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Conference Overview:

Welcome to the official website of the Dismantling Structures 2025 Conference!


Join us in the quest to deconstruct existing frameworks of knowledge to rebuild them into something new and innovative. The Conference aims to be a place of change and interdisciplinary collaboration to create a radical shift in what “humanities” means, seeking to give a voice to the voiceless and developing our disciplines.

Date

Wednesday 7th May

Location

2008 Charles Hastings Building, University of Worcester,

City Campus,

Castle St, WR1 3AS 

Keynote Speakers

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John Charles Ryan is an international researcher in literary studies, creative writing, and environmental humanities. He is Associate Professor and Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the Nulungu Research Institute, University of Notre Dame, Australia, as well as Visiting Researcher at the Arctic Centre, University of Lapland, Finland. Funded by the Kone Foundation, his current project examines possibilities for communication and collaboration between people and trees in Northern Finland. Ryan’s many books include Environment, Media and Popular Culture in Southeast Asia (2022, Springer, co-edited) and Introduction to the Environmental Humanities (2022, Routledge, co-authored). He is Chief Editor of the journal Plant Perspectives and Managing Co-Editor of The Trumpeter. For more information, see www.johncharlesryan.com.

In this presentation, I will provide an account of developments in plant studies, distinguishing the
field from critical plant studies, human-plant studies, plant humanities, plant geography, and ethnobotany. Key topics in the field include intelligence, consciousness, learning, memory, temporality, corporeality, narrativity, and conviviality in plants. I will then introduce phytocriticism, phytopoetics, cultural phytosemiotics, and plant ethnography as new frameworks of enquiry. My conclusion will stress the need for ongoing collaboration between academic, government, and conservation sectors to ensure the future of botanical diversity.

...

Originally trained as an artist, Lynn Turner is a writer working between continental philosophy (especially deconstruction), feminist theory, psychoanalysis, animal studies and visual culture. She is the editor of Erotics of Deconstruction: Auto-affection After Derrida (Edinburgh University Press, 2024); author of Poetics of Deconstruction: on the threshold of differences (Bloomsbury, 2020); co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies (Edinburgh University Press, 2018); editor of The Animal Question in Deconstruction (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) and co-author of Visual Cultures  As… Recollection (Sternberg, 2013). She is the co-Head of Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.

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Photographs of human skin inscribed with tattoo-like texts, Jenny Holzer’s Lustmord series was first published in 1993, showcased in the Sunday magazine supplement of the German newspaper, Suddeutsche Zeitung. Diane Elam drew attention to this work in her chapter on ‘Feminism in Deconstructions: A User’s Guide (2000), largely focusing on it as a linguistic performance between senders and receivers. She noted the blood used in the ink on the magazine’s cover – blood donated from Bosnian women raped by Serbians in the Bosnian War – primarily in the context of its hypocritical reception: the public recoiled from the impropriety of blood on the paper, not the systematic rape from which the series took leave. Between 1999 and 2001, Derrida’s seminars focused on the Death Penalty. There, blood drew material, thematic, poetic and conceptual analysis. While the cruelty of making blood flow (cruor) flooded the first volume of published seminars, the ‘Ninth Session’ in the second volume begins with the question ‘How to conceive of blood?’ subsequently repeating a refrain that asks after a possible future for blood. If the ‘concept’ is the ‘end of blood’ as Derrida argues, this chapter returns to Holzer to ask how the gift of blood in Lustmord might bypass this transubstantiation. Opening a future for blood might here offer a counter-path to lex talionis. While the mortification exhibited in the reception of Lustmord can be read as a reactive abjection that also staunches a future for blood, in this chapter it will lead to Freud’s misplaced transposition of the masculine and ‘primitive’ fear of defloration onto the feminine compulsion to castrate and to steal the penis that she is otherwise denied. Freud finds this ostensibly eternal condition repeated most strongly in the ‘emancipated’ writerly women of his own time. Yet rather than frontally refute Freud, Derrida joins in deconstructive alliance with these women in echo of resistance to the red thread of the death penalty historically offered not by philosophers or politicians but by poets and writers. In light of her invocation for women to write themselves, ‘Sanguine Resistance’ reads the Cixous of ‘Castration or Decapitation?’ within this alliance. Moreover, where Cixous offers to ‘relieve man of his phallus’, this chapter finds a displacement of retribution in favour of another ‘erogenous field’ that, in supplanting concept, contract, and castration, might dream of a future for blood.

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Venue Details

The conference will take place at Worcester University’s City Campus, conveniently located within the city centre. Hosted in one of the university’s spacious lecture rooms, the venue offers a comfortable and professional setting, ideal for engaging discussions and collaborative learning.

University of Worcester, Castle St

Worcester, WR1 3AS

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