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North and South: a siren call to tame industrial ambition?

October 2014

Angelica Michelis, Helen Nugent, Alan Shelston and Vanessa Pupavac introduced a discussion on what North and South says about society today, chaired by Pauline Hadaway

 

Angelica MichelisCostume dramas of nineteenth century Britain, self-consciously becoming more gritty than rosy, have recently captured the popular imagination way beyond the more prissy offerings of the 1970's. To mark the opening of the newly refurbished Elizabeth Gaskell House in October, this Salon discussion is going to have a look at what insights Gaskell's novel North and South, first published in 1855, offers us in understanding the dynamics of Britain's industrial revolution and what if anything it can tell us about society today. There is common reference made to a North / South divide, but compared to the times of Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, the Bronte sisters, and even Thomas Hardy is there still such a difference, and if so how does that present itself and what characteristics prevail? How should we be reading novels from different historical periods, and are we likely to misread them when transposing their messages for today?

Helen Nugent

 

In contrast to some earlier novels, with their own critique of the 'self-made man' from a capitalism dominated by individuals, Elizabeth Gaskell helps herald in a new genre of the social problem novel located in industrial Britain. North and South is notable, although not the first, in not dismissing industrialisation, with the heroine Margaret Hale acknowledging that her celebration of the countryside might be bit romantic and whilst cottage workers might be poorer, there was a real hope of overcoming the dangerous and insecure conditions for industrial workers.

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Recent Discussions

Cycling: four wheels good, two wheels better?

September 2014

IET CommunitiesMark Birbeck, Gabriele Schliwa, Helen Nugent and Nick Vaughan introduced a discussion on improving the road experience for all, chaired by Keith McCabe

 

Mark BirbeckHaving a bicycle for a child was often a precursor to travelling beyond the physical confines of your neighbourhood, and the first steps to adolescent freedom. Getting on your bike and visiting friends without needing a lift from mum and dad, or being able to cycle to the countryside away from the watchful eyes of adults has long been a rite of passage for teenagers. Though older generations may have known bicycles as their only mode of transport for going to work, most people now have access to a car yet many commuters are frustrated by congestion, and a plethora of impediments on the road. A return to the bicycle as a realistic form of transport is being publicly promoted, so what are we to make of such campaigns to get us on our bike again?

 

Gabriele SchliwaMuch is made of the health benefits of getting the nation out of cars and back on two wheels; indeed the government has designed tax schemes to incentivise us to buy a bike. Are we to believe they want us to experience that freedom we did as kids to whizz down a hill with our feet off the peddles, for no other reason than to feel the wind in your hair? That's clearly stretching things, but there's definitely a social trend to emphasise cycling as a modern and desired form of transport, well exemplified by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, taking every opportunity to promote it. Manchester may not yet have the cycle hire infrastructure of London, but the introduction of many more cycle lanes on main arterial routes, and the Tour de France visiting the region is a step in that direction.

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Recent Discussions

Curators and their audience

September 2014

Pauline Hadaway, Sarah Perks, and Wendy Earle helped unpick the changing role of curators and how we could save them from becoming museum pieces

 

Pauline HadawayIn line with many aspects of work in the arts and humanities today, the role of the curator has been re-configured in a political and philosophical environment which increasingly values the external impacts of art – social, economic and therapeutic, against its meaning as an intrinsic aspect of human experience and culture.

 

Sarah PerksIn Art as Therapy, a depressingly narrow and instrumental manifesto for improving visitor experience in art museums, Alain de Botton and John Armstrong argue for curators to abandon scholarship acquired in the ‘secluded privilege’ of the traditional museum, in favour of discovering the therapeutic value of art. Curators in de Botton’s new therapeutic art museum should programme exhibitions designed to help visitors find resolution for ‘life’s difficult issues’. Whilst art history may seem remote from everyday life, de Botton and Armstrong’s proposition that museums and galleries abandon belief in the value of scholarship in favour of more immersive, visitor focused experiences denigrates the idea of the audience as an intelligent, enquiring public.

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Recent Discussions

Playing God? The ethics of biomedicine

October 2014

Andy Miah, Sorcha Ui Chonnachtaigh, Steve Fuller and Anna Bergqvist will introduce a discussion on the ethics of biomedical enhancements

 

Andy Miah

Over the past decade, dramatic advances have been made in synthetic biotechnology, neuroscience and digital technology. Engineers of brain computer interfaces predict headbands that will deliver digitally enhanced cognition, letting us talk without speaking, see round corners, and drive just by thinking about it. In 2010, Craig Venter made headlines with his (partially) synthetic cell, and, as he plans to patent an entire manmade lifeform in the future, work continues on the creation of smaller DNA constructs known as bioparts. This year a man in Austria voluntarily had a (damaged) hand amputated so he could be fitted with a bionic limb controlled by brain signals. Stem cell science and synthetic biology bring the prospect of replacing flesh with ‘synthetic skin’ rather than creating crude cyborgs.

Dr Sorcha Ui Chonnachtaigh

 

Yet while futurists and transhumanists talk excitedly about the possibilities of biomedical enhancement, there is considerable ambivalence about such advances across wider society: the so-called ‘yuck factor.’ Ethics committees and ‘public dialogues’ have risen in prominence in recent decades partly to tackle public fears about the impacts of experimentation in controversial areas such as mitochondrial exchange, acting as a significant check on its development in the UK.

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Recent Discussions

First World War: origins and warnings for the 21st Century

June 2014

James Woudhuysen and Terry Jackson opened a discussion on the origins and warnings of the First World War.


James Woudhuysen

The origins of the First World War are variously attributed to the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, the complex system of international alliances that developed before 1914, the way in which Germany's Schlieffen Plan depended on its army sticking to strict railway timetables, or the unreadiness of old dynasties to move with the times.

Terry Jackson

 

In fact, James will argue, it was the very 2014 phenomenon of Foreign Direct Investment that, before 1914, bound all the eventual participants in the conflict into a system of long-run, spiralling tensions. Today's commentators on the First World War often miss three other forces that mediated and accelerated the catastrophe.

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There's art in them there hills

May 2014

James Heartfield, Ann Jackson and John Siddique explored why visual and literary art is so popular in the hills of the Pennines, chaired by Pauline Hadaway

 

James HertfieldThe Pennines have long been an alluring part of the world, both for industrialists utilising its natural resources and the workers in those industries escaping their factory life to enjoy the open and grand countryside. Developments in our technological infrastructure, particularly in the generation and distribution of electricity for power, has resulted in post war economic growth taking place in towns and cities rather than the countryside. There seems to have been something of a counter movement of preference by some for living in the urban countryside, particularly by artists, resulting in places like Hebden Bridge getting national recognition as a cultural hotspot.

 

Ann Jackson

Evan Davis in his recent BBC2 programme Mind the Gap, revisited David Fletcher's notion of Hebden Bridge for example becoming Britain's second city. This rather playful idea comes from Hebden Bridge being an inverted city with a greenbelt centre and suburbs called Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool. The tension between urbane city life and the rather slower and historic pace of life in the country has long been the source of an interesting dialogue, codified in planning regulations around protection of the green belt and metropolitan types banning fox hunting or badger culls for example. The description of economic disparity across the nation, popularly tagged as a north / south economic divide in the Thatcher years, is today often used similarly used to explain a beleaguered countryside.

 

John SiddiqueThe Blair government response to the decline of traditional manufacturing industries and hollowing out of the economy was to front on Education, Education, Education, whilst heavily investing in the creative industries in the hope of giving UK PLC some sort of immediate purpose and niche offering beyond the City of London. Whilst some individual artists profited handsomely from this attention, the spread of funding for most was certainly far more modest. More importantly perhaps was the development of a new tier of state led funding agencies bringing into play a swathe of grant applications that effectively played off art project against art project, whilst introducing local participation, social equality and identity through locality agendas to the creative process, however loosely policed.

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