Book at the early bird rate!

We are taking bookings for next summer's Gregynog Ideas Lab, which takes place from 11-16 July 2016. Further details of seminars by guest professors will be posted in the New Year. They will include topics such as feminist methodology and researching war, deconstruction and hermeneutics, Deleuze and politics, postcolonial writings, the neoliberal subject, and visual global politics. As usual there will be innovative sessions, including for 2016 an experimental learning space curated especially for the Ideas Lab, as well as the seminars, one-to-one research surgeries with guest professors, and much else.

Participants come from all over the world, and from various stages of their graduate study or their academic career. The Ideas Lab is equally suitable for those who have just embarked on PhD research--or are about to--and those who are already well established in their field. One of the things that makes the Ideas lab so unique, and so valuable afterwards too, is this mix of participants and the friendships that are built during the week at Gregynog.

The number of participants is limited. A place can be reserved with a deposit, and payment of the full fee by 31 January entitles you to the early bird rate. Please contact our graduate administrator, Yvonne Rinkart, on gregynogideaslab (at) gmail.com with any queries, or go straight to the booking link on this page.

We look forward to seeing you next summer!
Best wishes
Jenny

Booking now open!

Booking for Gregynog Ideas Lab V is now open. Places are limited to 30 participants and you can reserve your place by paying a £100 non-refundable deposit and the balance later. Or you can pay in full now. Early bird rates apply for bookings paid in full by 31 January 2016, and returnee discounts are available for people who've participated in the Ideas Lab before. Full details of how to book are in the 'About booking' link, or to book now go straight to 'Booking' in the menu to the right, which takes you to the Aberystwyth online shop.

Details of the Ideas Lab are in the 'Announcement' and a draft timetable and Guest Professor bios are also available in the menu to the right.

We look forward to receiving your bookings.  Any queries, please contact Yvonne Rinkart, our Graduate Administrator, on gregynogideaslab@gmail.com.
Best wishes
Jenny

Gregynog Ideas Lab V: Dates and details announced

We are delighted to be able to confirm that Gregynog Ideas Lab V will take place from 11 - 16 July 2016. The Ideas Lab, now in its fifth successful year, provides an open thinking space for graduate students and academics in critical, postcolonial, feminist, post-structural and psychoanalytic international politics to meet and exchange ideas in a wonderful and friendly setting.

Full details of guest professors and activities are in the documents in the information section of the blog, just to the right of this post. The announcement describes the Ideas Lab in detail, and other documents contain a draft timetable, bios of the guest professors, details of the methods training and some advice about funding.

Bookings will open shortly, so look out for another announcement soon, and pass on this message to your friends and colleagues.  There will be an early bird discount, and places are allocated on a first come first served basis.

We look forward to welcoming returning participants and new faces next summer!!
Best wishes
Jenny

Amazing Ideas Lab!

Thanks everyone for a fantastic Ideas Lab: it gets better every time and this year was amazing! And it's always the participants that make it so brilliant. This time sharing of often heartbreaking histories and images, alongside intense debates and discussions in seminars and over meals and walks, was all bookended by dancing! And the guest performance and our artist-in-residence made it very special.

I hope your journeys back were good, and look forward to seeing many of you again next year. We have 11-16 July 2016 booked provisionally and we'll let you know as soon as this is confirmed.

And we will have to work out some special celebration for Gregynog V! Any ideas, let us know...
Very best wishes
Jenny

Almost there! Final arrangements for July

July is fast approaching, and we are putting together the final arrangements for the Ideas Lab:

1. We now have details of the workshops and seminars, and you can download these from the list on the right. They include reading lists--broken down into reading that will be discussed in the seminar and background reading that you might like to consult but that is not essential to bring. If you have difficulty accessing any of the readings, contact the relevant Guest Professor for help, or email Yvonne. Unfortunately, as you will see, Marysia Zalewski is no longer able to join us this year: she has another engagement close to the time, and the logistics of doing both have proved impossible.
2. In addition to the workshops and seminars, this year there will be sessions organised by participants. If you have ideas and would like to organise something, please get in touch.  These sessions can be anything you like:  workshops, roundtables, informal discussions, etc.
3. We are delighted to be able to announce two additional guests. Catherine Charrett will be presenting her performance Politics in Drag: Sipping Toffee with Hamas in Brussels, and Dolly Kershaw will be our artist in residence in mid-week, exhibiting two of her art pieces and talking about her work.
4. Finally, we have a yoga teacher coming to do two sessions during the week, and the first evening we have the HiJinx Ceilidh Band to start us off in style with a traditional Welsh twmpath dawns.

We are still taking bookings, so if you haven't signed up yet you can still do so--follow the booking link to the right--and also accepting abstracts if you want to present your work.

Looking forward very much to seeing old friends and new faces soon!
Best wishes
Jenny

Programme and reading

The programme is currently being finalised and we hope to have full details, including lists of preparatory reading for guest professor seminars and workshops and information about seminar streams, available shortly.  It includes informal sessions for participants to present their work: a useful way of getting supportive comments and starting conversations. If you would like to present, please provide a short (100 word) abstract to Yvonne at gregynogideaslab@gmail.com. We will also have slots for roundtables organised by participants, and would be interested in hearing from you if you have any ideas of topics you are interested in, or guest professors you'd like to involve. Other suggestions for activities are very welcome too.

We are still taking bookings and if you are thinking of joining us and have not yet signed up you would be very welcome.  You can book online--see the menu to the right. Further information for participants about travel and the location will be posted shortly too; in the meantime there are some useful links on the right too. Any queries, contact us on gregynogideaslab@gmail.com.
Best wishes
Jenny

Amazing group of participants for Ideas Lab IV

We have an amazing group of people signed up for Ideas Lab IV this year. Participants come from a range of places including North America, Asia, Australia/New Zealand and various parts of Europe. So far—and unusually—South America is not directly represented, but we hope this will change. If you are thinking of joining us, places are still available, and bookings can be made online.

To whet your appetite and give you a flavour of the group this year, people’s interests range across, among other topics: the international mobility regime; the politics of classification; post/decolonial political thought; rationalities of the person/forms of political subjectivity; the consequences of economic growth; democratization; the use of the macabre; the politics of historiography; belonging; truth and justice; peace in the city; the security politics of counter-terrorism; the legal process; feminist IPE; post-conflict interventions; internally displaced persons; violence-trauma-violence cycles; visuality, scripts, and remediation; memory and memorialisation; the maritime sphere.

Among the specific empirical sites participants are working are protests in Turkey and Bulgaria; Japanese, South Korean and Chinese modernization; Australian immigration detention; Russian media; the postwar cities of Belfast, Mostar and Mitrovica; climate change in the Arctic; peacebuilding in East Asia; enforced disappearances in Brazil; the mediation of atrocity in Alfredo Jaar's Tonight No Poetry Will Serve; contemporary memorialisation in Mexico. The range of methodological/theoretical approaches is equally impressive: narrative, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, genealogy, governmentality, gender/queer theory, feminism, ethics, Continental European social and political theory, deconstruction, trauma theory, post-colonialism, African political thought.

For more information about the programme and the Ideas Lab in general, see the links on this site.  For questions and queries, contact Yvonne Rinkart by emailing gregynogideaslab@gmail.com.

We look forward to seeing you in the summer!!

Jenny

Online booking

A quick note to inform you that we now have online booking for the Ideas Lab: please click on the link 'Booking' which will take you to the online shop. If you have any difficulties with the process, please contact Yvonne Rinkart gregynogideaslab.gmail.com for assistance. The old booking forms will no longer be accepted.

SEMINAR AND WORKSHOP DETAILS

Initial details of the seminars and workshops our Guest Professors will offer are now available. We have two workshops:

• The first, on Method, entitled Thinking the Event: Political Temporalities, and led by Michael J Shapiro, focuses on particular historical cases that can be interpreted with the help of a “critical philosophical trajectory”: The Hiroshima bombing, Hurricane Katrina, and the contemporary sweatshop factory. 
• The second, on Storytelling, entitled Worlding the Postcolonial and led by Himadeep Muppidi, explores how we write other worlds into the colonial field of international relations and focuses on the task of writing itself.  

Seminars include: 

• Image, Aesthetics, Politics, Jenny Edkins 
  
• Diplomatic Entanglements: Ethnology, Ethology and the Ethics of Cohabitation, Sam Okoth Opondo 
  
• Notes on Equality, Erzsebet Strausz
• International/Historical, Rob Walker 
  
• Violence, Creativity and Un/making the Self, Annick T.R. Wibben 
  
• Imagining future(s): boundary world(s), Marysia Zalewski 
  
• Resisting Subjectivity, Andreja Zevnik

Further details, including abstracts of the seminars and workshops and indicative reading, can be downloaded by clicking on the link 'Seminar and workshop details' to the right. Please note the deadline for reduced rate fees is fast approaching: get your booking form and payment to us by 30 January 2015!!