NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY:
University of Arizona
April 6-9, 2006



CALL FOR PAPERS:
The 2006 New Directions in Critical Theory Conference, an interdisciplinary
graduate student forum at the University of Arizona, will focus on tensions
between local identities within global contexts. This conference will address
the crisis of how ?local? identities must act in ?global? frameworks,
and the ways that global frameworks in turn reflect and shape conceptions of
local identities. Concepts of local identity such as ?nation,?
?culture,? and ?language? are complicated by geo-political issues such
as globalism and global capitalism. Individuals do not adhere to discrete
categories of one culture, one nation, or one ideological framework. While
subjects may still be defined by a local or global identity, they are also now
subject to one that is ?glocal?--a hybrid identity that speaks to a complex
interconnectedness of both global and local identities. This is a particular
concern in border states and towns that must negotiate the immediate local
needs of a diverse community of Caucasian Americans, Native Americans, Mexican
Americans, and Mexicans, as well as the formation of a national identity that
works to define and thereby exclude for economical and political reasons.


Glocal identity does not go unchallenged; groups fight for local identities and
effectively tribalize knowledge and access to knowledge while the pressure to
act within larger contexts constantly weighs on people. This tension can be
found not only in the aforementioned identity and world politics, but also in
the academy itself, where academic tribalism comes into conflict with more
global interactions within the university (crossing disciplinary boundaries in
favor
of interdisciplinarity). This leaves us to question how identity, discipline,
and politics can be defined as both local and global, and how these relate to a
hybrid glocal approach.


An address by Lauren Berlant: Lauren Berlant, Professor of English at The
University of Chicago will open this event. Professor Berlant, is a
distinguished scholar who explores questions of nationhood, citizenship and
gender. Her work complicates these issues by relating concepts of citizenship
to class mobility, national and ethnic patriotism, constructions of family,
consumerism, gender, and sexuality. In her scholarship and publications
Professor Berlant exposes the multiple intersections between these facets of
citizenship that shape how American culture perceives and constructs boundaries
and borders, both physical and symbolic. Her recent publications include, Author
of the National Fantasy, The Queen of American Goes to Washington City: Essays
on Sex and Citizenship, and The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of
Sentimentality in American Culture.


We invite graduate students from any discipline to present
theoretically-oriented scholarship that investigates the social formation and
maintenance of local/tribal identities, global contexts, and the possibility of
hybrid glocal identities, and in doing so, question the tensions between these
forms of interaction and possible rewards attained from not merely crossing the
border, but from redefining and reconceptualizing definitions of citizenship
and nationhood. We would also welcome interdisciplinary work that crosses
disciplinary borders to create new knowledge within a glocal university context
(such as papers, film, artwork, installation projects, and so on).


Possible Topics:


Global/Local Politics
Postcolonialism
Language and discrimination
Language and racism
Language policy and planning
Tourism/Travel Writing/Advertising
Architecture/Geography
History/Autobiography
Memory and Identity
National/Cultural/Racial/Sexual/Gendered/Class Identity
Hybridity and Identity
Hybridity and Embodiment
Borders of the Human
Peripheral Zones/Contact Zones
The Rhetoric of Borders, Territories, Frontiers
Barriers/Communities/Home
Space/Mobility/Displacement
Immigration/Alienation
Othering
Borders and Criminality
Borders in Film and Literature
Science and Technology Studies
Virtual Borders
Borders and Boundaries in Cyberspace
Popular Culture/High Culture
Consumerism, Media and Identity
Sex and Economy
Violence and Desire
Heterinormativity/Homosexuality/Transsexuality
Feminist Theory and Queer Theory
Critical Race Theory
Spirituality and Subjectivity
Texts, Bodies and Spectacle
Bodies of/and Knowledge
Diversity, Similarity and the Academy
Translation/Appropriation/Adaptation
Teaching and Service Learning
The Academy and Activism


Please submit 100-250 word individual abstracts or panel proposals, comprised of
a 100-250 word abstract for the entire panel and one 100-250 abstract for each
paper. Include names, email address, mailing addresses, institutional
affiliations, technology requests, paper titles, and abstracts by February 1st
2006 to:


Meg Smith Hallak (Department of English) or Erica Reynolds Clayton (Department
of English)
Modern Languages Building, Room 445
University of Arizona
Tucson, Arizona 85721
(520) 621-1836
ndconf_at_email.arizona.edu


If you should have any questions or concerns, please contact Meg Smith Hallak at
ndconf_at_email.arizona.edu.


-----------------
New Directions in Critical Theory
University of Arizona
ndconf_at_email.arizona.edu

Intersections 2006: A Graduate Student Creative Conference
Call For Proposals (CFP)


CFP DEADLINE: Friday, January 20th, 2006


Hosted by the students of the Joint Graduate Programme in
Communication and Culture
York University and Ryerson University
Toronto, Canada
March 24-26, 2006



EMERGING SPACES, TRANSFORMING SCAPES


We invite all interested graduate students to join us for our 5th
annual Intersections weekend Creative Conference. This year we are
especially interested in discussing the significance of both new and
established scapes, and their relationships with and connections to
imagined and physical spaces. Edges, nodes, networks, overflows,
streams: the way we imagine our world is changing. We are at a point
where it is important to reflect upon and consider older
connectivities established through non-electronic media, while at the
same time considering the potentials of new media through emerging
communication technologies. Bodies, commodities, ideas, and
technologies follow an exploding number of conduits between the local
and the global, around, through, and behind nations and
institutions.


The 2006 Intersections Conference will be the 5th annual event organized by
the York/Ryerson joint Programme in Communication and Culture. After last
year's successful conference concerning themes of HYBRID ENTITIES,
which analyzed haphazard links, mongrel formations, and mutant
compositions, we are now interested in submissions that explore
intersections where steps and solutions can be actively followed in
attempts to answer the many questions that arise when we try to create
and influence the direction of Communications and Culture. The
conference will investigate the following new spaces and modes of
movement: How and by who are these flows, networks, and disjunctures
created? By what paths do we move/think through them? Where is power,
and how does it move? Do borders, edges, and in-between spaces exist?
What happens here? Is social change or even directionality possible
within a fluid and shifting environment? What metaphors and tools can
we use to conceptualize the world and the future? What potential
exists for scapes of resistance, or opportunities to challenge present
boundaries and structures? What can we learn from the past? How can
we imagine new social formations, solidarity, and subjects positions
in the 21st Century?


Open to all graduate students, this interdisciplinary conference
welcomes submissions that take up these themes either through an
academic paper presentation, an artistic expression, or an activist
agenda. Details on subtopics and submission procedures follow below.
We encourage all interested activists and scholars to participate and
to come celebrate the Fifth Anniversary of the Intersections
Conference!!


*******************************
SUBTOPICS AND THEMES


Invited submissions include papers, artwork and activist presentations
that relate to the following broad themes:


1) Media and Culture
Topics could include (but are not limited to) cultural consumption and
production, cultures of cities, space and place, depictions of
ability/disability, media democracy, media studies, popular and visual
culture, subjectivity, representations of
class/ethnicity/gender/race/sexualities, semiotics and linguistics.


2) Technology in Practice
Submissions in this category might address (but are not limited to)
questions regarding technology's emergent role in theoretical and
practical debates surrounding art, authenticity, and aesthetics,
negotiations of accessibility and identity, race and gender,
explorations in the concepts of the cyborg, the post-human, and
technoculture. Also, issues of how the Internet and network society
is reconfiguring social formations and subject positions will be
considered as a part of this category.


3) Politics and Policy
Potential areas of focus could include (but are not limited to)
accessibility, citizenship, communication policy, copyright and
intellectual property, cultural policy, deliberations about
communication and culture and the public sphere, globalization, media
ownership in Canada, questions of structure, power and agency, privacy
and surveillance, sovereignty, and strategies of resistance.



SUBMISSION FORMAT/DEADLINES


As an expanded event, this year EMERGING SPACES will include the
following formats for disseminating and discussing ideas.


1) Paper presentations
- 15 min. presentation of an academic paper with time for discussion
to follow


2) Creative work with artist's talk
- Artwork/media for exhibition, accompanied by artist talk during
conference


3) Poster session (with possible roundtable discussion)
- Presentation of materials in a poster and/or table display with
discussant. If enough interest, these displays may be followed by a
roundtable discussion.


Although these formats are tailored to accommodate academic papers,
artwork and activist contributions respectively, all participants are
encouraged to apply for whatever format is most interesting or
appropriate for your submission.


All interested participants are asked to submit a textual abstract or
artist's statement explaining the proposed presentation in light of
the conference themes, and indicate which of the above three formats
the presentation would take.


Abstract or statement should be no more than 250 words (approx. 1
typewritten page, double spaced) and submitted via email as an
attachment in .TXT, .RTF, or Microsoft Word format.


Name and contact information should not appear on this page. Please
include a separate page with the following information:


1. Title of presentation as it appears on the abstract or statement
2. Name
3. Affiliation (program and university)
4. Level and year of study (ex. Master's, 2nd year)
5. Phone number
6. E-mail address
7. Mailing address
8. A/V requirements (computer/projector, film projector, VCR, stereo,
turntables, etc.)
9. Other requirements (table, easel, hooks, display materials). If
you have exceptional requirements for your work, please contact us to
discuss feasibility.


Artists are also asked to submit a small sample of their work for
adjudication, by either email or post.


If sending creative works by email, please submit up to 10 jpegs sized
to display onscreen or a multimedia clip with cumulative attachment
size of 5mb or less. You may also direct us to an URL. Please number
the pieces and put viewing instructions, comments and titles in your
email if applicable.


If submitting creative works by post, please mail the proposal well
before the deadline with a self-addressed, stamped envelope for return
to the following address:


Intersections, c/o Graduate Communication and Culture
3068 TEL Building, York University
4700 Keele St. Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3


You may send a CD, DVD, cued video or other multimedia, the duration
of which does not exceed 10 minutes. Alternatively, you may send up to
10 slides or printouts of work, illustrations or diagrams. Please
include a slide or media list with title, size, media, and date, and
viewing instructions for your work if applicable. Please do not send
original work.


Deadline: FRIDAY, JANUARY 20th, 2006.


Please e-mail inquiries and submissions to: intersec_at_ryerson.ca


CFP available online: http://www.yorku.ca/cocugsa/conference.html


Presented by the Communication and Culture Graduate Students
Association (GSA): http://www.yorku.ca/cocugsa


For more information about the Joint Programme in Communication and
Culture: http://www.yorku.ca/comcult/

Saturday, March 25 - Sunday, March 26, 2006
Department of English
University of South Carolina, Columbia (USA)

ATTENTION
If you used the Submit Abstracts page prior to November 30 and received an error message, then we did not receive it. Please send your abstract again to ensure that we have your submission.

Call for Papers:
The Twentieth century witnessed enormous shifts in patterns of mobility and the meanings bound up with “moving”–shifts that went hand in hand with new definitions and associations for “stasis.” These changes were bound up with a range of social factors: the massive expansion of industrial capitalism, the growth of the modern city, new communication systems, etc. The changes gave rise to intense artistic debates about the value of a new, highly mechanized, and often urban, mobility on one hand, and an older, rural conception of organic communities and stasis on the other.

Working within the modern city, therefore, Walter Benjamin divides street walkers into two categories: the “flâneur” who meanders aimlessly and the “pilgrim” who seeks a destination. These same ideas, in a broader sense, have dominated the works of writers, poets, essayists, sociologists, filmmakers, musicians, politicians, and others as they sought to represent the city and the road as a means of answering questions about human identity. Artists, such as Joyce, Cela, and DeLillo, to name a few, have explored ideas of mobility within cities while Steinbeck, Dennis Hopper, and Baudrillard have similarly created an aesthetic of travel. Meanwhile, this mobile century saw widespread migrations, such as rural African Americans to Northern cities, rural Spaniards to Madrid, and other movements towards wartime and post-war industrial opportunity. Contrarily, artists, such as Kerouac and Picasso see the city as that which dwarfs and thwarts autonomy as it reflects, in the words of Alfred Kazin, the “trauma of modern man.”

Following the success of the previous two years’ conferences, we invite papers that not only examine and build upon these issues, but encourage the analysis and exploration of multiple types of literature such as hypertext, film, art, and music, in addition to poetry and fiction. We strongly encourage cross-genre discussions.

Topics may include, but certainly are not limited to: environmental literature
migration, miscegenation, hybridity
the postcolonial, or “imagined” city
community versus individuality/alienation
the romanticization of the American West
communities in exile
the road-buddy film or song
mapping the postmodern city
the hobo or vagabond as hero
urban and rural responses to war, terrorism and dictatorship
the city or the road as sexual landscape
travel literature
flâneurship
Blues music and mobility, Jazz music and the city
the city as destroyer
religious and spiritual journeys
existential ideas of the city and the road
wilderness versus civilization
Joyce’s Dublin, Cela’s Madrid, Dos Passos’ Manhattan
immigration and assimilation
historicizing the modernist city
the loss of rural space
racial/ethnic and environment
relationship of gender to travel and/or stasis
urban vs. rural communities



Information on our Keynote addresses:

Professor Gordon Ball – Virginia Military Institute
Gordon Ball, Professor of English and Fine Arts at the Virginia Military Institute, is a renowned independent film maker, photographer, and scholar on the Beat Generation and film. Ball was a close friend of Allen Ginsberg, about whom he has written extensively, and has edited two volumes of Ginsberg’s journals, including Journals: Early Fifties, Early Sixties (1977). His book Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness (1974) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Ball has also published a memoir titled 66 Frames (1999) and a book of prose poetry. Ball earned his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Professor Priscilla Wald – Duke University
An internationally respected critic and scholar, Priscilla Wald is Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Duke University. In addition to her notable work on Theodore Dreiser, Wald employs an interdisciplinary approach to analyze popular media as a site for a socially constructed vision of science. The author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (1995), Wald is also the Associate Editor of American Literature, and serves on the editorial board of Literature and Medicine. She is a member of PMLA’s advisory board. Wald earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University.

The deadline for submission is Friday, January 6, 2006.

Hosted by the Deanery of Humanities and organised by the Narrated Spaces Research Group
Liverpool Hope University
Liverpool, 29th-30th June 2006


Plenary speakers to be confirmed.

Is the 'global' city an age-old historical phenomenon associated with economic, cultural, and imperial power (Rome, Athens, Beijing, Istanbul), or a consequence of the industrial revolution? Is it a product of the media age or a continuation of the power and influence of the imperial metropolis? In the nineteenth and for much of the twentieth century it would have been claimed as a Western imperialist phenomenon (London, Paris, New York) or cities and countries that consciously emulated western imperialism (Tokyo). This conception -- if ever actually true -- certainly cannot be supported today. The European and north American cities now vie with the booming cities of Asian Tigers (Mumbai, Shanghia, Seoul), and the great developing cities (Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Bah?Blanca, Lagos), as well as regional expressions like the 'Pacific Rim' cities.


What is the essence of the 'global' city and how has it been represented? Is it a modern phenomenon or an ancient practice? How do we define global -- is globalism a consequence of mass urbanisation or does globalisation create the conditions for the emergence of the global city. How do the global cities of the twentieth century resemble or differ in form and function those of the past and, based on present trends, the future? In the 21st century more people than even will be living in urban environments: 'Over the next thirty years, the world's urban population could double from 2.6 billion in 1995 to 5.2 billion in 2025. Most of this growth will take place in developing countries, where some 4 billion people (over half of the total) could be living in cities by 2025, compared with 1.5 billion (37%) in the early 1990s' (Andrieu 1999). How will this impact on how we imagine the city and issues of migration, diaspora, and existing geopolitical inequalities -- not all global c!
ities are equal in these terms. What have been and will be the consequence of such global economic and technological inequalities?


This conference is intended to encourage interdisciplinary exchange on the representation, cultures, histories, experience, planning, and articulation of global cities. By interrogating the vocabularies that have arisen in several disciplines which might include in addition to the term 'global city', 'global village', 'megacities', 'cosmopolis', imperial metropolis', 'world cities', 'sprawl', 'postmetropolis', etc., the conference will bring together debates over images, narratives, economics, planning and, above all, experience, of the 'global' city. Papers are sought from any relevant discipline in the humanities, social sciences, architecture, urban planning, and beyond.


We will be actively pursuing various publishing outputs related to the conference.


Abstracts of 200 words for 20-minute papers by 28th February 2006 to: phillil_at_hope.ac.uk or the postal address below.


Proposals for panels of three speakers are also welcome.


Dr Lawrence Phillips,
Global Cities Conference
Humanities Deanery
Liverpool Hope University
Hope Park
Liverpool
L16 9JD
Telephone: +44 0151 291 3560
FAX +44 0151 291 3160
E-mail: phillil_at_hope.ac.uk


Dr Lawrence Phillips,
Award Director MA Humanities,
Programme Leader BA English,
Editor, Literary London Journal,
Secretary UK Network For Modern Fiction Studies,
Department of English,
Liverpool Hope University,
Hope Park,
Liverpool,
L16 9JD
UK


Tel. 0151 2913560
Web. http://www.literarylondon.org
http://www.uk-fiction-network.org/