Venue: Salzburg, Austria
This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary conference seeks to examine and explore issues surrounding evil and human wickedness. Papers, presentations, reports and workshops are invited on issues on or broadly related to any of the
following themes:
1. Wrestling with 'Evil'
2. The Nature of Evil
3. Explanatory Frameworks
4. Understanding Evil
5. Representations of Evil
6. Confronting Evil
Venue: Dublin, Ireland
The aim of this inter-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary conference is to provide an academic platform on which to initiate an open dialogue between academics, professionals and practitioners in the field of human sexuality. We seek to explore the issues that arise when the concepts of "self", "selves" and "sexualities" interplay with each other.
This conference is organized by colleagues from both the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies (SALIS) and the School of Nursing (SON) in Dublin City University, Ireland.
We invite abstracts and posters related to the above topic from academic fields such as education, comparative studies, business studies, media and communications, law, geography, art, literature, comparative literature, visual studies, psychology, sociology, anthropology, intercultural studies, women studies, gender studies and history. Practitioners from varied professional backgrounds including nurses, teachers, clergy, social workers, counsellors and doctors are also welcome.
Venue: Glasgow, United Kingdom
The 2010 Annual Conference is the second year of the new conference format. It will be a less theme-led model, similar to that of the ISA. The aim is to widen the participation of presenters and attendees.
Instead of the call for papers being organised under a single conference theme, participants may present on whatever topics they wish within broad streams (and open streams) that reflect the core research areas of the membership. The streams are:
There is a conference theme: Inequalities and Social Justice, which will be addressed in both the main plenary sessions and the sub-plenary sessions in each discipline. In this way we hope that more established figures in a number of fields will be represented at the conference. There will also be Open Streams, in recognition that not everyone's field of interest is covered by the main stream titles.
Venue: Lodz, Poland
In his 1995 book-length introduction to literary and cultural theory, Peter Barry observed that while the 1980s "saw the high-water mark of literary theory," the 1990s spawned much more critical approaches, and formulated both some radically skeptical responses and various ‘postscripts' to the broadly understood field of critical theory. According to Barry, the mid-1990s brought a realization that the "moment of theory" had probably already passed. Well over a decade after his reflection, we would like to return to the ‘ticklish subject' of theory during an interdisciplinary conference that would serve as a platform for addressing the present-day efficacy of theory, its limits, uses, or, possibly, abuses.
Since 1960's, the term "critical theory" has widened its scope. The changes taking place over several recent decades have introduced a shift in the understanding of the status of the literary text, the critical text, the function of the critic, and the ability of texts, and genres, to exchange identities. Such confluence may have been inspirational and enriching. Judith Butler claimed: "Theory is an activity that does not remain restricted to the academy. It takes place every time a possibility is imagined, a collective self-reflection takes place, a dispute over values, priorities, and language emerges." For others, however, the burgeoning of theory may have invaded reading practices with academic dryness. In his 1992 essay, Richard Rorty complained that, in an anthology of critical readings of Heart of Darkness, "none of the readers had been enraptured or destabilized by [the novel]."
In relation to such conflicting perspectives, we are interested in how theoretical approaches and formations have been affecting the work of literary critics, writers, academics, scholars and practitioners who focus their research on texts, not only literary. We welcome presentations on the usefulness of theory. When confronted with the work of writers, artists, film directors, or with phenomena or processes of culture, is theory a revealing tool or does it sometimes appear as a too limiting professional frame? Does theory allow the critic to do justice to the object of the study, or does it abuse it, by depleting the text's energy? Another question is whether engagements with theory help develop some new, specific approaches? Perhaps in the interpretive encounters of texts and "theory" new energy is released: textual, formal, artistic. If the theoretical moment at its most intense is now past, are there practices in our critical interactions and activities that have evolved from theory?
Venue: Tartu, Estonia
Increasingly, we see new forms of culture being born in the variety of online environments. Users have become producers taking over production of online content and traditional hierarchies of users and producers are collapsing. At the same time, traditional memory institutions like museums, archives, libraries and acknowledged artists struggle to make sense of the transformations that are coming together with new technologies. In this interdisciplinary conference we aim to look at the questions as how such developments influence culture - how is culture transformed in the digital age with a specific focus on the intersection of individuals and institutions. We hope to look at the notion of culture and transformations of the cultural heritage through a variety of disciplines ranging from arts and history to heritage studies and from museum studies to sociology and from media and literature studies to archival studies. The conference calls for variety of people both researchers and practitioners to discuss and analyze how digital culture is produced and consumed both in traditional and new forms.
