cfp.english.upenn.edu

The 3rd International Conference on Re-Thinking Humanities and Social Science is to be held at the University of Zadar, Croatia, from September 6 – 9, 2012. The conference has taken place every year since 2010.

The conference is an invaluable opportunity for meeting, exchanging and debating current topics in humanities and social sciences.
Two years ago the conference gathered approximately 100 international research scholars who discussed the topic of "Postmodernism and the Issue of the (Post)Other". The keynote speakers were Eric Santner (University of Chicago) and Stipe Grgas (University of Zagreb). Last year the topic was "The Zone and Zones: Radical Spatiality in Our Times" - keynote speakers: Edward Soja (UCLA) and Brandon Labelle (Bergen National Academy of the Arts).

In 2012 we would like to concentrate on the politics of memory.

Keynote speakers:
• Laura Mulvey (Department of History of Art and Screen Media, University of London)
• Lauren Berlant (Department of English Language and Literature, University of Chicago)

The Politics of Memory

How does remembrance shape our links to the past? What is the link between past and present? How are narratives of past constituted, maintained or dissipated? How is memory performed? How various discourses of the past inscribe social relations and subjectivities? How are our innermost emotions, desires and fantasies articulated with a discursive space of memory in the present? What is the link between communication technologies and the ways past is represented? How are we to understand various technologies of memory?
Today, more than ever, questions such as these raise a more general concern about the politics of memory. Once, the past was seen as a stable and known, it was used as a tool to construct collective identities, nation states, to give us a feeling of belonging and common origin, to create what was seen as “our heritage”. But today the concept of the “ours”, with all of its categories, calls into question the notion of heritage. There has been growing awareness among scholars that the way the past is remembered is always articulated along specific social axes of differentiation such as class, gender, ethnic background etc. Each of these axes is invested with particular meanings, which can differ according to the different discursive formations that are used as an interpretative framework. All of these constitute the politics of memory that is performed in everyday cultural, political and economic practices?
At this conference we problematise the politics of memory and the way it is embodied in films, photographs, performances, literature, public art, memorials …. We are especially interested in exploring the circulation of historical memories that offer the basis of identification in a given cultural, economic and political moment; (2) the possible responsive ways to, what Lauren Berlant calls “the urgencies of a moment (the historical moment, the sexual moment, the intimate moment, the singular subjective moment where survival time is another name for ordinary life)” and (3) the ways the new technology offers an opportunity to “aesthetics of the past to meet the aesthetics of the present” through “the aesthetic of delay” and confusion between living and dead (Laura Mulvey).

Possible topics include:

• Film, photography and memory
• Performing arts and memory
• Literature and memory
• Sound and memory
• Rituals of memory
• Memory, public sphere and citizenship
• Cultural memory and trauma
• Memory and forgetting
• Commodity culture and cultural forgetting
• Memory and body (memory of bodily movements, scars, pregnancy….)
• Memory and autobiographical texts
• Memory, gender roles and sexuality
• Memory and communication technologies
(…)

Proposals are invited from scholars from different fields and disciplines of humanities and social sciences for individual papers (30 minutes including discussion time).
Please send proposals (no more than 300 words in length) torhss.conference@gmail.com by June 15th 2012. Selected conference papers will be published.

Abstracts should be in Word or RTF formats and include the following: a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) e-mail address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract. Please use plain text (Times New Roman 12, Single Spacing, Justify) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline).

We acknowledge receipt and reply to all proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us within a week from your submission, you should assume we did not receive your proposal; in that case we suggest trying an alternative electronic route or resending.

The conference language is English.

Registration: Conference fee is 80 Euros. Graduate students fee is 40 Euros. Late registration fee is 100 Euros i.e. 50 Euros for graduate students.

Dates: Proposal submission deadline is June 15th 2012. Registration deadline for all conference participants is July 1st 2012. Final conference announcement and the program will be published August 15th 2012 on the conference website: http://www.rhss-conference.com

Additional Information: The conference will take place at the University of Zadar (www.unizd.hr), Croatia. Additional information about travel arrangements, accommodation, and other practical details will be posted soon on the conference website: http://www.rhss- conference.com
Or you can contact the organizers directly at rhss.conference@gmail.com