Conference Streams & Details

Academic Streams

• Control-Security — Examining security as a form of biopower over life in the twenty-first century, spanning cyber security, food security, and contemporary security formations.
• Additional streams were added as they were accepted, with stream organizers including Adam Bencard, Brad Evans, Elisabeth Friis, Dehlia Hannah, Stefan Helgesson, Tora Holmberg, Caroline Holmqvist, and Jens Hauser.

Venue

The conference took place in the Geoscience building at Stockholm University's Frescati Campus, located within the world's first national city park. The Aula Magna served as the setting for introductory sessions and keynote lectures.

Organizing Team

• Site Chair: Frida Beckman, Department of English, Stockholm University
• Conference Assistant: Pernilla Jansson
• Contact: info@control2016.com

Registration

Registration for this event closed prior to the conference. The event took place as scheduled on June 14–17, 2016.

The conference theme of control speaks to a fundamental tension in contemporary life — the desire to shape outcomes and the simultaneous resistance to being shaped by forces beyond our reach. Scholars gathered to examine how control manifests across different scales, from the intimate regulation of individual bodies to the vast architectures of state power and global systems. The discussions traced the lines where agency meets constraint, where freedom encounters structure, and where the will to govern runs up against the unpredictable complexity of living processes.

Literature, science, and the arts each offer distinct yet complementary lenses for understanding how control operates in culture and society. Literary narratives reveal the psychological and emotional textures of power relations, scientific inquiry maps the mechanisms of regulation in biological and technological domains, and artistic practice exposes the aesthetics and ideologies embedded in systems of command. At the intersection of these disciplines, new questions emerge about who holds authority and how that authority is enacted, challenged, or subverted.

Stockholm provided a resonant setting for these conversations, a city where Nordic traditions of social democracy and transparency coexist with the pressures of globalisation and technological change. The Frescati Campus of Stockholm University, with its blend of modernist architecture and natural landscape, offered a space conducive to both formal presentation and informal exchange. Participants moved between lecture halls and open courtyards, carrying the dialogue from structured panels into the shared rhythms of conference life.

The biennial gathering of the European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts has long served as a forum where disciplinary boundaries become porous and productive. Rather than treating the humanities and sciences as separate domains, the society fosters encounters that reveal their mutual entanglement. Conversations about biopolitics, security, and systemic control unfolded not in isolation but in dialogue, with speakers and audience members alike contributing perspectives that crossed the usual lines between fields of expertise.

Beyond the scheduled program, the conference created space for artistic interventions and exhibitions that made the theme of control tangible in sensory and material forms. These works invited participants to experience rather than simply analyse the dynamics of constraint and resistance, reminding everyone present that control is not only a concept to be debated but a lived condition that shapes bodies, environments, and the possibilities for collective action.