CFP: 2nd Global Conference: Trauma: Theory and Practice

21st March - 24th March 2012

Prague, Czech Republic

Call for Papers:

This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary conference seeks to examine and explore issues surrounding individual and collective trauma, both in terms of practice, theory and lived reality. Trauma studies have emerged from its foundation in psychoanalysis to be a dominant methodology for understanding contemporary events and our reactions to them. Critics have argued that we live in a “culture of trauma”. Repeated images of suffering and death form our collective and/or cultural unconscious. The second global conference seeks papers on a variety of issues related to trauma including the function of memory and trauma, collective and cultural trauma, time and trauma, testimony and trauma, and strategies of dealing with/coming to terms with personal/political trauma.

In addition to academic analysis, we welcome the submission of case studies or other approaches from those involved with its practice, such as people in the medical profession and therapists, victims of events which have resulted in traumas on either an individual or mass scale, journalists or authors (including playwrights and poets) whose work deals with both fictional and factual trauma, and theatre professionals.

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

1. Public and Political Trauma
~ War and trauma, both past and present
~ Public disasters and trauma including environmental catastrophes
~ Disease, public health and trauma
~ Political trauma, silencing dissent/voicing dissent

2. Personal and Individual Trauma
~ Bereavement
~ Murder and Assault
~ Domestic Violence
~ Child Abuse
~ Survivor guilt
~ Disability
~ Witnessing Trauma

3. Diagnosing and Treating Trauma
~ Psychotherapy, cognitive psychology and other psychological approaches to treating victims of trauma
~ Psychiatry
~ Other medical approaches
~ non-medical approaches, for example, narrative approaches, music, art

4. Theorising Trauma
~ Trauma and post colonialism
~ Memory and trauma
~ National identity and trauma
~ Trauma studies and psychoanalysis
~ Individual versus Collective trauma
~ Cultural trauma
~ Gender and trauma
~ The body and trauma
~ External and internal trauma

5. Representing Trauma
~ Affect, trauma and art
~ Dramatizing trauma on screen and on stage
~ Vision and Trauma
~ Media images: reality and fiction
~ literature and poetry
~ Eyewitness testimony
~ video games, violence and trauma
~ technology and trauma
~ reporting on trauma
~ the aesthetics and experience of trauma
~ fear, horror and trauma
~ Otherness and trauma

The Steering Group also welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 1st October 2010. All submissions are minimally double blind peer reviewed where appropriate. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 27th January 2012.

Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to the 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

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.

Organising Chairs

Colette Balmain
Hub Leader (Horror), Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Independent Scholar
United Kingdom

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

The conference is part of the ‘At the Interface’ 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) or for inclusion in the Perspectives on Evil journal (relaunching 2011).

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.