[e-Salon] After COVID: Can we do things differently?

Join us for an online salon discussion with three fantastic speakers about what we can learn from the extraordinary times in which we are suddenly living.  COVID-19 has led each of us to slow down or totally halt some areas of our lives while other aspects seem to continue at the same relentless pace. Our speakers will reflect on whether this enforced slowing down can lead us to reflect critically on the world we have inadvertently built, with all its contradictions, vulnerabilities and environmental challenges; and whether it might be a time to think and act differently.

We are welcoming back leading social anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Political theorist Albena Azmanova and Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication at the University of Leeds in the UK.

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PRACTICAL INFO

• Our virtual salon will take place from 8 – 9.15 pm
  
• Login details will be sent by email to all registered participants in advance.
• There is no charge for this event but places are limited as we still plan to prioritise participative discussion over lectures (as in our classic Full Circle events). There are only 50 tickets available, with a limited number for non-members.

SPEAKERS

Albena Azmanova, Reader of Political and Social Thought at the University of Kent’s Brussels campus.  She teaches courses in democratic theory and political economy. Her writing is dedicated to bringing the critique of political economy (back) into critical social theory. Her research ranges from democratic transition and consolidation to the dynamics of contemporary capitalism and its effect on ideological orientation and electoral mobilisation. Her most recent publication is Capitalism on Edge. How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia (Columbia University Press, 2020).

Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication, University of Leeds and Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. He specialises in novel methods of political engagement and online deliberation and he’ll be talking about Slow Democracy – ways of engaging and deciding that allow time for reflection and revision. 

Thomas Hylland Eriksen, is among the most distinguished anthropologists of our times. He is currently Professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, and leads the Overheating project funded by the European Research Council. A prolific writer, he has authored many books and has contributed considerably to popularising social anthropology through his work. He writes and talks in many genres about the contemporary world, what it means to be human and how the world can be made a better place.