Grad Prog 6/5: Social Media and PGR Profiles / "Sleep, Vigilance and Modern Power"

Wednesday 6th May 2015

Room 2.20 MediaCityUK (University of Salford building; please sign in at reception for the Graduate Programme)


3.30 PM - 4.30PM
Internal Speaker: Dr Gillian James (University of Salford)

Making the Most of Social Media to Aid Your Research Profile
You may be used to using social media to stay in touch with friends. However, it is also a very powerful tool for making connections with others researching in your field, whether your research is academic or practice-based. This session looks at optimising the use of:
Twitter
Facebook
Linkedin
We explore the most useful aspect of each of these platforms and look at several scenarios and establish which platform is the most appropriate tool for each one. In addition we look at setting up a blog and maintaining it in an effective way, possibly converting it into a full-blown web site. Most people would probably not want to use all of these tools, at least at first. The session will help you establish what is right for you.
 
4.30PM - 5.30PM

External Speaker: Dr Alexei Penzin (What is to be done? Collective/Univerity of Wolverhampton)
The Capitalist Continuum: Sleep, Vigilance and Modern Power

Departing from criticisms addressed to the Jonathan Crary’s recent book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (Verso, 2013) and referring to some other works in emergent field of critical sleep studies, I would like to present my own research project, suggesting an account of sleep in the contemporary or “terminal” capitalism. Its essential feature, in my view, is the uninterrupted or permanently “wakeful” continuity of production, exchange, consumption, communication and control. Marx stated already in Capital, vol. 1: “Capitalist production … drives, by its inherent nature, towards the appropriation of labor throughout the whole of the 24 hours in the day”. Maybe, instead of asking desperate though understandable question “when and how, finally, will capitalism end? The Left critique would better investigate this monstrous continuity itself. So the key questions for this account would be: what would be a genealogy of this obsessive continuity of contemporary capitalism? Is sleep just the last “natural barrier”–the term Marx used in theGrundrisse–in front of complete colonization of society by the incessant forms of life, shaped by 24/7 drive of capitalist production? How can the figure of sleeper be related to the constitution of a resisting subjectivity? Do we need a specific ontology to conceptualize and crack the oppressive continuity?

Alexei Penzin is Reader at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Wolverhampton (UK), and Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. His major

fields of interest are philosophical anthropology, Marxism, Soviet and post-Soviet studies, and the philosophy of art. He lectures widely on these topics and has participated in many international research projects, seminars, and symposia. Penzin has written numerous articles including the essay Rex Exsomnis: Sleep and Subjectivity in Capitalist Modernity (Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2012). Alexei is a member of the group Chto Delat (What is to Be Done?), which works in the space between theory, art, and political activism. Penzin is also a member of editorial boards of the journal Stasis (Saint-Petersburg) and the Moscow Art Magazine. He currently lives and works between London and Moscow.