Active Citizenship Seminar Cambridge University

Our Impact speaker this Easter Term will be Reni Eddo-Lodge, whose Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race recently won the 2018 Jhalak Prize for the best book by a British BAME writer.

On 16 May 2018, Reni Eddo-Lodge will be in conversation with Heidi Safia Mirza. The event is free and open to the public. No registration required.

The conversation will be chaired by Shakira Martin (President, National Union of Students).

The event has been added to Facebook, if you'd like to invite friends.

‘I am not racist but...’ : An uncomfortable conversation with Reni Eddo-Lodge and Heidi Safia Mirza

Never has there been a time when ‘Race’ and racism is so openly talked about and yet its roots so hidden and hard to tackle. The Windrush scandal becomes an administrative botch; Grenfell becomes a privatisation ‘disaster’. Decolonising the curriculum becomes an attack on freedom of speech; the xenophobia that drives Brexit is packaged as rational economic sovereignty. In this post-race, post equality moment defined by colour-blind sentiment (‘we are all the same’) and empty antiracist declarations (‘I am not a racist but’), Reni Eddo-lodge was moved to write her bestselling book – Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race. Fed up of having to explain her mere existence to soothe the conscience of those who want to feel better about the privileged positions they hold, Reni will continue this difficult conversation with the black feminist scholar Heidi Safia Mirza.

Together they ask, How does racism and white privilege manifest itself now? Why has the equality legislation and the diversity industry failed? What is the language of ‘antiracism’ and have we moved from ‘institutional racism’ to ‘unconscious bias'? What clarity does a black feminist intersectional approach bring, and how can we decolonise minds and institutions?


About Reni Eddo-Lodge

Reni Eddo-Lodge is a London-based, award-winning journalist. She has written for the New York Times, the Voice, Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Independent, Stylist, Inside Housing, the Pool, Dazed and Confused, and the New Humanist. She is the winner of a Women of the World Bold Moves Award, an MHP 30 to Watch Award and was chosen as one of the Top 30 Young People in Digital Media by the Guardian in 2014. She has also been listed in Elle's 100 Inspirational Women list, and The Root's 30 Black Viral Voices Under 30. She contributed to The Good Immigrant.

Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race is her first book. It won the 2018 Jhalak Prize, was chosen as Foyles Non-Fiction Book of the Year and Blackwell's Non-Fiction Book of the Year, was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and the Orwell Prize and shortlisted for the British Book Awards Non-Fiction Narrative Book of the Year and the Books Are My Bag Readers Award for Non-Fiction.

About Heidi Safia Mirza

Heidi Safia Mirza is Emeritus Professor in Equalities Studies, UCL Institute of Education and visiting Professor of Race, Faith and Culture at Goldsmith’s College, University of London. She is known for her pioneering intersectional research on race, gender and identity in education and has an international reputation for championing equality and human rights for women, black and Muslim young people through educational reform. She is author of several best-selling books including, Black British Feminism and Young Female and Black, which was voted in the BERA top 40 most influential educational studies in Britain. Her forthcoming coedited book is Dismantling Race in Higher Education: Racism, whiteness and decolonising the academy (Palgrave McMillian 2018).

Helen Smith (University of York)
Out of this World: Matter and Materiality on the Early Modern Moon

Anna Menyhért (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest) )

Abstract

Hungarian literary history tends to forget about women writers, they are not included in school curricula, even if they had been well known and highly appreciated in their own times. Anna Menyhért's book Női irodalmi hagyomány (Women's Literary Tradition) was the first to explore the reasons for the amnesia. Her talk will introduce the book, participants can read and discuss Hungarian women poets in translations by George Szirtes made specially for the occassion.



Anna Menyhért is an academic and a writer, a researcher at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. She used to be the vice president of the European Writers's Council. Her research interests include women's literature, 20th century literature, cultural studies, gender studies, trauma studies, (digital) memory studies. She is the head of the Trauma and Gender in Literature and Culture Research Group. The research group works on a webpage of 20th century Hungarian women writers similar to today's social media pages. Anna Menyhért's publications include Women's Literary Tradition (Női irodalmi hagyomány, 2013) and Speaking the Unspeakable: Trauma and Literature (Elmondani az elmondhatatlant: Trauma és irodalom, 2008). She has published a volume of poetry and several books for children as well. She has recently finished writing the fictional biography of Renée Erdős, a 20th century Hungarian women writer.

Further information
http://www.menyhertanna.hu
http://www.mannamesek.hu

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Season 2 Episode 4 of Cambridge PhDcasts with PhDcaster Barbara Cooke.

Barbara Cooke is a PhD student in Criminology researching dog-training programs in correctional settings.

The Cambridge PhDcasts are presented by John Gallagher and produced by Richard Blakemore and Ruth Rushworth with thanks to CRASSH.

http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/gallery/video/barbara-cooke-dog-training-programmes-in-us-prisons

Things Between Places: Artefacts from Oceania and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

Professor Nicholas Thomas (Director and Curator of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge) and
Dr Anita Herle (Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge)

Abstracts

Dr Anita Herle. Drawing on two outstanding Pacific collections at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology - the museum's founding collection from Fiji assembled in the mid 1870s and material from the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait - this presentation attends to the materiality, creation and circulation of highly valued things. As active agents, objects such as whale's teeth and cardboard masks reveal the complexity and nuances of social relations between Islanders and British collectors. The interactions between local hosts/informants and researchers summoned into existence some of the very things that were collected. These things continue to play a vital role in our understanding of the specificity of colonial relations and in forging relationships between cutural decendants and museum staff.

Professor Nicholas Thomas. This talk offers a critique of the 'natural artefact', that is of the understanding that objects in ethnographic museums are extracted from the organic flow of life in communities and 'decontextualised' in collections. While recognising that museum artefacts are (in this case) the creations of Pacific cultures that have travelled, it suggests that many things bear and acquire complex identities before, around the scene of, or subsequent to their collection. Works from the Marquesas and New Caledonia, in Cambridge, Paris and elsewhere illustrate these arguments.

Professor Peter Mandler (University of Cambridge)