Calendar of events
Here you can see forthcoming events organised by CRESC or related to our work.
Forthcoming events
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Wed, May 29th 2013
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Wed, Jun 5th 2013
CRESC Seminar
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Mon, Jun 24th 2013
A workshop bringing sociologists, anthropologists, economists and communication theorists together to explore the material infrastructures and space-bound practices operating behind the seemingly immaterial flow of digital contents.
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Fri, Jun 28th 2013
What is it to know? And to know materially? What is it to know materials that we think of as mute? Or animal? This day seminar will explore these questions, with distinguished speakers including Penny Harvey, James Leach and Hugh Raffles.
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Thu, Jul 4th 2013 - Fri, Jul 5th 2013
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Wed, Sep 4th 2013 - Fri, Sep 6th 2013
In a world of radical political, economic and ecological uncertainty, lives and life chances are increasingly precarious for many. It is becoming ever more urgent to explore the changing vulnerabilities of the majority. At the same time, understanding the in/vulnerabilities of elites and their sometimes inadequate forms of expertise and knowledge is also crucial. These are the two central themes of the CRESC 2013 Conference, which is co-sponsored by the Journal for Cultural Economy.
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Thu, Sep 5th 2013
Andy Haldane, Director for Financial Stability at the Bank of England, will speak at CRESC's 2013 Annual Meeting
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Fri, Sep 6th 2013
The 2013 CRESC Annual Lecture will take the form of a conversation between Isabelle Stengers and Michal Osterweil on academic knowledge and activism
Past events
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Fri, May 17th 2013
CRESC Workshop: Football, Fans and Finance - This workshop will explore the implications of the emergence of English Premier League football as a major entertainment industry.
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Wed, May 8th 2013
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Wed, May 8th 2013
A one-day symposium of talks on post-war urban transformations in Manchester.
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Wed, Apr 24th 2013
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Wed, Mar 20th 2013
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Mon, Mar 18th 2013 - Tue, Mar 19th 2013
This is the third of five events sponsored by the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM) on qualitative longitudinal research. Speakers at this event in include Andrew Abbott, Julie Macleod, Eleanor Casella, Michelle Bastian, Mike Savage, Liz Stanley, Niamh Moore, Stuart Muir, Andy Miles Alan Warde and Dave Watling. Please note that the main seminar is on March 18th. March 19th is reserved for early career researchers.
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Wed, Feb 20th 2013
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Wed, Feb 13th 2013 - Thu, Feb 14th 2013
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Wed, Jan 30th 2013
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Wed, Jan 23rd 2013
The author will present his book that explores the locus of powers, authorities an responsibilities of the global sphere. This event is an excellent opportunity to discuss the contemporary features of the global economy.
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Thu, Jan 17th 2013 - Fri, Jan 18th 2013
Despite time often appearing as an inert background to social life, there has been a wide array of work across a range of disciplines that argues that varying understandings and embodied experiences of time are intimately intertwined with power and agency. Recognising that particular kinds of time uphold, and seek to enforce, particular kinds of social formations and power relations, a range of what might be called ‘critical temporalities’ have been proposed, both from within and outside of the academy. The aim of this workshop then is to draw together these multi-disciplinary attempts to challenge and rethink time in order to provide participants with the opportunity to explore potential overlaps, dissonances and opportunities for cross-disciplinary conversation.
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Thu, Dec 6th 2012
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Wed, Dec 5th 2012
A seminar with Professor Mariana Valverde, Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto, Canada. The seminar is co-sponsored by CRESC Urban Experiments and OU's Open Space Research Centre.
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Wed, Dec 5th 2012
For additional information about the CRESC Seminar and to reserve a place please contact
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Wed, Nov 14th 2012
The Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) and the Open University's Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG) are pleased to announce an event planned in connection with the release of a new book, Military Migrants: Fighting for YOUR country, by Vron Ware (Palgrave MacMillan).
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Fri, Nov 9th 2012
This workshop will interrogate the ethical conundrums of setting the price of water in a contemporary policy making context that is both orientated towards private-public partnerships and recognizes water as a ‘human right’.
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Thu, Nov 1st 2012
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Thu, Oct 25th 2012 - Fri, Oct 26th 2012
Eurel Conference 2012, Religion and Territory - 25 & 26th October
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Wed, Oct 17th 2012
The purpose of this workshop is to reflect critically on the temporal assumptions implicit in dominant methods of working with communities and to explore alternatives. Part of the Temporal Belongings research network.
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Thu, Sep 6th 2012
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Wed, Sep 5th 2012 - Fri, Sep 7th 2012
This is CRESC's annual agenda-setting meeting. For full details visit this page.
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Thu, Jul 12th 2012
The EPSRC funded STEPCHANGE (Sustainable Transport Evidence and modelling Paradigms: Cohort Household Analysis to support New Goals in Engineering design) project will hold a workshop on its survey work
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Wed, Jun 27th 2012
With the UK threatened by the euro zone crisis, struggling to find a way out of the current economic slump and running a huge trade deficit, politicians want to rebalance the economy towards production and tradable goods. Most of the proposals tabled relate to building high tech sectors, while little attention is being paid to the mundane, price sensitive items of everyday consumption which we often import – items like pork and bacon. To address this issue CRESC is hosting a seminar on supermarket business models, supply chain dynamics and industrial policy for renewal.
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Thu, Jun 21st 2012
The seminar brings together two anthropologists and photographers in discussion about photography and the postcolonial: Chris Pinney, Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture, UCL and Patricia Spyer, Professor and Chair, Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of Contemporary Indonesia, Leiden University and Mark Sealy, Director, Autograph. Seminar to be followed by a reception from 17:00 - 18:00. Registration is free but to secure your place please send an email to Bussie Awosanya (Olubusola.Awosanya@manchester.ac.uk).
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Tue, Jun 19th 2012
Maurice Glasman will present CRESC's 2012 Annual Lecture. He will talk about 'An Ancient Polity for a New Economy'. Maurice Glasman is a Labour Peer, and Reader in Political Theory at London Metropolitan University
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Thu, May 31st 2012 - Fri, Jun 1st 2012
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Wed, May 30th 2012
Analytics packages like SiteCatalyst offer us unprecedented insights into the traffic to our websites; and social media monitoring tools allow us to explore affect and 'buzz' in new and exciting ways. What do they offer us and how can we make best use of them? In this lecture, Dr Hugh Mackay will present findings of his research on social media analytics during his placement at the BBC Global News Marketing & Audiences Department.
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Tue, May 29th 2012
'Powers of the Hoard: Artistry and Agency in a World of Vibrant Matter'
Jane Bennett, Johns Hopkins University -
Wed, May 23rd 2012 - Thu, May 24th 2012
Comparing the city of Manchester, ten years after it hosted the Commonwealth Games, with London - host to the Olympic Games in 2012, this two day workshop invites critical inter-disciplinary discussion and evaluation of the legacies of sporting mega-events for post-industrial British cities.
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Wed, May 23rd 2012 - Thu, May 24th 2012
This workshop brings together photographers and social scientists to explore the challenges they face, and the techniques they are developing to overcome the problems associated with the practice of describing change.
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Wed, May 23rd 2012
This workshop aims to critically explore the many ways in which ideologies and practices of hope, utopianism and futurity shape communities and their interconnections.
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Thu, May 17th 2012
BBC Arabic’s flagship tri-platform programme Nuqtat Hewar (Talking Point) has been in the vanguard of using social media. How do its producers engage users and manage social media? How can social media monitoring data support best practice in using social media? In this seminar, Nesrine Abdel Sattar, Nermeen Sayed and Mina Al Lami will provide insight into best practice in social media from the perspective of users and producers, and will assess the quality and scope of how users interact online.
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Thu, May 17th 2012 - Fri, May 18th 2012
How does music relate to the social? Substantively? And methodologically? This workshop will explore how music matters to people - and innovative research methods for thinking about this. Please subscribe early: numbers are limited.
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Thu, May 17th 2012 - Fri, May 18th 2012
The aim of this workshop is to bring a critical discussion of affect into debate with an anthropology of the state as a way of working towards a more coherent, ethnographically sensitive and fine-grained approach to the role of affect in political life.
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Mon, May 14th 2012
Sorry: this event, previously arranged for Monday 14th May, has been cancelled
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Fri, May 11th 2012
Impact is now a buzz word driving decision-making in many public service institutions - not just the BBC. But what is impact? How are we to understand this multi-faceted term and how useful is it at the BBC World Service? Dr Hugh Mackay will present findings from his research placement at BBC Global News Marketing & Audiences, and will invite you to take partin the discussion
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Wed, May 2nd 2012
Andrew Bowman will be leading a seminar on on 'Opportunist Transaction: A Pig of a Problem'. All welcome!
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Thu, Apr 26th 2012
An afternoon workshop which explores the potential of Geographical Information Systems technology in the analysis of ethnic segregation, with input fron leading scholars in the field including Angela Dale (CCSR, Manchester), Martin Dodge (Geography, Manchester), Ian Gregory (Digital Humanities, Lancaster) and Ludi Simpson (CCSR, Manchester). Please reserve a place with CRESC Secretary Bussie Awosanya (Olubusola.Awosanya@manchester.ac.uk). Places are limited.
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Tue, Apr 24th 2012
'Materials in Science and Society'
Ursula Klein, Max Planck Institute, Berlin -
Thu, Apr 19th 2012
CRESC members, in affiliation with OU's Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG), are hosting a keynote lecture and interview with Annemarie Mol (University of Amsterdam) on the theme of enactment. For more information and to reserve a place please see: http://www8.open.ac.uk/ccig/events/ccig-forum-26
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Fri, Mar 30th 2012
How have theories and methods formatted markets? How have they been moved from economics and STS? These questions will be explored by Michel Callon, Adam Leaver, Fabian Muniesa and Karel Wiliams from CRESC and the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de Paris.
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Wed, Mar 21st 2012
Gemma John will talk about The Flexible Person: Transparency and the Making and Unmaking of Bureaucracy
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Tue, Mar 20th 2012
'Materiality, Measurement, Energy, Politics'
Andrew Barry, University of Oxford -
Fri, Mar 9th 2012
This workshop explores the phenomenon of military multiculturalism in different national contexts.
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Wed, Mar 7th 2012
Professor Kath Weston - University of Virginia, and visiting Leverhulme Professor at Cambridge University
will present her book Traveling Light: on the road with America's poor . -
Wed, Feb 29th 2012
An open meeting of the Transition Research Network, bringing together academics and activists interested in community-led responses to climate change and resource depletion.
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Wed, Feb 22nd 2012
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Wed, Feb 8th 2012
'Winds of Desire: Energopolitics and Renewable Power in Southern Mexico',
Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe, Rice University -
Thu, Jan 26th 2012 - Fri, Jan 27th 2012
Speakers will examine the factors that are resulting in the growth of disparities between and within cities across various domains (e.g. finance, real estate investment, higher education, sports, migration patterns).
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Fri, Jan 13th 2012
Join CRESC for a gallery visit to the Dark Matters exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.
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Mon, Nov 28th 2011
A networking meeting for researchers and practitioners interested in researching the Transition Movement
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Wed, Nov 16th 2011
Registration now closed
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Tue, Nov 8th 2011
'Flood Apprentices: An Exercise in Making Things Public',
Sarah Whatmore, University of Oxford -
Wed, Nov 2nd 2011
Stewart Muir will be leading a seminar on on ''Healing the nation: Utopianism, Culture, and Aboriginal reconciliation." All welcome!
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Wed, Nov 2nd 2011
A debate between:
Hugh Willmott, University of Cardiff
Mick Rowlinson, Queen Mary University
Stuart Macdonald, University of Sheffield and
Huw Morris, University of Salford
and Ian Stronach, John Moores University, Liverpool -
Mon, Oct 24th 2011 - Fri, Nov 4th 2011
An online conference bringing together researchers in the US and UK who work on the material culture of the book and publishing.
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Fri, Oct 21st 2011
Drawing on the Centre’s general scepticism over epochal accounts of social change, linear accounts of causality and the passivity of methods, this one day workshop seeks to bring together CRESC researchers to explore the kinds of understandings of temporality we are utilising in our study of changing worlds.
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Fri, Oct 14th 2011
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Wed, Sep 14th 2011
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Tue, Sep 6th 2011 - Fri, Sep 9th 2011
The CRESC annual conference 2011 takes the rubric of 'framing' to scrutinise the processes by which the city has been conceptualised, conceived , ordered and depicted - and how these processes have been disrupted and contested - in regard to the meta-themes of: the material, ecologies and environments, publics & politics, economies, the visual, and affect.
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Thu, Jul 28th 2011
The edited book, Drama for Development: Cultural Translation and Social Change will be launched onJuly 28th.
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Thu, Jul 7th 2011 - Fri, Jul 8th 2011
CRESC and CCIG (Centre for Research in Citizenship, Identity and Governance, The Open University) members are currently putting together a panel on drawing and evidence. Further details of the conference can be found here: http://www.open.ac.uk/icccr/events.shtml. If you’re interested in contributing to this panel please contact Andrew Hill, a.hill@open.ac.uk.
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Thu, Jul 7th 2011 - Fri, Jul 8th 2011
This conference asks: what are the moral or ethical dimensions of creative work? What are the political outcomes of efforts to infuse creative labour with ethical intent or content? How might an ethical politics of creative labour be theorized and organized?
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Thu, Jun 30th 2011
This interdisciplinary CRESC workshop brings together researchers across the social sciences and humanities to ask how we might explain the robustness of this form of social identification in the face of the economic and political changes outlined above and what this implies for policy narratives like ‘the Big Society? In particular, what role does the spatialisation of inequality play in understanding class formation, fragmentation and relations; in the construction of social identities and the articulation of belonging; in the experience and memory of displacement and de-industrialisation and in the potential for a renewed class-based politics?
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Mon, Jun 20th 2011 - Tue, Jun 21st 2011
A two day interdisciplinary residential workshop exploring the interconnections between time and community.
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Mon, Jun 13th 2011 - Wed, Jun 15th 2011
The baroque may be understood as a set of styles associated with the seventeenth and eighteenth century, or as a complaint about features of that large and diverse body of work. It may also be understood as a set of procedures or sensibilities that refuses representation and seeks to know, appreciate, trouble, and/or redeem the world allegorically. Informed by this last concern, this workshop will use empirical examples and case studies to explore what this might mean for practical research in the social sciences and the humanities.
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Wed, Jun 8th 2011
Niall Cunningham is presenting on ‘Applying the ‘God-trick’ for longitudinal historical and social analysis: An Historical GIS of religio-spatial change in Ireland since the Great Famine.’
All welcome!
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Wed, Jun 8th 2011
Penny Harvey and Evelyn Ruppert will be speaking at a workshop organised by methods@manchester on 'Research methods and social responsibility'.
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Mon, Jun 6th 2011
In this CRESC workshop practitioners responsible for implementing Big Society initiatives will be joined by political commentators and academics to debate its challenges and promises from many positions.
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Tue, May 31st 2011
A networking meeting for those conducting research reviews and scoping studies as part of the Connected Communities research programme.
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Thu, May 26th 2011
Part of our interdisciplinary conversation. Six sociologists and social historians will present brief papers on post-industrial and post-colonial politics in contemporary Britain, and three social anthropologists will act as discussants, inviting debate from a small audience.
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Thu, May 19th 2011
Our monthly informal CRESC OU lunchtime meeting. Everyone is welcome - please bring your own lunch.
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Tue, May 3rd 2011
The BBC South Asian Language service, broadcasting in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Nepali, Tamil and Sinhala, has played a unique role as the trusted source of news for millions of people in South Asia
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Wed, Apr 27th 2011 - Thu, Apr 28th 2011
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Thu, Apr 14th 2011
Our monthly informal CRESC OU lunchtime meeting. Everyone is welcome - please bring your own lunch.
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Fri, Apr 8th 2011
Michelle Bastian will be leading a seminar on on 'Fatally Confused about Time: Climate Change and Non-Performativity'. All welcome!
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Wed, Mar 30th 2011
This event will explore how the sporting legacy of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Gamesmight transform the East End of London.
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Tue, Mar 22nd 2011
Second drawing seminar.
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Tue, Mar 22nd 2011
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Fri, Mar 18th 2011
This course is for people who have prior experience of doing mixed methods research and would like some training and guidance. The course will focus particularly on doing mixed methods research with longitudinal survey data.
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Thu, Mar 17th 2011
Our monthly informal CRESC OU lunchtime meeting. Everyone is welcome - please bring your own lunch.
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Thu, Mar 10th 2011 - Fri, Mar 11th 2011
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Wed, Mar 9th 2011 - Fri, Mar 11th 2011
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Fri, Mar 4th 2011
The Annual CRESC lecture will be presented this year by Professor Andrew Ross, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, at New York University. Author of numerous books including Nice Work if You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times (NYU Press, 2009), Professor Ross' wide-ranging research interests include labour and work, urban and suburban studies, and intellectual history.
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Tue, Mar 1st 2011
This is a meeting of our regular Social Life of Method reading group. The reading group meets about once a month. All CRESC members welcome.
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Thu, Feb 10th 2011
A round table debate at the House of Commons organised by the New Political Economy Network in association with CRESC.
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Thu, Feb 10th 2011
Our monthly informal CRESC OU lunchtime meeting. Everyone is welcome - please bring your own lunch.
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Sat, Jan 22nd 2011
This conference is on borders and the ways in which they shift. It will explore whether this displacement a characteristic of borders as such, and consider the making and remaking of borders, both literally and metaphorically.
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Fri, Jan 21st 2011
CRESC and the Institute for Cultural Practices at Manchester are jointly hosting the second meeting in The Knowledge Exchange Network - Participation and Engagement in the Arts Seminar Series.
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Tue, Dec 14th 2010
This conference will celebrate the 15-year career of Mike Savage as Professor of Sociology at Manchester University. The conference programme includes invited papers from friends and colleagues, all prominent in their own fields, who have been in conversation with Mike’s work over the years.
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Thu, Oct 7th 2010 - Fri, Oct 8th 2010
Before the current crisis, anthropologists studying finance attracted relatively little attention; academic research on finance was dominated by financial economics (mainstream and behavioural), and a variety of social studies approaches that were strongly influenced by science and technology studies. Neither of these left much room for anthropological concerns with the social and relational aspects of finance, nor the means by which finance became somehow unquestioned and self-evident, both conceptually and as a practice. The recent financial crisis has opened out the debate considerably as commentators and academics alike scrambled to try and explain the events, which seemed to be simultaneously entirely predictable and entirely unexpected. This has provided a much larger audience for those interested in how we might differently understand what finance does and how that becomes economically destabilising, socially divisive and difficult to reform.
The aim of this workshop is to bring two key anthropological concerns with finance (the relational aspects and the unquestioned self-evident characteristics of finance) together with others who have different perspectives and expertise to develop and share their views. The intention is not to combine different approaches but to bring them into relation, on the model that CRESC has followed. The hope is that the workshop will lead to the special issue of a journal or, given the diverse disciplines involved, an edited book that can encompass these different perspectives. In either case, the workshop is intended to begin the conversation; the subsequent text will try to draw out some fresh ideas and conclusions as a result of that effort.
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Fri, Sep 24th 2010 - Sat, Sep 25th 2010
A symposium at the University of Manchester covering 'Theories, Policies, and Prospects for Urban Communities in The Wake of the Global Financial Crisis'
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Tue, Aug 31st 2010 - Fri, Sep 3rd 2010
During the past century and longer, social scientific methods have come to be extensively deployed in government, administration and business, as well as in academic research. Maps, enumerations, surveys, interviews, indicators, software and visualizations proliferate. The aim of this conference is to consider how we can best understand the agency of social science methods in both shaping, and themselves being affected, by economic, social and cultural change, both historically and in the current contect when digitalization poses specific challenges to established repertoires of social science methods
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Tue, Aug 31st 2010
The workshop will consist of three sessions held between 11.00 and 17.00 at St Hugh's College, led by students who are either working on, or have recently finished their doctoral studies. The first two sessions will be structured around specific issues and questions submitted in advance by participants.
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Mon, Aug 9th 2010
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Wed, Aug 4th 2010 - Mon, Aug 9th 2010
Financial crisis has raised the question of whether and how mutuals could play a larger role in the provision of financial services as part of a more diverse ecology of firm types and business models within the financial sector. This workshop encourages debate and dialogue amongst academics, policy makers and financial service providers from inside and outside the mutual sector who have different answers to the question about the future of mutuals. The aim is to promote better general understanding of the future of retail financial services and specifically of the arguments for and against a larger role for mutuals in the context of more general policy choices about firm types and business models for established providers and new entrants.
We will bring together politicians, academics, practitioners, regulators and media in a lively, informal debate with each other and a small mixed audience. The workshop format with around 35 in the room is designed to ensure variety and participation. There will be short 15 minute presentations from different points of view giving academic input and a variety of diverse (for, against and agnostic) plus questions from the floor; all under Chatham House rules which should allow practitioners to speak freely. The workshop is be organised by the Centre for Research in Socio Cultural Change at the University of Manchester and the Mutuality Research Programme at the University of Stirling who are grateful for the support of our sponsors The Economic and Social Research Council and the British Acdemy.
Further details from karel.williams@mbs.ac.uk
For more information click here
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Mon, Jul 12th 2010 - Tue, Jul 13th 2010
The conference will have a dual focus on: (a) methods as a means for rethinking feminisms, and (b) the histories, transformations and travels of feminist methods and methodologies. It will promote dialogue within and between different quarters of feminist practice, research and activism and explore how feminist methods have been taken up and transformed in and across disciplines.
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Mon, Jul 5th 2010
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Thu, Jun 17th 2010 - Fri, Jun 18th 2010
The workshop is predicated on the recognition that urban politics and urban policy-making are not simply localised phenomena, but draw on much wider engagement with the experience of other cities and a range of policy actors apparently located elsewhere.
The workshop is sponsored by OpenSpace and CRESC. -
Tue, Jun 15th 2010
During the 1990s and 2000s, urban policy researchers championed the ‘creative city’, the potential for arts and avant-garde culture to revitalise cities and promote urban development. This seminar examines what is happening to the creative city paradigm after the worldwide financial crash of late 2008, and in particular in the UK where it has hit hard.
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Mon, Jun 14th 2010
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Mon, Jun 7th 2010
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Mon, Jun 7th 2010
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Fri, May 28th 2010
What is the relationship between the museum and visuality? A seminar convened by Andrew Hill and Helen Rees Leahy.
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Wed, May 26th 2010
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Thu, May 20th 2010
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Wed, May 5th 2010 - Fri, Jun 25th 2010
This seminar will scrutinise the relationship between digital visualisation and power.
Convened by Andrew Hill and Hannah Knox.



