A two-day symposium at Birkbeck, University of London supported by Birkbeck School of Arts and MaMSIE (Mapping Maternal Subjectivities, Identities and Ethics)

Thursday 31st January, Room B18, Birkbeck Malet Street Building Friday 1st February 2013, Room B04, Birkbeck Malet Street Building 9.30-17.00 with a wine reception on Thursday evening at the Peltz Room, Birkbeck School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD, to coincide with the launch of a special issue of Studies in the Maternal journal themed ‘Austerity Parenting’, Confirmed speakers include:

Dr Lisa Baraitser, Senior Lecturer in Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck Time and Again: Repetition, maternity and the non-reproductive

Dr Nina Power, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Roehampton University Anti-, Non-, Post-Reproduction

Birkbeck is hosting a two-day interdisciplinary symposium on the culture and politics of non-reproduction. Cultural anxieties about procreation often pivot around the notion of the non-reproductive body, in which intersecting fears about class, race, sexuality, gender and disability are encoded. Recent work in cultural studies< - notably Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive - has emphasised the radical potential of the subject that refuses to reproduce.

The symposium will interrogate this rhetorical opposition between the reproductive and the non-reproductive. Is the subversive potential of non-reproduction undermined by right-wing strategies such as forced sterilisation, ‘population bomb’ rhetoric, discriminatory welfare policies and the stigmatisation of single parents? What are the implications of ‘non-reproduction’ and anti-futurity for approaches to the archive and the preservation of cultural and social documents?

The symposium is free, but space is limited. To book a place, please email non.reproduction@gmail.com

For more information, including the conference timetable, see http://nonreproduction.wordpress.com

The conference is organised by Fran Bigman (PhD candidate, Faculty of English, Cambridge), Harriet Cooper (PhD candidate, Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck) and Sophie Jones (PhD candidate, Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck).