King’s Contemporary Studies Society presents

The Conference of the Contemporary

Students, faculty, and guest panellists in Contemporary Studies will present the annual Conference of the Contemporary. Panels start at 11 a.m. and end at 6 p.m., followed by a party and dinner in the Wardroom.

Conference Schedule

10:50 a.m.: Opening remarks

11 a.m. – 12 p.m.: Legality, Community, and Identity

  • Emma Metallic – Engaging with Mi’gmaw Legal Orders through Indigenous Feminist Legal Theory
  • Jacob Hermant – “Most people will comply, but some people will not”: Searching for a Human Community in Hannah Arendt and Jean-Luc Nancy
  • Isabelle Reynolds – Queer Community and Normative Power: Ideal Relationality in Nancy’s Being Singular Plural

12:15 – 1 p.m.: Bodies Touching Bodies: Intimacies, old and gay

  • Stuart Harden – The Good Touch: Affirming Intimacy and the Aging Body
  • Em Grisdale – Barbara Hammer and the Lesbian Body

1 – 2 p.m.: Lunch in Prince Hall

2 – 2:40 p.m.: Politicizing Technologies: Bodies of Knowledge and Bodies Online

  • Emily Jocks – Indigenous Bodies (of Knowledge) and Technoscience
  • Isabel Teramura – Instagram Influencers as Technologists

2:50 – 3:30 p.m.: Seeing is Believing, Hearing is Remembering

  • Katrina Jones – Destabilizing Perception: Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion and the Sonic Uncanny
  • Chelsea McMillen – Candle Eclipsed: Appropriation of Memory in Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind”

3:30 – 3:45 p.m.: Break

3:45 – 4:45 p.m.: Old Stories, New Articulations: Using Narrative to Reinterpret the Canon

  • Marlee Sansom – And I Alone Escaped to Tell You: Recovering Lost Stories of Those Buried by Narratives of Pain
  • Anja Deady – White Feminist Fiction and the Resurgence of the Repressed: The Uncanny in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper
  • Rachel O’Brien – “Old Tales in New Skins”: Benjaminian Translation in Emma Donaghue and Margaret Yocom’s Fairy Tale Retellings

5 – 5:45 p.m.: Eating and Gesturing: Redemption Through Embodiment

  • Frances Grace Fyfe – Benjamin, Agamben, and the Gesture of Philosophy
  • Alia Hazineh – A Transformative Practice of Grace

6 – 10 p.m.: Party and Dinner in the Wardy!