Concourse: 12/06/16

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Tuesday, December 6, 2016


Call For Papers
International Conference:
“Digital Approaches to Genocide Studies”

Co-sponsored by the USC Mellon Digital Humanities Program
October 23-24, 2017 at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA



The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites proposals for its 2017 International Conference “Digital Approaches to Genocide Studies” that will be cosponsored by the USC Mellon Digital Humanities Program. 

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research (http://sfi.usc.edu/cagr) is dedicated to advancing new areas of interdisciplinary research on the Holocaust and other genocides. One of the Center’s primary research themes is Digital Genocide Studies. 

Digital technologies have begun to significantly influence contemporary scholarship, theories, and methods in the social sciences and humanities. The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites scholars from all disciplines to examine the relationships between digital methodologies, practices, ethics and contemporary Holocaust and genocide studies. How can digital humanities shape, challenge, or complement contemporary genocide studies and vice versa?

The two-day international conference “Digital Approaches to Genocide Studies” will be held on October 23-24, 2017 at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. The conference will investigate the ways in which digital tools and methods, new media, and information technologies can help us to challenge conventional wisdom regarding Holocaust and Genocide Studies by raising new questions, improving our understanding, deepening our analysis, widening our field of view, or pioneering new approaches. Especially of interest would be how digital humanists from a range of disciplines and methodologies can broaden our methodological approaches to the study of the causes, consequences, and prevention of genocide. We encourage diverse approaches to the conference theme that draw from a wide variety of critical lenses and approaches, as well as focus on any time period, case study, or medium.

Submissions on the following themes are particularly encouraged:

Digital methodologies and their applicability to genocide studies

Quantitative genocide research

Big data methodologies and comparative genocide studies

cagr.usc.edu

Digital technologies (such as wearable devices, 3D printing, and others) and their

applicability to genocide studies

Creation, curation, promotion and analysis of digital genocide resources and collections

Audio and visual genocide testimonies and their digitization, preservation, and

accessibility

Social, institutional, global/regional, multicultural, and multilingual aspects of digital

genocide research

Ethics of digital genocide studies

Tools and methods of genocide studies that could fruitfully contribute to or influence the

digital sphere and the field of digital humanities

Founded in 2014, the Center for Advanced Genocide Research is the research and scholarship unit of the USC Shoah Foundation. The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research is dedicated to advancing new areas of interdisciplinary research on the Holocaust and other genocides, focusing on the origins of genocide and how to intervene in the cycle that leads to mass violence. The Center organizes annual international workshops and conferences, hosts a speaker series on genocide and mass violence, and offers a competitive international research fellowship program. For further information please consult: http://cagr.usc.edu.


The USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive holds over 54,000 digitized and fully searchable video testimonies of survivors and other eyewitnesses of the Holocaust, the Rwandan,Guatemalan and Armenian genocides, and the Nanjing Massacre in China. The interviews were conducted in 41 languages and in 62 countries. They encompass the experiences not only of survivors in these contexts, but also of witnesses, liberators, aid providers, and war crimes trials participants.

The USC Mellon Digital Humanities Program enables postdoctoral and graduate student fellows to gain training in emerging digital technologies while advancing research in the humanities. A partnership between the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, the USC School of Cinematic Arts, and the USC Libraries, the USC Mellon Digital Humanities Program possesses a unique set of attributes that positions our fellows to emerge from USC with extensive understanding of compelling problems, deep connections to scholars working in their areas of expertise, and enhanced digital skills developed through multi-disciplinary training in state-of-the-art techniques and technologies.

We welcome proposals for single paper presentations and for theme-specific panels comprising no more than three presenters. 

Please send a CV and a one-page abstract of the proposed paper or an abstract of the proposed panel plus an abstract of each paper of the proposed panel before January 15, 2016 to cagr@usc.edu.

Travel support will be available. Please include your travel request with your abstract.  


Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies

Graduate Conference 2017



Guilty Pleasures and Confessional Spaces: Storytelling and the Digital Dionysus

March 31 - April 1, 2017

Ninth Annual Cultural Studies Graduate Student Conference and Workshop at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque


Call for Papers

Although cultural conceptions of shame, punishment, and voyeuristic pursuits have reconfigured themselves across different eras and cultures, the inherent and hidden pleasures of transgression remain—linking desires, actions, and modes of thought. Individual pleasures stand in stark contrast to socially defined constructions of guilt and shame—particularly in the generation of postmemory. Palimpsestic experiences of trauma, pain, and the past continue to shape our memories, expectations, and how we communicate. These recurring themes and the strictures that legislate how pleasure is performed in public and private spaces can shape the pleasures we derive from transgressing them.

This conference seeks to interrogate the implicit and explicit relationships between the crimes we commit, the structures we violate, and the stories we tell. Specifically, we intend to investigate the notion of space—both imaginary and concretely defined—and the role it plays in shaping contemporary discourses of pleasure and punishment. Additionally, this conference will engage with these discourses in the age of information. How does this liminal space—an online bacchanalia of obscured identities, open transgression of social and cultural norms, and hidden impulses writ large—function as a construct that facilitates unique and revolutionary means of seeing and communicating on a global level?

Possible session topics include but are not limited to:

    Confessional acts as sites of pleasure
    Pleasure and transgression as a form of escapism
    Palimpsest, postmemory and collective trauma
    Post-colonialism & memory/ narrative
    Memory construction and storytelling in guilty societies
    Biopolitics: state-controlled bodies and narratives
    Cultural displacement and legislation of hybrid identities
    Violating  and transgressing notions of space
    Transgressive, anonymous and public identities in the digital world
    Cultural memory and digital humanities
    Voyeurism, Orientalism and the exoticized Other

Conference Structure: This conference/workshop will be comprised of the keynote address and panels on Friday, followed by additional panels on Saturday. Central to the conference is a graduate seminar style workshop on Saturday. This workshop is led by the keynote speaker and designed to explore the issues presented and discussed in more detail and depth. Presenters are requested to arrange their travel so that they can participate in the entire event, including the workshop.  There will also be a closing reception Saturday evening, which is open to all participants and audience members.

Please send a 500 word abstract along with a brief biographical statement, in a separate document, to csconference.unm@gmail.com by January 27, 2017.  Selected participants will be notified by February 3, 2017.

You can also visit our webpage for additional information about the conference: http://fll.unm.edu/clcs-graduate-conference/call-for-papers.php  

Note: Housing available with graduate students and limited travel funding may be also available, please inquire!