cfp.english.upenn.edu

The 13th annual Graduate Student Conference hosted by the Comparative Literature and Hispanic Studies programs at the University of Western Ontario will take place on March 17-19, 2011. We welcome proposals that explore “EMERGENCE/IES” from a variety of theoretical, disciplinary and critical perspectives. This conference will examine the theme of emergent/emerging/potentially emerging/surfacing realities and non-realities in language, literature, film, popular culture, theory and cultural studies.

Societies, as well as the human beings within them, are complex systems. Interactions occur constantly and at all levels. Subsequently, interactions between the components of such systems will lead to the emergence of new behaviours. Emergent properties or behaviours are evident in all areas of the environment: language, literature, culture and society, technology, politics and the World Wide Web, to name a few. Language, for example, is considered to be an emergent phenomenon that arises from interactions at all levels from the brain to society.
Prospective areas and themes of interest:

-Global affairs: Emergent countries, markets, governments, weather conditions
-Emergencies: emergent phenomena in need of immediate attention
-Multiple emergences: non-linear and/or simultaneous temporalities and spatialities, unified and singular emergence vs. plural emergences, postmodern and/or postcolonial identities
-Binaries of emergence: order and chaos, sanity and insanity, memory and history, language competence and performance
-Emerging out of nothing/ out of the blue: Big Bang Theory, fantasies, dreams, accidents, tragedies, Pandora’s box
-Scratching surfaces, the crystal ball and potentialities: what does the future hold for current emergences and what will future emergences look like?
-Just under the surface: subaltern voices, endangered languages
-Apocalypse: 2012, nuclear fission, bombs, 13
-Creativity: film, technologies, 3D, language, the visual, the Web
-Bodies: birth, rebirth, death, reincarnation, gender, queer, evolution, hybrid realities, mutants

Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words, no later than November 30th, 2010 to modlangconference2011@gmail.com. Please also include name, affiliation, technical requirements and a 50 word bio with your abstract. As this is a conference organized by two programs, we will accept abstracts and papers in both English and Spanish. Panels in Spanish will be held. Please see our website for more details: http://uwo.ca/modlang/Emergence/cover.html
We look forward to the emergence of new ideas at our conference!