*CFP* “AFFECT AND VIOLENCE: GENDERING THE MIDDLE EAST”, WORKSHOP, UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI

Affect and Violence: Gendering the Middle East

Gender Studies 2019 Conference: On Violence

24-26 October

University of Helsinki

For any queries, please don’t hesitate to contact s.tafakori@lse.ac.uk and/or sa130@soas.ac.uk.

Affect and Violence: Gendering the Middle East:

The aim of the proposed workshop is to explore the role of emotions and affect in (re)presenting, normalizing and shaping the contours of gender and violence in reference to the Middle East and North Africa in particular and the global south more broadly. There has been a good deal of scholarly attention in recent years to affects around conflict, disaster, vulnerability and trauma, but largely in relation to Euro-American perspectives and theorisations. 

This workshop aims instead to engage with the ways in which emotional framings of violence and gender in the MENA region are shaped by the co-constitution of local and global, West and non-West, and the historical and the everyday within transnational contexts.  We encourage submissions which examine in what ways the geopolitics of nationalism, (in)security, conflict and crisis in the region reinforce or complicate gendered and racialised discourses, and how the tasks of solidarity are rendered more complex and layered as a result.  These concerns may be shaped by attention to the broader context of the role of epistemic violence in constructions of the region, in the biopolitics and necropolitics of managing the life and death of populations.

We welcome papers which speak to these or related issues.  Contributions may address the role of affect in, for example,

• orientalising and racialising regimes of grievability and vulnerability;
• emotional narratives of gendered violence in online and/or offline popular culture, including visual mediations of violence;
• banal and ordinary framings of violence and gender vis-à-vis singular moments of crisis and rupture;
• non-Western security imaginaries;
• violence in collective memory and narratives of trauma; diasporic and migratory geographies of affect, gender and violence.

Please make sure the abstract includes: 

how the proposal is related to the theme of the workshop and the main ideas and key points of the proposed presentation. Abstracts should be no more than 250 words (2000 characters including spaces) in length.  Please include the main research question, outline methodology/methods, research materials/data and preliminary outcomes if the proposal is an academic research paper.

More details.

Guidelines on how to submit your abstract.

The deadline for abstracts is 30 April.