Words on the Move 3

The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities (BIH) is an interdisciplinary institute within Birkbeck, University of London which engages with important public issues of our time through a series of open debates, lectures, seminars and conferences. The Institute attempts to promote new ideas and forms of understanding in the humanities, hosting many events with the highly rated Birkbeck Humanities research departments in cross-disciplinary work. It also provides short-term fellowships for a small number of scholars from Britain and overseas, chosen in open competition and invites prominent writers, broadcasters and public figures to spend short periods at the Institute.Bookings for our events are being taken via Eventbrite. Important Information: Eventbrite is a privately run platform for event booking. By booking via Eventbrite you will become an Eventbrite user, and your data will be processed by them as described in theirprivacy policy. In addition please note that data you regarding your booking and attendance at this event will be passed from Eventbrite to Birkbeck and processed in line with thisprivacy notice.Join the mailing list here - be the first to hear about our events

Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities

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Oh Lord! Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood
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SPEAKERS: David Herd (University of Kent), Fran Lock (Birkbeck), Steve Willey (Birkbeck), Daniela Cascella (Sheffield Hallam University), Luke Williams (Birkbeck),  Marina Warner (Birkbeck), and Julia Bell (Birkbeck). 
Digital systems of communication hold out a promise of cross-border, cross-cultural and genre-blurring freedom of expression, but are intertwined with techniques of surveillance and information-gathering that are more intrusive than ever before. The new media give space to individual voices from parts of the world which can be isolated or remote - geographically, historically, and socially - and they are the principal channels by which displaced people access knowledge, visibility/audibility, and can make a claim on public awareness. At the same time, however, the same knowledge systems expose speakers/writers and their communities to scrutiny. Edouard Glissant has explored the idea of ‘opacity’ in language as a powerful shelter from exploitation and oppression, and in his book, Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language, the bilingual Moroccan scholar Abdelfattah Kilito has discussed the position of strength afforded in colonial condition when the masters do not know the language.
This workshop will explore the potential and consequences of expanded digital communications for expression today, in relation to the rise of English as a global mono-language. It is third in the series of workshops, Words on the Move, which take place at Birkbeck alongside the project <A HREF="http://www.storiesintransit.org" TARGET="_blank" DATA-MSYS-CLICKTRACK="0" REL="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Stories in Transit</A> in Palermo, Sicily. Thousands and thousands of people today have been unhomed by war, famine, and other circumstances, and we are exploring what words in motion can do to forge relations to self and community, and how they may offer some degree of shelter. 
Programme
14:30: Welcome and Introduction (Marina Warner, Steve Willey, Luke Williams)
14:45: ‘Making Space for the Human,’ by Professor David Herd (University of Kent).
Professor Herd’s paper will address the intersection between Arendt, Olson and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - the urgent interdisciplinary effort, in other words, to arrive at a language from which nobody might fall out. This paper proposes that words help forge relations between self and community and therefore offer some degree of shelter.
15:30: ‘Halting sites: Memory, Mourning and Archives,’ by Fran Lock (Birkbeck)
Introduction by Steve Willey
Traveller communities, whose settlements are, by their very nature, transitory, leave no corresponding trace or wound on the physical landscape. If we think of public space as a container for cultural heritage, then Traveller communities, their histories, and their memories, remain uninscribed, and are edited out of the mapping of that heritage. This invisibility has its analogue in archival space where Traveller existence is hedged by legislation at every turn, while remaining, in the most profound sense, “missing” from official narratives of Northern Irish history.
Fran Lock’s paper will explore digital space as a site and occasion for resisting the official archive’s postcolonial instrumentality, as a potential “halting site” where the apparent anonymity of digital space works against the compulsory visibility demanded from us inside of the institutions and systems that administer our existence. Might the internet afford us a freedom of movement that has no parallel in the material world; a model of co-existence in which Traveller communities are not forced to enter into an embattled spatial negotiation with the sedentary world? And in this pause, might digital space offer a site for ethical grieving, or does the loosing of our archives from their spatial bonds, homogenising their fragmented testimonies into smoothly scrolling data, blunt the archive’s capacity for moral witness and risk re-inscribing Traveller invisibility?
16:15: Tea, Coffee and Biscuits
16:30: ‘Chimeras, Stains, and Nosegays,’ by Daniela Cascella (Sheffield Hallam University) 
Introduction by Luke Williams
This presentation will ask how it is possible to begin and fabulate in the absence of shared, or clear cultural references. Using listening/mishearing and transmission/interference as devices, Cascella will generate meaning and question notions of origin and purity. She will present her ideas through an informal talk, a reading (one short essay and one experimental piece) and the playing of audio recordings from digital archives which she has used in recent writing.
17:15: Roundtable: ‘Literature on the Web: Self-exposure, Self-concealment?’
Speakers: Julia Bell, Steve Willey, Luke Williams (Birkbeck)
Chair: Marina Warner (Birkbeck)

18:30: Wine Reception
Marina Warner writes fiction and cultural history. Her books include From the Beast to the Blonde (1994) and Stranger Magic: Charmed States and The Arabian Nights (2011; winner of the National Book Critics Circle award, the Sheykh Zayed Prize and the Truman Capote award). She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, Professorial Research Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies, a Fellow of the British Academy, President of the Modern Humanities Research Association for 2018, and was elected President of the Royal Society of Literature in 2017. In 2015, she was awarded the Holberg Prize in the Arts and Humanities, and in 2017 she was given a World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award, and a British Academy Medal
Please note: this event will be recorded - live audio recording will take place.

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Words on the Move 3

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