science and culture

Communicating Science (to Public Audiences): From Theory to Practice

Deadline for Proposal Submissions: January 15, 2020

Editor: Dr. Julia Kiernan, Assistant Professor of Communications, College of Sciences of Liberal Arts, Kettering University 

At this moment in history, conversations around the publics’ distrust in science are more

often the norm than the exception; while this distrust is not a new phenomenon, it is one

C PRACSIS INTENRATIONAL CONFERENCE

On

VISUAL CULTURES IN CONTEXTS:  AFFECT, SUBVERSION AND RESISTANCE

Department of Media Studies, CHRIST deemed to be UNIVERSITY, Bangalore, Karnataka, India.

Call for Papers: Technical Writing at CEA 2020

March 26-28, 2020 | Hilton Head Island, South Carolina

Hilton Head Marriott Resort and Spa

The College English Association, a gathering of scholar-teachers in English studies, welcomes proposals for presentations on all areas of Technical Writing for our 51st annual conference. Submit your proposal at www.cea-web.org

Conference Theme

12th-Annual Medievalists @ Penn (M@P) Graduate Conference

Date: April 17, 2020
Keynote: Elly Truitt (Bryn Mawr College), author of
Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (2015)

The Victorian Studies Association of Ontario-Sponsored ACCUTE Joint Session: “Eco-Victorians: Water, Land, and the World,” For the Humanities Congress at the University of Western Ontario, May 30th-June 5th, 2020

Medicine in the Medieval North Atlantic World
19–21 March 2020 Maynooth University, Ireland

This interdisciplinary conference explores the reception and transmission of medical knowledge between and across England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and Scandinavia during the medieval period, and will draw on history, literature, philosophy, science, religion, art, archaeology and manuscript studies. It will interrogate medical texts and ideas in both Latin and vernacular languages, addressing questions of translation, cultural and scientific inheritance and exchange, and historical conceptions of health and of the human being within nature.

In an ever changing world the problems of setting boundaries as well as the need to create meanings and establish understanding of diverse phenomena have always been of the utmost importance for humanity. Borders, boundaries, frontiers, and borderlands, naturally formed or man made, are grounded in various ethical traditions, and have always been associated with limits and restrictions. The ongoing process of globalisation is changing the role and stereotypes of borders, so that they are often seen as opportunities rather than constraints. However, in some cases they are still being militarized and conflicted.

Food is a basic foundation of culture and society, it is vital to our health and well-being and it plays a significant role in our everyday creative engagement with nature. The shifts in activities surrounding food acquisition, preparation and consumption are not only essential for learning a culinary tradition but for examining a broader societal change.

This conference will explore food as a complex cultural product, an indicator of social, religious and political identity. It will focus on people's relationship with food and discuss how food choices are determined by historical period, region, class, gender, kinship and/or ethnicity.

The conference seeks to explore the past and current status of gender identity around the world, to examine the ways in which society is shaped by gender and to situate gender in relation to the full scope of human affairs. Papers are invited on topics related, but not limited, to:

Decay as a state of nature is inevitable, yet it is something that could be at least postponed: decay in art as the main decadent idea has been on the cultural front row long enough to make certain conclusions about its essential characteristics. Decay as a philosophical issue is much more complex than its natural incarnation: French Symbolists and, later, fin de siècle authors regarded decay as an inseparable part of any type of cultural cognition. Its original interpretations can be found in the ideas of Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Nietzsche, Wagner, Bergson’s intuitivism, modern scientific discoveries and folklore. The art of decay feels the need to justify its aesthetic principles, to explain to the public audience its goals and tasks.

Applying diverse methods from across subject disciplines the conference will explore fashion and style in wide-ranging contexts. It will examine connections between fashion, body and culture and will focus on dress, cosmetics, coiffure and body alterations (piercing, tattooing, circumcision, aesthetic surgery, etc). 

How does our dress or hair style create our identity and status? How is it concerned with sexual and body politics? Is the desire to be "in fashion" universal or unique to Western culture? These and other questions we set out to discuss at the conference.

Papers are invited on topics related, but not limited, to:

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. 

Through the centuries, humans have often shaped their social life by fictional moments and by taking part in fictional events: carnivals, representations, role plays, society plays, structured and semi-structured collective and singular moments where strictly coded contexts organize specific worlds and cultural dimensions. Play, in its wide acception and in its nature of artificial and coded mechanism, reflects historically the symbolic work by which human societies have elaborated, explained and organized the world.

Inspired by the journey of Virignia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Lauren Elkin’s critical work Flaneuse, this one-day workshop seeks to explore the idiosyncratic journey of various women in the city of London as represented in British fiction. The course will focus on the idea of women in public space and think about the ways in which the city provides women new freedoms to think, to explore and to be. We will look at work by Virginia Woolf, Muriel Spark and Anita Brookner and discuss representations of the city landscape in specific texts. We will also engage with some theories and ideas of the city in modernism and critical theory.