This research conference seeks to explore issues of intimacy
and love within the context of persons and interpersonal
relationships and across a range of critical, contextual and
cultural perspectives. Seeking to encourage innovative inter,
multi and post disciplinary dialogues, we warmly welcome papers
from all disciplines, professions and vocations which struggle
to understand what it is to be a person and what it means for
persons to stand in individual, social and national
relationships of intimacy, love, desire and friendship.
In particular papers, workshops and presentations are invited
on any of the following themes:
1. Public and Private Contexts of Intimate
Relationships
~ How and where to locate intimacy?
~ Should we re-think the idea of intimacy?
~ Modern and postmodern intimacies
~ Identity and belonging; the local, social, national and
international
~ Structures, institutions and systems; economics and intimacy;
work and intimacy
~ Acts and interactions; representations and symbols; space and
time
2. Love, Desire, Lust and Sex
~ Persons and the search for meaning
~ Norms that rule the intimacies of our lives
~ The death or killing of love, desire, lust or sex
~ Commitment and obligation; choice and respect; loyalty and
trust
~ The secular and the religious; the heretical and the
sacred
~ Personhood and identity without love, desire, lust or
sex
3. Bonds of Care, Friendship and Love
~ Persons and family: blood, heritage, choice and
happenstance
~ Who is a friend?
~ Historical, social and symbolic shifting grounds
~ Meaning, obligation, identity and belonging
~ Loving and caring for children, siblings and parents
~ Hospitality and bonds of care
4. When Relationships End or Fail
~ Norms, agreements and expectations
~ Betrayal, cheating and infidelity
~ The loss of intimacy; the destruction of trust
~ Isolation, alienation, loneliness and estrangement
~ Conflict, breakdown, crisis and the demise of
relationships
~ Separation, mourning and bereavement; unlinking and
unloving
5. Caring for Others
~ Persons, acquaintances, others and the needs of
strangers
~ Intimacies between strangers
~ Why should we care about others and distant others?
~ Dislocated persons; homeless persons; uprooted persons
~ Selfishness and selflessness; expecting and giving
~ Aloofness, estrangement and disconnected persons
6. Caring for Self
~ Selfhood intimacies and pleasures of the self
~ Soul, emotions, ideas and the inner-self
~ Dreams, fantasies and desire; symbols, meaning and the
unconscious
~ Time, space, solitude and the recognition of self and the
inner-self
~ Body rituals: aesthetics, playfulness, health and
functions
~ Alienation, madness, crisis of the self, despair and
suicide
7. The Politics of Intimacy
~ Inequality, power relations and intimacy
~ Normativity and normalisation; difference and
dissidence
~ Productivity, efficiency and the dwindling of free time
~ Homogeneity, identity and intimacy
~ The democratisation of intimate relations
~ Freedom, personhood, resistance and rebellion
Joint Organising Chairs
Alejandro Cervantes-Carson
Research & Project Development Director,
Inter-Disciplinary.Net, Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain
Email: acc@inter-disciplinary.net
Rob Fisher
Network Leader
Inter-Disciplinary.Net, Freeland, Oxfordshire, United
Kingdom
E-Mail: pil2@inter-disciplinary.net
The conference is part of the 'Probing the Boundaries'
programme of research projects. It aims to bring together
people from different areas and interests to share ideas and
explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting.
All papers accepted for and presented at this conference will
be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers
will be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume.