Tag Archives: BIH

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Apply Now: Birkbeck Institutes Internships – deadline Monday 1st October 2018

Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities
and
Birkbeck Institute for Social Research

Generic Skills Training for PhD Students: Two Part-Time Internships

The Birkbeck Institute for Social Research (BISR) and the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities (BIH) are cross-School interdisciplinary research centres that act as a hub for research at Birkbeck and beyond. We are currently recruiting for interns to take part in our 2018/19 paid internship programme. We are looking for two current Birkbeck PhD students from the Schools of Law, Arts and SSHP who will be required to work for approximately 3.5 hours per week during term time, which equates to 30 weeks total over the academic year.

The interns will work both independently and alongside the Manager of the two Institutes and the three Directors to gain experience of working within a professional environment with a variety of academic and professional staff. Their tasks will include:

  • Assisting with the organisation and promotion of events, workshops, and conferences for the Institutes.
  • Organising the Birkbeck Graduate Conference alongside your fellow interns, with the support of the Institute Manager.
  • Event logistics – ensuring the Institutes’ events run smoothly on the day (including meeting and greeting visiting speakers and guests, setting up seminar rooms, assisting with audio visual requirements.
  • Writing for and maintaining the Institute blog, including interview and event posts, and the organisation and editing of guest posts from other students and academics.
  • Website maintenance for both Institutes; maintaining comprehensive online resources and archives of the work that we do.
  • Producing monthly email campaigns and newsletters and using social media platforms to publicise BISR and BIH events.

The internship provides an extensive training programme covering the entire process of disseminating research across multiple platforms, helping students to develop invaluable generic skills that will contribute to their future academic careers.

The deadline to apply is 10am on Monday 1. October 2018.

Prospective candidates are expected to familiarise themselves with the work of both Institutes. For more information, required skills, salary, and details on how to apply, please visit the BIH or BISR websites:

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bih/aboutus/bih-bisr-interns

Birkbeck is an equal opportunities employer and encourages applications from all candidates irrespective of their sex, race, disability, sexual orientation, age, religion or belief. Birkbeck is a member of the ‘positive about disability’ two ticks scheme and guarantees to interview all candidates who meet the essential criteria for the post.

For enquiries please contact Lou Miller, Birkbeck Institutes Manager (lou.miller@bbk.ac.uk)

Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities
Birkbeck Institute for Social Research

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Call for Papers: Are we Living in an Age of Distraction? – Deadline: 26 April 2018

Call for Papers: Are we Living in an Age of Distraction?

Graduate Student Conference
Organized by Birkbeck Institute of Humanities, Birkbeck Institute for Social Research and Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality

Birkbeck, University of London (Room, TBA)
Keynote Speakers TBA

8 & 9 June 2018

Deadline: 26 April 2018
Please send a 200 word abstract for papers of 15 minutes and a 50 word biography to bisr@bbk.ac.uk

This conference explores distraction and all its meanings and implications. Distraction is commonly thought of as a growing concern or even a sickness of modern society and digital culture. From mindless scrolling to heavy consumerism, the pursuit for entertainment and satisfaction is insatiable, leaving us vulnerable to ruling corporations. Does our lack of control transform us into a conformed mass that is susceptible to tabloid media and the rise of populism? On the other hand, distraction is not necessarily steeped in negativity. In fact, it has had a long and fascinating history. Its German equivalent, ‘Zerstreuung’, comes from the idea of dispersion. At the start of the twentieth-century, Walter Benjamin defined the term as ‘floating attention’, where experience is caused by chance rather than concentration. Does lack of focus in fact allow a sense of freedom and inspiration?

Age of Distraction is a chance for an enriching discussion between MA, PhD students and early career researchers from all disciplines.

Topics to include:

  • History of distraction
  • Distraction and its oppositions
  • Distraction and/in Education
  • Distraction and madness
  • Modes of Extremism: online or in reality?
  • Democracy, populism, and online social networking
  • Freedom of speech v. government and/or regulatory control
  • Misinformation and fake news
  • Dystopia/ an Orwellian society
  • Distraction and creativity
  • Escapism, dream and day-dream
  • Feigned ignorance or ‘Turning a blind eye’
  • Emotional responses
  • Procrastination, boredom and solitude
  • Wandering and ‘killing time’
  • Inspiration, chance and serendipity

Of course, distraction can be considered from numerous perspectives:

Arts and Humanities

Distraction as a literary theme can be found in many forms, from dystopia to escapist fiction. Reading itself has been thought to have a negative impact on cognitivity and morality, the development of the popular novel suspected as a dangerous commodity. After WW1, new cinema and photography brought a wave of anxiety about modern man’s splintered focus and new perceptions. Distraction could also be a curse and blessing to the creative process, especially in the pursuit of originality. Diderot wrote in his Encyclopédie that: ‘Distraction arises from an excellent quality of the understanding, which allows the ideas to strike against, or reawaken one another’. How does this statement apply to areas such as writing, painting or film-making? Is writer’s block and procrastination a suspended state in which ideas are waiting to ‘reawaken’ or simply a result of laziness and denial?

Social Sciences

Although social media has given a platform to previously unheard voices, it is also susceptible to manipulation, as recent scandals have made clear. In this context, to what extent can social media still be considered a progressive platform for political action?  Should social media be regulated, and if so how, by whom and on what criteria? Does today’s open platform really represent shared global perspectives, or does it magnify the voice of those who already have power and influence? How does use of social media relate to dominant economic ideologies, and the ‘neoliberalisation’ of leisure time and social relations?

There is widespread concern that social media can be a major source of ‘mass distraction’ from real life conditions. Today’s technological advances raise a number of concerns: In what ways do social media influence public opinion and political participation, and do they provide channels for public deliberation? Is scepticism becoming dominant in response to the rise of the concept of ‘fake news’? Are social scientists equipped with adequate theoretical tools to make sense of the sociopolitical changes accompanying unceasingly evolving communication technologies?

Law and Criminology  

Distraction is also relevant to our legal and criminal justice system. Last year, the English High Court in Monroe v Hopkins [2017] EWHC had to decide what constitutes ‘serious harm’ following a Twitter war between Jack Monroe and Katie Hopkins. Legislatures around the world are examining Facebook’s internal policies and procedures as they relate to the dissemination of extremist material, hate speech and bullying. Constitutionally protected rights to freedom of speech and expression are clashing with individual claims asking for respect for private and family life.  What is becoming clear is that traditional legal frameworks regulating twentieth century media are not adapt to a twenty first century world. From this perspective, the law now needs to consider both ‘the distracted’ and ‘the distractor’. Inevitably, topics that critically engage with privacy and surveillance, control society and fundamental human rights need to be discussed.

Food and refreshments will be available.

The annual Birkbeck Graduate Conference is organised by the the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research, the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality. The Institutes’ interns for the current academic year take the lead on organising the conference.

Meet our interns for 2017-18: Azzam Al Kassir, Harooon Forde, Devin Frank, Pauline Suwanban.

We are currently recruiting PhD students to join the Working Party to help organise the conference. If you are a current Birkbeck PhD student and are interested in gaining the experience of organising an international conference please contact us on .

Previous conferences:

 

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CILAVS: International Conference Border Subjects/Global Hispanisms

CILAVS has the pleasure to invite you to the

International Conference

Border Subjects/Global Hispanisms

24-25 November 2017

Clore Management Lecture Theatre, Clore Management Centre

Birkbeck, University of London

London WC1E 7JL

Organised by the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies, CILAVS, and the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, BIH

This conference brings together scholars, curators, filmmakers, writers and post-graduate students from Latin America and the Caribbean, the United States, Europe and the UK to explore the emergence, nature and redefinitions of Border Subjects in the globalized Hispanic world from the Early Modern period to our current situation.

Attendance free but booking essential. Click here for more information and to book.

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Call for Papers – Crossing Borders: Negotiation, Provocation, and Transgression Deadline 7 Feb 2017

Birkbeck Institute for Social Research

in collaboration with

Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities

Call for Papers – Crossing Borders: Negotiation, Provocation, and Transgression

Birkbeck Institute Graduate Conference, Birkbeck, University of London, 5-6th May 2017

Supported by the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research

Call for papers deadline: 7 February 2017

Across the globe, borders are once again being erected, entrenched, and enlarged in order to contain, as well as to subject to the perpetual surveillance apparatus, people considered threats to the integrity of the national and supra-national state. From Calais to Lesbos, the camp has returned with a vengeance in Europe, supported by dubious claims for security. The spectre of the Jihadist and economic migrant haunts the political imaginary of the ‘advanced’ nations of Western Europe, who now spare no mercy for those displaced by civil war, environmental disaster, or material immiseration. Areas of conflict are increasingly being captured by drones, which, crucial for security, are profoundly redefining the borders between state, civil society, and privacy. Yet the very instantiation of the border speaks to and raises the possibility of its being breached, of forms of traversal, of lines of flight. This could be the contested borderland, a zone of indiscernibility where state violence regulates the movement of capital and labour, as in the case of the Mexico-US border and the region of Kashmir. It could also be the borderless world of ubiquitous data collection, which, paradoxically is recorded and stored in obscurely located and highly centralised data centres. Or, the faltering border between the conscious and the unconscious, whereby libidinal drives perpetually upset any stable sense of the sovereign self. Finally, ‘crossing borders’ poses a temporal question, directed to conceptions of historical change, the unpredictable instant of revolution which in shattering the known retroactively constitutes a border.

This conference is a call to intellectual arms, then, a provocation to think geographical, political, bodily, technological, and environment borders. What constitutes a border, how are they stabilised, and how can they be crossed, negotiated or transgressed? How are borders enacted, defined and re-defined by surveillance, technology, regulations and resistance? Are borders necessarily the logic of a colonial structure of thought, predicated on capture, division, and domination? How else might difference be thought and engaged? What is the discourse, language, imagery of the border? How are human bodies reciprocally shaped by the social environment? What model of the psyche can help us understand the rich diversity of socio-political mechanisms? How can we cross the border of rationality in order to explore and release the unconscious factors in our sense-making? And, crucially, how can we as academics cross institutional and disciplinary borders? We welcome submissions from all disciplines, and especially encourage contributions from artists and activists.

Suggested topics, but by no means exclusive to:

  • Approaching the Fortress State: Migrants, Asylum Seekers, and Refugees.
  • Borderlands, Hinterlands, No-Man’s Land: Contested Borders.
  • Settlements of the Border: Walls, Camps, Gates, and Occupation.
  • Media Ecologies: Governance, Surveillance, and Hacking in the Anthropocene.
  • Geographies of Data: Drones, Data Centres, and The Digital Commons.
  • Borders and the Case of Psychoanalysis.
  • Psychosocial Methodologies.
  • Climate Change.
  • Transnational and Transcultural Aesthetic Forms.
  • Fictions of Passage.
  • Theorists of Flight, Movement, and Non-Transcendent Crossings.
  • Caste, Class, Gender, Race, Sexual Transgressions.
  • Borders of Time: Revolution, Reaction, Restoration.

Proposals are invited for twenty minute papers and panels of three papers. Abstract (300 words) should be submitted to crossingbordersgradconference@gmail.com by 7 February 2017.

Please also include a short bio (no more than 150 words), contact details, and institutional affiliation. Accepted proposals will be notified by 28 February 2017.

 

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Birkbeck Institute of Humanities Summer Term 2016 Programme

Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities

Masterclass: Heaven and Earth According to Breugel

1, 2 & 6 June 2016| 2-4pm | Birkbeck, University of London, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7HX. Malet Street main building, Room 421, Torrington Square main entrance.

Speaker: T. J. Clark, University of California, Berkeley

This Masterclass – which is spread over three sessions – will revolve around a painting by Bruegel, The Land of Cockaigne (Munich, Alte Pinakothek), done in 1567, the year the Duke of Alva brought a Spanish army to the Netherlands to try to end Protestant revolt in the colony. Bruegel’s painting is a vision of the hereafter, building on materials drawn from peasant culture, launched at a moment of bitter religious strife. An account of Bruegel’s imagining of heaven on earth, and of his wider treatment of Christian and other eschatologies, will form the first chapter of a book in preparation, Heaven on Earth: Bruegel, Giotto, Poussin, Veronese. The Masterclass will outline the preoccupations of the book, and its possible relevance in a time like the present, of renewed apocalyptic politics and wars of religion. Thinking about Bruegel and the other artists in the book is, among other things, my way of pursuing issues – of political temporality, and reform versus revolution – broached in an essay, ‘For A Left With No Future,’ published in New Left Review in 2012, and as a booklet in Brazil the following year.

Full details

This event is free and open to all and you can book your place using the links below.
You are welcome to join us for one or all of the sessions.

Session 1: Wednesday 1 June, 2-4pm.

Chair: Jacqueline Rose, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London

Free event open to all: Book your place

Session 2: Thursday 2 June, 2-4pm.
Chair: Lynda Nead, Birkbeck, University of London

Free event open to all: Book your place

Session 3: Monday 6 June, 2-4pm.
Chair: Fiona Candlin, Birkbeck, University of London

Free event open to all: Book your place

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Introducing the Birkbeck Institutes

Dear PhD Student,

You may already have heard about the Birkbeck Institutes and the exciting wide ranging events we present. We comprise three different Institutes (BIH, BISR, BIMI) working separately and sometimes collaboratively presenting talks, seminars, symposia and conferences reflecting the research of the academic staff at Birkbeck.

Please sign up to the mailing list to be the first to hear about the events:

You can also befriend the Institutes on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

Some events are specifically aimed at PhD students, such as the “Developing Your Research Career” series of workshops and the “Birkbeck Institute Graduate Conference” (to be held April/May 2016). All our events are open to you as well as to the public and we hope that you will come along or even take part where appropriate.

Best wishes,

Julia Eisner, Sarah Joshi and Reina Goodwin-van der Wiel, Institute Managers

The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities (BIH) aims, through its events and activities, to engage with important public issues of our time as well as fostering and promoting a climate of interdisciplinary research and collaboration among academics and researchers. It promotes new ideas and forms of understanding in the humanities. It invites prominent writers, broadcasters and public figures to spend short periods at the Institute and engages the highly rated Birkbeck Humanities research departments in cross-disciplinary work.

The Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) is a response to the growing interest in film and the moving image across the College. Through public events and academic research initiatives, BIMI will address a wide variety of contemporary issues, particularly those relevant to its interdisciplinary structure.  Working closely with the Birkbeck Cinema, BIMI programmes public screenings and special seasons, making use of 35 mm film in addition to the Cinema’s high quality DVD projection.

The Birkbeck Institute for Social Research (BISR) is the focal point for social research at Birkbeck, and a hub for the dissemination and discussion of social research in London and beyond. Our distinctively critical and socially-engaged approach to social research is organised around five themes, each of which has a global/comparative dimension: social, psychosocial and feminist theory and methods; social movements, citizenship, policy and participation; subjectivity, intimacy, life-course and home; place, nation and environment; and media, culture, communication and learning.

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