A two-day conference organised by the Understanding Conflict research cluster, exploring the issue of complicity.

_{College of Arts and Humanities, University of Brighton
Tuesday 31st March - Wednesday 1st April 2015} 

The problem of complicity is a longstanding feature of everyday moral experience, and yet comparatively little work focuses explicitly on it. In an increasingly neo-liberal world it is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid complicity both in its creation of a particular model of the person and with its attendant demands on how we live on what we do and do not do and how we think. If Georgio Agamben is right to insist that "Today's man ... has become blind not to his capacities but to his incapacities, no to what he can do but to what he cannot, or can not, do", then complicity is taking centre stage in our everyday lives.

In this two-day conference the Understanding Conflict research cluster will explore issues of complicity in terms both of practice and of theorisation. We anticipate that these and related issues will be of interest to a wide range of people working in and studying, among other areas, cultural studies, philosophy, political theory, media studies, photography, journalism and post-colonialism, health studies and the NHS, queer theory, women's studies and women and the family. 

Thomas Docherty Keynote Address

Debate on the Academic Boycott of Israeli Institutions with Tom Hickey and Robert Fine

Dates: Tuesday 31st March - Wednesday 1st April 2015

Location: University of Brighton, Grand Parade Arts Campus, Brighton (UK) BN2 0JY

The two-day conference will explore some of the following issues:   

What is Complicity? 

• What counts as complicity and why? What counts as non-complicity and why?
• What are complicity's logical limits? Is there anything that cannot be (re-) described as complicity?
• What to do? What to avoid? What to not do? 
• What are complicity's logical limits? Is there anything that cannot be (re-) described as complicity?
• What to do? What to avoid? What to not do? 

Theorising complicity in relation to related moral-political issues

• How does the problem of complicity relate to that of "dirty hands"?
• What are the relations between complicity, personhood and moral agency? 
• Complicity versus integrity? Reasonable and unreasonable excuses
• Chains of complicity: moral overload; moral distance; moral paralysis; political overload; political distance; political paralysis
• Commission and omission 
• Complicity and the means/ends problem
• Complicity and/with violence
• Complicity and culpable ignorance
• The importance of moral disruption
• The realign of complicity to asymmetries of power; in or out of the tent? 
• Complicity, hypocrisy and necessity
• Complicity and power  

Empirical Cases 

• How to act on a committee 
• Whistleblowing 
• Voting 
• Lifestyles; petitions; protest; charities
• Conflict resolution; conflict transformation
• Specificities of the neo-liberal world
• The egoism of non-complicity: Impotent self-flagellation versus principled refusal
• Accepting tainted money: research grants and the like
• Embedded journalism, War photography
• Anthropological research, charitable work
• The armed forces
• Trade, business and "the market"
• Research, advocacy and silence
• Bodies
• Gender, sex and their interconnections
• Making use of power one thinks one ought not to have

The call for papers deadline has now passed. The programme is being finalised and no further submissions will be accepted. 

If you have any queries, please contact the organising team: conflictcluster@brighton.ac.uk