CFA: Political Violence Workshop
Where: University of Connecticut
Dates: December 4-6, 2015
Deadline: October 16, 2015
The Injustice League and the Public Discourse Project at the University of Connecticut are pleased to announce a workshop on Political Violence. While we invite contributions from a wide range of topics (see: below), we are especially interested in work that engages with institutionalized and racialized violence in the U.S., and with the Black Lives Matter movement in particular. The workshop will also aim to make progress on foundational questions such as what differentiates ‘political’ violence from other forms of violence, its uses and legitimacy, and what the appropriate response to political violence should be.
Keynotes will include Kathryn T. Gines (Penn State), with more to be announced. In addition to keynote presentations, we aim to accept roughly 10 participants through the submission process. We are open to a variety of methodological and interdisciplinary approaches. Abstracts should be between 750-1000 words in length, and should be prepared for anonymous review. Please send abstracts to uconn.pvw@gmail.com. The deadline for consideration is Friday, October 16, with notifications intended for the following week. Funds are available to assist with travel costs for participants with limited funding.
This event is modeled on our 2014 Dominating Speech Workshop. As with last year, we welcome volunteers to chair sessions, and warmly encourage interested parties at other institutions to attend and participate during Q&A. There is no registration fee.
A couple months after the workshop, interested participants will be invited to submit full drafts of their papers to the workshop organizers for consideration in a possible Journal of Political Philosophy symposium. We will make the initial selection with an eye toward quality and representation. The five or six papers chosen through this process will then be forwarded to JPP, where they will undergo the journal’s normal review process. Please note that paper acceptance is not guaranteed.
For more information, visit http://injustice.philosophy.uconn.edu/. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to email Daniel Silvermint at daniel.silvermint@uconn.edu.
Additional details:
This workshop adopts intersectionality as a framework, so while we are most interested in issues surrounding Black Lives Matter, we are also interested in how political violence manifests at the margins of race, gender, sexuality, class, disability, and indigenous, immigrant, and linguistic communities. In addition to these specific topics, a variety of other issues relating to political violence are welcome. Some non-exhaustive examples include:
- Violence as a tool or consequence of state power. Subtopics include: authority and oppression, the militarization of the police, racialized violence in law enforcement and the criminal justice system, solitary confinement, community disruption, enemy combatant status, and torture.
- Individuals as the agents of political violence, and the ethics of taking violence into one’s own hands. Subtopics include: violent political change and civilian unrest, acts of resistance and retaliation, rage and violence as alternatives to (or forms of) public discourse, vigilantism (e.g. in the context of unilateral border enforcement), politically motivated assassination, death threats and other forms of silencing, and hate crimes.
The status of innocents as both collateral damage and deliberate targets. Subtopics include: insurgencies and civil war, civilian displacement and refuge vulnerability, war rape, terrorism, international intervention, private military contractors, and drone warfare.
