Powers of Love: Enchantment to Disaffection, fifth PARSE biennial research conference.

The fifth PARSE biennial research conference from 15–17 November, 2023 at the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, University of Gothenburg, Sweden will explore the scope of love in its meanings and manifestations. From its occidental institutionalisation to its transformative potential as expressed in wider cultural contexts, the conference will engage with modes of art making, literary practices and scholarship with a focus on love as enchantment, as an entangled power in politics, as friendship, as eros, as intimacy, as queer potentiality and as disaffection. The powers of love have transformative affective registers in labour, learning collectives, economies of humanitariansim, ecosophy and ecosexuality yet within the powers of love also persists the sediments of historical, contextual, institutional and discursive formations. Love is arguably indispensable for human and planetary survival, and yet universalizing narratives of the intersubjective, immanence, communal harmony, and mastery of the earth may be seen to propose an all-encompassing narcissism.