Seminars and events
Our regular interdisciplinary seminar series, teach-ins and conferences act as a focus for cooperative research for both staff and students and feature visiting and Glasgow-based speakers. The seminars and events are open to the public. Watch recordings of talks at the Centre here. A full archive of past seminars and events since 2009 can be found here.
Upcoming talks:
Thursday 6 February 2025, 4-5.30pm, Room 915, 42 Bute Gardens (formerly the Adam Smith Building), University of Glasgow
Andrew Smith on Class and the Uses of Poetry: Symbolic Enclosures
Respondents: Bridget Fowler and Les Back
Synopsis: How does it come about that, in George Orwell’s words, ‘the divorce between poetry and popular culture is accepted as a sort of law of nature’? Drawing on qualitative research conducted in and around Glasgow, Class and the Uses of Poetry explores how working-class readers engaged with, made sense of, and contested a sense of exclusion from, contemporary poetry. In doing so it sheds light on the symbolic enclosure of poetry, on how that enclosure takes shape in the encounter between readers and poems, but also on why poetry continues to matter. Through these conversations, and in further interviews with unpublished poets, it reflects on the creative and expressive affordances of poetry, on what can be done with poetry and what it can make possible.
Andrew Smith is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of C.L.R. James and the Study of Culture (2010), Racism and Everyday Life (2015) and Class and the Uses of Poetry (2024).
Bridget Fowler is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of The Alienated Reader: Women and Popular Romantic Literature in the Twentieth Century (1991), Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory (1997) and The Obituary as Collective Memory (2007).
Les Back is Professor of Sociology, and former Head of the Division of Sociological and Cultural Studies, at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of The Art of Listening (2007), Academic Diary: Or Why Higher Education Still Matters (2016), and co-author of Migrant City (2018) and The Unfinished Politics of Race (2022).
Friday 28th February, 11am-1pm, Room 412, East Quadrangle (Geography), University of Glasgow
Fred Carter, ‘Refusing the Nuclear Housework: Entropy, Crisis, & Marxist-feminist Aesthetics after 1973’
As an index of crisis, the year 1973 weighs heavily on Marxist theory. It is at once the apex of a long economic downturn and the crystallization of an emergent structure of feeling marked by energy shortages, secular stagnation, and spiraling financialisation. More recently, accounts of the 1970s have historicized this false summit of peak oil and its attendant anxieties around limits to growth as the entrenchment of relations between superfluous labour, fictitious capital, and fossil fuels that now come to constitute the energy impasse of the present (Diamanti 2021). Less frequently acknowledged, perhaps, is how the short-term growth of the fossil economy was subtended by offloading the costs of crisis onto the terrain of social reproduction in the form of fuel price hikes, welfare cuts, and nuclearisation. Miners’ strikes, rather than social struggles over housing, health, and care work, tend to bookend this decade of struggle.
Assembling an archive of Marxist-feminist print culture, radical poetics, and performance practice, this paper follows entropy as a figure of anxiety for growth. This “entropic tendency” (Vishmidt 2017), I argue, offers a distinctive “resource aesthetic” (Bellamy, Simpson, & O’Driscoll 2015) which renders the transition from postwar surplus to terminal crisis acutely legible. From the “refusal of nuclear housework” to the saboteurial impulse embodied in the “high-entropy worker,” the prospect of unavailable energy appears as a persistent problem for capital and an analogue for its structural incapacity to valorise forms of “unproductive” labour (Midnight Notes 1979). Taking up this figural form as an energetic and aesthetic category linked to limit, crisis, or exhaustion, entropy appears across Marxist-feminist praxis and practice in an indexical relation with “capital’s endemic tendency to devolve towards its own generalized crisis of reproduction” (Best 2021).
Fred Carter is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Glasgow, where he is a core member of the Infrastructure Humanities Group. His current monograph project, Poetry & Energy After 1973, traces the emergence of a poetics of exhaustion and politics of refusal against intersecting crises of petroleum, productivity, and social reproduction. He is director of the practice research residency FieldARTS and his first poetry chapbook, Outages, was published in May with Veer Press.
Friday 14th March, 11am-1pm, Room 412, East Quadrangle (Geography), University of Glasgow
Mitaja Chakraborty, ‘Engaging the field: meaning making in the local activism spaces in Dhaka, Bangladesh’
Feminists from the global south have put forth the idea of an anti-colonial feminist solidarity with an emphasis on the intersections of race, class, caste, sexuality, gender, nation and colonialism. This presentation draws from that feminist tradition to call attention to the methodological concerns of doing feminist research on labour in South Asia. Located in the Bangladeshi garment workers’ movements and local labour activist networks, this presentation foregrounds the role of activist spaces that sustain movements as well as families by replenishing the labour power, will and aspirations of an entire workforce. Being a well-researched ‘subject’ community for transnational rights organisations, garment workers and union leaders in Bangladesh are aware of and prepared to respond to the standard questions about their work and struggles whenever an international researcher visits the industrial belts in the suburbs of Dhaka.
In this presentation, I will explore the modalities of how feminist research can centre the concerns of labour and gender on “life-making” processes that unfold in the field. This not only requires one to record the field in its “thick descriptions” and the peculiarities of gendered care-work, but also to be mindful of that immersion and be cautious of the narratives of loss, labour and sympathy that the transnational campaigns weave. In doing so, I undertake a mixed methods approach where I contextualise the field through observations, interviews and secondary materials in the form of campaign reports and documentary movies. This paper proposes to recentre the work, union and community spaces as an important site of reproduction of labour power marking a shift from the conjugal/domestic spaces. In the process, this paper would also explore the complicated relationship between an international researcher and the workers, in a field as dynamic as the garment industry in Dhaka, where meaning making becomes a two-way process – between the main actors in the field and an outsider extending (fruitless) solidarity.
Mitaja Chakraborty is a Neil Davidson Postdoctoral Writing Fellow at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow. She has completed her PhD at the University of Hyderabad, India. Her thesis, titled “What Makes Garment(s) Work: Gendered labour and networks of struggle in the garment industry of Dhaka, Bangladesh”, looked at how worker subjectivities emerge and take shape in the industrial areas and shopfloors through work and labour movements. She has had the experience of teaching academic and research writing and courses of legal and social understanding of work in different universities in India. Her primary interest lies in the field of labour and gender history, feminist research methodologies, sociological writing and transnational networks of solidarity.
Friday 28th March, 11am-1pm, Room 412, East Quadrangle (Geography), University of Glasgow
Nahia Santander, ‘The Conquest of Political Freedom and Democracy in the Thought of the Young Lenin (1893-1905)’
This talk explores the question of the conquest of political freedom and democracy in Lenin’s thought, analysing his writings up to the first Russian revolution (1893-1905). It tries to shed light on the value and use of concepts such as tsarist autocracy, democratic revolution, revolutionary provisional government, people's sovereignty and democratic republic, studying the link of revolutionary Marxism with themes proper to the democratic and republican tradition. Starting from Lenin's reflections, it is shown that Social Democracy has not set itself up in opposition to democracy, but has made its full realisation its own, fighting for the masses of the people to conquer their right to rule.
Nahia Santander is a visiting PhD student, based at the Altamira Faculty of Social Sciences and Communication, University of the Basque Country
ALL WELCOME
For more information on the series, contact Vassiliki Kolocotroni and Dave Featherstone