CFP: Challenging Aesthetics: Aesthetics and Politics Today

The Critical Studies Research Group is pleased to invite scholars, artists and practitioners to participate in its second postgraduate conference, Challenging Aesthetics, to consider - and indeed to contest - the relationship between aesthetics and politics. 

We hope that this conference will be of interest to artists, photographers, filmmakers and activists as well as scholars working in a variety of fields including philosophy, political theory, cultural studies and art history. And although this conference is organised by and primarily aimed at postgraduate students this in no way excludes others who are interested in participating – from experienced academics, artists or practitioners, to undergraduate students or those outside academia.

If aesthetics is concerned not only with art but also with the very nature of representation and subjectivity and the possible ways in which these might be transformed, then it is central to some of the most important political challenges of our time. In this way Challenging Aesthetics seeks to explore the forms, scope and limits of critical aesthetic theories and practices within the context of contemporary capitalism. Whilst the problems posed by reflections on aesthetics and politics are by no means radically new, they nevertheless need to be addressed again in light of the ever-tightening grip that neoliberalism exerts over current forms of existence, and in view of the specific modalities of resistance it has provoked. Faith in symbolic forms of contestation and in the emergence of novel articulations of subjectivity have generated a renewed interest in the affirmative power of aesthetics, arguably taking us beyond the paradigmatic distinctions of modernity and post-modernity. It is not least in view of the cynicism with which such faith is met that we want to encourage a revisiting of old debates, as well as exploring new trajectories, to trace and challenge the boundaries of aesthetics. It is once again time to turn our attention to the questions raised by the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

This conference aims to bring together scholars and practitioners from a variety of disciplinary approaches working on different aspects of the questions raised by the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Themes may include, but are in no way limited to:

• The aesthetics of politics/the politics of aesthetics
• Aesthetics as first philosophy
• Aesthetics and ontology
• Historical perspectives
• Art and revolution
• The aesthetics of protest
• Aesthetics and political subjectivity
• Left- and Right-wing aesthetics
• Formal radicalism and its politics
• Modernity/postmodernity revisited
• Aesthetics after the neoliberal revolution
• Aesthetics, digital technology and social media
• Political art in an age of austerity and precarity
• Realism in “realistic” times
• Aesthetics after postmodernity
• The politics of representation
• The politics of exhibition
• Art and ethics
• Ecological aesthetics

Abstracts or proposals of 300 words should be sent to Alice Gibson ([email protected]) by the 22nd of March.

The conference fee for students, unemployed people and independent scholars is £30 and it is £60 for full time University employees. The fee includes tea and coffee during the conference and dinner on the Thursday evening. Delegates will need to provide their own lunches.