Below you find suggestions for themed meetings, in which the idea is that several participants contribute with minor talks, reflections, ideas. The discussion is to be explorative and open, talking about issues that cannot necessarily be solved once and for all, but where the idea is that by sharing our experiences and talking about them, we’ll be better equipped to deal with them individually.
So far the themes are merely suggestions. We will only have meetings around themes that have received at least 4 suggested contributions.
I will continuously add suggested contributions in the last column.
Please suggest contributions
So, if you would like to contribute to one or several of the themes below, send an email to Ejvind Hansen (link). I will mainly need your expression of interest; of course if you are ready to put a headline on your approach too, that would of course also be great — but not necessary.
Notice, that for those of you who have suggested the themes, I do not take for granted that you would like to contribute. So if you do, tell me 🙂
Deadline: January, 16 2026
| Theme/headline | Theme motivation | Submitted contribution |
|---|---|---|
| The significance of silence beyond an acoustic imaginary: conceptualising the multi-modality of silence | In essence I have I sympathy to the attempts to think about silence in fairly literal/acoustic terms but it would be interesting to have a more concerted effort to thematise the role silence plays politically beyond it being a literal/audible lack of sound – am thinking of Ferguson’s/Vieira/Freeden’s reflections on how thinking about silence politically does not mean reducing silence to the literal absence of noise. | Björn PuhrI would like to do a minor contribution on the topic of multimodality, with a view to how silence in sensory perception plays a role in sensemaking.Ejvind HansenThe silence in what is said |
| Silence and the Limits of Negativity | Linked to Jung’s earlier presentation that talked about the relation between silence and negativity studies – I think there is more that can said on this, especially from a post-structural/post foundational standpoint. | |
| Silence and the politics of comparison and scale: translating silence across frameworks, disciplines and context | This is an idea stemming from the book exchange with Freeden/Vieira; silence studies is faced by the dilemma of being very acutely focused on context and thereby challenged b the ability of specific studies of silence to find common framework/languages beyond said context by which there can be a more generalised approach to silence – a reflection on the implications of this would be good. | |
| How to analyse silence in interviews | I am currently coding and analyzing my interview data and while silence is one of the main focal points, I was wondering how I could analyze the data to better focus and then theorize on it. So, I was thinking maybe there could be a discussion session where people talk about their own interview analysis strategies? | |
| Silence and change | Silence and change haunts me because of the ambiguous effects of silence on political change. On the one hand, powerful political agents may deliberately silence issues in order to preserve their hegemonic arguments. On the other hand, this silencing may be interpreted by actors as a void which allows for discursive interventions – breaking the silence. | Bernhard Stahl,Ejvind HansenSilence as what makes power possible. And thus also can challenge hegemonies |
| Breaking the silence | Breaking the silence often comes across as intentional moves of idealistic mindes actors, e.g. to break the silence on a country’s colonial past. Yet is there more about it – in particular, if we assume ‘order of silences’? | Bernhard Stahl, Barbora ÄŒapinská, Elisabeth Schweiger |
| Silence and oppression | A themed meeting around the topic of silence and oppression would be interesting, so the ways in which silence is embedded within systems of exclusion. Questions of how different forms of oppression depend on silences and create silences, but how silence can also be a way to resist oppression. | Barbora Čapinská, Bernhard Stahl, Elisabeth Schweiger |
| The many faces of silence | A meeting where we bring together all perspectives on silence, to get an overview and understand where these differences come from (the ontological bases, disciplines, or other). | Barbora Čapinská, Bernhard Stahl, Ejvind HansenSilence between the words |
| Silence in multilogues | Silence in multilogues, in group discussions or decisionmaking. Why people stay silent and do not object, do not argue for their standpoint. This topic could also be centred around silencing the self. Or, an alternative perspective on the same problem could be: staying silent when observing violence against others in a group (in physical or online conversations). | Barbora Čapinská, Bernhard Stahl |
| Silence that speaks | Silence is often understood in opposition to communicative actions. But silence is often also eloquent or meaningful. What forms of eloquent silence are significant for communicative exchanges? | Lukas MozdeikaWill present several kinds of silence from cinema historyEjvind HansenI will discuss how words in language are products of silence |
| Methodologies for silence research | Essentially, silence research is challenged by having to analyse what is not there. I think it could be illuminating to hear about all the various ways in which members of the network tackle this challenge. How do you make silence sufficiently “vissible” to be methodologically analysed? | Ejvind HansenHeideggerian typologies in looking out for silence in discourse |