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Tuesday, January 16, 2018

CFP:Imagine Queer: the Radical Potential of Queerness Now,Newcastle University, 12th October 2018, United Kingdom




The aim of the conference is to consider interdisciplinary approaches to the transgressive potential of queerness today. Considering grassroots LGBTQ+ activism, artistic practices, as well as academic discourse of queer theory, we seek to identify and address issues arising in the current transnational socio-political conditions. How can biopolitics be challenged by queer temporalities? How can radical activism of preceding decades be re-contextualised and employed now? Can queer social formations, based on friendship, kinship, and affective communities, be used to reconsider the heteronormative structures aided by the legislation in the international context?

Looking forward, we are interested in restoring the potential of transgressive queer activism, much of which has been now directed into the struggle of LGBTQ+ communities to enter the realm of normative domesticity, compromising its ability to challenge the state apparatus. Based on interdiciplinary, cross-national, and transhistorical research practices, we seek to address these questions in relation to nationhood, citizenship, and human rights. We encourage academic and practical responses to the analysed problem from interdisciplinary, cross-generational, and multinational perspectives.

The possible themes might include, but are not limited to:

  • Challenging chronobiopolitics
  • Community-based approaches to academic research
  • Radical potential of queer archives
  • Queer spatialities and temporalities
  • De-centralising HIV/AIDS narratives
  • Engaging with marginalised LGBTQ communities
  • Queer citizenships and nationalisms
  • Queer utopias and activism
  • Radical art-making
  • Queer artistic methodologies
  • Now what? Explorations of queer futurities
  • Disrupting centre/margins discourses
  • Practices of resilience and stigma management

















Please include 350-word abstracts for 20-minute presentations and a short biographical note in your application.
 The proposals should be sent to imaginequeer2018@gmail.com by 31st May 2018.


Keynote Speakers:
Professor Ken Plummer is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex. Prof Plummer has written extensively in Sociology and LGBTQ Studies during his formal working years. He is the founder editor of the journal Sexualities (edited it from 1996 to 2012), and the author of several textbooks: “Sociology: The Basics and Sociology: A Global Introduction.” His notable works include “Sexual Stigma” (1975), “The Making of the Modern Homosexual” (1981), “Telling Sexual Stories” (1995), “Documents of Life” (2001), “Intimate Citizenship” (2003) and “Sociology: The Basics” (2010). In “Intimate Citizenships,” Prof Plummer explores some ongoing public debates around the personal life – from ‘test tube babies’ to ‘lesbian and gay families’ – whose essence may be captured by Plummer’s prominent concept of “Intimate Citizenship,” and which he will revisit in his keynote address. https://kenplummer.com/
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay is a Montreal-born artist and diarist based in Edinburgh. His artistic work mediates emotional encounters with musical, art historical and Queer cultural material, encouraging deep listening and empathic viewing. In his work you will find bells, bouquets, ceramic vases, enchanted forests, folding screens, gay elders, glitter, gold leaf, love letters, imaginary paintings, madrigals, megaphones, mirrors, naked men, sex-changing flowers, sign language, subtitles, and the voices of birds, boy sopranos, contraltos, countertenors, and sirens. Nemerofsky’s work has been exhibited internationally, and is part of the permanent collections of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, the Polin Museum for the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Thielska Galleriet Stockholm and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. His current artistic research involves audio portraits of the private libraries and gardens of Queer scholars and community elders. www.nemerofsky.ca

















Sunday, January 14, 2018

Literary and Cultural Studies Symposium: Conference Theme: Labour- May 3-4, 2018, Department of English Language and Literature, Yaşar University,











Call For Papers:
As the Department of English Language and Literature, Yaşar University, we are delighted to announce our second Conference in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies. The title of the conference is “Labour,” and it will be held in Izmir, Turkey on May 3rd and 4th, 2018.

The organizers would also be happy to receive proposals for contributions in an alternative format, such as workshops, exhibitions, installations, etc. A more detailed description of the conference and a list of possible topics are below:


In this era of outsourcing, offshoring, casualization and digital production, does labour still work in accordance with the conventional paradigms for its analysis? At a time when traditional left-wing politics and organized labour have, in diverse places, experienced an enduring sense of crisis, do we need to insist once again with redoubled urgency on the critical unearthing of the exploitation of labour as the occluded infrastructure of our social and cultural systems, the obscured motor of history itself, or must we rather start again from a new historicization, novel forms of cultural and sociological analysis which explore the complexity, variability and multivalency of the very concept of work? This conference aims, from an interdisciplinary perspective, to re-examine the status and usefulness of “labour” as a term of analysis within literary and cultural studies.






In the wake of the interventions of feminist, postcolonial and critical race theory, among other strands of radical critique, can labour any longer—if it ever could—be seen as a single category, a universal underlying bedrock to be struck in the analysis of diverse cultural formations? How have alternative paradigms within the social sciences for the analysis of biopolitics, the reproduction and regulation of bodies, displaced the concern with labour, and how have they opened up possibilities for a richer account of labour and gender, labour and libido, the organization of leisure and laziness, the “race-ing” of labour, the work of ethnicity? In the light of such challenges, can the figure of the worker or the notion of the working class function as anything other than a residual and nostalgic fantasy? What remains to be said of the work of fantasy itself, the work of the literary imagination and of cultural creativity and activism? Is “labour” still effective as a rallying point for an oppositional political imaginary? Is the “work” evoked in contemporary accounts of psychological tasks such as mourning or memory compatible with a materialist account of labour?

If socialist feminism in particular has long drawn attention to overlooked sites of labour and (re-)production, including the home as a workplace, how do re-organizations of social space demand renewed examination of the location of work? While globalization has enabled new forms of mobility—including the profitable smuggling of bodies across borders—how has the entanglement of space and production wrought new forms of segregation, new geographies of difference, opportunity and exploitation? What novel forms of dispossession stem from work which appears to have no material place or product, such as the labour associated with information and communication technologies? How can literary and cultural studies examine their own entanglement in the organization of labour, including the question of the university as a place of work?

Precisely because of our emphasis on the mobility, variability and complexity of the putatively singular concept of “labour,” and the critical pressure we want to place upon its transferability across academic disciplines and fields of analysis, we hope that this conference will offer more than a series of independent scholarly interventions. We invite proposals for 25-minute papers from all disciplines within the humanities and social sciences, and we plan to organize opportunities for response, discussion and workshops, which we hope will promote space for comparative and interdisciplinary debate and dynamic encounters between alternative paradigms.









Possible topics include:

Literary Labours
Labour, Leisure and Laziness
Digital Labour and Digitization as Dispossession of Labour
Segregation and Inequality in Modern Labour
Sex Work: Labour, Libido, Commodification
The Production of Urban Space
By Hand and By Brain: Intellectual and Cultural Labour
Pre-Modern and Early Modern Production
The Labour of Ethnicity and the Race-ing of Labour
Housework and Its Value(s)
Labour, Habit, Ritual
Labour and Mobility
Biopolitics and/or the Commodification of the Body
Reproduction
Memory Work and the Labours of Mourning
The Myth(s) of the Labouring Classes
Students and Instructors as Workers
City, Class and Gentrification
Re-working: The Labour of Translation and Adaptation



Proposals for papers are welcome by January 20th, 2017 and should be sent to clcs@yasar.edu.tr
















Contact Info: 
Esen Kara, Yaşar University Department of English Language and Literature, Izmir, Turkey 
Contact Email: clcs@yasar.edu.tr

Friday, January 12, 2018

3rd International Pedagogical and Linguistic Conference ‘Educational Role of Language. How to we understand it?’, 14-15 June 2018 Lithuanian University, Vilnius,

CALL FOR PAPERS

The 3rd ERL Conference aims to collect different perspectives from around the globe concerning what the educational role of language is. We want to discuss this fundamental question in relation to language beliefs (i.e. what concepts the role of language rests on), language activity (what language activity supports the development the best), language experience (what emotional position to language on the part of learners is fostered by different educational systems) and language matrices (what language images/representations serve educational purposes the best). For more questions, see http://www.educationalroleoflanguage.ug.edu.pl/3rd-conf-scope.
Prospective presenters are encouraged to submit proposals for papers and demonstrations/posters that offer theoretically- or empirically-grounded answers to any of the aforementioned questions. Ideally, they might include in the papers/presentations a direct reply to the ERL III’s main question in as simple a fashion as possible so that all the participants can better appreciate their perspective. We welcome proposals from educators and scientists representing various language-related positions, including teachers of different nationalities, pedagogues, psycholinguists, sociolinguists, educational theoreticians, anthropologists of language, and all others whose work combines linguistic and educational studies. The ERL III’s main languages are English and Lithuanian, but we also accept proposals in other languages and we shall provide interpreters should it prove more convenient.

The Conference Proceedings will be submitted for evaluation and indexing in Thomson Reuters Conference Citation Index. Preceded by ERL I and ERL II at the University of Gdansk, the ERL III Conference is additionally meant to strengthen and expand our international cooperation undertaken as the Educational Role of Language Network. This being the case, the ERL III Conference shall also serve – similarly to the first two ERL conferences – as a platform for live discussions of international pedagogically-linguistic projects. For more on the Network, see http://educationalroleoflanguage.ug.edu.pl/aims-projects or http://educationalroleoflanguage.ug.edu.pl/teams-studies.
ERL papers have been published in ranked journals and interdisciplinary monograph, which we wish to be the case also with those from the ERL III Conference. As their destinations varies and is decided on after the conference (depending mostly on whether particular papers are more pedagogically- or linguistically-oriented), we request prospective presenters/authors to essentially follow APA guidelines. (the GOOD NEWS is that currently one issue of a ranked journal has already been secured for publications from the ERL III conference only). All further information on specific journals and rules shall be available at the ERL website.

Please note that:
-          the deadline  for paper proposals and conference registration is 31 March 2018
Early submissions are most welcome so that we can prepare the programme in advance
-          at the ERL Conferences we build up projects-oriented teams, which you may join.
Contact Info: 
tel. 48 509 747 531; pedmd@univ.gda.pl (Michal Daszkiewicz - main organiser)

Thursday, January 11, 2018

CFPs Conference and Pre-Conference The Women, Gender, and Sexuality Network of the Social Science History Association (SSHA) Nov. 2018,Phoenix, Arizona, USA.










Dear current and future Women, Gender and Sexuality network members and affiliates,


It was a pleasure to see so many of you in Montreal this year. Next year’s conference will take place from November 8 to 11, 2018, in Phoenix, AZ. The theme is "Histories of Disadvantage: Meanings, Mechanisms, and Politics.” Please find attached our network’s informal Call for Papers for next year’s meeting. At our WGS network meeting in Montreal many of you have suggested possible themes for panels that would complement the overall theme of the conference. Great! Please note that our thematic focus does not foreclose submissions on other themes on women, gender and sexuality.  In fact, we hope to organize several Author- Meets- Critics panels featuring the excellent work of network participants as well as panels that connect the overall conference motto, histories of disadvantage, to historical meanings, mechanisms, and politics of the meeting place of Arizona.





We also are excited to announce a Second Call for Papers, inviting you to join our one-day pre-conference with a focus on Border Crossings: Gender, Sexuality, and Rights at the University of Arizona in TucsonAZ (about 1.5 hours from Phoenix). The pre-conference theme is inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa’s seminal contributions to Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and will give us the opportunity to engage with the geographical location of the conference.









While we encourage contributions​ related to regional themes of borders and borderlands, histories of rebellious actions, and mobilization for rights (widely defined),​ we ​will be happy to consider papers or panels from all geographical regions that address ​related themes, offer new theoretical frameworks, and present materials that allow us to compare, contrast, and illustrate the complexity of rights (including, but not limited to legal concepts of gender/sexual power and norms, international/national dimensions of social/cultural/political/legal constructs of human rights, refugees and power/empowerment) as well as border crossings (including but not limited to the complexities of physical trespassing of nation-state borders, cultural ruptures, gendered and sexual transgressions).




Please note that we invite presenters and participants to arrive on Tuesday, November 6, 2018 for an informal reception; we plan to offer one night at a hotel to conference presenters pre-ceding our one-day conference on Wednesday, November 7, 2018. 



Submission Deadline: February 16, 2018


PLEASE SUBMIT ALL PRE-CONFERENCE PANELS AND PAPERS DIRECTLY TO THE NETWORK REPS:
Dominique Grisard     dominique.grisard@unibas.ch
Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney   jadwiga@email.arizona.edu







Reminder regarding SSHA conference submissions (to be done online): a full panel should have a chair, discussant and four presenters (ideally four papers, though we will accept panels with five presenters as well).  Preferably, panels should unite presenters from more than one discipline. We encourage panel organizers to bring together graduate students and scholars at different stages of their careers. If your panel is short of authors, discussant and/or chair, please let us know and we will do our best to help you complete the panel. Panel organizers should make sure potential participants are aware of the registration fees and are prepared to attend even if their potential travel grants fall through. As always, we are happy to help out with whatever query you might have.
*For additional general information, please see www.ssha.org.
















Pre-Conference Submissions (please send directly to network reps): we accept papers and panels and plan to collaborate with Arizona faculty.
For network-specific information, and FOR ALL QUESTIONS AND SUBMISSIONS REGARDING THE PRE-CONFERENCE PLEASE CONTACT US DIRECTLY.

PLEASE SUBMIT ALL PRE-CONFERENCE PANELS AND PAPERS DIRECTLY TO THE NETWORK REPS:


Best wishes,
Dominique, Jadwiga, and Martin


Contact Info: 
Dominique Grisard     dominique.grisard@unibas.ch
Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney   jadwiga@email.arizona.edu
Contact Email: jadwiga@email.arizona.edu

Sunday, January 7, 2018

CFP:Comparative Cultural Studies Conference- 29-31 August 2018,, Budapest, Hungary.












Call For Papers:

The comparative studies journals Comparative Literature Studies (Penn State University), Neohelicon (Akadémiai Kiadó, Hungary), and Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art (East China Normal University, Shanghai), with support of the Pázmány Péter Catholic University, will sponsor an international conference at the Institute of Musicology in Budapest, Hungary, from 29-31 August 2018, on the topic of “Comparative Cultural Studies.” Featured speakers are: Astrid Erll (Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany); Sabine Doran (Penn State University, USA); and Yehong Zhang (Tsinghua University, China).










Conference Theme:
In a 2005 special issue of Comparative Literature Studies devoted to the topic of comparative cultural studies, Michael Bérubé mused that “there does not seem to be any reason why cultural studies and comparative literature have had so little to do with one another.” And yet, such was the case.  One reason could be that the former has even less unity than the latter. In France, cultural studies might mean the literary sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau; in Britain the attempt to understand culture as a “structure of feeling”; in North America the study of mechanisms of social inequalities attributed to race, gender, or disability, and so forth. Another reason may be the fact that comparative literature remains largely within the modality of close reading and the valorization of texts as aesthetic objects. In those cases  where cultural studies works primarily with texts, on the other hand, its task is to analyze them as embodying the “social life of subjective forms” at a particular moment of their circulation (Richard Johnson). Just as frequently, however, cultural studies pays scant attention to texts (at least as traditionally conceived) in favor of analyzing  the processes of cultural production or reception.


Is Bérubé’s assessment “still” true? Is the divide still there? Are there scholars who compare cultural phenomena across language areas, and comparatists who use the methodologies of cultural studies? Does the current fragmentation of cultural studies into a seemingly endless variety of “studies” sub-fields (Memory Studies, Border Studies, Biopolitics, Anthropocene Studies, Thing Theory, etc.) advance or hinder the possibilities for comparison?









Papers given at the conference will be considered for publication in a special issue of one or more of these journals devoted to this theme.
  1. Research that actually “does the work” of cross-cultural comparison. Examples include: comparing conceptions of “disability,” “race,” or “gender” as these are conceived within different cultures; glocalizations of transnational media; cross-cultural (mis)understanding.
  2. Theories of culture or critiques of theories of culture (e.g. Adorno, Gramsci, Jameson, Lotman, Macherey) with broad application. Examples include: how do cultures remember – and forget?; “minor” or “small” literature?; can Border Theory be applied to any border?
  3. Reviews of the work done in one or more “studies” sub-fields with potential import for various language areas. Examples: current controversies in translation studies; why study the Global South? Frankfurt School – Third Generation.










We also welcome submissions of entire panels, workshops, or roundtables related to the conference theme.

The organizers of this conference welcome abstracts in English or French submitted by 31 March, 2018. At least three different types of contributions on comparative cultural studies in the form of 20-minute papers in French or English:

Questions? Questions concerning conference logistics, should be directed to Peter Hajdu. Questions on  conference theme, topics, etc., should be directed to Thomas Beebee.










Contact Info: 
Thomas Beebee, Editor-in-Chief, Comparative Literature Studies
Contact Email: cl-studies@psu.edu

Friday, January 5, 2018

Partially Funded STUDY ITALIAN DIASPORA CULTURE THROUGH A UNIQUE SUMMER PROGRAM IN ROME












Call For Applications:
The Italian Diaspora Studies Summer Seminar™ is a three-week summer program that takes place at Roma Tre University from June 11 to 29, 2018. It is designed to introduce participants (doctoral students and professors) to cultural studies of the Italian Diaspora from a variety of academic perspectives and to foster development of individual projects responding to the materials covered in the series of seminars in literature, film, and the social sciences. All participants will engage in a special research project.
The Italian Diaspora Studies Summer Seminar is open to graduate students (doctorate; advanced MA students may be considered) and professors from colleges and universities worldwide. This is a collaborative program between the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute / Queens College of The City University of New York and the Roma Tre University. Professors from these two institutions and others will comprise the teaching faculty of the entire three weeks. This is the fourth year of the Italian Diaspora Studies Summer Seminar.












The program will accept up to twenty participants for the 2018 summer program.
Fellowships of $1,500 per participant are available.
Cost of room, board (breakfast and lunch) and tuition (12 Roma Tre credit hours): $3,000. Air and ground travel are additional. Click here for the application form, and click here for more information on the program schedule and faculty.
For more information about the program schedule and faculty, contact Dean Anthony Julian Tamburri at 212.642.2094 or via email anthony.tamburri@qc.cuny.edu.
Application Deadline—February 24, 2018.













Contact Info: 
Cav. Anthony Julian Tamburri, PhD
Dean & Distinguished Professor
The John D. Calandra Italian American Institute
Queens College
The City University of New York