A YEAR IN PASTS AND FUTURES

A look back at our meetings in 2017. Originally published here.

In the last year we have had lively reading-based discussions and two great talks from invited speakers. The cluster played a key part in the Sociology symposium Fragile Citizenship, and cluster discussions generated the idea for a one-day conference reflecting on meritocracy.

Two recent discussions focused on history and how the past gets drawn into the present in biographical, communal and cultural narratives. On 13th December 2017 James Cummings, Ursula Balderson and Yang Li reflected on historicity, using Hirsch and Stewart’s (2005) article ‘Introduction: Ethnographies of Historicity’ (History and Anthropology 16(3): 261-74) as a starting point. It was fascinating to think about how this concept offered resources for James to think about gay men’s lives and biographical narratives in China’s Hunan province; for Ursula’s engagement with communities campaigning against mining pollution in the Andes; and Yang’s research on film representations of Tibet.

On 19th November 2017 we had a Sociology seminar from the cluster’s invited speaker, Felix Ringel (Anthropology, Durham). Felix’s discussion of ‘presentism as method’ used ethnographic material from two German cities to critically engage with the way the social sciences have conceptualised the past and the future, and drew an interesting response from Dariusz Gafizcjuk. The book on which Felix’s talk was based is out now.

Cluster members played prominent parts in Sociology’s March 2017 conference Fragile Citizenship. We organised a round-table discussion beginning with an intensely engaging talk about urban social history, music, and multicultural futures from Les Back (Goldsmiths). Post-grad cluster member James Cummings gave a fantastic talk based on his PhD work investigating belonging in the everyday lives of gay men in Hainan, and Diana Kopbayeva reflected on the notion of the ‘eternal nation’, which recently rose to prominence in Kazakhstan’s projects of nation-building.

Earlier in the year we had a couple of meetings focused on visions of the future and questions of social change. On 24th May 2017 Geoff Payne and Ruth Graham offered contrasting views on a still-resonant post-war vision of a more meritocratic (and less just?) future: Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy. On 8th March 2017 Lisa Garforth and Robert Hollands discussed the everyday transformative practices analysed in Davina Cooper’s 2014 book Everyday Utopias, and how artists and activists work for urban change, looking at Mould’s Urban Subversion. This meeting provided an interesting context for the talk on 3rd May 2017 from the cluster’s invited Sociology Seminar speaker Prof David Pinder (Roskilde) which explored utopia, time and vitality in urban spaces and practices.

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