A moment's pause
For the past few months I’ve been heavily absorbed in a new role Directing Queen Mary’s Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The brief has been to build a first-rate interdisciplinary research Institute more or less from scratch. There’s been incredible support and enthusiasm for the whole project across the eight Schools that make up HSS at Queen Mary (History, Law, Business Management, Economics and Finance, Geography, Languages, Linguistics and Film, English and Drama, Politics and International Relations). But it’s also been a huge amount of work.
With Covid-19 imposing a temporary hiatus, this is perhaps a good moment to share some of what we have been doing: both within the Faculty and on the wider stage. I’ll hope in future to be able to highlight some of that work here. The bad news is that much of the past two weeks has been spent either cancelling or postponing a roster of public events we had lined up through until the Summer.
Hopefully at least two of those will outlast the present global shutdown.
The first is a series of “in conversation” evenings called Rethinking The Public, which we’re doing live on stage in association with my friend and colleague Catherine Fieschi. Catherine heads up Queen Mary’s other ‘new’ public facing body, the Global Policy Institute. She has also written one of the few indispensable books on populism (the theme of a piece we both appear in here). The idea of the ‘public’ is in the spotlight now more perhaps than in a long time: as we all make smaller and larger sacrifices to our daily routines, and as we cut ourselves off from social intercourse in its physical incarnation, while absorbing its digital forms like never before. And, of course, as we are increasingly reminded of what a public health system is and why we ought to have taken better care of it.
The first event of this series - which you can watch online here - was about democracy and how to reimagine it. The next event – though it’s not quite clear when this will be just at the moment – features Sam Leith (Literary Editor at The Spectator, and author of You Talkin’ To Me?) and the writer Eva Hoffman (Lost in Translation). Together we’ll be discussing the rhetoric and reality of the concept of freedom. I suspect it is likely that a session on the public ‘body’ (think Richard Sennett’s classic book, Flesh and Stone) will now be needed as well. Later events will feature the Financial Times’s Gideon Rachman, the BBCs Katya Adler, and Máriam Martínez-Bascuñán of El País, who are among those signed up to appear.
The second larger project that I hope we’ll find a way still to bring about is an international conference scheduled for July on the theme of Present Imperfect. It’s an unintentionally appropriate title, read in today’s light. The blurb even nods to the possibility of viral disruption to social and intellectual life. The aim is to uncover some of the ways in which rapid social and political transformations leave their imprint upon thinking in the humanities and social sciences, both now and in the past. It presents an opportunity to reflect on what the Humanities and Social Sciences have to offer at this current and rather unusual moment. Here too we have a growing roster of wonderful speakers lined up to talk: culminating in a session on utopia.
Which is perhaps the appropriate point to sign off for now: a droplet of hope in the viral sneeze of our times. Like almost everyone else, I’m busy trying to figure out how to continue the work of the IHSS – an institute designed to bring scholars and others together – given the confines imposed by a quarter of all humanity now living in lockdown. Hopefully I’ll be back with an update on this soon.
In the meantime, stay well and wash those hands! And use those twenty seconds while you’re doing so to think of any ways you might be able to help others.