External Conferences

“The Evolution and Impact of a Rich and Powerful Suburb: Arlington, Virginia” led by Prof Bill Morales.

Arlington County was originally a rather undeveloped part of the District of Columbia that evolved into a rich and powerful suburb based mainly on its connections with the defence and intelligence industries. The transfer of wealth from the capital has had a profound effect on Washington, D.C., including the class and racial distinction that characterize both the city and suburbs.

This program  expands our approach to understanding the “middle landscape” by to delving into the opportunities and challenges of suburban/city relations.

Click here to see a Poster.

Call for papers:

Encircling Worlds: Imagining Irish Suburbia, Carlow College and VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow, Ireland, September 12-13, 2014

Conference Organisers: Dr Simon Workman (Trinity College Dublin), Dr Eoghan Smith (Carlow College)

In the final decades of the twentieth century and in the early years of the new millennium, the spaces of Irish suburbia have been significantly transformed. From the enlargement of commuter belts, residential areas, and the commensurate construction boom in apartment complexes, to the redevelopment of housing estates and older forms of residences, the socio-geographical configuration of the Irish suburb has undergone unprecedented change.

This conference seeks to explore how Irish writers and artists have consciously responded to the evolution of the Irish suburb and also how the changed nature of the Irish suburb has placed new demands and pressures upon Irish cultural and artistic forms. We welcome papers on themes and topics including, but not limited to, the following:

  • The aesthetics of Irish suburban literature. The amenability of the short story, the novel, drama, film, television, or photography to Irish suburban experience.
  • Traditions of Irish suburban literature and the sublimation of older forms of Irish suburban art into contemporary narrative forms.
  • Suburban identities: sexuality, gender, class.
  • Suburban cultures: heterogeneity and homogeneity.
  • Irish suburbia and the Celtic Tiger and/or legacies of the Celtic Tiger.
  • Irish suburbia and childhood.
  • The question of the Irish suburb as a site and source of creativity.
  • Migration, emigration, immigration within and to Irish suburban spaces.
  • Globalization/Glocalization in Irish suburbia.
  • The ecological impact of Irish suburbia.
  • Suburban Gothic.

Papers should last approximately twenty minutes maximum. Please send proposals of 200-250 words and a brief biography to the following email address: risbcarlow@gmail.com

Closing date for receipt of proposals: 30th May, 2014

2014 Conferences (in date order)

Seminar CFP ‘Dwelling in Diaspora’ for The American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, New York University, Thursday 20 to Sunday 23 March 2014,

Seminar Organizers: Elizabeth Syrkin (University of Muenster), Khachig Tölölyan (Wesleyan University)

The study of diasporas often privileges a vocabulary and rhetorics of displacement, deterritorialization, hybridity, and movement. This hypervaluation of mobility can be partially attributed to its conflation with economic advancement, freedom, and agency. While such a focus undeniably has done and continues to do great work, with its link to the destabilization of dominant and essentialist discourses, it has in turn relegated what may be called the sedentary to the margins. Despite its links with the ‘local’, the sedentary is too often equated with stasis and rigidity, or dismissed for its purported association with homogenizing forms of nationalism. Such an approach obscures the formative role of place, location, and dwelling in the formation, self-conception, and practice of diaspora.

This seminar invites papers that consider the complexities and realities of the sedentary, of dwelling and staying put, in diaspora studies. In what ways, we ask, are notions of home, belonging, and diasporic identity bound up with locality? What is the role of metropolises like New York or London (locations in which a large population both sustains fragments of an older culture and engages in the cultural production of the new) in diasporic self-representation and the production of diaspora-sustaining cultural work? How are diasporas situated in relation to each other in a given space? And what can the literary study of place, fixity, and the immobile tell us about the communities that inhabit them? By exploring these questions, we hope to bring back locality to the study of diaspora and diasporic literature.

Please direct questions to Elizabeth Syrkin at elizabeth.syrkin@uni-muenster.de

Abstracts (max 250 words) should be submitted through the ACLA website: http://www.acla.org/submit/ Please select ‘Dwelling in Diaspora’ from the seminar drop-down list. Deadline for proposals is November 1, 2013.

Seminar CFP ‘The Local and the Regional: Elided Spaces of Postcolonial Capital’, for The American Comparative Literature Association Meeting, New York University, Thursday 20 to Sunday 23 March 2014

Organizers:
– Laurie Lambert (Assistant Professor, African-American and Africana Studies, UC Davis)
– Shirley Wong (Post-doctoral fellow, English, NYU)

At a time when discourses of world literature, global ecologies, and planetarity have come to dominate discussions in comparative literature, what happens to those local, regional, and provincial spaces that attempt to resist, or simply fall outside the purview of such globalizing impulses? We are particularly interested in how the local and regional literatures of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century are shaped by, but elided from, the perspective of the national and transnational. We invite papers that interrogate literary, political, and cultural representations of such ‘local’ spaces and communities, as well as other zones of underdevelopment more broadly. How do such local spaces lie outside the major channels of capital—cultural or politico-economic? How might they also contribute to and in fact be constitutive of larger movements of capital? How might we reframe postcolonial studies—an area of inquiry that has largely been focused on nationalism and the nation-state—in order to take account of such the elided cultures and spaces of the local and regional?

Possible topics include:

  • Discourse of authenticity and the local/regional
  • Relationship between regional and national identities
  • Representations of the rural and the provincial
  • Representations of urban neighborhoods and ghettos
  • Diaspora and translocal configurations of cultural production
  • The postcolonial as a politics of the local

Please submit paper proposals (max. 250 words) through ACLA’s website and select this seminar from the drop-down list: http://www.acla.org/submit/

Urban Popcultures, 4th Global Conference, Lisbon, Portugal, Saturday 10 to Monday 12 May 2014

This inter- and multi-disciplinary conference aims to examine, explore and critically engage with issues related to urban life. The project will promote the ongoing analysis of the varied creative trends and alternative cultural movements that comprise urban popcultures and subcultures. In particular the conference will encourage equally theoretical and practical debates which surround the cultural and political contexts within which alternative urban subcultures are flourishing. Presentations, papers, performances, reports, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:

  • Urban Space and the Landscape of the City
    Urban Aesthetics and Architecture, Creative Re-imagining and Revitalization of the City. The Metropolis and Inner City Life: Urban Boredom vs. Creativity.
  • The City as Creative Subject/Object
    Urban Life and Urban Subculture Considered in Music, Art, Film and Videogames. Urban Fashion and Style. Urban Visual Styles, Street Art, Graffiti and Tagging. City Festivals.
  • Urban Codes
    Alternative Popular Culture and Ideology, Politics of Alternative Popcultures, Alternative Ethics of the City. Urban Religion and Religious Expressions. The Language and Urban Slang. The Avantgarde and Urban Codes.
  • Alternative Music Cultures
    Histories, Representations, Discourses and Independent Scenes. Popular Music Theory. Cultural and Social Aspects of Clubbing and Scenes. Being Alternative as a “religion”: Sub-cultures of Indie Rock and Post-Punk, Hip Hop, Rap, Electronica, Dark Wave Scenes – Post-Gothic.
  • Queer Theory and Urban Alternative Cultures
    Gendered Music and Fashion. The Role of the City in Gendered Freedom and Libertine Lifestyles.
    Pride Parades and Festivals.
  • City making the Fashion Styles
    Identity Creation. Style and Branding. Politics of Cool. Pretties, Freaks and Uglies.
  • Visions of Alternative Sound Cultures in Massmedia
    The Role of Internet Radio. The Visual Aspects of Alternative Entertainment. The Evolution of Music Television. Urban Alternative Styles and Extreme Sports.
  • Urban Alternative Cultures and Online World
    Urban Identity and Global/Glocal Membership. Globalisation/Localisation and Access to the Alternative Music and Clubbing Experience. Current Models of Music Distribution. Music Piracy – Copyright/Copyleft/Creative Commons. The Role of Internet and Prosumer in the Transformation of Music Industry.

In order to support and encourage interdisciplinary engagement, it is our intention to create the possibility of starting dialogues between the parallel events running during this conference. Delegates are welcome to attend up to two sessions in each of the concurrent conferences. We also propose to produce cross-over sessions between two and possibly all three groups – and we welcome proposals which deal with the relationship between teenagers, visual culture, and/or urban popcultures, subcultures and/or storytelling.

What to send: 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 6th December 2013 If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 14th March 2014. 300 word abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation as you would like it to appear in programme, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords.

E-mails should be entitled: Urban Popcultures 4 Abstract Submission

Proposals should be sent to the Organising Chairs: Daniel Riha: rihad@inter-disciplinary.net and Rob Fisher: up4@inter-disciplinary.net

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

The conference is part of the ‘Critical Issues’ programme of research projects. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume.

For further details of the conference, please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/cyber/urban-popculture

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

Crossing the Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945, the 16th Annual Conference of the Multidisciplinary ‘Space Between’ Society, Institute of English Studies, Thursday 17 to Saturday 19 July 2014

The 16th annual conference of the Space Between society will explore the notion of ‘crossing’ − whether of oceans, borders, classes, genders, disciplines or genres − as it relates to literature, art, history, music, theatre, media, and spatial or material culture in any country between 1914 and 1945. From 1930s writers and intellectuals crossing the class divide to the surrealist crossing of a sewing machine with an umbrella, from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando to Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca, from crossing the dance floor to spying and wartime betrayal, tropes and examples of crossing proliferate across the culture of the period. We invite proposals for papers considering any aspect of crossing whether literal or metaphorical, spatial or social, successful or unsuccessful. Topics might include:

  • Crossing time and space
  • Transatlantic crossings of American (North and Latin) and European cultures
  • Crossing between east and west
  • Crossing the Mediterranean
  • Crossing travel and colonialism
  • Crossing the breach between peace and war
  • Crossing between friendship and enmity
  • Crossing picket lines
  • Broadcast media crossing the airwaves
  • Border crossings
  • Double crossings, voluntary and involuntary
  • Identity crossing
  • Cross dressing
  • Cross purposes
  • Cross-cultural activity

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words along with a short biographical statement to Nick Hubble at Nick.Hubble@brunel.ac.uk by 2 December 2013.

Conference Organising Committee:

Erica Brown, Sheffield Hallam University; Richard Hornsey, University of Nottingham; Nick Hubble, Brunel University; Phyllis Lassner, Northwestern University; Michael McCluskey, University College London; Ann Rea, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown.