CFP: #Funded International #Conference : #Culture and the Mind: Voices, Sites and Practices- Denmark-May 2024

 CULTMIND will hold its first annual conference 15-17 May 2024 in central Copenhagen.

We invite scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and career stages to discuss the current state of research on the entanglement of culture and the mind, and to outline new paths for future exploration.

The conference will present a forum for discussing the cultural and social specificity of psychological distress, trauma and healing; for exploring the distinct cultural traditions in which ideas of mental health and treatment take shape.

The conference will address the following topics and questions:

• The social and cultural variety of ideas about mental disorder, trauma and treatment:

How do conceptions of mental health and therapeutic modalities reflect distinct cultural traditions and social contexts? How have definitions of the mind responded to major historical changes?

• The entanglement of the arts and the human sciences:

How have medical and scientific explorations of the mind presented a resource for cultural producers, and how have clinicians drawn on the insights and techniques of film, literature, theatre and art?

• Languages of illness and healing:

How do medical and scientific understandings of the mind travel outside the clinical setting? How do patient narratives and voices expand psychiatric discourses and diagnoses?

• The intersection of expert knowledge and political ideology:

How have medical and scientific ideas about the human mind overlapped with political agendas and imperatives?

• Cross-cultural encounters in mental healthcare settings:

How do medical professionals account for cultural factors in the course of diagnostic and therapeutic processes? How have the psy-disciplines engaged with the consequences of cultural change and migration?

• The place of the medical humanities:

What role can the medical humanities play in uncovering the cultural dimensions of mental health, illness and treatment?

We encourage early career researchers, tenured researchers, and clinical professionals to send us an abstract for a short oral presentation or poster to be presented on the conference.

Funding is available to assist presenters with travel and accommodation costs.

Please send proposals for oral presentations or posters (including a paper/poster title, an abstract of 300 words and a brief academic biography of 200 words) to: CULTMIND@hum.ku.dk by the 15^th of January 2024.

Contact Information

The Centre for Culture and the Mind, University of Copenhagen

Contact Email: cultmind@hum.ku.dk

URL

https://cultmind.ku.dk/events/culture-and-the-mind-voices-sites-and-practices/

CFP: "Witnessing / Becoming" - University of Toronto, Centre for #Comparative #Literature’s #Annual #Conference, March 22-23, 2024

 “‘I bear witness’—that means: ‘I affirm (rightly or wrongly, but in all good faith, sincerely) that that was or is present to me, in space and time (thus, sense-perceptible), and although you do not have access to it, not the same access, you, my addressees, you have to believe me, because I engage myself to tell you the truth, I am already engaged in it, I tell you that I am telling you the truth. Believe me. You have to believe me.'” – Jacques Derrida (“Poetics and Politics of Witnessing” 76)

Witnessing is more than seeing, more than recounting testimony. A witness to an event is its participant, whether central or peripheral. In its continuity, the act of witnessing carries us past the immediate crisis of an event, into a post-event life. Processes of witnessing have manifested as fluid, ongoing testimonies, conveyed through various mediums such as novels, memoirs, autobiographies, reports, and films, among others. One could argue that at the core of these testimonies lies what Nadine Gordimer describes in “Literary Witness in A World of Terror: The Inward Testimony” (2009) as “the duality of inwardness and the outside world” (Gordimer 68), the dual exploration of one’s inner self and the external world, the quest to reconcile oneself with the uncertainties inherent in evolving events and the imperative to conceive new meanings of self-identity.

We invite papers that consider how testimony has been represented not only as a form of documented eyewitness literature, but also as a process that entails transformations, and encounters that elicit new forms of becoming. By conjugating witnessing with becoming, we invite you to move past the eventuality of crisis, to understand language as irrevocably tied to the process of bearing witness, remaking itself continuously against the possible threat of erasure, “as if it were being invented at every step, and if it were burning immediately” (Jacques Derrida The Post Card 11). Differing subjectivities, selves, and life stories emerge in different environments. How might the act of bearing witness to uncodified subjective experiences and marginalized social realities challenge narratives of dominant power structures?

To return to the temporal disconnect between the witnessed event and the performance of testimony, becoming can take a similar form. To become is to recognize the same temporal disconnect, to look backwards at what once was, yet no longer remains. Becoming might be a reading of the past, enacted in tandem with the witness’ attempt to reconstruct it, which remains eternally out of reach. How do these two forms interact with one another? How else might they intertwine?

As an interdisciplinary conference, we encourage submissions from a variety of fields, such as literature, philosophy, history, ethnography, anthropology, media studies, disability studies, sociology, art history, religious studies, and gender studies. We welcome papers related (but not limited) to the following topics:

>

• Testimonial Literature
• Ethics of Bearing Witness
• Living & Writing
• Socio-political events in literature
• Performativity
• Transnationality & the Diaspora
• Queerness & Alterity
• Black Studies
• Indigeneity & Decolonial thought
• Planetary Subjectivity vs. Capitalist Globalism
• Language & Translation
• Temporality & the Self

Those who wish to participate in the conference should submit an abstract of no more than 250 words, along with a short bio. Abstracts must be sent, as attachments, to utorontocomplitconference@gmail.com before December 1, 2023. Emails should include the author’s name, institutional affiliation, and contact information. Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes.

Contact Information

Zichuan Gan, co-organizer 

PhD student 

Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto

z.gan@mail.utoronto.ca

 

Contact Email

utorontocomplitconference@gmail.com