Where do we begin with violence? Isn’t making a beginning already violent? We could begin by considering it as a concept, a praxis, a structure, an accident, a last resort? 

Violence has many justifications, and it might be unjustified, liberatory and uplifting, illegal or not, or even murderous. Violence might be constitutive of subjectivity, and community, be it personal, regional, or global. Violence might be needed to wrest the truth from its hiddenness in everyday opinions. Further, the occurrences violence takes might be equally plural: Violence may be ‘in’ words, ‘in’ guns and bombs, or fists; it may be local and concentrated or macroscopic and diffuse; it may be slow and ‘hidden’, and not perpetrated by a specific subject, but rather a decentralized network.

 

How, then, should we respond to violence, either witnessed or experienced? How do our current responses function and why? Can we ‘overcome’ violence?  Or can it rather be ‘channeled’ or ‘managed’? Is the juridical and institutional system and its monopoly of violence adept to deal with violence? Can we reframe violence, reimagine it and our response to it?

 

How might we speak about violence? What discourses take up, form, modify, and enable violence? Which words can - or should - a ‘we’ use to describe, refer, justify or criticize violence? Are ‘we’ perpetrating violence in using some rather than other words?  

Lastly, what role does, can, or should philosophy play? How do philosophy and violence relate to one other? Is philosophy inherently violent in its generalizations, conceptualizations, and its abstractions; in its attempt to wrench truths from illusions? Or is philosophical non- or anti-violent? 

 

This conference will center research whose aim is to elucidate, complicate, critique, comment, struggle with, reason with, reject, or problematize the notion of violence.  

 

We welcome submissions on any subject relating to the topic of violence, with a specific focus on submissions from philosophy, the humanities more broadly, the social sciences,  theology, and the various strands of ‘critical theory’ (from Queer Theory, to Critical Race Theory, Anarchist and Communist theorizing, to Critical Animal studies, Dis-ability studies, to Indigenous thought,  Decolonial and Latinx thinking).