This interdisciplinary conference calls for examinations of everyday encounters with violence. Particularly welcome are contributions from across social sciences and the humanities.

Although violence is an integral part of experiences in mundane living spaces, feminist conceptualizations of violence have so far been mainly confined to violence over women’s bodies. This conference therefore aims to look beyond, or perhaps behind, such understandings of violence by exploring violence and feminist critiques thereof in all its structural, material, legal, social and embodied forms across both the Global North and Global South.

The conference draws upon a wide definition of violence from sources in the arts, humanities and social sciences, seeing violence as both an everyday social force inflicting harassment, harm, suffering, grief and trauma and as a transformative force that (re)produces gendered agency, social action and resistance. It will explore violence as simultaneously structural, subjective, cultural, material, embodied and representational.

In addition to traditional plenary and paper sessions, we are looking to include practitioner panels, performative workshops, talking circles and World Café style interactions between participants. As a conference critically engaged with the academic community and civil society, we will also be live tweeting and hosting dedicated conference bloggers among the FWSA membership.

Please submit a max. 300-word abstract and max. 100-word bio to Ayona Datta (A.Datta@leeds.ac.uk) and (Martin Zebracki M.M.Zebracki@leeds.ac.uk) by 1 December, 2014.

For more info see the FWSA Blog