skip to main content
Goldsmiths - University of London
  • Staff & students
  • Search
  • Main menu
 
Main menu

Primary

  • Home
  • Course finder
  • Study with us
  • Departments
  • Research
  • Services for Business
  • For the local community
  • Alumni and friends
  • News
  • Events
  • About us
Staff & students

Staff + students

  • Students
  • Library
  • Timetable
  • Learn.gold - VLE
  • Email - Outlook
  • IT support
  • Staff directory
  • Goldmine - staff intranet
  • Graduate School - PGR students
  • Teaching and Learning Innovation Centre
  • Events admin
In this section

Breadcrumb navigation

  • Events
    • Radical New Cross
    • Degree shows
    • Fixing It
    • Black History Month
  • Calendar
Open social sharing
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Whatsapp

Radical Negativity


13 Jun 2014, 9:00am - 6:30pm

LG01, Professor Stuart Hall Building

Event overview

Cost Free but registration is required: http://radicalnegativity.com/registration/
Department
Website Conference Programme
Contact cup01tp(@gold.ac.uk)

An interdisciplinary conference interrogating productive possibilities for negative states of being

More recent feminist and queer scholarship has begun to productively address the dark aspects of human subjectivity perceived to have a detrimental impact on the self-constituting practices of the positive self, such as shame, trauma, unhappiness, loss, pain, and melancholia, and to reconceptualise them not only as integral to the process of subject formation, but critical and productive affective states in which to engage political action.

This interdisciplinary conference addresses the ways in which feminist and queer research may be informed by embracing philosophical oppositions, the ‘negative double’ of the positive value. The conference will interrogate what can be learnt from interventions focused on the interconnections between the negative and human agency, and how such a frame can inform ideas of feminist and queer practice.

Borrowing from Eve Sedgwick, this conference proposes that forms of the negative are “not distinctly ‘toxic’ parts of a group or individual identity that can be excised; they are instead integral to and residual in the processes by which identity itself is formed. They are available for the work of metamorphosis, reframing, refiguration, transfiguration, affective and symbolic loading and deformation” (Sedgwick and Frank, 2003, p.63).

If, like Sedgwick, we take up this challenge to valorise negative states of being as key conditions both for the production of meaning and being and as organising principles of identity, then we hope explorations into such states may provide the potential to open up new possibilities for politics and connection.

The conference will explore how negative states and conditions of being such as unhappiness, irresponsibility, passivity, vulnerability, failure, shame, hesitancy, pain, dispossession, rage, madness and depression may provide loci from which action and political engagement can arise.

Conference Keynote:
Ugly Little Dreams: An Iconicity of Feminist Suffering and the Promise of Radical Negativity
Delivered by Lisa Blackman, Professor of Media and Communications, Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London

Radical Negativity is supported by the Centre for Feminist Research, Department of Media and Communications, and the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths.

Conference Programme

Dates & times

Date Time Add to calendar
13 Jun 2014 9:00am - 6:30pm
  • apple
  • google
  • outlook

Accessibility

If you are attending an event and need the College to help with any mobility requirements you may have, please contact the event organiser in advance to ensure we can accommodate your needs.

Event controls

  • About us
  • Accessibility statement
  • Contact us
  • Cookie use
  • Find us
  • Copyright and disclaimer
  • Jobs
  • Modern slavery statement
Admin login
  • Twitter
  • Linkedin
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • YouTube
© Goldsmiths, University of London Back to top