We actively welcome doctoral researchers and academics to submit ideas, abstracts, and completed papers. Help us build a network of critical voices!
Below are current CfPs, please have a look and share your thoughts
Call for Papers – The Politics of Representation
Detailed section abstracts can be found here
The Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster is pleased to host the first event of the recently founded New Perspectives Series, an initiative by the DPIR graduate community that aims at promoting critical and cutting-edge research among doctoral- and early-career-researchers.
The first instalment of the series wishes to engage with (and challenge) the idea of ‘representation’, a prolific and widely utilised concept in political and international analysis with often take-for-granted implications.
Since the advent of modernity political representation has been perceived as an artificial dimension that enables collective modes of existence through the formation of mediating structures and the emergence of intersubjectively formed patterns of social knowledge. Yet, over the last decade alternative discourses have questioned conventional understandings of representation by stretching its boundaries far beyond traditional uses in political and international studies.
Linear understandings of reality are challenged by approaches that highlight the complexity and immanence of political processes. Globally one witnesses the emergence of fluid, network-like and non-representational conceptions of agency. In policy practice, established models of representation are no longer capable of accounting for collective identities due to their exposure to multiple antagonistic frontiers. Against this backdrop an investigation into novel and emerging approaches to representation appears to be timely and necessary.
The symposium invites contributions from postgraduate students that explore non-conventional approaches to the politics of representation, i.e. ontological theories of political knowledge production; agency in global politics; applications and practices in the area of security studies, the representation of danger, and identity politics.
We welcome submissions by doctoral researchers that explore approaches to representation through a multi-disciplinary lens, and invite paper-submissions that touch upon one or several of the following thematic complexes:
- Theories of political affects
- Embodiment and corporeal experience
- Network- and assemblage-theories
- Performativity and experimentation
- Non-representational agency in global affairs
- Ethics of (non)-representations
- Direct action, activism, the politics of the everyday
- Feasibility of immanent politics
- Spatializing practices and the politics of space
- Power and (non)-representation
- Discursive representation of (in)-security
- The unknown as a discursive space
- Representations of danger
- Representation, insecurity, and culture/identity
- Representing danger through counter-narratives
Abstract-submissions should be limited to 300 words and need to be accompanied by a 100-words biography. Please submit abstracts via newperspectives@westminster.ac.uk
Deadline for abstract submission: Sunday, 24 April 2016
Conference paper submission: Monday, 30 May 2016
The organizers are please to announce a best-paper-competition that will reward a piece of rigorous and innovative research with a £ 100 book voucher. The author will also receive the opportunity to present his or her work ahead of the Keynote Event.
Participation and registration is free of charge.
Host: University of Westminster
Department of Politics and International Relations
309 Regent Street, W1B 2HW London
Date: Wednesday, 8 June, 2016
Venue: 309 Regent Street, 3rd Floor, RS351
Contact: newperspectives@westminster.ac.uk
Web: https://newperspectivesseries.wordpress.com
New Perspectives Series 