Questioning Power: The Individual and the Boundaries of Embodiment
Inaugural Joint Politics and Philosophy Graduate Conference
The New School for Social Research
March 20th-21st 2014, New York City
Keynote Speakers: James Scott (Sterling Professor of Political Science, Anthropology, Forestry, and
Environmental Studies at Yale University)
Todd May (Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of Philosophy at Clemson University)
Respondent: Johanna Oksala (Academy of Finland Research Fellow at University of Helsinki)
One of the primary sites upon which political power operates is the individual and the body. The subjection of individuals to power occurs through practices that can be corporal (such as torture and imprisonment), disciplinary (such as policies that seek to intervene, delimit and regulate the uses of our person), as well as representative (such as racialization, sexualization, and other forms of taxonomy and segregation). Indeed, the very idea of an individual can be seen as a manifestation of power. So too has the individual and their body increasingly come to be seen as a site for and of agency, politics, empowerment, and resistance.
Contemporary theoretical discourses have thematized the operation of political power in terms of embodiment and have often located the body – either the physical figure or its representations – as the locus of emancipatory politics.
The inaugural NSSR Joint Politics & Philosophy Graduate Student Conference aims at interrogating the adequacy of our various theoretical models and practical approaches for dealing with the realities of corporeal subjection. Is the emphasis on individual bodies as sites of both subjugation and emancipation an adequate approach to dealing with the collective phenomena of politics? Does this focus provide us the best inroad to understanding the relationship between states and their subjects? Do alternative analyses of power or embodiment provide a better understanding of political oppression and resistance? Does the theoretical focus on somatic subjects account for those aspects of power captured by concrete historical or empirical analysis in a sufficient manner?
The conference organizers remain committed to an open, frank and rigorous discussion of all political issues from a diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches. We welcome and encourage papers from all disciplines, as well as from interdisciplinary perspectives.
Submissions are welcomed on (but not limited to) any of the following topics:
-The Individual Actor and/or Collective Agency -The State and Biopower
-Representations of the Body -The Racial Body
-Animal Life and Post-Humanism -Power and Technoscience
-Torture and other Corporeal Violations -Gender and Power
-Hunger Strikes and Bodily Practice as Dissent -Bodies and Movement
-Incorporation and Disincorporation -Biological Determinism
-Bodies, Markets and Living Capital
-Subjects, Subjectification, and Theories of Embodied Subjectivity
The submission deadline is Friday, January 17th 2014.
We will accept full paper submissions of 3000-6000 words, or detailed abstracts of 300-600.
Please format submissions for blind review and send to: questioningpower.submissions@gmail.com
Please send all queries regarding submissions or our conference to: questioningpower@gmail.com
A small travel stipend will be awarded to authors of selected submissions. Only full paper submissions will be eligible for this award.