Conferences/Events

If you wish to attend the conference dinner, please register before May 1st.
This conference aims to bring together current research on visual, material and archival collections and explore the ways in which their materiality is shaped by time and place. Held in museums and archives, objects, natural specimens, human remains, photographs, films, sounds, drawings, documents and more embody the disruption created by missionaries, militaries, colonial officers, scientists, explorers or humble travellers in territories which endured colonisation. Through the act of collecting, classifying, storing and exhibiting, museums, anthropology and imperial politics shaped an ethnographic present in order to dominate colonised peoples, whose own temporalities had no space to exist. This conference will explore how accessing archives and museum collections can enable communities to recover their past and rekindle “alternative stories” as well as disrupt the discourses constructed by Western views.

This summer UEA will welcome this major conference in experimental philosophy, to campus. Key note speakers include Emma Borg, Susan Gelman, Nat Hansen, Joshua Knobe, and Edouard Machery. The conference will also feature over 60 talks in parallel sessions, four interdisciplinary symposia, a poster session, and a work-in-progress workshop for early career researchers. Attendees will have the opportunity to participate in the satellite workshop, Experimental argument analysis: Interdisciplinary perspectives on verbal reasoning, which starts on Wednesday, 9th July.   

The main conference will be 10th - 12 July and the conference dinner on 11th July can be purchased separately as you progress through your booking. 

Find out more about the conference at: 

https://x-phi.uea.ac.uk/EuroX-Phi2025-conference 

PAA Europe 2025 Conference and Meeting
An Ocean of Connection: Oceanic art, artists and museums

Since the 1980s Oceanic scholars (Wendt 1982; Hau‘ofa 1994; Teaiwa 2014, amongst others) have responded to the tendency, resulting from colonialism and developmentalism, for Oceania to be divided into clearly delineated and distinct areas by reminding Islanders and non-Islanders alike that the Pacific Ocean is a linking pathway rather than a separating boundary. They emphasised the connection to the ocean for many people living in the region; a place defined by the seascape as much as the landscape. This discourse continues to resonate and inspire scholars, curators, artists and practitioners in the region and beyond.

The main conference theme is related to the Sainsbury Centre’s exhibition season Can the Seas Survive Us? The exhibition includes Oceanic contemporary art and community responses to the issues that the Pacific region faces, particularly in Yuki Kihara’s Paradise Camp. The conference will explore the Pacific Ocean as a relational entity, as a powerful metaphor for connection, as a pathway that is reclaimed by Oceanic people today by celebrating the impressive navigational skills of their ancestors when settling the islands, as well as a pathway used by collectors who shipped artefacts to museums.

The School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing is delighted to announce that this year's Lorna Sage Memorial Lecture will be delivered by Helen Small, the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, Oxford. Professor Small works at the intersection of literature, intellectual history and philosophy and this lecture will look to clarify ‘what sort of critical break with the past’ may be occurring (to borrow a helpful formulation from Stuart Hall), and where and why the shifts and tendencies remain highly uneven. 

This year’s symposium will host a wide-ranging discussion that builds on the work of our memorial lecturer, Professor Helen Small. Speakers will address themes central to Small’s work, including ‘Aging’, ‘the Humanities’, and ‘Philosophy and Literature’. Participants include Ruth Abbott, David McAllister, Heather Love, Tina Lupton, and Nancy Yousef, alongside speakers from UEA. Helen is giving the Lorna Sage Memorial Lecture at Dragon Hall on Thursday 19^th June, 5:30.

Location: 0.12 Earlham Hall

Date: Friday 20th June

Time: 9.30-3.15

Free entry, ticket required