[ecrea] CFP (Dec 1st, 2014): Conference on Complicity, Spring 2015.

*_COMPLICITY
_*

A two-day conference exploring issues of complicity, organised by the 
University of
Brighton's *Understanding Conflict: Forms & Legacies of Violence 
research cluster.*

* *

*
*Tuesday 31st March – Wednesday 1st April 2015
University of Brighton, UK


CALL FOR PAPERS
DEADLINE: 1st December 2014


The problem of complicity is a longstanding feature of everyday moral 
experience, and yet
comparatively little work focuses explicitly on it. Furthermore, in an 
increasingly neo-liberal world, it
is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid complicity both in its 
creation of a particular model of the
person and with its attendant demands on how we live, on what we do and 
do not do and on how
we think. If Georgio Agamben is right to insist that ‘Today’s man … has 
become blind not to his
capacities but to his incapacities, not to what he can do but to what he 
cannot, or can not, do’ (‘On
what we can not do’, Nudities, 2011, p.44), then complicity is taking 
centre stage in our everyday
lives. It thus requires our attention in terms both of practice and of 
theorization.
This conference will seek to begin that work. We invite proposals (max. 
300 words) that address
one of the broad inter-related themes outlined below:
DAY 1


What is complicity?

Issues might include:
• What counts as complicity and why? What counts as non-complicity and why?
• What are complicity’s logical limits? Is there anything that cannot be 
(re-)described as
complicity?
• What to do? What to avoid? What to not do?
• If there are degrees of complicity, how might they be characterised?
Theorising complicity in relation to related moral-political issues
Issues might include:
• How does the problem of complicity relate to that of “dirty hands”?
• What are the relations between complicity, personhood and moral agency?
• Complicity versus integrity?* Reasonable and unreasonable excuses
• Chains of complicity: moral overload; moral distance; moral paralysis 
political overload;
political distance; political paralysis
• Commission and omission
• Complicity and the means/ends problem
• Complicity and/with violence
• Complicity and culpable ignorance
• The importance of moral disruption
• The relation of complicity to asymmetries of power; in or out of the tent?
• Complicity, hypocrisy and necessity
• Complicity and power


DAY 2
Empirical cases
Issues might include:
• How to act on a committee
• Whistleblowing
• Voting
• Lifestyles; petitions; protest; charities
• Conflict resolution; conflict transformation
• Specificities of the neo-liberal world
• The egoism of non-complicity, Impotent self-flagellation versus 
principled refusal
• Accepting tainted money: research grants and the like
• Embedded journalism, War photography
• Anthropological research, charitable work
• The armed forces
• Trade, business and “the market”
• Research, advocacy and silence
• Bodies
• Gender, sex and their interconnections
• Making use of power one thinks one ought not to have


We anticipate that these and related issues will be of interest to a 
wide range of people working in
and studying, among other areas, cultural studies, philosophy, political 
theory, media studies,
photography and journalism, art practice and visual studies, film 
studies, the armed forces,
international security, armaments, banking, finance and globalisation, 
politics and geopolitics,
sociology, NGO and charitable sectors, colonialism and post-colonialism, 
health studies and NHS,
queer theory, women’s studies and women and the family.


Proposals of no more than 300 words should be emailed by 1st December 2014
to (conflictcluster /at/ brighton.ac.uk) <mailto:(conflictcluster /at/ brighton.ac.uk)>


For more information on the work and scope of the University of 
Brighton’s Research Cluster
Understanding Conflict: Forms and Legacies of Violence