Date: Tuesday 30th October 2018

Time: 10am – 6pm

Location: Ormond Building, Council Chambers, Manchester

Tickets: Free – please visit https://brexit-wounds.eventbrite.com

As academics in the humanities and social sciences, artists and writers, how do we engage with the challenges, threats and potential disasters of Brexit? How do we deal with a climate of continued uncertainty about definitions and effects of Brexit as they unfold in our everyday lives, and what kind of responses can we identify in current cultural practices? What do these Brexit effects have both short-term and long-term on the negotiation of relationships between British and European cultures?

In these unusual and unprecedented circumstances, we seek to bring together academics and practitioners from arts, humanities and social sciences in a creative and constructive dialogue around the cultural issues posed by Brexit. We invite 20 minute papers or creative provocations around (but not limited to) one of the themes indicated below. Panel proposals also welcome.

The symposium will include a postgraduate panel and the event will encourage postgraduate involvement from universities in Manchester and beyond.

• Brexit Cultures: the lived experiences of Brexit /living in times of crisis and uncertainty.
• Brexit’s effect on concepts of individual, community, family, citizenship, race and belonging.
• Discourses of Brexit: Imaginary landscapes and Fictional Nations/ Banal Nationalism, Colonial Nostalgia.
• Brexit Wounds/Brexit Affects: hurts, pains, anger and other feelings.
• Waiting for Brexit –deferral, delay and repetition, stasis.
• Brexlit and new cultural forms, film, art and visual media and culture
• Brexit metaphors and tautologies/ the language of Brexit, Hard, Soft, ‘Red, White and Blue’ Brexits
• Migration, citizenship and populism, violent borders and hostile environments, Jo Cox and her legacies.
• Pro-European groups, marches, activists and ‘I heart EU’, The Art of Protest.
• Perceptions of Press, BBC and media bias and digital media
• New Brexit activists: What types of new solidarities have emerged?
• The rise of European/Global Populism, the Far Right, Neo-Fascism and resistance.

Speakers:

Sara Dybris McQuaid (Aarhus University / University of Copenhagen Centre for Conflict Resolution) European and Irish perspectives on Brexit, Hannah Jones (Warwick) Author of Go HOME? The Politics of Immigration Controversies, Kristian Shaw, (Lincoln) Brexit and Literature, Anshuman Mondal (UEA), Muslim Identities and Multiculturalism, Dr. Paul Giladi (Manchester Met).

With a performance by Sara Kristina Davies, PhD researcher and Artist, at Manchester School of Art.

Organisers:

Members of the Manchester Metropolitan Global Studies Cluster.

Dr Eleanor Byrne, English, Dr Shoba Arun, Sociology, Dr Benedicte Brahic, Sociology, Dr Fionna Barber, Reader in Fine Art, Dr Beccy Kennedy, Art, Dr Muzna Rahman, English, Dr Leila Goulahsen, Languages, Dr Isabelle Vandershelden, Languages.

With funding from the Manchester Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence

Follow the symposium on Twitter: @WoundsBrexit

Draft Programme

Plenaries to be held in the Council Chamber, Ormond Building, MMU.

Parallel sessions to be held in Righton Open Space.

9.30am Coffee

10-10.15 am: Welcome

• Organising committee Ellie Byrne/ Fionna Barber/Muzna Rahman/Beccy Kennedy/Benedicte Brahic

10.15 - 11.10am Plenary Sara Dybris McQuaid (chair FB)

• ‘Walking Wounded’ - The Peace Process and other collateral Brexit damages.

11.10-12 am Parallel Session 1

Panel A - Brexit and private/ public spheres (chair BB)

• Paul Giladi (MMU) The War against Experts and the Reification of National Identity
• Katherine Davies (Sheffield) Talking Politics: Emotions, Brexit and Everyday Family Relationships

Panel B - The Guts of Brexit (BK)

• Ed Coomasaru (Courtauld Institute) ‘Gendering Brexit’s Gut: Eating, Excretion and the Museum of London Fatberg’.
• Muzna Rahman (MMU) Brexit Basket: Alimentary and textual contaminents and the national discourse of Brexit

12-1pm Plenary Anshuman Mondal (UEA) (chair MR)

• ‘Scattered reflections on Brexit and (de)colonization’

1-2pm Lunch (provided)

2-3pm Plenary Hannah Jones (Warwick) (chair BK)

• “We are the European family”: what happens to critical analysis of class, race and gender when the political is visceral?

3-3.50 pm Parallel Session 2

Panel A - Brexit and Arts Practice (FB)

• Lisa Mandemaker & Anne Vaandrager (Artists and practitioners joint paper) State of Unsettlement
• Kate Nolan (practicing artist) Lacuna (2015-2021) (audio visual work)

Panel B - Brexit’s Fictions (chair SI)

• Ellie Byrne (MMU) Autumn, Winter, Never Spring: Brexit Season
• Katy Shaw (Northumbria) Ghosts of Brexit Past: The Haunted England of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem

3.50-4.15 pm Tea/coffee

4.15-5.15 pm Plenary Kristian Shaw (Lincoln) (chair EB)

• BrexLit: Reading Brexit Backwards.

5.30 pm Wine reception and performance Sara Davies (Introduced by FB)

8pm Dinner at HOME