Conferences

A sympusium sponsored by the Mellon Seminar in the Humanities, Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia (CREECA), and Legacies of Violence Research Circle (LOV); Supported by the Division of International Studies, the International Institute, and Global Studies.

Thursday, 2.00-5.00 pm - Ingraham 336
2.00 Leila Lehnen (U. New Mexico) "Prisoners of Desire"
2.45 Lisa Voigt (U. Chicago) "Tupi Cannibals in Java and Algiers? Uses and Circuits of Captivity"
3.45 Gary Ebersole (U. Missouri) "Captivity and Identity: Captivities as Narrative Events"
4.30 Plenary Discussion

6.00 pm - Ingraham Hall 206
Nabi Abdullaev (Moscow Times) "Female Suicide Bombings in the Chechen Conflict"

Friday, 9.00-3.00pm - Ingraham 336
9.30 Nabi Abdullaev (Moscow Times) "Religious Motivations of the Chechen Female Suicide Bombers"
10.15 Griigory Shvedov (Eisenhower Fellow) "Political Terror and Human Rights in the Caucasus"
11.15 Jacques Lezra (U. Wisconsin-Madison) "Three women, Three bombs"
12.00 Nasser Abufarha (U. Wisconsin-Madison) "Cultural Conceptions of Martyrdom in Palestine"
2.15 Simanti Lahiri (U. Wisconsin-Madison) "The Politics of Fasting in India"
3.00 Kate McCoy (U. Wisconsin-Madison) "The Suicidal Politics of A Colombian Peace Community
3.45 Discussants Round Table & Plenary Discussion

A conference at UW-Madison by the Legacies of Violence Research Circle
Sponsored by the Division of International Studies, open to all.

March 23, 2007
9:00 AM - 5:30 PM
206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive

This conference engages with issues of violence and sexuality from historical and non-western contexts, as well as the linkages between sex and violence in current Western discourses about the past and others.

Madam and maid, master and slave - fetishized relations of production - remain central to neo-liberal capitalism often thought to have been replaced by private relations of contract and choice.

Gender, ethnicity, and nationality are crucial elements to the constitution of the desire economies which are informed by the dominant neo-liberal understanding of globalization and its neo-colonial logic - the violent desire for power and security, and the sexualized desire to consume the labor and bodies of others.

Carol Siegel (Washington State) - Goth’s Dark Empire ; Peter Sigal (Duke) - The Aztecs: Sexuality and the Ritualized Violence of the State ; Neil Whitehead (Wisconsin) - We Vampyrs - The Death of Ethnography and the Resurrection of Desire ; Olga Romantsova (Kharkiv) - Gothic Bodies In Ukraine ; Tomislav Longinovic (Wisconsin) - Imaginary Balkans: A Sado-Masochist Cultural Economy ; Helene Sinnreich (Youngstown) - Rape & The Holocaust; Christopher Butler (Wisconsin) - Criminal Vampirism in 1990s North America ; Kata Beilin (Wisconsin) - Sex and Politics; Discourses of Violence in Spanish Film ; Glen Close (Wisconsin) - Rosario Tijeras - Femme Fatale in Thrall ; Erika Robb (Wisconsin) - Tropical Travel Literature and Erotic Fantasy ; Zeb Tortorici (UCLA) - Dominatrix, Experiences in the American Sex Trade.

The conference explores the tradeoffs between international and domestic judicial responses to past atrocities, and includes a workshop on theory building in the literature on transitional justice.

Sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Legacies of Violence Research Circle, sponsored by the Division of International Studies, the International Institute and Global Studies.

Conference organizers:
Heinz Klug, Professor, University of Wisconsin Law School.
Leigh Payne, Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin
Kathryn Sikkink, Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota
Scott Straus, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin

Friday, April 20, 2007

The first day of the conference will focus on a specific issue in the transitional justice field, the tensions, opportunities, and tradeoffs between local and international judicial responses to large-scale human rights violations. What are the advantages and disadvantages of one judicial process over another? What is gained and lost between international trials, hybrid trials, and domestic ones? Are international and domestic trials in competition or do they complement each other? Do certain political contexts favor one method over another? These questions are ones that policy makers and political leaders often face after large-scale violence, yet the questions have not been addressed adequately in the literature. The conference will bring together both scholars of particular countries as well as those who study judicial responses from a global perspective.

Saturday, April 21, 2007

The second day will be a workshop designed to bring together a number of scholars working in the transitional justice field. Despite the proliferation of transitional justice mechanisms, country cases, and scholarship, the study of transitional justice remains under-theorized. Much of the scholarly work is descriptive in nature or relies on single-case or small-N studies. The absence of such studies has meant that emerging democracies adopt the transitional justice mechanism in vogue, or promoted by transnational advocates, rather than basing their policies on careful research and empirically tested analysis. The purpose of this workshop will be to provide feedback on individual and group projects that explore theory-building in transitional justice.

For past conferences, click here.