Open Space seminars
| Dates: | 10 March 2015 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 18:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | Manchester Urban Institute |
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Open Space aims to facilitate dialogue between advanced PhD students, early career researchers and academic staff across the School of Environment, Education and Development and the Faculty of Humanities more broadly. The initiative emerged from a dialogue and an initial workshop co-organied by a group of PhD students in 2011, and is facilitated and coordinated by Professor of Human Geography, Maria Kaika. It is funded through the support of cities@manchester.
This event features two speakers:
Robert Schulz (SoSS - Politics) - Neither repetition nor reflection: sacrificial commemoration practices and post-conflict reconciliation
How the past is remembered is crucial to the identities of political communities. It is particularly important to divided societies that went through violent conflict, such as Northern Ireland. How the past is remembered influences post-conflict reconstruction, i.e. the establishment of new political institutions, as well as post-conflict reconciliation, i.e. the rebuilding of relationships across communal boundaries. But how do we analyse the meaning of commemoration practices? The academic literature dealing with the role of commemoration in post-conflict reconciliation argues that commemoration can either keep the conflict alive (repetition) or facilitate reconciliation through remorse and critical memory (reflection). This presentation introduces a third mechanism that is different from repetition and reflection: Girardian sacrificial commemoration has to be seen as a mechanism that, although violent and exclusionary, contributes to a calming down of conflict.
Judith Krauss (SEED - IDPM) - Paradoxes of certification: Thoughts from doing research in the Nicaraguan cocoa sector
Conventional wisdom considers certification a universal panacea - a confirmation for consumers and brand manufacturers alike that the production of chocolate bars' defining ingredient, cocoa, abides by certain standards. However, certification entails manifold paradoxes in terms of realities produced and reproduced in representations, as I found in researching three chocolate global production networks and particularly the Nicaraguan cocoa sector. This conversation aims to flag and discuss a few of these phenomena, ranging from the consequences of certification's auditing and documentation requirements conceived in the Global North, to representations put forward by and about the certifying 'stewards of virtue' (Blowfield and Dolan 2008), to consumers' attitudes towards certification as recounted in focus group discussions.
Open to all postgraduate students.
Refreshments will be provided.
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
G.035-6
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
