Professors Rachel Harrison and Dina Matar will be presenting their inaugural lectures.

Professor Rachel Harrison from the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics and Professor Dina Matar from the Department of Media Studies deliver their inaugural lectures on two different and distinctive themes.

Professor Harrison's inaugural lecture is titled Inviting Interconnections: How Thai Cultural Studies Makes a Difference to the Wider World. This lecture explores what we can learn more widely from Thai cultural studies, reflecting on its relevance to world literature, world cinema and postcoloniality. How does it shape our appreciation of cultural difference, intercultural communication, genders and sexualities? And what basis does it provide for new theoretical perspectives?

Professor Matar's inaugural lecture is titled Unsettling the field of media and communication studies during Genocide. This lecture addresses the challenges the heavily mediated livestreamed genocide in Gaza poses to the critical study and practices of media and communications. Matar suggests that the genocide constitutes a seismic temporality that has forced many Palestinian scholars in the West to come to terms with the embedded and normalised racism in our field and to engage in the slow, necessary, anti-colonial project of unsettling it. It is also a moment when the so-called 'free' media dutifully occlude and obscure mass violence, enabling and reproducing liberal democracies by justifying some lives grievable and others not quite human enough, and therefore dispensable. The lecture begins with Professor Matar's academic journey to and in the field before addressing its limitations.