Monday 7 November 2011  

Keele University, Claus Moser Building, 9:00 – 4:00

Keynote speaker: Prof Michael Shapiro, University of Hawaii at Manoa

‘Thus, between the already ‘encoded’ eye and reflexive knowledge there is a middle region which liberates order itself…’ Foucault, The Order of Things, Routledge, 2002, p. xxii.

CALL FOR PAPERS: 

Rationale

Orders of the real are authoritative ways of imagining the world. They imply specific sets of beliefs, attitudes, practices, and discourses that taken together constitute regimes of truth around which decisions on what is to be taken as valid are made. Orders of the real presuppose understandings of how the world is known, the relations that constitute the regimes upon which knowledge is produced, and the representations and assumptions about the problem of political existence. Although within a positivist tradition of science they have been approached from the realm of ‘the empirical’ and observed through methods that seek to reduce them to objective and measurable facts, they are far more problematic than that. As continental thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Nancy, and many others have demonstrated, they enshrine complex relations of power, that include, and transcend, what has been known through and after Foucault’s work as power/knowledge.

Orders of the real constitute epistemological problems. They can be observed as sites from which to question deep assumptions that determine the outcomes of research. They can also be explored to make explicit the conditions of possibility and operability of systems of thought upon which modern technologies of governance depend. They can also be used to interrogate problems that in principle appear buried in time, such as various relationships between the modern and the secular as well as the modern and the uncertain, within technologies and practices of government and rule.

The Emerging Securities Unit was created in 2009 to support research on novel forms of revealing the possibility of being political. Through this workshop we intend to offer a space for critical reflection on the epistemological implications of researching the political, the global, and the international as sites of representation of orders of the real.

Format

The workshop is organised in the form of interventions to a general debate. We are calling for participants who wish to reflect publicly on the epistemological implications of their past, current, and future research projects. We invite abstracts on these interventions of no more than 300 words drawing on, but not exclusively, the following questions:

·       How can relationships between ontologies and epistemologies be made productive in revealing the possibilities of being political?

·       What does researching the epistemologies of the political, the global, and the international offer in terms of understanding the realm of the empirical?

·       What might a sceptical epistemology look like if traditional approaches to power/knowledge are to be resisted?

·       Can epistemologies be secured in an attempt to secure orders of governance?

Please send abstracts to Corey Walker Mortimer (c.b.walker-mortimer@ilpj.keele.ac.uk) by the 29^th of July 2011

Accepted participants will be asked to write a 1000-word brief on their intervention to be included on a report of the workshop which will be hosted at the Emerging Securities Research Group website.

Costs of participation: There are no fees for this workshop. However, participants will have to fund their own travel/accommodation/subsistence.

Organisers: Luis Lobo-Guerrero (l.lobo-guerrero@intr.keele.ac.uk), with the collaboration of Peter Adey (p.adey@esci.keele.ac.u), and Barry Ryan (b.j.ryan@intr.keele.ac.uk), on behalf of the Emerging Securities Unit.

Event coordinator: Corey Walker Mortimer (c.b.walker-mortimer@ilpj.keele.ac.uk)