Call for Papers: Symposium on Gender, War and Narrative

UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, Gower St, London WC1E 6BT
Thurs 11 May 2023,  2-7pm

If you are interested in giving a paper, please send a brief abstract or outline of your research to Anna Kvit (a.kvit@ucl.ac.uk) and Alex Hyde (a.hyde@ucl.ac.uk) by Friday 21 April 2023.

The UCL Gender & Feminism Research Network (GFRN) invites contributions for a symposium of narrative research on the gendered experience of war, state-sanctioned violence and military force. At a time of a renewed rhetoric of war in Europe, in contrast to ongoing yet invisibilised conflicts in other continents, the symposium aims to explore the idea of ‘war stories’ as a form of narrative power, examining how war becomes a frame for gendered (and ‘other’) experience and vice versa. The symposium is open to scholars of any discipline working on themes related to war or military force and their imbrication with hierarchies of power such as gender, race, class, sexuality and health.

The particular focus of the symposium is the portrayal of war from a gendered perspective through contemporary forms of representation. This includes empirical research as well as analysis of mainstream and social media, policy and rights discourses, literature, film, the arts, cultural productions and collective memorialisation. We encourage debates around the epistemic reproduction of violence and its multiple erasures; censorship and sensitivity in popular representations of violence; the role of witnessing and personal testimony in monitoring, reporting and data on violence and, importantly, the ways in which the representation of war is tied up in questions of gendered agency, victimhood and survival.

The aim of the event is to explore the experience of war, paying simultaneous attention to the ways in which that experience is framed, interpreted and put to use. We invite research that yields insights into the social patterning of global politics in localised spaces and what ethnographic methods show is the “extra/ordinary” (Wool 2015) status of war in everyday life. At the same time, we are also interested in questioning the gendered and ethnic stereotypes that circulate through representations of war experience, including how war and military force are bureaucratised, rationalised and invested with social and cultural meanings. The symposium welcomes a range of approaches from feminist, queer and decolonial scholarship, as well as work that crosses boundaries between academia, activism and cultural production, or combines theoretical and empirical research.  

Contributions will be in the form of informal 15-minute talks or presentations. There will be two panels featuring three papers per panel, followed by plenary discussion.

If you are interested in giving a paper, please send a brief abstract or outline of your research to Anna Kvit (a.kvit@ucl.ac.uk) and Alex Hyde (a.hyde@ucl.ac.uk) by Friday 21 April 2023.

The Gender and Feminism Research Network brings together scholars and students at UCL and beyond, working across the arts, humanities and social and political sciences. Our aim is to explore the points where gender and feminist politics intersect with a diverse range of power relations and social movements. We also want to support broader EDI initiatives, working towards social change and widening access to research on gender and sexual diversity.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/gender-and-feminism-research-network

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