Friday 4 December 2009, 11.30am, Chadwick lecture theatre, UCL

Hosted by UCL’s Grand Challenge of Sustainable Cities, UCL English Language & Literature and UCL Art & Humanities

The symposium ‘Just Enough: Sufficiency and the Cultural Imagination’ will examine how different cultures and contexts (institutions, disciplines, places, periods) have characterised and fleshed out the idea of ‘enough’. We will hear from several academics at UCL and other universities about the particular resonances of the idea of ‘enough’ in their discipline or period, followed by roundtable discussions in which questions that emerge in response to short papers will be explored by panellists and audience members.

Members of UCL English Language & Literature will offer us part of a linguistic and cultural history of ‘enough’ as it has been manifested in Britain over the centuries, and will be joined by representatives of other disciplines, including history of medicine, history of architecture and social anthropology.

In the evening, representatives from the day’s symposium will be joined on a panel by non-academics working in the field of sustainability communication in Britain today for a larger round-table discussion. Here the focus will be on thinking about the continual mediation of culture in our ethical and political decisions concerning sustainable living. What is general and what is particular about our own cultural moment in relation to other contexts? How does the current cultural framework shape our desires and limit our capacity for action?

To find out more, see:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities/just-enough

One-Day Symposium – ‘Just Enough: Sufficiency and the Cultural Imagination’

11.30 Welcome and Introduction

11.45 First Session

Enough in Language and History

Dr Kathryn Allan (UCL English Language & Literature) – Sociolinguistics

Dr Eric Langley (UCL English Language & Literature) – Early Modern Culture

Dr Hannah Skoda (Merton College, Oxford) – History, Medieval Culture

13.15 Lunch

14.15 Second Session

Enough: Styles and Life-Styles

Dr Paul Davis (UCL English Language & Literature) – 17th Century Culture

Hope Wolf (Kings College London and Imperial War Museum) – English 20th Century Wartime

Dr Ben Campkin (UCL Bartlett School of Architecture) – Housing

15.45 Coffee

16.15 Third Session

Resourcefulness and Sufficiency

Professor Rachel Bowlby (UCL English Language & Literature) – Modern Consumer Culture

Dr Jerome Lewis (UCL Anthropology) – Abundance or Scarcity?

Dr James Wilson (UCL Centre for Philsophy, Justice and Health)

17.45 Coffee

To register for the Roundtable discussion, please visit:

Just Enough: Sufficiency and the Cultural Imagination Debate