Five lectures between Thursday 18th January and Thursday 10th May. These are free to attend and open to all, Thomas Paine Lecture Theatre. All details can be found on the UEA website

Following the Brexit Means Brexit Public Lecture Series of 2017, in 2018 UEA’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities is exploring Britain’s changing global roles and responsibilities from different cultural and political perspectives. How does Britain’s twenty-first-century role differ from its previous identities? Which global duties and identities have changed? How are we communicating and representing ourselves on the global stage? And is Britain still ‘we’? Join us for a series of five public events to discuss these questions.

The five events address different elements of Britain’s global identity, its past, present and future, and how it represents itself to the world:

• Britain’s Global Pasts (18 January): Surely Britain in its past was rural, parochial, and isolated from the wider world?  Or its global past might sound slightly disturbing – evoking images of colonialism and exploitation.  This panel sets out to challenge these conceptions, highlighting British global pasts that provide positive, outward-facing models for Britain’s relationship with the wider world today.
• Britain’s Global Role (8 February): This session will explore opportunities for the UK to further its “Global Britain” agenda, looking across issues like development aid and UN peacekeeping, where the UK is making a positive contribution, and arms control, where UK conduct is falling short, with harrowing consequences for people in places like Yemen and more broadly, for the health of the international system.
• Gender and Intersectionality in Global Britain (15 February): Gender issues in ‘Global Britain’ often intersect with other factors such as identity, power, language, disability, religion, and sexuality. In this session UEA researchers in Gender, Queer Studies, and Linguistics aim to document the way in which the lived experiences of individuals occupying a particular intersection in Global Britain often become subjected to cultural misinterpretations and unethical ascriptions.
• Britain on Film: National Cinema in a Global Context (19 April): The Chief Executive of Film London (and UEA alumnus) Adrian Wootton will be leading a discussion of the UK as a location for producing feature films and high-end television, and the issues facing the film industry in the current political climate. The panel also considers how Britain has been represented on film, and will include footage provided by the East Anglian Film Archive.
• Communication in Global Britain: The Language Gap (10 May): Professor Steven Vertovec, Director of the Max Planck Institute, focuses on the challenges for communication we face. What role does language play in superdiverse societies such as Britain? What are the challenges and benefits of the increasing number of languages spoken in today’s Global Britain? And how will Brexit affect, and be affected by, the need to communicate across a growing number of languages?

The public lecture series is coordinated by Dr William Rossiter and Dr Emma Pett.  For further information, please contact them on w.rossiter@uea.ac.uk or e.pett@uea.ac.uk