The Inner Lives of Cultures conference, February 25-6 2010, brought together keynote speaker Tzvetan Todorov, leading lights from the academy in all its many shades, filmmakers, authors, translators, and cultural relations practitioners from around the world.
Here you can stream video of contributions from Ramin Jahanbegloo, Alena Ledeneva, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, and Sun Shuyun.
This is a complete recording of Tzvetan Todorov's keynote address, Unity of civilization, plurality of cultures, given at Counterpoint's The Inner Lives of Cultures conference in Brussels, 25 February 2010.
To coincide with Counterpoint's ongoing exploration of the British Council film archive of the 30s through 50s, we asked British Council employees to recount their experiences of using films as part of their work.
David Evans, who worked for the British Council from 1965-2002, here describes his memories of working with films abroad, and the far-reaching benefits, hilarity, even outrage, that ensued from their use. Vividly describing the practical ways in which British films made their way into diverse communities around the world, by providing for example, the resonant image of a field ambulance converted into a travelling projectionist's van to tour films overseas in the 40s, David's observations also speak of the constructed nature of every culture's visual sensibility, and the role of film in the active structuring of cultural memory and identity.
Current research about ‘gangs’ explores the role of ethnicity/race, religion, politics and territory in gang formation, concepts of youth and masculinity, and the emergence of female gang members. A variety of approaches (sociological, psychological and biological) have been employed to explain the phenomenon of gang culture.
In recent years Tibet has been caught in conflicting flows of international media exposure. High profile pop-cultural and civic movements in support of Tibet have by no means stopped a surfeit of stereotypes being levelled at its cultural universe. Sun Shuyun, author, filmmaker, and a participant at Counterpoint’s recent The Inner Lives of Cultures conference is interviewed here on Bloomberg television about the 12 months she spent in a remote Tibetan village resulting in the television series A Year in Tibet, and book of the same name.
Sun Shuyun’s insightful impressions of Tibet cover: the intermingling of tradition and technology; the everyday interdependence of science and faith; liberal attitudes towards private life, polyandry and polygamy; the ongoing battle between government control and community life, and the encroachment of a particular cultural modernity into the monasteries.
Students on the MA in Advanced Theatre Practise at the Central School of Speech and Drama are developing Whose Cloud is it Anyway? a durational performance project that takes Charles Leadbeater's critique of Cloud Culture for Counterpoint as its starting point.
Counterpoint has collaborated with Prospect magazine to produce a special supplement in the March 2010 issue of Prospect dedicated to investigating how advances in neuroscience are changing how we think about ourselves and our relationships with others. It is increasingly clear that neuroscience is providing radical new interpretations of how we learn to be, to play, to relate, and to learn. At the same time we need to get past the hardwired vs softwired binary to realise that productive future work will come through a combination of neuroscience's research, and cultural study.
The work of Rebacca Saxe, which she describes in this fascinating TED talk, is a good example of how neuroscience is revolutionising how we think about being human and the human social sphere. Saxe is a cognitive neuroscientist who, while still a graduate student, made the breakthrough discovery that: “There is a region in the human brain, in your brains, whose job it is to think about other people’s thoughts.” She now researches the region of the brain that she discovered, at MIT’s Saxelab, exploring how human minds interact.
The actions of the Christmas Day bomber, supposedly ‘radicalised’ while studying at the University of London, have renewed debate about the relationship between education, radicalisation and security. Through mass student surveys, expert interviews, and focus groups this Counterpoint project will seek to analyse what “radicalism on campus” across the UK looks like today. The study will be one of the first to specifically look at student perspectives, and will broaden current debate about Islamic Radicalism on campus, by looking at radical activity in all its forms.
Current debate remains centred on whether we should ‘police’ students or respect their freedom, with the issue being framed solely in terms of religion, and more specifically, Islam. The following links are a useful starting point for understanding the issues surrounding this debate.
