Fail Worse: Rethinking Narrative Redemption in Failure Studies

An international symposium on non-redemptive failure across the humanities and social sciences, held at the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts&Humanities Research Institute, Trinity College Dublin.

Symposium schedule

Day 1 (Thursday, 29 May)

9:00 Opening remarks (Debbie Lisle, Krzysztof Rowiński, Nicholas Johnson)

9:30 – 11:00 Panel 1
Eva Kenny, A Fetish for Failure
Aoife O'Donoghue (Queen’s University Belfast) and Ruth Houghton (Newcastle University), Failing Upwards: Utopias & International Law
Rebecca Carr (Trinity College Dublin), American Nightmare? Failing the American Dream in Death of a Salesman and The Brutalist As Considered Through American Dreams: Lost and Found

11:00 – 11:15 Coffee break

11:15 – 12:45 Panel 2
Jonathan Heron (University of Warwick), ‘This is the worst’: the problem of failure in higher education
Nathaniel Coleman (Newcastle University), Failure is a different kind of success
Maša Mrovlje (University of Leeds), “Fail Better”: Utopia, Rosa Luxemburg, and Learning from Failure

2:00- 3:45 Panel 3
Judy Thorne (Manchester University), Self-work after epochal failure: utopian despair and anti-individualism in the dying days of the Greek 2010s
Heather Johnson (Queen’s University Belfast), When Migration Fails
Esmé DeCoster (Trinity College Dublin), Waiting for…failure? On the performance of waiting’s role in resistance
Marten Weise (Humboldt University of Berlin), Feathered Failure: On Surrender, Alterity, and the Limits of Literary Form in Henry Michaux’s Un certain Plume

3:45 – 4:00 Coffee break

4:00 – 5:00 Long Table event

Day 2 (Friday, 30 May)

10:15 – 10:30 Half-way responding remarks (Rafael Mendes Silva, Trinity College Dublin)

10:30 – 12:00 Panel 4
Adriana Mica (University of Warsaw), Mikołaj Pawlak (University of Warsaw) and Paweł Kubicki (SGH Warsaw School of Economics), Obsessed with Failure: The Irrational Philosophy of Policymaking
Sara Jane Bailes (Sussex University), Catastrophic Embodiment in Performance
Ramona Mosse (Zurich University of the Arts), Scales of Failure – Performing the Failure to Act
panel co-organized with the Failure Lab, University of Warsaw

1:00 - 2:30 Panel 5

Andy Carolin (University of Johannesburg), Failure as/in the Queer Bildungsroman
Juan Nicolás Galindo Mantilla (Trinity College Dublin), Who Killed the Author? Or, Birth of the Reader
Susan McManus (Queen’s University Belfast), ‘To live … is to fail’ (Gillian Rose): Failure, the Reparable and the Irreparable

2:30 Concluding remarks (Debbie Lisle, Krzysztof Rowiński, Nicholas Johnson)

This project has received funding from the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute, Trinity College Dublin through the Research Incentive Scheme. We have also received generous support from the School of Creative Arts and School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, Trinity College Dublin.