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Led by IAS Junior Research Fellow Dr Ellen Filor.
The following events were organised by the research group:
Short Histories of the British Empire, 1816-1856
While historians have often sought out big events and explosive moments, this geographically wide-ranging conference souhgt to explore what short histories, individual biographies and innovative timespans can tell us about the British empire. By excluding the Napoleonic War and the Indian Revolt of 1857, the conference sought to move away from these large-scale, historically dominant events. Building on a vibrant field of imperial history, this conference rooted itself in geographical specificities of individual imperial hubs and plays close attention the routes between the metropole and settler and sojourner British colonies.
Examining four set of key themes (rule and resistance, work and capital, movement and networks, and knowledge) this conference offered the specificities and dislocations of the local in a time of extraordinary and accelerated change. Steampower, increasing bureaucracy, the end of the slave trade and developments in warfare all contributed to a period when the British empire expanded at a swift rate.
By bringing together historians, geographers, art historians, and architects at the interdisciplinary UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, this conference asked how approaches from disparate regions might fruitfully inform one another. Drawing attention to the 'short' but important events that shaped the British empire, we will propose revisionist chronologies and open up new terrains for study.
IAS Talking Points: Corruption and Race in the East India Company, 1800-1857 (1 June 2016)
Ellen Filor's paper explored the shifting meanings of corruption in the colonies at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Utilising a database of the hundred or so cases of corruption brought to the attention of the East India Company board of directors, this paper explored the gap between the legislative aims of legal reforms and the workings of such laws in practice. Over the period, the numbers of Europeans being accused of corruption declined steadily between 1800 and 1857 while the number of Indians accused rose steadily. This period, therefore, saw a shift in the ways that corruption was perceived on the subcontinent: it became something the 'native' did rather than the ruling Briton. As anthropologists have suggested, accusations of corruption are one way that non-Western nations can be 'Othered' and thus tarred as 'backward' or 'traditional' societies. Examining this racialising of corruption in nineteenth-century India complicates anthropological and social science approaches to contemporary corruption.
Respondents were David Hudson (UCL Political Science) and Natasha Eaton (UCL History of Art).
IAS Conflict, Confrontation and Justice Seminar: Representation and Form in Art and Politics (2 June 2016)
The event involved a presentation of short papers by Larne Abse Gogarty (UCL) and E.C. Feiss (UC Berkeley) followed by a discussion with respondent Amna Malik (UCL Slade) and the audience.
Collective and socially engaged art has frequently been discussed as inheriting a critique of representation from earlier politicised forms of art including conceptual art and institutional critique. However, as this event discussed, how can we understand the critique of representation within social practice as founded not only upon a deconstruction of artistic form, but also one that makes assumptions about the relationship between artistic and political representation? This is founded upon a notion that 'subject participants' might, through the artwork, gain access to political rights, an assumption which reveals a troubling slippage between the form of aesthetic and political representation. The papers engaged in questions of political strategy and reform, seeking to produce a more dialectical view of the formation of collective subjects.
Larne Abse Gogarty addressed group formation and collective art practice, exploring the relationship between psychic and political experience and E.C. Feiss addressed some relations between artistic and juridical forms, and their potentialities and limits within political and aesthetic discourses of emancipation.
IAS Conflict, Confrontation and Justice Seminar: Sex in the City (9 March 2016)
There were two talks chaired by Shema Tariq (UCL Department of Infection and Public Health):
Sex in Britain by Soazig Clifton
What? Who with? How often? The British National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal) have interviewed representative samples of the population every 10 years since 1990. This talk shared findings from the latest survey of more than 15,000 people aged 16-74.
Soazig Clifton is a survey researcher specialising in sexual health, based at UCL. She is part of the core Natsal study team, and has taken the findings to festivals, museums, pubs, and other public venues around the UK. For more information and findings from Natsal see www.natsal.ac.uk.
ChemSex by David Stuart
ChemSex has been identified as a public health concern for gay men internationally. David Stuart discussed the challenges it represents to the health sector and gay communities, as well as exploring the psychosexual/psychosocial, cultural and historical drivers behind this phenomenon.
David Stuart is the Substance Use Lead at 56 Dean Street addressing the sexualised drug use by gay men (the practice commonly referred to as 'ChemSex'). He has been involved in the development of London's pioneering services Antidote, Club Drug Clinic and CODE clinic, and has been instrumental in placing ChemSex issues firmly on international Public Health agendas. He has been consulted by the governments and public health bodies of many countries across Europe, Australia and USA, including the World Health Organisation/UNAIDS.
Confronting past injustices by teaching 'forgotten' histories (16 December 2015)
with Kristy Warren and Kate Donington
Dealing with the legacies of past injustices necessitates a multi-pronged approach, of which teaching 'forgotten' histories is a vital part. This talk explored this issue using Local Roots/Global Routes, a collaborative project run by the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project at UCL and Hackney Museum and Archives, as an example. The project explored Hackney's links to transatlantic slavery, helping to expand the history already being taught about abolitionists in the area to also reflect the presence of slave-owners and people of African descent. It did this through archival research, explorations of built heritage, and direct engagement with teachers and young people. In the process, the project also addressed constructs of the past that either ignored or distorted the histories of people of African descent, particularly the history of Africa before European contact and the role played by enslaved Africans in the fight against slavery.
Corruption on Celluloid: Screening of Seven Days in May (4 December 2015)
This showing and discussion of the corruption and conflict in Seven Days in May (1964) was led by film historian Hannah Graves and hosted by Ellen Filor. Written by The Twilight Zone's Rod Serling and starring some of the foremost actors of the era (Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster and Fredric March), this film follows an attempted military coup to overthrow the American president because he supports a nuclear disarmament treaty. Graves unpicked the Cold War paranoia of the era and showed how outside events impacted its reception by examining how Kennedy's assassination shortly before the release led to a new strategy for the premiere.