Events

A lecture by Dr. Sandra Laugier , Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne and senior member of Institut Universitaire de France.

Hosted by Dr. James McNamara (PhD, Oxford, 2011). Dr. McNamara is a screenwriter and a Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. McNamara’s creative practice, teaching, and research focus on adaptation studies, with a particular interest in screen adaptations of Shakespeare.

Co-Sponsored by the Film & Media Studies Department, the Carsey-Wolf Center, and the Graduate Center for Literary Research.

Lockdown gave us an occasion to discover new television series and to revisit others. TV series accompany us in our ordinary lives, and they can also be a resource or refuge in extraordinary situations. They provided us with comfort universes, full of things that seem like distant
memories: worlds in which people go to the coffee shops, travel…. The relevance and importance of series (there are now series in all countries and they circulate far beyond their countries of origin) is in their creation of what we may call elementary forms of shared experience. Philosophy has not yet sufficiently observed or analyzed this democratization of experience, and the constitution of a new set of values through the mass and digital distribution of TV series. They are the sites of the education of individuals, an education that amounts to a form
of subjective perfecting through sharing and discussing public and ordinary material, which is integrated into individuals’ lives. We need to rethink what we mean today by popular culture by connecting it to the Deweyan notion of the public . Public and popular forms of cultural production ascribe to each individual the capacity to trust her judgment; the intertwining of the private and the public, and even the privatization of the public space, challenge our conceptions of the place of TV series since the pandemic.

Dr. Laugier’s talk will focus on the Netflix series “ Lupin ”, drawing on her recent work on television series, in particular the forthcoming English translation of her 2019 book Nos vies en séries: Series-Philosophy . How TV series change our lives and transform philosophy (Exeter UP 2022), and the volume TV with Stanley Cavell in Mind, co-edited with D. LaRocca (Exeter UP 2022)

Sandra Laugier is Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne (Paris, France), a Senior Fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France, and the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) project DEMOSERIES. She has published extensively on ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein, Austin, Cavell), moral and political philosophy, gender studies and the ethics of care, and popular culture (film and TV series). She has translated most of Stanley Cavell’s work and is among the editors of his Nachlass. Her recent publications include: Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy (2013); Politics of the Ordinary. Care, Ethics, and Forms of Life (2020); and, edited with Greg Chase and Juliet Floyd, Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say? at Fifty (2022). Other recent books include: Tous vulnérables. Le care, les animaux et l’environnement (Payot 2012), Face aux désastres. Le care, la folie et les grandes détresses collectives , co-authored with Anne Lovell, Stefania Pandolfo, Veena Das (Ithaque 2013); Formes de vie , co-edited with E. Ferrarese (CNRS ed. 2018); Le Pouvoir des liens faibles , co-edited with Alexandre Gefen (CNRS ed. 2020); Concepts de l’ordinaire , co-edited with Pierre Fasula (Sorbonne Ed. 2021).

James McNamara is a screenwriter and a Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. McNamara is currently creating Detective Cooper, an international television drama series for Goalpost Pictures, Quizzical Pictures, and M-Net. He is also creating a television drama series for Sony Pictures / Playmaker. Other recent television work includes writers’ rooms for the Academy Award-winning See Saw Films, Matchbox Pictures / NBC Universal, Foxtel, ABC, and Endemol Shine. Additionally, McNamara is directing and writing an audio series for Audible, Estuary Films, and Princess Pictures. McNamara has consulted on features for Porchlight Films, Icon Film Distribution, and Fox Searchlight Pictures, and has twice been named an “international rising star” by BAFTA LA. McNamara’s creative practice, teaching, and research focus on adaptation studies, with a particular interest in screen adaptations of Shakespeare. His essays and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, and Australian Book Review, where he is a past member of the editorial advisory board. In 2018, he was guest editor of ABR’s film and television special issue, and he received the Ian Potter Foundation Fellowship, one of Australia’s major awards for cultural criticism, for his work on early 21st-century US cable television. Prior to coming to UCSB, McNamara was the Junior Dean of Pembroke College, University of Oxford.

This event is free and open to the public / Event will be conducted via Zoom webinar /
Please visit the GCLR’s website for more information.

Zoom link to the lecture :

https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/87162586197?pwd=V2YzR25weHRiMTdraEVQUVByemtWdz09
Meeting ID: 871 6258 6197
Passcode: 166TN

For additional lectures that Professors Sandra Laugier and Alexandre Gefen will be presenting at UCSB during their visit see:
https://gclr.complit.ucsb.edu/news/announcement/468
https://campuscalendar.ucsb.edu/event/alexandre-gefen-and-sandra-laugier#.YfLURfXMJUM
https://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/events/2021-2022-events/generative-ai/
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MoqJ-KHtE8GmHLnJfAD3ITLgeHmI4mte7VzLVU5c8eI/edit

Dr. Laugier’s visit is co-sponsored by the Comparative Literature Program, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the Transcriptions Center for Digital Humanities and New Media, the Carsey Wolf Center, the International Center for the Humanities and Social Change, the Department of Film and Media Studies, the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies, and the Graduate Center for Literary Research at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Their visit to UCSB has been organized and coordinated by:
Professor Dominique Jullien, dominique.jullien@ucsb.edu
Professor Catherine Nesci, catherine.nesci@ucsb.edu