National University of Ireland, Galway (Web)

Time: 7-9 June 2018
Venue: National University of Ireland, Galway
Abstract Submission: February 9 2018

In this, multi-disciplinary, conference we wish to think through the imbrications of violence, space, and the political. Given that our present conjuncture is one constituted by innumerable sites of apartheid, exclusion, oppression, and indeed, resistance(s), such an interrogation is both crucial and potentially productive in re-thinking questions of power and radical politics. In this zeitgeist the contingency of hitherto relatively stable configurations of power have been rendered visible through the failing allure of liberal democratic politics and the dislocation conjured by, among other things, its attendant ‘spectral dance of capital’ (Žižek, 2008). A void has been rift from which a plurality of discourses have proliferated that seek to address this moment of crises by either caging/bounding or expanding the social. That is, at stake in many contemporary political projects currently gaining traction is the redrawing of frontiers, the very bounds of inclusion and exclusion – from international borders and multilevel governance, to the remaking of frontiers within existing polities. Violence/antagonism, in various iterations, is central to the (re)inscription of these frontiers (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). Not only evident in ostensibly bellicose projects that seek to uphold, contest, or expand regimes of power through violent struggle, violence is imbricated in an other, perhaps more foundational or ‘originary’ sense (Arendt, 1963; Derrida, 1990). Read more … (Web)