Vital Theory 2014: Acknowledgements and Recap
December 23, 2014
December is never the best time to try to catch up with too many things at the same time. So, firstly, accept my apologies for the delay in writing some words about this year’s Vital Theory: The Meanings of Memory. Even though a couple of weeks have passed by since the symposium took place at …
Vital Theory 2013: Human Rights and Neoliberalism
December 27, 2013
One of the things that characterises the current era is the intensified involvement of global governmental institutions, such as the UN, the World Bank the IMF, in conflict and post-conflict situations particularly in what is, perhaps vulgarly, termed “the global south”. In other words, we live in an age of what Naomi Klein has called …
Vital Theory 2013 – Eva Giraud’s keynote
December 16, 2013
We promised we’d publish talks, so I thought I’d kick things off by putting my own up. Mine was less of a keynote, more of a discussion about what we were doing in the centre this year and my thoughts about theory more generally – so I thought I’d write it up in a more …
Vital Theory 2013: thanks and a few words…
December 15, 2013
Two days after our postgraduate symposium, Vital Theory, and I’m still feeling enthusiastic about the discussions we had and people we met. It’s easy to end (what can often be) a long and tiring term, feeling a little deflated – and I certainly felt that VT was the antidote to that. In the days to …
Vital Theory 2013
November 14, 2013
We are pleased to announce the third annual Vital Theory symposium will take place on Friday the 13th of December 2013 at the University of Nottingham. Vital Theory is an academic symposium organised by postgraduate students at the University of Nottingham’s Centre for Critical Theory. The first of these took place in 2011, and it has since grown …
Thank you!
December 8, 2012
The Vital Theory collective would like to thank all the delegates that attended the Vital Theory 2012: The Politics of Hope symposium for making it such an interesting and intellectually stimulating day. Thanks also to those who helped us to organise and run the day’s events, to the lecturers who participated, and to the catering staff for …
Dr. Colin Wright’s Keynote Address: The Politics of Hope
Dr. Colin Wright, co-director of the Centre for Critical Theory, has kindly given us permission to reproduce here his keynote address, delivered to Vital Theory 2012 delegates. I will say just a very few words about the question of hope, and why it is vital, precisely, that we develop a theory of the politics of …
Update from the Front Line of the Struggle for Hope
December 7, 2012
So far today, we’ve had discussions of hope in Beckett, the events of the Arab Spring, the rebirth of civil society, new art movements and political artistic practices, and feminist utopias! If you’ve missed out on what has so far been a very exciting day, do join us this afternoon in the Engineering and Sciences …
Planning the Aesthetics and Politics Workshop
December 4, 2012
I thought it might be a useful exercise (as both a potential ‘helping hand’ and a metaphorical scream!) to share my present experience of preparing a workshop for Friday’s symposium. With very little experience of facilitating a theoretical workshop it is certainly a daunting affair – as the clock ticks my nails are nearing the …
Securing Funding
November 30, 2012
It is a widely recognised feature of the contemporary academic landscape – especially in the Arts and Humanities – that there is less money than there used to be. Yet – perhaps not entirely coincidentally – things seem to cost a good deal more than they used to. That includes symposia such as ours, and …
