We are pleased to invite Evan Calder Williams AKA Socialism and/or Barbarism? to our weekly lecture.

Title: "From Swing Voters to Swing Looters." January 23rd 2012 4.15pm BWC lecture theatre Socialism and/or Barbarism is a theoretical project concerned with communism, horror, and cinema including Combined and Uneven Apocalypse and Roman Letters. It is currently based in Italy. A few reflections on 2011, rioting, blockades, chess, negation, cops, the periphery, basic material needs, and Foot Locker. Reading: http://socialismandorbarbarism.blogspot.com/ PROTEST!!! Mondays 4.15pm BWC lecture theatre The theme of protest has been deeply ingrained in our understanding of literature, theatre, music and art. This has meant that we identify the arts as being central to the way we might produce social change in its many forms, from the early politics of the avant-garde to the role of street theatre and folk music, and the infamous events of 1968. In these cases the arts were seen to move from the symbolisation of the sentiments of protesting masses towards their integration with life. At the same time the arts would preserve their symbolic value as a central attack on existing power. More recently and increasingly so, the arts continue to take to the streets to take on fundamental and universal social issues of human rights and war, as well the government cuts to funding the arts themselves. When we face the largest collective marches for years across the UK, the Arab Spring and the apparent directionless charge of the forces of change, as well as the human rights case of Ai Wei Wei, our culture of protest now more than ever demands some re-thinking. Here we may ask how does and where can culture fit into these moments of protestation and change? Indeed are the traditions which we conduct our protests, as marches, as sit-ins and as collectives a now outmoded and outdated form? Should we be thinking of other forms of action that might constitute protest? What is it that brings us to participate within these causes? And what meanings do these types of collective symbolism produce? When it comes to art, can we consider art as an effective participant in protest, or is culture only capable of recording and commentating ‘after the fact’? The conditions of protest urge us to understand what protest is anew in political terms, that is, how people might achieve their aims, be listened to and be heard in the face of certain power. Furthermore, we might explore more closely the relation between the forms that protest takes and what we might call the potential for images to be understood as ‘forms of protest’. In this light we are drawn to ask if it is time to re-organise our understanding of the role of art. These lectures invite artists and thinkers to respond to such issues drawing upon their own practice as well as that of others. Professor Amanda Beech Chair of Fine Art University of Kent