Public lecture: “Why does Albania need “public intellectuals”?
Public lecture: Why does Albania need “public intellectuals”?
The CRLDS Center Albania is pleased to announce and to invite you to its next activity:
Public lecture
“Why does Albania need “public intellectuals”?
Place: Doro City Hotel
Date: April 16, 2015 Time: 11.00
In this public lecture, Gezim Alpion focuses mainly on the importance of intellectuals in the development of society and the role of universities in the creation of an intelligence that is aware of its responsibilities.
Firstly, Alpion stops on the role of thinkers and intellectuals in the West during the European Renaissance and Enlightenment. This will be followed by a brief description of the influence of some 'autobiographical' writers, such as D. H Lawrence, James Joyce and James Baldwin, and researcherssuch as Charles Wright Mills and Edward Said, on him as a student in Egypt and England (1985- 1997) and on his scientific and creative publications.
After this, in the lecture it is discussed the historical context in which Max Weber expressed the controversial concept of 'value-free' Social Sciences / Sociology. By referring to C.W. Mills, Pierre Bourdieu, E. Said, Noam Chomsky and Zygmunt Bauman, then the attention goes to the treatment of concepts like 'sociological imagination', and 'public intellectual', and also in the analysis of their role in social and human sciences in western democracies since the late 1950s.
In the end, Alpion makes a brief analysis of the efforts of intellectuals such as Faik Konica, Fan S. Noli, and GjergjFishta to create the 'national consciousness' from the last quarter of the 19th century until the declaration of Independence, to create the challenges of intellectuals in various stages of the Albanian state, including their engagement in politics, ending with some thoughts on the situation of higher education in Albania.
This activity is addressed to: all people interested in this subject, all those who aspire to a more active and more productive role of its important actors in which our intellectuals must stand out. We need more presence and higher public visibility of them. They are not lacking, but they are not enough. Let us multiply their voice!
A short biography of Alpion
GezimAlpion was born in Peshkopi in 1962. He received his BA and MA from Cairo University followed by a PhD from Durham University in 1997. Alpion lectured at the University of Huddersfield, Sheffield Hallam University, and Newman University College before joining the Department of Sociology at the University of Birmingham in 2002, where he is currently a fellow of the University of Birmingham Institute for Advanced Research in Arts and Social Sciences. Alpion is a member of the board of several scientific journals, including "Celebrity Studies", published in Routledge. Initially he attracted the attention of British media by publishing and staging in several British cities the dramas 'Vouchers: A Tragedy "(2001) and" IF ONLY and dead Could Listen', (2008).
The “Mother Teresa: Saint or Celebrity “monograph is published in English by Routledge in London and New York (2007), New Delhi, (2008), and in Italian from Salerno editrice in Rome (2008). This work and the volumes of essays 'Foregner Complex' (2002) and "Encounters with Civilizations ': From Alexander the Great to Mother Teresa', published in India (2008) and America (2009 and 2011) by the Transaction Publications, are greatly appreciated by academic criticism. The author of a number of studies in scientific journals and academic pages, GezimAlpion is considered as the most authoritative expert for Mother Teresa in English. He has published a series of articles in several authoritarian newspapers "The Guardian", "Hindustan Times", "The Middle Est Times", and "The Hyrriyet Daily News".