"Moving Normativity": Conference Program
May 11 and 12: International Conference "Moving Normativity"
The Graduiertenkolleg 2638 will host its first international conference in 2023. "Moving Normativity" will be held on May 11 and 12 at the Uferstudios in Berlin. Bringing together researchers from Philosophy, Law, Political Theory, Religious Studies, and several disciplines from the Arts, the conference seeks to create a space for a genuinely interdisciplinary approach to pressing questions on normativity, agency, and social change. According to a general premise of our research, action is based on norms on the one hand, and only possible through a distance from norms on the other. In this understanding, critique is inherent to normativity. The conference sheds light on the various sites of tension inherent to agency, normative action and critique in four panels. The full program can also be downloaded here (as PDF).
The abstracts of the talks are linked below. A list of them can be found here.
The conference as well as the Artistic Interventions to be held beforehands are open to the public. No RSVP needed.
Thursday, May 11 23
9:30 Opening
Panel 1: Negotiating Normative Power. Identifying with, resisting against, and (re)shaping social standards
How is the normative power of action negotiated between multiple agents (norm authorities, role models, activists, artists, etc.) and in which way can marginalized groups participate in the negotiation process? Is participation in progress based on a subversive potential? How is this expressed and acted upon in religious, linguistic, and artistic practices? Moderation by Deborah Mühlebach
10:00-10:45 Ana Deumert (Linguistics): Voice: Reflections on Expressive Insurgency
10:45-11:30 Giulia Sissa (Religious Studies and Classics): Equal rights versus Natural Law. An ongoing duel
11:30-11:45 Coffee Break
11:45-12:30 Sumi Madhok (Political Theory and Gender Studies): Anti-Imperial Epistemic Justice, Agency and Critique: The shifting boundaries of normative agency and action
12:30-13:15 Panel discussion
13:15-15:00 Lunch Break
Panel 2: Social Movements, Blockade, and Contestation
In which sense can social change be shaped by social agents and movements which themselves have to rely on existing normative structures, for example in the form of rights? Can the grounding structures and bodily practices of contestation be understood as truly emancipatory, or do they rather tend to normalize subjects involved in practices of dissent, thus taming and neutralizing potentials of radical change? Moderation by Tobias Wieland
15:00-15:45 Tim Wihl (Jurisprudence): Hegel and Spinoza – Towards an integral jurisprudence of political protest
15:45-16:30 Daniel Loick (Philosophy): Fugitive Freedom: Towards a Standpoint Theory of Normativity
16:30-16:45 Coffee Break
16:45-17:30 Bojana Kunst (Dance and Performance Studies): Contesting through care: on the precarious ecology of social action
Friday, May 12 23
Panel 3: Reshaping Norms Through Counter Memories
How does story-telling and the (re-)writing of history contribute to the constitution of both individual and collective agents? Is the contribution in question realized through a negation of social standards or through the re-affirmation of them? Might the reappropriation of forgotten or repressed memories, images, and myths of the past empower new imaginative spaces of the present and future? Moderation by Isabel Mehl
9:30-10:15 Jessica Ullrich (Art Studies and Aesthetics): Exhibiting Animals. Decentering the Human in Art and Curating
10:15-11:00 Massimiliano Tomba (Philosophy): Anachrony, Revolution, and Restoration
11:00-11:15 Coffee Break
11:15-12:00 Sarah Colvin (German Studies and Literature): Literary storytelling and social change: from counter-normativity to reciprocity as resistance
12:00-12:45 Panel discussion
12:45-14:00 Lunch Break
Panel 4: Disabling/Enabling Agency through the negation of movement of body and mind
Given that movement is crucial to both understanding and representing human action, how does the choreography of body and mind change in situations of disruption, error or restriction? What are the generative potentials of the body or mind in pause or passivity? What are blocking and paralyzing factors that shape the movement of the body and the mind, and in which way can these factors open new spaces for agency? Moderation by Jochen Schuff
14:00-14:45 Fiona McGovern (Art History): Moving away from the white cube. On museums’ norms and attempts to break them
14:45-15:30 Francesca Raimondi (Philosophy): Beckett's Nephews. Exhausted Repetition in Contemporary Art (Hassabi, Tarr)
15:45-16:30 André Lepecki (Performance Studies): The dispute over movement and the non-time of the struggle. (Notes for a performance on the way).
16:30-17:15 Panel discussion
Closing remarks
Conference Concept: Friederike Allner, Johanna Baumgardt, Marlena Jakobs, Ina Karkani, Marta Lietti, Rodrigo Maruy van den Broek, Andrea Messner, Yon Natalie Mik, Ben Seel, Deborah Mühlebach, Jochen Schuff, Tobias Wieland, Georg W. Bertram
