CFP: Deadline extended for “Obsolescence” at UW-Milwaukee

Deadline extended to October 15, 2009

Please distribute widely

The fifth annual Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee seeks submissions for “Obsolescence,” a graduate student conference to be held February 12-14, 2010, in conjunction with the Center for 21st Century Studies and its research theme for 2009-2011: “Figuring Place and Time.”

This year’s theme calls upon scholars to interpret and consider variously the notion of “obsolescence.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary Online, obsolescence derives from the classical Latin obsolescere: “to fall into disuse, fade away, sink into obscurity.” Obsolescence thus presents a sense of expiration or decay, it represents some act, object or idea that is out of its own time. In contemporary life we hear much of technologies and their life-spans, often in terms of the fast-capitalist invention of “planned obsolescence.” Public life is also informed by the mainstream media’s focus on the immediate present or future; we are perpetually asking or being asked: what’s hot?—who’s now?—what’s next?

Given these observations, we are interested in exploring the theoretical, historico-cultural and political ramifications of identifying an act, object or idea as “obsolete.” However, we also wish to engage the concept of “obsolescence” as an active state of being, as a performative, as indicative of political value. We aim to engage in a multi-day, interdisciplinary exploration of persistent tensions within the concept of obsolescence as well as in its obverse—utility. In doing so, we expect to question the economic, political and cultural implications of temporality as tied to objects and media and to interrogate the assumption that value is inherently contingent on usability.

Submissions that explore “Obsolescence” from a diverse range of fields and disciplines are encouraged. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
* Desire, Nostalgia and the Fetishization of Obsolescent Media (vinyl, Viewfinders, pre-digital cameras,
typewriters, Stereo 8, the retro gaming movement )
* Storage and Transmission of the Past (packrats and hoarders, archives, museums, cemeteries)
* Discourses of Marketing: the new and improved, the upgrade
* Obsolescence and Fashion, Style, Mode
* Cultural Panic and Obsolescence: Y2K, Digital Amnesia, Future Shock, the Digital Dark Age, “Digital
Natives”
* Planned Obsolescence and Disruptive Technologies
* Transitional Places and Non-Places (airports, dead malls, junkyards, antique stores, the Atari Landfill)
* The “post” label (concepts of a post-racial America, post-modernism, post-gay, post-feminism, post-colonialism)
* Traditionalist Notions, Practices, and Spaces of Academic Study; the Tenure-Track academic
* Aesthetics and Un-useful Objects (knick-knacks, bric-a-brac, novelty stores, gift shops)
* Obsolescence and Ecology, Extinction and Conservation

This year’s keynote address will be presented by Matt Coolidge, founder and director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation.
Please submit a 250 word abstract, with title, for a 15-20 minute presentation as an MS Word file attachment (.doc or .docx) to: grad-conference@uwm.edu. Panel proposals for 75 minute sessions will also be considered (comprised of three presentations); please submit an abstract for each presenter and indicate that you are proposing a panel. Deadline for Submissions: October 15, 2009

CFP: 2010 Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, “Obsolescence”

Please distribute widely

The fifth annual Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee seeks submissions for “Obsolescence,” a graduate student conference to be held February 12-14, 2010, in conjunction with the Center for 21st Century Studies and its research theme for 2009-2011: “Figuring Place and Time.”

This year’s theme calls upon scholars to interpret and consider variously the notion of “obsolescence.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary Online, obsolescence derives from the classical Latin obsolescere: “to fall into disuse, fade away, sink into obscurity.” Obsolescence thus presents a sense of expiration or decay, it represents some act, object or idea that is out of its own time. In contemporary life we hear much of technologies and their life-spans, often in terms of the fast-capitalist invention of “planned obsolescence.” Public life is also informed by the mainstream media’s focus on the immediate present or future; we are perpetually asking or being asked: what’s hot?—who’s now?—what’s next?

Given these observations, we are interested in exploring the theoretical, historico-cultural and political ramifications of identifying an act, object or idea as “obsolete.” However, we also wish to engage the concept of “obsolescence” as an active state of being, as a performative, as indicative of political value. We aim to engage in a multi-day, interdisciplinary exploration of persistent tensions within the concept of obsolescence as well as in its obverse—utility. In doing so, we expect to question the economic, political and cultural implications of temporality as tied to objects and media and to interrogate the assumption that value is inherently contingent on usability.

Submissions that explore “Obsolescence” from a diverse range of fields and disciplines are encouraged. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
* Desire, Nostalgia and the Fetishization of Obsolescent Media (vinyl, Viewfinders, pre-digital cameras,
typewriters, Stereo 8, the retro gaming movement )
* Storage and Transmission of the Past (packrats and hoarders, archives, museums, cemeteries)
* Discourses of Marketing: the new and improved, the upgrade
* Obsolescence and Fashion, Style, Mode
* Cultural Panic and Obsolescence: Y2K, Digital Amnesia, Future Shock, the Digital Dark Age, “Digital
Natives”
* Planned Obsolescence and Disruptive Technologies
* Transitional Places and Non-Places (airports, dead malls, junkyards, antique stores, the Atari Landfill)
* The “post” label (concepts of a post-racial America, post-modernism, post-gay, post-feminism, post-colonialism)
* Traditionalist Notions, Practices, and Spaces of Academic Study; the Tenure-Track academic
* Aesthetics and Un-useful Objects (knick-knacks, bric-a-brac, novelty stores, gift shops)
* Obsolescence and Ecology, Extinction and Conservation

This year’s keynote address will be presented by Matt Coolidge, founder and director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation.
Please submit a 250 word abstract, with title, for a 15-20 minute presentation as an MS Word file attachment (.doc or .docx) to: grad-conference@uwm.edu. Panel proposals for 75 minute sessions will also be considered (comprised of three presentations); please submit an abstract for each presenter and indicate that you are proposing a panel. Deadline for Submissions: October 1, 2009

For more information, visit our website at: http://pw.english.uwm.edu/~migc

CFP: Queertopia! 2.0 Graduate Student Conference, Northwestern University

Call For Papers
Queer Pride Graduate Student Association
Northwestern University

We invite graduate students and advanced undergrads in all academic
disciplines to present their original research at Queertopia! 2.0 Graduate Student Conference to be held at Center on Halsted on Saturday, May 2. While we welcome submissions on all aspects of queer studies, we are particularly interested in submissions related to this year’s theme of (Re)Imagining Communit(ies).

Queer scholars have long recognized that there is no single gay community, but rather multiple overlapping communities comprised of people with multiple identities. We want to move beyond that, to interrogate how we can use our theoretical knowledge to understand our communities and lived
experiences.

Possible questions may include: In a shifting political landscape that
focuses less on a splintering of identity and more on community, how does the queer community and identity politics fit in? How do our multiple individual identities affect our constructions of different communities in which we claim membership? Once we’ve identified as queer, how do redefine ourselves in other communities? How do social constructions of sexuality affect our constructions of a queer community? How are stereotypes used by others and by us to define a queer community?

Proposed panels include, but are not limited to: bridging academe and
activism in queer studies; law, community, and queer studies; and gender variance and political-economy in the global south.

We invite paper abstracts of 500 words or less. In addition to submitting abstracts of individual research, we also invite students to submit proposals for panels. Interested parties should submit a title for the panel, description of the panel, abstracts of 4-5 papers to be presented, and contact information for a panel moderator/respondent and all paper presenters.

Please send an abstract, along with your contact information (name,
university, email address, and phone number), to ,queertopia.nu@gmail.com. We will begin reviewing abstracts as submitted on a rolling basis, with a final submission deadline of March 6, 2009. We will inform submitters of panel placements by March 23, 2009. We may be able to offer travel scholarships to presenters. Preference will be given to presenters travelling farther and those who do not have access to department, or other funds.

Please circulate this announcement to all those who may be interested.

CFP: Liminal Literature: Borders and Genre, Madison Conference in Language and Literature (MADLIT)

CALL FOR PAPERS:

“Liminal Literature: Borders and Genre”

University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madison Conference in Language and Literature (MADLIT)
English Dept. Graduate Student Conference
February 26-28, 2009

The fifth annual University of Wisconsin-Madison Literature Conference (MadLit) invites paper and panel proposals for this year’s topic, “Liminal Literature: Borders and Genre.”

The goal of this conference is to interrogate and critique the role of borders in literary and cultural studies. We invite papers that consider the idea of the border from formal, social, temporal, and/or geographic perspectives. Borders inform the way we think about genre, periodization, gender, race, nationality, geographies, disciplines, and social forms, but how do we account for things that cross, defy, or problematize borders—the liminal, the hybrid, the transgressive? How do troubling texts break down, reinforce, or reform borders?

Keynote Speaker: David Wittenberg

This year’s keynote speaker will be David Wittenberg, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Philosophy, Revision, Critique: Rereading Practices in Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Emerson (Stanford University Press, 2001). His research and teaching interests include 19th and 20th century literary theory and philosophy, American literature, architectural design and theory, and cultural studies. He is simultaneously working on two new book projects. The first is about the history and theory of time travel narratives, tentatively entitled Time Travel: The Philosophy of Popular Culture; it analyzes works from modernist and postmodernist literature, popular fiction and film, physics, historiography, and psychology. The second book project, cautiously entitled Big Culture, is a critique of very large objects and images in contemporary culture and space, as well as a theory of the aesthetics of quantity; it explores such sizeable phenomena as skyscrapers, Hollywood films, philosophical systems, disasters, pop stars, military machines, and Las Vegas hotels.

We seek proposals for 15-20 min. presentations and three-person panels on any aspect of the way borders affect genre, periodization, geographies, disciplines, gender, and material culture:

➢ What texts (or even authors) have been marginalized, overlooked, or (mis)interpreted because they exist at a threshold—generic, temporal, geographic, etc.? What texts have benefited from this status?
➢ How are generic categories formed—or deformed?
➢ What are the consequences of texts that exist between genres or on the threshold of genres?
➢ What are the consequences or limits of categorization? Are categories—generic, historical, material, economic, racial, etc.—productive?
➢ What kinds of borders (regional, gender, race, period, nationality, economic, disciplinary, etc.) influence generic borders?
➢ Are genres transhistorical? Are genders transhistorical? Are spaces transhistorical?
➢ What does transhistorical research reveal? What does it suggest about the limitations of periodization?
➢ What does it mean to be trans-gendered?
➢ How does one define places in relation to each other or in isolation? Can places—or spaces—exist without borders? Is the presence of borders all that is necessary to turn a space into a place?
➢ How do texts—or objects within texts—cross borders, and what implications do these crossing have?
➢ What are the consequences of analytical approaches that cross disciplinary borders? What are the benefits of problematizing disciplinary borders within the humanities?

Please submit a 250-word abstract to Eric Vivier by January 23, 2009. We will announce accepted papers by January 31.

CFP: “Bodies in Motion” The University of Rhode Island’s Third Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference Saturday, March 28th, 2009

“Bodies in Motion” The University of Rhode Island’s Third Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference
Saturday, March 28th, 2009
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Stuart Pimm, Professor of Conservation cology, Duke University
Extended Submission Deadline: Sunday, February 1, 2009

Across academic disciplines, “bodies” — animal, epistemological, textual, or otherwise — defy singular definition and elude our efforts to pin them down. As they parallel, intersect, and inform one another, these “bodies” demand rigorous research, creative thinking, and ever-evolving methodologies. How do we account for these “bodies in motion” and the complex ecologies of knowledge that they form? From what critical perspectives — scientific, mathematic, literary, historical, political, rhetorical, ethical, philosophical — can we examine these “bodies” in order to learn from them and from others? The graduate community at the University of Rhode Island invites submissions for posters, papers, presentations, performances and panels from a variety of disciplines exploring “bodies in motion.”

Dr. Stuart L. Pimm is Duke University’s Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology and the 2006 winner of the Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences. Dr. Pimm’s work focuses on maintaining global biological diversity. His commitment to environmental and species preservation has brought him to Washington D.C., where he testified before both the House’s and Senate’s Committee on the Reauthorization of the Endangered Species Act. He is a founder of SavingSpecies.org, an NGO working toward species preservation and carbon neutrality, and a member of National Geographic’s grant-awarding Committee for Research and Exploration. Bridging the divides between science, sociology, and anthropology, Dr. Pimm’s methods involve working directly with indigenous populations to help flora and fauna survive while maintaining local traditions. His books include World According to Pimm: A Scientist Audits the Earth, The Balance of Nature?: Ecological Issues in the Conservation of Species and Communities, and Food Webs.

Possible topics and areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Theorizing the body or bodies
• Bodies and environmental crisis
• The legal body
• Economic bodies
• Political bodies
• Bodies and health care
• Biotechnology and ethics of the body
• Bodies in literature
• Bodies in the digital age
• Migration, displacement, and/or diasporas
• Mass media and the global image of bodies
• Bodies as machines/Machines as bodies
• The aesthetics of movement
• Bodies and the flow of technology
• Artistic interpretations of the body

Submission Guidelines:
Please propose individual papers or panels and indicate whether you are willing to moderate a panel. Panels of 3-4 presentations are especially welcome.

To propose a paper, submit a cover page with your name; institutional affiliation; contact information (mailing address, phone number, and email); a 250-word abstract of the paper; a roughly 100-word bio; and a detailed request for audiovisual equipment (if needed). Presentations will be limited to fifteen minutes (about seven double-spaced pages).

To propose a panel, submit a cover page including the title of the panel and the names of presenters; a panel abstract of 150-250 words; a separate page with the names of presenters, their contact information (mailing address, phone number, and email) and institutional affiliation(s), the titles of their presentations; and a 250-word abstract for each paper. Panels will be one hour and fifteen minutes long.

The conference committee requests the submission of materials in the body of an email or as an attachment in a Word, text, or PDF document. All submissions should be emailed to Gradcon at URI. Please refer any questions you may have to this address as well. Notification of acceptance will be by Friday, February 7, 2009.

Memoir or Fiction? Oprah, Rosenblat, and An Angel at the Fence

From the Stranger/SLOG

Oprah Picks Another Winner

Posted by Paul Constant on Sun, Dec 28 at 10:08 AM

You were very nearly subject to a mass-media assault (glowing news stories, Oprah-approved bliss, an inevitable movie adaptation) regarding a new memoir, out in February, called An Angel at the Fence. It was a memoir by a man who says he met the love of his life during the Holocaust. Oprah loved the fuck out of this book and was going to no doubt push it to the top of the bestseller lists..

It’s a fake
.

The publisher of a disputed Holocaust memoir has canceled the book, adding the name Herman Rosenblat to an increasingly long list of literary fakers and ending with a heartbreaking crash his story _ embraced by Oprah Winfrey among others _ of meeting his future wife at a concentration camp.”I wanted to bring happiness to people,” Rosenblat said in a statement issued Saturday through his agent, Andrea Hurst. “I brought hope to a lot of people. My motivation was to make good in this world.”

Rosenblat’s “Angel at the Fence” had been scheduled to come out in February, but Berkley Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA), withdrew the memoir following allegations by scholars, friends and family members that his tale was untrue.

“Berkley Books is canceling publication of `Angel at the Fence’ after receiving new information from Herman Rosenblat’s agent, Andrea Hurst,” the publisher said in a statement. “Berkley will demand that the author and the agent return all money that they have received for this work.”

Posing as a Bidder, Utah Student Disrupts Government Auction of 150,000 Acres of Wilderness for Oil & Gas Drilling

from democracynow.org

Posing as a Bidder, Utah Student Disrupts Government Auction of 150,000 Acres of Wilderness for Oil & Gas Drilling

Decristopherweb In a national broadcast exclusive, University of Utah student Tim DeChristopher explains how he “bought” 22,000 acres of land in an attempt to save the property from drilling. The sale had been strongly opposed by many environmental groups. Stephen Bloch of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance said, “This is the fire sale, the Bush administration’s last great gift to the oil and gas industry.”

Read rush transcript here

CFP: Deadline Alert! Northwestern University Graduate Student Conference, “Radical Intersections: Performance Across Disciplines”

*CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS
**Radical Intersections: Performance Across Disciplines
An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student*

Submission Deadline:December 7, 2008
Conference Dates: April 24-26, 2009

Northwestern University’s Department of Performance Studies invites
proposals from graduate students whose research uses performance as theory,
method, or praxis to join us for panel presentations, performances, and
sustained dialogue. We also encourage proposals from graduate students from
across the social sciences and humanities whose research concerns cultural
performances, performance events, or performativity in everyday life.

Radical Intersections aims to interrogate junctures at which dissimilar ways
of being, doing, and thinking rub against one another. Such junctures have
the potential to disturb foundational concepts and disciplinary assumptions.
As Dwight Conquergood wrote, “Our radical move is to turn, and return,
insistently, to the crossroads.” With performance theory gaining currency in
a variety of disciplines, and performance studies itself interdisciplinary
in its subjects, methods, and analytics, performance scholars often inhabit
such crossroads. Graduate students, as the next generation of the academy,
would do well to pause at our present junctures and explore possible
directions. What choices do performance studies scholars face today, and
where should our scholarship go from here?

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
• How do collaborations of performance studies with particular disciplines,
sites, or public conversations provoke “radical” scholarship?
• Figuring the human body as a complex and dynamic site of radical
intersections of race, class, gender, sex, and sexuality;
• Queer bodies and queer spaces; communicating “trans” movements,
ontologies, and aesthetics;
• Going public: taking scholarship into the public, into pedagogy, and
translating scholarship into performance;
• Taking up space: finding, creating, and claiming space for our work;
• Collisions and collaborations of performance studies with cultural
studies, anthropology, theatre studies, ethnography, media studies, studies
of embodiment, and other fields;
• Making the comfortable uncomfortable: controversial subject matter, acts
of remembering, and using the body to enact scholarship and analyze culture;
• Creating rigorous scholarship while working from a place of feeling and
affect;
• “Performance anxiety” both within and out the discipline over
performance’s applications, its institutionalization, and its radical
potential;
• In a discipline that resists strict definition, where do our tensions lie?
What prevents us from doing particular kinds of work?

We welcome competitive proposals for individual papers as well as panels not
exceeding four presenters. Please submit a 300-400 word abstract and a short
CV or bio to Radical Intersections by Dec 7. (Proposals
for panels should include individual and panel abstracts.) Notices of
acceptance will be sent in mid-January.

CFP: McGill-Queens Graduate Student Conference in History

McGill-Queen’s Graduate Student Conference in History
13-14 March 2009, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

The Departments of History at Queen’s University and McGill University invite proposals for the sixth annual McGill-Queen’s Student Conference in History. The intention of the conference is to bring together Masters and Doctoral students working in a wide variety of fields in order to foster discussion in an interdisciplinary and bilingual environment. We encourage submissions from students working in all historical periods and geographical areas. The theme of the conference is ‘Forward Through the Rearview Mirror? Re-assessing History as a Medium.’

Our keynote speaker will be Dr. A.B. McKillop, Chancellor’s Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Carleton University. He is the author of several books on cultural and intellectual history, including A Disciplined Intelligence: Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian Era, The Spinster and the Prophet: Florence Deeks, H.G. Wells, and the Mystery of the Purloined Past, and Pierre Berton: A Biography. His talk, entitled ‘Engaging History: Historians, Storytelling, and Self,’ deals with the oldest form of history as medium—storytelling and historians’ relationship to it.

Proposals must not exceed 500 words, be accompanied by a short biographical statement, and include a phone number through which potential presenters may be contacted by the conference committee. Proposals may be submitted in either French or English. The deadline for submissions is December 7th, 2008. Those submitting proposals are encouraged to suggest possible themes for conference panels, and indicate whether they are interested in chairing panels.

Please send proposals via email (*.rtf; *.doc; or *.wpd) to Us . Or via post to:

McGill-Queen’s Graduate Student Conference in History
Queen’s University, Department of History,
49 Bader Lane
John Watson Hall, rm. 212
Kingston, ON, K7L 3N6
Fax: 613-533-6298

As we are interested in exploring the nature, variety, complexity, and relevance of contemporary historical practice, we encourage a broad interpretation of the conference theme from a variety of fields and backgrounds. Possibilities include (but are by no means limited to):

Gender and Sexuality
Social History
Cultural and Intellectual History
The History of Medicine
Postcolonial History
Political History
Indigenous Peoples and Cultures
The History of Childhood, Youth, and Adolescence
Historiography and Historical Method
Labour History
The History of Science and Technology
Public Memory
Educational History
The History of the Body
Military History
Environmental History
Legal History

CFP: 7th Annual Wayne State University Graduate Student Conference, “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall,” Interdisciplinary Approaches to Reflections

Call for Papers
7th Annual Graduate Student Conference

Theme: “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall” - Interdisciplinary Approaches to Reflections

Sponsored by the Classical and Modern Languages Graduate Forum
Wayne State University
Department of Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Conference Date:
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Submission Deadline for Abstracts:
Friday, January 16, 2009

When contemplating ourselves in a mirror we are confronted with our physical appearance. Although the mirror doesn’t lie, it doesn’t show us the entire picture either. Often how we feel about our appearance is predicated on how we perceive ourselves, and how others perceive us. Metaphorically, mirrors are not just objects of vanity but help us gain perspective, which we otherwise are not in a position to see. A mirror can only reflect an image, our face, our hands, our smile: but how do we perceive our internal countenance, our values, our fears, our memories? What tools do we use to perceive less concrete things such as culture, history and gender? How does language reflect our individually and collectively perceived reality? How do our experiences color our vision?
………………………………………………
Abstracts for 20 minute papers are welcome, and might include but are not limited to the following topics:

* defining and perceiving gender, historical, national/ethnic, linguistic identity *ideal vs. real identity *the individual as a reflection of a larger community *the psychological self *perceptions of beauty and cultural aesthetics *translation *historical perceptions and modern realities *mirror/illusion imagery in literature *the arts of reflecting/portraying the individual in film and the visual arts *reflections of space and “other” realities *reflections of genre

Submission Criteria
1. Abstracts and papers must be in English.
2. Abstracts must not exceed 200 words.
3. Abstracts must contain the following information: name of presenter, affiliation and status, mailing address, e-mail address, title of paper.
4. Presentation time limit 20 minutes (8 page maximum).

For further information and submissions, contact Sasha Pákh-Kelly here , or submit abstracts to http://www.linglist.org/confcustom/gsc7_wsu