BC Humanists Vancouver Meetup Group

The “No-platforming” of speakers with whom we fundamentally disagree can suggest that force ought to prevail over speech that is itself regarded as “violent.” This suggestion is deeply corrosive. Samir Gandesha wrote a recent editorial for OpenDemorcacy on free speech and will be expanding on his comments in an upcoming SFU panel entitled Weaponizing Words: The Dilemmas of Free Speech. The panel features trans rights activist Morgane Oger and BC Civil Liberties Executive Director Josh Paterson. Prior to his panel discussion, Dr Gandesha will present some of his arguments at our Sunday meeting. Samir Gandesha is an Associate Professor in the Department of the Humanities and the Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. He specializes in modern European thought and culture, with a particular emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. His work has appeared in Political Theory, New German Critique, Constellations Logos, Kant Studien, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Topia, the European Legacy, the European Journal of Social Theory, Art Papers, the Cambridge Companion to Adorno and Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader as well as in several other edited books. He is co-editor with Lars Rensmann of Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations (Stanford, 2012). He is co-editor (with Johan Hartle) of Spell of Capital: Reification and Spectacle (University of Amsterdam Press, 2017) and Aesthetic Marx (Bloomsbury Press, 2017) also with Johan Hartle. He has also contributed to openDemocracy, Canadian Dimension, the Vancouver Sun and the Globe and Mail. In the Spring of 2017, he was the Liu Boming Visiting Scholar in Philosophy at the University of Nanjing and Visiting Lecturer at Suzhou University of Science and Technology in China. All are welcome to attend. Join us at 10 am for BYO coffee, tea, and socializing. At 10:30 am we start our presentation and discuss topics of interest to our members. Keep up to date with our current topics at http://bchumanist.ca The BC Humanist Association was formed in 1984 and many of our members are not on Meetup. We have a regular attendance of about 30 people at our Sunday meetings (rather than the small number who RSVP on Meetup). For more details on how to find the centre: http://www.bchumanist.ca/oakridge_seniors_centre