Satire as Perspective on the Contemporary

The Research Group for Culture Studies, KuFo, invites interested researchers to take part, with or without presentation, in the workshop Satire as Perspective on the Contemporary.

The workshop will take place on Wednesday 17 October 2018, 10.15-17.30, in Minerva, Building 12, at Karlstad University, Karlstad, Sweden.

The workshop is interdisciplinary, and is intended for researchers who engage with satire from different perspectives.

Satire

Satire can be regarded as a genre, a mode of expression or as a rhetorical means. It challenges borders, values, and principles, and can function as a way of pointing to prejudices, injustices, immoral behavior or bad governance. It can be literary, visual or performative, and can be mediated by books, journals, newspapers, comics, radio, television, blogs, social media, etc. Satire can be used to provoke or criticize, and is often directed at authorities. It can be effective in contexts where open criticism is dangerous or where deviant voices have difficulties reaching out. It can be elegantly ironic or brutally sarcastic. Its greater purpose is often constructive social criticism, using wit and humor to draw attention to both particular and general issues in society. But is the criticism always constructive? And is it always funny? Today satire is used for many different purposes, and the reception depends on individual opinions and ideas. The message is of course, as always, dependent on the context, the rhetorical situation. 

But what is the relation between satire and the contemporary? What does satire look like in Sweden and other countries? How does satire today comment on important issues such as climate change, democracy, the refugee situation, gender issues and wealth distribution? How can satire be constructed and interpreted, verbally, visually and aurally? Has the expanded medial production changed its character? Is it possible to counter satire?

Keynotes

Keynote speeches will be given by Associate Professor of English Per Sivefors, Linneaus University, Sweden, and Dr Dieter Declercq, Associate and Assistant Lecturer in Film Studies and Philosophy of Art at the University of Kent, UK. Per Sivefors is currently at work on a research project on representations of manliness in English satire, and he will give the presentation A Manly Art? Satire and the Representation of Masculinity. Dieter Declercq completed his PhD thesis in 2017, entitled A Philosophy of Satire: Critique, Entertainment, Therapy. At the workshop he will give the presentation What is satire? And why does it matter today? 

Schedule

The workshop will start at 10.15 with the presentation by Per Sivefors, and a following discussion. After lunch, at 12.30, Dieter Declercq will give his presentation. From 14.00 the participants will present on their topics, grouped by themes, for 15 minutes each, followed by discussions around each theme. The workshop will finish around 17.30, and then we can go out for dinner together in the evening. 

Registration

To take part without presentation, please send an email to Karin Aspenberg, karin.aspenberg@kau.se, no later than 17 September, 2018

To take part with a presentation, please send an email with an abstract of roughly 300 words, and a short biography, to Margareta Wallin Wictorin, margareta.wallin-wictorin@kau.se, no later than 17 September 2018.    

Welcome!

Karin Aspenberg and Margareta Wallin Wictorin 

KuFo, The Research Group for Culture Studies at Karlstad University.