Fringe Thoughts

Keough Naughton Institute of Irish Studies has put together an interesting schedule of events, including three public seminars. The schedule can be found here. I know that Fergal will be particularly interested in Tuesday the 24th of June as Giovanni Arrighi will be speaking on “Hegemony Unravelling: American Imperial Decline and the Ascent of China”.

Below is the blurb from the seminar organisers:

To mark its first decade, the Irish Seminar has invited three very distinguished international intellectuals to offer free public lectures at the National Gallery of Ireland, (entry Merrion Street West entrance), over three successive Tuesdays at 8pm.

On Tuesday 17 June, Professor Jacqueline Rose, will deliver a lecture on Partition, Proust and Palestine.” An internationally distinguished feminist and literary critic, Rose has in recent years also become one of Britain’s most outspoken critics of Zionism and has written widely on that topic. Her many publications include The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1992), Why War?—Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein(1993), States of Fantasy (1996), Sexuality in the Field of Vision (1996, reissued 2006), The Question of Zion (2005); and The Last Resistance (2007).

On 24 June, the renowned economic historian Giovanni Arrighi, author of The Long Twentieth Century and Adam Smith in Beijing, will discuss the economic decline of American empire and the Rise of Asia. Arrighi is Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University and, with Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein, one of the leading international theorists in the field of world systems analysis. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (1994) and Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (2007) are widely recognised as classic studies of the history and economics of European and American imperialism.

On 1 July, Perry Anderson, whose family comes from the south of Ireland, will discuss the current collapse of American global hegemony and the situation of the contemporary left in a now rapidly-changing international arena. A founder-editor of the New Left Review and a polymath intellectual historian of enormous range and ambition, Anderson has been one of the most influential figures on the intellectual left for decades. He teaches at UCLA (where he has a joint appointment in History and Sociology) and is the author of numerous works including Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1974); Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974); Considerations on Western Marxism (1979); In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (1983); English Questions (1992); A Zone of Engagement (1992); The Question of Europe (1997); The Origins of Postmodernity (1998); and Spectrum (2005).

This year’s Seminar also features a number of lecture series: Clair Wills will discuss women’s writing and culture in twentieth-century Ireland; Seamus Deane will survey the intellectual history of Irish republicanism from Toland and Hutcheson through Tone and Mitchel to Davitt and Connolly; Luke Gibbons will consider issues of race, spectrality and Irishness; Chris Morash will track the development of modern Irish theatre 1900-1950; and Joe Cleary will review the careers of some influential twentieth-century Irish cultural critics. Other highlights include a forum on The Novel in the New Ireland led by Patrick McCabe and Barry McCrea, a Symposium on the works of Thomas Moore to mark the bi-centenary of his Irish Melodies, and lectures on a range of leading contemporary Irishwriters and artists from Edna O’Brien to Sinead O’Connor. For full details of the programme, see http://irishsem.googlepages.com

Aileen

Michael Burawoy is an marxist sociologist based at the University of Berkeley. He is probably best known for a book he wrote called ‘Manufacturing Consent. Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism’ which aimed at explaining why is it that workers work as hard as they do (he uses the metaphor of a game, which reminds me I must also blog about The Wire).
More recently he used his 2004 presidential address to the American Sociological Association to call for a more public sociology. This sparked a flurry of debates, and (a certain amount of hostility), with the British Journal of Sociology, Critical Sociology, Socio-Economic Review and The American Sociologist devoting special issues to the topic . The sociology department at NUI Maynooth held a symposium on Public Sociology 2005, and of course the socio-blogisphere has been debating the issue.
All this is way of an introduction to a very good blog from Older Woman on Scatterplot.

Many excellent points are made, one of them is that tenure (which is the American way of saying a permanent academic job) is one of the things that allows public sociology to exist as academics can speak without fear of job loss should they upset the powers that be. That should give us pause for thought. In Ireland there has been a marked shift in the academic job structure in the last ten years as many of us bounce between one one year teaching contacts and one to three year research contracts. However all is not lost in terms of civil engagement, read her post, it is very good.