Engels in Manchester International Conference

Engels in Manchester 

International Conference

30 November - 1 December 2024 At Manchester/Salford

Co-hosters: 

-    The International Association of Marx-Engels Humanities Exchange and Studies (MEIA)

-    University of Salford

-    Canterbury Christ Church University

-    The Marxism Specialist Group of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom (PSA)

Dates:

30 November 2024 - 1 December 2024 (Saturday - Sunday)

Venue:

University of Salford

Conference Building

Main Venue

Sub-venues

Academic organizers:

-    Prof. David Bates, Professor of Contemporary Political Thought and Director of Research and Enterprise for the School of LPSS and Associate Director of Research and Enterprise, Canterbury Christ Church University

-    Prof. Paul Blackledge, Professor, Shanxi University

-    Prof. Terrell Carver, Professor of Political Theory, School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol

Background information:

Manchester and Salford were the world’s first industrialized factory-cities of the railway age. They were surely what Marx and Engels had in mind when they wrote in the Communist Manifesto of ‘whole populations conjured out of the ground’. Engels knew the twin cities from the age of seventeen, taken there by his father on a business trip. And it was to Manchester that he took Marx – on his very first trip abroad – in the summer of 1845. After that their personal and epistolary – and indeed pecuniary – relationship was more to do with Manchester than anywhere else, till Engels retired the two of them to London in 1869.

Much has changed in the conurbation since those days, and even buildings familiar to Engels and to Marx, when he visited, now have very different uses. Yet the revitalized post-industrial landscapes make an excellent setting for an international conference inspired by people and place. 

Greater Manchester is itself a rich thematic through which to re-visit and re-examine, not just the works and thoughts of modern industry’s greatest theorists and most trenchant critics, but importantly to engage with the on-going conflicts of capitalist upheaval and global resistance.

‘Cottonopolis’ of the 1840s was an imperial city of manufacture and trade, and ‘The Northern Powerhouse’ of current politics is its 21^st century avatar. 

We invite paper-proposals on these themes below, though other ideas will certainly be considered:

• Class/gender/race conflict and urban politics in the industrializing world

• Modernization, colonialism, empire, wage/slavery, global political economy, primary products and luxuries, consumption and addiction, ‘free’ and forced markets

• International and intra-national politics of revolution, war and counter-revolutionary reactions

• Ecology, built environment, environmental change, climate change, pollution, public health

• Social reproduction, kinship and domesticity, women and gender-oppression, sexualities and socialisms/communisms

• Philosophy and politics, philosophy and science, dialectic and logic, materialism and idealism, industrial technologies and capital accumulation

• Political organization and action, coalitions and strategies, constitutional liberalism and social democracy, parties and networks, agitators and activists, resistance and progress

• Consent and obligation, compulsion and freedom

• Marx and Engels, associates and collaborators, opponents and enemies, wives and partners, servants and family members

• Museums and memorials, memory and recovery, publicity and propaganda, visuality and meaning-making, culture and communication

• Practical materialism, utopian thinking, pasts and futures, histories and knowledge

• Geographies, sociologies, human sciences, physical sciences, hermeneutics, positivism, spaces, places

List of Experts:

Requirements:

1. Proposals should include name(s), affiliations, title, abstract (up to 200 words) in Word or PDF format by email to info@themeia.org.

2. Proposals can be for individual papers or full panels (up to 3 papers, 1 discussant, 1 chair).

3. The organisers particularly encourage proposals from postgraduate students, early career scholars and scholar-activists.

4. There are plans for selected papers to appear in a special issue in an academic journal and/or an edited volume with a major publisher.

Schedules:

• Deadline for paper and panel proposals – 1 October 2024

• Acceptances posted – 15 October 2024

• Programme announced – 25 October 2024

  
  

Registration for Participation:

Please send your application to this email: info@themeia.org including your name, organization, position, and the dates you will attend. Additionally, please indicate whether you require the association's staff to arrange transportation and accommodation for you.