Events archive…
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Book launch- The Ascending Spiral
Thursday 8th February 6:30pm>8.:30pm, The Word Bookshop London SE14 6AF
Join us for the book launch of “The Ascending Spiral” by Gabriel Troiano, the writer’s second poetry and short stories collection.
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FUNGI: WEB OF LIFE – IMAX movie narrated by Björk and presented by Merlin Sheldrake
Saturday 3rd February 4:30pm… BFI IMAX 1 Charlie Chaplin Walk London SE1 8XR
This is a film about the ways that fungi have shaped life on Earth for over a billion years, and how we might partner with them to adapt to the radical change of our times.
It’s narrated by Björk, who speaks the story with extraordinary magic and sensitivity.
It features astonishing fungal time lapse photography from some of the best fungal photographers working today, including Steve Axford, Patrick Hickey, and Wim van Egmond. Much of this footage depicts aspects of fungal life that have never been captured in such high spatial and temporal resolution before.
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Aeropolis: Queering Air in Toxicpolluted Worlds
Thursday 1st February 6pm, 304a, Richard Hoggart Building Goldsmiths University SE14
Join us for an interdisciplinary symposium where scholars and artists engage and respond to Nerea Calvillo’s atmosphere-changing book!
Nerea Calvillo’s “Aeropolis: Queering Air in Toxicpolluted Worlds (2023)” offers a speculative and interdisciplinary framework to reorient common understandings of air and air pollution as matter “out there.” Aeropolis contests regimes of managing air which ultimately operate toward upholding dominant modes of world-making that are dependent on forms of exclusion and inequity. Instead, it proposes that air be thought of as a city, to center its social, cultural, political, ecological entanglements.
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Posthuman Possibilities of DMP: Ecofeminism and New Materialism Book Launch
Monday 6th November, 6pm>8pm, 300 and 300a, Richard Hoggart Building Goldsmiths University SE14
This free event is an invitation to celebrate the launch of the new publication ‘Posthuman Possibilities of Dance Movement Psychotherapy’. The evening will include presentations, discussion, intra-active and creative invitations and refreshments. A limited number of special edition paperback editions will be available @ £29.99. Click and collect your copy from The Word HERE.
This timely book explores an eco-feminist approach to dance movement psychotherapy, with an emphasis on the posthuman possibilities of differently enabled bodies and fostering social, political and environmental justice. Using the lenses of posthumanism and new materialism, the book examines the points of convergence between dance movement psychotherapy, eco-psychotherapy and critical disability studies, mapping out the experience of building care, empathy and kinship and exploring ecologically informed, embodied practices and research.
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The Goldsmiths Prize 2023: Shortlist Readings
Wednesday 25th October 7pm>10pm, LG02, Professor Stuart Hall Building, Goldsmiths University SE14
The six writers shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2023 reading from and discussing their novels, with readings from Amy Arnold, Kate Briggs, H. Gareth Gavin, Richard Milward, Benjamin Myers & Adam Thirlwell.
“What struck us was the sheer ambition and invention on display in these six wildly different books. This is a shortlist that shows the novel – that most slippery and vital of forms – continuing to morph and reinvent itself in ways that surprise and delight us” – Dr Tom Lee, Chair of Judges.
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Marina Warner: Viral Spiral: Multiple Shape-shifting from Ovid to Covid
Thursday 12th October, 6pm>7.30pm, IGLT, Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre Goldsmiths University SE14
A group of metamorphoses in myths and legends features gods and in between creatures, who are not quite divine and not quite mortal either, who can change their shape multiple times. Marina Warner will explore stories of multiple transformations in and out of different bodies, and reflect on their significance in relation to today’s concerns with fluid identities and interspecies contact and contagion.
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Goldsmiths Writers’ Centre presents: Jacqueline Crooks – Fire Rush
Wednesday 18th October 5pm>6pm, Room 137, Richard Hoggart Building, Goldsmiths SE14
Jacqueline Crooks will talk about her Women’s Prize shortlisted novel, Fire Rush, a book that immerses you in an electric story of dub reggae, love, loss and Black womanhood, ‘wrought with an incredible precision and a musicality which carries every sentence’ – CALEB AZUMAH NELSON, author of OPEN WATER
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Book Launch ART MONSTERS: LAUREN ELKIN
Tuesday 18th July 2023 7pm > 8.30pm Goldsmiths CCA Gallery St James’, New Cross, London SE14 6AD
Join us for the launch of Art Monsters, featuring a Q&A between writer Lauren Elkin and Juliet Jacques (writer and filmmaker). For decades, feminist artists have confronted the problem of how to tell the truth about their experiences as bodies. Queer bodies, sick bodies, racialised bodies, female bodies – what is their language, and what are the materials we need to transcribe it? Exploring the ways in which these artists have taken up this challenge, Art Monsters is a landmark intervention in how we think about art and the body, calling attention to a radical heritage of feminist work that not only reacts against patriarchy but defines its own aesthetic aims.
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Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames with Lara Maiklem
Saturday 29th July 2023 7pm > 8pm Ahoy Centre, Borthwick Street, Deptford, London SE8 3JY
In 2019 Lara Maiklem brought the ancient tradition of mudlarking vividly to life with her award winning, Sunday Times bestselling book, Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames. Recounting over 2,000 years of London history through the flotsam and jetsam of everyday objects washed-up on the river’s shore, her book offers a unique, often intimate insight into the lives of long-gone Londoners from all walks of life. As part of this year’s Festival of Archaeology, we are extremely pleased to have Lara come join us to talk about her amazing career and show us some of her cherished discoveries from over 20 years of mudlarking.
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Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub presents… Dr Carl Miller: The Hidden Reality of Power Today
Tuesday 8th August 2023 7.30pm – Davy’s Wine Vaults 161 Greenwich High Road, SE10 8JA
How the most precious commodity of the digital age is being fought over, won, lost and transformed. From politics to journalism, business to crime, Carl will talk about his year-long journey to track down the nature of power today, show where it has gone and the shape it now takes. His debut book, The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab (published by Penguin, Random House) looked at the realities of power in the digital age, and won the 2019 Transmission Prize. Carl has written for The Economist, The Sunday Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the Literary Review, Wired, New Scientist, The Telegraph, the Atlantic, and the Guardian.
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Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub presents… David Miles: Whooping cough vaccines: A century of good science and bad
Tuesday 12th September 2023 7.30pm – Davy’s Wine Vaults 161 Greenwich High Road, SE10 8JA
David Miles is an infectious disease immunologist who has worked mostly on diseases of childhood in Africa and the vaccinations that protect against them. His first popular science book, How Vaccines Work, was published in March 2023.
A hundred years ago, whooping cough killed more than one in every hundred children born in Europe. Eighty years ago, two women in Grand Rapids, Michigan, developed the vaccine that stopped it. All it took was years of working evenings and weekends, an army of volunteer healthcare workers and lab technicians funded by donations from local businesses.
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Jack Zipes in conversation with Michael Rosen: How Walt Disney Murdered Bambi and his Real Author Felix Salten
Tuesday 16th May, 5.30pm>7pm, Ian Gulland Lect, Whitehead Building Goldsmiths University SE14
Jack Zipes, leading fairy tale scholar, joins Goldsmiths, University of London to share his research on ‘How Walt Disney Murdered Bambi’, in conversation with Michael Rosen
His research for that book demonstrated that Bambi was essentially a Jew, as were all the animals in the forest Jewish, and that he and they had to spend their lives avoiding pogroms in the forest and learn to deal with loneliness. Salten wrote other books, such as Fifteen Rabbits (1928) and Bambi’s Children: The Story of a Forest Family (1939), which reflect upon the conditions Jews faced in Europe when anti-Semitism was common. There is a connection, Zipes believes, between the way we joyfully kill animals in the forest, and the way Jews were murdered during the first half of the twentieth century.
This event offers a wonderful opportunity to listen to world-renowned experts in the study, writing and translation of fairy tales, folk tales, and children’s literature, following Zipes’ recent publication of a new translation of Bambi (1922) written by Felix Salten.
This event is free, but please reserve your place HERE!
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Deptford Literature Festival
Saturday 18th March – various venues in Deptford
Deptford Literature Festival is back on Saturday 18 March 2023. The Festival celebrates the diversity and creativity of Deptford and Lewisham through words, stories and performance. The 2023 Festival theme is climate, nature and food. Deptford Literature Festival is funded by Arts Council England and is run by Spread the Word in collaboration with independent producer Tom MacAndrew. The Festival features a host of talented writers, artists and organisations based in the area. It’s a literature festival with a difference, with the local community at its heart.
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Natasha Soobramanien & Luke Williams, winners of The Goldsmiths Prize 2022
Wednesday 15th March, 7.30pm>9pm, LG01, Professor Stuart Hall Building Goldsmiths University SE14
‘By turns, funny, moving, and angry, Diego Garcia is as compelling to read as it is intricately wrought. For Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams collaboration is both method and politics. Against the dogmatism of the single-voiced fiction that informed the British government’s expulsion of the Chagossian people from their homeland, they respond not only with rigorous critique, but also with an understanding of the relationship between voice and power which shapes the very form of Diego Garcia. A marvellous book which extends the scope of the novel form.’ Dr Tim Parnell
‘An extraordinary achievement, this single novel composed by two writers is both a paean to connectivity and a profound study of the tragedy of human disconnect. At its core is an excoriation of a set of specific colonial foulnesses and injustices: the forced depopulation of the Chagos Islands and their expedient use by the UK and the US as a military base and bargaining chip. At its heart is an experiment with form that asks what fiction is, what art is for, and how, against the odds, to make visible, questionable and communal the structures, personal and political, of contemporary society, philosophy, lived history.’ Ali Smith
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Book launch: Twentieth Century Music in the West
Wednesday 8th March, 6pm>7.30pm, 143, Richard Hoggart Building Goldsmiths University SE14
This event will mark the publication of Twentieth Century Music in the West by Tom Perchard, Stephen Graham, Tim Rutherford-Johnson and Holly Rogers.
The book is the first introductory survey of western twentieth-century music to address popular music, art music and jazz on equal terms. It highlights the interconnections between different genres and styles, enabling better understanding of their aesthetics, practice and key repertoire. It is designed for easy use by students and teachers. The authors will present the book and some of the music it addresses, and then lead a discussion to further explore the possibilities and problems faced in rethinking music histories and curricula. A reception will conclude.
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Gary Younge Talk on Darcus Howe, Race Today: Legacies of Resistance
Friday 3rd March, 7pm>9pm, Ian Gulland Lect, Whitehead Building Goldsmiths University SE14
As editor of Race Today, Darcus was at the centre of black liberation in Britain during the seventies and the eighties. Latterly,as a television journalist, Darcus remained a controversial and well-known figure, always speaking out for the oppressed, always backing authentic grassroots protest. This event is a celebration of Darcus’ life,and his enduring legacy as a champion of organised grassroots resistance towards unjust power. In the midst of a wave of strikes not seen for a generation, and at a time when the government is determined to curtail the right to protest, a discussion of dissent and the legacy of black resistance is more relevant than ever.
Journalist & Broadcaster Gary Younge, partners with the Darcus Howe Legacy Collective to launch the Special Issue of the journal Race Today – published to commemorate the 80th birthday of radical pioneer Darcus Howe. Gary Younge will discuss the current state of protest, examining recent successes and new obstacles to effective grassroots resistance. The event is also the launch of Race Today’s on-line archive – that makes accessible a crucial resource for exploring the recent history of black protest in Britain.As highlighted by the BBC series Small Axe and Uprising, the once unknown history of Britain’s radical Black and Asian political movements of the ‘70’s and 80’s will now be available online.
Book launch: Blank by Fedja Stukan
Friday 3rd March, 6.30pm>8.30pm, LG01, Professor Stuart Hall Building Goldsmiths University SE14
An internationally renowned actor from Bosnia-Herzegovina, producer, human rights activist, rock musician and pilot talks about his personal past.
The book’s author Fedja Štukan talks about his personal past featured by the war in Sarajevo, hopelessness and substance addiction, loss and death and finding purpose in life to stand for peace, justice and tolerance. How does one cross the line between life and death? What does it take to move from a war zone to a Hollywood production? And what is the actor’s message to leaders who lead their nations into wars?
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For k-punk: The Weird and the Eerie
– Mark Fisher Memorial Event 2023
Wednesday 18th January, 5.00pm>2.00am at The Fox & Firkin, Lewisham SE13 6JZ
This January, For k-punk will be celebrating Mark Fisher’s final book, The Weird and the Eerie. These two terms were, for Fisher, two kinds of aesthetic experience. Common to tales of horror and the supernatural, he argues that the things we recognise as weird and eerie are not always aberrations to be expelled but rather problems to be solved.
Moving from the lecture theatre to the event space, this year’s event has a programme full of screenings, live performance, music and discussion.
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Clara E. Mattei on The Capital Order
Thursday 19th January, 5.00pm>6.30pm, RHB 137, Richard Hoggart Building Goldsmiths University SE14
A discussion of Mattei’s new book on how 1920s austerity led to fascism.
In her new book, The Capital Order, political economist Clara E. Mattei explores the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives: the protection of capital—and indeed capitalism—in times of social upheaval from below. Mattei traces modern austerity to its origins in interwar Britain and Italy, revealing how the threat of working-class power in the years after World War I animated a set of top-down economic policies that elevated owners, smothered workers, and imposed a rigid economic hierarchy across their societies. Mattei will present the arguments in her book, and then have a response from and dialogue with Costas Lapavitsas.
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Join us for the book launch of Cyberfeminism Index by Mindy Seu
Monday 30th January 6.30pm at The Word bookshop, 314 New Cross Road, London SE14 6AF
Hackers, scholars, artists and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology.
The internet is not only a network of cables, servers and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.
The creation and use of the Cyberfeminism Index is a social and political act. It takes the name cyberfeminism as an umbrella, complicates it and pushes it into plain sight. Edited by designer, professor and researcher Mindy Seu (who began the project during a fellowship at the Harvard Law School’s Berkman Klein Center for the Internet & Society, later presenting it at the New Museum), it includes more than 1,000 short entries of radical techno-critical activism in a variety of media, including excerpts from academic articles and scholarly texts; descriptions of hackerspaces, digital rights activist groups, bio-hacktivism; and depictions of feminist net art and new media art.
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London Fortean Society presents:
Visions of the Occult: An Untold Story of Art & Magic
Thursday 1st December 2022, 7.30pm at Conway Hall London WC1R 4RL
Archivist Victoria Jenkins presents her major survey of the occult collection of artworks, letters, objects and ephemera in the Tate Archive. This talk offers in-depth exploration of the occult and its relationship to art and culture including witchcraft, alchemy, secret societies, folklore and pagan rituals, demonology, spells and magic, para-sciences, astrology and tarot. Her lavishly illustrated magical volume, Visions of the Occult: An Untold Story of Art & Magic (Tate Publishing 2022), explores the hidden artworks and ephemera left behind by artists for the first-time idea and will shed new light on our understanding of the art historical canon.
London Fortean Society presents:
The Haunted Landscape: Folklore, Monsters & Ghosts
Saturday 19th November 2022, 10am > 6pm at Conway Hall London WC1R 4RL
The Haunted Landscape calls again with demons in the landscape, kings sleeping beneath the ground and the ghosts that have followed us through all of human history. Join the London Fortean Society at Conway Hall for a day of talks and short films on the folklore of Britain and beyond.
Dr Irving Finkel takes us back to the very beginning. He has embarked upon an ancient ghost hunt, scouring ancient tablets to unlock the secrets of the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians to breathe new life into the first ghost stories ever written. In his book The First Ghosts, he uncovers an extraordinarily rich seam of ancient spirit wisdom which has remained hidden for nearly 4000 years, covering practical details of how to live with ghosts, how to get rid of them and bring them back, and how to avoid becoming one
Jeremy Harte – John Wesley and the Devil: Hell-Wrestling with the Magic Methodists – The author of Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape.
Lisa Schneidau – Monsters from the Deep: River Folk Tales of Britain and Ireland – Lisa Schneidau is a storyteller and environmentalist based on Dartmoor. She seeks out, and shares, traditional stories about the land and our complex relationship with it. Lisa is the author of River Folk Tales of Britain and Ireland, Woodland Folk Tales of Britain and Ireland and Botanical Folk Tales of Britain and Ireland. She tells stories at events, nature reserves, arts centres and schools, including performance storytelling, training and storytelling development within education, as well as helping to run South Devon Storytellers and Dartmoor Storytellers.
Jasper Goodall – Into The Wild Night – Jasper Goodall describes his work as portraying the haunted nightscape. Inspired by, among many things, the historical Swedish folk tradition of Årsgång, translated as ‘the omen walk’. It is traditionally performed on New Year’s Eve or the winter solstice. Goodall’s nocturnal photographs have been described as both beautiful and terrifying. The images reference the idea that a kind of thrilling delight can be gleaned from viewing something eerie or disconcerting — imagining yourself in the dark places he visits.
Dr Victoria Flood – Alderley Edge and the Dead Man – Victoria Flood delivers a talk about Alderley Edge, a red stand-stone escarpment above a subterranean network of mines, associated with a long-lived legend of sleeping heroes, who will awaken at a time of national crisis. The Edge is intensely meaningful to a relatively small group of local stakeholders alongside a worldwide audience of readers engaged with the works of the novelist Alan Garner. Garner is perhaps best known for his Weirdstone trilogy, set in (and underneath the surface of) Alderley Edge, and his 2022 Booker prize longlisted novella Treacle Walker.
Roy Vickery – Eerie Planet Folklore – Plants have had symbolic as well as practical meanings and uses since the beginning of human civilisation. This talk on the rich variety of British and Irish folklore draws on Roy Vickery‘s own unsurpassed archives collated over forty years, and a wide range of historical and contemporary literature. Based on new material collected by Roy and showing that we still cling to the symbolic importance of plants.
Daniel & Clara – Avebury Imaginary: a personal history of a stone circle & hill – Artists Daniel & Clara take us on a personal journey to Avebury stone circle and Silbury Hill, reflecting on a body of work made in response to these ancient sites. Avebury is not just a place, it is a dream built into the landscape’
Brice Stratford – The New Forest: A Pocket of Pixies – Brice Stratford discusses the specific pixie traditions of the New Forest, which survive strongly today in genuine, lived belief as a real exception to the rest of the country. He is the author of Anglo-Saxon Myths: The Struggle for the Seven Kingdoms and New Forest Myths and Folklore.
Sound System Outernational presents SSO#8: UK Sound System Reasoning Day
Saturday 5th November, 10.30am>10pm, LG02, Professor Stuart Hall Building Goldsmiths University SE14
Bringing together sound system operators across the country to celebrate and exchange the culture and practices performed, preserved and changed across the generations. Through three reasoning sessions, we will learn how different practitioners started their sound systems; their approach to their practice and how various political and social situations have influenced their sound system approach.The event will discuss key issues, targeting culture transformation, gate-keeping, appropriation and how sound systems practices are being preserved to pass down through generations.
London Fortean Society presents: Walking London’s Horror History and Offbeat British Cult Films
Tuesday 1st November 2022, 7.30pm at Amersham Arms 388 New Cross Road SE14 6TY
Lauren Jane Barnett – Death Lines: Walking London’s Horror History
Lauren Jane Barnett unearths the literature, legends, and history behind horror classics. Tinged with humor, social critique, and more than a few scares, her book Death Lines delights in revealing the hidden and often surprising relationship between London and the dark cinematic visions it has evoked.
Whether read on the streets or from the comfort of the grave, Death Lines is a treat for all cinephiles, horror fans, and lovers of London lore.
Darrell Buxton and Jennifer Wallis – Offbeat: British Cinema’s Curiosities, Obscurities and Forgotten Gems
Offbeat contributors Darrell Buxton and Jennifer Wallis will be discussing some of Britain’s lesser-known cult films and their often-horrific depictions of mental healthcare and family relationships. From Twisted Nerve to Killer’s Moon, and from Amicus’s Asylum to Pete Walker’s Frightmare, we’ll see how British film between the 1960s and 1980s tackled some of the country’s thorniest issues, in the process transforming familiar British landscapes into spaces of terror.
The Goldsmiths Prize 2022: Shortlist Readings
Wednesday 26th October 2022, 7pm, LG02, Professor Stuart Hall Building Goldsmiths University SE14
The Goldsmiths Writers’ Centre in association with the New Statesman presents the Goldsmiths Prize 2022 10th Anniversary Shortlist Readings
The six writers shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2022 come together at Goldsmiths to discuss their novels. With readings from Mona Arshi, Sara Baume, Maddie Mortimer, Helen Oyeyemi, Yara Rodrigues Fowler, Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams.
“Our tenth shortlist further speaks to a vibrant place in the literary culture of the British Isles in which urgent contemporary concerns are addressed in daringly creative novels unfettered by conventions new or old. For the reader, each of these distinctive books will provoke thought and bring the pleasure of surprise.” – Dr Tim Parnell, Chair of Judges
Reweirding London presents: Urban Nature: Animals, Plants and Life in the City
Tuesday 13th September 2022, 7.30pm at Amersham Arms 388 New Cross Road SE14 6TY
A city is an eco-system and we’re going to explore it. Florence Wilkinson, author of Wild City: Encounters With Urban Wildlife takes us on the journey into why we should engage with our fellow urban species. Luke Turner of The Quietus, author of Out of the Woods describes his memoir on sexuality, shame and the lure of the trees on the cities edge and Roy Vickery of the South London Botanical Institute and author of Vickery’s Folk Flora discusses the lore of London’s urban plant life.
Florence Wilkinson – Wild City: Encounters With Urban Wildlife In Wild City Florence Wilkinson takes us on a fascinating journey into why we should engage with our fellow urban species. What we might see – if we only take the time to look – and how nature is adapting to human-engineered environments in unexpected and ingenious ways.
Wild City proposes a compelling manifesto for city wildlife, suggesting how we might take action to protect the often-overlooked residents who live alongside us.
Luke Turner – Out of the Woods: Nature, Sexuality, and Faith in the Forest Luke finds himself drawn again and again to the woods, eager to uncover the strange secrets that may be buried there as he investigates an old family rumour of illicit behaviour. Away from a society that still struggles to cope with the complexities of masculinity and sexuality, Luke begins to accept the duality that has provoked so much unrest in his life – and reconcile the expectations of others with his own way of being.
Roy Vickery – Urban Plant Folklore Plants have had symbolic as well as practical meanings and uses since the beginning of human civilisation. This talk on the rich variety of British and Irish folklore draws on Roy Vickery‘s own unsurpassed archives collated over forty years, and a wide range of historical and contemporary literature.
Iconicon with John Grindrod
Thursday 8th September 2022, 6.30pm at NOW Gallery The Gateway Pavilions, Peninsula Square, Greenwich Peninsula, London SE10 0SQ
John Grindrod presents an evening dedicated to London icons since the 1980s. Sat within the shadow of the Millennium Dome, John will take us on a revelatory tour of the buildings that encapsulate the dreams and aspirations of our culture, drawing on the research he undertook for his new book: Iconicon: A Journey Around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain. Whether modest or monumental, these projects offer a living history of Britain, symbols of the forces that have shaped our modern landscape and icons in their own right.
IKLECTIKA 2022: Experimental Music & Book Fair
Saturday 9th & Sunday 10th July at IKLECTIK SE1 7LG
Come along on the 9th and 10th of July for a beautiful outdoor fair featuring pioneering experimental labels, publishers alongside talks, panel discussions —ranging in topic from 3D sound to mental health and well-being— , live A/V acts and DJ sets while enjoying a selection of craft beers and homemade, locally sourced food.
City of the Beast: The London of Aleister Crowley
Tuesday 5th July 2022, 7.45pm at The Miller London SE1 3SS
Philip Baker combines biography and pyschogeography to trace Aleister Crowley’s life in London.Crowley had a love-hate relationship with London, but the city was where he spent much of his adult life, and it was the capital of the culture that created him: Crowley was a post-decadent with deviant Victorian roots in the cultural ferment of the 1890s and the magical revival of the Golden Dawn.
Not a walking guide, although many routes could be pieced together from its pages, this is a biography by sites. A fusion of life-writing with psychogeography, steeped in London’s social history from Victoria to the Blitz, it draws extensively on unpublished material and offers an exceptionally intimate picture of the Great Beast.
REWEIRDING: William Blake and Heaven and Hell
Tuesday 7th June 2022, 7.45pm at The Miller London SE1 3SS
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is one of William Blake’s most extraordinary works – at times outrageous, radical, heretical, profound, bewildering and very funny. Come and join John Higgs – the author of William Blake Vs The World – for a reading of this magnificent little book, as he attempts to understand both the text and what it reveals about William Blake himself.
John Higgs is a writer who specialises in finding previously unsuspected narratives, hidden in obscure corners of our history and culture, which can change the way we see the world. In the words of MOJO magazine, “Reading John Higgs is like being shot with a diamond. Suddenly everything becomes terrifyingly clear”.
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Progressive Economics 2022
Saturday 11th June 9:00am>6:00pm – University of Greenwich
Progressive Economy Forum launch the inaugural Progressive Economics Festival
On Saturday June 11, the Progressive Economy Forum is partnering with the University of Greenwich to bring you Progressive Economics 2022 – a one-day conference of debate, discussion and education on the defining issues of modern economics.
In a world battered by crises, facing environmental collapse, Progressive Economics 2022 will bring together leading thinkers from across the progressive economics movement to present the arguments and solutions we need to build a radically better economy.
The conference will be packed with over 25 in-person sessions, ranging from “The Cost of Living on a Dying Planet” to “The Coming Debt Disaster“, “Beyond the Green New Deal” and “The Future of Money“.
Featured speakers include: Ann Pettifor, Caroline Lucas, Guy Standing, Grace Blakeley, Gargi Bhattacharyya, Ed Miliband, Nadia Whittome and many more
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London Fortean Society presents: A History of Delusions
Wednesday 25th May 2022, 7.30pm at Conway Hall London WC1R 4RL
For centuries, delusions have been dismissed as something for doctors to sort out behind closed doors. But delusions are more than just bizarre quirks: they hold the key to collective anxieties and traumas.
The King of France – thinking he was made of glass – was terrified he might shatter…and he wasn’t alone.
After the Emperor met his end at Waterloo, an epidemic of Napoleons piled into France’s asylums.
Throughout the nineteenth century, dozens of middle-aged women tried to convince their physicians that they were, in fact, dead.
For centuries we’ve dismissed delusions as something for doctors to sort out behind locked doors. But delusions are more than just bizarre quirks – they hold the key to collective anxieties and traumas.
Based on the Radio 4 series of the same name, Victoria Shepherd’s book A History of Delusions is a groundbreaking history which uncovers stories of delusions from medieval times to the present day. Where do delusions come from and what do they mean?
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The Lazarus Heist – Inside North Korea’s Global Cyber War
Monday 23rd May 2022, 7.30pm at Conway Hall London WC1R 4RL
Meet the Lazarus Group, a shadowy cabal of hackers accused of working on behalf of the North Korean state. It’s claimed that they form one of the most dangerous criminal enterprises on the planet, having stolen more than $1bn in an international crime spree. Their targets allegedly include central banks, Hollywood film studios and even the National Health Service. North Korea denies the allegations, saying the accusations are American attempts to tarnish its image.
In his staggering, global investigation, award-winning journalist Geoff White examines how the hackers have harnessed cutting-edge technology to launch a decade-long campaign of brazen and merciless raids on its richer, more powerful adversaries. It’s not just money they’re after. The Lazarus Group‘s tactics have been used to threaten democracies, gag North Korea’s critics and destabilise global peace.
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Thinking On Sunday:
The Suspect – Counterterrorism, Islam and the Security State
Sunday 22nd May 2022, 3.00pm at Conway Hall London WC1R 4RL
What impact has two decades’ worth of policing and counterterrorism had on the state of mind of Muslims in Britain? Rizwaan Sabir draws on his own experiences to take the reader on a journey through British counterterrorism practices and the policing of Muslims.
Sabir describes what led to his arrest for suspected terrorism, his time in detention, and the surveillance he was subjected to on release from custody, including stop and search at the roadside, detentions at the border, monitoring by police and government departments, and an attempt by the UK military to recruit him into their psychological warfare unit.
Writing publicly for the first time, in his book The Suspect, about the traumatising mental health effects of these experiences, Sabir argues that these harmful outcomes are not the result of errors in government planning, but the consequences of using a counterinsurgency warfare approach to fight terrorism and police Muslims. To resist the injustice of these policies and practices, we need to centre our lived experiences and build networks of solidarity and support.
The London Fortean Society presents… The Last Witches of England: the Bideford Witches
Tuesday 3rd May 2022, 7.45pm at The Miller London SE1 3SS
In 1682 the last group of women, from Bideford, was executed in England, for the crime of witchcraft. The hatred of their neighbours endured, for Bideford, it was said, was a place of witches.
Though ‘pretty much worn away’ the belief in witchcraft still lingered on for more than a century after their deaths. In turn, ignored, reviled, and extinguished but never more than half-forgotten, it seems that the memory of these three women – and of their deeds and sufferings, both real and imagined – was transformed from canker to regret, and from regret into celebration in our own age. John Callow explores this remarkable reversal of fate, and the remarkable tale of the Bideford Witches.
Intersectionality for Social Workers
Celebrating Professor Claudia Bernard’s book launch: Intersectionality for Social Workers. A Practical Introduction to Theory and Practice
Thursday 28th April 2022 5:00pm at Professor Stuart Hall Building, LG102 Goldsmiths, University of London 8 Lewisham Way SE14 6NW
This book explores how intersectionality theory can be applied to social work practice with children and families, older people and mental health service users, and used to engage with diversity and difference in social work education and research.
Panel Members:
Professor Claudia Bernard, Goldsmiths, University of London
Professor Brid Featherstone, Huddersfield University
Professor Carlene Firmin, Durham University
Professor Frank Keating, Royal Holloway, University of London
Dr Prospera Tedam, United Arab Emirates University
Chaired by Professor Adam Dinham, Professor of Faith & Public Policy
Reweirding London: Lost Landscape and Found Lore – The Great North Wood
Thursday 28th April, 7:00pm at the Amersham Arms 388 New Cross Road SE14 6TY
Chris Schüler, author and local historian, will talk about the ancient forest that once stretched from West Norwood to the Thames.
Discover what remains of south London’s Great North Wood and revel in the revival of the Deptford Jack in the Green mayday celebration.
Standing in the busy streets of South London today, it is hard to imagine that much of this suburban townscape was once a vast wood, stretching unbroken for almost seven miles from Croydon to the Thames at Deptford. This compelling narrative history charts the fortunes of the North Wood from the earliest times: its ecology, ownership, management, and its gradual encroachment by the expanding metropolis
REWEIRDING LONDON: AUTHORS ON THE SECRET CITY
Lara Maiklem, Caitlin Davies and Tom Chivers
Thursday 24th March, 2022 7:00pm at the Amersham Arms 388 New Cross Road SE14 6TY
The ever-popular Lara Maiklem, will be talking about Mudlarking on the Thames, Tom Chivers discusses the history, geology, folklore of London, and Caitlin Davies reveals the incredible story of female crooks from the seventeenth century to the present.
Goldsmiths Writers’ Centre presents… An evening with Joelle Taylor
Wednesday 30th Mar 2022, 5:00pm – 6:00pm
Joelle Taylor is the author of 4 collections of poetry. Her newest collection C+NTO & Othered Poems (June 2021) won the T.S Eliot Prize and was the subject of a Radio 4 arts documentary Butch. She is a co-curator and host of Out-Spoken Live, resident at the Southbank Centre, and the current editor of Out-Spoken Press. C+NTO is being adapted for theatre.
My Search for Revolution: talk, book reading and discussion
Monday 4th April 2022 7:00pm at Deptford Town Hall, New Cross SE14 6AF
In 1985 the Workers Revolutionary Party imploded amid scandal and controversy. First-hand insight from Clare Cowen whose testimony is still relevant in an era of predatory power politics and “me too” solidarity.
Precognitive Dreams: Synchronicity and Coincidence
Can we see the future in our dreams?
A talk by renowned esoteric writer Gary Lachman
Tuesday 5th April 2022, 7.45pm at The Miller London SE1 3SS
Gary Lachman has been recording his own precognitive dreams for forty years. In this unique and intriguing talk Lachman recounts the discovery that he dreams ‘ahead of time’, and argues convincingly that this extraordinary ability is, in fact, shared by all of us.
His latest book Dreaming Ahead of Time is a personal exploration of precognition, synchronicity and coincidence drawing on the work of thinkers including J.W. Dunne, J.B. Priestly and C.G. Jung. Lachman’s description and analysis of his own experience introduces readers to the uncanny power of our dreaming minds, and reveals the illusion of our careful distinctions between past, present and future.