10th-11th December 2015
The year 2015 marks the thirtieth anniversary of Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain. In this seminal text, Scarry offers a radical and original thesis on the relationship between embodiment, pain, wounding and imagining, arguing that pain is central to “the making and unmaking of the world”. Widely regarded as a classic, the text has influenced work on notions of the body, war, torture and pain in a variety of academic disciplines – from philosophy, to anthropology, to cultural geography, to political theory, to many others – as well as informing debates and discussions in medical science, NGOs, charities and other parts of society.
In the years since its publication the text has only become more relevant as a growing number of scholars have taken account of various violences, at both the local and the global level, through an understanding of embodiment. Phenomena such as suicide bombing, ‘shock and awe’ tactics, neo-colonial occupation, the financialisation of abjection, anti-austerity occupation, the figure of the wounded veteran, memorialisation, and many others, have all been read through an understanding of the body and its relationship to power, violence and subjectivity.
In this two-day conference we will engage Scarry’s text with recent theoretical accounts of the body, pain, violence and subjectivity, as well as with forms of violence that have emerged in the light of new modes of war-waging and resistance. In this way we hope to reinvigorate some of The Body in Pain’s most well known arguments while bringing parts of the text that have received comparatively less attention to the fore.
Invited speakers include: Charlotte Heath-Kelly, Wendy Lynne Lee, Maria Fannin, Kevin McSorley, Lauren Wilcox, Joanna Latimer, Robin May Schott, Mark Paterson, Sarah Nettleton, Monica Greco, Yasmin Gunaratnam, Lisa Guenther, and Gillian Bendelow.
Sponsored by the Wellcome Trust and the University of Brighton, organised by CAPPE, The Centre for Memory Narrative and Histories (coordinating under the title ‘Understanding Conflict Research Cluster’) and the postgraduate student Critical Studies Research Group.
Conference Programme
Wednesday 9th December 2015
17:00 – 20:00 Pre-Conference Screening of The Act of Killing – Room 207
Chair: Naomi Salaman
Thursday 10th December 2015
9.00 – 9.30 Registration
9.30 – 10.00 Welcome – Sallis Benney Theatre
10.00 – 11.15 Keynote – Sallis Benney,
Joanna Bourke, Sadism: Reading Elaine Scarry through the History of Sexual Cruelty
Chair: Anthony Leaker
11.15 – 11.30 Break – Cafeteria
11.30 – 13.15 Session 1
Panel 1 – Sallis Benney
Chair: Kate Newby
Ana Carden Coyne – ‘Communicating Their Pain to Me’: Sensation, Silence and Intimacy among the Wounded of the First World War
Leticia Fernández-Fontecha – The Rhetoric of Children’s Pain (1870 – 1920)
Shadia Abdel-Rahman Tellez – The Language of Pain in Experimental Literature: Violence, Fragmentation, Subjectivity and Narrativity in Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing
Panel 2 – Boardroom
Chair: Megan Archer
Leila Dawney – Visibilities of Wounding and the Mediation of Affect
Kevin McSorley – Late Modern War and the Torturer’s Dream: Remapping the Body in Pain
Paul Reynolds – Making the World in Jouissance: The Body in Pain as Exploration
Panel 3 – G4
Chair: German Primera
Torsten Menge – Violence and the “Fiction of Power”
Sarah Meehan O’Callaghan – The Silent Scream
Alejandro Romero Reche, Maria Dolores Sanchez-Arjona – The Body in Torture Porn: A Graphic Essay
13.15 – 14.15 Lunch – Cafeteria
14.15 – 16.00 Session 2
Panel 4 – Sallis Benney
Chair: Kevin McSorley
Jennifer R. Ballengee – Torture, Terrorism, and the Global Public Sphere
Charlotte Heath-Kelly – The Body in Pain; the Body before Mortality
Robin May Schott – The Principle of Materiality and Political Violence
Panel 5 – Boardroom
Chair: Leila Dawney
Stephen Burwood – Pain and the Ambiguity of the Body as Mine
Susan Grayzel – Bodies, Objects, and Modern War: Exploring the Civilian Gas Mask in Interwar Britain
Mark Paterson – A Cartography of the Interior Structure of the Artifact: Mapping Pain and Sensation in the Nineteenth Century
Panel 6 – G4
Chair: Garikoitz Gómez Alfaro
Thomas Carter – The Joy of Pain and the Making of the Runner
Michael O’Rourke – SOOO… (Scarry’s Object Oriented Ontology)
Pau Pedragosa – Embodied Architecture: A Phenomenological Interpretation of Scarry’s The Body in Pain for Architectural Theory
16.00 – 17.30 Wine Reception – Boardroom
18.00 – 19.30 Keynote – Old Courtroom, Church Street
Elaine Scarry , Final Pain: The Problem of Nuclear Weapons
Chair: Tim Huzar
20.00 – Late Conference Dinner – The Mesmerist, Prince Albert Street
Friday 11th December 2015
9.00 – 9.30 Coffee – Cafeteria
9.30 – 11.15 Session 3
Panel 7 – Sallis Benney
Chair: Heather McKnight
Matthew Congdon – From Pain to Moral Injury: A Normative Typology of Aversive Experience
James M. Glass – On Torture as Political Trauma: Fanon and Calhoun on the Elevating Ethics of Violence
Wendy Lynne Lee – Elide, Efface, Erase: Violence Institutionalized as “Subject,” Embodied as “Pain”
Panel 8: The Act of Killing Film Discussion – G4
Chair: Lars Cornelissen
Clare Bayley
Naomi Salaman
Gill Scott
11.15 – 11.30 Break
11.30 – 13.15 Session 4
Panel 9 – Sallis Benney
Chair: Afxentis Afxentiou
Thomas Gregory – Bodies in Pain: Civilian Casualties, Targeted Killings and the Politics of Visibility
Tim Huzar – Pain, Voice and Logos in The Body in Pain
Nayeli Urquiza-Haas – Sisters of the Body in Pain: The Legacy of Hannah Arendt on Elaine Scarry, Wendy Brown and Judith Butler
Panel 10 – Boardroom
Chair: Anna Ilona Rajala
- Yasmin Gunaratnam – Diasporic Neurologies
- Deborah Padfield – Pain: Speaking the Threshold
- Emma Sheppard – The Problem of Chronic Pain
13.15 – 14.15 Lunch
14.15 – 16.00 Session 5
Panel 11 – Sallis Benney
Chair: Marina Espinoza
Sarah Bulmer – Making and Unmaking the Wounded Military Body
Harmonie Toros – My Grandfather, My Father, My X-Box, My Body: Embodying Human Experience of War in the Classroom
Johanna Willenfelt – What Can the Body in Pain Do?
Panel 12 – Boardroom
Chair: Angela Devas
Lisa Guenther – The Making and Unmaking of the World in Long-Term Solitary Confinement
Deana Heath – Colonialism as the ‘unmaking of the world’: Reinterpreting Colonial Violence through the Body in Pain
Karen Wells – Seeing, feeling and believing: the place of touch and sight in the discourse of witnesses to Sierra Leone’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission
16.00 – 16:30 Break
16:30 – 17.30 Round Table and Closing Remarks – Sallis Benney
Chair: Leila Dawney
Discussants: Joanna Bourke, Bob Brecher, Graham Dawson, Elaine Scarry
18.00 – Late Drinks – The Fountain Head, North Road
Leave a Reply