interdisciplinary

The concept of “Othering/ Otherisation” refers to the classification of individuals or groups as outsiders. This cognitive classification divides any sociocultural and political formation into potential two generally monolithic and mutually exclusive blocks: the in-group community versus the out-group community. The inclusion or exclusion of each block is contingent on different criteria like religion, ethnicity, culture, race, politics, class, etc. When these differences are used descriptively, they become somewhat acceptable and harmless. However, when they are normative, they are often couched in the discourses of superiority or inferiority, goodness or badness, civilized-ness or uncivilized-ness, etc.

This roundtable invites perspectives across the academy, including graduate students and contingent faculty, to explore the impact of virtual teaching on discussions of academic freedom and intellectual property. This is a guaranteed session through the Higher Education in the Profession forum.

The Modern Language Association will take place January 6-9 2022 in Washington D.C., and should include some hybrid components.

In this special issue on Kashmir, we look at the dramatic change in the status of Kashmir that was effected with the reading down/abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019 and the aftermath of this moment. While Kashmir has been violated for decades, the removal of all special status with the abrogation was more than a symbolic change and not just because of the escalation in violence, the most dramatic internet shutdown in any modern nation. What has changed with this abrogation? What did that moment mean for Kashmir and what does it mean for its future?

Hello, everyone. I'm editing a series with Rowman & Littlefield/Lexington on a line of academic books critically analyzing elements of Jewish science fiction and fantasy (that's the series title). https://rowman.com/action/series/les/lexjsf As such, I’d love some authors with concepts to write about.

At this stage, a paragraph-long proposal emailed to valerie@calithwain.com with a subject of JEWISH SPEC-FIC would be great. Here are some examples:

The Secret Jewish Roots of Star Wars (or some other top franchise)

In view of recent and current global events, the phone camera has emerged as an important and effective political apparatus. The centrality, proliferation, and prominence of phone footage across contemporary screen media and media platforms suggests that the phone camera is no longer just an indulgent phone fixture, but rather, an invaluable truth-telling tool. Practical, accessible, and autonomously used, the phone camera has been an essential technology to the present-day exposures of injustice, violence, and corruption around the world.

In today's culture, it's almost impossible to avoid "monsters."  Straight from mythology and legend, these fantastic creatures traipse across our television screens and the pages of our books.  Over centuries and across cultures, the inhuman have represented numerous cultural fears and, in more recent times, desires. They are Other. They are Us. This panel will explore the literal monsters--whether they be mythological, extraterrestrial, or man-made--that populate fiction and film, delving into the cultural, psychological and/or theoretical implications.

The Riverside Quarterly is accepting submissions for its inaugural Summer 2021 issue.

A multidisciplinary, open access, advertisement-free journal, The Riverside Quarterly is dedicated to serving the growing global creative class. We are accepting original articles, research digests, interviews, reviews, and opinion pieces [between 750 & 2500 words in length] that explore the art and practice of creativity.

Focusing primarily on the arts, education, and business, we seek to present our readers with the most compelling scholarship available in these areas. Our goal is to enlarge and amplify the global dialogue on creativity by providing our readership with a source for quality, usable, information.

MLA 2022 Non-Guaranteed Session CFP: Comics on the Border

(DEADLINE: 3/15/2021)

Call for Papers for a proposed non-guaranteed roundtable sponsored by the Comics and Graphic Narratives Forum to be held (if accepted) at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, Jan. 6-9, 2022, in Washington D.C.

Comics are defined by borders in formal representation and structure, in the boundaries between word and image and generic categories, in the networks and communities of mainstream and alternative production and circulation.

This two-day interdisciplinary symposium invites scholars to examine early modern women’s agency from a transnational perspective. Conversations about women’s agency continue to ripple across the world, from new, passionate campaigns in Mexico and Poland that have fought to address feminicide and sexual violence, to the Women’s Marches, which have annually inspired global response. Now, we turn with fresh urgency to early modern women’s participation in intellectual and literary cultures that bridged regional, national, and transnational divides.

In the context of the current viral pandemic, we look with fresh intensity at figurations of the invalid and of disease and disability in James’s fictional and non-fictional writing. With an eye to the cultural and political aspects of public health measures aimed at managing the spread of an infectious pathogen, we ask in particular about the relation in James’s work of sickness, subjectivity and society. How do James’s texts relate social experience to bodily ill-health or impairment? Does James position the invalid as a figure indicative of dysfunction in the larger social body, or suggest, in contrast, that illness or disability may be associated with an excess of social contact, a failure of ‘social distancing’?

In crises, many of us turn to literature and other forms of popular culture not only for comfort, but for insight, guidance. So it is in the "Covid era," that we have turned to "pandemic literature" and related forms for popular Culture, including Stephen King’s The Stand (1978, 1990) and its adaptations to date (1994, on television, and 2008 and 2012, in comics). Already provocative, the phenomenon is all the more so for Josh Boone's recent television adaptation, appearing amidst the ongoing pandemic, from December 17, 2020 through February 11, 2021 (http://www.imdb.com/video/vi2525675801). More so still, King, in writing the finale’s screenplay, has enriched the original’s conclusion.

This panel gathers papers that consider relational models of disability and histories of systemic racism in the U.S. to read quotidian practices of care. We situate care across scales, as we ask how care relationships between individuals are embedded in larger practices of identifying and resisting racialized harm in contexts including medical access, environmental racism, housing inequality, and economic justice. How, as disability and race scholars, can we consider individual and everyday acts of care as sites at which to identify and resist structural conditions of ableist, racialized physical and psychological harm and reimagine the dynamics of vulnerability and difference?

Over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st, cinema, television, and related media have become increasingly central both to individual lives and to the lives of peoples, groups, and nations. Cinema has become a major form of cultural expression and films both reflect and influence the attitudes and behaviour of people, representing their tensions and anxieties, hopes and desires and incarnating social and cultural determinants of the era in which they were made. 

The conference aims to explore Europe from a variety of perspectives. It will consider its political, social and philosophical dimensions as well as the cultural and intellectual life of Europe. Proposals can demonstrate both national and regional expertise, refer to the past or present, or offer a comparative analysis.

The main objective of the event is to bring together international scholars interested in European Studies and willing to examine intersections between their topic of interest and the broader European context. It will provide an integrated approach to the understanding of the processes within Europe.

Topics include but are not limited to: