Last night we hosted a screening of Jaak Kilmi’s fantastic film ‘Disco and Atomic War’. We hired one of the Curzon screens, sent out invites and hoped that people would be as intrigued as we’d been by the title..
It may be a case of collective narcissism, but the past couple of years have seen us all enthralled by the extraordinary insights of neuroscience. Stem-cell research and human enhancement drugs may revolutionise what we can be and do in the near future, but neuroscience makes a special play for our affections by promising to revolutionise our self-understanding. But we must be careful about abstracting the neurological from the cultural and social context in which it occurs.
Counterpoint is turning the spotlight on the interplay of culture and class today. In Culture and Class John Holden argues that it is essential we forge a new relationship between the two, asserting the central role of culture in the creation of a more egalitarian society. Free download of the pamphlet after the jump.
Counterpoint invites you to the launch of John Holden’s pamphlet Culture and Class at The Circus Space on 7 September. In a debate chaired by Catherine Fieschi, Director Counterpoint, the panel and guests will be discussing the urgent questions around the role of culture in the promotion of social justice, in the Creation Studio of the UK’s premier circus school.
The travails of ethnic Uzbeks in Southern Kyrgyzstan may have (briefly) brought Uzbekistan into the media spotlight recently, but Uzbekistan, from the outside, is not a place we know all that well. Uzbekness: from otherness to ideology, a paper by Hamid Ismailov - emigre poet, novelist and Writer in Residence at the BBC World Service - provides an insider's view.
Tzvetan Todorov gave the keynote address at Counterpoint's The Inner Lives of Cultures conference in Brussels, 25 February 2010. This is a complete recording of the address, entitled Unity of civilization, plurality of cultures.
Benjamin Barber, Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, Director of CivWorld and Senior Fellow at Demos US spoke to Catherine Fieschi of Counterpoint in this two part interview. In the first section of the interview he talks about the role of the arts in a capitalist society.
In part two, Benjamin Barber discusses the impact of Barack Obama since being elected US President over a year ago.
Cultural relations is about conversations between people. There was no lack of this at Counterpoint's recent The Inner Lives of Cultures conference in Brussels. For two days Counterpoint brought together keynote speaker Tzvetan Todorov, leading lights from the academy, authors, filmmakers, scientists and cultural relations practitioners from around the world. They were there to decipher the whispered, or tacit, discourses of individual cultures, so the dialogue between us all can become deeper, more informed, and more productive. Speakers from Mexico, Brazil, Uzbekistan, Russia, Romania, China, India, Indonesia, Turkey, Egypt, and Iran dug up and thought through cultural secrets.
Alena Ledeneva, Professor of Politics and Society at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, talks here at Counterpoint's the Inner lives of Cultures conference, about the realities lying behind Russia's layered soviet-era social paradoxes.
Video streaming after the jump.
