Thoughtlines Thoughtlines

When did we forget how to talk to each other properly? And how to think difficult things through, together? Or has this always been controversial, fraught, and sometimes even deadly?

The importance of honest, frank, respectful dialogue among citizens was a belief that Socrates lived and died for back in Ancient Greece. And for Dr Frisbee Sheffield – Associate Professor of Classics at Cambridge and Fellow of Downing College – it is a belief that needs to be re-examined and promoted today.

Her recent fellowship at CRASSH saw her bring Socrates and Plato alongside 20th century philosopher Hannah Arendt to ask ‘what’s so good about conversation?’

At a moment when the University itself was debating freedom of speech, and social media appears an increasingly toxic space, how can we restore the benefits of thoughtful disagreement and face to face discussion? And what might change if we did?

Learn More:
- Frisbee's page on the Faculty website: https://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/directory/dr-frisbee-c-c-sheffield

- Read more of Frisbee Sheffield's work on the ethics of conversation here: https://antigonejournal.com/2021/04/socrates-ethics-conversation/

- Listen to Frisbee Sheffield discussing Plato's dialogues and the death of Socrates with Melvyn Bragg on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0011rzy

- Discover the work of Frisbee Sheffield's CRASSH colleague, Kübra Gümüşay, on conversation, language and freedom of speech in a contemporary context, which is mentioned in this episode: https://www.waterstones.com/book/speaking-and-being/kubra-gumusay/gesche-ipsen/9781788168496

Read more on the Hannah Arendt / Adolf Eichmann controversy here:
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/wp-content/files_mf/1390334198d9Ezra.pdf

And more on Arendt and Socrates here:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23955554

In this episode we talk tech, power, and the endless hell of phone storage with sociologist Professor Gina Neff.

As the Executive Director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at Cambridge, and the Professor of Technology and Society at Oxford, she briskly rejects the mythology of a ‘lone genius’ in Silicon Valley coding every aspect of our daily lives. Instead, she champions those she calls the ‘unsung heroes’ of innovation – essentially everyone struggling to make a “better, faster, new way of working” actually … work.

Her academic research spans industries as diverse as fashion, construction, and healthcare, and she’s equally at home online, winning a coveted Webby award for her beginner’s guide ‘The A to Z of AI’.

Her love of a good data story well told is anything but dry, and her pandemic project is still flourishing. But her main goal is to empower us all to answer two key questions: what kind of future do we want? And what choices must we make today to make that happen?

Learn More:

Follow Gina Neff on Twitter (for those daily flower photos and more!)
https://twitter.com/ginasue

Gina Neff is the Executive Director of The Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at CRASSH - all projects discussed in this episode can be found here:
The Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy
https://www.mctd.ac.uk/

Watch Gina Neff give the CRASSH annual lecture, on 'The Cost of Data - making sense in digital society'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P94q42MzKvI

Her recently published book, Human-Centered Data Science, discussed in this episode can be found here:
Human-Centered Data Science
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262543217/human-centered-data-science/

Gina Neff's 'A to Z of AI' project, discussed in this episode, and which won a Webby Award for Best Educational Website in 2021, can be found here:
https://winners.webbyawards.com/2021/websites-and-mobile-sites/general-websites-and-mobile-sites/education/174204/the-az-of-ai


Other examples of Gina Neff's work can be found here:

On why AI must not make working women's lives worse
AI must not make women’s working lives worse - OECD.AI
https://oecd.ai/en/wonk/ai-womens-working-lives

A paper relating to her ongoing work on technology in commercial construction, 'Innovation through practice: the messy work of making technology useful for architecture, engineering and construction teams'
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8354369c-816b-4bc9-a74d-4f276fe4cc41

Her work on data, and on work: Who does the work of data?
http://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/may-june-2020/who-does-the-work-of-data
and Venture Labor
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262527422/venture-labor/

In this first episode of our second season of Thoughtlines we talk about how culture fights back with historian Professor Kenneth Marcus.

As a visiting fellow at CRASSH he’s been exploring what happens when music ‘goes there’ and tackles the horror and heartbreak of war. The ongoing conflict in Ukraine and its musical resistance, rapidly going viral on social media, is effectively his project in real time. But his focus on the epic pacifist works of Arnold Schoenberg, Hanns Eisler, and Benjamin Britten reminds us that music was shaping the global human rights imagination well before now.

Not only that, it’s also a very effective way to wake up the classroom.

Learn more:

Many thanks to Larry Schoenberg for permission to use an excerpt from Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 42: http://www.schoenberg.at/index.php/en/joomla-license-sp-1943310036/a-survivor-from-warsaw-op-46-1947

The piano track featured after the introduction is "Waves", written and performed by Kenneth Marcus.

Kenneth talks about his book, Schoenberg and Hollywood Modernism, in the Author Hub series at Cambridge University Press: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_u0-3dLsCw&ab_channel=CambridgeUniversityPress-Academic

He performs his rap on World War I, titled The War: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_D_K6oWdyI&ab_channel=KennethMarcus

One of the only live-performance videos of Hanns Eisler’s Germany Symphony (Deutsche Sinfonie, Op. 50) is with the Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester Berlin and Rundfunkchor Berlin, conducted by Max Pommer (1987): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvB_XNCaJKo

Examples of using the arts as resistance in the war in Ukraine:
Ukraine's music is an effective weapon of resistance
- https://theplanet.substack.com/p/ukraines-music-is-an-effective-weapon
"I wanted to fight. The army told me to sing"
- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-62137767
Ukrainian graduates dance in front of destroyed school in Kharkiv
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2YTdnJX960
Kyiv Chamber Orchestra, on using music for peace and resistance
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hieu5GSA2EM

Kenneth Marcus, Cambridge playlist:
Handel, Trumpet Concerto in D Major, HWV 335a (Crispin Steele-Perkins, trumpet, Cambridge Music Festival, St. Catherine’s College, 1990)
Dvorak, Cello Concerto in B Minor, Op. 104 (Steven Isserlis, cello, West Road Concert Hall, 1989)
Gershwin, ’S Wonderful (performed at Forbes Mellon Library, Clare College, 1987)
Gershwin, I Got Rhythm (performed at College Chapel, Clare College, 1987)
Marcus, Long, Hungry World (composed at Thirkill Court, Clare College, 1987)
Marcus, Talkin’ Love (composed at 30 Hardwick Street, Newnham, 1991)
Marcus, Waves (composed at Cambridge, 1991)
Quincy Jones with Ice-T, Kool Moe Dee, Big Daddy Kane, and Melle Mel, Back on the Block (played as DJ for Cambridge University Radio, 1990)
Strauss, The Blue Danube (Clare May Ball, 1990)
Tosh, I Am That I Am (Clare May Ball, 1990)
Javanese Gamelan (percussionist in Cambridge Gamelan Society, West Road Concert Hall and Hyde Park, London, 1990)
William Byrd, Short Evening Service (King’s College Evensong, 1989)

In this final episode of the CRASSH 20th anniversary year, we ask the centre’s Director, and Grace 2 Professor of English at Cambridge, Steven Connor, whether what we do for a living can ever, or should ever, be anything other than drudgery?

Thousands of column inches in the past year have been devoted to ‘The Great Resignation’, or ‘The Big Quit’ – a mass rebellion by millions of disgruntled employees worldwide who decided their current work just isn’t working for them any longer.  Employment, then, is yet another thing to be re-worked by the COVID-19 pandemic, but less examined is why we even do it in the first place.

Connor’s latest research project, the culmination of a 40-year academic career, aims to unpack our deeply, and sometimes unconsciously, held beliefs about what we ‘do’.

He himself is never less than fully and happily occupied, but also shares his thoughts on what could, and should, constitute ‘serious’ academic work in the Humanities. And it starts by allowing ourselves to admit that, despite our very best efforts to conceal it, we are having an awful lot of fun.

Find out more:


The CRASSH website includes Q&As on Steven’s two recent books; one with Imke van Heerden in June 2019 (https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/blog/the-madness-of-knowledge-5-questions-to-steven-connor/), on the strangeness of ‘the species that styles itself sapiens’, as discussed in his book The Madness of Knowledge (http://www.reaktionbooks.co.uk/display.asp?ISB=9781789140729), and the other, with Judith Weik in October 2019 (https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/blog/giving-way-5-questions-to-steven-connor/) on the nastiness of the idea of agency and the associated ‘lexicon of the illimitable’ in Giving Way: Thoughts on Unappreciated Dispositions (https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=31510).
 
He discusses his writing and especially his more recent work, in the podcast Critical Attitudes, a conversation with Nathan Waddell in March 2021: https://anchor.fm/criticalattitudes/episodes/8--Steven-Connor-e17be4r.
 
Thaumodynamics: Making a Living in Great Expectations, the Hilda Hulme Lecture given for the Institute of English Studies, London, in June 2021: http://stevenconnor.com/thaumodynamics.html

Ceremonics (https://stevenconnor.com/ceremonics.html) is a brief prospectus for the sequence of books he has been writing since 2019 on social performativities. The sequence includes Giving Way: Thoughts on Unappreciated Dispositions (2019); A History of Asking (2022) and Seriously, Though (2022). Essays on crisis-behaviour, desperation styles, anger-management, wishing-rituals and faith-operations form part of this ongoing enquiry.
http://stevenconnor.com/emergency.html
http://stevenconnor.com/desperate-remedies.html
http://stevenconnor.com/modernist-anger-management.html
http://stevenconnor.com/best-wishes.html
http://stevenconnor.com/religion-beyond-belief.html

More of Steven Connor’s essays, broadcasts and works-in-progress can be read, heard or watched on his website stevenconnor.com.

In this episode we answer a $100,000 question.

Writer and journalist Trish Lorenz won the global essay competition, The Nine Dots Prize, by turning anxiety about the world’s ageing population on its head and celebrating the game-changing power of Africa’s ‘youthquake’.

Part of the prize is the chance to spend a term at CRASSH, and turn that initial 3,000 word entry into a book published by Cambridge University Press. But Trish took the long way round from her home in Berlin – arriving in Cambridge via Lagos and Abuja where she found and interviewed the young Africans who best represent the energy, the ingenuity, and the infectious generosity that she wanted to highlight.

The ‘Soro Soke’ generation in Nigeria, and beyond, are outspoken, urban, tech savvy, globally connected, and unlike any demographic that has come before. So what happens when we start tuning in to what they have to say?

Follow Trish Lorenz on Twitter here: @mstrishlorenz and on Instagram here: @mstrishlorenz

Further examples of her journalism can be found here: https://www.clippings.me/users/trishlorenz

When Trish misses Lagos, and the energy of the Soro Soke generation, she listens to this track by Wizkid (the most steamed Nigerian artist of all time): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7QiLceJSLQ

Two albums that represent the sounds of contemporary Nigeria, both released in 2020, are WizKid's 'Made in Lagos' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OJ_5aS-PdM) and Burna Boy's 'Twice as Tall' (https://open.spotify.com/album/218CJKDCszsQQj7Amk7vIu).

More information on The Nine Dots Prize, including the publication announcement for Trish's book on the Soro Soke generation in Africa, appearing in May 2022, can be found here: https://ninedotsprize.org

A recent UNICEF study on what it feels like to be young in today's world can be found here: https://changingchildhood.unicef.org
And Africa's 'youthquake' is discussed here: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/9781800241589?gC=5a105e8b&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI-v6zgof49AIVdIFQBh2_fwCdEAQYAyABEgKJB_D_BwE

The story of how Jesus College, Cambridge, returned a Benin bronze to Nigeria, discussed in this episode, is here:
https://www.jesus.cam.ac.uk/articles/jesus-college-returns-benin-bronze-world-first

In this episode we discover how words move us. Literally.

Dr Charlotte Lee is a Senior Lecturer in German at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at the University of Cambridge, but just lately she’s stepped beyond her academic boundaries to ask everyone from neuroscientists, to dancers, to tiny children, more about the transporting power of poetry.

Working in three languages, and across disciplines, her current research tries to discover how writers make us physically feel things that we only read about, and how our brain dances along to textual rhythms even when our bodies remain sitting still in a library chair.

From the Ancient Greeks to nursery rhymes to hip hop, literature is always moving to the beat. But we’re only just discovering where it could take us.

Learn more:

Find out more about the New Hall Art Collection, the location for this episode, here https://www.murrayedwards.cam.ac.uk/about/new-hall-art-collection

The 'Watching Dance' project (http://www.watchingdance.org/) is an excellent resource for understanding principles such as kinesis and kinaesthetic empathy as discussed in this episode.

'Dance of the Muses' (http://www.danceofthemuses.org/) offers danced reconstructions of Ancient Greek choral poetry.

At Cambridge, the Baby Rhythm Project of the Centre for Neuroscience in Education (https://www.cnebabylab.psychol.cam.ac.uk/) is elucidating the central role of rhythm in language acquisition in babies.

Charlotte Lee's 2017 article on Klopstock and Goethe explores the relationship between poetry and movement (MOVEMENT AND EMBODIMENT IN KLOPSTOCK AND GOETHE - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/glal.12172)

Her first book, also discussed in this episode, is a study of Goethe's last works and can be found here: (www.mhra.org.uk/publications/gl-5).