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LEGITIMATING CULTURES, CULTURES OF LEGITIMACY: AN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
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  LEGITIMATING CULTURES, CULTURES OF LEGITIMACY:
  AN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
   
  Bucharest University, Romania
    November 23-25, 2006
   
  Organizers:
    Mircea Martin, Bucharest University, Romania
  Christian Moraru, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
   
    The conference provides an interdisciplinary forum for addressing issues related to the notion of “legitimacy” across discourses, cultural practices, and traditions. We are primarily interested in papers theorizing the construction and representation of the “legitimate?” in particular contexts.
  

    Presenters are encouraged to raise questions such as: How do cultures (specific cultures, cultural genres, or products) legitimate themselves at one point or another? How do their legitimating strategies and rhetorics change and why? What are the factors involved? What is the dynamic of cognate terms such as “legitimate,” “valid,” “acceptable,” “relevant,” and “reliable”? What roles have they played historically in the manufacturing of authority, in the makeup of power overall? How does authority legitimate—or authorize—itself, and what are the specific protocols in play here? Further, how does authority (political, cultural, and otherwise) deal with de-legitimating attempts? How does it cover-up its “questionable” nature and how vulnerable is it to illegitimacy charges? How do discourses and artifacts “justify” themselves as they claim to be “ideology-free”? How have identity and cultural studies helped complicate “legitimate” if reductive representations of race, gende!
 r,
 ethnicity, and sexuality? Why are such concerns (il)legitimate? Who decides what is “justifiable” or “arbitrary,” what “makes sense”—because it “plays by the rules?”—and what does not, who speaks “with authority” and who fails to do so?
   
  Send 200-word abstracts by May 15, 2006 to:
   
  Mircea Martin, Bucharest University (proposals from Europe), at:
  mircea_martin_at_yahoo.com
   
  OR
   
    Christian Moraru, University of North Carolina, Greensboro (proposals from non-European countries), at: c_moraru_at_uncg.edu
   
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Received on Wed Mar 15 2006 - 08:28:45 EST