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

PROGRAM

DAY 1 (January 21st)

9.20-9.45
Welcome & Opening by prof. dr. Thomas Vaessens, dean of the faculty of Humanities at 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

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 (Indian Institute of Technology, Bhilai)
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 (Radboud 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

DAY 2 (January 22nd)

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

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

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