Graduate Conference 2015
Friday 15 May - Saturday 16 May 2015 | Birkbeck, University of London
Friday: 2.30pm - 5.45pm, followed by wine reception (registration opens at 1.30pm)
Saturday: 10am - 5.00pm
Keynote speakers: Cristina Flesher Fominaya (University of Aberdeen), Liz Kelly () and Illan rua Wall (University of Warwick)
Chair feminism panel: Jacqueline Rose (BIH)
(Images by Birkbeck Media Services / Dominic Mifsud, 2015. You can view all photos from the event here.)
Life today seems to be continuously changing, floating, and shifting faster than ever. Boundaries and barriers disappear, only to re-appear in new forms. Social movements shout their demands for social change. Subjects face the complexity of the contemporary world and its challenges within and across groups and cultural heritages. Possibilities of completely new approaches to the same old questions blossom together and are shut down. Re-visiting the critical frameworks of feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, critical legal theory, and postcolonial studies, we ask ourselves “where are we now?” How should we theorise the social changes of the present? Are we going through a metamorphosis or a transformation?
As the PhD student interns in the Birkbeck Institute of Social Research (BISR) and the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities (BIH), we invite fellow postgraduate students to take part in the conference and discuss their on-going work with others.
Programme
You can find the conference programme, including abstracts - here
Registration
This event is free and open to all, but booking is essential - book your place here
For catering purposes, would you please let us know if you have registered but find that you cannot attend the event by cancelling on Eventbrite or emailing r.vanderwiel@bbk.ac.uk. Many thanks!
Call for Papers
The Call for Papers was divided into three sections:
1. Social Change and Social Movements: Historical Perspectives (HP)
Social change has often been achieved through the action of social movements, whose objectives ranged from partial transformation to radical change. What enabled or caused their success or failure? What are the differences between older and more recent social movements? How can past experiences inform present struggles?
2. Life and Law: Possibilities of a New Relation (LL)
Tahrir Sq, Zuccotti Park, Syntagma Sq, Taksim Sq, Sao Paulo and many more are joining to the list every day, calling for change, and practising common principles. Could these common principles help us to think about other forms of politics, law, and life? Can we think about another relationship between politics, law and life that dismantles biopolitics? Or is it too late? Should we search for a space out-of-law, if such a thing were possible? Are we doomed to live in a Kafkaesque novel? Or can the age of riots light the way to constitute a new law, politics and life?
3. Feminism: Oppression, Violence and Transformation (FOV)
How can feminist heritage and knowledge, produced especially since the 1960s, be used today to produce analyses of women's oppression that can take into account the complexity of the contemporary? Why does violence against women persist as a devastating phenomenon despite many changes to women's rights and freedom? What categories and theoretical tools can help us understand how to transform the multiple forms taken by women’s oppression?
Organisers
Eleonora Bottini (Department of Psychosocial Studies)
Luca Lapolla (Department of History, Classics and Archaeology)
Ceylan Begüm Yildiz (School of Law)