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DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20260507T170000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20260619T200000
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SUMMARY:The Manchester International Crime and Justice Film Festival 2026
DESCRIPTION:8 Fabulous  Films : Thursday 7th   May – Friday 19th June 2026 \n\n\n\n\nDownload: Crime and Justice Film Festival Calendar – May – June 2026\n\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\nWelcome to the 2026 festival sponsored by the School of Sociology & Criminology at Manchester Metropolitan University and curated by the university’s Policy Evaluation and Research Unit. \n\n\n\nSince 2019 we’ve had a consistent mission – screening great films which provoke debate and provide an alternative take on crime\, justice and punishment in the 21st century. \n\n\n\nThis year’s programme brings you an eclectic mix of international crime classics and lesser-known gems from a century of cinema\, with settings ranging from the Scottish islands to the south of Chile. Our experts will be on hand to introduce the movies and to answer your questions at Q+A sessions after each screening. Selected screenings will also feature short films documenting creative projects delivered in prisons\, in partnership between artist Faye Claridge\, learners from each establishment and our partner Novus. \n\n\n\nScreenings will take place at Grosvenor East Building\, the university’s Arts and Creative Hub. Grosvenor East is on the corner of Oxford Road and Cavendish Street\, five minutes walk from Oxford Rd train station. We also have a joint screening with our partners at Instituto Cervantes Manchester.     \n\n\n\nWe look forward to welcoming old friends and new audiences alike\, from the UK and internationally. \n\n\n\nSee you at the movies! \n\n\n\nYour festival team: \n\n\n\nKevin Wong\, Gavin Bailey\, Anton Roberts\, Katie Hunter\, Phil Edwards and Benedicte Brahic \n\n\n\nFilm notes by Phil Edwards
URL:https://ahead.mmu.ac.uk/event/the-manchester-international-crime-and-justice-film-festival-2026/
LOCATION:Grosvenor East Building\, Manchester Metropolitan University\, Cavendish Street\, Manchester\, M15 6BG
CATEGORIES:Event,Festival
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DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20260520T160000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20260520T190000
DTSTAMP:20260430T142949Z
CREATED:20260430T142948Z
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SUMMARY:Visual Arts Book Launch : Adam Walker - Textual Actants
DESCRIPTION:Textual Actants is a reflexive exploration of the things which hold things together\, be they lengths of steel\, programming protocols\, recognised authors\, or narratives of self. It pivots from the steel I-beam\, and a pilgrimage to the steelworks in Wallonia that first made them\, to the on-screen ‘I-beam’ cursor by which we navigate digital text. Via the supposed blankness of deserts and the techno-utopian imaginaries of Silicon Valley\, six interweaving texts attend to the slippery shifting relations of textualities and materialities\, and where bodies and subjects (and authors and readers) sit within these. \n\n\n\n‘You won’t read this and Adam Walker hasn’t authored it. Instead\, and together\, you’ll be in this book\, mapping\, systematising and modelling—forming it from the material world’s governances\, its archives and philosophies of such. This is a generous work for thinkers who will notice a baton being passed\, and roll up their sleeves.’Roy Claire Potter \n\n\n\n‘Proceeding by drift and detour\, by breakdown and rearrangement\, in prose at once spare and restless\, Walker takes us through deserts both material and imagined\, through post-industrial ruins and mirrored dreamscapes\, through the infrastructures that hold our texts and the texts that hold our infrastructures. The result is a lucid derangement: a meditation on art\, labour\, history\, and exhaustion\, where nothing stands alone and nothing quite falls.’Frank Wasser \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSPEAKERS \n\n\n\nAdam Walker is an artist and writer. Their practice is research-led\, critically and reflexively considering structures of inequality\, not least their own complicit position amid these. Text sits at the centre of their practice\, including its extensions into digital terrains as code and data. Interruption and impropriety are sought: subtexts and counter-texts that interrupt dominant textual flows. The works are sometimes written\, other times they spill into performance\, moving-image and digital forms\, and have been exhibited\, performed\, published and commissioned by institutions including the Serpentine\, ICA\, Tate and Tyneside Cinema. Their monograph Art\, Labour\, Text and Radical Care was published by Routledge in 2023. \n\n\n\nSusannah Thompson is an art historian\, writer and critic\, and Professor of Art History and Criticism at Manchester School of Art\, MMU. Her research follows three (often interconnecting) paths: feminist art history; Scottish art; art writing and creative criticism. Recent projects have focussed on Scottish women artists who write\, including Maud Sulter\, Cordelia Oliver and Joan Eardley. Alongside her academic research\, she has worked as a freelance art writer and critic since 2000\, publishing features\, reviews and articles in the specialist press including Artforum\, Art Review\, Burlington Contemporary\, Flash Art\, MAP\, Modern Painters\, Sight and Sound\, Variant and many more\, and for artists\, museums and galleries. Current projects include a catalogue essay on the work of Scottish painter Steven Campbell\, an article on artist-led publishing in Scotland from the 1980s\, and a monograph on the work of Maud Sulter. \n\n\n\nLaura Haynes is a writer\, editor and academic. She was co-director of MAP magazine (2011 – 2024) and at The Glasgow School of Art is leader of the studio-based interdisciplinary MLitt Art Writing programme\, where she also edits The Yellow Paper: Journal for Art Writing. Laura’s writing and research is concerned with autotheory and biomythography as poetics for critique. Publishing internationally\, and across various forms\, her work is published in journals including MuseMedusa: Revue de Littérature et D’Art Modernes and Journal for Writing in Creative Practice\, and magazines and presses including Sternberg\, Freelands Foundation\, Nothing Personal and MAP. With Susannah Thompson\, she was co-editor of ‘Art Writing\, Paraliterature and Intrepid Forms of Practice’\, a special issue of the Journal for Writing in Creative Practice. She is currently working on her first novel\, The Quick. \n\n\n\nNell Osborne is a poet\, novelist and researcher of feminism and experimental writing. From 2018–20\, she co-ran the Manchester-based experimental feminist reading series No Matter\, commissioning new work from writers including Anne Boyer and Lisa Robertson. She completed her doctoral research at The University of Manchester\, focused on writers including Ann Quin and Kathy Acker. She co-edited Gestures: a body of work\, a cross-disciplinary anthology on gesture and feminist practice (2025). In 2024\, she published the poetry pamphlet Thank You For Everything (Monitor Books). In 2025\, she published her debut novel\, Ghost Driver (Moist Books). Daisy LaFarge calls Ghost Driver ‘addictively morbid\, comic and discomfortingly familiar’. \n\n\n\nRefreshments will be available. \n\n\n\nCopies of Textual Actants (Infrastructure) will be available for purchase. \n\n\n\nThis event is hosted by the Visual Culture Research Group\, and made possible with support from AHEAD (Arts and Humanities Engagement and Dialogue). \n\n\n\n\nVisual Cultures Research Group
URL:https://ahead.mmu.ac.uk/event/visual-arts-book-launch-adam-walker-textual-actants/
LOCATION:Grosvenor East Building\, Manchester Metropolitan University\, Cavendish Street\, Manchester\, M15 6BG
CATEGORIES:AHEAD,Event,Talks
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DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20260527T140000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20260527T160000
DTSTAMP:20260209T174004Z
CREATED:20260209T172850Z
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SUMMARY:Human Rights & Resistance : Philosophies of Resistance
DESCRIPTION:The Manchester Metropolitan University Human Sciences Seminar Series is an invited speaker and research seminar organised by the Philosophy section of MMU’s Department of History\, Politics and Philosophy \n\n\n\n\n\nTickets £5 full / £3 concessions \n\n\n\nFree tickets for Manchester Met staff and students – email ahead@mmu.ac.uk for more details \n\n\n\nThe 2026 series\, Philosophies of Resistance\, will explore the philosophical thought that has resisted colonial\, racial and carceral oppression. \n\n\n\nThe series aims is to question the role that philosophical ideas have played – and continue to play – in collective struggles for social justice\, and human emancipation more broadly. \n\n\n\nThe three seminars in the series are: \n\n\n\n\nFrantz Fanon & Stand Up to Racism\n\n\n\nPhilosophy in Prisons\n\n\n\nHuman Rights & Resistance\n\n\n\n\nEach seminar includes an academic talk followed by an ‘in-conversation’ discussion between the speaker(s) and a local political activist\, and questions from the audience. \n\n\n\nA 15-minute refreshment break is included.Suitable for 18+ \n\n\n\nHuman Rights & Resistance seminar \n\n\n\nWednesday 27 May\, 2.00pm – 4.00pm\n\n\n\nIn this seminar\, Barbara Arneil will discuss the evolution of human rights and explore how they have been used as tools of resistance\, as well as tools of marginalisation and oppression. Following her talk\, there will be an in-conversation session with student activist Rishi Milward-Bose where they will consider the relationship between rights and more radical modes of political resistance as well as the advantages and limitations of systems of rights when seeking to overcome oppression. \n\n\n\nContributor biogs \n\n\n\nBarbara Arneil is a Professor of the Global History of Anti-Colonial Thought at the University of British Columbia. She is interested in the areas of identity politics and the history of political thought. As an author she has a specialism in the intersection between liberalism and colonialism. She is also interested in gender and political theory and has done research in the areas of social trust and diversity\, global citizenship and cosmopolitanism\, the role of disability in political theory and domestic colonies. Dr Arneil is Past President of the Canadian Political Science Association (2019-2020)\, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2022) and Member of the Order of Canada (2023). \n\n\n\nRishi Milward-Bose works as Migrant Justice Campaigns and Movement Building Coordinator intern at People & Planet facilitating the Divest Borders campaign\, supporting students who try to force their universities to exclude companies from investments that profit from migrant abuse. Rishi has previously been involved in a range of activist initiatives\, including university-based pro-Palestine divestment campaigns and encampments\, climate justice campaigns and a variety of community-strengthening initiatives.
URL:https://ahead.mmu.ac.uk/event/human-rights-resistance-philosophies-of-resistance/
LOCATION:People’s History Museum\, Left Bank Spinningfields\, Manchester\, M3 3ER
CATEGORIES:AHEAD,Event,Talks
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