Pre-Festival Events

Distinguished Lecture in the Alphonsus ‘Arrow’ Cassell

Memorial Series

The Conference Room at the Cultural Centre in Little Bay

on Thursday December 6, 2012 at 7 pm.

Professor Curwen Best

The University of the West Indies Open Campus in Montserrat and the Alliouagana Festival of the Word invite the public – including all parents and their digitally- sophisticated children – to participate in a Distinguished Lecture in the Alphonsus ‘Arrow’ Cassell Memorial Lecture Series. The lecture entitled “10 Things Our Youth Know (that we don’t) about Cyberspace, our Nation and the Future” will be presented by Dr. Curwen Best who is currently Professor of Popular Culture and Literary Studies and Head of the Department of Language, Linguistics and Literature at Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies.

According to Professor Best “The youth always seem to be on the cutting edge of culture. They challenge more conventional ways of thinking about who we are; they have adopted and adapted new ways of carrying out tasks. They share a special relationship through popular culture with emerging systems and technologies.”

How can we understand their current immersion in digital culture? What does it mean? Are those who look on, better placed to confront the dynamic challenges of a brave new world?

This presentation places some of the recent youth trends in the broader context of our contact with technologies over the past 30 years. And it poses the question: if we have always had to deal with technology, why should we be more nervous today? Given the comfort of many youth with their emerging cyber-nation, what is it that they know, and we don’t?

Professor Best has an interest in popular culture, cyber culture and Caribbean Literature and Culture. His publications include:

Barbadian Popular Music: and the Politics of Caribbean Culture (1999)
Roots to Popular Culture: Barbadian Aesthetics from Kamau Brathwaite to Hardcore Styles (2001)
Culture@ the Cutting Edge: Tracking Caribbean Popular Music (2005)

The Politics of Caribbean Cyberculture (2008)

Kamau Brathwaite and Christopher Okigbo: Art Politics and the Music of Ritual (2009)