This international interdisciplinary conference seeks to generate a new theory and practice of subjectivity – ‘sexuate subjects’ – out of Luce Irigaray’s theory of ‘sexuate difference’ and new poetic and political research in the visual arts, humanities and social sciences. It explores how these positive ethical subjectivities for women and men are constructed through spatial, material and textual feminist poetics and politics. Over 3 days, it invites respondents to examine especially how sexuate subjects (people/disciplines) aid interdisciplinary responses to contemporary global crises of community conflict, social and environmental wellbeing.  

Key questions being discussed include:
How are political, poetic and ethical issues addressed in feminist/feminine architectural and spatial practice?
How can sexuate ecologies and environmental practices inform global sustainability?
How can art inform conflict resolution?
Why poetry matters in thought, ethical and political life.
How can sexuate difference inform the ethics of global education?
How can feminist bio-ethics inform approaches to women’s and body-rights, fertility and population health?

In particular, Sexuate Subjects will focus on these issues as they are expressed in political, poetic and ethical practice and thought in disciplines including: architecture, art, literature, modern languages, philosophy, the political and social sciences. By examining these complex expressions of our physical and psychic lives through artefact, body, dialogue, image, installation and word, the event will provide a platform of diverse approaches which can help us build sexuate futures for all. Such approaches will contribute towards developing more nuanced understandings of the diversity of global cultures and their academic and public intersections. International experts from higher education, professional and public realms, as well as young researchers and practitioners, are invited to respond.

Please see the Panels listed below. Further details of contributors and schedule to follow.

Ecologies: Matter, Nature, Art
Chair: Phyllis Kaminski. Commentator: t.b.c.

Ethics of Global Education (title to be confirmed)
Covenors: Luce Irigaray (Doctor of Philosophy, & Centre National de la Recherche Scientific, Paris), Professor Michael Worton (UCL)

Feminist Approaches to Bioethics
Convenor: Professor Mary Rawlinson (Stony Brook, SUNY)
Panelists:
Gillian Howie, Liverpool University
Margrit Schildrick, Queen's University, Belfast

Irigaray and Her Contemporaries
Chair: t.b.c. Commentator: Danae McLeod

Mother-Daughter Relations
Chair: t.b.c. Commentator: Sara McNamara

Sexuate Sustainable Practices and Ecologies
Convenors: Dr Peg Rawes (UCL), Professor Gail Schwab (Hofstra University, NY)

Understanding Difference: why poetry matters
Convenors: Professor Timothy Mathews (UCL), Dr Sharon Morris (UCL)

Whirlwinds
Convenors: Professor Jane Rendell (UCL) and Dr Ana Araujo (University of the Arts, London)

The Karen Burke Memorial Prize Lecture
Convenors: The Luce Irigaray Circle

The Conference is being supported by: UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture Research Fund; the ‘Centre for the Study of Contemporary Art’, History of Art Department; the Department of French; the Slade School of Fine Art, and UCL’s Grand Challenge of Intercultural Interactions. Its international collaborators and funders are Hofstra and Stony Brook Universities, The Luce Irigaray Circle, and FATALE at KTH Stockholm.

Registration Details:

For information on the 2010 Conference please access the Conference's website at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sexuate-subjects. For general enquiries about the event please email Anna Solarska at anna.solarska@ucl.ac.uk.

Please register, using UCL's registration link, if you plan to attend the 2010 conference, or any of the talks. Full registration information will be available on September 1, 2010. 

The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL) is located at Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT. Hotel information is available for the 2010 Conference under UCL's accommodation link. Full registration details will be available by September 1, 2010.

Call for Paper requirements: (Call for Papers is now closed.)
Please find specific details of submissions and convenor contact details in each panel description link listed below.

Panel: Whirlwinds

Panel: Understanding Difference: why poetry matters

Panel: Lot's Wife: The imperatives of disobedience and the spectacle of violence

Panel: Sexuate sustainable practices and ecologies

The Luce Irigaray Circle open call for panels/papers

The Karen Burke Memorial Prize Lecture call for papers

The Irigaray Circle

The conference and other activities of the Irigaray Circle are made possible by support from

Stony Brook University and Hofstra University.