UPDATE: The Oral, The Written, and Other Verbal Media: Interfaces and Audiences (6/30/07; 6/19/08-6/21/08)

full name / name of organization: 
Brent Nelson
contact email: 

Call for Proposals for "The Oral, The Written, and Other Verbal Media:
Interfaces and Audiences": A Conference and Festival

University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, June 19-21,
2008

The organizers of the first international, interdisciplinary,
cross-cultural, and trans-historical conference and festival focusing on
the interface of the oral and the written invite proposals for
participation. In keeping with the plenitude of modes and forms of oral
and textual discourse, the organizers will welcome diverse modes of
presentation, including, but not limited to, oral performances, academic
talks and panels, readers' theatre (dramatized readings of scholarly
dialogues), workshops, and projects-in-progress sessions. Our goal is to
generate conversations among performers, audiences, and scholars,
including graduate students, from a wide range of academic disciplines,
cultures, and historical periods, and to foster opportunities for
collaboration among those interested in speech and other voicings on the
page. Because Saskatoon is located in a territory highly populated with
Indigenous peoples whose oral traditions are still vital and developing,
the festival will highlight Aboriginal performers in a Crow Hop Caf'
featuring storytelling, Indigenous Hip Hop, music, and other oral
performances.

Are you studying legal contracts in medieval Europe as they move from
the oral to the written, or Indigenous treaty narratives from
decolonizing parts of the world? Are you asking what happens to oral
stories when they are transmuted into fiction, drama, printed poetry, or
visual media? Are you trying to reconstruct the oral delivery of sermons
or epics on the basis of their printed forms? Are you working with
Elders on the transcription of oral narratives, and would you like to
discuss successes and obstacles in a workshop with others engaged or
interested in this sort of work? Are you an oral storyteller/keeper or
dub or spoken word poet interested in talking about your practice with
scholars? Do you have other ideas for workshops related to the
conference and festival theme? If you see your work reflected in these
or related questions, please contact us.

Other issues and topics that might be addressed:
- aesthetics, ethics, & politics at the interface of the oral & the written
- the body &/or gender at the interface of the oral & the written
- contesting writing's empire
- memory and commemoration at the interface of the oral and the written
- oral occasions, contexts, circumstances & modes of public address as
represented in writing
- oral and written poetics & modes of meaning-making
- orality, textuality, & authority; orality, textuality, & modernity
- orature, writing, and genre: sacred narratives, proverbs, jokes,
ballads, sagas, legends, folklore, sermons, oratory, & disputations
- recording oral narratives for community histories or school curriculum
- translation/transcreation of orature
- the oral and the written in visual arts
- strategies for textualizing the oral
- what audiences are well or ill served by textualizing the oral

Please forward inquiries and proposals (300-500 words) by 30 June 2007
to either of
Professor Susan Gingell
Department of English
University of Saskatchewan
Saskatoon, SK Canada S7N 5A5
sag178_at_mail.usask.ca

Professor Neal Mcleod
Department of Indigenous Studies
First People's House of Learning
Peter Gzowski College
Enweying Building
1600 West Bank Drive
Peterborough, ON K9J 7B8
nealmcleod_at_trentu.ca

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Received on Fri Feb 16 2007 - 19:28:00 EST