Description

More than ten years have passed since Orna Donath’s article “Regretting Motherhood: A Sociopolitical Analysis” made waves in academic circles and among the broader public. Notably, Donath’s ideas have inspired a number of artistic and creative responses, including literary texts, photographic projects, autobiographical reflections, and performances that engage with maternal regret. It is the value and contribution of these cultural interventions that will be the focus of this conference.  

This conference will feature papers that ask a number of key questions, including the following: How have cultural representations of regret taken the discussion in new directions? Within shifting cultural and media landscapes, what new modes for narrating and depicting regret have emerged? To what extent are cultural explorations of regret inflected by emerging political, cultural, and environmental crises? And what different ways of living with and responding to regret emerge through art and creative work? We hope to find shared areas of interest across and between disciplines. Ultimately, we ask how cultural representations deepen our understanding of the individual and sociopolitical dimensions of regret and drive the debate forward. 

 Keynote speakers: 

• Franziska Burkhardt (Performance artist and photographer, Weimar) 
• Milou Gevers (Director and filmmaker, Amsterdam) 
• Diana Karklin (Photographer and visual artist, Madrid