3rd Global Conference
Persons, Intimacy and Love

Friday 6th November - Sunday 8th November 2009
Salzburg, Austria

Call for Papers
This research conference seeks to explore issues of intimacy and love within the context of persons and interpersonal relationships and across a range of critical, contextual and cultural perspectives. Seeking to encourage innovative inter, multi and post disciplinary dialogues, we warmly welcome papers from all disciplines, professions and vocations which struggle to understand what it is to be a person and what it means for persons to stand in individual, social and national relationships of intimacy, love, desire and friendship.

In particular papers, workshops and presentations are invited on any of the following themes:

1. Public and Private Contexts of Intimate Relationships
~ How and where to locate intimacy?
~ Should we re-think the idea of intimacy?
~ Modern and postmodern intimacies
~ Identity and belonging; the local, social, national and international
~ Structures, institutions and systems; economics and intimacy; work and intimacy
~ Acts and interactions; representations and symbols; space and time

2. Love, Desire, Lust and Sex
~ Persons and the search for meaning
~ Norms that rule the intimacies of our lives
~ The death or killing of love, desire, lust or sex
~ Commitment and obligation; choice and respect; loyalty and trust
~ The secular and the religious; the heretical and the sacred
~ Personhood and identity without love, desire, lust or sex

3. Bonds of Care, Friendship and Love
~ Persons and family: blood, heritage, choice and happenstance
~ Who is a friend?
~ Historical, social and symbolic shifting grounds
~ Meaning, obligation, identity and belonging
~ Loving and caring for children, siblings and parents
~ Hospitality and bonds of care

4. When Relationships End or Fail
~ Norms, agreements and expectations
~ Betrayal, cheating and infidelity
~ The loss of intimacy; the destruction of trust
~ Isolation, alienation, loneliness and estrangement
~ Conflict, breakdown, crisis and the demise of relationships
~ Separation, mourning and bereavement; unlinking and unloving

5. Caring for Others
~ Persons, acquaintances, others and the needs of strangers
~ Intimacies between strangers
~ Why should we care about others and distant others?
~ Dislocated persons; homeless persons; uprooted persons
~ Selfishness and selflessness; expecting and giving
~ Aloofness, estrangement and disconnected persons

6. Caring for Self
~ Selfhood intimacies and pleasures of the self
~ Soul, emotions, ideas and the inner-self
~ Dreams, fantasies and desire; symbols, meaning and the unconscious
~ Time, space, solitude and the recognition of self and the inner-self
~ Body rituals: aesthetics, playfulness, health and functions
~ Alienation, madness, crisis of the self, despair and suicide

7. The Politics of Intimacy
~ Inequality, power relations and intimacy
~ Normativity and normalisation; difference and dissidence
~ Productivity, efficiency and the dwindling of free time
~ Homogeneity, identity and intimacy
~ The democratisation of intimate relations
~ Freedom, personhood, resistance and rebellion

Papers will be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 19th June 2009. If your paper is accepted for presentation at the conference, an 8 page draft paper should be submitted by Friday 9th October 2009.

300 word abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs
David White
Hub Leader (Persons), Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Department of Philosophy
Calgary, Canada
Email: dmw@inter-disciplinary.net

Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Network Leader
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Priory House, Wroslyn Road
Freeland, Oxfordshire OX29 8HR
Email: pil3@inter-disciplinary.net

The conference is part of the Persons Hub series of ongoing research and publications projects conferences, run within the Probing the Boundaries domain which aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore innovative and challenging routes of intellectual and academic exploration.

All papers accepted for and presented at the conference will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume.

For further details about the project please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/persons/persons...

For further details about the conference please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/persons/persons...