[SydPhil] FW: Torture and Sovereignty Symposium 7-8 September 2012

[Dimitris Vardoulakis]

TORTURE AND SOVEREIGNTY: interrogating state violence in the modern age
7 - 8 September 2012
Lecture Theatre 4, Building EA, Parramatta Campus
Registration essential: http://www.uws.edu.au/justice/justice/torture_and_sovereignty
Torture seems to belong to an earlier age, one before human rights conventions and democratic forms of government. Yet contemporary governments do, from time to time, inflict pain on opponents or citizens in a range of ways including waterboarding, sensory deprivation and tasering, while fervently denying this amounts to 'torture'. What is 'modern' perhaps is a sensibility about cruelty - since the birth of the prison, torture has become repugnant, almost unthinkable. Unlike the clean deaths we gleefully celebrate on TV dramas, the agony of torture continues to terrify and repel us. This seminar explores torture through film, novels and debate, from several disciplinary perspectives - law, philosophy, history, political science, cultural studies, psychiatry, psychology and sociology. Why do state agents torture others, how do they justify it, how is torture embedded in colonial projects (whether abroad or in the cities), how is it covered up, what impacts does it have on the victims and torturers, and how is torture represented in film or literary works?
Programme
Day 1
10.00 am         Keynote: Torture and Sovereignty - the state and violence
2pm                 Panel 1: Representing Torture
4pm                 Reception
Day 2
9.30 am           Keynote: Torture and the State/Democracy
11.30 am         Panel 2: Legal and historical landscapes of Torture
2.15 pm           Current issues and research directions
3.45 pm           close

Guest Speakers:
Professor Frederic Gros, (University of Paris XII), specialist in Foucault and Levinas.
Associate Professor Danielle Celermajer,  (University of Sydney) co-ordinator of a major international program on torture.
Professor Darius Rejali, (Reed College, USA) author of Torture and Democracy.

For more information, please visit: http://www.uws.edu.au/justice/justice/torture_and_sovereignty

______________________________________________________________________________________

Judy Camac  |  Research Program Coordinator  | Justice Research Group
University of Western Sydney
Bankstown Campus, Room 21.G.21
Locked Bag 1797, Penrith South DC  NSW  2751
tel:  +61 2 9772 6336 | ext:  6336 | email: j.camac at uws.edu.au<http://pubapps.uws.edu.au/teldir/personprocess.php?10691>
http://www.uws.edu.au/justice/justice

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