in the Amazon.

“Embrace of the Serpent,” is a complicated mixture of myth and historical reality, shatters lingering illusions of First World culture as more advanced than any other, except technologically. Full review’ and ‘though inspired by real-life journals, Guerra’s haunting and beautifully shot film transports us into the realm of the mystical and surreal. Full review’.

 http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/research/centres/socialtheorycentre/

Register now for the Narcissism and Melancholia Symposium on the 11th and 12th March 2015.

Keynote Speakers:

• Stephen Frosh (Birkbeck College)

• Ranjana Khanna (Duke University)

• Elizabeth Lunbeck (Vanderbilt University)

All welcome!

To be held on the 13th February 2015

Organised by Lynne Pettinger (Sociology, Warwick) and Liz Moor (Media & Communications, Goldsmiths)

We are open-minded about the empirical focus through which such issues might be explored, but possible questions that papers might address include:

• What kinds of (economic) knowledge and expertise are used in everyday economic action? What are the sources of this knowledge?
• How do people think about, and what do people learn about money and the workings of markets through everyday economic activities such as shopping, negotiating a pay rise, saving, allocating pocket money, making a will, or finding childcare?
• How do people make judgements of worth in everyday situations? What kind of underlying ethics or values can be traced in people’s decisions in these areas?
• What effect does poverty (or wealth) have on people’s sense of themselves as social/ economic actors? Conversely, how is people’s understanding of their economic choices or situations (including awareness of their position within hierarchies) shaped by public/media discourses about what counts as a ‘good’ economic subject?
• How do people retrospectively account for or justify the choices they have made in these areas? Or how do they account for having made ‘bad’ decisions in their economic lives? Under what circumstances do they feel obliged to make such justifications?
• What kinds of feelings are evoked when people engage in market/economic activities? How are fears and desires managed? Are there ‘prototypical’ affects or emotions associated with certain kinds of economic activities?
• How do people produce narratives about themselves and their lives/relationships in relation to money and economic decision making?

Submission deadline: 31st October 2014

For more information, visit the webpage

Gurminder K Bhambra (Warwick) and Julian Go (Boston) have won joint funding from the Strategic Funding Initiative for Joint Research and Education to develop existing links between faculty members at Warwick and Boston Universities around the general theme of ‘Postcolonial Cosmopolitanisms’. Through this collaboration we seek to: (1) consolidate research interests around this theme; (2) develop longer-term pedagogical and intellectual exchange through the crafting of a common interdisciplinary module that could be taught at both BU and Warwick; (3) discuss possible future faculty exchanges and student exchanges.

The intellectual background to the project is an address of the question: How do we, with our manifest differences, live together in the world? What are the ways in which cross-cultural difference have been imagined and managed across history and in different parts of the world? What forms of social organization, political structures, and cultural systems have facilitated or hindered coexistence? The theory and research programmes known as “postcolonialism” and “cosmopolitanism” have each emerged across the social sciences and humanities to offer different responses to these questions. While existing work in this area has separated the two paradigms, we will bring the two perspectives together into a critical dialogue to better address the larger questions they pose. Further, while the two paradigms have emerged in different disciplines, our project will offer a truly interdisciplinary approach, enabling new discussions between the collaborators’ respective fields, ranging from Sociology to English Literature to Classics and History. We will thereby cover not only multiple disciplinary perspectives but also different times and places, examining a range of theoretical perspectives and empirical work on cross-cultural interaction and management.

The first visit will be by Boston colleagues to Warwick in May 2011 and this will be followed by a return visit to Boston by Warwick colleagues in November 2011.

Professor Walter Mignolo from Duke University, USA, will be a Visiting Fellow in the Institute of Advanced Study and will be hosted by the Department and the Social Theory Centre from 22-27 November 2010. Professor Mignolo will be involved in a number of academic activities during his time here including a reading group session on his book, ‘The Idea of Latin America’, a postgraduate advanced seminar on ‘Delinking and Connecting Histories’, as well as being involved in a symposium on ‘Decoloniality, Postcolonialism and the Subaltern’ co-organised with the Centre for Global History.