When?
Monday, July 27 at 7:30PM
Where?
Who?
Paul Sims & Caspar Melville
What's the talk about?
Paul Sims and Caspar Melville talk about offence, free speech and other scrapes based on experiences they’ve had at the New Humanist.
Caspar’s just written a book about the issue too (http://bit.ly/bByn7) and they both have had various mini-controversies related to the magazine. A good example was when some people took offence to a cover featuring Richard Dawkins: http://blog.newhumanist.org.uk/2007/11/new-humanist-cartoon-controversy.html.
From plays to cartoons, books to Teddy Bears-interest groups, often using the language of human rights, are claiming that they are offended and attempting to ban, gag, even kill, those deemed to be the offenders. Intellectual heavyweights throughout the Anglo-American world of letters have charged to the defence of free expression. There have been many highly charged incidents, in particular around Islam, offering opportunities for an orgy of media self-congratulation about the superiority of secular democracy and the vital role of the press in supporting freedom. Using his experience as editor of "New Humanist" (itself accused of 'offensiveness'), Paul Sims and Caspar Melville try to disentangle the varieties of offence, to trace the origins of our current situation to the failed identity politics of the 1970s and the new language of human rights, and to distinguish between the duty to offend and the temptations of cultural chauvinism.
Paul Sims is New Humanist's News Editor. He graduated from Oxford University, where he studied Modern History, in 2006, before moving to London to join New Humanist in 2007.
Caspar Melville is editor of New Humanist. He formerly worked for openDemocracy. His writing has appeared in The LA Times, Toronto Star, Sunday Telegraph, Village Voice and loads of obscure music magazines. He has a PhD in media from Goldsmith's College, London.
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