Lecture by Ken Plummer: Re-imagining Intimate Citizenship in a Troubled World

CIRFASE and the TransNorm project are happy to invite you to the lecture

"Re-imagining Intimate Citizenship in a Troubled World"

by Prof. Ken Plummer (University of Essex)

Thursday, 26.04.2018.

19h30, Auditoire Montesquieu 01

Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), Louvain-la-Neuve

We have a great honor of hosting Ken Plummer, an internationally renowned scholar of social interaction and human sexuality, at Université catholique de Louvain on 26 April 2018.

Professor Plummer will deliver a lecture titled "Re-imagining Intimate Citizenship in a Troubled World" at Auditoire Montesquieu 01 starting at 19h30 on Thursday 26 April 2018. The abstract of the lecture and Ken Plummer's biographical note are posted below.

The lecture is open to the public, but the registration is mandatory.

This lecture will start off an international conference "The Political in the Personal: Families and Sexualities in Times of Social Change in Europe" organized by the Interdisciplinary Research Center on Families and Sexualities (CIRFASE). The conference is also open to the public.

For further information and registration, please, visit https://sites.uclouvain.be/conference-politicalpersonal/

"Re-imagining Intimate Citizenship in a Troubled World"

The idea of Intimate Citizenship is now over a quarter of a century old. Examining the ‘rights‘, ‘duties’ and ‘choices’ we confront around changing intimacies, the idea highlights the contradictions and dialogues between the personal and the political. Here, I will return to some of these ‘old’ debates, reviewing the key questions that were then posed and tracing some of the ways it has been developed. But a quarter of a century ago is a long time ago, indeed a generation ago. Things have moved on. Surveying briefly some of the many major world changes that have been happening, I will suggest that new crises bring new challenges. The body of my talk will look at the ways we should rethink ideas of Intimate Citizenship for new times. Drawing on Critical Humanism and ideas of Cosmopolitan Sexualities, Generational Sexualities, Narrative Hope and Social Imaginaries, I will raise new possibilities for thinking about social justice, human flourishing and the layers of our belonging and caring for each other in troubled global times.

Ken Plummer is Emeritus Professor in the Sociology Department at the University of Essex where he taught and researched between 1975 and 2005. In 1996, he became the founder editor of the journal Sexualities. His earliest research, starting with Sexual Stigma(1975) and The Making of the Modern Homosexual (1981) was concerned with helping to develop a theoretical orientation for the then emerging lesbian, gay and queer studies. In follow up work on sexual diversities, he championed the use of life story research in sociology and the importance of studying sexual stories, published in Documents of Life, 1983 (2nd ed. 2001) and Telling Sexual Stories(1995). His recent work takes a more explicitly political and critical turn with Intimate Citizenship (2003) and Cosmopolitan Sexualities(2015). He retired early because of ill health. He has always identified with symbolic interactionism; but these days calls himself a critical humanist. Forthcoming books are Narrative Power: Creating Human Stories for a Sustainable World (2018) and Critical Humanism: A Manifesto for Human Flourishing (2019).