Love in Our World
27-28 November 2008
Keynote speaker: Leela Gandhi (University of Chicago)
As a concept, experience, ethic, and subject of study, love remains one of the most elusive phenomena. Despite millennia of study and writing on love, it is difficult - if not impossible - to define what love is, what love does, or what love means. Yet we continue to try to make sense of its place in our lives and in our worlds, and to understand how it shapes us both as individuals and as communities - whether we understand love as an abstract universal ethic, or a contingent, contextual way of being social in the world. Few would deny that love - for better and worse - animates, shapes, and motivates our beliefs, our relationships, and our endeavours. And while it may not be possible to say what love is, we wonder still at how love works - what shapes it might take. It is, perhaps, the question of how we see love working in and on our lives (professional, personal, and political) that provides the conceptual space for us to give shape to a concept that is, essentially, shapeless.
Love in Our World is a multidisciplinary conference through which participants will attempt to trace some of the contours of love in their professional and artistic work, in what might be termed a desire to give expression to our understandings of love and its impact on and meaning for our lives.
Love in Our World is organised by the Research Network on Love at The University of Manchester, an interdisciplinary research group comprised of over 80 scholars and postgraduate students from across the Faculty of Humanities and beyond. The group is currently convened by Maja Zehfuss, Cristina Masters and Véronique Pin-Fat.
Booking form. Deadline 1st October 2008
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