Update: 5 April – just been told a few places are available, but be quick.
WORKSHOP
Orienting Ourselves in the World: The Particular and the General
Thursday 9 May 2019, 11am-5:30pm (coffee from 11, programme start at 11:30)
The University of Manchester, University Place 2.220
Speakers:
Molly Andrews (University of East London)
Amanda Beattie (Aston University)
Martin Coward (University of Manchester)
Naeem Inayatullah (Ithaca College)
Uma Kothari (University of Manchester)
Joe Turner (Sheffield University)
Convenors: Maja Zehfuss and Jenny Edkins
Organised by the Critical Global Politics Research Cluster, University of Manchester
When we think and act, we often – possibly always – bring together the particular and the general. As we forge ways to lead our life, we do things that we experience as personal, unique. At the same time, we do so in the context of our immigration status, racialization, gender, ideas about what constitutes love or the kind of education we aspire to. The world becomes sensible to us through general ideas, even as we interpret, disrupt and produce our relationalities in profoundly personal ways. This need to connect two apparently distinct ways of perceiving and indeed being in the world also give rise to different modes of generating scholarly work, one ostensibly abstract or analytic, the other engaging and personal.
In this context, the workshop asks:
• How do we think the particular and the general together to orient ourselves in the world?
• Does becoming ever more personal simultaneously approach the universal?
• Does decolonization involve a rethinking of relations between the particular and the universal?
• What implications does engaging with these questions have for our ways of being scholars?
• What sort of responses does telling stories prompt that academic reflections don’t (and vice versa)?
• Can fiction approach the universal more easily than non-fiction?
• What role do theory and abstraction play in experiencing, thinking about and representing the particular?
The sessions of the workshop will combine brief analytic provocations and short stories designed to set the scene for a wide-ranging general conversation examining the questions at stake.
This workshop is sponsored by the BISA Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group, the BISA Post-structural Politics Working Group and the University of Manchester.
Sara Fregonese, 
