For the Media, Culture and Racism Symposium, Critical Contemporary Culture is hosting an experimental workshop that explores how we reflect upon, refract, and respond to racist violence in British society. The idea is to both draw our attention to the way particularly events are individually and collectively memorialized as well as providing a key for future action.
During the workshop participants will work in small groups to produce a performative reflection on the theme of racist violence.
CCC has highlighted three main themes for participants to engage:
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The Pedagogic: This category responds to the way we encounter and filter ideas about ‘race’ and racism in learning environments. The brief is open but it might involve designing a group-taught lesson in which the observers are the students.
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The Media: This category responds to the way in which official discourses about inclusion and exclusion are produced and re-produced through digital and print media. Again the brief is open but this might involve a scripted press conference or a social media collage.
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The Artistic: This category responds to the experimental, creative and fluid way that different creative practitioners speak back to and from within ideas about ‘race’ and belonging in society. The reflection can be a collaborative or an individual effort as long as you all work around and in dialogue with each other.
The symposium seeks to bring together academics, journalists, arts practitioners, teachers, and policymakers to explore the enduring legacy of the Stephen Lawrence case, and to promote interdisciplinary dialogue about its impact, 20 years on; at a time when racism is bubbling up in areas of British life, from politics to music to football, the issues raised by the case, and its wider resonance in public and cultural life, need to be revisited.
Invited speakers include:
Professor Les Back (Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths University of London)
Professor Simon Cottle (Media and Communication, Cardiff School of Journalism, Media & Cultural Studies)
Rehana Minhas (Equality in Education, led the development of the Stephen Lawrence Standard in schools and colleges in Leeds)
Critical Contemporary Culture (journal that envisions an alternative cultural-intellectual public space)
Film screenings and performances will be programmed as an integral part of the event.
The symposium will also highlight submitted papers, performative presentations, films, artworks and other innovative formats, on themes including but not limited to:
• Institutional racism and multiculturalism
• Media representations, journalism and public debate
• Policing, race relations and the law
• Educational intersections, inequality and diversity
• Collective memory, sites of memory and memorialisation
• Artistic and cultural expressions, interventions and responses
REGISTRATION NOW OPEN
This event is free and open to all, but places are limited.
Please register at http://sl-symposium2013.eventbrite.co.uk/
A detailed programme will be made public shortly.
If you are interested in participating with CCC in the Symposium, please email us: editor@criticalcontemporaryculture.com.
Editor: Irida Ntalla
Chair: Antonia Dawes
Production Editor: Daniela P. Simon
Art Editor: Alexa Jeanne Kusber
Critical Contemporary Culture is an online journal that envisions an alternative cultural-intellectual public space. CCC is a conversational space, a democratising porthole, attempting to work against the restrictions of the market towards innovation, creativity and intellectual freedom. CCC brings together work in the humanities, social sciences, arts and cultural practice. It works towards providing an autonomous space.
