Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures - events

OCTOBER --

·      Flor De María Gamboa Solís: ‘”Femininity, fright, madness”: a paradigmatic circuit of the ghostly’
Tues 4 October, 5-6.30pm, 2.016/017 Arthur Lewis Building. Organised by RICC and MFTN (Manchester Feminist Theory Network).
“Femininity, fright, madness” is a circuit that can be translated into a threefold structure for thinking about the ghostly realm. This can model and order our way of understanding meanings and our sense of the frightening, spooky, horrifying and delirious results from such experiences. The key element enabling this circuit to function is the image of the castrated woman imbedded in psychoanalysis. This presentation looks at “The lost ghost”, a classic ghost story by Mary E. Wilkins, and attempts to dismantle the interconnections between the three terms in order to reveal why femininity is the fuel of the ghostly.

Flor de María Gamboa Solís is Professora-Investigadora de la Facultad de Psicologia de la Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolas de Hidalgo, Morelia, Mexico

·      Workshop - Haneen Maikey: 'Homonationalism, Pinkwashing, and the Palestinian Struggle
Tues 18 October, 10-11.30am, 2.016/017 Arthur Lewis Building. Organised by RICC and MFTN.
Full details of the workshop and readings will be circulated soon. Please email caitriona.devery@manchester.ac.uk if you are interested in attending. Haneen Maikey is the Director of alQaws Centre for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society, Jerusalem, a group of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, questioning and queer (LGBTQ) Palestinian activists who work collaboratively to break down gendered and heteronormative barriers in Palestinian society. She is also co-founder of the political movement of the Palestinian Queers for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions [PQBDS]. PQBDS is a group of Palestinian queer activists who live in the Palestinian Occupied Territory and inside Israel, who came together to promote and stand for the Palestinian civil society call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel.

Related event: Haneen Maikey will also give the Seventh Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture at Manchester Metropolitan University: ‘Queer politics and the Palestinian struggle: Ten years of activism’ on Monday 17 October, 6pm in Lecture Theatre C0.14 of John Dalton Building. Details:  http://www.discourseunit.com/hurndall.pdf

NOVEMBER --

·      Dirk Uffelmann (University of Passau): ‘Wrong Sex and the City: Polish Migration and Masculinity’
Mon 14 Nov, 4-5.30pm, Venue TBC. Organised by RICC and ITS (Institute for Transnational Studies)
This paper aims to discuss challenges to traditional models of masculinity in the wake of migration to Western metropolises. Drawing on examples from recent literary production by (and about) Polish migrants to Germany (Becker, Knapp, Muszer, Rudnicki), the UK (Bolec, Koziarski, Kropiwnicki, Sędzikowski) and Ireland (Wojnarowski), it explores how male migrants are deprived of (seemingly) secure masculine roles when confronted with a subaltern position as unskilled migrant workers. Special attention is paid to the modes of literary compensation for subalternity: carnivalisation (Bakhtin), the picaresque hero, mimicry (Bhabha), Signifying (Gates), self-orientalisation (Khalid) and so on.

·      Postgraduate Workshop: Ethics of Internet Research
Mon 21 Nov, 9:30am-5pm, University of Manchester
A postgraduate workshop organised by the Manchester Digital Media Network (MDMN), RICC, and sponsored by methods@manchester.
The question of ethics of online research is particularly challenging for postgraduate students working on digital media. As a new social field the Internet has only recently been addressed as a specific site that requires its own rules of conduct and there is still much ambiguity as to how to treat online materials (as public or private; anonymous or identifiable; as owned by individual users or by platforms and corporations). The aim of this workshop is to familiarise postgraduate students working on the Internet and staff who supervise such projects with the emerging literature and ongoing debates on ethics and challenges of online research; to present different possible approaches to ethics; and to develop necessary skills to formulate and solve ethical issues with their own, context-specific, projects.  This full-day workshop is based on three masterclasses with leading national and international experts, and an open session where participants can discuss their own research. Participation is free but registration is required as the number of places is limited. If you are interested in participating, please contact Caitriona Devery at caitriona.devery@manchester.ac.uk

·      Heather Latimer: ‘Reproductive Cosmopolitics in Maria Full of Grace and In America’
Wed 23 Nov, 3-5pm, Venue TBC, Organised by RICC and MFTN.
            Heather received her PhD in 2010 from Simon Fraser University, in Burnaby, Canada, and joined RICC as a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow. Her research examines reproductive politics, literary and visual culture, and representations of citizenship. She has published on contemporary literature, reproduction, psychoanalysis, and feminist science studies. Her current project explores the connections between fetal citizenship and refugee status.

·      William O’Reilly (Cambridge) ‘Illiberal Cosmopolitans and the early-twentieth century university’
Thurs 24 Nov, 4-5.30pm, Samuel Alexander Building, Room A101. Part of the History seminar series, co-sponsored by RICC.
William O'Reilly is Associate Director of the Centre for History and Economics, University of Cambridge Lecturer in Early Modern History and Fellow and Tutor, Trinity Hall, Cambridge. More details to follow.

Please keep an eye on the RICC Events Page for updates: http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/ricc/events/index.html