Public lectures

There are two sets of plenary lectures at Emmanuel College that are open to the public, listed below. (The symposium is by invitation only.)

All are very welcome to attend the public lectures.

Monday, 8th September 2014

4.30-6.30pm, Queen’s Building Lecture Theatre, Emmanuel College [map], University of Cambridge, St Andrew’s Street, Cambridge

Professor John Urry, Lancaster University
Offshoring as a way of undermining the Commons?

Offshoring has become a pervasive feature of contemporary societies, posing huge challenges both for governments and citizens. Elements of contemporary offshoring come in diverse forms – in work, finance, pleasure, waste, emissions, energy, security, and taxation – but each generates new patterns of power, reducing responsibilities for a privileged and powerful ‘offshore class,’ and undermining the possibilities of democratic governance. The offshore secret worlds that result directly or indirectly undermine various kinds of ‘commons’. But can offshoring of these commons, and the dark side of globalization, be resisted and reversed? John Urry explores the potential for ‘reshoring’ such commons, for strengthening democracy and for promoting low carbon futures.

Professor Natalie Fenton, Goldsmiths College, University of London
‘Politics in Common’ in the Digital Age

In opposition to the neoliberal destruction of solidarities, a new progressive collectivism has begun to emerge, re-establishing the idea of the demos in a way that challenges many of the assumptions of liberal democracy. The internet has played an important role in these emergent publics, enabling the return of a critical discourse based on inequality and the destruction of public goods. But it has also revealed crucial problems in the realization of mediated solidarity and collective politics, and in particular the difficulties with the notion of ‘political value’ in this new commons. Natalie Fenton explores these issues in relation to pluralism and horizontalism, freedom and autonomy, solidarity and the problem of ‘politics in common’ in the digital age.

Tuesday, 9th September 2014

4.45-6.45pm, Queen’s Building Lecture Theatre, Emmanuel College [map], University of Cambridge, St Andrew’s Street, Cambridge

Alun Anderson, Senior Consultant, New Scientist
Who can own the Arctic?

By 2030 Arctic summer ice may be gone for good. Who can own the wealth that the retreating ice reveals? Environmental groups say it should be preserved for the world. Indigenous people insist that the Arctic can never belong to anyone else. Arctic nations seek to reserve power for themselves. Distant governments see commercial opportunities, whilst unexpected new links appear. At the same time, nature shows scant respect for agreements that divide the commons. As waters warm, fish flee north, disregarding fishery zones – leaving coastal nations searching for principles by which to parcel out this uncontrollably shifting commons. These phenomena are local manifestations of changes to the largest of our global commons – the atmosphere. Alun Anderson argues that the scale and time-course of climate change challenges human comprehension, whilst the fragmentation of academic disciplines and the failure to create a true digital commons militate against an appreciation of the Arctic’s message.

Professor Katherine Gibson, Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney
Postcapitalist practices of commoning and a performative politics of assemblage

We are currently witnessing both the destruction and formation of vastly different ways of constituting community, as some commons are enclosed or destroyed and others emerge and grow strong. As we face the challenge of acting ‘as a species’ within the multi-species community of life on this planet, it is ever more evident that our lack of ability to ‘common’ our atmosphere, to care for and take responsibility for what presently exists as an open access, unmanaged commons, threatens our very existence. It is time to rethink the possibilities for collective action, not only as a public with voice and vote, but as a community-without-essence in which making and sharing a commons is a living, participatory and never-settled commitment. Katherine Gibson argues for a reinvigorated language and politics of the commons, one that can bring to visibility practices of everyday commoning that operate at multiple scales from the planetary to the local.