November 26, 2025

18.00

Kordatos Amphitheater

Haidy Geismar, UCL

Ioanna Laliotou, UTH

Chair: Konstantinos Kalantzis, UTH, UCL

Introduction: Chrysi Laspidou, UTH

In this presentation Haidy Geismar will reflect on the past ten years of building a series of new programmes and spaces for programmes focused on media, art, creative practice, history and collections at UCL. She reflects on the disciplinary shifts, broader sea changes in UK higher education (particularly since the shift to fee-paying for students and the regulatory environment that limits fees for home students but allows for very high fees from international students) and some of the tactics and strategies we developed to make an argument for more space, and resources and put this in a more global perspective. She explores the consequences of this political, economic and cultural landscape on arts education, university politics for arts and humanities education. She also focuses on her own area of expertise – curating, collections and archives and talk about some of the public facing activity we have done in this space – making the university facilities a community and cultural resource for our neighbours in London.

The lecture will be presented online as part of the course “Seminar Lectures I” of the Interdepartmental Master’s Program “Tourism and Culture Design and Development” via MS-Teams using the code: bbpolvi

Haidy Geismar is a social anthropologist with a research interests in intellectual and cultural property, indigenous rights and colonial histories and legacies, new forms of cultural representation, the affects and effect of digitisation, the anthropology of art, critical museology and the South Pacific (especially Vanuatu and New Zealand). Since 2000 She has worked with the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, investigating the ways in which people from Vanuatu work through the museum to generate powerful discourses about cultural value, which then extend into national marketplaces, village meeting grounds, and international performances and exhibitions. Since 2004, she has also been working in Aotearoa New Zealand, collaborating with curators to investigate alternative models of value for Maori cultural production in both museum and marketplace. Current research projects include Finding Photography – a collaboration with collections care researchers to explore the social networks and materials underpinning contemporary digital art photography, and Collecting in Context – a project exploring the applicability of new digital collecting platforms in diverse cultural settings.

The presentation will be held in English.