Warwick University June 13th-14th

Key Notes:
Kathryn Yusoff (Queen Mary) ‘Geopower: biopolitics and matter after life’
Claire Blencowe (Warwick) ‘Ecological Attunement in a Theological Key: Adventures in Anti-Fascist Aesthetics’
Didier Fassin (Princeton IAS) ‘The Rise - and Fall? - of Carceral Society’

Download full Symposium Programme here

Biopolitcal Matters: What is biopolitics today? What are its discontents? Is there life after biopolitics?

The Authority & Political Technologies (APT) network at Warwick aims to foster and support work in the critical social sciences that is informed by Foucauldian, Deleuzian and cultural-theory perspectives. In particular we are interested in work that carries forwards these traditions, but which takes seriously the arguments concerning their failure to speak to the ethical and political demands of the present; that is to say work that is striving to refigure and reinvent the ethical and political dimension of these perspectives for contemporary problematics.

In this our second biannual symposium we address transformations in what constitutes ‘biopolitical matters’ – including changing practices of how forms of life are understood, measured, hierarchized, produced and controlled - and their relevance in contemporary theoretical and political debate. We invite papers that explore plural and divergent accounts of biopolitics, from its original treatment by Michel Foucault, through its expanded use in an array of settings to address the merging of life and politics, to contemporary approaches that question the ‘bio’ as the frame of politics. This includes new regimes of police and security; environmental catastrophe in the Anthropocene, and new questions about ‘big data’ and its increasingly powerful behaviouralism. We encourage submissions from a range of disciplines including, but not limited to, sociology, politics, philosophy, law, history, geography, cultural studies and anthropology. In addition to standard conference papers we welcome proposals for panel discussions, films, exhibits and performance.

Please register here.

Organisers: Claire Blencowe, Amy Hinterberger & Illan Wall.

Supported by the Institute for Advanced Studies, Sociology, Law and the Social Theory Centre University of Warwick.

Authority & Political Technologies, IAS, Social Theory Centre, Sociology, Law – University of Warwick

This event is free to attend but registration is essential and places will be limited.

The event will take place on the campus of Warwick University. On campus B&B accomodation can be booked here: https://bandb.warwick.ac.uk/

More hotels can be found in Coventry and Kenilworth which are a three mile bus ride from campus.

Please note that the closest train stations to campus are Coventry, Canley and Tile Hill (not Warwick - which is eight miles away!). A regular bus service links Coventry station to Warwick campus.