Keynote Speakers
Mark Devenney is a Principal Lecturer in politics and philosophy and he leads the Humanities Programme degrees at the University of Brighton. His main research interests lie in contemporary Political Philosophy, with research expertise on Critical Theory (Adorno and Habermas) and contemporary Continental philosophy (notably Agamben, Hardt and Negri, Laclau, Ranciere, Derrida, Zizek and Badiou.) He uses this theoretical work to research different ways of valuing life, in a research project that focuses on the uses and abuses of human bodies (torture, patening, suicide bombing, genetic engineering and the ethics of life/death decisions).
Fred Botting is a Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University, London (UK). He has taught English Literature, Critical Theory, Film and Cultural Studies at the Universities of Lancaster, Keele and Cardiff. He has written extensively on Gothic fictions as well as on theory, film and cultural forms. His current research projects include work on fiction and film dealing with figures of horror and on spectrality, the uncanny and sexuality.
Full Call for Papers
On Violence
The financial crisis, the terrorist threat, natural disasters (such as the earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy) or immigration policies are just some of global issues where some of the new practices of social regulation can be detected. One of the important elements of the new ways in which societies experience this new regulation is ambivalent relation to violence. Although violence is often conceptualized as a non-human condition, coming from the collapse of the symbolic order, it is, however, precisely the symbolic order that organizes and structures violence. On the other hand, it is often allocated to the other thus promoting a new geopolitical map that now, in the post Cold War world, draws borders between us and them (violent Islamists, tribal Balkans, threatening Chinese). The case of Breivik showed that detecting the object of violence and performing a violent act can never be outside of symbolic but precisely in its core.
This raises questions such as: What is violence today? Who is the agent of violence? How is violence performed? In what way is violence (dis)approved? Can violence be outsourced? Are the military and the police as traditional agents of social regulation of violence regulated in a new way? Who are the victims of violence? Can victims reflect their condition? Are societies and individuals dealing with the new kind of traumas? Are there new social interpretations of the violent events in their past? What is a new relationship between different religions and violence? Are the new social movements appearing throughout the world (Occupy, Pirate Parties International, the Invisible Committee, Arab Spring Movement) offering a new way of resistance to new regulation?
At this conference we would like to focus on (1) the ways in which violence is conceived and perceived within different contexts, (2) the ways in which literature, film, performance, and other forms of art relate to and incorporate contemporary outbursts of violence, (3) the new ways in which this process can be theorized in the field of humanities and social sciences, and finally (4) the ways in which this type of violence changes cultural politics of diversity in societies.
Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
- Violence in literature, film and art
- Life after violence
- Experience of structural violence
- Historical approach to violence – its same morphology but different mechanisms
- New conceptualization of violence in the humanities
- Gender specific violence and its cultural background, race, disability
- Agents of structural violence and their opponents (including humanities and social sciences)
- Social construction of memories of violence
- Violence in/and popular culture
Abstracts
Abstracts are invited from scholars from different fields and disciplines of humanities and social sciences for individual papers (15-20 minutes including discussion time).
Please submit your abstracts (no more than 300 words in length) electronically using Abstract Submission Form available at
http://www.facebook.com/l/SAQHQFzRRAQHwMRYijh8gctxXYHzIuDyao6utN0y4gH4pLQ/www.rhss-conference.com
by June 1st 2013. Selected conference papers will be published.
Abstracts should be in Word or RTF formats and include the following:
a) author(s),
b) affiliation,
c) e-mail address,
d) title of abstract,
e) keywords + body of abstract
Please use the plain text (Times New Roman 12, single spacing, justified) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and reply to all proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us within a week from your submission, you should assume we did not receive your proposal; in that case we suggest trying an alternative electronic route or resending.
The conference language is English.
Registration
Registration will be completed upon your arrival at the University of Zadar. Upon registration the participants will receive a welcome package as well as their credentials and certificate for presenting the paper.
Conference Fees
Early Bird (by June 30): 90 Euros
Normal Registration (by July 31): 120 Euros
Late Registration (upon arrival or during August and September): 140 Euros
Unwaged: 50 Euros
Cancellation received before August 1, 2013 will receive a refund of 50% of the registration fee.
Dates
Proposal submission deadline is June 1, 2013.
Final conference announcement and program will be published on August 15, 2013 on the conference website
(http://www.facebook.com/l/8AQGgWbZLAQHFqcB5EBLJnEWfoU93A_N6ww12HaD7h32lNg/www.rhss-conference.com).
Duration of conference: September 5-7, 2013
Additional Information
The conference will take place at the University of Zadar, Croatia
(http://www.facebook.com/l/SAQHQFzRRAQHK2lgVKPZL-yPacBZupdyt2beaguWXZjWJuQ/www.unizd.hr).
Additional information about travel arrangements, accommodation and other practical details will be posted soon on the conference website
( http://www.facebook.com/l/8AQGgWbZLAQHFqcB5EBLJnEWfoU93A_N6ww12HaD7h32lNg/www.rhss-conference.com)
or you can contact the organizers directly at rhss.conference@gmail.com
Please check out our Facebook page - https://www.facebook.com/RHSSZadar