Isms: An Exploration of the Invisible Barriers of Classification
Isms: An Exploration into the Invisible Barriers of Classification
Saturday, March 22th, 2014
California State University, Northridge
Ism: A distinctive doctrine, system, or theory.
Ours is a world that builds, worships, and deconstructs at an incessant rate. So often we are required to define ourselves, our work, and our beliefs by either adopting or rejecting various labels. But is this mode of thinking beneficial? essential? or even healthy? This conference will attempt to explore the structures, the isms, that define and bind. We welcome work that aims to dissect various isms of the past, present, and even future, in order to examine their individual parts. We want works that attempt to uncover how these constructs are created and propagated, works that expose what controls their upkeep. Should we actively cultivate the isms or avoid them? Do they isolate or unite, stigmatize or revolutionize? Can examining isms help us re-imagine what power can/should be, or will we merely be reconstructing a new form of power? How do we work within, against, and between these systems of classification? Have we created a hydra head of isms?
We invite both graduate and undergraduate creative and scholarly works that explore, scrutinize, dismember, as well as defend or create the isms that restrict or empower in seen and unseen ways every day.
Potential topics include:
• Blended and Multi-Genres: Hybridity, Liminality, Interstitiality
• Slipstream, Speculative, Surrealist Narratives
• Creative Non-Fiction
• Poetry, Poetics, Lyric Essays
• Globalization
• World Literatures, Post-Colonialism, Cultural Studies
• Popular Culture, Film Studies, New Media
• Ecocriticism and Environmental Studies
• Pedagogy, Narratology, Rhetoric and Composition
• Unlikely Juxtapositions in Literature, Film, Art, etc.
• New Approaches to Gender, Race, Class, and Politics
• Linguistics
• Identity, Identities, Identification(s)
Please submit proposals of 250 words to sigmataudeltaiotachi@gmail.com by December 18th, 2013. Include with your abstract/proposal, your name, and contact info.
Thank you.