TEARS-1
Trauma, Evil and Anxiety Research Symposium
University of Hildesheim, December 11 & 12, 2015
This PhD and early career symposium seeks to explore how cultural practices and
production attend to questions of trauma, evil and anxiety.
Fear not only creates its environment, with its ghettos, gated communities,
communitarianism, it has also created its culture, a culture of repulsion. It relates to
racism and the rejection of the other: there is always a reason to push out, to expulse
the other. (Virilio 2012: 58 - 9)
Contemporary Western social and cultural discourse is preoccupied with narratives of
trauma, fear, anxiety and/or evil. Yet, in an increasingly news-saturated world – or even, a
news-controlled one – we encounter discourses of trauma, evil, and anxiety so diverse and
ubiquitous as to be at once pervasively unnerving and yet somehow quotidian or even
meaningless. Meanwhile, we are encouraged to be afeared of: the anonymous, invisible
other; of the unknown or unexplainable (think of the story and media furore around the
disappearance of flight MH370); of the collapse of capitalism, the banker responsible for it
and increasingly the ‘benefit cheats and scroungers’ propagating such economic
‘catastrophe’; of the rise of the political right (and indeed in Britain now the rise of the
moderate left of the Labour movement). In this context, it is not surprising that there has
been a significant increase in (popular) cultural products representing events, contexts,
people, and situations that relate to these themes. Thus, to consider these phenomena as
intellectual and cultural problems seems timely, necessary even. To ask what we mean by
each term and how culture attends to them might help shed light on the contemporary
structure of feeling.
Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man’s [sic.] symbolic activity
advances … he has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in
mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except the
interposition of this artificial medium. (Cassirer cited in Svendsen 2009: 28 – 9)
Following Cassirer, this interdisciplinary symposium seeks to explore how the various codes
peculiar to different modes of cultural production allow for ‘man’s symbolic activity’ and the
ideologically charged representation of the unknown, invisible or unexplainable. Such
representations do not restrict themselves to one disciplinary field but operate on medial,
aesthetic, and emotional levels at the same time and have mental, psychological, and moral
effects. This symposium seeks proposals from scholars interested in interrogating any aspect
of the above in relation to plural forms of cultural production, including but not limited to:
film, television, theatre, performance, fine and/or live art, literature, computer games, the
graphic novel.
Topics might include (but are not limited to):
 The history fear, trauma, evil or anxiety in a particular cultural form
 Performance (and) anxiety
 Trauma on screen, in performance or literature
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Protest as cultural practice
Portrayal of evil in contemporary TV
Dramaturgical strategies for representing the unrepresentable
Culture and the collapse of capitalism
News media as cultural production
Politics and ethics of representing trauma, fear, anxiety or evil
Terrorism in cultural production
Representing violence
The keynote address will be given by Professor Matthew Kramer (University of Cambridge)
200 word abstracts for 20 minute papers and 100 word bios should be sent to Professor
Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier (brusberg@uni-hildesheim.de) and Dr Patrick Duggan
(p.duggan@surrey.ac.uk) by 18 September 2015 at 5pm.
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Registration fee for the symposium, including refreshments and dinner, will be €25.
Two travel-bursaries of €100 (plus fee waiver) are available for PhD students – if you
would like to apply for one of these please include a 200 word case for subvention
with your abstract.