Hello all - first off we would like to apologise for the silence post-conference. It especially seems to jar with the fact that we have been very vocal about our desire to continue the blog and the online community inspired by this conference after the event itself.
However, the best laid plans and all that: graduation ceremonies, other commitments, and (best of all) holidays have kept all three conference organisers hopping over the last month, and we have not even had an opportunity to properly compose our own thoughts about the conference itself. However, the impressions it left were unforgettable.
Which leads to the second point: thank you. We want to thank our fabulous conference keynote speakers - Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Margrit Shildrick, and Peter Hutchings - for their outstanding contributions. If you were unable to attend, we regret that we can only give a hazy impression of the inspiring dialogue that took place between Rosemarie and Margrit on Day 1 of the conference, through both their keynotes and the questions that followed, which was regarded by many participants as one of the highlights of the day. However, we are incredibly fortunate that Jeffrey has posted a version of the paper which grew from his paper on zombie aesthetics, Grey (A Zombie Ecology) on his website In The Middle (he also wrote some lovely comments about the conference and his time in Edinburgh here). We highly recommend that you check it out.
Finally, we would like to thank all of our truly fantastic participants, those who gave papers and those who didn't, who were both equally a part of the conversation that took place throughout both days. You made your way from Europe, North America, andAustralia, to face weather which was, even for Edinburgh, pretty atrocious. Despite jet-lagged and waterlogged brains you delivered insightful papers and asked difficult questions and inspired discussion that was challenging, intense, and brilliant, and for that we cannot thank you enough. If you will be so patient as to accept our belated thoughts and thanks, and to wait just a little bit longer for information about the next stage of the Sensualising Deformity experience, we look forward to continuing that generous conversation and we hope that you do, too.
That reminds me - if you attended the conference and have written a post on your blog or website (or would like to) with reflections on the event, keynotes, panels, or general discussion, we would love to be able to share that with everyone! I know some people already have posted links on the Facebook group, and we will be setting up links on the blog as well to those posts, but if there are more please do let us know and we'll include them.
Thank you all again,
Ally, Maja, and Karin
