Concourse

Amazon

Wednesday, November 1, 2023

Call for Book Proposals: East Asian Popular Culture Book Series _Palgrave Macmillan Publishing House

 




Series Editors: Yasue Kuwahara, Northern Kentucky University, USA, John A. Lent, Temple University, USA

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan


Series Description: Launched in 2014, the East Asian Popular Culture Series focuses on the study of popular culture in East Asia (referring to China, Hong Kong, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan) to meet a growing interest in the subject among students as well as scholars of various disciplines. The series examines cultural production in East Asian countries, both individually and collectively, as its popularity extends beyond the region. It continues the scholarly discourse on the recent prominence of East Asian popular culture as well as the give and take between Eastern and Western cultures.  




Visit the Series page: http://www.palgrave.com/us/series/14958.

The series welcomes submissions of book proposals and manuscripts for consideration in English by both established scholars and early-career researchers.  Please send inquiries and proposals to the series editor, Yasue Kuwahara (kuwahara@nku.edu).

Contact Email
kuwahara@nku.edu

Tuesday, October 31, 2023

Whither #postcolonialism? New directions in #postcolonialstudies -- International Online Conference, 1-2 December 2023

 Postcolonial studies as a way of reclaiming history from the perspective of the colonised continues to uncover the myriad fraught legacies of colonialism. The emergence of newer interdisciplinary areas of inquiry, such as climate change, has further revealed tangled legacies of colonialism that continue to persist. The burgeoning field of postcolonial print culture studies, in turn, has been bringing to the fore a fascinating terrain of production, circulation and consumption of print in colonial contexts that is particularly enriching our knowledge of anticolonial resistance in various ways.  This conference aims to bring together academic work in some of the newer sub-fields of postcolonial inquiry with attention to continuities. Research papers are welcome from across disciplines on, but not restricted to, the following themes:

  • Climate change, caste and gender
  • Climate change and endangerment of languages
  • Climate change and changing cultural practices, and literature
  • Climate change and marginalized sexualities
  • Ecology and literature
  • Environmental humanities and postcolonial studies
  • Local knowledge and climate change
  • Postcolonial autobiography
  • Postcolonial print culture
  • Translation and postcolonial studies

Keynote speaker: Professor Robert JC Young, Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature, New York University, USA

Timeline:

  • Abstracts within 250 words, upto 5 keywords, and a bio-note within 100 words due by 12 November 2023.
  • Link to submit abstracts:   https://forms.gle/iJvL5XdDSKLFo4Wp9  
  • Selection of abstracts and details of online registration will be notified by email by 19 November 2023.
  • Registration deadline for presenters: 23 November 2023
  • Full papers for presentation not exceeding 2000 words, following MLA style (9th edition), are to be submitted by email to english.conference.sjm@gmail.com by 28 November 2023.
  • Conference dates: 1-2 December 2023

Publication: Submitted papers will be peer-reviewed by experts in respective areas and published in an edited volume by a reputed national academic publisher.

Conference registration fees:
Paper presentation: Rs 350.00 (Co-authored papers require individual registration)

Contact Information

Dr Durba Basu
Assistant Professor and Head
Department of English
Swarnamoyee Jogendranath Mahavidyalaya
Amdabad, Purba Medinipur
West Bengal 721650
India
 

Contact Email
english.conference.sjm@gmail.com

DiGRA India Conference 2023 (online): #Love and #Games

 Love in/and/for Games

Loving a game can lead to formation of gaming communities, and game communities can later become sites where love can be found and at times love for games can be lost. One can also sit back and play to complete a love story as a side quest of a game. One could also declare one’s love for games by establishing an academic discipline. Each case is a specific and possibly conflicting manifestation/articulation of love for/in/and games. While it is easy to reach a consensus that we all love games, the question ‘why do we love games?’ is politically charged and a heavily contested one. Sara Ahmed has argued that even ‘hate groups’ operate in the name of love, as we saw in the online harassment campaign known as Gamergate, where hatred, toxicity and violence were packaged as “love for games”. However, the women at the receiving end were subjected to violence, harassment and hatred not because they hated games but because their love for games did not coincide with attitudes of white male right-wing gamers. Often when we think of love and games, it seems that the conflict is not between game haters and game lovers, rather it is always between various constructed variations of the umbrella phrase love for games. In all this the game hater appears as a straw(o)man figure, who is almost like a phantom friend to gamers, designers, scholars, who they regularly speak of and talk to, who however, does not exist or perhaps is extremely difficult to find or maybe hides in plain sight. Perhaps, the answer to the question ‘why do we love games?’ involves a necessary speculation on how we love games and what languages, modes and mediums do we invoke to express our love for games.

Love, games and play has been a topic of interest for game studies for quite some time. In 2008 Jessica Enevold proposed a categorization model for Game-Love, in 2012 Jane Pinckard edited a special issue for the journal Well Played on the subject of romance in games, ‘Game Love: Essays on Play and Affection’ was published in 2014, in 2016 another volume ‘Digital Love: Romance and Sexuality in Games’ edited by Heidi McDonald was published. The current one day mini-conference is an effort in the same direction, in that, it wants to understand the ways in which games operate as a source of our feelings and how we are shaped by games. The challenge is to move beyond default expressions such as I love games because they are fun or I love games because they make me happy or I love games because they teach X (valid as these statements are)and question what is this fun/happiness/pedagogy that makes one a lover of games. 

We welcome abstracts, artistic musings, loveletters, testimonials and posters in line with the conference themeTopics may include but not be restricted to the following: 

  • #Love, addiction, and games
  • Devotion, love and games
  • Love, poetics and gameplay
  • Queering play and politics of love 
  • Algorithmic intimacy
  • Love, games, and fandom
  • Toxicity and obsession for games
  • Game studies and ludophilia
  • Posthuman love and games
  • Game-mechanics of love
  • Love for retro games
  • Consumerism and game-love
  • Ethics of care and love in digital games
  • Play as love

Important Dates:

Submission of Abstracts: 15th November, 2023

Intimation of Accepted Abstracts: 23rd November, 2023

Submission of Full-Length papers: 7th December, 2023

Date of the Conference: 9th December, 2023

Guidelines for Abstract and Paper Submission:

We invite abstracts of less than 300 words (and five keywords that will help us determine the focus area) along with a short bio-note of 100 words to be sent via email to digraindiaconference@gmail.com by 15th November, 2023. Full-length papers of accepted abstracts, of 4500-6000 words, in citation style MLA 9th Edition, should reach the same on or before 7th December, 2023.

In accordance with our theme, we have also curated a list of provocations (see link) to act as springboards for engaging with the area of interest. These provocations are to aid you in your creative processes. They do not restrict our preferred objects of study.

Contact Email
digraindiaconference@gmail.com

Monday, October 30, 2023

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 15th of January 2024.

Contact Information

The Centre for Culture and the Mind, University of Copenhagen

Contact Email: cultmind@hum.ku.dk

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

Sunday, October 29, 2023

CFP: International #Conference on #Language & #Literature: #Acquisition and #Preservation-28-29 November 2023 -#Bhopal, #India

 Conference Overview

Welcome to International Conference on Language & Literature: Acquisition and Preservation, which is schedule on 28-29 November 2023 at Bhopal; also known as city of lakes. We are inviting students, scholars, researchers, academicians and other professionals who engaged in the field of language and literature. Participants will get numerous networking and socializing opportunities to engage with their peers, get advice from keynote speakers and connect with the experts in their respective specializations during the conference.

Apart from this, ICLLAP 2023 is going to be held in both online and offline mode. So individuals who are not able to come in person can join it virtually.

Introduction

Language and literature are responsible for the growth and development of culture in a particular community and contribute in the diversity of a nation. They help in preservation of one's heritage and traditions. Language preservation ensures contact with one's history and literature. The International Conference on Language & Literature: Acquisition and Preservation (ICLLAP) 2023, emphasizes on the acquisition and preservation of languages through literature. It will include interdisciplinary studies to showcase advances and new research in the fields of language, literature and education. The purpose of ICLLAP is to bring together leading scholars, researchers and scholarly practitioners to share their experiences and research findings on all aspects of language and literature acquisition and preservation.

 

Objectives

  • Promote importance of language and literature preservation.
  • Highlight need of literature for language acquisition.
  • Facilitate research and developmental activities in language and literature field.
  • Encourage scientific information interchange between scholars, researchers, developers, students, and practitioners working around the world.
  • Discuss challenges and thier prospective solutions.

Topics of particular interest include, but are not limited to:
  • Language Curriculum Development
  • Language Learning and Acquisition
  • Language Testing and Evaluation
  • Psychology of Language Learning
  • Language and Ideology 
  • Language and Technology 
  • Language, Culture, Socialization 
  • Linguistic statistics in literature
  • Language Planning and Policy 
  • Language and globalization 
  • Applied Linguistics Trends in global literature
  • Language Program Evaluation
  • Language Teacher Education
  • Language Curriculum
  • Preservation Techniques
  • Language and communication
  • Language Learning and Acquisition
  • Offensive Language
  • Philosophy of Language
  • Asian Literature
  • American Literature
  • African Literature
  • Indian literature
  • Bilingualism
  • British Literature
  • Children’s Literature
  • Drama
  • English language teaching
  • Euphemisms
  • European Literature
  • Fairy tales
  • Fiction
  • Literary Styles and Movements
  • Literary Theory
  • Mystery and Detective Fiction
  • Myth and Folklore
  • Nonfiction
  • Novels
  • Humorous Literature
  • World Literature
  • Literature and Social Media
  • Contemporary Literature
  • Postcolonial literature
  • Multicultural Literature 
  • Women's literature 
  • Gender and Literature
  • Comparative Literature
  • Language and communication 
  • Sociolinguistics Classical Literature
  • Literature Preservation

Important Dates

 

Schedule

Dates

Start of Registrations

06 July 2023

Start of Receiving of Papers

7 July 2023

Paper Submission Deadline

18 November 2023

Conference Start Date

28 November 2023

Conference End Date

29 November 2023

 

* Paper review time is 5 to 7 Days from the date of submission.

 

Submit paper via electronic system:

Submit Paper/Submission Link

or

Send manuscripts to the conference email: 

icllap2023@abcdindex.com

Call for Papers/Voices/Participation: Approaching Academia: A Conference on Class and Culture -2024

 






CLASS CON 2024 Call for Papers/Voices/Participation

March 15th and 16th, Bowling Green State University, Jerome Library (and online)


Inspired by Ray Browne, the founder of Popular Culture Studies at BGSU, this conference seeks to give “education a broader base and greater richness” through the exploration of why and how popular culture and class are interconnected. A scholar and teacher who saw popular culture as a tool to bring together the working-class students and the elitism of academia to create a new curriculum, Browne’s legacy of inclusion and effecting change is at the heart of this year’s Class Con.

As class studies are often niche, invisible, or non-existent within many cultural studies programs, we hope to draw attention to the discipline and the broader need for class consciousness. By understanding and breaking down the structures and systems that uphold our modern class structure, this conference aims to make meaningful change both in and outside of the academic ivory tower. Specifically, with this conference we hope to brainstorm, workshop, and develop a pedagogic approach to bringing class studies into the classroom while also giving a voice to the students most impacted by economic uncertainties.

As a public university for the public good, Bowling Green State University will host an academic conference that has the potential to create good for the public to whom we are committed. This conference aims to facilitate dialog surrounding the issues of class in American culture, both in traditional academic presentations as well as in workshops, discussions, and artistic representations (written, spoken, visual, performance, etc.).

The key areas of the conference include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Pedagogy and Class Studies

  • Class Representations in Popular Culture

  • Class Issues in Academia

  • Labor Unions in Contemporary Culture

  • Social Outreach and Activism

    Interested parties and individuals are encouraged to submit their proposals (abstract of about 500 words) by December 1st to classcon@bgsu.edu. No cost to submit. Free for both in-person and online attendance.

Deadline To Submit December 1st


Contact Information

John King, Bowling Green State University, School of Critical and Cultural Studies

Contact Email
classcon@bgsu.edu