Subversive Histories for Public Cultures
The politics of life history research
8th annual Brighton-Sussex postgraduate conference, Co-hosted by the Centre for Research in Memory, Narrative and Histories (CRMNH, University of Brighton) and the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research (CLHLWR, University of Sussex).
10am – 4pm, 22nd June 2016. The Keep, Woolards Way, Brighton, BN1 9BP
The discipline of life history research has long had a political engagement with the tensions between marginalised and dominant voices in the making of public cultures. This year’s postgraduate conference ‘Subversive Histories for Public Cultures’ re-visits the politics surrounding the practice of life history research.
We seek to critically question acts of telling and hearing, and to consider how subversive narratives of the past perform and circulate in public cultures. In this way, the conference will conceptually explore how life history research methods contribute to the interruption and/or maintenance of public cultures, as well as the methods, approaches, and ethical considerations that this entails.
This is an open and free event with refreshments and a light lunch included. Places are limited so do make sure to book soon.
Keynote Speaker: Dr Carrie Hamilton (University of Roehampton)
Animal Stories and Public Cultures.
A significant development in European public cultures in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been the increased political and civic engagement with the lives and fate of animals. At local, national and transnational level, voluntary, charitable, and direct action groups have challenged liberal democratic definitions of rights and citizenship, demanding that state obligations to protect, as well as public duties of solidarity, be extended to include other-than-human animals. In this process, the tales of those people who defend and ‘speak for’ animals interrupts anthropocentric understandings of historical subjectivity.
This lecture will highlight these developments and disruptions with reference to life stories of animal welfare and animal rights activists from the UK and Spain. I explore how we might better learn to listen to, interpret and represent animal stories – both in the sense of human witnessing to animal lives, and of the physical presence of animal bodies in oral history interviews. This small archive of activist animal tales marks an important intervention in contemporary theorisations of human-animal relations and ‘posthumanism’, and presents significant challenges to the writing of history.
Other speakers include:
Elizabeth Chappell (The Open University), The Last Survivors of Hiroshima: Hibakusha stories as cultural, social and political myth making.
Elena Dirstaru (University of Essex) Collective Memory and Media Representations. Memories of Communism in Eastern Europe.
Hema Letchamaman (University of Cambridge) Does my story matter? The narratives of transgender youth in India.
Dr Alexandra Loske (University of Sussex) Wild Animals in Public Culture: Curating Georgian creatures in the 21st century.
Dr Carrie Parris (University of East Anglia), The Dismemberment of Sir Bernard Spilsbury: Subversion of an Icon.
Dr Cecilia Sosa (Universidad Tres de Febrero, Argentina) Tell me about your war. Minefield (2016, Lola Arias), performing traumatic lives on stage.
Tina van der Vlies ( Erasmus University Rotterdam) The ‘life history’ of a nation: Subversive histories in Dutch textbooks.
For further information about the centres, please visit:
http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/research/crmnh
and
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/clhlwr