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  • Note the Politics of Gesture:Historical Perspectives

A Past and Present conference with the support of the British Academy, and the Department of History, University of Sheffield, to be held at the University of Sheffield, 15-16 September 2007.

Gestures can be powerful means of communicating affirmation and solidarity and, for the same reason, can be powerful means of expressing dissent. Class, gender and generational relationships are all expressed and reproduced in gestural codes; so, too, are ethnic identities. Such codes are therefore central to the process of structuration described by Giddens: through individual actions we express, and reproduce, broader social relationships (structures). By the same token, transgressive gestures, or infractions of gestural codes—such as failing to take off a hat, or an over-familiar use of the handshake, for example—can modify or even transform the patterns of social interaction, leading to a more coercive expression of power or, in the absence of such, a dilution of the cultural weight and effectiveness of authority. Gesture, in other words, can be the battleground on which divergent visions of social and political order are fought. The conference brings together a distinguished group of speakers, whose research interests range in time from early medieval to contemporary history, and in space across East and South Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. Together, their papers will explore how the study of gesture can give access to politics in routine situations, and to the experience and negotiation of a wide range of political relationships—within the home, between generations and status groups, and between ethnic groups.

Speakers: David Arnold, Leslie Brubaker, Bill Chafe, Peter Coss, Philippe Depreux, Stephan Feuchtwang, Mary Fulbrook, Richard Handler, Dallett Hemphill, James Hevia, Colin Jones, Miri Rubin, Karin Sennefelt, Jim Sweet, Mary Vincent, John Walter.

Further details:<http://www.shef.ac.uk/history/research/conferences/gesture.html> [End Page 269]

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