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 https://www.ou.nl/en/web/cultural-perceptions-of-safety.

Confirmed keynote speakers

Prof. dr. Nils Büttner
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
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
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
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.

PROGRAM
Day 1, Thursday 21th of January 2021

9.20-9.45 Welcome & Opening by prof. dr. Thomas Vaessens, dean faculty of Humanities Open University
& Presentation of conference volume of the previous OU conference: The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons

9.45-10.45 Keynote prof. dr. Eddo Evink (Open University)
Security, Certainty, Trust. Historical and Contemporary Aspects of Safety

A philosophical approach of the notions of safety and security cannot work without questions like ‘what is safety?’ and ‘what is security?’. These questions cannot be answered with a simple and straightforward definition. Concepts often have a long history and can be divided in different aspects, regularly transforming in tensions or even contradictions. In my presentation I shall combine three approaches of the idea of security.
The first approach is conceptual-historical and will show how our contemporary concept ‘security’ goes back to the ancient Latin terms of securitas and certitudo. Both terms have been used in philosophical reflections for centuries, revealing many different features and degrees of safety. In this part I shall mainly focus on the tension between trust and control. The second approach is social-anthropological and will search, in an existential-phenomenological style, for general characteristics of safety and danger as inevitable part of the basic relations between humans and the world.
From there I’ll step over to the third approach, in search of a cultural and political perspective on the contemporary situation and recent developments of security in this human-world-relation. Here the philosophical method will explore a more hermeneutical or post-phenomenological style and focus on the technological facets of security in the world of today.

10.45-11.00 Coffee/tea break

11.00-12.00 Session 1 – Defining safety: philosophical and historical perspectives

Ana Alicia Carmona Aliaga (École Pratique des Hautes Études)
Tolerance, a safety policy in Pierre Bayle’s thought

Dr. Tom Giesbers (Open University)
The modern philosophical underpinnings of ‘Public Safety’

Dr. Kai Preuß (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt/Main)
Unsettling the secular – Late Antique perspectives on (in)securitization and power

Carlotta Voß (Freie Universität Berlin)
“what is profitable goes with security, and that which is just and honourable with danger”? The Athenian Security Discourse in Thucydides

12.00-13.00 Session 2 – Imaginaries of future safety

Dr. Susan Hogervorst (Open University)
Testimonies against terrorism. The use of the past to control the future

Darja Jesse (Freie Universität Berlin)
“A Potential Threat to the World”? The visual framework of safety in post-war Germany

Jilt Jorritsma (Open University)
A Future in Ruins: History, Memory and Space in the Imagination of Sustainable Futures in Amsterdam, New York and Mexico City

13.00-14.00 Lunch break

14.00-15.00 Session 3 – Safety, health and social order

Irene Geerts (Open University) 
Safety for whom? Dutch family members of people with a severe mental illness caught between a rock and a hard place, 1960-1990

Dr. Jan Oosterholt (Open University)
The Transfer of 19th Century Representations of Unsafety: Dutch Adaptations of Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris

Anubhav Pradhan (Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi)
Mutinous Ghosts, Malarial Fears. ‘Improving’ the Red Fort in British Delhi

Mario Silvester (Open University)
Dangers of the working-class neighbourhood (1870-1940). Slums as a hotbed of infectious diseases

15.00-16.00 Session 4 – Urban vice, Urban order: regulating safety in public space

Vincent Baptist (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Criminal or Cosmopolitan: Discourses of Safety on Rotterdam’s Interbellum Pleasurescape in Municipal and Audiovisual Sources

Jasper Bongers (Open University) 
“Give us the fair!” Negotiating perceptions of safety in the context of Utrecht’s fairs (1915-1926)

Dr. Wim de Jong (Open University)
The Construction of urban ‘social safety’. Policing ethnic minorities in Amsterdam and Nijmegen, 1970-2000

16.00-16.15 Coffee/tea break

16.15-17.15 Keynote prof. dr. Beatrice de Graaf (University of Utrecht)
Taming the future. Historicizing security and the rise of the national security state since the Enlightenment and the Napoleonic Age

In times of uncertainty – be it terrorist attacks or the Covid-19 pandemic - the national security state is called for. The rise of such a security dispositive, as inevitable, urgent and immediate it may present itself, is rather a modern day invention. In this lecture we trace the rise of the national security state since the Enlightenment and the Napoleonic Age as the consequence of changing notions of ‘evil’ in the modern western world.
Accepting ‘evil’ as a metaphysical force, gave way to the rise of ‘taming the future’. With theological (and philosophical) conceptions of ‘evil’ retreating into the confines of the last vestiges of religiosity, new perceptions of threat, risk and insecurity were culturally mediated, and funnelled into new conceptions of institutionalized, state-led security management.
The question is, whether these modern notions of ‘taming the future’ and the post-Napoleonic developments towards national security states have indeed caused the discourse of evil to wither away, or whether this discourse has continued to smolder underneath and is still erupts and flares up in times of crisis and uncertainty? In short, to what extent has the rise of the national security state affected culturally mediated and imagined conceptions of threat, menace, and evil?

Day 2, Friday 22th of January 2021

9.30-10.30 Keynote dr. Debra Benita Shaw (University of East London)
Leaving Home: Safer Spaces Beyond the Neoliberal Family

The Covid-19 pandemic has seen a rise in cases of domestic abuse worldwide. In the UK, the Guardian reported that, by mid-April, domestic abuse killings had already doubled and, in the same week, the government acknowledged the increase and published updated guidance for victims suffering as a result of the lockdown. For many, most of them women, the UK government’s instruction to ‘#StayAtHome and stay safe’ is, potentially, a death sentence.
This paper will examine the history of the home as an assumed place of refuge in the context of urban and suburban architecture which both assumes and discursively constructs the contemporary neoliberal family. I want to challenge the determination of the home as a place of safety and interrogate its connection to subject formation. I am interested in how the concept of ‘home’ invokes ideas that conflate specific understandings of corporeality with raced and gendered ideals of social structure and how these are expressed through the built environment. My question will be whether the vulnerabilities exposed by Covid-19 might open a space for imagining safer spaces beyond the neoliberal family and its association with a highly circumscribed idea of what it means to be ‘home’.

10.30-11.30 Session 5 – Places and spaces of safety

Dr. Muzayin Nazaruddin (University of Tartu)
Contesting the ‘disaster prone area’: the case of local communities on the slopes of Mt. Merapi, Indonesia

Prof. dr. Sigrid Ruby (Justus-Liebig-Universitaet Giessen)
Domesticity and domestication as politics of safety

Roos van Strien (Independent scholar) 
Brace for Impact: how perceptions of safety influenced architecture and urban planning in the cities Belfast and Oslo

11.30-11.45 Coffee/tea break

11.45-12.45 Session 6 – Feeling safe: the impact of media

Dr. Jaqueline Hylkema (Leiden University)
Lyes in Print: Fake News and a Sense of Unsafety in Early Modern Europe

Nicolas de Keyser (University of Gießen) 
The Chronotopes of (In)Security in Crime-Appeal Television

Daniel Michaud Maturana (UcLouvain)
News, quantifiers and the perception of safety

Dr. Elizabeth Parke (University of Toronto)
Filming Safety: Dashcams, Cars, and the Sinosphere

12.45-14.00 Lunch break

14.00-15.00 Session 7 – Experiencing safety

Dr. Marieke Borren (Open University) 
The Color of Safety. Racializations of Lived Embodied Experiences of Un/Safety of Public Spaces

Dr. Bianca Briciu (Saint Paul University, Ottawa)
I See It So That You Don’t Have To: Safety, Compassion and Vicarious Trauma in Films about War Correspondents

Dr. Frederik van Dam (Radboud University Nijmegen)
Safety as Nostalgia: Literary Representations of the European Question in Interwar Fiction

Dr. Femke Kok (Open University)
Feelings of being (un)safe. A philosophical exploration of feelings of unsafety in the work of Magda Szabó (1917-2007)

15.00-16.00 Session 8 – Representations of safety in word and image

Dr. Lizet Duyvendak (Open University)
Art works performing unsafety: Tumbling into someone else’s life?

Dr. Frauke Laarmann-Westdijk (Open University)
The Image of the Hangman

Dr. Erik Swart (Justus-Liebig-University, Gießen) 
The massacre of the innocents. The imagination of unsafety during wartime in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European painting

Dr. Karen Westphal Eriksen (The National Gallery of Denmark )
Portraying the feeling of being unsafe in art by Svend Wiig Hansen and Dan Sterup Hansen

16.00–16.15 Coffee/tea break

16.15-17.15 Keynote prof. dr. Nils Büttner (State Academy of Arts Stuttgart)
The „Golden Age“ Revisited: Images and Notions of Safety from Insecure Times

The 17th century is considered the "Golden Age" of Dutch art. It was a time of cultural boom, that was fostered by the European courts and the bourgeois elites of Europe. However, it is also a period marked by political and economic transformations, but above all of wars and violent conflicts. During this time a structure of legal norms and state borders developed that are still effective today. The roots of today's Europe lie in that period. At that time, also the foundations of the still effective visualizations and pictorial imaginations of safety and political iconography were laid. The painter Peter Paul Rubens made a significant contribution to this, whom the Dutch diplomat Constantijn Huygens considered to be the most important Netherlandish painter of his time. Rubens experienced the war himself, the devastation of which also affected his estate in Ekeren. In allegorical pictures he dealt with war and peace, gave visual expression to the hopes for safety for the ceremonial entry of the new governor, but also depicted everyday life in times of war. Thus he entered into a pictorial dialogue with Dutch pictures of his time. Based on the life and work of the painter and diplomat Rubens, the paper will focus on Netherlandish art and the visual discourses which developed the still prevalent European pictorial cosmos of safety in those uncertain times.

17.15 -17.30 Closing remarks by Prof. dr. Gemma Blok, head of research faculty of humanities Open University