Wednesday 28 November 2018 – Lunchtime Seminar with Colm McAuliffe (Critical Theory and Popular Culture at Birkbeck)

Speakers: Colm McAuliffe, PhD in Critical Theory and Popular Culture at Birkbeck, University of London
Title: RADICAL BROADCASTS – Theory On Television
Hosted by: Professor Esther Johnson

Imagine the following: radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing amiably explaining his theories on schizophrenia on a daytime television chat show in 1977; cultural theorist Stuart Hall discussing why Karl Marx mattered in 1983; David Lodge grappling with post-structuralist theory at a conference on the linguistics of writing at the University of Strathclyde in 1986; Edward Said musing on how ostensibly great western literature is complicit in the crime of empire.

All of these were screened on British television to audiences of millions throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

This screening and seminar asks: what has happened to television with radical and political cultural messages?

1.00PM – 2.00PM
WEDNESDAY 28 NOVEMBER 2018
CANTOR 9235

SCREENING – Border Country
5.30PM – 7.00PM
WEDNESDAY 28 NOVEMBER 2018
THE VOID CINEMA (OWEN 123)

The death of Raymond Williams in 1988 robbed Britain of one of its most influential literary and cultural critics, a major socialist theorist and an exemplary instance of the union of intellectual seriousness and political purpose. Border Country, originally screened on BBC2 in August 1970, and follows Williams as he contrasts the landscapes of his working-class birthplace of Pandy, on the Wales-England border, with the University of Cambridge where he lectured in English literature. Williams explains how the barriers between university education and ‘real life’ should be broken down, believing that many of Britain’s rebellious students are, like himself, inhabitants of what he calls the ‘Border Country.’

See here for details of other seminars in the series.

All SHU staff and students are welcome to attend the C3RI Lunchtime Research Seminars. If you are from outside of the University and would like to attend a seminar, please email the C3RI Administrator to arrange entry.