Event overview
A one day conference. Speakers include: Wang Hui, Achille Mbembe, Saskia Sassen, Ravi Sundaram
Emerging Publics combines buzzwords of the day like 'emerging nations' and 'emerging markets' with the idea of the public. It asks what will be the new publics as partly driven by the emerging world: China, India and Africa. It asks what can we hope for after the destruction of the classic public sphere – one framed by Keynes and Habermas. This classic public has been largely decimated by some 2-3 decades of reigning neo-liberalism. There has been very little response to the global finance crisis, the bank and possible sovereign debt defaults in the wake of 2008. There probably is no going back now to the classic public sphere. Instead we need to ask what are the possibilities for new publics, perhaps both more localized, and more global (than the classical national public sphere). These new publics may be driven by something like Paul Krugman’s regional economies of scale. The new economies of scale that this event will address are also social, cultural and surely political. They are increasingly driven by what is other to the West. These emerging publics are also a question of the ‘pirate modernity’ of spaces in, say, Lagos and Mumbai, in which software and politics is cycled and recycled, in which another urbanism is emerging in the context of grassroots politics, NGOs, the arts. Today’s emerging publics operate in the context of massive Chinese foreign primary goods purchase and infrastructure investment. They are a question of Chinese (and German) ‘sovereign surplus’ overload. And where there is sovereign surplus, there is Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain. These emerging publics – from the BRICs, Africa and the Middle East - have massive implications for what we in the West and the UK are encountering. What kind of community, what kind of public can be constructed in Britain in the wake of thirty years of neo-liberalism? What kind of art, what kind of media are at stake in this pirate modernity of also the battles between neo-liberalism’s monopoly copyright and the new public goods of a networked ‘copyleft’? What new kind of political economy is at stake in this? What sort of new critique of political economy? What kind of urbanism? Indeed what kind of politics do we need for the twenty-first Century?
Programme:
10 -11:30 AM. Emerging Media
Chair: Sanjay Seth
Speaker: Ravi Sundaram (Sarai-CSDS Delhi)
Discussant: Scott Lash
11:30-11:45 AM Coffee, tea
11:45AM-1:15 PM Emerging Modernities
Chair: Chris Berry
Speaker: Wang Hui (Tsinghua University)
Discussant: Michael Dutton
1:15-2:30 lunch. (Catered lunch for participants.)
2:30-4:15 Emerging Geo-Politics
Chair: Les Back
Speaker: Achille Mbembe (WISER Institute/Duke University)
Discussant: Irit Rogoff
4:15-4:45 tea, cakes
4:45-6:15 Emerging Urbanisms
Chair: Michael Keith (Oxford)
Speaker: Saskia Sassen (LSE)
Discussant: Abdoumaliq Simone
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 9 Jun 2011 | 10:00am - 6:30pm |
Accessibility
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