Research theme 2017-18: Lies

Past Events

IAS Lies Public Lecture Series: Ashraf Jamal on 'Art & Lies'

Time and Date: 6-8pm, 05 October 2018
Location: IAS Common Ground, Ground Floor, South Wing

The Institute of Advanced Studies is delighted to welcome Ashraf Jamal for this talk.

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IAS Lies: What's Your Type? The Strange History of Myers-Briggs

Time and Date: 5.30-7.30pm, 05 September 2018
Location: IAS Common Ground, Ground Floor, South Wing

The IAS is delighted to welcome Merve Emre for a talk drawn from her new book.

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Myths around the public sector and whose interests are served by the underlying lies

Time and Date: 6-8pm, 17 Jul 2018
Location: IAS Common Ground, Ground Floor, South Wing

The IAS is delighted to welcome Professor Mariana Mazzucato for this talk. 

What conditions breed innovation and entrepreneurship? Most people seem to agree that the state playing a large role in the economy is not one of them. Indeed, burdensome government bureaucracy is typically juxtaposed in opposition to the ambitious, risk-taking entrepreneurs who have driven the technological revolution of the past few decades, and now operate the world's largest and most dynamic corporations.

There is no Silicon Valley in Europe, so the argument goes, because Europe lacks America's free market capitalism and minimal state intervention. This assumption, says Mariana Mazzucato, is not only factually wrong but dangerous for the future of innovation and increases inequality. The false dichotomy between "the public sector" and "the private sector" leaves out the vital role that government has played - and must continue to play - in acting as financial backer and risk-taker in the most important innovations of our time that can help tackle the grand challenges facing us. Furthermore the lie ends up causing a situation by which risks are socialised while returns are privatised.

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UCL IAS Lies: 'Trust Me' - A Symposium on the Language of Medical Expertise and Imposture in English, 1400-1900

Time and Date: 9am - 7 pm, 25 May 2018
Location: IAS Common Ground, Ground Floor, South Wing

'Trust Me' is an interdisciplinary symposium on the long history of medical publicity. How did medical practitioners craft a language to cultivate confidence in their knowledge and abilities in English? Our conversation will trace how the assurances (and overassurances) of expertise-expressed in mountebanks' medicine shows, print medical advertising, bedside manner, and training literature-adapted to new paradigms of knowledge, media technologies, and regulatory regimes to win the trust of patients and authorities. We will explore the history of that language, as well as the forms of its dissemination in literary and public culture: how did this language circulate as a dramatic genre, a political problem, or style of speech? In this, we will follow this set of professional medical practices as it was translated into social life and the popular imagination, and how these practices shaped broader cultural attitudes about medical expertise and the people who claimed it.

M. A. Katritzky (Barbara Wilkes Research Fellow in Theatre Studies, Open University) will deliver the plenary lecture. The full program is TBA.

This symposium was organized as part of the 'Lies' research thread at the IAS by  Joe Stadolnik, in partnership with Dr Elma Brenner and the Wellcome Collection.

All welcome. Please register here.

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Democracy and (dis)trust in the experts

Time and Date: 6 - 8 pm, 24 May 2018
Location: IAS Common Ground, Ground Floor, South Wing

The IAS is delighted to welcome Dr Alfred Moore and Dr Zeynep Pamuk for this Lies seminar.

Dr Alfred Moore: Dynamics of Trust and Distrust 

How are trust and distrust related? Distrust is often - at least implicitly - framed as the mere absence of trust. Yet some important strands of liberal and democratic thought (e.g. Bentham) suggest a more complex relationship: we might trust in authorities to the extent that we believe there are mechanisms in place to make them trustworthy. Specifically, the active distrust of some might generate the conditions for the trust of others. Although various theories of institutional and political trust have emphasised the importance of monitoring and vigilance to minimise the risks of trust, less attention has been paid to ways in which trust and trustworthiness can arise from practices premised on distrust. In this paper I set out to give a fuller account of the dynamics of trust and distrust, which I will elaborate with some examples from science, the economy, and politics. 

Alfred Moore is a Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of York. He works on contemporary political theory, and he is the author of Critical Elitism: Deliberation, Democracy, and the Politics of Expertise (2017, Cambridge University Press).

Dr Zeynep Pamuk: A Political Epistemology for Uncertain Times

We believe that decisions made with more knowledge produce better outcomes. The ideal decision-maker is typically modelled as an agent with full information. At the same time, most political decision situations are defined as much by what we don’t know as what we know. Modern societies must make policy decisions on the basis of expert knowledge that is uncertain, incomplete and subject to disagreement. These epistemic difficulties are compounded when non-expert decision-makers must evaluate complex information without sufficient expertise and under time pressure.

Neither the value of having knowledge, nor the fact that available knowledge is often fallible and incomplete should be controversial. Yet we have not paid sufficient attention to the implications of the fact of imperfect knowledge for how the use of expertise should be treated in political decision-making. Even when we recognize the limitations of the knowledge we have, we still act as if trying to obtain the best available approximation or to identify the correct expert would be the right thing to do.  The purpose of this paper is to challenge this approach and to show that the recognition of the shortcomings of our epistemic condition should change our procedures and institutions of decision-making. I argue that we should adopt a “second-best” approach, which requires focusing on possible failures, raising or lowering evidentiary standards, employing strategies of deliberate ignorance, or shifting power and responsibility to different agents and institutions depending on the particular context and purpose.

Dr. Zeynep Pamuk is a Supernumerary Fellow in Politics at St John’s College, University of Oxford.

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Medieval Fiction and Its Contraries

Time and Date: 4 - 6 pm, 18 May 2018
Location: IAS Common Ground, Ground Floor, South Wing

Dr Julie Orlemanski, Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Chicago

When we theorise about literary fiction, we tend to define it against its contraries - against fact, truth or history; in opposition to scripture and belief; contra error and lie. This talk reflects on the 'others' of medieval fiction as both a historiographic problem and a literary-critical one, and along the way it argues for a comparative approach to the study of fiction in literary studies at large.

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UCL IAS Lies: Truth, Lies, and Cheap talk - Formal studies on information aggregation

Time and Date: 6 - 8 pm, 9 May 2018
Location: IAS Common Ground, Ground Floor, South Wing

Speaker: Francesco Squintani (Professor of Economics, University of Warwick)

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Post-Truth Politics and the Rise of "Bullshit"

Time and Date: 6 - 8 pm, 30 April 2018
Location: IAS Common Ground, Ground Floor, South Wing

As part of this year's research theme on 'Lies', the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies is delighted to welcome Adrian Blau from King's College London for this talk.

To what extent are we experiencing what some people call "post-truth politics"? Several commentators have approached this question by using Harry Frankfurt's notion of "bullshit" - a particular kind of nonsense, which Frankfurt characterises as phoniness, indifference to truth. G.A. Cohen has discussed a different kind of bullshit: unclarifiable unclarity, i.e. something which is not clear and cannot be made clear. In this talk, Blau will show that there are at least three further types of bullshit, and that each of the five types of bullshit violates core principles of rationality. He will then relate each type of bullshit to different aspects of post-truth politics.

Bio

Adrian Blau is Senior Lecturer in Politics in the Department of Political Economy and Director of Education at King's College London. He works on democratic theory and practice, including deliberative democracy, deliberative policy-making, electoral systems and party systems; corruption, Hobbes, history of political thought, and research methods. Dr Blau recently published Methods in Analytical Political Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and he is currently writing two books: Hobbes's Failed Science of Politics and Ethics, and First-Past-The-Post: Is It Fair? Does It Work?

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False Promises - Human Rights and the Politics of Hypocrisy

Time and Date: 6.30 - 8.30 pm, 20 April 2018
Location: IAS Common Ground, Ground Floor, South Wing

The IAS is delighted to welcome Dr Emma Mackinnon, Research Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, for this talk. 

When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt, who had chaired the drafting committee, presented the new document to the American public under the title "The Promise of Human Rights." Recent historians have echoed this claim, arguing that the UDHR represented a promise from the postwar powers, and from the United States in particular, on which to found a new international order. René Cassin, also one of the document's drafters, described the UDHR in France on similar terms: a renewal of the promises of 1776 and 1789. 

 And yet, especially in the two decades following 1948, both countries faced accusations of hypocrisy for openly violating their promises: France for colonial violence and the use of torture in Algeria, the US for racism and white supremacy. Certain critics charged both countries with failing to put stated ideals into practice - with saying one thing and doing another - and demanded the more complete fulfilment of past commitments. But looking to the Algerian resistance, including the work of Frantz Fanon and Ferhat Abbas, as well as to African American activists, particularly Malcolm X, I identify an alternative critique. For such critics, I argue, hypocrisy arose not from the failure to make good on a promise, but from the way the promise itself had been made. Denouncing the promises of the past as lies, they made use of the language of human rights to demand the making of new promises. Returning to this critique allows us to reconsider the meaning of hypocrisy in relation to the making and keeping of promises, and the interplay between universal ideals and imperial practices.

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Lying in Early Modern English Culture - From the Oath of Supremacy to the Oath of Allegiance

Time and Date: 6 - 8 pm, 16 April 2018
Location: IAS Common Ground, Ground Floor, South Wing

The IAS is delighted to welcome Professor Andrew Hadfield (University of Sussex) for this talk.

Bio

Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex and visiting professor at the University of Granada. He is the author of a number of studies of early modern literature and culture including Edmund Spenser: A Life (2012), winner of the Elizabeth Dietz Memorial Award, and Shakespeare and Republicanism (2005), winner of the Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature. He is currently co-editing the Complete Works of Thomas Nashe and is chair of the Society for Renaissance Studies.

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Defamation: A Roundtable on Lies and the Law

Time and Date: 6.30 - 8.30 pm, 22 March 2018
Location: Room D103, 25 Gordon Street, First floor (above Gordon's cafe UCLU)

As part of this year's research theme on 'Lies', the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies will be hosting a panel discussion on the present and future of defamation law. How can the law best protect rights of speech and of privacy in a digital age? Has the Defamation Act of 2013 allowed for the publication of truths, opinions honestly held, or speech in the public interest? How has a new standard of harm respected the rights of the claimants and defendants in practice?

Panel:

• Dr Alex Mills (UCL Laws)
• Professor Rachael Mulheron (Queen Mary Law)
• Robert Sharp (Head of Campaigns, English PEN)
• Dr Judith Townend (Sussex Law)

The discussion will be hosted by Harry Eccles-Williams, Associate at Mischon de Reya.

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Christina Sharpe on 'Lies and Lying'

Time and Date: 6.00 - 8.00 pm, 21 March 2018
Location: IAS Common Ground, Ground Floor, South Wing

The Institute of Advanced Studies is delighted to welcome Professor Christina Sharpe for this talk. 

Christina Sharpe is a Professor at Tufts University in the department of English and the programs in Africana and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her second book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, was published by Duke University Press in November 2016 and was named in The Guardian newspaper and The Walrus as one of the best books of 2016. In the Wake was a finalist for nonfiction for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards. Her first book Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects(2010) was also published by Duke University Press. She is currently completing the critical introduction to the Collected Poems of Dionne Brand (1982-2010) to be published by Duke University Press and she is working on a monograph: Black. Still. Life.  Sharpe has recently contributed essays to the book accompanying Arthur Jafa's first solo exhibition Love is the Message, The Message is Death, an essay called The Crook of Her Arm to a collection on the work of the artist Martine Syms, an essay on Luke Willis Thompson's autoportrait (2017), and a brief essay on Emma Amos's Take One (1985-87).

This talk is organised in collaboration with Autograph ABP. The IAS Lies Public Lecture Series is part of our 2017-18 research theme Lies and is generously supported by Mishcon de Reya's Mishcon Academy.

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Misinformed: A Roundtable on Social Media and the Shaping of Public Discourse

Time and Date: 6 - 8 pm, 5 February 2018
Location: IAS Common Ground, Ground Floor, South Wing

The UCL Institute of Advanced Studies will be hosting a roundtable discussion on media and politics in the age of the viral post, troll farm and automated botnet. How has the new digital media environment changed the ways we form opinions, elect representatives, challenge governments, create divides and bridge them? Bringing together researchers in political science, digital culture, journalism, and social media analysis, the roundtable will address the specific challenges posed by the ascendancy of platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to democratic societies, and about the possibilities these technologies might open up.

Panel:

• David Benigson, CEO, Signal Media
• Anastasia Denisova, Communication and Media Research Institute, University of Westminster
• Lisa-Maria Neudert, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford 
• Gregory Whitfield, Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL

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Psychoanalysis in the Age of Post Truth: Panel Discussion

Time and Date: 6 - 8 pm, 24 January 2018
Location: IAS Common Ground, Ground Floor, South Wing

As part of this year's research theme on 'Lies', the IAS is pleased to welcome an interdisciplinary panel discussion about the role of psychoanalysis in the age of post-truth.

Panellists include Lionel Bailly (Psychoanalysis Unit, UCL), Mairead Hanrahan (SELCS, UCL), Rye Holmboe (History of Art, UCL), David Morgan (Psychoanalyst and Organiser of The Political Mind), Mignon Nixon (History of Art, UCL), and David Tuckett (Psychoanalysis Unit, UCL).

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Marcel Theroux in Conversation with Rye Dag Holmboe about The Secret Books

Time and Date: 5 - 7 pm, 1 December 2017
Location: IAS Common Ground, Ground Floor, South Wing

Seeking adventure, a young man flees the drudgery of shopkeeping in Tsarist Russia to make a new life among the bohemians and revolutionaries of 19th century Paris. Travelling undercover in the mountains of British India, he discovers a manuscript that transforms the world's understanding of the historical Jesus. Decades later, in a Europe threatened by unimaginable tragedy, he makes a despairing attempt to right a historic injustice. This breathtaking novel by the award-winning author of Far North and Strange Bodies tells the extraordinary tale of Nicolas Notovitch and his secret gospel. It is the epic story of a young man on the make in a turbulent world of spies and double-cross, propaganda and revolutionary violence, lost love and nascent anti-semitism -a world which eerily foreshadows our own era of post-truth politics. Based on real events, The Secret Books is at once a page-turning adventure and an examination of the stories that humans are willing to kill and die for.

Marcel Theroux is a novelist and broadcaster. He has published five novels. His second novel, The Paperchase, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His fourth novel, Far North (2009) was a finalist for the U.S. National Book Award, the Arthur C Clarke Award, and was awarded the Prix de l'Inaperçu in 2011. His most recent novel, The Secret Books, was published this year by Faber & Faber. He lives in London.

Rye Dag Holmboe is Fellow in Contemporary Art at University College London. His writings and interviews have been published in The White Review, Art Licks, and in academic journals.

 

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Evidential Images

Time and Date: 5 - 7 pm, 29 November 2017
Location: Garwood Lecture Theatre, First Floor, South Wing

The IAS will host a panel discussion exploring what, exactly, photography and film can prove about 'what actually happened'. What truths could the camera capture?

As part of this year's research theme on lies, our panellists will discuss how technologies and genres of visual media make claims to truthfulness each specific to themselves. What kind of evidence have makers of true crime documentaries like The Jinx caught on tape? How could photography, painting and print each claim to reproduce the Dauphin's true likeness in the post-revolutionary France? How was Japanese newsreel footage of events in the Pacific screened for foreign audiences? Panellists from UCL and SOAS will explore the not-so-straightforward relationship between seeing and believing through the lens of modern media history.

Speakers

• Professor Stella Bruzzi (UCL, English and Film Studies),'"Evidence verité" and some of the issues raised by recent true crime documentaries'
• Dr Richard Taws (UCL, History of Art), 'Dead Ringers: Afterimages of the French Revolution'
• Dr Marcos Centeno (Film Studies, SOAS), 'Seeing Liberators, Seeing Perpetrators: Displaced Images of the Japanese Empire'