In collaboration with The George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights, and Conflict Prevention at the American University of Paris, we invite scholars, students, practitioners, and activists from all fields to take part in the Winter Symposium of the Nordic Summer University Study Circle Narrative and Violence.

This symposium will explore questions on the production, practice, and instrumentalization of violent narratives about racial, ethnic, religious, gender, sexual, and political minorities and groups. While multiple theoretical perspectives will be included in both locations, the symposium will have a broader international focus at the American University of Paris and will facilitate discussions primarily pertaining to the Nordic and Baltic sphere at the University of Turku.

We are interested in bringing together international scholars from multiple disciplines in order to investigate the role of narratives as a resource for motivating, justifying, and rationalizing structural violence, discrimination, and even mass violence or genocide. How and why are such narratives produced and disseminated? Are there common themes or patterns across cultures and cases? How do they derive their power? Why do persons and social groups subscribe to them? Are certain groups or persons more predisposed to appropriating these narratives? Are there ways to dissemble them? In order to explore these questions, we welcome papers that examine the language of stigmatisation, pollution, and discrimination from broad historical and geographical perspectives. We encourage papers that address the influence of fictional and non-fictional representations, oral histories and legal proceedings as well as the work of activist movements that attempt to counter violent narratives and reflect on how to shape possible, multicultural, inclusive futures.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• The social processes whereby violent depictions of race and otherness are constructed and sustained.
• The relationship between figurative or symbolic violence and physical violence.
• The recycling and reuse of violent narratives across different historical events, cultures, and social contexts.
• The role of fictional and non-fictional accounts and other genres in the construction of violent narratives.
• The distribution, circulation, and appropriation of conspiracy theories.
• Strategies for dissembling violent narratives.
• The memory and persistence of violent narratives over time.
• Issues of language, identity, and culture in narrating both new and old minoritization.
• The role of different media (film, text, music, social media) in the construction of violent narratives.
• The role of comics as a medium in the construction of violent narratives. (This topic will be in collaboration with Study Circle 9, Comics and Society: Research, Art, and Cultural Politics’ seminar ‘Racialised Violence and Comics in the Nordic Region and Beyond’).

The symposium is planned as a hybrid event (with both online and face-to-face participation, depending on the sanitary situation). Please send proposals for papers, workshops, roundtables, and performances (max. 300 words) with a title and a short biographical statement (100 words) to narrativeandviolence@gmail.com and schaeffercenter@aup.edu by 1st December 2020, indicating your preferred mode of participation. If you wish to attend without presenting, please get in touch with us and send us a short biographical note. PhD and MA students are eligible for up to five ECTS points for participation and presentation of a paper. The preliminary programme will be announced in January 2021. Go to www.nordic.university for more information about NSU and the Study Circles, or to sign up for the newsletter. Information about The George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention can be found here.