Past Events

Torture and Sovereignty: interrogating state violence in the modern age

Hosted by the School of Humanities and Communication Arts in association with
l’Institut des hautes études sur la justice.

7-8 September 2012
Parramatta, Building EA, Lecture Room 4 (EA.2.14)

Torture seems to belong to an earlier age, one before human rights conventions and democratic forms of government. Yet contemporary governments do, from time to time, inflict pain on opponents or citizens in a range of ways including waterboarding, sensory deprivation and tasering, while fervently denying this amounts to ‘torture’. What is ‘modern’ perhaps is a sensibility about cruelty – since the birth of prison, torture has become repugnant, almost unthinkable. Unlike the clean deaths we gleefully celebrate on TV dramas, the agony of torture continues to terrify and repel us. This symposium explores torture through film, novels and debate, from several disciplinary perspectives – law, philosophy, history, political science, cultural studies, psychiatry, psychology and sociology. Why do state agents torture others, how do they justify it, how is torture embedded in colonial projects (whether abroad or in the cities), how is it covered up, what impact does it have on the victims and torturers, and how is torture represented in film or literary works? Join us for some lively debates.

Speakers include:

• Frédéric Gros, political philosophy, University of Paris XII, specialist in Foucalt and Lévinas
• Danielle Celermajer, Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Sydney, co-ordinator of major international program on torture
• Darius Rejali, Reed College, USA, author of Torture and Democracy

Please see the Torture and Sovereignty - Program (opens in a new window)

For more information, please email david.tait@uws.edu.au

David Tait
Leader, Justice Research Group
University of Western Sydney