Eventlist

Lecturers: Craig Calhoun, Peter Beilharz, Nikos Papastergiadis 
Entry: FREE

Synopsis

The Research Unit in Public Cultures, in collaboration with Thesis Eleven and The Greek Centre for Contemporary Culture, are pleased to host a night in conversation with renowned sociologist Craig Calhoun.

Bio

Craig Calhoun is President of the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute, which works globally to advance cross-cultural understanding, improve governance, and deepen knowledge of great transformations shaping the human future. Calhoun was previously Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he remains Centennial Professor and before that President of the New York-based Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and University Professor of Social Sciences and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU. His books have been translated into 18 languages and include Does Capitalism Have a Future? (2013), The Roots of Radicalism (2012), and Nations Matter (2007), which predicted rising nationalist and populist challenges to cosmopolitanism grounded in a highly unequal global economy.

Peter Beilharz is Professor of Culture and Society at Curtin University, Perth. For many years he was Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University, Melbourne. In 1980 he co-founded the international journal of social theory, Thesis Eleven. From 2002 to 2014 he was Director of the Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology at La Trobe. He was Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard 1999–2000. Peter has written or edited 27 books, including Labour’s Utopias (1992), Postmodern Socialism (1994), Transforming Labor (1994), Imagining the Antipodes(1997), Zygmunt Bauman – Dialectic of Modernity (2002), Socialism and Modernity (2009), Thinking the Antipodes (2015), The Martin Presence (2015) and 200 papers. He is Fellow in Cultural Sociology at Yale and Visiting Professor at the Bauman Institute, University of Leeds. He was recently Research Fellow at STIAS, Stellenbosch ,South Africa and is affiliated with the Aesthetics Project at Sichuan University in Chengdu.

Nikos Papastergiadis is the Director of the Research Unit in Public Cultures, at The University of Melbourne. He is a Professor in the School of Culture and Communication at The University of Melbourne and founder - with Scott McQuire - of the Spatial Aesthetics research cluster. He is Project Leader of the Australian Research Council Linkage Project, 'Large Screens and the Transnational Public Sphere', and Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project 'Public Screens and the Transformation of Public Space'. His publications include Modernity as Exile (1993), Dialogues in the Diaspora (1998), The Turbulence of Migration (2000), Metaphor and Tension (2004), Spatial Aesthetics: Art Place and the Everyday (2006), Cosmopolitanism and Culture (2012). He is also the author of numerous essays, which have been translated into over a dozen languages and appeared in major catalogues such as the Biennales of Sydney, Liverpool, Istanbul, Gwangju,Taipei, Lyon, Thessaloniki and Documenta 13.

Organised with the help of:

Melbourne University RUPC, Thesis Eleven, Greek Centre