**** Submission Deadline Extended to November 1, 2005 ****

The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee is seeking submissions for a two-day graduate student
conference focusing on the theme "Archival Bodies" to be held on February
10-11, 2006, in conjunction with the Center for 21st Century Studies and its
2005-06 research theme "States of Autonomy."

The theme "Archival Bodies" draws its language from the work of keynote speaker
Walid Raad, the founder of The Atlas Group, a project established "to locate,
preserve, study, and produce audio, visual, literary and other artifacts that
shed light on the contemporary history of Lebanon." Raad will draw on this work
in his mixed media presentation "The Loudest Muttering Is Over: Documents from
The Atlas Group Archive."

The terms "archive" and "body" present opportunities for a wide range of
interpretations of the phrase "archival bodies." While we anticipate diverse
responses to the conference theme, we are particularly interested in the
possible intersections and collisions of two major, or perhaps dominant,
readings: specifically, (1) a collection, or corpus, of texts, and (2) the
living body in its capacity as an on-going and history-preserving repository of
events, responses, and cultural signifiers.

The conference seeks to engage such topics as:

        Autonomy written in and out of the body
        Bodily sites of memory and resistance
        Embodied histories and geographies
        Identity and its markers
        Race, gender, class, nation, sexuality as archival bodies
        The historical archive in the (pre-)digital age
        Roles of researcher, librarian, archivist
        Strategies of hierarchy, order, classification
        Canonical inclusions and exclusions
        Communities and collections
        Marked bodies and body modification
        Representing, reproducing, fictionalizing the body
        New media and film archives
        Archival residues of performance and everyday life
        Politics of preservation
        Bodily knowledge and structures of feeling

We encourage submissions that address ways of conceiving and critiquing the uses
of archives in contemporary scholarship, particularly in relation to issues of
the digital, the new media, film, and performance, as well as the reams of
paper filling university libraries and private collections. More provocatively,
though, we are interested in the ways the human body functions both as an
archive and in archival spaces. Taking up post-Cartesian conceptions of the
body, recent scholarship in the humanities and the human sciences has expressed
an interest in and concern with questions of bodies and embodiment, suggesting
that embodied social and cultural signifiers--both the outward markings of race,
sex, and age and the concealed traces of geography, class, education,
sexuality--might provide significant locations for intellectual and political
research. We are interested, then, in collections of "texts," in the broadest
possible sense of that term, whether they are located in a library or in a
human body. This conference seeks submissions that broaden our understanding of
how we act on archives and how they act on us.

In order to facilitate an interdisciplinary approach to the theme of "Archival
Bodies," we look forward to submissions from within the disciplines of
Anthropology, Architecture, Art, Communications, Comparative Literature,
Cultural Studies, English, Film, Geography, History, Linguistics, Performance
Studies, Philosophy, Sociology, Theater, Urban Studies, Visual Culture, and
other relevant fields of study.

Extended Deadline for Submissions: November 1, 2005

Please submit a 250-word abstract, with title, for a 15-20 minute presentation
as an MS Word file attachment to: gradconference_at_uwm.edu

For more information, visit the conference website at:
http://pw.english.uwm.edu/~migc

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Received on Mon Oct 17 2005 - 23:52:56 EDT