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Exploring Moral Interfaces:

Private Worlds and Public Systems


An International Conference organized by The English and Foreign Languages University
7th to 9th October, 2015
Everyone deserves a private life, says the female protagonist in the 1994 movie, Three Colors:
Red by Krzysztof Kielowski. The intrusive nature of the modern technologies that facilitate
accesswithout consent or acknowledgementto the private domains of peoples 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 persons privacy? And how do we historicize the private and the private individual?
To what extent can a persons 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-regulationin 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
developmentssay humanism or individualismand 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

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