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Call for Papers "Border States: Mental, Political, and Textual Landscapes" 12th Annual Work-in-Progress Postgraduate Conference School of English, Media Studies and Art History, University of Queensland St Lucia, QLD (Australia) 810 August 2008 __________________________________________________ Borders define the imaginative territories of the mind, the nation state and the cultural text at the very moment that they reveal their porosity. The figure of the border suggests a world of related metaphors with which literature and other arts approach the boundaries of texts, discourses and disciplines. We encourage papers that freely interpret the border and the figure of the border, including explorations of sovereignty, power, self and other. Proposals for papers might address the poetry and politics of frontiers, watchtowers, border conflict, and encounters with the foreign; or thresholds, the rough edges of maps, cartographic silence and No Mans Land. We also encourage explorations of invisible geographies, of the concealed and the spectral explorations, that is, of that which haunts us without yet manifest[ing] itself on the visible surface of the earth (Gregory and Pred, Violent Geographies). We invite abstracts (up to 300 words) from across the arts and humanities for 15-20 minute papers. Themes to consider include: - National borders - Interventions - Border transgressions and incursions - Physical and figurative Australian borders - The ethics of self and other - Psychological borders - Hosts and parasites - Cooperation across borders - Psychoanalytic topographies - Past and present - Living and dying - Memory and haunting - Topography and landscape - The figure of the border within poetry - The global reach of modern technologies - Textual borders - Sovereignty - Territory - Centre and periphery - Vanishing points: exceptions to state power - Outside borders: formlessness, amorphousness, the void - A critique of state-centred ideologies from the border - Transnational texts - Domestic space - Border pedagogy Deadline: 16 July 2008 Keynote Speakers: Professor Simon During English Department, Johns Hopkins University Professor Gordon McMullan English Department, Kings College London Contact: Philipa Haly-Summerfield and Mary Trabucco School of English, Media Studies and Art History University of Queensland Michie Building (Building 9) St Lucia, QLD 4072 Australia Email: [email protected] Web: http://www.uq.edu.au/emsah/index.html?page=20349 __________________________________________________ InterPhil List Administration: http://interphil.polylog.org Intercultural Philosophy Calendar: http://cal.polylog.org
