[csaa-forum] CFP for Conference in Croatia Sept 2014: Utopia and political theology today

[TANIA LEWIS]

FYI CSAA-ers

Great line up of speakers for this conference on utopianism.

Cheers

Tania



*CFP: Utopia and political theology today*

DEADLINE EXTENDED until JUNE 15

*Keynote speaker:* Simon Critchley

*Guests*: Eric Santner, Laura Mulvey, Fred Botting, Mark Devenney...

September 26-8, 2014, University of Zadar, Croatia



*Please send proposals for 20-minute papers (no more than 200 words +
keywords) to rhss.conference at gmail.com <rhss.conference at gmail.com> by June
15th 2014.*

Abstracts should be in Word or RTF formats and include the following:

a)     author(s) - name and surname

b)    affiliation

c)     e-mail address

d)    keywords



Selected conference papers will be published.



*CFP: Utopia and political theology today*

The Book of Revelations describes the Holy City, a New Jerusalem with
transparent glassy streets and pearly walls - a city so heavenly that, "The
nations will walk by its light" (Revelation 22.24). All nations, the poor,
outcasts, all races, all human forms, will dwell forever within the Light
of the Lord. In *The City of God* Saint Augustine developed this Heavenly
City as an idealised polis, as an eternal haven of joy above and beyond the
material world of the dying Roman Empire. "An eternal haven of joy", a
"light for all human forms" signals the emotional dimension of the utopian
promise for the oppressed, the noncountable, the marginalized, the
different, the singular. Today, after the catastrophic failure of the
communist projects at the end of the last century and the global domination
of liberal democracy, perhaps more than ever we miss this emotional side of
the utopian faith. Perhaps this is the reason for the recent theological
revival and the unusual upturn in interest in political theology.

The utopian side of political theology today calls us to reexamine and
rethink what it means to be a human self and what selves might be
together.  How are contemporary politics, art and culture contaminated by
different forms of the sacred? How is dominant liberal discourse and the
myth of modernity as a pure secular form of politics interiorized and
maintained? How does the discourse of 'crisis' connect to submissions of
the oppressed and production of the sense of a 'damaged future'? Does any
emancipatory project require what Simon Critchley calls both a
counterfactual faith and utopian faith in radical social imagination as a
performative alternative to biocapitalism?

*We invite papers that address these questions through critical examination
of the ways utopian faith has been envisaged in literature, film,
performance, art, politics, philosophy.... *We hope that the participation
of scholars from different fields and disciplines of humanities and social
sciences will create new avenues for critically-oriented scholarship and
collaboration.


*Possible topics include (but are not limited to):*



§     the political promise of the performative (political deployments of
performativity in art, performances, literature, film, individual actions,
movements, protests....etc.)

§     the survival of different forms of utopias in dystopias - e.g., in
new forms of life often represented as monsters (zombies....)

§     the utopian faith in images, or in the possibility to 'liberate'
images across gender/class/race division....

§     the utopian promise of plural performativity and the politics of
memoralization

§     the affects of belonging and discourses on the good life and
collective well-being

§     sound and sonic utopianism

§     revisiting the "classics" of political theology (Benjamin, Schmitt,
Kantorowicz, etc.)

§     the challenge of capital to emancipatory politics

§     time and temporality of (political) change

§     the meaning of "messianic" in late capitalism

§     Etc.



*Conference Fees*

Early Bird (by July 31): 80 Euros

Registration (by August 31): 100 Euros

*Conference website: http://rhss-conference.com
<http://rhss-conference.com/>*

Please forward this message to your colleagues. We look forward to seeing
you in Zadar in September.

-- 
Associate Professor Tania Lewis, Vice Chancellor's Senior Research Fellow
School of Media & Communication, RMIT University, Australia
www.rmit.edu.au/staff/tania-lewis

Digital Ethnography Research Centre: www.digital-ethnography.net/
Beyond Behaviour Change: www.rmit.edu.au/ahuri/beyondbehaviour

*PhD Scholarships*
Sustainable Urban Precincts Project (see Project 1.2)
www.rmit.edu.au/scholarships/supp

*Research Projects*
www.ethicalconsumption.org/
www.telemodernities.org/

*Publications*
https://rmit.academia.edu/TaniaLewis
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