Methods Lab events
"The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy"
Tues 2nd March, 6-8pm
Lecture Theatre, Ground Floor, Ben Pimlott Building,
Goldsmiths, University of London SE14 6NW
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi presents his new book ‘The Soul At Work: From
Alienation to Autonomy’published by Semiotext(e).
Co-hosted by: Department of Art, Sociology Methods Lab & Micropolitics
Research Group.
Free, Open to All.
- Download the poster [pdf]
Sociology Department | Methods Lab Interventions
Wednesday 27 January, 4-6pm, Richard Hoggart Building, Goldsmiths, RHB 143
Prof. Abdul Maliq Simone
Interventions: labs, wars, movements & the to's & fro's of everyday urban life-sticking oneself in the middle of things
Prof. Kevin McDonald
The sociological intervention as research method: actors, researchers & transformations
Annual Methods Lab Lecture
Date: Friday 19 February 2010 Time: 4-6pm
Location: Small Hall (with drinks reception)
Calling on our inter-disciplinary resources and traditions, the Methods Lab is hosting a series of free events in 2010 to critically inhabit the space of social intervention and social impact.
Date: Wednesday 27 January 2010
Time: 4-6pm
Location: RHB Room 143
Prof. Abdul Maliq Simone (Goldsmiths) Interventions: labs, wars, movements and the to's and fro's of everyday urban life-sticking oneself in the middle of things.
Prof. Kevin McDonald (Goldsmiths) The sociological intervention as research method: actors, researchers and transformations.
Walls of Film: the memory of public spheres
Date: Wednesday 21 October 2009
Time: 1.00pm - 5.00pm
Location: Birkbeck Cinema, Gordon Square view map
Organised by The Methods Lab, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London.
Screenings and Presentations from - Prof. Avtar Brah (Birkbeck), Jasbir Panesar (UEL), Alia Syed (Film maker & Research Fellow, Southampton Solent University), George Shire (Cultural Critic), Gil Toffell (Leverhulme Research Fellow, Queen Mary College) and Nirmal Puwar (Goldsmiths).
Working on different and historically located diasporic locations with film, this panel will address the space(s) of film viewing, as well as the space of working with film as academics, researchers, archivists, film makers and collaborators. The event will examine the ways in which film both opens up and constrains their abilities to make visible memories and journeys that are otherwise absent from the public domain.
Avtar Brah & Jasbir Panesar will screen and discuss a project they initiated (in the nineties) in Southall. Well before the current explosion of visual sociology and participatory media, they facilitated Asian elders, who visited a day centre, to acquire the technical skills to make a film about themselves. In languages and notations of their choice the elders directed this rarely seen movie of their journeys of life.
Alia Syed will screen and converse with George Shire about her film The Route, which addresses the intricacies of inter-familial relationships (fraught and supportive)between four generations of women. The act of filming, who films who, how each woman wishes to be seen and to see is the films subject matter. A split screen provides a discursive space inviting the viewer to engage "both at and through the screen". At the centre of it is Alia Syed's grandmother painting a wall a deep rose pink.
Gil Toffell will present his archival and memory based research on the life world of Jewish cinema in the inter-WW2 period in Europe and America. With particular attention to East End London as a site of exhibition and reception, he will offer an insight into how cinema enabled a minority social group to endure culturally; as well as giving an empirical account of the difficulties Jewish cultural outputs had in gaining recognition in a mass-public sphere. This paper will use theoretical categories developed to elucidate the notion of the public sphere to explore these settings.
Nirmal Puwar will screen a trilogy of films focused on a cinema which has sat as a ruin for over twenty years, is due for demolition and was at one time a thriving South Asian cinema, owned by forty shareholders in post-WW2 Britain. Left with the walls, the films and the memories of this public sphere, together the films explore different collaborative methods for engaging with complex histories and futurities through in-habitation of (public) space, voice, sound, colour, stone and paper are called upon. Menace, melancholia and every day practice move as layered textures in concurrence and tension in Cinema III (2009), which is the final part of a trilogy, made after Kabhi Ritz Kabhie Palladium (2003) and Coventry Ritz (2007).
Biographical Notes:
Avtar Brah has been a longstanding Professor in the School of Continuing Education at Birkbeck. She has published widely in the fields of gender, generation, race, employment and diaspora. Her books include the influential Cartographies of a Diaspora (1996), as well as Hybridity and Its Discontents (edited with A.Coombes, 2000), Global Futures (edited with M.Hickman & M. Mac an Ghail, 1999). She is a member of the editorial collective of the journal Feminist Review and has been the recipient of a number of international fellowships which have taken her to Cornell and Santa Cruz.
Jasbir Panesar is a Community Development Co-ordinator at the University of East London. She has extensive experience of working with widening educational access to different communities. In addition, she has worked in the field of information advice and guidance, housing and community development. Her commitment has involved a number of innovative initiatives.
George Shire is a cultural critic, broadcaster, writerand researcher on the confluence between visual culture and post colonial theory.
Gil Toffell is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School for Languages, Linguistics and Film at Queen Mary, University of London. He is currently researching Jewish cinema culture in interwar Britain. He obtained his doctoral in Sociology from Goldsmiths. He has made short films and is an avid archival researcher. Selections of his research have been published in the journal Screen (2009, 50:3).
Alia Syed is currently a Research Fellow at Southampton institute. Her films have been screened at film festivals around the world including Arrows of Desire(1991) at The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London; Pandemonium(1996) and Views of London (1997; 25 years of British Avant Garde at Tate Gallery, London (1991); Beyond Destination at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK(1994); Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand (1996); Performing Bodies at Tate Modern, London, UK (2000) ; Personal Space, A Century of Artists' Films in Britain at Tate Britain, London 2003.
In 2002, inIVA's touring exhibition of her films, Jigar, travelled to London, Walsall, Leigh and The Glasgow Museum of Modern Art. In 2003 she had a solo exhibition at New York's Talwar Gallery. Eating Grass was shown in the Sydney Biennalle and the British Art Show 6 and she recently has had Solo shows in The Talwar Gallery New Delhi and the Reina Sophia Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid. She completed her Bachelors in Fine Arts from University of East London in 1987 and Postgraduate work in Mixed Media from Slade School in 1992. Her Film The Watershed is currently being shown online as part of The Film and Video Umbrella "Free to Air".
Nirmal Puwar is Director of the Methods Lab at Goldsmiths, working with creative critical methodologies collaboratively, beyond academia. Her publications include the book Space Invaders: race, gender and bodies out of place (2004, Berg). She has co-edited several collections, including South Asian Women in the Diaspora (2003, Berg) with P. Raghuram, a Special Issue of the journal Fashion Theory on Orientalism, with N. Bhatia, a collection on Intimacy in Research for the journal The History of the Human Sciences, with M. Fraser (2008) and an edited issue that makes the case for a Post-colonial Bourdieu in the journal Sociological Review with L. Back and A. Haddour (2009). She is on the editorial team for the journal Feminist Review and on the board of the women artists archive MAKE. Her work has been translated into German, Italian, French and Brazilian Portuguese. She has led a number of research projects funded by the AHRC, ESRC, the British Academy, as well as LCACE.
To book a place on this event please see this London Centre for Arts and Cultural Exchange web page (bottom of the page).
November 2008
Screening of Unravelling - A film by Kuldip Powar, with original score by Nitin Sawhney
Performance of Post-Colonial War Requiem – composed by Francis Silkstone
A Special Opening by Martin Bell - OBE, UNICEF Ambassador, former war reporter & independent politician. Chaired by Prof. Carolyn Steedman (University of Warwick).
Noise of the Past presented two new related commissions produced from a creative call-and-response method to cast a different light on war and the art of dialogue.
[ Find out more..]
September 2007
Howard Becker: Telling About Society
The first Annual Methods Lab Lecture, organised by the Methods Lab, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths.
This was the third book in Howard’s bestselling series of writing guides for social scientists; it explores the ways knowledge about society can be shared and interpreted through different forms of storytelling.
[ Find out more ]
October 2006 - May 2007
Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria: Testimonies of Uprooting
Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria: Testimonies of Uprooting
Photographic Exhibition
Kingsway Corridor, Richard Hoggart Building
Goldsmiths, University of London
October 2006 - May 2007
- Responding to the Exhibition - 30 May 2007
Monday 19 June 2006
Methods for Social Cinema Scenes
Venue: Goldsmiths, University of London
Speakers:
Annette Kuhn
Victor Burgin
Vedide Kaymak
Ben Gidley
Gil Toffell
Atticus Narian
Nirmal Puwar
A Methods Lab initiative developing current works on social cinema scenes.
Wednesday 7 September 2005
Jean Rouch: ETHICS/ETHNOGRAPHY
Venue: The Photographers´ Gallery, 5 Great Newport Street, London, WC2H 7HY
A joint panel on ´Creating Collectivities/Doing Transnational Politics´ was held at the European Social Forum (ESF) in London 2004. Our co-participants were Feminist Review, Scovenga (Italy), Torino Samba Bank (Italy) and NextGenderation (London).
For further details, see the British Sociological Association Race Forum.