CONFERENCES


NEW MEDIA/ALTERNATIVE POLITICS: Communication technologies and political change in the Middle East and Africa


This conference brought together a diverse mix of participants from academic, activist, policy and media backgrounds. The event opened with a lively panel discussion debating whether optimistic assumptions that new media inevitably open spaces for more liberal and  relationship between new media and political and social change in a wide range of contexts from South Africa to Zimbabwe, Liberia, Nigeria, Egypt, Iraq and the Israeli­  forms were analysed, including not only social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube, but also the interaction of new and ‘old’ media such as SMS messaging and radio. Support from CRASSH enabled a number of African speakers to participate, including Amy Saunderson­ Meyer from the Zimbabwean civil society activist network Kubatana.net and Dombo Sylvester from the University of Zimbabwe.


COVERT CULTURES: Art and the Secret State, 1911­1989


Covert Cultures brought together scholars and practising  cultural and aesthetic implications of the 20th­century secret state. Taking place in the anniversary year of the  widespread renewal of interest in the British intelligence services following their anniversary year. The conference opened with an introduction from Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, who, to a room of surveillance sceptics, gave an engaging account of the real experience of being watched by the  links drawn between theory and practice.


Day one concluded with a plenary talk by artist and experimental geographer Trevor Paglen who spoke about his long­running engagement with the records and visual practices of the ‘black world’ of US covert projects. The


This is just one example of a CRASSH conference over the past year that has made an argument for the importance of the humanities perspective and has alerted participants to how the world is changing before our eyes. In the light of the so­called Arab Spring a few months later and the role of new media within this, this conference was highly topical indeed.


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second plenary address, by Professor Adam Piette, gave a  Robert Harris, drawing on the literary theory of René Girard and on his own Cold War researches.


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Discussion returned, at several points, to the possibility of ‘visibility’: can the political acts of secrecy and spectacle, as practiced by states, offer provocations to artists; conversely, can the provocations of artists offer criticisms of state practices? An exhibition of newspaper cartoons on the subject of espionage, kindly assembled by Nicholas Hiley of the British Cartoon Archive, formed the visual backdrop of the conference.


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