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First Tuesday current affairs discussion - Tuesday 3 September 7:00pm start
Public discussions and debate in Manchester
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Valuing the arts in an age of austerity

June 2011

Angus KennedyDr Kim Wiltshire and John Summers will discuss how the arts sector can ensure excellence in the midst of dramatic budget cuts

Angus KennedyThe Arts in general have always had a difficult time in attracting public and private funding for their activities, but with widespread cuts in public spending budgets, including the arts, financial considerations on which productions and organisations will and which won't go ahead will be more difficult than recently. The economic crisis and subsequent funding cuts are forcing many in the arts to reappraise how they argue the case for funding.

 

Dr Kim WiltshireThe Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) is investigating techniques to assess the economic value of the arts, what it terms non-market goods, in terms of what people feel they would be willing to pay for things if they were not free.

 

And the February 2011 Royal Society for the Arts (RSA) pamphlet entitled 'Arts Funding, Austerity and the Big Society: Remaking the case for the arts' states:

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The struggle for democracy in the Middle East and Africa

June 2011

Karl Sharro will introduce this discussion of recent developments and asking whether the Arab movements can survive western intervention?

 

Karl Sharro

The uprisings in Arab countries came as a surprise to most; even President Obama questioned US intelligence agencies’ failure to predict events. Those uprisings are driven by genuinely popular democratic movements, but their outcomes are still unclear. Following the early successes in Tunisia and Egypt, the fate of the uprisings in Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and Syria is now far from certain. Given the lack of traditional forms of political organisation spearheading those uprisings, how will events unfold and who are the main players determining the outcomes?

 

The UN-sanctioned NATO intervention in Libya has revived support for ‘humanitarian intervention’, but Western leaders appear very reluctant in leading this intervention. In the absence of a coherent US and Western policy, regional players are stepping up to fill this vacuum with Saudi Arabia sending its troops into Bahrain to help crush the uprising there, and Turkey attempting to orchestrate the outcomes in countries such as Syria and Libya.

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Talking therapies: good for people and politics?

May 2011

Professor Dennis Hayes and Dr Kenneth McLaughlin will challenge the Con-Dem government's campaign to broaden access to talking therapies.

Professor Dennis HayesDr Kenneth McLaughlinDeputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg recently announced £400m of government funding to be put into talking therapies, designed to re-train the mind to think more positively. Putting aside discussions about this money being re-routed from other NHS budgets which are facing big cuts themselves, there is a problematic trend that increasingly presents economic or political problems as medical and personal ones. By exaggerating the relatively small number of mental illness cases that require specialised intervention, to say that the incidence of mental ill health affects about one in four people, more resources are sought but does it necessarily follow that an increase in therapeutic interventions is a universal good?

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From tribal to identity politics

April 2011

Kevin Bean and Chris Gilligan will be in conversation with the Salon audience, with a focus on recent developments in Northern Ireland.

Kevin BeanChris GilliganWhether it was the Peace Process or the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger, Ireland as a whole has been a focus of interest over the last twenty years. In Northern Ireland, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement was supposed to end the old tribal politics and usher in a new era. But instead of transformation, has the Peace Process simply created new forms of conflict framed around issues of identity? 

 

Identity politics are usually associated with the New Social Movements of the Left which emerged in the late 1960s – such as radical feminism, sexual politics and black power. However, in Northern Ireland it is associated with Irish Nationalism and Ulster Unionism. Orange Order parades are defended by Unionists on the grounds that they are celebrations of their cultural identity. Irish Nationalists defend murals which depict IRA hunger-strikers as an expression of their cultural heritage. In this view being Irish or British provides a sense of belonging to a community, and the cultural articulations of Irishness or Britishness are expressions of the authenticity of those communities.

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The future of journalism and publishing online

March 2011

Brendan O'Neill and Louise Bolotin will introduce a conversation about recent changes in journalism and how the future of online publishing can be shaped

Brendan O'NeillLouise BolotinNational and regional newspapers have experienced a protracted period of retrenchment, and the development of critical and in-depth journalism has been one of the main casualties. Alongside this trend in paper based publishing has been the proliferation of a variety of online publishing mechanisms, by individual bloggers and collaborations trying to develop new mechanisms of news reporting and commentary. 

 

Brendan O'Neill represents the first custom-built online current affairs publication in the UK, as editor of spiked, so will be able to talk through experience of the practical challenges posed for online publishers of quality commentary. Louise Bolotin represents a Manchester-based response to the development of a news platform that only publishes online, incorporating technology to address the demands of a 24-hour news agenda and using social media such as Facebook and Twitter to reach new audiences. The Inside the M60 website she co-owns appeals to a particular readership that only rarely pick up print copies of the papers.

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China's economic growth: what should we celebrate?

February 2011

Alan Hudson will focus on state led planning for the Shanghai Expo in 2010, whilst Professor Berthold Schoene on how British authors are leaving the national scene to imagine a global community.

Alan HudsonAs a trailer for his introduction, Berthold SchoeneAlan Hudson said 'the exhilarating technical inovation, speed of development and unashamed ambition of Chinese urban centres should be welcomed as a direct challenge to the painful negativity of western planning. But a Maglev train and a Five-Year Plan represent only a partial, and one-sided, re-engagement with China's century long struggle to embrace and reconstitute the modern.

 

China's fractured experience of modernity combined with he peculiar social and economic development of the post-1980s reforms present a vivid example of what happens when detailed planning meets the aspirations and intelligence of city dwellers. The city is a place of strangers in a world of difference. In a city, the opportunities are defined, not by a fixed relationship to nature and tradition, or by regulation and behavioural codes but by social possibilities. As anywhere, technically the movement is easy but there are social constraints. The heterogeneity of the the cosmoploitan city is asymmetrical. In Shanghai there are 'citizens of the world' who commute between there and London and New York. Others are bound in a particular space but their imagination is not.'

 

Berthold Schoene will look at the visions British authors express in their novels of an increasingly cosmopolitan society and one less focussed on the national scene. He will explore the extent to which their interest in cosmopolitanism may well be to provide an ethically informed response to globalisation, and perhaps as a way of rationalising the relative decline of previously ascendant economies and societies such as Britain.

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