Conference in honour of Patrick Joyce
Liberal Subjects: The Politics of Social and Cultural History since the 1980s
28 - 29 March 2008, University of Manchester, Hanson Room, Humanities Bridgeford Street Building
The conference has been funded by the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) and the School of Arts, Cultures and Humanities at the University of Manchester, the British Academy, and the Center for British Studies at Berkeley.
Conference Outline
For over thirty years Patrick Joyce has challenged orthodoxies in history and the social sciences. Through his engagements with cultural Marxism, the linguistic turn and Foucault’s work on governmentality, his has been a consistently radical voice in the successive debates over the future and politics of social and cultural history since the later 1970s. While his research has ranged widely from the politics of class in Victorian England to the formation of the modern self, it has always shown a preoccupation with liberalism, modernity and the discipline of history. Although his work has concentrated on Britain, its influence has registered widely, not only in Britain and North America, but across much of the world.
The aim of the conference is to honor Patrick Joyce’s work in a way that he would appreciate, that is to say in a critical manner informed by the political and intellectual changes of the last quarter of a century. The conference is about the politics of social and cultural history, including the revival of interest in histories of the ‘social’, and their particular relationship to liberalism. A central concern is with the ways that social and cultural histories have differently projected the history of liberalism in Britain, together with Britain’s relationship to Europe and empire in the modern period. We hope to do so by replicating the cosmopolitan tone of Pat’s own engagement with social and cultural historians of other parts of the world.
With this focus in mind, the conference is divided into four themes:
- class and its politics;
- government, statecraft and freedom;
- cities and moral regulation;
- the liberal disciplines of history.
Conference Programme
FRIDAY 28 MARCH
9.00-9.30 Registration and Coffee
9.30-11.00 Introduction: Historicizing the Work of Pat Joyce
Simon Gunn (Leicester), Restless enquiry: Patrick Joyce and historical innovation
James Vernon (UC Berkeley), More secondary modern than postmodern: Patrick Joyce and the peculiarities of liberal modernity in Britain
John Seed (Roehampton), Baudrillard in Rochdale: Patrick Joyce’s postmodern Victorians
11.00-11.30 Coffee
11.30-1.00 The Liberal Disciplines of History
Catherine Hall (UCL), Macaulay: a liberal historian?
Tom Osborne (Bristol), Liberal historicism? On historiography and the rule of freedom
Tony Bennett (Open University), Culture, habit, history
1.00-2.00 Lunch
2.00-3.30 Government and Freedom
Francis Dodsworth (Open University), Liberty without liberalism: government and the limits of freedom in 18th century England
James Epstein (Vanderbilt), Freedom rules/colonial fractures: the search for free labour in early 19th century Trinidad
Gavin Rand (Lancaster), Same difference: administration and governmentality in the Indian empire
3.30-4.00 Tea
4.00-5.00 Statecraft and Secrecy
Tom Crook (Oxford Brooks), Blind spots: liberalism, secrecy, filth
David Vincent (Open University), Government and the management of information
6.15-7.30 Wine Reception and guided tour of John Rylands Library
8.00 Conference Dinner at Don Govanni’s St Peter’s square
SATURDAY 29 MARCH
9.30-11.00 Class and its Politics
William Sewell (Chicago) Consumer capitalism and class in 18th century France
Jon Lawrence (Cambridge), Class and populism as master narratives of British politics
Carolyn Steedman (Warwick), The investment in class
11.00-11.30 Coffee
11.30-1.00 Cities and Moral Regulation
Chris Otter (Ohio State), ‘The ecology of freedom: infrastructure, housing and energy since 1800’
Peter Bailey (Manitoba), ‘Languages of pleasure in modern Britain’
Frank Mort (Manchester), ‘A thoroughly modern scandal: the Profumo Affair, London 1963’
1.00-2.00 Lunch
2.00-3.00 Social and Cultural History: Looking Back, Looking Forward - Patrick Joyce
3.30 Depart
Abstracts
For a PDF File with all the abstracts please click HERE
Registration
This conference is by invitation only, but if you are really interested to attend please contact Bussie Awosanya at cresc@manchester.ac.uk as there may be a few places available