Abstracts and biographies
‘Sustainable Futures: Survival of the
City’
Academic symposium to celebrate
Warwick’s 50th anniversary
Professor Shirin Rai
Travelling to work: the city as a site of depletion
Building on my work on depletion and social reproduction, this paper will explore how travelling to work
adds a layer of depletion for women domestic workers. The lack of adequate public services, the crowded
nature of buses and trains, the domestic labour that most women do before starting on their travels, all
contribute to depletion – physical and mental – the performing marketised and non-marketised, paid and
unpaid social reproductive work. The paper will thus focus on traversing the city for work and assess how
the travels across space are often overlooked as moments of performative labour. Based on a project on
working lives in Delhi and Kolkata, the idea is to develop a narrative data set of working lives and the
challenges they face; to be able to analyse human stories of labour and depletion, of rewards and
alienation, of what works and what doesn’t and cannot work in terms of personal strategies of survival as
well as of thriving for those engaged in social reproductive work in the city.
Shirin Rai studied at the University of Delhi (India) and Cambridge University (UK) and joined the
University of Warwick in 1989. She is Professor in the department of Politics and International Studies.
Her latest works are The Grammar of Performance and Politics (eds., 2014, with Janelle Reinelt),
Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament (ed., 2014) New Frontiers of Feminist Political Economy (eds., 2014,
with Georgina Waylen).
Associate Professor Rashmi Varma
Peripheral Patna: Cultural Production in a Zone of Backwardness
My paper examines the case of Patna, a provincial capital in northern India and once an important centre
of British rule and Indian nationalism, that is seen to have fallen upon bad times since the mid-1970s. Yet,
in spite of staggering economic and social backwardness, Patna has a flourishing literary and cultural
scene that typically operates in the underground, marginal and interstitial spaces of the city. The paper
will examine the literary and cultural forms that have emerged from conditions of peripherality and
backwardness in the city. As such, the paper will provide a reflection on the paradoxical parameters that
we often use to assess aspects of urban life such as cosmopolitanism, technological development and
economic growth.
Dr. Rashmi Varma teaches postcolonial and world literary studies and
feminist theory in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of
Warwick. She is the author of The Postcolonial City and its Subjects: London, Nairobi, Bombay (2011)
and of the forthcoming Modern Tribal: Representing Indigeneity in Postcolonial India. She is the foundermember of the editorial collective of the journal Feminist Dissent.
Associate Professor Joanne Garde-Hansen
Liquid Memories: A Proposal on Remembering City Rivers through Digital Media
The headlong stream is termed violent
But the riverbed hemming it in is
Termed violent by no one.
Berthold Brecht
First stanza ‘On Violence’ Poems 1913-1956 (p. 276)
Is water in a state of oblivion? Is it being remembered only for its violence or scarcity and forgotten for its
everyday life-enhancing storytelling? Can it only be appreciated as contained (by territories and
concrete)? Liquid memories speak back to the (violent) riverbed of hard facts (economic capitalism, power
politics, environmental risk, urban development) and offer soft processes that work through the
(patriarchal) past to produce trans/mobile modalities of un-contained flows of river stories. Water in
oblivion (as the connection between remembering and forgetting says Marc Augé) is the necessary work
state to understand river life narratives as self-realizing personal agency in a cultural policy of water.
Here ‘[m]emories are like plants: there are those that need to be quickly eliminated in order to help the
others burgeon, transform, flower’ (Augé 2004: 17). The liquid memories proposed in this paper, as
constructed fictions of the river made from memories of flooding for example, will offer the possibility of
new margins and develop new landscapes. The aim is to address new trans-cultural departures within
cultural memory studies and memory policy. The latter have largely focused on (a) the territory of the
nation state (collective memory); (b) on European history (the memory of Europe project) and (c) on the
relationship (a) back to (b), which may be one of difficulty or unevenness for emerging economies.
To address the fluidity of memories of water that are mediated by increasingly globally connected people
is to recognise the remembering and forgetting of the river in and under the city. Rivers flow into seas and
oceans, water circulates globally. Yet, water inequalities, water crises and water politics are addressed
within national public spheres as if water and the meanings it generates must be read against the social,
cultural, religious, historical, political and economic schema of each nation state. What mechanisms can
be produced for a trans-national/trans-setting sharing of stories of urban rivers? This paper draws upon
AHRC, ESRC and NERC funded research in the UK on sustainable flood memories and drought narratives
to ask questions about the future memories of City Rivers.
Joanne Garde-Hansen is Associate Professor in Culture, Media and
Communication, in the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. She directs
the MA in Global Media and Communication. Her research and teaching focus upon two strands: media,
memory, archives and heritage; and media, gender, emotion and ageing. She has published on (digital)
media and memory, television archives and cultural heritage in a range of books and journal articles.
Joanne was co-investigator on the ESRC funded Sustainable Flood Memories project and principal
investigator of the British Academy funded Inheriting British Television Project. She is also coinvestigator on the NERC funded DRY – Drought Risk and You Project. Joanne is currently working with
colleagues in São Paulo and Belo Horizonte, Brazil, as well as Kings College London and University of
the West of England on water, river, city, and mediated memory research proposals.
Associate Professor Louise Bourdua
Sustaining Venice in the Late Middle Ages
Rising water and building control remain foremost concerns for today’s Venetian administration.
Sustainability, however, was at the forefront of past government as long ago as the middle ages. This
paper will focus on the role of the Procurators of San Marco in sustaining Venice during the fourteenth
century.
Dr Louise Bourdua is Reader and Head of the Department of History of Art at Warwick. Her publications
have focused on the artistic patronage and iconography of religious orders and include The Franciscans
and Artistic Patronage in the Veneto in the late middle Ages and Art and the Augustinian Order in Early
Renaissance Italy. She is currently working on a book entitled “What Petrarch Saw. Art and Patronage in
Fourteenth-Century Venice." She was Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study
in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington (2013/14), and Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest
Visiting Professor at The Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence (2011).
Jane da Mosto
Round Table discussion Connecting Venice: Research and Reality
Today, more than ever, Venice is literally swamped by problems. Confusion reigns, amidst complex
governance and institutional issues, because proposals that are put forward as solutions can actually
cause further damage to the city.
Jane da Mosto, co-founder of the research-based, grass roots NGO We are here Venice, will explore how
to address the fundamental issues challenging Venice through robust academic processes. This will
provide researchers with the rare chance to access case-study material in a unique city where issues are
so blatantly visible, and will benefit Venice through the objective analysis of scholarly research.
Venice provides a useful perspective in that it has a long history of inherent resilience but it can also act
‘the canary in the mine’ regarding the challenges of the 21st century such as adaptation to climate change,
global mass tourism and socio-economic threats to livable cities.
Jane da Mosto read Zoology at Oxford and obtained an MSc from Imperial College before becoming a
research fellow at the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (Milan). In Venice since 1995, she has worked on
climate change at CNR-ISMAR and, as Scientific Advisor to the Venice in Peril Fund, co-authored The
Science of Saving Venice (2004) and the Venice Report (2009) as part of an ongoing collaboration wit
Cambridge University Coastal Research Unit. In 2010 she curated a section of the British Pavilion at the
Architecture Biennale and was a consultant on water management for the OECD Territorial Review of
Venice. Recently she has been trying to promote change more directly through initiatives like the “Venezia
è Laguna” flag campaign and coordinating more than 30 associations under the umbrella “Forum Futuro
Arsenale” to ensure that revitalisation of the compendium fuels sustainable economic development of the
city as a whole by building on its cultural and historical integrity. “Vogliamo Venezia” is the latest action
by Wahv that gives Venetian citizens a voice in addressing the torment of cruiseships.
Dr Nicholas Whybrow
High Tide, High Time: Alfredo Jaar’s 2013 Biennale Installation Venezia, Venezia
Alfred Jaar’s installation Venezia, Venezia for the Venice Biennale in 2013 presented an exact scale model
replica of the Biennale’s Giardini galleries complex, a lush neighbourhood of national pavilions laid out
neatly like foreign embassies in a formation that exudes early 20th century western colonialist power.
Jaar’s Giardini model lies sunken in a large square pool of murky green Venetian canal water, so there is
no initial hint of the Biennale complex, only a deceptive calm. After a while a clunking mechanism kicks in
and the gardens slowly emerge. They remain for approximately half a minute before receding again,
leaving behind but a few air bubbles floating on the surface. Jaar’s installation represents a critical
reckoning with the Biennale as highly-influential, long-standing global art-world event, setting this in the
context of both the future ecology of the city of Venice as a whole and a declining western civilisation.
Nicolas Whybrow is Reader and Head of School in the School of
Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. His most recent
books are Art and the City (2011) and the edited volume Performing Cities (2014), with chapter
contributions on diverse global cities from an international line-up of artists and scholars. He is currently
working on a monograph entitled Contemporary Art Biennials: the Work of Art in the Complex City.
Associate Professor Shaul Bassi
The Merchant in Venice, Shylock in the Ghetto
Two landmark anniversaries will coincide in 2016: the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death
and the 500th anniversary of the foundation of the Jewish Ghetto of Venice, a place that provided the
world with the concept of the 'ghetto', as well as the historical backdrop to Shakespeare’s controversial
play. Both the Ghetto and The Merchant of Venice are global icons, two fundamentally ambivalent
documents of Western civilization that have been used both as instruments of intolerance and catalysts for
cultural exchange. I will discuss the project that will lead to the first performance of The Merchant of
Venice in the Ghetto in history. Never before has the play been brought live to its ideal historical setting,
making play and place resonate with each other.
Shaul Bassi is Associate Professor of English Literature at Ca’ Foscari University
of Venice. His recent publications include Shakespeare in Venice. Exploring the City with Shylock and
Othello (with Alberto Toso Fei, 2007), Visions of Venice in Shakespeare (with Laura Tosi, Ashgate,
2011), Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures (with Annalisa Oboe, Routledge,
2011). Shakespeare's Italy and Italy's Shakespeare. Place, 'Race', and Politics is forthcoming in 2016 from
Palgrave Macmillan. He is leading the international effort to produce the first performance of The
Merchant of Venice in the Ghetto in 2016.
Professor Alison Ribeiro de Menezes
Landscapes After The Battle, Life Stories on the Edge: Entanglements of Memory and Crisis in
Contemporary Spain
This paper considers the interweaving of two key issues in contemporary Spanish cultural studies: the
legacies of civil war and dictatorship, and the fall out from the recent economic crisis. The landscapes left
behind by the battles of Spain’s indignado or anti-auterity movement have witnessed the arrival of new
Mayors in the Ayuntamientos of Madrid and Barcelona. Non-career politicans have been voted into office
on a wave of radical protest that has not simply challenged the politics of austerity, but has gone so far as
to suggest that Spain’s post-dictatorship political settlement is in crisis.
This can be traced on Madrid cityscape: the anti-auterity protests were most closely associated with
occupation of Madrid’s main square, the Puerta del Sol. This same movement has backed calls to change
street names recalling heroes of the civil war era, just as writers such as Isaac Rosa and Jéronimo López
Mozo have ‘outed’ in their works the Ayuntamiento in Sol as the headquarters of the Franco Regime’s
political police. However, novelist Rafael Chirbes’s works, which narrate the criss-crossing stories of
everyday individuals caught up in wider political changes, are perhaps the most succinct expression of the
entangments of the politics of memory and of economics that characterise Spanish urbanscapes today.
Alison Ribeiro de Menezes is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Warwick. She has
published widely on contemporary Spanish narrative, including the books Juan Goytisolo: The Author as
Dissident (Tamesis, 2005), and A Companion to Carmen Martín Gaite, co-authored with Catherine
O’Leary (Tamesis, 2008, paperback edition 2014). Her current research focuses on issues of cultural
memory in the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds, and she has co-edited two volumes in this area: War and
Memory in Contemporary Spain/Guerra y memoria en la España contemporánea with Roberta Quance and
Anne Walsh (Verbum, 2009), and more recently Legacies of War and Dictatorship in Contemporary
Portugal and Spain, with Catherine O’Leary (Peter Lang, 2011). Her latest monograph, Embodying
Memory in Contemporary Spain (Palsgrave Macmillan) was published in 2014. Alison is currently coediting a series of essays on The Future of Memory in Spain with Dr Stewart King of Monash University,
and beginning a project on the transnational circulations of memory debates.
Professor Susan Bassnett
Translating Cities
Writers from many cultures have been variously fascinated, enchanted and appalled by the idea and the
diverse realities of the city. Some have imagined ideal cities, others have created dystopian images of
cities as cruel, brutal places. This paper looks at ways in which cities have been imagined, or rather,
translated, when translation is understood in the broadest sense of the term as a process of intercultural
reflection. Bassnett, one of the founders of the new discipline known as Translation Studies, focusses on
cities as multilingual entities, where translation and negotiation between cultures is part of daily life.
Susan Bassnett is a writer and scholar of comparative literature and translation
studies. She served as Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Warwick for ten years and taught in its
Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies, which she founded in the 1980s. She was
educated in several European countries, began her academic career in Italy, and continues to lecture in
universities around the world. She sits on the board of several international funding bodies, including the
Leverhulme Trust.
Author of over 20 books, her Translation Studies(4th edition, 2013), which first appeared in 1980, has
remained in print ever since and has become an important international textbook in this field. Her
Comparative Literature (1993) has also become internationally renowned and has been translated into
several languages. Other books include works on Latin American literature , women’s theatre history, and
poetry. Recent books are Translation in Global News (2008) written with Esperanca Bielsa, Reflections on
Translation (2011) and Translation (2013) in the Routledge New Critical Idiom series. In addition to her
scholarly works, Bassnett is a well-known journalist and also writes poetry. She is an elected Fellow of the
Institute of Linguists and also of the Royal Society of Literature.
Professor Alexandre Quintanilha
Public understanding of Risk
Our understanding of risk involves the integration of a number of diferent components of knowledge. The
three major components include: a) What is the status of current knowledge regarding a particular
subject? b) Do we view the world we live in as either robust or fragile? c) To what extent do we trust those
that provide us with answers to our questions? There are, of course many other factors, but I consider
these as the most critical. Several examples will be presented that will illustrate how we deal with issues
that require us to decide whether we should embrace risk, or not. I will attempt to show how all areas of
knowledge contribute to our (mis)undesrtanding of risk.
Born in 1945; completed high school in Lourenço Marques (Maputo)
Mozambique.
Read physics/mathematics at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, completing his Ph.D. in
Theoretical Physics in 1972. Spent the next two decades in California at U.C. Berkeley and the Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory as professor of cell physiology and biophysics and director of a Center for
Environmental Studies. Moved to the University of Porto in the early 90’s as professor of biophysics at the
Biomedical Faculty (ICBAS). Was, until 2010, director of both the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology
(IBMC) and the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (INEB). He then chaired the committee responsible
for implementing a newly formed consortium of the three major biomedical research institutions in Porto
(I3S). He is a member of several international Academies, and over the years has chaired various
committees at the ESF, the EC (Chair of Advisory Committee for Marie Curie Actions, Chair of ELSA and
member of EURAB), the OECD and other national and international research organizations. He currently
chairs the Council of Associate Laboratories (CLA) of the Ministry of Science, is President of the Ethics
Committee for Clinical Research (CEIC) in Portugal and is a member of the National Council for Science
and Technology. He was also a member of the Science and Technology Advisory Council of the President
of the European Commission. He has published well over one hundred and thirty peer-reviewed scientific
articles and six books and has always been involved in science policy. His interests continue in the area of
biological oxidative stress and have included, more recently, risk perception and public understanding of
knowledge.