News and events archive - 2009
March 2009
17 March 2009 Sukhdev Sandhu (NYU) Cries and Lullabies':
Ethnographies of Nocturnal London, Goldsmiths, organised by The Methods Lab.
On 17 March Dr Kate Nash gave a talk 'Comparing Cultural Politics of Human Rights' in the Gender Institute research seminar and public lecture series, LSE
Professor AbdouMalik Simone delivered a plenary lecture to the Urban Geography Group, Association of American Geographers, in Las Vegas in March 2009. He will also be speaking at University of California/Berkeley (Feb 5 and 11) Stanford University (Feb 4) University of California Santa Cruz (Feb 10), Harvard Graduate School of Design (Feb 14 and 22), University of Michigan (March 4) University of Cape Town (April 1-3), University of California Irvine (April 11) Dennison University (April 14) Ohio State University (April 15) University of Minnesota (April 18) Tate Britain (March 14)
Sociology Applicant Day - 25 March 2009
Uncanny Belongings: Bioethics and the technologies of fashioning flesh. Fiona K. O'Neill, Lancaster University, Wednesday 11 March. What is Medicine? Seminar Series.
Thursday 12 March, Craig Calhoun, Department of Sociology, New York University and President of the Social Science Research Council, will lecture on the topic: >"Is Humanitarianism Beyond Politics?"
Alberto Toscano spoke at the On the Idea of Communism Conference at Birkbeck College 13 - 15 March 2009
Wednesday 25 March, Interrogating the logic of care: the case of medically unexplained symptoms
Monica Greco, Sociology, Goldsmiths. What is Medicine? Seminar Series.
Nirmal Puwar presented at a Barcelona University on methodologies on 27 March 2009.
February 2009
Wednesday 25 February, 'What is the 'mental' in 'mental illness'?: Psychiatry, the 'double-brain and the problem of hearing voices'. Lisa Blackman, Media & Communication, Goldsmiths. What is Medicine? Seminar Series, the seminar room 12th floor Warmington Tower. Enquiries to: Trudi Kent, Department of Sociology, ext. 7707, t.kent (@gold.ac.uk)
On 21 February Les Back is giving a lecture at the Univeristy of Umea, Sweden entitled Hope's Ethnographer: Obama, Politics and Sociology
On 16 February Dr David Hirsh will present to the Experts' Forum of The London Conference on Combatting Antisemitism, hosted by the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism and the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
- Dr Monica Greco joins Laurie Taylor on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed Programme. From dizziness to chronic pain, the overstretched health service is faced with increasing numbers of patients with symptoms that defy a medical explanation. They are often subject to repeated tests and treatment yet their illness persists. Dr Greco's research suggests the practice of patient choice ensures that many such patients get worse rather than better.
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On April 29, Noortje Marres (University of Oxford) will be presenting "How environmental publics fail: material democracy, Walter Lippmann, and the problem of affectedness" Goldsmiths with respondences by Gay Hawkins (University of New South Wales, Sydney) and Lisa Blackman (Goldsmiths) 5 - 7 pm in room 137a Richard Hoggart Building, Goldsmiths.
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Reinventing Social Emancipation through Epistemologies of the South A lecture by Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos
Small Hall/Cinema, Richard Hoggart Building Cost: Free
Time: 6 May 2009, 04:00 - 06:00
[Find out more...]
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Wednesday, 13 May
Priska Gisler, Collegium Helveticum, ETH Zurich and University of Zurich, Visiting Research Fellow CSIS will be speaking on "Collecting Animals (Blood) for Humans in Medicine: Following A Tale of The True Blue Blood of the Horseshoe Crab P in the What is Medicine? Seminar Series
12th floor seminar room, Warming Tower 4 - 6pm
Enquiries to: Trudi Kent, Department of Sociology, ext. 7707, t.kent (@gold.ac.uk)
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Annual Methods Lab Lecture & reception Alessandro Portelli (Rome) Oral History and Literary Representations Tuesday 28 April 2009, 4-6pm Small Hall, RHB, Goldsmiths.
FREE but register with n.puwar (@gold.ac.uk)
Further details:
Methods Lab
Download a poster (pdf)
Books include:
The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome (2007)
Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue (1997)
The Text and the Voice (1994)
The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (1990)
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Refik Hodzic, co-founder of XY Films in Sarajevo comes to Goldsmiths Events with award-winning documentary filmmaker Refik Hodzic.
Refik Hodzic, co-founder of XY Films in Sarajevo and the recipient of numerous awards at international film festivals over the years, will be coming to Goldsmiths.
Thursday, 30 April 5-8pm, Richard Hoggart Building - RHB 309.
A double-bill screening of ‘Justice Unseen’ and ‘Statement 710399’ followed by a Q+A with the Director. [Find out more...]
Friday, 1 May, 4-6pm, 34-40 Lewisham Way, ground floor seminar room (G8).
A talk in the Anthropology Department (and co-covened with the Global Justice Unit), offered in Refik Hodzic’s formal capacity as the International Liaison Officer for the ICTY.
[Find out more...]
Exploding Objects: A New Scholars Symposium
10 September 2009
Exploding Objects: A New Scholars Symposium is a one day event being held by Goldsmiths Department of Sociology in September 2009. The event builds on the successful (Re)Creating: Methodologies, Concepts, Practices postgraduate symposium of 2005 and Exploding Method: A New Scholars Symposium of 2007.
The aim of this year's symposium is to explore the status of 'objects' within current sociological debates. Deconstructing and reconstituting our understanding of 'objects', the symposium seeks to utilize innovative forums to explore what a postgraduate community's work contributes to the study of 'things'. From tracing various objects through their journeys across social worlds to reflections on the role of the senses in constituting the perception of objects and considerations of people as 'objects' vs. 'subjects', the conference intends to 'explode' sociological understanding of 'objects' and to develop further connections across the postgraduate community.
Papers will be organised into small streams, which will enable participants to present their work in a format that will encourage dialogue and constructive engagement. Each participant will be assigned one paper prior to the symposium to which s/he will be encouraged to prepare a response. The symposium will also attempt to engage with objects in more innovative ways through a 'show and tell' workshop.
With Beverley Skeggs 'Turning it on is a class act: immediated object relations with television' and Caroline Knowles 'The life-worlds and journeys of a flip-flop sandal'
Applications to attend Exploding Objects have now closed.
Download a copy of the symposium poster here.
If you have any questions about the symposium, please email exploding (@gold.ac.uk).
Further information
Exploding Objects has been organised by PhD students from Goldsmiths Department of Sociology. They are:
Alex Rhys-Taylor
Charlotte Bates
Hannah Jones
Vanessa Arena
The symposium organisers are grateful for the support they have received from Goldsmiths Department of Sociology.
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Walls of Film: the memory of public spheres, Wednesday 21 October 2009
Birkbeck Cinema, Gordon Square. 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).
'The Sociological Imagination': a 50th Anniversary Celebration
"Developing a quality of mind [and] the capacity to change perspective."
Saturday 24 October 2009
9.00am - 6.00pm
Ben Pimlott Lecture Theatre, Ben Pimlott Building, Goldsmiths, University of London
Cost (including lunch): £30 (waged); £15 (unwaged).
To book a place, please email sociology @gold.ac.uk
C Wright Mills' The Sociological Imagination was published in 1959 some half a century ago. This event explores the legacy of the book but also asks: how has the sociological imagination been transformed since its publication. How is the promise of sociology today different from Mills' formulation? Mills wrote The Sociological Imagination while a Fulbright fellow at the University of Copenhagen during the 1956-1957 academic year. It is a critique of American sociology and also an argument for his own vision enshrined in books like White Collar and The Power Elite. Initially titled 'Autopsy of Social Science' he wrote the book, as Daniel Geary has argued in a recent intellectual biography of Mills, out of the conviction that America sociology had broken its promise. US sociology had resulted in the Grand Theory of Talcott Parsons which papered over conflicts and injustices and the abstracted empiricism of Paul Lazarsfeld that could not see the empirical wood for the political trees. In a similar spirit we want to use its anniversary to ask probing questions about the state of sociology today.
Programme (click on title for abstract)
| Time | Session | Speakers | Title |
| 9.00-9.30 | Registration (refreshments available) | ||
| 9.30-9.45 | Introduction | Beverley Skeggs | |
| 9.45-11.00 | New Imaginings? | Les Back | The Promise of Sociology in the 21st Century |
| Keith Khan Harris | The Practice of Dialogue | ||
| Public Cultures | Vikki Bell | Art, Events and Remembering? | |
| 11.00-11.15 | Break | ||
| 11.15-1.00 | Imagining | Alberto Toscano | Imagining Finance and Crisis |
| Kevin McDonald | |||
| 1.00-1.45 | Lunch (provided) | ||
| 1.45-3.45 | Political Imagining | Kate Nash | The Scale of Political Imagination |
| David Oswell | On War and Infancy: Modern Imaginations of Violence at the Borders | ||
| 3.45-4.00 | Break | ||
| 4.00-6.00 | Visual Imaginings | Nirmal Puwar | Imagining Public Spaces |
| Nina Wakeford | Visual commitments: design, art, me | ||
| Caroline Knowles | Global Imagining: Shoes and Fabrics in Motion | ||
| Paul Halliday | Sociological Film |
Measure and Value: a one-day workshop, Friday 18 September 2009
Organised jointly by the Sociology Departments of Goldsmiths, University of London and the University of York
Friday 18 September 2009
9.30am - 6.00pm
Ben Pimlott Lecture Theatre, Ben Pimlott Building, Goldsmiths, University of London
Issues of measure and value are emerging as central in current debates concerning the capacity of social science and cognate disciplines to engage contemporary social and cultural life. Debates on the restructuring of time, scale, number, pattern and sequence, for example, as well as those on the changing character and properties of data, evidence and the empirical, point to a need for a reevaluation of the conventions, devices and practices of measure and value in the social sciences and humanities. What forms of measure can and should be deployed, for example, in regard to non-linear phenomena, active data or event time? Do we need new forms of measure? And what do different forms of measure do? This workshop brought together a cast of distinguished speakers to address these and related questions and to place issues of measure and value at the core of contemporary debate.
Programme (click on title for abstract)
| 10.30-11.00 | Registration (refreshments available) | |
| 11.00-11.15 | Lisa Adkins (Goldsmiths) and Celia Lury (Goldsmiths) | Introduction |
| 11.15-12.00 | Nick Gane (York) | Value. A lost concept in Sociology? |
| 12.00-12.45 | Helen Verran (Melbourne) | Costanza’s number: ordering and valuing our relations with nature. |
| 12.45-2.00 | Lunch break | |
| 2.00-2.45 | Emma Uprichard (York) | Classifying (splintered) classifications: Food categories in York and England since the 1950s. |
| 2.45-3.30 | Francesco Guala (Milan) | The problem of evidence for evolutionary game theory: experiments, policy and history. |
| 3.30-4.00 | Tea/coffee | |
| 4.00-4.45 | Mike Savage (Manchester) and Evelyn Ruppert (OU) | Transactional politics |
| 4.45-5.30 | Roger Burrows (York) and Aidan Kelly (Goldsmiths) | Measuring the value of sociology? Modelling the outcomes of the 2008 RAE for the Sociology Unit of Assessment. |
| 5.30-6.00 | Discussion and concluding remarks |
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Profressor Caroline Knowles published an article in the THES 31st of December, 2009. The article in the 'My Eureka Moment' section described the moment when got the idea for her project on 'flip-flop' shoes as an emblem of globalisation.
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Goldsmiths Sociology will have have a presence in Celtic Park advertising its MA course and work through the Glasgow football club. Dr Hiroki Ogasawara, Goldsmiths alumnus and current Associate Professor at Kobe University in Japan, conducted a sociological study of Celtic for his doctorate. You can read more about his reflections of the Celtic's popularity in Japan and the rise of Shunsuke Nakamura who joined Celtic Football club in 2005. See the Press Release.
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ESRC Quota awards for 2008-9
Goldsmiths Sociology has 2 ESRC quota awards for students wishing to start a PhD in 2009. Please see Postgraduate page for criteria and how to apply. The final date for applications is Feb 1 2009 but all applicants must have been accepted for a departmental place before the ESRC application can be considered.
The AHRC will announce its MA/PhD awards in Jan/Feb 2009.
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Council for Social Develoment
Professor Kate Nash will be visiting the Council for Social Development in Delhi in February and March, 2009 supported by ESRC-ICSSR India-UK Knowledge Exchange. She will be working with Professor Manoranjan Mohanty on the comparative cultural politics of human rights and will participate in the Hind Swaraj Centenary International Seminar which is organised jointly by the Council for Social Development, India International Centre, DCRC, Delhi University, CPS, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Nelson Mandela Centre, Jamia Milia Islamia, ISHS, University of South Africa, REGGEN, Federal Flomenance University of Brazil and Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara.
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Birzeit University Visit
The visit of Professor Islah Jad and Amira Silmi from the Institute of Women's Studies at Birzeit University in the Palestinian territories has greatly strengthened the links between Goldsmiths Sociology and Palestinian academics. During a very productive and stimulating, week-long programme of activities organised by the Department of Sociology more ideas for collaboration emerged, including innovative postgraduate opportunities for Palestinian MPhil / Phd students, a joint photographic exhibition, academic exchanges and further research collaborations. The visit was part of a programme of activities sponsored by the British Council to develop teaching, research and other academic collaborations with universities in Palestine. A year ago, colleagues from Goldsmiths Sociology went to Birzeit University to engage in similar activities there, and it is anticipated that colleagues from Goldsmiths will go again in the next academic year.
- Monday June 29 - Wednesday July 1 2009 Beverley Skeggs, Liam Berriman, Goetz Bachmann and David Oswell will be speaking on a panel on 'Logics of What? A Relational Re-Orientation of Television Studies' at The Ends of Television Logics/Perspectives/Entanglements Conference, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and the Department of Media Studies, Universiteit van Amsterdam.
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David Oswell spoke at the 'Showcomotion' conference in Sheffield on 2nd July, 2009. The conference is a flagship event for practicitioners, filmmakers and all those involved in children's media industry.
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3rd July, 2009 Brett St Louis, Nirmal Puwar and Les Back contributed to a colloquium in honour of Avtar Brah's work at Birbeck College, London. The colloquium entitled Race, Gender and Postcoloniality included many of the learning writers in the field including Ann Phoenix, Niral Yuval-Davis, Gail Lewis, John Solomos, Claire Alexander and Michael Keith. The final address was given by Stuart Hall.
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Les Back will be speaking on 30th September, 2009 at the Instititute for the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Newcastle University. The talk is entitited Researching Community and it Moral Projects 15.30-1730 in Room 2.22 Research Beehive
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American sociologist Howard Becker comes to Goldsmiths
Howard Becker, the American sociologist credited with the development of 'labelling theory' in the 1960s, will take part in two events to be held at Goldsmiths, University of London.
His work has been influential on sociology and criminology, but he was also a jazz musician in the 1930s and his latest book "Do you know ...?" explores how musicians, previously unknown to one another, are able to adapt to each other and play music together in spontaneous live performance.
He will be taking part in the following events:
The Craft of Sociology - Howard Becker and Les Back in conversation
When: Monday 2 November, 6pm – 7.30pm
Venue: Small Hall/Cinema, Goldsmiths, University of London
Cost: Free (email sociology@gold.ac.uk to book a place)
Becker discusses the craft of sociological writing and thinking. Illustrated through a series of his favourite sociological studies he demonstrates how these books tell about society and offer useful exemplars for researchers to reflect on their own practice and scholarship.
Howard Becker Lecture
When: Thursday 5 November, 7pm – 8.30pm
Venue: Small Hall/Cinema, Goldsmiths, University of London
Cost: Free (email sociology@gold.ac.uk to book a place)
Becker presents his new book, "Do you know .?" (co-authored with Robert R Faulkner). "Do you know .?" dishes out entertaining stories and sharp insights drawn from the authors' own experiences and observations as well as interviews with a range of musicians. Becker and Faulkner's vivid, detailed portrait of the musician at work holds valuable lessons for anyone who has to think on the spot or under a spotlight.
For the second event, Becker will be illustrating his lecture with performances on the piano.A podcast of this event is now available here
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Professor AbdouMaliq Simone will give a keynote addrerss to The African Perspectives Conference that will take in place in Pretoria, September 25-28th, 2009. Participants will include African architects, mayors, and other local authorities.
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