Thursday 18 February 2010Justine Brian, Rob Lyons and Angelica Michelis will look at some key contemporary debates about food and health and begin to challenge these ideas The availability, range, cost and quality of food in Western societies have never been more favourable, yet food is also the focus of a great deal of anxiety. There are concerns that our current diets will mean we will get steadily fatter and more unhealthy while consuming ‘junk food', with consequences for our quality of life, our children's behaviour and even the environment.
Justine will look at how the political imagination, and the scope of social policy has narrowed, a gap filled by an emphasis on the personal and corporeal, creating an inward, individualised perspective that breeds a personal sense of vulnerability and distracts from issues of broader social importance. She will look at the use of ‘food as metaphor’ – the way that ‘bad food’ and obesity, for example, have become code words for an elite disdain for the masses, and that a solution to the problems of social inequality lies in the consumption of five fruit and veg a day. |
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Tuesday 16 March 2010Brendan O'Neill will look at whether the political establishment merely pandering to popular prejudice For the past 40 years or more, there was a fairly clear dividing line on the issue of immigration. If you favoured equality, opportunity and liberty, then you generally supported migrants’ rights. If, however, your key concern was to preserve British traditions and protect “social cohesion”, then you looked upon immigration as a potentially destabilising force. The British authorities were at the forefront of problematising immigration (letting in controlled numbers of migrants while at the same time ratcheting up fear about these unpredictable outsiders), and it was mainly left to radical campaign groups to defend migrants’ freedom of movement. You could tell a lot about a person’s attitude to politics and freedom by their views on immigration.
Today, however, there seems to have been a shift in the way immigration is discussed. Immigration is problematised nowadays not on the basis that migrants themselves are dangerous, but on the grounds that they might evoke anger or envy in what is now considered the most dangerous community of all: native working-class Britons. Both the opponents of immigration and its supporters justify their arguments in these terms: the opponents argue that “too much immigration” will agitate less well-off Brits and possibly turn them violent, while the supporters of controlled immigration argue that we must not pander to the prejudices of these less well-off Brits and must let immigrants in and protect them from harm. The authorities now pose as “pro-migration” (while maintaining strict border controls) and seem almost unconsciously to be constructing a new view of Britain as multicultural and migrant-friendly as a way of undermining the traditions and fears and alleged backwardness of British-born working-class communities. How do we account for these changes? And in such a climate, when “pro-immigration” is frequently a codeword for “anti-working-class”, how do those of us who support full freedom of movement put forward our case?
Background readingsNot all migrants are scruffy, dirty victims, by Natalie Rothschild in spiked online 01 October 2009. MP Plans Immigrant Benefit Ban to Battle BNP, Julia Reid, Sky News Online 04 February 2010.
Venue and Time The Shakespeare Pub, 16 Fountain Street, Manchester, M2 2AA at 7:15pm for a 7:30pm start. A charge of £5 per person will be made to cover costs incurred. |
Wednesday 21 April 2010Keith McCabe and Professor Inderjeet Parmar will look at the changing debate on climate change and international poltics from Kyoto to Copenhagen and if we're all heading for the proverbial iceberg.  Keith McCabe will concentrate of what has changed about the language and content of the discussion on Climate Change from Kyoto to Copenhagen, and since. Keith will also outline how engineers have been responding to the challenges posed by the way the discussion on reducing carbon and other man made emmissions is formulated. Alongside Keith will be Professor Inderjeet Parmar who will look at the way in which US Foreign Policy has changed over a similar time period, outlining some key arguments aired in the new book he's jointly edited entitled 'Soft Power and US Foreign Policy: Theoretical, Historical and Contemporary Perspectives'.
The rise of widespread negative attitudes towards US foreign policy, especially due to the war of aggression against Iraq and the subsequent military occupation of the country – has brought new attention to the meaning and instruments of soft power. Soft power, described by Inderjeet, is the use of attraction and persuasion rather than the use of coercion or force in foreign policy. It arises from the attractiveness of a country's culture, political ideals and policies, whereas hard power develops out of a country's military or economic might. The discussion will also be an opportunity to question Inderjeet over the essays in the book by an outstanding line up of contributors providing the most extensive discussion of soft power to date. |
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July 2010Angelica Michelis will look at some key contemporary debates about crime novels Angelica will talk about the crime novel as a genre and the millennium trilogy crime novels in particular.
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