Leeds Salon on Film

Heidegger and the Rejection of Modernity
Final Tetley Talk on Civilization and Its Discontents, on Martin Heidegger, philosopher of being and becoming.

Spencer and the Organic Society
Second in the series of Tetley Talks on Civilization and Its Discontents, on Herbert Spencer, the evolutionary sociologist.

Freud and the Repressive Society
First in the series of Tetley Talks on Civilization and Its Discontents, on Freud.

Multiculturalism and its Discontents
Do multiculturalist policies threaten to re-create and reinforce a more divided Britain, or are they still essential to delivering a fairer, more tolerant and egalitarian society?

Eleanor Marx: A Life
Acclaimed writer and historian Rachel Holmes on this remarkable and inspiring figure of the late nineteenth century

Radicalisation and Security
Is radicalisation a security issue – to be tackled by bureaucratic ‘Prevent’ strategies? Or is it a symptom of a more fundamental crisis of confidence and meaning within Western societies themselves – to be overcome by principled and passionate argument?

Resilience: The Government of Complexity
Resilience has become a central concept in government policy understandings over the last decade. In our complex, global and interconnected world, resilience appears to be the policy ‘buzzword’ of choice, alleged to be the solution to a wide and ever-growing range of policy issues.

Hunger in the UK: The Foodbanks Phenomenon
The government’s critics argue that the rise of food banks is a result of benefit cuts and austerity. The DWP claims that the rise in food bank use is a matter of supply, not of increased need. But is there cultural change too – are some people more open today to accepting charity?

What Happened to Agency?
Nowadays everyone is obsessed with themselves. People take life-affirming journeys and courses in self-discovery, cover themselves in tattoos, and the fear is that we are a selfish society. But the preoccupation with the Self is a clue that the modern sense of identity is weak, not strong.

More Than Just An Ape?
Researchers tell us animals are so much more like us than we ever imagined. The argument is at its most powerful when it comes to our closest living relatives – the great apes. So is humanity exceptional or just another ape?

Have We Still Got Soul?
The concept of the soul is a problematic one today: pushed into obscurity by philosophic rejection of dualism and scientific understanding of our materiality. What explains our desire to see the person in the self-portrait or picture, the subject as being somehow present in the object?

What Does Authority Mean in the Twenty-First Century?
In the 21st Century authority appears to have become “an elusive force”. While the issue and contestation of authority has been a central concern throughout human history, today the very idea of authority seems to be viewed in an almost entirely negative light.

The EU and the End of Politics
The growing power of the EU is often interpreted by its critics as due to the rise of a powerful EU elite in Brussels. However, according to James Heartfield, the forward march of the European Union has been widely misunderstood.