Organized by Prof. Martin Butler & Prof. Paul Mecheril
Opening Lecture by Gayatri C. Spivak (New York)
A number of recent events in different parts of the world, such as the uprisings in Ukraine, Occupy Gezi, and the protests in Northern Africa, have brought back the issue of ‘resistance’ to both public and scholarly attention. As manifold as the forms that resistance takes at the beginning of the 21st century are the explanations for these phenomena: In western societies, the crisis of global capitalism, along with a general loss of trust in institutionalized politics, is often made responsible for the recent emergence of new movements of protests and resistance. By contrast, in regions such as Northern Africa, political uprisings have commonly been regarded as a reaction long overdue to totalitarian regimes and their infrastructures of oppression and control. With the disclosure of practices of surveillance through national secret services such as the NSA, then, similar mechanisms of power have been made visible in western societies, which, in turn, are said to have enhanced tendencies towards civil disobedience and resistance.
Not least because of its 40th anniversary and the commemoration of the host University’s name patron, Carl von Ossietzky, the conference sets out to explore phenomena of resistance in different historical and contemporary contexts from an interdisciplinary and transcultural perspective in order to add to a theoretical debate on the term and concept(s) of resistance. The conference will be framed by three major questions: 1. What is ‘resistance’? 2. On which normative grounds do forms of resistance work, how are they legitimized? 3. Who uses the term/concept of ‘resistance’? When, where, and for what purposes? In order to approach these questions, the conference takes a distinctly comparative view on the various notions of resistance in different disciplinary as well as social and/or cultural contexts in order to discuss whether ‘resistance’ is an exclusively ‘western’ concept, or whether there are concepts of resistance that are not based on or refer to western intellectual, political, or ideological traditions.
Please see the attached Call for Papers for details on the conference’s concept and the submission of proposals.
Central thematic clusters of the conference, which allow for the discussion of the major questions outlined above, are:
1. Subjects of resistance
2. Representations of resistance
3. Contexts of resistance.
Paper Proposals
We invite proposals for papers (max. 20 min.), which, either through the presentation of empirical research on phenomena of resistance or through theoretical/terminological discussion, address the conference’s major questions – ideally, the conference may contribute to correlating both kinds of contributions and put them into a fruitful dialogue. In your proposal, please indicate in which of the three clusters („subjects“, „representations“, „contexts“) you would situate your paper. As every cluster is further subdivided into four sections, you are also supposed to indicate what you consider the most appropriate section for your contribution. More detailed information on the clusters and sections can be found in a longer version of this CfP available at: http://www.uni-oldenburg.de/forschung/cmc/konferenz-widerstand-2014/
Submission deadline: May 1st, 2014.
Please send your proposal to: cmc.sekretariat@uni-oldenburg.de