Globalization, post-9/11 politics and the post-2008 financial crisis have all birthed modes and histories of opposition and dissent, be they dissent from global political-economic systems or opposition to ranges of international authoritarian regimes. Contemporary dissent, however, oft-draws from forms and imaginations of earlier modes of protest, be they student protests from the late ‘60s onward, the peace movement in the same period, the anti-nukes movement of the 1980s or the anti-Apartheid movement spanning the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. Still, dissent takes other historical forms: individual critiques of “actually existing” socialist systems, be they civil rights based critique from individual figures such as Sakharov or Rostropovich (or Solzhenitsyn’s nationalist-culturalism), media-driven dissent, such as the political magazine Mladina’s criticisms of the Yugoslav regime in the late 1980s and early 1990s or the voices of “everyday” social actors, such as the Damas de Blanco in Cuba. In a historical period encapsulating the last decades of the Cold War and an unfolding twenty-first century, dissent and social opposition undergo and have undergone redefinition within the confines of modern and contemporary culture.
Dissent!: Histories and Meanings of Opposition from 1968 to the Present addresses these issues with history and theory in dialogue. The conference seeks to reveal dissent in its ideological, social and political diversity. The conference seeks to comprehend dissent as “owned” not by one counter-cultural or ideological position, but via broad pastiches of global movements and ideas. The conference seeks to address socio-political opposition as contextually responsive and historically diverse. Moreover, Dissent! seeks to examine dissidence in a period where late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries
do not necessarily “break” (typically around 1989), but rather provide genealogies of acts warranting comparison, narrativization, theorization and representation under the heading of “social and political opposition.”
The conference thus calls for papers falling within the following areas:
• Histories of dissident acts or movements from 1968 to the present
• New theorizations of dissent and socio-political opposition
• Representations of dissent from 1968 to the present, and discussion of their historical context
• Genealogies of dissident and oppositional socio-political movements from 1968 to the present
• Dissent and ideology; what are and have been dissenting political positions in recent history (since ’68) and in what contexts?
• Education and dissent: what challenges are posed teaching either histories or theories of dissent in institutions of higher education?