CFP: 2010 Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, “Obsolescence”

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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: “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.

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

CFP: 3rd Annual UC Davis Queer Studies Graduate Symposium “Queer Mobility, Queer Citizenship”

3rd Annual UC Davis Queer Studies Graduate Symposium
“Queer Mobility, Queer Citizenship”
University of California, Davis
May 29, 2009

Recent queer scholarship reflects an investment in studies of
transnationalism and a concern with questions of mobility and citizenship.
Scholarship within the growing field of transnational queer studies, as
exemplified in works such as Social Text’s 2005 special issue “What’s Queer
about Queer Studies Now” and GLQ’s 2008 special issue “Queer/Migrations,”
investigates the imbrications of gender and sexuality with racial, national,
and diasporic formations; circuits of travel, migration, and displacement;
and immigration, asylum, and citizenship policies. To interrogate discourses
of sexuality, desire, and political change within the current phase of
globalization, transnational queer studies requires attention to the ways in
which constructions of sexuality are linked to the movements of bodies,
ideas, and capital as well as to local, regional, and global systems of
inclusion and exclusion. This conference emerges at a moment in which
technologies of war and information simultaneously transcend and reinscribe
modern boundaries of time and space. Therefore, we invite conversations
around how queer modes of mobility and citizenship may be at once complicit
with and disruptive of the temporal, spatial, and affective logics of
nation-states, economic formations, and liberal personhood.

What does the study of mobility and citizenship offer queer scholarship? Who
is denied or granted access to various forms of mobility? How is that
access/denial contingent upon and constitutive of one’s citizenship status?
When and how are non-normative genders and non-reproductive desires in
synchrony with the state and when do they expose the fissures,
inconsistencies, and ambivalences of the state? Is queerness compatible with
the pursuit of liberal citizenship and is queer citizenship possible? How
does a focus on mobility and citizenship further demonstrate the necessity
of interrogating the racial, class, and gendered formations inherent in
discourses of sexuality? How can considerations of different scales of
mobility and forms of embodiment bring together studies of sexuality,
dis/ability, and citizenship? How are metaphors of mobility (coming out,
“fluid” identities, access) central to queerness? What are the links between
citizenship and in/voluntary modes of travel, im/migration, and
displacement?  How is the production of modern citizen-subjects embedded in
histories of colonialism, war, and empire-making, and what is particular
about the role of mobility in the construction of queer subjectivities? How
does queer fail or succeed as a transnational and translatable concept,
identity or politic?

We invite scholarship from a broad range of disciplines, especially
interdisciplinary work in queer theory and transgender theory. We especially
encourage work that critically engages mutually constitutive articulations
of race, class, sexuality, ability, gender, citizenship, religion, and
nationality. Papers engaging activism and community organizing are also
encouraged. For information on past symposium please visit
www.queersymposium.org.

Please send 250-500 word abstracts to queersymposium2009(AT)gmail.com by March
15, 2009.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
-Histories of queerness mobility and citizenship
-Gay/lesbian tourism and travel
-Immigration and asylum law
-Technology / digital and virtual spaces
-”Global Gay” / the gay international
-Embodiment/Disability Studies
-Queerness and mobile capital
-Border crossing and borderlands
-Violence, war, and the State
-Immobility/Stasis
-Local and regional belonging
-Temporal mobility, temporal belonging
-Affective and cultural citizenship
-Homonormativity, neoliberalism and mobile citizenship

Third Annual Graduate Conference in Comparative Studies-Ohio State University

*Third Annual Graduate Student Conference in Comparative Studies*

Hosted by the Department of Comparative Studies

http://comparativestudies.osu.edu

The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH USA

16 January 2009

*The Body in Pain and Pleasure*

As our lives are increasingly characterized by disembodied and mediated experiences, how is it that the individual comes to know pain and pleasure? For the person in pain, Elaine Scarry famously argues, “‘having pain’ may come to be thought of as the most vibrant example of what it is to ‘have
certainty,’ while … hearing about pain may exist as the primary model of what it is ‘to have doubt.’” In other words, she argues that certainty is contingent upon the experiential reality of the body. Though Scarry is specifically addressing pain in the context of torture here, this same logic might be extended to pleasure – that to ‘have certainty’ of pleasure necessitates embodied experience.  In terms of seeking certainty, Aristotle noted in *Nicomachean Ethics* “bodily pleasures are pursued by people who are incapable of experiencing other pleasures.”  In an age, however, when individuals are increasingly divorced from their bodies, how are pain and pleasure known or understood?

To this end, we are seeking graduate student papers that look to address the body in pain and pleasure from a variety of (inter)disciplinary perspectives. We welcome projects that consider the following topics or others, as they illuminate our inquiry:

·         Biopolitics and governmentality
·         History and historiography
·         Nation, state, and nation-state
·         Religion
·         Art, film, and literature
·         Theatre and dance
·         Popular culture
·         Pornography and erotica
·         Trauma
·         The family
·         Psychoanalysis
·         Gender and sexuality
·         Substance and substance abuse
·         Terror and terrorism
·         Crises and disasters
·         Performance
·         Philosophy and ethics
·         BDSM
·         Environmentalism
·         Technology
·         Race
·         Illness, medicine, and death
·         Justice and the law
·         Sport and exercise

Please send 250-word abstracts for individual 20-minute papers (or panels of 3-4 presenters) to compstudiesconference@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is November 10th, 2008.  Accepted applicants will be notified by November 30th.  In the body of the e-mail, please include the following information:

Presenter(s) name(s):
Institutional affiliation(s):
Level of graduate study:
Title of paper:
Contact information:

CFP Released

The CFP for the 3rd annual Midwest Interdisiplinary Graduate Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has been released and is available on our site by clicking on the CFP link.

Submission deadline is November 1, 2008.

Welcome to the MIGC blogsite

We are pleased to announce  The fourth annual Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee titled, “Faking It! Production, Knowledge, Authenticity,” a graduate student conference to be held February 20-22, 2009, in conjunction with the Center for 21st Century Studies and its 2007-09 research theme “Past Knowing.” The CFP will be posted in one week and at that time we will begin accepting submissions through November 1, 2008.