Location: Clattern Lecture Theatre, Main Building, Penrhyn Road Campus
Penrhyn Road, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey KT1 2EE
(see below for evening reception location)

10:30-10:45 - Arrival and Registration, refreshments

10:45-11:00 - Welcome Remarks


11:00-12:15 - Stella Villarmea keynote lecture and discussion
Birthing: Vindicating a Visceral Body Philosophically

Birth matters matter — and they matter philosophically too. Villarmea works on philosophy of birth, that is, she uses the tools of philosophy to analyze representations and practices around childbirth. Villarmea’s thesis is that to reorient philosophical conversation toward birth and, specifically, to the origin of our lives in the female body, produces a radical perspective shift. Once we take this turn, many of the tales about our origin truly become ‘old-tales’. Are we already imagining a new genealogy, a new logos for genos? Can we philosophically (and medically/obstetrically) represent and vindicate this new genealogy?


Short break


12:30-13:30 - PhD students’ presentations – Q&A

Hannah Voegele, Your Body Belongs to You? Self-Ownership’s Troubles in Reproductive Struggles 

This paper interrogates the troubling aspects of organising around bodily ownership when it comes to reproductive struggles. Therefore, it highlights three scenes: the historical use of bodily ownership arguments in eugenic feminist thought around the turn of the 20th century, the conceptual limits of such a proprietary relation to the body deriving from liberal thought, and finally, the current discussions around trans youth that once again show the precarious conditionality of self-ownership.

Anna Argirò, Between Private and Public: Reframing Maternity with Hannah Arendt

In her paper, Argirò proposes an Arendtian reading of maternity by using her distinction between the public and the private spheres. Arendt is generally recognized as the thinker who re-evaluated plurality and the importance of acting together in the Western tradition, setting at the centre of her political thought the category of natality rather than that of mortality. However, when it comes to address topics such as that of maternity, most feminist philosophers look with suspicion at Arendt’s thought, emphasizing her relegation of the ‘maternal labour’ to the private sphere of reproduction and bodily necessities (Guenther 2006, Honig 1995, Söderbäck 2018).  Building on Arendt’s reinterpretation of the dual Greek understanding of the body, on the one hand biological/private and subject to life necessity, on the other hand political/exposed to others through which beautiful actions can be performed in public, this paper argues that Arendt’s framework can be used for a rethinking of maternity beyond the biological category. This analysis, in turn, can help reconfigure Arendt’s categories, making them more flexible.


13:30-14:45 - Sandwich lunch provided and informal networking


14:45-15:30 - PhD students’ presentations – Q&A

Emma Mitchell, Let the Body Tell Her Tales: Fiction and Herstory through Embodied and Experiential Writing Practice

Navigating archival research and creative writing through the lens of a global pandemic, Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and perimenopause came with many challenges as physical symptoms and realities forced new ways of being and doing a practice-based research project. Working with the women listed in the 1761 edition of Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, a methodology was developed that eschews traditional (essentially male) research and writing techniques to elevate and dignify female knowledge and practices centred in grounded bodily presence and encompassing the menstrual cycle, perimenopause, the moon cycle, and the pagan sabbats among other things. This is work that leans in to being, feeling and knowing to give authentic voice to female experience.

Paul Paschal, Poetry reading “Love to all lovers”

Love to all lovers is a collection of poems written from experiences of gay male hook-up culture. They center sex as a setting and practice to think about things like touch, clumsy translation, reparative dialogue, the history of Nottingham, the pleasures and perils of inviting someone into your home, and hosting at the scale of the body. These texts develop a writing practice that attends to visceral and complex qualities of sensation, that might arise in many different kinds of encounters.


Short break


15:45-16:45 - PhD students’ presentations – Q&A

Charlotte Warne Thomas, Tainted Love 

Warne Thomas will present a recent short video titled Tainted Love (2023), which includes sections shot on location at Baird & Co, the UK’s largest gold refinery. Combined with text offering different definitions of love, the video reflects upon love’s value, and hints at its role in persuading women to undertake domestic care and parenting. This will be linked to the wider context of her practice-based PhD in Fine Art, which explores invisible labour, with a particular focus on the ‘motherload’ – loosely defined as the additional emotional labour undertaken, principally by women, in managing a household and maintaining harmonious familial relationships. More broadly, the research seeks to establish a link between women’s’ unpaid domestic care work and the additional invisible labour undertaken by female artists in a male-dominated /market-oriented art world.

Julia Pond, Let What is Hidden Lead. Practicing / performing control, care and in/visibility with bread dough and the body

Responding to contemporary demands to ‘perform’ engagement (Power) - at work, as a mother, this performative presentation explores time ‘outside the capitalist everyday’ (Baraitser). Proposing a layering of performance and practice, it explores the virtuosic possibilities of practicing waiting-with and maintaining. It explores the notion that underneath the ‘performance’ of professionalism and personal passion, something violent happens to the human territory. Through poetic power point, image, and movement, the research conceptualises and utilises bread dough as extended flesh; as metaphor that exposes hidden vulnerabilities - and power. Simultaneously an object of care and control, the dough modifies and mutates the female body into new forms (Hamming). How can foregrounding the hidden, which is considered ‘without value’ in a political economic sense (Harvey), help to expose the unruly realities inside socially sculpted roles, to allow the sometimes painful paradoxes of mothering, to be experienced in their full complexity?


Break, refreshments


17:30-18:45 - Lisa Baraitser, keynote lecture and discussion
The Labour of Love and the Maternal Death Drive

Drawing on Garrett Bradley’s 2020 documentary film Time, this paper takes seriously the clichéd romanticization of motherhood as a ‘labour of love’. Sibil Fox Richardson, the protagonist in Time, is a prison abolitionist and mother of 6, whose partner Rob is serving 60 years without parole in the US prison industrial complex. Richardson resists the enforcement of solitary motherhood through control and subjugation of Black life by libidinalizing maternal time, documenting the family’s life for two decades for Rob to see, so that they do time together. Revisiting ‘mother time’ through this extraordinary practice of care that counters the racist violence of the prison industrial complex, Baraitser links this labour of love to what she calls the ‘maternal death drive’, a particular repetitious form of time that reinserts love back into dead time.


18.45-19:00 Concluding remarks

Location: Town House Fifth Floor Cafè Area, Penrhyn Road Campus, Penrhyn Road, Kingston upon Thames KT1 2EE

19:00-20.15 Final reception
Please join us in the Town House (next to the Penrhyn Road main building) for drinks and nibbles at our final reception!