cfp.english.upenn.edu

This year’s (dis)junctions conference at UCR invites papers that contribute to conversations around notions of “encountering,” with particular focus given to the operation of texts, understood as representational media objects, within “scenes of encounter.”

Encounter: transitive verb
1 a: to meet as an adversary b: to engage in conflict with
2: to come upon face-to-face
3: to come upon or experience especially unexpectedly

In our contemporary situation within media-saturated, cosmopolitan modernities, we “come upon” texts and Others so frequently that “encountering” with its unanticipated and oppositional valences has become the norm. To articulate both the continued utility and the potential limitations of our critical literacies in a world of encounters this conference examines the impact of situatedness, unexpectedness, and/or unpreparedness on “face to text” encounters with media objects, embodied encounters negotiated through or overdetermined by texts, and representations of “encountering” within texts.

Please visit disjunctions2013.org for specific panel CFPS, as well as a fuller theorization of the conference theme of “encountering.”

As always (dis)junctions welcomes panels and papers from all areas of the humanities, social sciences, and creative disciplines, as well as panel proposals from our colleagues in the physical sciences.

Abstracts and panel proposals should be submitted through www.disjunctions2013.org or emailed to disjunctions2013@gmail.com no later than February 22nd.

We are proud to announce that the keynote speaker for the 2013 (dis)junctions conference will be Dr. Nicholas Mirzoeff, professor of visual studies in New York University's Media, Culture and Communication department. An internationally-renowned scholar of visual culture, his work has appeared in such journals as The Journal of Visual Culture, Visual Arts Research, Radical History Review, and Culture, Theory, and Society, and has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Chinese, and Polish. In addition to being a premier voice in visual culture scholarship, he is a contributing editor for the online project, and is a co-PI in the development of the multi-media, digital-born authoring software, “Scalar.”

Dr. Mirzeoff’s work ranges from explorations of the importance of the interaction between art and visual sign language in modern France, to the historicization of war and diaspora and the counter-historicization of global visual culture. The editor of both editions of Routledge’s Introduction to Visual Culture (2000, 2009), as well as the Routledge Visual Culture Reader (2002), his current work in visual studies focuses around three major areas: developing a genealogy of “visuality”; developing visual culture as a field of study and a methodology; and working in conjunction with creative visual artists and media practitioners. Currently, he is working in conjunction with Islands First on a project that explores the visual culture of climate change.