CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS

PRECARITY, POPULISM AND POST-TRUTH POLITICS

 1-3 February 2018

Universidad de Córdoba, Spain

 

This three-day event—a two-day conference followed by a workshop on the third day—aims to interrogate the multiple and overlapping global processes underlying three emergent relational fields or modes of enquiry: precarity, populism and post-truth politics. As a network, we are committed to the pursuit of arguments and ideas that will foster articulation of research questions and positions and the construction of one or more interlinked, interdisciplinary projects. We seek to identify the interconnections between precarity, populism and post-truth politics in ways that will enable the development of cross-cutting thematic and theoretical approaches to these manifestations of global inequality, injustice and tension.

Judith Butler first introduced the concept of precarity in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), defined as a type of precariousness by which human life can be understood from a collective, communal and interdependently political point of view. Whereas all lives are born precarious—i.e. vulnerable and hence finite—precarity refers to a “politically induced condition” (2009, 25) derived from (in)action on the part of social and economic systems, usually maintained by nation-states, which fail to protect human lives from physical impairment for reasons such as disease, poverty, starvation, or political violence. In a similar way poverty also has been reframed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum,[1] as not just material deprivation but a failure of the world system, due to social cultural exclusion, lack of agency and access to rights and capabilities.

In these contexts, a new form of populism has recently emerged, albeit not unprecedented in history, as a powerful social response, tainted by xenophobia, which emphasises the need for protection against perceived threats to national security, health and well-being, employment and living standards. More peripheral groups, often aided by Non-Governmental Organizations, independent associations, Refugee Councils or other transnational agencies, have traditionally been targets of populism; but recently more affluent social sectors have also begun to experience conditions of precarity, to demonstrate hostility towards immigrants, and to demand sovereignty, as with Brexit, or secession, as with Catalonia in Spain. Examples include the European austerity policies and the emergence of right wing political parties and pressure groups such as UKIP, the Front National (France), The Golden Dawn (Greece) and the Freedom Party (Netherlands), which both foster and are symptomatic of the opposition between the haves and the have-nots. This growing fracture entails the dehumanization and/or reification of the Other, rendering asylum seekers, illegal migrants or refugees—i.e. border subjects—considered outside national and ethnic boundaries, as unintelligible and unrecognizable.

This per se intricate situation of our contemporary moment is complemented by a third phenomenon, known as “post-truth”, a term which was awarded the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year in 2016.[2] Post-truth, usually associated with the noun “politics,” is described by the Oxford Dictionary of English (ODE) as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. The complex interrelationship between precarity and populism is thus marked by the unparalleled mass media impact on our globalized era and the tendency towards distortion of the news in the press and social media. Factual events are set aside; emotional appeals are foregrounded. This implies that reality is multifarious, kaleidoscopic and that multiple overlapping and sometimes colliding “truths” co-exist. Global issues of poverty worldwide (regardless of whether those areas are classified as developed or developing countries) are in danger of being overlooked and political governments and agencies are faced with ethical and aesthetic issues of representation, concerning aspects of voice, agency and authenticity.

In taking up the critical concepts of this three-field intersection, we suggest precarity, populism and post-truth politics can be interpreted through the lens of racial, gender, or ethnic discrimination, silencing, censorship and marginalization on the part of governments, corporations or other forces, leading to violence and terror and ecological degradation in the context of fierce neo-liberal capitalism.

This International Conference also proposes to examine precarity, populism and post-truth politics through multiple research disciplines, ranging from sociology, economics, ethnography, anthropology, literary and comparative studies, visual and media studies, translation, among others, by focusing on individual or collective cases, imaginative responses, and theoretical or experimental approaches. The aim of this conference is to provide a multi- and transdisciplinary platform which will allow delegates to (un)settle, (re)frame, and analyse the global issues from multiple viewpoints as well as their cultural representation.

We invite abstracts that focus on, but are not limited to, the following:

* Global Health and Safety, starvation and housing

* National and transnational terrorism, war, and violence

* Subalternity, marginality, poverty, and economic inequality

* Gender, sexuality, poverty, and precarity

* Diasporas, immigration and global population trends and growth

* Mass media representations of economy, democracy and global conflict

* Depletion of natural resources, ecological degradation and the Anthropocene

* Imperialistic globalization of cultures

* Human Rights, refugees, asylum seekers, illegal migrants and social activism

* Populisms and aesthetics

* Global emergence of right wing ideologies

* NGOs, UN and other corporate stakeholders

* Racism, discrimination, and ontologies of the grievable

* The role of censorship in mass media and cultural representations

* Neo-liberal capitalism and human sustainability

* The role of science and technology in poverty, populism and the post-truth era

* The humanities and social sciences in the global world

* Truthiness,[3] Truth and Post-Truth Politics: political discourse and consciousness

* Scapes of poverty and precarity and its representational practices

* Contested representations of precarity, populism and post-truth phenomena

* Political separatisms, populism and Brexit

* Literary and visual representations of precarity, populism, post-truth politics

* Ethics and aesthetics in the representations of poverty

 

CONFIRMED PLENARY SPEAKERS

Elleke Boehmer (University of Oxford, UK)

Tabish Khair (Aarhus University, Denmark)

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION

We invite abstracts of 300-400 words for 20-minute papers which can be either oral or virtual. If virtual this should be stated on the abstract as instructions about content and delivery will be sent on acceptance. Proposals for 90 minutes panels, with a 500-word justification in addition to individual abstracts of 300 words, are also welcome. Please include personal information (name, affiliation, contact information) with the abstract, and send it to the following:

 

Om Dwivedi, Sri Ramswaroop Memorial University, Lucknow, India (om_dwivedi2003@yahoo.com)

Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández, University of Cordova, Spain (cristina.gamez@uco.es)

Janet Wilson, University of Northampton, UK (Janet.Wilson@northampton.ac.uk)

 

Deadline: 30 September 2017.

Notification of acceptance: 31 October 2017.

 

[1] See, for example, Amartya Sen, ‘Capability and Well-Being,’ in M. Nussbaum and A. Sen, The Quality of Life. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Martha Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2011).

 

[2] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016

[3] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/truthiness

Deadline for submissions: September 30, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Northeast Modern Language Association
Contact email: bnelson@gradcenter.cuny.edu

In Moby-Dick, Ahab, the monomaniacal captain of the Pequod, famously iterates the following lines: “Hark ye yet again,—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!” In this instance, Ahab might be seen as possessed by what John Dewey called philosophy’s endless “quest for certainty.” Thus, Ahab’s monomaniacal discourse can be said to turn on the appearance/reality distinction—a dichotomy germane to Western metaphysics since Plato. Philosophy, and questions frameable in philosophical terms, is all over Moby-Dick, just as philosophical questions and allusions to philosophy permeate many of the literatures belonging to the creative period known as the American Renaissance.

This panel aims to examine literature from the American Renaissance (and 19th century America, broadly conceived) in terms of its intersections with philosophy. As such, papers that take a distinctly philosophical approach (by pairing philosophy and philosophers with American literature) will be given special priority. Assuming the inherent value of interdisciplinary scholarship, this panel seeks to examine 19th century American Literature by placing it in generative dialogue with the philosophical methods and/or the intellectual histories of Western and Eastern philosophy. One question the panel poses is: What happens when we pair philosophers and philosophies with literatures traditionally dissociated or excluded from philosophic inquiry, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin? This panel will be particularly useful in highlighting philosophy as a critical approach to all forms and genres of 19th century American Literature.

Possible paper topics might include (but are not limited to): Cartesianism and anti-Cartesianism; dualism, monism, and/or pluralism; epistemology after, or in pursuit of, modernity; philosophy of science; pragmatism and proto-pragmatism; phenomenology and philosophies of the body; discourses of sentiment and sympathy; stoicism; platonism and/or neo-platonism; transcendentalism’s platonic (or counter platonic) leanings; object oriented ontology; Stanley Cavell and skepticism; feminism; existentialism; Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophy.

Please submit your 250-word proposal through the NeMLA submission system. A direct link can be found here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/17023.

Proposals are due by Sept 30, 2017. Participants will be notified by October 15.

The Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) conference will be held in Pittsburgh, PA, April 12-15, 2018.

Deadline for submissions: September 11, 2017
Full name/name of organization: University of Louisville
Contact email: alan.golding@louisville.edu

The 46th annual Louisville Conference on Literature & Culture since 1900

February 22 – 24, 2018

The 46th annual Louisville Conference on Literature & Culture since 1900 will be held at the University of Louisville, February 22-24, 2018. Critical papers may be submitted on any topic that addresses literary works published since 1900, and/or their relationship with other arts and disciplines (film, journalism, opera, music, pop culture, painting, architecture, law, etc). Work by creative writers is also welcome.

Submissions may be in English, French, German, Italian or Spanish. Submissions will be considered if received by 11:59 P.M. EST September 11, 2017.

Critical panels

Panels pre-organized by participants are welcome. Panel proposals are to be emailed to submissions@thelouisvilleconference.com with two attachments in pdf, rtf or doc format. The first attachment is to include: (a) copy of each abstract; (b) rationale for grouping papers, including a suggested title for the panel; and (c) name, address, email address and phone number of panel organizer and/or panel chair. The second attachment is to contain a cover sheet for each participant. The panel presentation should be designed for a 90-minute time slot. Please submit all panel abstracts together within the same email.

Critical Submissions

Send an email to submissions@thelouisvilleconference.com with two attachments in pdf, rtf or doc format. The first attachment is to consist of a 300-word abstract (double-spaced and titled), omitting all references to the submitter. The second attachment is to contain a cover page (see details below). Previously presented or published papers are not eligible.

Creative submissions

Send an email to submissions@thelouisvilleconference.com with two attachments in pdf, rtf, or doc for- mat. The first attachment is to contain poetry or short fiction/nonfiction selections suitable for a 20-minute reading. The second attachment should contain a cover page. Submitter’s name should appear on the cover page only (see details below). Creative submissions may be published or unpublished works. Manuscripts cannot be returned.

Seminars

Seminars are limited to 15 participants, who write short position papers that are circulated and read prior to the conference. At this point, we are calling for seminar leaders and topic proposals. After seminar topics are announced on the conference website in fall 2017, participants will be able to sign up on a first- come, first-served basis, at the point when registration for the conference as a whole opens.

Prospective seminar leaders should send an email to submissions@thelouisvilleconference.com with two attachments in pdf, rtf or doc format. The first attachment should contain the title of the proposed seminar and a 300-word summary of the seminar’s theme(s) and purposes, suitable for posting on the conference website. The second attachment should contain a submitter’s cover page (see details below).

Submitter’s cover page to include:

Name (as it will appear in the program)

Address (home or institutional)

E-mail address (necessary to confirm your acceptance) Academic affiliation (if applicable)

Title of paper/work/seminar (as it will appear in the program)

National origin/genre of work discussed (please be specific) Personal biographical note (100-150 words)

Group Societies

Group societies are welcome. Society panel organizers should email proposals to submissions@thelouisvilleconference.com as an attachment in pdf, rtf, or doc format. The attachment is to include: (a) abstracts and titles for the papers to be presented; (b) a suggested title for the panel; and (c) the following information for each presenter and for the panel organizer or chair: name (as it will appear in the program), address, e-mail address, academic affiliation (if applicable). The panel presentation should be designed for a 90-minute time slot. Please include the society name in the subject line of the e-mail submission.

Conference registrants may participate in up to two, but not more than two, of the following activities: (1) a critical or group society panel; (2) a creative session; (3) a seminar. Registrants may also chair one or more panels. Submissions are limited to one entry in each category.

Section Chairs

Submitters as well as guests are encouraged to chair a session. Please submit a brief statement specifying your area(s) of interest.

Inquiries: E-mail janna.tajibaeva@louisville.edu (Conference Coordinator) or alan.golding@louisville.edu (Conference Director).

Website: www.thelouisvilleconference.com. Consult our website for additional conference information.

Registration: Please see rates below for presenters and presenter-chairs, panel chairs, and guests.

Presenters, chairs and guests must remit fees by January 31, 2018.

Price Before Deadline (January 31, 2018) 

Regular $150

Independent Scholar/Metroversity $125

Graduate $85

Chair $50

Guest $15

Price After Deadline (January 31, 2018)

Regular  $180

Independent Scholar/Metroversity $125

Graduate  $100

Chair  $60

Guest $15

Deadline for submissions: September 30, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Northeast Modern Language Association
Contact email: rponcecordero@keene.edu

Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States on an openly anti-immigrant, and indeed anti-Mexican, platform constitutes a challenge for the field of border studies: What is border culture when the leader of the most powerful country in the world insists on closing the border? This panel aims to map the current state of the discourse(s) on and from the U.S.-Mexico border, including literature, film, journalism, and music. Papers in English and Spanish will be considered.

As an interdisciplinary field that seeks to examine the ways polities, cultures, identities, and subjectivities merge and constitute each other at junctures that are deemed “borders” in the geographical or, rather, geopolitical sense, border studies has been a vital area of scholarly reflection and research in the last three decades. Specifically, academic work about the U.S.-Mexico border has been influential in positioning the notion of transnational migration as being not just a “social problem” but also a productive dynamic that shapes our world. Our time is marked, however, by the election of Donald Trump as the President of the United States on a platform that prominently featured an overtly anti-immigrant, and actually anti-Mexican, discourse, to say nothing of the antisemitism, islamophobia, plain racism, and rampant misogyny of his campaign. As a result of this event, NeMLA published a statement in support of diversity and regretting the current bigotry and racial/ethnic violence in the United States, as well as reminding the public of the classic academic principles of truth, inclusiveness, and peaceful relations. In other words, this election and the distorted reality into which it has seemingly inserted the whole political discourse on migration, international relations, and human rights makes it more urgent than ever that we take border studies seriously and talk about its issues in a more prospective way.

Please submit a 300-word abstract and brief biographical statement by September 30, 2017 directly through NeMLA’s system: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/17035.

The 49th Annual NeMLA Convention will take place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on April 12-15, 2018.

Deadline for submissions: August 1, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Film and History
Contact email: smatheson@ucn.ca

CALL FOR PAPERS

Westerns: Where The Deer and The Antelope Play

An area of multiple panels for the 2017 Film & History Conference

Representing “Home”: The Real and Imagined Spaces of Belonging
The Hilton—Milwaukee City Center, Milwaukee, WI (USA)
November 1-5, 2017

EXTENDED DEADLINE for abstracts: August 1, 2017

In the Western, be it ever so humble—a teepee, a log cabin, a covered wagon, or a sod house—there is no place like home. Representations of “home,” quickly built, lovingly maintained, and often fiercely defended, reflect cultural ideals and refract complex ideologies—relaying stories of nations, ethnicities, genders and classes, technologies and economies in film as well as in television.

How can “home” be a memory or a destination for those travelling West? What about contested homes, as Native Americans defend tribal lands from white men who seek new homes of their own? In what ways is the absence of a home as important as its presence in the Western? How do we continue to think about gender roles in an ideological “home” where women often tend the home fires while cowboys feel more at home riding the range –and outlaws, of course, can never go home again?

This area, comprising multiple panels, welcomes papers on the subject of “home” in all aspects of Western film—from production and distribution to exhibition and reception. Possible topics include, but are certainly not limited to, the following:

* Heading for Home: The Covered Wagon, Westward The Women, Cheyenne Autumn, Meek’s Cutoff

* The Home Place: Shane, Bonanza, Little House on the Prairie, Unforgiven

* Home Sweet Home: Drums along the Mohawk, The Magnificent Seven, City Slickers

* Angels of the Western Hearth: Cat Ballou, Deadwood, Jane Got A Gun

* Returning and/or Leaving Home: The Searchers, Forsaken, Unforgiven, The Ballad of Little Jo

* Protecting Home and Hearth: The Sons of Katie Elder, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Hannie Calder, Home On The Range

* Home Studios for the Western: Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox, Republic Pictures

* Homes for Westerns: Towns, Backlots and Locations: Melody Ranch, Old Tucson, Bronson Canyon, Monument Valley, Death Valley

Proposals for complete panels (three related presentations) are also welcome, but they must include an abstract and contact information, including an e-mail address, for each presenter. For updates and registration information about the upcoming meeting, see the Film & History website (www.filmandhistory.org).

Please e-mail your 200-word proposal to both of the area chairs:

Sue Matheson
University College of the North
smatheson@ucn.ca

Gaylyn Studlar

Washington University in St. Louis

gstudlar@wustl.edu

Deadline for submissions: September 5, 2017
Full name/name of organization: C19 Conference, Albuquerque 2018
Contact email: travis.foster@villanova.edu

Homonationalism has typically been used to name a late-twentieth and twenty-first century phenomenon in which gay and lesbian rights discourse has achieved power, in part, by donning the rhetoric of U.S. exceptionalism. Yet Jasbir Puar’s 2013 re-articulation of homonationalism as a “facet of modernity and a historical shift” also points to an underexplored set of questions pertinent to nineteenth-century American Studies: What are the deeper genealogies of homonationalism? What forms does it take in periods prior to the popularization of the “homosexual” as a type in Euro-American sexology? What earlier iterations of nationalist homosociality also comprise something like a sexual politics? In what contexts does the homo- of homonationalism become useful for describing non-sexual social formations? What affinities exist between histories of homosociality—erotic, intellectual, aesthetic, literary, militaristic, class-based, or otherwise—and the machinations of white supremacy and settler colonialism?

Scholars of sexuality such as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Peter Coviello, and Samaine Lockwood have paved the way for this work to be done, attesting to the fact that national belonging in the United States has long taken shape through the cultivation of same-sex intimacy and homosocial attachment. At the same time, scholars such as Mark Rifkin, Siobhan Somerville, and Leela Gandhi have urged scholars to look to the nineteenth century to explore intersections between queer sexualities, deviant racial formations, and anti-colonial politics. Building on this work, “Genealogies of Homonationalism” will interrogate where and how homonationalism takes shape in the 19th century, and in what contexts homonationalism becomes useful, as a category of analysis, for describing intersections between race, citizenship, and socialities oriented toward “sameness.”

We invite 300-word abstracts pertaining to any of the themes and questions addressed above. Please direct these and short CVs to Travis Foster (travis.foster@villanova.edu) and Don James McLaughlin (dmclaug1@swarthmore.edu) no later than September 5th, 2017.

Deadline for submissions: August 14, 2017
Full name/name of organization: C19 Conference, Albuquerque 2018
Contact email: gokce.tekeli@uky.edu

In her 2016 book, Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway suggests that the way beyond the anthropocene and capitalocene is “making oddkin” which is “always situated, someplace and not noplace, entangled and worldly.” For this panel we seek readings that explore the relationship (or kinship) between subject and object, body and environment, the self and the landscape. Posthuman ecology and new materialism may collide in texts that blur the self and her environment (both natural and social). This phenomenon may particularly manifest in texts where human subjects occupy Othered identity positions, such as women, non-white, and immigrant subjects who inscribe how their environments mark their bodies and their lives. We might ask: How is the self inscribed in the landscape? How do we build kinship with our environments? How does a climate shape the self? How are socio-political shifts reflected in the landscape?

Topics may include, but not limited to:

• Gendered and racialized bodies
• Posthuman body and identity
• Biopolitics and biopower
• (Dis)abled bodies
• Urban and rural communities
• Kinship and mobility
• Posthuman agency
• Representations of spatiality and temporality
• Memory and landscape
• Materialism and agency
• Ecologies of kinship

Abstracts of no more than 300 words and a current CV should be sent to Gokce Tekeli (gokce.tekeli@uky.edu) and Katie Waddell (katie.waddell@uky.edu) no later than August 14, 2017.

Deadline for submissions: September 30, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Kurt Vonnegut Society at NeMLA
Contact email: nllowman@buffalo.edu

This session will be held at the 2018 NeMLA convention in Pittsburgh from April 12-15 (https://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention.html). Submissions must be sent through NeMLA’s online database: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/16913. Deadline for submissions is September 30.

Many authors use real-life experiences as a foundation for their fiction, while others use highly imaginative spaces to create new worlds that still make room for personal reflection and cultural critique. Kurt Vonnegut does both and often in the same piece. Vonnegut not only sets his fiction in places that had an important impact on his life–for example, Dresden and Schenectady (in the form of Ilium)–but he also creates his own worlds like Tralfamadore, integrating the three into Slaughterhouse Five. One wonders which elements of these locations are accurate according to Vonnegut’s memory, which are fictionalized to meet a particular end, and how we (or he) can really tell the difference.

Vonnegut is not the only twentieth-century American author to play with setting and world-making. Authors like Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner use their war experiences or their upbringing as inspirations for their work, and this, too, can be seen in their reappropriation of place. Science fiction writers like Philip K. Dick reimagine earth in order to explore cultural and political themes, while others imagine their own worlds to do the same. How does Vonnegut align with these techniques or apply them in his own unique way?

Presentations in this session will consider the function of setting in Vonnegut’s work—space, place, and/or world–and the ways in which the location’s “realness,” “fictionalization,” and/or “alterations” affect and shape the characters, plot trajectory, or authorial relation to the text.

Presentations might consider:
*Vonnegut’s renaming of places and how he reimagines them (e.g. Midland City, Ilium)
*Vonnegut’s imaginary locations (e.g. San Lorenzo, Tralfamadore)
*Vonnegut’s use of “real” locations (e.g. Dresden, Galápagos)
*Comparisons of Vonnegut’s spaces, real, imagined or otherwise rethoughtComparisons between
*Vonnegut’s Midland City/Ilium and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County; Hemingway’s Italy/Switzerland in A Farewell to Arms and Vonnegut’s Dresden in Slaughterhouse Five
*Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five
*Vonnegut’s America and Philip K. Dick’s America
*Other interpretations of Vonnegut’s (re)imagined spaces as the focus of the presentation or in discussion with the works of other twentieth-century American authors

Please submit a 250-word abstract and a 2-3 sentence bio by September 30 via NeMLA’s submission page: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/16913.

Direct questions to Nicole Lowman, co-Vice President of the Kurt Vonnegut Society: nllowman@buffalo.edu.