International Conference on Exploring Moral Interfaces Private Worlds and Public Systems

International Conference on Exploring Moral Interfaces  

Private Worlds and Public Systems

7 - 9 October, 2015

Organized by 

The English and Foreign Languages University

“Everyone deserves a private life,” says the female protagonist in the 1994 movie, Three Colors: Red by Krzysztof Kieślowski. The intrusive nature of the modern technologies that facilitate access—without consent or acknowledgement—to the private domains of people’s lives further blurs the already hazy borderlines that separate the public from the private. The proposed conference will address some of the troubling issues relating to this phenomenon.
The conference focuses on the distinction between “private worlds” and “public systems”, which however can never be separated and whose nebulous moral interfaces fade into each other. To what extent is it possible to delineate within a social and legal framework the discourse of the private, which constitutes the personal world of feeling (and which, strictly speaking, is also the nuclear space of civil society)—from the institutional demands of public systems, of which the State is a major but not necessarily a paradigmatic example? What exactly is the moral status of a person’s privacy? And how do we historicize the private and the “private” individual?
To what extent can a person’s private life be used against him/her in the context of his/her public positions or actions? Is it alright to invoke specificities of private life to question the stand a person takes on public issues? Can there be rules in this matter? Or would it be a matter entirely for self-regulation—in which case, would there be rules in any meaningful sense? How do literary artists, filmmakers, philosophers, sociologists, legal experts and social scientists envision the point where the ‘private’ ends and the ‘public’ begins? It is often said that those in public life should be ready to have their private lives discussed, exposed and used as ammunition in public polemics and political contestations. Is this view justified? What exactly is the moral basis of this view?
Next, how are we to conceive the politics of privacy from the point of view of class, race, gender, caste or other categories involving social power? Does the question of privacy transcend these distinctions? What is the “secret” history of privacy as a domain meant to be kept away from public limelight? Must we assume that ‘privacy’ is a product of certain historical developments—say humanism or individualism—and that therefore we should be prepared to abandon this ‘value’ when those ways of looking at human reality are no longer considered valid? Is the binary of “private-public” merely of heuristic significance? Is it susceptible to a deconstructive analysis that would reveal the private to have been always already public?
In seeking to address these questions, the fluid, relative and situational character of the debate needs to be borne in mind. A sensitive and nuanced understanding of private worlds which gives meaning to terms such as “selfhood” and “personhood” and “public systems” in terms of how they operate to assert their power in delimiting the space of individuals, keeping institutional goals in mind, needs to be examined. In other words, should the conflicts between the private and the public be placed in a normative framework so that there is clarity as to the relative/contextual primacy of either of them?
Likewise, the ways and means through which individuals and smaller groups resist the systemic attempt to be gazed at or reduced to objects of surveillance is of extraordinary importance, given the ownership of global technologies in the hands of power elites. Must this resistance remain a matter of open contestation where the gradient of power determines the outcome, or should we raise normative questions with regard to it? The same exploration is required at the interpersonal level as well, though the values that complicate the issue here are somewhat different. But the question arises here as to how far we might be willing to prevent ourselves, as citizens (or in any performative/interventional role), from entering the space occupied by “others.” What are those likely situations where it becomes important to reach out to others at the risk of violating their privacy?
Any serious question carries within it the assumption that there are possibly more answers than one that might be in conflict with each other. Moral interfaces are ambivalent zones, and the language used to address the exploration is bound to share the ambivalence of the reality itself. The construction of the argument, the narrative, and the symbolism are as important as the interface and in some sense become the interface itself. In order to appreciate the scope of the debate and widen its parameters, we must include works from art and literature to theoretical and conceptual frameworks cutting across genres and discourses, and the aim must be towards an interdisciplinary, intertextual, comparative, and cross-cultural understanding of issues.
This being the broad aim of this conference, you are invited to contribute to it from the vantage point of your discipline or field of current engagement.

The following are the broad themes/contexts that could be examined within the broad purview of the conference proposal:

• State, Citizen, Surveillance
• Civil Society and Public Order
• Public and Private Spheres of Influence
• Public as Opposed to Private Law
• Objective Condition and Subjective Imagination
• Privacy in the “Public” Domain of Internet and Telecommunications
• Depictions of Public/Private Space in Popular Culture
• Philosophical Hermeneutics and the Question of Privacy
• Right, Wrong and the Truth
• Private Self and Public Persona
• Freedom versus Responsibility
• Private and Public as Socio-Political Categories
• The Politics of Secrecy and Intrusiveness
• Ethical Discourses in Humanities and Social Sciences
• Academic Spaces and Life Worlds
• Institutions and Personal Autonomy
• I, Me, Myself, and Others
• The Home and the Street/World
• The Sacred and the Profane

Registration fee: Rs. 500 for students, Rs. 1500 for independent scholars/researchers, Rs. 2500 for teachers
Please send abstracts of around 300 words by 1st July 2015 to publicprivateconference@gmail.com.
Acceptance will be intimated by 15th July 2015.
Coordinators:
Prof. Syed Sayeed
Department of Philosophy
The English and Foreign Languages University
Tarnaka, Hyderabad
AP - 500007 - India
Email: syedsayeed55@gmail.com
Prakash Kona
Associate Professor
Department of English Literature
The English and Foreign Languages University
Tarnaka, Hyderabad
AP - 500007 – India
Email: prakashkona@gmail.com
Contact: Prakash Kona
Email: prakashkona@gmail.com OR prakash@efluniversity.ac.in