Night of Ideas
  • About
  • What’s On
  • Before the Night
  • Who’s who
  • UK-Wide
  • Partners
  • Info
  • Replay the Night
Institut francais
  • About
  • What’s On
  • Before the Night
  • Who’s who
  • UK-Wide
  • Partners
  • Info
  • Replay the Night


  • Welcome Remarks: Rebuilding Together

    18:00–18:50 - Ciné Lumière – Opening

    Onsite & Online

    Bertrand Buchwalter, Cultural Counsellor of the French Embassy to the UK and Director of the Institut français du Royaume-Uni, will launch the Night of Ideas 2022. This new edition will focus on “Rebuilding Together”.

    Opening address, online, by Philippe Descola, anthropologist and Professor at the Collège de France, author of Beyond Nature and Culture.
    Opening address, by artist Zineb Sedira, who represents France at the 59th Venice Biennale.

     

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    See the livestream on Youtube
    Watch the Facebook Live



  • The Politics Of Expertise

    19:00–19:50 - La Médiathèque – Debate
    Onsite
     
    Considering the difficult, if not impossible, task of finding political solutions to the health crisis, scientists were often praised as those who should act as real decision-makers. However, contradictory stances may emerge depending on which science is prioritised. And isn’t political decision-making precisely what exceeds the sheer sum of all varied expertise?

     

    Hybrid event with

    • Bashir Al-Hashimi, Professor in Computer Engineering, King’s College London (onsite)
    • Marcus du Sautoy, Mathematician, University of Oxford (onsite)
    • Renate Christ, Climate Change Expert (online)

    Chaired by Judith Rainhorn, Professor in Modern History, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (onsite)
     

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  • Noire

    20:10–21:00 - Les Salons – Film
    Onsite
     
    Tania de Montaigne’s performance Noire. La Vie méconnue de Claudette Colvin, a theatrical adaptation of the biography she has written about the American pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement, will be shown before her participation in the conversation The problem with universalism.

     

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  • Les Impatients

    21:20–22:10 - Les Salons – Film
    Onsite
     
    The political discourse often claims to be about the people, playing on the vagueness of such a concept. Who feels unconcerned by it? The crisis of political representation might stem precisely from a misunderstanding of what “the people” means. In Les Impatients, a film-essay in the form of a “chronopolitical” series, art theorists Aliocha Imhoff and Kantuta Quirós – founders of the contemporary art curatorial platform A People is Missing – unravel those who are engaged in a movement of reconstruction of the future, of futures, those who carry within them an impatience with regard to a History that now seems motionless, stopped.

     

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  • The Problem With Universalism

    21:20–22:10 - La Médiathèque – Debate
    Onsite
     
    Once praised as a pathway to liberation, universalism is now criticized by new inclusive movements that don’t believe in its emancipatory effect anymore. Is universalism definitely over?

     

    Hybrid event with

    • Shuk Ying Chan, Research Fellow in Politics, Nuffield College, Oxford University (onsite)
    • Tania de Montaigne, Novelist and Journalist (online)

    Chaired by Sameer Rahim, Managing Editor (Arts and Books) of Prospect (onsite)
     

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© Institut français du Royaume-Uni 2022