CFP: Civilisation and Fear: Writing and the Subject/s of Ideology

Just in time for Christmas...

Civilisation and Fear: Writing and the Subject/s of Ideology
Conference Call for Papers
22-25 September 2OlO
Ustron, Poland

***
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
(T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, ll.27-3O)
***

What Eliot voices here is, no doubt, his fear and, simultaneously, concern about the prospects of European civilisation as he saw it in the first decades of the 2Oth c. Eliot's lines carry eschatological overtones, too. Do we fear the end of our civilisation, or the condition it has reached at present? What is the connection between fear and civilisation? Are we still waiting for the barbarians? Do we have more fear of the real or the virtual? Should we, perhaps, opt for the positive senses of fear whose presence may testify to the mystery human life is, or brings to light the limitations which human life involves? Can we possibly conquer our fears by writing about them, and redefining their sources? Aren't we – as individuals, citizens, family members, superiors and inferiors, natives and strangers, bodies and spirits – our own fears writ large?

This call for papers is not intended to alarm or intimidate anyone. We extend a cordial invitation to all scholars who take genuine interest in any of the issues raised in the title of the conference as well as those listed below. Our aim is to address a multiplicity of concerns which often coincide and intersect in modern discourses (including literary and cultural studies, psychology, sociology, religious studies, art and others). However, we propose to consider writing (both literary and non-literary) as a window onto, and a meeting ground for, the following themes:

• Arts & literature: the future of arts; literatures of terror; artistic (literary) modes (genres) of terror; the terrific/horrific sublime; (limits of) self-fashioning and self-expression; anxiety of influence in the age of parody, travesty and appropriation

• Civilisation & technology: fear of modernisation & of acceleration; clashes of civilisations; the fearful interplay between culture and nature; man vis-à-vis machine (e.g., threats to humanness, simulacra of the human as source of anxiety, "new" humanity)

• Politics & ideology: enslavement, subjection, subordination through discourses; the "fearful asymmetry": discourses & practices of the modern state (intersections of the political and the personal); democracy, liberty(ies), religion: from orthodoxy to fundamentalism and back, the self of ideology

• Discourses: thanatophobia and the postmodern condition; religious studies as a necessary/contingent by-product of recent traumas; fear and/of metaphysics; power and its institutions as forces prescribing discourses of the self

• Identity / the self: phobias of exposure to fear and trauma; the threatened/shifting selfhood & competing models of subjectivity; the sub/un/conscious; the Lacanian Real

We invite all delegates to deliver 20-minute presentations. Abstracts of the presentations should not exceed 200 words and should be submitted electronically to civilizationandfear[at]gmail.com by March 31, 2010.

For further details please visit: http://www.fear.us.edu.pl

Registration
The registration form will be attached to the first Circular (to be sent to prospective participants in April) and will be also available from our website. The registration fee will not exceed $150 (inclusive of access to all conference events, delegate bag, mid-session refreshments, seminar room hire, and the publication of conference proceedings). As you receive this, our negotiations with prospective sponsors are under way, and we expect to be able to reduce the fee. You will be notified of any alterations in this regard.

Organisers
Institute of English Cultures and Literatures
University of Silesia
ul. S. Grota-Roweckiego 5
41-205 Sosnowiec
Poland
in cooperation with
The Committee on Literature Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences
Chair of the Organising Committee
Prof. Wojciech Kalaga
Secretary of the Organising Committee
Anna Chromik
civilizationandfear@gmail.com
Plenary speakers
Prof. Agata Bielik-Robson – IFiS, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
Prof. Jeremy Tambling – University of Manchester, UK
Prof. Horst Ruthrof – Murdoch University, Australia

Venue
The conference will take place in Ustroń, Poland. Details will be included in the conference circulars. We estimate that full board and accommodation should not exceed 150 PLN per day (ca $50). Detailed get-to information will be posted in the forthcoming circular.

Contact us at: civilizationandfear@gmail.com
For further details please visit: http://www.fear.us.edu.pl

CFP: Thomas R. Watson Conference: Working English in Rhetoric and Composition

Thomas R. Watson Conference
Working English in Rhetoric and Composition:
Contexts, Commitments, Consequences
October 14-16, 2010
Louisville, KY

The eighth biennial Thomas R. Watson Conference in Rhetoric and Composition solicits proposals that examine the working of rhetoric and composition in the era of the globalization and localization of English.

• How can and do we work English (that is, employ, construct, and redesign it) in the process of learning and using it?
  
• How can we best make English work (that is, make it operate and function) effectively and equitably in public deliberations, cultural expressions, and educational practices?
  
• How do competing notions of the workings of the English language (that is, notions of its formation, apparatus, relations to other languages, and relations to the shaping of individual-collective selves and lives) affect teaching and research in rhetoric and composition?
  
• What different inflections of work and class are implied by these competing notions of working English?

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: Mar 1, 2010

For more information, visit our website: http://louisville.edu/conference/watson Email Min-Zhan Lu, conference director: watson[at]louisville.edu Or call: (502) 852-1252

CFP: RCIA International Symposium on Culture and Political Economy: New Perspectives

2010 RCIA International Symposium on
Culture and Political Economy: New Perspectives

Jointly Organized by the Research Center for International Affairs, Wenzao, Taiwan and SOAS, University of London, UK

Call for Papers

Paper submissions are invited for the 2010 RCIA International Symposium on Culture and Political Economy: New Perspectives, which is to be held at Wenzao Ursuline College of Languages, Kaohsiung, Taiwan from Friday, September 17th to Sunday, September 19th 2010.

This conference intends to bring the interdisciplinary dialogues and problems between international cultural studies and political economy to the fore. Through analyses of international cultural/politico-economic issues at the theoretical and empirical levels, it aims to delineate the mutually enhancive and/or conflicting relations of the two in the global/local conjunctures of recent history and the present time.
The following issues and directions will form the major sessions:

1. Reinterpreting Global Political Economy: Culture as an Explicandum or Methodology?
* Modelling the Patterns of Political Economic and Cultural Change
* Critical Survey of Cultural Interpretations of Key Terms in International Political Economy
* Constructivism: Identity and Culture in International Political Economy

2. Cultural Factors in Economy
* Religious, Ethical and Ideological Factors in Economic Growth
* Historical and Contemporary Trends in the Relations between Economic Development and Cultural Change
* Cultural Dependencies? Asian Values and Little Dragons Revisited

3. Soft Power and Foreign Policies
* Clashes of Civilizations and Beyond
* Local/Global Networks: Guanxi as a Way of Soft Power?
* Culture beyond the Nation: International Relations in a World of Regions and Changing Frontiers.
* Cultural Diplomacy in the East and West

4. Cultural Engineering and the Regime of Global Knowledge
* Cultural Enlightenment as a Prerequisite to Long-term East Asian Political Economic Development.
* A Common Cultural Model between Japan, China and the advancing East Asian Systems
* Technology and Media in Global Political Economy
* Values, Religious Ethics and Regime of Useful Knowledge
* Museums, Power Display, and the Return of National Cultural Treasures

5. Organization Culture and New Cultural Economy
* McDonaldisation? Patterns of Enterprise Culture and Behaviours
* The Growing New Cultural Industries and Economy
* Cultural and Economic Impact of Mega-events and Festivals in Global Cities
* Economic or Cultural Wars? The Cultural Dispute between WTO and UNESCO

6. Prospect of the Culture-Political-Economic Synergy
* Cultural Transformation as the Key Element of Stability in International Political Economy
* Analysing the Immeasurables? Probing the Synergy of Cultural Political Economy

Paper proposals (all in English) containing title, abstract of 300-500 words, contact information and affiliation should be sent no later than January 15th 2010 electronically to one of the following: organizer Professor Jerry Liu, Wenzao Ursuline College of Language at jerryliu@mail.wtuc.edu.tw; co-organizer Professor Ian Inkster, Nottingham Trent University, UK at ian@inkster.org.uk; co-organizer Professor Stephan Chan, School of African and Oriental Studies, UK at sc5@soas.ac.uk. For further details of the conference please visit the website of Research Center of International Affairs at http://www.rcia.org.tw/. Final papers must be received no later than August 25th 2010 and should also be submitted electronically.


發佈日期：2009/12/19
聯絡人：Dr. Jerry Liu 劉俊裕 副教授
聯絡電話：07-3426031 Ext. 6102, 6121
相關網址：http://www.rcia.org.tw/
E-Mail：jerryliu@mail.wtuc.edu.tw

CFP: The City and the Ocean: Urbanity, (Im)migration, Memory, and Imagination

Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences
National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan

Call for Papers / 2010 International Conference
The City and the Ocean: Urbanity, (Im)migration, Memory, and Imagination

4th International Conference of the Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences, National Sun Yat-sen University, 16-17 October 2010, 80424 Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

Through history, cities and their inhabitants are locations of encounters between peoples, the trade of goods and services, the evolution of various forms of urban space, and the production of culture and technology. Cities continue to reproduce a series of familiar "common places," each a site of shared memory: centers of government and other public buildings; places of worship and other sacred spaces; neighborhoods and other residential areas; markets and other commercial zones; and public spaces such as squares, monuments, and parks. Throughout history, many cities are located at oceans and the conference's theme of the city and migration is understood in relation to the ocean. With the twentieth and twenty-first centuries a new set of global megacities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America has emerged to challenge the primacy of European and North American metropolitan centers. This expanded landscape of the city and urbanities -- here in relation to cities located at the ocean -- suggests to both re-imagine and to re-member the city where memory functions to organize aspects of the city in its now increased pluralistic globalized cultural context. With the movements and flux of (im)migrants, exiles and refugees, climate refugees, ethnic and racial minorities, alternative or countercultural groupings, etc. continue to contest and complicate the ways in which cities articulate their pluralized identities and societies through literature, history, architecture, social function, and various forms of artistic and cultural production. Papers in the conference examine the problematics of urban identities in cities at the ocean in the context of memory, (im)migration, and imagination in order to offer interpretations on the multiple and parallel versions of the city today.

Abstracts of papers in 200 words with CV are invited by 15 February 2010 to Professor I-Chun Wang at chsc705[at]mail.nsysu.edu.tw. Revised and peer-reviewed long versions of the conference papers are planned to be published in the National Sun Yat-sen University Humanities and Social Sciences Monograph Series and participants in the conference are required to submit their papers after the conference.

Proposals are welcomed, but not limited to the following topics and areas:

• Between ocean and city
  
• Ocean and migration
  
• Geography and literature
  
• Landscape and cityscape
  
• Cross-Atlantic or cross-Pacific travel
  
• Harbor city and Maritime city
  
• City and human rights
  
• City, ocean and war
  
• Slaveship
  
• Travel
  
• Geopolitics
  
• Maritime material culture
  
• City and maritime history
  
• Navy and sea battle
  
• Seafaring
  
• Maritime heritage
  
• Seapower
  
• Translantic Trade
  
• Men of the sea
  

Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan 國立中山大學人文社會科學研究中心 [Tel] +886-7-5252000 ext.3241 [Fax]+886-7-5250818 [E-mail] chsc705@mail.nsysu.edu.tw [Web] http://humanitiescenter.nsysu.edu.tw

CFP: Power & Knowledge 2010, Tampere, Finland

Power & Knowledge
The 2nd International Conference, Tampere, September 6-8, 2010
Call for Session Proposals


Inspired by the great success of the first conference (Power: Forms, Dynamics and Consequences, September 22-24, 2008), we carry on probing questions of power. This time the conference concentrates on the links between power and knowledge.

As is well known, Michel Foucault argued that power and knowledge are like two sides of the same coin. There are however many other approaches and research traditions that tackle the role of knowledge production in affecting and constituting power relations.

What are the roles of science, research and research-based knowledge production in promoting policy models? Does scientific research or evidence-based consultancy save the world and lead us to a better future? What effects does the key role of knowledge production in contemporary societies have on power and politics? How are the established databases and statistical classifications of the public and private organizations constructed and reproduced? What is the role of everyday knowledge in society? What is the relationship between knowledge and resistance?

By bringing together scholars who approach these questions from different angles this conference will advance our understanding about power relations in social reality.

Keynote speakers will include:
- Patrick Carroll
- Gili S. Drori
- Susan Haack
- Sakari Hänninen
- Michael Mann
- Yuval Millo
- Soile Veijola
- (to be announced)

To send a session proposal and to get more information about the conference, please email a session title and abstract (100-200 words describing the session) to power2010@uta.fi

The conference website is in
http://www.uta.fi/power2010/

The latest day to submit the proposal is January 31st 2010. Call for papers will be launched after approved sessions are confirmed.

Welcome to Tampere!

Risto Heiskala
Professor, Director
Chair of the Organizing Committee

CFP: The Asian Conference on the Social Sciences

via

"East Meets West in Pursuit of a Sustainable World"

The theme of the Inaugural Asian Conference on the Social Sciences is 'East Meets West. For more than a decade, sustainability has emerged a global issue for business and industry, government, and academia. Historically, sustainability has been associated with environmental concerns such as the energy crisis and global warming. Today, however, it is recognized that social/economic justice is equally important to achieving a sustainable future. Thus, issues such as poverty, hunger, education, health care, and access to markets should be a part of the evolution of any comprehensive sustainability paradigm. The conference will address these various dimensions of human sustainability.

Conference Chair:

Professor June M. Henton, Ph.D.
Dean, College of Human Sciences, Auburn University, USA

CALL FOR PAPERS

The conference's theme is 'East Meets West in Pursuit of a Sustainable World' and the organizers encourage submissions that approach this questions from a variety of perspectives. However, the submission of other topics for consideration is welcome and we also encourage submissions within and across a variety of disciplines and fields related to the Social Sciences, including the following:

* Anthropology, Archaeology, Cultural Studies and Humanities
* Media and Communications
* Economics and Management
* Education and Social Welfare
* Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Gender
* Natural, Environmental and Health Sciences
* Politics, Public Policy and Law
* Psychology, Cognitive Science and the Behavioral Sciences
* Research Methodologies, Quantitative and Qualitative Methods
* Sociology and Geography
* Technology and Applied Sciences
* Other Areas of Social Sciences, including interdisciplinary research.

NB Abstracts should be 250-500 words in length and will be blind reviewed by a voluntary team of peer reviewers. Authors are limited to one abstract submission, whether as lead or secondary author. Please apply through the online system at www.acss.iafor.org

Conference Deadlines

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 15 January 2010
Results of abstract reviews returned to authors: 5 February 2010
Deadline for submission of full papers: 1 April 2010
Deadline for full conference registration payment for all presenters: 1 May 2010
ACSS Conference: 18-21 June 2010

CFP: The Asian Conference on Arts and Humanities

via

Theme: "East Meets West"

The theme of the Inaugural Asian Conference on Arts and Humanities is 'East Meets West', which is a response to the ongoing process of globalization and its implications. It offers an opportunity to search for similarities of ideas that may enhance international understanding on the one hand and for differences in culture that may have to be accepted as irreconcilable on the other. Racial and religious disagreement, culturally contrasting ways of dealing with social, economic, and political problems, exacerbated by the forces of globalization, combine to exert enormous pressure on the systems that have been created to manage human affairs on this planet. This conference is dedicated to the cross-cultural exploration of the interconnectedness of the central questions involved in order to generate new ideas and fresh approaches that will be relevant and constructive as support for the emerging generation of thinkers, educators, and global leaders.

Conference Chair:

The Reverend Professor Stuart D.B. Picken
Order of the Sacred Treasure, B.D., Ph.D., F.R.A.S.
Chairman, Japan Society of Scotland

Keynote Speaker:

Lord Charles Bruce
Lord Lieutenant of Fife
Chairman of the Patrons of the National Galleries of Scotland Trustee of the Historic Scotland Foundation
Honorary patron of the Japan Society of Scotland

CALL FOR PAPERS

The conference's theme is 'East Meets West' and the organizers encourage submissions that approach this questions from a variety of perspectives. However, the submission of other topics for consideration is welcome and we also encourage submissions within and across a variety of disciplines and fields related to Arts and Humanities, including the following:

Anthropology
American Studies
Archeology
Architecture
Art
Art History
Dance
English
Ethnic Studies
Film
Folklore
Geography
Graphic Design
History
Landscape Architecture
Languages
Literature
Linguistics
Music
Performing Arts
Philosophy
Postcolonial Identities
Religion
Second Language Studies
Speech/Communication
Theatre
Visual Arts
Other Areas of Arts and Humanities, including interdisciplinary research.

NB Abstracts should be 250-500 words in length and will be blind reviewed by a voluntary team of peer reviewers. Authors are limited to one abstract submission, whether as lead or secondary author. Please apply through the online system at www.acah.iafor.org

Proceedings Submission Deadlines

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 15 January 2010
Results of abstract reviews returned to authors: 5 February 2010
Deadline for submission of full papers: 1 April 2010
Deadline for full conference registration payment for all presenters: 1 May 2010
ACAH Conference: 18-21 June 2010

CFP: Engaging Students in the Global Century

via

The New York Institute of Technology announces its sixth interdisciplinary conference, "Engaging Students in the Global Century." Scholars from a range of disciplines are invited to interpret the theme broadly for this one-day conference at NYiT's Columbus Circle campus on Friday, March 19, 2010.

The conference, as in past years, will draw scholars from around the country and world for panel discussions, featured speakers, and lively conversation. Keynote speakers, such as author Mark Kurlansky, sociologist Saskia Sassen, and historians Marta Gutman and Kenneth T. Jackson, have added to the depth of past conferences.

Possible themes for papers:

• Strategies and experiences related to incorporating Web 2.0 technologies, including Wikis, social networking sites, blogs, and virtual reality platforms, into the undergraduate classroom
• New ideas in instructional design and teaching strategies for online learning
• Plans for developing and implementing successful undergraduate research programs, particularly in the humanities and arts
• Addressing students as global citizens and creating community across global campuses
• Problems and solutions connected to collaborative learning
• Critiques and questions related to new technologies, intergenerational dynamics, or ethical concerns involved with 21st-century teaching and learning.

Please send a 500-word abstract and C.V. to Jennifer Griffiths at jgriff02 [at] nyit.edu by January 15, 2010.

Jennifer Griffiths
NYiT, Manhattan Campus
1855 Broadway
NY NY 10023
212-261-1580

Email: jgriff02[at}nyit.edu