Identity and Power
London, UK, 1-2 August 2020
Deadline for proposals: 15 March 2020
An international Conference on Communication and Media Studies organised by London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research
Nowadays we live and breathe media, minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour. News, television, social media, celebrity culture, music, and more. As the media and communication sector becomes ever more diverse and dynamic, and we are going to consume it, we also need to understand it.
Today, the new bio-technical forms of life produced by mainstream digital media and by a whole range of artistic and non-artistic practices confront us with unprecedented theoretical questions, which can be dealt with by combining profound and perplexing perspectives. We need appropriate theoretical frameworks in order to understand the phenomena.
Media studies requires the in-depth analysis and criticism. From newspapers, radio and television, to the Internet and mobile technologies, media, communication technologies and information tools impact our daily lives in countless ways. We use them to socialize with others, to seek out or share information and entertainment and to participate in social and cultural debates. But what are media, exactly? How do media institutions and technologies impact the development of society and culture and influence our activities and behaviours?
In turn, how do users shape media? What role does the economic structure of media institutions play in shaping our relationship with them? In what ways does the organization and presentation of information influence our understanding of the world and our place in it? How are user-generated forms of media such as social networking sites, blogs, and collaborative informational sources like Wikipedia changing the modern media environment?
These are just some of the questions the conference aims to answer. It will also focus on modern communication and information technologies, and try to discover the ways they influence our lives.
The conference will bring together speakers from various fields, including mass media, film studies, games industries, political sciences, education, etc., creating closer ties and connections among scholars from different disciplines working on communication and media studies.
Papers are invited on topics related, but not limited, to:
- Media Cultures
- Cultural representation and power in media
- Politics of media and media in politics
- Censorship, affront and censoriousness in media
- Media Theory
- Psychology of media and communications
- The idea of the virtual
- Cybernetics
- Media discourses
- Media analytics
- Media Technologies and Processes
- Mass media and broadcast media: television, radio, newspapers, magazines
- Cinema and documentary
- Typographic media
- Internet and online media
- Social media
- Media Business
- Media management
- Intellectual property
- Globalization of media
- Advertising and marketing
- Media Literacies
- Media education
- Media training and workforce development
Paper proposals up to 250 words and a brief biographical note should be sent by 15 March 2020 to: media@lcir.co.uk. Please download paper proposal form.
Standard registration fee – 220 GBP Student registration fee – 180 GBP
Provisional conference venue: Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7HX
(posted 4 January 2020)
Archipelagic Memory: Intersecting Geographies, Histories and Disciplines
University of Mauritius, 4 – 6 August 2020
Deadline for proposals: 20 March 2020
Confirmed keynote speakers
Ananya Jahanara Kabir, King’s College London Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the Witwatersrand/NYU
George Abungu, Archaeologist and International Heritage Consultant Anwar Janoo, University of Mauritius
The concept of the “archipelago” has been discussed and deployed by historians, social scientists, literary and cultural studies scholars since the 1950s to dismantle linear narratives of historical, national and cultural development; to resist the taxonomy of centre-periphery; to emphasise shared human experiences premised on relation, creolisation and cultural diversity; and to inspire research and creative projects tracing discontinuous yet interlinked geographies over a planetary scale.
Taking the Indian Ocean as a principal site for investigating new meanings and experiences of the archipelagic, the conference will marshal and build upon the different strands of archipelagic thinking already engendered by the Caribbean world to explore connected histories across oceans and seas, and to instigate a theoretical dialogue on memory-production encompassing the Indian, Atlantic, Pacific and Southern Oceans and their articulated spatiality. What has been enabled and what has been precluded by thinking primarily through the model of the Caribbean archipelago and its anti- mimetic patterns of repetition and difference? What has not yet been thought of archipelagically? What if ethnic, national and geological borders are in conflict with each other, resulting in fractured archipelagic identities? How does the sea function as an imagined space that reduces or entrenches geographical and affective distance? How, indeed, does the sea enable archipelagic relations?
Simultaneously, the conference explores what it means to remember the past in the present and how to consider future trajectories in individual, collective, as well as national identities, addressing the possibilities offered by an archipelagic approach to memory, one that is mobile and dynamic as much as entangled, even surpassing island and archipelagic spaces. What, in effect, is an archipelagic memory project, and how might it contribute to memory studies? If the past is memorialised as archipelagic, as a series of fragmentary geographies, cultures and histories converging in a fluid space that might also act as a symbol for other, larger connections, how can archipelagic memory enhance continental practices of articulating the past, de-centre or contribute to traditional approaches to memory? How can archipelagic mnemonic projects be multidirectional, reparative and committed to justice, instead of competitive, suppressive or destructive?
We welcome papers and poster presentations from scholars at any point of their academic career addressing the theme of archipelagic memory. Suggested topics for papers include, but are not limited to:
Archipelagic epistemologies
- The memorialisation of transoceanic connections, transnational movements and displacement, and cosmopolitan cultural entanglements in the archipelagic mode
- Critical archipelagic methodologies for memory studies
- Postcolonial studies, multidirectional memory, and the archipelago
Archipelagic memory practices
- The thematic and symbolic dimension of archipelagic memory in literature and the arts
- Performative memory-making in and across archipelagos
- Non-canonical and disobedient archival practices: orality, musicality, embodied knowledge and the senses
- Textual and symbolical translation, cultural borrowing and divergence
Archipelagic memory spaces
- Ships, shorelines, port towns and other places where archipelagic memory is inscribed
- Isthmuses, canals, peninsulas, and their role in increasing the sense of the archipelagic
- National, ancestral, and imaginary homelands as archipelagic memory palimpsests
- Trans-oceanic identification across islands and archipelagos; archipelagos as continents, continents as archipelagic
History, traumas, and archipelagic memory
- Human and natural catastrophes in archipelagic spaces
- Ways of remembering and moving beyond past conflicts and collective traumas across oceans and continents
- Vestiges of the colonial past in the postcolonial archipelagic present
Memory and politics in the archipelago
- Bilateral relations between archipelagic states, small island nations, and established or emerging continental powers
- Maritime and territorial claims and their impact on regional stability and peace-keeping
- Activism and its implications in the building of an archipelagic future
We invite contributions in English and French for 20-minute papers. We also invite research posters (e.g. work in progress; research findings) and creative posters (e.g. photography/poetry projects) for display, particularly from postgraduate students. Please send a 300-word abstract for papers and poster proposals, accompanied by a short bio-note (100 words) and 3-4 keywords, to: archipelagicmemory@gmail.com
Deadline for paper and poster proposals: 20 March 2020
Notification of acceptance by 31 March 2020
For more information and regular updates, please visit the conference website, http://www.archipelagicmemory.wordpress.com or contact us at archipelagicmemory@gmail.com
Conference Organisers: Sraddha Shivani Rajkomar (University of Mauritius); Luca Raimondi (CISA, University of the Witwatersrand); Linganaden Murday (University of Mauritius)
Conference Administrator: Rosa Beunel (King’s College London)
(posted 17 January 2020)
The Uncanny in Language, Literature and Culture
London, UK, 15 August 2020
Deadline for proposals: 31 May 2020
An intenational conference organised by London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research
The twentieth-century literature and culture tended to explore and to celebrate subjectivity. But this tendency did not mean the turn to the self, but beyond the self, or as Charles Taylor puts it, “to a fragmentation of experience which calls our ordinary notions of identity into question”.
In his attempts to define the uncanny Freud asserted that it is undoubtedly related to what is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror. It may be something domestic but at the same time unfriendly, dangerous, something that sets the sense of insecurity within the four walls of one’s house. “Persons, things, sense-impressions, experiences and situations which are known and long familiar arouse in us the feeling of danger, fear and even horror. Everyday objects may suddenly lose their familiar side, and become messengers”.
The uncanny suggests an unsettling of the feeling of comfort and reassurance in one’s home, but also in oneself. Architecture takes the place of psychology (Kreilkamp). The perturbed relationship between the characters and their familiar world, the troubled sense of home and self-certainty is a result of a traumatic experience of loss.
In the new literary and artistic discourse authors tend to depict the new human being, “psychologically deep and multi-layered, fragmentary, floating on sensation and consciousness, fed by their random thoughts and their half-conscious dream worlds” (Bradbury). The new style relies on fragments, breaks, ellipses and disrupted linearity of the narration. It serves to convey the idea of the fractured character of modern time and fragmentariness and allusiveness of subconscious thought. As “an externalization of consciousness”, the uncanny becomes a meta-concept for modernity with its disintegration of time, space and self.
This conference seeks to explore the representations of the uncanny in language, literature and culture. Papers are invited on topics related, but not limited, to:
- uncanny geographies
- uncanny technologies
- the uncanny and visual tropes
- the uncanny and postcolonialism
- the uncanny and gender studies
- the uncanny and sexuality
The conference aims to bring together scholars from different fields. We invite proposals from psychology, sociology, anthropology, literature, linguistics, etc.
Paper proposals up to 250 words should be sent by 31 May 2020 to: uncanny@lcir.co.uk.
Download paper proposal form.
Registration fee – 100 GBP
Provisional conference venue: Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7HX, UK
(posted 29 December 2019)
Culinary Evolutions: International Conference on Food Studies
London, UK, 22 August 2020
Deadline for proposals: 20 February 2020
Food is a basic foundation of culture and society, it is vital to our health and well-being and it plays a significant role in our everyday creative engagement with nature. The shifts in activities surrounding food acquisition, preparation and consumption are not only essential for learning a culinary tradition but for examining a broader societal change.
This conference will explore food as a complex cultural product, an indicator of social, religious and political identity. It will focus on people’s relationship with food and discuss how food choices are determined by historical period, region, class, gender, kinship and/or ethnicity.
The conference will approach the study of food across a range of disciplines such as history, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, literature, culture studies, politics, economics, medicine, biology, psychology, etc.
Papers are invited on topics related, but not limited, to:
- Food systems and diets
- Eating/drinking habits and etiquettes
- Food and rituals
- Cooking/eating spaces
- Culinary professions
- Food and health
- Food and power
- Hunger, starvation, and malnutrition
- Dangerous foods and poisons
- Cookbooks and food magazines
- Culinary festivals and TV shows
- Food in social media
- Food as pleasure
- Gastronomic tourism
- Food, biodiversity and sustainability
- Agriculture and food technology
- Food safety and quality
Paper proposals up to 250 words and a brief biographical note should be sent by 20 February 2020 to: food@lcir.co.uk. Please download Paper proposal form.
Registration fee – 100 GBP
Provisional conference venue: Birkbeck, University of London, Bloomsbury, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX
(posted 29 December 2019)
Violence and Society
London, UK, 22 August 2020
Deadline for proposals: 25 April 2020
organised by London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research
Violence has become one of the features of the present-day world, although it has existed throughout times, playing undoubtedly an important role in the development of any society. The analysis of violence is a complicated and controversial issue nowadays, as it may cover different levels – interpersonal, institutional, collective violence; as well as different forms – racist crimes, gender basedviolence, genocide etc. The conference will be an attempt to shed light on the social construction and nature of violence, applying an interdisciplinary approach to various manifestations of violence.
Conference panels will be related, but not limited, to:
- History of violence
- Physiology and psychology of aggression and violence
- Violence, crimes and criminology
- Racism, gender based violence, homophobic violence
- Religion and Violence
- Social norms and culture of violence
- Domestic violence, mass violence, genocide
- Cruelty to animals
- Spaces of violence
- Violence in media
- Violent sports
- Hate speech
- Violence in literature and art
- Nonviolence and pacifist movements
The conference will bring together scholars from different fields including philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, literature, linguistics, architecture, geography and others.
Proposals up to 250 words should be sent by 25 April 2020 to: violence.society@lcir.co.uk. Download Paper proposal form.
Registration fee – 100 GBP
Provisional conference venue: Birkbeck, University of London, Bloomsbury, London, WC1E 7HX, UK
(posted 10 February 2020)