Activities

Forthcoming Events

• Ignes Sodre - Imparadised in Hell: Idealisation, Erotisation and the Return of the Split-off
  This lecture will explore the use of physical illness and deterioration as metaphors for mental illness. Various pathological unconscious mechanisms of defence will be illustrated  through the use of examples from literature, mainly from Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Mann's Death in Venice.
  Wednesday 10th February  8.30pm - 10pm  Room B35  Birkbeck Main Building
  Free public lecture - EVENT NOW  FULL
  
  
  
• After Human Rights?  Panel Discussion
  This debate will examine, challenge and rethink the tension between ‘particular, nationally-bounded’ citizenship and ‘natural’ human rights drawing on the insights of theoretical and empirical scholarship and of the politics of human rights activism.
  Speakers:  Conor Gearty (LSE),  Costas Douzinas (Birkbeck), Adam Weiss (AIRE Centre - Advice on Individual Rights in Europe)
  Co-Chairs: Leah Bassel & Engin Isin
  Friday 26th February  6pm - 8pm  Room B36  Birkbeck Main Building
  Free - open to all - no registration
  
  
  
• Slavoj Zizek - "On the Idea of Communism - A Year After"
  Monday 1st March 2.30pm  Room B34  Birkbeck Main Building
  EVENT IS NOW FULL
  
  
  
• Etienne Balibar - “Cosmopolitanism and secularism. Working Hypotheses”
  Thursday 6th May  2.30pm Room B33 Birkbeck Main Building
  Free - open to all - no registration
  

Recent Events (for earlier events see tabs on the left)

• Latin America, Historical Memory and Universal Justice - Screening and talk with Baltasar Garzón
  Judge Baltasar Garzón will be speaking about Latin America and universal justice after a screening of “El alma de los verdugos” (2007, 105’, no English subtitles). Garzón collaborated with Spanish journalist Vicente Romero to create this documentary about Argentinian and Chilean repression which presents the testimonies of victims as well as those responsible for torture and other crimes.
  Please note: This event will be entirely in Spanish.
  Saturday, 9 January 2010   2 pm – 5 pm.   Clore Lecture Theatre, Birkbeck Clore Management Centre, Torrington Square, London WC1. Free - open to all - no registration
• The Shape of Water - Film Screening and Q&A with the director.
  Documentary by first-time film maker, Kum-Kum Bhavnani, narrated by Susan Sarandon interweaves intimate stories and compelling footage of six women living in Senegal, Brazil, India, and Jerusalem. The women:
  • spearhead rainforest preservation (rubber-tappers in Brazilian rainforest);
  • sustain a co-operative of 700,000 rural women (world’s largest trades union, India);
  • promote an end to female genital cutting (women abandoning this practice, Senegal);
  • oppose war and the occupation of Palestine (Women In Black, Jerusalem);
  • maintain Navdanya farm (Himalayan foothills) to further biodiversity and women’s role as seed keepers
  Friday 22nd January  6.30pm  Room B36  Birkbeck Main Building
  Register by emailing Julia Eisner j.eisner@bbk.ac.uk
  http://www.theshapeofwatermovie.com
• Ignes Sodre - Unconscious Phantasies of "Cure" and the Therapeutic Aims of Psychoanalysis Tuesday 26th January  1pm - 3pm  Room 153 Birkbeck Main BuildingFree - open to all - no registration
• Rethinking Childhood/Children in the 21st Century - 2 day conference
  We used to know what a child was. The social history of childhood was a product of the 20th century and its new focus on the social construction of cultural categories.  The “child” became the ultimate insider's outsider.  In psychology and law, notions of the “best interest” of the child came to define the actual social position of the child.  The rise of middle class values that seemed to obsessively center on the child, in the West as well as in Asia, defined the “best interest” in ways that stressed material values.  This focus lead to further obsessions about mass childhood abuse as well as the representations of the child as the object of trauma from the concentration camps to the Upper West Side. (See the spate of faked or forged holocaust autobiographies such as Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments or the extraordinarily popular novels of Jodi Picoult).
  In retrospect the invention of childhood seems from the standpoint of the 21st century as too easy, too obvious, too reductive, too uncritical.  The conference will bring together a wide range of scholars and practioners from history, law, literature, psychology, sociology to examine the older meanings of childhood and the new attempts to rethink this category in society, both west and east.  One focus will be on public scholarship.  We will examine the literal representations of childhood in the new wave of “museums of childhood” and their reinvention over the past decade.
  Thursday 4th February & Friday 5th February   Registration and all other details http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bih/news/childhood