Arthur Lewis Lectures
Our series of prestigious annual Arthur Lewis Lectures started in 2015 to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of the economist Arthur Lewis, who became Britain's first black professor when he was appointed to a Chair at Manchester in 1948.
2023 Arthur Lewis Lecture
The Annual Arthur Lewis Lecture 2023, a talk by David Scott about Stuart Hall's life and work as an intellectual entitled ‘A Sense of Displacement: Stuart Hall’s Art of Living’, took place on 14th March 2023.
Stuart Hall was a leading intellectual of the Black experience in Britain, but also of the Caribbean. This talk reflected on the particular distinctiveness that Hall’s biography brings to his work as an intellectual. the talk also aimed to think of him as a practitioner of an "art of living" animated by the idiom of "displacement," and asked how one might usefully think of his personal and intellectual formation in relation to Jamaica.
David Scott is the Ruth and William Lubic Professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University.
He is currently completing a book tentatively titled “Irreparable Evil: New World Slavery in Moral History,” and working on a biography of Stuart Hall.
Scott is the founder and editor of the journal Small Axe, and director of the Small Axe Project. In this context he is also the curatorial director of the exhibitions, Caribbean Queer Visualities (Belfast, Glasgow, 2016, 2017), and Visual Life of Social Affliction (Nassau, Miami, Rotterdam, 2019, 2020), director of the Caribbean Modernisms project, and was the curatorial director of the Kingston Biennial, 2022, Pressure.
The lecture was followed by a question-and-answer session.
The event was organised by the School of Social Sciences in association with Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE).
2022 Arthur Lewis Lecture
Disability rights: a global phenomenon?
The School of Social Sciences was delighted to welcome Professor Tom Shakespeare CBE, to present the Annual Arthur Lewis lecture in Manchester on Tuesday, 3 May 2022. Tom is Professor of Disability Research at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, having previously worked at the Medical School at UEA and for the World Health Organisation.
In this talk, Tom offered an overview of the disability movement, in Britain, America and across the world, and talked about his experience of disability and development research.
The lecture focussed on the following questions: “Is the idea of disability rights something which activists in the Global North have imposed on the Global South or is this a genuinely global movement, free of cultural imperialism?”
The talk was chaired by Professor Brian Heaphy and was followed by a question and answer session.
