science and culture

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.

Recent work in the field of disability studies by scholars like Ato Quayson (2007), Tobin Siebers (2010), Maren Linett (2016), and Suzannah Biernoff (2017) has considered modernism’s appropriation of disabled bodies. This seminar thus seeks to better understand the role of disability in modernist literary and visual aesthetics. In particular, we encourage papers that consider how writers and artists borrowed from, mimicked, or otherwise recast disability as uniquely modernist literary and artistic subjects. Secondly, this seminar is interested in the ways modernism was cast as disabled in varied attacks on its aesthetic projects.

CALL FOR PAPERS:

Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Annual Convention 2020

(Un)natural Selection: Adapting to Changing Environments in Literature, Media, Film

UPDATE: Work on international and/or non-English authors especially welcome!!

With Health Humanities programs on the rise and medical memoirs flooding our bookshelves, it is easy to forget that the alliances forged between literary representation and medical discourse are new and fragile. Writers from a multitude of traditions have frequently squared off against doctors for the right to diagnostic prominence, particularly in capturing the "essence" of disease and the dis-eased body/mind. Their motivations, meanwhile, have spanned from the starkly political to the intensely personal.

XXII Generative Art International Conference
deadline for submissions:
September 15, 2019
full name / name of organization:
Generative Design Lab, Argenia Association
contact email:
celestino.soddu@polimi.it
GENERATIVE ART 2019

GA2019 , the 22nd Generative Art Conference, Exhibition, Live Performances
Location: Italy, Rome, Villa Giulia, National Etrurian Museum, the 19, 20 and 21 of December 2019

Art&Science - Image&Space - Music&Poetry - Visionary Scenarios - Infinity&Identity

The fourth edition of the Series, entitled "Posthuman Agency" will be held at NYU, in New York City, from April 30 to May2nd 2020.

The Call for Papers is now open. Deadline: December 31st 2019

CFP

We are seeking abstracts for an interdisciplinary collection of critical essays exploring insects in the long eighteenth century.