University of Oxford, June 24, 2016
Deadline: Mar 31, 2016

Call for Participation: Thinking Colour Symposium
Trinity College, University of Oxford, 24 June 2016

'Thinking Colour' invites academics, curators, and artists to consider
the philosophical relations between colour and thinking. Engaging with
questions of colour in ways that exceed the discussion of specific
cases and linguistic manifestations, we invite our participants to
approach colour through visual analysis, visual theory, critical
thought, and comparative or transhistorical reflection. This symposium
starts from inquiries already opened by thinkers such as Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Gilles Deleuze, and Julia Kristeva, and more recently by
Michael Taussig and Natasha Eaton. It asks questions such as: how do
images think in/through colour? What is colour’s affective power? How
does colour relate to specific materialities? How can colour have
agency? Is colour a device for – or even a form of – thinking? We also
invite responses both to ontological questions around being in colour,
being without colour, resisting colour, and inhabiting colour, and to
epistemological questions around colour and knowledge. How can colour
function in relation to thinking in artistic practice/research?

Understanding interdisciplinarity as a polyphony of voices and
methodologies coming together in and around a single context, the
Thinking Colour symposium invites its participants to contemplate
colour as a topic for theoretical reflection, in the light of their own
discipline. It offers a space for presentation but also for debate, and
exchange, with an emphasis on comparison as a methodology for
stimulating new thought.

The day will consist of several talks delivered by invited
international academics who are leading in this field. We are honoured
to host David Batchelor (Royal College of Art), Laure Blanc-Benon
(University Paris-Sorbonne), Natasha Eaton (University College London),
Jacqueline Lichtenstein (University Paris-Sorbonne), Liz Watkins
(University of Leeds), Paul Smith (University of Warwick).

Responding to, and comparing, ideas raised by these distinguished
speakers, will be a panel composed of artists, graduate research
students, early career fellows, and established academics. There will
also be a round-table of shorter (10 minute) paper presentations and
discussion for which we invite paper proposals.

We invite potential participants to apply to one or both of the
following formats:
1. To give a short (10 minutes) paper/proposition: please send a 300
word abstract
2. To be considered as a respondent and panel member, offering a
10-minute comparative response to invited speakers: please send a 300
word ‘indication of interest’ surrounding your academic and theoretical
interest in the topic of colour and thinking

Please send proposals to: ThinkingColourSymposium@gmail.com by 31
March 2016. Applicants will be notified of the decision by the
beginning of April.

The symposium is co-funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research
Council (AHRC) and the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH).

This CfP and the latest information about the symposium, will be
permanently available at the link:
https://oxford.academia.edu/LucyWhelan/Other