CFP: 3rd Global Conference: Trauma: Theory and Practice

Tuesday 19th March – Friday 22nd March 2013

Lisbon, Portugal

Call for Presentation:

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 has 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 third global conference seeks papers on a variety of issues related to trauma including: the function of memory, memorial, and testimony; collective and cultural perspectives; the impact of time; and the management of personal and political traumas.

Whilst we continue to warmly welcome research papers of theoretical and clinical interest, we would also encourage papers that address: critical questions of practice; practical projects; first-hand survivor/bystander reports of individual and collective experiences; and, those that interrogate, critique, represent, or create works that deal with fictional and actual traumatic events.

Case studies, papers, performance pieces, reports, works of art, 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
~ Captivity and torture
~ Public disasters and trauma including environmental catastrophes
~ Disease, public health and trauma
~ Political trauma, silencing dissent/voicing dissent
~ Social trauma
~ Traumatic displacement and cultural uprooting
~ Inherited intergenerational trauma

2. Personal and Individual Trauma
~ Bereavement: parent; sibling; partner loss
~ Abandonment
~ Betrayal
~ Peer pressure and bullying
~ Murder and assault
~ Domestic violence
~ Child abuse and childhood trauma
~ Survivor guilt
~ Disability
~ Witnessing trauma and secondary trauma
~ Coping strategies – stress management and reduction

3. Diagnosing and Treating Trauma
~ Medical, therapeutic, and holistic approaches to trauma management
~ Non-medical therapies/approaches – the uses of drama, dance, narrative, bibliotherapy and scriptotherapy, music, art, and digital technologies
~ Vicarious traumatisation, secondary stress, and compassion fatigue
~ From person to survivor – perspectives of change

4. Theorising Trauma
~ Trauma and post colonialism
~ Memory
~ National identity
~ Trauma studies
~ Individual versus collective trauma
~ Socio-cultural perspectives on traumatic experience
~ Gender
~ The body from the inside and out
~ Psychic trauma

5. Representing Trauma
~ Affect, trauma, and art
~ Trauma on stage, screen, and in cyberspace
~ Traumatic expression
~ Media images: reality and fiction
~ Literature and poetry
~ Eyewitness testimony
~ Gaming and violence
~ New technologies
~ Reporting on trauma
~ Aesthetics and experience
~ Fear and horror
~ Otherness, spirituality, and trauma

What to Send

The Steering Group also welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 12th October 2012. 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 18th January 2013. 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 f) up to 10 key words

E-mails should be entitled: Trauma 3 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). 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

Peter Bray 

Rob Fisher

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.

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: 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.

She-Wolf Conference Criticized by Werewolf

During my regular cyber-surveys of all things werewolf, I've come across a few mentions of the conference on blogs, livejournal and other sites. We certainly seem to have caught people's attention. However, tonight I discovered that not all the attention is positive. I found A Werewolf Blog in Brooklyn, a blog written by a 'modern day werewolf from Brooklyn'. The female werewolf who authors the site has taken some offence at the ways in which we are marketing the She-Wolf Conference. In particular, she's not happy about the link I have made between the 'female monster' and the 'female werewolf'.

Of course, it has never been my intention to cause offence. But I would like to offer a brief defence. Theoretical considerations of the 'monster' are becoming more common in academic discourse; literary studies, film studies, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, history, legal studies, theology... and many other disciplines are becoming more and more engaged with exploring the concept of the 'monster' and the impact this has on our understanding of the 'human'. Though in everyday parlance the word can simply refer to something repellant, unpleasant or dangerous, academics seek to go beyond this and question the far-reaching implications of 'monster-production', 'monstrosity' and the 'monstrous'.

I would suggest that this is even more problematic when examining the female 'monster'. Women - werewolf or otherwise - are monsterized and dehumanized in many discourses. So what happens when we create or are confronted by the monstrous monster? The other of the other? The inhuman non-human? Does this double otherness, as many critics have suggested, give the female monster more power? Or does it render her utterly abject?

These are the questions I wanted to raise and discuss by organizing She-Wolf. And, if you have a look at our programme, you'll see that our speakers will be grappling with these questions from different perspectives and from different theoretical positions. I believe that our discussions will cover many of the representations of the female werewolf in art, literature and culture - but will also explore what it means when we distinguish between the human and the monster.

I hope this clears up some of the thinking behind the conference. Despite the animosity the author clearly feels towards the conference, I would recommend giving A Werewolf Blog in Brooklyn or the downloadable zines a go. It's an interesting read, particularly if you're familiar with a lot of the recent pop culture representations of female werewolves.

Feel free to comment!