• Subjects and Practices of Resistance
2013-05-21
CALL FOR PAPERS
For two inter-linked, consecutive workshops under the theme of Subjects and Practices of Resistance to be held 9-11 September 2013 at University of Sussex.
The first workshop (9-10 Sept) is on Discipline(s), Dissent and Dispossession and the second on Counter-Conduct in Global Politics (10-11 Sept). The workshop convenors encourage attendance at both workshops. However, paper proposals should specify the intended workshop and which days participants would be able to attend.
The workshops are generously sponsored and supported by the BISA Poststructuralist Politics Working Group (PPWG) and the Centre for Advanced International Theory (CAIT) at the University of Sussex
Workshop 1: Discipline(s), Dissent and Dispossession
9-10 September 2013
Contemporary struggles against dispossession – from the 2011 Occupy movement to ongoing land rights conflicts in the Ecuadorian rainforest – not only remind us of existing forces of domination and exploitation, but also challenge the ready-made concepts and frameworks through which such struggles are often interpreted. Building on a previous project – “Disciplining Dissent”* – this workshop aims to open up discussion on the intersections between the politics of resistance and the politics of knowledge. How might we conceptualise dissent or resistance in ways that are sensitive to the social and epistemic relations within which anti-systemic struggles are embedded? How might we frame the complementarity and tensions between political dissent and intellectual critique? How might available concepts and frameworks occlude the complex interplay between resistance and repression, discipline and dissent, obscuring what is at stake politically in existing practices of struggle?
We welcome contributions that consider these themes from diverse theoretical perspectives and academic disciplines, including international relations, international political economy, sociology, philosophy, geography and anthropology.
Questions that might be addressed include (but are not limited to): how is dissent rendered intelligible in ways that serve to contain, nullify or depoliticize struggles; the politics of knowledge in political dissent; the place of normative political critique in the absence of universal categories or emancipatory blueprints; the ways in which dissenting communities are building their own theories of dissent or are theorising out of their own dissenting practices; the forms of subjectivisation incited, subverted or arrested through practices of dissent and/or their relation to the types of dissenting subjects assumed by intellectuals and experts; the ways in which academic disciplines interpret, appropriate and discipline both dissent and critique; the nature and purpose of academic critique at a moment of austerity and economic “crisis”.
It is hoped that the workshop will serve as a basis for a journal special issue, as well as for further collobarations around these themes.
Abstracts of approx. 300 words should be sent to L.Coleman@sussex.ac.uk and cait@sussex.ac.uk by 31 May 2013 (please indicate whether or not you plan to attend both workshops).
Convenors:
Lara Montesinos Coleman, University of Sussex
Doerthe Rosenow, Oxford Brookes University
Karen Tucker, University of Bristol
*published as Lara Montesinos Coleman and Karen Tucker (eds.), Situating Global Resistance: Between Discipline and Dissent (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012) and as a special issue of Globalizations 8:3 (2011).
