Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Equality, Vulnerability, Precarity | Reading Group on Judith Butler’s work

Thursday, February 13th, 2014

Equality, Vulnerability, Precarity

Reading Judith Butler’s Precarious Life and Frames of War

Pavilion Parade, University of Brighton

30th April – 11th June 2014

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In this term-long reading course, hosted by the Critical Studies Research Group and the Understanding Conflict Research Cluster, we will engage in a close critical reading of Judith Butler’s Precarious Life (2004) and Frames of War (2009). In these texts Butler further develops her recent ethical work, offering a theory of generalised precariousness to interrogate the conditions necessary for a life to be livable. She situates her analysis in the context of modern warfare, focusing her critique on the ‘war on terror’ and the Israeli State’s occupation of Palestine. This course will be relevant to those interested in philosophy, political theory, history, law, sociology, war and peace studies, memory studies, gender studies, queer theory, international relations, cultural studies and geography.

The reading course is free and open to all members of University of Brighton and University of Sussex. All sessions will be held between 16:00 and 18:30 on Wednesday afternoons in B5 Pavilion Parade, BN2 1RA.

To register interest please contact Tim Huzar: t.huzar1@uni.brighton.ac.uk.

The Critical Studies Research Group (CSRG) was founded in 2011 by postgraduate students in the School of Humanities, University of Brighton, with the aim of providing an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of critical ideas and practices in light of the socio-political struggles we face today. The challenges that interdisciplinarity might pose are counteracted by our shared interest in the role and scope of critical thought and practice in the context of contemporary capitalism. For more information on the CSRG, please visit: brightoncsrg.noblogs.org.

The recently established Understanding Conflict research cluster brings together expertise in humanities and social sciences from across the University of Brighton. The cluster aims to develop, over a number of years, a valuable interdisciplinary synthesis for understanding and engaging with the forms and legacies of recent and contemporary violent conflict.

Course Outline

All sessions will be held between 16:00 and 18:30
on Wednesday afternoons in B5 Pavilion Parade, BN2 1RA.

Precarious Life
30th April

‘Explanation and Exoneration, or What We Can Hear’ – Chapter One
‘Violence, Mourning, Politics’ – Chapter Two

7th May

‘Indefinite Detention’ – Chapter Three
‘The Charge of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel and the Risks of Public Critique’ – Chapter Four

14th May

‘Precarious Life’ – Chapter Five
‘Violence, Non-Violence: Sartre on Fanon’ in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 27:1, 2006

Frames of War
21st May

‘Introduction to the Paperback’
‘Introduction: Precarious Life, Grievable Life’

28th May

‘Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect’ – Chapter One
‘Torture and the Ethics of Photography: Thinking with Sontag’ – Chapter Two

4th June

‘Sexual Politics, Torture, Secular Time’ – Chapter Three
‘Non-Thinking in the Name of the Normative’ – Chapter Four

11th June

‘The Claim of Non-Violence’ – Chapter Five
Mills, C. (2007), ‘Normative Violence, Vulnerability and Responsibility’, Differences, 18:2
Jenkins, F. (2007), ‘Toward a Nonviolent Ethics’, Differences, 18:2

CfP: Protest and the University of Brighton

Friday, January 24th, 2014

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Protest and the University of Brighton

One Day Symposium

Critical Studies Research Group
Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics

Saturday 10th May 2014

The Critical Studies Research Group (CSRG) and the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE) are organising a one day symposium on the topic of ‘Protest and the University of Brighton’. The symposium aims to offer a history of protest at the University of Brighton; a counter-narrative identifying Brighton as a political university (as opposed to its typical identification as ‘non-political’, contra University of Sussex’s ‘politicalness’); and a theoretical account of protest in higher education more generally.

To this end we are accepting abstracts for presentations that respond to these aims. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • the relationship between the University and the wider community;
  • the Students’ Union and its relationship to protest;
  • trade union protest at the University;
  • privatisation at the University;
  • the lived experience of academic life;
  • the revolutionary past of the University;
  • the ethics of disruptive protest;
  • protest in education;
  • protest as education;
  • the function of occupation;
  • the governance of the University;
  • The ‘Prevent Strategy’, the University and the United Kingdom Borders Agency.

While we encourage papers that respond directly to the context of the University of Brighton, abstracts will also be accepted which deal with issues of privatisation, activism and the criminalisation of protest in other institutional contexts. In this way a key aim of the conference is to make visible the links between the struggles occurring within higher education, and the struggles surrounding immigration and asylum rights, anti-austerity protest, state racism, and other forms of resistance to “social abjection” (Imogen Tyler, Revolting Subjects).

The conference fee will be £20 waged, free for unwaged / students.

Abstracts of no more than two hundred words should be sent to Tim Huzar: t.huzar@brighton.ac.uk. The deadline for abstracts is Friday 28th February.

The CSRG was founded in 2011 by postgraduate students in the School of Humanities, University of Brighton, with the aim of providing an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of critical ideas and practices in light of the socio-political struggles we face today. The challenges that interdisciplinarity might pose are counteracted by our shared interest in the role and scope of critical thought and practice in the context of contemporary capitalism.

CAPPE was founded in 2005, with the aim of bringing together philosophy both with other disciplines and with the wider public. It intervenes in the public arena on the basis of a commitment to rigour, clarity and criticism and to extend the practice of philosophy beyond its narrowly academic boundaries.

2nd CfP: Ontologies of Conflict

Thursday, January 23rd, 2014

Call for Papers

Ontologies of Conflict

3rd Critical Studies Research Group International Conference

School of Humanities, University of Brighton

16-17th June 2014

Keynote speakers:
Vlasta Jalusic, Peace institute, Ljubljana
Brad Evans, University of Bristol

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In recent times there has been a renewed interest in extending the understanding of conflict in both its scope and its effects; this has brought to the fore questions surrounding the relationship between conflict and ontologies. Conflict can now be understood as encompassing a broad range of phenomena, from its traditional preserve of violent confrontation, to structural or systemic violences, to the ‘private’ as well as the ‘public’, and to cultural and social antagonisms. Rather than simply a negative notion, positive valences of conflict have been embraced, whether from the neoliberal logic of competition or from the post-structural valorisation of ‘dissensus’. At the same time conflict’s traditional setting – war – has undergone a transformation, the forces of globalisation prioritising time over space, catalysing rapid technological change, and resulting in a shift in the strategies of war and in the relationship between the embodied human and the new technologies of injuring.

As our understanding of conflict broadens and deepens, and the new forms of war we wage (or are exposed to) alter dominant understandings of violence and bodily destruction, what effect does this have on the nature of selfhood and the worlds in which we live? In what ways has ontology itself become a target and site of violence, state or otherwise? Can conflict be universalised, or can it only be understood in its particular relationships to gender, race, class, sexuality and disability? In what ways are our understandings of conflict framed by underpinning ontologies? When we conceptualise a world mired in violence, what ontologies do we presuppose? What ethics can we draw from an analysis of conflict? Who is the privileged ‘we’ capable of explaining the topic of ‘conflict’, one of whose effects, it could be argued, is the very interruption and deconstruction of explanatory frameworks?

Topics for discussion and presentation might include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Structural violence and the transformation of the self/world.

  • Language and conflict: is language itself inherently, inexorably, violent?

  • The relationship between the global and the local in conflict.

  • Past, present and future paradigms underpinning the logic of conflicts.

  • Ontology in time and space: contexts and scenarios for an ontology of conflict.

  • Empathy, technology and the politics of (dis)embodied violence.

  • Conflict and/as the political.

  • Memory, narrative and the transformation of conflict.

  • Conflict and the (re)construction of selves.

  • The politics of life and Violence

The conference is interdisciplinary in its scope, and is particularly (but not exclusively) aimed at postgraduate colleagues working in philosophy, political theory, history, law, sociology, war and peace studies, memory studies, gender studies, international relations, cultural studies and geography.

The conference fee will be £60 (waged), £20 (unwaged / student).

Abstracts of no more than two hundred words should be sent to Tim Huzar: t.huzar@brighton.ac.uk. The deadline for abstracts is Friday 2dn of May.

The Critical Studies Research Group (CSRG) was founded in 2011 by postgraduate students in the School of Humanities, University of Brighton, with the aim of providing an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of critical ideas and practices in light of the socio-political struggles we face today. The challenges that interdisciplinarity might pose are counteracted by our shared interest in the role and scope of critical thought and practice in the context of contemporary capitalism.

For more information on the CSRG, please visit: brightoncsrg.noblogs.org.

British Discursive Constructions of the Struggle for Independence in Montenegro until the Congress of Berlin in 1878

Sunday, January 19th, 2014

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We continue CSRG’s lunch seminars this Tuesday 21st of January with Ana Zivkovic Snowley. Her presentation is entitled: “British Discursive Constructions of the Struggle for Independence in Montenegro until the Congress of Berlin in 1878”:

This presentation examines British representations of the struggle for independence in Montenegro from the Ottoman Empire up to and until the Congress of Berlin in 1878. My analysis will show that discursive representations of Montenegro are not homogenous; they change and are modified under the influence of wider political and historical pressures, as well as a consequence of writers’ own experiences. I will illustrate shifts in perceptions by looking at extracts from works of several British observers with various backgrounds, political, diplomatic, naval, religious and literary. These texts reflect the writers’ positions as extensions of their own country’s political and economic aims on how to project power over other parts of the world. In addition, the writers enter into a dialogue with discursive constructs and codes of representation originating from their home culture.

It will take place in room 303 (Pavilion Parade) between 1-2pm.  As always, there is no need to register, but timely arrival is highly recommended due limited space available.

CSRG is resuming the work-in-progress presentations series | Tim Huzar

Friday, January 10th, 2014

Urtza Alkorta

The Critical Studies Research Group resumes its activity with a new series of work-in-progress presentations. We conceived the series as a way to present our work within a supportive and welcoming environment, sharing thoughts and ideas over lunch break. This term we will start next Tuesday (January 14th) with Tim Huzar‘s presentation on Judith Butler’s concept of nonviolence. He’s prepared a brief outline of his presentation:

“In this presentation I offer an overview of Butler’s account of nonviolence, situating it in the context of ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ forms of resistance. As Judith Butler has noted, liberal understandings of nonviolence are flawed in that they typically refuse to recognise the ubiquity of the variety of forms of violence attendant to the modern subject. In this way the modern subject finds themselves “mired” in violence – a violence which is often beyond their control – making the notion of a nonviolent act, ethos, or ethics unsustainable. Nonetheless, Butler maintains that the question of what nonviolence could mean is still pertinent precisely because of the ubiquity of violence in the continuing formation of the modern subject. Can we understand nonviolence as an improper form of politics?”

We will continue meeting between 1-2pm in room 303, Pavilion Parade Building (between 12-13 Pavilion Parade and Pavilion Street). Entry is free and open to all students and staff of the Universities of Brighton and Sussex. For the door code to gain access to the building, please contact us.

The following work-in-progress presentation will be given the 21st of January by Ana Zivkovic on the British Discursive Constructions of the Struggle for Independence in Montenegro until the Congress of Berlin in 1878. We will post soon a full list of this term’s presenters, as a well as some more information about the graduate conference we are preparing.

 

Monday, November 18th, 2013
This Tuesday 19th of November Doug ElseyLOS MUTILADOS-OSWALDO GUAYASAMÍN will be presenting his work-in -progress, entitled “Is, Ought and Disenchantment”.  As always, the presentation will be in room 303 Pavilion Parade, 1-2pm.
Abstract: “The alleged absence of any definitive dividing line between humans and non-humans has been used by non-anthropogenic ethical theorists to point out the logical inconsistency of conventional anthropogenic ethical and political theory that purports to justify the exclusive moral considerability of humans on the basis of our separateness from, or uniqueness in relation to, the rest of the natural world. The metaphysical basis of such ostensibly non-anthropocentric ethics is the idea that, ontologically speaking, there is no clear separation of the biophysical and human worlds.

 

The lack of a categorical material division between human and non-human worlds is often understood in terms dependency and embeddedness. The idea here is that human beings are necessarily embedded in a bio-physical environment upon which we are dependant. The problem for would-be non-anthropocentric ethicists is that it is argued that the ontological fact of humanity’s bio-embeddedness and inextricable interconnectedness the rest of nature does not logically imply that we ought or ought not to care about the so-called “natural world”. The idea is that our dependency upon, and connectedness to, the biosphere does not provide the basis for normative claims about how we ought to orient ourselves to the world given these facts.  For environmental politics, the problem is two-fold. In the first place, the normative content of those political and ethical theories that help us decide how we ought live cannot be deduced from natural facts about our existence; such content must be found somewhere else. Secondly, the question of how nature should be valued cannot be answered by discovering value in nature itself.

 

My aim is to show that the  necessary philosophical background for these problems is the notion of disenchanted nature. The idea is that the world revealed by the natural sciences is a world free from properties such as purpose, meaning, agency and value. Hence, this world could never provide the values and principles we’re after.  Of course the problem is that given that human beings are no less a part of nature than is anything else, the rising tide of disenchantment threatens to wash away that last bastion of meaning, purpose, value and agency – us.  One well-known philosophic response to the problem of disenchantment is some or other form of dualism. However, dualistic responses trade one set of philosophic problems for another.  Drawing on Wilfred Sellar’s notion of the manifest and scientific images of mankind, I consider two contrasting responses to the problems that emerge from the dualist solution to the quandary of disenchantment”.

Tom Bunyard: Temporality, Praxis and Ethics in the Theoretical Work of Guy Debord and the Situationist International

Friday, November 8th, 2013

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After the reading week break, our next work-in-progress presentation will take place this forthcoming Tuesday (12nd Nov). Dr. Tom Bunyard will present a paper on “Temporality, Praxis and Ethics in the Theoretical Work of Guy Debord and the Situationist Internationalt“. Tom has kindly sent us an abstract for his presentation:

Within Anglophone academia the work of the Situationist International (S.I.) often seems to be viewed largely in art-historical terms, whilst the work of the group’s primary theorist, Guy Debord, tends to treated as a crudely essentialist critique of the mass media: his theory of ‘spectacle’ thus becomes an elaborate diatribe about a society that has become saturated with literally visual forms. His most famous work, 1967′s The Society of the Spectacle, is however best understood as a book about history; or, more accurately, as a Hegelian Marxist account of a society that has become characterised by an alienated relation to its own historical agency. This article will attempt to pursue these aspects of Debord’s account by attending to his much neglected concern with temporality. If that interest in time and history is pursued via an engagement with the philosophical and theoretical material that informed his own and the S.I.’s work, then one can go some way towards accessing the notions of praxis and historical agency that underlie it; and if one does so, it may prove possible to extract from them a set of ideas pertaining to strategy and political organisation that could perhaps be considered in their own right. The article endeavours to frame this problematic as an attempt to push the concept of spectacle beyond its current iteration within Debord’s extant formulations, and does so by demonstrating that the concept’s purview need not be reductively identified with the consumer capitalism that it was primarily intended to define.

As always, we’ll meet at room 303 (Pavilion Parade) between 1-2pm.

Vicky Margree: The Feminist Orientation of E. Nesbit’s Gothic Short Fiction | CSRG Work-in-Progress Presentations

Monday, October 21st, 2013
 E. Nesbit
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The next work-in-progress presentation will take place this Tuesday (22nd Oct). Dr. Vicky Margree will deliver a paper entitled “The Feminist Orientation of E. Nesbit’s Short Gothic Fiction. Vicky has provided two of Nesbit’s short stories that may be of interest (although her paper won’t presume knowledge of the stories). They can be found here and here.
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The presentation will explore the critical contention that the supernatural story of the long 19th century provided women writers with ‘a public discourse for voicing feminine concerns’ (Vanessa Dickerson). I will focus on the case of Edith Nesbit, who, although famed as a children’s author, also wrote extensively for adults. Nesbit presents an interesting case study because of the ambivalence she evinced about the women’s movement. In many respects resembling the New Woman of the late-Victorian / Edwardian periods, she nonetheless refused to support the campaign for women’s suffrage. I will suggest that exploring the paradox of Nesbit’s position can lead to a more nuanced understanding of Victorian feminism and anti-feminism. My main argument, however, will be that a) that there is in fact a distinct feminist orientation in evidence in Nesbit’s short Gothic fiction, and that b) that this is the case suggests something interesting about the genre of the short supernatural story, both in respect of the possibilities presented by a departure from realism, and the possibilities presented by the very brevity of the form.

As always, the presentation will be hold in room 303 of Pavilion Parade (1-2pm).

Critical Studies Research Group | Work-in-Progress Presentations

Friday, October 18th, 2013
The last 8th of October, the Critical Studies Research (CSRG) launched this term’s Work-in-Progress presentations. The CSRG meets most weeks on Tuesdays, 1-2, in Pavilion Parade (room 303). The group mainly presents work-in-progress to one another, but in the past has also organised conferences, seminar series and reading groups. Academic staff are also invited to present their work-in-progress.
Although the work-in-progress presentations are intended to be delivered by and to PhD students and academic staff, MA students and undergraduates are strongly encouraged to attend, ask questions, get involved in the CSRG organising other activities and, of course, present their work if they wish. If you would like to contact us either through our gmail account (brightoncsrg@gmail.com) or during the sessions. 
Spartakists in BerlinArmed Spartakists marching in Berlin, 1918 or 1919

Outline of the first work-in-progress presentations

The first work was presented by Dr. Mark Devenney (8th of October), who gave a paper entitled Plato, Benjamin and violence’ in which he drew upon some ideas of Plato and Benjamin on violence in relation to the Occupy movement in New York.

The last presentation was delivered by German Primera, who spoke about the “Body and Bare Life: a thanatopolitical reading of the biopolitical body”. German argued that the relation of the body with bare life passes through a biopolitical exchange that redefines and reassembles both in a manner that Agamben’s understanding of the production of bare life is incapable of grasping. Using Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of the intruder and Haraway’s approach to technology – deactivated of its ontological weight – he proposed to read the production of bare life in terms of the indistinguishability of the inside and outside of the body and the destruction of the self, returning to Foucault’s notion of the materialist incorporeal and his rejection of phenomenology.

For the following sessions, we have asked the presenters to provide us with a small abstract of their presentations. We will be posting them in this blog.

We look forward to see you at the sessions.

Neoliberalism Seminar Series 2013/14

Tuesday, October 8th, 2013

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The Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE) at the University of Brighton is launching a new series of fortnightly semianars that will deal with the question of what it means to live in a neoliberal world. Everybody is welcome to those seminards and no registration is required. You can see the rest of the details below. We hope to see all you there.

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