Category Archives: Archived Call for Papers

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Call for proposals: BIMI programme 2018-19 deadline 18 June 2018

Call for proposals: BIMI programme 2018-19

Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) is currently planning its programme of events for 2018-19.

We welcome proposals from researchers and students working in any discipline or field across the Schools of Arts, Law, SSHP, and Science.

We are very happy to work in collaboration with research centres and institutes at Birkbeck or at other institutions.

All our events take place in the Birkbeck Cinema, typically on Friday evenings 6-9pm and Saturdays 10-5pm.

We can show films in 16mm and 35mm, as well as a variety of digital formats.

We are especially keen to foreground film and other moving image material that is rarely screened in public.

If you would like to propose an idea for an event, please use the attached form and send it to bimi@bbk.ac.uk – the deadline for submission is Friday 18 June.

Looking forward to hearing about your ideas.

Michael Temple, Director, Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, and Essay Film Festival

Matthew Barrington, interim BIMI Manager

Sign up to our newsletter: bimi@bbk.ac.uk

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Birkbeck_BIMI

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Birkbeck-Institute-for-the-Moving-Image-542278625939273/

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CFP: Visualising Asia: Deciphering ‘Otherness’ in Visual and Material Cultures – deadline 3 June 2018

Visualising Asia: Deciphering ‘Otherness’ in Visual and Material Cultures

SOAS, University of London

21st September 2018

Confirmed Keynote: Dr Anne Witchard

Historically, Asia has been a contended space of exploration and domination, where both Asian and non-Asian agents sought to define themselves against others. Within this broad historical and geographical context, this international and interdisciplinary conference brings together various forms of visuals, such as films, cartoons, and objects, in their interaction with discourses of ‘other’.  The platforms of visualising Asia were assimilated into daily life and practices, feeding into narratives that transcend any single medium. Due to their visual impact, they became lasting repositories of imagined identities and thus have critical implications for those representing and those being represented. This conference invites discussions on the differing ways ‘otherness’ has been used in both Asian and non-Asian societies through visuals. We encourage the participation from postgraduates, career researchers, scholars, curators, practitioners, and archivists.  The aim is to bring together an array of visualities from across various disciplines in order to reflect on the importance of visuals in knowledge production and circulation within and across cultures and societies.

Wider themes include: empire, multiculturalism, identity, nation, ethnic and cultural minorities, integration, ‘othering’, inclusion, exclusion, power dynamics, representation.

Papers or panels are invited on any topic related to the themes and questions explored in the conference that include but are limited to the following:

  • Representations of Asia by non-Asian cultures across different historical eras.
  • Representations of Asian societies by their neighbouring Asian countries.
  • Representations of minorities within hegemonic discourses in Asia.
  • Gender, ethnicity and class in visual othering of Asia.
  • How and why did representation occur, and the significance and impact for those being represented and those representing.
  • The development of concepts of identity through the use of visual and/or material culture.
  • The politics involved in visual knowledge production.
  • Long-term effects and consequences of visual representations of Asia.
  • The relationship between power and representation. The limits of ‘othering’ and representation.
  • Images of Asia and the development of visual and material industries.
  • Approaches and/or practices in cataloguing images of Asia in archives..

Panels and individual submissions are welcomed.  Please send queries and abstracts of 250-350 words, along with a brief bio of no more than 100 words, to visualisingasia@gmail.com by 3 June 2018.

The conference convenors are Amy Matthewson (SOAS, University of London), and Dr Irene González-López (Kingston University).

 

 

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CFP – Sound and Silence – GLITS – 4 May 2018

GLITS Annual Graduate Interdisciplinary Conference 2018:

Sound and Silence

Date: June 8th 2018

Venue: Goldsmiths, University of London

Website: https://glits4.wixsite.com/mysite 

 

Plenary speaker: Dr Holly Pester, University of Essex

Holly Pester is a poet and lecturer at the University of Essex, working in sound, song and speech-based poetics.

“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.”

Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You

“I came to think that silence may be the only ‘place’ in which the boundaries of the autonomous self can dissolve, can be penetrated without breaking.”

Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence

Sound and silence occupy an inherently complex and paradoxical relation to meaning, as both its antithesis and its very essence. Sound figures as both Pope’s “echo to the sense” and the irrefutable noise of the Real. Silence designates absence and the impossibility thereof, as Cage famously proclaimed, “I have nothing to say and I am saying it.” How these sonic signals are interpreted and contested determines who can speak, who makes noise, who is silenced – which subjects are permitted and legitimised and which are discredited and repressed.

Anne Carson sees the dichotomy of sound as irrevocably gendered due to the patriarchal insistence toward logos, whereby male speech is valorised as the standard-bearer for rationality and female “noise” is perceived as dangerous and disruptive. For Friedrich Kittler, the advent of mechanical storage signals not just a shift in technics but the arrival of a new episteme. Since mechanical ears do not differentiate acoustic events like human ones are trained to, the meaningless and the accidental become as relevant as the deliberate and the symbolic. Psychoanalysis, then, finds its epistemology a matter of phonography, redoubling the policing of human sounds as either normative or pathological.

Harold Pinter once said, ‘I think that we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempt to keep ourselves to ourselves.’ Culturally and politically, silence represents the interstices between thought and language, where that which is refused expression is captured in a state of iteration. Phonic expression, then, is threatening both for its capacities and its limitations.

Sound and Silence is an interdisciplinary postgraduate conference held on 8 June 2018, hosted by the Goldsmiths Literature Seminar (GLITS) at Goldsmiths, University of London, bringing together scholars across multiple fields to ask: how do we recognise, break and rebuild boundaries through phonic utterance and expression? What part does silence play in psycho- and socio-logical development and how do we attune ourselves to its cacophony of meanings?

We invite proposals from various disciplines and historical periods – papers, creative pieces, readings – covering such possible topics as:

  • Sound and silence in the humanities
  • Architecture
  • Identity
  • Race
  • Soundscapes/silentscapes
  • Phono-semantics
  • Textual methodology
  • Spoken word
  • Speech: dialects/accents
  • Gender
  • Religious
  • Speaking out and speaking back
  • Acts of silencing

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words or examples of creative work along with a brief bio to glits@gold.ac.uk by Friday 4th May.

 

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Call for Papers: Are we Living in an Age of Distraction? – Deadline: 26 April 2018

Call for Papers: Are we Living in an Age of Distraction?

Graduate Student Conference
Organized by Birkbeck Institute of Humanities, Birkbeck Institute for Social Research and Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality

Birkbeck, University of London (Room, TBA)
Keynote Speakers TBA

8 & 9 June 2018

Deadline: 26 April 2018
Please send a 200 word abstract for papers of 15 minutes and a 50 word biography to bisr@bbk.ac.uk

This conference explores distraction and all its meanings and implications. Distraction is commonly thought of as a growing concern or even a sickness of modern society and digital culture. From mindless scrolling to heavy consumerism, the pursuit for entertainment and satisfaction is insatiable, leaving us vulnerable to ruling corporations. Does our lack of control transform us into a conformed mass that is susceptible to tabloid media and the rise of populism? On the other hand, distraction is not necessarily steeped in negativity. In fact, it has had a long and fascinating history. Its German equivalent, ‘Zerstreuung’, comes from the idea of dispersion. At the start of the twentieth-century, Walter Benjamin defined the term as ‘floating attention’, where experience is caused by chance rather than concentration. Does lack of focus in fact allow a sense of freedom and inspiration?

Age of Distraction is a chance for an enriching discussion between MA, PhD students and early career researchers from all disciplines.

Topics to include:

  • History of distraction
  • Distraction and its oppositions
  • Distraction and/in Education
  • Distraction and madness
  • Modes of Extremism: online or in reality?
  • Democracy, populism, and online social networking
  • Freedom of speech v. government and/or regulatory control
  • Misinformation and fake news
  • Dystopia/ an Orwellian society
  • Distraction and creativity
  • Escapism, dream and day-dream
  • Feigned ignorance or ‘Turning a blind eye’
  • Emotional responses
  • Procrastination, boredom and solitude
  • Wandering and ‘killing time’
  • Inspiration, chance and serendipity

Of course, distraction can be considered from numerous perspectives:

Arts and Humanities

Distraction as a literary theme can be found in many forms, from dystopia to escapist fiction. Reading itself has been thought to have a negative impact on cognitivity and morality, the development of the popular novel suspected as a dangerous commodity. After WW1, new cinema and photography brought a wave of anxiety about modern man’s splintered focus and new perceptions. Distraction could also be a curse and blessing to the creative process, especially in the pursuit of originality. Diderot wrote in his Encyclopédie that: ‘Distraction arises from an excellent quality of the understanding, which allows the ideas to strike against, or reawaken one another’. How does this statement apply to areas such as writing, painting or film-making? Is writer’s block and procrastination a suspended state in which ideas are waiting to ‘reawaken’ or simply a result of laziness and denial?

Social Sciences

Although social media has given a platform to previously unheard voices, it is also susceptible to manipulation, as recent scandals have made clear. In this context, to what extent can social media still be considered a progressive platform for political action?  Should social media be regulated, and if so how, by whom and on what criteria? Does today’s open platform really represent shared global perspectives, or does it magnify the voice of those who already have power and influence? How does use of social media relate to dominant economic ideologies, and the ‘neoliberalisation’ of leisure time and social relations?

There is widespread concern that social media can be a major source of ‘mass distraction’ from real life conditions. Today’s technological advances raise a number of concerns: In what ways do social media influence public opinion and political participation, and do they provide channels for public deliberation? Is scepticism becoming dominant in response to the rise of the concept of ‘fake news’? Are social scientists equipped with adequate theoretical tools to make sense of the sociopolitical changes accompanying unceasingly evolving communication technologies?

Law and Criminology  

Distraction is also relevant to our legal and criminal justice system. Last year, the English High Court in Monroe v Hopkins [2017] EWHC had to decide what constitutes ‘serious harm’ following a Twitter war between Jack Monroe and Katie Hopkins. Legislatures around the world are examining Facebook’s internal policies and procedures as they relate to the dissemination of extremist material, hate speech and bullying. Constitutionally protected rights to freedom of speech and expression are clashing with individual claims asking for respect for private and family life.  What is becoming clear is that traditional legal frameworks regulating twentieth century media are not adapt to a twenty first century world. From this perspective, the law now needs to consider both ‘the distracted’ and ‘the distractor’. Inevitably, topics that critically engage with privacy and surveillance, control society and fundamental human rights need to be discussed.

Food and refreshments will be available.

The annual Birkbeck Graduate Conference is organised by the the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research, the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality. The Institutes’ interns for the current academic year take the lead on organising the conference.

Meet our interns for 2017-18: Azzam Al Kassir, Harooon Forde, Devin Frank, Pauline Suwanban.

We are currently recruiting PhD students to join the Working Party to help organise the conference. If you are a current Birkbeck PhD student and are interested in gaining the experience of organising an international conference please contact us on .

Previous conferences:

 

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Call for Papers: *DICKENS DAY* – deadline: 31st May 2018

*DICKENS DAY*

Saturday 20th October 2018, Senate House, London.

CFP: Dickens, Families and Communities

Dickens often associated his own works with a cheerful ideology of hearth and home. Writing to his friend John Forster on plans for a new periodical, he promised that it would have ‘a vein of glowing, hearty, generous, mirthful, beaming reference in everything to Home, and Fireside’. Yet, many of the families in Dickens’s fiction are far from mirthful. From Mrs Joe going on the rampage to the murderous Jonas Chuzzlewit, the Dickensian family is as conflict-ridden as it is cosy. And, for Dickens, family is a particularly flexible concept, ranging from the nuclear to the extended, encompassing elective families, diverse gender roles, child-carers and surrogate-parents. Dickens’s writing is frequently concerned also with those without families: orphans, singletons, and those alienated from others by choice or circumstance.

Dickens’s wider communities are equally eclectic. In prefaces and journalism, he makes appeals to his ‘community of readers’, a virtual community linked through his writings. He participated in other more tangible communities, as an author, journalist, social reformer, and actor in amateur dramatic performances. And he wrote of diverse forms of community: gangs, clubs, the parish, the nation, and religious, political and cultural societies.

Jointly run by Birkbeck, Cardiff University, the Dickens Fellowship and the Institute of English Studies, this one-day conference will explore all aspects of Dickens, Families and Communities. We invite proposals for 20-minute papers in response to the theme and warmly encourage Dickensians and scholars of all backgrounds and career stages to apply.

Topics could include but are not limited to:

  • Hearth and home: happy families
  • Threats to and within the family
  • Alienated from the family: illegitimacy, orphans, solitary individuals
  • Adoptive and elective families
  • Dickens’s own family
  • Dickens’s community of readers
  • Nation, empire and other imagined communities
  • Institutional communities: orphanages, schools, prisons, workhouses, parliament and the courts
  • Criminal and transgressive families
  • Privileged and underprivileged communities
  • Clubs, societies, lodgers, friends, neighbours and other networks
  • Amateur dramatics, fictional and non-fictional theatrical communities

Please send proposals (maximum 500 words) to Bethan Carney (bethan.carney@gmail.com), Holly Furneaux (furneauxh@cardiff.ac.uk) and Ben Winyard (benwinyard@hotmail.com).

The deadline for paper proposals is 31st May 2018.

 

 

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CFP: The Literary Self: from Antiquity to the Digital Age – deadline 10 April 2018

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Literary Self: from Antiquity to the Digital Age

A postgraduate conference hosted by the University of Edinburgh on 4-5 June 2018.

Generously supported by the Institute for Academic Development, the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities and the School of Classics at the University of St Andrews.

Keynote: Professor Simon James, Durham University
Other confirmed speakers: Dr Roger Rees, University of St Andrews

Throughout history authors have grappled with how their texts are presented to their audience. Critics and theorists have responded to this in kind with a multitude of diverging approaches to the author in a text and the nature of the self generally. However, very few of these approaches have come to bear upon the literary nature of our online identities, whether it’s the lexical semantics and rhetoric of our online existences or indeed the literary value that such existences might produce. Our conference will examine approaches to authorship and selfhood through time and culminate in roundtable discussions of their applicability in our digital age.

We will have panels grounded in the Classical, Medieval and Early Modern, and Modern periods and invite papers from all disciplines.

As the conference is interdisciplinary we encourage papers that examine the literary self in a specific field or time period but also have applicability to a wide audience. Speakers who are successful will have the opportunity to publish their proceedings in FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts.

Paper topics might consider:
• Biographies, autobiographies, and the mythology of authorial persona
• The psychology of literary identity
• Digital humanities and the networks of reception
• Ontological philosophies of selfhood
• The media of self-presentation (e.g. papyri, codices, books, social media, or e-books)
• The linguistics of expression and repression

Thanks to the generosity of the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities, the Institute for Academic Development, and the School of Classics at the University of St Andrews, we can provide a limited amount of funding for travel from your home institution. Lunch and refreshments will also be provided.

Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words to literaryself2018@gmail.com by 10 April 2018.
You will be notified by email by mid to late-April of the submission outcomes.

Conference Organisers
Caitlan Smith (St. Andrews), Consuelo Martino (St. Andrews), Matthew Tibble (Edinburgh), Miles Beard (Strathclyde)

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CFP: Representing Gender in the North: 1945 to the present day – Deadline 3 April 2018

The University of Sheffield 23.5.18

Call for Papers

“When he saw this Tom was so full of himself that he had to share the pleasure with somebody, so he turned to a woman sitting across the aisle.

“There it is, missus.”

Surprised, the woman looked across him at him.

“You what, love?”

Tom nodded towards the panorama through the front window.

“The North.”

The woman looked, saw nothing, then observing that they were alone

thought it best to humour him.

“Yes, love. Very nice.”

And she stood up and went downstairs.”

Barry Hines, First Signs, (London: Michael Joseph, 1972), p.89

“Representing Gender in the North: 1945 to the present day” is a one-day conference which is to be held at the Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield on 23 May 2018.  The conference focuses on prose, poetry, film, theatre, and television.   Contributions are warmly welcomed from established scholars and post-graduate students alike.  We invite abstracts of 300 words (please send to rlhughes@shef.ac.uk)  by 3 April 2018. Topics for discussion include but are not limited to the following:

Representations of gender in the town or in the country

Ethnicity in the North

Northern authorship

LGBTQ representations

The post-industrial

Displacement and/or the returning native

Class

The teenager or the Bildungsroman

Stereotypes/stereotyping

Dialect and gender

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CFP: ASMI POSTGRADUATE SUMMER SCHOOL – Deadline 9 April 2018

University of Warwick

21 – 22 June, 2018

The ASMI Postgraduate Summer School provides a forum for postgraduate students and early career scholars in the field of Italian Studies to share their research and test their ideas.

We welcome proposals for papers on any aspect of Modern Italian history, politics, society and culture, from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century and from any academic discipline.

Participants will present their papers in panel sessions and then receive feedback from senior scholars and junior colleagues in a welcoming and supportive environment.

Papers can be in English or Italian and should be no more than 20 minutes in length.
Please send an abstract (max 250 words) and a short biography (max 100 words) to the conference organisers at asmi.summerschool.2018@gmail.com by Monday 9th April 2018.
The Summer School programme will include two keynote lectures and a training session (speakers to be confirmed).

The Summer School is free to all members of ASMI. ASMI membership is offered at a discounted rate of £20 per calendar year to students and the unwaged, and includes subscription to the journal Modern Italy (http://www.asmi.org.uk/membership/).

A limited number of travel grants will be available. For information, please contact the organisers at asmi.summerschool.2018@gmail.com
The organising committee: Gianmarco Mancosu (University of Warwick), Daniela Zanini (School of Advanced Study, University of London), Emiliano Zappalà (University of Warwick), Kate Devine (Royal Holloway, University of London).

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CFP: Spain: Social Movements Between Past and Present – Deadline 23 March 2018

University of Cambridge

8th June 2018

Social movements in Spain have increasingly attracted academic and popular attention over the last years. Political mobilisations are frequently treated as spontaneous phenomena, divorced from their wider social and historical contexts, as testified by much of the recent commentary on the 15M/Indignados movement and recent Catalan separatism. There is little interaction between those studying activism in the transformative decades of la transición española and those researching contemporary social movements. This can mean that their lessons and wider significance are lost. Historians of popular politics are also often reluctant to relate their research to contemporary events or to acknowledge the influence of present movements on the collective and academic memory. Our workshop is partly a response to social movement theorists’ suggestion that we attend to a particular mobilisation´s temporal, spatial and transnational dynamics to gain a deeper understanding of the movement itself and the societal changes it sheds light on.

This workshop will allow participants – PhD students and early-career academics – to reflect on social movements in Spain from the mid-twentieth century to the present, linking between past and present in important themes of mobilisation in contemporary Spain. It will help lay the ground for dialogue between scholars of Spanish history and politics from a diverse array of disciplines and intellectual contexts. Speakers will have twenty minutes to present their paper followed by comments and questions lead by an established academic. We will proceed with a roundtable discussion.

We aim to facilitate discussion on a variety of topics related to Spanish social movements, including but not limited to:

  • Gender and sexuality
  • Relations between social movements and institutions
  • Nationalisms
  • Urban Infrastructure
  • Youth Activism
  • Student movement
  • Memory
  • Labour and trade unions
  • Relations between actors
  • Movements and political parties

How to apply: Please send abstracts of up to 250 words and a short biography (max.200 words) to Roseanna Webster (rw561@cam.ac.uk) and/or Tiago Carvalho (tmlc3@cam.ac.uk) by March 23rd, 2018.

 

Limited funding to cover travel and accommodation is available.

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