Scholars working in the Department of Political and Cultural Studies are involved in organising international conferences and workshops, held at Swansea University.  Below are some recent examples.

We have also hosted conference at Gregynog.

In July 2010 Dr Lee Jarvis (Swansea University) and Dr Michael Lister (Oxford Brookes University) recently hosted an ESRC-funded workshop on Anti-Terrorism, Citizenship and Security in the UK.  The workshop brought together a number of high-profile scholars from across the country with an interest in these themes, and included a wide range of papers exploring the political, cultural and social impacts of contemporary anti-terrorism policy and legislation.

Conference programme:

• Anti-Terrorism, Citizenship and Security in the UK  

The 2007-2009 financial crisis represents a failure not only of Economics but also of an entire economic culture. The crisis is a painful reminder that decades of freeing financial markets from social and political constraint in fact made them ever more embedded not just in our economic life but in our everyday social and cultural experience. Financial markets promised freedom from work, endlessly rising property prices, and protection from risk. Traders in the financial markets became convinced that risk had been tamed by mathematised software algorithms that perversely legitimated ever greater risk-taking and the buying and selling of dangerously complex derivatives. Popular television programmes promoted property investment and get-rich-quick schemes. As pension funds increased their trading on international markets our personal futures became a commodity on which others could speculate. 
 
What the Classical Political Economists called ‘the full range of the passions’ has been historically marginalised from economic theory by neo-classical assumptions about the rationality of market actors. But we cannot assess the meaning and impact of the financial crisis without attending to that full range of feeling, thinking and acting. Political Economy must cease believing in effective sovereignty of individual rational choice. Greater attention has to be paid to the role played by processes and institutions of financialisation, not least to the promotion of particular cultures of finance. Walter Benjamin (at the time of the Wall Street Crash) criticised Historical Materialism for its lack of ‘sensuousness’. The same charge can be made against much of contemporary economic theory.
 
This workshop explored the potential contributions of contemporary developments in Cultural Political Economy which focus on the cultural, semiotic, subjective, aesthetic and phantasmatic aspects of economic thought and activity. Leading scholars from across the UK will debate and develop approaches that can measure up to the task of understanding and moving beyond our social, cultural and political as well as economic crises.  

The keynote speaker was Professor Bob Jessop, Department of Sociology and the Cultural Political Economy Research Centre, Lancaster University.

Further information:

• Imagined Recovery Programme
  

This conference continued the PSA’s specialist programme of biennial conferences on territorial politics. It follows successful specialist group conferences at the University of Edinburgh in 2008, Queen’s University Belfast in 2006, the University of Strathclyde in 2004 and Cardiff in 2001.

It was concerned with the politics of nationalism, regionalism and multi-level government and their implications for a wide range of political phenomena. Since devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and the development of English regionalism from the late 1990s all of these issues have become key concerns for the UK research community. The international trends towards the increased saliency of sub-state nationalism, regionalism and multi-level government mean that it is important for both British and comparative scholars to come together to present new research and engage in debate.

In the UK we are at a particularly interesting juncture in the development of devolution. The UK’s transition from a highly centralised state to a (partially) multilevel state was relatively painless and trouble free. But amongst academics and commentators, it was commonplace to suggest that the stability of UK devolution would not properly  be tested until competing parties led government at each level.

This conference provided an opportunity to examine how the system has fared since 2007. That year saw the election of a nationalist government in Scotland, a coalition of Labour and Plaid Cymru in Wales and the resurrection of devolution in Northern Ireland. The UK Labour government, meanwhile, made its own transition from Blair to Brown. How has party political incongruence in the territorial government of the UK challenged the system of devolution? Has it led to greater policy divergence or greater intergovernmental strife? Have the nationalist agendas of the Scottish and Welsh governments undermined the legitimacy of the existing devolution settlement?

Has the UK government responded effectively, and what do developments of the last few years suggest for the future of multi-level politics under a prospective UK Conservative government? How has England – by far the largest partner in this lopsided union – responded to the evolution of devolution among its neighbours?  And what insights can be drawn from comparative studies of multi-level government, where party political incongruence has been commonplace?

The conference featured the best of contemporary research on territorial politics in the UK and beyond, including new research by established academics as well as papers by researchers who are about to complete, or have recently completed, their doctorates.

Further details:

• Conference Programme
• Edinburgh University charitable status

This 2-day international conference on war and masculinities included panels on disability, marginalised masculinities, memoirs, veterans, and masculinities in visual cultures, film and literature. The conference was a collaborative event hosted by the Group for War and Culture Studies (GWACS) and the Callaghan Centre for the study of Conflict, Power and Empire at the University of Swansea in conjunction with Swansea research centres GENCAS and MEICAM.

The conference was held at the University of Wales Conference Centre, Newtown, Mid Wales on 10-11 September 2009.

• Programme