Call for Papers

Time and Fear: The Proximity of Crisis and the Horrors of Repetition

Politics of Temporality Workshop, Wednesday 9^th June

University of Sussex, Fulton Room 214

We live in times that are saturated with narratives of present crisis, past mistakes and uncertain futures. Political temporalities may seem to be collapsing in on themselves to pinpoints of inevitability, from which there is no turning back until we have hit an unbearable ‘rock bottom’. The rise of the right may seem to be echoing back to dark and dangerous histories as if the lessons learnt have now been suppressed or forgotten. From the election of Trump, to the racist discourse surrounding Brexit, from the refugee crisis to climate change, we are seeing unsettling indicators that our future may be limited and totalitarian. At the same time we can see the emergence of international movements of resistance, the prevalence of direct action, discourses of kindness, and a call for a fundamental reconsideration of how systems of political representation are operating.

We welcome abstracts that address the above theme, this may include but is not limited to:

• The relationship between temporality and fear
• The positioning of the crisis as happening now
• Representing and misrepresenting horrors of war and conflict
• How the media and political parties are using past narratives, or future projections, to justify, or explain, political actions
• The role of memory and/or artistic representation in affirming and escaping present fears
• The positioning of fear in the personal and the political, understanding the temporality of emotions
• What is the role of forgetting, remembering or suppressing the past in times of crisis
• What counter narratives are there to the rhetoric of fear, and future limitations
• What discourses are being overlooked by the primacy of the crisis narrative
• The role of repetition in either resistance or oppression
• The temporality of protest
• The role of technologies in constructing these futures, or in reconstructing our past to explain or resist

Abstracts should be between 200 – 300 words. Please sent titles and abstracts to h.mcknight@sussex.ac.uk by 1^st May 2017