Showing posts with label Oxford. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oxford. Show all posts

Thursday 30 October 2014

CFP: Telling Tales: Manuscripts, Books and the Making of Narrative

The biennial conference of the Early Book Society 2015

The next biennial conference of the Early Book Society will take place at the University of Oxford, from lunchtime on Thursday 2 July 2015 to early afternoon on Sunday 5 July 2015. Abstracts of 300 words or fewer for 20-minute presentations should be sent to the organizers by 30 November 2014 to the conference e-mail address. Abstracts should include your name, affiliation (where relevant) and email address. Computers and data-projectors will be available for all sessions; speakers would need to bring presentations on a memory stick / USB plug-in device. People who have other AV needs should specify this on their abstract.

The theme, which may be interpreted narrowly or broadly, invites special attention to the material records of different genres of narrative, such as verse, romance, chronicle, biography or history. It might consider the ways that manuscripts, printed books and other media serve a narrative function: whether page layouts were modified for chronicles and annals, whether collections of documents were compiled to tell stories, whether images in books are important components of storytelling, whether poems on monuments recount lives.

The topic also invites participants to tell different kinds of stories about early books. In particular, we may reflect on our storytelling as scholars. What is the role of biography – of the author, of the ‘celebrity’ scribe, of the idiosyncratic reader – in the study of early books? How sure can we be of cause and effect, of chronology and dating, of different kinds of paleographical, codicological and bibliographical evidence, in studying these books? Are history and narrative the best models for ‘book history’ or might studies of manuscript and print serve literary criticism, linguistics or philology in other ways?

Finally, papers which concern books in or around Oxford are also encouraged. But, in general, proposals for papers on any aspect of the history of manuscripts and printed books from 1350 to 1550, including the copying and circulation of models and exemplars, style, illustration, and/or the influence of readers and patrons, artists, scribes, printers, are welcome.

Accommodation and most meals will be available at St Anne’s College, Oxford. Most lectures will take place there too, but part of the conference will take place in the newly renovated Weston Building of the Bodleian Library, which reopens officially in March 2015. There will be ‘masterclasses’ with manuscripts on show, a visit to the exhibition and some optional visits, on a first-come-first-served basis, ‘behind the scenes’ to departments of the library. We are grateful to the Centre for the Study of the Book in the Bodleian for co-hosting the conference and sponsoring these events.

The website with details of registration and accommodation will go live later this winter and will be announced on the EBS listserv, Facebook, and also on the EBS website.

For those making travel plans, there are some preliminary points to bear in mind.

Depending on availability, accommodation might be in St Anne’s or other Colleges for extra nights before or after the conference. Oxford is about an hour from central London by rail. The closest international airport is London Heathrow, and from there and from London Gatwick there is a convenient coach service, The Airline, which can be booked in advance. Birmingham International Airport is also close and has direct train connections to Oxford every half an hour.

People planning to combine the conference with a research trip might be reminded that the Special Collections department at the Bodleian Library and the Colleges’ libraries tend to be busy with visitors in the summer months, so planning is advised, given that dozens of early book enthusiasts will be in town!

Also, Leeds International Medieval Congress begins the day after our conference, on Monday 6 July 2015. Travel from Oxford to Leeds on Sunday evenings takes three and a half hours by rail, direct or with one change, and if booked far enough in advance (up to three months in advance) can cost (at this year’s rates) as little as £45.

Monday 10 December 2012

CFP: 11th Global Conference: Monsters and the Monstrous

Thursday 18th July – Saturday 20th July 2013

Mansfield College, Oxford

Call for Presentations

This inter and trans-disciplinary project examines all things monstrous; whether real or imagined, ideological or cultural, historic or futuristic. Building on the discussion points of the previous meeting, this year’s event will focus upon points of concentration within issues raised at last years events as well as examining certain aspects of the current ubiquity of particular monsters in contemporary popular culture.

Presentations, papers, reports, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:

-Humans as monsters and monsters as humans: Popular media sensationalism and fascination around humans as mass murderers, serial killers and paedophiles (Hitler, Ted Bundy, etc.) and films such as Saw and Hostel where monsters are very much part of our everyday evironment whilst figures such as Dexter and vegetarian vampires, that only kill animals or bad people, are considered heroes.

-The Zombie Apocalypse: the ubiquity of the zombie in popular culture both of what we are now and what we will/might become. As a political, ideological figure but also its continuing humanification in literature and film (Warm Bodies, Breathers, Wasting Away, Zombie Neighbour etc.)

-Contagion, infection and disease: The continual fears around over population, invasion and infection causing, or caused by ecological, biological or technological viruses. Hybridity, mutation and cultural death-drive.

-Translation, appropriation and interpretation: The movement of monsters across time and cultures. How historical monsters have changed in later manifestations and how different cultures view, appropriate and reinterpret monsters from other nations (i.e. vampires moving from Europe to the USA, to Japan and back again).

-Children and monsters: Children as the target of monsters, children and childhood as monstrous. Monstrous babies & births, adults in children’s bodies. Child vampires, zombies, demons and ghosts.

-Possession: The popularity of films and narratives around the theme of possession and mind control and the resultant anxieties over identity and the ‘true’ self. Demon possession, as in Paranormal Activity and The Devil Inside, Compelling, glamouring and mind control, as in Vampire Diaries and True Blood.

-The resurgence of faeries and fairy tales, as seen in series such as True Blood, Once Upon a Time, Grimm and Haven, and how not all monsters are bad or can only exist in relation to a pre-existing script?

-The continuing use of Nazis and Nazism as a short-hand for cultural and ideological monstrosity, as in Frostbite, Dead Snow, Hellboy 1 & 2, Iron Sky.

All of the above can also be considered in relation to, cultural and geographical specificity, gender and sexuality, ethnicity and historical approaches.

What to Send:

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 15th March 2013. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 31st May 2013. Abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords

E-mails should be entitled: Monsters11 Abstract Submission

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication.We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs:

Rob Fisher 

Simon Bacon 

The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume.

For further details of the conference, please click here.

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

CFP: 5th Global Conference: Fashion

Monday 9th September – Thursday 12th September 2013

Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Presentations

Fashion is a statement, a stylised form of expression, which displays and begins to define a person, a place, a class, a time, a religion, a culture, subcultures, and even a nation. This inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary conference seeks to explore the historical, social, economic, political, psychological and artistic phenomenon of fashion, a powerful component of contemporary culture. Fashion lies at the very heart of persons, their sense of identity and the communities in which they live. Individuals emerge as icons of beauty and style; cities are identified as centres of fashion; the business of fashion is a billions of dollar per annum global industry, employing millions of people. The project will assess the history and meanings of fashion; evaluate its expressions in politics, business, pop culture, the arts, consumer culture, and social media; determine its effect on gender, sexuality, class, race, age, nation and other sources of identity; and explore future directions and trends.

Building on the foundations of previous meetings, publications and collaborations, the conference will be structured around 5 main areas of focus. Each area will have the opportunity to enjoy specific as well as whole group sessions. Papers, presentations, demonstrations and workshops are invited on the following themes:

1. Understanding Fashion

- Fashion, Style, Taste-Making, and Chic
- Fashion and Fashionability
- Fashion and Zeitgeist
- History of Fashion
- The Future of Fashion

2. Learning and Fashion

- Tools and Methodology
- Theorizing Fashion: Disciplines and Perspectives
- Fashion Education and Fashion Studies
- Identifying, Defining and Refining Concept(e.g., ‘style,’ ‘fashion,’ ‘look,’ ‘fad,’ ‘trend,’ ‘in & out’)
- Studying and Documenting Fashion (curatorial practice, collections, archives, and museums)
- Fashion Specialists (e.g., pattern makers, fitters, embroiders, tailors, textile experts)
- The Materials of Fashion

3. Representing and Disseminating Fashion

- Fashion Icons
- Designer and Muses
- Stylists
- Style Guides and Makeover Shows
- Fashion Photography
- Fashion Magazines, Blogs, and Social Media
- Films and Documentaries about Fashion
- Fashion and the Performing Arts, Music and Television
- Celebrities as Fashion Designers

4. Identity and Fashion

- Fashion and Identity (e.g., class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, nation, transnationalism, religion, etc.)
- Fashion: (Sub)Cultures
- Fashion, Politics, and Ideology: e.g., ‘message’ fashion; political platform, regimes, and revolutions)
- Ethical Issues in Fashion (e.g., cruelty free fashion, eco-fashion, exploitative labour, the ‘fakes’ market)
- Fashion as Performance
- Fashion, the Body, and Self-Fashioning (e.g., beauty standards, body art, weight, plastic surgery, etc.)

5. The Business of Fashion

- Fashion Professions and Trades
- Fashion Cities, Fashion Weeks, Fashion’s Night Out
- Fashion Marketing (e.g., brands, flagship stores, guerilla stores, eCommerce)
- Fashion Models
- Fashion Forecasting
- Marketing Platforms (e.g., communication, streaming video, social media, etc.)
- Fashion Markets: Vintage, Nostalgia, Mass, Luxury, Emerging
- Producing Displaying Fashion (production sites, showrooms, runways, window displays, websites, etc.)
- The Rise of the Accessory as a Driving Force of Fashion

The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals.

What to Send:

300 word abstracts are due by Friday 15th February 2013. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 21st June 2013. Emails containing the abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords

E-mails should be entitled: FASHION5 Abstract Submission.

Please Note: In this email please attach TWO versions of your abstract as follows:

1) One with title and body of abstract only (no identification of the author—this version will be for our blind peer review process).

2) The other with the following information about the author(s): affiliation, email, title of abstract, title and body of abstract.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs:

Jacque Lynn Foltyn 

Dr Rob Fisher 

The conference is part of the Critical Issues series of research projects. The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume.

For further details of the conference, please click here

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

CFP: 3rd Global Conference: Re-framing Punishment and the Body

Sunday 1st September – Tuesday 3rd September 2013

Mansfield College, Oxford

Call for Presentations

What is Punishment? Is it about hurting the body? Or is it about pleasure? Or is it neither? There are those who argue that punishment is a mechanism for controlling deviance and deterring crime. Others argue that it is a method that balances the scales of justice. While still others argue that it is a form of controlling behaviour and an expression of power. Accordingly research today is often focused on punishment in terms of offenders, the offence, the state and legal codification. Yet in the 19th century the French sociologist Durkheim maintained that rituals of punishment were not necessarily concerned with the criminal. He argued that punishment involved reordering or making amends for a situation in a way that demonstrated group norm and strengthened moral boundaries – it rebuilt solidarity and social order. More recently Smith (2008) argued that ‘punishment is an activity and communicative process involving the sending and receiving of messages, ambiguity or the analysis of multiple and intersecting, complex and layered systems of meaning’. Overall this suggests that the concept of Punishment is a meaningful site of contestation. Therefore the aim of the project is to develop different ways of understanding the complexity of punishment and/or the body from a variety of perspectives, approaches and practitioner experiences. We encourage unique approaches to punishment in terms of the body and boundary control, whether it is control of evil, the politically subversive, the economically disruptive, or punishment in pursuit of system stability or marginalisation of the liminal. Papers might also consider the operation and consequences of wrongdoing and various forms of societal/social punishment. Accordingly the project welcomes papers, work-in-progress and pre-formed panels from diverse areas of academic study, as well as practitioners. Papers, presentations, reports and workshops are invited, but not limited to, issues broadly related to any of the following themes:

-Changing notions of punishment over time or in particular spaces
-Punishment issues relating to defining the contours of disgust, desire, dread, or the abject
-Body horror and forms of Punishment
-Desire and Punishment (addiction, BDSM, modification, fashion)
-Punishment and its relationship with Pain, Fear and Death
-Punishment, Ritual and Religion/spirituality
-Punishment and Strategies of Control /Order in everyday life or business
-Punishment, War, Enforcement, Education and/or the Family
-Literature, Art, Popular culture and Punishment
-Cultural approaches to punishment
-Abuses of Punishment

What to Send:

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 22nd March 2013. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 21st June 2013. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 key words. E-mails should be entitled: PUNISH3 Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Joint Organising Chairs:

Shona Hill and Shilinka Smith 

Rob Fisher 

The conference is part of the Probing the Boundaries series of research projects. The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume.

For further details of the conference, please click here

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

Thursday 1 November 2012

CFP: 6th Global Conference: Diasporas

Saturday 6th July–Monday 8th July 2013

Mansfield College, Oxford

Call for Presentations:

This inter- and multi-disciplinary project seeks to explore the contemporary experience of Diasporas – communities who conceive of themselves as a national, ethnic, linguistic or other form of cultural and political construction of collective membership living outside of their ‘home lands.’ Diaspora is a concept which is far from being definitional. Despite problems and limitations in terminology, this notion may be defined with issues attached to it for a more complete understanding. Such a term which may have its roots in Greek, is used customarily to apply to a historical phenomenon that has now passed to a period that usually supposes that diasporans are those who are settled forever in a country other than the one in which they were born and thus this term loses its dimension of irreversibility and of exile.

In order to increase our understanding of Diasporas and their impact on both the receiving countries and their respective homes left behind, key issues will be addressed related to Diaspora cultural expression and interests. In addition, the conference will address the questions: Do Diasporas continue to exist? How do they evolve? What is the footprint or limit of Diaspora? Is the global economy, media and policies sending different messages about diaspora to future generations?

Presentations, papers, performances, workshops, presentations and pre-formed panels are invited on any of the following themes:

Queering Diaspora

Diasporic identities and practices invariably position heterosexuality as central to the past (the imagined homeland) and the future survival of the diasporic community through implicit and explicit norms, traditions, and expectations. How do members of diasporic communities who identify with subordinated forms of sexuality such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered or other queer identities negotiate hetero-normativity in their communities? Do questions of diasporic cultural and social survival heighten homophobia? Or conversely, are diasporic spaces more easily queered? We welcome papers that address how LGBTQ members negotiate sexuality and diasporic identities, and consider the implications for intersectional theories of diaspora.

Diaspora, Sex, and Gender

If heteronormativity can shape diasporic identities, so too can historical norms of patriarchal power and the practices and social infrastructure associated with them. How, for instance, are diasporas and diasporic communities complicit in the general social practices that buttress inequalities or abuses? Do differences between sexes produce different perspectives on what constitutes diasporic identity? Does this disparity result in the co-existence of competing diasporic identities or ‘imaginaries’ that are tied to sex and gender identity? Or, on the other hand, does diaspora offer opportunities for change or for alternate social performances of sex and gender to arise? Does the distance between the home/land left behind and the new home offer an opportunity to break with the past and with tradition? To what extent can we speak of ‘gendered’ diasporas?

Visible Diasporas

Cinema, television, youtube and other mass media, and the visual arts are instrumental in representing diaspora or making diaspora visible both to itself and to others beyond the diasporic community. In then case of cinema, the presence and impact of displaced/globalised populations of audiences, spectators and producers of new mainstream/Hollywood/Bollywood cinema are crucial to the emergence of this post-diasporic cinema, as these narratives from texts to screen constitute a fundamental challenge for the negotiation of complex diasporic issues. How does the visual language of these various media shape or define diaspora? Those presenting on this topic and whose papers focus on cinema and other visual narratives/media are encouraged to show short excerpts or clips from their primary texts or to provide handouts rather than simply to describe the visual media. Long, descriptive summaries of film, for instance, are discouraged.

Invisible Diasporas

While there are multiple ways in which diaspora is made visible, what are the ways in which diasporas are made invisible? How do diasporas escape the attention of, or are actively made invisible by, the global media the collective institutional consciousness of such bodies as state governments and organisations such as the United Nations, etc.? Are these diasporas invisible because of their relatively small size or because they exist within other diasporas or in the shadow of other, larger visible diasporas? Is their invisibilty the result of a lack of awareness or documentation? Ignorance and apathy? Or are they forced into silence and invisibility due to the exigencies of power? That is to say, is their visibility actively repressed? Or do these diasporas engage in making themselves strategically invisible as a kind of self-defensive cloaking or masking mechanism necessary to survival? Do discrimination, assimilationist ideology or other forces ensure that this takes place either actively or passively over the course of time?

e-Diasporas and Technology

Technology has changed the way we think about diaspora. The internet, youtube, email, skype, social media, etc. have produced what has become known as the virtual diaspora and has had a profound effect on the way that diasporic communities interact with ‘home/land’ and each other. When communication can take place in such an immediate way, distances are shrunk and the boundaries between ‘here’ and ‘there’ are problematised or made more porous if not actually erased. Such connectivity only intensifies the interstitiality or cross-border mobility of diasporans who are able to engage virtually in more than one social environment. In a discussion of so-called e-diasporas, questions of access, mobility, connectivity ultimately lead to questions of privilege. Who is able to connect and who is not? And how does technology and the connections it provides allow the diaspora to reshape ‘home’ from a distance and vice versa?

The Limits of Diaspora — Problematising ‘Diaspora’

What are the ‘limits’ of diaspora? What is its ‘footprint’? What are the inter-generational issues that cause diasporas to evolve over time, to move toward or away from assimilation in then mainstream culture of the present home? How and why do diasporas redefine themselves? In what ways does ‘diaporic identity’ perform a gate-keeping function that includes but also excludes? How are diasporic identities contested? What are some of the ways to identity and define the subject in changing political boundaries where cultural interactions are amplified? What are the processes of social formation and reformation of diasporas in an age of increasing globalisation? What are the circumstances that give diasporas a window of opportunity to redefine their social position in both the place of origin and the current place of residence? How do we ‘problematise’ or critique diaspora?

The Evolution of the Critical Language of Diaspora

This topic is related to the previous one but focuses more specifically on the discipline of diaspora studies itself. What new cross-’ethnoscapes’ and cross-’ideoscapes’ are emerging and what new methods can be used to theorise the web of forces that influences Diasporas? Rogers Brubaker posits the current phenomenon of a diaspora ‘diaspora’ or an increasing dispersal of the concept and the ways that diaspora is represented, understood, and theorised. Stéphane Dufoix discusses the need to “go beyond ‘diaspora’ in the same way that Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper have shown it is useful to go beyond ‘identity’” (Diaspora. Berkeley: U of California P, 2008. 108). What is the current state of diaspora studies and what is the trajectory of its evolution? How does globalisation affect the ways in which we understand diaspora? In what ways are the realities of contemporary diasporas posing challenges to the critical language of the discipline? What’s next?

The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Papers will also be considered on any related theme.

What to Send:

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 8th February 2013. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 10th May 2013. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords.

E-mails should be entitled: DIAS6 Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs:

Ram Vemuri and Rob Fisher 

Jonathan Rollins 

The conference is part of the ‘Diversity and Recognition’ series of research projects, which in turn belong to the At the Interface programmes of ID.Net. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference will be published in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into 20-25 page chapters for publication in a themed dialogic ISBN hard copy volume.

For further details of the conference, please click here

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

CFP: 2nd Global Conference: Apocalypse: Imagining the End

Wednesday 10th July–Friday 12th July 2013

Mansfield College, Oxford

Call for Presentations:

From Christian concept of the ‘Apocalypse’ to the Hindu notions of the Kali Yuga, visions of destruction and fantasies of the ‘end times’ have a long history. In the last few years, public media, especially in the West, have been suffused with images of the end times and afterward, from the zombie apocalypse (the AMC series The Walking Dead) to life after the collapse of civilization (the NBC series Revolution.) Several popular television series and video games (Deep Earth Bunker) are now based on preparing for and surviving the end of the world. Once a fringe activity, ‘survivalism’ has gone mainstream, and a growing industry supplies ‘doomsday preppers’ with all they need to the post-apocalyptic chaos. One purpose of the conference is to explore these ideas by situating them in context — psychological, historical, literary, cultural, political, and economic. The second aim of conference is to examine today’s widespread fascination the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic thought, and to understand its rising appeal across broad sections of contemporary society around the world.

This interdisciplinary project welcomes presentations from all disciplines and research areas, including anthropology, psychoanalysis, political economy, psychology, area studies, communal studies, environmental studies, history, sociology, religion, theology, and gender studies.

Presentations,papers, performances, reports, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to (but not limited to) the following themes:

- Decline, Collapse, Decay, Disease, Mass Death
- Survivalism and Doomsday Preppers
- Revolution
- Theories of Social Change
- Peak Oil, Resource Depletion, Global Warming, Economic Collapse
- The Second Coming/Millenarianism/Rapture
- The Hindu Kali Yuga
- Sex and Gender at the End of Time
- Ironic and/or Anti-Apocalyptic Thinking
- Utopia and Dystopia
- Intentional Communities as Communities of the End Times
- Selling the Apocalypse, Commodifying Disaster, and Marketing the End Times
- Death Tourism and Disaster Capitalism
- The Age of Terror
- Zombies, Vampires, and Werewolves in Post-Apocalyptic Fiction
- Disaster Fiction/Movies/Video Games
- History as Apocalypse
- Remembering and Reliving the Collapse of the Western Roman Empire

What to send:

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 8th February 2013. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 10th May 2013. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords.

E-mails should be entitled: Apocalypse2 Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs:

Charles W. Nuckolls 

Rob Fisher 

The conference is part of the ‘Ethos’ series of research projects, which in turn belong to the Critical Issues programmes of ID.Net. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and challenging. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference will be published in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into 20-25 page chapters for publication in a themed dialogic ISBN hard copy volume.

For further details of the conference, please click here

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

CFP: 12th Global Conference: Environmental Justice and Citizenship

Wednesday 10th July–Friday 12th July 2013

Mansfield College, Oxford

Call for Presentations:

This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary conference aims to explore the role of environmental thinking in the context of contemporary society and international affairs, and assess the implications for our understandings of fairness, justice and citizenship. ‘Environmental justice’ is conceived broadly as reflecting not only justice in the context of human communities but also towards other species, ecosystems, habitats, landscapes, succeeding generations and the environment as a whole. ‘Citizenship’ is understood as an awareness of individual’s relative responsibilities in the global context.

Within this framework the 12th Conference of Environmental Justice and Citizenship will explore models, approaches and context necessary to solve the problems impeding environmental justice and living justly. We request contributions which explore technological, political or economic solutions to these problems, or those antecedents, agents, processes and institutions that support development of such solutions. The conference provides opportunities for scholars and practitioners in different disciplines to share examples and proposals for reducing the barriers to environmental justice and citizenship.

Presentations, papers, performances, reports and workshops are invited on any of the following indicative themes:

- Boundaries: reach and limitations of judicial and political systems in contributing to solving problems of environmental justice and citizenship
- Media and knowledge: generating, vetting and disseminating information related to environmental justice and citizenship; sources and channels
- Education: approaches to environmental education
- Hegemony and diversity: resolving problems involving differences in moral and legal frameworks
- Sustainable communities: lessons to be learned from communities that have implemented standards for environmental justice
- Hope: the roles of emotions in shaping behavior and practices; how hope for environmental justice and citizenship develops and is sustained
- Critical thinking: skills, assumptions, perspectives and habits of mind essential to environmental justice and citizenship

Perspectives are sought from all disciplines including:

- The natural and social sciences, and those engaged in actor network theory, agriculture and agricultural economics, the built environment and urban studies, conflict and dispute resolution, critical geography, environmental studies, human and sustainable development, industrial relations, law, philosophy and ethics, political science and international affairs, public policy and politics, sociology and communication of science, theology, cultural studies and anthropology
- People in the public and private sectors who are involved in planning and project development, policy-making and implementation, and negotiation and mediation at national and international levels
- People in Governmental, inter-governmental and non-governmental organisations, voluntary sector bodies, environmental charities and groups, business and professional associations

The Steering Group welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals.

What to Send:

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 8th February 2013. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 10th May 2013. 300 word abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to all Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract.f) up to 10 keywords

E-mails should be entitled: EJGC12 Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline).We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs:

Ram Vemuri and Rob Fisher 

Karen Druffel 

The conference is part of the Critical Issues series of research projects run by Inter-Disciplinary.Net. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and challenging. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into 20-25 page chapters for publication in a themed dialogic ISBN hard copy volume.

For further details of the conference, please click here

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

CFP: 4th Global Conference: Revenge

Sunday 14th July–Tuesday 16th July 2013

Mansfield College, Oxford

Call for Presentations:

Confucius is said to have remarked, ‘Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves,’ implying that revenge cannot be undertaken without recursive deleterious effects on the revenging agent. This is the view that revenge is at best counterproductive, or that seeking it runs counter to the ethical mandate that one turn the other cheek. Does that mean that vengeful motives are out of place in seeking justice for real wrongs? Should the law attempt to exclude vengeance-seeking? Do some economic or political systems tolerate, or even require, elaborate systems of revenge? Not all societies, of course, would agree that revenge is ethically problematic; some would define revenge as a necessary component in social relationships, even as a method for connecting people across time or over distances. Traditional grudges are commonplace in places as cultural different from each as the Swat Valley (Pakistan) and the American Southeast. Given all this, is is even possible to come up with a universally relevant concept of revenge that would make comparison possible?

This multi-disciplinary research and publications project seeks to explore the different ideas, actions, and cultural traditions of vengeance or revenge. The project explores the nature of revenge, its relationship with issues of justice, economy, and social organization, and its manifestation in the actions of individuals, cultures, communities and nations. We will also consider the history and political economy of revenge, its ‘legitimacy,’ the ‘scale’ of vengeful actions, and whether or not revenge has (or should have) ‘limits.’ Representations of revenge in film, literature, law, television, and cultural performances will be analysed; cultural ‘traditions’ of retaliation and revenge will be considered. And the role of mercy, forgiveness and pardon will be assessed.

Presentations will be considered on the following or related themes:

- Philosophies of revenge
- Revenge and political economy
- Revenge in the philsophies of East and South Asia: Confucian and Hindu perspectives
- Revenge in Maori culture
- Vengeance and gender
- Vengeance in history, literature, and popular culture
- Revenge cross-culturally
- Is there any proper and improper time for revenge? Can an act of revenge be carried across generations?
- Revenge, vengeance, retaliation
- Justice and revenge
- Betrayal, humiliation, shame, resentment, and revenge
- Revenge and the individual; revenge and the group; revenge and the nation; revenge and capitalism
- Revenge in music and the arts
- Revenge in television, film, radio and theatre
- Relationship between revenge and mercy, forgiveness, pardon
- Revenge case-studies: individual, cultural, and historical

The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals.

What to send:

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 8th February 2013. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 10th May 2013. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 key words

E-mails should be entitled: REV4 Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Joint Organising Chairs:

Charles W. Nuckolls 

Rob Fisher 

The conference is part of the Probing the Boundaries programme of research projects. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers maybe invited for development for publication in a themed hard copy volume(s).

For further details of the conference, please click here.

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

Wednesday 31 October 2012

CFP: 8th Global Conference: Visions of Humanity in Cyberculture, Cyberspace and Science Fiction

Thursday 18th July–Saturday 20th July 2013

Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Presentations:

This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary project aims to explore what it is to be human and the nature of human community in cyberculture, cyberspace and science fiction. In particular, the project will explore the possibilities offered by these contexts for creative thinking about persons and the challenges posed to the nature and future of national, international, and global communities.

Presentations, papers, performances, and workshops are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:

- the relationship between cyberculture, cyberspace, science fiction
- cyberculture, cyberpunk and the near future: utopias vs. dystopias
- technologies of the future today: equality and access
- science fiction and cyberpunk as a medium for exploring the nature of persons
- humans and cyborgs; the synergy of humans and technology; changing views of the body
- human and post-human concepts in digital arts and cinema
- digital artistic practices and aesthetics
- mobile media, place and the telematic body
- bodies in cyberculture; body modifications; from apes to androids
– electronic evolution; biotechnical advances and the impact of life, death, and social existence
- artificial intelligence, robotics and biomedia: self-organization as a cultural logic
- gender and cyberspace: new gender, new feminisms, new masculinities
- cyberculture of virtual worlds and videogames
- interactive storytelling, emergent narratives, transmedia storytelling, alternate reality games
- nature, enhancing nature, and artificial intelligence; artificial life, life and information systems
- networked living in future city, new urban lifestyles
- human and post-human politics; cyborg citizenship and rights; influence of political technologies
- boundaries, frontiers and taboos in cyberculture

The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Papers will also be considered on any related theme.

What to Send:

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 8th February 2013. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 10th May 2013. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 key words

E-mails should be entitled: VISIONS8 Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Joint Organising Chairs:

Daniel Riha 

Rob Fisher 

The conference is part of the ‘Critical Issues’ series of research projects run by Inter-Disciplinary.Net. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and challenging. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into 20-25 page chapters for publication in a themed dialogic ISBN hard copy volume.

For further details of the conference, please click here

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

CFP: 5th Global Conference: Videogame Culture and the Future of Interactive Entertainment

Sunday 14th July–Tuesday 16th July 2013

Mansfield College, Oxford

Call for Presentations:

This inter- and multi-disciplinary conference aims to examine, explore and critically engage with the issues and implications created by the mass use of computers and videogames for human entertainment and focus on the impact of innovative videogame titles and interfaces for human communication and ludic culture. In particular the conference will encourage equally theoretical and practical debates which surround the cultural contexts within which videogames flourish.

Presentations, papers, performances, workshops and reports are invited on any of the following themes:

1. Videogames and Gaming

Theories and Concepts of Gaming. Identifying Key Features and Issues.

Videogames as Text. Videogames as Interactive Image. Multidisciplinary Approaches to Videogame Analysis. Film, Literary, Art Studies and Cultural Studies Approaches to the Analysis of Videogames.

2. Videogame Cultures

Emerging Practices in Online and Offline Gaming. Games as Cultural Artifacts.

Pervasive Gaming, Convergence and the Integration of Videogames. Videogames as Art, Fan Cultures.

3. Games and Society

Ethical Issues in Videogames, Videogame Controversy – Rating, Violence, Sex, Morality and their relation to Maturity. Videogames and Politics. Propaganda Games. Censorship.

4. Immersion and Embodiment

New Forms of Interaction, Immersion and Collaboration in Videogames. Sound, Music, Touch, and Game Space. Evolution of Gaming. The Role of Innovative Interfaces.

5. Games with Meaning?

The Relationship between Game and Gamer. Social Impact Simulations. Educational Use of Videogames. Serious Games. News and Documentary Videogames.

6. Reception, Temporality and Videogames

Player Generations. Old Originals vs. Retro games. Indie Games and Low-Tech Aesthetics. Innovations in Independent Game Movements.

7. Works in Progress

Games in Development. Approaches to Game Design. Discussion Workshops on Games under Production. Best Practice and Know-How Exchange.

A presentation with a quick demo of the game and workshop proposals are strongly encouraged. We might offer 2 hour slot for 1-3 intensive workshops on design methodologies and media comparative sessions. Delegates presenting in the frame of workshops are eligible for publishing in special track of Videogames 5 ebook on methodologies.

The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Papers will also be considered on any related theme.

What to Send:

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 8th February 2013. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 10th May 2013. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords

E-mails should be entitled: VG5 Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Joint Organising Chairs:

Daniel Riha 

Rob Fisher 

The conference is part of the ‘Critical Issues’ series of research projects run by Inter-Disciplinary.Net. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and challenging. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into 20-25 page chapters for publication in a themed dialogic ISBN hard copy volume.

For further details of the conference, please click here

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

Wednesday 3 October 2012

CFP: 2nd Global Conference: Making Sense Of: Play

Monday 22nd July – Wednesday 24th July 2013

Mansfield College, Oxford

Call for Presentations:

The interdisciplinary project Making Sense Of: Play seeks to examine the various meanings of “play”, elucidate their inter-relationships and trace the origins of the patterns of play and their place in the human condition. Variations in cultural conditions naturally impact on play, its meanings and its forms, as do, often in a different way, economic inequalities both within and between different cultures. Our deliberations will necessarily takes this into account. In many languages, as in English, throughout its etymological history “play” has been closely connected to the world of children and make believe. Academic study of play, too, deals predominantly with various aspects of children’s play and its importance in development. There is, in fact, a lack of balance between the study of play in relation to children and childhood on one hand, and “play” more generally, as outlined above, on the other. For this reason our project explicitly emphasizes the comparatively under-explored aspects of play in linguistic, literary, philosophical, historical, psychological and evolutionary frames of reference.

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” (Plato)

Possible Themes and Topics:

Its evolutionary significance: Viewed from biological and paleoanthropoligical standpoint, how has play factored into the evolution of Homo Sapiens?

In politics: is politics a game? What are the “rules” and how can they be transgressed?

In literature and the arts: How do the arts function as play in our culture? Are artists game-masters? Are some forms of art especially “playful?” How is “the play the thing”- to quote Shakespeare? What should we make of artistic works in which “dark play” is featured?

Historical and cultural models of play: Does “play” mean and function differently in different cultures and societies? What can we learn by exploring other cultures’ models of play? Has the concept and practice of play evolved differently for adults and children?

In philosophy: How does play function in the divide between truth and appearance? Do philosophers “play” with ideas? How can we understand play beyond the limits of specific disciplinary boundaries? Why does play continue to be a “slippery concept”?

As a psychological issue: Do we need to play as a function of mental health and well being? Are there healthy and non-healthy forms of play?

Play/Work/Contemplation: does Aristotle’s analysis of the good life serve contemporary conditions?

In language: what does it mean to” play with language?” Are metaphors linguistic play? How is ‘deconstruction’ a form of playing with language?

As humour: How do jokes and other forms of humor operate as play? When might jokes and humor be “anti-play?”

Play of perception: How do our senses afford us opportunities to play? Is the artistic look a form of play? Can sounds, tastes, colors invite us to playfully engage in the world?

Play and the life-course: How does play figure into existential crisis (illness, death), love, hatred, and power? Does play serve as special form of communication? Can play be a form of addiction or can it be used to address addictive behavior? What forms does play take in adult lives and in the lives of the elderly?

Animal play: What does play mean in the animal world? Do animals play? Need to play? Can we play with animals in the sense that we are engaging in their own forms of play? Animal play has been an important tool in understanding how humans play. Given this, how are human and animal play different and similar?

Play and children: What role do toys serve in a child’s life? How does play function in the classroom? How do children play? What role does contact with the natural world play in child’s play?

Play and technology: How has technology changed and expanded/or limited how we play in our respective cultures?

Dark and dangerous play: Where does play veer from “playful” to dangerous and destructive? How does the example of “war as play” provide a paradigm of exploring the complicated nature of play? How can we understand “dark play” within the classic paradigm in which play is seen as predominantly “fun”?

The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Papers will also be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 8th February 2013. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 10th May 2013.

What to Send: Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 key words

E-mails should be entitled: PLAY2 Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Joint Organising Chairs:

Wendy Turgeon (Project Leader) 

Rob Fisher (Network Founder and Leader) 

The conference is part of the Probing the Boundaries programme of research projects. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting.

For further details of the conference, please click here

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

Saturday 24 December 2011

CFP: 1st Global Conference: The Graphic Novel

Friday 7th September 2012 – Sunday 9th September 2012

Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

“Behind this mask there is more than just flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea… and ideas are bulletproof.” - Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

Call for Papers:

This inter- and multi-disciplinary conference aims to examine, explore and critically engage with issues in and around the production, creation and reading of all forms of comics and graphic novels. Taken as a form of pictographic narrative it has been with us since the first cave paintings and even in the 21st century remains a hugely popular, vibrant and culturally relevant means of communication whether expressed as sequential art, graphic literature, bandes dessinees, tebeos, fumetti, manga, manhwa, komiks, strips, historietas, quadrinhos, beeldverhalen, or just plain old comics. (as noted by Paul Gravett)

Whilst the form itself became established in the 19th Century it is perhaps not until the 20th century that comic book heroes like Superman (who has been around since 1938) became, not just beloved characters, but national icons. With the globalisation of publishing brands such as Marvel and DC it is no accident that there has been an increase in graphic novel adaptations and their associated merchandising. Movies such as X-men, Iron man, Watchmen and the recent Thor have grossed millions of dollars across the world and many television series have been continued off-screen in the graphic form, Buffy, Firefly and Farscape to name a few.

Of course America and Europe is not the only base of this art form and the Far East and Japan have their own traditions as well as a huge influence on graphic representations across the globe. In particular Japanese manga has influenced comics in Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, China, France and the United States, and have created an amazing array of reflexive appropriations and re-appropriations, in not just in comics but in anime as well.

Of equal importance in this growth and relevance of the graphic novel are the smaller and independent publishers that have produced influential works such as Maus by Art Spiegleman, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, Palestine by Joe Sacco, Epileptic by David B and even Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware that explore, often on a personal level, contemporary concerns such as gender, diaspora, post-colonialism, sexuality, globalisation and approaches to health, terror and identity. Further to this the techniques and styles of the graphic novel have taken further form online creating entirely web-comics and hypertexts, as in John Cei Douglas’ Lost and Found and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, as well as forming part of larger trans-media narratives and submersive worlds, as in the True Blood franchise that invites fans to enter and participate in constructing a narrative in many varied formats and locations.

This projects invites papers that consider the place of the comic or graphic novel in both history and location and the ways that it appropriates and is appropriated by other media in the enactment of individual, social and cultural identity.

Papers, reports, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to (but not limited to) the following themes:

* Just what makes a Graphic Novel so Graphic and so Novel?:
~Sources, early representations and historical contexts of the form.
~Landmarks in development, format and narratology.
~Cartoons, comics, graphic novels and artists books.
~Words, images, texture and colour and what makes a GN
~Format, layout, speech bubbles and “where the *@#% do we go from here?”

* The Inner and Outer Worlds of the Graphic Novel:
~Outer and Inner spaces; Thoughts, cities, and galaxies and other representations of graphic place and space.
~ Differing temporalities, Chronotopes and “time flies”: Intertextuality, editing and the nature of Graphic and/or Deleuzian time.
~ Graphic Superstars and Words versus Pictures: Alan Moore v Dave Gibbons (Watchmen) Neil Gaiman v Jack Kirby (Sandman).
~Performance and performativity of, in and around graphic representations.
~Transcriptions and translations: literature into pictures, films into novels and high/low graphic arts.

* Identity, Meanings and Otherness:
~GN as autobiography, witnessing, diary and narrative
~Representations of disability, illness, coping and normality
~Cultural appropriations, east to west and globalisation
~National identity, cultural icons and stereo-typical villains
~Immigration, postcolonial and stories of exile
~Representing gender, sexualities and non-normative identities.
~Politics, prejudices and polemics: banned, censored and comix that are “just plain wrong”
~Other cultures, other voices, other words

* To Infinity and Beyond: The Graphic Novel in the 21st Century:
~Fanzines and Slash-mags: individual identity through appropriation.
~Creator and Created: Interactions and interpolations between authors and audience.
~Hypertext, Multiple formats and inter-active narratives.
~Cross media appropriation, GN into film, gaming and merchandising and vice versa
~Graphic Myths and visions of the future: Sandman, Hellboy, Ghost in the Shell.

Papers can be accepted which deal solely with Graphic Novels. This project will run concurrently with our project on Fear, Horror and Terror – we welcome any papers considering the problems or addressing issues on Fear, Horror and Terror and Graphic Novels for a cross-over panel. We also welcome pre-formed panels on any aspect of the Graphic Novel or in relation to crossover panel(s).

Papers will be accepted which deal with related areas and themes. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012. 300 word abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords

E-mails should be entitled: GN1 Abstract Submission

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs

Nadine Farghaly
Paris-Lodron University, Salzburg,
Austria

Rob Fisher
Network Leader
Inter-Disciplinary.Net,
Freeland, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom

The conference is part of the Education Hub series of research projects, which in turn belong to the At the Interface programmes of Inter-Disciplinary.Net. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore discussions which are innovative and challenging. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume or volumes.

For further details of the project, please click here.

For further details of the conference, please click here.

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

Wednesday 7 December 2011

CFP: 1st Global Conference: Skins: Exploring Critical Issues

Tuesday 25th September 2012 – Thursday 27th September 2012

Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Papers

Now in its sixth series on E4 in the UK and first series on MTV in the US, the brainchild of father-son writing team Bryan Elsley and Jamie Brittain has gained popularity and critical acclaim for the honesty, authenticity and humour of its no-holds-barred depiction of the teenage experience. In a reflexive turn, Skins has become a cultural phenomenon whose influence is registered through its status as essential teen viewing, the Skins party craze and the tendency among fans to perceive their own identities and experiences in relation to characters and situations from the show. The richness of Skins as a televisual text supports wide-ranging explorations of the show’s aesthetic, thematic, ideological, social and technological implications.
We therefore invite papers and preconstituted panels that address any aspect of Skins, such as:

■Representations of teenage life and teen culture
■Identities: gender, class, race, sexualities (hetero-, homo-, bi-, fluid, queer, etc.)
■Death and the concept of mortality
■Mental illness/psychology/psychoanalysis
■Fandom
■Transnational reception
■Analysis of fanvids, fanfics, fanart
■Assessments of the meaning/cultural significance of specific storylines (c.f. the Naomily phenomenon)
■Plotline controversies and moral panics
■Adapting Skins for the American market
■Narrative and storytelling
■Creator/showrunner as author
■Genre analysis
■Modes of comedy
■Defining the ‘Skins aesthetic’
■Uses of inter-textuality/pop culture allusions
■Fashion
■Music
■Space and place: Bristol on screen
■Skins novels
■Acting and performance
■Cameos and guest stars
■Fame and celebrity
■Production process studies
■Technologies of production, distribution and reception in the post-broadcast era
■Skins and Channel 4/E4/MTV
■Comparative analyses of Skins and other television shows

For 2012, the Skins and Contemporary Culture project will meet alongside our project on Gender and Love It is our intention to create cross-over sessions between the two groups – and we welcome proposals which deal with the relationship between gender and love and Skins and contemporary culture. Papers will also be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper of no more than 3000 words should be submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords

E-mails should be entitled: SKINS Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs

Ann-Marie Cook
Visiting Fellow, ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation,
Queensland University of Technology,
Australia

Dr Rob Fisher
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Priory House, Wroslyn Road,
Freeland, Oxfordshire OX29 8HR

The conference is part of the Critical Issues series of research projects. The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume.

For more information, please click here.

CFP: 2nd Global Conference: Beauty: Exploring Critical Issues

Friday 21st September – Sunday 23rd September 2012

Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Papers:

“The first real problem I faced in my life was that of beauty,” wrote the poet-playwright- novelist Yukio Mishima, in Temple of the Golden Pavilion as he pondered beauty’s relevance, meanings, and the spell it cast over him. Beauty is complicated by the word beauty itself. Limited or overloaded, beauty has been celebrated as essential or denounced as irrelevant. The existence of beauty has been challenged, called a search for El Dorado. Some find no beauty in life, a recurring motif in subcultures, music lyrics, and the notes left by suicides. Others dismiss that perspective, arguing that common sense, experience, and multidisciplinary research reveal the reality and centrality of beauty in our lives. But what exactly is beauty? Speculations about the nature of beauty are various and contradictory. Some philosophers have argued that it will remain a mystery. Other theorists have held less modest beliefs, arguing that beauty expresses a basic spiritual reality, has universal physical properties, or is an experience and construction of mind and culture. The beauty ‘project’ will explore, assess, and map a number of key core themes.

These will include:

1. Understanding Beauty
- Defining beauty
- Theorising beauty
- Power of beauty
- History of beauty
- Politics of beauty
- Culture of beauty
- Religion of beauty

2. Experiences of and Representations of Beauty
- Pursuit of beauty
- Expressions of beauty
- Appearance of beauty
- Making beauty
- Documenting beauty
- Emotion and beauty
- Beauty and seduction
- Representing beauty in art, literature and popular culture

3. Beauty and Nature
-Beauty and the natural world
-Beauty and the Sublime
-Beauty and desire
-Science and mathematics of beauty
-Medical aspects of beauty

4. Beauty, Culture, and Identity
- Beauty subcultures
- Beauty and social stratification: gender, sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, age, etc.
- Beauty collectors
- Beauty specialists
- Beauty disciples
- Enhancing the body beautiful: cosmetics, tattoos, piercings, surgical interventions, and other forms of body modification

5. The Business of Beauty
-Beauty and consumer culture
-Beauty and cultural capital
-Beauty professions and trades
-Beauty cities
-Beauty marketing and forecasting
-Professional beauties (models, actors, celebrities, beauty pageants etc.)
-Fashion and beauty
-Glamour and beauty

6. Diminishing the Beautiful
-Beauty and transgression
-Beauty and ugliness
-Beauty and aging
-Defiling the beautiful
-Destroying the beautiful
-Beauty and death
-Beauty and decay

Papers will be accepted which deal with related areas and themes.

The 2012 meeting of Beauty will run alongside a second of our projects on Strangers, Aliens and Foreigners and we anticipate holding sessions in common between the two projects. We welcome any papers or panels considering the problems or addressing issues that cross both projects

The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Papers will also be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords

E-mails should be entitled: Beauty Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs

Dr Jacque Lynn Foltyn
Project Leader
Professor of Sociology, Dept of Social Sciences, College of Letters and Sciences, National University, CA, USA

Dr Rob Fisher
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Priory House, Wroslyn Road,
Freeland, Oxfordshire OX29 8HR

The conference is part of the Critical Issues series of research projects. The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume.

For further details of the project, please click here.

For further details of the conference, please click here.

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

Sunday 4 December 2011

CFP: 10th Global Conference: Monsters and the Monstrous

Monday 10th September – Thursday 13th September 2012

Mansfield College, Oxford

Call for Papers:

For this 10th Anniversary of the Monsters and the Monstrous Project we are looking forward to the future, and so are starting from Franco Moretti’s comment that “the monster expresses the anxiety that the future will be monstrous.” Our focus then will be on Monsters of the Future, no matter from which time or place that future is viewed. So whether the present is Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romantic, Modernist or Post Modernist it is the ways that, as further noted by Moretti, a “new order of beings” makes manifest the terror of an unknown and uncontrollable tomorrow and the forms these creatures take.

As such the monster becomes not the return of the repressed but an immanent Imaginary that constantly harasses and harangues the borders of the Real. Just as Grendel, Caliban, Frankenstein’s Monster, Dr. Moreau’s creatures and the clones from Blade Runner can be seen to manifest a hybrid future that blurs the borders between human/non-human, the humane and the in-humane, the converse is equally true where the tomorrow they envision is as much degenerative as it is evolutionary. Here, as in Wells’ the Time Machine, or Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness, the future is in fact a portal to the past and that the true anxiety we feel is not for inevitable change but for a monstrous stasis that, like the vampire, will lock us forever in a never-ending present (not unlike Wittgenstein’s immortality of the never-ending moment). This then is a call for monstrous visions of the future, whether it is a new and alien land or one that is only too familiar; for the Post-Human, the Non-Human and the Anti-Human, the Robot, the Golem and the Cyborg, the Pure-bred, the Hybrid and the Mudblood, the Unborn, the Unliving and the Undead.

Papers, reports, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:

Monstrous Places/Spaces of the Future:
~The city, the town, the home of the future
~Environmental disasters, global warming, nuclear meltdowns, plagues and terra incognito
~Dystopias/utopias
~New Worlds, forgotten worlds, undiscovered worlds: Atlantis, Shangri-la, Eldorado

Human Monsters:
~Medical experimentation, cloning, reproduction
~Cyborgs, robots and inanimate bodies made real
~Hybrids, both real and supernatural, post-human and beyond human
~Evolution and degeneration
~Actual bodies and supernatural bodies.
~Monsterisation of the human body: fragmentation, surgical modification and bodies without organs

Monstrous Aliens & Alien Invaders:
~Invasions of unknown beings, conquistadors, Martians, heavenly or alien life forms
~Humans as invaders, Starship Troopers, Iain M. Banks’ The Culture
~Parasites, diseases, flora and influences

Monstrous Generations:
~The glorification of Youth, Logan’s Run and In Time
~Monstrous adolescents
~Demonic children and alien babies
~Middle-aged zombies and serial killers, possessed grandparents
~Romantacising the Monster: Paranormal Romance, dark lovers and heroes, Twilight, Vampire Diaries and Dexter.

Monstrous Politics:
~Protest, revolt and revolution
~Zombie Capitalism and undead labour
~Class, status and the aristocracy
~Post colonialism, diasporas and migration
~Ageism, sexism, health-ism and separatism e.g, District 9, Metropolis, Matrix, Daybreakers

Papers can be accepted which deal solely with specific monsters. This project will run concurrently with our project on The Erotic – we welcome any papers considering the problems or addressing issues on Monsters and The Erotic for a cross-over panel. We also welcome pre-formed panels on any aspect of the monstrous or in relation to crossover panel(s).

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012. Abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords

E-mails should be entitled: Monsters Abstract Submission

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs

Sorcha Ni Fhlainn
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
School of English, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

Rob Fisher
Network Founder & Leader, Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Freeland, Oxfordshire
United Kingdom

Simon Bacon
Poznan,
Poland

The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume. Some papers may also be invited for inclusion in the Journal of Monsters and the Monstrous.

For further details of the project, please click here.

For further details of the conference, please click here.

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

CFP: 1st Global Conference: Reframing Punishment

Monday 3rd September – Wednesday 5th September 2012

Mansfield College, Oxford

Call for Papers:

The concept of punishment has a long history and diverse cultural, social and criminological meanings. Research and debate is often focused on the offender, the offence, the state and legal codification. In contrast, this project seeks to re-frame these debates in order to combine the insights they produce with broader cultural meanings, social representations and ritualistic or other activities. Therefore, the aim of the project is to develop different ways of understanding the penetration and complexity of shared understandings of punishment from a variety of perspectives, approaches and practitioner experiences. Reframing the debate might be done through papers aimed the personal or social levels. We encourage unique approaches to punishment in terms of boundary control, whether it is control of evil, the politically subversive, the economically disruptive, or punishment in pursuit of system stability or marginalisation of liminality. Papers might also cover punishment issues relating to defining the contours of disgust, desire, dread, or the abject. They may even consider the operation and consequences of both wrongdoing and various forms of societal/social punishment. Accordingly the project welcomes papers, work-in-progress and pre-formed panels from diverse areas of study such as the humanities, social sciences, business, science, law schools and the arts, as well as practitioners.

Papers, presentations, reports and workshops are invited on issues broadly related to any of the following themes:

* Cultural (including cross-/inter-cultural) notions of what constitutes punishment

* Religious/spiritual punishment, asceticism, whether self-inflicted or externally imposed

* Pain, fear and corporal punishment

* Punishment, public services and performance measurement

* Punishment and child development/child rearing

* Punishment rituals

* Punishing the body for pleasure (modification, BDSM, smoking, etc)

* Punishing the body in the name of beauty and fashion

* Representations of punishment in contemporary times and across historical periods

* Theories of punishment and deviants: What is punishment’s purpose? Ideal methods? Is punishment limited to humans? What about animals or nature, and in some societies, why is imprisonment such a key form of punishment?

* Proportionality, materiality and other concepts used to administer punishment(s)

* Shame, forgiveness, vengeance, retribution and punishment

* The limits of punishment: whether controlled by the state, institutions or groups, including sports groups, cults, gangs, the military, etc.

* Shifting social attitudes toward punishment

* Self-harm, abuse and control

* Space and its role in enhancing or ameliorating punishment

* The relationship(s) between discipline and punishment

Papers on any other topic related to the theme will also be considered.

This project will run concurrently with our project on Space and Place– we welcome any papers considering the problems or addressing issues on Reframing Punishment and Space and Place for a cross-over panel. We also welcome pre-formed panels on any aspect of Reframing Punishment or in relation to crossover panel(s).

This project will run concurrently with our project on Space and Place– we welcome any papers considering the problems or addressing issues on Reframing Punishment and Space and Place for a cross-over panel. The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to all Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 key words

E-mails should be entitled: PUNISH Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Joint Organising Chairs:

Shona Hill & Shilinka Smith
Conference Leaders
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
New Zealand

Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Leader
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Freeland, Oxfordshire,
United Kingdom

The conference is part of the Probing the Boundaries programme of research projects. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers maybe invited for development for publication in a themed hard copy volume(s).

For further details of the project, please click here.

For further details of the conference, please click here.

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

CFP: 6th Global Conference: Fear, Horror and Terror

Friday 7th September 2012 – Sunday 9th September 2012

Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Papers:

This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary conference seeks to examine and explore issues which lie at the interface of fear, horror and terror. In particular the project is interested in investigating the various contexts of fear, horror and terror, and assessing issues surrounding the artistic, cinematic, literary, moral, social, (geo) political, philosophical, psychological and religious significance of them, both individually and together.

In addition to academic analysis, we welcome the submission from practitioners, such as people in religious orders, therapists, or victims of events which have been provoked by experiences of fear, horror and terror – for example, social workers, those involved with the legal system, medical practitioners, or fiction authors whose work aims to evoke these reactions.

Papers, reports, work-in-progress and workshops are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:

1. The Contexts of Fear, Horror and Terror
- case studies
- professions dealing with the Fear, Horror and Terror (Therapists, Clergy, etc.)
- creating and experiencing fear, horror and terror
- the properties of fear, horror and terror
- contexts of fear, horror and terror
- the language, meaning and significance of fear, horror and terror

2. At the Interface of Fear, Horror and Terror
- the role of fear, horror and terror
- emotional releases (pleasant or negative) achieved by Fear, Horror and Terror
- techniques of fear, horror and terror
- marketing fear, horror and terror
- recreational fear, horror and terror
- aesthetic fear, horror and terror
- the body, temperature, touch, taste or sound and fear, horror and terror
- silence as a strategic subversion of the operation of fear, horror and terror
- fear, horror and terror and the visible/invisible

3. Representations of Fear, Horror and Terror and:
- the imagination or the sublime
- pleasure, hope, despair, anxiety, disgust, dread, loathing
- art, cinema, theatre, media and the creative arts
- survival horror video games
- literature (including children’s stories)
- the other
- technology
- the future

Papers will be accepted which deal with related areas and themes. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012. 300 word abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords

E-mails should be entitled: FHT Abstract Submission

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs

Shona Hill & Shilinka Smith
Conference Leaders
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
New Zealand

Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Network Leader
Inter-Disciplinary.Net, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom

The conference is part of the ‘At the Interface’ series of research projects. The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume.

For further details of the project, please click here.

For further details of the conference, please click here.

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.