James Woudhuysen helped install Britain’s first computer-controlled car park in 1968, before graduating in Physics. He wrote about chemical and biological weapons for the Economist in 1978, completed an instruction manual for word processing in 1983, led a multi-client study on e-commerce in 1988, and suggested Internet TV in 1993. He has worked with Amadeus, AT&T, BA, Barclays Bank, BT, Ericsson, Ford, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Johnson Controls International, Midland Bank, Motorola, Nokia, Orange, Philips, Renault and Yamaha Motor, as well as with the cities of Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, Portsmouth, Cardiff and Croydon.
Now Professor of Forecasting and Innovation at De Montfort University, Leicester, Woudhuysen has written for the Economist and The Times, and contributes regularly to Radio 4 and Spiked.
What's radical any more? with James Woudhuysen
The watchwords for our troubled times seem to be 'easy now', and there are no radicals left in the western world. Students, alternatives and political activists of all kinds, who once experimented with new ways of living, doing things and organising themselves, are no longer leading struggles for international solidarity, equal rights or better conditions.
When mums drop their kids off to demonstrate against tuition fees, strikes last just one day and the one thing we all agree would make society better - more jobs - looks impossible in the global recession, what does it mean to be radical today? Are we all conservative with a small c now?
Are there lessons we can learn from the past, when students, feminists and trade unionists believed the world could be different? Or should we try to learn from the failures of the right, and not throw out the gains made under Reagan, Thatcher and New Labour? How useful to westerners are the examples set by radicals of the Arab Spring, India and the far East? Is it possible to be radical at all today?
In place of the complacent at Sussex University: for campaigns with brains!
Forty years ago, when the Vietnam war was at its bloodiest, the University of Sussex was a real laboratory for challenging ideas – and for forceful action too. Chemists going to lectures were given leaflets with the intriguing title 'CLASS STRUGGLE AMONG THE MOLECULES'; a worker who came to address an open-air meeting in defence of trade union rights began his address with the bald assertion 'This country is becoming a police state'. Dozens of students read Karl Marx's Capital, hundreds refused to pay their campus rents to the authorities, and a philosophy professor's lecture on the decline of empiricism was packed out by humanities students and scientists alike.
Today, what remains of these traditions? How much is the Sussex academic ethos still committed, as once it tried to be, to internationalism, to interdisciplinary studies, and to the future? To recruit students, Sussex still nostalgically invokes its reddish past. But at just the moment when a renewed world economic and social crisis should make the university pose searching questions, Sussex has chosen to commemorate its golden jubilee with a tame weekend at Falmer (including an organ recital and a campus boundary walk), and an even tamer series of debates in 2012 in London ('Citizenship and democratisation', 'Culture and heritage').
Undergraduates, graduates and staff at the university, as well as the people of Brighton, deserve better. This salon is being held to interrogate the history of and prospects facing Sussex, and to start the process of fusing radical theory with radical practice. Nothing less will be enough to match the grave realities of 2011.
Speaker
Speaker
Nick is a graduate of Sussex University and a star of its competitive debating society. He has a wide experience of teaching English abroad in some of the poorest areas of West Africa and in South America, and also of coaching debating skills to underprivileged school children in London. He has recently been working with the political and civil liberties campaign, The Manifesto Club, and for the London think tank,The Institute of Ideas. He is looking to work in the political, NGO, think-tank and development sectors.
Speaker
Dan is the Director of the Brighton Salon and has has written extensively about the Criminal Records Bureau checks on volunteers working with children and other problems facing competitive sport in the UK. Dan has published several articles and has had numerous Televison and Radio appearances in the UK and around the English-speaking world on the interplay between sport and society. He has also campaigned against public drinking restrictions and is currently writing a book on the decline of elite distance running and mass participation in time for the London Olympics. He has been a tennis coach for many years and runs a digital marketing firm.
Chair
Sean is a founder member of The Brighton Salon and a journalist who formerly worked in the local press industry and on the magazines Computing and Campaign. Sean has written dozens of reviews of salon events and occasionally contributes to other publications. He has been involved with many and various political and cultural campaigns for many years.
Sean writes freelance about the relationship between journalism the public and runs an editing and proofing company. He also organises activities for The Brighton Salon as its secretary.