Keynote Speakers: Griselda Pollock (Leeds) and Susannah Radstone (London)
Special Guest: Carmen Castillo (Paris)

This one-day conference offers a platform for scholars, artists and students to critically explore women’s memories of political violence. We seek to tackle issues of great importance for all participants: ‘how can we account for and research the range of experiences of female perpetrators and victims in armed conflicts as well as their representation in film and visual arts? In doing so, we do not take for granted the category of ‘experience’ but put it into question from different perspectives within and beyond academia. The conference includes two panels, two keynote lectures and a screening of Skinny Alejandra, co-directed by Carmen Castillo, who will be present to discuss her work. The event concludes with a roundtable discussion.

For the conference panels, we invite contributions that engage with women’s experiences of political violence from a range of backgrounds. The panel ‘Regarding the pain of others: re-presentations of traumatic events in film and visual arts’ aims to critically reflect on the (im)possibilities of representing an ‘event at the limits’. In this context, we are particularly interested in papers researching on documentary films, photography and other visual representations going beyond ‘lived’ experience to access past events. Our second panel ‘Moving beyond the perpetrator/victim dichotomy: theorising women’s roles in political violence’ seeks to discuss recent challenges and developments in feminist research on violence. For this panel, we invite papers by postgraduate students and scholars with a background in politics, social sciences or humanities, which analyse women’s roles in armed conflicts from a feminist perspective and/or critically examine feminist theories of violence.

We welcome proposals dealing with these topics particularly (though not exclusively) in the context of Germany and Latin American political violence and State repression.

Contributions may address, but are not confined to the following questions:
- What place should we grant to ‘experience’ when discussing cultural traumas?
- How do we account for ‘the pain of others’?
- What is the role that image plays in the transmission of past events?
- How productive is the notion of trauma in relation to ‘second generation’ accounts?
- How can we collect and analyse data on women’s experiences of violence?
- How can feminist research broach the issue of women’s experiences of political violence without reducing them to helpless victims of patriarchal structures?
- How can we account for the complex interplay of gender, class, race and other constitutive differences in our analyses of political violence?

(funded by the Humanities Research Centre and the University of Warwick)