Julian Brigstocke's book The Life of the City has been reviewed in the Journal of Historical Geography by Carlos López Galviz.
We will be posting videos, powerpoint slides and other materials on the website very shortly. In the meantime, Bron Szerszynski has compiled a fantastic Twitter 'storify' that captures some of the conference. Theories and Methodologies Cluster, Sociology, and APT present a two day symposium at the University of Warwick - May 7th-8th Occupational Hazards: Theories and Methodologies (Palestine/Kashmir) - a workshop: May 7th, 10.00-18.00 Ramphal R1.04 Authority and Political Technologies - Dialogues and Works in Progress: May 8th. 10.00-16.00 Ramphal R2.41 The symposium is free to attend but registration is essential and places are limited. If you would like to present a work in progress on day 2 please register and submit an abstract as early as possible and by Friday 24th April at the latest. Registration here. The ARN network recommend this publication by a couple of ARN friends Counterpress
Being Social brings together leading and emerging scholars on the question of sociality in poststructuralist thought. The essays collected in this volume examine a sense of the social which resists final determination and closure, embracing an anxiety and undecidability of sociality, rather than effacing it. Through issues including queer politics, migration, and Guantanamo, recent events such as the occupation of Gezi Park in Istanbul, and theoretical explorations of themes such as writing, law, and democracy, contributors assess how a reconfigured sociality affects thinking and practice in the legal and political realms. With a particular emphasis on Jean-Luc Nancy, whose work brings questions of community to the fore, these essays explore how the consistent ‘unworking’ of sociality informs the tenor and form of political debate and engagement. To purchase the publication click here In October 2014 the ARN organised a day long symposium in Brighton. Called Emergent Authorities, it brought together speakers and discussants from the UK and Brazil, the event being the first stage in a series of shared projects between the two countries. The symposium circled around the questions that have animated, and troubled us, from the start of beginning this group. Not only an interest in how authority is enacted in institutional spaces, in public space, in the political sphere, in cultural forms. But also a concern for the political void filled by charismatic voices, a curiosity directed at the cultural forms, in all their contingency, that gather authority. Circling around the event was the voice of Nigel Farage, possibly at the peak of his powers then, and the “yes, well” of Boris Johnson; figures whose authority is derived, as Jonathon Coe so nicely argued, from their capacity to channel the ridicule they produce.  "Re-engaging Elaine Scarry's 'The Body of Pain' " The event is a two day conference celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, to be held at Grand Parade on 10th-11th December 2015 organised by Dr Leila Dawney and Dr Tim Huzar of the University of Brighton. The conference is being held at the Grand Parade site and the link for the call for papers is here  Naomi Millner was recently awarded ca. £13000 of ESRC Impact funding by Bristol University to support a new collaboration with Bioversity International, a Research for Development organisation which specialises in the protection of agricultural and forestry biodiversity. The funds will allow Naomi to contribute to the 'Livelihoods' theme in a multi-million pound project focused on the conservation of forestry theme of a large inter-disciplinary research programme focused on biodiversity conservation within forests in Mesoamerica. Drawing on her previous participatory work with small-scale farmers and social movements in El Salvador, Naomi will complement the scientific and economic studies being undertaken by contributing toward cultural understandings of nature and conservation amongst the forest indigenous communities. She will also support the design of impact pathways for the broader research by developing in-depth understanding of diverse stakeholder interests and perceptions of the research. The larger project breaks new ground by bringing together, for the first time, a multidisciplinary team of social and natural scientists who will rigorously analyse and compare community forestry experiences in the Petén, Guatemala and the Autonomous North Atlantic Region of Nicaragua (RAAN), some of which have been under way for as long as 25 years. There are few examples of community forestry where enough time has passed for lessons to be learned, but the community forests of the Petén, established more than 20 years ago, are among them. Nicaragua’s forests, similarly rich in mahogany, currently yield fewer benefits to local people. A ban on harvesting mahogany and several other timber species has been in place since 2006, and Hurricane Felix devastated large forest areas in 2007. The expected impact of the project is that new information, tools and recommendations will be integrated into management and utilization plans, policies, regulations and development activities by governments, NGOs and community organizations. Their implementation will yield increased benefits to local people from the use of forest resources (including high value timber species) and improved management and conservation of the resource base. The options developed will be applicable not only in Nicaragua and Guatemala, but also to other forest communities in Latin America and beyond. Spaces of Attunement: Life, Matter, and the Dance of Encounters
Glamorgan Building, Cardiff University March 30th (11.00-17.30) & March 31st (09.00-16.30), 2015 Fee: None. Registration / abstract deadline: 1800, February 13, 2023 We are pleased to announce a small number of travel bursaries for our symposium on Spaces of Attunement: Life, Matter, and the Dance of Encounters. If you would like to apply for financial support to attend the symposium, please download the application form here and email it to [email protected] by the end of Friday 13th February. Applications will be assessed according to the following criteria: (1) fit to themes of the symposium; (2) lack of other sources of funding; (3) early career status. The deadline to apply to attend or to give a paper at the symposium is 1800, Friday 13th February. Register / submit an abstract here. Symposium website: http://www.authorityresearch.net/spaces-of-attunement-symposium.html Bursary application form: http://www.authorityresearch.net/uploads/8/9/4/1/8941936/spaces_of_attunement_bursary_application_form.doc  Naomi Millner and her project team have been successful in securing funds for a collaborative research scheme called "The Hospitality Project." The c. £50,000 will be used to bring together three community organisations and three academics for whom hospitality is imagined as a politically or ethically transformative practice. Focusing on issues surrounding asylum-seeking and inter-cultural relationships the project starts from the premise that acts of sharing and hosting can establish platforms for mutual encounter and productive co-creation. However, we highlight that in practice hospitality practices are constantly fraught by unequal power relations, differential access to resources, and clashes between cultural interpretations. Interventions will involve a series of arts-based workshops and an away weekend including researchers, managers, volunteers, service-users and members of the three community groups. The workshops will take place around hospitality practices such as the giving and receiving of food, but will also employ forms of reflective storytelling devised with the support of artists to produce knowledge about the practical difficulties of trying to enact hospitality across cultural boundaries.  The call for papers for the final event of the ARN's project on 'Participation's "Others"' has now been announced. The syposium's title is: Spaces of Attunement: Life, Matter and the Dance of Encounters It will be held at Cardiff University on March 30th & 31st, 2015. We are delighted to welcome plenary speakers including: Ben Anderson (Reader in Human Geography, Durham University); Deborah Dixon (Professor of Geography, Glasgow University); Kevin Hetherington (Dean of Social Sciences, The Open University); Mara Miele (Reader in Human Geography, Cardiff University); Kim Tallbear (Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas). For more details, visit the symposium website at: http://www.authorityresearch.net/spaces-of-attunement-symposium.html or contact Julian Brigstocke and Tehseen Noorani. Deadline to register to attend or submit an abstract is 1800, February 13th 2015. Call For Papers: Geographies of debt and indebtedness: everyday and comparative frames
Annual Meeting of the Royal Geography Society with the Institute for British Geographers 1st - 4th September 2015 Venue: The University of Exeter Convenors: Christopher Harker (Durham University) [email protected] Samuel Kirwan (University of Bristol) [email protected] Co-sponsors: Economic Geography Research Group & Political Geography Research Group Abstract The changing composition and size of state and household debt burdens in the UK, and the different histories of high indebtedness in other countries and regions, has sparked growing interest in the ways in which debts compose space, time and experience, and in how, on a broader scale, the being-in-common of the anthropocene is, and has been, conditioned by indebtedness. However, we still know relatively little about geographies of debt and indebtedness, both in terms of how they shape specific performances of the everyday and the connections, differences and thus comparative possibilities between different national, regional and local milieu. We invite contributions that explore geographies of debt and indebtedness, whether through economic, political and/or socio-cultural registers. We are particularly interested in papers that:
We are particularly keen for contributions focusing on non-UK contexts. Format: Two 100-minute sessions Each session: 4 x 20min presentation, plus 20min discussion Please send abstract to both convenors by 10th February 2015 By Tehseen Noorani The Voice of the Other retreat, held as part of a project on more-than-human political participation, was held in September at The Lynhurst, a large house situated on the cliffside in the coastal town of Lynton, England. Twelve academics and artists got together to ask questions such as: What does it mean to create the stages for the voices of non-human or non-living participants to be heard? How can ‘we’ (a term that became reciprocally-problematized) listen differently? And what role do the arts – drama, music, poetry, digital art – play in authorizing the voices of non-human and non-living actors? Over the week we wove these, and related questions, into the sharing of our research interests and practices. There were lovely moments of connection, within our discussion sessions but also over meals, walks, playing music and unwinding at the end of the days. We explicitly tried to bring non-humans into the fold – for example, using the house and the locality themselves as connectors, engaging with the spaces through events that had occurred in the past. A recurring theme was taking seriously the form, in addition to the content, of claims and practices of participation. How they made, through which material and technical apparatuses and using what modes of expression. Doctoral Studentships at the University of Brighton The University of Brighton currently has a number of funded studentships available, both through the AHRC's TECHNE scheme and the university's own studentship scheme. Potential PhD applications are invited to submit applications on the theme of: Affective cartographies of authority How is authority produced through the generation of affective states? What emergent forms and figures of authority are coming into play in political, cultural and economic life? How can we best understand the lure, or promise, of such forms and figures? We welcome expressions of interest from students who wish to engage with cultural, geographical and political theory and develop methodological approaches for thinking about the politics, aesthetics and ethics of affect, for making sense of the affective landscapes of power through which authority takes place. A spatial politics involving claims to place, identity, landscape or nation can be played out through affective attachments, fears or alienations. The love of nation, for example, may involve spatialised performances of attachment that serve to anchor the subject within the idea of nationhood. This studentship seeks applications from those who are interested in producing doctoral work on the politics of such affective attachments, detachments and aversions, paying attention to the forms of authority that they generate. Topics could include: ... By Sam Kirwan As part of work I am doing on the work of Citizens Advice, I was asked to respond to the paper “States of Imagination” by John Clarke and Janet Newman, part of the Kilburn Manifesto. It is a paper that asks questions of the state and community that we have also looked at as part of our research group, and gave an opportunity to expand from advice work to governance and the contemporary logic of neoliberalism. Yet what it led me to think about most was the nature of democratic authority, and so set out below are my current thoughts on what the paper, and our work, can tell us about this concept.  Photo: Reuters. What I found interesting about Clarke & Newman's paper is the proposition that to...  The Authority Research Network spent seven days in Alfriston from November 1st-9th revisiting issues we tackled in the early days of the network, around power, authority, alienation and transcendence. The readings we discussed included: Monday - Alienation
From The Provisional University:
The Openhere conference/festival starts tomorrow in the Science Gallery, Dublin. The three-day program all looks really interesting – a great line-up of speakers – but perhaps most interesting for us are the talks by Brett Scott on open-source financing and the interview with the Robin Hood Collective who ask: “Could we bend the financialization of the economy to the advantage of precarious workers? Could we challenge the debt mechanism of control, the command to submit to any work and the limited options we have for financing our living? Could we think of sharing the means of creating money that financial capital has in its use, of putting them to work for us also? Could we think of a relation to money, not as binding us with debt and to capital relations, but as a means of freedom, escape, and increased independence? Could we appropriate the power of money, not only as a means of payment and exchange, but as a power to command the future?” The Robin Hood Collective are also going to have an ‘office’ on Foster Place from Monday to Thursday next week. Openhere 14.11-16.11 2014 .
"In the literature on power there has been a tendency to interpret power as domination, thus the opposite of authority. In this important collection of articles the authors challenge this viewpoint, arguing that power and authority structure everyday life in a mutually constitutive manner ... this collection makes a significant contribution to contemporary debates in social theory" Mark Haugaard, National University of Ireland. Call for Papers: Association of American Geographers annual conference 2015, Chicago, IL. Spaces of Emergent Authority: Embodiment, Materiality and the Making of Common Life Deadline Friday 31st October, 2014. Organized by Julian Brigstocke (Cardiff University, UK) and Leila Dawney (Brighton University, UK) What is the relation between processes of (historical, political, technological, environmental) emergence and the material, affective and spiritual investments that attach bodies to power? (How) is authority generated when the world is experienced as perpetual process and creative force? (Why) are we bound to a fate in which spectacular violence subsumes the space of collaborative political participation, affective attachment and justice? (Where) are there vital new practices of collective life that resist such violence or generate authority as a collaborative, egalitarian art? (How) are emerging commons and practices of commoning generating creative new entanglements with material agency and more-than-human life? Conversely, (how) are emergent forms of authority contributing to new forms of domination and inequality?  Venue: University of Brighton, Grand Parade campus Date: Friday 31st October 2014 Organisers: Leila Dawney, Claire Blencowe, Suzy Armsden What is the relation between processes of (historical, political, technological) emergence and the material/spiritual investments that attach bodies to power/ (How) is authority generated when the world is experienced as a perpetual process and creative force? (Why) are we bound to a fate in which spectacular violence subsumes the space of collaborative reason, affective attachment and justice? (Where) are there vital new practices of collective life that resist such violence or generate authority as a collaborative egalitarian art? This symposium launches a new collaboration between the Authority Research Network and colleagues from Brazil, supported by the AHRC Connected Communities programme. We are working together intensively to reflect critically and hopefully on a range of contemporary sites of authority making. Together our research explores the experience of power in the present as well as practices/imaginations of making the commons. We see 'emergent authority' as the condition of political life in the present. We seek neither to condemn nor applaud forms of authority that are based on experiences of emergence per se, but rather to reorient critical/creative practice to these conditions and to insist on the continued urgency of questions of meaning, attachment and authority in an age of emergence ... As part of our project Participation's "Others": A Cartography of Creative Listening Practices, led by Julian Brigstocke and Tehseen Noorani, the Authority Research Network have held a very productive residential retreat in north Devon.
The retreat brought together a highly interdisciplinary group of people interested in creative forms of listening with voiceless 'others', and consisted of some intense engagement with works-in-progress, combined with a very interesting series of arts-led workshops exploring ways of listening to non-conventional forms of more-than-human agency through drama, creative engagements with place, digital life, and silent listening. We started work towards a collectively written, multimedia book of essays, creative writing, songs, and other creative outputs. Watch this space! |
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