​​Resistance

5th International Critical Studies Research Group Conference
13th-14th June 2016
Grand Parade, University of Brighton

Keynote lectures:
Fred Moten (UC Riverside)
'Resistance and Conduction'
Nina Power (University of Roehampton)
'The Ambivalence of Resistance'

Registration is open here
Programme available here

If resistance has a tradition, it is one which is not unilinear or uncontested. Dominant understandings of resistance are themselves resisted, typically when certain peoples are left outside of the history or the conceptualisation of resistance. This conference explores how the notion of resistance has been challenged, both by practices of resistance and theorisations of resistance (a distinction which can only be maintained so far).

How has the advent of new technologies shifted understandings of resistance? Is resistance distinct from politics, and if so how do both operate when neoliberal rationality becomes hegemonic? Does violence interrupt resistance, or is it generative of resistance? What conceptions of the human are presumed in discourses of resistance? Can resistance be enacted, or contested, through memory?

Topics to be covered might include:

• Fugitivity; the undercommons; ensemble
• Memory and/as resistance
• Resistance to (neo)liberalism
• Neocolonial/decolonial resistance
• Détournement today
• Conformity and social media networks
• Populism(s) and/as resistance
• Medicine and misconduct
• Violence and nonviolence
• Counter-histories of resistance
• Democracy and/as resistance
• Queering resistance
• Horrorism; necropolitics; precarity
• Resistance in/to asymmetric warfare
• Discriminations: ableism, sexism, ageism, racism
• Police and protest
• Intersectionality and/as resistance
• Youth and resistance
• Virality, online political movements and digital resistance

Conference fee: £60 (waged), £25 (student / unwaged).

For more information please contact Megan Archer: M.Archer@brighton.ac.uk.

Viktor Bulla's Pioneers in Defense Drill, Leningrad (1937)