On the 2024 SWIP Ireland Annual Conference

We would like to thank all who attended, delivered papers and engaged in conversation at our 2024 conference on ‘World Building in Times of Violence’!

We would like to thank UCD School of Philosophy and the Maynooth University ‘Impact through Dissemination Support Fund 2023/24’ for their very generous support of the conference.

We would like to thank MU Department of Education for their support of this conference and particularly the administrative assistance provided; and we also thank MU Department of Geography for their support with facilities.

For the 2024 conference we invited participants to consider what philosophy can tell us about the root causes of violence, the means through which we can address violence, and ‘the why’ of doing the work of world building.

The histories and complexities of the transformations needed – from the structural to the personal - in order to build the conditions that enable liveable lives for all were reflected in the wide range of papers and discussions.  These extended across sessions on Deconstructing Structures; Forms of Resistance; Deconstructing Understandings of Violence; The Constraints of Speech; Contours of Alienation, Connectedness, and World Building; World Building in the Midst of Armed Violence; World Building in the Context of Climate Breakdown; The Difficulties and Possibilities of Living in Common; and Understanding and Addressing Gendered Violence.

Danielle Petherbridge, our first keynote speaker, spoke on Epistemic Violence, Recognition and World-Building.  She drew on an account of epistemic recognition in considering the kinds of violence and harm done to marginalized groups of an epistemic kind. She argued that epistemic recognition is not only a key component in addressing epistemic violence but specifically in attending to such harm through epistemic reparations.  She proposed that epistemic reparations should not only focus on redressing harms through certain linguistic conditions associated with testimony but also marginalized knowledge more generally.

In their keynote address, ‘Reversing the Critical Turn: Reclaiming feminism for gender challenges’, Finn Mackay, deconstructed contemporary understandings of femininities and masculinities.  They examined how gender remains and sustains as an ongoing power structure, and how valid concerns about the operating system of patriarchy – raised by feminists as far back as the 1970s - have never been properly addressed and are often constructed as out of date.  They critiqued the replacement of feminist theorising with so-called gender critical campaigns.  These campaigns have resulted in a hyperfocus on how a minority of people do their gender and led to increases in homophobia, transphobia, racism and state and individual forms of violence.  Examining the mainstream discourse on violence, which often relies on racist and colonialist metaphors of the ‘savage within’, they argued that in fact the human response to vulnerability is often not to exploit or to dominate.  They proposed that we need to re-imagine what human nature is and could be, and how power could function - we need a slow, flat horizontal power that raises all.

Wendy Brown’s keynote address ‘Listening for Political Freedom’ centred on the concept of ‘reparative democracy’ as a possible successor to liberal democracy and democratic socialism.  She argued that listening, as an aspect of reparative freedom, facilitates practices that are relational, responsive, and responsible.  Reparative democracy requires us to discover and enable conditions and practices for orienting human consciousness toward the earthly lives with which we are deeply implicated, without devaluing our distinctiveness as creatures.