Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference: Living Remains

The third annual Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at the
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee seeks submissions for “Living Remains,” a
graduate student conference to be held February 15-17, 2008, in conjunction
with the Center for 21st Century Studies and its 2007-09 research theme
“Past Knowing.”

This year’s theme calls upon scholars to interpret and consider the
relationships between the key terms of the title: living and remains. Each
of these terms can be interpreted doubly as a noun or a verb: as that which
lives or as the act of living; as what is left over or remains or as the
act of remaining. Because each term is ambiguous, together they allow for
interdisciplinary discussions on the tensions between living and remaining.
For example, how do terminal illness and disease more broadly change the
body’s relationship to living, history, activism, theory, space and/or time?

The theme invokes a tenuous temporality; while living is a temporary state,
to remain seems at least a bit more permanent. We are interested in new
ways of thinking about the tensions between living and time: How does life
inform what persists? How do imagined remains inform living? How do
alternative ways of knowing (such as affect) influence these tropes? How
does space structure and become structured by living/lived practices of
“remaining”?

The conference seeks to engage such topics as:

* Death studies, medical and anthropological discourses on life/death
* The Trace
* Temporalities
* Genealogies, historiographies and/or counter-histories
* Living in/as the archive
* Identity and its markers (race, class, gender, sexuality, etc) as
historical objects
* Ontologies of death and dying
* Terminal illness: diseased/decaying bodies, activism, theory
* Analyses of various representations of living and/or remains in
literature, film, theatre, dance, pop culture, etc.
* History and new media
* Disciplined/-ing bodies

We look forward to submissions from such diverse fields as: Anthropology,
Architecture, Art, Communications, Comparative Literature, Critical Race
Studies, Cultural Studies, Dance, Education, English, Environmental
Studies, Film, Gender Studies, Geography, History, Journalism, Law,
Linguistics, Medicine, Musicology, Performance Studies, Philosophy,
Political Science, Psychology, Sociology, Theater, Urban Studies, as well
as other relevant fields of study. This year’s keynote speaker will be
Professor David Halperin of the University of Michigan.

Please submit a 250 word abstract, with title, for a 15-20 minute
presentation as an MS Word file attachment to: grad-conference_at_uwm.edu. If
using Office 2007, please submit as a Rich Text Format file as .docx
compatibility is limited. Panel proposals for seventy-five minute sessions
will also be considered (comprised of three presentations). Please submit
an abstract for each presenter and indicate that you would like to present
as a panel.

(NEW!!) Deadline for Submissions: November 1, 2007

For more information, visit our website at:
http://pw.english.uwm.edu/~migc/Welcome.html

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Received on Tue Oct 02 2007 - 16:04:13 EDT