Call for papers – A two-day conference exploring issues of complicity, organised by the University of Brighton’s Understanding Conflict: Forms & Legacies of Violence research cluster, on Tuesday 31st March and Wednesday 1st April 2015 – University of Brighton, UK

CALL FOR PAPERS

DEADLINE: 1st December 2014

The problem of complicity is a longstanding feature of everyday moral experience, and yet comparatively little work focuses explicitly on it. In an increasingly neo-liberal world it is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid complicity both in its creation of a particular model of the person and with its attendant demands on how we live on what we do and do not do and how we think. If Georgio Agamben is right to insist that “Today’s man … has become blind not to his capacities but to his incapacities, no to what he can do but to what he cannot, or can not, do”, then complicity is taking centre stage in our everyday lives. In this two-day conference the Understanding Conflict research cluster will explore issues of complicity in terms both of practice and of theorisation. We anticipate that these and related issues will be of interest to a wide range of people working in and studying, among other areas, cultural studies, philosophy, political theory, media studies, photography, journalism and post-colonialism, health studies and the NHS, queer theory, women’s studies and women and the family

 Boundaries of complicity

What counts as complicity and why? What counts as non-complicity and why? What are complicity’s logical limits? Is there anything that cannot be (re-)described as complicity? If there are degrees of complicity, how might they be characterised?

Theorising complicity in relation to related moral-political issues

How does the problem of complicity relate to that of “dirty hands”? What are the relations between complicity, personhood and moral agency? Chains of complicity: moral overload; moral distance; moral paralysis political overload…, …

Political distance and political paralysis

Commission and omission; Complicity and/with violence; Complicity and culpable ignorance; Complicity, hypocrisy and necessity; Complicity and power

Empirical cases

Conflict resolution; conflict transformation; Specificities of the neo-liberal world; The egoism of non-complicity, impotent self-flagellation versus principled refusal; Accepting tainted money: research grants and the like; Embedded journalism, War photography; Anthropological research, charitable work; The armed forces

Proposals of no more than 300 words should be emailed by 1st December 2014 to conflictcluster@brighton.ac.uk

For more information on the work and scope of the University of Brighton’s Research Cluster Understanding Conflict: Forms and Legacies of Violence: