[Air-L] Call for papers - Radical Negativity

[Ella Fegitz]

We are pleased to announce the call for papers for the graduate conference
on Radical Negativity.

*Radical Negativity: Interrogating productive possibilities for negative
states of being*

Friday 13 June 2014
Goldsmiths, University of London
Conference Keynote: Lisa Blackman, Professor in Media and Communications,
Goldsmiths

Supported by the Centre for Feminist Research, Department of Media and
Communications, and the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths.

Website: http://radicalnegativity.com

*Proposals are due by Friday 14 February 2014*

More recent feminist and queer scholarship has begun to productively
address the dark aspects of human subjectivity perceived to have a
detrimental impact on the self-constituting practices of the positive self,
such as shame, trauma, unhappiness, loss, pain, and melancholia, and
reconceptualise them not only as integral to the process of subject
formation, but critical and productive affective states in which to engage
political action.

This interdisciplinary conference addresses the ways in which feminist and
queer research may be informed by embracing philosophical oppositions, the
‘negative double’ of the positive value. The conference will interrogate
what can be learned from interventions focused on the interconnections
between the negative and human agency, and how such a frame can inform
ideas of feminist and queer practice.

Borrowing from Eve Sedgwick, this conference proposes that forms of the
negative are “not distinctly ‘toxic’ parts of a group or individual
identity that can be excised; they are instead integral to and residual in
the processes by which identity itself is formed. They are available for
the work of metamorphosis, reframing, refiguration, transfiguration,
affective and symbolic loading and deformation (Sedgwick and Frank, 2003,
p.63).”

If, like Sedgwick, we take up this challenge to valorise negative states of
being as key conditions both for the production of meaning and being and as
organising principles of identity, then we hope explorations into such
states may provide the potential to open up new possibilities for politics
and connection.

We invite papers and panel proposals that explore how negative states and
conditions of being such as unhappiness, irresponsibility, passivity,
vulnerability, failure, shame, hesitancy, pain, dispossession, rage,
madness and depression may provide loci from which action and political
engagement can arise.

*Submission Guidelines*

Please submit paper abstracts of 300-500 words along with a short biography
of 100 words.
Panel proposals should include a 300-word description along with
accompanying paper abstracts for the panel of 300-500 words. Please provide
a short 100-word biography for each presenter.

Email submissions to: radicalnegativity at gmail.com by*Friday 14 February
2014*.