Doctoral Researchers Network (DRN) and Early Career Researchers Network (ECRN) Summer Symposium

Join us for the DRN and ECRN Summer Symposium. We are excited to bring you a day of activities at IKON in Birmingham.

This year the conference theme is “Precarity in Art History: Thinking with the Discipline’s Past, Present and Future”.

The challenges in art history are urgent, as the discipline faces an existential crisis due to recent developments in the sector. This call for papers framed the crisis through three interrelated developments:

• The first is the context of academic precarity within the sector. Precarity is a condition that currently shapes the discipline, particularly for the work done by doctoral and early-career researchers. It entrenches existing social inequalities and is connected to recent efforts to manufacture “culture wars” which is exacerbating and intensifying marginalisation.
• Second is changes in funding for the arts and heritage sector across the UK. This symposium will take place in Birmingham, a city which is facing a complete cut to council funding for the arts over the next two years (source). A similar situation exists for other local authorities and councils across the UK.
• Third is the brutal reality of conflict and genocide around the world, and the notable component of targeted “scholasticide” alongside the wholesale destruction of educational, religious and heritage sites and archival records.

With these developments and challenges in mind, this symposium will seek to explore the ways in which we can both navigate precarity in our work as art historians, whilst also historicising the way that precarity has shaped the production of art across periods assist us with the challenges of the present.

The schedule for the day will include paper sessions, breakout workshops, a keynote, work-in-progress roundtables and opportunities to meet fellow doctoral and early-career researchers. We will also host a drinks reception, enabling conversations to continue.

Programme