LSE Gender Institute

Sociology

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Professor Imogen Tyler - Keynote/plenary speaker

19/06/2015

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Doing Justice to Figures A One Day Graduate Research Symposium Friday June 19th, 2015 London School of Economics Keynote: Dr. Imogen Tyler (Co-Director Centre for Gender & Women’s Studies, Lancaster) Doing Justice to Figures and Figuration seeks to bring together interdisciplinary scholars in the social sciences working on figuration and/or with figures. Figuration – the process of reification through the production of a particular form or idea – is increasingly understood as significant to mobilizing and understanding social and political life. The proliferation of contemporary iterations, including the benefits cheat, the Islamic extremist, the innocent child, and the integrated immigrant, are being used to justify everything from the increasing cuts in social welfare and education, to the ongoing funding of global warfare, and the heightened restrictions on immigration. In the stigmatization or celebration of figures, affective and historical discourses of gender, ability, race, religion, sexuality, age, class, and nation are called upon to structure social and political life. Simultaneously semiotic and material, figures can be used to powerful effect across divergent sites. Resonant with meaning, the use of figures and figuration in the academy is equally complex. Within social science research, figures are employed to illustrate theories, unpacked to reveal structures of subject production, or cited and explored as knowledge-producers in their own right. But these strategies are not innocent of the dilemmas that popular forms of figuration face. Due to the heightened impact of contemporary figures on social life, academic research on or with figures requires urgent provocation and renewed critical reflection. Asking, for example: How do figures structure contemporary forms of racism, nationalism, heterosexism, homonormativity, coloniality, and biopolitical regulation? How do we do justice to contemporary “optimistic” figures which might emerge out of and extend violent histories? What role does affect play in the prioritization or vilification of contemporary and historical figures? And, what methodological approaches, theoretical lenses, and modes of writing lend themselves to doing justice to figures? Doing Justice to Figures and Figuration seeks to create a space in which to discuss the potentials and risks of using and interrogating figures within academic research. Doing Justice to Figures is funded by the ESRC with support of the LSE Gender Institute. It is being organised by Emma Spruce and Jacob Breslow, doctoral researchers at the LSE’s Gender Institute.

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Title	LSE Gender Institute
Date	19/06/15 → 19/06/15
Location
City	London
Country/Territory	United Kingdom
Degree of recognition	National event

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Philip Leverhulme Prize: Sociology and Social Policy

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