popular culture

"Culture and Crisis"
A Call for Papers for
A Special Issue of CULTURAL LOGIC

Edited by Joseph G. Ramsey, appearing Winter 2009/2010

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Talk of crisis is everywhere. Financial. Environmental. Geopolitical. Cultural. A Crisis of Crises...

Energy and Appalachia: Narratives of Sustainability and Environmental Justice. South Atlantic Modern Language Association Conference, Oct. 6-8, 2009.

The 2009 EAPSU (English Association of Pennsylvania State Universities) Conference will be held at Shippensburg University, October 22-24, 2009. The conference theme is "Making Our World: Language, Literacy and Culture."

We invite proposals from faculty and students for presentations, roundtable discussions, and workshops that address how the work of English studies continues to make and remake our communities, our classrooms, and the world around us. Topics include, but are not limited to: Literatures, Popular Culture & Film, Composition and Pedagogy, and Creative Texts: Fiction, Creative Non-Fiction, and Poetry.

Popular Culture and Activism at MAPACA (Boston, Nov 5-7 2009)

Popular Culture and Activism welcomes papers or presentations that explore the sphere of activism in the production of popular culture. Whether historical or contemporary, investigations into the role of activism in shaping popular culture or the role of popular culture in shaping activism are encouraged.

This panel will interrogate the upsurge of the new(?) homicidal/suicidal religiosity in the West. Possible perspectives are political, sociological, activist, and philosophical. Approaches can cover the full range from critical analysis to prescriptions for action action. Some possible ideas, not intended to restrict ideas but to spur thinking on a few possible approaches:

- the suicide bomber as Kierkegaardian hero
- religious mania as a reaction to/ byproduct of Western modernity
- leaps of technological faith: the new high-tech cargo cults (Heaven's Gate, etc)
- the faith of Abraham vs the faith of Andrea Yates
- when religion comes to power: implications from the Taliban to the Christian Right

Conference Call for Papers
the Tulsa School
at the University of Tulsa
Tulsa, Oklahoma, November 5-7, 2009

Confirmed Participants: RON PADGETT, DICK GALLUP,
Alice Notley, Robert Harris, Anselm Berrigan, and Edmund Berrigan

The Irish Studies area of the Midwest Popular Culture and Midwest American Culture Association is extending its deadline for its upcoming conference. The MPCA/MACA conference will be held Friday-Sunday, October 30-November 1, 2009 at the Book Cadillac Westin in Detroit, Michigan.

Please send proposals on any aspect of Irish Studies to the area chair via email or mail. Emailed proposals should be sent to Kathleen Turner, Department of English, Northern Illinois University at turner8kathleen@gmail.com. Mailed proposals should be sent to Kathleen Turner, Department of English, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL 60115.

Call for Papers: GENDER

The editors invite contributions for the forthcoming issue on the theme of GENDER from postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers working across the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Suggested areas for articles include, but are not restricted to:

Cinema, Film & Television
Embodiment, Space & Time
Feminism, Anti-feminism, & Masculinism
Equality & Liberation
Gender, Sex & Androgyny
Language & Linguistics
Stylistics and Discourse
Teaching, Learning & Acquisition

Please send submissions in Microsoft Word format to: e-pisteme@ncl.ac.uk

All submissions must contain the following information:

We seek to delve further into the mind of Rowling and examine all aspects of the Harry Potter series that lend themselves to a lavender lens. With Dumbledore's ejection from the closet, queer scholars have taken up Rowling's decision at all three major Harry Potter Conferences (Accio, Portus, and Terminus) over the summer of 2008. As such, we seek papers for an interdisciplinary reader on queer and feminist issues in Harry Potter. We welcome critical and passionate papers catering to both students and scholars in the fields of sexual/gender diversity studies, cultural studies, children's literature, and literary analysis. A non-exclusive list of topics are

Deadline for full consideration: June 15, 2009
http://repositories.cdlib.org/acgcc/jtas/cfp.html

CALL FOR PAPERS
SCIENCE FICTION, FANTASY, AND LEGEND AREA
2009 Conference of The Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association (NEPCA)
Queensborough Community College (Bayside, Queens, New York City) , Friday October 23 and Saturday October 24, 2009
Proposals by 1 June 2009

Proposals are invited from scholars of all levels for papers to be presented in the Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Legend Area. Presentations will be limited to 15-20 minutes in length and may address any aspect of science fiction, fantasy, and/or legends in popular culture.

Adoption has often, though not always, involved secrecy. How has secrecy or openness affected the history, experience, and representations of adoption? How have literature and film portrayed the impact of secrecy and disclosure on adoptees, birthparents, adoptive parents? What is the impact of recent revelations of secret histories in memoir, books such as _The Girls Who Went Away_, documentaries such as _First Person Plural_ (the creators of both will be keynote speakers)? How and why did adoption secrecy, and the practices it hides, develop differently in different cultures, countries, and even different states? Where are alternatives to secrecy practiced and how do they work?

For decades, scholars have studied popular romance, whether in romance novels, films, comics, or other media. They have studied its sexual politics and aesthetic structures, its audiences, its authors, and the industry that produces and distributes it world-wide. For the most part, however, they have done so in isolation, divided by boundaries of nation, genre, and academic discipline.

This is a Call for Papers for [Inter]sections, the online [under]graduate journal of American Studies at the University of Bucharest, Romania, available on the home page of www.american-studies.ro.

Since [Inter]sections is a monthly publication, this CFP is open throughout the academic year. Please see www.american-studies.ro for more details.