CFP: 1st Global Conference: The Graphic Novel

Friday 7th September 2012 – Sunday 9th September 2012

Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

“Behind this mask there is more than just flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea… and ideas are bulletproof.” - Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

Call for Papers:

This inter- and multi-disciplinary conference aims to examine, explore and critically engage with issues in and around the production, creation and reading of all forms of comics and graphic novels. Taken as a form of pictographic narrative it has been with us since the first cave paintings and even in the 21st century remains a hugely popular, vibrant and culturally relevant means of communication whether expressed as sequential art, graphic literature, bandes dessinees, tebeos, fumetti, manga, manhwa, komiks, strips, historietas, quadrinhos, beeldverhalen, or just plain old comics. (as noted by Paul Gravett)

Whilst the form itself became established in the 19th Century it is perhaps not until the 20th century that comic book heroes like Superman (who has been around since 1938) became, not just beloved characters, but national icons. With the globalisation of publishing brands such as Marvel and DC it is no accident that there has been an increase in graphic novel adaptations and their associated merchandising. Movies such as X-men, Iron man, Watchmen and the recent Thor have grossed millions of dollars across the world and many television series have been continued off-screen in the graphic form, Buffy, Firefly and Farscape to name a few.

Of course America and Europe is not the only base of this art form and the Far East and Japan have their own traditions as well as a huge influence on graphic representations across the globe. In particular Japanese manga has influenced comics in Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, China, France and the United States, and have created an amazing array of reflexive appropriations and re-appropriations, in not just in comics but in anime as well.

Of equal importance in this growth and relevance of the graphic novel are the smaller and independent publishers that have produced influential works such as Maus by Art Spiegleman, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, Palestine by Joe Sacco, Epileptic by David B and even Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware that explore, often on a personal level, contemporary concerns such as gender, diaspora, post-colonialism, sexuality, globalisation and approaches to health, terror and identity. Further to this the techniques and styles of the graphic novel have taken further form online creating entirely web-comics and hypertexts, as in John Cei Douglas’ Lost and Found and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, as well as forming part of larger trans-media narratives and submersive worlds, as in the True Blood franchise that invites fans to enter and participate in constructing a narrative in many varied formats and locations.

This projects invites papers that consider the place of the comic or graphic novel in both history and location and the ways that it appropriates and is appropriated by other media in the enactment of individual, social and cultural identity.

Papers, reports, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to (but not limited to) the following themes:

* Just what makes a Graphic Novel so Graphic and so Novel?:
~Sources, early representations and historical contexts of the form.
~Landmarks in development, format and narratology.
~Cartoons, comics, graphic novels and artists books.
~Words, images, texture and colour and what makes a GN
~Format, layout, speech bubbles and “where the *@#% do we go from here?”

* The Inner and Outer Worlds of the Graphic Novel:
~Outer and Inner spaces; Thoughts, cities, and galaxies and other representations of graphic place and space.
~ Differing temporalities, Chronotopes and “time flies”: Intertextuality, editing and the nature of Graphic and/or Deleuzian time.
~ Graphic Superstars and Words versus Pictures: Alan Moore v Dave Gibbons (Watchmen) Neil Gaiman v Jack Kirby (Sandman).
~Performance and performativity of, in and around graphic representations.
~Transcriptions and translations: literature into pictures, films into novels and high/low graphic arts.

* Identity, Meanings and Otherness:
~GN as autobiography, witnessing, diary and narrative
~Representations of disability, illness, coping and normality
~Cultural appropriations, east to west and globalisation
~National identity, cultural icons and stereo-typical villains
~Immigration, postcolonial and stories of exile
~Representing gender, sexualities and non-normative identities.
~Politics, prejudices and polemics: banned, censored and comix that are “just plain wrong”
~Other cultures, other voices, other words

* To Infinity and Beyond: The Graphic Novel in the 21st Century:
~Fanzines and Slash-mags: individual identity through appropriation.
~Creator and Created: Interactions and interpolations between authors and audience.
~Hypertext, Multiple formats and inter-active narratives.
~Cross media appropriation, GN into film, gaming and merchandising and vice versa
~Graphic Myths and visions of the future: Sandman, Hellboy, Ghost in the Shell.

Papers can be accepted which deal solely with Graphic Novels. This project will run concurrently with our project on Fear, Horror and Terror – we welcome any papers considering the problems or addressing issues on Fear, Horror and Terror and Graphic Novels for a cross-over panel. We also welcome pre-formed panels on any aspect of the Graphic Novel or in relation to crossover panel(s).

Papers will be accepted which deal with related areas and themes. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012. 300 word abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords

E-mails should be entitled: GN1 Abstract Submission

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using 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.

Organising Chairs

Nadine Farghaly
Paris-Lodron University, Salzburg,
Austria

Rob Fisher
Network Leader
Inter-Disciplinary.Net,
Freeland, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom

The conference is part of the Education Hub series of research projects, which in turn belong to the At the Interface programmes of Inter-Disciplinary.Net. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore discussions which are innovative and challenging. 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 or volumes.

For further details of the project, please click here.

For further details of the conference, please click here.

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.

Conference Round-Up 2011

Since 2011 is coming to a close, and everyone is writing their reviews of the year, I thought I’d offer a round-up of the academic conferences I’ve attended this year. It’s been a good year for conferences, and I’ve been to some fantastic events. This post is a taste of my year in conferences.

January

6-9 Jan: Gender and Medieval Studies: Gender, Time and Memory
University of Swansea
My first conference of the year was the annual Gender and Medieval Studies conference, held this year at the University of Swansea. The keynote speakers at the 2011 conference were Diane Wolfthal (Rice University), who spoke on serial marriage in the Middle Ages, and Elizabeth Robertson (University of Glasgow), who spoke on gender and the translation of empire. My own paper was entitled: Reading Marie de France’s Muldumarec: Blood, Masculinity and Devotion. The 2012 Gender and Medieval Studies Conference will be hosted at the University of Manchester on 11-13 January 2012. I’m on the organizing committee for the 2012 event, along with my former PhD supervisor (Anke Bernau) and one of her current PhD students (Daisy Black).

February

March

7-8 Mar: Before Man and God: Sin, Confession, Forgiveness and Redemption in the Anglo-Saxon World (MANCASS Postgraduate Conference)
John Rylands Library, Deansgate, Manchester
In 2011, the annual MANCASS postgraduate conference explored sin, penance and forgiveness in the Anglo-Saxon world, and was organized by PhD student, Chris Monk (University of Manchester). I didn’t speak at the conference, but I chaired a session on the second day, with papers on the Old English Martyrology and male sexuality in the Anglo-Saxon penitentials. As always, the postgrad conference coincided with the annual Toller Lecture, which was given this year by Professor Barbara Yorke (University of Winchester), who spoke on ‘King Alfred and the traditions of Anglo-Saxon kingship’. The 2012 MANCASS postgraduate conference will focus on domestic life and lifestyle in the Anglo-Saxon period.

After the conference closed on 8 March, a number of us headed over to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation for the launch of In Strange Countries: Middle English Literature and its Afterlife (ed. by David Matthews), a collection of essays in memory of J.J. Anderson.

11-12 Mar: ‘The Ideal Woman’: Interrogating Femininity Across Disciplines and Time
Queen’s University, Belfast
This interdisciplinary conference, exploring representations and constructions of femininity across different time periods, was organized by QUB postgraduate students to celebrate International Women’s Day. My paper was entitled: Gothic Lolitas: Infantilization and Idealization in Contemporary Teen Fiction.

17-19 Mar: Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness
Prague
This was the 12th annual Perspectives on Evil conference, organized by Inter-Disciplinary.Net. My paper was Her Husband’s Goods: Women, Shopping and Evil in the Later Middle Ages, and was part of a panel on women, evil and shopping I organized with independent reasearcher, Linda Maguire. I originally met Linda a few years ago at an ID.net conference on monsters, and we came up with the idea for the shopping panel at a 2010 conference on Magic and the Supernatural in Salzburg. Having spent a lot of time emailing each other about evil and shopping, it was really great to eventually bring everything together and present our papers. Unfortunately, the third member of our panel wasn’t able to make the conference, but Linda and I really enjoyed the way the session turned out. The 2012 Perspectives on Evil conference will be held on 15-17 March 2012, in Prague.

April

May

13-15 May: Evil, Women and the Feminine
Warsaw
My second ID.net conference of the year was the third annual Evil, Women and the Feminine conference. My paper was entitled: Watch Out Boy, She’ll Chew You Up: Werewolf Mouths and the Vagina Dentata. It was great to catch up with people I’ve met at previous ID.net events, especially Sorcha Ní Fhlainn and Ann Marie Cook (who is currently organizing a conference on the TV show Skins and popular culture). I also got to catch up with Simon Bacon, who I met at the De Montfort Vegetarians, VILFs and Fang-Bangers conference in 2010. EWF was also where I met Gráinne O’Brien for the first time, who is organizing the Magic is Might 2012 conference at the University of Limerick (23-24 July 2012), and Eileen Pollard, who went on to work with me on organizing the Hic Dragones Afterlife of Alice conference. The fourth Evil, Women and the Feminine conference will run 6-8 May 2012, and will be held in Prague.

I’m currently in the process of editing a dialogic collection of essays that have developed out of this conference, to be published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2012.

16-18 May: The Gothic: Exploring Critical Issues
Warsaw
I stayed on in Warsaw for a second ID.net conference, this time on the Gothic. My paper for this conference was: Glitter Gothic: Uses of the Past in Contemporary YA Fantasy Fiction.

Following this conference, I was asked to be guest blogger on the University of Stirling’s Gothic Imagination website.

28 May: Thought this date was worth mentioning. In June, I mark GCSE papers for one of the exam boards (something has to pay for all my conference travel, after all). Before beginning the marking, I attended the standardization meeting in Birmingham, and this year decided to combine this with meeting up with someone I’d been chatting to on Twitter, whose sister attended the She-Wolf conference in 2010. We went for dinner, fell in love, and have been together ever since.

June

4-5 Jun: Trailtrekker
Skipton
Not an academic event, but an Oxfam one. I’ve been volunteering for Oxfam since I was 16, and usually run one of the checkpoints at Trailtrekker, a sponsored 100km hike for teams of four that takes place around Skipton in Yorkshire. My role involves supervising volunteers, checking teams in as the arrive at our checkpoint and generally standing in a field for 27 hours making sure things run smoothly. I’ve stewarded at music festivals for Oxfam since 1997, but got involved with Trailtrekker when it started in 2009, as I fancied trying something a bit different.

6-7 Jun: Education and Ignorance: The Use of Knowledge in the Medieval World
John Rylands Library, Deansgate, Manchester
This was the third annual University of Manchester Postgraduate Medieval Studies conference. I chaired the first session, which was oddly ‘Katherine’ themed, with papers from Katherine Frances (on Saint Margaret of Antioch), Katherine Harvey (on episcopal elections) and Emily Dalton (on Capgrave’s ‘Life of Saint Katherine’). This was followed by the keynote paper by Carolyn Muessig (University of Bristol), who spoke on scholasticism and women’s religious education. This conference was organized by three postgraduate students from the University of Manchester: Robert Mitchell, Stephen Gordon and Daisy Black.

26-28 Jun: Can’t Buy Me Love? Sex, Money, Power and Romance
Fales Library and Special Collection of New York University
This month, I made my first ever trip to the US to attend the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance conference in New York. My paper for this conference was entitled: ‘Hit Cost a Thousand Pound and Mar’: Love, Sex and Wealth in the Fourteenth-Century Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle. This was also the only conference of the year where I received some funding, getting a small travel grant from the Romance Writers of America. The conference keynote was given by Laura Kipnis. I also enjoyed papers by Ann Herendeen (author of Pride/Prejudice), who spoke on ‘The Upper-Class Bisexual Man as Romantic Hero’, and a panel by Katherine E. Lynch, Ruth Sternglantz and Len Barot (of Boldstokes Books), who spoke on contemporary lesbian romance and the queer female hero. Len Barot writes paranormal romance under the name L.L. Raand, and her alpha (Sylvan Mir) recently won ‘Best New She-Wolf’ on this site. It was also nice to catch up with Jonathan Allan, who I first met in 2010 at the ID.net Monsters and the Monstrous conference.

29 Jun: After the conference finished, I had a spare half-day to myself (not really a lot of time, since it was my first trip to New York!), so I decided to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for few hours before I headed off to the airport.

30 Jun: I landed in Manchester at 9am, and headed straight off to the station to catch a train to London. A couple of us had tickets for the British Museum’s Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe exhibition. This was a really stunning display of reliquaries and devotional objects, with some breath-taking pieces. Also, I can now say that I went to both the New York Met and the British Museum within the same 24-hour period... I’m quite proud of that.

July

5-6 Jul: Wounds in the Middle Ages
John Rylands Library, Deansgate, Manchester
This was an invite-only workshop on wounds and wounding in the Middle Ages, organized by Cordelia Warr and Anne Kirkham from Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. I spoke on Christ, Wounds and Romance. This was, without doubt, one of my favourite academic events of the year. The range of papers was fantastic, and speakers covered early and late medieval culture, European and Arabic medicine, literary and historical sources, religious and secular material. Every paper was fascinating, but I particularly enjoyed Anthony Bale’s presentation on the circumcision of Christ.

27-31 July: Camp Bestival
Dorset
And now I took a little break from conferences to do some more volunteering for Oxfam, this time as a festival steward. My first festival of 2011 was Camp Bestival. As a side note, one of the people I was working with performs as Dolly Delicious with the Ooh La Las, who I’m hoping to book for one of the 2012 Hic Dragones events.

August

2-7 Aug: Big Chill
Eastnor Castle
After Camp Bestival, and a night’s stopover in Stroud, I headed up to Big Chill for a bit more stewarding.

24-29 Aug: Leeds Festival
Leeds
My third and final festival with Oxfam for 2011.

September

October

6 Oct: A Journey Through Wonderland: Alice in Multimedia
Portico Library, Manchester
No conferences in October, but I did attend the preview evening of the Portico’s Journey Through Wonderland exhibition, which featured various illustrations and interpretations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice novels. The exhibition was launched by Vanessa St Clair, the great-granddaughter of Alice Liddell, and was curated by librarian Emma Marigliano, who worked with me to co-promote this event with the Hic Dragones Afterlife of Alice conference (which ran the day after the exhibition closed). As well as the exhibition, the Portico also hosted a series of talks on Alice in Wonderland and its legacy, including a brilliant talk on 12 October from John Reppion and Leah Moore on their Complete Alice in Wonderland.

26-31 Oct: Bram Stoker Film Festival
Whitby
Not really a conference, but I went spent four lovely days in Whitby, and attended the Bram Stoker Film Festival. You can read my review here.

November

2-4 Nov: Vampires: Myths of the Past and the Future
IGRS, University of London
This conference, organized by Simon Bacon, explored the various manifestations of vampire myths in literature, film, history and folklore. My paper was entitled: Vampires in Those Days: Interrogating Master Narratives. This conference was quite intense, with long days filled with lots of excellent papers. It was also notable for offering the most amazing list of keynote speakers: Milly Williamson, Catherine Spooner, Ken Gelder and Stacey Abbott. I was particularly pleased to be able to meet Catherine Spooner, as her work (especially Contemporary Gothic and Fashioning Gothic Bodies) has been really influential on my own. Catherine is currently involved in organizing the Capturing Witches: Histories, Stories, Images (400 Years After the Lancashire Witches) conference, to be held at the University of Lancaster on 17-19 August 2012. As well as the four keynote papers, this conference incorporated the annual Coffin Trust Lecture (an unintentional pun), which this year was given by Sir Christopher Frayling, who spoke on ‘The Nightmare of Bram Stoker’. As well as listening to some great papers, it was nice to meet Jim Doan and Barbara Brodman (who are currently working on a two-volume collection of essays entitled The Universal Vampire) and Clemens Ruthner (who is organizing a ‘Vampires and/as Science’ conference, to be held 5-6 July 2012 at Trinity College, Dublin). And I got chance to catch up with Gráinne and Sorcha.

18-20 Nov: The Monster Inside Us, The Monsters Around Us: Monstrosity and Humanity Conference
De Montfort University
This was a three-day interdisciplinary conference, exploring monsters and monstrosity across different time periods and cultures. My paper was titled: Battle Not With Monsters: Slayers from Beowulf to Buffy, the beginning stages of a new project that I’m hoping to write up as journal article at some point in 2012. The conference was organized by Deborah Mutch (De Montfort University), and had keynote papers from David Punter (University of Bristol) and Andy Mousley (De Montfort University). Andy has recently set up an interactive website called SageBites, which offers reflections on quotations for life.

December

1 Dec: Further Adventures in Wonderland: The Afterlife of Alice
Hic Dragones, Manchester
My final conference of the year was the one I was most nervous about, as it was the first event organized by my publishing and events company, Hic Dragones. The conference was held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, and explored the various representations and interpretations of Alice in Wonderland that have come after Lewis Carroll’s novel. My paper was entitled: Steampunk, Cyberpunk, Whimsy: Generic Definition and Jeff Noon’s The Automated Alice. Our keynote paper was given by Will Brooker (Kingston University), author of Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture, and other papers covered books, films, computer games, Disneyland rides and pop music. We were also happy to have Mark Richards (of the Lewis Carroll Society) and Emma Marigliano (of the Portico Library) in attendance, as both were very supportive of the conference. I was also assisted in the organization of the event by Eileen Pollard, a PhD student at Manchester Metropolitan University.

I am planning a collection of essays based on this conference, which will expand on the topics discussed during the day.

CFP: 1st Global Conference: Skins: Exploring Critical Issues

Tuesday 25th September 2012 – Thursday 27th September 2012

Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Papers

Now in its sixth series on E4 in the UK and first series on MTV in the US, the brainchild of father-son writing team Bryan Elsley and Jamie Brittain has gained popularity and critical acclaim for the honesty, authenticity and humour of its no-holds-barred depiction of the teenage experience. In a reflexive turn, Skins has become a cultural phenomenon whose influence is registered through its status as essential teen viewing, the Skins party craze and the tendency among fans to perceive their own identities and experiences in relation to characters and situations from the show. The richness of Skins as a televisual text supports wide-ranging explorations of the show’s aesthetic, thematic, ideological, social and technological implications.
We therefore invite papers and preconstituted panels that address any aspect of Skins, such as:

■Representations of teenage life and teen culture
■Identities: gender, class, race, sexualities (hetero-, homo-, bi-, fluid, queer, etc.)
■Death and the concept of mortality
■Mental illness/psychology/psychoanalysis
■Fandom
■Transnational reception
■Analysis of fanvids, fanfics, fanart
■Assessments of the meaning/cultural significance of specific storylines (c.f. the Naomily phenomenon)
■Plotline controversies and moral panics
■Adapting Skins for the American market
■Narrative and storytelling
■Creator/showrunner as author
■Genre analysis
■Modes of comedy
■Defining the ‘Skins aesthetic’
■Uses of inter-textuality/pop culture allusions
■Fashion
■Music
■Space and place: Bristol on screen
■Skins novels
■Acting and performance
■Cameos and guest stars
■Fame and celebrity
■Production process studies
■Technologies of production, distribution and reception in the post-broadcast era
■Skins and Channel 4/E4/MTV
■Comparative analyses of Skins and other television shows

For 2012, the Skins and Contemporary Culture project will meet alongside our project on Gender and Love It is our intention to create cross-over sessions between the two groups – and we welcome proposals which deal with the relationship between gender and love and Skins and contemporary culture. Papers will also be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper of no more than 3000 words should be submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords

E-mails should be entitled: SKINS Abstract Submission.

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). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. 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.

Organising Chairs

Ann-Marie Cook
Visiting Fellow, ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation,
Queensland University of Technology,
Australia

Dr Rob Fisher
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Priory House, Wroslyn Road,
Freeland, Oxfordshire OX29 8HR

The conference is part of the Critical Issues series of research projects. The aim of the conference is 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 more information, please click here.

CFP: 2nd Global Conference: Beauty: Exploring Critical Issues

Friday 21st September – Sunday 23rd September 2012

Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Papers:

“The first real problem I faced in my life was that of beauty,” wrote the poet-playwright- novelist Yukio Mishima, in Temple of the Golden Pavilion as he pondered beauty’s relevance, meanings, and the spell it cast over him. Beauty is complicated by the word beauty itself. Limited or overloaded, beauty has been celebrated as essential or denounced as irrelevant. The existence of beauty has been challenged, called a search for El Dorado. Some find no beauty in life, a recurring motif in subcultures, music lyrics, and the notes left by suicides. Others dismiss that perspective, arguing that common sense, experience, and multidisciplinary research reveal the reality and centrality of beauty in our lives. But what exactly is beauty? Speculations about the nature of beauty are various and contradictory. Some philosophers have argued that it will remain a mystery. Other theorists have held less modest beliefs, arguing that beauty expresses a basic spiritual reality, has universal physical properties, or is an experience and construction of mind and culture. The beauty ‘project’ will explore, assess, and map a number of key core themes.

These will include:

1. Understanding Beauty
- Defining beauty
- Theorising beauty
- Power of beauty
- History of beauty
- Politics of beauty
- Culture of beauty
- Religion of beauty

2. Experiences of and Representations of Beauty
- Pursuit of beauty
- Expressions of beauty
- Appearance of beauty
- Making beauty
- Documenting beauty
- Emotion and beauty
- Beauty and seduction
- Representing beauty in art, literature and popular culture

3. Beauty and Nature
-Beauty and the natural world
-Beauty and the Sublime
-Beauty and desire
-Science and mathematics of beauty
-Medical aspects of beauty

4. Beauty, Culture, and Identity
- Beauty subcultures
- Beauty and social stratification: gender, sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, age, etc.
- Beauty collectors
- Beauty specialists
- Beauty disciples
- Enhancing the body beautiful: cosmetics, tattoos, piercings, surgical interventions, and other forms of body modification

5. The Business of Beauty
-Beauty and consumer culture
-Beauty and cultural capital
-Beauty professions and trades
-Beauty cities
-Beauty marketing and forecasting
-Professional beauties (models, actors, celebrities, beauty pageants etc.)
-Fashion and beauty
-Glamour and beauty

6. Diminishing the Beautiful
-Beauty and transgression
-Beauty and ugliness
-Beauty and aging
-Defiling the beautiful
-Destroying the beautiful
-Beauty and death
-Beauty and decay

Papers will be accepted which deal with related areas and themes.

The 2012 meeting of Beauty will run alongside a second of our projects on Strangers, Aliens and Foreigners and we anticipate holding sessions in common between the two projects. We welcome any papers or panels considering the problems or addressing issues that cross both projects

The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Papers will also be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords

E-mails should be entitled: Beauty Abstract Submission.

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). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. 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.

Organising Chairs

Dr Jacque Lynn Foltyn
Project Leader
Professor of Sociology, Dept of Social Sciences, College of Letters and Sciences, National University, CA, USA

Dr Rob Fisher
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Priory House, Wroslyn Road,
Freeland, Oxfordshire OX29 8HR

The conference is part of the Critical Issues series of research projects. The aim of the conference is 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 project, please click here.

For further details of the conference, please click here.

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.

The Steam King

Recently, I've been working as a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant on a project involving searching databases of nineteenth-century newspapers. Though it has nothing to do with the project, I've become quite enamored with the following poem by Edward P. Mead, which was originally published in The Northern Star and reprinted in Engels' Conditions of the Working Class in England. I was also pleased to see it discussed in a recent conference paper, at the De Montfort The Monster Inside Us, The Monsters Around Us conference.

If you're interested in the industrial revolution, and the ways in which some people of the time viewed it, or if you're a steampunk writer or fan, I think you'll enjoy...

The Steam King by Edward P. Mead
Originally published in The Northern Star, and Leeds General Advertiser (vol. 6, February 1843); reproduced in Engels, Conditions of the Working Class in England (1845)

There is a King, and a ruthless King;
Not a King of the poet’s dream;
But a tyrant fell, white slaves know well,
And that ruthless King is Steam.

He hath an arm, an iron arm,
And tho’ he hath but one,
In that mighty arm there is a charm,
That millions hath undone.

Like the ancient Moloch grim, his sire
In Himmon’s vale that stood,
His bowels are of living fire,
And children are his food.

His priesthood are a hungry band,
Blood-thirsty, proud, and bold;
’Tis they direct his giant hand,
In turning blood to gold.

For filthy gain in their servile chain
All nature’s rights they bind;
They mock at lovely woman’s pain,
And to manly tears are blind.

The sighs and groans of Labour’s sons
Are music in their ear,
And the skeleton shades, of lads and maids,
In the Steam King’s hell appear.

Those hells upon earth, since the Steam King’s birth,
Have scatter’d around despair;
For the human mind for Heav’n design’d,
With the body, is murdered there.

Then down with the King, the Moloch King,
Ye working millions all;
O chain his hand, or our native land
Is destin’d by him to fall.

And his Satraps abhor’d, each proud Mill Lord,
Now gorg’d with gold and blood,
Must be put down by the nation’s frown,
As well as their monster God.

CFP: 10th Global Conference: Monsters and the Monstrous

Monday 10th September – Thursday 13th September 2012

Mansfield College, Oxford

Call for Papers:

For this 10th Anniversary of the Monsters and the Monstrous Project we are looking forward to the future, and so are starting from Franco Moretti’s comment that “the monster expresses the anxiety that the future will be monstrous.” Our focus then will be on Monsters of the Future, no matter from which time or place that future is viewed. So whether the present is Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romantic, Modernist or Post Modernist it is the ways that, as further noted by Moretti, a “new order of beings” makes manifest the terror of an unknown and uncontrollable tomorrow and the forms these creatures take.

As such the monster becomes not the return of the repressed but an immanent Imaginary that constantly harasses and harangues the borders of the Real. Just as Grendel, Caliban, Frankenstein’s Monster, Dr. Moreau’s creatures and the clones from Blade Runner can be seen to manifest a hybrid future that blurs the borders between human/non-human, the humane and the in-humane, the converse is equally true where the tomorrow they envision is as much degenerative as it is evolutionary. Here, as in Wells’ the Time Machine, or Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness, the future is in fact a portal to the past and that the true anxiety we feel is not for inevitable change but for a monstrous stasis that, like the vampire, will lock us forever in a never-ending present (not unlike Wittgenstein’s immortality of the never-ending moment). This then is a call for monstrous visions of the future, whether it is a new and alien land or one that is only too familiar; for the Post-Human, the Non-Human and the Anti-Human, the Robot, the Golem and the Cyborg, the Pure-bred, the Hybrid and the Mudblood, the Unborn, the Unliving and the Undead.

Papers, reports, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:

Monstrous Places/Spaces of the Future:
~The city, the town, the home of the future
~Environmental disasters, global warming, nuclear meltdowns, plagues and terra incognito
~Dystopias/utopias
~New Worlds, forgotten worlds, undiscovered worlds: Atlantis, Shangri-la, Eldorado

Human Monsters:
~Medical experimentation, cloning, reproduction
~Cyborgs, robots and inanimate bodies made real
~Hybrids, both real and supernatural, post-human and beyond human
~Evolution and degeneration
~Actual bodies and supernatural bodies.
~Monsterisation of the human body: fragmentation, surgical modification and bodies without organs

Monstrous Aliens & Alien Invaders:
~Invasions of unknown beings, conquistadors, Martians, heavenly or alien life forms
~Humans as invaders, Starship Troopers, Iain M. Banks’ The Culture
~Parasites, diseases, flora and influences

Monstrous Generations:
~The glorification of Youth, Logan’s Run and In Time
~Monstrous adolescents
~Demonic children and alien babies
~Middle-aged zombies and serial killers, possessed grandparents
~Romantacising the Monster: Paranormal Romance, dark lovers and heroes, Twilight, Vampire Diaries and Dexter.

Monstrous Politics:
~Protest, revolt and revolution
~Zombie Capitalism and undead labour
~Class, status and the aristocracy
~Post colonialism, diasporas and migration
~Ageism, sexism, health-ism and separatism e.g, District 9, Metropolis, Matrix, Daybreakers

Papers can be accepted which deal solely with specific monsters. This project will run concurrently with our project on The Erotic – we welcome any papers considering the problems or addressing issues on Monsters and The Erotic for a cross-over panel. We also welcome pre-formed panels on any aspect of the monstrous or in relation to crossover panel(s).

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012. Abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords

E-mails should be entitled: Monsters Abstract Submission

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. 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.

Organising Chairs

Sorcha Ni Fhlainn
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
School of English, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

Rob Fisher
Network Founder & Leader, Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Freeland, Oxfordshire
United Kingdom

Simon Bacon
Poznan,
Poland

The aim of the conference is 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. Some papers may also be invited for inclusion in the Journal of Monsters and the Monstrous.

For further details of the project, please click here.

For further details of the conference, please click here.

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.

CFP: 1st Global Conference: Reframing Punishment

Monday 3rd September – Wednesday 5th September 2012

Mansfield College, Oxford

Call for Papers:

The concept of punishment has a long history and diverse cultural, social and criminological meanings. Research and debate is often focused on the offender, the offence, the state and legal codification. In contrast, this project seeks to re-frame these debates in order to combine the insights they produce with broader cultural meanings, social representations and ritualistic or other activities. Therefore, the aim of the project is to develop different ways of understanding the penetration and complexity of shared understandings of punishment from a variety of perspectives, approaches and practitioner experiences. Reframing the debate might be done through papers aimed the personal or social levels. We encourage unique approaches to punishment in terms of boundary control, whether it is control of evil, the politically subversive, the economically disruptive, or punishment in pursuit of system stability or marginalisation of liminality. Papers might also cover punishment issues relating to defining the contours of disgust, desire, dread, or the abject. They may even consider the operation and consequences of both wrongdoing and various forms of societal/social punishment. Accordingly the project welcomes papers, work-in-progress and pre-formed panels from diverse areas of study such as the humanities, social sciences, business, science, law schools and the arts, as well as practitioners.

Papers, presentations, reports and workshops are invited on issues broadly related to any of the following themes:

* Cultural (including cross-/inter-cultural) notions of what constitutes punishment

* Religious/spiritual punishment, asceticism, whether self-inflicted or externally imposed

* Pain, fear and corporal punishment

* Punishment, public services and performance measurement

* Punishment and child development/child rearing

* Punishment rituals

* Punishing the body for pleasure (modification, BDSM, smoking, etc)

* Punishing the body in the name of beauty and fashion

* Representations of punishment in contemporary times and across historical periods

* Theories of punishment and deviants: What is punishment’s purpose? Ideal methods? Is punishment limited to humans? What about animals or nature, and in some societies, why is imprisonment such a key form of punishment?

* Proportionality, materiality and other concepts used to administer punishment(s)

* Shame, forgiveness, vengeance, retribution and punishment

* The limits of punishment: whether controlled by the state, institutions or groups, including sports groups, cults, gangs, the military, etc.

* Shifting social attitudes toward punishment

* Self-harm, abuse and control

* Space and its role in enhancing or ameliorating punishment

* The relationship(s) between discipline and punishment

Papers on any other topic related to the theme will also be considered.

This project will run concurrently with our project on Space and Place– we welcome any papers considering the problems or addressing issues on Reframing Punishment and Space and Place for a cross-over panel. We also welcome pre-formed panels on any aspect of Reframing Punishment or in relation to crossover panel(s).

This project will run concurrently with our project on Space and Place– we welcome any papers considering the problems or addressing issues on Reframing Punishment and Space and Place for a cross-over panel. The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to all Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 key words

E-mails should be entitled: PUNISH Abstract Submission.

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). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. 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.

Joint Organising Chairs:

Shona Hill & Shilinka Smith
Conference Leaders
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
New Zealand

Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Leader
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Freeland, Oxfordshire,
United Kingdom

The conference is part of the Probing the Boundaries 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 will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers maybe invited for development for publication in a themed hard copy volume(s).

For further details of the project, please click here.

For further details of the conference, please click here.

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.

CFP: 6th Global Conference: Fear, Horror and Terror

Friday 7th September 2012 – Sunday 9th September 2012

Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Papers:

This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary conference seeks to examine and explore issues which lie at the interface of fear, horror and terror. In particular the project is interested in investigating the various contexts of fear, horror and terror, and assessing issues surrounding the artistic, cinematic, literary, moral, social, (geo) political, philosophical, psychological and religious significance of them, both individually and together.

In addition to academic analysis, we welcome the submission from practitioners, such as people in religious orders, therapists, or victims of events which have been provoked by experiences of fear, horror and terror – for example, social workers, those involved with the legal system, medical practitioners, or fiction authors whose work aims to evoke these reactions.

Papers, reports, work-in-progress and workshops are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:

1. The Contexts of Fear, Horror and Terror
- case studies
- professions dealing with the Fear, Horror and Terror (Therapists, Clergy, etc.)
- creating and experiencing fear, horror and terror
- the properties of fear, horror and terror
- contexts of fear, horror and terror
- the language, meaning and significance of fear, horror and terror

2. At the Interface of Fear, Horror and Terror
- the role of fear, horror and terror
- emotional releases (pleasant or negative) achieved by Fear, Horror and Terror
- techniques of fear, horror and terror
- marketing fear, horror and terror
- recreational fear, horror and terror
- aesthetic fear, horror and terror
- the body, temperature, touch, taste or sound and fear, horror and terror
- silence as a strategic subversion of the operation of fear, horror and terror
- fear, horror and terror and the visible/invisible

3. Representations of Fear, Horror and Terror and:
- the imagination or the sublime
- pleasure, hope, despair, anxiety, disgust, dread, loathing
- art, cinema, theatre, media and the creative arts
- survival horror video games
- literature (including children’s stories)
- the other
- technology
- the future

Papers will be accepted which deal with related areas and themes. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012. 300 word abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords

E-mails should be entitled: FHT Abstract Submission

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. 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.

Organising Chairs

Shona Hill & Shilinka Smith
Conference Leaders
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
New Zealand

Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Network Leader
Inter-Disciplinary.Net, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom

The conference is part of the ‘At the Interface’ series of research projects. The aim of the conference is 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 project, please click here.

For further details of the conference, please click here.

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.

CFP: 3rd Global Conference: Space and Place

Monday 3rd September – Thursday 6th September 2012

Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Papers:

Questions of space and place affect the very way in which we experience and recreate the world. Wars are fought over both real and imagined spaces; boundaries are erected against the “Other” constructed a lived landscape of division and disenfranchisement; and ideology constructs a national identity based upon the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion. The construction of space and place is also a fundamental aspect of the creative arts either through the art of econstruction of a known space or in establishing a relationship between the audience and the performance. Politics, power and knowledge are also fundamental components of space as is the relationship between visibility and invisibility. This new inter- and multi-disciplinary conference project seeks to explore these and other topics and open up a dialogue about the politics and practices of space and place. We seek submissions from a range of disciplines including archaeology, architecture, urban geography, the visual and creative arts, philosophy and politics and also actively encourage practioners and non-academics with an interest in the topic to participate.

We welcome traditional papers, preformed panels of papers, workshop proposals and other forms of performance – recognising that different disciplines express themselves in different mediums.

Submissions are sought on any aspect of space and place, including the following:

1. Theorising Space and Place
~Philosophies and space and place
~Surveillance, sight and the panoptic structures and spaces of contemporary life
~Rhizomatics and/or postmodernist constructions of space as a “meshwork of paths” (Ingold: 2008)
~The relationship between spatiality and temporality/space as a temporal-spatial event (Massey: 2005)
~The language and semiotics of space and place

2. Situated Identities
~Gendered spaces including the tension between domestic and public spheres
~Work spaces and hierarchies of power
~Geographies and archaeologies of space including Orientalism and Occidentalism
~Ethnic spaces/ethnicity and space
~Disabled spaces/places
~Queer places and spaces

3. Contested spaces
~The politics and ideology of constructions and discourses of space and place including the construction of gated communities as a response to real/imagined terrorism.
~The relationship between power, knowledge and the construction of place and space
~Territorial wars, both real and imagined.
~The relationship between the global and the local
~Barriers, obstructions and disenfranchisement in the construction of lived spaces
~Space and place from colonisation to globalisation
~Real and imagined maps/cartographies of place
~Transnational and translocal places

4. Representations of place and space
~Embodied/disembodied spaces
~Lived spaces and the architecture of identity
~Haunted spaces/places and non-spaces
~Set design and the construction of space in film, television and theatre
~Authenticity and the reproduction/representation of place in the creative arts
~Technology and developments in the representation of space including new media technologies and 3D technologies of viewing
~Future cities/futurology and space
~Representations of the urban and the city in the media and creative arts
~Space in computer games

Papers on any other topic related to the theme will also be considered.

This project will run concurrently with our project on Reframing Punishment – we welcome any papers considering the problems or addressing issues on Reframing Punishment and Space and Place for a cross-over panel. We also welcome pre-formed panels on any aspect of Space or Place or in relation to crossover panel(s).

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012. 300 word abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords

E-mails should be entitled: SP Abstract Submission

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). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. We acknowledge receipt and answer 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.

Organising Chairs:

Matt Melia
Conference Leader
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Kingston University, United Kingdom

Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Network Leader,
Inter-Disciplinary.Net, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom.

The conference is part of the ‘Ethos’ series of research projects, which in turn belong to the Critical Issues programmes of ID.Net. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and challenging. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference will be published in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into 20-25 page chapters for publication in a themed dialogic ISBN hard copy volume.

For further details of the project, please click here.

For further details of the conference, please click here.

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.

CFP: 7th Global Conference: The Erotic

Tuesday 11th September – Thursday 13th September 2012

Mansfield College, Oxford

Call for Papers

Mapping the field of the erotic is a complex and frustrating endeavour; as something which permeates lived experience, interpersonal relationships, intellectual reflection, aesthetic tastes and sensibilities, the erotic is clearly multi-layered and requires a plethora of approaches, insights and perspectives if we are to better to understand, appreciate and define it.

This inter- and trans- disciplinary project seeks to explore critical issues in relation to eroticism and the erotic through its history, its emergence in human development, both individual and phylogenetic, as well as its expression in national and cultural histories across the world, including issues of transgression and censorship. The project will also explore erotic imagination and its representation in art, art history, literature, film and music. These explorations inevitably touch on the relationship between sexualities, gender and bodies, along with questions concerning the perverse, fetishism and fantasy, pornography and obscenity.

Papers, presentations, workshops and pre-formed panels are also invited on any of the following themes:

* the erotic and identity

* disability, ethnicity, gender, class and eroticism

* the erotic in education and the education of the erotic

* eroticism in popular culture and media: cinema, tv, theatre, radio, newspapers and magazines, the internet in all its forms

* the erotic in literature and on the screen exploitative eroticism, e.g., pornography

* the erotic, ethics and philosophy the eroticised (or de-eroticised) body

* absence, control and excess of the erotic

* the erotic and sexuality: is there a difference, and if so, what? the erotic in representation

* the erotic and (post- neo-)colonialism

* eroticism in the making of the exotic

* the erotic in mythology

* the erotic and the non-human’ (vampires, zombies, cyborgs, etc)

* eroticism and technology: sex toys and other turn-ons

This project will run concurrently with our project on Monsters and the Monstrous – we welcome any papers considering the problems or addressing issues on Monsters and The Erotic for a cross-over panel. We also welcome pre-formed panels on any aspect of the monstrous or in relation to crossover panel(s).

We welcome submissions from within specific disciplinary boundaries, but we are also particularly interested in interdisciplinary contributions that balance the scope of insight that disciplines bring with the limitations that disciplinary boundaries create in failing to recognise cross-disciplinary connections, which neglect important historical and cultural perspectives on the development of the ‘erotic’ as a locus of attention. Consequently, we are particularly keen to encourage submissions that are not subsumed within disciplines, but cut across and between disciplinary vocabularies to provide new synergies, domains and inter-disciplinary possibilities. We warmly welcome proposals which go beyond traditional paper presentations and encompass also panels, performances and workshops.

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012.

Abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords

E-mails should be entitled: The Erotic Abstract Submission

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. 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.

Organising Chairs:

Natalia Kaloh Vid
University of Maribor,
Slovenia

Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Network Leader
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Freeland, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom

The conference is part of the Gender and Sexuality series of research projects, which in turn belong to the At the Interface programmes of Inter-Disciplinary.Net. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore discussions which are innovative and challenging. 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 project, please click here.

For further details of the conference, please click here.

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.

CFP: 4th Global Conference: Strangers, Aliens and Foreigners

Friday 21st September 2012 – Sunday 23rd September 2012

Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Papers

This multi-disciplinary project seeks to explore the crucial place that strangers, aliens and foreigners have for the constitution of self, communities and societies. In particular the project will assess world transformations, like phenomena we associate with the term ‘globalisation’, new forms of migration and the massive movements of people across the globe, as well as the impact they have on the conceptions we hold of self and other. Looking to encourage innovative trans-disciplinary dialogues, we warmly welcome papers from all disciplines, professions and vocations which struggle to understand what it means for people, the world over, to forge a sense of self in rapidly changing contexts where it is no longer possible to ignore the importance of strangers, aliens and foreigners for our contemporary nations, societies and cultures.

Papers, workshops and presentations are invited on any of the following themes:

1. Transformations of Self
~ How is Self interweaved with Other? And the many ways in which Self depends on Other
~ Acknowledging the importance of strangers for our lives, for our sense of well-being
~ Recognising our dependence on aliens and foreigners for our communities, cities and towns, for our countries and nations
~ The decline of the value of sameness and homogeneity, the rise of diversity and plurality
~ Opposing the construction of self by othering, excluding and stigmatising

2. Boundaries, Communities and Nations
~ Who is a stranger? Aliens and foreigners to whom?
~ New migrants, new migratory flows and massive movements from peripheral to central countries
~ Trans-national networks and the blurring of boundaries; are we living trans-national and post-national realities?
~ Assimilation, integration, adaptation and other forms of placing the responsibility of change on foreigners
~ What has happened to ideas like acceptance, hospitality and cosmopolitanism

3. Economies, Institutions and Migrants
~ Labour migration as key for economic growth and prosperity
~ The politics of making aliens, foreigners and migratory labour ‘invisible’
~ Global politics of money over people; new forms of global exclusion
~ Social movements, new rebellion and alternative globalisations
~ Trans-cultural connections that escape institutional and political control

4. Art and Representations
~ Production and reproduction of cultural typing and stereotyping
~ The contested space of representing self and other, native and foreigner
~ Art, media and how to challenge the rigid constructions of art and culture
~ Fictions of strangers, stories of aliens, fables of foreigners
~ The artistic constructions of otherness

5. Self (inevitably) linked to Other
~ De-centering selves; who am I if not the relation with others?
~ Thinking and acting with others in mind; orienting life inter-subjectively
~ Tensions, contradictions and conflicts of living recognising aliens and foreigners
~ Bonds of care across boundaries of inequality and exclusion, ideologies and religions, politics and power, nations and geography
~ Non-recognition as social and cultural violence

The 2012 meeting of Strangers, Aliens and Foreigners will run alongside a second of our projects on Beauty and we anticipate holding sessions in common between the two projects. We welcome any papers or panels considering the problems or addressing issues that cross both projects. Papers will be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012. 300 word abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords

E-mails should be entitled: Strangers Abstract Submission

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication 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.

Organising Chairs

Dr S. Ram Vemuri
School of Law and Business, Faculty of Law, Business and Arts
Charles Darwin University
Darwin NT0909, Australia

Rob Fisher
Network Leader, Inter-Disciplinary.Net,
Freeland, Oxfordshire,
United Kingdom

The conference is part of the Diversity and Recognition research projects, which in turn belong to the At the Interface programmes of Inter-Disciplinary.Net. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore discussions which are innovative and challenging. 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 project, please click here.

For further details of the conference, please click here.

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.

CFP: 2nd Global Conference: Gender and Love

Tuesday 25th September – Thursday 27th September 2012

Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Papers:

The study of gender is an interdisciplinary field intertwined with feminism, queer studies, sexuality studies, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies (to name just some relevant fields).

This project calls for the consideration of gender in relation to various kinds of love (with regard, for example, to self, spirit, religion, family, friendship, ethics, nation, globalisation, environment, and so on). How do the interactions of gender and love promote particular performances of gender; conceptions of individual and collective identity; formations of community; notions of the human; understandings of good and evil? These are just some of the questions that occupy this project.

This conference welcomes research papers which seek to understand the interaction and interconnection between the concepts of love and gender; and whether, when, how and in what ways the two concepts conceive and construct each other.

Papers, presentations, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:

1. Love as a Disciplinary Force: Productions of Gender
* Love, Gender, Essentialism and Ontology
* Love, Gender and Narrative
* Love, Gender and the Law
* Love, Gender and Religion

2. Norms, Normativity, Intimacy
* Rituals and Rites
* Conventions, Commitments and Obligations
* Choices and Respect; Loyalty and Trust
* Transgressions and Taboos

3. Gendered Yearnings
* Personhood and Identity
* Body Politics and Belonging
* Love and Gender Performativity
* Transgender Desires
* Queer Kinship Formations
* Queer Conceptualisations of the State

4. Global Perspectives on Gender and Love
* Transformations of Intimacy in a Global World
* Sex and Choice
* Reproductive Rights
* Sexual Citizenship
* Gender, Love and Trans/Nationalism

5. Representations of Gender and Love
* Aesthetics and Intelligibility
* Gendered Narrations of Love
* Media, Gender and Love

For 2012, the Gender and Love project will meet alongside our project on “Skins” and Contemporary Culture. It is our intention to create cross-over sessions between the two groups – and we welcome proposals which deal with the relationship between gender and love and Skins and contemporary culture. The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Papers will also be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords

E-mails should be entitled: GL2 Abstract Submission.

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). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication 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.

Organising Chairs:

Dikmen Yakalı Çamoğlu
Department of Communication Sciences
Dogus University, Istanbul,
Turkey

Dr Rob Fisher
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Priory House, Wroslyn Road,
Freeland, Oxfordshire OX29 8HR

The conference is part of the ‘At the Interface ’ series of research projects run by ID.Net. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various
discussions which are innovative and challenging. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into 20-25 page chapters for publication in a themed dialogic ISBN hard copy volume.

For further details of the project, please click here.

For further details of the conference, please click here.

CFP: Preternature 2.2

Monstrophy: The Academic Study of Monsters

''Monstrophy'' is a term referring to the academic study of monsters as representational and conceptual categories, which has gained recent currency in several related fields of study (literary and cultural history, sociological theories of identity and difference, et al.), as well as in a number of recent books and articles about monsters as subjects of theoretical interpretation. Etymologically derived from Latin ''mōnstrum'' (meaning prodigy, ominous sign, monstrous creature or person, abomination) and Greek ''sophia'' (σοφία, wisdom), hybrid compounding of monstrophy is not uncommon in disciplinary names, e.g. [[sociology]], another Greek and Latin compound.) Monstrophy literally means "wisdom about monsters," and in academic usage refers to the broader study of monsters in society and history.

Monsters have been widely catalogued in their historical and ethnographic contexts, and have been commonly included in cultural products such as epic, folktale, fiction, and film, but have only begun to be studied seriously as semiological markers indicating the seams of internal cultural tension. Interpreters commonly note the "monstrous" as occupying space at the borders of a society's conceptual categories, such as those relating to sexual and behavioral transgression, or to inherent prejudice and internal conflict (for instance, in race, gender, politics, and religion). Monsters are rarely fully distinct from the "human," but are often comprised of hybrid features
of the human and non-human. This issue of Preternature invites contributions that explore how the category of "monster" is used to define and articulate what a certain group of people articulates to itself to be properly human.

Contributions are welcome from any discipline, time period, or geographic provenance, so long as the discussion highlights the cultural, literary, religious, or historical significance of the topic.

Contributions should be roughly 8,000 - 12,000 words (with the possibility of longer submissions in exceptional cases), including all documentation and critical apparatus. If accepted for publication, manuscripts will be required to adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition (style 1, employing footnotes).

Preternature also welcomes original editions or translations of texts related to the topic that have not otherwise been made available in recent editions or in English. Submissions are made online here.

Final Papers are due February 15, 2012

Queries about submissions, queries concerning books to be reviewed, or requests to review individual titles may be made to the Editor.

Inquiries about book reviews should be sent to the Book Review Editor.

For more on the journal, please consult the website.

CFP: 5th Global Conference: Making Sense of: Madness

Thursday 30th August 2012 – Saturday 1st September 2012

Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Papers:

This inter-disciplinary research conference seeks to explore issues of madness across historical periods and within cultural, political and social contexts. We are also interested in exploring the place of madness in persons and interpersonal relationships and across a range of critical perspectives. Seeking to encourage innovative inter, multi and post disciplinary dialogues, we warmly welcome papers from all disciplines, professions and vocations which struggle to understand the place of madness in the constitution of persons, relationships and the complex interlacing of self and other. In the 4 previous conferences we had the participation of friends and colleagues who have experienced forms of madness in their personal lives, and they have always been not only welcome, but also moving and illuminating for all: Such contributions based on the actual experience of madness from within are always welcome to our annual events.

In particular papers, workshops, presentations and pre-formed panel proposals are invited on any of the following themes:

1. The Value of Madness or Why is it that We Need Madness?
~ Critical explorations: beyond madness/sanity/insanity
~ Continuity and difference: always with us yet never quite the same
~ Repetition and novelty: the incessant emergence and re-emergence of madness
~ Profound attraction and desire; fear of the abyss and the radical unknown
~ Naming, defining and understanding the elusive

2. The Passion of Madness or Madness and the Emotions
~ Love as madness; uncontrollable passion; unrestrainable love
~ Passion and love as a remaking of life and self
~ Gender and madness; the feminine and the masculine
~ Anger, resentment, revenge, hate, evil
~ I would rather vomit, thank you; revulsion, badness and refusing to comply

3. The Boundaries of Madness or Resisting Normality
~ Madness, sanity and the insane
~ Being out of your mind, crazy, deranged … yet, perfectly sane
~ Deviating from the normal; defining the self against the normal
~ Control, self-control and the pull of the abyss
~ When the insane becomes normal; when evil reins social life

4. Lunatics and the Asylum or Power and the Politics of Madness
~ The social allure and fear of madness; the institutions of confining mad people
~ Servicing normality by castigating the insane and marginalizing lunatics
~ Medicine, psychiatry, psychology, law and the constructions of madness; madness as illness
~ Contributions of the social sciences to the making and the critique of the making of madness
~ Representations, explanations and the critique of madness from the humanities and the arts

5. Creativity, Critique and Cutting Edge
~ Madness as genius, outstanding, out of the ordinary, spectacularly brilliant
~ The art of madness; the science of madness
~ Music, painting, dance, theater: it is crazy to think of art without madness
~ The language and communication of madness: who can translate?
~ Creation as an unfolding of madness

6. Unrestrained and Boundless or The Liberating Promise of Madness
~ Metaphors of feeling free, unrestrained, capable, lifted from reality
~ Madness as clear-sightedness, as opening up possibilities, as re-visioning of the world
~ The future, the prophetic, the unknown; the epic, the heroic and the tragic
~ The unreachable and untouchable knowledge of madness
~ The insanity of not loving madness

7. Lessons for Self and Other or Lessons for Life about and from Madness
~ Cultural and social constructions of madness; images of the mad, crazy, insane, lunatic, abnormal
~ What is real? Who defines reality? Learning from madness how to cope with reality
~ Recognising madness in oneself; relativising madness in others
~ Love, intimacy, care and the small spaces of madness
~ Critical and ethical implosions of normality and normalness; sane in insane places and insane in sane places

Papers will be accepted which deal with related areas and themes.

The 2012 meeting of Making Sense Of: Madness will run alongside the second of our projects on Chronicity and we anticipate holding sessions in common between the two projects. We welcome any papers or panels considering the problems or addressing issues that cross both projects. Papers will be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 26th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012. 300 word abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up tp 10 keywords

E-mails should be entitled: Madness Abstract Submission

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. 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.

Organising Chairs

Gonzalo Araoz
Project Leader, Inter-Disciplinary.Net and University of Cumbria,
Cumbria, United Kingdom

Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Network Leader, Inter-Disciplinary.Net, Freeland,
Oxfordshire, United Kingdom

The conference is part of the ‘Making Sense Of:’ series of research projects. The aim of the conference is 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 project, please click here.

For further details of the conference, please click here.

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.