Author Archives: greyzone

Call for Papers Summer School GREYZONE Edinburgh June 2018

Call for Applications – Summer School

Navigating the Grey Zone:

Complicity, Resistance and Solidarity

University of Edinburgh, 25-27 June 2018

In June 2018 the University of Edinburgh is hosting an interdisciplinary Summer School entitled “Illuminating the Grey Zone: Complicity, Resistance and Solidarity.” This event targets PhD students and early career researchers (within 4 years of obtaining their doctorate). We will explore the complexities of complicity in and resistance to systemic human rights violations. Moreover, we will consider the ethical and political value of art for shedding light on the ambiguous reality of political responsibility and fostering relations of political solidarity. The Summer School is part of the interdisciplinary ERC research Project GREYZONE, and we aim to bring together perspectives from political theory, political science, law, history, sociology, cultural studies, aesthetics and art. The main goal is to give participants the opportunity to interact across disciplinary boundaries with several international experts and to receive critical feedback on their own projects. The Summer School will Continue reading

Film Series Complicity

Film Series

Complicity

How are we to judge actions, inactions and rationalisations of people who find themselves in a murky grey zone of complicity with violence? What does ethics demand of us in dreadful, even impossible, situations? The film series explores cinematic depictions that bring the thorny issue of complicity to the fore, focusing on Nazi-occupied France, apartheid South Africa, Argentina’s Dirty War and Communist Romania. In selecting these four critically acclaimed films, we aim to provoke reflection on ambiguous aspects of violence and human rights abuses. A guiding premise of the event is that reckoning with such experiences is essential to learning from past atrocities and preventing future catastrophes.

Continue reading

PTRG Programme Term II 2017

PTRG Programme Term II 2017

 

18 January, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Chiming Zhong (PIR), On the Methodology of Rights Theory

 

25 January, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Cian O’Driscoll (Glasgow), Victory in the Just War Tradition

 

1 February, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Masa Mrovlje (PIR), Judging Violent Resistances

 

8 February, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Anca Gheaus (Pompeu Fabra), The Best Available Parent

 

15 February, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Kerri Woods (Leeds), TBA

 

1 March, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Chandran Kukathas (LSE), TBA

 

8 March, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Hugh McDonnell (PIR), TBA

 

15 March, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Thomas Fossen (Leiden), Legitimacy, Judgment, and Utopia 

 

22 March, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Lorna Finlayson (Essex), False Consciousness and the Politics of Austerity

 

29 March, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Joe Carens (Toronto), TBA

 

5 April, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Matthew Festenstein (York), TBA

 

26 April, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Raúl Madrid, (Pontifical Catholic University, Chile), Is academic freedom a relative notion? 

 

3 May, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Matthew Chrisman (Philosophy), The Speech Act of Protest

 

10 May, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Tim Hayward (PIR), TBA

 

17 May,3 pm, CMB 2.15

Cormac Mac Amhlaigh, (Law), (Suprastate) Constitutionalism as Ideal Theory

 

22 May, time and location TBC

Amy Allen (Penn State), Joint lecture PTRG and GENDERPOL

 

24 May, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Cat Wayland (PIR), TBA

 

31 May, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Philip Cook (PIR), TBA

 

7th of June, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Jill Poeggel, TBA

 

14 June, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Monica Brito Vieira (York), TBA 

 

21st of June, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Kieran Oberman (PIR) TBA

 

5th of July, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Alia Al-Saji (McGill University) Glued to the Image: A phenomenology of racialization through works of art (Joint event PTRG, Philosophy, Centre for Cultural Relations)

 

Monumental Legacies and Symbolic Humiliation

As the recent controversies surrounding Cecil Rhodes’ statues in South Africa and the UK have shown, public constructions attest to political regimes’ desire to imprint their version of history on the country’s landscape and, more importantly, on the memory of citizens. Statues, memorials and monuments set in stone a certain view of the past, usually in glorious and heroic terms. Hierarchies of all kinds (political, social, racialised, gendered) are reflected in – and reproduced through – public art, one of the many ‘voices’ through which the state speaks. What is celebrated or commemorated is as significant as what is forgotten: defeats, reprehensible deeds by the nation, as well as marginalized groups are usually omitted from the material representation of the official story.

voortrekkermonument2

The Voortrekker Monument, South Africa

Continue reading