Seminar Series
These seminars are open to all students and parent/carers of both learning communities. They are held at Redland Green learning community. There are two prizes in every lecture for the two best questions! Please see below for a summary of each of the lectures.
Videos of Last Year's Science Lectures
Last year's Science lectures are now available to view on YouTube.
Seminar Summaries
Life in the Law
Bridget Forster, no. 5 Chambers
Bridget Forster talked about ways into, and life in the Law. She was bombarded by excellent questions from the floor in a lively session that covered the practicalities and the morality of finding and doing legal work.
Stilyagi, Russian Visual Culture c. 1950
Doctor Birgit Beumers
A crowd of people, all dressed in grey, stalking through the park at night, wielding scissors... They are breaking up and attacking a hipster rock and roll party, cutting their clothes and their carefully styled hair because they see the Russian Hipsters, the Stilyagi, as morally reprehensible, inexcusably extravagant and just not Soviet enough.
This is the scene from the Russian film Stilyagi, which with Dr. Beumers began her talk.
She went on to put the Stilyagi in political context.
Soviet Russia fought with the allies during WWII. Immediately after the war, America was still the friend of Soviet Russia, 'Voice of America' was aired on Soviet radio.
However, during 1946-48 there was a sudden deterioration in relations between East and West. American values began to be eschewed. In 1948, the 'Voice of America' was taken off air and in 1949 a campaign began against the hipster youth.
'Stilyagi' is a pejorative term. 'Stilyat' means to copy a riff in jazz (to which these hipsters listened) and the 'yagi' is a pejorative ending.
Dr. Beumers argued that the Stilyagi represented a reaction against the monotony of Soviet fashion; the puritanism of Soviet education; and the culturally-approved music styles which were slow and not conducive to wild dancing and expressions of joy. And it was joy that this youthful subculture wished to express: youthful exuberance, celebration of postwar freedoms, but against the backdrop of a society grieving for the disastrously heavy losses of WWII.
The things that the Stilyagi embraced were illegal and difficult to obtain, so involvement with the Stilyagi was dangerous. Owning a saxophone could incur a prison sentence, as could reproducing jazz records. The underground way of doing this was on old x-rays, leading to the expression, 'boogie on the bone'. Where did they get their clothes and these illicit items? On the black market, which thrived in the repressive Soviet regime, or else they were smuggled in by friends who had been abroad. The Stilyagi drew members from all walks of Moscow life - although they were a tiny minority and a very localised phenomenon.
The Stilyagi could be constructed as a harmful social influence; a Cold War phenomenon; promoters of individual liberty; precursors of Punk. Dr. Beumers argued that when the Stilyagi faded from view, they went underground and helped to preserve the artistic counterculture that fed into the liberalisation of Soviet Russia.
