Tag Archives: Symposium

Posted on by

Screening and Symposium about the film 120 BPM – 10 May 2019

Screening and Symposium about the film 120 BPM

10 May 2019 – 6.00 – 9.00pm

The screening takes place at Queen Mary, University of London on Friday the 10th of May. It will be followed by a roundtable with a fantastic lineup of speakers and a wine reception. See speaker details below.

– Ben Walters (a writer who blogs about moving-image, queer and DIY cultures @not_television & recently completed a PhD on nightlife collective Duckie at Queen Mary)
-Ray Malone (co-founder of the NHS Anti-Swindle Team, the founder of The Fallout Club and ACT UP activist)
-Lo Marshall (who works with the UCL Urban Laboratory on a project researching LGBTQI nightlife spaces in London from 1986 until the present).

The symposium will take place at King’s College, London on Saturday the 11th of May and will focus on diverse and interdisciplinary responses to 120 BPM, including panels on ‘Queer Histories / Activisms’, ‘Colour’, ‘Dance, Sound, Rhythm, Community Building’, ‘Digital Technologies and Virtual Reality’ and ‘Death, Dust, & Plastics’ and a keynote by Dr Fiona Johnstone, whose publication AIDS & Representation: Portraits and Self-Portraits During the AIDS Crisis in America is forthcoming in 2019.

FILM SCREENING:

Friday, May 10th

6.00 – 9.00pm at the Hitchcock Cinema, ArtsOne, Queen Mary, University of London.

FREE, BOOK HERE:   https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/120-bpm-film-screening-and-panel-tickets-59883719818?aff=erelconmlt

SYMPOSIUM: 

Saturday, May 11th
10.30-5 at the Anatomy Lecture Theatre, Kings College London
FREE, BOOK HERE:   https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/120-bpm-symposium-tickets-59883604473

We are extremely grateful for the support of our sponsors the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS), The Society for French Studies (SFS) and The Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France (ASMCF).

To find out more about the conference please go to 120BPMsymposium.wordpress.com or our twitter feed @120BPMSymposium.

. . Category: Archived Events . Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted on by

Incarceration: Space, Power and Personhood – 17 June 2019

Incarceration: Space, Power and Personhood

With Lisa Guenther

Speakers (tbc) Lisa Baraitser, Louise Hide, Leslie Topp, Tina Chanter, Shokoufeh Sakhi, Hilary Marland and Catherine Cox

 

Monday June 17, 9.30am – 4.30pm

Room 101, 30 Russell Square, Birkbeck College, University of London

 

Places are limited; to register contact Katy Pettit   k.pettit@bbk.ac.uk

 

The aims of incarceration are manifold: to punish, to disempower, to deter, to silence, to interrogate, to reform. In this interdisciplinary symposium we will examine how the experience of incarceration – the myriad temporalities and spaces of imprisonment – shape personhood, psychic life and the possibility of interpersonal relations. The prison cell, as the typical site of modern incarceration, also provides a template for thinking about how carceral logic shapes lives and communities outside its walls, for example in psychiatric hospitals, schools, workplaces and gated communities. This expanded notion of carceral space describes the spatial organization of relationships among bodies and things through practices of criminalization, surveillance, confinement, segregation, and other forms of punitive control. In this workshop we will bring together short working papers which explore how different forms of carceral space shape and control the institutionalized subject.

 

We also take note of important recent work that considers questions of race, gender and class in the carceral setting, examine first-hand accounts, not least regarding the experience of ‘solitary’, and explore theories about particular psychological mechanisms, including ‘defenses’ in the psychoanalytic sense, that may be used by inmates in attempts to adapt to and tolerate long-term confinement. In exploring the various histories, logics, models and motivations behind such practices we also seek to consider how carceral regimes may reflect and sustain wider cultural processes, political systems and forms of social organisation.

 

The symposium will be held during the visit of philosopher Professor Lisa Guenther’s visit to Birkbeck in June 2019, arranged under the auspices of the Hidden Persuaders project, the Birkbeck Insitutute of Social Research and The Pathologies of Solitude project at Queen Mary. In her powerful book Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives, Guenther provides a history and phenomenological account of solitary confinement, describing the lived experience of solitary as a form of perceptual and social death. As her account reminds us, exploring the dehumanizing effects of incarceration also provides an opportunity for reflecting upon conditions that maintain or destroy personhood; facilitate, reduce or destroy a capacity for human flourishing. This symposium will be an opportunity to examine how limitations on sensation, agency and social interaction profoundly influence the incarcerated subject’s perceptual and emotional experience of the world.

 

 

. . Category: Archived Events . Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted on by

CFP: European Literary and Cultural Perspectives – Deadline 28 April 2019

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Pathological Body From the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present: European Literary and Cultural Perspectives

A one-day symposium at the Institute of Modern Languages (IMLR), Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU, UK

Friday 20 September 2019

Keynote Speaker: Dr Steven Wilson (Queen’s University Belfast)

* With support from the Cassal Endowment Fund *

What is sickness, and how is it represented in literature? In his twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart novel cycle (1871–93), Émile Zola creates pathological bodies living within Napoleon III’s Second Empire (1852–70), a period which is represented as being engulfed by political and social sickness. It is in the last volume, Le Docteur Pascal, that there is hope embodied within Pascal’s newborn son, the potential ‘messiah’ of the French nation. In the aftermath of the disastrous Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), Zola’s cycle may be a literary reaction to the state of a weakened France in exalting the mythicised image of the mother and child, at once a symbol of purity and new beginnings. Reflecting on the multi-dimensional aspect of Zola’s Naturalism, Henri Mitterand writes that these novels are not merely a form of social and historical documentation, but, instead, offer a knowledge that is more intuitive, modern and poetic, and which might be termed an ‘anthropomythic naturalism’ (preface, Émile Zola, Le Docteur Pascal, p. 48). This symposium aims to explore the nexus of fears, anxieties and desires that society projects onto the body within European literature and culture, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, tracing the birth and development of modern medicine. It will examine the widest meaning of sickness and the power dynamic between the body and society. Is sickness ever ‘just’ sickness, or is there often a covert ideological agenda that drives and constructs it? How can literature help us understand the relationship between the body and society? The symposium will take a transhistorical and transnational approach in order to see whether, and how, cultural anxieties which appropriate the body change and differ across European national boundaries during a time when medicine is establishing and asserting its increasing authority. The symposium will be an opportunity for colleagues to forge connections and to compare different approaches within the growing field of Medical Humanities within the Modern Languages.

Suggested themes include, but are not limited to:

Fin de siècle

Gender

Race

Class

Degeneration

Blood

Hysteria

Social order

Myth

Sacred and the religious

Suffering

Contagion

Evil

Medicine

Illness and cure

Life and death

The other

Purification

Nationhood

Utopia

Politics

Deviancy

Contamination

Infection

Ideology

Rebirth

Healing

Morality

Necropolitics

Biopolitics

Power

Ritual

Abject body

Heredity

Identity

Proposals of c. 250 words for 20-minute papers in English and a 100-word biography should be emailed to the conference organiser, Dr Kit Yee Wong, by Sunday 28 April 2019. Notifications to potential speakers will be sent out by Saturday 25 May 2019.

. . Category: Archived Call for Papers . Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted on by

‘Trust Me’ Symposium, UCL Institute of Advanced Studies & Wellcome, Friday 25 May

‘Trust Me’: The Language of Medical Expertise and Imposture in Britain, 1400-1900

A Symposium at the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies and the Wellcome Collection

25 May, 9:30 AM – 6 PM

 

‘Trust Me’ is an interdisciplinary symposium on the long history of medical confidence and publicity. How did medical practitioners craft a language to cultivate confidence in their knowledge and abilities? We hope to trace how assurances (and overassurances) of expertise—as expressed in mountebanks’ medicine shows, print medical advertising, bedside manner, and training literature—adapted to new knowledge paradigms, media technologies, and regulatory regimes to win that trust of prospective patients and skeptical authorities. How did this language of medical publicity circulate? How was this language translated into social life and the popular imagination?

 

  1. A. Katritzky(Barbara Wilkes Research Fellow in Theatre Studies, Open University) will deliver the plenary lecture, ‘Performing medical harangues in early modern Britain and beyond’.

 

Participants will include:

  • Elma Brenner (Wellcome Collection)
  • Joe Stadolnik (UCL)
  • Sarah Mayo (University of Georgia/UCL)
  • Genice Ngg (Singapore University of Social Sciences)
  • Alannah Tomkins (Keele University)
  • Jeni Buckley (Warden Park Academy)
  • Emily Senior (Birkbeck)
  • Cara Dobbing (Leicester)

This symposium was organized as part of the ‘Lies’ research thread at the IAS by Joe Stadolnik, in partnership with Dr Elma Brenner and the Wellcome Collection. This conference is generously supported by the IAS and a conference grant from the Society for the Social History of Medicine.

 

All welcome. Please find the programme here and register here.

. . Category: Uncategorized . Tags: , , , ,
Posted on by

Symposium – Liberty, Irreverence and the Place of Women in Early Modern Culture – Friday 11th May 2018

Liberty, Irreverence and the Place of Women in Early Modern Culture

One Day Symposium in Honour of Dr Letizia Panizza

 

Bloomsbury Room, G35, Senate House

Friday 11th May 2018

9.30am – 7pm

For more information please contact: Stefano.Jossa@rhul.ac.uk

Registration free at: https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/events/event/15855

This one-day conference considers ideas of liberty, irreverence and womanhood in early modern literature and culture, with 17 speakers from British and European Universities.

Programme

 

9.30 Registration / Coffee
10.00 Giuliana Pieri (RHUL): Introduction
10.15 Stephen Clucas (Birkbeck College): Letizia Panizza’s Contribution to Scholarship
10.45 Coffee
11.15 The Contribution of Women to Early Modern Italian Culture
Chair: Sarah Hutton (University of York)

Abigail Brundin (University of Cambridge): Domestic Devotion in Renaissance Italy

Helena Sanson (University of Cambridge): The Ammaestramenti e ricordi, Difese and Panegirico (1628) by Isabella Sori ‘alessandrina’: A Lost Voice from Seventeenth-Century Italy

Francesca Medioli (Independent scholar): Arcangela Tarabotti and the 1620-1640 Gap Period

Sandra Cavallo (Royal Holloway, London): Gender, Privacy and Space in the Roman Baroque Palace
12.45 Lunch
 

13.45

 Poetics and Poetry
Chair: Jane Everson (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Alison Brown (Royal Holloway, London): The Poems of Piero de’ Medici

Amelia Papworth (Cambridge): ‘Do not blame me, but Ariosto’: Laura Terracina’s Discorsi and the Orlando Furioso

Ambra Anelotti (Royal Holloway, London): The Afterlives of Ariosto’s Characters

Poetry – Chair: Jane Everson (Royal Holloway, University of London)
15.15 Tea
15.45 Philosophy – Chair: Martin McLaughlin (University of Oxford)

Unn Irene Aasdalen (Norwegian Humanistic Academy, Norway):  Diotima’s Role in Marsilio Ficino’s De amore

John Sellars (Royal Holloway, London): Philosophical Lives in the Renaissance

Michael J. B. Allen (UCLA): title to be confirmed
17.15 History, Art, Libertinism and Satire – Chair: Dilwyn Knox (University College London)

 

Marta Fattori (Sapienza Università di Roma): ‘1735 Machiavelli all’Indice: Processo contro il marchese Bernardo del Grillo e la sua biblioteca’

Angelo Romano (Università del Salento): Religious Reformed Satire of the Sixteenth Century

Chrysa Damianaki (Università del Salento): Reconsidering the Form and Character of Gian Cristoforo Romano’s Bust of Beatrice d’Este
18.45 Conclusion
. . Category: Archived Events . Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted on by

Symposium – Communalities, urbanities and artistic commonalities – 5 June 2018

Communalities, urbanities and artistic commonalities

Symposium

School of Arts, Birkbeck University of London

5th of June 2018. 1pm to 5pm

Room 124, 43 Gordon Square

 

The symposium Communalities, urbanities and artistic commonalities will interweave ideas of art, activism, politics and urban commons, aiming for a dialogue around how we understand the creation of interdisciplinary platforms of exchange and community action in relation to artistic practices in different locations.

Read more about the event and register on Eventbrite-

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/symposium-communalities-urbanities-and-artistic-commonalities-tickets-45059285536

Presentations 

Evanthia Tselika; Paul Watt; Stephen Pritchard; Lorraine Leeson; Sophie Hope

Dialogue

The dialogue will involve presenters and symposium participants so as to consider ideas around art, activism, politics and urban commons. We will be addressing:

  • New structures of living together – refugee realities and the implication of art.
  • Gentrification and the visual capitalization of marginalization.
  • Cultures of global mobility and digital interactions.

    Initiated by | Evanthia Tselika, Assistant Professor University of Nicosia, Cyprus & Associate Research Fellow, School of the arts,  Birkbeck University of London

    Supported by | Corkscrew Network, Birkbeck

. . Category: Archived Events . Tags: , , , , ,
Posted on by

CASTING CODE: Reflections on 3D Printing half day symposium – 14th May 2018

CASTING CODE: Reflections on 3D Printing half day symposium

Date: Monday 14 May 2018

Time: 1-5pm

Venue: Keynes Library, School of Arts Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD

Free to attend, but registration is required. Book here

All welcome

This half-day interdisciplinary symposium will explore how digital 3D technologies are transforming the ways that art and cultural artefacts are produced, stored and shared.

3D printing has been used to reconstruct destroyed ancient monuments, inspire activist communities and help reimagine contemporary art practice. As digital 3D technology finds new applications in an ever-growing number of fields, it has opened up new possibilities for digital reproduction on a global scale, seeming to promise new alternatives to mass-manufacture and unprecedented opportunities for the circulation and exchange of objects.

The increasing role of digital 3D technology in the production and reception of art and cultural heritage raises numerous urgent aesthetic and ethical questions. Although many of these concerns – such as big tech monopolies, uneven accessibility and energy consumption – are shared with other areas of digital culture, their particular manifestations in relation to 3D printing technologies frequently animate these issues in ways that emphasise the interconnection between the digital and the material. As such, critical explorations of digital 3D technology can help to challenge out-dated distinctions between virtual processes and material objects and infrastructures, revealing some of the ways in which our world is being radically, but often silently, reshaped by the power structures that underpin digital technology.

This interdisciplinary symposium brings together artists, curators, conservators and researchers working in art history, law, media studies to explore the significance of 3D printing and associated digital 3D technologies for artistic and cultural practice.

Event schedule

13:00     Welcome: Elizabeth Johnson (Birkbeck)

13:15     Amelia Knowlson (Sheffield Hallam University) will present new research on the curatorial decision-making processes behind 3D digitisation at The British Museum. Her work used design-based methods to examine micro pre-existing and emerging 3D projects across curatorial departments.

13:45     Xavier Aure (University of West England) will discuss the influence of computer graphics techniques in his research on visualisation and texture reproduction of paintings.

14:15     Dukki Hong (Bournemouth University) will introduce some IP issues in relation to emerging 3D printing technologies, considering what IP law is; how it is constructed; and most importantly why 3D printing matters to IP law.

14:45     Break

15:15     Mara-Johanna Kolmel (Leuphana University Lüneburg,) will be speaking about Reforming the Formless. An art historical perspective on 3D technologies.

15:45     Daniel Rourke (Goldsmiths) will discuss The 3D Additivist Cookbook, a compendium of 3D .obj and .stl files, critical and fictional texts, templates, recipes, (im)practical designs and methodologies for living in this most contradictory of times, which he devised and edited in collaboration with artist Morehshin Allahyari.

16.15     Discussion chaired by Joel McKim, (Birkbeck)

If you have any additional access requirements please get in touch elizabeth.johnson@bbk.ac.uk

This event is kindly supported by the Lorraine Lim Postgraduate Fund and the Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology

. . Category: Archived Events . Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted on by

CFP Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations – Submissions Deadline 31 January 2018

Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations 

Escaping Escapism in Fantasy and the Fantastic

26th – 27th April 2018

What is the role of fantasy and the fantastic? Why—and perhaps more crucially, how—does the genre matter? Fantasy theorists frequently define the genre in opposition to what is possible and real: Kathryn Hume, for instance, sums it up in Fantasy and Mimesis as “departures from consensus reality”. Critics often scrutinize this departure as a negative, and disparage representations of the fantastic either due to their failure to depict real world issues or their presumed attempts at “escapism.” This perceived link between fantasy and escapism is so strong that dictionaries like the Oxford English Dictionary define escapism as “engaging in fantasy”.

Despite this association, a growing body of evidence asserts both that escapism can be healthy and that the fantastic can influence how its consumers perceive real world issues even when their representations are deemed problematic. For example, though readers and scholars have criticized the portrayal of minority groups in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, studies suggest that people who read the series are more accepting of stigmatised groups and more likely to vote for political candidates whose policies support these groups. And while some critics view the creation of fictional Secondary Worlds as a troubling detachment from reality, creativity scholars have drawn links between creating imaginary worlds as a child and high achievement in artistic and scientific fields later in life. Escapism is perhaps not as escapist as it was previously perceived to be, and even when it is, it can have a positive impact. The “escapism accusation” is being flipped on its head, with texts as disparate as Diana Wynne Jones’s Fire and Hemlock and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s “Normal Again” presenting the rejection of the fantastic in favour of “reality” as the dangerous escapist behaviour. The traditional dynamic between escapism and the fantastic is constantly being changed and renegotiated.

This two-day symposium seeks to examine and honour the relationship between escapism and the fantastic. We welcome proposals for papers on this theme from researchers and practitioners working in the field of fantasy and the fantastic across all media, whether within the academy or beyond it. We are particularly interested in submissions from postgraduate and early career researchers.

We will offer workshops in creative writing for those interested in exploring the creative process.

We ask for 300-word abstracts for 20-minute papers, as well as creative presentations that go beyond the traditional academic paper.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

– Intersections and interplays between fantasy and reality.

– Metatextual responses to escapism in fantastic texts and media.

– Theoretical and/or critical discussions of escapism in relation to fantasy and the fantastic, broadly defined.

– Relationships between Secondary Worlds and the Primary World; relationships between world and characters.

– Reading, writing, and engaging with fantasy as a political act; the depiction of real world issues, or lack thereof, in fantastical settings and contexts.

– Representations of the fantastic in media associated with escapism, such as live-action role-playing, board games, tabletop role-playing games, television, etc.

Please submit a 300-word abstract and a 100-word biography in separate editable documents (not PDF) to submissions.gifconference@gmail.com by Wednesday, the 31st of January 2018.

. . Category: Archived Call for Papers, Archived Events . Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted on by

Call for Papers: Everywhere and Nowhere: An Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Symposium on Imagined Spaces, deadline 22 April 2016

Everywhere and Nowhere: An Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Symposium on Imagined Spaces

Monday 20th June 2016
University of Nottingham

Keynote Speaker: Professor Stephen Daniels (University of Nottingham)

Imagined spaces are engaged with on a daily basis, whether they be in the novels we read, the news reports we hear, or in the forthcoming development posters we see around our towns and cities. These imagined spaces are multiple and mutable, coming into conflict with one another and the values they embody. With the physical and imaginary both influencing one another, imagined spaces have a diverse and meaningful impact on lived experience, affecting the way we conceive of and interact with the places and landscapes around us.

This symposium aims to emphasize the role of the imagination in the representation of space and place and to explore the ways these imagined spaces engage with and shape ‘real’ spaces and identities. We welcome papers that engage with imagination and space in a broad sense, across historical periods and disciplinary boundaries.

Papers are invited on – but are by no means limited to – the following themes:

  • Maps and the translation of place
  • The colonial and post-colonial imagination of space and place
  • Speculative, fantasy, and alternative spaces
  • Dramatic, literary and artistic imaginings of space and place
  • Nostalgia and the memory of landscape and place
  • Landscape design and city planning
  • The influence of technology on conceptualizing space and place
  • Theoretical approaches to the imagination of space

This is a one-day, interdisciplinary symposium that seeks to offer postgraduate students an opportunity to present related work at any stage of their research in a friendly and supportive environment. It is the tenth annual postgraduate workshop to be run by the Landscape, Space, Place Research Group and hosted by the Schools of English and Geography at the University of Nottingham.

We invite abstracts of 250-300 words for 20 minute papers from all current postgraduate students. Please send, along with a short biography, to lsp-group@nottingham.ac.uk by Friday 22nd April 2016.

Organising Committee: Alexander Harby, Hollie Johnson, Philip Jones, Mark Lambert, Sarah O’Malley and Xiaofan Xu.

Visit the LSP symposium website: https://lspimaginedspaces.wordpress.com/

. . Category: Archived Call for Papers . Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted on by

One-Day Symposium: ‘W. S. Graham: The Far Coasts of Language’, 18 March 2016

W S Graham Symposium

 

One-Day Symposium: ‘W. S. Graham: The Far Coasts of Language’
Organised by the Bristol Poetry Institute, University of Bristol

Speakers: Jon Cook (UEA), Ralph Pite (Bristol), Natalie Pollard (Exeter), David Punter (Bristol), Denise Riley (UEA), William Wootten (Bristol)
When: Friday 18 March 2016
Where: Link Room 2; 3-5 Woodland Road, BS8 1TB; 11:00-16:30

This one-day symposium, hosted by the Bristol Poetry Institute, will feature six short talks on various poems by W. S. Graham, one of the most extraordinary poets of our time, with ample time for participation by the audience.

Admission is free but booking is required by Eventbrite; lunch will be provided:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ws-graham-symposium-tickets-21110067781

Any enquires regarding this event please contact: poetry-institute@bristol.ac.uk

. . Category: Archived Events . Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,