On Thursday 21st and Friday 22nd of January 2021, the Humanities Faculty of the Open University of the Netherlands in collaboration with the Huizinga Institute, the Netherlands Research School for Cultural History, organizes the international conference ‘Cultural perceptions of safety. Reflecting on modern and pre-modern feelings of safety in literature, philosophy, art and history’.

This two-day conference will bring together scholars from eight different countries and various humanities disciplines to pursue fluctuations in conceptualizations, expressions and feelings of safety over time as well as in cultures of surveillance and safety practices. Speakers will address a variety of topics, ranging from narratives and visual discourses of (un)safety, to representations and imaginations of places and spaces of safety and regulations to ensure safety.

You can now register for the online conference. The conference is open to scholars, PhD’s and research master students from all humanities disciplines and those from other disciplines that are interested in the study of cultural perceptions of safety. You can register for the complete conference program or certain timeslots via the website. For registration and the full conference program go to the https://www.ou.nl/en/web/cultural-perceptions-of-safety.

Confirmed keynote speakers

Prof. dr. Nils Büttner is a professor ordinarius of Art History at the State Academy of Arts Stuttgart and member of the Centrum Rubenianum vzw. He specialises in the visual culture of Germany and the Netherlands from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. He has published monographs on Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel, Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer, as well as a History of landscape painting and books on the history of drawings and prints. He has also written numerous catalogue essays and has served as a curator for several museum exhibitions.

Prof. dr. Eddo Evink is Professor in Philosophy at the Open University in the Netherlands and Assistant Professor in History of Modern Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. His main areas of research contain phenomenology, hermeneutics, metaphysics, philosophy of the humanities and philosophy of art. He recently published Transcendence and Inscription. Jacques Derrida on Metaphysics, Ethics and Religion, Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz, 2019.

Prof. dr. Beatrice de Graaf is professor of History of International Relations and Global Governance at the University of Utrecht. Her research focuses on how states and societies try to maintain high levels of security and how these attempts relate to core values and institutions (democracy, freedom, rule of law, constitutional and responsible government). She studies the emergence of and threats to such security arrangements from the 19th century until the present, including in times where both the effectiveness and the legitimacy of these arrangements were at risk. She currently leads the “Securing Europe” (SECURE) project, funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant. Beatrice is a member of The Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW) and is a fellow in the ISIS Files project/Program on Extremism at the George Washington University.

Dr. Debra Benita Shaw is a Reader in Cultural Theory at the University of East London where she teaches Architecture and Photography. She is a critical posthumanist concerned with issues of gender, social structures and the politics of space and has published widely in the fields of cultural and urban theory, science and technology studies and science fiction criticism. She is the author of Women, Science and Fiction (2000), Technoculture: The Key Concepts (2008), Posthuman Urbanism: Mapping Bodies in Contemporary City Space (2018) and is the co-editor of Radical Space: Exploring Politics and Practice (2016). She is a founding member of the Centre for Cultural Studies Research at UEL and principal editor of the Radical Cultural Studies book series for Rowman & Littlefield International.