Events & Initiatives programme 2022 - 2023

From maps to chronicles, from sagas and songs to emerging cities, landscape plays an active part in shaping the medieval world. Much more than a backdrop to narrative, much more than a passive object of knowledge, much more than patches of space to be allocated and appropriated, landscape is a vital force in narrative, power, and knowledge. For this conference, which follows the seminar series of the same name, we invite contributions from researchers at all career stages working on medieval culture in any language.

This two day conference will provide a platform to bring together emerging Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and give attendees an opportunity to share their research whilst interacting with senior academics, activists and community leaders all through a critical engagement with the field of Indigenous Studies.

This conference proposes to contribute to the University of Cambridge legacies of enslavement inquiry through dialogue with world-leading scholars on Black history while also creating a forum to advance the rapidly evolving public debate on slavery’s long legacies and the idea of historical reparation.

The Ottoman Political Economies workshop aims to bring together this work, enable conversations between scholars engaged in this subfield, and showcase it for a wider audience of economic and social historians, social scientists and anthropologists, and theorists of political economy. Overall, the workshop has two objectives: to view the Ottoman empire and its subjects through the lens of political economy; and to question the concepts of political economy and capitalism in the light of Ottoman experiences.

The present and impending environmental crises and resulting social crises require approaches that can grapple with the very complex nature of the problems we face. More specifically, they require researchers in scientific, technological and socially oriented disciplines to come together to explore and understand these complexities, and reflect on how socially oriented, non-technical approaches can work together with technical approaches to address the challenges we face. As a step towards creating spaces for these cross-disciplinary conversations, CRASSHand the NanoDTC are organising a joint event, with an intentionally provocative statement ‘Technology can Save the World’ as the primary subject of discussion.

Before Capitalist Hegemony seeks to re-open the once vibrant debate on the concept of Mode of Production as a heuristic category for the study of the past, focusing in particular on non-capitalist modes apt to describe extra-European pre-industrial societies. The workshop gathers specialists of different areas and periods stretching widely across Afro-Eurasia from Late Antiquity to the nineteenth century, each focusing on key politico-economic structures that produced past societies and that were in turn produced by them. The workshop will conclude with an open table calling for a closer dialogue between empirical research and theoretical investigation and for interdisciplinary collaboration across different fields of history.

This workshop aims to bring together scholars from early modern social, cultural, and environmental history, as well as intellectual historians and historians of science and material culture, to talk about water across different settings and geopolitical contexts in Europe between 1450 and 1700. The focus will be on early modern communities, their social and political institutions, and how they interacted with water.

This film screening and workshop considers the contribution of social realism films to studies of inequalities in health.  The chosen films – “Sorry We Missed You” (Director: Ken Loach, 2019) and “Bicycle Thieves” (Ladri di biciclette, Director: Vittorio de Sica, 1948) – explore the experience of families struggling to do better for their children in bleak economic times; and doing worse.

This film screening and workshop considers the contribution of social realism films to studies of inequalities in health.  The chosen films – “Sorry We Missed You” (Director: Ken Loach, 2019) and “Bicycle Thieves” (Ladri di biciclette, Director: Vittorio de Sica, 1948) – explore the experience of families struggling to do better for their children in bleak economic times; and doing worse.

The topic of the conference is intentionally open to different methodological interpretations. Among the invited speakers there are scholars dealing with theology, natural philosophy, logic and social history. Our conference also aims to bring together scholars of Hebrew, Arabic and Latin medieval philosophy.

The burgeoning research on right-wing populism has given rise to new ethical dilemmas and emotional challenges for researchers, which – despite the increasing interest in populism studies – have been largely overlooked. We seek to address this timely blind spot by bringing together researchers of right-wing populism, and particularly those using qualitative and ethnographic methods, to share their experiences and explore the tensions in studying what Susan Harding has famously termed ‘repugnant others’.

This workshop will bring together political scientists, economists, and contemporary historians to explore how public debates over tax, spending, and borrowing have played out in different electoral contexts since the 1980s. By ranging across disciplinary boundaries and national borders, we hope to map the ‘state of the field’ and to strengthen our understanding of how parties think about tax and spending commitments in the real world.

Workshop

This two-day online conference critically examines narratives of economic efficiency associated with cost-cutting paradigms, by thinking about externalised and overlooked costs of personal hardship and financial instability arising in economic austerity. Growing disparity and stark changes to life chances are often dismissed as a problem of personal circumstances or work ethic, with struggling households encouraged to manage their finances more efficiently, seek better jobs, and grow their savings to compensate for uncertainty.

‘The (im)possibility of queer presentism’ conference and workshop explores what it might mean for contemporary queer culture to adopt ‘presentism’ as a way of both looking at and living in the world. Since its inception in the early 1990s, queer theory (and its predecessor, Gay and Lesbian Studies) has been principally concerned with time.

What are the assorted functions of our criticism? In the midst of concerns about the relation between the academy and the state, trust in authority, and conspiracism, questions regarding ‘use’ and ‘function’ in the humanities are ever more pressing. Since Bruno Latour archly observed that critique has ‘run out of steam’, the discussions that postcritique thinker Rita Felski has termed the ‘method wars’ have sometimes been fractious. This conference seeks to return, in a generous spirit of collaboration, to imperative questions regarding the humanities’ functions, methods, and contribution both within and beyond the academy.

This event will bring anthropologists, archaeologists and environmental historians into an interdisciplinary conversation about memory’s beyond human-centred and further than anthropocentric whereabouts. Scholars of genocide will be in conversation with scholars of the anthropocene to explore the potentially transformative social and political possibilities of ‘more-than-human memory.’

Queerness is, among many other things, change; therefore, a queer gaze needs to be aware of mutations and deviations. In their fundamental essay “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” (2005), David L. Eng, Jack Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz asked themselves a critical question: given all the achievements and the preponderance of identity politics in social, political, and academic discourses, what are the new paths Queer Theories should embrace? “The contemporary mainstreaming of gay and lesbian identity —as a mass-mediated consumer lifestyle and embattled legal category— demands a renewed queer studies ever vigilant to the fact that sexuality is intersectional, not extraneous to other modes of different”, the authors claim (1).

The panels in this conference will be organised around critical debates currently taking place in the field of Queer Studies. The panellists will be invited to contribute to those debates by exploring the intersections between queerness and Hispanism.