Apocalyptic Nostalgia? Cold War Imagery in Popular Culture : Manchester Metropolitan University and the Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements

Since the end of the Cold War, its imagery, atmosphere, and music have been repeatedly appropriated and reappropriated within contemporary popular culture. More than thirty years after the Berlin Wall fell, these images continue to appeal to generations with no memory of the original tensions of the time. From the… Continue reading

M3GAN and ChatGPT– A Critique of Contemporary AI?

In an interview about OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Matt Murray from the Wall Street Journal asks Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella ‘do we need to learn math anymore? Why learn math?’[i] The New York Times article ‘Alarmed by A.I. Chatbots, Universities Start Revamping How They Teach’, retells the story of a teacher catching… Continue reading

British Library Boston Spa: Review: North American Resources at the British Library

The day formed a sort of whistle-stop tour of a public institution that wants to be used. The organisers were more than forthcoming about the importance of human resources in finding material. For all the database searches possible, the subject librarians themselves have decades of experience and indispensable knowledge which they want to disseminate more widely. Like the promotion of analogue, the human face becomes a mascot for remembering how scholarship must seek to maintain a contact with material reality, as it then gains capacity to enrich both academic and public spheres. Continue reading

University of East Anglia: Review: Queer Subjects and the Contemporary United States

Queer Subjects and the Contemporary United States was a colloquium born of the present moment. Focused on discussions of what queerness means under the Trump administration, this conference set out to consider the ways queerness figures within a contemporary social, political, and cultural U.S. context. Continue reading