Critical Studies Research Group

Protest and the University of Brighton

One Day Symposium

Critical Studies Research Group

Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics

Saturday 10th May 2014

Grand Parade

Free for students / unwaged, £20 waged

Online Registration

This one day symposium, organised by the Critical Studies Research Group (CSRG) and the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE), will look at the history of protest at University of Brighton in relation to current struggles against the privatisation of higher education.

How is protest at University of Brighton remembered, and what is the effect of this on current and future forms of protest? How do we account for the privatisation of higher education, and what can theory tell us about resistance? How is solidarity maintained across different forms of protest? What lessons from the past can help us stake a claim in the university of the present?

Please see below for the symposium programme. For more information please contact Tim Huzar: T.Huzar@brighton.ac.uk.

10:00 – 10:30

Welcome

10:30 – 12.45

Chris Cocking – Policing Student Protests: Criminalising Dissent?

Bob Brecher – The Humanities Programme as Protest: 1985 – 2014

Tim Huzar – Democracy as Protest: Towards an Alternative Students’ Union

Tom Hickey – Trade Union Protest at the University of Brighton

12:45 – 13:30

Lunch

13:30 – 14:40

Lucy Pearce – A Question of Historical Consciousness: the Cultural Memory of May 1968 in the Student Protests 2010

Tom Akehurst, Louise Purbrick, Lucy Robinson – After the Winter of Discontent

Sue Gollifer, Naomi Salaman, Lizzie How, Molly Maher, Tilly Sleven, Lois Mckendrick, Phoebe Hill – Any Questions? From the Occupation at the Brighton School of Art 1968

14:40 – 15:00

Coffee Break

15:00 – 16:00

Workshop / Discussion

16:00 – 16:15

Closing Remarks

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

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. For more information on CAPPE, please visit: arts.brighton.ac.uk/research/cappe.

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.

Call for Papers

Ontologies of Conflict

3rd Critical Studies Research Group International Conference

School of Humanities, University of Brighton

16-17th June 2014

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.