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Call for Papers
"Violence and the Contexts of Hostility"
8th Global Conference
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Budapest (Hungary)
4-7 May 2009
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This multi- and inter-disciplinary research and publications conference
aims to identify and understand violence in contemporary life. The
project will pay particular attention to the different contexts and
places where violence develops, occurs and where its effects are felt;
from the interpersonal to the international, from the empirical to the
symbolic. Attention will also focus on uncovering the motives, dynamics
and functions that violence has for individuals, groups, populations and
societies, as well as for bonds and social relations in the private,
institutional and public spheres of life. Exploring and understanding
representations of violence in media, art and literature is a key part
of the conference.
Violence has been part of societies and used as a political tool in
multiple ways: to unite or divide, to produce fear and compliance, to
incite or neutralize mobilization, to resist domination or to impose
subordination. It has been touted as the only path for liberation or the
inevitable road to annihilation and destruction, as a necessary means
for transformation or as the ultimate form to avoid change and defend
the status quo. And despite global, national and local efforts to
minimize, reduce or eliminate it violence remains a horrifying feature
of today's world and life.
The conference will be structured around seven main themes; papers,
presentations, reports and workshops are invited on the following:
1. Perspectives for Understanding Violence
Exploring the methodologies available for uncovering the underlying
factors which contribute to violence, the perspectives provided by all
disciplines and field practitioners for attempting to understand
violence and the models available for developing interdisciplinary
studies for comprehending the complexities of violence.
2. Motives and Goals of Violence
Assessing the impulses, motivations, invitations and the allure of
violence; analysing the motives and goals of violent attitudes, acts and
behaviours.
* Being and becoming violent
* Rage, anger, hatred and violence
* Ideas, images and ideologies of hatred
* The "hard" and "soft" violence of discrimination
* Alienation, isolation, marginality
* Mental illness, deviance and violence
* Violence as a social pathology
* The discursive logic of social pathologies
* Discourse, ethics and legitimacy: When is violence justified?
o From the "top-down"
o From the "bottom-up"
o As defence and protection
o As resistance to domination
3. Generating Enemies, Being Violent
Understanding the construction of enemies and the production of
violence; identifying the processes that generate and establish violence
as part of life and as normal.
* Fostering, nurturing and socialising for violence
* Allowing and consenting to violence
* Justifying, reinforcing and rationalising
* Education and violence; educating for violence
* The logic and rationality of violence
* Views of human nature in the disciplines as naturally violent
* Dichotomies that confront people: friend and foe, neighbour and
stranger
* Dichotomies that divide minds: love and hate, empathy and
disdain, trust and fear
* How to identify elusive forms of violence?
* The violent process of normalisation and the normality of violence
4. Contexts of Hostility and Violence
Situating the specific contexts where violence emerges, develops and
affects the lives of people; capturing the links between time, space,
frames of mind and social institutions.
* Domestic violence directed toward families, women, men and children
* Community violence directed toward ethnic and minority groups,
racialised groups, issues of nationalism, youth and gang violence,
hooliganism
* Institutional violence - violence in the workplace, schools,
hospitals, police and law enforcement agencies
* State violence - as both an internal phenomenon (against
citizenry - civil war, terrorism and the metropolis; repression;
'surveillance' culture post 9/11; legitimation of violence through the
law, punishment and capital punishment) as well as an external
phenomenon (cultures of war and militarism, 'intervention' and
'pre-emptive' policies, cultures of societies that develop into warlike
states, religion, religious institutions, and their role in curtailing
or propelling violence; religious fundamentalism and violence)
* The use of violence to achieve peace (e.g., the human/animal
rights agenda, resistance movements), anti-globalisation violence,
anti-vivisection violence
5. Violence, Victims and Others
Understanding violence by understanding the impact it has on its
victims. Understanding the subjects that produce violence and violence
that produce subjects or the mutually constitutive link between subjects
and violence.
* Violence, trauma and victim-hood
* Violence over bodies, psyches, sensibilities
* Othering, pathologising, stygmatising, scape-goating
* Problematic inventions of the "other"
* The politics and dialectics of fear and violence
* Violence intertwined with:
- Love and care
- Sex and desire
- Taste and the aesthetic
- Distinction and privilege
* Inequality, marginalization and injustice
* Symbolic violence
* Forms of non-recognition and cultural exclusion
* Social structures and violence or the violence of social structures
6. Resisting, Countering and Preventing Violence
How to promote, foster and develop counter cultures to violence?
Knowledge, systems of meaning, movements and organizations that work to
counter, neutralise and prevent violence.
* Peace is to war, as "what" is to violence?
* The constitution of the not-violent person
* Identifying and embracing the "other" within the "self"
* De-naturalising and de-essentialising violence
* Respect and recognition of diversity and radical difference
* Extending and embracing hospitality
* Systems of meaning that destabilize, neutralize and nullify violence
* Knowing how to handle and counter violence
* The work and role of NGO's and other social organizations that
counter violence
* The role of normative standards and law, enforcement and prosecution
* The promotion of education and educative strategies
* Counter, neutralising and prevention strategies
7. Representations of Violence
Gauging the role of media in recording, portraying, disseminating and
reflecting on violence. All forms of media are included - radio,
television, cinema, theatre, graffiti, internet, music, art, sculpture,
books, propaganda. The methods and intentions of portrayal and the
symbolic effects will be assessed.
The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed
panel proposals. Papers will also be considered on any related theme.
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 9th January 2009. If an
abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be
submitted by Friday 10th April 2009.
300 word abstracts should be submitted to both Organising Chairs;
abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:
author(s), affiliation, email address, title of abstract, body of abstract.
We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If
you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did
not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest,
then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.
Joint Organising Chairs:
David White
Department of Philosophy
University of Calgary,
Calgary
Canada
E-mail: [email protected]
Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Leader
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Freeland, Oxfordshire,
United Kingdom
E-Mail: [email protected]
The conference is part of the Probing the Boundaries programme of
research projects. It aims to bring together people from different areas
and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are
innovative and exciting.
The first Diversity within Unity was held in Prague in 1999 and focused
on the theme of Human Community and Civil Society. The second conference
was held in Oxford in 2000 and focused on the theme of Culture,
Conflict, and Belonging. Subsequent conferences have met in Prague and
Budapest and looked at the general theme of the Cultures of Violence.
Multiple eBooks and volumes of themed papers have been published or are
in press from the previous conference meetings of this project. All
papers accepted for and presented at this conference will be eligible
for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers accepted for and
presented at the conference will be published in a themed hard copy volume.
For further details about the project please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/ptb/hhv/vcce/vcce.html
For further details about the conference please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/ptb/hhv/vcce/vch8/cfp.html
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InterPhil List Administration:
http://interphil.polylog.org
Intercultural Philosophy Calendar:
http://cal.polylog.org
