What things are, and what things do

Güneş Tavmen and Hannah Barton

This interdisciplinary seminar will debate the role of ‘structuring structures’ in social and cultural contexts. The seminar will run from 2-5pm in the Keynes Library, and will be followed by a reception with wine and nibbles between 5-6pm.
The event will conclude with a free screening of Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon (1975) which will take place at <A TARGET="_blank" HREF="http://www.bbk.ac.uk/arts/about-us/our-building-and-arts-spaces/gordon-square-cinema" DATA-MSYS-CLICKTRACK="0" REL="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Birkbeck Cinema</A> from 6pm. All are welcome to attend. 
Media, in the broadest sense, provide ways and means of interpretation, influencing perceptions of matters social, political and ecological. How do complexes of structures – technologies of production, circulation, affiliation and definition – determine cultural narratives and shape the way we understand, interpret, and act in everyday life?
What things are refers to material structures and their affordances: as city planning is to free movement, as media technologies are to broadcasting, as hardware is to software, code and communities.
What things do refers to the sociological, affective and soft-cultural consequences of infrastructure, all of which relate to power.
What Things Are, and What Things Do will open a forum in which practitioners from the fields of sociology, media and cultural studies, critical writing and the arts can respond to this question, cultivating interdisciplinary responses, and initiating nascent conversations and lines of thought 
This event is organised by <A TARGET="_blank" HREF="http://www.bbk.ac.uk/birmac/2015/07/09/gunes-tavmen-digital-media-in-the-city-the-nature-and-limits-of-citizen-participation-and-open-data-in-a-smart-city/" DATA-MSYS-CLICKTRACK="0" REL="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Güneş Tavmen</A> and <A TARGET="_blank" HREF="http://www.bbk.ac.uk/birmac/2014/10/01/hannah-barton-understanding-internet-memes-as-discourse-strategies-within-a-networked-culture/" DATA-MSYS-CLICKTRACK="0" REL="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Hannah Barton</A>, doctoral students from Birkbeck's department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, who will be discussing their research during the seminar, and is supported by <A TARGET="_blank" HREF="http://www.bbk.ac.uk/birmac/" DATA-MSYS-CLICKTRACK="0" REL="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture (BIRMAC)</A>.
Invited Speakers: 
Dr Emily LaBarge is a writer and researcher, based in London. She has a PhD from the RCA, where she is currently a visiting lecturer. Her doctoral dissertation was entitled 'The Essay as Art Form', and straddled practice and thesis to examine the formal and structural relationships between the literary essay form and the work of art. She contributes to esse arts + opinions, Cambridge Humanities Review and The Photographer's Gallery blog, and teaches occasionally at Kingston University and Christie's Education, London. Her work is often interdisciplinary and collaborative: she is currently writing a chapter for a book about writers' bodies (The Body that Remains, Punctum, 2017), as well as a performance-based essay with artist Mary Hurrell, about Throbbing Gristle's ex-studio, The Death Factory.
<A TARGET="_blank" HREF="http://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/staff/mbarua.html" DATA-MSYS-CLICKTRACK="0" REL="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Dr Maan Barua</A> is a Research and Teaching Fellow at Sommerville College, Oxford. His research interests include cultural geography, postcolonial environmental history and political ecologies of biodiversity conservation. His doctoral research was on ‘The Political Ecology of Human-Elephant Relationships in India’ and his current postdoctoral research focuses on the fields of human and environmental geography. His current research engages with political economies of nature through ‘more-than-human’ perspectives.
Dr Lisa Mullen is currently a Wellcome Trust ISSF researcher at Birkbeck, where she is working on an interdisciplinary project examining how medical tools and technologies are felt and lived by patients and doctors. She is also preparing a monograph based on her doctoral thesis, entitled 'Midcentury Things: uncanny objects in British post-war literature and culture'.

Keynes Library

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