Emergent Authorities & the Experience of Power

Venue:  University of Brighton, Grand Parade campus - link to map
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 ...

Key note discussants:

Goldie Osuri
Monika Krause
Helen Nicholson

Grand Parade campus including travel directions

Places for this workshop are limited in order to facilitate the emergence of ideas, conviviality and focused conversation.  If you would like to secure a place on the workshop please e-mail Leila Dawney with a brief note to explain your interest.

Programme

09.30 - 10.00     Registration and refreshments - Room G4

10.00 - 11.00     Introducing the Authority Research Network and the new project -
                            Main Boardroom

• Leila Dawney (Brighton) : Thinking about emergent authority - attachments and alienations
• Claire Blencowe (Warwick): Benjamin's Challenge: Authority Crisis, Violence and Common Life
• Aécio Amaral (Universidade Federal de Paraiba): ARN and the Brazil connection

11.00 - 11.30      Break

11.30 - 13.00        Selection of Working Papers - Main Boardroom

• Samuel Kirkwan (Bristol): A State for the Commons: A Look at the changing role of the state, the law and 'the commons' through the lens of advice work.
• Joanildo Burity (FUNDAJ): Authority and the in-common in processes of minoritisation: Brazilian Pentelcostalism
• Noami Miller (Bristol): Soil and emergent authority:  Materialising social change with the permaculture movement of El Salvador
• Nildo Avelino (UFPB): Confession and political normativity: subjective control and production of the subject

13:30 - 14:30        Lunch

14.30 - 15.30        Thematic roundtable discussions involving all participants - G4, M57 and Main Boardroom

15.30 - 17.00        Panel discussion on the Important (or not) of the Concept 'Emergent Authority' - Main Boardroom

• What is at stake in understanding power through processual ontology
• What is the importance of thinking about commons/commoning or resistance in terms of power and authority?

Evening:   Drinks at Craft Beer Company