FINAL CALL FOR PROPOSALS
Deadline: 1st December 2014
 
COMPLICITY CONFERENCE
 
A two-day conference exploring issues of complicity, organised by the University of Brighton's Understanding Conflict: Forms and Legacies of Violence Research Cluster. 
 
Tuesday 31st March – Wednesday 1st April 2015
University of Brighton, UK
 
Opening Address:    Professor Bob Brecher – University of Brighton
Keynote Day One:     Professor Thomas Docherty – University of Warwick
Keynote Day Two:     Professor Shlomo Sand – Tel Aviv University
 
 
The problem of complicity is a longstanding feature of everyday moral experience, and yet comparatively little work focuses explicitly on it. Furthermore, in an increasingly neo-liberal world, it is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid complicity both in its creation of a particular model of the person and with its attendant demands on how we live, on what we do and do not do and on how we think. If Georgio Agamben is right to insist that ‘Today’s man … has become blind not to his capacities but to his incapacities, not to what he can do but to what he cannot, or can not, do’ (‘On what we can not do’, Nudities, 2011, p.44), then complicity is taking centre stage in our everyday lives. It thus requires our attention in terms both of practice and of theorisation.
 
This conference will seek to begin that work. We invite proposals (max. 300 words) that address one of the broad inter-related themes.
 
DAY ONE
·      What is complicity?
·      Theorising complicity in relation to related moral-political issues.


DAY TWO
·      Empirical cases.

We anticipate that related issues will be of interest to a wide range of people working in and studying, among other areas, cultural studies, philosophy, political theory, media studies, photography and journalism, art practice and visual studies, film studies, the armed forces, international security, armaments, banking, finance and globalisation, politics and geopolitics, sociology, NGO and charitable sectors, colonialism and post-colonialism, health studies and NHS, queer theory, women’s studies and women and the family.
 
Proposals of no more than 300 words should be emailed by 1st December 2014 to [log in to unmask]
 
Registration fee: £120 for waged and £40 for unwaged/students. 
 
For a full list of possible issue subjects and more information on the work and scope of the University of Brighton’s Research Cluster Understanding Conflict: Forms and Legacies of Violence.
 
Visit http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/research
http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/research/conflict/cluster-activities/complicity-conference