Shifting Spatialities: The Dynamic Boundaries of Place and Space

Rice Graduate Symposium
October 2-3, 2009
Rice University, Houston, TX

Call For Papers
Submission Deadline: July 1, 2009

As the citizen of the nation becomes the consumer of the multinational corporation, our roles as inhabitants of space become increasingly complicated. Our literature, our faith, our bodies all speak to the different ways that we find to occupy the shifting territories of the postmodern landscape. Looking both to the past and future can help us to discover the real and imagined ways our cultures can develop in more richly and defined ways.

We anticipate work that looks at the connections between spatialities and a broad variety of disciplines, including feminism, sexuality, gender, literature, anthropology, philosophy, architecture, performance, political science, linguistics, history, physics, and mathematics.

Possible paper topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Community planning
• The role of the global corporation
• Reconfigured national boundaries
• Real and imagined communities created by literature
• Bodies, sexuality, and limits
• Performance studies and the fourth wall
• Disciplinary spaces of the academy
• Travel narratives
• Ethnic and racial boundaries
• Topologies

Please send proposals for panels or individual paper abstracts of 250 words or less to rice.symposium@gmail.com.